Didn't Naughty Dog and Sony release dev kits that were free to use with Sonys permission for any 3rd party developer? Seems they just got lazy or didn't want to ask for help.

When I put together Ikea furniture I get mad at not knowing where the parts go instead of reading the instructions.

It wasn't just Epic, a lot of developers were asking for more RAM including Bethesda and Lionhead. But Epic with the most popular engine on the market was probably the loudest voice especially with the famous 2 screens of gears one using 256MB and one 512MB.

Its a lovely story with all the Developers asking for something and Microsoft relenting. It doesnt seem likely though. The memory would have to have been committed to way before production so we are talking mid 2005 at the latest. Gears was released Xmas 2006.

It sort of fits but I honestly believe more likely is MS getting cold feet and asking key developers for their input on the final decision.

Gears of war development began before Epic even had early dev kits, and according to the Oblivion anniversary podcast it was mentioned that the 360 dev kitts had 256MB right up to a few months before production started, and the programers threw a party when they got the news that the RAM had been doubled. Aparently it's the happiest the producer had ever seen some of them lol.

And we have to take into consideration that the debugging tools take 50-60 MB of space, so they only had ~200MB of RAM to work with. MS only provided 1GB RAM dev kits recently, so the newest games can be debugged up to the real 512MB of RAM, instead of the ~450MB that they could use before.

Well if true that may well mean the last of the 360's power will be released just before the next gen starts.....

I guess hats of to them for timing.....

Hm, if it's so damn difficult to develop games for ps3, why are there so many multiplatform games? Especially low budget games? Casual games don't sell well on the ps3 and developes still make them, instead of sticking to wii and 360. Weird eh?
I can't think of many examples that ps3 is left out, other than the Black Eyed Peas game. Why port MJ: the experience to ps3? Look at its sales. Same with Dance on Boradway. Now they want to port Grease too. If the sales are low AND the development/port is a pain in the ass, why do they keep doing it?

I think that he means it's a pain in the ass when you want to extract everything from the hardware. Doing a quick port of a simple game isn't what his team is doing.

Because its easy to develop badly for the PS3.

Dont care about the result then write for the Xbox 360 spend a week porting to PS3 using an automated multiplatform engine tool.

Hello downgraded textures, missing lighting effects and low frame rates with screen tearing every where.

Ultimately they do it because a week of extra DEV work for maybe 500,000 more sales to PS3 fans is money for old rope.

Never lose sight of the fact these companies are commercial operations.

The sales for the games I mentioned are abysmal for the ps3, so not even close to 500.00.

I've seen comparisons between multiplatform games (on lens of truth) and I really don't think there's a definite winner. I like some games more on 360 and others on ps3, but the difference is not that great. Only pc games look much better. In my mind the difference is so insignificant that it sounds ridiculous.