Prepare to be disappointed. Given how long it's taken MS and especially Sony to get to profitability, I wouldn't count on MS and Sony going with huge jumps in power. I wouldn't be surprised if the next Xbox and PS4 go the Wii route when it comes to hardware.

The rate of return on more power has been reaching its leveling-off point for now, I'd say. I expect the console developers to focus on evolving other things in their hardware in the coming years. Social networking like XBL does, controls, etc.

Honestly, I think that is a good thing.  I love great graphics as much as the next guy, but with bigger and bigger budgets to create even "B" level games the experimental phase of videogaming seems to be dying.  It's no wonder we are seeing so many ports and HD remakes of popular old games.  Devs and Pubs need to release this stuff to compensate for huge budgets for their AAA games.

As internet speeds continue to increase I too think that the ways we interact online and build communities will be refined.  I just hope that doesn't mean you have to have a subscription to every popular game out there just to play it online.

There's a reason why XBLA games are my favorite games on the 360. =)

So true.  Even Wiiware has some gems.

In would have to disagree ^^ If they where to use hardware that put the ps4 lets say back to $450 it would be imensly more powerfull than the ps3. Dont underestimate the speed and which technoligy advances and the speed its spice drops :) I the time period of just 1 year we went from the GTX 480 to the GTX 580 which is almost 60% more powerfull and yet costs slightly less than the GTX 480's origonaly price :) Thats just one year imagine whats happend in the last 5 years

I don't know ...

Knowing the strategies that Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony have executed in the past I would expect Nintendo to focus on 720p and Sony/Microsoft to focus on 1080p; and (potentially) Sony/Microsoft could mandate support for a high end 3D format that doesn't really exist yet (stereoscopic 1080p). The net effect of this would be that, while Sony and Microsoft could have far more powerful hardware, people wouldn't notice (or care about) the difference in processing power because it was lost in meaningless enhancements.

To make matters worse, modern GPUs can produce more polygons with higher texture detail than can be displayed at 720p and the primary difference in visual quality beyond this point will come from lighting effects; and these are generally fairly small and difficult to notice for people who are not educated and experienced.

To put this in more straightforward terms, I could be wrong but I suspect that if you took a system built with a Radeon HD 4870 that was playing a game at 720p @ 30fps and compared it to a dual Radeon HD 6870 playing a similar game at 1080p @ 60fps the average consumer would have difficulty telling them apart.