started last gen actually.
Watch Dogs, Far Cry 4, Thief, Wolfenstein New Order, MGSV, CoD Ghosts, COD Advanced Warfare, BF4 were all cross gen.
This time though the first party publishers followed suit because they knew their fanboys could be counted on to be good little boys who will defend the indefensible. The decisions to make HFW, GoW, GT7, Halo Infinite, Forza Horizon 5 were all made in around 2017-2018. Way before Covid was a thing.
It just came back to bite them in the ass because games that used to take 3 years now take 4 years and covid added another year to that. leading to a longer cross gen period than last gen which lasted around 1-1.5 years.
Nintendo has gone through this several times before. Zelda BOTW was a Wii U title that was pushed back to launch alongside the Switch, but it was as cross gen as it gets. Metroid was greenlit in 2021 over at Rare and they knew Switch 2 would be out by 2025, but they made it a switch 1 game anyway. Again, they know people will buy their new hardware regardless so why push boundaries and make things harder for themselves?
At the end of the day, the console manufacturers have to encourage third party developers to go next gen only so they can sell more consoles. Be it with exclusive funding or just plain old pressure. But this time around, both Sony and MS are basically fat publishers themselves with dozens of studios, and couldnt afford to keep their $100 million games on next gen only consoles waiting for a slow burn in sales. Even if they tried to convince other developers to go next gen only, the developers likely just pointed to their Sony and MS's own lineup of cross gen trash and told them to go fuck themselves.
Now they are paying for it. Sales for Xbox are down 50% year over year in Europe. PS5 are down 20%. And we are just in the fourth year when they should be peaking.