This is merely an observation, so if you’re one of those silly fanboy types at least hear me out before you begin the hate campaign. It’s just something that I have noticed occurring behind the scenes over the last year that I think is worthy of bringing up, as it indicates a growing faith in the PlayStation 3 console from developers and publishers across the globe. It does not mean that the Xbox 360 is any less important, just that the PS3 is definitely starting to get equal-footing on multi-format games.
Go back six months and more, almost every game that was multi-format was given to journalists on Xbox 360. Code came in for Xbox 360 debuggers (the devices on which we play unfinished games), promo copies were for the Xbox 360 and almost always games were demoed to us on Microsoft’s console when out at junkets across the world. It’s just the way it was.
Obviously being a multi-format publication, we actively chased PS3 versions of these games but they were rarely forthcoming, and if they did make it in, it could be months later. I sit alongside both the editor of Australian 360 Magazine and Official PlayStation Australia and often see the frustration as the latter continually hassled for code that was already sitting on the former’s desk in the opposing format.
So why did this happen? It is my belief that the Xbox 360 code during this period was simply more reliable. When you’re giving media access to your game, you want it to run as smoothly as possible, play to the best of its ability and hopefully not crash at all (which early code as a tendency to do). In the end, this is your best shot at getting a positive response from journalists. So with developers getting a year’s head-start on the Xbox 360 and the PS3 architecture proving to be somewhat challenging to master it simply came to be that the former’s code was the more predictable beast.
Makes sense, no? And if we had to guess we would have said that the code coming into the office throughout 2007 for games available on both formats would’ve been around 80% Xbox 360 and 20% PS3. Hell, maybe even 90:10. It really was that much of a difference, even right up to the final box copies that arrived post-release. To be honest, it was like most publishers preferred that journalists didn’t experience their game on PS3 if they could help it.
But that was then, and as we indicated above, there has been quite a momentum shift in 2008.
