PS3 outpaces x360 in GTA IV pre-orders on amazon.com

[andersonalex]

Sony has a major problem when it comes to 3rd party support. The 360 has reached a critical number of users - enough so that developers want to have their games available on that platform. Making a game that's exclusive for the PS3 doesn't make sense, because you eliminate all of those 360 owners. You would end up spending more development dollars optimizing a game for PS3's unique architecture, and you'd end up being able to sell your game to fewer customers.

Leveraging the PS3's power requires developers to learn a new way of programming, one heavily centered on parallel processing. In the beginning people assumed that it would just be a matter of time before PS3 programmers learned how to work with it, but that once they did, we'd start to see games looking much better on the PS3 than their counterparts on the 360. However, what we didn't consider was that making a game that truly took advantage of the PS3 would in turn make it a completely new development effort to port to the 360 (or PC). The two architectures are so different that to really take advantage of the hardware for both, you'd have to greatly increase the money and time you spend on a title. And in the end, you really wouldn't get enough extra money out of it to be worth it.

So what's the solution? Well, thus far it seems to be this: develop your games using the traditional programming techniques that work well with the 360 and PC's, and then port the code as directly as possible to the PS3, using only its main processor to handle the game. The PS3 is fast enough to handle this relatively well, though not quite as well as the 360. This is I believe why we're seeing games like Madden and now Orange Box coming to PS3 with the same graphics but poorer performance than the 360. It's the easiest, least expensive way for the developers to get 90% of the way there without greatly increasing their money and time expenditures.

At this point, most major developers have no interest in seeing the PS3 gain a dominant market share. In the end it could only mean they would have to spend more money on their own development without actually bringing in more money as a result. They're going to be very content with programming their games to be as portable across as many platforms as possible, and that means staying away from the platform-exclusive programming techniques that PS3 really requires to take advantage of its power.