Titan Quest producer rants on PC market.

[DraQ]

I like Titan Quest. A lot. Basically a dumbed down Diablo, but I like it.

How can one possibly dumb down Diablo? :shock:

Now, don't get me wrong, I loved Diablo for all it was - a mindless, though pretty atmospheric clickfest, I simply can't envision a dumbed down version.

 

[Raapys]

Diablo 2 could be dumbed down some though.

 

[The_Pope]

Wow, *him too*?

Didn't the developers of Crysis and those of Gears of War just say the exact same thing? Is this some sort of bandwagon? Let's make crappy games with crazy system requirements and blame piracy for failing to reach the unrealistically high target set?

Gears, yes. Crytek were pretty happy with being a million seller.

 

[Raapys]

Oh, looks like it wasn't Crysis developers complaining, but Peter Molyneux.

Peter Molyneux: I think it's a huge tragedy. I mean, you might as well say PC gaming is World of Warcraft and The Sims... The weird thing is everyone's got a PC, they're just not buying software for it.

You only have to look at some of the titles which have recently come out. Crysis - I don't know the final sales figures, but they certainly weren't stellar compared to the amount of effort they put in.

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=93121

 

[RK47]

I think Pete's telling Crysis ppl r dum cuz their game is too complicated and not having low enough IQ to be accessible to the masses.

 

[Schauman]

Love how he goes with the copy protection. So, my hardware, my software and my unfraged HD are the source of all pain, blight and terror on earth? Yet the CTD copy protection against evil pirates and lame P2P bandits is 100% bug-free, foolproof and slices cake too? My current OS is 100% bug-free, foolproof and slices cake too. It also crashes more than the Wright brothers ever did.

 

[Annonchinil]

Other than not alerting people that the game crashed do to piracy protection how were his complaints not legitimate?

Let's see Titan Quest averaged AA on critic and user reviews, making it a good game despite what the Codex thinks (and not that people care anyways) It had a demo released about a month before the actual game and to those complaining about poor sales do to high system reqs.; the game could run on a Geforce 4, which even by 06' standards was outdated (though obviously not max it out). The market complaints by people like denizsi who obviously don't do any research into dedicated GPU sales, which sell more than consoles like the Xbox360 are in no way valid. In fact the only PC games that seem to sell well are either the Sims/casual or have a strong multiplayer component. Its increasinly becoming evident that for a good single player experience consoles are the choice.

Somebody mentioned that The Witcher sold 600,000 copies, half of those were in Easter Europe at a lower price and for a major publisher a succefull game usually sells 2 million at full price.

 

[MetalCraze]

you can't have a good single player experience on the consoles

all consoles have this illness of repetitiveness - basically in one random game some unique original element of gameplay is introduced - but then... they simply copy it through the whole game making it totally boring and overused.

I recently watched Alone in the dark trailer. it had 1 nice element with combining items to create weapons.

HOWEVAR!

by the end of this 5 minute trailer I was bored of this not overused idea. why? because you can tell from the trailer that the only combination you can do is just combine 1 single item with the sticky tape to sticky that item somewhere. nothing else.

console games are so goddamn boring

 

[Annonchinil]

http://www.gamespot.com/video/932100/61 ... al-movie-2

You mentioned the Witcher as one of the best games of '07 and yet any redundancy there did not bother you.

 

[Texas Red]

Somebody mentioned that The Witcher sold 600,000 copies, half of those were in Easter Europe at a lower price and for a major publisher a succefull game usually sells 2 million at full price.

No bitch, the games cost in Eastern Europe/Russia as much as in West. That's part of the problem, nobody wants to waste 20% of their monthly salery on a probably shitty game.

 

[Chork]

I wish I had pirated that boring pile of mediocrity instead of paying for it.

 

[Section8]

Let's see Titan Quest averaged AA on critic and user reviews, making it a good game despite what the Codex thinks (and not that people care anyways)

Reviews don't really mean shit if the concept itself isn't interesting. "Out of the Park Baseball 2007" is Metacritic equal best PC game of all time, with a 96 (!) average. That's 19 percentile higher than Titan Quest's 77. It's a text-based baseball management sim. I'd be willing to stake a princely sum that Titan Quest is the bigger seller.

Also, you have to consider that one the typical 80-100% scale of game reviews, Titan Quest gets a -3.

It had a demo released about a month before the actual game

Which wasn't much fun, and played no small part in turning people off the game.

and to those complaining about poor sales do to high system reqs.; the game could run on a Geforce 4, which even by 06' standards was outdated (though obviously not max it out).

Titan Quest System Reqs: 1.8 GHz. Processor, 512 MB RAM, 5 GB free HD space, NVIDIA GeForce 3/ATI Radeon 8500 or higher.

Diablo II System Reqs: 233 MHz Pentium or better, 32MB RAM, 650MB drive space, 4X CD-ROM drive, DirectX compatible video card

You do the maths.

The market complaints by people like denizsi who obviously don't do any research into dedicated GPU sales, which sell more than consoles like the Xbox360 are in no way valid. In fact the only PC games that seem to sell well are either the Sims/casual or have a strong multiplayer component.

Here's something to ponder:

Brand new, a Sims expansion will cost you half the price of a full game. If you already like the Sims and want more of it, that's a pretty good option. How many people would bother to buy a full price game with nearly identical gameplay to The Sims and a few stylistic changes?

Casual games also have a lot going for them. They're cheap - for the price of Titan Quest at release, I could have bought three or four different Popcap games. There's also a lot more variety in casual games, and though clones certainly exist, they probably suffer the same fate as clones like Titan Quest. If Puzzle Quest didn't dress up Bejeweled with a whole lot of peripherals, there'd be no point in buying it if you'd already played the original. And everyone has played Bejeweled. Additionally, they have low system requirements. My (mid-fifties) parents love Bookworm Deluxe, but they only just scrape the system reqs on the PC they use for word processing, email and internet access.

Multiplayer is admittedly a draw, but it's also a major draw for console games, since the social aspect of sitting in a room with a few friends is very appealing. There's a reason why Goldeneye, Mario Kart and Smash Bros are 3 of the top 5 selling N64 games. Massively Multiplayer is notorious for spawning far more failures than successes, so I'm not sure you can use the few exceptions like WoW to prove a point.

Its increasinly becoming evident that for a good single player experience consoles are the choice.

I wouldn't say that necessarily. There are just more games released, and as a result, a higher quantity of interesting games. The most successful ones however, are fairly predictable - continuations of popular series', exclusives, and quirky ideas like Wii games, Guitar Hero or Rock Band. The PC is pretty much the same, except it's sorely lacking in exclusives and has no big budget titles doing anything outrageous like giving the player a toy guitar to rock out on.

And quite simply, there's not much out there that could only be played on a PC. Nobody wants to play to its strengths.

Somebody mentioned that The Witcher sold 600,000 copies, half of those were in Easter Europe at a lower price and for a major publisher a succefull game usually sells 2 million at full price.

That's a bit rich. There would probably be between about 10 and 20 PC games ever that have achieved sales figures in that vicinity.

 

[Ahzaruuk]

As they seem to say on the WoW forums (terrible place, I avoid it whenevr I can)

QQ more , L2develop


*battle log*

WoW Forumesque post crits you for OVER 9000 damage

you take 10% IQ damage

you die.

 

[Norfleet]

I have to say that, completely unexpectedly after reading the thread title, I feel a lot of sympathy for many of his points. They really should have thought through the implications of that copy protection though...

The man claimed he needed that word-of-mouth advertising, then he proceeded to shoot himself in the foot by making sure the most vocal word of mouthers whose opinions would be heeded by their less technically advanced peers would complain the game was buggy crashware. Smooth. If you expect to establish yourself as a name, you effectively have to eat your losses on your first game, because few people are daft enough to blow their cash on a game no one's ever heard of which is likely crap. If you're relying on word of mouth to spread your game, the pirates *ARE* your advertising campaign.

 

[AdrianWerner]

TQ actualy did make money
They were closed down because they couldn't find the publisher for their multiplatform RPG , but somehow they did manage to secure funding for the three PC projects they've made. OMG! It;s all PC's fault we couldn't find funding for our console project



I wonder if it isn't just THQ making things cheap though. If we'll see IL crew hired by THQ and then see a "new action-rpg" from internal THQ development group then we'll known for sure THQ was just thinking "blah...why waste money buying them? It's cheaper to let them close down and just hire everybody"



Shame, Ultima:Lazarus mod for DS was one of the best RPG experiences in the last 5 years and this mod's leads were hired by Iron Lore
Maybe those people can start their own small company. I would definitly pay 20-30$ for and RPG of Lazarus quality;

 

[Section8]

I have to say that, completely unexpectedly after reading the thread title, I feel a lot of sympathy for many of his points. They really should have thought through the implications of that copy protection though...

The man claimed he needed that word-of-mouth advertising, then he proceeded to shoot himself in the foot by making sure the most vocal word of mouthers whose opinions would be heeded by their less technically advanced peers would complain the game was buggy crashware. Smooth. If you expect to establish yourself as a name, you effectively have to eat your losses on your first game, because few people are daft enough to blow their cash on a game no one's ever heard of which is likely crap. If you're relying on word of mouth to spread your game, the pirates *ARE* your advertising campaign.

Like I said over on the Iron Tower forums, you shouldn't be thinking in terms of 90% in lost sales, you should be thinking you've gained 900% in viral marketing.

 

[Shannow]

Wow S8, I thought I was harsh *g*
No rest for the wicked, heh?

On a more constructive note: There are lots of ways to make your game attractive for a potential purchaser. With a Diablo-clone you NEED to offer good on-line play. The random locations also help. Or if you look at Kult or Sacred you need to innovate in the gameplay mechanics. Both offered something different from Diablo. They may not have been great games in themselves but they were more than a bad copy+pastes.
And finally you can go the CDproject route. I wanted to buy The Witcher anyway but I also considered pirating it. With their EE there is no question now.

On a side note: I wasn't inerrested in TQ so I didn't really follow any reviews but what I heard claimed that D2 had finally been dethroned and similar hype-bs.

EDIT: Note to myself: Read the fucking second page before posting!

the game could run on a Geforce 4, which even by 06' standards was outdated (though obviously not max it out). The market complaints by people like denizsi who obviously don't do any research into dedicated GPU sales, which sell more than consoles like the Xbox360 are in no way valid.

We've been over this before, Anno. Just because the game will run on "outdated" gpus in gpu-market terms does not mean that those are also the current systems used by players. Especially not if consoles suggest that you don't have to worry about hardware issues with them. You present GPU sales without a link, well, I suggest you look up the valve statistics of the systems actually used to play games. I don't actually remember what it said but my last system which would now be 5 years old and wasn't top notch to begin with was in the upper midfield of that statistic...Developers need to invest more time into optimizing their engines and not develop games for some futuristic super computers.

 

[Disconnected]

Like I said over on the Iron Tower forums, you shouldn't be thinking in terms of 90% in lost sales, you should be thinking you've gained 900% in viral marketing.

Exactly.

But the guy shouldn't worry about it at all, he should simply be glad he's out of a job & find a job he actually likes doing.

If you're in the business of making video games, you're in the business of entertaining people. Part of doing that is not to treat your audience like they're so fucking stupid they make ferns look clever. By lambasting your audience for having enough brains not to throw their money away on something they can get for free, you accomplish only one thing; that you're in the wrong line of work.

The audience isn't the problem. If the audience was the problem, there wouldn't be any piracy, because the only way an audience can be a problem to you, is if they don't want to be your fucking audience. Read that again until it sinks in, you empty headed snob.

So what is the guy's problem? Two things. He hates his audience & he's too stupid to make money off a product people apparently want. I say apparently, because despite his arrogant stupidity, I don't want to accuse him of being a lying sack of shit. But hopefully I've managed to imply it.

Of course, I don't expect Mr. TQ Wonderboy to actually read this, but just in case there's a game dev reading this who actually likes his audience, here's a clue: if your product actually reaches 10 times more people than you have paying customers, what you have is an untapped fucking goldmine. There isn't a single advertiser in the world who wouldn't pay for that kind of market penetration, especially because it makes their audience do all the work. So enough with your fucking retarded, outdated, non-distribution money-sinks. Don't sell your product to people who can get it for free. Sell it to people who need to deliver something to people like your audience.

Yeh, read that bit again too. Idiots. How fucking hard can it be...

 

[ricolikesrice]

...

the 90% lost sales is utter bullshit anyway.

if we re at statistics right now my personal experiences with people i know leads to believe that 80% of pirated games are played for a timespan of 10 minutes to at most 1-2 days. a great game wouldnt be boring after such a short time span, but unfortunately these days there isnt many great games anymore.

now of course its everyone s right to claim that even a game only 10 hours long justifies a price of 50 bucks.... but obviously a lot of people think different, probably people spoilt by "better games" that give you 100h+ of entertainment for 50 bucks.
games like that used to be pretty common some years ago. even shooters which are mostly the shortest games across all genres if you dont count MP.

i mean compare duke nukem 3d with the totally awesome super shooter of 2008:
i dont have the exact playtime in my head anymore but the SHAREWARE (aka free) part of it was longer then CoD4s SP.... and had more interesting weapons, more interaction with the environment and felt less like whack-a-mole.
the full game easily beeing at least 3times as long as CoD4.
the "free" part of CoD4 (demo) was what... 30 minutes ?

....so basically those devs are complaining that they are charging 50 bucks for what used to be free years ago and that there s plenty of people who (illegaly) still get it for free to help them on the question of whether its worth buying ?

and in my experiences piracy like section 8 already says also works as a sort of advertisement for GOOD games (tough luck iron lore with titan quest :p), because at least in my experience almost everyone who pirated a game that he truly enjoyed..... buys it. yes there s exceptions... and those exceptions are a freaking shame..... greedy fucks enjoying a game but not wanting to pay for it DO exist and thats crap.

thats the actual theft happening in the games genre and it sucks, but its nowhere near 90% lost sales, maybe 10% at most.

but i bet that those 10% are more then easily made up if you actually provide a good game in which case piracy will work in your favour spreading the word that this game is worth buying.

 

[Herbert West]

In CliffyB, Peter Molyneux and the-TQguy world, PC games have achieved perfection.

There are no bad games at all! All are good and deserve being bought by every man woman and child with a PC.

There are no bad games, however there ARE evil, insidious pirates and stupid customers who don't wan't to givie us their money for fucks sake, dumb mutherfuckers!

Seriously now, it's not the piracy that's a threat to PC gaming, it's an attitude of the kind those gentlemen present.

 

[The Feral Kid]

Maybe he should just shut the fuck up and try not to make an idiotic clickfest next time.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

So, ILE shut down. This is tangentially related to that, not why they shut down, but part of why it was such a difficult freaking slog trying not to. It's a rough, rough world out there for independent studios who want to make big games, even worse if you're single-team and don't have a successful franchise to ride or a wealthy benefactor.

I don't get the "successful franchise to ride" comment. Weren't mose of the successful franchises first built out of nothing? id made Wolfenstein and Doom and turned both into huge franchises. Blizzard created Warcraft and then Starcraft (which is a total Warhammer rip-off but still). They even made Diablo from scratch and turned that into a huge success. Why? Because they were good games and they did them damn well. Things to note about all of those games:

• Very little to none in terms of piracy protection (and yet everyone at id was able to buy Ferrari's thanks to Doom).
• No shitty bugs that needed patching the day of release.
• No insane system requirements.
• They were all totally awesome games. The "must-have's" of their respective genres.

Titan Quest? Some shitty Diablo clone that needed far too many system resources to run for what it was.

One of the copy-protection routines was keyed off the quest system, for example. You could start the game just fine, but when the quest triggered, it would do a security check, and dump you out if you had a pirated copy. There was another one in the streaming routine. So, it's a couple of days before release, and I start seeing people on the forums complaining about how buggy the game is, how it crashes all the time. A lot of people are talking about how it crashes right when you come out of the first cave. Yeah, that's right. There was a security check there.

As people have said, the message should've been a simple "Copy protection failure". Oh sure, it lets the pirates in on the joke so they can crack it but there are two things here:

1. If it can be cracked, it will be cracked.
2. You've just told everbody there was a copy-protection there and that's why it's crashing. So if they're going to find out that's why it's crashing sooner or later, may as well make it sooner and avoid the "WHY MY GAEM NO VERK?" threads.

I also think Section8's point about viral marketing might be valid here too. I'm against piracy and I think developers should try and do things to stop it (EG: Steam, Microsoft's Activation etc... None of the "We're about to fuck your PC up" bullshit though) but that said, if pirates are going to be playing your game and talking about it on internet forums, better they say good things than bad (assuming of course, they would've said good things about the game in the first place).

One guy went so far as to say he'd bought the retail game and it was having the exact same crashes, so it must be the game itself. This was one of the most vocal detractors, and we got into it a little bit. He swore up and down that he'd done everything above-board, installed it on a clean machine, updated everything, still getting the same crashes. It was our fault, we were stupid, our programmers didn't know how to make games - some other guy asked "do they code with their feet?". About a week later, he realized that he'd forgotten to re-install his BIOS update after he wiped the machine. He fixed that, all his crashes went away. At least he was man enough to admit it.

I find it funny that a BIOS update prevents, presumably, Titan Quest from working properly where-as (again, presumably) all his other programs worked just fine (otherwise he would've twigged to the BIOS update earlier, right?). Quite simply, when you have a bunch of stuff installed on your PC and only one program doesn't work, it's fairly typical that it's that program's fault and not the fault of your PC. After all, everyone else seemed to be able to code for it, didn't they?

What was the ultimate impact of that? Hard to measure, but it did get mentioned in several reviews.

Insert comment here about piss-poor state of the game "review" industry.

Two, the numbers on piracy are really astonishing. The research I've seen pegs the piracy rate at between 70-85% on PC in the US, 90%+ in Europe, off the charts in Asia. I didn't believe it at first. It seemed way too high. Then I saw that Bioshock was selling 5 to 1 on console vs. PC. And Call of Duty 4 was selling 10 to 1. These are hardcore games, shooters, classic PC audience stuff. Given the difference in install base, I can't believe that there's that big of a difference in who played these games, but I guess there can be in who actually payed for them.

I don't doubt his numbers but I do question the assumption that these people would've paid for it. For the most part, those that pirate do so because they can. They may not particularly care what game they get, just something to pass the time "nd hey, what's popular? "Sure, why not try that new thing that's just been released and see what it's like. Oh wait, I can't pirate that? Oh well, I'll skip it and find something else I can play for free." I've done the same with small programs typically for movie conversions and such. I need to make something from one format to another, I don't have the program that does it so I google. If I find one that I have to pay for, I skip it and keep looking until I found the open source free version that does the same job without the $29.99 outlay for something I'll use precisely once.

Again, I'm not saying that therefore, piracy is okay. I'm saying the huge numbers of pirates would likely dwindle and not be converted into "real sales". Particularly in Asia, Russia and Europe where most people are dirt poor and the cost of a new game is something like half a month's average wage or more.

Titan Quest did okay. We didn't lose money on it. But if even a tiny fraction of the people who pirated the game had actually spent some god-damn money for their 40+ hours of entertainment, things could have been very different today.

I think if all the pirates bought everything they pirated, there'd be a lot more crime as people would have to steal the, quite literally BILLIONS OF DOLLARS of money they'd need in order to legitimately purchase all the games they do. Fort Knox would've been emptied out by now.

Some really good people made a seriously good game, and they might still be in business if piracy weren't so rampant on the PC. That's a fact.

... or if the game didn't suck so much? I mean, they already stated they "didn't lose money" on the title. So what gives?

Let's talk about hardware vendors. Trying to make a game for PC is a freaking nightmare, and these guys make it harder all the time. Integrated video chips; integrated audio. These were two of our biggest headaches. Not only does this crap make people think - and wrongly - that they have a gaming-capable PC when they don't, the drive to get the cheapest components inevitably means you've got hardware out there with little or no driver support, marginal adherence to standards, and sometimes bizarre conflicts with other hardware.

This rant again, I can understand but it's just so way off base. I seem to be able to play cheap little $20 games to my heart's content without any problems but you can't make Titan Quest work? Why, what gives? I also thought (though I'm not a programmer) that things like DirectX were supposed to resolve most of those issues. In fact I was under the impression that there was more industry standardisation today then there was when id first released Wolfenstein.

But, it's always the game's fault when something doesn't work.

Yup. As I said, if everything else works and your game is the odd one out, guess who gets the blame?

IM that's always on; peer-to-peer clients running in the background; not to mention the various adware and malware crap that people pick up doing things they really shouldn't. Trying to run a CPU and memory heavy app in that environment is a nightmare. But, again, it's always the game's fault if it doesn't work.

Hey, if coding's too hard for you, get another job or try to not completely rape every available bit of memory and CPU power out of the machine, just to display some whizz-bang cloud effect that only 3 people will notice.

Which brings me to the audience. There's a lot of stupid people out there.

Yup, gamer's are stoo-ped. As someone else here already said (I think), that might be the clue as to why console's are so popular. Plug 'em in, start 'em up and you're done. None of this "want to update drivers?" business PCs deal with.

But god forbid something that they've done - or failed to do - creates a problem with your game. There are few better examples of the "it can't possibly be my fault" culture in the west than gaming forums.

Well, if you were any good at coding, you'd try and detect those things during installation. "Your graphics card does not support XYZ special effect shader 91-b technology. Please update your drivers". Hell, who else here remembers the day of having to choose from the list as to whether or not your sound blaster was "16-bit compatible" or whether you had one of the other 20 options you had available. Even Warcraft had a sound card check.

Your soundcard works perfectly.
Your soundcard works perfectly.
Your soundcard works perfectly.
Enjoying yourself?
Your soundcard works perfectly.
Your soundcard works perfectly.
Your soundcard works perfectly.
It doesn't get any better than this.

And while I'm at it, I don't want to spare the reviewers either. We had one reviewer - I won't name names, you can find it if you look hard enough - who missed the fact that you can teleport from wherever you are in TQ back to any of the major towns you've visited.

That's where a strong fan-base blasting the crap out of the reviewer comes in handy. Hell, developer's have blogs these days, ridicule the guy on that. Scream it out to the world that "Hey, this guy is a dumbass!".

We had another reviewer who got crashes on both the original and the expansion pack. We worked with him to figure out what was going on; the first time, it was an obscure peripheral that was causing the crash, a classic hardware conflict for a type of hardware that very, very few people have. The second time, it was in a pre-release build that we had told him was pre-release. After identifying the problem, getting him around it, and verifying that the bug was a known issue and had been fixed in the interim, he still ran the story with a prominent mention of this bug. With friends like that...

Moral of the story? Don't release it until it's done. No really, why are you giving him a copy of a game you know is flawed? How do you expect him to ignore the flaws? And worse yet is that if he does, all he's doing is adding to the "crappy reviewers" pool. How many times have you read a preview which skipped "all the bugs" because "they'd be fixed in the full version, honest" and "this is just a preview build" only to find out the bugs are still there in the final release and haven't been patched yet?

Alright, I'm done. Making PC products is not all fun and games. It's an uphill slog, definitely. I'm a lifelong PC gamer, and hope to continue to work on PC games in the future, but man, they sure don't make it easy.

Sure, making games is teh hard and no, none of these things make it easy but hey, if it was that fucking easy, everybody'd be doin it, right? And if that was the case, there'd be no games industry. We'd be back to swapping floppies with the latest text adventure our friends made in QBASIC.

 

[Naked Ninja]

Sometimes the sheer aggressiveness of a lot of your stupidty makes me grind my teeth.

Logic fail :

-> I didn't like the game this man made.

-> Therefore, when he makes points about issues that affect every single PC developer negatively, all of them, even the ones you like, his points are invalid and it is time for jeering. Because he didn't make a game you like.

Epic logic fail. Stardock is successful are they? Awesome. So that makes it fine if no piracy could potentially make them twice as successful? If they could get more of the fruits of their labour that they deserve, that is theirs by right? Stardocks attitude is a good one, but who wants to bet me $100 their games still get pirated? They just aren't wasting time fighting a hopeless war. Just because they take it on the chin doesn't make complaints about the losses invalid.

Oh, and they shouldn't put copy protection in because what happens if criminals half break it then that gets used against them via word of mouth? Epic fail.

The man claimed he needed that word-of-mouth advertising, then he proceeded to shoot himself in the foot by making sure the most vocal word of mouthers whose opinions would be heeded by their less technically advanced peers would complain the game was buggy crashware. Smooth. If you expect to establish yourself as a name, you effectively have to eat your losses on your first game, because few people are daft enough to blow their cash on a game no one's ever heard of which is likely crap. If you're relying on word of mouth to spread your game, the pirates *ARE* your advertising campaign.

AAAaaaaaagh, I am experiencing severe headpain...

 

[Lesifoere]

I wish I had pirated that boring pile of mediocrity instead of paying for it.

So do I, Chork, so do I.

 

[Gnidrologist]

Actually, i find his points quite well presented. The problem is - his game is so shitty, that it makes all his ranting just laughable. If it was a well known developer, who's been in charge of few great games it would be an another story.