On Twitter today, a couple of arguments continue to rage. One concerns Twitter, which, according to some people, has just turned into the BIG BAD of social networking, in having to deal with censorship. Elsewhere, Apple is being beaten into the ground by a number of tech pundits over supply chain issues, not least relating to human rights and labour.

I’m anti-censorship and also not thrilled by the situation endured by people building iPads and other Apple kit. But I also happen to be a realist: censorship will happen; goods will continue to be manufactured in places like China, by people working under conditions and for pay that would not be acceptable in many countries. To my mind, how we react to these things is therefore very important.

It’s increasingly apparent that many critics have joined yet another knee-jerk online mob. Twitter are evil! They censor things! Grrr! But what about Twitter’s rivals—how open are they? (Answer: mostly not very.) Do they provide pages with explanations regarding what is censored and how? (Answer: rarely.) And Apple is evil! But what about Apple’s rivals in computing, smartphones and tablets? How many of them use Foxconn and similar manufacturing companies? (Answer: the vast majority of them.) How many of them not only audit these places and stop working with those that don’t pass standards, but also make said auditing openly available? (Answer: I’ve no idea, but I’ve found no other examples like Apple’s. If you have, please let me know in the comments.) And now widen the target to other electronics, and even things like clothes. Are the things you’re buying all ethically produced? If so, congratulations (and I mean that sincerely), but I bet that’s a vanishingly small percentage of people reading this post; and if not, stop slamming one company out of a countless number manufacturing in China, not least because it’s seemingly at least doing something about the problems that are occurring there.

In the case of Apple, I’ve also had comments that Apple’s massive profits means it should lead by example and bring its manufacturing back into the USA and EU. But at that point, one of two things happens: Apple either ramps up its prices and becomes uncompetitive in terms of commerce, or its profits vanish, and it becomes a company that becomes uncompetitive in terms of investment. This could in a short period of time derail the company and ensure its rivals leapfrog it, bringing us back to square one, apart from the diminishing number of people working for a US/EU-only (or whatever) version of Apple. And that’s even suggesting it would be possible for Apple to do this—after all, ensuring some kind of US/EU-only manufacturing for every component would be a massive, possibly entirely unrealistic undertaking. Recently, it was reported that Chinese companies ended up manufacturing iOS devices not only because they were better from a costs standpoint, but also because nowhere in the USA had the capabilities.

As far as I can see, we now have two tech companies criticised for being, if not ‘good’, then at least the ‘least bad’. The ‘least bad’ isn’t something I typically champion, but I would argue that any element of openness from giant social networks and corporations is a good thing. Twitter’s openness about its censorship is something that should be praised, but that doesn’t mean you’re praising the censorship itself; likewise, Apple’s openness about its supply chain should be praised, but that doesn’t mean you back anything to do with the impact of Apple’s manufacturing, including from environmental, safety and human rights standpoints.

But to instead chastise these companies will merely encourage its rivals to clam up instead of following the examples of Twitter and Apple, to a point where change becomes more widespread and possible. I’m not saying things can’t and shouldn’t be better. I’m not saying we shouldn’t encourage them to do more—we very much should. But I am saying we shouldn’t be quick to simply slam those who are trying to improve things, even if the steps are much smaller than we’d like.

Engadget reports on Nintendo’s rather poor quarter:

The company posted profits of ¥40.9 billion (about $631.6 million) for the October – December period, representing a 61 percent quarterly drop. That’s especially disappointing, considering that this period has traditionally been strong for Nintendo, which had previously forecast an operating profit of ¥1 billion (around $12.9 million). Those forecasts have since changed, however, with the manufacturer now predicting a ¥45 billion ($580 million) operating loss for the full year, ending March 31st. Nintendo blames the poor showing to sagging 3DS sales, which have forced it to slash prices.

Despite my gaming now almost entirely being on iOS, and my belief that iOS has heavily impacted on Nintendo (through people gaming on smartphones and iPods, and through parents buying children iOS devices over Nintendo handhelds with expensive, easy-to-lose cartridges), I was fairly positive about the company a year ago:

It remains to be seen if the 3DS sales slump is a temporary glitch, and even if the console isn’t a massive hit, that certainly doesn’t mean Nintendo is in any way doomed. Like Apple, it’s managed to be profitable at almost every point during its history, even when one of its consoles only had a minority share of the market. But Nintendo could for the first time find itself ousted as the default company synonymous with handheld gaming—and that would be a pretty major shake-up for the entire industry.

I still think Nintendo is probably the company most people think of as synonymous with handheld gaming; the thing is, that’s clearly no longer enough for it to remain profitable. And since that was Nintendo’s trump card—an Apple-like profitability regardless of its market position, that is a major concern for the company.

When the 3DS appeared, I didn’t think it was enough. It felt like a relic, with a gimmick—an echo of a bygone age, where dedicated handheld gaming devices still mattered. It continued Nintendo’s line of thinking that had worked so well since the original Game Boy: technologically middling but accessible and portable hardware; reliance on high-quality first-party IP that’s drip-fed over many months to an eager audience; software sold on expensive cartridges; an honest focus on the purity of gaming; a level of accessibility that the likes of Sony can only dream of.

These ideals were once precisely what the industry needed, but now Nintendo has to face the harsh reality that it’s veering dangerously close to becoming another Sega. If it cannot halt the decline with the Wii U, whatever it brings out next in the handheld space (and I’ll be surprised if the DS brand isn’t retired, enabling the Game Boy to—potentially—triumphantly return) will have to be nothing short of amazing—a device that will wrench people away from smartphones and iPods, back to Nintendo. But if Nintendo continues to stubbornly follow the same path, will that be enough? It wasn’t for the 3DS. So will the company bite the bullet and go with the flow, with a system that works with cheaper downloads rather than expensive cartridges, and that at the very least recognises some manner of an app ecosystem (with stronger options regarding web browsing, social networking, reading, movies, music, and so on)?

I hope so. Despite what raging Nintendo fan-boys think whenever I criticise the company (my record to date: a drop of 50 Twitter followers from one short string of comments some months back), I do not want Nintendo to fail. Although over-reliant on refreshing certain aspects of its catalogue a little too often, it’s also been a company of innovation. The original DS was a brave move, as was the Wii. Both made gaming more accessible and open, wrenching it from the claw-like grips of so-called ‘hardcore’ gamers. For a long time, I considered Nintendo the Apple of gaming—a company that cared about the details and about the right things (fun, excitement, enjoyment). Nintendo’s problem these days is that Apple is now the Apple of gaming—and the Japanese veteran needs to fight back, perhaps borrowing some of the tricks used by the plucky American upstart.

If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll have noticed earlier today that I went off on one about shiny discs versus naughty downloads of TV shows and films. My rant was prompted by two things:

• Studios continuing to whinge about the eleven billion dollars per second they’re apparently losing through the evils of piracy, oblivious to the fact they are in part to blame for said piracy;
• A number of official pre-recorded shiny discs I’ve recently bought that made me want to hit things.

In the latter case, it’s commonplace to plonk your shiny disc in your shiny disc player and watch, getting increasingly angry, as the following happens:

1. Unskippable company logos, to remind you who’s wasting your time;
2. Unskippable piracy warning, to remind you who’s patronising you;
3. Unskippable adverts and trailers, to remind you about things you either already own, didn’t want to buy, or perhaps didn’t want to buy a while ago, when you first bought the shiny disc;
4. Unskippable advert about some other format that you don’t care about or already own, to remind you to add ‘the people who compiled this disc’ to your list;
5. Unskippable animated menu, to remind you that the studio’s art department are just as dickish as its marketing and legal teams.

Phew! That all takes a while. But at least now you can play your show—well, at least if the stupid unskippable animated menu doesn’t continue stupidly animating between pages, like some kind of stupid videogame where you get to control precisely nothing.

But wait! Then this happens:

1. Unskippable warning that the commentary on this disc might contain opinions that differ from those of the studio, to remind you that sometimes it would be better to put disclaimers on the box, or in a little menu option called ‘disclaimers’, like they do on websites;
2. Another unskippable piracy warning, to remind you that, yes, these guys really hate you;
3. Unskippable stupid logo for the stupid sound encoding the stupid disc makes, to remind you to hate related parties and not just the studio itself;
4. More unskippable logos, to remind you that you’ve just wasted minutes of your life, for no good reason.

I’ve recently bought discs that do exactly this, and it drives me nuts. In one case, I have an ‘acquired’ digital copy of some episodes of one of the TV shows, and here’s what happens when I select a file:

• It plays, immediately, and with no fuss.

“Aha,” you might argue, “studios are getting this! Just buy digital downloads, you idiot! They don’t have all this crap welded to them.” And that is true. Fire up an episode of, say, Castle on the Apple TV and it goes right to the content itself, without all the associated crap. But here’s the thing: studios still clearly want you buying shiny discs and not digital files, presumably because shiny discs provide more profit, or just because they hate you. I say this on the basis that:

• Digital content (in terms of access) is haphazard and inconsistent across territories, often being hugely delayed outside of the home territory and sometimes not showing up elsewhere at all;
• Digital content is often removed from services after a short time (such as movies that suddenly vanish from the Apple TV);
• Digital content is typically priced at least as high as a shiny disc, and older content is rarely discounted, leading to the absurd comparison of “shall I buy this TV show on iTunes for £40 or just grab the DVD for a fiver?”;
• Digital content is sometimes locked down with DRM, making it hard or impossible to transfer between devices you own.

By comparison, illegal content is:

• Available worldwide, shortly after broadcast;
• Typically available for a lot longer than official digital content;
• Free;
• Easy to transfer between devices.

The continued bitching of the film and TV industries and its support for draconian copyright measures is really pissing me off. The industries still refuse, for various reasons, to provide anywhere near the same level of user experience in bought media—be it digital or physical—that people can get with illegally downloaded content. There will, of course, always be people who refuse to pay for anything—but they are a lost cause; however, most people are happy to pay for convenience and immediacy. The thing is, they don’t want to wait. It’s no longer the 1980s, where you don’t really know right away what’s going on elsewhere in the world. When a new episode of House airs in the USA or Doctor Who on the BBC, everyone who’s a fan knows about this. If your studio isn’t then making this content legally available, affordably, and on a worldwide basis, shortly after broadcast, you’ve only yourselves to blame when people hit torrent websites and download it for free.

As I said on Twitter:

Companies do a lot better commercially when it appears they don’t hate their customers with a frenzied passion.

When some chunks of the music industry realised this, ditched DRM, embraced digital and mostly stopped being dicks, things started to improve. The same could be true for the movie and TV industries too, but they have to want to stop being dicks first.

The Appside reports Nvidia’s VP of mobile content predicting the future of mobile hardware market-share:

Apple is fabulously successful and I’m sure will continue to be so, but I do think Android will, over time, really dominate the mobile market. It’s nothing to do with who’s better, it’s just you have thousands of companies producing these devices… I think it’s going to be a repeat of the PC/Mac market, with 80% Android and 20% iOS.

First, that really isn’t a repeat of the PC/Mac market, which has mostly been closer to 95:5. Even now, with Apple massively outpacing the PC market by some margin, its share of computers remains in single figures.  But secondly, and most importantly, I find the argument that there has to be—or even that there will be—one dominant player in the mobile market without foundation. If we look back through the history of technology, and even examine the present, the PC/Mac market was an aberration. You don’t have people arguing that only one company will become dominant in TVs, cars, sound systems, and so on.

Additionally, we’re today able to enjoy a large amount of interoperability between different systems, largely thanks to the internet, and also through instant-messaging systems, social networks, and even the likes of SMS. Each hardware provider attempts to have its own lock-ins and ecosystems, but, increasingly, we have a mobile environment that can happily cater for and support a number of players.

I don’t doubt Android will retain the largest chunk of the market, although it does appear it will become increasingly fragmented—we may soon end up in a situation were Android is merely the underlying foundation for a number of systems that are, in a de-facto sense, individual entities. (Although I suspect most reporters will happily ignore this, in order to produce yet more link-bait headlines.) But iOS dropping to 20 per cent, or further? It’s possible, but I certainly don’t think we should be using the PC/Mac battles of the 1990s as evidence that it will. And Apple’s Q1 and Verizon’s Q4, where it was revealed more than half of Verizon’s sales were iPhones (CNET), shows that Apple can hold its own against the Android juggernaut, despite being the only company making iOS devices.

Late last year, it was revealed that Vector Tanks and Vector Tanks Extreme had been pulled from the App Store. The games were reasonably close tributes to Atari’s classic arcade game Battlezone, but did not use the original game’s IP. Ed Rotberg, creator of Battlezone, told me during an interview that he was impressed by Vector Tanks; Atari, unsurprisingly, was less so, and has of late gone on something of a rampage of destruction on the App Store, taking down as many apps that resemble its properties as possible.

After days of silence, Atari issued a statement to Joystiq:

For companies like Atari, our intellectual property portfolio is our most valued asset. While we have great respect for the indie developer community and greatly appreciate the enthusiasm that they have for our renowned properties, we need to vigorously protect our intellectual property and ensure that it is represented in highly innovative games. We have been actively engaging with numerous established and up and coming developers to help us re-imagine our iconic franchises, and outside app developers have already helped us produce two top 10 mobile game successes in Asteroids: Gunner and Breakout: Boost. We look forward to further developing strong relationships with the indie app development community through additional games that we will be releasing in the future.

Responses to Atari’s actions varied. Some argued it was unfairly throwing its weight around; others, such as Jared Newman at Technologizer, argued that Atari was perfectly within its rights, since Vector Tanks

rips off plenty of the Battlezone aesthetic, including the green wireframe tanks, the square- and triangle-shaped obstacles, and the wireframe mountains in the distance set against a black backdrop.

And while Vector Tanks Extreme adds more features,

it’s built on the same cloned foundation.

I find the case more troubling. There’s no doubt Vector Tanks was heavily inspired by Battlezone, but if that’s an argument, Atari needs to realise that the vast majority of its own IP was based heavily on other properties, too, judging by interviews I’ve done with the developers of many of its classic games. Very few games were truly original, even in the early 1980s. And even in today’s litigious society, surely Atari could have taken a smarter route. It talks about outside developers helping to produce updates of old Atari games, so why not just rebrand Vector Tanks as an iOS Battlezone series? Instead of killing the games, bring them sort-of in-house. That way, everyone’s happy.

Today, however, we see the Atari/Vector Tanks situation in reverse. Zynga has released Dream Heights, a game that appears perilously close to indie hit Tiny Towers by NimbleBit. Curiously, one NimbleBit developer said on Twitter that Zynga

did go the honest route and try to acquire us first.

The developer has since written a snarky open letter to Zynga, starkly highlighting the similarities between the games, and noting the difference in size between Zynga (2789 employees) and NimbleBit (three). What links this to the Vector Tanks spat is there’s as much Tiny Tower in Dream Heights as Battlezone in Vector Tanks, but I wonder what would happen if NimbleBit issued a similar take-down request to Apple. Would Apple comply? Possibly. But would the long-term results be the same? My guess: not at all. Zynga would simply unleash its legal team and NimbleBit would have no way to fight back.

This is the imbalance in the App Store. The same legal issues ultimately exist for the Vector Tanks developer, too. There is legal precedent that videogame mechanics are barely possible to protect—only direct IP (trademarks and so on) are; however, the small developer has no chance in fighting the big guns, regardless of whether it’s the one being inspired or the one providing the inspiration. On a gaming ecosystem that’s done more to level the playing field than any other since the days of 8-bit computers, this is a huge pity. Here’s hoping that Tiny Tower being first to market enables it to continue being a success, and that the Vector Tanks developers continue to produce great games that don’t resemble Atari’s IP enough for them to be the target of legal smackdowns.