Dear Future Gamer

I've just seen your appearance on the Children's BBC program Short Change. Mr Smith, you are a very scary man.

However, with reference to what you said, I don't see how we can ever have a single format. One format will stifle the creativity of developers as they will never get more powerful hardware to work with. Would anyone have liked the NES to have become the universal format? It would mean all games produced now would only have about 10 colours. The same applies now; in 10 years, no-one will want to be buying PlayStation-level games.

The only way round this would be to produce upgrades, but then we get into dodgy PC territory. Yes, the big games companies should try to make their consoles last longer, but look what happened to Nintendo when they stuck with the Super NES. In the nasty world that's the modern videogames industry, can anyone be trusted not to produce yet another more powerful system?

Single format - it may be good for the consumer but it isn't going to happen any time soon.

Robert Dawes

FG: As I said on the program, a single format would be good for the consumer but there's no way it would happen because there's just too much money to be made for whoever's system becomes the industry standard, and therefore every hardware manufacturer is chasing that goal. That's something you note yourself.