THQ has confirmed that its WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2007 title will not appear on PS3 until holiday 2007 while the XBox 360 version will be available, on schedule, during holiday 2006.
The news of the delay of the PS3 version of WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2007 would really not be that significant for most gamers had the story not first seen the light of day in the THQ forums. There, in a story that was subsequently withdrawn by THQ, users discussed the delay claiming that the difficulty of creating content for Sony's new console was behind it. Wrestling games rarely achieve critical acclaim but almost always seem to sell enough copies to warrant a sequel; in that respect the loss of WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2007 is significant for Sony.
The official THQ comment states: The next installment in our perennial SmackDown franchise is slated for release across multiple game systems this holiday. The highly anticipated WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2007 is scheduled to ship for Xbox 360, PSP and PlayStation 2 in November. Consistent with our goal of delivering the highest quality content across all next-gen platforms, we have decided to postpone the debut of the SmackDown series on PlayStation 3 until the holiday 2007 timeframe.
Sony's policy on the PS3 has been controversial and developers have had to deal with the excessively high cost of the development kit as well as the challenge of creating content for a brand new processor using a brand new way of delivering the data. Some seasoned developers claim that the problems they are currently facing with PS3 are not worse than those they faced with PS2 but Microsoft was not ready with a similar product then.
