“Leave Xbox One and PS4 behind”: developers are tired of working with weak hardware of current consoles
Digital Foundry specialist John Linneman said that many developers do not like to deal with versions of games for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, because the consoles were released back in 2013. They want to quickly switch to creating projects only for the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5.
According to Linnemann, for many developers optimizing their future games for different generations, and in particular, the basic hardware of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, is a rather painful process.
“No one else wants to develop a weak processor the Jaguar, – wrote Linneman on Twitter exclusives in the discussion for the next generation consoles. – I spoke with enough developers to understand how painful this process is at the moment. Leave Xbox One and PS4 behind. “
He also noted that recently he has increasingly noticed the opinion that releasing a game exclusively for next-generation consoles is a step against the client. Linnemann disagrees. “This is how it used to work: Mario 64 didn’t come out on Super NES and that’s great,” he added.
Liza Shulyaeva, a former software engineer at DICE studio, also joined this discussion and confirmed that game development for multiple consoles is really quite difficult. “There are compatibility issues in the SDK and other tools, as well as staffing and infrastructure constraints. It’s not a question of pressing an extra button to support 10 platforms instead of 9, ”she added.
As a reminder, Sony Interactive Entertainment supports this approach. The company does not stand on ceremony with its community and it looks like its last game on the PlayStation 4 will be Ghost of Tsushima. At the same time, Microsoft is trying to sit on two chairs but gives developers a choice: to make a project for both generations or leave the Xbox One behind. Based on the latest Xbox presentation, many studios have chosen the latter option.
