Gaming industry analysts Pacfic Crest Securities have stated that they believe both Microsoft and Nintendo will have new gaming consoles out by 2010 – just 2 years from now. This might seem reasonable, except that they also expect the Playstation 3 to have a 10-year life cycle, meaning Sony wouldn’t release a new system until closer to the middle part of that decade?

If the recent trends and estimates pan out for this year it looks like Nintendo’s Wii will continue to dominate the market while the Playstation 3 starts selling like crazy and eventually overtakes Microsoft’s Xbox 360. If this holds true, it makes sense that Microsoft would want to be the first to market with a new console in a few years, as they have benefited from being the first to the market in this current generation.

Microsoft also happens to have a console which appears to have an awful 16% rate of failure. Not good.

So say Microsoft launches a new Xbox in 2010, it’s hard to imagine both Nintendo and Sony not responding with new consoles of their own. Even if Microsoft’s new console wasn’t that much more “next-gen” than the current iterations, it would be perceived as such simply being newer.

If Sony waited 5 or 6 years after that to launched their next console, the results could be disastrous for them – much more disasterous than launching a $600 console when another competitor (Nintendo) had one for $249.

Who really knows though, by the middle of the next decade mobile gaming could be even bigger than it is now and the consoles might be a secondary business to many of these companies – which would be very bad news for Microsoft seeing as they don’t have a mobile game device.