CONSOLE DESIGN REFRESHES: Gamesmanship or a lack of ideas

I spent a good amount of time looking up the correct spelling of 'console' just to make sure I started off right.

Home video gaming hardware has a come a long way in the last 20 or so years. SEGA & Nintendo held a monopoly till Sony joined the fray with the PlayStation. The gaming space seemingly couldn't take all three at once so one had to make room for Sony. Despite bringing us the Mega Drive, Saturn & Dreamcast, SEGA found itself marketless and went to game development entirely.

SEGA Dreamcast

Then came Microsoft with the Xbox. An odd move by a traditional pc maker, trying to move from desks to living rooms. They withered the lukewarm reception to their first generation hardware and bettered it with the Xbox 360. This was all at at parallel time to the release of Sony's own Playstation 3, released a year later. This has put these two in direct competition ever since and has made picking an overall winner hard.

Nintendo, meanwhile, has steered clear of this somewhat. Focusing on innovations that have made both Sony and Microsoft react with versions of their own i.e. the Wii movement concept spawned Microsoft's Kinect and the Playstation Move. The later not being well received by consumers.

Sony PlaysStation 3 ('12)

2005 & 2006 saw the birth of the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 respectively....Fast forward more than 6 years later, neither Sony nor Microsoft is talking a complete overhaul in the hardware they brought us. Microsoft freshened up the 360 by slimming it down in 2010 and just the other day Sony followed suit, slightly reshaping the PS3. One would then start to wonder, when will we see a whole new console from either?

Xbox 360 ('05) & Xbox 360 Slim ('10)

Are these two companies trying to stick to the winning formula?
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. So far both consoles have sold in hundreds of millions, their manufacturers could be trying to milk out the most from them without having to bother changing how  the hardware looks or feels.

Or maybe they are waiting to see who blinks first. It could be that they are both waiting for that one killer innovation to push them further ahead of the competition. Motion control is yet to be perfected, hard to tell where the next big thing could come from. If I knew, I'd be a billionaire. Microsoft will not venture into the mobile gaming world with PS Vita like xboxes, too risky a market.

I strongly doubt we'll see a PS4 in 2013, more likely a new Xbox but that is debatable. And where is Nintendo in all of this? Quietly prepping the Wii U, possibly with the aim of stealing a march on sales.

Nintendo Wii U

I have owned the same Xbox 360 for a good 4 years, looks good, firmware updates keep me I'm touch. Safe to say I'm only changing to the Xbox 720 if it will be called that.