it always bugs me when people say long consoles lifes hurt the industry cause i honestly this gen was the only one that could get away with it because it was about half way through this gen was the economic crash just a couple years ago which i think might play a factor as to why this gen went long for as long as it did and lets be honest a lot more things are hurting the industry a lot more 

From a gamer's point of view, it's limiting innovation and holding games back from making large leaps forward.

maybe that is why to many shooters this gen 

they are just bad coders, and can get the max potential of the console. If you notice none of the first party developers ever say this, because the are magicians with their consoles, and keep making better games.

It is not that M$ has many first party studios to begin with, but at least 343 industries demonstrated the 360 can do better than GeOWs and CODs. Meanwhile ND, SSM, GG keep demonstrating this with every game they develop. And nintendo does not give a damn about hardware so, they dont complain.

So 3rd party developers want new hardware in order to get better at making games.

The Xbox 360 is 7 years old. Game developers are simply unable to make fundamentally different/better games than the console capabilities allow for. When a new generation starts the smaller developers have a chance to make a splash because they can take new concepts and bring them to life quickly whilst still making games which look better than previous generation games. Publishers give a lot of new opportunities to up and coming developers when there is a new generation.

Nintendo still has studios like Retro and Tokyo EAD which demonstrated that the Wii can do more than almost any 3rd party has shown.

Yet even those studios will be able  to do more on Wii U, just like Naughty Dog and Santa Monica will be able to do more on PS4.

It's still possibe to make different games but most people won't take a chance on them since they have little chance of looking as refined as the established franchises. Meanwhile franchise fatigue will slowly kill of interest in the longstanding sequals which indeed don't have any room to grow anymore. A new gen will create opportunities for both the old and new to grow again.

Plus the market is saturated with cheap current gen games by now either discounted or 2nd hand. Anyone buying a console now doesn't have any reason to buy new games except for the yearly shooter their friends are playing. The rest can all be bought on the cheap and plays just as well as new games.

The reason why a long generation can hurt the industry has to do with the library of the consoles. The longer a console is on the market, the bigger library it develops. These game developers keep pumping out games, but the more games that are out the more choices the consumer has and the less likely their games can sell as well.

It is great for gamers, but for developers that need their games to crack almost a million to make a profit, it makes it much harder. The big AAA games don't have a problem, but some of the smaller games start getting lost in the shuffle.

I mean, look at Sony's exclusives this year. If they had been launched on a newer console with a more limited library, they probably would have sold a lot better, especially playstation all stars. Still not sure why Sony didn't wait until their next system launch to bring out that IP...

"limiting innovation and holding games back from making large leaps forward" 

No it's  "hard core" gamers that are causing that. 

i blame people who buy crap like yearly sequels on limiting innovation