Anti-Doom: And Now The Blessed Companies

So I got pretty cross about Kotaku presenting its vast audience with a piece pejoratively entitled '10 doomed games businesses' (and about its industry analyst author, Gamesbrief's Nicholas Lovell, choosing such emotive and negative terminology for an otherwise discussion-worthy topic). He then wrote his reasons for doing it, with a spot of mea culpa, and there's been plenty of civil discussion since, though the jury apparently remains very much hung. Now Nicholas has penned a follow-up, which appears to be half a more optimistic exploration of the strange and myriad games industry business models of the hour, and half a sort of sociological experiment into whether audiences flock to positivity or negativity.

Kotaku has also reposted that one, which is noble of them - but I can't help but doubt that they'd ever have gone for it had the controversial first piece not already attracted so much attention. Negativity and slaggings-off can certainly draw hits - people do like a moan - but the question for me remains whether it is fair for the consumer games press to unilaterally damn unreleased projects. Both rubbernecking and wagging the dog are unattractive, if universal, media tendencies.

Considered, cautious optimism I have no problem with. Quite the opposite, in fact. Here's '10 Blessed Game Businesses.' Actually it's 12, but never mind. Agree/disagree? About six of them are related to PC in some way; there's some interesting picks, and better still deeper discussion as to why they've been picked. If it were me, I'd have thrown in a couple of up and coming indie studios, too. Team Meat, for instance, look like they're striking gold with Super Meat Boy on XBLA. (Now put it out on PC, you basts).

And here's its repost on Kotaku, in case you want to see how the positivity/negativity experiment element's going.