Bull- why don't developers simply develop on the ps3 first then follow up by porting to 360 and/or wii?

-Side note it's a forum I have a say in any conversation.

Because developers aren't fanboys, they do what they believe is the best decision for their business. I would like to see some of you in a high pressure environment, without much sleep time or free time, with deadlines, the management guys pressuring you, and the marketing guys deciding a street date
that it's almost impossible to reach. In that environment, which is the most common in this industry, do you really think you have time to spare learning how to develop for a hard to develop console, in sony's words? No, you learn as you develop, and that's what most developers do.

First party studios have bigger budgets, and looser deadlines, as their parent company use their games as a marketing tool, so that's why they're encouraged to spend much more time learning the tricks of a specific hardware, because the game profitability isn't as important as it's to sell the hardware.

PS: We've had some class auctions of ex-workers of some companies (EA, the Rockstar team that developed Red Dead Redemption, the Team Bondi guys...) due to this development time nightmare. It's really sad, but it's very common in this industry.

If After 5 years in the market, The PS3 is still kicking your ass, give up already.

Because then we have the same problem in reverse. The PS3 although powerful places heavy constraints on the game developers.

You cannot just start coding and hope for the best. Memory is such a finite resource in the PS3 that every subroutine and every texture has to be thought about in advance.

The 360 allows you to "share" the memory between CPU and GPU. People say this leads to lazy development and maybe it does to a point but the PS3 alternative is enforced development by straight jacket.

Effectively you can get away with a lot more "loose" coding for the 360 without taking a performace hit.

Try that on the PS3 and you are looking at low frame rates and screen tear city.

I think John Carmack said it best "The memory architecture of the PS3 was a curious choice"

DEvelopers don't need to be fanboys and it's the developers job to know how to work on a system to it's full extent and the supposed pressure shouldn't be an issue as it's been 5 years and I find it very shocking that companies are complaining that the ps3 is difficult to work on and I'm sure others must be surprised as well.

Also, if uncharted can have a release every 2 years why is it a problem for Darksiders, can it be the budget? No, at least I highly doubt it as THQ should have quite the budget to fund the development of their games, a lot of their games which are all multiplat which means THQ should DEFINITELY have the budget to supply their dev teams with a surplus of money to ensure their games get finished on time and in reasonable time.

Sorry it doesn't work that way. They need to make money and have a time frame and a budget. Like I said before it's not like working just for the one system. It's multiplat.

That's the point it's multiplat they make more money on more systems, simple as that there's no real thinking about it and time frame really doesn't make sense if amazing games like killzone and uncharted come out every 2 years, then time frame shouldn't be relevant to make an average looking game like darksiders on the 360 then port it.

I think you are overstating the constraints.  Instead of 512 unified it's 256 and 256, it's not like NONE of the 360's 512 is going to the CPU.  I'd guess (and I admit it's a guess) it only feels like a "straitjacket" to those who carelessly wrote for the 360 without even considering that they would have to port it to the PS3 later.  Cry moar, I'm sure there are some problems if people do the opposite as well. 

Anyway, back when this debate was raging originally, I'd gotten the impression that the Cell processor (with its kind-of-independent SPUs) was the biggest problem going from 360 to PS3.  Not so, or not anymore? 

Considering that Darksiders dissapointed THQ in sales I doubt they uped the budget for the sequel much. And considering that Darksiders 2 is going to be on 4 platforms at launch instead of 2 there are probably less resorces to devote to each platform, so you can see how having to jump through hoops and spend extra time on one platform could be annoying for the developer. 

Also Vigil Games currently has 120 employees  and is currently working on 2 games one of which is the massive Warhammer 40K MMO which likely more than half the studio is working on, and Darksiders 2 has a 2 year dev cycle. Naughty Dog has 100+ employees works on only one game at a time on one platform and has had access to dev kitts long before other devs, Guerrilla Games has 150+ and also works on one game at a time for one platform. The fact they can make better looking games of PS3 than Vigil is not suprising, it is there job to push the PS3 as far as it can go and Sony give them every resource possible to make that happen. And for Vigil to devote extra resorces to PS3 would mean that all the other platforms would have even less resources, and yet it's likely that Vigil will put the extra resorces into the PS3 and the PS3 version will look better than the 360 version despite all the hate they are currently getting from PS3 fanboys. 

That's a fair argument.