What an awful day it was today. It started well. One of our key developers is leaving to go to Microsoft whic is a bummer but we had a last day lunch and movie (saw Van Helsing which was pretty good). Then it all went down hill.

Various technical problems - Stardock Central messing up, can't make news items via our internal news syndication system, and other minor mishaps.

And then the contract negotations with publishers on one of our upcoming games. I'm faced with some unpleasant choices. Got one offer with a huge advance on royalties but one that pretty much assumes we won't ever see any additional royalties due to the way the deal is structured. And it would demand that we give up a lot of control over the game which we normally don't do (on GalCiv we took care of the on-line support, sold teh game directly, and put out lots of updates).  The other deal lets us have that freedom but have a much more modest advance and is from a smaller publisher so it won't likely sell anywhere near as many copies.

But negotiations are always tense and when you're dealing with six figure payments, they're quite intense. I feel exhausted and demoralized since I just don't know what the right path to do is. It's the classic freedom/less money vs. less freedom/money scenario. And it's easy for me to answer for myself what I'd choose but I have to think of the welfare of our employees and our customers and frankly, our customer community.