I'm curious. Did you ever try hiring someone who was an occasional gamer (the Wii and Bejeweled gamer) and they didn't work out or did you just assume that they wouldn't be a valuable addition to your team and automatically exclude them? The reason I ask is because I wonder if having some diversity in the level of gameplay ability in your staff might actually produce better games (i.e. ones that mere mortals can play). Of course, I have no idea what your target market is, but its pretty clear to me that occasional gamers are a largely untapped market that the large game companies are mostly ignoring. There's no doubt that Halo, Call of Duty, WoW, etc. sell a lot of units, but there are also a lot of people (I am one of them) who have absolutely no interest in playing those kinds of games for the very simple reason that we have other things to do with our lives. We still play games, but we avoid games that require a significant time investment in order to achieve competency at gameplay. For example, I do not play first-person shooter games at all - the user interfaces are too complex to learn when you're the sort of person who only plays games for a couple of hours on Saturdays and may go for a month or more between sessions of playing any particular game. Battle for Middle Earth II is at the upper limit of interface complexity that I am willing to tolerate before I give up on a game because it seems like I'm spending more time trying to remember the mechanics of the controls than I am just having fun playing. I tend to gravitate towards simple turn-based or mouse-click slash & hack RPGs (Pool of Radiance, Dungeon Siege, Diablo II), sim games (Sid Meier's Civilization, Masters of Orion II, The Sims), and simple arcade or puzzle games (Dig Dug, Arkanoid, Minesweeper). If it takes more than a minute to relearn the controls of a game when a month has passed since the last time I played it, odds are that I'll get frustrated and stop playing that game and avoid others like it. Similarly, if the default game AI is tuned to perform at the level of a hardcore gamer and there's no way to turn it down to a level that a perpetual n00b like me can compete with, I'll ditch the game and never buy another one like it (many real-time strategy games are guilty of this offense).