I can't believe there are no threads about it yet! Very exciting!

I just bumped some old threads.

Well all right wing is crazy (god has no place in economics), but some are crazier than others.

And I'd disagree, I'd say that it gets easier every time someone bows out. Think space exploration. Way back when in the USA it was just NASA, these days the market is there, the technology is there, and all the private companies are demanding to be let in on the action.

Each new "revolutionary" preps the audience, with the final one succeeding. That's how it seems to play out anyway

*ahem*
Yeah, and that's a huge problem in my view, private space exploration. Pray tell what interest would a private company have to carry out a mission for science objectives alone, as the rest doesn't matter and won't matter for a long time to come, and at no profit, since if they obtain a profit it'd only follow that a state agency should technically be able to do it cheaper and therefore fit more missions in the same budget?
Back when you had just NASA but they believed they were competing militarily with the USSR in space as well, they could put men on the moon with the technology of pocket calculators and came up with reusable spacecraft. Then the military angle was gone, their budget collapsed to a tenth or less, and they were content to just poke at some things now and then, and lately less so even at that. And now you have private companies delivering food to the ISS (when stuff doesn't blow up) and planning space tourism and maybe mining asteroids or the moon, while in terms of exploration after 2017 we'll be left with no functional craft orbiting anything beyond Mars, and with the Voyagers possibly ceasing to operate around 2025, New Horizons around 2030, ESA's JUICE only supposed to work for some 3 years at Jupiter once it'll get there and no plans at the moment for anything else going out there, we as a species may eventually have no "eyes" in the outer solar system at all for the first time since the early '70s.
And just these days was looking at the Kepler Team's AMA and they were saying that 10 years ago they were thinking by 2030 they'll be able to directly image Earth-size habitable-zone exoplanets and analyze their atmosphere, but now they're not hoping for much before 2050 anymore, while the New Horizons people admitted there are a few instruments on NH worse than those on the Voyagers and they won't be able to meet some very important objectives with it at Pluto because they didn't get the funds for the instruments needed when it was launched.
Somehow, highly doubt any private company will step in to fill in those blanks for the sake of the cause. And state agencies in China and India hardly seem to try either, being more concerned with just showing off if they do manage something at all.
(Different issue of course, but since you brought it up...)

[On topic:]
I guess we can see how Shiny Loot will hold, as those seem to make a point of fighting regional pricing, and maybe the newer Games Republic that was mentioned around here, but neither of those is firm against DRM, so nobody (that I know of) fighting both anymore. Plus that the taxes issue will hit Shiny Loot hard, being an US company, while GOG being an EU one was very well placed to shrug it all off and tell publishers to do the same.

Of course, there's less money in it so private doesn't care. They only want the profitable parts of space ex. to be taken off of public agencies and given to them for free, public still needs to do the groundwork with long range transport. :P

And it technically is related, just very loosely haha