EA: Longer console life cycle means more price drops

EA's Eric Brown believes that consoles currently on the market will be around for longer than previous iterations.

Speaking at the Wedbush Morgan Securities conference, Brown said that since two out of three consoles are HD-capable and can render 60 frames per second, we're at the limit of currently-available tech.

"I myself am not quite sure where we go from here," said Brown. "There's just no broadly-available consumer viewing technology beyond HD. You have to be a PC technophile with an ultra high resolution monitor to get past that."

Brown admitted that even with Wii's less graphically-enhanced console, the innovative controls prove that "high-powered processors are increasingly less relevant" to a console's success.

Yet, online capabilities of the PS3, Xbox 360 and innovations in digital distribution prove there is still room for continuing growth on all three platforms.

Because of this, he says we should not expect new consoles anytime soon, but more price drops for the ones already available.

"The point here is that we've seen one major price drop thus far in this console cycle; we feel that we have a long ways to go, and a lot more of the unit sales will occur at the lower price points," he said.

"History holds more [hardware] units translates, times tie ratio, to more software units and software dollars for third-party publishers. Those are the key takeaways in terms of where we see this console cycle at this point in time."