3. It marries Triple A budgets with Triple A gameplay

Unlike the movie or music industries, videogames' biggest titles - for the most part - are of an extremely high quality. Call Of Duty maintains this standard, and that's important for gamers. Cinema is spoiled by huge movies with little to no substance, and the less said about the state of modern pop music the better. Pop gaming, though, whether it's GTA, COD or Halo, is synonymous with well-made and highly entertaining stuff.

Oh I strongly disagree with that for DAMN sure.

#5 is the first one that comes to mind for me. Having successfully run Guitar Hero into the fucking ground, Activision would be deader than a doornail without COD. And even though that sounds quite nice at first blush, no Activision = no Transformers: War for Cybertron or Jurassic: The Hunted.

6. we need a game to blame stuff on it.. doesn't matter what but within 6 months from now we are gonna blame Black Ops..

Mustn't.. get... involved... Must.. stay.. calm... guh!

*I respectfully disagree with much of the article.*

3. It marries Triple A budgets with Triple A gameplay

This is true.

However with COD, if you remove the budget, you remove the quality. Its just spit n shine. The actual game is like a rail shooter with ellaborate scripted events and cut scenes.

But yeah, outside of Blizzard and CoD it doesn't seem like they've been making anything worth buying lately.

Never heard of it.

Whoever came up with this really didn't think it through. (1) Revenue is good, but isn't necessarily sustaining. GTAIV turned massive revenue, but didn't save TakeTwo from taking a loss that year (which really should have been a throw-in-the-towel moment for TakeTwo. If a mainline GTA game can't make you profitable, nothing can)

As for (2), it's quite mangled, first off by its implied definition of core vs implied definition of non-core, secondly for believing that these values that make the game core are what make it sell (hint: it's not)

3 just holds a fallacious view of all three industries mentioned. The best movies are good movies, the best music... maybe not, but music is a more fractured market, and certainly the top-selling music is stuff that people have poured a lot of money and effort into.

4. Call of Duty is near sports? No. Call of Duty as a cultural phenomenon in its own right? Definitely. Really the most legitimate point here so far

5 is all the more fallacious. You should focus on profitability at every level, whether it's a bigger or smaller release. Blur is a hideous example anyway, because it failed

Not very well put together