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| haxxiy said: It would be a nightmare to develop for, though, since it's essentially as if there were many consoles in the market to port the same game. A lot of devs are struggling with the Series S as it is. That being said, if the PS5 Pro had like hardware emulation for PS1-PS2-PS3 as well, Xbox-style, that would have made it very worth its price. So I think there are potentially a lot of ways to increase the value of a premium console and make it desirable despite the price. Or maybe if Sony just came forward and said "This will be a long generation, don't expect the PS5 in less than 5-6 years" that would also make the PS5 Pro more desirable. |
I think it definitely is more work, but not to the extent of "nightmare." Almost every game releases on PC at this point, and the problem this provides from a software development perspective is an order of magnitude larger in scope (instead of say four configurations or slightly more, given "performance modes", you have dozens to hundreds.)
I think it actually solves a lot of the issues with these staggered hardware releases and provides much more benefit (from the software end) by doing it at the start of the generation rather than by having mid-gen refreshes, because then developers don't have to go back and patch games that have long since been released, but instead find an appropriate settings profile to match with each performance tier while they are in the peak of the initial development and have resources appropriated for it already. The mid-gen refresh isn't much worth it if games don't get patches.
I actually think the bigger reason why they don't do this is because of the hardware R&D and marketing costs more than software development. The software end of things has been largely solved with middle-ware (proprietary game engines that scale seamlessly and automated testing environments.) Having hardware engineers design multiple different SKUs, is a huge cost for very little marginal benefit though. This pans out when you're trying to make a weaker system to sell to more people who otherwise wouldn't have purchased the platform by lowering the price or you are trying to get people to double-dip and buy a mid-gen refresh (hopefully also increasing attach-ratio as they are more willing to buy new software that takes advantage of it.) But if all of your tiered platforms have the same profit-margins anyway why would you care which one somebody buys and why would you invest in the R&D? The only way this would make sense is if people are moving towards gaming PC's and choosing to buy consoles at lower rates. In the past this wasn't much of an issue because the console experience was much more distinctive from PC gaming, but nowadays there aren't even many console exclusives that don't come to PC. In some ways, getting a PC can maximize which games you have available in your library because you'll get both Microsoft and Sony exclusives.
