| The Ghost of RubangB said: The PS3 is too expensive to develop for as it is when it's on the way up. It'll get ditched way faster than the PS2, since it'll have higher dev costs and a smaller userbase on the way down towards the end of this generation. |
Initially development costs are higher because there are significant differences with past technology.
But costs will become less and less as once game engines and middleware are redesigned, they are already adapted and there are less costs involved with follow-up games. Concept art or target art and audio is often done in very good quality and then reduced to suit the console's capabilities. So with mature game engines this downgrade if needed at all would be less significant.
The benefit of designing more efficiently with the PS3 architecture in mind is that this results into performance benefits on other hardware like multi-core PCs as well, this means lower specced PCs can run the game and thus more people can run your software. The best sold PC games are the less demanding titles, so development costs will earn themselves back in course of time.
