Cyberpunk 2077 is ~2 years delayed and was marketed heavily as the pinnacle of what the last generation of consoles could do, to the extent that they released a limited edition Xbox One X bundle for the game [0]. They couldn't exactly do that and then not sell it on that console, could they?

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/xbox-one-x-1tb-console-cyb...

This wasn't originally meant to be only for the next-gen consoles. It was advertised as being for the current gen with improvements for the next-gen consoles once released.

On the other hand, there are still games being released now that work and look perfectly fine on PS4. Spider-Man looks and plays great on my base PS4 non-Pro. Miles Morales had some crashes and bugs but those were patched within two weeks and now that game works smoothly and looks beautiful on my older PS4.

You could argue that it's a first-party game and it gets better attention due to that.

I understand Cyberpunk 2077 won't look nearly as good on my PS4 compared to PC's or PS5's, but there's no reason it should have PS2-era graphics/pop-in...

This game was clearly overmarketed early on. Everyone at CDPR was evidently far too optimistic about what could be achieved in a few years on last gen console hardware and how fast they could churn out content vs optimize the core gameplay. The end result is an unfinished mess on anything other than great pc hardware or stadia with a great network connection.

Two problems with that. A) New consoles are pretty tightly supply-limited on release, so people won't buy the game until they know they can pick up the console. You've totally killed the preorder market.

B) You risk losing even more game sales towards the end of the console lifecycle, as soon as rumors start flying around about new hardware about to hit the market.

You really have no idea? The number of people on previous gen consoles dwarfs the people on new console, especially in a world where new consoles can't even nearly keep up with demand.

But wouldn't this be true for every console generation? I'm used to seeing launch titles drive new hardware sales.

This is true for some games that basically has "drive console sales" as part of the mission statement. In those cases, the game studios are getting economic incentives from the console company to focus on next-gen, even if the market share is smaller. In other cases the studios themselves are controlled by the same company that sells the consoles. See Gears of War, Halo etc.

If the mission is simply "sell as many copies as possible", it will always make sense to not ignore the largest market share. This is why CP2077 is not having proper next-gen features, but is rather running the same (poorly optimized) last-gen build on both systems. Ironic as it sounds, it seems like the focus was to provide a serviceable experience for last-gen gamers first and foremost.

They clearly failed on that front. So now they have a poorly running game on last-gen, and a gimped one on next-gen.

Sorry, I'm rambling.

The latest console generation is literally a couple of weeks old. At this point in the lifecycle yes it's absolutely true of every generation.

I imagine one very real reason right now is that most people cannot buy the new consoles right now, or at least don't want to play the in-stock game to try to snag one when they drop and are available for 5 minutes at retailers.

So lots of people who have the last gen hardware see that the new consoles are constantly out of stock, and decide that they are 'good enough' for now until you can actually just order a new console w/o hassle. That may not be till well into the new year.

The launch date for this game got pushed back multiple times. It was originally targeted for the then current gen consoles, and had many pre-orders on those consoles.

Market reach, the new consoles have just released and are very hard to get.

Big AAA need plenty of market reach to be profitable unless they have some exclusivity deal.

There are only a few million of each new console sold. Even if you somehow managed to sell to 75% of the owners, that’s not many people.

Wiki says Cyberpunk started development in 2016. Wiki also says hardware design for Xbox Series X started in 2018.

Wouldn't Cyberpunk team have been developing the game for 2 years before rumors even surfaced about the development of a next gen console?

The time lines don't seem like they line up to only building it for a next gen console that didn't have hardware architecture planned out yet.