Ubisoft will continue to develop for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles for several more years, company vice-president of creative Lionel Raynaud told Edge.
"We will have games for PS3 and 360 for this year and probably the years after," said Raynaud prior to confirmation of Assassin's Creed Unity on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Windows PC. "We want to be able to provide games to people who are playing on these consoles. Black Flag was the first Assassin's Creed game of this new generation but it was designed with that in mind, but I wouldn't say it was a cross-generation game, as it has features that could only be for this generation."
Developing across both last and current gen systems doesn't hurt development, Raynaud continued, describing cross-generational development as simply a matter of deciding which console will be the lead platform throughout.
"It's a choice," he said, "even when you do a game that has old-gen and new-gen versions, we decide which one is lead. So if you decide that new gen is lead for all of your games, then you have no restrictions at all. You're just saying that the other generation will maybe not be able to have everything but still be a better game than we're used to having on this generation. We never made choices on Assassin's Creed or Watch Dogs where because we have this other generation we couldn't put something in the game. It would be a very bad call from a company and brand perspective."
"Gen 3 is an awesome platform," he said. "It has a huge audience and has a lot of capability and we're going to continue to publish games on gen 3 for as long as there is an audience there. We have a tendency as a company to support the last-gen platforms for many many years. I can tell you we have products planned for next year, the year after that and the year after that for gen 3 for sure."
