Spiderman 2 is over 24 months away. What Sony first party games are going to take advantage of the PS5 I/O in the meantime?
Magic doesn't exist, you'll need to be patient because to develop tech and make games needs time. Some points:
- AAA games published in recent years or planned to be released next year take on average 4-6 years to be developed.
- Devs didn't have the final next gen console specs and first devkits until 2019, so couldn't start making the engines to take full advantage of their specs and the new tech, and design the games around that until them. And this is for the ones who aren't waiting for Unreal 5, that won't be ready until later this year.
- We know that there ae AAA unannounced games from Guerrilla, SSM, Firewalk, Firesprite, London Studio, Arrowhead (if published by Sony) and maybe the Uncharted spinoff that was being made by ND with Bend's help that started in 2018, 2019 or before. Which means many of them could be ready from at least 2022 to 2024 plus who knows if some extra 2nd party game, some other team that may be there but we don't know it exists (maybe a 2nd Sucker Punch or Bluepoint team?) or some other team they may acquire. So if some of these guys or Sony combined managed to make a great engine and had the specs and an early devkit or started to make the games targeting next gen based on guesses before getting the real stuff, at least a few of them could be on time to release late 2022 or H1 2023 pushing real next gen stuff.
- Spider-Man 2 has a 2023 date, which could be January 2023 (15 months from now).
It's going to be hard to see games taking full advantage of next gen hardware before 2023 or 2024. Until then we'll see crossgen games or next gen only games that are basically a previous gen game with a few extra shiny stuff but htat doesn't take full advantage of the hardware.
Which isn't nothing new, all generations we had to wait until 2nd gen or 3rd gen games to take full advantage of the hardware. This time with longer dev times and with the pandemic we'll have to wait more.
I think the PS exclusives will be significantly better than Xbox's probably until 2024.
Sony is growing a lot their internal studios to release games faster and have more games developed at the same time inside their studios. They are also acquiring. They are also betting had on 2nd party and 3rd party.
So I think that by 2024 they already will have secured to continue release more and better games than MS during the 2nd half of the generation and the start of the next one.
On top of that we'll have to see how MS will modify these games released 2024 and later to monetize them considering their Gamepass strategy. Probably the biggest ones will be chopped and go GaaS and we'll have to see how microtransactions and to have their content spread over years instead of having all available day one affects them. We know the first one will be Halo and the next one Forza Motorsport. We saw some of them making previous attempts with Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online and remember how they did start.
Obviously not all will go GaaS and I think people like Double Fine, Hellblade II or Indiana Jones will be (I assume) outside that. But I smell they may have some potential big issues related with that which could affect several of these games like Halo, Forza Motosport, Elder Scrolls VI, Gears, FH, Fallout 5 or the next Doom to name a few with potential (or already confirmed) to go GaaS.