WoW, EQ et al are ALL turn based games.

Good job missing the entire point of the article ;) WHOOSH!

Offer your own free version, and ask those that find it useful to buy the hard copy. Or, update it, then do that.

Welcome to the world of Apple, where backwards bullshit policies and systems are the rule.

Wrong. Hardware polls by people like Valve prove you wrong and parent right. Mod parent UP.

I call bullshit. Even if Apple makes some bullshit pie-in-the-sky patents, it doesn't mean they're going to single handedly make OpenGL into a modern graphics library, which is the REAL reason many devs write games for Windows.

LOL @ using model/view/controller for game development. Sorry, but that's just laughable.

Yeah I have to say (in my professional opinion as a game developer), most of those patents are wishful thinking or out and out bullshit.
For example this: "Why not take a picture of yourself with an included camera and have your features actually appear on a game character?"
Which is fine, and would be a great idea had not everyone in the industry been trying it for the past ten years, and failing miserably, because of the simple fact that nothing of that sort will *EVER* match up with the art in a game, unless specifically tailored to do so, or the capturing mechanism is something more sophisticated than camera based techniques can provide (i.e., 3D surface scanning, which isn't feasible for home users anyway).
And this: "Intelligent Audio Mixing Among Media Playback And At Least One Other Non-Playback Application."
Too bad it's been done before, so WTF? Big deal.
Not to mention, I personally find it hard to believe that many game devs would really want to invest in making a game for this thing, when the device itself could potentially fuck the user experience through no fault of the developers.

I have to disagree. Writing things right the first time almost never happens in the real world (and just leads to wasted time trying to think of the perfect method of designing a system). Typically you get 10x-100x improvements by rewriting the correct but slow parts of your code, or redesigning the system to work around the parts that are slow.

Mod parent up. People above pointing out how big their optimization-e-peens are apparently haven't learned the first thing about optimization in the real world.

Even if you're writing a game(and I'm a game dev), there is very little use in writing a sorting algorithm. In fact, I know my boss would give me a big "WTF!?" if I started writing one. The reason? It's going to be less efficient, and also a waste of time that I could use to be doing something that actually moved tasks forward. Now, obviously it is important to understand the various uses of different sorting algorithms, their performance implications etc. But actually knowing how, from memory, to write any particular sorting algorithm is pretty pointless IMO.

Too bad the DMCA isn't a Swedish law.

Well, whether there is or isn't more public domain stuff than not is rather irrelevant. Also irrelevant are the motivations of the TPB.

The fact of the matter is that anything digital has a marginal cost of $0, and thus will be subject to copying regardless of what anyone does. Until people making such items (and I'm a game programmer myself, so I've thought about this quite a bit) learn to monetize their products in a way that accounts for the fact that bits are inherently not-scarce, and thus not based on the economics of physical objects and scarcity, we will continue to have people bitching about copyright infringement.

I mean, yeah, it sucks, and we all still need to make some cash to feed ourselves, but I'd argue that we're doing that now. If you're an independent developer and find your stuff on torrent sites, why not ask the people downloading it why they didn't pay (without being super pissed off about it :P) and make the changes necessary (aside from just giving it away for free, although that could also work, with some other means of monetization tacked on) to include those potential customers too. And if the answer is "Didn't want to pay for it" well, guess what? They wouldn't have bought it any damned way.

It isn't ducking the ethical question. For every copyrighted work that's on TPB, there are many that are public domain. So, are we going to outlaw knives now too, because you can stab a person with one as easily as you can cut a piece of twine with it? How about we start outlawing any object that can be used for ill, regardless of its legitimate purposes. Well, there goes anything blunt, anything pointy....

Do you really want the *AA setting precedent that would allow people to be prosecuted for pointing to a resource on the internet, as if they were hosting that resource themselves?