Sources tell EDGE that first-party game developers are already working on the next generation of consoles. The successors to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 have been rumored for a while, but the news on EDGE makes the good point that releasing new consoles in 2012 will put Nintendo’s high-definition Wii U at a big disadvantage.

Wii U has been positioned to developers as a suitable home for Xbox 360 and PS3 ports, and putting new consoles on shelves next year could leave Nintendo scrambling for thirdparty support. Reports this week claim that Microsoft could announce its console at CES in Las Vegas in January; Nintendo is not to reveal the finalised Wii U hardware until E3 in June.

Also, a producer at Ubisoft Montreal (Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, Far Cry 2) says that ““Our challenge with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox [360] is that we’re extremely limited in what we can do,” he said. “It’s a challenge for the engineers to provide nice graphics and nice AI and nice sound with a very small amount of memory and computation time.”

The experts are telling us that our experiences are fundamentally, in a way, obsolete. Am I the only one who is still enamored of the photorealism in the first Gears of War?

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– Ryan Kuo