There’s a fair amount of excitement with the recent announcements of the new XBox One and PS4 consoles with exciting new harder specs and TV features. There has never been a better time to own an PS3 or XBox 360. On the “old” consoles there’s a massive back catalogue of quality games to choose from, many at knock down prices or available pre-owned. If you want a console for TV the PS3 has a blu-ray player, an optional remote control and supports services like NetFlix and LoveFilm, it’s also quite quiet. If you’re interested in gaming, developers really know these “old” consoles now and there’s a healthy indie games scene too.
If you’re a game developer on royalties you may want to think twice about jumping straight onto the latest and greatest consoles. Sure they’re new and shiny, but they’ll have a much smaller user base for quite some time yet, likely require a much larger team and longer to develop. This winter holiday season XBox 360 and PS3 will be at their peak. I remember being on a royalty share at Ocean on Jurrassic Park, I worked on the PC and Amiga versions, which were a huge success. But the big royalties came from the GameBoy version which had a team of 2. I guess this might be one of the reasons you see so many band members pursuing solo careers.
Further reading: The benefits of developing for PS3, not PS4