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Resident_Hazard said: Hopefully Nintendo and Microsoft will maintain their current machines after the successors launch. Both Nintendo and Microsoft axed their last-gen machines last time, almost immediatly as the successor hit the market. The NES survived almost two years after the SNES launched. The N64 was dead nearly a year before the GameCube hit the market. The PS2 is still available for sale--and people still pick it up. That system has lasted an incredible 10 years. Because Sony was smart enough not to just drop it because the PS3 was out. They didn't alienate their own customers. |
GC/Xbox/N64 being abandoned so quickly had more to do with their market performance and cost of production than who they were from.
NES actually lasted a solid 4 years after SNES (Nintendo's last published game was Star Tropics II in early 1994). In Japan, we were still getting new SNES games until 2000. GB had lifespan that lasted over a decade, and we were still getting new GBA games fours after DS launched... that's how Nintendo tends to handle really profitable and successful wind downs. N64 was killed because the cost of goods (ie: carts) and 3rd party disinterest, GC was killed because it's market was already dead outside America and those resources were better served going to Wii projects (Zelda TP, Super Paper Mario, etc).
Microsoft's recent comments about 360 (ie" kinect adding 5 years to it's cycle) make me pretty secure in it's continued support for the future too. Xbox was killed early because nVidia was raping them on licensing fees for the GPU, and MS wanted to put everything into pushing 360 as soon and as hard as possible.
If anything, I'd say PS3 would be the one to worry about most (look at how Sony's utterly dropped the ball with PSP), but with Move being pushed as a new platform and all those massive debts the system has to recoup, I think we're going to see them push PS3 as long as they reasonably can.
