What if God of War II would have launched with the PS3? Don’t be surprised if your head begins aching from the possibilities. We recently chatted with Shuhei Yoshida, Sony Computer Entertainment’s senior vice president of product development, about the decision to go ahead and release Kratos’s second god-murdering adventure on the PS2 late in the console’s life.

When asked whether he thought God of War II should have been delayed in order to be a PS3 launch game, Yoshida said “We had a lot of debates about it, actually. I always firmly stood by keeping it on PS2. Many people, including marketing, suggested that maybe it should be moved to PS3. What I believed was that God of War II would be the best-selling and best game of the year. We had always seen that, at the launch of a platform, the developer has to spend a lot of time becoming familiar with the platform and software tools. Technical issues take up a lot of the development, perhaps leaving less time for really polishing the game. Towards the end of a platform is when you see really great games, after developers really begin to understand the hardware.

“In the God of War franchise,” he continued, “I saw an opportunity for the Santa Monica team to complete their vision for the second game on a platform they totally understood. That was my argument and the company and team supported it. I’m very happy with the result. So to your question, I have never regretted the fact that we released God of War II on PS2.”

http://gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2010/01/25/news-Sony_3A00_-No-Regrets-Releasing-God-Of-War-II-On-PS2.aspx

Besides having higher res....it wouldnt have been that much different from the ps2 version.....thats how all launch games are.

i think it wud not ave been been as polished at launch cuz that is when developers were just getting the hang of ps3. But a launch with god of war 2 would've resulted in way more sales and keeping gta 4 exclusive would've completely destroyed microsoft at that point thus keeping many of the exclusives they have lost over this generation.

Either it's old news or a typo from GI because Yoshida is now the president of SCEWWS not the VP.

God of War 2 is one of the best PS2 games, why risk putting it on a new console with little experiences with its architecture at that point?

I'm glad Sony played it safe by releasing it on PS2, at least we had a classic game, as oppose to a potential buggy games on PS3.

this way, the GoW franchise is preserved

Thats true, the first games on a new console are always hard to program. Just take a look at Oblivions developers that had to place the same information multiple times on the disc to ensure faster long time lol. They didnt understood the new hardware and coding at all.