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The 5-Year Console Cycle Is Dead

Posted by Soulskill on from the trading-increments-for-subscriptions dept.

Pickens writes "The Xbox 360 recently turned five years old, and with no known successor on the horizon for the 360, PlayStation 3 or Wii, Cnet reports on the death of the 5-year console cycle — one of the video game industry's most longstanding truisms. For example, the Nintendo Entertainment System came out in 1985, followed by the Super NES in 1991, the Nintendo 64 in 1996, the GameCube in 2001, and the Wii in 2006. But now, why should console makers upgrade their offerings? Consumers are still buying their machines by the hundreds of thousands each month, and ramped-up online initiatives are breathing new life into the systems. A lot of it has to do with the fact that with the current generation of consoles, each company found a way to maximize either the technology behind the devices, or the utility to a wide range of new gamers."

5 of 422 comments (clear)

  1. Say again? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Didn't MS just come out with the Kinect?

  2. The console itself is dead. www.onlive.com by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    There is no longer a need for game consoles. Check out www.onlive.com. I've been using it for a few months and it works great.

  3. Re:Why do they call it the Xbox 360? by owlstead · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Whoops, wrong parent (who's parents did you have?).

  4. Re:Why do they call it the Xbox 360? by Nimey · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    The red ring of death is a 360-degree circle.

    --
    Hail Eris, full of mischief...

    E pluribus sanguinem
  5. Re:It is all about resolution by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    The organization style has altered within of a way which helps make 5-year-console-cycles much less important. buy wow gold It employed to be turning out a producer new console would give you new capabilities AND would get individuals to purchase an exceptional offer of new games. Now you could possibly get merely a tiny even more energy and may possibly possess the ability to upgrade the way in which several points are done, but even more of your income stream arrives from subscriptions than from new fixture or new console sales. (New console income are in actuality a net negative, a minimum amount of for some in the principal providers, wow gold for that reason which they retain the lost low to stimulate income in the fixture titles and recoup the deprivation on fixture titles + subscriptions.)

    Also, the solutions of fixture platforms isn't advancing quickly enough any even more to create a five-year-lag a opposition killer.