Craig Alexander, Turbine"s vp of product development, spoke at Austin GDC today in a panel called "MMOs to Consoles." He did spend a lot of time pointing out how difficult it is to develop games on the PS3 vs. the Xbox 360.

Here"s the logic:

# The Blu-ray drive on the PS3 is actually slower in seek and access time than the DVD drive on the Xbox 360. Once the Blu-ray gets up to speed, it can handle large amount of data. Just not in seeking and accessing, which is a pain for streaming when you"re playing something like an MMO.

# The memory architecture is different. When you"re dealing with main memory, you work with "256ish MB" on the PS3 vs "512ish MB" on the 360.

# The tools aren"t as friendly on the PS3. That includes the performance monitor tools, the debugger tools ... everything.