360 director: Xbox One lacks the wow factor

"The most expensive parts when you start [building a console] are the silicon parts, and the silicon cost reduces very quickly with volume but the mechanical parts do not," says Reid.

"The price of a Blu-ray drive is not going to drop by 80 per cent over the life of the Xbox One and PS4 generation, while the cost of the silicon in there will. And there's something about the consoles that's always tethered to some of that base cost. I don't see it going away but I don't see it being the juggernaut of the industry in ten years that it was five years ago."

The limitations are starting to show

That's not to say that the specs of the Xbox One and PS4 aren't impressive. "8GB of RAM is a big step up from the 512 we had on the 360," states Reid, laughing. "But we used to joke 'can the helmets in your sports game get any shinier?' and at what point does it matter?

"Aren't we already providing more colours than a human eye can easily resolve? Yeah the consoles have a lot of power, but you already see where that's going. It's more about 'Let's make a better Call of Duty, let's make a better Grand Theft Auto, let's make a better Madden and FIFA, and a lot of the excitement in the industry is really not there right now."

For Reid, the PC is filling that gap. "The reliable monsters of the industry are these cross-platform things that are annualised sequels, and they're important, but they've become a lot less exciting for gamers than what's happened on the PC lately."

"It's easy to do all these experimental things on the PC," he says. "It's almost like this Kickstarter effect of 'I don't have to go super big and hope that ten million people show up to buy my game' as I kind of do on the console, which is becoming a very unforgiving market for the not-quite-successfuls."

"Minecraft would have never launched on a console but it's doing terrific on the PC. It's a huge success story," Reid reminds us. "I would much rather be on the PC side of things than on the console side of things as an independent developer right now."