If I look carefully at what's happening around, and not only in the gaming industry, I can say it seems that, these days, for almost every company, comes a time when a "kill generation" is installed at the helm. For example, Microsoft and its "monkey boy," or - to really get into the gaming industry - Electronic Arts and all those who could change the way things are being taken care of... but they don't.

Today, I'll tell you about the head of this "kill generation," EA's boss, John Riccitiello, who spoke about not being afraid to discontinue development of titles if they don't live up to the expectations. This sounds nice, but I think the Need for Speed franchise should have been shut down a long time ago... anyway, that's my personal opinion, but let's see what the man has to say, shall we?<-125x125 Button - right->

In an interview with Gamasutra, Riccitiello said "When something's not meeting expectations... you can course correct by giving it more time, more money, changing the concept or killing the game."

To put a nice cherry on the cake, he added that "If you're committed to quality, you take one of those paths. If you preclude any one of those paths, quality will suffer. EA will kill a game or two a year. Forever."

The interesting part is that EA may kill in-development titles that seem to be bad for a few chosen ones, but they wouldn't kill a game from a franchise that would even sell bricks, as long as they're labeled with a certain name. Am I right here, or not? After all, this is more like "preferential kill generation," and not "kill what sells unconditionally..."

Gamecock Media Group used to be an indie video game publisher founded last year by Mike Wilson, Harry Miller and Rick Stults, original founders of Gathering of Developers. While that publishing company ended up being acquired by Take Two in 2000, about 2 years after being started, it seems the Gamecock news of the day are even more interesting than that - this new company has been acquired even faster! Who got'em? That's what we're about to see right away...

... as I tell you just two words: SouthPeak Games. If this doesn't ring a bell, maybe Monster Madness, Two Worlds or Roogoo sound familiar. Good, so we know who, but there's one question remaining - "why?"

According to Melanie Mroz, CEO of SouthPeak, "Gamecock brings us a solid slate of upcoming titles, including Legendary, <-125x125 Button - right->Mushroom Men and Velvet Assassin and supports our strategy of working with independent developers." I don't know about you, but I think Legendary owns, and Mushroom Men doesn't look bad at all, either.

Mike Wilson, CEO of Gamecock, said "We are thrilled to be joining forces with SouthPeak to continue to bring great original titles from independent developers to market with a stronger sales and distribution reach. We have followed each other's progress closely over the last two years, and combining our team with theirs results in a very strong and well-rounded force in the market," but the most interesting part of the deal - the financial details, are not public yet, so this entire Gamecock news story seems like a nice steak, without the sauce.

Well, at least things should be looking brighter for Gamecock, and I really hope the gaming industry veterans I mentioned in the beginning will remain there, instead of funding yet another company...

You know what's probably one of my greatest regrets related to computer gaming? It's not the fact that - as most of my friends - I can't find enough time for gaming lately. It seems those theories saying that days are getting shorter as time goes by are true, but even if a day in 2010 would last 10 "1995 minutes," my problem remains - I missed playing the first game fantasy real-time strategy game from Blizzard Entertainment when it arrived on the market!

The game I am talking about is Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, and my regrets are related to the fact that I only got to see it after playing Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness like a madman. Obviously, the encounter was ruined, especially because there's a huge difference when it comes to graphics between the two games.

Now, let's leave my regrets aside and talk about Blizzard's Mike Morhaime opinion regarding new MMOs that try to conquer this huge online gaming market. <-250x250 Square - right->Basically, it's the fact that everyone underestimates the huge logistics effort that comes with such a game, and even Blizzard Entertainment did it - "I think everyone who hasn't done it will probably underestimate the logistics behind it - we certainly did," said Morhaime.

"You focus on the things you are used to but you don't necessarily realize how difficult it is to scale up quickly and with an MMO you have to factor in providing 24/7 customer service, multiple languages... and that's not just hiring all those people to do customer service because internally within the organization you still have to support your employees and that's a whole lot of management infrastructure that doesn't exist before the launch." Oh, yeah, I fully agree with that. In the end, we're talking about an industry here, and not a game you make for your friends, gets uploaded to some freebies site, and an additional 100-1000 people start to play it.

Regarding their own World of Warcraft, Blizzard Entertainment claims that, after  Wrath of the Lich King, gamers will have to wait more than a year until the next update. According to the same Mike Morhaime, "The next one I think it is still unlikely that we're going to get it down to a calendar year. We're going to continue to try and decrease that but really the content of the expansion is more important and I think you guys are going to find with Wrath of the Lich King that it's going to be worth the wait."

Well, if the big ones have to spend so much time for updating an existing product...what about the little ones? I think we should respect at least the effort of some new companies trying to enter this MMO world, because it seems the path to success is longer and harder to finish than most of us would imagine...