Times are tough. Economically speaking, at least. And when times are tough, people have less money to spend, and when people have less money to spend, big business gets worried. Gaming is a big business these days, so is gaming worried? Let's find out. Speaking at the BMO Capital Markets interactive entertainment conference today, the big cheese from EA, Nintendo, Take-Two and Ubisoft all sounded off on their thoughts for the holiday season. Those thoughts range from the optimistic to the not-so-optimistic.

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Remember when EA said they were looking at ways they could take a chunk out of Nintendo's Wii Fit market? Well, they found a way. Aimed primarily at the ladies, new title EA Sports Active will, like Peter Moore said a few weeks back, be targeted at a more Western style of fitness, as opposed to Wii Fit's reliance on stuff like Yoga. EA Sports Active will include over 20 more active pursuits like running, programs like a calorie counter and "virtual personal trainer", and even go down the Wii Sports path with simulations of games like tennis.

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Attention all professional athletes who use Kotaku as your primary news source: if you want to secure the coveted/cursed Madden NFL coverboy spot, you may have to open up those wallets. EA Sports head honcho Peter Moore says, according to a Bloomberg report, that the company is considering selling off the cover treatment to the highest bidder. Don't PayPal the cash yet — the matter is still under internal discussion.

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According to ESPN, the NBA Street series is officially "on hiatus." Yes, we know. The trail of tears forms to the left. The NBA licensed street ball series, once part of the EA Sports BIG label and kind of a big deal, looks to have gone the way of the dinosaur, thanks in part to Wii Sports.

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EA Sports bossman Peter Moore, formerly of Microsoft and Sega, thinks Rare is bunch of "great people." He also thinks "the industry had past Rare by," that "their skillsets were from a different time and a different place and were not applicable in today's market." They might be beyond their googly-eyed "glory years." That's according to a Guardian interview, one that Mr. Moore wasn't quite expecting to be so... published in its entirety.

How does Rare feel about all this? MTV Multiplayer asked the developer's own Gregg Mayles, one of the creators of Banjo Kazooie, who says "I don't take much notice about what people say about our games I work on, whether positive or negative." Mayles never mentions Moore by name.

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All last week, Guardian's game site has been running portions of a big Peter Moore interview. In that interview, we learned that Peter Moore thought developer Rare's skill were "not applicable today", that Peter Moore killed the Dreamcast and fired lots of people and loads of other stuff. The best part? Guardian writer Keith Stuart explains:

I didn't tell EA or Peter that I was planning to run the transcript in its entirety on this site — I'm sure you can guess the reasons. EA have reacted very favourably and with considerable understanding. However, Peter has asked if I run a final word from him, which I think — under the circumstances — is entirely fair.

Oh ho ho! More Moore after the jump:

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Today's Friday, and Guardian's Peter Moore week has drawn to a close. And today, instead of telling us how he killed the Dreamcast (bastard!) or how he thinks Rare is now irrelevant (ouch), Moore talks about how EA's digital distribution and how the end goal is not to become the next Apple:

We need to look three years into the future and say it's going to be a completely different business, because of broadband connections. I am not going to be at the helm of a company that ends up like the music business that refused to stop trying to sell you CDs for £15 because it was a hugely profitable model. And the music consumer says, 'you know, I don't want to pay £15 for 12 tracks of which I want two, I don't want shiny discs anymore'. And so what did the industry do? It started suing its consumers for illegal downloads and, you know, Steve Jobs comes to the rescue to figure out a way to charge you 99 cents or whatever you're paying in the UK... You're being ripped off. We're not going to do that, we're going to evolve, we're going to go faster for the consumer, whatever the consumer wants.

Big words from Moore.

Peter Moore Interview: Part Five [Guardian] [Pic]

In case you haven't been following, Peter Moore's "don't whine about your time at Microsoft" NDA expired this week, and he's been pouring his heart out over at The Guardian. It's been fun stuff. Particularly the bits where he totally slags off Rare, saying that the industry had "passed Rare by" and that they "were not applicable in today's market". Ouch. Well, Microsoft are having none of it, Phil Spencer telling GI.biz "Rare is a great studio that continuously delivers high-quality, award-winning titles for the Xbox platform and will continue to do so in the future". Which may or may not be true. Who knows. Spencer's smart, however, to also remind Moore of Rare's work on the 360's new avatar system, which in a strange twist of fate may turn out to be the most important thing they ever do for the console.

Microsoft defends relevance of Rare to Xbox business [GI.biz]

All the Peter Moore you can handle! In today's latest Guardian fireside chat with the businessman, SEGA-turned-Xbox-turned-EA exec Peter Moore talks about how he was already an EA employee when he took the stage at E3 2007 and bungled Rock Band (only Bill Gates, Robbie and Steve Ballmer knew he was leaving) or how he felt his "Things break" remark was twisted (apparently the actual quote was taken outta context). Moore also divulges what his first impression of seeing the Wii-mote:

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Two sides of the same story here. On the one side, ex-Xbox man Peter Moore, who explains how the decision to include a HDD in the original Xbox eventually led to its early demise (they even had a pre-determined kill figure!), and thus why they didn't bother making them standard in the 360:

...not having a hard drive in every Xbox 360 was a hard decision, but we wanted to get price under control. The hard drive in every Xbox killed us; we we're still selling it at $199 and the hard drive was like $70. That's why we prematurely left the original Xbox, because the more we were selling - there was still great demand - it was killing us, and there was no way to bring the price down. So in the end we determined at around the 25 million unit mark that we just needed to slow this thing down and just not sell any more, and move to the 360 as quickly as we possibly could. And to this day people still believe we left the Xbox too early but it was purely for financial purposes.

So that's the Xbox. But what about the PS3?

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