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Microsoft has already pledged to aim for concurrent Xbox releases on its first-party games.
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Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla was on Xbox One and PS4, as was Call of Duty: Vanguard, Battlefield 2042, and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy.Īnd that’s a trend that’s set to continue for the foreseeable future: Halo Infinite and Forza Horizon 5 are playable on an original Xbox One from 2013 right alongside the cutting-edge Xbox Series X a first-generation PlayStation 4 from almost a decade ago will get the same Horizon Forbidden West and God of War Ragnarok games as an impossible-to-find PS5.
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With the exception of a handful of true next-gen exclusives, like Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Returnal, or Microsoft Flight Simulator, virtually every big “next-gen” release has been available on older consoles and PC. Meaning even if you can get ahold of a console, there are still relatively few blockbuster titles to actually play on them.Įven if you can get ahold of a console, there are still too few next-gen games
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Why limit yourself (and your sales) to the handful of next-gen console owners when there are millions of Xbox One and PS4 customers to whom you can sell copies of games?Īdding to the mess has been the fact that industry-wide delays (many of which are due to similar pandemic-related issues as the broader supply chain problems) have also seen tons of next-gen optimized or exclusive games moved out to 2022 and beyond. That in turn means that there’s little incentive for developers to aim for exclusive next-gen titles that truly harness the power of the PS5 or Xbox Series X. The physical consoles themselves are still nigh-impossible to buy, which naturally limits the number of customers who own them and can buy games for them. In short, they’re games that in some way rely on the hardware of a new console enough to help justify the outlying cost of a new machine compared to its predecessor.Ī complicated mess of factors have led to the next-gen bottleneck.
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Games like Ratchet and Clank: A Rift Apart or Microsoft Flight Simulator, which push the boundaries of graphics and SSD load times to the point where they can’t have existed in the same way on an older consoles. There’s no formal definition of what makes a game “next-gen.” But I’m choosing to define it here as a game that can’t have existed as an Xbox One or PlayStation 4 title.
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