Football not so hot on PS3?

Posted in PS3 by James Temperton on July 5th, 2007 at 18:27

Football (the American kind) isn’t too great on the PS3, according to reports. With gaming versions of the sport some of the best selling titles of all time in the USA it is hugely important that they are made well. Case in point: the PS2 got Madden and the Dreamcast didn’t. So what’s the problem with football on the PS3? We’ve got the details for you inside.

A story over on 1UP has revealed that the PS3 versions of of Madden NFL 08, All-Pro Football 2K8, and NCAA Football 08 will all run at just 30fps. This is in comparsion to the XBOX 360 versions that will run at 60fps. What does this mean? Well, it means the XBOX 360 version will be quicker, prettier and smoother. But why is this the case?

1UP put the question to Sony:

“We have already proven that sports titles can run on the PlayStation 3 at true HD with 1080p output with NBA 07,” says Dave Karraker, Sony CEA’s senior director of corporate communications. “If you have questions about specific third-party games, you should speak to those publishers.”

A rather strange view to hold. Surely Sony would want to ensure that multiformat games on the PS3 were at least as good as on the XBOX 360, if not better. The approach they seem to be taking hardly seems helpful to third parties, which is somewhat baffling.

Todd Sitrin, EA’s vice president of marketing sports branding had this to say:

“We want to make sure that we give the best experience we can on each platform. In designing a game, there are all sorts of tradeoffs that include frame rate, visuals, features, AI, etc. Football is an extremely challenging sport to replicate because of the number of people on the field, their interaction, and the scope of the environments. As you can see, every company making a football game this year made a decision that the best experience for the Xbox 360 included 60fps whereas the best experience for the PS3 was 30fps. We certainly believe that both the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions are our football products are outstanding experiences and recommend that each gamer look at the entire experience, not just one aspect. We think they’ll be very happy no matter which version of the game they play.”

A few weeks ago, Karraker talked about the the subject on Sony’s PlayStation blog:

“If your game starts on Xbox 360 you will have to re-engineer aspects of the game to run properly on PS3. This means additional effort. Some developers have been complaining about this but I don’t believe we can solve that. Xbox 360 is a different machine with good, but lower powered hardware in a different architecture. Developers have to view them as two different machines not as a common platform.”

Is the PS3 really more difficult to develop for? Is this just a case of developers being lazy? Apparently there are tricky conversion issues between the XBOX 360 and the PS3. As the XBOX 360 came first, it seems to have the upper hand. In the case of these titles, they have been in development for the XBOX 360 for longer and thus the PS3 versions come off second best. Worrying news, or just lazy developers?