Counterfeit Girl Scout Cookies

So the rumor around the Internet today is that the reason for Rockstar's delay of GTA 4 stems from difficulties in developing for PS3. I am going to go out on a limb and state that the PS3 version of GTA may very well be a port of the Xbox 360 game. The team underestimated the difficulty in porting a complex game between these two architectures. This sort of porting action may work for a hack title like Shrek the Third, but in order to maintain quality a significant amount of work will be required. In fact it looks to be around 6 months of so of additional work.

I worked on a PS2 title that was being co-developed for the Xbox 360. The demands of porting were so great that the 360 sku was killed before it even made it out of the gate. It was early on in the 360's life cycle and both the publisher and developer massively underestimated the complexity of developing for a next generation console.

The big difference is that with the case of GTA IV is that there is so much money behind each sku that they simply can't even consider killing one.