In today's EA investor conference call, CEO John Riccitiello was asked by analysts whether the company's PlayStation 3 development process had caught up with its Xbox 360 development process, an issue that had led to delays at a number of publishers. "Not quite," Riccitiello said, adding "There's no doubt that Electronic Arts, along with many other publishers, had some challenges essentially meeting the technical specifications effectively on the PlayStation 3." Yes, we do remember The Orange Box, John.

He went on to clarify the current situation, saying "Games where we essentially led development on the PS3 platform, like Burnout [Paradise], [...] 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're still experiencing some delay on the PS3."

The EA head called the PlayStation 3 "a little bit more challenging development environment for us." Those challenges, according to Riccitiello were becoming less and less of problem over time, ending with "but there still remains some catching up to do on the engineering side for the PS3."

It's unknown if those challenges on the PS3 side are related to delays with multi-console releases like Mercenaries 2 or Battlefield: Bad Company. EA has shipped a number of PlayStation 3 titles later than their Xbox 360 counterparts or with less impressive visual performance. Someone should really write a book about optimizing 4D performance on the PS3. They'd make thousands!