Developer choice is good party stuff and all but if the platform holder wants to incentivise new hardware they'll be putting pressure on publishers to urge dropping support of old hardware. Big publishers may be able to resists but equally, as time wind on, getting new technology to work on older less powerful hardware becomes harder and harder. It'll be interesting to watch how this pays in once Microsoft new hardware comes on the scene.
I don't really agree with this. IMO, console holders want to hold onto their user base more than they want to incentivize new hardware purchase.
New hardware was traditionally there to prevent the loss of users to a newer competing platform or to get new revenue streams going as a console generation died down due to obsolete hardware. But that basically meant rebooting your revenue stream each time you did that with an ensuing downturn in revenue as revenue slowly ramped up again during the generation.
Additionally hard console generation resets risk losing users to the competition as there is no continuing legacy of investment in the platform.
IMO, that's bad for the console holder and bad for developers and publishers.
Again, I still believe the best way forward is rolling generations. Every console represents the same power increase over the prevous 6-8 year old console. Just like traditional console cycles. Only now each "generation" happens every 3-4 years.
The consoles already remain relatively cutting edge and there's always an entry point into the current generation. That means not only is it good for the console maker, developer and publisher, but the consumer as well.
It just has to be communicated clearly to the consumer that once a new console drops, mandatory game support ends at the previously released console. However, developers are free to support older consoles if they wish.
So every console has mandatory support by games for 6-8 years.
As long as games remain scalable (this is a given if a PC release is even remotely a consideration), then this won't restrict what can be done on a new "generation" console. In other words, it won't be at a disadvantage versus a traditional console that breaks compatibility every 6-8 years.
Ryse, a launch title for the current traditional generation didn't take into account any previous gen hardware when it was made and still looked next gen.
It runs fins on a 2009 era graphics card. That's a high end card, but it's also high quality settings. At low it'll run on far more modest hardware. Hardware that would have been weaker that what a 2009-2010 console might have had.
Scaling games down is much easier than scaling games up. Heck, the 5870 was also a radically different GPU arch. than what was in the XBO. It'd be another 2 GPU generations before GCN got its start.
That's a console exclusive (PC version came out much later). A next generation (at the time) graphics showcase. And it has no problems running on hardware that is 4 years older and weaker than the XBO.
Just to drive that home. Gears of War 4, also runs just fine on 2009 era hardware. That's almost at the cutoff for mandatory support of a 2016 release (3 years after launch running, hardware 7 years older than the game release...1 whole traditional console generation) for a hypothetical rolling generation. Anything launched after the XBO-X would, in this paradigm, not have to have mandatory support for anything older than the XBO. Forza Horizon 3 won't run however, as it only supports DX12, but it likely could run if there was a Dx11 rendering path.
It's strange that people think it's extraordinarily difficult to support older generations of hardware, when that has been done on PC for that past 2 decades. There's no secret sauce involved. Hell, companies porting current gen console games to PC aren't even trying to make it run on 2009 era hardware. Their minimum requirements don't go that far back because they don't test hardware that far back. But as long as it has a Dx11 rendering path (almost all do) then it just automatically works for the most part.
Regards,
SB
