| greenmedic88 said: 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. |
Call of Duty has 3 studios working on games, so each one of them has 3 years, even if the game reuses a lot of assets and don't change much between iterations. Assassin's Creed usually takes several major studios at the same time, it may even employ 1000 people. It's not feasible for most games to use that level of manpower. Also mind that the last two games were bug fests, so it isn't a good example.
The advantages of a PC-like architecture are clear. I remember that The Division started its development on PC. I saw in an interview a developer saying that they ported the cod they had to PS4 after receiving the dev kit in 4 months with only 4 guys. Easy peasy. This made Scorpio and Neo possible.
I think removing gens would make things easier for us, consumers. However, I'm afraid that Sony/MS/Nintendo won't do it because launching a new console really is a big marketing ploy. The new stuff, a bunch of new functions packed up, it's a special moment. It's hard to replicate this when you do an iPhone-like reveal. Even Apple is having trouble to really "wow" the consumers because it's always more of the same.
