[quiet mike]

I think they will try to keep the GameCube's life longer than the normal 5 year cycle. And that's a very good thing, since more games will come on the system, more time to take full use of it's compatibilaty with GBA and less money spent on new hardware development in a span of 10 years.
Maybe looking at this Sony and Microsoft will delay as much as posible their future consoles, since Xbox will need more than 5 years to become trully profitable considering all MS lost on it in this first year, and Sony surely wants to exploit as much the profit it takes with a console that is slightly behind the competitors yet in the lead. so maybe they'll wait 7-8 years before puting out the next systems.


Gekko's coments are very good too, and if I might read more into it I think consoles should be made in a 10 year or more cycle. Right now consoles are very powerfull and the next diference will be sligthly better ans so on. But making a new console brings a downfall: It costs enormly to develop in a console of this generation, and in 5 years companies invest $5-30 million to make 3-4 games. If the console and games aren't supported they will be cutting it too close. Plus they will have to spend more time to learn a new hardware configuration, and as technology upgrades, programing cost increases as well.

Remember when NES, Genesis, SNES were having games coming out all the time? Technology is what stoped that, and if we race like this only a few power houses will be left standing making "the same" games or new ones but in a much less frequent pace "Nintendo"