What we are witnessing is a market reboot coupled with a market crash. These two things have happened, are happening, or are going to happen in more or less every industry ever. They're opposite ends of the universal market trend.
When a market gets rebooted, at least one participant in the market (incumbent or newcomer) takes a step back and asks what can truly be done to bring the market's appeal to a larger audience than it currently caters to. The end result is usually a Blue Ocean product, and inevitably disruptive.
When a market crashes, it is almost always due to over-focusing on a single market demographic over all others. Part of the universal market trend is refinement of concept to better appeal to the customer, which of course leads to a narrowing down of who will take an interest in what the market has to offer. When a market crashes, even its most loyal supporters start abandoning it, to the point that the expense of catering to what's left exceeds the profit of doing so.
That said, it's rare to see two markets active at once in the same general domain, one crashing and one starting up. As Rol named them, they are "next generation" and "new generation". As they are non-abstractly, they are the market which has focused on the values of better visuals and more cinematic gameplay and the market which has focused on better controls and more immersive gameplay.
To all of you who think that the "next generation" embodied by the 360 and PS3 has always been about better graphics and more cinematic gameplay, take a look back at the NES versus the PCs of the same era, and see if you still hold that opinion afterwards...
Sky Render - Sanity is for the weak.
