If there's one thing I never agreed with, it's that some unified single console would be better for the gaming industry or that it's the future. There's always room for at least two consoles in the industry, but it seems that the whole single console idea is getting interest from developers.

First, EA's Gerhard Florin hinted at wanting to develop on a single, unified console. Now, Denis Dyack, creator of the long delayed game/ potential vaporware known as Too Human, says such as thing is "inevitable" in the latest issue of UK's Official Xbox Magazine, according to the site Computer and Video Games.

I often use wrestling as an example of what might happen if gaming was unified under a single platform. I don't really know if it's a great example or not, but there's lessons to be learned from what happened in the wrestling industry. When WWE came in and took out WCW, and ECW folded under its own financial problems, Vince McMahon was left as the sole big shot in pro wrestling. And since that day, pro wrestling's quality has degenerated significantly, to the point that I stopped watching for a long time because it had grown stale.

The problem I see with games is that a single unified platform would lead to a worse form of companies copying off each other and basically putting out the same game under different names. While it's been limited to certain genres in the past few years, it could be very easy for it to explode to an industry-wide issue. There's already been complaints of not enough innovation in games today, but a single platform without competition means that there's little incentive to innovate. That's a basic economic principle. If Nintendo had collapsed and Microsoft had been crushed bad enough by Sony and the PS2 that the 360 never happened, then things like the Wiimote or Xbox Live wouldn't be around today. Both these things came from the fact that Microsoft and Nintendo had to try and find ways to differentiate themselves from Sony, to try and offer something Sony wouldn't. And in part, they succeeded to the point that Sony emulated those ideas in the SIXAXIS and Playstation Network. Or why not use the example of the Nintendo 64 and its cartridges versus the Playstation and its CDs. Sony's competition and success with the PS1 was likely part of the reason that Nintendo's hand was forced to move to discs and away from cartridge-based games.

I just don't see the idea of a single console making gaming viable. In fact, I honestly believe a single console would lead to a decline in gaming as a whole, because it is the competition from outside that forces the industry forward. Without that mechanism, we might as well be playing the same damn games over and over again.