As I get older, I want shorter and shorter gens... I mean 8 years is a stupid amount of time. Starting to think 5-6 Is too much. I'm happy with 4 year gens, and I'm warming to the fact of quicker backwards compatible upgrades.

The way you know a gen has gone on too long, say a kid is 12, then when the next gen is out he is 20, that's just crazy.

If you look at it from an economic stand point a longer generation is better for the wallet, but if you look at it from what is better for the industry as a whole, including the PC market research shows it better to have about a five year cycle. It seems that developers are more prone to try something new, as in new IP earlier in a console's generation. And the longer generation last gen caused some stagnation

Long generations is fine. Getting as much out of a console as you can is pretty great.

Another 7th gen would be pretty nice.

6-7 years. with mid gen refresh.

Last gen would've been more bearable if we had updated ps360s, being stuck in 720psub30 so long(7-8 years) was awful.

5 years seems about enough for me. Really its not the frequency of the hardware for consumers that is a problem its the frequency of major hardware changes that result in developers having to retool their software for those pieces of hardware. If the machine just comes out faster then its not going to be a big problem for developers to get games working and optimize on the new refresh.

Gen 9 will be starting in 2016 with Nintendo followed by a 2017/18 by Microsoft, 4-5 years gens are better than the longer cycles imo.

I really don't care either way.

No, I don't. That means that development will be halted by hardware limitations, it also means that consoles will need a lot of revisions to keep up on functionality, forcing us to renew them, this sort of takes away the entire point of consoles for me. They should be cheap and easy, having to buy new ones every 2-3 years would make consoles into what some are accusing PC gaming of being (expensive and driven by constant and costly upgrades).

There's been even talks about whether generations are even a useful concept anymore, and here's a question how long this gen should last. I don't personally think generations are even going to be useful from now on so it doesn't even make sense to talk about generations anymore, let alone how long they're going to last. If there's going to be another generation, it seems likely it's going to be just a formality and not an actual new generation. Right now I'd put my money on shorter cycles and backwards compatibility that blur the lines between so-called generations.