That’s what Mike Capps, President of Epic Games thinks will be the minimum year we see a new Playstation, Xbox or Wii even up to 2018 – given the typical 5-6 year shelf life of a console. Brian Farrell, CEO of THQ also thinks it will be another 7 years until we see a new system because of the time it takes to fully utilize the Xbox 360, Wii and PS3.

So what are the clues that the next consoles are under development? Nintendo President Satoru Iwata admits the company is working on the next Wii but won’t admit to anything concrete at this time.

“We are always preparing for the next hardware,” Iwata says. “We are under development. … But the hardware is a kind of box that consumers reluctantly buy in order to play our games.”

“Every hardware needs some revolutionary features,” Iwata says. “This time around, it happened to be we had a revolutionary user interface. Will it be the same for the next generation? I really can’t tell.

Nvidia’s Larrabee GPU and Advanced Micro Devices (ATI) are actively trying to win over the three console makers to buy their next generation chips as we speak, and Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 is under development for future games.

Read more on the next-next-gen consoles at Forbes