It would seem that Neil Thompson, (Microsoft's senior regional director for the Entertainment and Devices division in Europe) doesn't think a lot of the gaming public's spending habits. Basically, he just seems to think that if Microsoft gives us plenty of choice, we won't care about what it is we're actually choosing.

Speaking in an interview Thompson told GamesIndustry.biz, "Quite often it's just about having the choice, irrespective of what within the choice they use, they still want to see the choice. That's how I think about it - so therefore, what an individual piece does to the whole is quite difficult to judge specifically."

This has transcended simple corporate speaking and has entered a new circle of what we've decided to call "meta-linguistic acrobatics" because it sounds as if it makes as much sense. Let's try to translate from MLA into English:

"People like to have a choice. It doesn't matter what things are in that choice. This is because all people want is choice. Because of that, estimating how good or bad any of the items in the 'choice' is can't be done because the individual items aren't the issue." Nope, we can't actually translate. Maybe a business-minded SPOnG reader can help us?

Specifics seems to be what Thompson wants to avoid getting into. He won't give specific figures on how Live is doing in the UK, all he would utter was, "What I can say is that we have 17 million Xbox Live subscribers worldwide that are very active, and all of our download content - especially in the UK - is above where our expectations put us."

Asked about whether one particular aspect of Xbox Live's downloadable offering needs any more attention, Thompson said, "The way I encourage people to think about this is that we're trying to make the Xbox 360 platform as completely compelling as a whole platform. What we feel you have to do is have a variety of different entertainment experiences that people will want to consume at different times, for different reasons. And different types of people will want to consume them. So we tend not to look at individual pieces and ask if it's doing well as a piece."

So... it's OK for one area to be crap, so long as there are other aspects of the service to pull it up? Really?

If you don't remember what former Xbox boss Peter Moore had to say about PR handling at Microsoft, SPOnG suggests you go back and have a look, then admire what a fine job the company is doing at stopping its employees talking about much of anything at all.