Over the years there has been a constant battle between consoles that has been going strong for many years and will keep going for many more and currently the most recent generation of consoles from Microsoft and Sony are the Xbox series X/S and the PlayStation 5. Both of these consoles are incredible in their own right boasting numerous pieces of technological, graphical and hardware upgrades that make them the best consoles to date, but because of their high specifications and high quality improvements it has brought up the question of what to do with the older generation of consoles and whether to leave them to one side or keep them supported.
What are the reasonings behind Microsoft’s decisions?
Microsoft have reportedly made the difficult decision to stop all support for their Xbox One consoles. Don’t fear though, what this actually means is that whilst Xbox Live, Games with Gold and so on will continue to function on the older consoles, Microsoft are stopping the development of games for the console. First party franchises like Horizon and God of War won’t be making an appearance again, that’s for certain. Many outside developers may still decide to release for the outdated console, though.
Even though new games may still be playable on the Xbox One they will not be able to keep up with the newer consoles as the specifications and development for these newer games will prioritise the curren generation of consoles like the Xbox Series X/S due to the fact that these consoles have newer features and capabilites encouraging newer games and their developers into utilising those features into their games, unfortunately resulting in the weaker Xbox One being forgotten.
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Even though Microsoft has a large range of games that can be played on their newer consoles as time goes on newer games will take longer to develop as game developers will want to try and meet the specifications of two different consoles at the same time, this may mean that gamers will have to wait a lot longer for games, even though this may be the case they are still attempting to ensure that the Xbox One is still a viable option for those who may not have their hands on the newer consoles which is quite a commendable action but it may create new issues that have not yet been seen.
Is Microsoft’s competitor at risk of abandoning their old generation consoles as well?
As the newer generation of consoles began to roll onto shop shelves many people had the question of whether it would cause their older generation consoles to become obsolete, with developers focusing on future generation consoles and meeting their demanding criteria. For Sony and their PlayStation 5 this was not the case as when they released their new console it brought along new games with it that were pushed for the PlayStation 5 but they were still playable on the PlayStation 4. As games were developed for PlayStation consoles most games came with both a version to use on a PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 and it was very rare for a game to only be on one system. Even today there is a running joke that the PlayStation 5 has very few exclusives, and for good reason.
Even though this was a very common feature in most games that were released it didn’t stop the issues that could arise for developers, due to these issues most games that are releasing are having a lot longer of a development time. Years ago games would only be in development for roughly 2-3 years especially mainstream games but due to the larger requirements on consoles to be able to work with their newer features it is causing games to go into longer development periods some can take up to 5 years, this is because developers are having to create their games to be able to run on both consoles meaning they essentially need to develop their games twice.
Only time will tell if Sony follow Microsoft’s lead and end up abandoning the PlayStation 4, but what we do know is if you have an Xbox One, Microsoft is no longer supporting it with new releases, meaning you either deal with what you have in your game library now, upgrade to ‘Generation 9’ or be forgotten. What will you decide? Let us know in the comments!
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