There’s this quite interesting piece over on the BBC discussing the implication of next generation consoles for the games industry, which I meant to write about yesterday.

The main thrust of the piece is that games producers are going to have to rise to the challenges/opportunities presented by the next-gen consoles (PS3, XBox2, Whatever-they’ve-decided-to-call-the-new-gamecube-this-week) Any companies who don’t make the grade are gonna fall by the wayside.

The BBC article describes it as ‘a cull’. Personally I don’t think it’ll be anything like that dramatic. It took a while for a lot of companies to step up anything more than the number of polygons they were using between PS1 and PS2. So I don’t think it’s the mere implication of a new type of console.

What’s going to make or break companies here is which console they decide to back. There is going to be (you could argue there already is) an all out battle between Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo – and if you back the wrong one, you might not be playing to a big enough marketplace.