Odd Player

Lately, IVe noticed that some games (such as Unreal Tournament 3 and Clive Barker’s Jericho) require you to install the software version of Ageia’s physics engine onto your system. It bathers me, because it’s wholly separate from the game and integrates itself into Windows as a service, and you also have to uninstall it separately from whatever game is using it. Why can’t this software be just part of the gaming code itself, like the Havok system (from Source games) or earlier physics engines? Ageia has already been all but laughed out of existence for its silty hardware “physics accelerator,” so is the engine worth the extra intrusiveness into my system?

This brings up a larger point: Lots of online games require other add-ons to facilitate matchmaking. Personally, I despise GameSpy and its ilk, and I wonder why more games can’t have their own integrated software that doesn’t need to be installed separately on your system. Is the industry just specializing? Are developers just outsourcing more and more of everything?

Am I the only person who gets annoyed by the intrusive third-party apps? What do you guys think of all this?