> Software is treated as a second-class career in most major corporations. There's less cultural prestige with being a software engineer.
While I can't comment on the latter half of this statement, the first still rings true even today. The PlayStation 5 came out and featured a completely new system interface, and there have been numerous complaints about everything from navigation to moving saves forward from the PS4 to the PS5. Microsoft, Sony's biggest competitor in the space, chose to iterate on their interface, and while there are still some complaints, keeping the same wheel let them focus on things like easing the transition between hardware boxes via game updates and syncing saves.
For example, if you want to move a save game from a PS4 to a PS5 running an updated version of the game:
- Start the game on the old PS4, and make sure the save is synced to the cloud service.
- Install the PS4 version of the game on the PS5. On launch, the system didn't do a very good job of distinguishing the two versions of a game.
- Launch the PS4 version of the game on the PS5, just to pull the game down from the cloud service.
- Launch the PS5 version of the game on the PS5, so it can ingest the now-local cloud save.
Microsoft set up some system-level infrastructure to handle installing the "correct" version of the game (useful since they're selling two boxes with different specs) and has always handled save games as cloud saves, so moving between platforms can be as simple as "install game, start game", provided the developer/publisher hasn't opted out of the upgrade infrastructure (so they can sell an upgrade path).