Hardware always comes in hot, always has always will. Even the Wii U that uses older tech came in hot. But the difference is that modern engines are designed to be scalable across different hardware, and easily portable. It's far to expensive to remake everything from scratch these days so they design engine tech to be evolved over time, that is why Naughty Dog are using the same engine that Uncharted 1 uses on the PS4 games just polished up with new tech added in. Even the big new engines like Unreal Engine 4 have been in development for years (Tim Sweeney started on UE4 in 2003 by himself and had a small team on it by 2008 and became available to license in 2012) all tech in games is designed looking towards the future. And the fact that the consoles are mostly using existing PC tech and architectures just makes it easier. Sony especially has made the PS4 much easier to work with, shipping with competent tools and well documented system. Unlike for example the PS3 that shipped with all the technical documentation in Japanese only with buggy tools, and a crazy architecture that no one understood at the time.
The reason that there are fewer games from big publishers on current gen consoles has nothing to do with tech. It is because the industry has changed and there was a serious lack of confidence in the traditional console space. Console software has been on a downward trend for several years with sales being focused on fewer and fewer big titles, plus PC, social and mobile especially in terms of the F2P model were exploding in popularity. and the only indicator for hardware they really had was the Wii U which was slow out the gate. This led to publishers ever bigger focus on to big to fail lowest common denominator tent-pole releases, trying to immitate Activision's wildly successful model. This naturally means few big titles but the ones that are coming are bigger than ever before, and as the budgets get bigger so does the risk of faliure which means a lot of hedging so that means cross gen as publisher couldn't predict that PS4 and XBOne would be off to such a strong start hardware wise when they made the decisions keep in mind games take 2+ years to develop and most of the big ones 3-5 and decisions on platforms are made at least a year out from launch.
So we have a climate where publishers are focusing resources into fewer bigger games in fewer franchises. Too scared to ditch old hardware for fear that the console market could be shrinking. With other new platforms offering lucritive business models with higher ROI steeling more resources. Yea it's not really surprising there is a shortage of big titles for current gen hardware. It's not like the warning signs werent there, tho now that the harwardware is doing well there will probably be a renewed investment in console games.
and if you don't belive me
http://www.worldsfactory.net/2014/01...s-nothing-2015We have talked a lot in the last week about Kingdom Come: Deliverance, the CryEngine powered RPG based on medieval history. It is very likely that we’ll talk a lot more about it in the next couple of years or so (the tentative release date is set for late 2015), but today we intend to inform you about an interesting and yet worrying prospect shared by Creative Director Dan Vàvra: he fears that most publishers have nothing prepared for 2015, because they were just too scared about the next generation and mobile gaming taking over to finance proper projects such as Kingdom Come: Deliverance.
"Our meeting with the investor took place 13 days before the launch of PS4. What has that got to do with us? A lot, because I had deduced one interesting, almost shocking revelation from our negotiations: one of the main reasons why nobody had signed for our game was the fear, I would say almost horror, of the established big publishers that the new consoles would be a washout, that they weren’t powerful enough and that people today wanted nothing but free-to-play MMOs for iPad. So they were all preparing a few guaranteed mega-titles and waiting to see what happened with regard to everything else, which sent a few studios to the wall and might also result in a big drought for good console games in 2015, because I get the feeling from behind-the-scenes talk and indications that most publishers have nothing prepared for that year, because they didn’t want to plan that far ahead in such an uncertain climate and now they can hardly come up with something epic in less than two years."
@TheVoxelman on twitter
