No PS4! (What are the chances)!

[bdbdbd]

Squilliam said:

The Gamecube -> Wii transition was exactly the transition I was thinking. However the key difference is that it would have to be a soft generational chage rather than a hard generational change. With the Wii Nintendo only had 24M consoles sold and they had the other console manufacturers releasing in short order simultaniously so the whole industry and consumers supported and expected the changeover or at least accepted it. With upwards of 40M Xbox 360s sold and many sold recently they have quite a young and plentiful userbase whilst the Gamecube did not. This is the reason why I believe that both next and current generation will be supported simultaniously, perhaps even initially with the same media. They have every incentive to release a new generation of consoles but at the same time they cannot afford to orphan the current userbase.

The goal of an Xbox Natal is to aquire users they could not have otherwise obtained with the current marketing/product mix of the Xbox 360 IMO. So I would suspect they would use seperate branding to distinguish between games designed for the Natal camera and games designed for the standard controller. They could colour code them to tell people which is which. Say the current green for games designed with the standard controller and white (Wii) or blue for games which are playable with Natal mainly or exclusively. So they could call it Xbox 360 Natal or whatever name they chose and any Xbox 360 games would be playable on both but only Xbox 360 Natal games could be played on that system and beyond that using a colour code to tell people which interface was best used for the games. That seems like the best system I can think of for them to support both userbases at once.

 

 

This is pretty much what i thought too. Except that i believe the hardware will have a slight upgrade in processing power, some bottlenecks will be solved and it has a mandatory HDD.
The system however should force the developers to use the new controls as a default method, in order for the controls to catch wind.