HomeLAN - What do you see are the big events and trends that will affect the video/PC game industry in 2005?

Brian Green - The discussion of crunch time is hopefully going to bring about some big changes in the game development world. The industry has been built on the basis of "eating its young" for too long. We lose too many experienced and knowledgeable people from burnout. With the games industry (and its income) growing at a tremendous rate, it's time to make sure that game developers are treated properly and not taken advantage of.

HomeLAN - What video or PC game that was released in 2004 that you played was the most disappointing and why?

David Walgrave - I'm not going to name names, but a lot of games these days aren't challenging anymore. You don't need "skills" or practice anymore, just a lot of time to go from point A to point B (unhindered) and then the game ends. It's as if they forgot to implement a "Game Over" screen, and a lot of games aren't replayable because of that. People are always talking about how long it takes them to finish a game. I'd rather see people talking about how long a game still lasts after you've finished it. Working for a developer though, I do see the pro's and con's of both types of games...

HomeLAN - What do you see are the big events and trends that will affect the video/PC game industry in 2005?

Anatoly Subbotin - Hardware development will continue to be one of the major factors in the PC game industry. If the intense armaments race goes on we might witness another significant graphics quality leap.

The game industry will be affected by the appearance of the new console generation. The success or failure of those systems in many respects will predetermine the market’s development.

HomeLAN - Overall, what do you feel was the most significant thing that happened in 2004 in the video and PC game industry?

Piotr Panasewicz - As you can probably see from my other answers, in my opinion 2004 was a year of FPS games. Publication of hit titles such as Halo 2, Far Cry, Doom 3 or lately Half-Life 2 meant that basically the press and Internet mentioned this genre and almost nothing else the whole year. I wonder if next year is going to be similar? I hope that cRPGs will be big then, partly because of the Witcher ;-)