Next Generation Approaches But What About The Current Generation?

It’s been a week filled with talk about next generation consoles, now that the world has been introduced to Sony’s PlayStation 4 (kinda) and Microsoft’s Xbox One, but not many people have thus far asked the question of current generation consoles. Specifically, how long more do we have with them until the move to the next generation is forced upon us?

After all, as much as we might say that we’re getting the consoles on release, we still have quite a large library of current generation games, which we don’t have when the next generation initially releases. This then means that a large number of us are going to stick with the current generation, at least for the time being, before eventually committing in one or the other direction; or both, if your parents are loaded or you’re just an excessive spender.

So then the question becomes, how long will we have with our current generation of consoles? Rather, how long will developers endure development on the current generation?

It stands to reason that a developer will want to get gamers onto the newer, next generation console, but the catch-22 is that they already have a large, established audience on the current generation. As such, they might be forced to sacrifice one or the other or cater to both, depending on the publisher they are attached to. EA, for example might well hold off on a full-on move for now, since they can afford to port many games over and support as many platforms as possible.

According to Blake Jorgensen, chief financial officer at Electronic Arts, who claims that the publisher will be supporting current generation consoles until 2017, that might well be exactly what they plan to do. This revelation came during the Stifel 2013 Technology Conference in New York.

Now, we already know that games the likes of Battlfield 4, FIFA 14 and the next Need for Speed are all being developed for the current generation, however even with that, the extra four years of development effectively extends the current generation console cycle to twelve years, which is two years longer than initially declared by the manufacturers when the current generation was once the next generation.

Then again this might just be thanks to EA deciding to develop games for the Wii U again, and of course the Wii U has comparable specs to the PS3 and Xbox 360, so it’s just a matter of porting the games over and tweaking them. Whether this — and Frostbite 3’s incompatibility with the Wii U — leads to buggier, less functional iterations of blockbuster titles in the coming years is anyone’s guess, but in truth I don’t think it matters that much since within a few years, most of us ought to have found something new to play with… in a manner of speaking.

Still, support until 2017 provides quite a nice buffer, but this is obviously just EA and we must wait a while longer to see how long other publishers aim to support the current generation before leaving it to die. In the meantime, I’m going to go and hug my Xbox 360 as the ‘break-up vision’ overcomes me.

Name: Caveshen Rajman
Location: Durban
Position: Former Managing Editor

Caveshen has published 2177 posts. Read all of Caveshen's posts.

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