1UP

The Witness is looking like a very interesting game, as is to be expected given that it's being developed by Thekla and Jonathan Blow, the man behind Braid. Unfortunately it sounds as if console gamers might not have the opportunity to play it. Blow has stated the aging technology of Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 would make it a real hassle to get the game running on either of them.

When 1UP got to check out the game over the summer, Blow expressed interest in releasing The Witness on multiple platforms -- Steam, Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, and, in particular, iPad. He now seems to be less interested in getting the game on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 as a result of the challenge doing so would pose.

"We like 360 and PS3, but their specifications are over five years old now, and that's a lot in computer years," he told Edge. "The kind of tricks we'd have to perform to get this game working on those platforms are such a lot of work that to port it over at this point is just not worth it for us. The budget of this game we would hope to make back through Steam and iOS, plus I would like to make a profit. But breaking even is most important as it allows me to keep making games, and I can do that without consoles."

You shouldn't take this as a definitive statement that Blow's latest project won't be released on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Things could always change. As of right now, though, he isn't counting on it.

"Maybe this time next year I'll be singing a different tune because I found out I was wrong, but I don't think so," he continued. "By the time this game comes out in a year or more, we might be on an iPad 4. We do have to compress the game for that platform, but we don't have to do the certification stuff we would have to on consoles, so we can live with doing just one of those giant tasks. And I like this as an iPad game. It's a natural thing. But we'll see how that plays out."

http://www.1up.com/news/xbox-36-ps3-hardware-too-old-braid-the-witness

Damn thats crazy.

Really. Naughty Dog can get U3 to run on PS3. Epic can get GoW3 to run of the 360.

Yet, one dude who made a single (popular) indie game claims that these consoles don`t have enough processing power.

Bullshit.

He has a point; 5 years in a long time in terms of technological advances in processing, pretty much nothing can stay cutting edge for that long.
By modern standards, both PS3 and 360 have primitive GPUs and jack-all RAM.

He didnt claim that the consoles dont have enough power but he said its too much work to port it over , probably he doesnt think his game will sell enough copys to cover the costs of the porting process.

Haha. I got a good chuckle.

yup the fact one guy can't occomplish something that took 150+  people working for 6
years developing, designing and optomising arround one system he is obviusly the one at fault. Not the 6 year old hardware that has very little RAM (the main factor he seems concerened about) and outdated (and in the PS3s case hard to use) SDK and that need low level direct to the metal (something that very few Programers are good at) programing to get decent resaults out of.

Thats all there is to it really. He wasnt even sure to break even.

I dont understand how he can get this running on Ipad and not one of the current gen consoles.

You got to remember that it's much easier for a big team to get every drop of power out of a console than it is for one guy. You have to do lots of optimisation and tweaking to get the results Naughty Dog is getting and that's just too much work for smaller teams.
It sounds pretty clear to me that his current engine demands more power than the consoles can offer and he doesn't think it's worth the trouble to fix it.