Julien Merceron, technology director at Square Enix, has stated his belief that developers are growing tired of the current generation of home consoles, and as such are turning their attention elsewhere.
Speaking to GI.biz, Merceron reckons platform holders Sony and Microsoft made a massive mistake in stretching the lifecycle of PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 beyond the norm.
“We have Sony and Microsoft talking about this generation lasting seven, eight, nine or even 10 years and it’s the biggest mistake they ever made,” he said.
"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,” he added.
Merceron went on to say that future hardware cycles should be shorter otherwise the industry risks losing more developers – an alarming number of studios have folded in the last 12 months alone.
“If you start to make the entry bar really high, more studios will die, more publishers will die, there’ll be less titles on platforms, etc. If you make it accessible, you give more chances to people, you’ll have a better portfolio at launch.”
"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."