Something to consider with non-visual VCL components is that it's mostly just eyecandy for those that like to see all those neat little boxes tossed onto a form. [size=9px](But not always. Some games/tools are unique in design.)[/size] Which is perfectly fine, I did this for a few years with DelphiX back in the day. Of course in changing them from VCL, the Object Model remains weither or not you use the 'components' aspect of it or not, thats the basis of the Object Pascal language it's self.

But for many 'veteran' game programmers the feel good factor of having only needed to drag and drop a component icon into the form quickly fades as he realizes that there is much more code to do reguardless. And in some ways he can even get a small to sizable increase in speed or decreased filesize without.

I guess you can think of VCL [size=9px](to a game programmer)[/size] as a temporary crutch for beginners and more likely to be considered when creating tools for content design and testing/debugging.