What's Killing the Video-Game Business?

I found this interesting article on Slate By N. Evan Van Zelfden.

Like pretty much every industry these days, video-game publishing is in some financial trouble. Electronic Arts, the world's largest game publisher, best known for Madden and the Sims, lost $641 million in 2008's fourth quarter. Activision-Blizzard, owners of the cash cows World of Warcraft and Call of Duty, reported losses of $72 million in the fourth quarter of 2008. (They lost $194 million the quarter before that.) THQ, the third-largest publisher in the United States, and known for lucrative licenses ranging from the Ultimate Fighting Championship to Pixar, had $192 million in losses over the holidays and is laying off 24 percent of its work force.

In my opinion, they need to revise their business model. Their biggest problem is that their costs exceeds their revenue. They should employ smaller teams on products that sell and cut-out the middleman. There's no need for draconian DRM schemes that hurt sales.

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DEUTERIUM MICROBOMB ROCKET PROPULSION

Abstract

Large scale manned space flight within the solar system is still confronted with the solution of two problems: 1. A propulsion system to transport large payloads with short transit times between different planetary orbits. 2. A cost effective lifting of large payloads into earth orbit. For the solution of the first problem a deuterium fusion bomb propulsion system is proposed where a thermonuclear detonation wave is ignited in a small cylindrical assembly of deuterium with a gigavolt-multimegampere proton beam, drawn from the magnetically insulated spacecraft acting in the ultrahigh vacuum of space as a gigavolt capacitor. For the solution of the second problem, the ignition is done by argon ion lasers driven by high explosives, with the lasers destroyed in the fusion explosion and becoming part of the exhaust.

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Interesting...