It's *users* who want it, not developers. Getting a potential customer to download and install a thick client is a big hurdle compared to just providing the experience directly from the web page. It's not just the extra work required from the user in the first place, although the number of clicks required to become a customer is a huge factor in conversions. It's also, from the user's perspective, all the potential problems adware, malware, bundled toolbars, DLL conflicts, and applications that don't uninstall correctly or permanently make themselves a part of your taskbar consuming resources.

I believe the rights to the IP belonged to Sierra, which like Blizzard was a division of Vivendi Universal, and thus is now a part of the Activision-Blizzard empire. I could be wrong, my guess is Arcanum 2 isn't a priority for Bobby Kotick. :-)

I know, Bloodlines technically was developed by Troika. Still, mostly the same crew.

Not really. A few people from Troika went to Obsidian initially, but not many stayed long. At this point the biggest concentration is probably at Carbine Studios under Tim Cain, followed by Turtle Rock where experience with the Source Engine paid off in the making of Left 4 Dead. If you take a look at a recent L4D blog post you can definitely see how much the early screen shots looked like Vampire -- not surprising considering some of the same lighting/level/texture people did them. (I was lead programmer on Vampire. You can ultimately blame most of the bugs on one very bad decision, by me, very early in the project. I chose an architecture for the scripting system that gave us more flexibility than we needed at the price of easy testing and validation. That's another story, though.)

Epic's down in the research triangle of North Carolina, pretty far away. Firaxis (Sid Meier's company) is up around Baltimore, along with Day1 Studios. That's kinda-sorta within a contiguous metro area, but not something you'd ever want as your daily commute. Baltimore's also home to Zenimax Online, an MMO studio spun off from the same parent company as Bethesda. EA-Mythic is in Fairfax, VA, but I'm not sure how many people are still there or what their future is.

There's an oversupply of people who want to work in the game industry, but certainly not an oversupply of talent. Building a big-budget game has all the complexities of a large-scale development (my last project had over a million lines of code and 300+ GB of assets), with all the limitations of small-scale low-level embedded systems development (got to fit that all into your console). People who can handle that are rare. I've been involved in hiring at my last few jobs, and we'd routinely turn away piles of applicants who thought programming was just about shuffling information back and forth between a data store and a front end, while crying that we were behind schedule because of unfilled positions.

There are long hours, but it's often self-inflicted. For a lot of us, we want to make something awesome, and working on a cool game and bringing a vision to life is what we enjoy doing for 10+ hours of our day. I've done it at my own startup and I've done it at EA. It's not for most people, but neither are most specialties.

There's no real protection, because ultimately references just come down to syntactic sugar. In a large enough project, where foo(), bar(), and baz() below are implemented in different files by different teams, it's entirely possible to end up with something like this:

struct A { int value; };

void foo( A & ref ) { ref.value = 17; }

void bar( A * ptr ) { foo( *ptr ); }

void baz() { bar( NULL ); }