Actually, in the case of the 360 that's more or less what happened:
http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/655/655273p1.html
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Originally Posted by State of the Xbox 360: Final Kits, Oct. 2 2005 |
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We had seen the future of HD, and it wasn't all it was cracked up to be. The truth of the matter was that the vacuum of information that created one of the dullest summer sessions in countless years. It turns out this effect was partially created by design, partially because of the late delivery of Beta Kits.
Microsoft finally delivered Beta Development Kits in June, several weeks after they were promised to developers. Their delay partially caused the unimpressive E3 showing, but it also meant that developers didn't have the triple-core processors to work with until well into the summer. The kits, as reported in our feature story "Enter the Beta", were unstable and difficult for developers to adjust to at first, but in time their games started showing some breakthroughs. The Beta Kit architecture much more closely resembled the final console architecture, it showed real processing power, and it gave programmers a much clearer idea of how to address the totally new multi-core processors, which game developers had never seen before.
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This was significant because it meant that the team responsible for developing the initial 360
Madden (i.e. the basic code that would be the foundation for all of EA's next-gen football titles for years to come) had to do so with only limited knowledge of how the final 360 hardware actually worked.
I'm not saying that was the sole cause of all of the problems we've seen with EA's next-gen fb titles (there were some
very questionable design choices made as well), but it sure as hell didn't help.