“It’s probably the greatest creative risk maybe going on in the game industry today,” he said, responding to audience questions about dealing with failure. Calling Spore “massive” he continued, “I believe it’s going to be one of the greatest franchises in our industry and will rival World of Warcraft or The Sims or Rock Band. It’s going to be right up there.”

“Or not.”

He went on to say that EA was “100% behind the team that’s creating that, and we will live and fall together,” regardless of the outcome, but that the project was one that was well thought out and well executed.

He went on to clarify the current situation, saying “Games where we essentially led development on the PS3 platform, like Burnout [Paradise], [...] we had no issue at all. But, in circumstances where we either led with the Xbox 360 or we ran parallel production, for the most part, we’re still experiencing some delay on the PS3.”

The EA head called the PlayStation 3 “a little bit more challenging development environment for us.” Those challenges, according to Riccitiello were becoming less and less of problem over time, ending with “but there still remains some catching up to do on the engineering side for the PS3.”

It’s unknown if those challenges on the PS3 side are related to delays with multi-console releases like Mercenaries 2 or Battlefield: Bad Company. EA has shipped a number of PlayStation 3 titles later than their Xbox 360 counterparts or with less impressive visual performance. Someone should really write a book about optimising 4D performance on the PS3. They’d make thousands!