I also find it funny that one of your co-workers posted an article about video game Halloween cosplay that pretty much treats women the way you don't want to be treated. Irony... no?
Working on what is essentially the same game for 14 years would drive any dev. company employee insane. Just look at Infinity Ward, but it only took them about 8 years to go insane and split.
@dowingba: Guessing Nintendo learned their lesson seeing 1000's of Japanese Pokemon games floating around in America. Gotta protect those international copyrights and release dates.
@milford: China has been fighting Blizzard and World of Warcraft for years now. They can't agree on what to keep and what to cut to make the Chinese government happy.
Australia has pretty strict rules too. I remember they had a fit over Left 4 Dead 2 and almost had it banned from store shelves when it came out. So there are worse countries than Germany.
@madog: Region locking is necessary to protect copyrights, plain and simple. What is owned by one company might be owned by another company in America. A lot of Japanese companies sell rights to their games, characters, series, etc. to outside companies rather than distribute themselves outside of Japan.
Besides Madden and Super Toon Rumble that looks like a solid line-up. Tom Clancy is meh but at least it's better than another Call of Duty game which I'm sure is in the works.
@Salen: I can't believe Microsoft isn't trying to stop them either. That is until one of them tries to sell their mods then Microsoft is gonna want a piece of that money pie.
@LoungeLizard: It's just one giant advertisement anyways, Activision, EA, Capcom, etc. they all get free advertisement for their upcoming games and undeserved awards for their newly released ones. They need to include independent developers too because they have a stake in the industry too.
I don't need a chart to tell me that PC pirating is a problem. It's the reason why many developers have a hard time doing multi-platform releases that include the PC.