With the news of development costs for Playstation 3 games soaring (think Stranglehold or Heavenly Sword), a couple development firms are already starting to shy away from Sony’s expensive next-gen platform. The companies’ concerns are two-fold, actually - first, with the time required to create photo-realistic textures, character models, and animations, firms have to spend Hollywood-style sums to produce the expected content for the PS3. But secondly (and perhaps more importantly), with the PS3’s price tag there looms the question of whether the system will ever see the size of installed user base the PS2 has.

For these reasons presumably, Atari and SNK have both announced that they will not be supporting the PS3 platform in the near future. Atari has stated, in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz that the PS3 will not see any new titles from the company “until 2007”. Given that Atari recently sold its Driver franchise to Ubisoft and has been seeing lackluster earnings reports, it’s questionable how much of an impact their announcement will have on Sony’s success. SNK is a slightly stranger piece of news - during a recent interview with Kotaku, they stated:

“There won’t be enough consoles at launch. Few consoles mean few software sales. We need to wait three or four years. Maybe 2009-2010 is a good time to release a game for the PS3”

Coming from most companies, this analysis would make a lot of sense… but SNK, whose success in the games industry has been mainly based on artistically brilliant 2-D fighters and side-scrollers?? For SNK, it seems like development costs shouldn’t really be an issue - the fact that the PS3 can shade 60 trillion pixels per second isn’t going to raise development costs much for the primarily hand-drawn Metal Slug franchise. More likely, then, is that they’re concerned with the second point above—SNK really doesn’t believe Sony is going to sell enough systems to make it worth their while.

Of course, the real irony here is that SNK has thrived in recent years thanks to the PS2’s success, and their interview with Kotaku re-affirms their commitment to that console. Will more developers see developing for the PS2 as an alternative to big-budget PS3 titles? It seems if more companies take that route, Sony could become its own worst enemy.

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