PS4 and Xbox One have been relatively much easier to work with, since Sony and Microsoft have managed to keep an architecture very similar to those developers work on with the PC platform, and tools have remained mostly the same since there’s not been any particular disruption from the HD era.
If you recall, publishers and developers had quite a tough time when Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 got announced.
That was mainly due to the shift to the high definition standard, which costed a lot of money both in terms of development teams getting bigger to accommodate the needs of working on bigger and bigger games, and tools becoming more complex and expensive.
PS4 and Xbox One have been relatively much easier to work with, since Sony and Microsoft have managed to keep an architecture very similar to those developers work on with the PC platform, and tools have remained mostly the same since there’s not been any particular disruption from the HD era.
Looking at things in perspective, we’ve been in an HD+ era with the latest consoles, with the next ones that will likely carry us over the 4K+.
A particularly interesting opinion about things to come with the next consoles has been expressed by Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick, who says he doesn’t expect PS5 and Xbox Scarlett to be as “challenging” as PS3 and Xbox 360 after all.
“In terms of next-gen consoles, we certainly pay attention when new business offerings are coming. However, we don’t see the next generation as being particularly disruptive because tech is pretty fluent at this point,” he thinks.
“The last time we had a cycle that was challenging was the one before the last one,” Zelnick said, referencing the move to HD with Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. “That [disruption] didn’t happen in this past shift, and I don’t expect it to [again].”
That’s something I can see coming if you consider that many of the platform owners, existing or newcomers, are going to bet big on streaming, which doesn’t require any particular effort from developers but it’s only a work of data centers being offered by those giants like Google, Microsoft, and Sony.
This is also one of the reasons why the publisher behind Red Dead Redemption 2 and Grand Theft Auto V is so happy about it.
