Force PS3 players to migrate over to PS4 and then drop support for it

[Rivienne]

I wish it was that simple, would solve a lot of issues and stuff holding back the game. They keep on saying it's not holding back the game but come on, there isn't enough memory to handle all the UI that PC can show and in order to solve that issue they have to take stuff away to get other UI's in, it's alright now but 5yrs down the line it's going to show up more and more for sure. Minagawa-san keeps on mentioning the memory situation with the PS3 so there is proof that there is PS3 issue. Now the PS4 is much more flexible since it has much more memory than 256MB so devs got more room space to work with.

However, I believe there is some type of contract between SCE and SE that the game needs to be released on the PS3 and that's why they had and promised to do it.
So... basically we're stuck with this, until that contract or w/e agreement is finished.

Note: Not saying the PS3 can't do all the things, it probably can but in order to do that you have to free up that much memory to get the other stuff in. It's not an easy task, and also probably one of the reasons why it requires extensive Q/A to make sure it works on both platform.

The problem is your baseline. You have to support the most number of people, this always inevitably means supporting older hardware. The thing that is holding back development and will continue to hold it back, is that a large percentage of players will always be out of date. SE can't change this. If they don't try and find a good baseline, in this case PS3 and low end PC, they lose a large percentage of customers. And they can't afford to take that risk. This isn't about contracts, but about customer base.

I think that in about 5 years they could realistically drop support for the PS3 and (current) low end PC's. Maybe even 2 years, but you have to be careful.

This is the same reason why people do multi-console platforms, and why there are games that are on both PS3 and PS4 at launch. If they only did PS4 there would be the risk that they wouldn't get enough early sales to cover development.

So PS3 and low end PC both are a hindrance to the game being better than it is now. But that is the compromise made to make sure there are enough players to justify game development. And once you get that customer base, you cannot simply drop support for them either. You have to maintain some level of support for years.