In November, Nintendo will release Wii U, the first update to the groundbreaking motion-controlled gaming console that took the industry by storm in 2006. Pundits and developers presume Sony and Microsoft will quickly follow suit with their own updated game consoles — also the first in years — though neither have confirmed it.

Assuming all of these new machines arrive as predicted, they’ll hit store shelves at nearly the exact moment when the venerable game console, and the business model that sustained it, became obsolete.