This generation of consoles has been the longest in recent years, and the Xbox 360 might end up reaching eight years before its successor finally releases. Square Enix’s worldwide technology director Julien Merceron thinks that this extended life cycle has been a bad thing for the console game industry.
“We have Sony and Microsoft talking about this generation lasting 7,8,9 or even 10 years and it’s the biggest mistake they’ve ever made,” said Merceron. “This generation has been way too long, and I say this because you have a lot of developers that work on a new platform, and perhaps will not succeed, so they will wait for the next generation, and will jump on that platform. You could not do that with this generation though. So these developers went elsewhere to see if the grass was greener.”
“They found web browsers, they found iOS, they found other things and a lot of them won’t come back to the hardware platforms,” he predicted. “So you could look at it that thanks to Microsoft and Sony and the length of this generation, it helped the emergence of other platforms and helped them get strong before the next hardware comes out.”
Source: GamesIndustry.biz
