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Mandalore76 on 12 May 2017
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Barkley said:
Wyrdness said:

A President or Prime Minister in the UKs case can be replace before the usual term is up so the analogy is fine it's happened here in Britain twice in the last decade it doesn't stop the replacement being classed as the next President or Prime Minister it's happened in South Korea this year. Show me where it is written in law that a company has to follow a schedule to be defined as a gen, the is none only what people have made up in their heads a gen is not an industry wide thing it never was it was an individual classification for platform released by companies.

What blows your argument out the water is the SMS and Megadrive which released 3 years from their predecessors and where all different gens, companies didn't follow schedules they released platforms strategically which forced other companies to react and people mistook that as some gentlement agreement that the is this schedule that needs to be stuck to.

So PS5 can be classified as a 10th generation machine? But no the analogy is not fine, a generation contains multiple systems, the 8th president is always referring to one individual, there can never be more then one president at a time. Meanwhile the 8th generation refers to multiple different entities all belonging to the same group.

I have no idea how you think, a president (individual), is a good analogy for Generation (group).

New Console = +1 is not a valid defintion for a shared generation, and like it or not 6th,7th,8th,9th generation, these are shared, not individual classifications, these refer to a group of systems. Generations are archaic and going the way of the dodo, but anyone insisting on using them must have a defintion for generation better than "it's another system though!"

What if Nintendo released a successor in 2019, would that be the start of 10th gen? You can't take one companies release schedule as a definitive line for a generation, as the generation covers the whole industry thus it needs to take the whole industry into account.

A console generation is a group of consoles, thus for it to be part of a generation it needs to be grouped with other devices, and a reason for being grouped with those devices as opposed to others.

I think for the most part, the "generations" are defined by which consoles spent the most time competing against each other in the retail space.  Coleco Vision competed for sales against both Atari 2600 and Atari 5200 during it's lifespan, so it made sense for 2 Atari systems to be lumped into Gen 2.  If Switch spends most of it's lifespan competing for shelfspace against PS4 and XBox One the same as Wii U did, then yeah, I would concede that Nintendo released 2 consoles in the 8th gen.  If a hypothetical PS5 or next XBox released 2 years from now leading the Switch to spend half of it's life or more competing against those systems for shelf space, then one would be equally justified to classify the Switch as a 9th gen system.  It is complicated yes.  I don't think the question can definitively be answered until Sony or Microsoft release their own successor console.  Only then will it be clear which "group" of systems Switch will spend the most time sharing retail space with.