Ben-DutkaAs if it comes as any surprise to PS3 owners, Electronic Arts has admitted they haven't exactly mastered Sony's hardware just yet. Basically, they're saying they have some "catching up to do" with the PlayStation 3.
According to Next-Gen.biz and EA CEO John Riccitiello, their titles certainly enjoy a "faster development cycle" when being produced for the Xbox 360, but development on the PS3 is still lagging behind. An analyst recently asked Riccitiello if the PS3 development process had managed to catch up to the 360, and the CEO's reply was-
“Not quite. There’s no doubt that Electronic Arts, along with many other publishers, had some challenges essentially meeting the technical specifications effectively on the PlayStation 3," he said when asked by an analyst if PS3 game development had caught up with the 360. Games where we led development on the PS3 platform, like Burnout, which is doing very well on the market today, we had no issue at all.
“But in circumstances where we either led with the Xbox 360 or ran parallel production, for the most part, we’re still experiencing some delay on the PS3. It’s a little bit more of a challenging development environment for us. It’s probably only a third of a problem for us as it was [nine months ago]. But there still remains some catching up to do on the engineering side for the PS3.”
Other publishers have indeed faced difficulty when developing for the PS3. For instance, Rockstar recently said the reason for the initial Grand Theft Auto IV delay was because creation of the PS3 version was taking longer than expected. However, we've already seen some pretty amazing productions on the PS3 to date, so we're wondering how much longer EA can hide behind this ongoing mantra… Yes, we get that it's tough, but how come other developers (and not just first-party teams) are coming through for PS3 owners?
