PS3 ousting Xbox as lead development platform

[BR7]

Developers are increasingly using the PlayStation 3 (PS3) over Microsoft's Xbox 360 as the primary development platform for games, according to a Sony executive.
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"We are now starting to see developers creating games on PS3 and then porting them to other platforms such as EA's Burnout," said PlayStation boss Jack Tretton in an interview with IGN.
"We are seeing tremendous progress from the third-party community in terms of what they are able to do with our development kits."

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[Chewy]

From what I have read, fewer games are even developed for the PS3, but then it is
the newer platform. Being so much harder and expensive to develope than Xbox or PC.

Kind of hard to believe anything Sony says.

[admin]

What developers are finding is that when you make the Xbox 360 as the lead platform and then try to do a port over to the PS3 and try to get the same gaming experience, it's almost impossible because of the difficulties and differences in PS3 programming. It's a lot of work trying to find workarounds to problems that don't exist on the 360. However, if you make the PS3 the lead console and the port over to the 360, it's not as hard because the 360's development environment is a bit more friendly and accomondating, with less need for workarounds. This is perhaps the main reason why developers are switching to the PS3 as the lead platform (cynics would suggest Sony made the PS3 hard to develop just for this reason).

It might force some smaller developers to ditch the PS3 though, or hand over the PS3 porting work to their more resource rich publishers/parent companies, as has been observed with Valve and The Orange Box.