The Fury said: Next gen wouldn't be here until like 2020 or 21, at the earliest . We are only just in this gen by less than 2 years, 360 lasted 8 years alone. So, Yes, knowing SquEnix's work time.

The current platforms were much weaker relatively at launch than the PS3 and 360 were at their launches. They are already pretty dated hardware wise, and third parties were unsatisfied with the performance. Don't expect an 8 year cycle, expect the typical 5 year one that we got every generation before the seventh.

Why though? Both sony and microsoft need profits from these consoles. I can see them milking them for around 6 years.

If we only look at one data point (this gen) I suppose that is true.

Looking at dimishing returns and the slowing pace of hardware evolution, the days of monumental leaps are over IMO. So few devs have the capacity to make the most of a system 8x the strength of the PS4 but there is obvious room for improvement, just look at all of the downgrades we've seen.. Devs are already making scalable games better looking then what PS4 can handle. Moving forward I don't think sony or MS will introduce new systems by dropping support for the previous ones, there will not be big enough difference to warrant that in most games. They've both clearly hit a sweet spot with devs by bringing their architecture closer to PCs, PS5 is not going to go against that or be anything drastically different, devs clearly want scalability and unified development.

You're right both sony and MS need to milk these consoles and they will, both systems are immediately more profitable then their predecessors but milking doesn't mean they can't have profit centres in other places too. 20m people have a PS4 now, in 4 years time many of whom will be ready to update meanwhile sony can continue selling PS4's to a casual audiences at $199 pricetags and below. Complementary to that they sell a $399 PS5 for profit at launch, the games have maximum AA, Ultra quality texures, foliage, water/hair simulations which would otherwise be turned off for console games, always 1080p or higher resolutions (not 4k), 60fps, better morpheus performance (native 120fps) etc

even if sony waited till 2020 to release a 12TFlop PS5, it won't matter because most developers won't ever have the resources to build as detailed a setpiece like what we saw in the E3 uncharted 4 demo. So for me the question is why would they wait? To conclude PS4 and 5 can co-exist, this gen clearly illustrated that many people are willing to upgrade simply for improved performance. All of last years biggest sellers were cross gen

They could always do a kickstarter to raise budget...

Actually beside the Wii U and probably NX Nintendo is the last company to release their console each gen.

Square is outsourcing the game to a team outside of their company (CC2 or Level-5 probably), so I don't think we'll have to wait 3-4 years to see the game. One of the Square insiders said on GAF it's already been in development for a year. I'm expecting a holiday 2017 release to coincide with the 20th anniversary.

The Original Xbox released like 10 days after the Gamecube...

I doubt it. If you want maxed visuals, you should hope for a PC version. It will most likely happen anyway.

Doubt it but it might be anyway if it takes forever to develop for