Marty - as far as I'm concerned, the "Standard Edition" thing without the restrictive license would be not so much a matter of increasing the customer base but just staying competitive. Since they abandoned the lower-priced, *unrestricted* Standard edition I've been very seriously considering abandoning Delphi. I simply can't justify spending many hundreds of dollars for every upgrade when there are so many other free and cheap options - many of which also lack Delphi's other problem of being closely tied to a specific company. C++ maybe be a pain in the ass but it's not quite as bad for games (as opposed to GUI app develpment), it's free in many forms, and you can write C++ for every significant game platform in existence. Even the "gold standard" Visual C++ IDE is available for under $100 (doesn't come with their best optimizing compiler, but there is no restriction on selling your app unless you're using the academic version). I've also considered using C#/.NET, which is also free if you download the SDK from MS and download the SharpDevelop IDE. The code is very much like Delphi, too.

IMHO, Borland is shooting themselves in the foot by making the financial barrier to new shareware developers way too high - a freaking THOUSAND DOLLARS before you're allowed to sell the app you create. They probably make more from licensing to established companies than to "newbies" or low-sales shareware developers, but the pool of competent Delphi developers is going to start to diminish the more expensive and restrictive the licensing gets. They need to make it cheap and easy for students and newbie shareware people to jump on the Delphi bandwagon, but they're going totally the opposite direction.