Electronic Arts chief creative officer Rich Hilleman is one of many people who expect this current generation to drag on and on. He believes that incremental updates will extend the lives of the PS3 and Xbox 360, and that a new line of systems won’t happen until we see notable upgrades to the current machines.
“I expect we’ll see a PlayStation 3.5 before we see a PlayStation 4 and an Xbox 560 before we see an Xbox 720,”he states.
He also adds that online games and digital distribution are the way forward, with quite a bold statement: “The biggest shift is how fast packaged goods games are changing and going away. If I want to go to see the past of gaming, I go to Japan. If I want to see the future, I go to Korea.”
In South Korea there are over 28,000 internet game rooms, where customers pay an hourly fee to use the computers. Hilleman adds that over half of the country’s 48 million people are into games. So, make sure you take a good, long look at South Korea, because that’s where we’re all headed.
