thanks for that relevant, well considered, and coherent response.

Does anyone know if any sites are auto-jailbreaking phones that visit them yet? If so, what would be the symptoms? I've just released a lite version of Hexius, and went to visit Apptrackr to see if a "cracked" version had appeared yet (yes - lite versions also get cracked for some reason). My phone mysteriously went to the lock screen and the sim had also become locked....

I posted a blog post related to this recently (http://phasiclabs.com/blog/2010/07/20/16/). My game is only 99 cents, yet the piracy rate is still at around 85%. Even though the pirated version nags the player once they have had more than 20 goes, people rarely pay their dollar to remove the nag screens, even if they do go on to play it a few hundred more times. >> The impact of piracy on a low profile title is probably the difference between making a >> modest profit and having to shut down the studio that made it I agree entirely.

I'm an indie developer, and I happened to be at the State of Independence conference in York 2 months ago.

Ed Vaisey, now the Creative Industries Minister in the Department of Culture Media and Sport was a keynote speaker, and actually took time out of election campaining to be there.

The general gist of what he was saying was that should the Conservatives get elected, then he would be pressing for tax breaks for UK game developers (he also claimed the idea of tax breaks was partly his idea, but that Labour had taken the credit).

Also, at a Playing The Game panel session (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/industry-support-is-number-one-priority-vaizey), he claimed :

O rly?