PS3: Development harder but is it worth it?
According to a lengthy report by Dr. Dobb's Portal, game development for the PS3 is significantly more difficult than the Xbox for many reasons.
The primary reason, however, has to do with the Cell architecture. While it is infinitely superior to the PC based architecture in terms of performance and ability, it is still much harder for developers to build games for.
While in a normal situation a game designer would build for a platform and then port the game (IE build for PC then port to console) this becomes much more difficult for the PS3.
Sony claims that the difficulty is worth it as the developer ultimately has much more flexibility in terms of being able to add more richer features to the game, however there would be a cost involved with that.
And this could be why some developers are shying away from the PS3 a little. It's one thing to develop solely for the PS3, but its completely another to try and develop the same game for all consoles. Either you develop for the PS3 and still spend a lot of time and money cutting, or you develop for the Xbox and spend a lot of time and money modifying. Either way it stands to be an expensive proposition for game makers.
Knowing this I'd expect to see gamers start to develop better and more efficient porting tools to help with this issue but since both consoles are still relatively new, this could be difficult.
That being said, the chances of Microsoft moving from the PC architecture are slim, therefore port tools need only be developed for the cell and procedures developed to ensure porting is worthwhile.
This could mean developing most of a game for both platforms and then forking into 2 branches - one cell based and one PC based - so that you can take advantage of both platforms.
Then again, M$ could always switch to the Cell platform once they see the success Sony will have with it. Hard core gamers want the best experience and Sony delivers it. For Microsoft to be considered a true contender for the high end gaming market they need to remain competitive. That means improving the hardware. If that happens the next logical step is the cell processer.
And if that happens then developers will not have to worry because most of the development can be done for the Cell.
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