Sony's vice president of product marketing Scott Steinberg has questioned the future of Microsoft's Xbox 360, observing that "in three years certain systems will look pretty long in the tooth graphically".

When speaking of the Nintendo Wii, Steinberg told next-gen: "Wii is on a different trajectory completely and I’m not exactly sure what that will look like in two or three years' time.

"The technology that’s under that hood is so different from ours and I think the jury is still out.”

But the Sony chief believes that games on the PS3 will push it ahead of its rivals in the future: "In the years ahead our games will begin to distance themselves from other next-gen games, our games being first-party exclusives.

"As our teams work on third generation software, you’ll see games begin to tip the scale at thirty gigs, forty gigs, fifty gigs. You can’t possibly fit that on HD-DVD unless you want to do the old floppy disk swaps of years past.”