Generation Overlap: The next-gen consoles learn to cohabit | Opinion
Rob Fahey
Contributing Editor
Friday 18th March 2022
Microsoft
Nintendo
Sony
It's common knowledge that the lifespan of game consoles has been slowly stretching out -- a trend you can trace in a fairly linear way, for Sony consoles at least, from the roughly five years between the launches of PS1 and PS2 up to the seven years between the launch dates of PS4 and PS5.
What's perhaps less widely appreciated, however, is that measuring the interval between launch dates only tells one part of this story. In parallel with the slow growth in that interval, consoles have also come to enjoy longer and longer market relevance even after the launch of their successor. Supporting the previous console through a single annual cycle used to be plenty for most publishers; nowadays it's fairly common for the old hardware to get parallel releases of major franchise titles for two years or more.
That overlap is important for consumers, of course -- a system you bought only a year or two ago suddenly seeing no new games released for it because of a new system being released would be a pretty awful experience that would do nobody any favours -- but it's a bit of a headache for game creators.
That overlap is important for consumers, of course, but it's a bit of a headache for game creators
The overlap period effectively demands the creation of multiple versions of each major game serving systems with radically different technical specs and performance profiles; at best it's expensive and time consuming, and at worst, it limits the design and technology decisions that can be made for the versions on newer hardware because of the need to maintain broadly identical functionality on older hardware. Of course, in the end this is done because the market
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