John Carmack predicts a long future for next gen consoles

Despite growing competition from the likes cloud and PC gaming, Id co-founder John Carmack believes that dedicated consoles will still remain very much part of the industry.

"I hesitate to predict anything five, six years into the future, but the next generation should last a long time," Carmack stated at E3 this week.

"Console gaming might morph," he further explained. "You can certainly see cloud gaming being built into every display device and traditional consoles could become more like the audiophile niche of people who want the extreme experience there."

Carmack has been at the expo to promote his own Head-Mounted Display, which has been running off an adapted version of DOOM 3: BFG Edition for PC. Despite the decision to showcase the motion-tracking technology on the PC version of the game, Carmack said that console gaming offered many benefits over PC development.

"In many ways this would have been easier to do on consoles," he explains, "but unfortunately you can't just plug a USB device into a console and have it work; you have to have it certified and go through a whole process. And that's a little bit of a shame because even though the PC is ten times more powerful sometimes getting something done at the exact right point is easier on the consoles - it's a place where you know what scanline you're on at any point, and so on."

Thanks, CVG.