Forget about your Xbox 720 or PS4, forget about having to drop another 400 dollars 4 years from now and forget about what you used to call a console generation. Pick up your system of choice now, because both of them will be around for ten years.

Let’s face it: game development is expensive. Your average AAA title costs between 15-40 million dollars to develop and publish now. Part of this is due to inflation, but most of it is due to the rising costs of middleware, and the mass amount of people and time needed to make these titles. More artists need to be hired, more animators needed to animate that art, and more coders needed to bring it all together. With budgets for Halo 3 and Killzone 2 topping 20 million, and Metal Gear Solid 4 at an estimated 40 million, developers need more time than ever to maximize what these powerful consoles have to offer, and more importantly, publishers can’t afford development more expensive than it already is.

Back in the day, you could sell a few hundred thousand copies of a game and call it a financial success; now anything less than a million for a big title is commercial failure. Developers and publishers need this generation to last 10 years for install bases to grow large enough to see appropriate returns on their investments.

This batch of consoles is more expensive than ever before, with the Xbox 360 Premium launching at just under $400 and the PS3 launching at an exorbitant $600. No consoles have ever launched at such high prices and been successful in the mass market. The PS2—so far the most successful home console ever—has sold around 120 million units worldwide in the seven years of its life. But, over 80% of those sales came after the console reached a $199 price point – a mental barrier for a lot of mainstream consumers.

The Xbox 360 offers developers a ridiculously high amount of power to work with, and the PS3 even more so – with extra power and disc storage. The steep learning curve involved in next-gen development, even more so for the complicated PS3 architecture, would lead one to believe that we haven’t even seen 50% of what these consoles can accomplish.

Because they launched at a higher-than-normal price point, the consoles will take a longer period of time to achieve the large install base their predecessors enjoyed. Because their hardware is so complex, more time will be needed to squeeze every ounce of power possible out of them. These factors mean we have years and years of quality gaming ahead – regardless of your system of choice.