It seems that every console generation there's always speculation about whether this will be the 'last one' before a move away from dedicated hardware, and according to former Xbox boss Peter Moore, that even went on internally at Microsoft during the Xbox 360 era.
Talking to IGN this week, Moore said that during his time at Xbox, the team was thinking about the future of gaming hardware since around 2007 or so.
"The broader picture — and we certainly feared during my time even at Microsoft — we were saying then, in 2007, is this the last console generation? Do televisions start to come with chips that can play games and you just need a controller? Is the PC, as it was then, a renaissance?"
The interviewer then followed up on this 2007 mention, hinting that it was a long time ago to be questioning this sort of thing. Here's what Moore replied with:
"Yeah, the Xbox 360, during the back end of that. You have that concern. If you were thinking then of something that launched the mid-2000s, what does the end of the decade look like and how long the cycles were — usually five, six years — and what does it look like in five, six years? Are we going to need another? Well, the answer ultimately was yes, but the questions were being asked then."
So, yeah, while there's been lots of speculation recently about the future of Xbox, consoles 'going away' has been a larger part of the conversation for a while. And, according to Microsoft, we can at least expect another very powerful Xbox system in the coming years.