VBGamer

"VB is for beginners and newbies" - I agree that VB is not used in the professional AAA game development world, but VB is widely used by professional experienced developers in the business world on large projects. It is not used in AAA games mainly because it cannot be ported to PS/2, Nintendo, and because the majority of the game industry has the historic tie to C/C++. "advanced games people are willing to pay for", people are not only willing to pay for advanced games, they are also willing to pay for simple games too (e.g. Deer Hunter, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, budget games). "any game done in VB that is even somewhat advanced is most likely very slow", yes Quake 3 done in VB would be very slow, but I get the feeling that you are passing judgement on Close Approach without having tried it, on my PC (PII 450, NVidia GForce2GTS) it runs at 43FPS with the hightest quality options set and 640x480 mode. Close Approach, a budget game made in VB was released in 1998 the same year as Activision released a new version of Asteroids written in C/C++. Asteroids was given the AAA treatment even though it was just the same top-down 2D shooter as before. Close Approach offered something new, a 3D first person asteroids shooter, which in my biased opinion is a better game. I still do not think that out of these 2 games, one should be freeware and have its source code given away just because it was written in VB. Obviously you are entitled to your opinion and unfortunately this is a similar opinion to that of the free open source movement. It is not, however, my opinion.