A couple years ago, I read an article about how researchers are finding ways to incorporate touch, taste, and smell into games. Granted, this is crazy. Just like the NES and SNES was huge for its time, so is 360/Wii/PS3. We will keep outdoing ourselves. 10 years ago you would have never been able to predict the technology we have today. Dont even begin to try and predict what we will have in 10 years from now. People dont know what they want. They just know that once they see it, they want it.

If you asked my 14 year old ass 10 years ago what I wanted out of the future, I would've said, "just touching the screen, or waving my arm around in the air like magic." Dreams come true people. I think the technology will keep getting ridiculous and amazing, but I think these production values have got to go before they drive all the indie devs into EA's belly.

I think we've hit a budget wall, not a technology wall. And I think as technology gets cheaper, the lower end (of technology) will be raised more than the higher end. That will make creativity more important than huge budgets and allow for smaller developers to better compete with the big guys. Spending $10M for just more explosions won't work.

I think that the industry hasn't hit a wall so much as a steep incline. That's whay Sony was going around saying that this generation would last 10 years (for their system, at least). Processors aren't making quite the same leaps and bounds they used to, and budgets are really holding game developers back. We'll see much better graphics than the PS3 or 360 are cpaable of sometime in the future, no doubt, but it may very well take longer to achieve than is normal for the console business.

That's how I would describe it.  There's always a technology curve, I think Sony and MS just drove too far up it for this generation (and many would say Nintendo didn't drive far enough up it).  They went past what I would consider the "sweet spot."

Go stranne go! I agree 100%!

Good points, maybe next gen sony and m$ will be more conservative and Nintendo more aggressive. What Sony should have done what nintendo did with the wii for ps3. Just made a overclocked ps2, maybe double the cpu speed, gpu and ram (leave out blu-ray).

That way dev's could have taken all their ps2 skills and taken it to hardware with twice the grunt. Im sure we would see better and more games. The ps3 would have taken over where the ps 2 left off.

Where gamers will be hurt is in diversity of game selection. As it becomes more and more cost prohibitive to build a game from the ground up, middleware/reusable code will be leaned on more heavily to fill the void and keep costs low. What we're going to wind up with is a slew of big budget/big promise titles that look a whole lot like one another, and pretty much just like their last gen counterparts, only with prettier textures. This seems especially true on the PS3 and the 360. Really, it's been trending this way for the past six or seven years already anyhow.

I think the lower dev costs on the Wii could push some of the more risk-taking titles there - Zak & Wiki, for example - as lower dev costs means not having to move a minimum of 1M units just to break even.

Technology and performance grow naturally as time passes.  There's no need to rush it and put overpriced, non-cost effective technology into a system.

As for game developers, it'll mean as much or as little as they desire.  If they want to use it they can, if not they won't.  Very simple.

Well Mass Effect, Gears of War, Bioshock, Rainbow Six: Vegas, and Stranglehold all use Unreal Engine 3 and they don't "look a whole lot like one another"...