Heavy Hitter Developers for PS1 (Konami, Capcom, Square)

[Rydon]

The other thing hurting Capcom, at least, was that they had a lot of trouble rising to the task of producing high-budget titles and making back their investment during the PS3 era. So they went into the PS4 generation having to pick their battles. Lower-cost DS and 3DS titles really sustained them.

Yeah, I think about that a good bit on cost for development, etc. for games now vs. 20+ years ago. Looking at 2600 era, it was one guy doing everything, which then expanded into teams around the Famicom/NES era, and those teams just grew so now you have buildings of people working on a single game.
I know indie devs are pointed at for the single person innovating, but I miss the times when the big companies were announcing and showing new IPs vs sequels. There are always some new games coming out, like right now with Forspoken from Square, but I find that most of these games don't really push much in terms of gameplay, etc.
I will say, I loved Elden Ring, and FromSoft still can give me a great game to look forward to.

[marurun]

new tech that was being taken advantage of (CDs!)

There was a lot of new tech that generation, but there was ALWAYS a lot of new tech with every generation. And CDs weren't one of those new techs, because two major console players had already done work in the CD space, along with many varied PC implementations. The 32-bit era was when CDs went truly mainstream, but that's because it was old, known tech by then.