Sadly, I don't see this happening.  With the rise of the digital age, you'll see more and more episodic content.  You'll buy your games for less, sure, but if you want the rest of the story, of features, you'll have to unlock them via DLCs...

I don't want it to happen, but looking at the current trends, this is what the future is looking like from my point of view.

And I hate it.

I would say you're right actually. I hate digital, it's just an absolute mess and is so expensive.

If it does, I'm going back to my retro consoles, SNES, Saturn, Dreamcast, PS2 and Gamecube is all I'll need.

You say  this now, but would you really be able to resist it when awesome new games start being released.

This most powerful shit is getting quite annoying. Someone please tell me, when was it ever necessary for a console to be the most powerful?

Unless they come out with a system that looks like the real thing (i.e., I feel like I'm playing a movie) then I don't see the need for more power. I have a feeling MS has got the right idea, taking cues from Wii and Kinect. Innovation will sell, not more power. Didn't Sony lose their ass with that mentality last time?

I'm also sure that with all the money Sony is putting into this new system, they will still use controllers from the PS1 era. This may be the first PS I don't buy. Sorry Sony, but no more $600 consoles for me. I won't buy any system over $300 anymore. Not with the satisfaction I have from the current gen.

The only reason I got a PS3 was because of MGS4, the rest of the games I bought were simply because I had the console and I wanted to give everything a try. Sadly, since then, I have got into gaming may too much, obsessing over every little detail and not getting very much enjoyment out of my games. I think I'll be able to resist next gen, at least for a few years.

MS and Sony need to make sure that these new systems have full backwards compatibility. I think that the majority of people out there are content with the current gen. The shift to the next gen will not be as rapid, because like others have said before, the graphics quality is already good enough for most. The next xbox should be able to operate as an xbox 360. Meaning, full compatibility, including software, the controllers and other peripherals. Kinda like every new iphone. Eventually, more and more people will move to the newest generation, but it will still be easy to cater to the Xbox 360. This works out good because most developers probably don't even want to make the switch yet, but I'm sure that there are some that do.

My guess is that it would take around 2 years for the next generation consoles to become the current gen. The next generation, however, will probably end up being even longer than this gen.

You're absolutely right that being "most powerful" has never been an indicator of anything. PS1 was MUCH less powerful than N64, for example, yet N64 got trounced. Xbox 1 was clearly much more powerful than PS2 (the first Splinter Cell game was *dramatically* better looking and playing on Xbox than  PS2), yet it got trounced as well. PSP is WAY more powerful than DS, yet again--got it's ass handed to it. People love specs, I believe, because they're measurable, even when the specs we get don't always reveal useful numbers.

A case in point was, of course, the Cell processor. According to Sony's released numbers it was roughly twice as powerful as Xenon, yet 5+ years into this generation and we've seen no real evidence to demonstrate it. On the contrary, more often than not cross platform games get the better deal on 360, with higher resolutions (albiet, very slightly), better AA, better framerates (look at Skyrim between the two platforms; gorgeous in both, but in certain circumstances the PS3 version chugs to virtually unplayable framerates) and so on. Goodness knows there've been plenty of flame wars on the matter, citing figures, and if you go just by the released numbers then sure--PS3 is dramatically more powerful. Unfortunately, few ever acknowledged the mitigating factors: PS3's split memory, two different kinds and speeds of memory, SPU's inability to directly access memory, 128 bit system bus and the generally slow transfer speed of 2x Blu Ray all conspired to mitigate those raw numbers. That's why it's really importnt we never take published, raw numbers at face value; they're selected only to convey the *marketing* message the corporation wants you to believe. Lacking specific knowledge of how computer systems work, most people will simply interpret "higher number=better," but that's not always true, as we've seen.

I like to highlight, though, that whether PS3 or 360 was more powerful than the other or not, both have offered a very healthy serving of great games. At the end of the day, how much has it really mattered whether one or the other was more powerful? My take is: not much at all. As long as the games are good games, that's all that matters. And now that we've reached the era where PS3 and 360 are our baselines and HD is expected, there aren't going to be any more ugly games (barring artistic style preferences, of course :P) going forward. So, I'm not at all worried about how powerful the next systems are.

I'm in truth very happy with both my PS3 and 360--and often, even my Wii. Knowing that anything that comes after this generation will be at least as good looking as typical 360 and PS3 games, and possibly even better? I can live with that :P

They could get away with using a Cell revision with more cores and SPU's, I'd think. When Cell launched, it was a problem because nobody knew anything about the architecture and Sony was ridiculously slow at providing proper documentation in English. If a Cell with more cores operates in mostly the same way as the existing cell, then it's a fairly straightforward matter to develop for. GPU, I think, is the biggest problem. PS3's GPU is among the last of a previous generation of GPU's that operate very differently from the current generation. It may present some problems with backward compatibility for PS4. Hard to say for sure, though.

As for RAM, they could probably do fine with DDR5, and because it's cheaper than XDR, much less XDR2, they could also afford to put more of it in. I realize many claimed that RAM speed would make up for lack of quantity, but, as a number of games have shown us on PS3, where they're inferior to their 360 counterparts, that simply isn't true.

I wouldm'y have thought that a modern unified programmable pipeline GPU would have much trouble emulating an older GPU, a unified shader should in theory be able to do anything a vertex or pixel shader can. The GPU in the PS3 is basically off the shelf as far as I know so no fancy "smart" EDRAM or anything exotic in the architecture like the 360 does. Not like the PS2's custom GPU and CPU architecture. Tho it's not directly compairableas the GPU would be programed "direct to metal" in the PS3, but all DX10/11 GPUs maintain DX9 compatability even tho unified shaders were a DX10 feature. I guess they could be doing that at the driver/API level, but then couldn't Sony just implement an API for backwards compatability mode that does the same? Anyway I am just thinking out loud. 

I hope you stick arround, it would be good to have someone who actually knows about this stuff arround.