yes, agree 100% with you damocles (everything besides the duke nukem forever - we all know it comes on april 2666

one thing though: do you think casual games have a higher market potential if they run on low-end machines? i'm not talking about moorhuhn, it would simply make no sense to use shaders an PP effects for it. let's take foxhound's tower. beside the fact that fairly other people than 3dgs users and casual game site hoppers know about it, would it make a difference if it required a dx8-graphics board and a 2GHz cpu instead of a p3-500 and a 16mb-dx6 board? let's think- p3 500 machines are 6 to 7 years old, even an average bureau machine is about 3 years old. i'd say, casual game development should not be dependent of cpu speed, but on the graphics chip: if you develop for eg. bureau machines, you can bet they have onboard graphics with approx. 32 mb tc/ 128 mb shared memory. developing for machines like this means fallback in shaders or completely avoid them, reduce lighting effects etc. but not a general fallback to 1999 (play fifa 2000 to see what i mean) referring to eg. polygons.