Namco Bandai’s Katsuhiro Harada is tired of seeing the console market split between Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft, saying that all three companies should just build a single gaming system together. While certain consoles were needed to play certain games in the past, the reality is that most titles aren’t tied to a single machine anymore.

While talking to the Herald Sun (who hilariously seems to think that Harada’s last name is actually “San”), the Tekken director stated that in the age of browser games, tablets, and smartphones, the next logical move is for a single home console joint produced by all three tech giants:

“People are able to not be tied down by consoles,” he said. “And it doesn’t stop with phones, we have browser gaming and all these different platforms.”

“I think it would be interesting if Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo got together just to make one console,” he said. “It makes me very happy to think about all the possibilities that could occur because of that.”

It’s a pipe dream that many people have tried to wrap their heads around, and for people like Harada, it would make his job a lot easier, developing and licensing content for a single system instead of three.

But the hard truth is simply this—as long as one company thinks that they can out-profit the other two, there’s actually no incentive for Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft to join forces.

Each of them is a very different organization at their core (Sony: electronics; Nintendo: video games; Microsoft: computers/hardware), and with the incredibly long history in each of their brands, a merger would actually reduce the amount of revenue that flows in the gaming market between them. But if worse comes to worse, maybe consoles will be replaced by something else—then Harada can probably start thinking about the next “unified” gaming system.

Source: Herald Sun