They could have put it on the PS2 if they wanted to. God of War 2 came out in 2007 and did fine on the system.

It also goes to show that maintaining platform loyalty for no apparent reason is bad business. The 360 moved forward earlier, and SE usually ignored PC as well, and it seems some sort of miscommunication with Sony cost them a lot of money and dev time. Like you said, if they had started on PC development and also eyed the 360 earlier, they would have been in a much better position. Putting all your eggs in one basket out of some misguided brand loyalty is bad business - I can understand if they got money or dev incentives, but clearly that's not what happened here.

Maybe this is the reason Square has been moving away from Sony - they got pissed for Sony not informing them accurately about their console plans?

i agree losing 1.5 year of time and money is realy bad planning. 

But... What did SE say about Sony to imply the relationship was troubled? They are putting strong support behind the PS3.

I guess the game was already designed to fit onto the single DVD...

I mean with starting a relationship with MS, it's not all money, I remember SE's president saying in an interview that he had to give out a serious internal warning to his developers that they could no longer just do what they wanted, and could no longer ignore 360 and PC, as they only wanted to continue doing PlayStation brand development.

It seems a decision borne of both analizing the market correctly, but also that there was something there between SE and Sony. I mean, Final Fantasy is arguably the franchise that made PlayStation what it is today, why would SE not know Sony's plans?

Final Fantasy XII came out in Europe only a few weeks before the PS3's launch, if there wasn't the delay on the PS3's launch it would have been after.

When did they started development? As either FFXII must have been delayed considering PS3 was known about in 2005 was it not?