GTA V coming Spring 2013 to PS3, X360. UPDATE: it's official now, R* confirms

[Mr Khan]

runqvist said:

Mr Khan said:

That R* should do it because it will make them money. Porting costs are quite low for a high profile game, and unless its totally gimped or made into a ripoff (ME3), it will easily sell enough to make back the money put in, several times over.

Passing up an opportunity to make money for a business is irrational. So it points to 3rd parties being either biased or stupid, and if they're not biased, they're pretty damn moronic, and if they're not stupid, they're pretty damn biased.

Care to present some facts to go with your argument or are you just basing this on your own thoughts?

You could start with the porting costs, how much would it be to port a game which you haven't seen for a platform you know almost nothing about? When you have explained that with links or proper calculations done by yourself, you can move to part 2.

Prove that the game will sell enough to pay those costs several times over. You already have the costs, all you need is to know how much the game sells and how much of those sales are going to R*.

Surely that is easy, as you make it sound that those are facts.

We look first at the claim of the Darksiders II developers, who got a build of the game up and running in weeks, with a tiny team. Likely because of the Wii U's power-based CPU and more able GPU, which would provide no clear hurdles to anyone familiarized with 360 or PS3 development.

Obviously this was just a build, and that there are other things that need to be done with putting a game over, but there's copious testimony that porting to Wii U is cake. Certainly for a memory-intensive game like GTA, Rockstar should be stamping at the bit to move to a platform with fewer memory restrictions, or at the very least less memory restrictions should make for an easier experience. Either way, you're talking about a comparatively small amount of money for a port that would sell at least 2 million (as long as it wasn't feature-gimped), even if those are bad numbers for a GTA, it would give them 2 million more sales for very little work, which is only sensible busines.

Unless, of course, Rockstar (and a great many of the most celebrated third party developers) are less competent coders than the image they project, but that couldn't be, could it?

Well, we know Bethesda aren't very good at working outside their comfort zone, so maybe incompetence among others isn't so far-fetched.