Gamecloud - You recently signed a new deal to bring Punkbuster to Quake IV, which has a lot more multiplayer content than id's last game Doom III. What has Punkbuster done to work with id and Raven to make the game as secure as can be out of the box?

Tony Ray - Shipping PunkBuster 'out of the box' with a new game always gives us an advantage as the hackers never get a firm foothold in the community. Any punk cheater who downloads some new cheat for these games knows or finds out very quickly that there will be consequences. Sure there are few who pay money for hacks so they can cheat longer, but eventually they all get caught and banned from PB games. There are number of punks who were caught trying to hack PunkBuster with private hacks in games we have supported for some time that won't even be able to play Quake 4 on PunkBuster servers without getting new hardware to get around the global ban. This is a serious deterrent as even hard-core cheaters don't want to risk getting hardware banned and becoming unable to enjoy hot new games on the best servers - the PunkBuster servers :)