2018... 7th generation consoles had impressive capabilities for their time for the price you could get them at. The 8th generation consoles by comparison don't have that same gap or advantage. 5 years seems fair for this generation.

2018|2019

What i was trying to say is, under 200 its imo a mass market price point, we know this industry is growing, but that growth will surely hit the ceiling at some point right? If they get faster to the mass market price, they will hit that ceiling faster too, then sales will drop sooner than last gen for example (like what happened in late 2012 and full 2013 for the 7th gen) has soon as that happens, I think the new console has its way layed out. Imo they will just sell them faster then before, don't know how's that's a bad thing...

November 2018 is my guess.

Yh I know what you are trying to say, and I am still saying that its looking at the entire situation in reverse. 

You see you are basing your theory off the fact that sales tapering off with the current gen consoles equates to a necessity to launch new consoles/generation. Well, thats not true.

The mistake you (and practically very console doom saying media journalist) keeps making with consoles is that they are always looking at the wrong metric of a consoles performance to determine its sucess, failure or successor. Which is, the sales of a console. Whereas, what you should all be looking at is the sale of games for the console.

Believe me, if sony or MS could somehow get 100M people to buy their console on day one and not a single other person buy it for the next 5 years, they would jump at that in a heartbeat. Cause what is important is having people to sell your games to. Hitting $200 earlier this gen just means that they start hitting peak console sales sooner, and also means that they get to make lots of money from selling games to a much larger install base for a longer period of time. Do you really think that these companies like the idea of starting a new console generation just when they are hitting the peak saturation of their previous console? Or do you somehow do that journalist math with regard to consoles and factor in reducing annual or yoy console sales to mark some sort of generation/console end while ignoring that the people that bought the console in its first year are still buying games to play on it.

In relation to the  previous gen, the new consoles didn't come about cause the old ones hit sub $200, that generation was really just long in the tooth and even now maority of the major game releases are also still on the previous generation.  The only thing that can really jump start a new generation in say 4-5yrs, is the epic failure of one of the competing platfomrs and that platform starting a new gen early (in a way that causes the others to worry) to get out of the one its failing in early.

And yes, selling the consoles faster if prices drop faster is a good thing, I am just trying to tell you that selling them faster does not mean that a new gen starts sooner. Thats simply not how the industry works. having a larger install base to sell games to for as long as possible is what is more important. If sony and MS somehow get 100M and 60M consoles sold by 2017 respectively, and then multiplatform games sell at a 1.4:1 ratio in favor of the PS4 across both consoles, then forget it, the soonest we will see new consoles from them will be in 2020. Especially if nintendo does another wiiU and releases an underpowered console in 2017. Though I feel that nintendo may actually wait it out and release whenever sony and MS are releasing.

2019/2020

The PS5 has already been released. It's called PSNow.

I would say Fall 2019.

2019, maybe even 2018. The consoles already struggle hard to run at 1080x1920 or 60fps or even both (and even struggling with 30fps in some games), while QHD and 4K are already incoming fast. PS360 where on par or even slightly ahead of high-end PCs at their release while this generation, they where already just equal to mid-range computers. In other words, even with their much lower level API they just can't keep up. You can already build a PC with similar specs to a PS4 for around 500$/€ or less, with only the Windows license making it considerably more expensive.

It's even worse for the Xbone which will be equaled by iGP/APU onboard graphic chips by 2016, which means you won't even need to buy a seperate graphics card to build a PC with the same power anymore.

In short, I think the Xbone will get replaced by 2018 and the PS4 in 2019, unless they are willing to live on with 720p or even less with upscaling, unstable 30fps and downgraded graphics compared to their respective PC ports or turning them into streaming consoles.

A Fall 2018 release sounds reasonable.