Making games for two console generations at the same time 'sucks', says Control developer

According to Remedy's communications director Thomas Puha, developing games across two different console generations at once isn't particularly fun, or easy.

In a new interview with IGN, the Control developer's head of communications outlined some of the issues with developing games at this point in time – when consumers and developers both are caught in the intersection between two console cycles.

"Whenever you're in this cross-generational point, to be blunt, it sucks," Puha told the site. "You have to support the previous gen, make sure that sings, and then whatever you bring to next-gen is still limited by the choices you made years ago for the previous generation. It's not a very realistic thing, that this old game, we're just going to remake everything and then bring it to next-gen.

"It's just not like that. It's not a reality for us, because you're literally taking away resources that are building the future games and improving the engine for the future."

Remedy is, of course, known for releasing Control most recently, and thanks to a couple of developmental hiccups, the studio ended up delaying the PS5 and Xbox Series X versions of Control, as well as announcing a cloud version of the Lynchian adventure game for Switch around the same time.

Puha's insight suggests that this cross-generation hustle by developers is the reason that new-gen titles don't particularly look like what many people were expecting them to just yet; a lot of resources are still tied up in cross-gen development, after all.

"The games that will come out, the stuff we're working on, the visual bar, you're going to be blown away. And you only need to look at previous generations. You look at something like Modern Warfare. I can't understand how that game looks so good on Xbox One and PS4. And you're going to have the same on this current generation. We're going to see so much improvement."

Here's hoping that Remedy's upcoming game, Vanguard, will live up to these lofty statements, then. And if we don't see the promised upgrades in those tweets, maybe we'll see the results of what's going on right now behind closed doors in one of the other two Remedy games in the works with Epic Games as publisher.