No you have to go through a "publisher" of some sort who has an agreement with Apple. Previously sites like CD Baby or Reverbnation offered this service to musicians but they charge annual fees to keep your stuff up on the store.
When Distrokid launched he said on Reddit that there was no need for people to pay these annual fees and he wanted to create a cheaper option.
You've got this a little backwards. CD Baby, for example, charges per album (currently $49) to sell your music through a number of digital distributors (and they also provide distribution for physical CDs and vinyl records). It's just a one-time fee, but you have to pay it for each album you sell.
Distrokid, on the other hand, does charge an annual fee, but that's for an unlimited number of albums.
They actually pulled most of their top titles off Steam when Origin launched. Mass effect, Dragon Age etc. If you already own them on Steam then they remain in your library but you can't buy them on there anymore.
Dragon Age 1 and Mass Effect 1 & 2 are still available on Steam. Interestingly, they pulled Crysis 2 then a few months later added Crysis 2 Maximum Edition.
For Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3, I agree with their reasoning. Steam doesn't allow in-app purchases that circumvent their distribution system, and that's a load of crap.
steam isn't an open 'app store' though. It is entirely curated through valve. Valve chooses the games to list and if they aren't happy, they will not ask you to list with them. They could easily refuse to sell games if you did that.
Crysis 2 came back once no more DLC was going to be released - hence 'maximum edition'.
The no in-app purchases which don't cut in Steam was introduced when they began allowing free-to-play games on the service (which are usually monetised by microtransactions, and would be a money-loser for Valve if they didn't make a cut from them). I don't know why Steam can't make an exception for EA titles (or those purchased from the store rather than F2P), but that's the reasoning.
I thought we were supposed to be outraged at having DRM forced upon us because developers don't trust us. Now we have to be concerned that "less than five percent of apps were secured against cracking"?
I find the double-standards that people have quite interesting; what was really striking to me was seeing that it was often the exact same individuals who would argue against technologies like DRM and laws like SOPA while at the same time lamenting widespread piracy and demanding effort be put into stopping it (with explicit descriptions of possible schemes that involve either DRM or centralized filters very similar to those we would see under SOPA). When you point out the hypocrisy directly, these people get quite defensive. :(
There are multiple versions of Wine out there, and the exact results potentially depend on the user's Linux distro, the exact versions of packages installed, the compiler version it's built with, ... One of the problems Wine developers have is that DRM is often very fragile and sensitive to software changes that are outside their control.
I was going to ask what the point of this was, because I can just do it already on my iPhone. But from the comments I guess they charge you extra for it in the US?
That sucks.
Me? I get 5GB of data on my plan which costs $89 AU a month. That includes unlimited phone calls, SMS, voicemail etc
The only thing with a cap of any kind on it is the data, and I never use even close to 5GB, even with my iPad and MacBook tethering occasionally.
I don't think Google expected to just magically kill Facebook.
Most (95%) of my friends don't use G+, they use Facebook. Whenever I mention Google+ they just say "ugh not another social network. I spend too much time on Facebook as it is".
The majority of people in my circles are other tech industry people, because we find this kind of stuff interesting, but the average person needs a pretty compelling reason abandon Facebook. And I say abandon because they don't want to use both. I'm currently using both for different things because I want to be "part of it", but the average person on the street isn't interested.
There's nothing on Google+ at the moment that's very compelling for normal people who are perfectly happy with Facebook, and "pages" aren't the answer.
But Google probably knows all that.
I seriously doubt there's ever going to be something that instantly causes everyone to abandon Facebook. But if Google can slowly build G+ into a better option by trying things and listening to feedback, then it's possible.
I remember everyone saying they'd never abandon Myspace for Facebook.
