A digital copy protection company has conducted a survey that found "only" 28% of consumers avoid protected games.

Next Generation asked me what I thought of that.

You can read the whole thing over at the link below.  However, this was a survey done by a copy protection company that apparently thinks it's not bad that more than 1 out of 4 people avoid games that are protected. That's way higher than I ever thought it would be.

If I make a game and it has a feature that is going to drive away 1 out of 4 gamers, it's coming out.

A couple of years ago when I started really getting into blogging I reached a fork in the road.  My blog writings were starting to really get out there and bring a lot of traffic to my blog (back then Joeuser.com was just my site).

The Alexa rankings help speak to that:

So at its height, JoeUser.com which was just my site was nearing the top 10,000 blog sites total.  I got a lot of traffic because I was blogging every day on political issues of all kind. That is the key to becoming a popular blogger - you have to do it every day and you have to do what you can to make sure your blogs are well sindicated out there so others know about them. Most bloggers on JU really aren't trying to get their stuff read outside of JU which is okay. My goal was to write stuff that was read by as many people as I could.

But that's when I realized I was just too thin-skinned and too snobby to put up with the constant trashings I would take. 

One of my favorite bloggers, someone who has the talent and has put in the hard work has seen her blog become immensely popular:

By writing every single day, making interesting commentary, she has gotten a huge following, become a Fox news contributor, written a book, etc.  I really admire her.  But I don't envy her.  This week she's been the victim of photoshopping scum. People who take pictures of her face and put them onto bodies of other people doings things she doesn't approve of.  It's just plain old smear tactics from people who disagree with her political views.  And this is no isolated incident. She takes all kinds of crap all the time that would drive me nuts. 

I'm putting a link below to her blog. If you've never read it, it's a great read. She's insightful, interesting and intelligent.

I've read some articles recently by digital distribution advocates that think that retail is no longer necessary for PC games.

I find that notion ludicrious. Any MAJOR title of note today needs to be at retail. A lot of people won't buy games digitally.  An expansion pack is one thing. But any major title looking to become remotely mainstream still needs to be at Best Buy or EB and GameStop.  Perhaps someday that won't be the case but as long as people can buy their games at their local store, buyers will continue to view games released at retail as being class A and games that are only available on-line as class B (whether fair or not).

To use an analogy, think of digital-only releases being the equivalent to releasing a movie on DVD.  What is the perception about movies that are initially released on DVD instead of theaters?

This past summer, Stardock announced that it was going to start publishing third-party titles.  We would be very selective in this (And we've received dozens of promising games from developers looking for a publisher).  And when we say publisher, we mean selling the game in every channel that gamers might have access to - at the store and digitally.

Where things get confusing are the third-party games that we sell on TotalGaming.net.  We don't publish those games. Those are games that we distribute - a key difference.  Things like TotalGaming.net, Steam, GameTap, etc. are distribution channels.

If I developed a game and my publisher intended to only sell it at one store I would have a real problem with that.  TotalGaming.net is one store of thousands. If you have a game that you are selling on-line, then TotalGaming.net is a great place to put it because we have access to millions of people.  But if we're publishing a game that's a whole different thing.

The only modern PC game we've published is Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords.  That is a game that is currently available (even 8 months after release) at nearly every retailer in North America AND available on-line at places like Amazon.com and countless other places AND available digitally at totalgaming.net.  Our job as a publisher is to make sure gamers can get the game as easy as possible.

Digital distribution is an important tool but it is just one tool in a set for a publisher.

Michael Scheuer, the CIA operative who was in charge of the Bin Laden unit was interviewed this week and was out-right emotional in his assertion that contrary to Bill Clinton's claims on Fox News last week, Clinton did have plenty of opportunities -- 10 actionable ones to be exact -- to kill Bin Laden but chose not to.

In each case, there was a plausible explaination (such as not wanting to risk damaging a Mosque).  But Clinton strenuously argued that he had done "everything in his power" to get Bin Laden whichi s just not true.

So that we're clear: I don't think Clinton really did anything worse than Bush did in his first 8 months.  The problem I have is Clinton's bald-faced attempt to rewrite history as someone who was aggressively fighting terrorists which is flatly untrue.  Bush wasn't aggressive pre-9/11 and neither was Clinton.

Clinton made 4 claims that were discussed on this weekend's news shows:

1) That he did everything in his power to get Bin Laden.  Not true at all. The CIA operatives involved came out this past week (with Michael Scheurer himself being the latest) to state emphatically that that was not true ("A flat out lie" said Scheuer).  "It is a question of fact" said Scheuer. He also was unhappy that the 9/11 commission wouldn't even allow operatives to testify.

2) That he had a "battle plan" drawn up in 1998 to take out the Taliban.   This came as real news to, well everyone. No such battle plan existed. Total on-the-fly fabrication.

3) Claimed that he left a "comprehensive anti-terror strategy". In another thread on JoeUser.com, left-wingers argue that the 14 page position pager that Richard Clarke provided Clinton in 1998 constitutes this comprehensive-anti-terror strategy document. While that demonstrates how far Clinton apologists will go to defend their guy, there was no such comprehensive strategy document or plan put together.  Incidentally, Clinton had rejected that 1998 strategy document.  And for left-wingers who aren't familiar with how this sort of thing works -- units provide the President with policy documents that are typically a dozen or so pages that give a summary of a strategy. If accepted, they are then turned into an actionable plan that typically is hundreds of pages long and outlines how exactly something would be done (THAT is what most knowledgeable people would consider a comprehensive anti-terror strategy).

Bush didn't take terrorism seriously. But Clinton didn't provide anything that a reasonable person would consider comprehensive on what the US should do regarding global-terrorism. 

4) Clinton claimed that Republicans complained that he was "obsessed" with Bin Laden.  Nobody can seem to find any Republicans (and certainly not congressional --read ELECTED Republicans) who said anything that could remotely be construed as Clinton being "obsessed".  Fighting terror was a relatively low priority during Clinton and Bush until 9/11.

I never have felt Clinton was somehow responsible for 9/11.  I didn't begrudge him not getting Bin Laden.  But I DO begrudge him trying to rewrite history to suit his political ends.  During the 9/11 commission I was very unhappy with the political nature of it with people like Sandy Berger (who got caught removing papers) seemingly trying to cover things up.

Clinton was no more responsible for 9/11 than Roosevelt was responsible for Pearl Harbor.  But Clinton apologists need to spare us with the reinvention of history here. Clinton was no terror warrior. 

So what would Windows Vista look like if it were running a Windows XP skin (via WindowBlinds for Windows Vista)?

The horror.  The horror.

(before anyone asks, WindowBlinds for Windows Vista isn't available yet, it'll be on Object Desktop this Fall).

The article I link to below is written by a historian who writes far more eloquently than I can about why conspiracy theories in general and the 9/11 "inside job" conspiracy in particular are annoying to him.

It's definitely worth the read.

For the past few weeks, Stardock and CivFanatics.com have had a contest to come up with some characters to be inserted into the campaign of the upcoming expansion pack to Galactic Civilizations II.

We originally intended to only have 3 best entries.  But we've found that there were so many compelling entries that we increased the number of winning entries to 7. There were several others that were outstanding but we just couldn't figure out a way (or a budget) to insert them into the game.

Below are the winners:

Character: Ragash
Race: Koranth
Originator: Tiavals
Role: Leader of the Korath military forces. Assigned by Kindar to destroy The Dark Avatar.

Character: Sothos the Mnemonarch
Race: Iconian
Originator: Sarx
Role: Data archiver lord of the Iconian Refuge. They have been trying to rebuild the shards of the Precursor libraries to help give them an advantage. They have discovered a technology that allows for resources to be harvested from asteroids and literally beamed as a low frequency energy to a selected world. Sothos is willing to trade this technology to the Drengin's Dark Avatar in exchange for the Drengin protecting the Iconians from the Korath.

Character: Slir Rah'shi
Race: Drath
Orginator: M.B.M.
Role: Commander of the Drath war fleet. He has brought together the clans of the Drath civilization together in an all out defense of their home world. Slir Rah'shi has even managed to convince convince the Altarians to help defend the Drath home world despite their past differences. He has his own long-term agenda, however.

Character: Delta-3
Race: Yor
Originator: Enigma
Role: Delta-3 is the ultimate arms merchant. He will step in and offer help to anyone who needs help if they are losing a war. Delta-3's motives are unclear but there are rumors he may be linked with the Dark Yor.

Character: Lord Vire
Race: Drengin
Originator: Shane Maness
Role: Lord Vires is the main non-player character of Dark Avatar.

Character: James Solon LOcke:
Species: Human
Originator: Arilias
Role: Locke is the leader of the remaining Terran Alliance forces.

Character: Lok'tar
Species: Drengin
Originator: NIGHT HAWK
Role: Lok'tar is your master sabateur who has been sent to aid you in subverting the Korath. The goal would be to defeat the Korath without going to war with them in one of the scenarios.

In some cases, I've made some minor tweaks to the characters in order to fit them into the game.  You can read the full backgrounds of these characters and the other entries HERE.

Thank you to everyone to participated. We will begin contacting the winners next week with regards to their pirzes.

The sheer creativity demonstrated in the contest has inspired us to examing making Dark Avatar an expanded expansion pack (i.e. put in even more features. You can read some of our thinking on that in this thread).

Here is a new screen in which players can now create their own custom opponents.

When you're a game developer, life is easy. Make customers happy. That's pretty much the only thing you have control over.  Few (very few) developers are also their own publishers. And publishers have a very different set of criteria -- making sure the retailers are happy too which may involve contradictory approaches.

Stardock has one thing going for it that most publishers don't -- a mature and popular digital distribution network (TotalGaming.net on the game side). This has helped us keep some leverage. After all, who the heck is Stardock anyway? But because we sell millions of dollars a year in software via our own digital distribution network, we have alternatives.  That is why, for instance, WindowBlinds hasn't been at retail.  For years, various distributors have tried to make us do deals that would be bad for our customers and bad for us but very good for them.  Historically, distributors had all the clout along with the retailers so the developer/publisher pretty much had to accept whatever was offered.  But digital distribution gives us more options.  WindowBlinds, for example, sells more copies -- even today -- than Galactic Civilizations II.  And GalCiv II has sold very well. Well into the six figure range by the end of last June.  So you can imagine how well WindowBlinds sells and that's direct from Stardock.

This brings us to some of the things we want to do.

We want to lower the price of GalCiv II during the Christmas season. That probably sounds insane. But here's the thing, we want new players to feel like they're part of the rest of the community and hence be able to get Dark Avatar when it's available. And we don't want those users to be spending $70 at once.  As a gamer, I can deal with $40 to $50 at once and then $25 to $30 half a year or more later.  But expecting to put up $70 or more at once is too much for me. 

I know of a lot of cool games I've heard about via word of mouth over the years that I didn't end up buying because I wasn't willing to just get the base game when there was an expansion pack out.  Yes, I know I could just live with the regular game and get the expansion later. But I suspect I'm not the only one who feels this way -- if I'm going to get a game, I'm going to get the whole thing.

So now we talk about where the retailers come in.  Retail shelf space is tight.  So one idea was to expand Dark Avatar even further. Put in MORE features than we have listed there. Make it not quite a sequel but far more than a typical expansion pack...

..and then, thanks to digital distribution release the upgrade as the expansion pack digitally so people who bought the original game could get the full new version of GalCiv II at a discount and make the retail version a compilation that includes it all in a single box.  This would make retailers happy and new users happy but it would mean dealying the expansion pack until after Christmas (we'd do an open beta this Fall so people who wanted to start playing it before Christmas could play, it would be "Beta" only in name really, no buggier than a 1.x beta has been which means, some bugs but nothing huge typically).

But doing so brings the question of what to call the new stand alone version? GalCiv II: Gold? GalCiv II: Dark Avatar? There is likely to be some confusion either way.  One of the benefits is that having an expansion pack and compilation version out at the same time would help sales at retail since that's when all the editiorial coverage and advertising would be taking place.  But again, the question returns - what to call the stand alone compilation vs. what to call the expansion pack.

So what got us thinking down this track in the first place? The CivFanatics.com contest. No single entry per se but reading through there just inspired us to want to come up wtih more features to put in. But at a certain point, the features become so long that they're almost a quasi-sequel being made with the same underlying game engine.

We'd love to hear your thoughts...

The 3rd bi-annual GUI Championships are well underway.  Over $12,000 in cash and prizes are being given out to the winners of the contest.

The events are WindowBlinds skins, IconPackager themes, and wallpapers.  There's approximatley 2 weeks left before the IconPackager themes start getting voted on by users. So far, there's only 9 icon packages submitted into the contest giving entries a very good chance for icon artists to win won of the top prizes.

Similarly, with about 3 weeks left before judging on the WindowBlinds skins, only 7 WindowBlinds skins are in so far. 

If you're a graphics designer who ever wanted to try your hand at skins or icons, you can use SkinStudio to make skins and IconDeveloper to make icons and IconPackager to create the icon package.

The home page for the GUI Championships is www.guichamps.com.