Again, as I must always remind people, hyperbole in operating in this area.

I've been catching up on my GDC and DICE viewing of late and recently watched Peter Molyneaux's Fable 2 presentation. He opened with an interesting little mini-game which will be sold through XBLA and from which you can transfer winnings to your in game character.

Now, it could be that I'm firmly entrenched in the "embittered and cynical" camp but the first thing that came into my head was the following.

"EA is going to make a ****ing mint out of this."

Don't get me wrong, I think that asynchronous play has some seriously cool potential, but at the same time I can't help but think of all of the "this should have been in the goddamn game" moments that we will be having over the next few years as more and more studios start fracturing their games into yet more levels of micro-transaction hell.

For example, I can see EA pulling the roster editing, trading and other franchise aspects out of Madden, NHL et al and putting that up on XBLA as something for asynchronous play. After all - that's not part of the core game experience and why should everyone who buys the game be forced to pay for something that isn't going to be used by them?

Nevermind that the game would remain at the $60 price-point with this content stripped out and that you'd have to buy it later for some strange amount of points that may or may not be $5 or $50 because no one can tell what a points amount is in real money. And what comes after that? We've been waiting for the "current rosters as pay-DLC" shoe to drop. I can't wait until things like the mini-camp games turn up as asynchronous options too. What about player creation and editing? Surely people won't miss that and would be willing to pay 500 points to get that feature back in the game?

Some of these ideas aren't actually terrible. If EA could guarantee me that they could get a Franchise Mode working on a Zune with asynchronous play, so that I could spent time editing rosters, making trades and setting seating prices at times when I'm not at my 360, then that would be awesome and a reason for me to a) get a Zune and b) pay that little more. Why? Because it would mean that when I did get the time to sit down at a 360 I could actually just play the games and not have to worry about losing gaming time to the Franchise bits.

But that won't happen. What will happen with this asynchronous play is that suddenly we'll be faced with a barrage of new money-spinning rubbish which will almost always result in a scream of: "Why wasn't this in the game to start with?"

Peter Molyneaux's Fable 2 gambling thing is quite cool and if released at a reasonable price could be something that I'd seriously consider getting. But I just get the feeling that asynchronous play will just become another revenue-generating tool for publishers and developers. I can only hope that Microsoft is going to have stringent controls on what they allow to be released with an asynchronous component, or that developers ensure that the total cost of a gutted game + guts sold seperately never exceeds the price for the full game that they should have released in the first place.

But we know that both those things will never happen.