Counting PC Gamers

There has never been a better time to work out how many PC gamers are out there buying new hardware each year.

Coming up for a decade ago we knew that around 90% of motherboards shipped with integrated graphics, back before CPUs gave up an area of their die for an iGPU.  But they were also quite crappy a lot of the time and lacked the ports and performance, even for 2D sometimes, to be useful.  Just as motherboard audio was often looked down on as no good, even if you didn't play games then a discrete GPU wasn't the worst of ideas.

But something changed.  Just as with motherboard audio, combined in that case with the Vista driver changes that killed hardware audio acceleration, the floor kept rising and soon there was not a lot of reason to buy your own discrete AIB (add-in board).  We are now at a point where the integrated graphics, now on the CPU rather than the motherboard chipset, are everywhere and good enough.  Intel and AMD are even starting to push the claim that if you enjoy some 3D games then you'll still be able to just buy a single clip from them so before their claims hold too much water we are given an interesting opportunity to get some rough idea of how many new or refurbished gaming PCs are being purchased every year.

Luckily Intel and AMD have helped us out, because if you're not gaming then you don't need an AIB (discrete card GPU) or a laptop with an nVidia chip in (AMD also bundle their CPUs in the numbers so I'm ignoring them - nVidia numbers come with a percentage of discrete laptop GPU market indicator from which you can extract the real AMD numbers).  There isn't even really a super-low end, not for discrete GPUs, because the rising performance of iGPUs that come with every CPU you buy has killed the market.  There are not 115m AIB sales like there were in 1999 (seems to be the peak, also about the time more chipsets started integrating a graphics option on some motherboards) but almost all the ones that are left are for gaming systems.

We should have a rough idea of where the other major market is.  Consoles, both home and portable.  The market leading console can sometimes sell ~20m a years, which is how we get one or two consoles that break well over 100m global sales over their (previously somewhat limited for time in the Sun as the primary device) lifetime.  Everyone else (at least in recent times, where there has been no clear loser) is getting closer to 10m sales a year (but you give sales from 2005-2013 and you get your 75-80m units that press releases from Sony and MS point to).

How does the PC platform stack up against that, in what we think is the last couple of years of some pretty good pickings for extracting only the 'gaming was a feature request' sales?  You see about 35-40m nVidia desktop GPUs sold each year.  AMD is more like 25m.  That's still getting on for as many dedicated gaming cards in a year as there have been 360s sold since sometime in 2006.  But if you consider the 50 million nVidia mobile GPUs and 20m AMD discrete units then we're not even playing in the same ballpark.  There are almost certainly more gaming PCs sold every year (consistent for at least a while, much harder to get an impression of sales when I can't be assured people didn't need to buy a GPU to make a complete PC and so it becomes real murky to estimate gaming PCs more than a few years ago) than there have been console devices of a single platform in play at any one time.  Only the lifetime PS2 and DS sales even poke their head above the ~100m ceiling to possibly eclipse PC dedicated GPU sales for a single year and with the hardware revisions, and expected lifetime, and known element failure rates (which don't really count for GPUs that are all within year 1 of the warranty) then how many of those were actually in any state to be used to play games by the end when the sales total reaches that high?

Lost, broken, sitting on the shelf at a used store, in the cupboard.  That doesn't sound like the fate of many GPUs purchased in that year but a 6+ year old console (one of many iterations and colours) may have a significant hit to how many are really in the wild.  I'd be pretty confident that annual gaming PC sales is significantly larger than the combined console market and that probably has been true for a long time.  And unlike mobile sales, where you don't really know how many people want a phone and how many want a gaming platform with benefits, the current market segmentation means you're throwing money away for an identical product for your needs if you don't buy that discrete GPU because you at least know you'll want the option of gaming.  Maybe you don't realise your 10 year old games will run just fine on the CPU's iGPU today but I'm still going to count that as a gamer worth counting.  They're buying the gaming hardware.  Just like a cinephile might have purchased a PS3 for the cheap access to a good HD movie player, or in today's market maybe a crazy person purchased a Netflix box rather than buying a $50 Android or similar device for the same purpose.

I hadn't seen it actually laid out, with a reasonably coherent argument for how the current market actually makes it pretty easy to count likely PC gamers.  The numbers are more analyst report averages (GPU makers don't seem to publish chip volumes, only financials) but do roughly tie into where I was expecting and a vague idea of revenues (and the comparative volumes sold at each price tier).  I don't think they're going to be off by enough for it to matter (even if you halve the GPU numbers you're still looking at quite a gap to the next nearest platform adding new units).  When we talk about how well PC gaming does (is it dead, is it reborn, can it never truly die, is it going mobile tomorrow?), the only real question is how many gamers we can convert to the insatiable console appetite for a high attach ratio (several games per year habit, and paying for them at retail for the tracking to work) to make the software side explode into being more important than consoles.  In terms of hardware then the consoles are the amusing iOS minnow to the Android shark, lots of noise and software sales but very few units out there globally when you look at the competition.  And when I started writing this post I had no idea I was going to end on that apt comparison to another closed platform that can make far more PR and software sales via the mandated single store but not nearly the hardware sales volume of the open platform it competes with.

An Objective Review of The Stanley Parable

I have decided to do my bit for the forwarding of the cause for the proliferation of objective reviews of interactive media content by providing a review of The Stanley Parable.

This will provide readers with a useful method of deciding if The Stanley Parable if worth investing their time and money in.  It will avoid all the wishy washy ideas of subjective analysis and simply provide you, the reader, with what you need.

You will, at the end of this process, be capable of making an informed choice based not on a demo that fails to show any game content but via my exploration of the game, as it exists.

As this game is a non-linear progression through a narrated experience I have decided to log how I saw the game through a series of progressive snapshots of the game.  Please respect the spoiler warnings I have had to use in some places and not hover to uncover them unless you have already purchased and completed the game.

The full gallery, including the spoiler tagged images, will provide people who wish to have a walk-through with the most direct way of experiencing the game, as it exists.  This includes a meticulously detailed path to the best ending.

Now please click through and explore my review of The Stanley Parable.

Click here to continue.



After taking in that gallery, you have concluded exploring my review.

I am sure you are now ready to make that important purchasing decision.


Edit, Dec. 2013: Steam currently automatically expires spoiler tags from screenshots after 4 weeks. This has kinda ruined the joke of this post when you follow the various links to the gallery.

Logitech Gaming Software, meet nVidia GeForce hardware

This may also affect AMD and even Intel users (if this affects integrated graphics which is sharing a power budget with your CPU then it'll be making your desktop less responsive rather than just wasting power making your PC louder and hotter than it needs to be) but I'm describing it as it happens on my system. My Google-fu didn't throw up someone complaining about it so hopefully this'll get search engine tagged for other to find (as the chances of bug reports sent to the companies involved ever getting acted upon is ~0%); if you use Logitech Gaming Software (currently version 8.46.27) with a modern nVidia GeForce GPU (current drivers are 320.49) then your computer may be running too hot when at the desktop and so wasting power and generating unwanted heat.

With modern GPUs the dynamic clock speed and power use of the card can vary quite dramatically. The GTX760 I have here clocks down to 135MHz core and 650MHz RAM when idle at the desktop. The base GPU clock (before it uses boost bins to get to 1.2GHz when extra power and thermals allow) is 1072MHz and the RAM clocks to 7GHz when called to offer fast 3D performance. As you can imagine, that extra power comes with extra energy use and that means the fans crank up to make the system louder, the electricity bills go up ever so slightly, and everything runs warmer than it maybe needs to be in desktop mode.

The problem with using the Logitech mouse drivers (to set fast updates down the USB cable, sensor DPI, and assign extra buttons to what you want if a game can't see the buttons with their default assignment) is the default setting to the right (which starts out selected) to hardware accelerate the interface. At least with my more recent nVidia GPU and the current GeForce drivers then this option to use hardware acceleration seems to always bind and request resources to render the UI, even when the window is closed and only the notification icon remains. To render the picture of a mouse, the Logitech software seems to hook into the nVidia driver (possibly asking for an OpenGL accelerated surface, maybe it is Direct3D) and this fools the driver into thinking it is being asked to render something for a game. That nice low idle rate (more than enough grunt to render the Aero Windows interface with the limited GPU acceleration Windows asks of a card for this mainly 2D work) is disabled as the card clocks up to full RAM speed and full base clock on the GPU, North of 1GHz. Possibly the Logitech software is failing to put a framerate cap on the surface it calls so is actually thrashing the card to redraw the mouse over and over or maybe the nVidia setting for idling at low power only gets maintained when the only work it is being asked to do is things it knows Windows asks for. Either way, this is not software, drivers, and hardware working together as intended.

Disabling this option seems to fix everything. The Logitech driver falls back on drawing a few textures to the window with standard Windows UI API calls and the nVidia driver goes back to thinking it is just sitting at the desktop and no games are asking for an accelerated surface that means it need to clock up and render as many frames as possible. The GPU and RAM are clocked down at almost 10% frequency and the fan goes back to the lowest speed (an almost inaudible 30%).

If you're running a graphics card from the last few years (even a 4 year old card will clock down somewhat but in recent years AMD and nVidia have really pushed to get lower idling speeds which use very little power on the desktop) and have some Logitech peripherals that mean you run their Logitech Gaming Software then I strongly recommend you disable this hardware acceleration setting for peace of mind.

How to Make & Sell Software Without Going to Hell

There can be a lot of legal and ethical issues with the production, sale, and protection of digital goods (which have near zero duplication cost so the payment for a copy is a return on the development investment and not really about paying for the cost of making the copy).  Here is an outline that has evolved as an intranet document for the last few years providing some guidance to making a fair deal with users, developers, and investors.

This is very much a work in progress document that has gone under several major revisions, is not written in a consistent style, and could easily have flaws in the logic that it argues as a unified approach to software sales in this era of global and digital distribution.  Expect future revisions from time to time, which will be flagged as such.  Now seems as good a time as any to expose it to the critical light of day.

Respect for the users

Software is being executed on the user's hardware.  Our code is a guest on their system.  Through this lens the obligations of the developer are clear and unacceptable behaviour stands out far more starkly against a background where major developers have lost sight of this fact.

Customers are being sold content, that is the personal license to all the copyrighted works involved and without limitation on their freedoms within the overall restrictions that copyright involves (to limit further duplication).  Users cannot duplicate content for others, especially for sale, but spending time and effort restricting their right to play with the copy they now own is wrong-headed.

Enabling users to express this freedom to tinker with the copy they own without impairment includes distribution of our source code with every sale (not to be redistributed to non-owners, same as all other content sold in the package).  No DRM or online activation should prevent the user from accessing their copy of the software.  No End User License Agreement (EULA) needs to be signed for use of our software.

Added 1/11/13: A personal license (if one is required by the local laws) to duplicate the content sold for personal, private use is required to enable the previous two clauses to work.  The access to source code is no use without, at minimum, the ability to create a translated duplicate via compilation.  This freedom does not provide license to duplicate work for others who do not hold their own license to the material (via purchase of our software).

Copyright was not designed to operate how it currently does.  We will release titles with a clear expiry date of copyright at which point it will transfer to the public domain for easier reuse and remixing into the wider culture without the need to show fair use.  We will also attach an upper bound price to the effort that created the work, if this return is realised (after taxes) then the work will be released to the public domain before the expiry date.

We will always try to balance the rights of our customers when it comes to creation of derivative works (and the line between this and uncopyrightable ideas that may be freely reused) and protecting fair use vs the defence of our copyrights to avoid improper monetisation and distribution of our work.  In cases such as online streaming and screenshot photography we believe in most cases this is a clear fair use (generating a transformative derivative work which justifies a fair use defence) and even if not the slight monetisation of ad supported streaming is not something any developer should ever try to limit.

Edited 5/8/16: We certainly allow any customers to stream out their experience of our software, including on monetised streams such as competitive gaming and ad-supported "let's play"s as a derivative work for which the creators should also claim their own copyright to protect their work.  We would request creators contact us before fully commercialising (via, for example, digital or disc sales of footage) a derivative work so we can agree that the bar for fair use is being crossed and can provide legal clarity & security to their IP via any free license.

Users should be invited into the community spirit of submitting patches to progress the main software for all owners and offering up modifications (mods) for use by other owners of the base software.  A system for sharing should be created to allow this to avoid the issue with distributing copyright material to people who potentially do not own the game and so should not have legal access to the base code / assets (underlying work).  The creation of mods usually involves the creation of derivative and independent works and the additional copyrights this generates should be protected while offering an easy way for those who desire to share this work (providing permission for their copyrighted work to be shared and even remixed).

Due to the desire to play on a level playing field, the use of multiplayer should attempt to enable a restricted mode where each player knows that the other is playing by the same rules.  This does not mean no mods or that this is the only way people can play together.

Games are a set of agreed restrictions on play.  House rules are the ability of players to agree on the rules outside of a dictated set from the game designer.  We should enable players to implement house rules as far as is possible.  Viewed at a certain angle then Counter-Strike is just a particularly complex set of house rules for multiplayer Half-Life.

LAN play is an expression of the freedoms granted to users to play outside of a managed online experience.  The addition of LAN spawn installs provides possibilities for players to evangelise multiplayer modes and should be considered as a mulitplayer demo mode where possible.  DRM free software does not technically restrict players from simply duplicating the software for this purpose but our copyright assertion is that this is not acceptable so a LAN spawn option must be developed to enable this promotional duplication use.

Solo cheats are an expression of the freedom to modify the copyrighted works sold, they should not be offered as DLC for sale and if they are offered for sale as part of an online component then that is an implicit permission for users to modify their client to make it seem like they have already purchased these cheats.  Basically don't do it because it's bad design and ethically questionable.

Customers are buying.  This means they gain something after handing over money.  Systems must never be built that allow players to give money without gain unless they are clearly marked as pure donations.  (egregious example:) If a virtual currency exists then it must not be simply deleted as it is unspent money (that this needs to be committed to such a document is remarkable).  Customers must be made aware of exactly what they are buying (for example if you've already sold a game including music files then the soundtrack may be no more than a more easily accessible and mp3 formatted version of something they already own).

The case can and has been made that pre-orders do not serve the industry as a whole in best matching users who wish to spend money with the most enjoyment they can derive from this purchasing power.  We currently err on the side of not taking money for the promise of future, as yet unscrutinised, content.  Companies leveraging their future value is not at all unusual and many smaller developers can only afford to develop the projects they are passionate about by leveraging the risk of their fan base.  This is a dangerous path and we are not certain of our ability to repay that risk transferral with adequate value.  Companies with several billion dollars in revenue certainly do not need you to take on risk by pre-ordering games and should rather look at revenue via the long tail of the extensive catalogues they already control and have full access to.

Current game sales management, discounting, and pricing are designed around a model that does not accept the first-sale doctrine or similar legislation that provides balance to copyright by forcing the author to compete on price with the existing copies of a work they have duplicated using their exclusive right.  We would like to move the industry towards recognition of this consumer right but expect to find some technical and competitive hurdles to implementing it unilaterally in the current marketplace.  We are open to suggestions for how to allow this but hope the marketplace can be transformed by establishment of precedent in cases such as those currently going through the European court.

We hope retail partners will be open to facilitating such consumer rights to trade and gift 'used' games on their stores.  Due to the DRM-free (and shared source) nature of our product, transferring the product under protection of first-sale doctrine (by moving the copy, not duplicating it) will not be prevented by any technological means and we would not try to oppose it; our sales partners may not share this view and so would prevent transferral of the download access (which complicates the ability to unilaterally offer transferral of an online account to a new owner without incurring the cost of providing this download link ourselves or expecting the user to manage their own backup solution, such a burning to a disc or saving to a backup hard drive).

Exclusionary design and narratives that restrict the reach of our games via bigoted, outdated, or simply wrong choices do not help sales and do not show a respect for our customers.  This is not the same as targeting a niche of enthusiastic gamers with a narrow focus title even if the distinction between the two may be more of a scale than two distinct categories.  Accessibility is a right and we will work to make our software as accessible as we can.  We always aim to try and respect all people and minimise the effect of our prejudices on our design and the stories we tell.

This extends to not discriminating against who should be able to buy our games, while fitting into whatever local legal system exists at the point of sale. We will be out here on the internet selling to everyone for the same price (baring local taxes that we are required to collect and with some lag from constantly moving exchange rates) on the same day and with the same content.  Obviously there are global legal issues that may impede our ability to execute this but we will never choose to impose limits.

Respect for the developers

Full chain of content creation and use.  Was it included in some way in the bundle sold to users?  Then they deserve to be credited.  Creation is a chain and so that doesn't mean the final assets need to have been directly created by someone, was their work reworked to generate a derivative work?  Authorisation is required (usually through employment contract) and deserves crediting.

Everyone has to right to be an Alan Smithee.  This is the balance to the previous mandate.  Working on something gives you the right to be credited but you can obviously always opt out, especially as it might not have been you who last touched something.

While we try and release some of the copyright restrictions on our own creations to better serve the users and wider culture, we also understand the importance of these copyrights to other developers and comply with them.  We will always respect the copyrights of others and their work.  We will work with external parties contributing to our projects to make sure we can secure licensing for work that allows us to bundle it under the same restrictions we distribute under or with a clearly separated line between the works (which may come up with items like licensed music).

Crunch is counter-productive beyond a few days.  We can all push ourselves to get stuff done but to do things well (and coders know this all too well as they debug the code they wrote on hour 20 of a binge) rest and time off are key.  Not only can crunch not be considered mandatory working conditions, it must be prevented to ensure the quality of work is maintained and the health of workers.  We want to make great software, but we're not going to ruin people's lives to do it.  We believe in sustainable development.

We believe in the independent review process and the scoring of games based on the viewpoint of the author as much as the technical merits of the software or even an 'objective' evaluation of the merits of the work.  We will not base bonuses on averages of review scores or work with investors who make such demands.  As sales drive our available cash then we may create bonus structures around sales figures so the bonuses can be calculated to pay for themselves.

Unions are a valid form of collective bargaining for workers.  We will work with unions and help to enable our staff to join or create them while preserving the freedoms of the individual staff.  In practical terms that means we will not agree to terms that require or compel union membership (distinct from that of a professional body) as a condition of a job opportunity.  While it may be considered in the interests of the individual employee to reinforce the power of a union, we do not agree with the removal of their freedom in this way to facilitate it.

No developer should be unaware of our commitments to the customer and how this restricts our actions.

Respect for the investors

The best way to increase the value of the company is to serve our customers, which will provide long term revenue streams on which to generate profits.  Short term revenue maximisation methods are fundamentally flawed.

No investors should be unaware of our values before investing.



All of the above are practical and ethical positions.  We do not believe in the religious zealotry of declaring such ideas dogmatic or that we must only work with others who exactly share these ideals.  This is not a commitment to forever hold or apply the above notions to our work; our position may evolve, it is simply a snapshot of our current thinking.

First-Sale Doctrine Drives Bad Game Design?

As the Xbox One policies have flipped around, the backlash to the backlash has emerged that says the path to the future has been set back by retaining a classic model of physical goods.  Here's the argument.

So because games have to compete with their used stock (as the designers of copyright intended, fair use and first-sale doctrine being the safety valves built into the exclusive right to duplication given to creators at a time when reasonable copyright terms were a decade or thereabouts) this is what has forced everyone to use DLC, filler content, micro-transactions, etc etc.

It isn't that DLC/micro-transactions were only made possible by internet connectivity and that started during the 6th generation of consoles (DC/PS2/xbox/GC) but was only there on the ground floor (with significant population coverage) for the 7th gen (PS3/360/Wii) so that is where it came to power?  Filler content is a result of a move to combat used?  If so then why is it something that has existed since the beginning of time (where it was first linked to the quarter slot and need to get more money to see the ending, an alternative design choice to hard and arbitrary death mechanics) with 'grinding' (especially in RPGs) being far more extreme well before used was a 'debilitating' thing (ie before there were significant retail presence for games at all, let alone used)?

Case study analogy: The automotive industry is 'losing sales' to used cars.  They can combat this with the application of repairs at authorised dealers and sale of spare parts for those repairs.  There is therefore tremendous pressure on car manufacturers to get their engineers to build less and less reliable cars to reinforce the value of buying new and extract the maximum value from those used cars for which they don't directly get a cut of the sale.  If we look at vehicles over the previous few decades we can see that this pressure has done nothing to reliability.  A competitive marketplace where the ability to increase reliability within a cost envelope increases your perceived value and so ability to stand out against peers has driven up the reliability of all types of vehicles at all price points.

Does the video game industry have something to hide?  Should they be referred to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission to work out if this is some anti-competitive cabal where all the players have agreed not to compete on value with each other in order to stifle the marketplace competition that should be driving up quality or driving down price?  My thoughts are no, the entire argument doesn't hold water that links used and these practices.  The industry looked for additional revenue streams as soon as they were technologically viable and this was independent of used games and that perceived issue.  Expansion packs have been a traditional form of expansion content and those actually moved the other way, to enabling more sales by selling as standalone (so not requiring the original game disc/installed content) before DLC and piecemeal expansion content was considered to be cheaper to produce/generating better revenue for manpower expended at a time when traditional expansion content build on the same engine and gameplay mechanics was now being used as annualised sequel fodder at $60 per disc.

Here is the end-game of the digital revolution: subscription services.  The global music industry can entirely replace their annual income from wholesale music sales with 90m premium Spotify subscribers*, assuming the cost of streaming is below that of physical disc production they currently pay on those revenues.  Done.  That's how you monetise a zero duplication cost/IP item.  You form an evil cabal, call it an artists collective, and collect such a wealth of content (and new content production) that anyone would be culturally excluded if they didn't sign up.  Use the volume of people to make the per-person price very affordable.  Be aggressive in picking up new talent that is potentially initially incubated outside of the collective (where they live on direct sales or free distribution of their content and donations).

Here's what goes wrong with trying to walk down that road by first removing first-sale doctrine (while retaining your demand that copyright be enforced using harsher and harsher legal penalties for non-compliance and cooperation with data connectivity services and providers to remove potentially fair use and non-infringing content at the mere accusation of copyright infringement) to tighten up the traditional sales mechanic to bleed as much money as possible from each individual: You're going the wrong way stupid!  We're aiming to bring down the per user cost and bring up the numbers and make sure our collective products are culturally essential at a great value.  Stop driving people away by trying to increase how much you extract from each individual by any means necessary.  Here's how you sell a premium product: delight the consumer.  Get them to eulogise the value anyone should obtain from making the transaction they did.  Apple can make an almost 50% profit on their products (ie they are priced about twice as high as they could be and still be viable) and they don't do it by making people feel ripped off when they've purchased something.  This is a perception war, stop fighting to make people feel like their $60 doesn't buy the entire product and demonise people who increase the value of your new product (by offering people who do purchase it cash to sell it at a later date).

In the current climate then digital marketplaces should look at how they can better serve the consumers (and creators) by enabling their traditional rights (and in doing so protect creators from potential issues with challenges to their copyright under grounds of failure to comply with the conditions of fair use and first-sale) and any move to justify the import of current digital license rules into the physical product world should be noted as highly suspect and probably unable to hold water.  This is a companion piece to my article last month about how the technical limitation of DRM on a closed platform stands opposed to the viewpoint that the medium has and will continue to increase in cultural significance and provide a good value purchase for more and more consumers.


* Twelve monthly payments of $15 x 90m = source for total revenue figure.  There are over 7 billion potential pairs of ears out there, the music industry only needs the current subscription value from less than 1.3% of them.

How Call of Duty ends

This week I realised I don't care about Call of Duty.  What I caught of Modern Warfare 3 looked terrible and by the end of MW2 I did not want to know more about that story so I'd skipped it.  MW2 managed to hit peak crazy by the time it ended and there was nowhere the series could go that I wanted to join it.  But Black Ops was rather enjoyable, Mason and I had found out what the numbers mean, and eventually BlOps2 arrived on my doorstep to partake in.

It was during a section filled with unskippable cutscenes (at least they seemed to be unskippable, they had a pause menu rather than a skip option and I couldn't work out how to make them go away and get to the bit where you can actually play the game) which would eventually end with a grenade and a civilian getting married in a cutscene.  There was an area that is bugged (as in I could Google and find people describing the exact details of what was wrong and advice to restart the level to fix it rather than anything useful you can do because the checkpoint seems to encode the corruptions so going back will never unstuck you) and after a long time looking for an enemy to kill to trigger the next section and an NPC unlocking a door to a cellar, I decided the enemy probably fell out of the level or was outside of the invisible walls preventing my free movement so I would never be able to progress.

I tried getting back to the checkpoint a few times but every time played out the same way, whether I triggered the optional extra wave of enemies by climbing up to the sniper's nest or not.  So I restarted the entire level and watched the many cutscenes and 'played' a section where I found out I could just run around and not actually play the game, just sprint between the checkpoints with a 'rage' buff making this very quick (also making it even more obvious that the scripting was changing my selected weapon rather than the level contents having anything to do with what weapon I had equipped).  Then I got to the actual game bit with shooting.  I made my way to the assault the mansion section and the bug was there again.

"Walk forward you useless NPCs, you need to unlock something so I can continue playing!"

I restarted again and walked away to make a cup of tea while the game played a cutscene to itself.

This time I managed to not encounter the bug and so got into the cellar to kill some more bad guys before triggering the final cutscene where we saw the grenade go flying from a different perspective than the flashback cutscene that had come just before the level started.  But I didn't care.  I didn't care for the story.  I didn't hear the numbers.  I didn't even want to hear the numbers, to find out what they wanted to tell me.

There is a difference between doing something you want to do and doing something so it is done.  I wasn't playing BlOps2 because I wanted to do it.  I was playing because I wanted to have played it.  And at that point I realised I didn't even care to have played it.  Who knows how many more hours I would have thrown away if I hadn't repeatedly walked into that bug and taken a step back to work think about what I was actually doing.

I'm done.