Either way, the developers of World of Goo are still screwed. "Screwed" relative to what? The cloud-cuckoo-land business model where they have the same develop

Either way, the developers of World of Goo are still screwed. "Screwed" relative to what? The cloud-cuckoo-land business model where they have the same development and distribution costs and the same marketing effectiveness but a 0% piracy rate? That plan only works in your imagination. Seems to me that the World of Goo developers might be doing pretty well by their business model. They've got 10% of their users paying $15. If they'd made an iPhone app 100% of their users would be paying something... but how much smaller is the universe of users, and would they have built as big an audience in that universe if they had charged $15 for a game? Here's something claiming to be a bestseller list: http://thumblounge.com/topapps/ http://thumblounge.com/topapps/ SimCity for iPhone seems to be pulling in $10 a unit... but SimCity is a legendary existing brand with no marketing problems. Somewhat obscurer games -- which nonetheless have pretty well-known existing brands -- are Enigmo and Bejeweled, which are charging $2 each. So: much less revenue per user, smaller potential universe of users, but a much lower piracy rate. Does it pay off? Should every new game be exclusive to the iPhone, now? Now factor in this: Which game developers are now in a great position to get some big game company to sign a contract for the Wii, PS3, or XBox rights -- or to port their game to iPhone and leverage their piracy-built brand to get lots of people to pay $4.99 to play it again? Is it worth allowing pirates to copy your game onto half the machines in the world if one of those machines happens to be sitting near a manager at Electronic Arts? I don't know the answers to these questions. But they would be interesting to explore. Without doing so, sitting around and complaining about the "unfairness" of a 90% piracy rate is just an unenlightening fantasy exercise, like imagining how much better you could fight if you were Colossus from the X-Men.