No one's voiced this opinion yet but I think it is a more valid option than any of the others. If one of the big three left I don't think any company will have the balls to step up to the plate.

For a very long time there has been two serious contenders each gen. The third company usually gets forced out because of poor sales, or lack of gameplay. The only reason Nintendo stayed in last gen was because of the success of their handheld market and the AAA IP's that they own.

Had the Wii not been a success it is very likely Nintendo would have been forced to abbandon the home console market after this gen. (The strength of their IP; might have held them afloat one more gen)

Therefore, from an analysits perspective it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to go into a market with no established IP's, high start-up cost, and a very good chance that your console will be forced out of the market within a couple generations.

I could list a slew of examples to support this. (panasonic, Atari, Sega, Nokia, Coleco, ect, ect, ect.)

So rasone77 is saying that MS "gegged" into this gen and will be forced out next gen due to Nintendo and Sony being in it longer and have established franchise,Halo which is an established franchise but Halo3 is the last one so what is MS flagship title that appeals to loads of people then?Gears of War?Its not FPS its TPS slightly different less people like them.Fable?RPG small ordience.PGR/Forza?This is the best shot racing everyone likes it(most people)seen as a casual thing to do.
Are the SEGA fans still around after so long?If they are and SEGA suddenly gets LOADS of money might re-enter even after saying they wouldnt i think they are kind off pissed off they got pushed out by Nintendo and Sony(the newcomer at the time).

Yeah, but the Apple difference is putting out an expensive product that's already inferior to what's on the market at a higher price.  If they released the Ps3 it would of been $800.   The fact that consoles cost about the same as Ipods should tell you all you need to know about that.

I mean look at the Iphone.  There are phones that do everything the Iphone does and more... and comes with a keyboard instead of an awkward touchscreen.  Apple would make the same mistakes Sony did with the PS3, except they wouldn't have the brandname for consoles and popular franchises backing them from earlier systems.

EA is the most interesting to me... as for having a shot.

I don't think EA would "win" but i think it'd be destined for 2nd place in america since it would have the only NFL game. Probably 1st if Microsoft was the one to back out.

Of course then i'd expect the NFL to not renew their contract when it came up for renewal because i think the NFL would want a presence on all of the systems.

if it has to be one of the actual actors of the market to go out, it would be obviously MS or Sony.... my choice would be Sony, because for me they brought more bad than good to VG (mass production of game by quantity not quality and non respect of the gamer MS is more or less on the same side for that last one though, YEAH I'm still not over the disappearance of sega and the dreamcast)......

if I had to chose a company to replace them, I'll chose between Sega, Atari, Amiga, SNK

the company most likely to jump in right now would be google... because they are the only one to my knowledge that expressed the eventuality of them making an entertainment platform or something similar for the living room...

Now that I think about it more, Apple, in my opinion, would make the most headway doing so. Think about it. How many console games get ported to PC, but NOT Macs? If Apple had a console, got a mid-big name third party studio, they could make exclusives for their iCore (Apple core lolol :P) and THEN have Mac ports, though I'm unsure if they'd be exclusive to the Mac. This would see an increase in Mac marketshare and gaming would ACTUALLY take place on a Mac. Apple + IBM + AMD (Ati) = leet console, toss in some multimedia iPod/Phone things, with access to the Apple Store? Mmmm, might be a hit.

MS is the most likely to bow out, but Sony is a possiblity due to their business model of selling consoles at a loss and recooping cost through game sells.  This model becomes a disaster if you can't sell enough systems to make games profittable.  I'm not saying that'll happen, just it's possible.

It'd take a brave (or foolish) company to step in and they'd have to believe they have some novel twist (like a wiimote) that'd take the industry by storm.  They also need deep pockets, IPs and recgonizable brand.

Apple is a possiblity as mentioned previously but lack any IPs to start.  Also American companies sell poorly in Europe and Japan.  However, Apple could possibly leverage existing relationships to obtain exclusive IPs. 

My favorite choice though is Virgin.  Wait, I'm not crazy, here me out...  We all know Virgin for airlines, but Sir Richard Branson is one electic guy and Virgin has a huge catalogue (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Group) of subsideries including comics, music, online games, movie studio (now closed), mobile phones and mobile games, books and so on.  Branson has the vision, balls, money and exisiting IPs and infastructue to give it a go.  The Virgin brand would sell equally well in Europe and NA, but still struggle in Japan unless it was something totally unique and to their tastes.   

I was under the impression that part of the contract EA has with the NFL for exclusivity requires them to produce games for all actively sold consoles (or something along those lines).

Wouldn't that alone make it infeasible for EA to enter the hardware business? Because either they get rid of their stranglehold on the NFL, or they lose their killer app. And they'd have to tread *very* carefully when it came to making the games for the other consoles... if they purposely made them shitty then they would likely be in trouble from the NFL and/or anticompetitive business practices.

Then again, I personally don't think there's a company desperate enough to try to enter this market as it is, anyways (even if a non-Nintendo party dropped out). When you look at development costs for a new console coupled with the fact that Nintendo's next console will be the successor to such a breakaway hit (say what you will about brand not meaning anything, thats a *lot* of people who will likely grow to love Nintendo's IP this generation). I think that if another company enters the market, it will likely be in the generation after the Wii2 - that;ll be the first generation I think someone would likely have a shot at going anywhere (by tapping into a new blue ocean perhaps - Nintendo themselves have said that it was their market position with Gamecube that let them see the untapped market around them).

All in all, my predictions are:
This gen:
MS, Sony, Nintendo all stay in, Wii = breakaway hit, PS3 and (25% likelihood, for the entire xbox line) 360 in the black by the end of the generation.
Next gen:
All three companies start the generation, and either Sony or MS pulls out, making it a 2-company race. Final numbers are about 55/45/5% for the three companies (I am not going to predict who will pull out or who will lead, but the generation I feel will be closer than they have been in the past because all companies will be trying to out-innovate each other in non-gfx ways, leading to the consumer winning!)
Gen after that:
Whichever 2 survive the previous generation. If another competitor enters, it will be here, and it will be early.

EA....

Ea makes money by having their games on every platform, limiting it to only one (their own) would kill them.

Samsung. Hardware, it comes down to hardware. You need to have the consumer electronics background, the engineers, and massive, hefty resources to plow into a ten-year development cycle. It would be hard to break into the home console biz, but maybe they could start by focusing on MMOs, which Korea excels at.