I totally agree. Cliffy B’s getting no end of grief around the web for suggesting that the industry is facing its worst crisis since the Big Crash of the ’80s (mostly, I suspect, from kids who weren’t there), but it feels a lot like it to me: developers and hardware manufacturers flailing around looking for the next big thing, and losing sight of the games.

Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing. The ’80s crash opened the market for home computer games in Europe and America. If the Atari 5200 had been a success, maybe the Speccy and C64 wouldn’t have been, and we’d never have seen that huge surge of creativity from all those “bedroom programmers”. You could be right about indie games and Kickstarter being the future.

The only vaguely “next gen” thing I’m remotely excited about is the SteamBox, and I’m not confident that Valve’s going to get it right. If they do, having exactly the same platform on a console and PC – that’s only about games – will be very interesting. Then again, it’s download only…