Moore's Law, PS3 and next gen

[couchmonkey]

First, let's get to the source of the quote. A Google search brings up a couple:

"If I'm going to buy a next-generation game console, I'm going to buy a console with next-generation media. It's going to last 10 years." - Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang (Gamasutra)

"No regrets whatsoever, and it's those kinds of decisions, painful though they were to live through in the last quarter of 2006, those are the decisions that are going to propel PlayStation 3 to be a platform that lasts for ten years, like we've seen with PS1 and PS2. And it will be, I believe, reflected on as the smartest decision we ever made." - Phil Harrison (GameDaily Biz)

So more than one person who worked on PS3 says it is a "ten year console". I'm going to speculate big-time here and guess that it was Krazy Ken Kutaragi that came up with the notion of a ten-year console, and then disseminated it to everyone else, and it's bollocks.

It's not bollocks because Nintendo and Microsoft will have more powerful consoles in ten years. It's bollocks because PS3 costs twice as much as PS2. It's bollocks because Wii is mopping up the floor with everyone on a system that's only slightly more powerful than last-gen consoles.

Most of all, it's bollocks because you can't afford to wait 3 years into the generation for your hardware to start selling - all the third parties will go elsewhere to make money and by the time your system is cheap enough to reach the mass market, your competitors will have far more compelling game lineups.

Of course Sony could decide to leave the PS3 on the market for 10 years, but who will care if the sales are terrible and hardly any third parties want to develop for it?