A few things, Randall Turner, it has been a joy to read your posts the last several days on this subject. I keep coming back, in spite of a busy schedule, just to see what has come up on this thread.
MMOs are logical to make. You get long term money in subscriptions, and you also get to cut out the pirates just by requiring subscriptions. My big problems with MMOs right now is that they are too expensive and too combat oriented. I'm not paying money up front AND every month (and $15 every month is quite a bit around these parts, anyway) to run around and kill monsters...and practice non-combat skills that do nothing except make me better at killing monsters.
In this respect, two MMOs I have liked were Runescape and ATITD.
A move to consoles would not bother me at all.
In fact, most of my favorite games over the last few years have been on my Wii... unfortunately...most were actually made by Nintendo. It seems few companies are willing to try something very different.
Civ has changed a lot with CiV...and look how people have reacted. If there is blame to be put somewhere for the sea of sequels and sameness, it certainly goes to the consumers that will cry foul at anything different.
CiV has problems (Steam, crashing...) but the diplo and one unit per tile changes were (overall) good and just need some tweaks here and there. Heaven help the company that takes their game based on building empires, and makes the emphasis on empire building, empire happiness, and inter-imperial relationships, as opposed to managing 10 individual cities, as was the case before.
I think that is a big problem, and you don't need to look far to see how a company doing something different makes people mad.
It's too bad that companies are slowly becoming scared of anything new because the vocal "hardcore" gamers (though this could be said for movie-goers, music listeners, etc. as well) don't want anything different.