Next-Gen recently published an editorial entitled The Road to a Universal Platform which (to be blunt) rejected one naive assertion about the fate of the console with an equally naive (if well-intentioned) proposal to the industry. Let’s dive right in:
David Jaffe recently came under some criticism for a few statements to consumer website 1UP about his future visions of the game industry. The big headline, repeated across the Internet for a day or two, was “Ten years from now there will be one console”.
Like there’s one computer processor? (AMD vs Intel) Or one brand of cola? (Coke vs Pepsi) Or one consumer operating system? (Mac vs Windows) Etc…
There won’t be “one console” anytime soon because market forces won’t tolerate the existence of a single player in this space — not as long as “consoles” are defined as they are today. The market opportunity is simply too great for potential competitors to ignore. And of course, there are the social and legal dimensions to this.
