They are the professional analysts whose job it is to research, keep track of, advise their clients, and opine to the media about the gaming business. Analyze This cuts right to the chase: rather than reporting on a subject, and throwing in quotes by analysts to support or refute a point, Gamasutra offers up a timely question pertaining to the business side of the video game industry and simply lets the analysts offer their thoughts directly to you. Each person's opinion is his own and will (probably) not necessarily agree with their fellow colleagues'.

Recently, there has been talk about the idea of a standardized game console platform -- whether this would be unified hardware specifications or development tools. This has been brought up separately by executives of two third-party developers: Silicon Knights president Denis Dyack and EA Executive Vice President and General Manager International Publishing Gerhard Florin. Other independent developers and publishers might also feel that a single developing standard would have benefits to their bottom lines (most obviously, not needing to spend the money to make the same game for more than one platform).

So we asked Ed Barton of Screen Digest, Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan Securities, Ben Bajarin of Creative Strategies and Billy Pidgeon of IDC:

Do you think it's possible that the video games industry will create a standardized (development or hardware) platform in the future?

How would independent developers not benefit in a market with a single gaming platform?

Isn't PC gaming already the "one gaming platform" standard? Or is this analogy not quite right?

(Special thanks to Analyze This reader Larry Asberry, Jr. for submitting this topic idea.)