Squilliam said:
Actually its more likely 4 more years and its because of rising costs and a sense of 'where the fuck' are we going to go from here to improve and surpass the current generation? It really does boggle my mind because all the new technologies and interfaces have tradeoffs against the old. |
I'm inclined to agree.
From this point on, consoles will end up seeing a diminishing point of returns as technology continues to improve.
Yes, they can be more capable from the technology standpoint, but the improvements will be less pronounced and the full potential less apt to be fully realized by most developers, simply due to the costs involved in taking advantage of the optimal output the hardware is capable of producing.
Sure, true photorealistic graphics with multi-level ray tracing are only a generation or two away, but the man hours involved in producing such content would be prohibitive to only the most well funded development studios and would have to produce commercial success to justify the expense involved.
Eventually, the restriction becomes the amount of artists needed to produce the content that fills the environments, characters, objects, etc. rather than just the cost of the tools used in production.
Interfaces that improve upon the way players interact with their games seems to be where the industry is leaning towards, with the success of the Wii, so the next gen may well just provide an improvement over the current functional, yet still somewhat crude control scheme of the Wii.
So... improved Wii-like controls and modest bumps in processing power (Nintendo's next console will probably show the most improvement over the 6.5 gen Wii) and hardware resources due to Moore's Law and subsequent cheaper cost of components.
Why only modest? Simple: cost. Current gen has demonstrated once again, the limited viability of a spare-no-expense approach to hardware design.
