Legendary game designer John Carmack has said he still feels there is plenty more juice to squeeze out of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
Chatting with Wired (via VG247), the id Software founder admitted he “struggles” about deciding whether to explore the potential of Sony and Microsoft’s last-generation platforms or jump straight into new hardware.
“There’s so much you can still do on the previous console generation. The 360 and PS3 are far from tapped out in terms of what a developer could do with them, but the whole world’s gonna move over towards next-gen and high-end PCs and all these other things,” said Carmack, now CTO at Oculus Rift.
“Part of me still frets a little bit about that, where just as you fully understand a previous generation, you have to put it away to kind of surf forward on the tidal wave of technology that’s always moving.”
The DOOM programmer added however that nostalgia probably plays a part in his musings.
“Data has shown over the decades that that’s usually not as important as you think it is,” he said.
“Although I keep making new arguments where now we can say that we’re past the knee of the cost-benefit curve in terms of what we get with graphics, and people are saying that with the next-gen consoles, that okay, they look better but they don’t look nearly as much better as the previous generation. So does that mean people will stay happier with the current things? And I could make that argument with a straight face and play for it, but it’s probably going to be wrong.”
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