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Game consoles are now smartphones, and that's okay
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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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game consoles won't be "smartphones" until there's way better backwards/forwards game compatibility.
Modern consoles are pretty great about backwards compatibility. There's room to improve for sure, but an Xbox Series X/S can play all Xbox One/Series games, plus hundreds of 360 and original Xbox games. PS5 is a bit worse with only PS4 backwards compat. The Switch is in the roughest shape, because PowerPC emulator or hardware compatibility wasn't practical with the design or hardware of the original Switch.
Are you saying that phones have good backwards compatibility? I do still remember the big iOS cleansing of 32-bit games and apps alongside older Play Store apps being hidden from you due to being developed for "a previous version of android"
better practical compatibility for sure. Of course not literally the entire back catalog of old legacy smartphone apps are still supported but probably like 99.999% of apps people still use are supported on 99.999% of phones people use. 32-bit app devs have had 10 years to update to 64 bit, and most managed it within the first couple. Also the kind of major compatibility jump as with 32bit>64bit should be fairly infrequent, not like every console hardware generation.
compare that to game consoles where the last gen could be cut off from new games at any given time, and next gen is a crapshoot whether the manufacturer will support backwards compatibility.
True, any lost compatibility is usually due to the devs ceasing support and not because of the OS' limitations.
If devs have to actively maintain software to support new versions, I would argue that is not better than how consoles handle backwards compatibility. Especially since games tend to be tend to be treated as finished products that devs stop updating once they move on to their next project.
But that isn't the case anymore, and I expect it never will be again. This generation's transition period has been so heavily reliant on backwards compatibility. Hell, plenty of titles still just launch on PS4 since PS5 can run it anyway.
The only exception has been the Switch, and that's because it was necessary just this once to break away for a new architecture. I can almost guarantee Switch 2 will be an evolution of Switch 1.
At this point the big three are locked into their current architecture. They need backwards compatibility, if a new console ever tries to break from that it will flop as a result.
Yeah, consoles have way better backward compatibility than phones.