Seamus Blackley, the man who spearheaded Microsoft's Xbox project, has told us that those who believe the rise of Facebook, iOS devices and cloud gaming means the death of the traditional console are wrong, saying: "The console business has won."
Blackley recently quit his position at Hollywood talent agency CAA in order to return to game development, and he believes there has never been a better time to do so: the potential audience is bigger than ever, and consoles are everywhere.
"All kinds of people are releasing consoles," he tells us. "They're called iPads, and Facebook. What's happened is not that the console business has died, it's that it has won.
"You can't release a device that's not a console now, and if you release one that can't be a good console, it will fail. It's just true."
While Apple has been widely credited with expanding the gaming market, Blackley believes it was never its intention to do so. "They hated videogames," he says. "The victory of games is utterly complete with Apple. It's a total victory.
"They tried real hard to make the iPad about word processing and music, and the audience just doesn't want it. It's beautiful. You don't need to have a games strategy anymore.
"You need to have a strategy so that your platform isn't disadvantaged in playing games, because gaming is going to be the number one activity on any platform. The highest calling of any digital device is to play a game."
Blackley's comments are an extract from An Audience With Seamus Blackley. The full version - in which he explains why Zynga should be welcomed, not reviled, and why today's game industry is like the arcade business of the 1980s - is in our latest issue, E231, which is on shelves today.