His targets? Piracy on the PC platform and dealing with hardware vendors, two factors which make developing for the platform "an uphill slog", are at least partially to blame.

Fitch says that Titan Quest actually did okay. But that's about as positive as his venting gets.

"We didn't lose money on it," he says. "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."

Fitch goes on to lament, "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." He also points to distressing data that "pegs the piracy rate at between 70-85% on PC in the US, 90%+ in Europe, off the charts in Asia."

The whole thing is at parts depressing and enraging, but also worth the read if you didn't catch the link to it in our comments section earlier.

Venting my frustrations with PC game-dev [Quarter To Three Forums]

Best of luck to the Iron Lore folks in the future and thanks to the trio of tipsters who gave us the heads up.

ILE Closes [Iron Lore]

Another game dev has a theory on what's killing PC gaming. This time, it's not Mark Rein spraying mouth foam all over his fellow developers as he channels his inner store of full on crazy to lambast episodic content. It's Brian Sullivan, that Age of Empires guy:

"For retail PC games, I think the biggest problem is World of Warcraft. It is such a compelling MMO game that it sucks up a lot of money and time that would normally be spent on other retail PC games."

I personally don't quite get this: people play WoW obsessively because it's damn good, not simply because it's an MMO. His complaint, then, is that a few games are too good and offer thousands of hours of compelling gameplay are killing a market primarily of boring, short games.

If a few long lasting, imminently playable games are really what's killing PC gaming, good riddance, call me when I can spit on the corpse. Florian Eckhardt

Is WoW factor killing PC gaming? [Guardian Gamesblog]

I can tell you what I'm damn well not going to be playing this weekend. Metroid Prime: Hunters. While the Gamespot review wanks off about the incredibly fluid, intuitive control scheme, my experience is directly opposite: I'm about ready to gouge my stylus through the lower DS screen in frustration.

Who can play a game this way? The stylus works okay as a mouse, but holding the DS in the air with one hand and using the stylus with the other quickly leads to hand cramping. I can balance the DS Lite on my knee, except then, I can't actually see those tiny orbs floating around shooting at me. As near as I can tell, the only comfortable way to play this game is hunched over your DS at a desk, squinting. Unfortunately, I like my portables portable... as in not requiring a stationary flat surface to play on.

So that leaves me pretty much out of ideas. I've been in the mood for a Diablo-like, but unfortunately my torrent of Titan Quest hasn't finished yet. Note to Ironlore's lawyers: just kidding. Actually, I don't really know if it's been released over in Europe yet. All signs point to 'no'. Perhaps it's just time for a Diablo 2 hardcore run. What the hell... it was on sale around the corner for 40 clams. Purchased.

Comment section, people. You know the drill. Florian Eckhardt