I definitely didn't see this coming.

You'd think after Activision's suit alleged that the pair had "been flown to a North American location to meet with a competitor" that they would've kept under the radar a bit, but I guess not.

That's ridiculous. How many people who stick modchips in their PS2s, etc are doing it because they want to do homebrew stuff?

How many people interested in this 3.21OO firmware are likely to install it to restore the "Other OS" functionality vs those who would install it if it meant a gateway to playing copied games?

Even if you completely disregard the fact that people jailbreak/unlock/hack stuff to avoid having to pay for games, and that the ability to do these things probably leads to increased sales of the console itself, it's debatable how much money Sony actually make from each PS3 sold - I would presume that the real money comes from the licensing for the games. Consoles themselves have been a loss-leader for years.

Your halcyon belief that "Other OS", homebrew or whatever somehow makes hackers or others that rely upon hackers more altruistic is just plain dumb, sorry. Money talks at the end of the day and if "Other OS" ends up being a gateway to not having to pay $80/£40 for the games you can sure as shit bet those same hackers would work towards that goal.

On the contrary it sounds as if the draconian DRM in AC2 & Settlers 7 is actually working from a "prevention of piracy" point of view.

I've heard the former has been cracked but has ridiculous limitations (e.g. not being able to save, crashing arbitrarily at key DRM checkpoints, etc), and as far as I'm aware there is still no release of the latter.

So, looking at it dispassionately - it seems like Ubi's DRM is actually working, all they have to do it seems is get the server reliability up to scratch?

I'm not sure what value multiplayer would add to - say - Mass Effect, and I would certainly have concerns about what sort of "tacked on" multiplayer they added if it diluted the product as a whole, had knock-on effects in the single player realm (e.g. balancing) or just plain diminished the amount of time & energy spent making the SP experience what it ended up being.

Mass Effect - as an example - presumably used up its budget in producing what we ended up with. If you assume that you had to somehow squeeze in a shippable multiplayer component within that same budget & timescales, well something has to give...

So you argument is basically that development time costs nothing? Just because the process of copying the media is the same whether you're copying a game that's taken 2 years of paid development time to create and a load of CVs you've written yourself doesn't mean the value is the same.

The problem with your attitude is that without someone ultimately paying for the development time and everything else that goes with it what you steal wouldn't exist in the first place. I know it's a convenient deceit to figure mainstream musicians, games developers, movie studios, etc "make too much money", but if it weren't so easy to copy stuff what would you do? Go without? Piracy is so fashionable because it's so easy, intangible and apparently victimless - if your only option to get something was to pay for it or do without you'd either find a way to scrape together the cash if you needed it bad enough, or you wouldn't.

Team Fortress 2 (also by Valve) had problems with the German authorities not approving it with blood & gibs in, so it was changed for that market so that you don't see blood splatters and gibs were turned into cogs, rubber ducks, etc.

Obviously the way they did this and the fact the game is moddable meant that anyone who wasn't happy with their watered-down version could get the blood & gibs back easily.

I suspect this will be no different - Valve will comply with the requirements, and the mod community will patch back in whatever is removed within a few days of its release.

That's not quite the same though.

In the case of Virgin Media losing Sky channels that represented a tangible "loss in service quality" that subscribers had originally paid for. The closest corollary to this would be if advertisers somehow changed the layout or general playability of levels by adding advertisements.

Whilst I agree wholeheartedly with the comments already made about the retarded auto-respawning checkpoints, murderous AI who home in on your exact position if they catch sight of one pixel of you, etc there are some positives in the game.

Firstly, it looks great. As a showpiece for the DUNA engine it excels admirably. Whilst there will be some who debate about whether Crysis looks better, personally speaking I found Far Cry 2 to look just as good in "high" settings, at twice the FPS and at much higher resolutions. I can comfortably run the game in 2560x1600 on an almost bleeding-edge system and see things like this whereas in Crysis I could only run it in a much smaller resolution. In that respect, as an engine, it is a great technological accomplishment.

Secondly whilst the core AI had its faults there were aspects of it which made me ponder its deeper aspects. I came across one guy who was stuck inside a rock (not a great advert for AI granted) who I heard say "This is crazy I can't see anything from here". Another time, later in the game, I encountered two guys who whilst chattering made reference to a mercenary (me) who was "killing people from miles away". One of them remarked "you'll never see him coming, you'll just end up dead". Throughout the game I had been focusing on killing from afar with sniper rifles, very rarely bothering with CQC. Now, you could argue that this was just a coincidence but the accuracy of what they were saying was uncanny.

All in all whilst the core AI (checkpoints, zeroing in on fleeting targets, etc) seemed dumb, there were nuances to it which made me think there are layers under the surface and intrigued me enough to warrant completing the game.