Here we go again. Now Panic has got hit by Apple’s random hammer of doom, being forced to remove an ‘upload document to iCloud’ feature from Transmit iOS, because, and I quote:

we cannot upload content to iCloud Drive unless the content was created in the app itself

Just to be clear, Apple’s made the decision—undocumented, naturally, according to Panic—that uploading to iCloud Drive is perfectly fine, but only if your app makes the document that it’s uploading, which presumably takes into account the most minor of edits/updates as well. What’s out, however, is a company (once admired so much by Steve Jobs he wanted it to make iTunes) creating a pro-oriented app for pro-oriented people that would enable them to manage files, for example sending Mac documents to Dropbox, or Dropbox content to iCloud Drive. That kind of thing is totally not wanted on iOS, for reasons.

This decision strikes me as so absurdly stupid, it’s hard to know where to begin. iPad sales are reportedly in the toilet, and yet here again we see Apple freaking out about the extensibility afforded to iOS devs in iOS 8 and banning things it’s now decided aren’t allowed, even though nothing’s actually written down, and even though such things are helpful to the kind of professional users who shout loud and also showcase how iOS potentially isn’t just for faffing about with semi-automated creation tools and playing games—it’s possible to use for actual work. *deep breath*

Perhaps this will all settle down soon. Maybe Apple will perform a quick U-turn like it did when PCalc was judged to have broken App Store rules with its Notification Center widget. But given recent events elsewhere, I’m not optimistic. Apple needs to sort its shit out with these new capabilities, before the developers that try to do something new and useful bugger off elsewhere, before those devs who consider innovating think better of it, in case of subsequent random and abrupt app rejection, and before iOS itself gains a reputation for being a hamstrung and hugely limited platform, primarily because of Apple hamstringing and limiting it.

Wired covers Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s interview with Henry Blodget. On covering a spat with publisher Hachette (now finally resolved) over pricing, Bezos still maintains books are overpriced:

If we want a healthy culture of reading book-length things, we’ve got to make books more accessible and part of that is making them less expensive. If you make it more affordable, it’s not going to make authors less money. It’s going to make authors more money.

The fallacy here is that an author will magically sell enough extra copies of a title at a lower rate to make up for dropping the price, because way more people prefer to pay less for whatever they buy. In reality, though, we’ve now seen a race to the bottom in apps, games and books, and although there are naturally a few winners (as ever), it’s hard to see a climate where the bulk of creative people are better off because of prices continuing to tumble. If anything, we’re furthering the decline of value in media—it’s becoming entirely throwaway, and people are trained to expect low prices (and, increasingly, no prices).

Really, Bezos should have just been more honest and said:

If we want a healthy culture of Amazon making more money, we’ve got to make everything more accessible and part of that is making everything less expensive. If you make everything more affordable, it’s not going to make Amazon less money. It’s going to make Amazon more money.

One thing the Vega campaign has again showcased is that people who love old games also happily pretend that basic copyright law does not exist. To anyone wondering about how Vega was going to legally bundle 1000 games with its fake Spectrum, the response was generally “Who cares?” or “All those games are public domain now anyway.” It’s a curious idea that old games alone have somehow fallen out of copyright in only about 30 years, just because people want them to.

As a thought experiment, imagine equivalents in other media. Try reprinting a bunch of books from the 1980s into a single volume and selling it in stores. Do you think you’d get away with it? Or what about 1000 music tracks from the 1980s, bunging them on a hard drive and selling that? Again, you’d be mad to think this could be in any way legal. But people think this about games.

It’s either ignorance or entitlement that results in this belief. The facts are simpler though: unless a company or individual officially releases their IP into the public domain and without caveats, subsequent distribution of any kind is simply not legal. For example, even though hundreds of ZX Spectrum games are legally available via World of Spectrum, the rights for doing so are usually single-site, meaning you can’t suddenly create your own similar site and host the same games. And even when old developers say “Do whatever you like with my old games,” that first assumes they actually own the rights (some won’t) and secondly often comes with the addition of “But you can’t resell them in any form—they must remain free”.

The Vega team is reportedly aware of this issue, and I would be disappointed to say the least if it bundled 1000 games without securing rights to all of them—a mammoth task, but one the team promised rather prematurely. For fans of old games, I’ll concede that individuals are unlikely doing any harm by downloading and playing a copy of Deathchase on an emulator, and at any rate, if you’re strongly guided by morals, you can just buy legally distributed versions of classic games you love when the opportunity arises; but it’s another thing entirely when a commercial product dances with the concept of abandonware, and people think that’s perfectly fine, largely because they have rose-tinted glasses glued to their face and a fondness for Jet Set Willy.

The Sinclair ZX Spectrum Vega got a ton of press yesterday, mostly by tech blogs copying and pasting a press release. The Indiegogo campaign, now successfully funded, resurrects the much-loved 8-bit computer as a kind of mini-console. It’s essentially an emulator — a Spectrum version of those tiny Master System consoles that do the rounds every Christmas.

However, the tech press didn’t seem to pause and ask two important questions: can you really run “all of the games” released for the system on this device, and how can the device come with 1000 games pre-loaded?

If the prototype and render images are in any way accurate, the first question is a flat no. The Spectrum was a very keyboard-oriented system for games, unlike rival the Commodore 64, which was largely joystick-based. Therefore, the expectation was most Spectrum users would control games using keys. The Vega, however, provides only four directional controllers and four action buttons. At best, the controls of all pre-loaded games will have to be remapped to whatever keys the Vega uses. Any game that requires more keys simply won’t be playable, which not only includes all text adventures but a fair amount of arcade efforts and other classics. (Good luck playing Elite with only eight keys, for example.)

The second answer, regarding pre-loaded games, is that I have no idea. I asked the people behind Vega for an answer and was met with silence. The Eurogamer reporter did at least ask about game rights and was told the Vega creators are “speaking with the owners of software rights to Spectrum games”, which is a far cry from “and we have the rights to 1000 games”.

Securing game rights is notoriously tricky at the best of times, but even more so when it comes to retro games. IP changes hands alarmingly quickly and so while the Vega team now has upwards of 100 grand to spend, it’ll need a ton of that to secure game rights, assuming it’s going to do this legally.

Of course, judging by the comment threads underneath reports of the Vega, quite a lot of people don’t seem to think games retain or should retain any copyrights at all. But that’s just flat-out wrong.

Update: Developer John Pickford, co-creator of the superb Magnetic Billiards—but also a load of Spectrum games—notes: They’re seeking permission from copyright holders but not offering a royalty. Instead they propose a charity donation. So the devs are expected to donate their work despite this device being sold for profit. I hope the copyright holders turn them down.

Some recent mobile gaming highlights:

Angry Birds Transformers launches. It is a surprisingly good game, retaining the series’s penchant for wanton destruction, and wrapping it in a playable and engaging mechanic where you auto-run along levels and shoot directly at targets. But it’s a freemium game, heavily and arbitrarily gated with all kinds of timers, IAP and ads. People complain: they just wanted to play the game.

The Silent Age‘s second episode arrives, hugely expanding the award-winning adventure title, initially downloadable for free. Those who pay $4.99/£2.99 to unlock the full story are treated to a compelling and beautiful gaming experience. But instead many people complain: they just wanted to play the game—for free.

And now paid game Monument Valley has been updated with a new set of gorgeous Escher-like puzzles to explore. The ‘forgotten shores’ is roughly the length of the original game, at least as visually stunning and inventive, and costs roughly half the price. Again, people complain. They don’t understand why they just can’t play the new levels immediately; the developer is, apparently, “greedy”, and those who bought the game are now busy downrating it on iTunes. Their original four- or five-star experience is now only worth one or two stars, because the developer had the audacity to want income for months of effort, in order to fund further games that those who bought it would presumably enjoy in the future.

On Twitter, developer ustwo half-joked:

Seems quite a few people have gone back and 1 star reviewed Monument Valley upon update because the expansion was paid. This makes us sad. That’s it, we’re giving up the premium game. Next time we’re just going to sell you 500 coins for $2 instead.

It’s hardly surprising everyone took the comment at face value. Why wouldn’t they? Developers take months crafting something, and they need to pay the bills somehow. But too many mobile gamers don’t want to pay; but they also don’t want IAP gating or adverts. They want something for nothing.

I don’t know how this plays out, or how it can be fixed. It’s too late to put the entitlement genie back in the bottle, and I suppose developers have to weather the idiocy storm and just hope enough people remain to make their efforts worthwhile, whether that’s from buying apps with price-tags, or paid upgrades, or from flinging a few bucks into the IAP well in order to make a freemium title less hideous. What I do know is that we’re still seeing the most innovative and exciting of gaming platforms continue to get a kicking, all because of greed—but from consumers, not developers.