id Software technical director and Doom creator John Carmack believes Sony will be the first to kick off the next wave of consoles with a successor to PS3, tentatively referred to as PS4.

Whether Sony wants to jump the gun to prevent the same sort of 360 lag from happening to them again seems likely.

As developers, we would really like to see this generation stretch as long as possible. We’d like to see it be quite a few more years before the next-gen consoles comes out, but I suspect one will end up shipping something earlier rather than later.

Further to this, Carmack mentioned there is a “decent” chance that one of the next-generation platforms will ship without support for optical media, as Sony has already done with the UMD-less PSPgo. Three years ago, such a scenario would be viewed as unrealistic, but today it’s not exactly far-fetched when taking the rapid growth of digital-based distribution services into account.

Carmack: PS4 will be first to market [MCVUK]

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