It may not surprise you to learn that I love video games. Equally, I would hardly be bowled over if you told me you were fans as well. It's our hobby, it's what we do when we're feeling down, when our friends come around, in the small hours of the morning after a night on the town. Everybody has a different way of loving them, but it's a love affair we all find difficult to conceal: it's a passion that we'll defend to the hilt and we're not afraid to show it.

However, it may surprise you to learn that video games companies don't love us at all. They're perfectly content to tolerate us as we part with another wad of our cash for this week's latest release: they're going to do everything to separate us from our money that is legal, but they do not feel particularly close to us as people: we are another number, another statistic, we are not a passion for them, but instead a little sack of money on legs. And they try very hard to cover this. Their passion is money, not games, and they want to hide that.

Right now I hear swords being drawn and axes sharpened: in fact, more than a few of you will have stopped reading by now. All I can say in my defence is that the truth hurts and we all need a dose of reality from time to time to help us get over the misty-eyed view we have of the gaming industry.

No doubt many among you will now be thinking of the online forums, the feedback forms inserted in game cases, telephone support numbers in the manuals and a whole plethora of other devices constructed to make us believe that they actually care. They want to hear our input! They are keen to know what we thought of their last game! They want to hear our thoughts on how to improve the series!

They do not.

Nothing speaks quite like money �it makes the world go round, and computer games are part of the world. If a game sells well enough, it will get a sequel. The sequel will rarely be an enormous leap technologically or in originality �unless it stars on the next generation platform, most games will get a graphical overhaul, a few new enemies, perhaps even a sassy sidekick to back up the maudlin hero. If this sequel sells well, then there will be another: and another: and another...

"But wait!" I hear you cry, "Bad games don't get sequels, so they must be listening to us, because they don't make another bad game based on the original!"

No. Bad games don't get sequels, because bad games don't sell. If the original product bombed, then why would anyone want to invest money into a very risky sequel that may well bomb just like the first game?

Frankly, if bad games sold, bad games would get as many sequels as possible: bad games have typically short development cycles, so if a developer and publisher could rush out a sequel to a great-selling bad game, then they would happily do that �think of the money they would make!

Step forward, EA.

Now, I am not for a minute saying that all EA games are terrible games with short development cycles; Need For Speed and its sequel are two very good racing games, and are acknowledged to be so by general critical consensus. FIFA is not a good game, but it sells. It sells despite being a very cynical cash-cow that features few innovations or changes in each iteration, so it gets a sequel. The sequel does not feature life-changing gameplay. It does not come packed with a cool new peripheral that revolutionises interactive entertainment. What it does come with are slightly tweaked graphics and some players have retired, some have moved clubs, so the names are different. But it sells, so it gets another sequel.

This industry is all about money. Fact.

Another example is Argonaut, the creators of the Catwoman movie tie-in game -it sold five copies to the five people who genuinely thought that the movie was better than Casablanca. Argonaut have now closed their doors, the industry has effectively disowned them. Not because they made a bad game, but because they didn't make any money. If the industry was truly a caring industry, then they would be forgiven, after all, we are forgiving EA year-after-year, aren't we?

Nintendo are just as guilty of this as anyone else. If we go back to the early nineties, the company was riding high on a wave of brilliant sales �inspired by the new Game Boy portable video games system. The industry still loves the Game Boy and it is now in its second decade. Alongside Pokemon, it is a fountain of money for the Japanese firm. The name of the man who conceived the Game Boy was Gunpei Yokoi. For a short while, he was the toast of the industry and Nintendo.

In fact, Nintendo was so proud of his success with the Game Boy that they immediately allowed him to let-loose with another video gaming concept. You see, the success and the originality of the Game Boy was an amazing phenomenon almost unknown at the time. It was therefore logical that the creator of the Game Boy would be the progenitor of the next "must-have" games machine.

Gunpei Yokoi presented his new machine to the world. It was called the Virtual Boy.

Gunpei Yokoi got fired.

Despite the phenomenal success of the Game Boy, the continuing appeal of the Metroid series �for it was he who first envisaged Samus Aran in all her metal-clad glory. Despite the hours of time and love he had put into the company and all the money he had made them, he had created a headache-inducing financial disaster, and that is something that industry will not tolerate.

The Game Boy brand continues to go from strength to strength �so it should do, it makes so much money for Nintendo and third party companies.

The day it stops making money, however...

Rare are the final example which we can cite in this case. During the lifecycle of the Nintendo 64, Rare were responsible for the finest non-first party games on the machine. In fact, Goldeneye was the must-have system-seller that the N64 needed. Alongside high-quality titles such as Banjo-Kazooie (better than Mario 64, in my opinion) original concepts such as Blast Corps and excellent use of the Donkey and Diddy Kong licences, Rare were effectively the second line in Nintendo's war against the technically inferior Playstation. They worked hard and churned out a lot of triple-A titles for a machine that was bereft of third party support.

They were subsequently entrusted with the development of a major Nintendo licence: Starfox Adventures. Originally intended to be Dinosaur Planet and scheduled for an N64 release, the game was in development for a very, very long time. Too long, in fact. Whole teams of staff had to be pulled from other projects to try and meet constantly slipping release dates, eventually everybody in the company was drafted in to make the game, suspending work on other anticipated titles.

The game bombed.

But even before its release, Nintendo did the smart thing and sold them to a very eager Microsoft for quite a lot of money. Not the smart thing from a fan point of view, but the smart thing for a business. Rare had made little or no money for the company for years and they were dropped. No golden handshakes, no apologies, no nostalgia. There was not enough money to be made keeping them, so they were dropped.

The industry can't afford rose-tinted spectacles when it would much rather have money-lined pockets.

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