The incidents of PS3 games being delayed or pushed back for launch is no stranger to PlayStation 3 users. But Mike Bilder, the Midway studio head for Stranglehold, has the solution–instead of porting Xbox 360 games to the PS3, start with the PS3 version first.
Sony says this is the logical answer in solving game delays for its machine. "If your game starts on Xbox 360 you will have to re-engineer aspects of the game to run properly on PS3. This means additional effort."
Bilder concurs with Sony’s interesting fix. "With the PS3 and the 360, it’s certainly more of a level playing field, so I don’t think it’s necessarily a negative to put the PS3 first. But it does help mitigate some of that risk in frame rate, memory, technology, just the hardware differences."
But the remedy put forth by Bilder and Sony falls apart in the real world of game development. Time is money, as they say, and the extra effort in beating games into submission to work properly on a PS3 isn’t always a sound business decision for game companies.
The PS3 doesn’t have a large enough user base or online community that competes favorably with the 360 yet. Sony’s game machine is also very expensive to develop for, relative to its competitors and until these issues are resolved, many game companies will continue to put the Xbox 360 and Wii as their first choice for designing games.
[via Gamasutra]
