It occured to me there are now three companies who's games I will not touch with a barge pole ever again:

Goa - for their disasterous handling of customer service for Daoc
GN - for the frankly imbecilic handling of customer service for Horizons EU
AE - for their inability to recognise a good thing when they had it

Equally, there are several software houses that consistently release good games, and as such, these will always be provided with hard disk space, at least for evaluation.

Blizzard - Not sure about WoW yet - but everything up to that has been good
iD - Although I haven't played Doom 3 yet - Doom & Doom 2 were great, so I'd be willing to try something new...

(Rather worringly - though you'll notice I qualify this with a specific division)

Microsoft Game Studios - Age of Empires / Mythology series was really good, Zoo tycoon is okay (read childish fun), Dungeon Siege was really good fun

I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has ever analysed things to this level?

As an aside, not a rant, kudos to those of you still playing Horizons - I just can't do it. Anyone who fancies a look at something different (and it's very different) may like to consider A Tale In The Desert 2 (www.atitd.com).