There was an interesting comment made at GDC by an Electronic Arts programmer on the team working on Will Wright's current in-development project. To paraphrase, his bottom line was that the next-generation of systems were technically optimized for media and graphics but poorly if not detrimentally optimized for AI, game logic, and the other important types of code that determine good games. This is a crucial point because once we've gotten past the beauty of next-generation graphics and audio, many aspects of next-generation gaming will be the result of next-generation AI, physics, story-engines, and more. Yet each console will use a multi-core CPU, bus architecture, and graphics pipeline that is optimized for media processing. This may level the playing field among companies for graphics (artistry notwithstanding) but create a very uneven playing field for everything else because "gameplay code" on multicore processors may be more of an art then a science for quite some time.
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