as to whether or not you are a gamer in 5 years, you will be.

I'm 41, played pong when it came out, grew up on donkey kong pacman

i am married, have 3 kids- 6,3,3(twins) the 6yr old has a gameboy, a DS and a Wii...

i play the wii for RE:4 and PC for gaming

once a gamer, always a gamer

You might think the new generation is controlled by user preference, but really as hardware sales drop off they release a new console (historically five years). I predict Xbox 3.0 Dec. 2010, Wii 2.0 Dec. 2011, PS4 Dec. 2011.

One thing to consider is that it will take 18 to 24 months to market a new console to publishers before you release it; this means that if you're releasing a new console in 2010 you'd probably begin marketing after holiday season 2008 (for 2011 you'd start after holiday season 2009).

It's likely that Nintendo will be aiming for 2011 because winning or losing they tend to release their consoles on 5 year cycles and I suspect  they will have reached nearly the maximum market penteration the Wii can successfully achieve.

The other two companies releases will mainly depend on how much money they're losing and their potential to recover lost ground ...

i think the technology thats in this generation will be hard to noticiably improve upon, even tho the 360 and PS3 are much more powerful than their previous generations, alot of games still feel like last gen games in high def, its only lately that we have seen games really pushing the machines. Its definely a far cry from the increase in performance we saw with the PS1 to PS2.
Beause of this i think consoles will have to start and have a longer shelf life, especially when we have the PS3 costing so much and coming with the BD drive in it, asuming it becomes standard.

In some ways Sony and MS are shooting themselves in the foot by pushing technology forward like this, its becoming increasingly hard for lesser developers to compete with the big companies like EA and Ubisoft, generating a 3d environment that pushes the 360 and PS3 is a very lengthy and expensive process and its not something every developer can (or wants to) do.

I will hazard a guess that MS will be first to release their next generation, which will include a next gen movie drive and this will be late 2009, sony will take longer (assuming they beat MS hands down this gen) and probably release the PS4 in 2011. I think one of them may take the step to go totally digital and remove the need for an optical drive completely.
Nintendo will probably release something around the same time, unless the Wii suddenly sees a nosedive from which it never recovers, the userbase is going to mean its goin to have a very slow death.

I'd say that Nintendo will probably wait til HD is in about 75% of households at least before they release their next console, because if their next console isn't 1080p, then they will get a lot of flack for it. But I, in no way, think that next generation will be UHD, heck, not even cinemas have that yet, there's probably less than 100 UHD screens in the world, and then you'd need a HUGE flash drive, or holographic disks, to get anywhere near the storage space necessary. Personally my bet would be from 2012 onwards. In the order Microsoft-Nintendo-Sony (although they may go earlier if the PS3 is still making losses).

@tispower.
yeah i reckon by 2011 50% of households will have HDtvs [though the percentage who actually use their HD will still be minimal... i doubt many channels will have HD coverage because people are only just going digital, and dvds will be the majority of disc media till at least 2015], however games machines by that time will need to be HD [whether still using DVD-9 im not sure]

i think 2010/11 for MS, i would hope nintendo and sony would not try to challenge them by releasing a year later, i think if it were not for 360, the wii and ps3 could last at least 7 years.

Whenever N6 is released i will be ready.

I hope nintendo releases a new system in 2010 or 2011 with graphics and processor power equal to or a little better than ps3/360 and significantly improved motion controls for like $250-300. I love the wii but I want the next gen wii sooner rather than later. I don't really care when sony and m$ release theirs.