kber81 said:
PSP is much more port-friendly (PS2) than DS. Actually I believe DS version is a bit more expensive to develop than PSP's because of hardware limitation. |
Yes and no ... A DS game would be very similar in cost to produce as a N64 game whereas a PSP would be similar in cost to port as a PS2 game which means that cost of development may actually be very similar (or in some cases cheaper for either platform). Anyways, from my understanding EA is increasing support for the DS because of increasing revinues and healthy profits on the platform; at the same time they're maintaining the level of support for the PSP because (inspite of declining revinue) they are still making a healthy profit off of the platform.
Anyways, I think the discussion about EA was started because of a comparison of how poorly EA games have done on the PS3 and Wii. In general, neither platform has had very strong sales for third party software but (with the exception of Gundam Musou in Japan) I don't think many third party developers had too high of expectations for these games; EA always has Madden as a launch game for new consoles and when the console launches in October or November it typically only sells a few hundred thousand copies and then stops.
No one expects too much from systems at or near launch because the userbase is too small to really sell that many games; this is why every system has a drought for (about) 6 months after launch, and most of the game released in that time period are multiplatform games or ports. From this point on it is important for reasonable quality games (with decent marketing) to sell at a rate which provides developers and publishers a healthy profit; if publishers lose enough money (or often enough) by producing a game for a particular platform they will be far less likely to support it in the future.
