Digital Foundry’s John Linneman has said that he has spoken to enough developers to deduce that, contrary to popular belief, making cross-gen games is a “painful process” from a development standpoint.
In a Twitter thread addressing the portion of gaming community that is reluctant towards the idea of next-gen exclusives, Linneman pointed out that this has long been a business practice and helps to advance the industry. When a follower opined that making cross-gen games is more doable now than 25 years ago, Linneman said that “nobody wants to develop for an under-powered Jaguar CPU any longer.” “I’ve spoken with enough developers to know how painful the process is at this point,” he added. “Leave Xbox One and PS4 behind.”
One weird thing I’ve noticed lately is an aversion of “next-gen” exclusives as if launching a game exclusively for a next-gen machine is “anti-consumer”. This is how it’s worked before – Mario 64 didn’t exist on Super NES and it was a great thing.
— John Linneman (@dark1x) August 13, 2020
Business wise, I fully understand the investments and desire to maximize potential customers. It’s absolutely logical. But I don’t feel going next-gen exclusive is somehow “anti-consumer” and am baffled by the insistence that it is.
— John Linneman (@dark1x) August 13, 2020
A number of developers agreed with Linneman on Twitter.
“Building and certifying games for a bunch of targets is hard regardless of hardware utilization,” said former DICE developer Liza Shulyayeva. “Compatibility issues in SDKs and other tooling are a thing, as are staffing and infrastructure limitations. This isn’t a matter of clicking an extra button to support 10 platforms vs 9.”
These comments seem to contradict the argument put forth by Xbox boss Phil Spencer, who recently claimed that cross-gen releases don’t hold games back.
[Source: Wccftech]
