If today's comic looks similar to say... yesterday's comic, it's intentional. Chris Lewis' comments about Microsoft's dedication to innovative, exciting IP in the face of their current struggles [more info] were so similar to Jeff Brown's comments about EA I couldn't resist drawing (literally) an obvious parallel.

Just like with the EA writeup yesterday though I'm not really seeing anything innovative in Microsoft Game Studios' coming lineup. At least Lewis didn't say "original". It's a heck of a lot easier to be "exciting" than it is to be "original".

This is going to be interesting to watch since in the past during an economic downturn, entertainment usually does okay since people need distraction. But the cost of electronic entertainment being higher than more simple alternatives could be the plight of many.

Personally, I could do without television and many other forms of entertainment, but think I would go stir crazy at the thought of cancelling my WoW subscription, especially now that I'm within 1 level of reaching 80.

I would go crazy without my timesink...er wow account.

Pretty much the same thing I said yesterday. In this market you have to put out good games that will push the people to buy the game. In short, make a good decent size game that has good replayability and that game will sell.

Maybe a little offtopic but electronic entertainment is going to change drastically in 2009. I know both my gaming and television habits have altered quite a bit over the last 6 months. For TV, I cancelled my satellite and have been using downloads, Hulu, Netflix, and OTA broadcasts. All are still in HD on my projector so no love lost. I use PlayOn (mediamall) to serve this through my PS3 and XBMC modded XBOX over the network to my 3 televisions.

Gaming titles I have stopped buying for the most part. No longer shelling out $60+ a game in this market. I do continue with a subscription game (warhammer) and my console play is mostly reduced to Rock Band and the occasional borrowed title....

I am sure these companies are looking at the reduced sales already. I have several friends as well that are discovering much less expensive alternatives out there for entertainment. I wonder the end result for console gaming...if they will lower title cost, concentrate on less expensive downloadable content, or just reduce the number of titles they develop altogether. Everytime I look at a news release like this I translate them into..."we really don't know what we are doing in this market....so we are focusing on what bread and butter titles and not taking risks"

I'm not seeing the overwhelming difference between being "original" and "innovative". Almost every conceivable storyline has already been used, everything is just a retooling of previously used plot elements. As far as control schemes and game mechanics go, the two terms seem like synonyms. So unless the mosquitoes Bill Gates released are actually going to implant people at that convention with nanites that bring VR to a whole new level, originality and innovation both seem kind of like falsehoods. Exciting, however, I can easily see as possible. James Bond movies are still good, and those have been around almost 47 years and gone through 6 different actors, but people still go to see the movies. The movies are awesome to watch, but nothing original or amazing innovative about them.

Just to add what Eddie's mentioned there, I think sometimes people like the movies to be more predictable. Maybe just a sense of control, I don't know, but it seems, well, safer in times of unrest and stress to have movies out with content you know you can count on. Of course I could be completely wrong as well. <shrugs> And there are probably a lot of other factors involved.

I almost think that games tend to be complained about in various guises by gamers because we have access to places to voice our opinions. Again I could be wrong, but it seems like if you have even half a chance of bending a Dev's ear, wouldn't you make use of it?

To get back a bit more on topic here, in some ways I don't see what else game company CEOs could say. It all seems political-speak any way - telling the customers what they think they want to hear, to deflect interest away from what reality might actually be. I guess that's not something I can necessarily blame them for, after all if they preached doom and gloom, or realism, as I like to call it, investors would no doubt panic. Reputation seems a fickle thing, especially in this market.

Anyway, just my two cents.

The climate for gaming has almost hit that burst bubble ceiling. Tier 1 games are wickedly expensive to produce, but hasn't there been talk of the price of games to decrease in the near term? It'll cut into their profits, yes, but they might move more games.

On the (sort of) topic side, I grabbed the demo for Halo Wars the other night and it is rather amusing. Having the Warthogs run over the grunts as their special ability is just awesome. It's nice to hear and see all the familiar parts from the trio of games in this one. It would be nice to be able to zoom way down into the fray, a la Company of Heroes, but it's still pretty cool that they brought a lot of detail into the game. I guess that is MS's latest big entry into the market. I hope it does well and they make the whole game as fun as the demo.

Here I think it's more appropriate. EA occasionally barfs up an interesting title (or at least, they buy up a studio that does) while I haven't been that interested in any of Microsoft's offerings.

Halo Wars could be good, but adding new mechanics to RTS isn't a simple task. Westwood and Blizzard have done damn near everything that can be done in the genre. Halo Wars will ultimately be a rehashing of old (hopefully classic and proven) mechanics with pretty graphics and a back story of the halo-verse. But that's the problem I was talking about earlier. Not much can truly be "new" anymore. Spore was something unique, but games like that are few and far between anymore. It's sad, but we are running out of untapped territory.