I'm confused. I can't decide whether I'm really optimistic about the future of gaming or terribly depressed, writes viewer Ten Iron.

Almost every change promised for gaming seems to have a really nasty flip side to it, so that every piece of good news is ruined by the small print.

It's making me feel old before my time as I find myself wishing that things just stayed the way they were.

From talking to my friends I've found that we've all been pretty happy about the direction gaming has been going in the last few years.

Sure hardware has become really unreliable all of sudden and I'm getting a bit sick of first-person shooters, but these are minor complaints compared to all the great games that are out there right now.

So why did anything have to change?

As I understand it, basically everyone's plan for this generation of consoles was completely wrong.

I don't just mean the Wii either, although obviously that's had a huge effect on Microsoft and Sony.

It hasn't changed what the third-party publishers do much though. Instead their problem is they don't seem to have realised quite how expensive it would be to make games nowadays.

We're getting to the point where all but the absolute biggest games just aren't making any profit any more.

And every time a publisher tries to release a "normal" game on the Wii, to take advantage of it being cheaper to make, it never sells.

No wonder publishers are desperate to move to digital downloads, where they can make bigger profits on the same games.

The problem is that digital downloads are really bad for customers.

They're not any less expensive, you don't get a physical copy, you can't swap or sell it on and they're usually full of DRM and anti-piracy software.

And then there's the publisher's other trick for making a profit: making you buy a stupidly expensive controller at the same time. £100 for DJ Hero? No thanks.

I think many gamers are like me: they just want things to go on like they were with great games coming out as normal, for normal prices.

Instead we've got digital downloads, motion controls and an ever-narrowing range of game types being released.

Pretty pessimistic I know, but I'm still looking forward to stuff like Alan Wake and Uncharted 2. Why did it ever get more complicated than that?