Is there something EA doesn' t buy? ;)
By the way, isn' t Bioware also making a Sonic RPG or something for DS? Kind of weird then, that Sonic game will be some Sega-Bioware-EA mix in a way :P

And Microsoft stopping? Hm, I don' t know. But I can imagine that no business wants to lose lots of money. Didn' t they lose lots of money on the Xbox for many years? Are they making any now on sold 360' s? Do the sales of games make up for it? I have no idea. But even if they have an incredible amount of money, they want to get back something of course in the end.

Maybe Sega can step in again afterwards. There are some new (99,9% fake I assume) rumors floating around of a new console anyway :P I read some stuff before from people within Sega mentioning that IF they would get back into consoles. That it would be around 2009-2010 earliest. Would be about right timing then.

Is there something EA doesn' t buy? ;)
But I can imagine that no business wants to lose lots of money. Didn' t they lose lots of money on the Xbox for many years?

MS Lost led the xbox 1 to the tune of $3.7billion dollars - that is how much they wanted the next console to succeed. Can' t see them pulling the plug, and if anything the future xbox will be closer to its original concept of a direct-x box than ever before, so much like Sega' s cabs will be more PC than ever before - but still a unified platform.

EA have done a lot of good for the industry too. It' s founding fathers created trade bodies which defend gamers rights, and a friend of mine in EA over here heads up their outsoursing - fighting a battle to keep creatives in charge of the outsourcing rather than the accountants. I know everyone loves to hate giants, especially ones that specialise in serialised gaming, but without them our industry would have little of the credibility in society and business circles that it has today!

At worst - neccessary evil. At best - An industry flagstone..