Draginol Draginol

PC Games need to deliver the goods to compete!

▼

PC Games need to deliver the goods to compete!

Don't blame pirates for PC game sales decline

http://www.totalgaming.net
from JoeUser Forums

This article from "Elf-Inside" about his experiences with games and with Stardock really underscores where the PC game industry needs to go. He has a really good analogy:

When I buy a pizza, I expect to get a pizza. I expect it with the toppings I order, and I expect it to be delivered promptly. By calling Domino's or Papa John's, I've contractually agreed to pay for a pizza when it arrives. But if the deliverman shows up 2 hours late, with cold pizza, with Anchovies instead of Peperoni, then, no, I'm not going to pay for that. The problem with typical game publishers, is they expect you to eat that pizza, and be happy for it. You paid for hot pepperoni, and got cold anchovies, but you have no recourse.

Which is so true. It is also one of the reasons why I think the console market is really starting to eat the PC's lunch. I've been outright hostile to consoles for years but even I find myself starting to buy console games. Why? Because they work out of the box. I don't have to "Wait for the first patch" to play the games.

And PC games have a perfect storm of bad habits:

  • First, I am expected to devote hundreds of megabytes to them. Okay, I can live with that.
  • But then they expect me to keep the CD in the drive.
  • And then I usually have to keep track of a little tiny paper serial number (usually taped to the back of the CD jacket).
  • And all that so that I can play a game that needs a couple of patches to play.

And when the PC sales go down, what's the reported reason? Piracy of course.  Yea, it's piracy. Sure. In my experience of writing games, it's not pirates ripping us off of our hard earned money, it's been publishers.  The tale of Galactic Civilizations is very similar to the tale of Swamp Castle from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

The other developers told me I was daft to write a space based strategy game for OS/2! So I wrote Galactic Civilizations for OS/2. I was a college student back then so I couldn't afford to get it into the stores. So a publisher called Advanced Idea Machines "published" it. They never paid us royalties and disappeared soon after. Since I had no money, I couldn't afford a lawyer at the time.

So I got smart. Stardock would publish the OS/2 sequel Galactic Civilizations II.  So we made the game, manufactured the boxes, took care of all the marketing and getting it into the stores.  And just to be safe, we had two distributors. One called Micro Central and the other one called Blue Orchards.  Both went went out of business owing us hundreds of thousands of dollars.

That particular incident nearly wiped out Stardock.

But no matter, we recovered. We clawed our way back up and made it into the Windows market.  We decided to make a Windows version and we decided to work with a well known publisher on it (Strategy First). This time everything would go perfectly...

Well, that was a year and a half ago and we're still waiting for royalty payments on most of their sales.  But this time, we had an out -- direct electronic sales. People were able to buy the game directly from us and download the game.

So don't talk to me about piracy. It's not the pirates that have ripped us off of hundreds of thousands in lost royalties. It's been "Real businesses" doing that thank you very much.  The position of royalty eating parasite has already been taken.

It's the demographic of people who allegedly do all this pirating that's been paying our bills. People with Internet connections who download games. They pay my salary. They are my overlord now.  So I hope you can excuse me if I don't lose sleep at night that some 15 year old might have downloaded my game while some executive at a company (or former company) is sailing on their boat paid for by my hard work.  The software pirate can go to jail on a felony, the business executive who doesn't pay royalties gets off the hook.

So yea, tell me again how I need to put some dongle or whatever on my game to keep 15 year olds from pirating? When our contract with publishers forces them to wear a shock collar that I can press a button to shock them if royalties aren't paid on time then we'll talk about forcing customers to deal with massive copy protection. But it's not the pirates I worry about.

I'm sure that Galactic Civilizations is pirated somewhere.  But I highly doubt it's pirated in significant quantities.  I know it sold over 100,000 copies out there. But people didn't pirate it much. Why? Because we didn't force them to pirate it.  We didn't make someone have to create a CD crack so that they could play it on their laptop on the plane where the CD drive is replaced with an extra battery.  We didn't make them have to download "patches" to get the game working.  The version of Galactic Civilizations that won Editor's Choice Awards from most of the major PC game publications was the 1.0 version out of the box.  And we encouraged people to pay their hard earned dollars for the game by giving them value by putting out updates after release. We put out a bunch of free updates that added tons of features. A BonusPak, a free expansion pack.  Heck, GalCiv 1.21 is due out this week!  You want to fight piracy, don't give people a reason to pirate.

In fairness, the retail version of The Political Machine will have a CD check. However, the electronic version from TotalGaming.net will not and users of the boxed version will be able to forgo the CD check after January 1, 2005 as part of our compromise with our publisher. A win-win since the main problem with CD checks is losing the CD or damaging it in the long term and it satisfies the publisher's concern over "0 day warez" sites (though it'll still get pirated I'm sure).

I think that's a major reason consoles are starting to really crush the PC game market.  People are getting fed up. They're getting a cold pizza and being told to lump it. It doesn't have to bet that way.

For example, The Political Machine comes out in August.  We plan to have a free update available for it on the first week that adds some new features and extra goodies. There will be "bug" fixes but they'll likely be bugs no one would run into. And we'll put out updates as regularly as Ubi Soft will let us (unlike with GalCiv, The Political Machine updates have to go through Ubi Soft's outstanding QA department).

We don't do this because we're nice. We do it because it is good business.  If the competing technology (consoles) can't be updated with new stuff after release, then you should exploit that advantage.  And that means add new features, not use the Internet to supply updates that finish the game!

I'm not against copy protection schemes on the PC because I'm some sort of flower child developer. I'm against them because they're bad business. They discourage people from buying PC games in the first place.  Once you make someone have to hunt down a CD crack, you've set them on the path of pirating the whole game and future games.

That's what I hope to see TotalGaming.net prevent.  Make it a no-brainer for someone to purchase games electronically by keeping costs reasonable and make using the games they've purchased easy and convenient.  After all, it's their pizza, deliver it to them as they want and they'll support you with future orders.

322,381 views 115 replies
Reply #51 from JoeUser Forums Top
You blog rants about the failings of pc game makers vs console game makers and implies that this is why PC games get pirated?

As one other commenter posted, this is obvious a "grass is greener" view. I have been in the game industry for years. I have made both PC and Console games. My first love of gaming is on the PC, though I recognize that both consoles have their strengths depending on genre (racing on a pc just sucks). One thing you seem to miss though is that console games get pirated to. On a massive scale. It's not that you don't have many good points, but the piracy example is a poor one. As a developer, I expect a certain amount of piracy. My goal is to ensure there is enough quality content and replayability to compell gamers to want to buy a real copy. As the old adage goes, locks are to keep honest people out.

What I am more sick of, and this is more of a console issue, are games with no real multiplayer support and a single player campaign that only last 8-10 hours. Even a quality game like Prince of Persia Sands of Time makes me angry to waste $50+ on it when I finish it in a single day. That's why, even as a developer, I harbor no ill will towards rental services. If your game bombs because everyone rents it instead of buys it, make sure the game has enough content that rental isn't cost effective...

Oh, and content upgrades and patches are finally becoming available to consoles, and will just be more common in the future...
Reply #52 from JoeUser Forums Top
Wonderfully written article which so succintly summarized the frustration of tons of PC gamers out there. However, I feel that there are a few minor points that the article and succeeding comments failed to capture.

1) Yes, it's the publishers that are responsible for declining sales, not piracy, but, stop and look at the business side of releasing games without raving for a moment. Making a game available for sale online is a great idea but we all know that to reach a wider audience (i.e. ppl without broadband), the game must also be available in stores. Heck, thanks to my ISP (screw you Rogers!), i have a cap on how much i can download like many other people, meaning that i have to go to a store to buy my game. Now, for a publisher, to put out a game in stores and expect it to sell entails advertisement, purchasing shelf space, making umpteenth hard copies of the game, the manual and the box, not to mention paying all the employees responsible for taking care of these. The publisher is taking a pretty huge financial risk here, just look at Interplay - they gambled all they got on FO: BOS (a.k.a. Barrel of Sh*t) and DA2, and when they did poorly (admittedly because the former game sucked and the latter game couldn't compete with Everquest's brand name recognition) they went under. So, if a game does poorly, it isn't just the developer and the fans that take the hit, publisher catches financial flak as well.

2) patches. I hate 'em, you hate 'em, i'm sure the game publisher/developer hates 'em because of broadband fees. Yeah, patches are a big reason why I'm purchasing more console games nowadays; however... Patches happen because: a) the publisher's marketing department is composed of idiots who want to rush the game in unfinished state to Christmas Market glut come hell, or high water, or Cthulhu, or 1.000.000 angry e-mails from consumers, or b) the developer didn't do their job and didn't properly test the game. So when you get angry at the patches, don't get angry at just the publisher, get angry at the programmers or testers who didn't catch the bug in the first place as well, when they are paid to do so (unless it's an Interplay employee - then he'd get paid as much as a Russian coal miner - nothing).

3) Okay, time out on complaining about innovation here. Sure, i'm kinda tired of Battlefield clones, other FPS clones (an online frag in Doom3 might look prettier than a frag in an original doom, but the exhiliration is still the same), YABMOMRPG (Yet Another Bloody Massively Online Multiplayer Role-Playing Game), but I think that sometimes, a return to a good game formula is best. My case in point - Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity. First of all - no multiplayer, so ppl without broadband and/or credit card can enjoy it. Secondly - fairly low hardware reqs. Thirdly - relatively few bugs. Fourthly - tried and true Diablo-style gameplay only with an actual story, incredibly well written dialogue, well-thought out game world with plenty of background, better character creation system and amazing music. The game isn't original by any stretch of imagination, but somehow by refining the original, doing everything right, and then making the game available for fairly cheap (heck, i bought the outstanding Divine Divinity/Beyond Divinity bundle for only 45 canadian bucks, and it provided more than 150 hours of entertainment) it became a huge success with gamers and critics alike. The moral: the game doesn't sell just on originality, or graphics, or hype; the game sells on how well all of its components are brought together - polish polish and more polish. Second moral - consoles don't have a monopoly on releasing a complete and polished product.

4) Very brief point now. I totally agreed with an already stated comment that switching to consoles is a "grass greener on the other side" phenomenon. In today's console market, only a few select Nintendo titles show any original thought, and even then are passed by the consumers who dismiss these titled as "kiddy-ish". I mean, look at the glut of Resident Evil games, multitude of shooters with poor controls, Final fantasy games and their clones (*cough*Disgaia*cough*), endless Tony hawk and other sport games, etc. If you think that only PC gamers are dumb enough and gullible enough to keep shelling out bucks for same old tired gameplay, think again - nobody has monopoly on gullibility and near-sightedness.
Multiplicity - Control multiple PCs using one keyboard and mouse
Reply #53 from JoeUser Forums Top
Amen to that. That pizza analogy is golden. I've heard a car analogy too. YOu can buy this car now, but it won't go in reverse. We'll have that gear ready in a month. I don't want that. If I want "updates" for my car, I want tail-fins and rims. I want to make it BETTER. Not make it WORK.
Reply #54 from JoeUser Forums Top

You blog rants about the failings of pc game makers vs console game makers and implies that this is why PC games get pirated?

No. On the contrary. I don't think PC piracy is that significant. Or more to the point, I don't think it's what is causing the decline in PC sales. I thought the article was pretty clear on that.

Reply #55 from JoeUser Forums Top
Razor boy: It isn't that they aren't testing the games properly. It's that they aren't testing the games. At all.
Reply #56 from JoeUser Forums Top
. Good point Hellsau.

Ironic point, i initially pirated Galactic Civs (the newest one), and after playing it i went out and bought it in the store. I don't know about all gamers out there, but this to me is what marks a great game. The only other games i pirated and then bought are a sadly short list: Fallout 1 and 2, Planescape Torment, Half-Life, Baldur's Gate 2, Divine Divinity, Heroes of Might and Magic 3, and Arcanum. I don't even bother with the new games - you can pirate them but it's pointless because every new release out there is multiplayer-oriented and so a pirate copy won't work (i.e. Battlefield and Battlefield Vietnam, and UT2004).

Which brings me to another point. This emphasis on multiplayer is very alarming. Why? Because there's less incentive for developers to polish the gameplay. They don't need to create awesome in-game cutscenes and scripted events (a la Half-Life) - the players supply the excitement (in theory, unless some 8 year old is camping the plane spawning grounds). Furthermore, they don't need to test it as much - player feedback (i.e. rants and threatening emails) will provide the feedback needed to release yet another patch. All recently RPGs on PC with exception of yet another Neverwinter Nights expansion are multiplayer only. All FPS released in last 3 months (except Painkiller) have very little single-player and massive multiplayer component. At this rate there will be no single player games left on computer at all. And I for one thnk that it's a BAD thing - i don't want to go play online with a bunch of assholes, campers, l33tists and whatnot - i just want to enjoy a good game by myself. When the dark day of single-player death comes to PC, it'll be consoles only for me. Sayonara PC.
Reply #57 from JoeUser Forums Top
I tend to think the impact of warez on the game market is overstated. Rightly or wrongly, the impression I'm always left with when a publisher screams about "pirated copies" is that they're trying to find a ready scapegoat to explain away low sales for a bad game. Now, I don't tend to buy many games (at least I don't think so) in the first place, so I'm not really in a position to say whether my impression for many often-cited games is correct or not. I have downloaded no-cd cracks in the past just to get rid of stupid cd checks for games, and on other occassions I have actually obtained a warez copy of a game to see if I liked it before actually putting any money on it. Matter of fact, that was how I happened upon Galactic Civilizations. I came across it one day and I'd never heard of it before. I did a little online research and decided to give it a go. I got hooked on GalCiv very quickly and heard about the free v1.1 expansion Stardock would be releasing. This (as well as numerous other things I had read about GalCiv and Stardock) convinced me to go out and buy a copy of GalCiv (though from what I've read about Stardock getting screwed on royalties, I'm kinda bummed that I didn't think to order it directly), since I wanted to support a company that was continuing to improve their product post-release with the input of users taken into account and didn't feel the need to burden customers with idiotic copy-protection schemes. Later, I heard about the possibility of a paid-for expansion, which I wasn't interested in at first. I changed my mind when I started hearing about some of the new goodies the expansion would bring and ordered a subscription to Drengin.net so that I could also get Corporate Machine (which I also enjoy thoroughly). I was very thrilled when I noticed the new games being made available when Drengin.net evolved into TotalGaming.net. So far my experience with Stardock has been exceptional and I plan to renew my TotalGaming.net subscription when the expiration date begins to loom close. And to think I had to be an "evil pirate" to find such a great experience with a game company. Heck, I've even gotten a friend of mine curious enough to buy a copy of GalCiv just from talking about it so often and he loved it.

And as others have pointed out, sometimes companies seem to just beg people to obtain warez copies of their games. I had to obtain a no-cd crack of the expansion for Sim City 4 just to get the damn thing to run since it couldn't seem to verify that the disc was actually in the drive. I'm still very bitter about that little experience and I'm certainly not going to be jumping up to buy anything from EA again for quite some time. Yes, I love the Sim City games, but I can manage without the next version/expansion if they want to be asses about it. I'll most likely give that extra gaming money to a company like Stardock, who I've had good experiences with and who hasn't given me a reason to pirate their stuff. No, EA, that doesn't automatically mean that I'm going to be getting warez copies of your games, regardless of what you may be led to believe. I'm just voting with my money, and I'm not using it to vote for you.
Reply #58 from JoeUser Forums Top
Brad, I think you miss one major thing about your own games: they're not attractive to pirates.

People aren't trading GalCiv in high schools or dorm rooms like they do the latest 3D shooter, and they won't be doing it with Political Machine either. So you can do what you're doing; try making a 3D shooter and put it out there without any copy protection. It's a different market, a different target demographic.
Reply #60 from JoeUser Forums Top
I totally agree with the article and find it very insiteful. The only thing is that I was shocked and still find it very hard to understand how you said that ubisoft had a good QA department. Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow is riddled with bugs and connection problems on PC AND Xbox. And it looks as though they aren't going to work too much on patching it again. I'm figuring they pretty much gave up on the game. Another great tactic from a game publisher, anger the customers so they never buy your product again. Smooth.
Reply #61 from JoeUser Forums Top
while i wholeheartedly agree that pc games should be released virtually bug free, there seems to be a sentiment here that consoles are miraculously bug free. This is not in any way the case. Almost every launch version of every gaming console has had some type of bug in it. There was a signifigant amount of ps2s that actually scratched games making them unplayable. Many 1st generation xbox s had problems with the dvd drive and would not read game disks some of the time. There have been games released with substantial bugs. The character Realm in US Final Fantasy 3 had a bugged "sketch" ability that would not only freak out the game, could also damage your game as well, losing your save files and possibly requiring you to send the game in to get it repaired/replaced. And although a lot of the time, many games could have been released in a much better state, sometimes things just slip past. Think of any complex game and how many different possible ways you can do things and try to visualize if you could try every possibility imaginable. So some bugs are going to slip by, because it's not cost effective to beta test a game for 2 years to iron every last thing out. And i know it comes down to this: companies are in business to make money, and unfortunately for the end user that means we get a beta product because the ceo wanted 4 yachts this year instead of 3. But all in all, if we keep buying the games, are the pc publishers really gonna say, "hey they keep handing us buttloads of cash, let's delay the next release a little and do it right" No, you can hardly expect any business that has a staple form of income, to jeopardize that with changing the way things are. The only way to get them to change is to not buy the product, not continue to spend money and complain about things that bother us.

In terms of piracy, just because the publishers release beta products with annoying cd keys and such, that doesn't give anyone the right to steal the game. That's what piracy is, theft. yes perhaps some piracy would go away if publishers enacted some of the changes recomended here, but perhaps nothing would change at all. Wrongdoing, can't be excused because the publishers inconvienienced us. You can't blame them for trying to protect their product.

I'm not trying to badmouth what was said up above i just think that people need to realize that there are 2 sides to every story, and that even though i'm in the boat that publishers need to give us games in a better state and not snake out on us, They do have reasons for doing some of the things they do.
Reply #62 from JoeUser Forums Top
There are So Many reasons to wait a couple months before buying a game or console nowadays, sad but true.

Oh, and a shrinking market won't force quality out of the developers (ref: Nightlong for the Amiga, Bad CDs).

Jeff Whitehouse (Jeffimix)
Reply #63 from JoeUser Forums Top
A method I use to avoid getting murdered: don't give anyone reason to murder me. I can talk of how someone doesn't have the right to kill me, that punishments for murderers should be less severe, but if someone wanted me dead bad enough, that would not stop them. Fear of punishment is not a strong enough motive to not do something. Remove the desire to pirate, don't make it a forbidden fruit.
Reply #64 from JoeUser Forums Top
That was meant as a response to turbo noob, but Whitehouse beat me to the punch. Also, "less severe" should be "more severe."
Reply #65 from JoeUser Forums Top
I only buy games that I know are good. Usually I know this because I have researched them on the web, and/or because I have tried out illegal copies or borrowed legal versions from friends. The PC gaming market may be a bad one, but no one forces me to buy and play crappy games. Or even mediocre ones.

The next game I'm looking forward to is Metalheart: Replicants Rampage by Akella, but I'm not sure that game is going to be as good as it looks. Judging by the constantly slipping release date they're either having trouble with the game itself, or they're having trouble finding a publisher. Maybe *they* should give direct publishing over the internet a shot? But I suppose there's always a chance that the release date is slipping because they're finding new bugs and doing something about them before actually selling the game.
Reply #66 from JoeUser Forums Top
For those who think it's a problem that games arr not published on time I have to disagree.

If a developer says they are going to release a game in 2 months, I'll say great I can't wait.
When that 2 months is up they say "Sorry it's not quite finished yet. We're gonna work on it for another 6 months to make sure it's perfect.", then I'll say "Okay, take your time. I want to see this done right."

If the development is rushed then the game will be buggy.

As a comparison, JRR Tolkien started working on the story that would ultimately be The Lord Of The Rings, (Considered on of the greatest literary achievements of modern times by me), during the World War I, 1914 or sometime like that. It wasn't published as The Lord Of The Rings until the 70's.

If it takes time to do something right then, damn it, take the time.

I want quality.
Reply #67 from JoeUser Forums Top
Turbo noob: Wow, i thought the only people who used Relm were people who WANTED the bug, since it randomly gave you many, many items. I'd just rather use my 8-attack Celes, Terra-Gogo-Mog on magic team....wait a second, this isn't the ff3 forum! Crap!

But the list of buggy console games is quite short, average is a couple mis-translated lines. Or a horribly named main character (Butz? Wha???).

Still, Can't explain SC:PT. That's prolly some kind of conspiracy. They want our toast...
Reply #68 from JoeUser Forums Top
I think game sales for consoles will always beat out game sales for Computers. Why? Because thats all you CAN do with consoles, buy games. With computers you can do so much more. Computer games come with better resolution, and overall just a little better.

So please don't argue that you buy more games for consoles than you do computers. If you want, say that computer games cost to much.

Later,

Marticus (@thebluetree.net)
Reply #69 from JoeUser Forums Top
The only bet this post misses is the part about the no return policy now in force in, as near as I can tell, 100% of all retail outlets.

So, not only do I get cold pizza, but I have no choice to swallow it because I'm out my money in any case.

No business, well none except the RIAA's, gets away with this. Hmmm, what's the other business group that complains about Pirates? Oh yeah! The RIAA.

So, let me see, 2 groups, the Software Publishers Assoc. and the RIAA sue their customers, 2 groups use copy protection to protect themselves from their customers, and 2 groups consistently publish TRASH, and then do not allow any refund when the customer they have just robbed, not "ripped off" or "screwed" but robbed, as in theft, as in stealing your money, try to return said trash. Also note, both groups contiune to see their profits fall.

Add to that both of these groups also exploit the people who produce the product, so it's pretty easy to understand why those people so often produce trash, they aren't actually getting paid any way.
Reply #70 from JoeUser Forums Top
Spot on, in my opinion. Excellently written and insightful. Shame that publishers don't think the way he does.
Reply #71 from Stardock Forums Top
I completely agree with everything stated in the article...it's almost always the little developers that put out quality games consistently because of aforementioned freedoms, particularly with electronic download of the game.

Curious thing about this is that it mimics what is happening in the RIAA (as one person stated earlier). They blame piracy for lack of sales, when it clearly isn't (several studies have been done on this since the whole "crusade" things started a while ago). Then again, people do have good reason to pirate a song or two....why pay almost $20 for a CD when you only want one or two songs from the CD? That was the beauty of vinyl, my friends....the 45 RPM records only had two songs each on one 45...but it was less than a dollar for most of the time when vinyl was still predominant over other forms of musical recordings. This is especially obvious as a good 99.9% of artists today put out nothing but crap. Kinda got off subject there, but it's very similar situations...and I'm a classic rock junkie...so I needed to spread the word .
Reply #72 from JoeUser Forums Top
VaMage: Electronics Boutique (in the Northeast US anyway) will take opened PC games. They used to have a 100% refund policy, but after some pretty heavy abuse, it turned into store credit only. But last time I checked, EB still will take back your opened PC game for store credit. There was even a story in the local news about an EB store that purchased a "used" game from a guy who turned out to have stolen it from another person. When the police determined the theif's identity and where the game was sold, EB refused to release the game back to the woman who legally owned it without her repurchasing it at the used price.
Reply #73 from JoeUser Forums Top
"And when the PC sales go down, what's the reported reason? Piracy of course. Yea, it's piracy. Sure. In my experience of writing games, it's not pirates ripping us off of our hard earned money, it's been publishers. "

I agree with your sentiment on this. I've actually heard several people talk about music CD's in this fashion. That those who download the mp3's are directly responsible for the outrageous prices. Well guess what? Anyone who's old enough to remember the 80's knows that CD's have always been that outrageous.

To me "it's the Pirate's fault!" is nothing more than a way to herd the sheep that is the average customer.
Reply #74 from JoeUser Forums Top
I agree with Nosmirc and Warsamer; I remember running SC on the sys req's and it ran fine with no slowdown . I also agree with Warsamer about 2d not being put to good use today. A key example of this can be seen in the latest console Sonic games. I'm sorry but Sonic was not made to be 3d, it should really go back to its 2D roots.

I find it incredible to hear about companies not willing to invest in an original game concept/design when history has shown that the innovator is the one who makes the most money. Look at Wolfenstein 3d and Doom, both can be seen as innovators and originals at the time and look at how much money they raked in. Look at Street Fighter 2. Yet another originator in its own right and look at how much money it's made. The same can be said for games like DDR, Baldur's Gate, and Warcraft. All of these games were created by people and companies willing to take a risk. And all of these are some of the biggest $$$ making games in the history of video games today.


Awesome article Draginol .
Reply #75 from JoeUser Forums Top
Damn, this guy just hit the nail on the head. I've been saying and feeling the same way for awhile now and couldn't quite nail the fine points. I give credit to You Draginol, and hope that the game developing community will take heed (I too am an avid Gamer) Thanks for writing that awsome article