Now that Sony has an official blog going, they’re stepping right up to the plate with an article the community really wants to see (granted, with a company spin).

Dave Karriker, the man you all know and love as the head PR man at Sony, wrote up a nice little article to show the in’s and out’s of development for the PS3.

This is an interesting question and hidden within the question is an enormously complex subject! If the game starts life on PS3, then man-hours per feature or costs related to asset production are comparable with industry norms. For that, you can include Xbox 360 and high-end PC games, and exclude PS2 and Wii. However, since PS3’s Cell processor allows MORE features – better physics, more complex graphical processing, lighting or sound, etc. — there is inevitably going to be more cost in supporting those extra features. It’s not that PS3 is harder to write for, it’s just that you can do more with it.

The article goes on to talk about how there’s some great new engines and development tools out there to help developers take full advantage of what the PS3 has to offer.

Karraker then breaks things down a little further:

Now, it’s not without challenges:
1) SPUs are not ‘normal’ processors like the PPU. There is a trade-off between performance and versatility. A Ferrari is not the best car for a visit to Home Depot…

2) If you are porting:
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.

3) If your game has heavy online use:
XBL provides more and better standard libraries for online gaming to developers. For the same features on PS3, developers have to do some extra work. We’re catching up, but there is a difference.

I think this clears some things up, but won’t necessarily stop fanboys from saying whatever the hell they want. Still, it’s terrific that Sony now as an official forum to get this information out to the community.