To date, console generations have not been especially long-lived. Sony waited six years after the PlayStation 2 hit shelves to release the PlayStation 3. Nintendo’s Wii followed up the GameCube in five years. And Microsoft made some gamers’ heads spin by launching the Xbox 360 a mere four years after the debut of the original Xbox. If history repeated itself, that would have the next generation of consoles starting with an Xbox 360 follow-up arriving next year.

However, with the amount of money companies have poured into their new hardware and the consistently record-breaking sales figures those machines are putting up, conventional wisdom says new systems are a ways off. Talking with financial magazine Forbes this week, THQ CEO Brian Farrell said new systems just aren’t needed yet. "One of the things I like about this generation is we are still very early and there’s still a lot of room for growth … as we move down those price curves," Farrell said. "Those engines have a lot of steam left in them. We think it could be seven or eight years before new machines start to roll out."

Farrell isn’t the only industry suit who thinks the current generation will remain on top of the heap for some time. Epic Games president Mike Capps said his company isn’t expecting new systems until 2012 at the earliest, and 2018 at the far end of the spectrum.

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata told Forbes that the company is already working on the successor to the Wii.

"We are always preparing for the next hardware," Iwata told the magazine. "We are under development. … But the hardware is a kind of box that consumers reluctantly buy in order to play our games."

Microsoft’s Shane Kim would not confirm to Forbes that the company had plans for another console after the Xbox 360, while Sony executives have briefly discussed the successor to the PlayStation 3 in the past. On those occasions, they said it would not come any sooner than in previous console cycles.

By Polybren