I applaud Tim Holman.

The last PC game I bought was UT 2004, and I've not upgraded my PC since. I've a 360 and a PS2, and my PC runs everything I need at a 2003-5 spec.

Now, this has effectively locked my out of the PC games market, unless I spend £300-£500 upgrading my motherboard, CPU, memory and graphics card.

Not going to happen. I'm older, with too many other things to spend money on.

I have massive hard drives, and 1Gb RAM is fine for my desktop use for the time being. I'm a system admin, so I optimise my system to run very well in XP with 1Gb RAM.

I don't need to upgrade, my A-I-W card is fantastic for MPEG-2/4 video capture, so what am I upgrading for? To play badly optimised, glitchy games that freeze my system? There's nothing else apart from iTunes that demands an upgrade, so the game developers are shooting themselves in the foot.

I'm a big gamer, but maybe I'll buy another PC game in the next 3 years, when I can play Burnout Paradise and GTA IV on a cheap system.

Their loss.

Fantastic article - and very true.

I have a career, and although I was hardcore as a young teen, I have no time to continually repeat sections in games with silly controls or ridiculous punishing difficulty spikes.

Keep the normal and higher difficulty levels for those that want them, and for my second playthrough, but make sure that there's a mode that allows me to play a game through to its completion without giving up due to games begin designed for lifeless geeks only.

I don't have time to play 20hr games in 1-2 weeks, and if I continually fail to see the end of games as happened during the last gen, and is happening now, then my full-price purchases will drop and I'll simply buy preowneds at less than £20 each.

Not great for the charts or the game sales, considering I'm one of the big money game spenders that the industry needs to keep.

double post

Don't you realise that you're saying the same thing as me?

People don't like UMDs, so they hack the console and rip the games to memory stick.

They also gain the ability to run hundreds more games.

This in turn reduces the number of games bought, as many more games are traded in.

Preowned sales are affecting the developers profit, as are poor reviews for broken games due to the console's controls.

Game development slows, more people unlock the console to play emulators. Vicious cycle.

The Japs have Arcades, so they've nothing to complain about!