it would be lame.

long live exclusives!

Welcome.  I do get tired of games being fanboy fodder where hypetrains behind things not released, get there because people think the games will be able to sell consoles, and people act as unpaid foot soldiers for different companies.  I did feel a need to chime in to say that the approach for one common platform isn't practical at this time.  Companies loose too much prestige if they drop a console.

As far as the game marketing being more like Hollywood, I think it is a BAD idea.  To model yourself after a certain industry and not have revenue streams set up the same way (like your industry lacks box office) is a recipe for going under.  The videogame industry does not have box office, and is skating on razor-thin margins, due in part to it trying to be like Hollywood.  The effect is likely worldwide to.  I happened to get into a Skype call with a recruiter in the videogame industry in England.  He was dealing with another studio laying off more people.

Modeled like Hollywood means less studios and more blockbuster content.  It means the industry wanting to drive the price up further, as they provide less and less content.  It means focus less on gameplay and more on anything BUT gameplay.  The benchmark of a good game is accessibility, depth, and replayability.  When I saw someone post on another forum, they want SHORTER games, because longer games water down the storyline and plot, to me that is a sign of games stop being games. 

Anyhow, that is my take.  I think that is worth of another subject.  I could go into a rant about issues with interactive fiction and their being confused with games, and the Hollywood connection to this.

The overall quality of the games would drop as there would be less compeition.

See I don't buy this at all.  It's like expecting the quality of movies to drop because you can play a DVD on any player.

Competition between game developers (and the basic skill of the developer) drives game quality, not exclusives.  3rd party titles can be just as good as exclusives in quality - Portal 2 being an obvious recent example.

Exclusives exist to attract you to a particular console from an availability perspective.  Consoles compete primarily on exclusives not by quality per se but availability.  You want your Mario you have to go Nintendo.  You want your Halo you have to go MS, etc.  The point of exclusives is more for the benefit of the console manufacturer than you.

Invalid comparison. Tons of studios (those owned by Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo and those dependant on contracts from console manufacturers, etc.) would suddenly lose of their funding and have to be, either picked up by acquistion or the studio disbands with the employees trying to get jobs at the existing studios. Either way, there's less developers out there with less offerings with less compeition.

Invalid comparison. Tons of studios (those owned by Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo and those dependant on contracts from console manufacturers, etc.) would suddenly lose of their funding and have to be, either picked up by acquistion or the studio disbands with the employees trying to get jobs at the existing studios. Either way, there's less developers out there with less offerings with less compeition.

so basically, a PC? God help us if that were the case. Endless expensive upgrades, patches, updates, and incompatibility issues, No thankyou!

Yep I can imagine paying $2000 Dollars for a system and then 125 for each game. I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't be a gamer and gaming would be dead.

It will happen sooner than you think. The PS3 is NOT that powerful and the i7 is miles ahead of Sony's PS3 cell chip.

It's just a matter of when someone will get motivated enough to write an emulator, not whether PCs will have the brute power to run the emulation software. That shouldn't be far away at all and I'm not sure that high-end computers aren't there already. A lot can be done with a 3 gig i7 chip, 8 gigs of RAM, and a pair of 1GB video cards.

Actually I think your point is invalid here.  You're talking about funding/volume of titles, but that doesn't guarantee competition, in fact arguably studios being overly supported negates competition as it potentially allows them to overspend or survive weak titles failing due to the additional support layer.

It's pretty clear that there is plenty of business available making games, and that alone guarantees competition between developers without any need for a support structure per se.

You're talking about an additional support structure which is good for developers but doesn't directly result in good competition or good results for the end consumer.

If you want a competative market then a feature of that will be that some developers will fail - due to failure to deliver good games or an inability to align their title to the market.

Sure, more developers implies more competition, but you don't need the support structure for that to happen.  One look at the number of third party titles vs exclusives shows that.

Note I'm assuming you mean supported third party or maybe second party developers.  First party are simply part of the company and shouldn't be counted.

I don't want to put people out of jobs, but the support structure to mention doesn't really mean normal competition.