At the Launch conference in Birmingham, two UK game industry stalwarts ponder the future of consoles, episodic content and short development cycles

The next Xbox or PlayStation could be a tablet PC rather than a console, suggested industry veteran Guy Wilday on Wednesday.

Speaking on a panel at the Launch Conference in Birmingham, the former Codemasters studio head, now working as a consultant, said that the traditional five-year console life cycle has stalled for good, and that delivering games on more flexible platforms was the future.

"The market has changed – the industry is focused on content," he said.

"It's less about rapid innovation of platforms and more about focusing on games themselves and making sure they're deeper. It's exciting, it's a very different challenge."

Wilday praised the App Store model as a straightforward route to market for games, and suggested that future consoles would work in a similar way – even borrowing their form factor from mobile devices, a notion that has previously been put forward by other developers.

"Will consoles be tablets?" he asked. "It's an interesting possibility. You can stream tablet content to your TV now, and tablet graphics hardware is becoming exponentially more powerful. That whole dynamic of having a device that you use in one way, then bring home and use in another way is an influence going forward."

Intriguingly, Nick Burton – incubation director at Rare, the UK studio now owned by Microsoft and responsible for a lot of the early development work on the Kinect – suggested that console game development itself would be moving toward a smartphone model of shorter development periods, followed by regular post-release iterations as publishers use analytics to see how gamers are using their products, reacting with new content accordingly.

"Content is still king," he said. "But what I do think we're going to see is deeper use of analytics in games, especially as everyone becomes connected all the time – it makes it easier for us to tune our products to suit our audience, whether that's on a handheld device or a bigger platform.

"We're all getting a lot better at finding out what our audience wants and reacting to that. With that sort of iteration, long development cycles over multiple years is going to go away."

As Burton's team worked with very early versions of Kinect, it's safe to assume the product he's currently "incubating" is the next Xbox console.

His comments suggest that the next games platform from Microsoft could be built around a model that hovers somewhere between the smartphone market and the current Xbox Live set-up.

But will the next consoles be entirely cloud-based, with game content streaming from remote servers rather than coming on discs or as downloads?

Burton seems unconvinced for now.

"Cloud computing is interesting," he said. "There are balancing issues when something like Battlefield 3 is released and seven million gamers bring your server farm down on day one. But it does offer the potential for our industry to have very long tail on a particular device.

"It can become more like a set-top box – you just sell a small, cheap £99 'thing' and that's your gaming device for the next 10-20 years.

"It's early days though, the net's not ready – we're pretty well connected in the UK but many areas still have latency issues. I wouldn't want to do it just yet …"

Maybe the Xbox 1080, then?