I agree with a lot of what you said mitsuhide. You make some good points. Some things I am not so sure about:
I have have followed the GamingIndustry since PS1 and know about SNES,NES and part of the Atari generations and NO company has controlled for 3 gens in a row(except Nintendo in HANDHELDS(but that doesnt count))and when they try to get back in to the race they leave examples:Atari and SEGA neither has a company that has started out set records for amount sold example:Sony neither has a company came out and barely scratched the surface and stayed in example:Microsoft neither has a company stayed in for 5gens example:Nintendo(Atari came close with 5consoles in 4gens reason the second gen is broken into 2 parts:8bit and start of 16bit).
With this info at hand i think we can agree that nothing is the same in the industry anymore and we can go on what history "tells" us but things have changed since then and NOTHING is set in stone
Purely looking at consecutive consoles controlling the market and the total number of generations entered into by a company are fairly arbitrary figures anyway. I don't think a lack of coherence to them is an indication of much. Also the Wii marks the 5th generation entry for Nintendo (NES, SNES, N64, GameCube, Wii). I agree we can't blindly cite the past without taking into consideration current factors, but there is definitely a lot it can teach us. Nothing is set in stone sure, but the general field of Wii the clear first and xbox and PS going after 2nd seems to be pretty certain.
MS will release an Xbox3 just because they can and it will be subpar,offer nothing and have a online expererience getting more and more average due to Nintendo and Sony hammering the online part of games and consoles and XBL will still cost money.Unless Xbox3 takes everyone by storm and takes 1st place by a good 10million units sold i think they WON'T release an Xbox4 due to investers saying that they will stop investing and that their stock will decline and that they wont have a massive bankroll because Vista isnt selling and their OS's from here on will start to look less and less appealing when their up against MacOS or Linux and so this will hurt the rest of the company because they wont have the "unlimited" bank balance they seem to have now.Xbox3 WON'T have a HD disc format if Bluray wins because there is no chance in hell Sony would sell Bluray licensing to MS unless it looks really profitable for them.MS will have to come up with a new falgship game after Halo3 and it WON'T be GeOW because its 3rd party and Epic would never accept take over by MS due to loss of profits because MS wouldnt allow them to sell the UnrealEngine to other devs.If HDDVD losses then MS will buy HDDVD for games only so they have something that can compete with Sony's Bluray.
I think you are underestimating Microsoft. A company doesn't get and stay that big by being stupid as to not learn from their mistakes. Vista may not be doing as well as they hope, but they still are basically a monopoly and almost all new PCs sold have Vista on it. Additionally, Microsoft have stated that the next OS (Windows 7) will come out in 3 years which will be before the next gen. I expect them to do much better with it having learnt from the Longhorn/Vista delay and feature reduction debarcle.
I also think Microsoft will do quite well this generation with the XBOX360. They look like they may beat the PS3 WW and more importantly they look like they will be more profitable. I think 2 years ago few people would have believed that the XBOX360 could beat the PS3 which is what they were aiming to do. The fact that the Wii blindsided everyone and stole the show doesn't take much away from their huge success vs the PS3 (considering where they came from last gen). I expect the XBOX3 to be quite good.
I think they will also go with whatever HD DVD format has been decided on. It is clear that the next gen will need this amount of space for the types of games you will get on XBOX3 and PS4. I just can't see Sony withholding Blu-ray from Microsoft should it beat HD DVD. To do that would be abusing a monopoly and Microsoft would sue the pants off them.
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