The music industry has spoken out about the five British developers and publishers going after illegal file-sharers in the UK. What of the other players in the gaming industry? We have yet to hear any official word on the matter from other developers or publishers, but Peter Moore - in his personal capacity - has talked about it, and he'd have to agree... with the music industry.

One of the catchy terms you'll hear these days is the word "globalization". During the MI6 Conference 08 opening day, various VIPs spoke about this very topic and how it relates to video game marketing. For more business speak, turn to the full article after the jump.

Jack Thompson is the one name that immediately brings to mind the public relations problems facing the gaming industry as a whole. Although most, if not all, of the negativity aimed at the industry comes from the uninitiated and ignorant, the too-cool-to-care attitude that many average Americans associate with the industry and gamers themselves does much to exacerbate the issue.

By failing to adamantly reject these stereotypes, gamers have been cast by society at large as slackers, stoners, anti-social geeks and all-around burdens to society prone to Columbine style killing sprees. At best, the world sees gamers as aloof, aimless, nerds that talk funny. 

A recent report in The New York Times touched briefly on the image of gaming. The article focused on how powerful forces behind the scenes are currently attempting to move, "beyond the boys in their bedrooms," to reach the mainstream masses. Unfortunately, the executives in charge of transforming the image of gaming are hardly the type of people that are capable of understanding and relating to "ordinary Americans."

At this year's Electronic Gaming Summit, an ultra-exclusive meeting of the most powerful 150 people in the industry, the topics discussed ranged from the death of E3 to methods for improving the image of the industry as it moves further into the mainstream. Don't feel bad if you've never heard of the EGS. This one is for the elite only.

It's a private (invitation only) event hosted by a marketing magnate at his vineyard in California to determine the fate of the industry, and it definitely is not meant for public consumption. In attendance were the heads of all of the major gaming companies, including: Peter Moore (Microsoft), Jack Trenton (Sony), and George Harrison (Nintendo).

Ziff Davis, head of the special interest media and publishing company that started the event, apparently believes that input from 150 rich, pampered executives is all that's necessary to lead the industry's charge to reach average Americans. We hope he's right, but the very fact that some of the top gaming executives on Earth believe that, "to run this business effectively there are really only 150 people that I need to deal with worldwide," points to a disconnection between industry insiders and the real world that will certainly hamper any image improvement efforts.

Earlier, we reported about MS' Peter Moore's take on MMOs making a transition to the Xbox 360. He said that "there obviously is a resurgence driven by 'WOW' (World of Warcraft), and we love it because it's driving PC adoption. The question is, is it a console experience? They've never really done tremendously well on the consoles. There's a lot of stuff you need to do."

Mr. Moore also said the demands of MMOs in consoles, "the content constantly needs to be refreshed. There's patches, there's updates. We could do it ... but it's always been a keyboard-and-mouse, kind of lean-in experience. You look at 'Guild Wars,' you look at 'WOW,' obviously. ... Now, we're going to an MMO with Marvel. I think that is a nice bridge because it's familiar characters and a familiar environment, a kind of comic-book look and feel. But for a lot of people, still, MMOs are a little too intense and a little geeky at times (to make sense for a console)."

From that alone, it seems that WoW and other MMOs are not yet a good fit for the consoles...for now. And now, it was Blizzard's turn to say for the nth time that "no, we are not making Warcraft for Xbox 360". This again was caused by a Vivendi presentation wherein the WoW publisher and official rights-holder announced that all future Blizzard games would be massively multiplayer online games.

The denial continued with Blizzard saying that "we do not currently have any MMO development plans beyond the upcoming expansion for World of Warcraft...Furthermore, we don't have any intentions to focus on only one genre or platform with our future games." But you know what they say about rumors that don't die down - if there's smoke there's a fire. It may not be true for now, but in the future, we'll never know. Until then, we will keep you posted.