I offend people. Often. Daily. It's not that I'm a jerk.  Well, I might be a jerk but I don't think of myself as a jerk. Not a big jerk anyway. The problem is within my fingers. They move fast. Very fast.

You see, I type 120 words per minute. Busy hands. And I have a lot of opinions on a lot of things. Many things I don't worry too much about but I like writing about them anyway. I care. I just don't care care. A couple weeks ago, I wrote about Dashboard vs. Konfabulator. It's not that I care that much on that issue.  But I do find it interesting enough to write about. And people who read it couldn't figure out why I was so "pissed off" about this issue.  I wasn't. I just find that sort of thing really interesting.  I also wrote about the shareware industry awards. I got emails accusing me of having "sour grapes" syndrome because we didn't win. I failed in their cases to communicate my point which wasn't about us winning or losing but rather the nature of these kinds of "awards" (if I was going to be ticked off, I would have been ticked off every year for the past several years where we didn't even get nominated despite having millions of users of our "shareware").

The problem comes in that I don't always (okay, I don't usually) read over what I've typed.  I just whip it out and post it. And because written communication requires some precision, the wrong choice of wording can really alter the entire thrust of your conversation. Being too direct or too candid can come across as obnoxious, offensive, whiney, etc. 

The second problem is length.  If the average decent typer can go at 40 words per minute and I can type 120 words per minute that means that my articles will be 3 times longer given the same amount of time.  And if you don't go back and edit what you've written, your article can sound like a long whiney rant. Why? Because most people attribute length of an article to how much they "care" about the subject matter.  So if my article is twice or three times the length of what is expected, one might assume that this is a very serious issue that I've spent a lot of time thinking about.  In reality, longer articles often are the ones that I've just written as fast as I can based on what springs to mind. 

The combination of rushed writing and lengthy articles leads to disaster. It used to be worse when I hadn't written as much.  In my OS/2 days, my writing could manage to offend even sympathetic readers. Diplomatic writing takes time (and experience). When I was younger I didn't spend the time nor have the experience.  Now, I just lack the time usually.

At the end of the day, I'm just a guy on the net writing about stuff.  Stuff that I find interesting.  Those who know me would tell you that I'm pretty light hearted.  I don't get mad often and have a lot more similarities to Chandler than Darth Vader.  But the written word...ah the trickiness of communicating on-line. That I haven't quite got the handle on yet.

Have you ever heard the phrase "I care...but I don't care care."  If you have, please bear that in mind as you read this blog.

The Shareware Industry Conference had its awards last week.  If Len Gray, author of the excellent Microangelo, hadn't told me that WindowBlinds had been nominated last month for best "Desktop enhancement" I wouldn't have even known about it. It's not that I'm not interested in the shareware world. It's just that we've been around long enough to know that these various "awards" programs tend to be little more than a club of old guard developers who pick other club members to give awards to without any sort of recognition of the wider world out there.

For instance, for best desktop enhancement they had two icon creation utilities, WindowBlinds, and a screen saver. That's it.  Let's ignore, for a moment, that icon editors are not generally considered desktop enhancements (and that they had two graphics editing utility categories already that they could have gone in).  And let's ignore all the other Stardock desktop enhancements (on Download.com Stardock has 5 of the top 6 positions).  What about Samurize? What about 3DNA Desktop? What about WinStep? What about Hoverdesk? What about Rainlendar? None of these types of programs have ever been nominated. 

And this sort of provincialism isn't just in desktop enhancements. It's hit in miss in all the other categories too.  The more you look, the worse it gets.

You can almost imagine a group of a couple dozen guys who have a very fragmented level of knowledge on the wider software world. They get together and pop off the apps that they're familiar with.  No research, just what they know off the top of their heads.

That's how you can imagine programs like mIRC and WinZip (which won best OVERALL) still dominating something like this in 2004. Maybe they hadn't heard that ZIP is included with Windows and has been for some time (it's hard to believe but Windows XP is now 3 years old).

I like mIRC but let's face it, it's not exactly been evolving. It's the same program today essentially that it was in 1999. I can name a bunch of really new and popular such programs (we use Ventrilo here) that are really innovating in the area of communications.  At least Trillian won that category.

It's no surprise that WindowBlinds didn't win (Microangelo Creator won "best desktop enhancement").  I hadn't expected WindowBlinds to win for the reasons I just mentioned (which was one reason I didn't bother to announce the nomination).  And I'm glad that Microangelo won and not say the screen saver.  But come on, why bother even having a desktop enhancements category if you can only find one desktop enhancement to include? It's not an obscure category.

Let me be clear, I don't have a problem with Shareware organizations. I just think it's a little cheeky when they start giving out "shareware industry awards" that are essentially just awards to their buddies they know about.

See here's the thing, because they've been giving out these awards for so many years they now have credibility. So when they give out these awards, they get covered in places like PC Magazine, ZDNet, CNet, etc. And it doesn't take a lot of research to realize that these guys aren't really serious.

They nominate the same apps year after year as if they're living in 1996.

 Look for yourself:

2000 Winners:  Link
2001 Winners:  Link
2002 Winners:  Link
2003 Winners:  Link
2004 Winners:  Link

Let me illustrate it plainly:
2000 nominee for best Internet utility: FTP Voyager
2004 nominee for best internet utility: FTP Voyager

Apparently not much has happened with that whole Internet thing since the last millenium.

If they were just representing them and their friends, that's fine. But when they represent themselves as the "whole industry" then it just gets absurd.

One can almost envision the awards as traveling back to a distant world where it's 1996 forever.  The land where Paint Shop Pro is the only graphics utility program. For in 2004, they only had 3 nominees for back graphics utility.

I guess there hasn't been much progress in graphics packages in the past decade. Forget PMView, ACDSee, Ulead, Snagit, Konvertor, FaceLifter. They apparently hadn't heard of those programs. I'm not even a graphics guy and I'm familiar with these programs.

Like I said, I care, but I don't care care about this. I wrote a shorter version of this on WinCustomize and someone thought I was really ticked off.  I'm not.  Winning the PC Magazine Editor's Choice award matters.  Being in Newsweek today is a help.  A shareware awards thing isn't a big deal. It just tingles my "fairness" bone a bit because I talk to shareware authors all the time where the recognition of something like this would make a different. 

These awards make no difference to us. At least in 2004.  But a legitimate shareware awards program back in 2000 would have been bloody helpful. And not just to us. And it would still be useful today to struggling shareware authors who work hard to put out neat things that go totally unrecognized because their first release wasn't in the Windows 3.0 era. Jorge at WinStep could use this kind of publicity. 

I don't want to make it sound like these or other similar awards are run by bad guys. Every person I've ever met associated with any of these programs has a heart of gold. I think they're great guys. I just think they've gotten so complacent that they're not really following the shareware industry today.

If you're going to present yourself to be some industry authority, it would probably be useful to check out what's going on outside the clubhouse.

It figures the first time I get quoted in Newsweek it would be the issue with Steve Jobs on the front.  His big mug glaring at me for all eternity as a constant reminder that even as software companies go, we're small potatoes. But still, it's pretty cool to be in Newsweek because of something we made as opposed to something we did!

But still, definitely pretty cool to get into Newsweek with my name mentioned and quote and all. 

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.

It figures the first time I get quoted in Newsweek it would be the issue with Steve Jobs on the front.  His big mug glaring at me for all eternity as a constant reminder that even as software companies go, we're small potatoes. But still, it's pretty cool to be in Newsweek because of something we made as opposed to something we did! As they say, it's an honor to be in there at all.

Speaking of "honors",  The Shareware Industry Conference had its awards last week.

Have you ever heard the phrase "I care...but I don't care care."  If you have, please bear that in mind as you read this part.

If Len Gray, author of the excellent Microangelo, hadn't told me that WindowBlinds had been nominated last month for best "Desktop enhancement" I wouldn't have even known about it. It's not that I'm not interested in the shareware world. It's just that we've been around long enough to know that these various "awards" programs tend to be little more than a club of old guard developers who pick other club members to give awards to without any sort of recognition of the wider world out there.

For instance, for best desktop enhancement they had two icon creation utilities, WindowBlinds, and a screen saver. That's it.  Let's ignore, for a moment, that icon editors are not generally considered desktop enhancements (and that they had two graphics editing utility categories already that they could have gone in).  And let's ignore all the other Stardock desktop enhancements (on Download.com Stardock has 5 of the top 6 positions).  What about Samurize? What about 3DNA Desktop? What about WinStep? What about Hoverdesk? What about Rainlendar? None of these types of programs have ever been nominated. 

And this sort of provincialism isn't just in desktop enhancements. It's hit in miss in all the other categories too.  The more you look, the worse it gets.

You can almost imagine a group of a couple dozen guys who have a very fragmented level of knowledge on the wider software world. They get together and pop off the apps that they're familiar with.  No research, just what they know off the top of their heads.

That's how you can imagine programs like mIRC and WinZip (which won best OVERALL) still dominating something like this in 2004. Maybe they hadn't heard that ZIP is included with Windows and has been for some time (it's hard to believe but Windows XP is now 3 years old).

I like mIRC but let's face it, it's not exactly been evolving. It's the same program today essentially that it was in 1999. I can name a bunch of really new and popular such programs (we use Ventrilo here) that are really innovating in the area of communications.  At least Trillian won that category.

It's no surprise that WindowBlinds didn't win (Microangelo Creator won "best desktop enhancement").  I hadn't expected WindowBlinds to win for the reasons I just mentioned (which was one reason I didn't bother to announce the nomination).  And I'm glad that Microangelo won and not say the screen saver.  But come on, why bother even having a desktop enhancements category if you can only find one desktop enhancement to include? It's not an obscure category.

Let me be clear, I don't have a problem with Shareware organizations. I just think it's a little cheeky when they start giving out "shareware industry awards" that are essentially just awards to their buddies they know about.

See here's the thing, because they've been giving out these awards for so many years they now have credibility. So when they give out these awards, they get covered in places like PC Magazine, ZDNet, CNet, etc. And it doesn't take a lot of research to realize that these guys aren't really serious.

They nominate the same apps year after year as if they're living in 1996.

 Look for yourself:

2000 Winners:  Link
2001 Winners:  Link
2002 Winners:  Link
2003 Winners:  Link
2004 Winners:  Link

Let me illustrate it plainly:
2000 nominee for best Internet utility: FTP Voyager
2004 nominee for best internet utility: FTP Voyager

Apparently not much has happened with that whole Internet thing since the last millenium.

And this is just par for the course.  It's the same apps from the same tiny pool year after year.  Heck, Micrangelo won in 2000! Has new software been released since 2000?

If they were just representing them and their friends, that's fine. But when they represent themselves as the "whole industry" then it just gets absurd.

One can almost envision the awards as traveling back to a distant world where it's 1996 forever.  The land where Paint Shop Pro is the only graphics utility program. For in 2004, they only had 3 nominees for back graphics utility.

I guess there hasn't been much progress in graphics packages in the past decade. Forget PMView, ACDSee, Ulead, Snagit, Konvertor, FaceLifter. They apparently hadn't heard of those programs. I'm not even a graphics guy and I'm familiar with these programs.

Like I said, I care, but I don't care care about this. I wrote a shorter version of this on WinCustomize and someone thought I was really ticked off.  I'm not.  Winning the PC Magazine Editor's Choice award matters.  Being in Newsweek today is a help.  A shareware awards thing isn't a big deal. It just tingles my "fairness" bone a bit because I talk to shareware authors all the time where the recognition of something like this would make a different. 

These awards make no difference to us. At least in 2004.  But a legitimate shareware awards program back in 2000 would have been bloody helpful. And not just to us. And it would still be useful today to struggling shareware authors who work hard to put out neat things that go totally unrecognized because their first release wasn't in the Windows 3.0 era. Jorge at WinStep could use this kind of publicity. 

I don't want to make it sound like these or other similar awards are run by bad guys. Every person I've ever met associated with any of these programs has a heart of gold. I think they're great guys. I just think they've gotten so complacent that they're not really following the shareware industry today.

If you're going to present yourself to be some industry authority, it would probably be useful to check out what's going on outside the clubhouse.

And so it begins...

People have long talked about the day when we would just be able to buy a retail-level game and be able to download it right then and there.  And for the past two years, Stardock has allowed its customers to purchase and download Stardock's retail titles via Drengin.net.  But the challenge was how to expand those titles beyond the Stardock titles?  How to convince independent developers and publishers to put their titles for available on-line -- especially since revenue, at the start, will be relatively small.

There is still a real concern in the PC game industry over piracy.  I've written before that I believe piracy is overstated. And that was on new titles.  On electronic distribution, your target audience has plenty of opportunity to pirate long before they've logged onto your service.  So our view has been to try to make it as easy and convenient as possible for them to legally purchase the games.

And hence, we now have TotalGaming.net!

We've got a pretty good line-up of games to start with:

• Galactic Civilizations
• Galactic Civilizations: Altarian Prophecy
• The Political Machine
• The Corporate Machine
• Celtic Kings
• O.R.B.
• Disciples II: Ultimate Edition
• And a couple of smaller games.

If you were to buy these games on their own, even at "bargain bin" prices you would still be paying around $150 whereas a TotalGaming.net subscription is only $89. But these aren't the only games you'd get.  TotalGaming.net also gives you access to all the games we add for an entire year.  And we will be adding 4 more retail games to the mix by end of the year (one per month) so assuming each of those games is worth say only $20 (list price on them is higher than that but for the sake of argument we're going to say that someone went bargain bin hunting) you'd be up over $200 easily.

That said, TotalGaming.net's point isn't "get games cheap".  The fact that it's a good deal is just side-effect of the lower overhead involved in electronic distribution.  We think the real point of TotalGaming.net is "get games conveniently".  You can purchase just a single game or buy a subscription to the whole thing. It's up to you. Then just press a button and voila.

We think there are 5 major advantages to TotalGaming.net's system over other electronic distribution concepts emerging:

1) No copy protection, no wrappers, no digital rights management, no nonsense.   This has been the biggest challenge we've had thus far in getting new content onto it.  We've been able to convince a number of publishers so far and we think this will grow as its success becomes apparent.  Our view is simple: Warez people are generally going after "0 day warez".  Other than Stardock titles which are on there from the start, our strategy with the top publishers is to try to bring new life to games that are at the end of their retail lifespan (which is typically 6 months).  The demand for pirating those games just isn't there. So why hassle paying customers with limitations and copy protection? Let them download the game and use it however they want. If they get a new machine, let them put it on there. If they want to put it on their laptop to play on a trip, no problem.

2) No renting, you're buying games.  While most of the emerging electronic distribution models are talking about having hundreds of games, they also want to charge $15 per month.  The problem with that is that a person can only play one game at a time.  So even if your selection is 5,000 games (which none of them are) what good is that? At the end of the day, you're still paying $15 per month per game.  And if you stop paying, the game is gone.  With TotalGaming.net, it's yours. Forever.  You lose your game due to a hard drive crash in 2006? No problem. Just redownload it from TotalGaming.net.

3) Smart Downloading.  On paper, downloading games sounds like a great idea.  Then the idea hits the real world - games are huge nowadays.  Only TotalGaming.net has smart downloading.  We've broken up the games into pieces.  We've figured out how many megabytes you really need to play the game and made that a module.  So for example, in Galactic Civilizations, you only have to download something like 50 megabytes in order start playing.  The other 500 megabytes you can get later.  We've applied this to the other games as well.  Lots of games are perfectly playable with only a hundred or so megabytes with the other gigabyte of movies, music, etc. being optionally downloaded later.  This lets dial-up users participate and makes the whole thing more approachable.

4) Experience.  We've been doing electronic distribution for half a decade now.  We know how to do it. We have the infrastructure in place.  Not just bandwidth (one cable modem user last night was talking about their 400K per second download speeds from TotalGaming.net) but account management, secure transactions, community features. Etc.  These things all come together in hundreds of small but important ways.  It probably doesn't hurt that we're game developers as well of award-winning games.  We could have had a lot more games on TotalGaming.net if we just let any retail title submitted be put on.  But we're trying to focus on titles we think our users will like. That doesn't mean big games only (we added BaseGolf for instance which is a small fun little game). But the quality has got to be there. But it's experience as gamers ourselves that lets us recognize that many users would not be trilled about having to download some gigabyte sized game over the course of a couple of days only to have to delete it at the end of the month or continually pay fees. Someone who's downloaded a gigabyte game they've paid for is going to expect to have it as long as they want without recurring fees.

5) Unique content.  Because Stardock's games show up on TotalGaming.net starting in beta, our users can help mold the games from the start rather than the typical scenario where the game comes out and users have to rally the developer for a "patch" to make the game better.  The benefits are pretty obvious -- look how well Galactic Civilizations turned out.  It was beta testers who came up with ideas such as the star bases and interstellar resources. 

The million-dollar question (literally) is whether PC gaming is ready for all this. Retail sales of PC games have declined in the past year as more and more gamers move to on-line games. Are those same on-line gamers ready to purchase games on-line? Only time will tell.

Let me know what you think. Visit www.totalgaming.net to see what it's all about.

Livonia MI – July 20, 2004. Stardock Entertainment, best known for its award-winning PC strategy games such as The Political Machine and Galactic Civilizations launched a new gaming network today called TotalGaming.net.

TotalGaming.net allows users to purchase PC games and immediately download them individually or as part of a subscription.  Users obtain the games through a powerful yet easy to use program called Stardock Central.

“This is the closest thing I’ve seen to iTunes for Games,” said Alex Bradley, a game reviewer on JoeUser.com. “You just select the game you want, press a button and in a few minutes you have it ready to play.”

Stardock was one of the first companies to deliver software content electronically through a subscription model. Its popular Object Desktop suite of desktop enhancements was launched in 1999 and has over a million users today. Object Desktop technology is used by Microsoft, nVidia, ATI, Alienware, Nintendo, Goodyear, and hundreds of other companies.

“For us, TotalGaming.net is a natural next step,” said Brad Wardell, President and CEO of Stardock Corporation. “We’ve had great success with our non-game products being delivered this way.  And we’ve been testing this concept on a smaller scale with our own games via Drengin.net which TotalGaming.net is succeeding. We’ve found that people who buy software on-line don’t want to have to mess with copy protection or Digital Rights Management or ‘wrappers’ or renting schemes or what have you. They want to be able to buy the games and not have to deal with any hassles.”

While users can purchase games individually, Stardock expects the real appeal of TotalGaming.net to be in the subscription. For $89, users receive a host of good games plus everything added to TotalGaming.net for an entire year afterwards.

For the initial launch, Stardock has put together an impressive list of games that will be available on day one, such as Galactic Civilizations, Celtic Kings, Orb, The Corporate Machine, LightWeight Ninja, and a new compilation of Disciples II called Disciples II Ultimate Edition, which integrates all of the latest expansion packs for that popular game into a single entity.  Stardock then plans to add a new game each month for the rest of the year starting with The Political Machine in August.  TotalGaming.net users also get access to the latest Stardock betas such as the beta of Galactic Civilizations II which is due to show up this January. 

Any game released on TotalGaming.net during the time the user is a subscriber is theirs.  Even if they choose not to re-subscribe, they can still re-download the entire game years later.

“Stardock feels that the biggest barrier to entry on electronic distribution is the concern that if the user changes computers or loses their game they won’t be able to play it anymore.  With TotalGaming.net, that’s not a concern. Even if someone chooses not to re-subscribe, they can still re-download the game years later.  All you need is your TotalGaming.net serial #. And if you lose that, no problem, the system can automatically email it to you,” said Wardell.

What users won’t see are claims about quantity of games. Of the hundreds of games submitted to Stardock for inclusion on TotalGaming.net, only a small number have been slated for inclusion.

“We don’t want users having to sift through mediocre games. If the game is a new game from an independent developer, we’ll put it through our evaluation process. If it’s a game that’s already been released, we’ll look at reviews on sites like Gamespot.com and Gamespy and GameRankings.com to see what kinds of magazine reviews and user reviews the game has received,” said Wardell.

For gaming content, Stardock is talking to both independent game developers as well as to the top publishers.

“There are some great games that have been released that, once they leave the store shelves, they might as well not exist. One of the things we’re doing is talking to publishers and showing them that there’s a way to continue to generate revenue from their titles even after release.  I suspect I’m not the only one who can think of many great games that would still be great today that you just can’t easily get.  What we want to do is take some of these classics, integrate all the fixes, enhancements, expansion packs, etc., and make them available for gamers, ” said Wardell.

TotalGaming.net’s home page is http://www.totalgaming.net.  It is $89 for the first year and $50 for subsequent years. More information and screenshots can be found on the TotalGaming website. Individual games can be purchased as well with pricing between $10 to $50 depending on the title.

TotalGaming.net

Individual games sell for between $9 and $50

TotalGaming.net subscription is $89 for the first year and $50 for subsequent years.

All games released on TotalGaming.net remain accessible to the user permanently even if their subscription expires.

Home page: http://www.totalgaming.net

What's fixed / new

The retail version of The Political Machine is going to probably go for around $19.95 whereas the version purchased here is $29.95.  What gives you might ask.

The version sold from here will include the Political Operatives Kit.  That includes: The Issue Editor and the TV Interview Creator.  So you'll be able to greatly expand the game. You will also have the ability, starting January 1, 2005, to redownload the whole game electronically. So that even if you lose your CD or whatever, years from now you'll still be able to just click a few buttons and have the game.

We will have a way for people who are purchasing at retail to get the Political Operatives Kit / Download Access for a $10 upgrade fee soon.