Electronic Arts Chief creative officer, Rich Hilleman, expressed his opinion that both Microsoft and Sony will continue to offer incremental hardware updates to their consoles before releasing any new consoles.
"I expected we'll see a PlayStation 3.5 before we see a PlayStation 4 and an Xbox 560 before we see an Xbox 720," Hilleman said at the Hot Chips conference in Stanford."The biggest shift is how fast packaged goods games are changing and going away."
Hilleman noted that handheld gaming devices outnumber home consoles 2-to-1 and current gen games require a marketing budget that is almost three times more than the actual development cost.
Hilleman also noted that EA earns $35 of each $60 game and, at this rate, each title needs to sell 1.1 million units in order to break even. Piracy and secondhand games sales have narrowed the effective sales window for a new game to six weeks.