Yeah I vowed to stop trying with them after the whole EULA thing. That was the straw that did it. If it wasn't for my friend Jim reaching out to me this thread would have continued collecting dust.

Free just isn't going to happen. It's a waste of energy to hold onto that idea. It's been talked about between myself and David I. and he pretty much told me that it'll never happen and that their stance is that they cannot do it.

A stripped down version of Delphi would work if they kept to a low cost model and sold it as a locally compiled multi-platform solution, one product per platform. Then you compile your game projects for multiple platform just like you do on Lazarus.

If the cost were to sit somewhere around $50 - $100, maybe even $150, I could see it working and I could even budget a game project on those numbers.

The value would be in familiar language features and tool environment and they would need to focus on the core of the product and less on the frills and fancy business components. (Probably why the Delphi compiler's stability and performance has suffered for so long.)

VCL and all of that stuff could be a nice to have, but if you are a serious game developer it's not important and you would have or make your own tools anyways.