John Carmack gave one of his legendary speeches at QuakeCon yesterday, addressing numerous—almost countless—topics about the game industry, technology, and culture. One of the topics he weighed heavily upon was the next-gen console and whether there will be a 'next-next gen' beyond the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4.
“I don’t think there’s going to be much of a push for another generation for a long time,” Carmack said. “Really, we could be doing great, innovative work even on the current generation for many more years yet. It’s not like anybody’s seen everything that you could do.
“I’ll be surprised if we see radically better games enabled because of the new capabilities on the consoles, and, I’ve thought for a while we’re now past the knee of the curve of the payoff benefit, so we’re going to be definitely on the gradual sloping part of it going forward.
Carmack addressed the possibility of an evolution of the next-gen in which both the Xbox One and PS4 would embrace cloud gaming ahead of any next-next gen platform.
“Whether we get something like cloud gaming owning large shares of the market before [next-next-gen], or people using both systems or you just play on your mobile phone and it shows up on whatever screen’s near you, that could become [the] dominant gaming platform.
“But, a traditional next Xbox? Yeah, I think that’s a long ways off, and there’s a credible argument to be made that there may not be another console generation as we know it now.”
via Joystiq.
