PS3 Issues Caused GTA IV Delay?

Dr. Eggman writes "According to statements made by Michael Pachter on Gamasutra, 'The Rockstar team had difficulty in building an exceptionally complicated game for the PS3, and failed to recognize how far away from completion the game truly was until recently.' The article goes on to describe an agreement between Rockstar and Sony not to favor the 360 by releasing their version first, necessitating the delay on the 360 as well. Pachter's comments are interesting, because all Take-Two has been willing to say is that 'technological issues' were causing the hold-up. "

Interesting...

[FreeKill]

If it truly is a PS3 only problem that is causing this delay, Microsoft should just throw money at Take-Two to get them to release the 360 version early. Would be a big kick to Sony. Sadly, they are probably contractually obligated though...

Re:Way to spin it into a PS3 problem zonk.

[sammy baby]

I'm reading the exact sentence you quoted, but I'm getting a different vibe from it.

The quote says that the difficulty was specifically in porting the environment. Not "the PS3 is hard to develop for," or "we developed this in parallel on the 360 and PS3 and the PS3 version has been harder to do." Just that they developed it on one, and porting it is more difficult than they expected.

I'm happy to blame Sony for a ton of stuff, but it's too early to lay this at their feet.

Makes sense...

[ch1a]

This seems to feasible as all the press demos I've heard about have been on the 360.

Here's [gamespy.com] one I could find on short notice.

I'm not aware of Rockstar ever showing the press the game engine running on a PS3.

Anybody have examples of that?

This just in...

[GoNINzo]

Apparently, we take the opinions of analysts as news now? Especially ones that have been wrong in the past? This is the same guy who said [wordpress.com]:

"At the end of the day, we don't play games for social interaction ... We play games to escape." Microsoft's strategy is "absolutely flawed," he said.

I suppose he has never seen the game of World of Warcraft or any of the other games that allow you to play with your friends.

Seriously Zonk, try to have some news objectivity. I'm sure if you dug around, you could find some analyst on the Sony payroll to say how it was the xbox360's extra content causing the holdup.

Re:"Zonked" again...

[Rayonic]

he PS3 has always been the lead platform for the game

Interesting. Link?

Wikipedia makes no mention [wikipedia.org] of this fact, though it does mention that they're using the RAGE engine [wikipedia.org] from their earlier Xbox 360 release, Table Tennis.

Re:"Zonked" again...

[dopplex]

I'm not sure it's accurate to describe the PS3 as the lead platform for the game.

After all, the demos were shown running off of 360s, I believe. (I seem to remember MS saying as much at some point during E3)

We've seen more evidence at this point to suggest that the 360 engine is at a demoable stage of development than we have for the PS3 engine - we've seen 360 demos, but we haven't seen PS3 demos.

Re:"Zonked" again...

[Blakey Rat]

Of course, the financial analyst also believes the PS3 version is a port of the 360 version, when in fact the PS3 has always been the lead platform for the game.

Has it? They've been demoing it on Xbox 360 this entire time, and it's using the same engine as their previous Xbox 360 game. Not that it really matters which platform is the primary development platform, but still, I've never heard that the PS3 is considered the "lead" platform by Rockstar.

Re:Hilarious Zonk FUD!

[ironwill96]

If you're going to troll every games post over the last few days, at least log in so we can flame you properly.

See similar posts here [slashdot.org], here [slashdot.org], and here [slashdot.org].

I think we've all got the point that you're really mad about Microsoft not using a larger optical disc format. Your soap box has been stood upon, you don't need to pick it up and bludgeon us to death with your daily rant.

Thanks!

Re:Way to spin it into a PS3 problem zonk.

[svnt]

Remember that this is a financial analyst [wedbushinc.com], not anyone associated with the company. While he is no doubt only responsible for a limited number of companies, little information is given about his technical background. We can most likely assume he has little to no experience in software development. For him, "porting" could very well translate to "the versions are being developed in parallel and the PS3 version is taking longer".

But as you said, it is far too early to blame the PS3. The article even states he's guessing.

Re:Way to spin it into a PS3 problem zonk.

[DaveCBio]

That's a load of crap. The GPU in the 360 is at least as powerful as the PS3 if not slightly better. Look at all the cross platform games out there and you'll see they usually look better on the 360. Not to mention EA saying that their new sport titles would be running at 60FPS on the 360 and 30FPS on the PS3. Get your facts right there pal.