At yesterday's Game Developers Conference EEDAR chief product officer Geoffrey Zatkins claimed he felt the current next-gen consoles will be the last generation of hardware.

Wii U, PS4, and Xbox One are currently the eighth generation of consoles, something Zatkins feels, "could be the last generation of dedicated hardware," according to GameSpot. EEDAR is a video game market research firm, and Zatkins was speaking in a panel called "Awesome Video Game Data."

(Photo : (PHOTO: Wikipedia))
Xbox One console with controller.

In a past interview with Famitsu, Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada sort of went along with what Zatkins said.

"I think in the future, it'll will be a contest of services instead of hardware," Harada said. "When there's the PS5, it will probably be just a controller and a monitor. Then, the thing that will be left is the name of the service."

He continued, "We previously spoke about PlayStation going from hardware to something closer to a service, regardless of the device. Of course, PlayStation will still be the center, but I think we would like to expand to different things."

This seems to be the direction the consoles themselves are heading to. Sony has created PlayStation Now, which will rent and stream videos. Microsoft will be focusing the Xbox One on cloud services, and Nintendo is bringing a whole new policy into play for the Wii U that will focus on the users well being.

Music is now all digital, television and movies are on the way to be all digital, in this natural progression video games are the only thing left requiring hardcopies and consoles, and even that is beginning to change.

What do you think of the future of gaming? Could this be the last era of console gaming?

(Photo : (PHOTO: Wikipedia))
Nintendo Wii U console.