My thoughts. The real issue is AAA is becoming unwieldy... sorry IS unwieldy. There are only three or four franchises that can claim the AAA money needed to turn profit and break even. Now those names HAVE shifted- in the last year, even- but its always a crap shoot. Its not so much, as investors may have wanted, games are expanding so much as the top performers are performing at new heights.
Now comes the threat of cheaper consoles eating up the real electronic winners in terms of profitability (the casual games and apps and so on) whether its the Ouya, Steambox, SmartTv, cheap PC with TV HD hook up, Roku, what have you. So where does that leave those at the edge? Funny thing is if they doubled all the stats on their current consoles the Video game consoles would still be lagging like cripples behind middle PC gaming rigs. Competing with them is just a losing game, if the PS3 is to be a lesson,. It won every battle it set out for itself and still managed to lose the war. It helped set the new next media standard but afterwards streaming took up and most are sticking with DVDs as they still consider them new and affordable. Most couldn't master programming for the Cell or the cost of putting out the level of polish and game was too much for scaling down or intricately advancing. And so in practice and then in theory the PS3 was outclassed by cheaper PCs people already had they were price competing with. That or due to similarity and third party and other factors the PS3 and 360 pretty much ended up resembling each other too much with only minor key differences (free online service or paid with lots of features and updates and matchmaking and etc)
The WiiU is Nintendo going sideways yet again. Its decent but its more features with an eye to the gamer who's an adult with kids if not the whole family, but not leaving behind the family. More importantly there is the issue of price. People are balking at the WiiU's price and then comparing its value/features, what's the PS4 or Nextbox going to cost and what can it offer to compete and what will those features cost? Sony can't afford the PS3 to be less than 200 dollars still. MS is experimenting with subsidized payment plans ala the cellphone. Even if they are the same price as the WiiU they'll have to be more powerful and offer significantly improved experiences because of it at launch. The PS3 has some AWESOME game experiences... but it took I'd say two to three years for it to really be anything but shiny PS2 and it still hasn't met its potential but its still outmoded in the ebusiness as a blurayer and online service provider and gaming device.
Now to be fair the real cool thing is Nintendo has left themselves a lot of room here. What happens say in a year they put out a SKU that has no gamepad and can slash their price and then sell the gamepad seperately. What if they can in three or four years put out a new upgraded box but let you keep the rest of your rig/gamepade and its more comparable to the PS4 of Nextbox?
The main thing is that for likely less, if not similar cash, as new console the hardcore gamer seems to have their heart set on the economic market of Steam and the App store with their computers that will already be guaranteed to be more powerful than the Ps4 and Nextbox or at least more economical. Sony tried the highest end emachine, it backfired on them in numerous ways. MS is more a service and entertainment hub provider Why bother with the highest end of tech?
I guess I'm seeing the WiiU as doing good with first to the next gen market. And MS and Sony in a weird place of at best eclipsing Nintendo but not putting out a higher end product. Not pushing the limit, so much as further raising the ceiling as Nintendo is doing. Depending on how the third party relations work that might not be much of a change as Warren Spector noted. Its time for developers to develop for the most popular console and then scale up than for their private supercomputers and only go down as far as they dare let their vision be compromised.
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