> By and large, with the exception of a few exclusives, the 360 and the PS3 have more or less the same set of games. Both were incredibly advanced and were a logical progression of the course that these systems were going. But they both more or less have the same software ecosystem. Most of the library available on one is available on the other.

You know, this part still blows my mind--and that's really my age showing, because this is one of those "new normal" states that anyone born recently won't even question: Sony spent untold amounts of R&D money making an 1+8 core system at a time when that amount of power was unheard of. Microsoft put commodity PC hardware in a plastic shell. And yet you don't see any games that are exclusive to one or the other because porting is technologically unfeasible. (On the contrary, the only "exclusives" are that way because of licencing agreements.) Does this mean that people still aren't taking advantage of the systems' respective unique hardware, after all these years?

I would say no. Instead, it seems more that an increasing trend to make one's SDK something that runs on commodity PC hardware--instead of an expensive, dedicated, serial-connected tester unit, as in previous generations--has fostered all the disadvantages of commodity PC hardware on the developer. It's hard to developer for 8+1 cores if you don't see the speedup on your own machine. So game software is now, by and large, PC software--software for a CPU with some small number of cores, some large amount of RAM, and a pretty massive GPU for everything else--not software targeted at special tile-drawing and sprite-drawing and audio-synthesis chips.

What this means, I think, for the next generation of consoles: ignoring UX differentiators like the Wii (and it seems like they're still the only ones differentiating on UX), the rest of the systems will probably all have roughly the same set of games. Portability is now easy, because every console is basically a PC. We don't include special hardware any more, because nobody's gonna program for it. For consumers, this means console choice will come down to something like price-point + brand-recognition, rather than any question of "what games will run on this."

The obvious exception is the one I mentioned above--platforms with enough leverage to make exclusive licensing deals. But this is, at least currently, a declining relic of a bygone age: I can see first-party (Nintendo, Valve) and fully-owned subsidiaries (Bungie) as continuing to create exclusives, but even the most heavily one-platform-at-a-time companies (Square-Enix) are now branching out all over the place, because that amount of power over the consumer is decreasingly relevant, and it captures more of the market to have some games on every platform, than to target one console's market and get "guaranteed" consumption because you're the biggest fish in the smaller pond.

In other words, in a way, console software is being "globalized" between markets, just like movies and music are being globalized between the US, Europe and Asia. You can't just release on one and then perhaps re-release on the others at some later date; you'll be missing out if you aren't everywhere.