The cross generational releases were actually a pretty recent trend. Between the 6th and 7th gens. It really wasn't a thing prior to that.

I'll say it's a bit odd that developers would skip the time it takes to do a scaled down port for 7th gen titles, but hey; I'm not privy to their spreadsheets and I have no idea what their accountants estimate would be the results on extra cost of development relative to the extra sales they would have on legacy platforms.

On the plus side, it does give developers something to use for marketing and PR if their game supposedly pushes some technological boundaries or makes legitimate use of the greater resources 8th gen platforms have to offer.

On a consumer level, it does let new adopters feel more justified in their purchase and maybe even buy a few more games they wouldn't have normally bought, but do because they're exclusive to their new console.

It'll be interesting to see how long cross gen support lasts. For some titles, it makes sense in terms of market size, while other titles might benefit from the illusion that they simply can't be done on older hardware.

Why not?
XOne and PS4 multiplats are doing extremely well already and they're just barely out.

I hope the wiiu now gets ports from ps4/bone version instead of lazy ports from the ps360
*hope*

Perhaps the sales of the next gen hardware, particularly the PS4 must be encouraging to a lot of publishers.

What about 2015 and 2016?

I'm not really that surprised.

The same has happened with every new gen and the excellent sales of the PS4 and XboxOne (which are the platforms that matter for western devs) only make this transition a lot easier for them.

Only the sport titles like Fifa or games like CoD will still get PS360 ports for the next couple of years.

If it can fit on 7th gen then it technically isn't made for 8th gen now is it?

Anyone see the sales of Thief on last gen(the correct name for 360/PS3?) Literally nothing! I believe there will be no games releasing for last gen by the end of this year. There is simply no money in it! Look at GT6 too! What a disaster to go from 12 million to struggling to 2 million.

weird? More like refreshing

Am not sure why, there is a huge install base of 7th gen to be used, even probably with 100k copies would justify the port cost. Maybe the games cost more to port than they used to? I genuinely don't like how the costs in the industry are rising, putting more pressure on the developers to restrain from doing anything innovative and play it safe to avoid bombas. You don't need an unnecessarily huge budget to create a great gaming experience