Is gaming becoming a victim of the fast paced technological world we live in, or is it just simply natural progress?

There was once a time when, a console came out and that was how it remained pretty much through it entire life cycle, no changes to the hardware either internal or external, or internal to an extent of maybe making it run better overall but nothing that made it work any different to the original model that came out.

These days it seems to be the motto if it ain't broke fix it anyway, as a console can go through many number of internal and external changes in its own life span, from as simple tweak in it overall appearance to completely removing half the features from the very first models, and then including different ones in later models, the PS3 is probably the first console to go through so many major changes both internal and external in such a short space of time, and I am sure many would agree that the very first model had far more functionality than any of the later ones with pretty much full PSone and PS2 backward compatibility and even built in card reader.

Of course changes these days no longer just include simple hardware alteration but ever evolving software updates to the systems firmware, just looking at the X-Box 360's original navigation screen it has now been completely replaced by a much newer version and with new features making it a completely new experience, thus changing the system not only in hardware from it original model but the basic software of how it runs too.

Even handheld systems are not safe from hardware updates both the newest DS and PSP models offering far more features than their original models, the latest PSP even requiring no form of external media to play games on just an Wi-Fi connection, and much like the home counterparts the PSP is also evolving on the internal software front with regular updates to the firmware too.

So is this just the simple evolution of games consoles or just a part of the ever expanding fast moving technological world we are living in now?

Well personally from the updating of new firm ware to add new and better functionality to the system I am certainly all for that as I believe that is just a progression of making things better in most electronic devices, but as for the continual hardware changes, well all I will say is I want to be able to purchase something early on and it to have all the hardware features that any later models are going to have, not suddenly add a new HDMI output all of a sudden giving it better video output and better picture quality or a bigger hard disc because they suddenly realised the one they put in the model I got wasn't big enough to actually hold enough data to do more than a few things. I don't want to have to consider buying a second console just so it has better hardware than the one I brought to begin with because it may not be able to play game X how it was meant to be played. From that point I think they really need to take a look at it from the consumers point of view, updating the firmware is one thing but completely changing the hardware every year can be very frustrating and make you wonder if it just not worth waiting for the next model, incase it just that little bit better.

I can't imagine this changing now though as I am sure it will continue with the next generation of consoles as manufacturers keep trying to stay ahead of the competition.