Mount, vice president and chief financial officer in Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division, touted the recent price cut on the 360 Arcade configuration to argue Microsoft remains well positioned despite what everyone anticipates will be a consumer slowdown in the worsening economy. “History shows that more than three quarters of console sales come at a price of $US199 or lower,” Mount said, calling the 25 million installation figure an important milestone, but “only a start.”

Much of Mount’s discussion dealt with video gaming’s strong value compared to other entertainment experiences of a more limited duration.

“Video games offer some of the most hours of entertainment per dollar than any other form of entertainment,” Mount said. “For price of taking family of four to an NFL game, you could also buy an Xbox 360 Arcade, a copy of Madden, and play football all year long.”

Mount also noted that the last U.S. recession on record, in 2001, still saw 43 percent growth for interactive entertainment. “It’s not recession proof, but even in hard times people want entertainment more than ever before, and video games offer great value for the money.”

Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime spoke at today’s BMO Capital Markets Interactive Entertainment Conference, starting his presentation with a look at the landscape of the five most popular web sites in 1996. Fils-Aime pointed out that each was a search engine, “gathered and controlled by someone else.”

“They were, essentially, the world’s best library cards,” he said. “But if you look at the top five most visited sites today, you’ll find content composed almost entirely by users for the benefit of other users.” This, Fils-Aime explained “is the game changer” for every form of entertainment.

Fils-Aime pointed to four titles coming from Japan as new initiatives that focus specifically on user-generated content: Band Brothers Deluxe, Girls Mode, Nintendo DSi Moving Notepad and WarioWare Myself.

“Band Brothers Deluxe lets DS users compose their own music and then share it. Girls Mode is a game that lets players design their own clothing and then run their own fashion store. Nintendo DSi Moving Notepad can be thought as a flipbook animation, your own doodle pad turned into a little movie and with WarioWare Myself users can design their own mini-games and then play them against their friends,” Reggie explained. “As entertainment changes, we will keep pace.”

The Nintendo president also focused on fourth quarter titles like Wii Music and Animal Crossing: City Folk as indicative of the company’s strategy for putting creation tools in the hands of gamers.

Fils-Aime also highlighted the company’s “core gamer” focused titles, attempting to counter “non-game” trolling with “If there were journalists here today from core gamer sites, they’d be grousing ‘Yeah, well, what about us?’”

He showed off the more traditional titles Punch-Out!!, Sin & Punishment 2 and The Conduit in video form as the kind of content that will appeal to those less interested in the “blue ocean” offerings.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Reggie presentation without some sales bragging. Fils-Aime pointed out that the Nintendo DS has reached an install base of 23 million units in the U.S. alone, with more than 12 million Wiis sold over the past two years.

He expected NPD Group sales data to show that over 475,000 Wii consoles were sold in the U.S. this October, “likely to be the strongest sell through month this year for console sales.”

“Looking ahead, the biggest opportunity that we see for the industry as well as for us is downloadable content,” he said. “With Grand Theft Auto IV we will be offering downloadable episodes that gamers can buy on Xbox Live after they’ve purchased the original title. We’ve also that next week we will be releasing add on content worldwide for Bioshock. And these are our first offerings for downloadable content. We’re excited about the creative opportunity. We are very excited about the profit potential and we’ll see how these things roll out. I think the entire industry is focused in this area.”

Zelnick went on to talk about the importance of microtransactions and how multiplayer gaming could perhaps be the solution to the growing used game market. In other words, make your online mulitplayer good enough and people won’t want to sell the game back.

And then he had to ruin it all by bringing up subscriptions and not, it seems, just for the typical massively multiplayer online PC game

“The holy grail is taking a business, already a very large and successful business that’s focused on packaged goods that you sell once and then are occasionally resold by others with new benefit to us, and turning that into a subscription business or a semi subscription business where we have an ongoing relationship with consumers, giving them products that they want,” he said. “Who’s better positioned to do that than the company that has the top franchises.”

But what games could you be thinking of doing that to Strauss?

“It’s our view that you won’t be able to apply a subscription model to mid-tier titles,” he said. “The triple-a titles that people really want to have that are really must have are in the best position for this business model.”

Please tell me he’s not thinking of a subscription-based Grand Theft Auto or BioShock. Worse still, this makes two of them.

“We just bought it from them since those guys have Blizzard so they didn’t need that studio as much as we do, and those guys are extremely strong in RTS (real-time strategy), so they are going to help us also get closer to the MMO space. Our goal there is to go first with light MMOs…that have been extremely popular in China but are also coming in the U.S. and Europe and are generating lots of good revenue, so our goal is first to start with light MMOs, and then in the future also come with RPG and RTS, also in the MMO space.”

See, you can’t just toss out any old MMORPG. You have to build to that. I’m sure whatever they come up with will be just lovely with the Massive team on the job.

“Some of your are interested in our release schedule,” he said. “To update that our PC title will be released early next month. Downloadable content is a big undertaking, it’s important that it be really special, really something unexpected by consumers. We’re setting incredibly high standards for it. We have it planned for the end of the first quarter. It’s close to be completed. That said it may move into the second quarter depending on its completion date.

“Chinatown Wars we’ve decided to move out of the first quarter in order to fill out a better launch and marketing window. The title will ship in the first half of our fiscal year and we will provide more information on release dates by the time we report our earnings next month.”

The comments came following a presentation by Zelnick that both highlighted the companies successes and stressed the concerns he and other developers have about the seemingly worsening economy.

“On the horizon we see a number of strategic growth opportunities including new channels of distribution, new markets, new products and new business models,” he told the gathering. “We have a very strong publishing platform and an unrivaled development team.”

But minutes later he described the current retail conditions as “extraordinarily challenging” and said that there has been a “softening of retail” that has had a negative impact on the industry.

So Take-2’s strategy is to “release a limited number of top tier titles” in the hope it will cushion the publisher in the short run.

Thanks to MTV Multiplayer for the heads-up.