President of Gearbox questions Valves lack of PS3 support.

[heruamon]

Procrastinato said:

heruamon said:

I'm not a programmer, but I've managed enough large scale projects to know that the cost to port a game isn't cheap, by any stretch of the imagination.  That 10% addition cost isn't jsut something most developers overlook...let's see..on a 12-15 million project, that's over a million $$$...that's cheap?  It's called Return-on-Investment...and if you're get better returns on a 360 game, over a PS3 game...why would you invest in multi-platform again?  Valve is looking at the results from Borderland  and laughing their ass off...the second week of the 360, tops the TOTAL sales of the PS3...WOW! 

Yep, that's cheap, when the total return on revenue is that much greater and then some.

It's actually something of a fluke that Borderlands doesn't appear (on VGChartz) to be selling better than it is on the PS3.  Making a multiplatform game is almost always a good idea, unless your demographics are radically different.  I kinda think you either don't understand just how similar the PS3 and 360 are, or you have something of an... odd bias.  It really is easy, and cheap, in the relative sense.

If you manage a large game project... you might consider hiring some more experienced developers, if they're having trouble getting the PS3 version to work.  Its just not that hard or different, or for that matter, expensive.  Trust me on this one... I DO know.  Anyone who suggests otherwise well... I guess they can speak for themselves, but they shouldn't generalize their experience to include other devs who... umm apparently... find it pretty easy.

Actually...I'm looking at the 10-Q of all these companies losing money...and listening to you tell me $1.2 million isn't anything significant.  I have ZERO idea how easy it is on a technical level to port games, but based on reports from experience developers, it's not trivial.  If you have some anecdotic evidence, please post it, but I've yet to see any.