| colonelstubbs said: Ive only had my PS3 a year! 2011 makes it 4 years! Thats ridiculous! If the PS4 was to come out before 2013 i will...switch sides! |
What 'colonelstubbs wants' or the technology available doesn't really factor into when a new console is released ...
The videogame market is an oligopoly which means that each of the participants in the market bases their strategy in response to the strategy of their competition. As we have seen in the past, it is a very bad idea to leave your competition on the market for too long before bringing a new system to market that is in direct competition to it; one of the primary reasons why the Playstation was so dominant over the N64, and the PS2 was so dominant over the XBox and Gamecube, was they had an 18 month lead (only dealing with weak competition) to build a userbase and secure third party support before their competition came to market. At the same time the market tends to start rejecting the more minor competitors after 4 or 5 years, and they soon start to see a very rapid death.
With this in mind, some time 2009 it will become fairly obvious to one of the manufacturers that their third party support will start to decline in 2010 and they will not be able to support their system much past the begining of 2011 and they will be highly motivated to release a new console in 2010/2011; at this point in time they will begin to move their R&D from the early design/planning stage to producing a final product for their next console and prepare its release. Within a couple of months of this move the other two manufacturers will start to look at the rumors and public announcements about their competitions' systems and formalize their upcomming systems; the latest they would release their system is 12 months after the first mover.
