But that's just counting graphics. What about processing power? Consoles can still improve by beefing up in order for more advanced A.I., more enemies on screen, etc. There's really no limit there in how many times we can advance until we finally run into the limitations set by the theory of relativity. Processors won't be able to handle calculations faster than the speed of light, so that's a firm limit, but I guess that is still far into the future before we reach that limitation. So consoles still have much room in that regard.
Yeah, that does make a difference. The question is how much of a difference does it make for the consumer to feel the need to upgrade. The financial cost is also a factor. You can go crazy making a game that makes full use of the most state-of-the-art hardware around but will it make back the cost of development? That's already a concern now so I think that at the very least it would be dangerous to go further right now. Let's wait until games that make full use of the PS3 right now are easily affordable to develop.
AI advances interest me the most though. They could do some cool stuff. 
Gunpei Yokoi pioneered the right idea which he called "lateral withering". It means you wait until a technology gets really old and dirt cheap, then you grab it and start using it for something different, such as video games. That was his thinking that led to the game & watch and the Gameboy, among other things. If you think about it, the Gameboy was pretty outdated even when it was new. It was the only handheld that lacked a full color display (unless you also count the virtual boy as a handheld, but I don't because it isn't hand held). Yes, it was the first handheld thing, but the Gamegear and Lynx weren't too far behind it and they were full colored, so it proved Nintendo didn't HAVE to make it display everything in spinach color, but that ended up making the Gameboy the cheapest console of all and also had the best battery life by far.
If you think about it, the Wii is a lot like the Gameboy because it is the market leader yet is underpowered compared to its competitors. That's no accident. Even though Gunpei Yokoi is dead and no longer with the company, his thinking helped influence Iwata among others, and that's why Nintendo still embraces the "lateral withering" principle, and its worked out well for them.
But my point is that current HD graphics and cell processors and all that are also "laterally withering". They're not cheap today, but in a couple years they probably will be. See, the PS3 launched at $600, right? That's because it embraced cutting edge technology that hadn't "laterally withered" yet. With the Slim model they were able to include components that had been manufactured for awhile so the price had come down, and that's why the PS3 is now half the price it was at launch. Wait another 2 years and it might be half of what it is now.
That would be the perfect time for Nintendo to embrace that sort of technology. Not only will those components be cheaper, but they will be much better as well. Graphically speaking, they won't offer much noticeably improvement over current HD systems, but the Wii 2.0 could still beat the PS3 in things like A.I. and so forth.
Just remember, the Wii 2.0 doesn't need to be a "super computer" like the PS3 was in 2006. It can just use budget 2011-2012 components and still have something that's better than the PS3. Gunpei Yokoi was a genius, and its reassuring to know that Iwata is taking time and waiting for technology to come down before embracing it, unlike Sony or MS who don't have the patience and just embrace it by creating a system that is expensive and doesn't sell very well. Sony is doing better now that they've brought the price of their system down, but had they used less cutting edge components from the start they would probably still be the market leader. If you start out with components that are already cheap, then you won't need to wait for costs to come down, and $600 was just too much. They're doing better now, but it doesn't justify the cost of dropping from 1st place to 3rd in a single generation.
Topic: How will the PS3 be able to compete against the more advanced Wii 2? (Read 15214 times)
