Are there any benefits to shorter lifespans for consoles?

[KBG29]

I don't like the idea of shorter life cycles. Like Nautilus said, games are taking longer to make, so a shorter life cycle would mean we would only see about one game per studio, per generation. That is not something I want to see. Even Call of Duty has went to three year development cycles. In many cases, developers have not switched to 8th gen gaming engines yet, and we are nearly 3 years into this current generation.

I think 8 year or 10 year cycles are perfect in todays market. Systems can get little enhancements in the non gaming aspects to keep them relevent, such as extra RAM for multitasking, faster secondary chips for better background networking and video decoding, and up to date Blue Tooth/Wifi/NFC wireless chips. But, I think the game side of the systems should stay at a set spec long enough to see 3 or 4 full games from places like 343 Industries, Turn 10, Polyphony Digital, Naughty Dog, and Guerrilla Games.

This will also mean each new console will see large gains over the last. It also makes things less confusing. Half of PlayStation consoles sales typically come after the 4th year, so I think switching consoles at a rate of like 5 year would just crush the industry by confusing the consumers.

The only people that really benefit from a short cycle are people with lots of money, people that need the best graphics all the time, or people that are living life trying to impress others with their material buying power. For the rest of us, and the entire game developement and ppublishing industry longer is better.