"If you take some internet forum poster's word, then you've got to take my word that this forum moderator (who have would have no idea regarding porting dev costs -- why would he?) is dead wrong. ;)"

You obviously don't know who I mean. Christian Svensson (his username is Sven) is a vice president of the company. He kind of knows what he's writing.

And if you think about it, porting isn't easy. Take a single texture. Put it from the PS3 to the 360 and you have to rewrite how the GPU generates it, how the VRAM handles it taking into account size, bandwidth, clock speed, and latency, and how the shader pipelines handle it. And do that for every texture in the game.

You're telling me that one of the VPs of Capcom responds to forum posts, asking about dev costs, eh?

Also... you do realize that all three platform SDKs have prebuilt libraries for loading and rendering textures, right?  That you don't have to author code to render each texture independently... or whatever it is you're trying to suggest.  You seem to have a grossly under-informed concept of how graphics APIs (like OpenGL, which the Wii and PS3 APIs are close to, or Direct3d which the 360 basically uses... which is kind of a variant of OpenGL.. but thats a long story) work -- if you're not a programmer, that's understandable.  You should probably try and avoid using it as an example though -- you're way way off the mark.

"You're telling me that one of the VPs of Capcom responds to forum posts, asking about dev costs, eh?"

He does, or at least last I was there. Go to capcom unity and see for yourself. He was acting as feedback to people through the forum, not as a forum poster. And he discussed it because I asked.

"you do realize that all three platform SDKs have prebuilt libraries for loading and rendering textures, right?"

That was only one hypothetical form. And there isn't a way to just automatically convert one texture rendering thing to another, if that's what you're thinking. And even if you took care of the textures, you have to make sure any level uses the textures properly, and that cannot be converted with a prebuilt library.

If you gave me a .bmp file, or a .tga file, or a .dds file (or a variety of other formats), I could render it on any of the three current-gen consoles, or a PC running Windows or Linux, in under 1 minute.  I could literally do it on all those consoles in under 3 minutes.  I'm not joking in the slightest.  Most of that time would just be me, copying and pasting that file around, and renaming it, and then loading the same test app on all 5-ish platforms and running it.

You really need to stop talking about the supposed difficulties of porting code, which is, by nature (all compilers enforce language syntax, so its only APIs that are different) portable, except for specific API calls, which are often *very* similar.  Unless you are porting to a radically different architecture (single-core to multi-core, for example, or a game with large portions of assembly code, which is different on different processors... except of course this gen all three consoles share a PowerPC assembly base), porting is usually just resizing of resources to fit in memory, outside of some minor compiler and API changes.  None of those items is difficult.  They can be time-consuming, but not relative to creating them in the first place -- not even close.

Optimizing on a per-platform basis, now that can be tough.  However, that's usually only a problem with side ports or downports.  It's almost never a problem with up-ports, which both the God of War collection, and probably MH3, were.

Textures are not picture files. That's a common mistake (something I even asked Sven about). And calling the difficulties supposed doesn't make them not. Go and ask twesterm. He's a game developer here and he will tell you how difficult it is.

to be honest, i think wii owners made up their minds about 3rd parties a long time ago.

Supposedly you only have to do this once per gen however and then you reuse the code...

"Supposedly you only have to do this once per gen however and then you reuse the code..."

Again, textures was just a hypothetical thing. What would count would be telling a system how to incorporate every texture in a level. So all those things apply that I mentioned, as well as the frame buffer, and how the non graphical parts of the games interact with them. No system does it the same way twice (counting APIs as a system in that context).

Boo Ubi, yay Sega

I'd like to point out another fact. Looking at the overall sales numbers, it's pretty obvious that the US and european (others) market are now very close, Japan being the last market. but in facts, US/Japan get the games before, and it seems the 3rd parties aren't really targeting the european market. Don't you think the conclusion of this generation are also influenced because of the geographic factor ?