Legendary programmer John Carmack not only believes that Microsoft and Sony will "be here in a couple of years", but also that the next generation of consoles will be "ten times as powerful as this [generation's]".
While many can't wait for that to happen, Carmack is more of a realist and understands that photorealism is essentially the limit of graphics and that it's coming soon:
I'd be surprised if that doesn't last over a decade before people wind up saying, well, we've really tapped out everything you could possible do on there. The better games get get, the harder you have to go to give a delta people care about. That's going to be challenge for the next generation of consoles, to show what pack-in title is going to look so much more awesome than what you get on the current ones that people want to go spend $300 on a new console.
They'll be able to do it on the next generation, but it's going to be much harder.
In fact, he earlier proposed that in ten years' time cloud computing would take the industry by storm, as much as some gamers still swear by physical copies for their game collections.
[Source]
