EA's Schofield hopes Sony can figure it out...

[heruamon]

Procrastinato said:

@ Squilliam

I hear what you're saying, I think. All the examples you're giving sound like support for the "dev on the PS3 first" argument, though. Clearly lots of teams have trouble porting engines designed for the 360 over to the PS3, as you state. Anecdotal evidence from early 360->PS3 ports demonstrates this pretty well, I think.

I think EA's future games -- I think game such Madden '10 may be the first such example -- will show the benefits, in terms of performance, from their "develop on the PS3 first" decision. That decision's effects won't have seen the light of day/the store shelf, just yet.

EA also has a special "need" they want to address, due to their heavy-hitting sports franchises -- they have exactly the kinds of products that stand to benefit hugely from extremely complex character skeletons and animation, performed on large numbers of onscreen characters. That's a prime candidate for large-scale CPU parallelism -- I would even say its the prime candidate.

The PS3 has huge potential in that area, and I would not be surprised if the lead engineers behind those projects realized that, by redesigning their engine(s) around the parallel concepts that the PS3 excels at, they could achieve better performance on the X360 than their current/older engine gave them, and downright stellar PS3 performance for that part of the game frame. Good animation is critical to good-looking sports titles -- the more bones in the animated skeleton, the better, the higher sample-rate, the better, the more blended animations... better. Qu ality animations are critically important for the future of EA's sports franchises -- and they aren't going to skimp on them, when their competition may up the bar.

In this regard, EA is different from most developers -- they have a bar to reach, and compete at, with regards to performance.  Shortening development time and cost on their sports franchises is much less important to them, overall, than beating the competiton is, since most of the expense on these titles is actually not the engineering dev costs.  

Other types of games don't stand to benefit as much from the performance gains yielded by this decision, and in many cases, the extra dev costs may not be worth the trouble.

As far as EA Sports is concerned, however, I would say that the extra dev costs are most certainly worth it.  If they share internal engine technology, then they may as well apply that dictum across the board -- and they have done so.

So if I'm understanding you correctly, the team that originally worked on the PS3 design, would hten be the team to port over the game to the 360?  Therefore, requiring the design team to be versed in both platforms?  I'm not sure if this is how it's already done or not, and logic would seem to indicate that if you could find enough people skilled to work expertly on both, you'd seriously have a win-win situation...but I'm not sure?  I'd be really interested to so the cost breakdown on that 10% rough order of magnitude on going multip-platform.  It is still a sizable $$$ amount on a 420-30 million project, but it's better than 50-60% more.