As of late, Midway has ran into some issues with the whole Xbox 360 to PS3 porting business. Stranglehold, which saw a September release on 360, was delayed until October and finally released this month on PS3.

To alleviate this concerning trend, Midway’s Mike Bilder believes that studios are going to start developing their games with the PS3 in mind, and then port over the code to 360. Basically, the opposite of the way things are going right now.

I think a lot of people and a lot of focus as far as games that we have internally that are going to be multi-SKU are trying to put the PS3 out in front now, make that your lead SKU. And in the same way I think a lot of people put the PS2 as their lead SKU in the last hardware generation, and then Xbox came after.

The difficulty you run into there, at least in the last generation, was that the Xbox was considerably more powerful than the PS2, and you found that people didn’t always take advantage of the hardware. Whereas with the PS3 and the 360, it’s certainly more of a level playing field, so I don’t think it’s necessarily a negative to put the PS3 first. But it does help mitigate some of that risk in framerate, memory, technology, just the hardware differences.

Two things I get from this statement: Logically, it makes sense to develop for the PS3 first. Get the hard work done and then port over the code to 360. But it also looks like this means development studios are seeing the PS3 in second place in the future, as from a business standpoint, it wouldn’t make sense to start with the PS3 first unless it was selling better than the 360.

Getting Hard Boiled: Midway Chicago’s Mike Bilder on Stranglehold [Gamasutra]

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