| Soundwave said: Yeah the console business has traditionally never really supported three console platforms at once. Super NES, Genesis and ... Turbo Grafx 16 (odd man out)? Playstation, N64 and ... Sega Saturn (nope). PS2 kinda just ran away with that gen, but the XBox probably hurt the GameCube by splitting what was left of the market and forced Nintendo to go chase casuals, which in the long term IMO has not been good for the industry. The Wii was the only time it really happened, but that was the definition of catching lightning in a bottle and is something that is almost imposible to repeat on cue.
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Theoretically MS and Sony could create a cross-platform-console, since they target the same market. And that the games sold would work on either console. Which would mean that they would focus more on releasing software and not focusing on selling their consoles so much.
But when I think about it, this is kind of how it works today. All major third party games are released for both, it's just a handful of exclusives that separates them. From the software point of view.
But I guess it's an interesting idea, that consoles would move more towards becoming PC:s, and being released within a 5 or 8 year time-span, and they would have to follow the same kind of architechture and performance. And you can choose whichever consoles you want but play all games released for either one of them. This would open up for other companies to create consoles but don't have to develop games for them. And Nintendo, MS and Sony could focus only on sofware if they choosed to.
And this would mean that multi-platform wouldn't even exist, since it's the same achitecture, so the games would play as good on either one of them. Well, theoretically of course, we know there can still be issues with drivers and hardware, as with computers.
A good or a bad move/change? Not sure, but interesting.
