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Mr Khan said:
Squilliam said:

There are unfortunately too many unknown variables but I guess the motivations and the incentives are easier to decipher. Theres nothing preventing any console company from selling two generations of consoles at once so even the idea that Natal or the Mii2 copymote from Sony would prevent them from releasing a new generation soon after would be false. The real question in my mind is how much more compelling a new generation of consoles would be to the current userbase at the time in the 3.5 to 4 year timespan where the major adoption would take place for a new generation released 2.5 years from now.

In the Xbox 360 case, a next generation console could cost $250 or $300 because the Xbox 360 in this case would likely cost around $100 by that time for minimum entry with some sort of flashed based storage which is larger than 10GB.

I've long campaigned against the idea of the extended generation, for similar reasons. Sony and Microsoft should know that their motion solutions are not going to give them the necessary momentum against Nintendo, unless they essentially re-launch the console with the device made integral. Microsoft has already alluded to this, and i think they'll take that opportunity to make it new hardware, but hardware that is still backwards compatible and mostly interoperable with the existing 360. Sony will have to follow a similar path, especially if the Natal 360 starts paying off for Microsoft. Thus the generation will end up being of normal length, even though the launch of the next Xbox and PlayStation will not be a huge technical leap from the previous norm.

 

Nintendo, of course, is moving independently, and their incentive to move will come internally. When their devs feel they have exhausted the mine of possibilities with Wii, they'll push for new hardware, and i simply don't think that Nintendo will be able to come up with enough ideas to get the Wii to last beyond 2011

See, now you're talking specifics and that makes it harder. I do know that unless they can come up with a new experience right out of the box for a next generation console they may very well delay the release until they do. Like WoW said theres a benefit to releasing earlier than the competition but to do so you have to have a compelling product. Since I don't know precisely what that is, though I suspect that 3d might play a big part in it I cannot really comment much on it.

One thing I do know is that releasing slightly updated hardware may very well be too troublesome unless theres a specific reason for it. Say running gaming at 60FPS instead of 30 or something similar to that.

 



Tease.