A very insightful article. You people trying to make this about Microsoft need to shut up. I don't particularly like Microsoft, but there are a ton of great points in this article, and it applies to the whole industry.

Well, do you think making a good game which everyone likes today is very easy? Developers want to innovate and be creative but consumers trying to avoid new things more than welcoming as they got used to old forumula very much and depend on others opinions like reviews so much. Also game evualuation system today is very bad and it hurts the game sales very much.

Your advice is asking the devlopers to shift to Indie style development, its not possible to budget AAA games because of the work required, huge competiton and marketing needed because its Retail game which requires more marketing, manufacturing and retailers percentage in the game sale.

He seems to forget that there are many kinds of games than just AAA games.

My main problem is that people seem to think that if you want creative games there's always indies. While many of them are creative, we still lack something in between indies and AAA games, the AA games. The amount of them are fading, and that's really sad to see. Indies are not going to replace them.

I dont see how a cap would be plausible in this scenario, you cant really put a cap on spending on creation as you dont know how much it would cost overall.

If they say gave a £5,000,000 cap to a developer to create a new game, what would happen if they used that money but the game was only 60% finished? abandon the game and then that £5 million goes down the drain? even just going over schedule increases the cost by way of having to keep paying those working on it longer than intended.

Gaming is not being destroyed. I'm not going to read the whole article but just look Steam. There are usually at least 100 games released every month on steam. Maybe console gaming is being destroyed but Steam is growing so fast.

Originally the article I pulled this one's header read "How Xbox co-creator on how the pressure of AAA made him leave MS" but I felt the over all article was really about the state of the industry as a whole. so I changed it here.

I think this relates to more than just MS. It relates a lot to big 3rd Party studios as well. The games they put out get more money funneled into advertising than they do in game development and innovation.

Strongly disagree. I'm no expert, but I don't think Sony's big budget franchises are breaking even.

I think he's right on the principle and the issue, but despite not liking it, IMVHO MS isn't the worst one with this attitude, From what we know Activision can be the worst with its devs and EA is trying hard to become the worst with gamers. MS can be ruthless with competitors and trying fishy things with its users too, but, despite a few bastard behaviours and excesses of Ballmer in the past, it's generally a good company to work for to 1st and 2nd party devs. And while in the recent past MS forcing excessive competitiveness almost disrupted team work (and this is probably one of the reasons Lardmer was replaced), generally game devs claim they weren't affected by this involution, instead they were left quite free.
This said, big publishers and devs slowly or quickly destroying great franchises with overmilking, dumbing down, etc, while smaller devs like CD Projekt RED, Mojang and others manage to make great games with far smaller budgets, tell us there is a lot of truth in what Fries says.

What makes you think that?