Maelstrom is just as prone to opinion. I like Maelstrom articles when they deal with Blue Ocean strategy. During these sessions he is typicly on the ball. The thing is UGC has nothing to do with Blue Ocean and often good UGC games tend to bring massive profits over a long term period(Half Life, LBP, Face Book, Blogs, web page articles). Maelstrom clearly doesn't like the idea UGC in general and is expressing his opinion. I would suggest ignore him if it doesn't deal with Blue Ocean.
Good UGC on a console requires all the support that communities generate on the PC. Web pages, custom upload apps.... Wii Music as listed above just lacked all of that and so failed at what it was supposed to do. Nintendo failed at communicating the people because it didn't understand UGC. UGC is about public/shared expression. by making UGC of WiiMusic difficult to share(only your WiiMusic FC) it failed. If WM however uploaded to a webpage or allowed it to be saved as a flash to an SDCard at least it could have done a better job.
In the end Maelstrom is falling into the same trap as those prone to fear change in regards to UGC.
Squilliam: On Vgcharts its a commonly accepted practice to twist the bounds of plausibility in order to support your argument or agenda so I think its pretty cool that this gives me the precedent to say whatever I damn well please.
