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Two 360 Titles Lose Their Exclusivity
While for the most part we've been hearing about formerly PS3-exclusive games heading to Microsoft's console, as the PS3 begins to get some momentum up in the marketplace we'll start to see the opposite happening. The first converts are the titles Kane & Lynch (a stealth shooter), and Crossfire (a co-op military shooter). Both are now slated to launch on the PlayStation 3, as well as the Xbox 360. Opposable Thumbs reports: "'[SCi Entertainment's] Board believes that a release of these products simultaneously on all three platforms (PS3, Xbox 360 and PC) including the two next generation platforms will benefit the long term revenue potential for these two strong franchises rather than releasing different versions at different times.' It's hard to say that this move is all that surprising. We've said time and time again the high development costs of current generation software are going to lead to an increase in the number of cross-platform software, as extending the possible player-base for a title is crucial for profit. From the looks of these two games, this is a solid win for the PS3: two more quality games to add to the growing list of the PS3's star software."
Porting most titles from the 360 to the PC or the PS3 is probably a straightforward exercise. There are issues of course, but all three platforms can obviously share the majority of their code and other assets like graphics.
The same is not true of the Wii. The reason there are so many crappy PS2 ports going to the Wii is because it has no peer. It is underpowered in memory, CPU and graphics compared to the 360 or PS3, making it difficult or downright impossible to downport things to it. Thus it gets a lot of sloppy seconds from the PS2. I don't really see the situation changing for the forseeable future. Once the PS2 starts to wane, the Wii is going to have to overly rely on exclusives which many 3rd parties may consider to be suicidally risky when Nintendo has dominated sales for exclusives.