2K bossman Christoph Hartmann has been talking to MCV, and has been defending the decision to make XCOM into a manshoot:

“The ‘90s generation of gamers all love Xcom and we own the IP, so we thought OK, what do we do with it? Every studio we had wanted to do it and each one had its own spin on it. But the problem was that turn-based strategy games were no longer the hottest thing on planet Earth. But this is not just a commercial thing – strategy games are just not contemporary.”

So that clears that up, eh? I am sure there will be a lively discussion of this. Can a game genre really get old enough to be abandoned? Should we consigned turn-based games to the past? If the 90s generation love it and that’s a reason to remake it, why try making it “contemporary”? Surely the challenge should bring to bring the game to a new generation, not the IP? Why do publishers think game and IP are somehow unrelated?