Yesterday at my college, Jeff Ward, ex Besthedia employee, came to talk to our class about tools for game development and how certain tools can be used to help speed up game developement and avoid as many bugs as possible in the shortest amount of time, etc.

But he also did mention that because the PS3 has a slower disc read, but can also read off the HDD and the Disc at the same time is whats hurting PS3 games at the moment because the system has to read 2 different sources of data.

Would that mean that PS3's exclusives that install i.e. MGS4, Heavenly Sword, etc, that install on the HDD read off the HDD only? I'm just wondering to see what he meant by speed if its in terms of how fast data can be read, or the amount of data read in a given time frame.

Don´t you remember a topic about a good % of PS3 games didn´t make profit ???

This might be true, but what difference does is make if you are going to have both a 360 and PS3 version of the game anyway?  And if developing for the PS3 first then porting to the 360 takes less time and resources, then more money will be made on both versions I'd suspect.  So why are 3rd parties still supporting the PS3 with a smaller userbase and the PS3 being harder to develop for? 

Smaller install base hence smaller potential sales with increased dev costs mean lower returns.

It may seem harsh but developing on the other platforms PS2 XBox 360 and Wii with essentially the same architecture produces huge economies.

So long as all companies work this way and then port to PS3 more money is made quickly.

I appreciate that means that the PS3 version will suffer but as long as all companies do this then the poor ports will be fairly standard on the PS3 and shouldn't affect sales.

Its a fairly lousy state of affairs, but thats the commercial world.

Easy, just look at the huge amount of money invested on the PS3 dev kits, trainning and support before launch, any sane company should support the console as long as they have the people and the technology to do it, if they drop the support right now is like throwing a lot of money to the garbage...

So that's why EA has said that PS3 will be their lead platform?

The one thing about the article that has also been the case here (in Belgium) is that the biggest games-site has now started to do previews and reviews of multiplats on the PS3 (they used to do it primarily on the xbox360).

just because its a ps3 game doesn't mean it can't make a profit ...
if that's the case why develop for it..???
if u think every ps3 game has the same budget or target sale to make a profit ur crazy...

Great, so if developers think that developing for the PS3 first and then porting to the 360 saves them time and resources, then more power to those developers.  Because I can see that a precentages of PS3 games are not making a profit when you consider a number of factors.  So these developers can either cut their losses sooner by stopping PS3 development (if those non-profiting games are that big of a factor), or they can maximize profits by more effeciently doing things like developing for the PS3 first.

Thats the issue, not everyone is following that development model, more devs are going PC first and later PS3 and 360 versions, stoping the PS3 bleeding can be done by removing it from the main chain and putting in on less important part, this what SE is doing, and this what let them port the game to the 360, putting the PS3 first model was not their choice, the same for Capcom, and probably many more devs who got a licence for the UEngine...

thats not true.

white engine start as a project to get great graphics on the ps3 then made multiplatform.

thats why it start as FF7 Tech Demo was made.

all engines are PC based.

but some are optimized to certain consoles, white engine was optimized first for the ps3.