Yes, but if they made the consoles have the same underlying coding environment you will essentially have no competition.
Not what I meant m8, If they make some unified decisions about devepment and standard practises etc a together the coding environments can be very different but standard practises would allow better cross development and porting for the developers cutting costs.
what they need to stop doing is making cross platform games, it never works, you end up with one version being better than another. Yes it makes lots of money for companies like EA that just churn out crap no matter the quality. But most of the really high end games, the ones that go down as the greatest games have always been coded especially for a platform. That is why the games are good.
This will not change but allowing for better conventions in the development process it will be down to graphics and gameplay on each console but still at the end of the day its about the games.
All the games now seem to be {insert game series} sequels that have no reason to be made other than to make some more money by hoping they sell as well as the last one.
But then you have games like the next gta which are or look to be amazing.
That is why gaming is dying, the only people to have seen this are nintendo, but even their market is being flooded with people trying to flog old dead ideas with bad control systems. Hell even sega are getting in one the game, i cant remember the last time i enjoyed a sonic game since the dreamcast.
Nintendo Are the worst at it in my opinion, yes they have a new control system but every console they do while at first has the wow factor the games are basically the same constantly with every console. Developers make sequals but Nintendo while they make great games have far less vision then anyone else these days and the later versions of a series are basically exactly the same constantly and why their consoles and games drop off far quicker then the others.
They are doing well and again make great games but they still just make the same bunch of games constantly and rare do they get other developers etc. The silly thing is their DS platform is the only true console out there at the moment that actually as a great variety of games out there on any platform but then they do not do that on their main consoles.
Trying to unify the market is only going to make this worse, we will have more games being churned out by developers cashing in on the fact they can just throw as much as they can out in the hope that something sticks.
Microsoft know they own the high end games market now, with DX10 and the 360 it is making it easier for developers to make games between the two. Unfortunately it doesnt work, just look at the disaster that was shadowrun on 360 and PC for how trying to unify console and pc can create a game that is crap on both
But then take command and conquer which was a huge success even for an rpg on a console and the success of the 360 but more over the games and the fact developers like games for windows and many signed up for it etc it says otherwise in regard to being a disaster.
IF we want to see a disaster we just have to look at Sonys online experience and laugh, Nintendo was stupidly slow on this front saying it would never take off but they have caught up well.