Everyone else has already covered most of what I would say in response to St John's arguments - I don't think consoles are going anywhere. Two things I would add though.

First, St John might have a point that hasn't been well-covered here: the advent of cloud computing raises possibilities for videogames that aren't well-understood yet. If a company can get a game running on servers in an online cloud that anyone can access over the internet, then it won't matter what box you use to play the game on: the console/computer essentially just functions as an internet terminal, and the quality of your graphics will be determined by your connection bandwidth, not your local hardware. You could end up (probably in 5-10 years time, mind) with a $40 console that's little more than a commodity, like today's DVD players. Single-player FPS and RTS games can work on this model just as easily as multiplayer games. This future scenario is totally plausible once bandwidth gets to an appropriate level, but is by no means inevitable.

Second, to the point that consumers in East Asia get by without console boxes, this has less to do with whether they like consoles or not than it has to do with what's practical for them. If you can only afford to play videogames 50 cents at a time in an internet cafe then naturally the sorts of games that can be accessed over the internet (i.e. Flash games) or that come pre-installed on the computers in cafes (Lineage, Starcraft) will be the ones that get the most playtime. As people in those countries get richer, more of them will be able to afford home console gaming, and generally speaking economic consumption habits in developing countries tend to converge with habits in rich countries as levels of income converge. Just as we see the Chinese swapping their bicycles for cars as they get richer, they may swap their net-focused gameplay habits for home consoles as their incomes increase.

He might be making money for himself, but this seems to me more like the sort of thing that company executives do to reassure the markets and financial analysts about the health of their firms, so I doubt that the poke in the eye for EA employees was intentional.

Fact is that if your company's share price is tanking and you've had to announce that you're making compulsory redundancies, a lot of institutional investors will be nervously wondering whether they should dump your stock; it's the sort of situation which could end up in a disastrous sell-off of EA shares that hammers all of the company's remaining shareholders (i.e. its owners, who the company's managers have a responsibility to work on behalf of) and ends up harming its viability permanently, which then harms all remaining employees.

If you ask me this share purchase is Riccitiello's way of saying to the markets: "This may be a rough patch, but I have enough confidence in my company to risk a serious amount of my own money on it bouncing back." That's the sort of message that would have me buying/holding EA stock, were I an investor.

This isn't just about race - it's also about colonialism, and it's through that prism that some of the comments about the game being racist can be understood. Western imperialism in what is now thought of as the developing world left powerful legacies on the national consciousness of many developing countries, and with good reason given the exploitative and usually brutal colonial regimes that Western powers installed. Africans in particular remember Western domination as being characterised by injustice, brutality and - often - mass-murder.

The reason that the game's story-line raises hackles despite colonialism ending years ago is that, firstly, colonialism certainly hasn't been forgotten (apartheid in South Africa only ended in 1994), and secondly because the game is so clearly reminiscent of the colonial setting with the player taking the role of the bad guys. A white guy from a western country going into Africa and shooting hordes of black people (even if they're zombies - so they just look like crazy black people)? Imagine if the game had you play a German being sent into England to shoot hordes of the English, or as as a Japanese soldier being sent to China/Korea to shoot hordes of Chinese/Koreans. There would be riots in China if the latter game ever got made, and with good reason - whatever the storyline, the very concept would be in extremely bad taste.

Criticism coming from blacks in the US about this can perhaps be linked to empathy? There are a lot of parallels between white European treatment of blacks in Africa and white American treatement of blacks in the States, and the existence of slavery in America was closely related to the growth of colonialism in Africa. Imagine if the game had a white protagonist going to Georgia or Mississippi to shoot black zombies. Depending on your perspective, you might not find the two settings all that different. If you don't see the similarity then it's worth trying to understand why other people would rather than just dismissing the controversy out of hand.

That this didn't even occur to the producers doesn't mean that they're racist, but it does mean that they're ignorant of major currents in international politics and ethnic controversies. They're clearly not ignorant of these things any more, and seem to be doing their best to fix things, so fair play to them in my book.

Eh? Surely they pocket billions in profit because they provide a better/cheaper service than anyone else and thus win more custom? They wouldn't be profitable if they didn't give customers what they wanted.

That said, this sort of strong-arming of suppliers has rightly gotten them in trouble before in other sectors... seem to remember something about milk...

It's pretty amazing that Sony could actually be falling further behind - I'd been wondering what the exact statistics were.

The only variable I would add to your analysis is geographic distribution. 360 is pulling ahead on a global basis, but PS3 sells more evenly across the three main geographies. You could see this in two ways:
1. 360's success over PS3 is overstated because of its very weak sales in key geographies. PS3 may be selling less overall, but it's selling more widely and actually has a big advantage in Japan and Europe (apart from the UK). So PS3 is succeeding in territories that 360 isn't.
2. 360's success over PS3 is actually more impressive than you might think, because it's not even doing that well outside of the US and UK. If it's extending its lead on a global basis mostly from sales in two territories, that means that in those territories it's smashing PS3 by a larger margin than is widely appreciated.

I think there's truth in both points of view - PS3 will likely always be the hardcore console of choice in Japan (assuming the current 360 surge is a blip and won't continue forever), but 360 is consistently extending its lead elsewhere. This explains some of the problems that Japanese developers are having in translating hit domestic titles into international sales - hence some high-profile titles moving to DS (which sells well everywhere), receiving 360 ports or even being developed exclusively for western audiences.