That doesn't really matter when the developers bite the bullet and port to the PS3 anyway. Like, I'm sure that developing the 360 version AC3 is a lot easier, but the PS3 version is still happening.
Of course it mattered, and mattered in a huge way. Because of things like poor tools not allowing us to properly optimized ps3 builds, having ~100mb+ less memory to use on ps3, etc, meant that ps3 versions always lagged behind the 360 versions to a significant extent. Word of mouth got out and the damage was done, core gamers that wanted to play the best version had to get it on 360 not just for the better online support but to get the better game in general. Sony chose it to be like that by ignoring what developpers needed, but it really didn't have to be that way.
How is your rival making a huge mistake not lucky? Unless MS had saboteurs embedded in Sony's management, this was pure luck on MS's part. The #1 thing MS capitalized on was Sony choking on its own hubris. But MS suffers from plenty of dysfunction itself, which is why it was unable to pull what Sony pulled on Sega and Nintendo in the 90s.
I don't think it was pure luck at all. Historically Japanese console companies don't support developers very much. Developers to them are cogs, they will work with whatever they are given and do whatever it takes to get the job done with whatever poor "tools" they are given. We've seen this in tons of platforms in the past where developement tools are just rediculously bad with Japanese consoles. This is the first time Sony has had to go head on against a full fledged software company and that's why they lost, because Sony's priorities were very different from Microsofts, one being a hardware company and the other a software company. Software wins the race, that's been said time and again in the past and that applies to the development process as well but in the past it was always Japanese hardware company vs Japanese hardware company, so the development process was equally horrific all around. I can think of just one exception there, the PS1 was actually relatively easy to develop by Japanese standards and that may have helped them leapfrog their competition at the time. I remember being irritated by the PS1 due to documentation only being in Japanese for much of the docs, etc, stuff like that, but by Japanese standards that machine was a breeze to develop for. Even there though they fall short of what a company like Microsoft deems as good tools, it's just a different league.
MS "stole" almost nobody. Rather, nearly everyone that was voluntarily exclusive last gen went cross-platform this gen (if it was about avoiding Sony's awful tools, they wouldn't have made PS3 games at all) because there is no one platform claiming 80% of the market.
It was a domino effect. Sony launching with a machine that was so far behind in both tools, available memory, etc, meant that the 360 gained enough foothold to where Microsoft was now able to court publishers resistant to the 360 platform and have them defect. The situation way back then when I was involved was that the 360 was a temporary platform, we all started on it but the intent was we would all switch over to ps3 fulltime and the 360 would eventually just get ports. No one at that time expected the 360 to amount to much. It didn't turn out that way as when we all saw how shockingly behind Sony was, lacking on basic stuff like consistent online, achivements, fast game patching, tools, memory, etc that our plans changed and we stayed on 360 as the primary platform. I can't imagine we were the only ones that saw it this way, as indeed the 360 held on as the primary platform for most developers for many years to come. That process insured it was the best platform for the best selling games after which publisher after publisher caved in and started to support the 360. This entire situation was avoidable, but it all came to be this way because Sony was clueless about developers and what they needed.
Really all Sony had to do is take some of that small fortune they poured into 1st party games and divert it to tools and support. Sure we still would have had to deal with the slow bluray drive, split memory, rsx and spu tasks, but with the right tools and support it would not have taken 7 years to figure out, maybe just a year or two. We all had issues on the 360 as well, it's cpu sucked and ran legacy code like ass but Microsoft was there with tools to identify bottlenecks and hands on support to let us know exactly why code performed poorly so we were able to rapidly fix it from the beginning. I mean heck we used to be able to litereally debug a pixel on the 360 very early on, you could see exactly every step a pixel took during the render process and debug it. Or back in 2005 I spent two days with key Microsoft staff in Redmond doing nothing but profiling our game with them. They told us tons of valuable info at the time to optmize our game, patiently sitting there with me and another coder as we went over everything in extreme detail. That attention to developpers and tools is what turned the tide for them, along with other forward thinking like XBlive.
