| Mr Khan said: There would be an advantage to a slower update cycle, however. Stability, time to master the hardware and optimize use of APIs and such. I'm all for the rapid advance of technology, but the stability afforded by dedicated consoles has to be valued by some developers in lieu of an ever-shifting environment, especially given how long large games take to develop. If anything, there are elements stumping for longer generations than there already are. Quite a few PS360 gamers i've heard tend to be in that crowd. |
The slower the hardware cycle, the more developers can do with less, but this tends to be more out of necessity than anything else. People naturally expect the next game in a series to be technically improved over the previous one just as much as most developers want to improve their games from one project to the next.
Regular updates in hardware at a rapid turnover rate really just describes PC gaming as newer and faster components are constantly being released. It's not like developers are ever at a loss of figuring out how to utilize the additional resources. Typically the limiting factor is developing for the lowest common denominator (trumped only by time/budget) without making the games themselves feel or look dated. So long as developers aren't tasked with learning an entirely new or radically different development environment, most if not all welcome the extra resources.
If you approach things from a gamer's standpoint, sure; the ones who want current hardware platforms to last as long as humanly possible are typically the ones who just don't want to shell out for a new platform yet still want access to the latest and best games. The only other people stumping for grandfathered hardware platforms are the companies who sell consoles for the simple reason that it costs hundreds of millions, if not billions to launch a new platform. It's only when returns on old platforms taper off that they have to measure the cost of a new platform launch with the continual losses in revenue due to diminishing sales.
