2012. I call 2011 on this the month November for a worldwide simultaneous launch. 6 years after the launch of X360 along comes the new XBox

FUCK YOU MS IS DOUBLING PRODUCITON.

My personal expectation is that in late 2010, potentially on the 5 year aniversary of the XBox 360, Microsoft will announce that they are releasing the follow up system in 2011 while still releasing first party games on the original XBox until the end of 2012.

Very good post by Million.

At any rate, if Microsoft wants to be profitable, they can NOT release a X720 or whatever for a few more years.

It's absolutely CRAZY to think that they would stop production soon on a console that has only dropped $50 (officially) since it debuted! Common sense would dictate that they would lower the price a few more times, and then eventually release a successor once the 360 sold all it could.

The Xbox only lived for 4 years, not because it failed or was a bad system, but was a financial boondoggle. Microsoft never made a dime on the hardware, and always sold it at a loss. It's hard to make your system profitable (or make it price competitive) when your component costs rarely go down in price, and your at the mercy of other companies.

As for TSE market pricing. It could just be their expectations of the X360 brand, as the PS3 did well last month due to MGS4, and the consumers are having a knee-jerk reaction to sales. The X360 will still sell well above 40m units before it's done.

Currently Sony is more likely to stop production of the PS3 then MS.

Microsoft is working on its successor console. So is Nintendo, and so is Sony (though they might have been a little late to the party this time, due to arrogance about the PS3 being allegedly "future-proof"). This is just how the industry works: as soon as you finish a system, you start working on the next. It has no bearing on when the next systems will be released.

What does have a bearing here is Microsoft's apparent commitment to shorter lifecycles than its competitors. If they haven't already released a new console by 2010, they'll be chomping at the bit to do so; they built their early lead on giving people a new Shiny (tm) to buy and will be eager to repeat that.

MS are not going to drop support of the 360 anytime soon.

It is possible that they will release a new console in time for Christmas 2010 but certainly not before.

I think that when a 720 is released it will be a scaled up version of the 360 hardware, maybe 6 cores instead of 3, an uptodate graphics card and, crucially, much more ram and a mandatory hard drive.

This would make it almost out of the box for the new console to be backwards compatible. I also predict that you will be able to see friends lists regardless of whether they are online on the 360 or 720.

Game publishers with successful franchises on the 360 or ps3 will want to release at least 3 games per franchise in the current generation as production cost reduces massively for versions 2 and 3 of a game. (Infact hasnt it already been announced that Gears 3 and Mass Effect 2 and 3 will all be released on the 360).

As far as tech goes im pretty happy with what the 360 can do and how the games look / play, the leap of games technically from 360 to 720 is not going to be that large unless you have 1080p displays.

I still think MS or Sony could make a bucket load from a top notch WoW clone as well.

XB360 is doing quite well, killing it, besides being stupid for this reason, would be too because it will give MS a fame of unreliability, both players and developers wouldn't believe anymore MS is willing to seriously support its platforms.

Can't believe I'm the first to do this, but:

 I have to sadly agree