The extended life of current-generation consoles is beginning to get the blame for hurting the industry by pushing developers away to other platforms such as mobiles and browsers.
The technology director of Square Enix Julien Merceron bluntly stated that Sony and Microsoft were not doing the right thing by hanging on to PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 respectively for seven to ten years instead of introducing new hardware. Allowing the current generation of systems to stretch on for so long was not in the best interest of these companies as it was beginning to compel developers to explore other options after failing to find success on the existing platform.
“This generation has been way too long, and I say this because you have a lot of developers that work on a new platform, and perhaps will not succeed, so they will wait for the next generation, and will jump on that platform,” Merceron said. “You could not do that with this generation though. So these developers went elsewhere to see if the grass was greener. They found Web browsers, they found iOS, they found other things and a lot of them won’t come back to the hardware platforms.”
While it is never certain whether these developers will be able to find success on the next-generation console, at least it keeps them interested instead of simply deserting the whole platform altogether.
The rapidly-evolving mobile platforms such as iOS, Android and browsers appear to be a perfect alternative for the developers, allowing them to be creative and keeping them more optimistic about their chances of success.
Traditionally, consoles were not as long-lived as now. A console would be released and then about four-to-six years later, its successor would become arrive. This would begin the transition period that would see the company gradually ending its support for the previous console and focusing on the new system instead until the latter took complete precedence over its predecessor. This whole cycle then restarted.
This time around though, things are being done differently. While Microsoft brought Xbox 360 four years after launching Xbox, it has allowed the current system to continue for seven years without showing any solid intention of moving to a newer system any time soon.
Same is the case with Sony. Released in 2000, PlayStation 2 came across its successor PlayStation 3 in 2006. The company has stuck with the latter since then and does not seem interested in advancing to the next console in the near future.
This drive for console longevity appears to be severely hurting the gaming industry as there seems to be an apparent lack of excitement and innovative intellectual property. The upper limit of what is possible on the current hardware has already been reached and the experience on offer is beginning to appear stale.
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