But they are almost compulsary. We also like it how games get heaps of updates too. Most of those are free as well. Good times with the industry and heaps of updates.

Depends on the price; if they're $300, then probably only one every 2-3 years for me. I have always kind of felt that 5 year generations were a little too long.... Although understandable given the price of developing new hardware.

its not good times! my launch ps3 has a problem starting the updates i have to try atleast 10 times so i dont get an error. updates are bad!

Are you an American? Because PS3 updates are perfect, only in America.

no im not. but my psn account is.

That would suck, and if they were to make them that quick there will be a drawback with the hardware. Theres only so much you can do in a limited amount of time.

I wouldn't buy every single one, but I would upgrade at least once during the generation

If Ignorance was the force you would be Sith Lord.

There's one flaw in your comparision - you don't need to have latest CPU/GPU to play new games on PC

When you buy new game it will work on older setups but you won't be able to get as much eye candy as person who have never stuff (altrough at the current time running game on 3 years old computer would likely be diffrence beetween Full HD@30 fps vs Full HD with AAx8 and 60 fps).

I don't see any reason why would this matter to you unless you are communist and belive that if 720p@ pseudo 30 fps is good for you then it's good enough for everyone else on the planet.

You know I was refering to hardware updates. I'm not an idiot Wii , 360 and PS3 all recieve software updates. But that is not what the thread is about. Its about hardware updates. Needing to buy a new graphics chip or new model every year or so. Would you be willing to buy a new console every year? or a graphics card upgrade so you could play the latest games? Or would this turn you off console gaming?

Yes but you do need the latest graphics card and video card. I upgraded mine constantly. Eventually I found in some cases it was cheaper to just buy a whole new tower. This cost hundreds of dollars where as a console cost a few hundred and lasts 5-years. But what if you needed to buy the latest graphics upgrade for your X-Box 360, or a whole new model to play the latest games. Would you be fine with constantly upgrading your console?

GPU= graphics processing unit= video card

CPU= central processing unit= processor

And no you don't need new ones constantly ever since current gen started - 2 year old GTX 260 won't have any problems pushing Mass Effect 2/New Vegas to maximum details full hd @ 60 fps and will likely last few more years.

Also if you remember Oblivion was game killing computers and needing $ 300 graphics cards when it was released and at that time it looked better on X360. Now noone would consider it demanding game on pc and even cheap computer can run it fine. At the same time it runs on X360 exactly like it did 4 years ago and no matter what you do it won't ever look better and same can be said about other console games they will only have evolutionary improvements over previous titles.

In the meantime pc games started to look "a bit" better:

Oblivion X360:

Witcher 1 PC from end of 2007

Witcher 2 PC (for reelase in 2011):