You have to take into account there is a huge difference between small indi companies and larger game developers. If you have invested a lot of money up front to make your game. You need to recoup that as quickly as possible (time value of money). You also need to be certain that you have made enough noise compared to all the competing products out there. Your investors will not be happy if you left this very important area to chance. Advertising, PR etc are all hugely expensive, you have to be sure your product will make the biggest splash.

This process costs money. Sure you can do without it but lets face it many games are a bit lame, If there games are launched they will probably only make a fraction of what it would have made with a publisher pushing it for you simply becuse the whole viral thing would not work for you

Did this remind anyone else of the star trek Crystalline entity?

Reading through the comments here I would suggest the following thought experiment.

1.Take an adult stem cell,
2.Regress it to an embryonic state
3.Profit

Or

3.Allow it to differentiate into an egg precursor cell (not sure how this would happen but it must happen because all the eggs in a womanâ(TM)s ovaries come from the same single ball of stem cells)
4.Nurture it into an egg cell
5.Fertilise it
.
7. Profit

So adult stem cells - embryonic stem cells ⦠whatever!

Well, technically, the legality of that would depend on which device you were watching the Simpsons on!

For those intereseted there is small write up with a few pics on the cultural aspects of Shan zhai on:
http://chinayouthology.com/blog/?p=369

Talking to friends in China last week "Shan zhai" anything is a hot word in china now, being applied to mobile phone, fashion, whatever.

While I was there I offered over half a dozen iphone look alikes which can be bought from around 1000 yuan (~£110)

Its not just lopsided its wanton indiscriminate killing.

They know that their activity is resulting in significant civillian deaths and they still carry on using the same methods. If that doesn't make those deaths intentional murder I don't know what does.

TBH both sides are f*"ked up, but the isreli government chose to go in with such force and they chose to sustain a campaign which they knew was killing civillians. This makes them just a bunch of dickheads. Personaly I have stopped buying anything made there... suggest you do the same

Yes ....I get tired of repeating this, but you could just swap out the whole power pack in less time than it would take to fill the tank.

Gas/oil prone sediments are buried to a depth where they cook and release Oil and Gas. The volumes created are huge, only a tiny fraction of that becomes trapped under the earth in what we would call oil/gas deposits. A large proportion of the remainder simply vents to the atmosphere through faults. Major seismic events, mountain building etc may release big volumes and may be one mechanisem for paleowarming (the big warming events we have seen in the past).

On another note the palegeological maps which you can get for windworld give a nice view on how much the world has changed since most of these oil/gas prone rocks where deposited