"Hardly anyone plays first person shooters on the PC any more," said Microsoft's Kinect creator Kudo Tsunoda, taking a motion-controlled plunge into a sea of controversy and bad-feeling, and once again raising questions about the Windows giant's dedication to its biggest gaming platform.
Let's get something straight from the off, one Microsoft exec does not represent the views of the entire company. At least I hope that's the case – because, let's be frank, when it comes to PC gaming the software giant has hardly been jumping through hoops to make us believe they still care.
The party line is that the arrival of Fable III, a new Age of Empires and the next generation of Flight Simulator will rejuvenate the PC.
But it doesn't take a genius to spot that there isn't a first person shooter in sight.
Point or pointless?
So does Kudo have a point? For me, he is absolutely, unequivocally wrong, and here's why.
First of all, I challenge anyone to suggest that first person shooters aren't still popular after 20 minutes of trying to find a slot on a public server just after an update to Team Fortress 2.
When it comes to online gaming, first person shooters may not be in the same league as the likes of World of Warcraft or Farmville, but there are still hundreds of thousand of people playing each of the major shooters online at any given point.
Team Fortress 2, CoD: Modern Warfare 2 and Counter Strike, are all hugely popular at the moment. And the last title has been played by millions over a decade, influencing countless games on PC and console alike.
Indeed, early suggestions are that a little more than 700,00 people are concurrently playing the biggest online console game of the moment, namely Halo:Reach.
That's with a brand new game, in the flush of a massive marketing campaign.
Steam-ing on
And yet at its peak there were 2.7 million people logged onto Steam in the past 24 hours, with never less than 1.25m logged on.
You do, of course, have to carve that number up; many won't be playing FPS, many more won't be playing games at all.
But to describe numbers in the hundred of thousands as 'hardly anyone' is not only crass, but also downright deceptive.
Nobody is doubting that the Xbox is a brilliant, vibrant and hugely successful platform both online and for first person shooters, but the PC gaming market is still flourishing in both of these areas despite lacking a unified piece of hardware; success is not an either or.
