PlayStation 4 and Xbox 720: why we're in for a long wait

Tradition dictates there will at some point be an Xbox 720, or 1080, or whatever foolishness Microsoft's marketing department decides is a suitable name for the company's third games console.

Tradition would also seem to dictate it'll be any day now – we're four years on from the release of the Xbox 360, which was itself released four years after the original Xbox.

The same, theoretically, is true of a Playstation 4, though a little less pressingly so. Its infamous predecessor is now three years old, and arrived six years after the launch of the still-existent Playstation 2. So news of a new Sony console should be hitting the horizon very soon, right?

This is the console generation that breaks the cycle, the regular hardware refresh from competing manufacturers that became a trend when Sega followed up the Master System with the Genesis/Megadrive and Nintendo followed suit by replacing the NES with the SNES.

2011 has oft been touted as the year we'll see the Sony PS4 and Microsoft Xbox 720 consoles, but that's now looking increasingly unlikely. The Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 are only just getting started.

There are three key reasons for the extension of the current console generation. The first, is, perhaps, the most obvious – the prevailing financial climate. Now is not the time to be introducing a new electronic luxury item - and not simply because consumers will balk at spending a few hundred quid when most of them already have a capable gaming machine with a slew of £40-50 games.

"Both Microsoft and Sony are under enormous pressure", explains Nicholas Lovell, Founder of games consultancy Gamesbrief.

"Microsoft from Google and Apple as it tries to work out how Windows and Office fit into a web-based, cloud-computing future, and Sony because it needs to transition from being an engineering company to a modern intellectual-property company. Investors have not got the appetite for further, expensive wars to fight for what may well be a shrinking market: the hardcore gaming market."

New controllers

Which brings us to point two – the pursuit of a different gaming market. On the near horizon is Project Natal for the Xbox 360 – a plug-in box capable of, reportedly, breathtaking motion, face and voice recognition.

PROJECT NATAL: A demo at the recent GamesCom event

It's intended as a total controller replacement, shifting from button-presses to naturalistic body gestures - a riposte to Nintendo's Wii. From the Sony camp comes the PlayStation Motion Controller, which looks uncomfortably like an obscure sex toy but, similarly, is a gesture-based device intended to attract a less hardcore gaming audience to the PS3.

These new controllers were not made lightly; they are not experimental gimmicks made to please gadget fetishists. They exist because the Wii has proven that there is a huge, huge audience out there that consoles have traditionally left untapped, and one that doesn't care about bleeding-edge graphics or even The Next Part In The Epic [insert violence-based sci-fi franchise here] Saga.

"I absolutely believe that Natal and the motion controller are part of a strategy to extend the lifecycle," says industry analyst Nicholas Novell. "Nintendo has convincingly demonstrated that graphical fidelity and processing power are not the only battlegrounds for consumers.

"Accessible, intuitive gameplay is key. Historically, the jump to the next generation has been driven, at least partially, by the need to offer gamers the latest technology: I believe that the latest technology is now the controller, not the visuals or underlying technology."