and how many games for each did they release?  Those numbers mean nothing unless accompanied by how many games generated those funds.

 And if you read a little further, DS sales are up 145% while PSP sales are down 28%. 

You are funny. DS - 19 games (£104/19 = 5,47 million), PSP - 27 games (£258/27 = 9,56 million)

Next time try to check some info before...

http://www.ea.com/platform_psp.jsp

http://www.ea.com/platform_ds.jsp

So what? What does it mean for you? A sign of upcoming doom?

Ok about 5 mil in sales per ds game, and about 9 mil in sales for psp game. But the real quetion is the developement costs. If the psp costs 2 times or more to develope for than the ds (and i think it does), then the ds is more profitable for EA.

Ok, you are totally contradicting yourself...

In the earlier Sales numers you quoted for the Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360, the PS3 and Wii were basically the same. They both had very similar sales, take or give a few thousand. Therefore, you are basically saying these games are selling crap on the PS3 as well.

 Now, about development costs. Ok, all these games were ported from the 360 to the PS3 to try and get them out for the PS3 launch etc, but then again all these games were ported to the Wii as well. Im pretty sure that it costs a hell of a lot more to port a game to the PS3 then it does to port it to the wii, so your argument is flawed. Nevertheless, if my guesses are wrong then it doesnt matter; the only reasons why those games were ported was to make them ready for launch, and more than likely from now on EA and Activision will make versions for each console, making sure that they highlight each consoles strengths. When this happens, Wii will have significantly lower development costs, because the PS3 costs loads to make games for (if i remember correctly, a game has to sell at least 500,000 copies to actually make a profit, a feat that many many games have not reached yet)>

 Also, what do you think defines "next-gen"? Personally, i believe next-gen is something innovative and different. 

PSP is much more port-friendly (PS2) than DS. Actually I believe DS version is a bit more expensive to develop than PSP's because of hardware limitation.

Yes and no ... A DS game would be very similar in cost to produce as a N64 game whereas a PSP would be similar in cost to port as a PS2 game which means that cost of development may actually be very similar (or in some cases cheaper for either platform). Anyways, from my understanding EA is increasing support for the DS because of increasing revinues and healthy profits on the platform; at the same time they're maintaining the level of support for the PSP because (inspite of declining revinue) they are still making a healthy profit off of the platform.

Anyways, I think the discussion about EA was started because of a comparison of how poorly EA games have done on the PS3 and Wii. In general, neither platform has had very strong sales for third party software but (with the exception of Gundam Musou in Japan) I don't think many third party developers had too high of expectations for these games; EA always has Madden as a launch game for new consoles and when the console launches in October or November it typically only sells a few hundred thousand copies and then stops.

No one expects too much from systems at or near launch because the userbase is too small to really sell that many games; this is why every system has a drought for (about) 6 months after launch, and most of the game released in that time period are multiplatform games or ports. From this point on it is important for reasonable quality games (with decent marketing) to sell at a rate which provides developers and publishers a healthy profit; if publishers lose enough money (or often enough) by producing a game for a particular platform they will be far less likely to support it in the future.

360 is becoming the popular console for third party tripe. Seems its popularity with the casual "bad boy" gamer is doing it well. On the issue of the DS, well, the DS is far more successful than the PSP because of its support and quality control. PSP break rather easily and UMDs have a tendency to fall apart. Plus the PSP has jack shit in games. Most games for the PSP don't get much fan praise either, for any gamer who doesn't make an effort to look up what's on it, its as if the system doesn't even exist. Gamestop stores are now limited their shipments of PSP games and refuse to carry half the library because they quite honestly just can't move them.

i think the wii will be getting better third party support because of the cheap costs. The ds vs psp cost argument is kind of pointless though as both platforms are very cheap to dev for. That's kind of a problem as well considering a lot of smaller dev team are making things only for handhelds now as they actually have some kind of a chance of making a profit wereas on pc or a next gen console the dev costs are skyrocketing like crysis is costing Crytek 30 million U.S to make and i don't think they'll be able to make that back.