Deliberately a title to get you to look inside the thread...

However what I mean is that compared to the "golden" age of gaming there are fewer and fewer manufacturers of consoles and we seem to have settled on Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft. Microsoft and Sony are relatively new players into the market. Question is do you feel they will all continue to develop new console hardware or will we get to a point where all we have are entertainment centres and downloadable content via the internet?

If you feel this is going to happen, can you put a timescale on it? Do you feel that Nintendo may end up just concentrating on the handheld market for example?

Other question is will manufacturers who used to have consoles on the market such as NEC, SNK (or SNK Playmore now), Bandia, Sega and Apple enter the market as a competitor? The only one of those that struck me as a potential was Apple but I could be wrong.

So what do you think?