TRios_Zen said:
Mass Effect is a great series, but it isn't a Gears of War/Halo type of exclusive, so I have absolutely no problem with them porting the game to the PS3. If you are a PS3 only owner I hope you have the opportunity to play it, I've played through the first twice and enjoyed it both times. My argument has never been PS3 owners shouldn't have access to either of these games. @kitler53, outside of Game of The Year discs (with DLC included) how often are current generation games included completely free? By your logic, since I'm a new PS3 owner, if I want MGS or Resistance 2, them being old and all, I can just wait for the next game to come and I shoud get both for $60, right? Come on! That's silly and you know it.
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It's not silly at all.
For one thing, your examples are pretty poor. Resistance is a Sony-owned, 2nd party franchise, and it shipped on BD from the start. R1 and R2 may not even fit on a single BD together, and they'll certainly never be on the X360, thanks to their owner. R1 and R2 are both readily available, at discount prices, as well as used, on the PS3, so there's no reason at all to release them again. MGS4 is the final entry in a long-standing series which originated on the PS1, and had two iterations on the PS2. I sincerely doubt that they would be easy to bundle/port to the 360, unlike ME1, which, by nature of using the Unreal Engine, was practically doable on the PS3 when it was first released anyway. On top of that, MGS4 was made, for years, as a custom engine on the PS3 -- porting it to the 360 probably would have cost an arm and a leg. Millions of arms and legs, if you will, especially in comparison to what ME1 would likely cost to port to the PS3.
Mass Effect is a new,hot, franchise. It started this gen, and it may last until next gen. EA would be fools to exclude PS3 owners from the potential buyer base. That there is plenty of incentive to put an easy port onto a BD disc which could clearly hold both ME1 and ME2 without raising cost-of-goods, from the information presented in the OP.
There's nothing wrong with my theory. The only real question is... is EA smart enough to do it? E3 is only a couple months after ME2's release -- the game will still be hot, and PS3-only owners would be ecstatic to learn the game was coming to their platform, especially in this kind of value-pack format. Instant hype -- and big sales. More importantly, in one fell swoop, EA turns ME3 from an exclusive to a multiplat, probably boosting its actual revenue by a good 50%, while only raising the dev cost about 10%, if that (since Unreal will do most of the work for them, presumably, so the typical in-house +10% devcost rule doesn't apply).
Back to your example of MGS4 -- I can pretty much guarantee that, if the port cost, and potential sales were there, there would be MGS4 360. But... the port cost would be excessive, the cost-of-goods (say 3 or 4 DVDs) would be tragically larger (which severely impacts publisher profit), and any pre-established fanbase probably owned the game already, since the series spanned two generations beforehand, and the fans knew which platform it was coming to well in advance. Mass Effect is a completely different beast -- its first iteration was during this gen, and its fanbase is still growing, as are the console(s) that it is on. It uses a game engine that is widely known to perform very well on both HD consoles with relatively cheap and painless porting. It started life on a console which, by nature, would cost more cost-of-goods to have any sort of Game-of-the-Year or bundle edition than the competition (2 DVDs probably cost more than 1 BD, and 1 BD will hold what.. 6 DVDs?), and thus would have no serious issues in making the transition to the larger media format.
