I know what you mean about regarding the performance and function of games, although these days there is honestly next to nothing preventing a good experience on console alongside PC when it's all the same architecture versus the 360/PS3 and prior generations.
In fact, at least from what I understand about Sony/Playstation, I've read that they offer solid dev kits and support, so things aren't just getting worse for the PS5, but gaming as a whole thanks to numerous factors that have only become more prominent over the years recently, e.g.:
- We have hit the point of diminishing returns in what you can achieve visually for the hardware available that comes with an exponential performance tax to see middling gains, from console to budget PC to the most high end, thousands of dollars setups.
This is contributing to the rising costs to develop AAA games and why there are barely a handful of games worth looking at this gen. Sony has been especially guilty of chasing visuals and is reaching the threshold of almost desperation with some of plain wasteful and stupid remasters they've pushed out, which is just pissing money away and dev time.
- Optimization is seeing much less priority from the top with the mentality of pushing the visual envelope over stable frame rates or visual clarity, while the talent pool is drying up from the bottom to handle the increasingly demanding task at hand with more complex games.
A somewhat minor side of this is an increasing reliance on licensed engines like Unreal a bit more on the third party side but not necessarily if you look at Microsoft's studios, under the presumption that a more accessible and commonly used engine equates to these people automatically knowing what the hell they're doing.
Now this you actually can chalk some of this up to DEI as well because they're no longer hiring the necessary number of legitimately qualified developers when they're more interested in looking for pronouns and rainbow flags for a toxic positivity safe space instead of making video games. Studios no longer have people stepping up risking to rock the boat by say saying, "um, what the fuck is this?," which applies as much to how WTF the piss poor stories and characters are as to shoddy state games are releasing in.
- There is the growing use and expectation of ray tracing, which easily tanks the possible performance for some spastic little details that most people would completely miss in most situations of normal gameplay. Developers might get an easier lighting/shadow solution in the short term, however this comes at the cost of performance, and again they are less equipped than ever to optimize for these increasingly complex games.
- Combine all of that and there is now a near total reliance on frame generation and resolution upscaling to compensate for the overly-demanding visuals and lacking of optimization. As mentioned before, the economical hardware for consoles or lower end PCs simply is not enough to combine all of the pieces without some forms of sacrifice, and developers have turned to those two "solutions" over anything else, especially when they no longer have the talent to do anything else other than what takes the least effort or skill.
So now you have games that barely move the needle with how good they look compared to their predecessors, and the most up to date hardware struggles to nudge it any further regardless of how much money you throw at it, which is where consoles naturally tap out early.
That's why at least the hypothetical resources allocated to developing for more than one system is not really going to have a negative effect outside of company-side incompetence and mismanagement, especially when the key difference console releases and the PC ports is that the former has no guarantees of running at X resolution at Y frames per second, or running at all on individual hardware (think the Xbox s and it's shit hardware and the documented headache that has caused). The industry's growing problem of incompetence and mismanagement isn't even a secret now, either, and we already know that Sony's first part studios aren't immune with Naughty Dog being an easy example (why no Factions 2?), and now they get to be the proud owners of the poster child of bad management, Bungie.
In fact, the additional revenue will not only offset any expense porting it, but help
future games receive the necessary development budgets with the added benefit of even more confidence in the larger audience interest. However, that is assuming that the game itself is actually
good, which circles us back to Sony's problem right now where they're investing in games
nobody wants to play.
That is what will 100% negatively effect the performance and quality assurance behind games for console players because Sony has been drying up their funds wasting development money and time.
Nice! You've got me sold, because that's really all I look for these days. SB's studio is one that Sony needs to take notes from alongside the Astro Bot studio because the Eastern developers understand their market. Meanwhile, I could probably count the number of Western games I'm interested in on one hand.
