| > said companies might not have even thought about trying to do something with those platforms because it was assumed impossible We know now that Epic (obviously) wanted to open negotiaions with Nintendo on EGS deals, even if they haven't started yet and are considered a shot to the moon. I'd be surprised if other companies never put even a bit of thought into the alternate platforms. That is partially was why the court subpeona'd the entire industry for questions and arguments. >With how much mobile OSs change I'm not sure it's relevant. I say it's relevant because part of the marketing of app versions is how (relatively) easy it is to migrate, often including automated tools for the job. I highly dought Nintendo and Sony offer similar things (maybe Microsoft). As such they want to encourage that longevity as long as the dev in intersted in maintaining. So it again comes from "do they care"? Google and Apple do. consoles make no such guarantee. Some years after the next gen becomes current gen, they will leave no option to submit previous generation titles. Both in a physical (stop accepting submissions) and marketing sense (less updates to older consoles, usually just security patches). It should also be noted that consoles are 1-2 systems specs, and some games highly, highly optimize for that spec. So mimgration is naturally harder because consoles generally give devs almost a full memory block to work with, compared to, say, Window's non-guarantee of memory layout. |
No, but the maintained lifetime of a game is usually shorter than a full console cycle (within which you absolutely do have that guarantee) so this doesn't affect those games. It's also worth noting that games that came out in 2013 for the X1/PS4 should still run on their newer counterparts with no changes (though this degree of back compat is at least somewhat unusual, so I'll give you that). On the other hand, the mobile space sees many apps get entirely redesigned multiple times in a decade.
> It should also be noted that consoles are 1-2 systems specs, and some games highly, highly optimize for that spec.
First of all, games tend to be optimized for specific hardware features, with "notches" to turn on additional features in the game for each main target spec. Most games these days ship on multiple platforms including PC so the idea that they're optimized for a specific platform isn't really true anymore. Second of all, the previous and current generations added new specs (X1X and PS4 Pro, PS4 -> PS5 and X1 -> XS back compat, XSS/XSX hardware differences) without breaking any compatibility by keeping general architectures the same with some extra support in the OS to smooth over the places that it differs.
> So mimgration [sic] is naturally harder because consoles generally give devs almost a full memory block to work with
This only complicates migrating to platforms that don't use a unified memory architecture and dedicated system resources, it has nothing to do with updating for new console generations.
Full disclosure - I work for Microsoft/Xbox.