President of Gearbox questions Valves lack of PS3 support.

[Reasonable]

heruamon said:

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.

Well, the thing is you don't want to port at all.  My understanding is, going by comments from Ubi and other developers, that to develop equally for both consoles (i.e. no porting in the traditional sense) will add approx 10% to 12% of budget only going with one console.

Clearly, unless you are unlucky or the demographics don't work, the additional 10% or so is worth it for most titles.  Borderlands aside (which is pretty ironic when you think about his defence of PS3) most titles are more profitable as a multi than exclusive - look at Batman, DMC4, etc. and you can see it is well worth spending another 10% to gain anything from 35% to 50% more sales.

On the other hand, if you are confident of your sales or have other focus, then I can see why some developers want to avoid being muliplatoform.  The 10% or so additional cost assumes you are ready to go for multi-platform development.  Valve clearly aren't as such.  They develop for PC and have the option to easily move PC code to 360 so they take it - easy money with no massive additional effort.  To support PS3 they'd have to put in a fair initial effort, most tellingly I suspect they'd have to undertake a fair effort on their Source engine to get it properly running on PS3 and optimized.

Personally I have no issue with Valve not supporting PS3, but do find (even as a big fan of their titles on PC) that their comments are simply not professional or worthy of their status.  They've developed some of the biggest selling titles ever, some of the the PC's biggest FPS franchises and titles, have become a major platform for sales and online support with Steam, and their comments don't fit that status IMHO.

Equally though, I just don't get Gearbox's sudden obsession with taking pops at Valve.

 

Final point, if you do want to go multiplatform, my understanding is you want to either:

i - develop PC tools that support compiling and delivering code across multiple platforms or an engine/SDK that supports multiple platforms (id I believe are taking this approach with their Tech 5 and I believe this is what Crytek are doing too)

ii - develop simultaneously for each platform but share assets (I believe this is the IW approach)

iii - develop on PS3 then port to 360 (I believe Criterion took this approach with Burnout).

 

What you don't want to do is take a PC engine/code, or a 360 engine/code and try and port them to PS3 - every title that has done this has suffered, sometimes horribly.