Sony's U-turn - Should first party games be cross-gen?

[Mr Puggsly]

AkimboCurly said:

Mr Puggsly said:

Here's the primary question, does going cross gen change the scale or how the game functions? If the answer is no, then it doesn't really matter.

100% this is the heart of the issue from the consumer perspective.

And as I mentioned and has been argued again, the console sales perspective is pretty much a closed case. They're selling out everything they can make so the downsides that might normally exist are made redundant. 

I am inclined to think that the two primary routes that they can hold back next gen are:

1. CPU bottleneck. Not such an issue at 30fps (the fx-6300 manages above 30fps on Valhalla, Cyberpunk and sometimes can scrape 30fps in Flight Sim 2020), where the last gen consoles are still serviceable. But some cases where 60fps will be targeted on last gen... you have to worry. I'm looking at Halo Infinite and Battlefield 6 having large potential to have their ambitions cut short by a requirement to target 60fps on what was a low-end CPU from 2012...

2. Engine choice. I was interested to hear Ryse: Son of Rome brought up as a good example of an early-gen game which used cutting edge tech. We haven't seen anything like it yet this generation. The temptation as well to rely on BC mode to get your game on next gen rather than using a native port also rules out even making modest engine adjustments to bring in additional visual features. But the fact is that Ryse (and arguably Killzone: Shadow fall) were outliers does go to show that most of what were "next gen"-only games ran on old tech regardless. 

During the entire generation people stressed how bad the CPUs were in 8th gen consoles. But quite frankly, I thought they were fine because developers didn't care about pushing CPU. More often GPU bottleneck was the issue and it makes sense given graphics are often the focus. Even now with crossgen content, seems like developers are mostly struggling with GPU. Even with Cyberpunk it seems to me GPU was the real limiting factor in base console versions along with just being poorly optimized.

Modern engines tend to scale very well. I mean we see impressive games running on Switch. So unless the scale of next gen games is really beyond what 8th gen can handle, I think many games should be able to function as cross gen. UE5 is being hyped as next gen tech, but I anticipate it will work well on mobile and 8th consoles as well.