MikeB's past predictions

[MikeB]

@ Kynes

Good developers like Crytek shouldn't run into too many problems.

Tim is a developer for Epic Games, which has some exclusive deals with Microsoft. Their game engine was enhanced with the help of Sony programmers, having just completed Bioshock a few weeks ago, I think their game engine runs quite nicely on the PS3 nowadays, but in the past they got sued for lack of effort.

One thing is as good as sure, once you have taken the hurdle of modernizing your game engine there isn't a way back. Your game engine will not worsen, but will normally only improve in course of time.

They did state they don't want to enhance their game engine too much to take advantage of the Cell's SPEs in the past. But I think in course of time with others putting more effort into developing for the PS3 architecture they can't afford to stay behind too much (or suffer from looking incompetent or uncommited to a major gaming platform a lot of people prefer).

The PS3 isn't hard to develop for at all, but using Microsoft recommended high level inefficient development approaches can result into significant porting issues (like some buddy developers also had to suffer from while porting to other operating systems on similar or to lower powered more efficient hardware).