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with homebrew you'd have terrible access to the hardware, and the hardware isn't all that compelling (it's not any better than a PC, which is equally tied to your living room)

Sometimes tied to your living room is exactly what you want. A lot of households have the PC and the TV in separate rooms or otherwise so far away that a cable won't reach. Most people don't connect PCs to TVs. It's mostly something that only other geeks do.

If you want to homebrew up a game it's far easier to just use a PC.

And if your game is in a genre that traditionally uses two to four gamepads and one large monitor rather than two to four separate machines and monitors, such as fighting games as opposed to FPS/RTS, you end up with no audience.

Being able to play on my TV is a matter of buying a $20 cable for my PC.

For a lot of people, it would involve buying another $400 PC to put next to the TV.

I've found that people who believe that people with different tastes are simply choosing "whomever the movie studios tell them to elect through their co-owned TV news channels" almost never have anything remotely perceptive or interesting to say.

So you appear to dispute the effectiveness of MPAA-owned news outlets framing the issues. Is there a better way to explain why A. nobody proposing real change makes it past the primaries, and B. Ron Paul wasn't allowed to get a word in edgewise in the 2008 presidential debates, and C. both relevant U.S. political parties agree on expansion of the scope of copyright?

ObTopic: One of the articles comes from a source accused of pandering to people vulnerable to framing. The comparison between people vulnerable to framing and farm animals has been challenged. Productive discussion can't continue until participants agree on a better term for people vulnerable to framing.

With such better means of distribution, how can we justify periods of copyright law that extend far beyond the average lifetime of the musician who created the works?

Easy: In the government of man, he who has the gold makes the rules. The movie studios, through their ownership of television news media, control who gets chosen in the primary elections. They play up Hollywood's favorite candidate (e.g. Barack Obama and John McCain) and don't let anyone proposing real change (e.g. Ron Paul) get a word in edgewise at the debates.

Windows Phone 7 is stillborn

Even after Nokia's deal?

Porting [Xbox 360 Indie] games to a phone is still going to require a major rewrite anyways

How so? I've read reports that porting between XNA on WP7 and XNA on Xbox 360 requires 1. rewriting the input and 2. using lower detailed meshes and textures on the phone. That's it. Even in a case where you'd have to replace the entire graphics engine, such as between XNA and Mono for Android, game logic elements such as collision detection and enemy behaviors would remain unchanged across platforms that support the same programming language. See my article about multitier architecture.

But relying on a tablet rather than a netbook will make it harder for someone who consumes to step up to creating.

The Republican party is in favor of even stronger copyright law, and the Democratic party is in favor of... exactly the same. They are both beholden to corporate interests, because that is where the money is - and it doesn't matter how good your policies are, you arn't going to get far in politics without the money to run a campaign.

It's not just that. All five major TV news organizations are co-owned by five out of the six major motion picture studios. They will play up or play down issues and candidates in a way that controls public perception of the movie industry. Details

Or a shirt so long that you don't have to wear pants.

there seems to be quite a few SQL implementations that don't support binding to arrays:

SELECT * FROM foo WHERE bar IN (?)

I asked the webmaster of bobby-tables.com about this. The reply was that apparently, you're supposed to construct the list of placeholders in the statement in parallel with the array of values to be substituted into those placeholders. But under some APIs *cough*mysqli*cough*, that can be far more painful than making a working function that escapes an entire array for use as right side of a WHERE expression and then carefully testing that function with every special character that your DBMS's manual mentions.

So your interaction code would have to be re-written depending on the device.

But that doesn't mean your game's logic tier would necessarily have to be rewritten.

Correct, the 'interaction code' is how the user interacts with the application so if you are using a different interaction method (touchscreen, controller, keyboard/mouse) then that should be the only part you need to re-write.

With WP7 you would have even fewer difference making even more shared code.

But is there any language that compiles both for Windows Phone 7 and for platforms without a CLR? I want to reuse the logic tier that implements "game play, AI and graphics/animation", and I don't want to have to maintain C# and standard C++, or verifiably type-safe nonstandard C++/CLI and standard C++, versions in parallel and worry that they would fall out of sync.

XNA is designed to be compiled on multiple platforms.

How many non-Microsoft platforms are among them? Is it possible to target Mac OS X, Android, and iOS on the one hand, and Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7 on the other hand, without a complete rewrite of everything including the physics and AI tier? I could live with rewriting the control and graphics, but I want the physics and AI to be bit-perfect across platforms, so that if a player can make a certain jump on WP7, he can make the jump on iOS, and vice versa.

So your interaction code would have to be re-written depending on the device.

But that doesn't mean your game's logic tier would necessarily have to be rewritten. Only the control portion would have to be forked, unlike the complete rewrite needed when porting between a .NET-only platform, such as Xbox 360 XBLIG or WP7, and a platform without a practical CLR, such as iOS.

You can write XNA and Silverlight apps in C++, if you like.

But not the standard C or C++ that you may have used on PC, iOS, and Android NDK. One must use the verifiably type-safe subset of C++/CLI (/clr:safe), and its syntax for arrays, pointers, and references is incompatible with that of standard C++. If you want to compile one program, such as the logic tier of your game, both as standard C++ and as verifiably type-safe C++/CLI, I have been told that it would take a buttload of arcane template wizardry.

I never once had a Windows machine on my desk. [...] For the occasional bug that I couldn't repro on Linux, I'd fire up VMWare just long enough to work it out.

Even if you have successfully split the cross-platform logic from the platform-specific presentation, testing the Windows presentation still needs a Windows license, whether Windows is running on bare metal or in VMware. This makes the PC a "machine with Windows installed".

And I wasn't the only developer there who chose to work that way.

Did all or only some developers use Linux as a primary platform for developing and testing software intended to run on Windows? I can see cases where developing a Windows app on Linux might not be practical for smaller one- or two-developer shops.

These plebs should install Linux and be totally free!

I'm not trying to imply that end users need to go all the way and install GNU/Linux on a PC or buy a GNU/Linux based phone or PDA such as the N900 or Pandora. But at least they should buy devices with the option of turning on the equivalent of Android's "Settings > Applications > Unknown sources". Ask anybody who had an idea for a PS3, Wii, or home theater PC game but had to retool it for Xbox 360 (with all its flaws) because PS3 and Wii have no indie developer program and HTPC penetration is next to nil. Or ask Bob Pelloni, who anybody who had an idea for a DS, PSP, or GP2X game but had to retool it for iOS and Android because DS and PSP have no indie developer program and GP2X penetration is next to nil.

TuxRacer it is!

You know, there is a middle ground between video games released as free software or freeware and video games developed by an established company with an office and employees who have years of experience working for an incumbent video game developer. It's just that certain walled gardens make it difficult to jump that gap without moving hundreds of miles away to another state.

There is a reason there is a legal term "intellectual property": because it's different to physical property and has different laws and different offences against those laws.

"Intellectual property" didn't become a legal term until the formation of WIPO, as I understand it. Richard Stallman has explained how "intellectual property" confuses several issues, and I've written my own thoughts on the term. The term carries several hidden assumptions, at least some of which I believe are contrary to fact:

• Copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets are more similar than different in purpose.
• These exclusive rights are more similar than different in scope.
• These exclusive rights are more similar to exclusive rights in land than different from it. (You recognize that this is untrue, but some "IP" proponents have not.)
• The best way to promote the creation of works of authorship and inventions is by creating a state-sponsored entitlement to exclusive rights.
• Especially when the term is abbreviated as "IP", strained analogies among these exclusive rights and between them and rights in land should be taken for granted.

If you mean copyright, say copyright. Otherwise, I agree with the points you make

That's what you idiots get for buying into the Obama facade.

The article states that copyright is generally not a partisan issue. Both relevant U.S. political parties favor expansion of its scope and expansion of enforcement, and a lot of that is due to movie studios' control of TV news. How do you recommend that I convince enough people in my congressional district and my state to vote third party?

I'd call it a chicken-egg problem. That's a problem for all HTPC-specific software and hardware, actually, as general-purpose PCs under the TV have never really caught on in a big way.

The root of the problem comes from the fact that before 2007 or so, most living room TVs were SDTVs without PC-compatible inputs. And the rest, as you said, is path dependence. So I take it you don't have any suggestions for breaking the cycle either.

I'd love to have some non-emulated local multiplayer games for my PC, but I'm not expecting to ever see any released.

I've started a short list on my site, but you're right that they're just token efforts.

but many people have at least two televisions and a friend who owns one of the same consoles they do.

But then you'd need to buy two copies of every game. Apart from Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS, I've seen only one console game with spawn installation, and that was Dr. Mario Online Rx for Wii.

I just know that I, personally, rarely care much about a console game's online play features.

And it appears that a lot of Slashdot users happen to feel the opposite: the only multiplayer they care about is online because it's the only practical way to play if all your friends live over 50 miles (80 km) away.

You know where you have to look for innovation? Flash games and YouTube. Yes, Flashgames and YouTube.

Even SWF games have to have an ROI even if only to justify $700 for Adobe Flash CS*. Or what environment do you recommend for one to get started making an SWF game without Adobe Flash CS*?

Do you think any music exec would have invested a dime in things like Autotune-the-News?

No, because of the litigious stick-up-the-behind attitude that some major copyright owners have about their works. A news station could see a lot more dollar signs suing a notable record label than whoever does Autotune-the-News, especially when it's one of the network news giants like ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, or CNN, all of which are owned by movie studios.

If you're saying .NET is not a native framework then I'd also argue that Android's java/dalvik framework is not native either.

You're correct: Dalvik uses a JIT, and it used to even use an interpreter. But Android at least has NDK, which allows writing much of the program in standard C++, compiling that to ARM machine code, and then connecting that to a front-end using the Java/Dalvik framework. This can prove convenient if your program is ported from another platform, and its model is written in C++. Windows Phone 7 and Xbox Live Indie Games, on the other hand, lack anything comparable to NDK or NaCl; they run only IL which must 1. be verifiably type-safe and 2. not use Reflection.Emit. This in practice means C# or C++/CLI, and if you want, I'll explain how the verifiably type-safe subset of C++/CLI is C++ in name only.

In everyday usage the word Linux refers to the whole OS. And by that we mean the kernel, GNU stuff, (sometimes also X11 and whatnot). In light of that, Android is not Linux, even if it technically is.

Which might even validate the point of the people who insist that Linux distributions similar to desktop Linux be called GNU/Linux. This would at least serve to distinguish "GNU/Linux" on N900 from "embedded Linux" on Android phones.

I looked up "runaway1956" on IMDB, but only got this. Have you produced anything I might be familiar with, or was it all indie stuff?

The tendency to look down on "indie stuff" solely because it hasn't been reviewed by the mainstream media is characteristic of someone who accepts or even benefits from a divide between those who create works and those who "just consume". It is in the mainstream media's interest to downplay prosumption because it competes with products of entertainment conglomerates that own the mainstream news media.

I looked up "runaway1956" on IMDB, but only got this. Have you produced anything I might be familiar with, or was it all indie stuff?

The tendency to look down on "indie stuff" solely because it hasn't been reviewed by the mainstream media is characteristic of someone who accepts or even benefits from a divide between those who create works and those who "just consume". It is in the mainstream media's interest to downplay prosumption because it competes with products of entertainment conglomerates that own the mainstream news media.

Only nine people in this country know what the Constitution really means.

No, only nine people are presently empowered to have the final say on what the Constitution really means. That's not even remotely the same thing.

The Supremes are infallible in the same way that the Pope of the Catholic Church is infallible: they're infallible because they're final.

Over the generations those nine people change

There are directions in which the nature of political process itself pushes policy change in a specific direction. For example, U.S. Presidents appear more likely to nominate and Senators to confirm judges who are willing to go along with the copyright industry special interests that control the reputation of candidates for federal elective offices through TV news.

It is not like every matter relating to the U.S. Constitution ends up in front of the supremes.

As I understand it, the Supremes largely take cases that have led or are likely to lead to a split among the appeals circuits. If there is a substantial split, then I'd guess one appellate judge knows the relevant part of the Constitution and the other doesn't.

'Parties and candidates fixed outside of elections in various channels'? You mean channels like primaries

The MPAA manipulates its co-owned news media to keep candidates proposing real change out of U.S. primary voters' mind. Look at how Ron Paul wasn't given much of a chance to speak even in those 2008 presidential debates to which he was invited. He ended up mathematically eliminated from the race before the primaries even got to my state.

Why not just demand that our leaders pass laws and make treaties that reduces the limits on copyright terms and places some mandatory licensing schemes into play after a certain period of time?

Because said leaders have repeatedly shown that they won't listen to their constituents on copyright issues. It's impossible to get elected to the U.S. Congress without support of the TV news networks, and MPAA members own those.

What I said still applies to Sony and Nintendo consoles.

Even considering XNA, how does one port an existing game written in standard C++ to XNA? The XNA environment runs only verifiably type-safe IL, and I'm not aware of any automated way to translate code written in standard C++ into any language that can be compiled to verifiably type-safe IL. There exists something called C++/CLI, but its verifiably type-safe subset is a syntax error in standard C++.

Why do Americans always assume their politics must come in one of two flavours, that someone is either on the right or the left?

The two-party system arose because U.S. congressional and presidential elections are plurality rule, not something more sensible like approval, and U.S. politics has reached the end state predicted by Duverger's law for plurality systems. Also because the MPAA-controlled TV news organizations only have to cover the two parties most favorable to them.

Say what you will about Oracle, but with OpenJDK, I can pretty much do what I want.

Except run on platforms that run verifiably type-safe .NET IL and nothing else. These platforms include at least Xbox Live Indie Games, the only set-top video game platform that officially allows micro-ISVs to develop and sell games for it, and Windows Phone 7. Say I want to write a video game whose physics and AI are shared among all platforms even if it has a separate graphics engine per platform. Can the Java programming language be compiled to IL, or just to JVM bytecode?

The root cause for this lack of choice (as in Canada) is lack of proportional representation.

In my opinion, it's more that American voters tend to choose whom to vote for based in large part on TV news coverage, and the movie studios own TV news. Issues on which movie studios are thought to disagree with the public almost never get news stories, nor do candidates whose platform would reduce movie studios' ability to earn profits and rents.

You should have read this portion of the AC's comment:

In the USA you have effectively two choices.

The Democrats, who side with "the creators, artists, etc." and are thus for a strong copyright protection framework
or
The Republicans, who side with the business and are thus for a strong copyright protection framework.

Which means that it doesn't matter if you choose whom to vote for based on TV news coverage, use a Ouija Board, or by reading chicken entrails.

There is no choice - both parties are for the same thing, as far as copyright laws go.

When is the last time the winner of a major election in the USA was someone not from the Democrat or Republican parties?

It doesn't matter what the news coverage is of any candidate, if they all support the same position.

The root cause for this lack of choice (as in Canada) is lack of proportional representation.

In my opinion, it's more that American voters tend to choose whom to vote for based in large part on TV news coverage, and the movie studios own TV news. Issues on which movie studios are thought to disagree with the public almost never get news stories, nor do candidates whose platform would reduce movie studios' ability to earn profits and rents.

It's not like the PC somehow prevents them from making a shared screen game.

Because of the lack of deployed home theater PCs, most home PCs are connected to 13" to 19" PC monitors, not 24" or bigger TV monitors. It's more difficult to fit two to four adult bodies around the smaller monitors that are already connected to PCs than around the big screen TVs that are far more likely to be connected to consoles. A lot of TVs made before 2006 are SDTVs and don't even have a VGA or HDMI input for PC signals, and even HDTVs aren't always in the same room as the family PC. People would have to buy a separate $500 small-form-factor PC with non-Intel graphics for shared-screen PC gaming, such as a Dell Inspiron Zino, Gateway SX, or Mac mini, and because there are next to no major-label shared-screen games exclusive to the PC, members of the general public buying a set-top video gaming device will almost invariably choose a console (or even two consoles) over a PC. People could move the family PC to the living room, but most people don't want to A. hog the TV for homework and Facebook or B. move the family PC back and forth between the desk and TV multiple times a day.

dial-up and charged by the minute

Dial-up Internet access in the United States was typically billed at a flat monthly rate. A few ISPs imposed a limit of 100 to 150 hours a month to free up modem pools.

Either my friend would come to me or I would come to him

A lot of other Slashdot users explain to me that they play online because A. their friends live hundreds of miles or hundreds of km away and they can't afford to be a frequent flyer, or B. they play with strangers because their friends don't play the same video games.

The XNA dev kit is free, and games created with it can be freely distributed on windows computers.

Say I develop a game in C#, the preferred language of XNA. Now how do I port it to Mac OS X, iOS, Android, or any other non-Windows platform? Ordinarily, I'd develop the game with a multitier architecture, with a fairly clean separation between the platform-agnostic physics and the platform-specific graphics engine. (I've done this before to get a single game working on PC and Nintendo DS, with the platform-agnostic portion written in C.) But this sort of multitier design works only when all platforms can run the programming language in which the platform-agnostic portion is implemented.

And as far as "limited" goes, for most people just creating games for fun and the hell of it ... the only boundary has been time.

There are plenty of other boundaries. All code must be verifiably type-safe IL, which rules out porting games written in standard C++. (The verifiably type-safe subset of C++/CLI is incompatible with standard C++.) Games may include text only in a handful of languages, which rules out games designed for teaching other languages or RPGs where a character encounters a village of NPCs who aren't fluent in the common tongue and learning their language is a quest. And until XNA 4 introduced the "dynamic sound effect", there was no way to synthesize speech.

I'm guessing the bar for entry on these games being made for PC would be lower if people used their PC to drive large HDTVs, and devs catered to them.

Major devs don't cater to HTPC owners because not enough people set up HTPCs. I'm working on an article about the lack of PCs driving TVs. If you have suggestions for how to better market HTPCs to the public, I'd appreciate your comments on its talk page.

the only cost difference is the price of extra licenses

Darn right. Will mommy buy a 4-pack of Steam game licenses for $160 or a single console disc for $60? Or once a game is older, will mommy buy a 4-pack of Steam game licenses for $80 on sale or a single used disc from GameStop for $30?

Or find a way to keep everything on a single screen like Smash Bros. or most fighters.

This is exactly what I was planning on doing until CronoCloud and other Slashdot users gave me a reality check about the lack of PCs driving TVs.

can you play a PS3 game on a PS2?

No, but I can play a PSP game on a GBA.

Some new games work on older hardware some don't.

And inability to concisely express system requirements is one of the major faults of PC gaming.

Seeing that I play single player games or multiplayer over the internet, this is not a problem for me.

Say you have little Abigail and little Chester who live together and want to play together, but only one of the PCs in the household is a gaming PC, and the head of household has bought only one copy of the game for them to share. If they were to rely on multiplayer over the Internet, Chester would have to set up a play date to visit the home of a friend who also has a copy of the game just to play with Abigail, and it would be rawther impolite for Chester to ignore this friend and concentrate on Abigail. That's a severe violation of play date etiquette as I understand it.

Also, it may be difficult to connect a console to a computer monitor for single player use (my CRT monitor would most likely work with this as long as the console has a VGA (or RGB) output, but most LCDs and even CRTs wouldn't).

You have a point about Wii, which appears to have only "consumer electronics" style video outputs: composite, S-Video, and YPbPr component. But all PLAYSTATION 3 consoles and all Xbox 360 consoles after the first few batches have HDMI out, and many newer LCD monitors tend to have HDMI in or DVI in with HDMI audio support.

OK, I'll try to explain: SMB style games with those graphics are OK - the graphics do not have to be 3D, but they have to be high enough resolution. On the other hand, games like NetHack are out. Also, some 3D games have very low resolution models and textures, to the point that it is difficult to recognize what I am looking at.

So allow me to rephrase your standard as I understand it: if you don't have at least Xbox/Wii class video hardware and comparable asset authoring capacity, keep it 2D.

Given a choice between to very similar games, I'd pick the one with better graphics.

Consider a choice between a video game that is free and Free vs. one that is proprietary and $50 per player. Or a video game that runs on hardware you own vs. a video game that needs a new CPU, a new GPU, and more RAM. At what point do graphics override other considerations?

private interests or governments catering to them

Of course governments cater to the private interests that control the means by which legislators are elected. MPAA studios' parent companies own the major TV news outlets.

Representative democracy became corrupt as the news media consolidated with the MPAA and other producers of fictional entertainment. People vote for candidates that they're familiar with on issues that they're familiar with, and the MPAA controls what the voters are familiar with. You can't run for federal elected office if your platform includes bringing balance back to copyright because balanced copyright would hurt the MPAA's profits, and the MPAA-controlled news channels would just deny you recognition.

Jailbreak a mobile and you can run emulators on it. A NES or SNES in your pocket.

For one thing, few smartphones have a D-pad and physical buttons designed for gaming. A multitouch surface doesn't cut it because without tactile feedback, it's hard to tell whether your thumb is properly aligned over the buttons. For another, there are very few good homebrew games for NES and fewer still for Super NES. It's easier for a programmer to write a native Android or iOS app than to write an NES game in assembly language, even though that doesn't stop some people. Or are you talking about making infringing copies of commercial video game ROMs?

Stop supporting this model

All three major video game consoles use this razors and blades business model of selling the console near or below cost and making a profit on a tightly controlled software developer licensing program enforced with a digital imprimatur. Replacing the video game console with a home theater PC doesn't work because PC game publishers tend not to include multiplayer modes designed for a home theater PC, in turn because there are not enough other people who own a home theater PC.

and buy a phone of your own

How can one do this in an area where T-Mobile has poor signal? T-Mobile has "Even More Plus" plans available in-store or over the phone, and its MVNO Simple Mobile offers a similar plan, but the other three major U.S. carriers don't give a discount for bringing your own phone.

Stop supporting this model

All three major video game consoles use this razors and blades business model of selling the console near or below cost and making a profit on a tightly controlled software developer licensing program enforced with a digital imprimatur. Replacing the video game console with a home theater PC doesn't work because PC game publishers tend not to include multiplayer modes designed for a home theater PC, in turn because there are not enough other people who own a home theater PC.

and buy a phone of your own

How can one do this in an area where T-Mobile has poor signal? T-Mobile has "Even More Plus" plans available in-store or over the phone, and its MVNO Simple Mobile offers a similar plan, but the other three major U.S. carriers don't give a discount for bringing your own phone.

However, you have a game that looks like Tetris *AND* a game name similar to Tetris.

Would it be safe if the name of a Tetris clone didn't share any letters with Tetris, like Lockjaw? You might think so, but The Tetris Company and one of its licensees (Arika Ltd.) went on several rampages of OCILLA takedown notices on YouTube. They even sent a takedown notice for a video criticizing Arika's behavior, which YouTube for some reason kept down for longer than the OCILLA maximum 14 business days after counter-notification.

Politiians are whores for your votes

Major copyright owners can provide more votes than concerned members of the public because major copyright owners control the major U.S. television news media. This lets major copyright owners manipulate voters' awareness of both issues and candidates.

Copyright law (and its associated enforcment and punishment) has been abused far too much by certain organisations that it has lost all respect.

Voters don't appear to think that way, or they'd have signed petitions for Pirate Party legislators' ballot access.

The one does not follow from the other.

But then the MPAA-controlled news media have been doing a good job of hiding the Pirate Party's existence from voters.

Hmm.... One arm of an industry protecting another arm? Who would've thought!

Copyright law (and its associated enforcment and punishment) has been abused far too much by certain organisations that it has lost all respect.

Voters don't appear to think that way, or they'd have signed petitions for Pirate Party legislators' ballot access. But then the MPAA-controlled news media have been doing a good job of hiding the Pirate Party's existence from voters.

By "Xbox Live", did you mean "Xbox Live Arcade" or "Xbox Live Indie Games"? I've read that the former is available only to established companies (like WiiWare). As for the latter, like Apple's App Store, XNA is subject to censorship, restrictions on developer tools (e.g. no ports of an existing C++ game), and other flaws.

How are consoles different?

Consoles differ from PCs in two main ways:

• Consoles are generally connected to larger monitors than PCs. This allows for same-screen multiplayer. Same-screen multiplayer is far easier and cheaper than a LAN party, and some genres (such as fighting games or the party games popular on Wii) depend on it.
• Consoles require all code to have been digitally signed by the console maker, and console makers such as Sony and Nintendo have categorically refused to sign code developed by a dedicated team of individuals working out of home offices.

Unfortunately for indie developers, these two are tied: if your game is in a same-screen multiplayer genre, you must either make it for the apparently negligible home theater PC market or somehow get a dedicated office and "industry experience" (which I take to mean a prior commercial title in a PC genre).

How are consoles different?

Consoles differ from PCs in two main ways:

• Consoles are generally connected to larger monitors than PCs. This allows for same-screen multiplayer. Same-screen multiplayer is far easier and cheaper than a LAN party, and some genres (such as fighting games or the party games popular on Wii) depend on it.
• Consoles require all code to have been digitally signed by the console maker, and console makers such as Sony and Nintendo have categorically refused to sign code developed by a dedicated team of individuals working out of home offices.

Unfortunately for indie developers, these two are tied: if your game is in a same-screen multiplayer genre, you must either make it for the apparently negligible home theater PC market or somehow get a dedicated office and "industry experience" (which I take to mean a prior commercial title in a PC genre).

If you create and publish a work critical of another work, expect the copyright owner of the other work to sue you. Sure, such suits are winnable, but only for people who have beaucoup bucks for a good lawyer.

Not really, this just does not happen.

It has happened. See SunTrust v. Houghton Mifflin over The Wind Done Gone .

If it did any such action is almost certainly going to be thrown out on the first motion

Good luck getting to that first motion on an indie budget, and good luck defending the appeals of the throwing out.

(assuming US jurisdiction - in Brittan your fucked)

So how do I prevent copies of my work from being sold in Great Britain and Northern Ireland so as not to attract British jurisdiction? How should I know in advance which jurisdictions are least friendly to criticism of a copyrighted work?

If the DMCA's anti-circumvention clauses gets removed

...then magical unicorns exist. Substantially pro-consumer changes to United States copyright law aren't going to happen in the next decade because the MPAA-owned news media control who can run for Congress.

And there's another issue: accidental copying. George Harrison accidentally copied part of a Ronald Mack song into his own "My Sweet Lord" and lost a lawsuit (Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music). What was Harrison supposed to have done first in order not to get sued by Mack's publisher?

There just aren't enough home theater PCs

Why the hell not?

I've attempted to cover the reasons I know of for lack of HTPC penetration in this article. But now, from C++ vs. C# to cross-platform APIs vs. XNA to PCs vs. consoles, we've strayed way off-topic; let's please continue on the article's discussion page.