See, now there’s your mistake! What have I ever done to suggest seriousness, credibility or integrity?

Nonetheless, as a token nod to dour sobriety I will note that there are altogether far too many players in the gaming racket, both in the hardware and software side of things, and something will have to give.

Incresingly we are finding ourselves in the situation where only established franchises are making money (and we all know how good that is for the health and creativity of the game industry), while everything else is destined for a hastey transit to the discount bin (or in fact to disappear completely from store shelves).

Too many developers, and the wrong ones are making the money. The market has expanded too far, too fast, and now needs to reign things in a little, else become unsustainable.

Or leastways that is my reckon.

Competition is *usually* good for consumers, but I am increasingly believing this is not the case in the gaming industry. Normally, competition makes rival companies try to create better products than their competitiors–but these days, in the gaming hardware industry, companies are only interested in solidifying their positions; moreover, it is the software devs who end up shouldering the cost of parallel platform development.

M$ is one of the worst things to happen to gaming as a whole, and I agree that their involvement dealt the JRPG industry a punishing blow at an inopportune time. JRPGs hadn’t been doing entirely well for starts, and then to be divided and dithered by M$ was certainly no help.

XBox deserves to fail in Japan, and rightly are. Their policy of ‘money can buy everything’ and ‘everything should cost money’ is abhorrent.