| torok said: The lenghty pipeline is something new, since the last generation. PS2 games were made with 50 developers and two or three years. Also mind that it isn't always possible to start developing so early, because you need dev kits to do real progress and that won't arrive that early. Porting to a next gen is feasible, but you would end up with games that look midway trough generations (like MGS5). For the bolded part, I believe that this could even end up eliminating console generations. No more retro-compatibility problems, new units each 2 or 3 years. Each unit keeps receiving games for 7 or 8 years. |
And yet major AAA franchises like Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty, etc. can crank out a new title every year even though that's done via multiple development teams working on different games from the same franchise.
Nintendo games have had long development pipelines dating back to the N64. There's a reason why we don't see annual or even bi-annual releases for IPs that could easily sell on that frequency. Zelda games in particular have notoriously long development pipelines.
The thing to note about current console development is that most of the games are co-developed for PC/Windows due largely in part to changes in console architecture that more closely resembles modern gaming PCs. This is intentional. It's also the reason why we're not seeing crazy proprietary chipsets in consoles anymore.
But once you start developing console games that are more of a product of a PC like development environment, it becomes quite a bit easier to do cross generational ports. It's a fairly safe bet that this is going to be the common standard heading in the future.
And yes, because of this, we may well see the eventual elimination of the concept of console generations as a marketing tool, much like the PC market. While I'm sure this will rankle a portion of the console consumer base, particularly the ones who buy on the perception of having the most powerful/up to date hardware, I would not be surprised to see a console market in which SCE and MS release significant hardware updates every 2-3 years while maintaining the same operating system and full compatibility with the previous generation hardware (as a ".5" or "+" update), possibly even squeezing the same games across 3 generations of hardware before the earlier generation loses standard support (no more first party releases/ports, no required 3rd party support for new games, etc.). So a consumer would still be able to play the latest games on a 7 year old console, but with a fair amount of concessions in the form of performance and visuals, just like an older/lower spec gaming PC.
