You have too much faith in developers appealing to something beyond the lowest common denominator. It wouldn't happen, not for controls.

Split userbases aren't a problem, not really. All that it does it take the fundamental problem of consumerism - you can only buy so much - and cordone off larger sections of choices.

I'm still not seeing advantages which outweigh the disadvantages, here. It's a recipe for stagnancy of interaction, of tech, and of design.

i think that casual gamers and games  and mainstream gamers and games are slowing gaming.

oh and fanboys

So if the controller ratios were to be as they are currently (50% motion controllers, 50% dual analogue controllers for the sake of argument), you're saying developers would gladly cut away half their potential audience by not developing an extra control scheme, or depend on people to go out and buy new controllers in order to play their game?

For some games, it makes sense to only have one control scheme (carnival games gain a lot with motion controls for example, but are of even less interest to the consumer if they're played on a dual analogue controller). That seems the same to me, like if developers were making exclusives for the HD consoles all over the place, because if they wanted to double their audience, they'd have to either port their game over to another console or build it for two different consoles from the ground up. Based on the current situation, that doesn't really make sense, as developing an extra control scheme should be much cheaper than porting a game over to another console, which happens constantly.

When you limit the amount of choice for consumers, you also limit competition. A game like God of War III isn't in direct competition with something like MadWorld, even if they're in the same genre, because they're selling to different audiences (disregarding the overlap between PS3 and Wii owners). Consumers also have to spend more money buying hardware, as opposed to buying games, if they want to play with their friends who own a different console.

And I honestly don't see how this will affect anything other than the internals of the console, which is hardly all that important when talking about innovation. No one is locked to one online service, control scheme, etc. These companies are free to develop everything aside from the internals, which then seems to me like customers will have to be attracted with other things than price advantages (bundles for example). Nintendo would still have sold loads of their own hardware if it came bundled with a Wiimote and Wii Sports.

In every other area than the internal hardware of the console, competition would go up. I don't see how that would lead to stagnation.

If the online networks cannot work together then at some point one console will probably take a considerable (>50%) lead and then have a near permament control over the the market and monopolise it. If they cannot work together on networking then there can be only one. Where you have interoperatability you have a competitive market and where you don't you get a monopoly.

The market will move towards one standard whether people want it or not. If we don't get multiple hardware / single network standard then we will get one hardware standard / one network.

Are there any more who want to share their thoughts on this?

Mememememe!!!

Pachter says that we might be heading into the last generation of home consoles... Something to consider...

uh oh,you've expanded on that post the other day,controller wars confirmed in rainbirds world

isn't the PC like that as someone else has said,i don't really understand what you want,its all about profit at the end of the day

why would companies want to give that away

in the future i guess it will all just be instant streaming,so i guess you'll get your wish

Well, the controller wars wouldn't be mcuh different from what we have now, but the console wars would be much less prominent.

And it's not like the PC.

1) The PC is not a platform per se. Windows is a platform, Mac is platform and Linux is a platform, and if you want to game, you're pretty much locked to Windows. So the problem is actually similar on the PC in a way, when you divide it into platforms.

2) A PC is not a console, it's not a plug-and-play device. That's why we have consoles in the first place, they allow people to game without the need to worry about their hardware being up to par, their drivers being up to date, etc.

And companies don't want to throw away profits, which is why this isn't going to happen without a bit of effort. But publishers (including Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft) and developers stand to make more profit from their games. And at some point we'll probably reach a system with streaming, but until we get much better connections, it's not gonna happen, so that's still some ways off.

A somewhat more practical problem:

Nintendo would not, under their current philosophy, ever go for this. Microsoft and Sony are a tremendous maybe, but not Nintendo.

The whole point of Nintendo taking the stance they do is somewhat similar to Apple: control of both hardware and software allows them to tailor software particular to their hardware, and allows hardware to be designed around software ideas. It's been stated by Iwata that that is why they will never go third party: it's not just the money they collect from games published on their platforms, but that they are not willing to give up that element of control and work within someone else's system.

it is the closest to what your model envisions. It has multiple hardware suppliers, with steam now on mac and windows it bridges that gap also. It has third party controllers made. Most pc periphials are plug and play now. It is pretty darn close to what you described. Games that come out for pc can be played on many different hardware configurations, and are scalable to the available hardware to them. There are games that cross the windows/mac/linux line and more of those types will be coming out. what els does it have to do to fit your model?