2000's

The new millennium saw the realease of the playstation 2 on march 4th and a year later  the gamecube, which was nintendo’s first disc based console although it uses smaller disc’s than that of a normal size cd. The gamecube didn’t feature many third party games compared to the playstation although later on the gamecube did have a few grittier title’s such as resident evil and a remake of the first metal gear solid even though it was plagued with talk of being a childrens console.

2001 also saw Microsoft who up till now only released computer software and operating systems enter the market with the xbox, the console used a fair amount of computer hardware and is said to have been sold at a loss to increase sales in hope for recouping money from development and publishing. One game which made the xbox very successful was halo: combat evolved, the franchise went on to become one of the most popular shooting gamer ever. This decade also saw the rise of alternate controllers although not anything completely new as the ps1 and sega Saturn both featured light guns the company red octane introduced guitar controllers for the game guitar hero and after the release of the second game there was a huge increase in the rhythm based game market seeing later releases with drums microphones and guitars for a full 4 player band.

Seeing a spread in broadband connections it was during this decade which online gaming became most prominent with pc games such as world of war craft and xbox’s halo 2 supporting online play it opened up a whole new aspect for players and developers.

 2004 is said to be the start of the 7^th generation in gaming with both sony and Nintendo releasing handheld consoles the play station portable and the Nintendo DS. In the coming years both companies released upgraded models of their handheld consoles.

In 2005 microsoft released their second console the xbox 360 and 2006 saw sony release the playstation 3 with both consoles featuring high definition graphics, large hard drive based storage systems, online gaming and networking built in and both companies having their own online games service called xbox live and playstation network. The ps3 was a fair amount more expensive than the xbox because the ps3 included a blu-ray player and wi-fi built in,  these two features were available on the xbox but as optional extras which need to be bought so it really depended on what the gamer wanted when choosing between the two. At the time of release the xbox was selling for around £300-£400 whereas the ps3 was selling for around £500-£600 therefore xbox had the price advantage. Not long after the ps3 was released Nintendo brought out their new console the wii which was more of a casual games console and although it was nowhere near as powerful as the ps3 or xbox its use of motion control made it very popular and to much surprise from critics became the fastest selling console in 2006.

 Sony and Microsoft also jumped on the band wagon a lot later in around 2009-2010 with their own motion controlled peripherals and Microsoft’s kinect became the fastest selling consumer electronics device as of march 2011.

In the present decade not much in terms of consoles have been released although sony are to release their next handheld the playstation vita to compete with nintendo’s 3ds and again Nintendo have released information about an upcoming console to proceed to wii called the wii U and is said to include a controller with a 6.2 inch touch screen with some games not even needing a TV to be playable but using the controller instead.