Today, Konami announced that it was dropping one of the most controversial titles of the year -- Atomic Games' FPS take on the Iraq War, titled "Six Days in Fallujah."

The strategists at Take-Two have a problem on their hands. They made the best-reviewed game ever for the Nintendo DS. And no one seems to care.

Almost a year ago, this column touched on a planned update for the superhero MMO "City of Heroes," which would allow users to create and share their own custom missions for the game. Yesterday, the Mission Architect, as the feature is now called, officially launched after a beta period in which 5,000 missions were created in a 2-week period.

A very interesting bit of news dropped recently that is going to have profound effects reaching well beyond gaming: Blizzard just created a "Mobile Authenticator" application for the iPhone.

I would be violating the rules of gaming journalism, it seems, if I didn't write something about OnLive this week. The gaming-on-demand service was the belle of the ball at this year's Game Developers Conference, and has yielded a crop of speculative articles about the future of console gaming as well as many, many bad headline puns ("OnLive is OnCrack," and "OnLive is UnLikely" are some choice selections).

Tuesday I'll be moderating a panel at OMMA Global titled "Play Me A Story: Can Games Help Content Producers Tell Stories?" I've been thinking over the topic a bit during this week leading up to the conference.

It's safe to say that the respective marketplaces for the PS3 and the Xbox 360 have taken up the role that backwards compatibility once occupied -- offering gamers the option to fire up retro titles and play the games that resonated in their youth (or at least that resonated four to five years ago). The fact that "Super Street Fighter II" Turbo HD Remix, a graphical update of a game that's been out for more than a decade, is #6 on the list of top-selling Xbox Live Arcade games, shows that the market for retro games is alive, well, and …

There's a new, emerging trend in core video game business models: the downloadable content (DLC) "tail." Most recently, Microsoft announced that the expansion for "Grand Theft Auto IV, The Lost and Damned," trounced previous sales records for the first day release of DLC. While company didn't release specific sales figures, still the event was clearly a shift.

Much like many industries in today's uncertain economy, video game software developers are taking a bit of a beating. Major publishers like Electronic Arts, Midway, Eidos, Microsoft Games Studios, THQ and others are making some hard budgetary choices, cutting projects, and laying off development staff. And part of the buzz currently around this trend is that with the loss of creative staff at these firms, creativity will start to suffer in the 2009 and 2010 release calendars.

n interesting development happened this week: Hulu pulled access from the Boxee platform. Boxee is a software package that offers IPTV to various set-top box devices. For Hulu, Boxee was providing over 100,000 streams the week before it was pulled. It wasn't Hulu's choice, but was pressure from the content providers. Which leads me to the major point of this post: mainstream content owners don't get it.