PS3 Loses Another Exclusive Due to Unreal Engine 3
- Scribbled on July 3rd, 2007 by Jonah Falcon
- Filed in Action, Flying/Space, Industry News, Microsoft Xbox 360, Press Release, Sony PlayStation 3, WTF
The PlayStation 3 is having one craptacular life. It loses exclusive after exclusive after exclusive after exclusive, causing Sony fanboys to make petitions to boycott some companies, and sometimes stuff will look better on less expensive systems. It doesn’t look like Source engine likes the system, and now it seems like Unreal Engine 3 isn’t too crazy about it either, as Fatal Inertia has been dropped as a PS3 game “indefinitely” and added to the Xbox 360 stable. According to Chris Kohler’s blog at Wired:
While the Xbox 360 version will ship on September 11, the PlayStation 3 version has been “delayed indefinitely,” a Koei representative told Game|Life this morning.
The delay, he said, is due to “the delay is due to the progress of the game engine for PS3.” Fatal Inertia uses Unreal Engine 3, middleware produced by Epic Games.
(Thanks, Wired.)
July 3rd, 2007 at 8:15 am
Wow. I wonder if the complexities of the PS3 require way too much porting of these working engines before they’ll work, thus not justifying the cost.
I’m not a console designer, but it seems to me that it would have been in their best interest to look at the most popular game engines, today, and see if you could design a console software system that could work within the confines of their features.
But that, on Sony’s part, might have also been more work and hard to justify in cost. Easy to say, hard to do, I know.
July 3rd, 2007 at 8:18 pm
[...] if Sony didn’t have another troubles losing exclusives (check the link farm for a recap), it seems like they may have completely lost Beautiful Katamari [...]
July 3rd, 2007 at 9:59 pm
Ouch. Sony could certainly use more exclusives to get it off the ground, Ninja Gaiden will help, but it dosen’t take a long look at the release list to see something is scaring developers off. Is it possible it has something to do with market concerns? Maybe developers are just as worried about these issues, and the limitations of such a high cost?
I see a lot of titles suddenly bound to come out on the 360 and the PS3 rather than just the latter. On the one hand this is good for me personally, all I have is the 360, on the other hand, the PS2 was probably the most sucessfull platform so far, it’s still kicking, even, so it seems a shame.
July 3rd, 2007 at 10:02 pm
Ninja Gaiden is not an exclusive - it’s a remake of Ninja Gaiden Black for the Xbox.
July 3rd, 2007 at 10:14 pm
Ninja Gaiden SIGMA is, technically. And there are some very die hard fans of the series who would probably grab a PS3 for it. But the back compatibility of the 360 will probably unhinge even that level of exclusivity, true.
August 2nd, 2007 at 1:15 pm
[...] some debate as to whether the PS3 could correctly handle the Unreal Engine 3, Fatal Inertia was previously [...]