*Groan*

I'm not the GP, and I can see he used "low profile title" to mean the games that just barely make it to the shelves of physical stores, without any serious advertising campaigns etc. Those games are still built with serious budgets and 100+ person workforce and have to compete with the high-profile games. To just break even, those games need to sell in the 100K+ units scale. These are the games that, according to the GP, are going to be hit the hardest by copyright infringement.

Indie games are done in teams of maximum of 10 people, in some cases only one, where sales amounts of 5K - 10K units might (maybe) be enough to make it worth the developers' time financially speaking. These are the games which "are probably not going to be popular enough to attract that much piracy."

...yes, I pulled the numbers in this post out of my ass, but I honestly see them as somewhere in the correct ballpark. Feel free to correct me with solid information if you have any.

So. Like all corporations, when push comes to shove, they'll bow to the almighty Dollar - or in this case and probably moreso in future, Renminbi. News at 11.

Who were the guys behind NEXTStep, again? And sure, they took stuff from BSD, but so what? The end result is, the system ended up being better that way. Please don't get me wrong, I hate Apple's shenanigans these days as much as anyone else, but saying that NEXTStep is nothing else but BSD is just dishonest or ignorant.

Come on now, things are not that black and white. That should be where The Constitution kicks in. And international Human Rights treaties. ...In theory, at least.

As a finnish person myself, I'd like to point out that there are few loopholes; first, the regulation states that the theoretical maximum of the available connection must be at least 1 Mb/s, and it can be provided whatever technology is the "most viable choice", including wireless and such. Looking at the track record of what kind of actual speeds finnish telcos are able to provide over wireless technologies around the country, I wouldn't shout out in rejoice just yet. Luckily I live in Helsinki where I can actually get a passable & affordable broadband access by cable.

Depends on a game and overall design. I'm not going to say that there is a genre where it would never work (because someone would just prove me wrong with a single datapoint saying otherwise) but I'd say that

a) It must be very carefully balanced
b) Game should have better rewards for those who handle the greater challenge. That should solve the problem of "rewarding mediocrity".

Take shmups, for instance. The better the player plays in them, the harder they usually get. (at least most of the good ones.) However, the "better" playing is also tightly coupled with the mechanics of scoring, which is essentially the main rewarding system, which means that harder difficulty=higher scores. I actually like this type of system more than pre-set easy-normal-hard-very hard -steps, because first, they are by definition able (when executed right) to give the "right" difficulty for everyone, and second because it keeps everyone's scores on the same scale.

Of course, this type of system does not fit into every game. Also, if awards for good playing are items, completely losing opportunity to get some specialized gear because of good play would be mildly off-putting.

But you can still sell them to someone who is crazy enough for retro gaming that he keeps an antiquated system running for games. Or you can use emulators/virtual environments to still play those games without having completely artificial technological barriers stopping or inconveniencing you just because some business-type assholes said so.

I honestly do think of the bolded part to be relevant to this issue, especially since DMCA and it's ilk make it illegal for anyone else help you bypass those artificial barriers.

> What else could possibly be needed?

Sane quality/bandwidth ratio, perhaps?

No, he didn't forget that. You see, he wrote:

... and it's quite clear that VI is the winner.

pining for the fjords.

There is NOTHING preventing people from selling music that plays on the iPod, UNLESS you want DRM - then you're stuck with Apple. No DRM, no Apple control.

It really is not that simple... Because, for most people, the iTunes integration as both the place people can buy music and the only tool that can reliably sync and interoperate with iPods' music directory/database is the killer feature. Yeah, there are opensource projects trying to sync with iPods in order to let oss people use iPods, but Apple is notorious with breaking them with iPod firmware/iTunes updates. Why? Apple is using their dominance with portable music players to keep the competition away from the downloadable music market. Or vice versa. YEAH YEAH, I KNOW you can import non-drm music from any source into your iTunes Music Library and put that into iPod. But it is an additional hassle. And when it comes to the masses, they will not put up with the hassle unless they have a really good reason to do so. And no, having their music in FLAC or cutting down the price, like 30-50 cents apiece, is just not worth it for most consumers.

If the other digital music retailers really want to have any hope of beating Apple, they really need to figure out how to beat the end-user experience while working with the iPod. That would mean they have to somehow magically hook into iPod and probably into iTunes music library for most people.