I'm still up for a new Spyro the Dragon game by these guys

Insomniac Games, developer of the Ratchet and Clank and Resistance series’ have announced on their official blog that they have made a deal with EA Partners to make a new franchise for both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Writing on the blog, Ted Price thanked fans of the games for supporting the company for 16 years and then goes into explaining the basic details of partnership.

Today, we’re excited to announce that we have created a brand new universe and franchise for you to experience in the coming years. As we develop it, one of our goals is to provide an awesome experience for as many players as possible. With that in mind, we’re working with EA Partners to bring this title to both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Before all you PlayStation fanboys attempt to crush themselves with the console, let’s read a little further to see what this actually means for Insomniac and fans of their games.

You may be wondering why we’re announcing this game now, and how it relates to our existing projects. We’ve been developing games on an annual pace during the last 16 years. One thing that has become apparent to us though is that in order to live up to our own high standards of quality, we want to give ourselves more development time to iterate and polish our games. All future Insomniac titles will benefit from longer development cycles, which will directly benefit you, our fans.

So, basically, rather than, as they have done the past few years, knock out a Ratchet title, then a Resistance game, then a Ratchet game, they are taking a little bit longer to make the games better, which is never a bad thing, especially when you consider that most of the Ratchet and Clank games were exactly the same and Resistance 2 hardly lit the world on fire.

Price maintains that they still have a very strong relationship with Sony, and all existing games and new projects will be developed with them, but will all benefit from the longer development cycle.

This seems very similar to the type of deal that Bungie have made with Activision to publish games on multiple consoles. Nevermind the fact that  it makes more financial sense to publish games on more platforms, but development studios naturally want to try new things and grab new audiences.

Also, similar to the Bungie deal, the Ratchet and Resistance intellectual properties are owned by Sony, the same way that the Halo franchise is owned by Microsoft. Remember, Insomniac are not owned by Sony, instead acting on a mutual relationship. Obviously there will be some questions about lead platforms vs ports, with many PS3 owners complaining about dodgy ports from Xbox 360’s and vice versa, but Insomniac’s track record tends to suggest that they will be quality titles.

I’d say we’d just have to wait till E3 to see what they are planning, however on their Twitter account, Insomniac confirmed that they were not showing the single IP and single game for the consoles at E3, with rumours about a look at Resistance 3 at the show possibly taking precedent.