Difficult to say, clouded the future consoles of Nintendo, Sony, and MS are.

Nintendo will continue to make consoles until the company dies, which is going to be a long, long time from now.

MS has one more in them I think. So far, they have lost a couple billion dollars in the console market and I really have to question if they are in it to get into gaming or to get into people's living rooms. If their XBL downloads (movies, tv shows, music) don't take off and they continue to be unpopular in Japan and Europe and they aren't making any type of decent profits, I think the company will pull out of the industry.

Sony is a tricky one, but here it goes. Sony is never going to leave the gaming business, however I think they will leave the game console business. I think PS4 is going to blur the line between a game console and a multimedia computer. We are already seeing Sony start this type of thing with offering SACD, Blu-ray, DVD upscaling, Web Browsing with the ability to download Divx, WMV movies, MP3, and photo support and I think PS4 is going to push it even farther away from being able to be called a game console. Yes, the thing will play games, but it will do so much more than that, that you never would even have to play games on it and you could easily justify the purchase.

There will only be two things left after a nuclear war

Insects and Nintendo consoles.

ie, they will keep pumping out systems until japan is underwater from a global holocaust.

Wont be surprised if 360 is MS' last console

Maybe they will release a handheld game device which can be used as phone & pda in the near future, but i dont see why they should stay in the console market.

Nintendo has been consistently popular throughout the years and.. even in its low sales points, still has managed to make a profit. Nintendo, much moreso than the others, has a very loyal fanbase who will likely never stop buying its games. Even people who have sat out one of two generations are now getting Wiis. People who owned an NES back in the 1980s are buying Wiis for their kids. The only way to get loyalty like that is to always put out great games and most people will agree that Nintendo does. It will likely be around for years and years to come.

Its really hard to tell with Sony, now that PS3 sales are finally starting to turn around. They obviously have lots of financial resources and can likely ride out rough patches in sales. The PS3 and Blu-ray will mutually ensure sales for the time being.

Microsoft also has nearly infinite financial resources but its shareholders are obviously nervous about its gaming division, and rightly so. XBox 360 is now last in sales in all three major territories and doesn't appear to be picking up much steam even with another price drop in Europe. Prior to the release of the XBox, Microsoft released some very successful PC games -- most notably Flight Simulator and Age of Empires. It is plausable that Microsoft could revert back to PC gaming when its investors say enough is enough with the Xbox brand. 

Nintendo = never (gaming is nintendo's main industry)
Sony = hard to predict
Microsoft = next generation
Toshiba = will enter in 2010
EA = will enter in 9th generation

JUST PREDICT. NO PROOF

Im going to agree with most of the thread and say that Nintendo will be in the game market until there is no more market.

Sony will stay in as long as the heads of the company deem the console market financially viable.

Microsoft is mostly in the same boat because they also have lots of income from other areas besides gaming.

Man if KH 3 is, I'm going to kill myself! Their is no reason to believe it will because the last two sold very well and even if the PS3 didn't have the fan baseof it when it came out, it would sell systems just so people could get their hands on it.

Interesting question.

Thinking that the limitations of TV will somehow stop the development of home gaming, or thinking that future technological improvements in raw processing power are trivial is thinking inside of the box. The consoles are more than devices attached to a tv set.

I agree that the Wii is a taste of what is to come in terms of gaming future, and it also gives some idea of which of these companies has a long term commitment. Nintendo will never stop. People will play games, and Nintendo will be there making the devices that the games can be played on. Sony has interest in home entertainment, so I think they will also stay in the game, but providing more conventional solutions, aligned technologically and conceptually with their other technology. I don't think that Sony will quit the game in the foreseeable future, seeing that they are also trying to enhance the gaming experience outside the world of the TV as Nintendo has done.

The one player that is the most bound to the world it was born in is MS, which is loosing scope as gaming moves forward, further from the world of the flat screens and the traditional pad controls etc. MS has their touch screen solutions in the works, but somehow I see that as an enhancement to what has been done already, when Nintendo is obviously looking for ways to truely pull the players in, and Sony wants to follow there.

I could write endlessly on the future of the gaming, as I see it will change radically in the next 15 years. The game console was a revolution, and we will see another sooner than some people think - it already started.

Consoles will change - handhelds might actually be the closest thing we will see akin to current gameconsoles in terms of gaming experience as the consoles evolve - but there will be devices used for gaming that people buy into their homes. They might not be connected to the television, and they definately will feature a controlling mechanism different from the game pads of past and present, but they are still standardized platforms for playing separately purchased games.

Having said this, I think that MS will drop first, maybe after seeing that the Ninth Generation is moving too far from their scope as a company. Sony will stay as long as gaming experience remains parallel with other home entertainment, so it will not drop before people stop buying gadgets. I don't see this happening if there is no worldwide disaster preventing the use of electronical appliances.

Nintendo would go on after this, figuring out more ways to play games if the electronics fails.

nintendo never
Sony in about 20 years
Mircosoft at the end of this gen
Apple will enter next gen

All things considered, the three in it now will still be in it until all of our media is pumped directly to our brains by a device the size on an ipod.

Frankly, Nintendo makes way too much money doing it to quit. They'd probably still be making consoles after the release of the "mindpod" proposed above. Sony will probably be involved with making that device, and so will MS, or they'll be making competing devices, so they'll quit the console race the moment it no longer makes sense to be in it. Those two companies sell so much software now it doesn't matter if they sell at a loss. PSN and Live Arcade are very lucrative and in the near future (if it's not the case already) it'll bring in more profits than traditional sales.

They can both keep going for a good, long time because as they get more and more digital they'll keep more and more of the profits for themselves. Plus, it changes the old business model. Retail outlets expect certain things with pricing, but you can cut outside control like that out of the picture with digital distribution.

Really, no matter how bad it has look for either of them in the last could of years they are in fact both well off at the moment.