Chief creative officer of Electronic Arts, one of the world’s largest publishers of video games, said that he would expect Microsoft Corp. and Sony Computer Entertainment to keep upgrading their existing video game systems for quite some time from now. Literally, there will be PS3.5 and Xbox 560 before next-generation becomes available.

“I expected we’ll see a PlayStation 3.5 before we see a PlayStation 4 and an Xbox 560 before we see an Xbox 720. The biggest shift is how fast packaged goods games are changing and going away,” said Rich Hilleman during his keynote at Hot Chips conference, reports Venturebeat web-site.

This is not the first time when game makers predict that Sony and Microsoft are unlikely to introduce their next-generation consoles any time soon. This is quite logical. Both companies will only launch their new motion-sensing game controllers in 2010 and are more than likely to allow themselves as well as third-party game developers to capitalize on them for two or even three years before releasing their next-gen. In the meantime, both may introduce new services or even hardware for existing machines to improve user experience.

Nintendo, however, is in a different situation. It already has motion sensing technology, but its hardware is only slightly more powerful than that inside PS2 and the original Xbox. It is very likely that the company spent loads of time optimizing the costs of its hardware instead of boosting its performance. As a result, it is very likely that internally the firm has been working on something more powerful than Wii. Theoretically, this could be so-called Wii HD, but considering that fundamental technology development for Wii was finished around 2004 at the latest, the company has already had five years to develop something completely new, not just an update to Wii.

Tags: Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Playstation, Xbox, Wii, Electronic Arts