Comment by jpalawaga
Comment by jpalawaga 3 days ago
You end up with a weird phenomenon.
Games written for the PlayStation exclusively get to take advantage of everything, but there is nothing to compare the release to.
Alternatively, if a game is release cross-platform, there’s little incentive to tune the performance past the benchmarks of comparable platforms. Why make the PlayStation game look better than Xbox if it involves rewriting engine layer stuff to take advantage of the hardware, for one platform only.
Basically all of the most interesting utilization of the hardware comes at the very end of the consoles lifecycle. It’s been like that for decades.
I think apart from cross-platform woes (if you can call it that), it's also that the technology landscape would shift, two or few years after the console's release:
For PS2, game consoles didn't become the centre of home computing; for PS3, programming against the GPU became the standard of doing real time graphics, not some exotic processor, plus that home entertaining moved on to take other forms (like watching YouTube on an iPad instead of having a media centre set up around the TV); for PS4, people didn't care if the console does social networking; PS5 has been practical, it's just the technology/approach ended up adopted by everyone, so it lost its novelty later on.