Corporate earnings calls can often be a fount of information and insight into a videogame publisher's practices. Last month, during Electronic Arts' earnings call for the quarter ended December 31st, 2007, CEO John Riccitiello was asked by an analyst whether the company had gotten over the hump as far as the challenges in developing for Playstation 3 were concerned. Here's the exchange, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha:

Doug Creutz, Cowen & Company: It seems to me one of the minor themes of last year was that a lot of publishers had difficulty completing PS3 titles on time and I wondered if you think that you are at the point now where the PS3 development process has caught up to the 360 development process and we’re less likely to see those kind of delays in 2008. Thanks.

John Riccitiello, Electronic Arts: Not quite. There’s no doubt that Electronic Arts, along with many publishers, had some challenges essentially meeting the technical specifications effectively on the PlayStation 3. Games where we essentially led development on the PS3 platform like Burnout, which is doing very well in the market today, 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 are still experiencing some delay on the PS3. It’s a little bit more challenging a developing environment for us.

If the problem was sort of of a certain size as much as nine months, it’s probably a third as great a problem today as it was then, but there still remains some catching up to do on the engineering side for the PS3.

Riccitiello's response suggests that the best technical solution to the difficulties with EA published titles--which ranged from Madden PS3 running at half the framerate as Madden 360 to the PS3 version of Valve's Half-Life 2: The Orange Box shipping weeks later than its 360 counterpart--is to lead development on PS3. But does EA intend to mandate such a plan across its collection of city-states? The answer is no. We emailed a follow-up to EA vice president of corporate communications Jeff Brown. Below is our question, followed by his response:

On the call, Riccitiello says that when EA leads development on PS3, as with Burnout Paradise, you don't have product quality issues on the PS3 SKU. But when you lead on 360/PC, or do straight simultaneous multiplatform development, you tend to have problems with the PS3 SKU's quality. So from an overall product quality perspective, it seems that EA should be leading all development on PS3, but Xbox 360 still has an installed base advantage, which means that from a Metacritic and revenue perspective, the Xbox 360 SKU should be the priority.

My question is this: given that there's an obvious tension between product quality (which suggests that PS3 should be the lead SKU) and revenues (which say that Xbox 360 should be the lead SKU), does EA plan to stay the course and continue to lead console development on Xbox 360, or is there a strategy in place with current and future greenlit projects to make PS3 the lead SKU so as to bring up EA's overall product quality?

It's hard to believe that EA would ever issue an edict commanding development teams to lead on one platform. That's not how we work.

I think John's comment was an observation about early development on a new system--not a top-down policy command on platform choices. EA is agnostic in how we chose a lead platform--Burnout Paradise led with the PS3; others led with Xbox 360; and games like Playground and My Sims are exclusive to the Wii. Dev teams make platform choices based on a number of factors including installed base, technical spec, genre and game mechanics. But don't underestimate consumer demand--if the team thinks a particular group of gamers is going to be responsive to a game or a feature, they'll make every effort to give players what they want.