Sony has been hailing the prolonged Playstation 3 lifecycle as one of the console's strongest selling points, but id Software technical director John Carmack believes that it will be the first company to release a new console.
"The whole jockeying for who's going to release the first next gen console is very interesting and pretty divorced from the technical side of things," he said. "Whether Sony wants to jump the gun to prevent the same sort of 360 lag from happening to them again seems likely."
"As developers, we would really like to see this generation stretch as long as possible. We'd like to see it be quite a few more years before the next gen console comes out, but I suspect one will end up shipping something earlier rather than later," he added.
Carmack also expects that at least one of the new consoles will ship without optical drives.
"I think that Xbox Live... the advent of that and the App Store with the iPhone are wonderful signs of the future of digital distribution. I think there's a decent chance that one of the next gen consoles will be without optical media... the uptake rates of people who have broadband connects surprised everyone this generation. It's higher than what the core publishers and even the first party people expected."
