Ya guys think they will to react against Nintendo's Wii U coming out next year? Or will they let Nintendo have a potential 2 year head start? (potential meaning they can show it at E3 2013 and released theirs at October-December of 2013)

What do you guys think? Discuss!

ms is going for the family audience so they will announce an kinect built in 360 that is cheap for the family audience.

Sony could but dont have to, since Wii U isn't that much powerful and doesn't offer that major gameplay difference for its games they can continue to fund and release core titles and watch 360 gamers who may be sick of the kinect flock to the system that is supporting an more core audience with games they want. And sony are pushing 3D to support there TV and movie businesses and who knows you might see an new 3D focused PS3. I still think they should just build in PS3 into the tvs.

most people here can easily predict that MS next console will be entirely digital distribution or cloud based and a few more years is required until fibre becomes in and internet speeds and cap increase past 100mbps and gaps reaching past 1000GB or none at all.

They could tease about it, it really depends on what they think the NES 6 will do.

it's probably gonna be another 2-3 years before MS or Sony think about announcing their new consoles. It took both of them awhile to be profitable this gen and their motion control schemes aren't even a year old yet. At the earliest I would guess we'd hear an announcement at 2014, but even then I'm apprehensive. Plus I don't think the PS3 and 360 have come close to hitting their ceiling so there's nothing from the technical side of things demanding that.

I see Microsoft waiting till E3 2013 to announce their next console (releasing mid 2014) and Sony waiting and announcing at E3 2014 (releasing early 2015).

Neither want to give up their current profiting positions. They will both hold out and keep dropping price until the 7th gen market is saturated at those lower price points.

They also can't afford to make a significant jump in tech/features to justify new consoles until those components drop in price as well. They will both still sell at a loss at launch, though it will be a smaller loss margin this time (probably around -$100 per console). I expect $399 price points on both the new Sony and MS home consoles when they launch (meaning they will only be about only $500 worth of hardware).

All that said, I don't think developers can support the higher dev costs associated with these new consoles. We will see a small difference between 7th and 8th gen games because of this, and this will prevent a 9th gen occurring until dev costs drop by 80% or more (based on next gen's dev costs).

Right now cost are high because of optimization. We're talking about getting games like Killzone to run on a GPU with just 24 Pixel Pipeliens and 8 Vertex Shaders and 256MB of GDDR3. Nowadays, LOW END GPU's from AMD come with 80 unified shaders (can be either Pixel or Vertex) and up to 1GB of GDDR5. Not to mention only 256MB of XDR main ram for the Cell to use. Costs are high to get good stuff on that hardware. PS4 hardware will be more powerful, and thusly easier to develop for (needs less optimization)

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As far as I know, the majority of the costs are associated with the larger staff/longer time needed to produce the: higher poly count models, advanced post processing effect, high detail animations, high detail textures, advanced AI, etc.

The game engine optimization and resource management costs may be less, but overall the costs will increase.

What really needs to happen is a breakthrough in programming/layout/logic/asset creation/etc. AI to enable large reduction in the scale of required time/staff to produce the same content.

...Or a brain scanner that can turn your thoughts into full fledged AAA games.  :P

If they feel truly threatened by nintendo then maybe they'll hint on new consoles.

I'd have so many awesome games out then..lol