Too Human developer Silicon Knights recently announced plans to lay off 26 of its 180 employees. The clues seem to indicate the lay off might be due to the lackluster sales and reception of the recently released game, Too Human.

The Xbox 360 price cuts have clearly made a difference to the sales figures, but we won’t know quite how much difference they have made until September’s NPD data is revealed. As usual, the analysts are out in force ahead of time to give their predictions. And not only does Jesse Divnich see the Xbox 360 beating the PS3 this month, he sees the price cut affecting this console war massively.

Recently, Microsoft announced an agreement with Eidos to release exclusive downloadable content (DLC) for the xbox 360 version of Tomb Raider Underworld. Also, about a month ago Sony announced that the PS3 will receive exclusive DLC for the PS3 version of Mirrors Edge. Gamers who are wondering what this trend of platform exclusive DLC means to them may not like the answer to this probing question.

The Xbox 360 has not had a good 2008, at least in America. But Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, still regards the console as a phenomenal success. He also rejects claims that the recent across-the-board price cuts had anything to do with flagging sales. He’s clearly living in cloud cuckoo land.

One of the silliest arguments fanboys like to make is that Microsoft has a vast reserve of unlimited resources, all of which can be thrown at the Xbox division.  Just like any other business, Microsoft is in the console market to make money and not to fuel useless fanboy fancies.

We have been closely following the closure of Ensemble Studios here on Blorge. And in light of some recent comments made by key studio member Bruce Shelley, it seems that things were not as rosy as Microsoft made them out to be. In fact some of the key studio members will be leaving Microsoft to form an independent studio.

Many Xbox 360 owners have been eagerly waiting for the update coming out near the end of the year which will allows Netflix movies to be streamed onto the system. In the mean time, Xbox 360, PS3 and PSP owners will be able to watch movies via Netflix very soon using an application called PlayOn.

Microsoft’s first party studio Rare has been in the video game news recently due to some criticism it has received by Peter Moore, former head of Microsoft Game Studios. We also ran a story yesterday questioning if there is anything Rare has to worry about with the closure of fellow internal developer, Ensemble Studios. It looks like Rare is back in the limelight after confirming that the fan favorite game Killer Instinct will not be brought back anytime soon.

A couple of days ago I wrote a story about how Microsoft announced the closure of one of its first party studio, Ensemble Studios. The stated reason behind this decision to close one of its studios was due to lack of scalability. In other words, Microsoft execs felt that Ensemble as a venture could not grow profitably. This raises an interesting question; could the same fate fall upon Rare as well?

Just last weekend, I spoke about the next generation of consoles and who is likely to be involved. I think all three current players, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are likely to play again, but some feel differently. Could it be that the PS3 and Xbox 360 are the last consoles from Sony and Microsoft respectively?