Massive loss of talent following Shigeru's retirement?

I'm pretty sure this will be Miyamoto's last gen (at least working on big projects) iirc he has mentioned about working on smaller projects (probably eshop stuff).

Petroleum will be scarce so they won't have enough dust-gathering plastic to make consoles.

No thanks, if I wanted to support devs who shipped busted games I would just game on PC. Epic must have some bizarre testing as every patch for Gears2 fixed an issue and introduced another, so again I think the issue is with devs. Also note that MS is pragmatic enough to differentiate between flat-out busted games and games which evolve, such as Minecraft. And games which support user-created maps and gametypes, like Halo and Trials Evo, which I think will become more common.

"When Gears of War 2 launched and we found out that our netcode wasn't working right, it took us three months to get an update out," Bleszinski said. "By that time, the majority of users had moved on to the next game or had traded it in. If Microsoft and Sony are to do well in this next generation, they are going to need to reduce that time as much as possible, as well as continue to enable user-supported mods, independent games, and really just get rid of the wall that makes it incredibly hard to find those products, even if they're allowed on the console... All that red tape needs to be stripped away in order to create an ecosystem to allow for a product like Minecraft to actually happen on a console."

How about you stop sucking? Make your game right the first time or suffer the consequences? It worked just fine for the first 30+ years of console gaming. The ability for developers and publishers to ship broken games and fix them later is one of the worst developments in gaming.

"That means $20 horror games, $40 shooters, $60 AAA blockbusters, free-to-play, and everything in between, all easy to find for the audience who would be most interested in them."

It would be about time. I have no idea why the video game industry has been so rigid in its pricing structure.

It seems to be publishers who drive the pricing structure, but it's not so cut and dried. Games like Deadly Premonition launched with realistic pricing and sold decently because of it. I'll give this gen one thing, the rise of download games really took off and we now have a nicely-tiered budget market, which has been kind of absent since the old days of Mastertronic 1.99 range and so forth. The quality of download titles is also very good.

So I think the main roadblock with publisher pricing is physical media, which is a production risk.

How about he lets someone who wasn't ten years old at the time talk about this.

It has been a bit better this generation, I agree.  I still don't see nearly enough retail games starting out with the lower price point though.  Usually it comes down to a price cut.

There is a cost associated with the physical production and distribution of retail games.  From the breakdowns I've seen, it is around $4 dollars per game.  So it really is not that much.

The irony of Cliff's point is that the 83 Atari crash was precisely because there was nothing filtering the flood of literally unplayable dross coming out for the VCS, along with that generation of systems being totally outclassed by the cheap 8-bit computers that came out in late 82.

If anything, he's endorsing the state of affairs pre-Atari bankruptcy over the carefully curated libraries of later consoles. He's complaining that he should be able to release ET the videogame and make it not suck later, after a million kids cry about how bad it was on xmas morning. The console policy now prevents such a state of affairs precisely by enforcing a certain technical standard, with penalties for those who can't play by the rules.

I've seen the state of affairs on iOS and Android, for every one decent game there are 1000 terrible and identical games, sometimes malicious. It's harder to compete on consoles at the moment mostly due to the immense back-catalogue of quality titles, along with publishers all trying for the same release windows. Being able to flood the market with broken rubbish is only going to make matters much worse.

Sly recently debuted at $40 and I had more fun with it than many $60 games.  Also the Walking Dead and Journey have provided a lot more entertainment than many $60 games I've bought.