| RolStoppable said: After so many years it's still shocking how willfully people buy into third party excuses. Third party support isn't about horsepower, ease of programming or even sales. It's first and foremost driven by bias. There are people here who seriously argue that the GC's storage medium was a notable culprit for lack of third party support, but don't you guys realize how difficult the PS3 was to program for? But not only had Sony created a monster, it also led to a year where virtually every major third party player posted a loss (the only exception I remember is Disney Interactive). That's a significant difference to the Nintendo situation where games simply didn't sell as well as third parties hoped for; so you are looking at too low profits for third parties on one side (Nintendo), and outright losses for third parties on the other side (Sony). The PS3 was also in third place. Yet all of those factors combined didn't lead to third parties dropping support for the PS3, instead it became the lead platform for development in many cases. Third parties were willing to endure losses to keep PlayStation in the game. Not too long ago there have also been interesting quotes from Square-Enix and Nippon Ichi concerning the Japanese market for dedicated gaming devices. Both companies stated that they have to drive the installed base of PlayStation which runs contrary to the premise that third parties don't consider themselves responsible for moving hardware because that's the console manufacturer's job. The obvious question is why don't they develop more games for the 3DS which already has a huge installed base and sells the most third party software in Japan. And that's when you should realize that not even sales play that big of a role in determining third party support. It's first and foremost something that is driven by bias. |
Part of me has always wondered if the reason that major third parties gimp the pc port is due to the fact that if the differences between console and the pc versions of games were ever too large, then too many people would give up consoles and go buy or build a pc.
