The conventional wisdom is that Microsoft and Sony are planning a 10 year life cycle for the current generation of consoles, XBox 360 and PS3, and their strategy is to extend the normal 5 year generation by adding motion control support.

But has the world moved on??, In a very interesting article on Ripten, they ask the question,

“It’s now 2011, the sixth year since the Xbox360 was released, and while it can be argued that we have progressed in leaps and bounds, we’ve ultimately come to a slow halt. The current age of gaming feels like the end days of the Playstation 2, we’re seeing the same games only somewhat prettier, with a few new features thrown in here and there for good measure”.

Add to this the new competition from mobile phones, and tablets like the iPad2, the iPad2 which has more or less the same GPU as the PSP2 / NGP.

Plus what is really scaring the incumbents is the new game pricing emerging from the App store, why pay 10 times the price for a downloaded game (eg monkey ball) on the 3DS when you can get the same game for your ipad or iphone for 99 cents?.

This translates to the future XBox 720 and PS4, these consoles will have to be competitive on games pricing and also on hardware, they will be losing on both if the ipad2 is anything to go by.

So in the end you have to ask the question, what is the future for the XBox 720 and PS4?, nobody knows but you can be sure, Sony cant afford to over price the PS4 like it did for the PS3, and the XBox 720 lets just say MS should at least fix the red ring of death while they are expanding their Xbox live and beef up the GPU substantially.

The old gaming pricing model pioneered by Nintendo is dead, the days of paying 60 USD retail for a game and the publishers paying license fees to the console platform provider are dead, thank the gods, everyone wins..

 Founder of GamertechTV, and EIC, executive editor of GamertechTV Read more from this author

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