This upcoming generation is going to last at least 8 years. The Wii U 2 or Wii 3 will be out in 2016.

What he means is the console makers cannot afford to allow for another 10 year console cycle. Already, the consoles are outdated, service based duds, outclassed by the PC and it's inexorable dance with Moore's Law. Should Sony and MS choose to allow for a longer cycle, they will buried by the screaming tide of PC superiority, fueled by the unstoppable force of technological evolution.
Already, people begin to talk of the gap between console and PC- and it is only widening. Sooner or later, game makers will have to cater to an ever increasing customer base who are intelligent enough to realize that the PC gives the consumer the best bang for their buck.

7 years is perfect. gives more time for companies to develop their hardware the right way.

I think 5 years is the sweet spot, anything longer than that is pushing it.

They want more consoles out there so they can crank out crappy ports and bring in more $$$.

People need to realise that bringing a new console to market costs £billions with research advertising, development and manufacturing costs so basically they cannot afford to do it any earlier than 7 to 8 years and more in to the future we go its going to cost even more so basically I cannot see a console after ps5 because it will all be done online.

If you look at past consoles, 5 years is about when new consoles should be announced. This long console cycle has hurt a ton of developers and us gamers as well.

We get sequel after sequel because they already have those engines built and it's easy to pump them out. If we had the standard cycle, we'd have more innovation and less sequels.

I think around 2010 we should have had a new Xbox announced, you have tablet and phone owners getting new hardware every year, and that excites people, I'm not suggesting yearly console releases, but 5 years should be fine.

ubisoft dooesn't understand consoles

Given the current state of affairs, I for one think that they should wait another ten. A hot issue with the current generation since it debuted was sub-HD resolutions and anything else under 1080p.

Even still, we've got 4K and possibly 8K looming on the horizon, which will be yet another exponential performance cost on future consoles. The current gen almost seemed like a test bed for the HD revolution, and not one console was able to manage it adequately(how many 1080p/60fps games did we actually end up with? Exactly.). You can bet your bottom dollar that not a single game will even be allowed to run at 720p during the next generation(it's almost certain to be in the fine print), and that resolution increase doesn't come for free. I say wait an adequate amount of time and allow the optimal hardware to be developed for future resolution standards. A lot of people seem to take higher resolutions for granted, but the increase doesn't come for free.

I still think that the forthcoming generation is launching prematurely; if it were up to me, we wouldn't see new machines until 2015 at the earliest. Personally, I'm on the fence about the footage that was shown at last night's conference. The Killzone gameplay, IMHO, looked like what I think the PS3 iterations SHOULD HAVE looked like; it seemed more like the next-gen equivalent of todays ubiquitous "HD re-release" of PS2 classics. Oddly enough, the trailers with the highest fidelity came from Capcom and Ubisoft; that Deep Down footage was stunning, although I couldn't differentiate between what was in-engine and what was pre-rendered.

^^^^^^ English please