A month after the holiday present spree has come to an end, and almost two months after the Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii have been released, the reign of the current generation video game systems is coming to an end. Owners of Playstation 2s, X-boxes and to a lesser extent Gamecubes are finally starting to see the drop in new games being released to their systems. Which is part of a trend that video game companies like Nintendo and Sony (this is Microsoft’s first experience with advancing a video game system) have been doing for years. Once the new generation systems get even a minimal foothold in the industry, fans of the older systems are all but abandoned by the companies.Aside from the usual sports titles and the few games that are releases for all systems that can support the game, no new original content is released for the “old systems.” All over the world, millions of gamers own these old systems are then forced to play the games that they own or fork over another couple hundred dollars for a new system. The problem with the video game industry is, they are willing to abandon fans and users to make more money, money they aren’t assured to actually make. Yes, most of the users will buy the new systems eventually, frustrated that no new games will come out for the old systems. This time it will be an even bigger problem for friends of the old systems, because the new systems as well as their games are so much more expensive. Games are 50 dollars and both the Playstation 3 and X-box 360 are upwards of $300 (the X-Box 360 is priced starting out at $300 and the PS3 is priced starting out at $400). On top of all this, there is still a very large shortage of systems to be sold to the public, and it can still be very hard to get a hold of a Wii or a PS3 because the demand is so high, and only a few thousand units are shipped out at a time. This isn’t so much the case for the X-Box 360 anymore because it has been out for an entire year, however that doesn’t change the fact that it is an expensive console with expensive games. It is most unfortunate, seeing that PS2, X-box, and even Gamecube still have a lot to offer in the gaming world, and haven’t yet been used to their full potential. It has been proven in the past that game producers can easily port new games over to the older systems with little extra cost to the producers that they cannot regain simply by increasing the amount of games they could potentially sell.The video game industry makes the old systems into very expensive doorstops, because of the lack of support for the old systems, and some of the old games are now about as useful as Frisbees because the systems don’t offer much backwards compatibility, and if they do it costs extra to be able to play the old games, on the new system. It is a shame to see that the video game industry thinks themselves powerful enough to make machines that not many in the age bracket that most plays video games can afford as soon as they are released, and abandon those gamers almost entirely in a matter of a few months, all in the name of profit that may or may not come there way. There will soon be a time when gamers say enough is enough and stop handing over large amounts of money for an investment that will only last about five years before it becomes outdated and replaced not at the request of the gamers but, at that of the CEOs of the companies that produce the games. That time just may be upon us.