People keep saying this, but I don't see Microsoft cooperating. They still have a ton of money in their bank account.

They will go for a very powerful chipset, if for no other reason than to force Sony to either move out of the market or surrender another large chunk of their userbase.

Nintendo is just this kind of quirky, Japanese company that does it's own thing and MS knows that, but Sony tries to do the exact same thing as MS, and MS is not going to take pity on them just because they're broke. Quite the opposite if Microsoft's past is any indication.

This is what Microsoft wanted after all is it not? They got into the game business to break the Playstation brand because Sony would not cooperate and put Windows on Playstation. Well ... Microsoft, here's your chance to deliver the killing blow.

I've been thinking along the same lines for a while. If either Sony or MS overshoot the specs of the WiiU by a significant margin and the other doesn't, the one that does might find itself in a bit of a pickle.

The 'overspec'd' machine could find itself competing against 2 similarly spec'd machines for third party attention. Ironically this is similar to the situation the Wii found itself in at the outset of the current gen and despite it's overwhelming sales success this proved to be a handicap that it never really overcame.

It could even be argued that this might be a wise move for Sony which can no longer afford to compete with MS on a loss-leading strategy. Sony troubles seem to start with them reaching for the bleeding edge of technology despite the great success they had with the moderately powerful PS1 +PS2. By returning to what has previously worked for them and targeting their machine in the same ballpark as the Wii U they could make the WiiU/PS4 combo a very attractive proposition for developers in opposition to developing for the likely smaller install base of a single system (Xbox720) and the higher development costs associated with pushing the boundaries on a much more capable piece of hardware. It could also work the other way if Sony again reach for the stars but I feel that's much less likely.

I was just about it write this.

From what I can see, even though the Wii U is undoubtedly stronger, it's not THAT much stronger than the PS3. The multiplat games won't look exponentially better on the Wii U when compared to the PS3 since the Wii U isn't as big a jump as Wii and PS3 for example. So the PS3 could receive slightly scaled down ports of games for the Wii U.

In that case one has to question, why would Sony even bother releasing PS4 which as the OP claims, won't be a big leap over the Wii U? Why would they sacrifice a 60M userbase just for a small leap in power? Why would they bother going through all the R&D, marketing and start from scratch again if there is not much change? I mean we all know how they have already lost so much money.

I think people should look at the difference between the Wii and Wii U and see how huge a jump that was and not look at the jump between 360/PS3 and Wii U. There is no need for any manufacturer, be it Sony or MS to release a new console if there is not a significant jump from their previous iteration. As gamers you should be wanting as big a leap as we can get with a relatively affordable price. Why would you want consoles that are just a little better than the ones we have been playing on for 7 years straight?

360 can live with superspec (for a console) because it's basically a PC in drag. That means 360 gets all the support of the developers who are making PC versions of games. and lets face it, all the greatest selling Xbox games are either on PC or are Xbox exclusives. So Xbox being out there with super specs would be fine (albeit having to sell the HW at a loss). It's really only Sony that would be screwed if they made a super-spec machine (and had to sell at a loss) and MS only took half a step forward and put all it's effort into Kinect 2.0.

While on many levels Sony has made poor decisions with the PS Vita. The one decision they made, which bodes well for PS4 launch, is they are selling each unit at a profit. Sony will launch the PS4 aiming for each unit sold to be profitable, perhaps not a vanilla PS4, but as long as the buyer buys an extra controller, or they buy 3 games then the over all sale will be profitable. i.e. the unit loss for a vanilla console will be small, like $10 only.

To get a new console on shelves. Old hardware doesn't sell forever.

Why did Nintendo release the Wii instead of just releasing the wiimote for the already 20+M Gamecube userbase ?

New hardware is new, even if it is not such a big jump as it used to be. 

Exchange rates have nothing to do with it. The only factor that determines how powerful PS4 and X720 are is the upper limit of power consumption of the GPUs that you can put in a console.

With that said I believe they will achieve 8 x X360, or around 2 Tflops of performance, compared to around 650 gflops in the Wii U, meaning they are 3 times as powerful as the Wii U.

3 times as powerful is not huge, but this combined with the big publishers discrimination and bias towards Nintendo will assure that the Wii U won't win next gen.

I believe Wii U will sell around 50 million lifetime while X720 and PS4 around 100 million.

Didn't read the OP, but based on the title, I do believe the PS4/720 won't be as powerful as people are expecting. They'll be more powerful than the Wii U, of course, but not the leap people are expecting.

Like I said in previous threads, I'm just waiting to see how folk who are knocking the Wii U will react when Sony's next system isn't the quantum leap they expect. I want to see if they're suddenly OK with it, being as though it's their chief complaint about the Wii U. Will be interesting to see.

Like Apple is doing with iphone.

anyways I strongly believe Sony (or MS) should not release new consoles anytime soon. They got the userbase, they should focus on releasing great games

I don't know, Sony's corporate culture doesn't seem to be changing, and people were saying the same exact thing (spec wise) about the PSVita in comparison to the 3DS, and it ended up being a a beefier machine.

Of course that example also proves that Nintendo CAN win and still be under powered, Doesn't mean they will be though, so lets just wait and see.

The would because if they can make a tecnical superior console at the same or similar price, they'll have the chance to kick their most direct competitor right in the balls. Also I'm not sure Kinect is really so much expansive to manifacture.