Well, if they really like it that way, I'm not going to stop them or say they're wrong. it's just one preference out of many. I just hope this doesn't mean artists will start putting this noise in their tracks deliberately, because I DON'T like it, and of course it's trivial to add MP3 distortion but impossible to remove it.

It's kind of like pop stars now deliberately overusing auto-tune on their vocals--they (or really, probably their producers) LIKE the unrealistic "pop" between different pitches and robotically flat tonality. Personally I can see that--I'm not really a fan of genres that commonly do this, but I can see its artistic merit as an individual technique, and it doesn't detract from my appreciation of artists with noticeably un-tuned voices (i.e. Tom Waits).

Sega pulled this, deliberately or not, with the Sega Saturn. It was really a pretty powerful piece of hardware, but it's massively parallel architecture and shitty development tools meant it was very hard to work with. Some titles actually ignored entire processors on the motherboard simply because it was too much trouble to integrate them into the code.

Granted this was not the only problem with the Saturn--Sega of America's president also had the business sense of a ponzi scheme victim, but still.

The Halfbakery has been all over this and many other microgeneration techniques for years. Call in the lawyers!

Unless he's referring to people who fuck areas. As in, "I'm fucking the San Francisco Bay area!"

I think Popcap has being doing this for years. I mean, nearly all their games are just variations on, "make a group of three or more objects of the same color", endlessly iterated with some peripheral rules into the most addictive configurations. Throw in a random aesthetic theme and some cheerful sound effects and watch the money roll in.

Interestingly, this seems to only apply to the "Formula 1" brand itself, so other games can certainly include F1 cars, so long as they don't use the F1 organization's name. I guess F1 doesn't actually hold any rights to the cars themselves--which makes sense, but then recent years have shown very little usually makes sense when it comes to copyrights/trademarks/patents.

Certainly nice for those independent game developers anyway, especially Live for Speed, which has an officially sanctioned version of BMW Sauber's 2006 F1 car (as well as BMW's V1 Championship car), which they're using via a deal with BMW Motorsport itself.