Real analysis costs money, but you can speculate without spending a dime. Case in point, peep this crystal-gazer by Chris Morris for Forbes, a cruising altitude accounting of current affairs with an eye toward things to come.
Remember Sony President Jack Tretton claiming at this year's E3 that consoles were on 10 year cycles?
Morris's position: Game machines typically follow a five to six year trajectory, but could peak this cycle closer to eight.
UPDATE: Morris dropped a note to further explain what he meant in his column:
Interesting thoughts on my latest column ? and I agreed with many. One thing I?d like to clarify: the column wasn?t meant to imply that the lifespan of a generation is only 5-6 years, but to point out that new hardware models typically roll out in that time period. As I?m sure you know, previous generation models often remain on the shelves (as we?ve seen with the PS2) and often outsell their successors for a long time. It?s just now, in fact, that the PS3 is taking a sales lead over the PS2. That doesn?t mean one system dies when the other comes out (well, except for Xbox maybe), just that the big three have traditionally begun looking to the future in that timeframe.
My position: It all depends on what the meaning of "cycle" is. The PS2's been around for just shy of eight years, development in the U.S. is down to multi-platform morsels (e.g. Madden, Tiger Woods, NHL, etc.) and what Tretton's really talking about includes tail-end sales in developing countries, which will be absolutely crucial to carrying the PS2 through magic number 10.
Let's look at the Forbes article's prognostications from developers, like this one from THQ CEO Brian Farrell.
One of the things I like about this generation is we are still very early and there's still a lot of room for growth?as we move down those price curves. Those engines have a lot of steam left in them. We think it could be seven or eight years before new machines start to roll out.
Me: Yep, developers typically take at least a year or two to work out the kinks and get up to speed on a console. That's not counting the time spent working with software simulators and early alpha or beta developer versions of the hardware prior to consumer launch. On the other hand, that totally misses the "design" angle. Mario 64 was vastly more important design-wise than Donkey Kong Country, but everyone remembers DKC for its pre-rendered 3D graphics, even if Shigeru Miyamoto famously remarked that "Donkey Kong Country proves that players will put up with mediocre gameplay as long as the art is good."
Moving along, Epic Games President Mike Capps says new consoles will hit "somewhere between 2012 and 2018."
Me: A six-year spread? Isn't that like betting on red and black and numbers 1 through 36 simultaneously?
id Software's John Carmack, probably the smartest kid on the block, makes the smartest point as well:
The worst case is, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo all pick a different interface. That's because you have to program so differently for [the different architectures]...if we end up with a diverse set of GPUs [graphics processing units], it would make life difficult.
Okay, second smartest. First place actually goes to Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, when he dismisses all the attention paid to the hardware in the first place, saying:
We are always preparing for the next hardware. We are under development...But the hardware is a kind of box that consumers reluctantly buy in order to play our games.
Me: Reluctant is right. I've said it before and I'll say it again: We play games, not hardware. A fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a totally irrelevant minority of us go out and take apart the hardware and blog about the integer and floating point power of the CPU or the fill rate of the GPU and futz with the operating system, whether out of a desire to illicitly pirate software or primordial "howzat-work?" curiosity. That latter group gets more coverage than it deserves because it's also a disproportionately large slice of the media.
The rest of us could care less whether Grand Theft Auto IV runs on Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony hardware. We might care whether we're playing on a desk in front of a 20" LCD or in front of a 60" HDTV, or on a mobile phone versus a dedicated handheld. We might care whether we're using a keyboard and mouse or a gamepad, a gesture-driven camera or a pair of motion controllers. But that's it. No one (in their right mind, anyway) gazes amorously at the clumsy-looking piece of glowing, whirring plastic crammed begrudgingly into their entertainment centers while popping heads off zombies in Dead Rising or slinking along surreptitiously in Metal Gear Solid 4 or leaping from planetoid to something even more geometrically improbable in Super Mario Galaxy. We care how much the hardware costs, what the operating system can do, and what games it'll let us play. Consoles (and for that matter, PCs) are software-enablers, not pets.
That said, one of the things developers like id's Carmack need to start looking past is the historical focus on mainboards and "render-ware." "Every hardware needs some revolutionary features," says Nintendo's Iwata. He's not talking about CPUs and GPUs, and he's absolutely right. Developing for a system like the Wii has much more to do with how you use the Wii Remote and Nunchuk in relation to the games themselves, than the system's GameCube-plus-one CPU/GPU architecture.
Down the road, we'll probably glance back at companies like Intel, Nvidia, and AMD, and see that a shift occurred in the early twenty-first century. A shift away from muscular graphical leapfrogging to a fundamental rethinking about the way we interact with what we're playing. I don't pretend to know what comes next, and it'll probably at least in part be driven by "render-ware" advances, but it's also going to have to be more than just another spectacle involving $600 boat anchors with only marginally better-looking graphics and games that play exactly like the prior generation.
