THE BUZZ: As talks begin to move to the next generation of consoles, Naughty Dog has revealed its fears over a difficult transition period for the team.

Studio co-president Evan Wells is calling the move a ”double-edged sword,” explaining, ”The geek inside you is always excited about a shiny new toy, but then the practicality of it starts to set in: this is going to be a lot of hard work.”

“When you’re going to new technology, every day is a slog, progress is slow and it really takes a different kind of attitude and mentality to get through that kind of push and it’s not right for everybody,” he added. The reason for the fear is that the time between PS2 and PS3 was, ”the period that Naughty Dog had its darkest days and we lost people on a weekly basis – people just couldn’t get through it.”

Fellow co-president Christophe Balestra added, ”We made some mistakes with our move from PS2 to PS3 and we won’t make those again. I guess we’ve done it a couple of times!”

EGM’s TAKE: A lot of developers will be looking at the move to the next generation of hardware with fear, as an improvement in technology means learning new techniques and increased costs, something that they could do without in this fragile economy.