You can still vote with a silver account, you just have to vote on a 360 rather than the website. I would rather they restrict votes to accounts that have at least tried the demo, but this is better than nothing.

Uh oh! I guess I shouldn't bug my wife about the smoking then! Thanks for the tip!

Would you rather have 5050 people playing your game, or only 50? You can't assume that just because 5000 people P2P'd your work that you lost those people as sold customers. To be fair, the number of real customers would be between the 50 and 5000, but probably much closer to the former than the latter.

Anyway, you should create your game because you WANT to create your game. There's no guarantee that even 50 people will buy it much less 5000.

If you want guaranteed funds, you need to provide a service instead of a product. Otherwise it's just a gamble.

I guess it all depends on what he means by "scanning char fields". What I imagined was a single field called Status with many values in it:

"status1, status2, status3"

Obviously a case of a denormalization, though it wouldn't be too bad if you didn't have to search based on these values as they would return quickly. Still, makes me a little queasy just to look at it.

If he's talking about a column with a single char value vs a column with a single numerical value, then I don't see his point either.