Mikeyfell said:
Does EA realize that anyone who "Grew up" with mobile games is like eight to 12 years old?
Dead Space 3 is an M Rated game.
Are they really willing to wait 6 to 10 years to see the fruits of their stupid decision making?
No, they know dumb parents will buy the game without paying any attention to the 18 rating and are perfectly happy to market to the very part of the market their game is explicitly banned from sale to. Remember "your mom will hate this game" from the Deadspace 2 marketing?
Love the new logo guys!
On the topic of developing games for the multiple platforms though, if the PS3 is the outsider it's not because of it's hardware; its more because of it's software.
The PS3 and the 360 are surprisingly similar when it comes to the fundamentals of the system. Both have PowerPC based central processors which run the same number of threads: The Xbox has three cores running two threads each, while the PS3 has eight cores with single threads - of which Six are available to developers for games (One runs the OS and security software while the last core is a backup in case one of the other cores is a dud or breaks down.) The two use graphics chips clocked at similar speeds (500MHz for the Xbox and 550MHz for the PS3) based on PC cards from the same time period (2005-2006 in both cases.) There are obviously differences between the two platforms, the PS3 favours speed of processing data while the Xbox favours volume of data, but the key ones are in the software side.
The reason why Xbox and PC code are comparatively similar has more to do with the XBox using a derivative of DirectX9. Consequently games which are developed on the Xbox platform, then ported to the PC use DirectX9 - because there's no point redeveloping the game from the ground up for later versions of DirectX since Microsoft altered the system so drastically with DX10. Since DX9 is available for windows at the same time, you might as well save time and use that. Sure, it means you can't support certain features - but if you can't make your investment back on the PC game sales where's the point in redeveloping it just to add those when you can't use them on the other platforms anyway?
If your porting from the PS3 you have to develop the game from the ground up for the other platforms, and vice versa. You can't really port a game to the PS3, you have to develop it again on that platform. You can reuse assets, but not code. At least, to my understanding.
I'm a PC gamer myself so I'd rather they would develop on the PC first, then make nerfed versions that the consoles can manage. But the PC market isn't big enough, in the opinion of the big game making studios, to support that. Why risk alienate the larger market by catering to the smaller one? Well EA and mates, you might want to ask Valve - unless you want to suggest that the console versions of their games are better than the PC ones?
Oh, and a game for getting a Scifi fan into games - try FTL. It's simple, easy to learn and cheep. Also it gets you used to loosing a lot at first, then getting better quickly.