EA is saying what EA's PR wants it to say, though it isn't hard to figure out that some systems have certain advantages over others that 3rd party devs would use where beneficial.  I don't think they mean that certain types of games will be made for only one system.  There is almost no game that can be done on one system that would be impossible to make on another if the money is there to do it.  Rayman Raving Rabbits was doable without the Wiimote as seen by its 360 and PS3 versions.  Live is something that a company could copy well enough on the PS3 if it was worth the effort (as I understand it Resistence's online is decent and free).  Lair or RE5 can be ported to the Wii if it would sell enough to cover the 3 or so million dollar cost of redoing the game engine.  Was RRR as good on the 360 and PS3 as the Wii?  Is Resistence's multiplayer as good as Gears of War?  Would Lair or RE5 look as good on the Wii as the PS3?  No, no, and no, but that doesn't mean it can't be or won't be done.  Most 3rd party multiplatform games would be similar enough though that the added cost wouldn't be that great anyways. 

The only games that won't be done on a system are games that don't sell well enough.  For example, I don't think we'll be seeing many more Sims games from EA on non-Nintendo platforms.  Not that Sony's giant CPU with a console attached to it couldn't handle the Sims, just that the sales wouldn't really justify remaking the Wii version for the PS3.  Any hard core multiplayer FPS is going to naturally find its way to the 360 but not because the other two systems couldn't handle it, just because the sales wouldn't be worth it.  Should the Wii really take off in the mass market then games like RE5 will eventually be made for it, even if it means cutting the poly count down by an order of magnitude. 

Which of the 3 specialties the 3rd party devs focus on, Cell, Live, or Wiimote, will depend on which generates the most profits for each game.  I don't see what the fuss is (aside from trying to use it solely to start flame wars), none of them cover the entire gambit of gaming which seems to be all EA is saying. 

well of course, if you scale it down, it can be done ;)

Lair has very large environments with HEAPS of characters. There is just too much there for the Wii to handle. In most cases you can scale the graphics down and it will run fine but I think the huge outdoor areas with thousands of soldiers in Lair wouldn't be possible at all with the Wii

of course, I would love to be proven wrong

Was it just a couple of weeks ago EA said they were putting more resources into Wii projects? They may say that the Cell is great, but actions speak louder than words.

5-95 still falls into the family-oriented spectrum. They're not gonna get the college FPS player with what they're offering. PS3 will come down to mass market pricing eventually. No, MySims isn't an AAA title. I'll give it one A. Maybe. EA is putting more money into Wii projects... more money than it put into Gamecube projects.

You can basically break the market into 2 (uneven) groups ...

80% - People who are likely only going to buy 1 console
20% - Multiple console owners

The Wii is designed to apeal to the 80% of the market who are only going to buy one console; for the most part these people are not early adopters and are unlikely to spend more than $200 on a console. The XBox 360 and PS3 are designed to apeal to the 20% of the market who are going to buy multiple consoles. The way this may work out is that (over the next couple of years) the Wii will sell well in single console homes which will block the sale of another console, and sell well to multi-console owners because they tend to own (nearly) every console.

The college gamer is very likely going to buy a Wii because it is very inexpensive and trendy at the moment; they may have/buy an XBox 360 or PS3 as well but that really doesn't matter to Nintendo that much.

Thank you, you are the first person who actually makes sense. Instead of hating start lovin.

Sorry, but I don't really agree with you, due to a simple reason:

Do you know how optimized Code for the Cell is written?

First you write the complete program for the PPE alone and then you try to debug it. The main reason for this is that every bug you won't find in this stage will cause you major headaches or even crash the whole project in later stages. But this code can be easily transfered to the Xbox 360, andf withn slight modifications even to the PC!

The big difference of the plattforms happens in the next stage: On the Xbox 360 and Multicore PCs you try to divide the main Project into several only weakly connected problems. These semantical weakly connected problems can be divided into different processes.

For the cell you don't need semantic problems, instead you try to find computing intensive routines, that obey ceratin criteria. If a routine does not follow these demands you can try to rewrite the code, to make it better suitable for the execution in a SPU.

The first step will always generate highly portable code, due to the similar architecture, even if you use high level development there is no principal difficulty in writing a transcription layer that translates the code for one plattform to one of the others.

In general it will not be easy to develop games that can be done much easier on the Cell, than on any of the other plattforms. If I look at the plattforms at least PC, Xbox 360 and the PS-3 are clearly on a way to a multi plattform path. It isn't as simple with the online part, because Microsoft follows a different architecture (more oriented to centralized servers), to follow this path Sony and Nintendo will have to find ways to finance such a structure. 

@Kars

I'm aware of the Cell's requirement for highly optimized code and that this requirement which seperates it from the other systems.  That's why I listed it with the unique features of each system.  I'm not quite sure what the disagreement is over since I agree that games optimized for the Cell will be impossible to translate directly to other systems (just like live or wiimote optimization).  I don't think it would be impossible to move such games from the PS3 but it would require the dev to redo the game engine from the ground up (as in not even try to use any aspect of the PS3 code) and would produce a game with lower graphics, less AI, fewer characters, etc.  If the money is there to do it though 3rd party devs would be stupid not to. 

It will be interesting to see how this affects 3rd party devs though.  If it turns out that making blockbuster expensive games for the PS3 isn't worth it (too early to say at the moment), will the they choose to optimize for the PS3 then pay another $3-5 million to make a new game on the Wii or will they make make the game as simple as possible on the PS3 to cut costs and cover the Wii port.  Having a unique system has its advantages if you have a system that sells well.  If you don't it certainly makes things interesting for the 3rd party coompanies.

 No, the problem is: Even if you want to write highly optimized code you MUST NOT target the SPUs at once, so even such programs can be ported quite easily. I know iot sounds a bit crazy but thats a problem. You can't really predict which solution will be faster, you can only decide where to put most of the developers!

While the SPU can calculate vectors very fast, each SPU has only a single thread, while in the Xbox 360 each Core has two threads with Altivec-Engines. It depends on the exact type of code and the data distribution to tell, which architecture will be faster. While it is not to difficult to find code that can be pushed to the SPUs it won't help your program if it was not a very time consuming and therefor critical part of the code. 

The main event loops of programs have the severe restriction, that they can not be parallelized easily. You can try to optimize for the Cell, but you will never know if you will be successful till the program was written.     

Is this the thread that got Kwaad and Hus banned? I didn't see anything too bad, and I think this forum is generally anti-sony slanted as it is. Oh well...just curious.

Until EA shows it can produce good games again I'm not sure it matters what their PR says...