Most gamers believe that the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 successors will be out before the end of 2013, but head of Microsoft Game Studios Phil Spencer has finally made clear that this quite unlikely.
"Right now the Xbox 360 is really healthy and it's doing incredibly well," he explained. "I think the 360 has a lot more than two years [left]. It has legs for a long time."
"The nice thing about the Xbox 360 right now is - if you look - we're the number one console globally, " he added. "We're able to bring in new content and still support the best of the core games. "
Interestingly, the numbers available to us don’t support Spencer’s bold claim. It is true that the Wii has lost a lot of its traction in the last 2 years, but it still has a 50% lead on Xbox and PS3 in total hardware units sold to date. As for the yearly unit sales, the Xbox 360 came third behind the 3DS and PlayStation 3 in 2012 (till now) and it was second behind the PlayStation 3 in 2011. According to vgchartz, PlayStation 3 sold 14,128,407 units in 2011 while Xbox 360 sold 13,808,365 units and Wii sold 11,567,105 units.
"It's a platform that has really reached scale," the Microsoft Game Studios head affirmed. "This is the time when you really see the great content showing up. The future in a lot of ways is always tomorrow: [things like] the Smart Glass technology and Windows 8 [show that] things are going to constantly evolve. "