Are new gaming consoles necessary yet?

Let’s act like we all have a ton of money to spend on video games. Nice life, right? No need to pick and choose which gaming console you drop $200 – $350 on to get the titles you long to enjoy. Okay, quit dreaming, because not all of us are so well-off.

Clearly, the software industry leaders pick which console is successful by (more or less) leaning their development efforts to one console. People buy a Playstation 3 to play Konami’s Metal Gear Solid 4, and they alternatively buy an XBox 360 to keep their Halo fix well-fed. No matter what your reason for buying a particular console is, one thing is for certain: they’re always a long-term investment. This thought may be entering your head more as more time is put between the last wave of console updates (2005-2006) and today. Before that, we saw new consoles being released from 1999-2001. Seeing a trend? Consoles are given an almost preset lifespan of 5-7 years. After that, we are made to feel that it’s time to upgrade to the latest and greatest. The release dates are placed around the same time to keep competition tight, obviously. However, the only thing getting tight is our budget set aside to purchase this hardware.

Now is about the time that we’d start hearing rumors of a secret Microsoft hardware project, or a blurry picture of a Playstation 4 prototype “leak.” However, these things are basically absent from any news outlet thus far. Gaming technology is nowhere near the max-capacity of what it can do, so what’s the holdup? More importantly, would a new console really be necessary? Sure, a Playstation 4 would have better graphics, a new controller (hopefully not), hype of some new and unique feature that will only be provided by Sony, and a lineup of PS4 exclusives that are sure to help sell the console. Sony could pull it off and make a ton of money, but what would be the true end-goal of this new console? This release (which, let me remind you, is fabricated for this discussion) would be a really polite way of telling Sony customers that their PS3 system is now completely worthless and obsolete, that the console has no future, and everything that could be done with it has been done with it. Is this the case? Would a new wave of consoles make sense in the coming few years? Do developers really need an even more powerful piece of hardware to make their wildest dreams come to fruition?