Despite the enthusiasm surrounding the Xbox One and PS4 – and the monster sales accompanying both since their respective launches – former id Software programmer and industry veteran John Carmack believes that the current generation still has a lot of potential left.
Speaking to Wired, Carmack stated that, “There’s so much you can still do on the previous console generation. The 360 and PS3 are far from tapped out in terms of what a developer could do with them, but the whole world’s gonna move over towards next-gen and high-end PCs and all these other things.
“Part of me still frets a little bit about that, where just as you fully understand a previous generation, you have to put it away to kind of surf forward on the tidal wave of technology that’s always moving.”
However, some of that concern may just be a general reluctance to move away from known hardware to relatively new platforms and that with concerns to the above, “Data has shown over the decades that that’s usually not as important as you think it is.
“Although I keep making new arguments where now we can say that we’re past the knee of the cost-benefit curve in terms of what we get with graphics, and people are saying that with the next-gen consoles, that okay, they look better but they don’t look nearly as much better as the previous generation. So does that mean people will stay happier with the current things? And I could make that argument with a straight face and play for it, but it’s probably going to be wrong.”
Considering that some analysts like Michael Pachter believe this generation of consoles to be the last, it will certainly be interesting to see how long their cycles last.