Developers are having a hard time scaling PS5 and Xbox Series X titles back to the original PlayStation 4 and Xbox One hardware.
At least, that’s what John Linneman of Digital Foundry said last night via Twitter. According to Linneman, many developers have confirmed that scaling up their upcoming cross-gen titles back to basic current-gen hardware is a rather “painful” process. In fact, Linneman states that developers do not want to develop titles for the now ‘under-powered’ AMD ‘Jaguar’ CPU within the base models of Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One, both of which launched in 2013.
“No one wants to develop for an under-powered Jaguar CPU anymore,” Linneman wrote on Twitter when talking about the lack of exclusives of next gen. “I have talked to enough developers to know how painful the process is at this point. Leave Xbox One and PS4 behind. ”
One strange thing I noticed recently is an aversion to “next-gen” exclusives, such as launching a game exclusively for a next-gen machine is “anti-consumer”. This is how it used to work – Mario 64 did not exist on Super NES and it was a great thing.
– John Linneman (@ dark1x) August 13, 2020
Embark programmer, and former software engineer at EA DICE, Liza Shulyayeva, also stepped in on the matter and confirmed that developing games for various purposes is rather difficult. According to the programmer, creating titles working on both current and next-generation consoles requires a lot of work.
“Building and certifying games for many purposes is hard, despite using hardware,” she wrote. “Compatibility issues in SDKs and other tooling are one thing, as are personnel and infrastructure constraints. This is not a matter of clicking on an extra button to support 10 platforms vs 9.. ”
In recent months, there have been several reports about the current gene consoles keeping the next consoles of the next gene. However, Xbox CEO Phil Spencer stated that this is not the case with the Xbox.
“Yes, every developer will find a line and say that this is the hardware I will support, but the variety of hardware choices in PC has not kept up with the most true PC games on the market. The highest fidelity PC games rival anything anyone has ever seen in video games, so this idea that developers do not know how to build games, or game engines, like ecosystems, work on a set of hardware … there’s a point of proof in PC that shows that is not the case.
What are your thoughts on this matter? Do you agree with Linneman? Hit the comments below.
