Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

Fortnite and Call of Duty are not great examples given they both still run on the PS4. Even the latest Call of Duty iteration that launched barely two weeks ago still runs on last generation consoles, because there's still so many players who haven't felt the need to upgrade to the successor generation after four years.

I don't think there's ever been a console generation before where the last generation was still getting big new releases this deep into the next one. The PS5 Pro is out now and the PS4 is still getting new games.

View on HN

From what I've heard only about 4% of CoD: BO6 buyers were on PS4. It might finally be getting to the point where it just no longer makes sense to craft an entirely different version for the older consoles. Perhaps Switch 2 getting CoD will keep the PS4 version on life support however.

I wonder how much effort it really takes to release a game for both PS4 and PS5, especially if you're already building it for Xbox and PC. PC requires you to support a wide array of performance capabilities, at least in theory making it easy to scale back performance to a previous-gen console; and they're probably still using an evolution of the same engine they were using for PS4, so at least to my mind it's a checkbox, some performance tuning and a bunch of QA. (at least in theory). maybe some different servers to support multiplayer - but since CoD supports cross play maybe not even that.

Agreed, and 4 years into PS5, the onus on making the PS4 a "quality" experience is lower, vs. just giving PS4 owners "something" to play e.g. in developing markets where people mightn't have upgraded yet.

An analogy I might draw is the FIFA games, where FIFA 14 came out on the PS4 and PS3, but also the PS2 and Wii, which were just roster updates of previous years (no new gameplay features whatsoever), and clearly that was acceptable to enough people to give EA the trouble of developing, printing and distributing.

Or for years getting a ps5 was nearly impossible and so they gave up.

Yeah but the only discernible difference to most gamers from last gen to this gen is load times… the ps5 pro side by side to a ps5 screenshot of an enhanced game vs the unenhanced version is crazy.

Crazy in what way? I don't think there's much of a difference in terms of visuals between a PS5 and a PS5 Pro, especially at common TV viewing distances.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com