Dear Future Gamer,

Just a suggestion about the way games are made. There seems to be a big bust-up happening in the industry about piracy and emulators and people sharing their games. I have a suggestion.

Back in those ‘old’ days, when the original Quake was released, I bought it. Fantastic, then I craved some multiplayer action and decided to hand out the disk to my friends so they could install it and play me, because it didn't need a CD to run.

I'll admit that was wrong and wasn't really on, but if software companies make their software so it runs off the CD (yep I know it’s slow!) or a half and half procedure, then I think they would find a lot less people like me or people who have friends who swap games, handing out games to each other.

I understand that a lot of developers do this, but they always seem to have a full install option which is defeating the object. Although, one note. Valve, why did you make your anti-piracy system on Half-Life so complex? I had problems and had to wait another week before I got a new disk that would read and let me play!

Robert Rider

FG: A neat solution to this is when software houses allow you to install a game and run it without having the CD present for the multiplayer game only. In single-player mode you need the original CD, which goes some way towards stopping piracy, but you can still enjoy playing your mates in a multiplayer game by installing their copy of the game. As for Valve, well you can hardly blame them and with every mass-produced product a small percentage of them are going to come out wrong. You just happened to get one of the duff ones this time, and at least they replaced it relatively swiftly.