I wish I would be that optimistic!
Well "looking like" high end PC games is a given though I read many time here that BF3 for example was not good enough.
I don't expect that games budgets are going to further explode up, or at least not for a significant amount of titles.
Though on pure technical merit I don't expect this gen to achieve what the 360 achieved last gen and be at the top of the pyramid even for a few months.
Haswell CPU should provide performance consoles won't touch. On the GPU side I would be surprised if they manage to include the last generation of AMD GPU (should be GCN2 by tis time) in the design, even less the higher products.
I would think that both MSFT and SOny would want to thing to be well ironed out, to start production well ahead of the launch window, etc. I would think that RroD and its lesser brother on the PS3 would have triggered an aversion to risk among the executives of those two companies.
Overall I think that next gen are pretty much going to be PC under disguised, so nothing new for the devs and researchers that have gotten their hands on that kind of hardware for a long while and even on way more forward looking kind of hardware (like Larrabee).
The thing that kind of turn me off is that mid way this gen we were fed presentations about the "paradigm shift" to come and it won't happen. I think that actually aside the researchers that wrote those papers nobody wants it to happen. The R&D cost to create hardware would be crazy high (if we speak about a billion for a major revision like Broadway => Expresso imagine for something new). On the software side well early result would be most likely underwhelming.
Shortly looking at the money involved I would say aversion to risk pretty much ensure that we are mostly only going to get more of the sane.
At this point I'm just hoping that "next gen" does last more than 5 years. I went to best buy this week end and it is depressing to see those old consoles caught in nothing short of a "time stop" when their are new tablets, new computers with touch screen, even a new windows.
Not a really a surprised that sales are down, I mean it is depressing.
Anyway it is more and more likely that from my pov a proper PC will be a better investment that either the next xbox or ps4 even though it could proved a tad costlier.
I mean if I wait as planned till late 2014 to replace my laptop I should be able to buy something that match those "next gen" systems, that is mobile, that allows me to do whatever I want, and so on.
