| Sogreblute said: The Xbox One and PS4 will die at the same time for AAA support. The Xbox 360 and PS3 pretty died at the same time which was 2016, the last year both systems still saw decent AAA support. I think 2023 will be the last decent year for both systems. Big AAA publishers want to maximize revenue, so if they develop for PS4 they'll do the same with Xbox One since both systems are identical in system architecture. Porting costs today are much lower compared to back then where each system was vastly different in developing games. It's this reason plus the increasing cost of game development that we're seeing a lot of games now going to Xbox or multiplat in general. |
The 360 and PS3 dying out around the same time doesn't disprove my prediction, as they sold nearly as many units as each other and the unit sales disparity between Xbox One and PS4 is one of the main reasons I think it'll be different this time around.
How do you mean identical in system architecture? They're not identical in system architecture. Their CPUs are admittedly both Jaguar-based and very similar, but their GPUs are a little more different from each other than that, and their memory architectures and software development environments are quite a bit different. The efforts to optimize games on each are going to be different too. You make it sound like it's almost a recompile between the two, and I don't think that's true. Different enough that if PS4 sales are holding up better, and Xbox One sales holding up worse, that I predict a break-point where the porting and optimizing work on Xbox One won't be worth it despite that work on PS4 still being worth it. Consider that the Xbox One being weaker than the PS4 overall, making the work to optimize it on Xbox One harder than on PS4 when back-porting to last-gen, and is an additional complication that further weakens the business case for an Xbox One version. Consider further that Microsoft has deployed the tech to stream current-gen games to Xbox One system, and in theory a developer could sell you a code to give you streaming access to the game (not for everything on xCloud, just their game), as a potential wildcard too (as there's no talk of that happening, but it's technically possible).
But hey, mine is a prediction, and my prediction may well not come true! :)
