“Q: How do you look back at this point on the differences between the PS 3 and the Xbox 360?
A: You’ll have a hard time if you port without having a PS 3 game in mind when you created the 360 version. That is where a lot of complaints are coming from. They created the 360 engine with a unified memory architecture in mind, with the embedded frame buffer with its advantages and disadvantages, and not thinking too much in early stages about multicore. If you try to get that over to the PS 3, you’re in for a bad surprise. The PS 3 is all about streamlining about the two different memory pools. They are separate. You don’t have to do tiling because you don’t have an embedded frame buffer. All of these advantages of the PS 3 turn into disadvantages if you don’t start making your game on the PS 3. Hence the griping. If you create first on the PS 3, it is pretty easy to port it to the 360. A lot of companies coming on board now will probably start on the PS 3 and move to the 360.”

So, my guess was right - it sounds like its easier to start development on the PS3, then port to 360.

The long awaited GTA IV trailer was released last week - bringing with it plenty of controversy along the way. While it appears to be set in Liberty City, there are many landmarks similar (okay, exactly the same) as in New York… to name a few, St…

I don’t quite understand why Home will ‘cut the available memory’. Sure you will run Home as a standard ‘game’/application, and when you want to play a game, it will boot into game mode, and game will have full access to all the resources it will want. There’s no need for Home to be running at the same time as the game, is there?

And in your frank honesty, Matt, how exactly are you able to predict future 3rd part sales? I’m not sure the sales have anything to do with the difficulty of development - that would manifest itself in delayed releases on the difficult platform and missing features (and whining developers :-). Lower sales are likely to be related to the install bases?

And as far as the HD Cashing and disk space–unless you’re filling your disk with CG cutscenes or your team really sucks at programming and/or compression, Blu-Ray is not needed and is a red herring. Sony does have HD Cashing standard, which I will give them credit for, as it does help developers out.

However, as it’s been said before here and elsewhere, as soon as Sony forces their @ Home onto all of the developers and cuts the available memory significantly, XBox 360 will have a definite on-board memory advantage (does currently to some degree…) which will render HD cashing moot.

And frankly–let’s just be honest here. If the PS3 were so easy and great to develop for, then why are all the 3rd party titles looking and selling better on the 360 at this point (and pretty much for the foreseeable future?)

He’d also be wrong in that respect. Porting from the PS3 is harder for developers primarily because of the storage difference. The PS3 has a much larger disk space, porting titles to the 360 would mean cutting out a lot of bulk usually. Also, all PS3s have a HDD included meaning developers can use it for cacheing, something the 360 cannot do.
Surely it’s easier to write a 360 version then port to PS3 and bulk out the disk with extras and harness the cacheing benifits.

Perhaps you guys misread Megaman’s comment?

He didn’t say it’s easier to develop games for the PS3 as opposed to the 360. I think he is implying that the process of developing for the PS3 and then porting to 360 is easier than devloping for the 360 and then having to port it to the PS3. I think he is suggesting that porting to 360 is much easier, which it may well be.

Um, no. Nice try, but that’s a load of ****.

Many developers have already gone on record about how craptacular the PS3 is to develop for. Mind you, this is something Sony has addressed and is trying to fix right now, but the damage has already been done, and the perception is reality (and truth), and likely will continue to be so until Sony collectively pulls its head from its rectum.

And remember that Rockstar already had said that it’s prior XBox 360 game was also a tech demo/benchmark test for developing on Microsoft’s system. Really easy to read between the lines there, folks.

As for porting, you’re going to see games being developed for the 360 and then ported over to the PS3 for the rest of the generation–not only is the 360 easier to develop for (currently), it’s got a bigger install base, 3rd parties aren’t supporting the PS3 until Sony actually has decent sell-through numbers (Eidos), and 3rd party programmers aren’t going to be hamstrung by such things as memory constraints on the 360 because of a lack of foresight (especially when Sony starts forcing devs to support voice, @ home, etc. in all games.)