Don't treat it as a religion, especially when dealing with stuff that can contaminate things unrelated to your "scientific experiment". Or with "safely modified, strengthened, disease resistant food".

I don't want your GMO "food" to mix with my food. I don't want my food to even have a chance to be contaminated with your food, even if you think it isn't dangerous.

You're free to do things as long as you don't infringe on my freedom. And at this time in my life, I want freedom to eat non-GMO food.

Could another effect be lowering of their transaction fees? You're no longer paying $0.99, you're now paying $9.99 or so. Plus, this allows easier sale of prepaid cards, doesn't it?

So, they're not ONLY trying to affect your mind, they're also making it cheaper and/or easier for themselves to take your money.

BSD license is more free, but does not preserve the freedoms.

Choice of license should depend on your goals. If one of them is philosophy, so be it. If one of them is business, so be it. I always pick the license that I feel best for a project.

Centralized autoupdate for all apps bought off the store. A bit of quality checking.

Service packs, yep. Small incremental improvements. However, Lion will for me be a step back, UI-wise, as no service pack could be. What they're doing with buttons, with tabs, with scrollbars makes me think that Snow Leopard will be the pinnacle of the UI design. Maybe in a year or two I'll disagree with myself and I'll like it. Let's wait and see. There are only a few announced Lion things that I want in Snow Leopard, such as improved Expose.

Yes, but I have not seen any 3D game that makes me want to really play it. I find the 3D aspect interesting professionally, and from a technological perspective, but I don't find it adding entertainment value.

I disagree that customers demand 3D on mobile. In fact, I disagree that they demand it on desktop, for many game concepts. Despite what my personal tastes say about it, tons of people play stuff from casual vendors such as Big Fish Games especially from the "Hidden Object" category.

Does 3D add significant value and (more importantly) improved visuals to puzzle games, to hidden objects? Do you think people wouldn't play Torchlight if it were 2D? 3D games we already very strong back in 2000, yet Diablo II was mostly 2D.

I don't think people's tastes are all that radically different today. Games can be improved by 3D, but it might be unimportant, and it may significantly hinder the visuals of the games if they have the same budget. A game with 2D sprites, background et al can take advantage of excellent renderers in 3D modeling packages and only then be touched up in Photoshop to improve the look. A game with 3D environment has to have great texture artists, great modelers, great shader writers and display the entire good looking 3D environment quickly on even poor machines.

It all depends on what your market is.

I agree with this one completely!

It does depend, however, on how complex is it to implement your ideas with an off-the-shelf game engine, and sometimes it may even be so with an off-the-shelf renderer. Just sayin'. :-)

Interesting! Thanks for the info! I'm pretty sure if one sat for a while and thought about it, one could come up with a way to easily implement wrinkle maps with Ogre. On the other hand, there may be many such tricks in CryEngine.

In the end, it all comes down to this: how much of those tricks does one need for most games?

That's right!

Nice to hear from someone that actually used the engine to confirm my suspicions :-)

Crappy stuff can be made with any of those. So can good stuff. I'm talking about erosion of market because major stuff is available in all engines for free. Open source engines are mostly missing fancy editors, since they work primarily with rendering.

Since you are obviously knowledgeable with all three systems, when you work with them, what major thing is missing from Ogre3D? What major thing do you think Unreal Engine 3 and CryEngine include that cannot easily be done with Ogre3D? Feel free to be subjective, if you need to be.

Can you also say a few words on flexibility of UE3 and CE when developing a new idea?

For most stuff on mobile, you don't need a 3D engine. In fact, 3D games I have played on mobile are all far less compelling than 2D, but fancy, stuff I have seen. What game do you find compelling that uses 3D on mobile, and that its design depends on 3D and could not be done with 2D?