With consoles, no neuroses, everyone plays the same for all intents and purposes. With PCs, the sky's the limit, and that's always pitched as a positive. So it's oh, you can play it at all these different levels, it has legs, it'll last for three years, you can come back and play it again, it'll be a whole new experience, etc. I understand that, and I agree with some of that, but there's a group over here that's not being addressed, namely the sort of enthusiast that wants to be enthusiastic about the game alone and not get mired in peripherals like level-of-detail settings.

RS: A lot of that is effectively communicating what the experience is going to be like. I mean, minimum specs are for the most part meaningless, because it's just the lowest end system with a completely naked operating system that some tester at that publisher was able to make the game run on.

If you're a typical PC owner, there's no such thing. You don't have an operating system that's perfectly clean from numbers of add-ons, and ActiveX is this, and background virus scanning is that. All of that weighs on your experience.

If you're on the edge of the minimum spec, you know as a gaming consumer that you're probably not going to have the experience that was intended at that minimum spec. That's what we're trying to factor into the recommendations that we provide to the industry that supports the PC Gaming Alliance, which is to say we tested al those environments. We checked out systems at the low end of the spectrum and loaded them down with virus checkers and stuff like that. We understand the headroom that's required to have that experience operate correctly and appreciably for the person that's paying [US]$50 for that game.

End of the day, when it comes to consumer expectations, you expect that when you see some commercial or you watch something online, some preview say, that's what it's going to look like when you fire it up on your system. And if it doesn't, then you're either on the phone, or you're in the blogs, or you're in the forums complaining about the experience that you're having with that title.