Sony initially said the same thing shortly before the PS3 launched and that never happened. It can only hurt them to do this.

Right now it's just a rumor. A system that only allows for new sales is going to have some backlash, especially if they never discount prices. They may reduce the cost of games or at the least keep them the same, but I don't see such a model being very popular. In any case, there's 4-5 months until E3, we'll find out then if the rumors are true.

I swear to god, if the 720 is the official name, I'm going to kill myself.

I highly doubt it's going to happen. All it will do is piss people off

If it is it'll be very fitting.....the system will keep people going in circles trying to figure out who to blame for the entire mess.

Actually, I'd be willing to bet money (not very much) that the official name will be Xbox 1080.

I dunno, it could be worse. The nickname for the GameCube while it was still being developed was "Dolphin," which I think is a MUCH better name for a system than the tremendously boring "GameCube." And it looks like Sony is just going to increment the numbers on the PlayStation for all eternity, which is even MORE boring.

No, I don't think this will actually happen, and no I don't think it will be console suicide, but it's going to put a fuckton of devs out of business as soon as publishers see their first months' sales tank on all their big projects.

You'll also see way more hacked consoles. Frankly the only reason XBox 360 isn't hacked more often is that Live is actually a really good user experience (for most people, YMMV) so there's a lot of incentive to hack it is low compared to what you lose, do this and suddenly a lot more people suddenly have the motivation to hack their consoles.

Wii was going to be called the Revolution...which IMo would have been better as well.

I doubt it will happen

But then again...Microsoft has been pretty much completely retarded in almost every decision with the Xbox 360 this generation so you never know how retarded they can get

I bet they stick with a numbered name, at least, ever notice how MS products with a non-numbered name suck horribly: Bob, Vista, Kin, Win ME, etc.?

after Sony actually shipped the PSP go without a disk drive, I find nothing these ass hats do can surprise me anymore.

Except they pretty much "won" in every metric but "number of consoles sold". Sometimes I wonder how they did it when everyone kept saying all their decisions were awful, I'm honestly not sure, the Gold membership requirement for online play kept the 12 year old, angsty trolling to a minimum (as small as it's gonna be on a system like that), sometimes I wonder if that wasn't a (possibly accidental) brilliant move.

On another note, what's the proper term for an accidental, brilliant move? Serendipitous happenstance? Tried to step in horse shit and landed in a pot of gold? I don't know.
Even Sony figured out that was a terrible move. It turns out it might take a baseball bat to the nads, but even they can discern the meaning of the cluebat.

IMO ANYTHING would have been better than 'Wii', it just sounds like a childish name for piss!