Consoles are closed off monopolistic piles of BS, there should be only one.

[.jayderyu]

@OP
I partially agree, but I don't believe the controller should be the central part. The only real difference in gameplay from the NES to Wii from all consoles was essentially the improvement of the controller. You can find Metal Gear on a NES, sneaking, shooting... while the gameplay is refinded and the graphics are updated the game model is essentially the same. So the interaction with the game is the only that fundamentaly changes. By buttons, camera, pointer, tilt, motion.

I do agree however that games design itself is suffering due to this separation. Companies are indeed wasting time and money on different machines, new engines, figuring out how to take advantage of ability X than they could be spending times improving and building up. Take inFamous and Assassins Creed as excellent new forms of terrain traversal. The core game play engine works on all machines, but rather refine and improve them they customize them and make sure they work on the machine. If engine could work on all machines right from the beginning then the devs will stop wasting time. More so with AC than inFamous.

We do need a standard, but it shouldn't be in the controller or hardware, but the language and format of the software. If that were the only difference between all the consoles then all 3rd party games could appear on all machines. Only the graphical resources would be upgraded or down graded as need be. This would increase developers profits. Resulting in more and better games.

 

Edit:

The reason why PSN and Live gamers can't compete with each other is because console developers are lazy. PC developers never felt it was the manfuacturers responsibility to provide online. As such a PC server could service everymachine out their. I could in theory produce a NDS homebrew Asteroids multiplayer game that plays against a PC player with the same game. Then port it over the PSP, PS3..... Why can I do this, because i'm not using the console manfuaturers online service. If you want to see a smart company look at Disney. They took it into their own hand to create DGamer. Ok I'm not interested in their games, but DGamer only requires 1 user account across all DGamer games. This in on the NDS too. So don't get on console manfuacturers cases when it's the console developers lackluster work.