Julien Merceron, Square Enix’s worldwide director of technology, believes that the current generation of consoles has gone on much too long. Furthermore, he believes that the length of the consoles life cycle has forced developers to like at emerging platforms and, as a result, has helped those platforms become as significant as they are now.
Merceron goes so far as to say that the long generation is the biggest mistake that Sony and Microsoft have made.
“Now you don’t need to manage longevity by complexity of programming, because your longevity is ensured by your online model. And I would suggest that maybe we don’t want long generations. We have Sony and Microsoft talking about this generation lasting 7,8,9 or even 10 years and it’s the biggest mistake they’ve ever made.
“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. 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.
“So you could look at it that thanks to Microsoft and Sony and the length of this generation, it helped the emergence of other platforms and helped them get strong before the next hardware comes out.”
Source: GI.biz
