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Gamasutra covered how much of a scam this contest is.

The executive summary: Atari gets full ownership and rights to every submission, winning or otherwise, and you'll never earn anywhere near $100k even if you win the top prize.

All of this is rather unsurprising, given the dirty tricks Atari Legal have been playing lately.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/BrianRobbins/20120228/163180/Why_Ataris_Pong_Indie_Developer_Challenge_is_bad_for_developers.php

Uhhh...you DO realize that MSFT went into the black with the X360 more than 2 years ago, yes? And that other than advertising its been pretty much gravy ever since? or that MSFT is making a HELL of a lot more money off of the X360 than just the sales of consoles thanks to XBL and licenses? Finally I would point out that the Xbox is the one example i can think of where MSFT actually sat a goal and accomplished it with flying colors. what did Ballmer say with the release of the original Xbox? "We want the living room" and what did the X360 give him? It gave him the living room on a silver platter. It has tons of content on XBL, it is so simple to stream from the Win 7 desktop to the X360 frankly your grandma can do it, after one complete failure after another the Xbox was a shining example that they could actually accomplish a goal.

FYI here is a citation showing that the Xbox division saw a 1.32 BILLION dollar profit for 2011. if that is a failure I'd like two please if you don't mind.

A series of articles I enjoyed:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132024/the_history_of_computer_.php?print=1
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130124/the_history_of_computer_.php?print=1
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/129994/the_history_of_computer_.php?print=1

Not a top ten list, and pagination defeated by print mode.

A series of articles I enjoyed:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132024/the_history_of_computer_.php?print=1
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130124/the_history_of_computer_.php?print=1
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/129994/the_history_of_computer_.php?print=1

Not a top ten list, and pagination defeated by print mode.

A series of articles I enjoyed:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132024/the_history_of_computer_.php?print=1
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130124/the_history_of_computer_.php?print=1
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/129994/the_history_of_computer_.php?print=1

Not a top ten list, and pagination defeated by print mode.

#idonthavefactstobackthisup, but when fremium games generate more profit, it's not because the same people end up paying more.

Short reply: this is incorrect. From what I recall of the stats, most F2P games make all of their money on ~2% of the user base. Think of that Apple guy that buys everything that has an Apple logo on it. They're the type those games target for profits. TF2 in particular can capitalize on "whales" since they can buy lots of items and then give them to friends (or trade them for rare items from other people), rather then being entirely restricted to personal purchases.

I had a friend that went way into these sorts of transactions (even on non-F2P games, like WoW server/faction/race tranfers) -- when I pointed out that she was paying a lot of money for what I saw as pretty little return value, she just said that she didn't care. She had disposable income, and this was what she did. It certainly wasn't any worse than paying $50 a night going out to clubs, and she was having fun.

But if you do have DRM your games will *still* be pirated. I have yet to encounter even one piece of single-player DRM for games that defeated the pirates - it only takes one cracker, and their work will be all over the p2p networks in hours. Multiplayer is a different story, yes - you can use things like requiring unique serials then that really do bother the pirates - but single player? No, DRM is useless. Might buy a couple of days.

Occasionally you'll find a few games that last significantly longer. Not forever, but long enough to get those all-important first month sales out of the way before a full crack is available.

I'll be interested to see if they go for WoW-style "raw", imperative Lua (gobs of functions) or a more OOP-style Lua (NB: my site).

In designing the Lua interface for an old Game UI authoring product I originally went with OOP-style Lua. It was (IMHO) a rather elegant wrapper on our DOM. However, we soon found that the memory thrash of using Lua's lightweight userdata to go back and forth between C++ and Lua resulted in poor performance on consoles, and I ultimately had to redesign the interface to be more WoW-like for our next release.

It was a shame, putting more onus on the scripter to manage objects (tables of properties in Lua) based on a 'pointer' passed around to uniquely identify each element in the DOM, and passing that pointer to all relevant functions. But the performance increase was dramatic.

Definitely a good read, and one of the links lead me to one of the best articles I've seen in a while, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6366/persuasive_games_exploitationware.php
(disclaimer: I barely have time to play games nowadays, but I cringe at all the clickware so endemic in social gaming...)

They better come out with this quick. It's amazing how quickly they crashed and burned with the Wii. This is what I call an "I told you so" post.

It seems like only a year ago (and it probably was) when any time you said the Wii was in trouble someone would come and tell you how wrong you are and that the Wii is "totally pwning Xbox and PS3". I think anyone could see the trouble was heading to within 1 year of the Wii coming out, but nooooooo. "Oh, you don't know how much the Wii is dominating Xbox/PS3!".

Well, no - it wasn't. It was selling at a small profit for Nintendo but nobody was buying very many games. It was old technology, it looks like crap. It was a gimmick that flashed brightly for a while because of the innovative controller, then it died almost as quickly.

Nintendo needs the U _now_ and they need it to be ~25% more powerful than current generation gaming consoles. I wish them well, I think 3 major platforms is perfect and want them to stick around but I was a bit annoyed by the blinders people had regarding the Wii.

Nintendo profited from every Wii made. Sony and MS lost lots of money on every PS3 and 360 sold until recently.
The global attach rate for the Wii is about 7.7, while it's around 8.5 for the PS3. The 360 has an attach rate of about 9.2 in the US, and less globally (I don't know the number).

The Wii has sold about 100 million units and the PS3 and 360 are sitting at around 60 million units.
Nintendo is the developer of most of the top-selling games on the Wii, so they get 100% of the profit.
For the PS3 and 360, the bulk of softare sales are for games developed by 3rd parties - MS and Sony only see the royalties from those sales.

Here's a chart for you (old, but still reflective of the situation):
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/edit/img/images/blog/5615/profit_chart_consoles.jpg

You realise WP7 is still WinCE but with a nice-ish managed UX layer.

No native stuff tho, so no Unity3D stuff. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/38561/Unity_Engine_Not_Coming_To_Windows_Phone_7.php

That can't be true because Quake 3 wasn't published by Zenimax and I know Urban Terror HD is now an officially licensee of the Quake 3 engine.

I think you've flipped it around. Zenimax will license the old engines, but won't license the current engine as they consider it a competitive advantage.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/29886/id_Tech_5_Rage_Engine_No_Longer_Up_For_External_Licensing.php

However, official licenses have nothing to do with open sourcing the old engines. And I saw multiple news stories that Bethesda/Zenimax would not allow iD to continue giving engines away for free.

Because we are getting to the point in technology that us humans won't be able to perceive the difference in graphics.

We are far from this point. In fact we may be close to the point where we cannot easily pinpoint what is wrong but we are still able to perceive it unconsciously. There are a lot of important things current 3D engines can't do correctly such as indirect lighting (radiosity), refraction and caustics. Here is an interesting article about some of these limitations : http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/PhilippeRinguetteAngrignon/20090606/1708/Why_quotNextGen_Gamesquot_Went_Gray_Brown_And_Grey.php

I'm also very interested in programming games. So far I haven't found any that are exactly what I want, but there are some enjoyable ones.

I used to do programming contests in college, while I enjoyed these I always felt like I wasn't learning enough. They're designed so that you'd need a very good team and lots of outside training. It isn't nearly as much fun outside of real (or even practice) competition, but you can find big banks of problems and an online judge if you want to play along. TopCoder is similar and much easier to participate in, but again its focus is on competition, not education (though maybe that's changed?).

The closest I've seen in video games are those by Zachtronics Industries, they all deal in some way with engineering design. SpaceChem in particular is quite programming-like (as explored here) and has a great difficulty progression. Kohctpyktop is an integrated circuit design puzzle with a strong test driven development bent, though if I hadn't already studied EE it would probably be prohibitively difficult.

There's also pleasingfungus' Manufactoria, which has a lot of CS (stack machine) stuff in it and a great sense of progression.

A lot of these attempts tend to be directed at kids; the old Rocky's Boots was one of the first steps in this direction, with logic gates and simple circuits. I didn't find it very good, but ToonTalk is an ambitious visual programming environment and game-like tutorial rooted in SmallTalk semantics.

Cort Stratton wrote a post in September called The Games Programmers Play, which covers this topic well. The comments here on Slashdot and on Gamasutra suggest some more such games.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about designing "games for learning programming", I've written somewhat more extensively about it on my blog. I hope you find some of these suggestions interesting, sorry for the linkstorm.

Except they have said that they won't be licensing it for anyone outside of Zenimax (iD, Bethesda, and a few others), at least until it's too old and gets released as open source.

So, a tech demo for their company only? That doesn't make sense. They were trying to be cool many years ago when they started got beat by Fallout 3 and Borderlands. This interview at Gamasutra sums it up. The interviewer doesn't just drool over them like most game web sites. Uh, you can buy guns at a vendor, or wait for it to drop as loot. Revolutionary!

It sounds good for a rental but not a keeper. I pulled up Redbox to see if it was available around me, and oddly, they only have the PS3 version for rent. Most all of the games they rent are for both HD consoles.

To start, they should create a [write-once run-anywhere environment] for Windows. There's more than enough libraries that should make it possible.

It's called Java

Surprise surprise! It's called the Flash Platform! -> Flash/Flex/AIR

...and it does it relatively well with proper dev & if your app isn't too resource-intensive:

OP Author is yet another guy who didn't do his homework and properly research the tech he was talking about. With the Adobe AIR pathway instead of targeting the in-browser Flash Player, you can a good workflow going. Very cost effective to do minor tweaks from single code/asset base as opposed to having separate devs or doing separate ports to Android, iOS, Desktop, etc with their native languages if you lack time/developers/resources.

Check it out: Multi-Screen application running on Android, iOS and the Playbook all powered by Adobe Flex & AIR
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vVi62BBLT8

For those with any doubts about the Flash Platform/AIR solution for iOS, Machinarium which was built entirely with Flash CS Pro took the #1 spot in paid apps and knocked Angry Birds and Plants vs. Zombies from the top spot during its release: Top iPad Game Apps: Machinarium Topples Angry Birds Seasons

http://gamasutra.com/view/news/37151/Top_iPad_Game_Apps_Machinarium_Topples_Angry_Birds_Seasons.php

So yes, it is a good production & deployment solution.

As for open source, the Adobe Flex SDK is open and free so no probs on that front. It's more or less the same thing as the JDK. Runtime/player might not be open source, but the toolchain can be: build your flex/AS3 app using any text editor/IDE you want, then compile via command line with mxmlc instead of javac ;)
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Flex+SDK

cheerios.

As I said - it all comes back to the same, underlying problem - the (collective) lack of recognition and understanding of games - what it is the word game itself represents, based on its use (in general) - BOTH in isolation, and in relation to the rest of the language.

This is therefore a matter, (and failure), of LINGUISTICS, that then causes a problem of semantics.

I have a blog on gamasutra to talk about this problem - but since it's merely symptom of a deeper problem within the language, dealing with how the basics of the language is recognised and understood (ultimately because of how it is taught, which is why it's a matter of linguistics)), is the real underlying problem. (Which is why I have to wade through quite a few things to describe the problem itself for how it is related to the language in general).

In short, the problems with the word game exist because people are not applying the basic rules of English grammar consistently when describing what other words in the language represent based on how they are used - specifically the TYPES of concept/information they are used to represent, further represented by the words NOUN, VERB & ADJECTIVE. (It appears that there's a bit of a problem with adverbs too, but I haven't really looked at them yet).

The problems with the word game, are mainly a symptom of not describing nouns and verbs consistently in RELATION to each other.

Blog: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DarrenTomlyn/3291/

Bullshit. We can bitch about it being C#, but I'd prefer C# to Excel any day... ...and yet, when someone builds a 3D engine in Excel, they deserve some geek cred.

Of course, if he's trying to claim it's useful, then we might immediately respond with, "Why C#? Why not [insert option here]?"

The problem is that they refuse to accept that fact. They deliberately decided not to license out their idTech 5 engine. Then they spent more than four years creating content for their new engine. But by all accounts this content isn't any good, and the engine that looked amazing when it was first demoed, is now not so impressive. They really need to learn how to leverage their strengths or they won't survive another release.

Original developers of Team Fortress:

• - Robin Walker: Still a Valve employee. Core dev for TF2 (and other Valve games).
• - John Cook: Still a Valve employee. Core dev for TF2 (and other Valve games).
• - Ian Caughley: Hired by Valve, went on to be a director for another company, no bad blood I was able to find

Original developers of Counter-Strike:

• - Minh Le: Hired by Valve, worked on CS2, project got shelved and he move to SK.
• - Jess Cliffe: Still works for Valve. I'm sick of looking this stuff up, but I'm going to guess he has something to do with CS:GO

Original developers of Portal:

• - Eric Wolpaw: Still works for Valve. Made Portal 2.
• - Chet Faliszek: Still works for Valve. Wrote Portal 2.

I don't care how you measure it, that kind of loyalty is goddamned amazing. A bunch of people who definitely have options chose to stick around and make their games. Minh Le is the most negative story of the bunch, and here is a 2010 interview where he's asked about Valve. You decide for yourself if they fucked him over.

I'm all for calling companies on their bullshit, and as a general rule I think the corporate model couldn't encourage the worst parts of human nature any better if that was their explicit goal, but I find it extremely hard to fault Valve for claiming ownership of any of these games. As a long-time hate-filled negative prick, trust me when I say that your bile will be much more potent if you make sure it's deserved.

Thanks. That's very big of you. However, I wasn't entirely correct either: my figures of 11-20 billion look like they're only US revenue. Global revenue for PC + consoles does seem to fall in the 65-77 billion range.

Here's the clearest article I've found so far. 77 billion total in 2009, of which over 30 billion for consoles.

Langdell got the smackdown in court
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/30784/Court_Refuses_Preliminary_Injunction_In_Edge_Trademark_Case.php

The problem underpinning ALL of these kinds of arguments is extremely simple though:

Games are NOT fully recognised and understood for what they are, at this time: WHAT the word game itself represents, according to its 'current' USE, is NOT consistently recognised nor understood. (Most definitions of the word game are still based on a perception of the word game that was only ever consistent with some of its use centuries ago - with a meaning that is consistent/identical with the word play (when used as a noun). Since games can be played for work, this is now inconsistent with its current use and therefore definition)).

But the problem with the word game, is actually a SYMPTOM of a deeper problem within the English language - a failure to recognise and understand half of the basic rules of English grammar - WHAT words (especially types thereof) represent, (ideas/concepts), in combination with HOW the words are used. The TYPE of noun the word game belongs to is not fully recognised or understood... (Nouns in general are not fully recognised or understood for what they represent, and verbs and adjectives have problems too - (I've not looked at adverbs yet)).

I'm going to be coming back to all this later on in my blog, but I've covered the basics required for the word game, (and related words, such as competition and puzzle - (am working on the post for art) - so far, (along with word story - which many people seem to have problems with, (that is one of the reasons I'll be revisiting the basics of English grammar later)):

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DarrenTomlyn/20110311/6174/Contents_NEW.php

The reason WHY people are complaining about games these days is simple - as you said - they're NOT being made/created/designed consistently AS games in the first place! If you're not doing that, then how can you hope to make the best possible game that people then want to play for a long time?

But that's why getting it sorted out as a matter of LINGUISTICS matters first!

Little seems to have developed since Gamasutra posted a very similar story about this on March 15th: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/33536/InDepth_Jason_Rohrers_Chain_World_Meets_Controversy.php The 'news' in Wired's story is the revelation that someone named Positional Super Ko won the auction and is now making cryptic Go-related tweets. The fact that Jia Ji went hiking in Hawaii and that Jason Rohrer doesn't believe in vaccinations is just padding. The only thing I really learned from this article is that Wired must pay their writers by the word...

In my opinion, Batle is very biased and frankly, a bit dinosaur.

He is the guy that argues that "Permanent Death" is good thing for MMO (and only hated because of bad past implementations and that intelligent player can be convinced it is good thing for him).

Then, it goes downhill. He is basically all about trying to convicne people that good old hardocre muds were fun and if you do not find then fun, you are stupid. Any innovation is, of course, stupid too because it dilludes old and superior design. He is the guy that mocks player who wants to join up group of his friends in dungeon without havign to travel world for half and hour.

Game designed by this guy would be, well, disaster. Marketers made better games than him because they make games for their current customers while he wants to make game for his 20-something self.

Read and laugh: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2157/soapbox_why_virtual_worlds_are_.php

A more nuanced description of the save game system is here:
http://gamasutra.com/view/news/35476/Capcom_Used_Sales_Not_A_Factor_In_The_Mercenaries_Save_System.php

Just keep in mind this isn't an RPG, where saved data prevents you from seeing the beginning. This is a shooter game where your high scores and unlocks are permanently saved to the card. I suppose it's sad that you can't restore everything back to its original locked state and get the pleasure of unlocking each item individually, but I doubt it's as bad as everyone fears.

Sonic the Hedgehog, as a series, wasn't known for being difficult (like Mega Man) or innovative (like Marathon). It doesn't even have that much of a compelling story (like RPGs).

The counterexamples to your assertions are, respectively, Sonic 2, Sonic 1 and Sonic 3&K. As platformers, they delivered on all three of these counts. I'll refer you to this article about S3K in particular.

I think the analogy to Sgt Pepper is apt, if a little presumptuous. Certain games define the genres in the eras they are made, and usually become classics whose quality is obvious in any era. The single best example from the 16 bit platforming era is probably Super Mario World, but there are several titles across genres which remain playable and entertaining to this day.

What the author is bemoaning appears to me to be the inability of these old game to achieve the same level of genre defining impact they once did. By definition, this is of course obvious; they cannot define a genre a second time. Nevertheless they remain classics, so long as no-one tries to remake them. I think the same applies to something like the Star Wars prequels.

Gamasutra did an awesome article a few years ago talking about the creation of PacMan. Link: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3938/the_pacman_dossier.php

It included a fascinating discussion of the Ghost AI behavior. The short version is that the Ghosts can't turn around*, and try for the shortest path to their target tile. The Red ghost is aiming right under you, the Blue ghost is aiming for 3 tiles ahead of you, the Yellow ghost is aiming for 3 tiles behind you, and the Orange ghost is aiming for the center of the map (which he can't reach, so he orbits the spawning area).

This leads to interesting tricks where you manipulate the Blue and Yellow ghost by changing directions right as they pathfind, so that they target a tile that you don't care about and get out of your way until the next fork in the maze.

It is my understanding the current world record holder did NOT memorize map patterns and timing, but by learning the AI behavior and manipulating the ghosts. This was successful because people who memorize the routes are screwed if they mess up timing on a turn or something, but this technique lets you have a fighting chance to recover.



*The ghosts take short breaks every ~15 seconds where they stop targeting you and start targeting an assigned corner of the maze. When a break starts or stops all ghosts suddenly reverse direction as a tell. They reverse direction even if it means not killing you, and even if it means they're going away from their target tile.

Carmack used to lead the 3D Engine sector around. A bit of history, Quake, is the grand-daddy that started it all: first true-3D Game. And it was Carmack. Now, Epic Games went on to win the "licensing" war and that is why practically every game today has a bit of Unreal Engine 3 in it. Carmack however, is still one of the smartest cookies around: he has the ability to keep on pumping out revolution after revolution. And now that Zenimax has folded id Software into it: Carmack doesn't have to worry about those pesky "business" aspects anymore and can just concentrate on where he shines: code.

I wrote a comment some years ago at Gamasutra where I mentioned 13m players was the most players WoW could ever hope to achieve, based on growing trends. I predicted back then that by 2010 Blizzard would launch their new MMORPG, because I thought Blizzard would like to catch those leaving WoW in a new hobby, but I was mistaken, they instead launched an expansion.

It took almost 2 years to cross from 11.5m to 12m subscribers. Many dismiss the 600k drop, but take notice that it took almost 2 years to grow 500k, and they lost more than that in 5 months.

The thing is, it is very hard to keep the players interested for so long about the same game, even with expansions. In its 7th year, most of the areas are by now already known by heart, most of the enemies defeated, most of the quests finished, most of the equipment gathered... what else is left for players? A giant paid chatroom with avatars. But you have the disadvantage of not being able to run it in a minimized screen to do something else (as you would with other instant messengers)... Also, people grow, when World of Warcraft launched you might have been a teenager, but now you are an adult and have other obligations like working and taking care of children. And people who were 6 when WoW launched and are now 13 might not be interested in it at all, but instead prefer to hang in Facebook or Twitter, so the install base stalls and even drops.

They ripped it off, it's well known. Apparently not by everyone though.

The problem with common knowledge is that it does not prove that something is correct. If a fact is "well known" then you should probably spend a bit more time checking to ensure that this is true.

The idea that the XBox 360 ripped off the Cell comes from the cover notes for David Shippy's book. However, in this interview with him, the details don't seem to match the blurb. Regarding Microsoft choosing IBM to design their chip::

Shippy doesn't believe that Microsoft yet knew that Sony had the PlayStation 3 in the works -- but liked what it saw in the PowerPC technology that was now possible thanks to design principles partly researched for Cell.

The article says that all the companies involved had the right to use the technology developed for the Cell for other projects and other customers. This is standard practice. The article goes on:

Does that mean Microsoft got a look at the Cell itself? "No, we didn't show them the Cell chip," Shippy clarifies. "The Cell itself and the fundamental architecture that went into that, actually not -- that was all proprietary for PS3. What was shown to Microsoft was just a technology road map that said, 'hey, we can go do these high-performance PowerPC cores at very high frequency and low power'."

In wanting to sell his book, the author made it seem that there was something underhanded going on with Microsoft. And yet:

So despite some higher-level conceptual ideas in common, Shippy stresses that both consoles' processors are very different, from architecture to software models. "They differentiated themselves in their own unique ways," says Shippy. "What's interesting is that they did that with this common building block that was designed initially for the PS3."

The Xenon processor was not a ripoff of the Cell, IBM just used some of the technology that they developed with the other processor.

But if you ignore his "one price for everyone is a bug" idea, which is fucking stupid.

Micropayments have already proven to be a good way to get price discrimination. For example, check out what happened to Dungeons&Dragons Online after it went free-to-play with ability to buy extra content or eye candy. By giving customers a lot of payment strategies to choose from they managed to get a huge revenue increase. Here's a first link I googled out for you: Going Free Boosts Turbine's DDO Revenues 500 Percent. This is reality, not theory.

Suddenly you've invented an elaborate system, which might make less profit, and the inventive structure might deter people from getting into these games because "well if I'm not good at it, I might end up paying more for other games I'm more interested in/better at".

You're bashing a perfectly reasonable theory for *your* inability to see it implemented. They must love you at brainstorming sessions. All of the points you mentioned can be worked around. For example, you can have a per-game rating that can never get below 0, so there would be no point in avoiding a game.

I don't have to "prove" it, it's obvious from the statements made by Nintendo and Sony, e.g. Peter Dille calls the rampant piracy sickening. It's obvious just from looking at the torrent sites. You will also note his comments about the effect piracy has on 3rd parties. Simply put no one will sink millions on a premium game if it cannot be profitable due to the amount of sales lost due to piracy. Instead the platform turns into shovelware hell with perhaps a few 1st party titles dotted around. So users suffer from not experiencing premium games because the money isn't there to justify making them.

How? If hardly anyone uses OtherOS (or has the technical expertise to enable the hacks), then how could they possibly 'lose' significant portions of potential profit?

If Other OS became a means to root the PS3, then it would not be long before custom Linux isos appeared whose express purpose was to install, root the box and install CFW. It wouldn't be a case of people using Other OS for it's legitimate purpose before this happened, but how many would be using it afterwards as a means to root the box.

Yet there's rampant 'piracy' because of it? Taking things away and tricking customers is 'okay' as long as there's only a few of them?

I suggest you furnish yourself with a clue concerning what the threat meant. Simply put it meant the PS3 being totally opened up to custom firmware, piracy and everything implied by that. Sony would have to be out of their minds to permit that and hence the course of action they chose.

That was Spyro: Year of the Dragon for the Playstation. They did a lot of sneaky stuff to make pirated copies not fun, but randomly, so you would think it worked fine until it triggered somewhere else.

You can read about it here.

Note that since it was a console game there was a very low chance of false positives compared to a PC release.

The problem with 'gamification' is that it's not about games!

'Gamification' is about the application of (the lessons from) game theory, which has to do with psychology - the study of HOW and WHY we behave in such a manner - but not WHAT.

'Game' theory is a misnomer - it's NOT about games in themselves at all - it's about the study of COMPETITION, and COMPETITIVE behaviour in general.

Games are, of course, competitive activities, but so are puzzles, competitions, and life in general.

'Game' theory is not about the specific application of the specific behaviour the word game itself represents, even if it forms PART of its application, and so considering games in such a manner is INCONSISTENT with how the word game is used, and what it represents, elsewhere in the language, and is therefore causing problems!

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DarrenTomlyn/20110311/6174/Contents_NEW.php

If you REALLY want to get stuck in to a language problem, then try reading the first entry in my blog:

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DarrenTomlyn/20110314/7218/Starting_Again__Part_1_Problems_With_The_Word_Game.php

Games and art represent two DIFFERENT APPLICATIONS OF DIFFERENT BEHAVIOUR, based on their use and place within the English language.

Art and games, although different, ARE, however, COMPATIBLE - in that games can be made USING art itself - but because they can and do represent two separate things, they do not define each other. (in the same way that within 'metal table' the word metal does not define the word table).

For this reason, any game which USES art - such as video/board/card games etc., uses another word in combination with the word game, to describe such media being used.

The underlying problem we currently have, however, is that the word game is not fully recognised or understood for WHAT it represents in a manner that is consistent with its use - independently of such (further) applications.

There is very good reason for that, however - the basis of which can be found here:

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DarrenTomlyn/20110314/7218/Starting_Again__Part_1_Problems_With_The_Word_Game.php

The problem is that their guidelines are vague and broad.

http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20100909/apple-bye-bye-fart-apps/

As part of their guidelines, they may reject if they feel that the market is saturated with your type of app, or if your app doesn't provide enough entertainment or utility.

And directly addressing the quality aspect: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/30338/NewlyRevealed_App_Store_Guidelines_Discourage_Amateur_Hour.php

With such a wide array of content available on the App Store, Apple is cautious of letting the quality apps become drowned out by poorly-made products. "If your App looks like it was cobbled together in a few days, or you're trying to get your first practice App into the store to impress your friends, please brace yourself for rejection. We have lots of serious developers who don't want their quality Apps to be surrounded by amateur hour."

PS3 supports standard [...] USB controllers [but] Xbox360 on the other side has [...] a proprietary USB protocol that is specifically designed to block third party controllers

I thought PS3 system software 3.50 and later had rejected unlicensed controllers.

The thing that sucks with Sony is that they bit by bit are taking away the freedom they offered. Microsoft on the other side never offered any freedom in the first place, quite the opposite, their console is pretty much as locked down as it can be.

What counterpart does any current PlayStation product have to Microsoft's XNA Game Studio, App Hub (formerly XNA Creators Club), and Xbox Live Indie Games?

You just don't like it because you can't actually refute it. The track records speaks for itself compared to Android.

Actually, I very much can refute it :) Please see Aurora Feintand Storm 8. And that's just the high profile ones. If a platform can have software written for it, you can guarantee there will be at least some malware written for it.

Don't be fooled. Apparently only 78% of PS3 owners and 73% of XBox 360 owners have their respective consoles hooked up to Internet. Wii trails a long way behind that with 54%.

KIDS THESE DAYS

Pretty sure shiny things existed for kids of the past too...

Also, Suck On This:

A recent survey by consumer research firm Experian has found that PS3 owners are actually much, much older than Wii and Xbox owners. The study says the Wii attracts 18-24 year olds, while the Xbox 360 nabs 35-44 year olds. The PS3 then gets those who are 44 or older.

It is now safe to switch on your brain. :-P

Here's an excerpt from McGonigall's book that covers exactly how games are like hard work that we love.

http://www.joystiq.com/2008/01/24/the-xbox-turns-a-profit/ Xbox turns a profit starting First quarter 2008. http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/20346/Xbox-Division-Records-Second-Profitable-Year-in-a-Row/ 2009 ends 2nd year of profit for entertainment division on high sales from Xbox/xbox360 even being a tough year the xbox brand carried the division. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/28220/Xbox_360_Division_Pushes_165_Million_Profit_For_MS_Q3.php 10% profit for entertainment division on Xbox sales. http://www.joystiq.com/2010/10/28/microsoft-announces-record-q1-revenue-thanks-xbox-360-consoles/ MS sites xbox360 as big part of profit numbers. http://xbox360.gamespy.com/articles/110/1104553p1.html xbox live had $1billion in revenue for 2010. I know you guys hate MS and want to see them fail but that took 2 minutes.

Thank you. That's the one that lingered in my mind. So the time-bomb failures are
1) Sony PS3 leap-year bug in 2010
2) Microsoft Zune bug 2 Januaries ago
3) An iPhone DST bug for Europe in November 2010
4) The latest iPhone's January 2011 one-time alarm bug

All are large companies and don't account for the indie app bugs we don't get to hear about on the front page. This furthers my point that something is seriously wrong with developer training in the past 5 years, both degree-less and degree-holding.

Hard to say, but since it's mentioned in this report alongside Britain, France and Germany, I suspect it's a significant player.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/32009/All_New_Game_Engine_For_Next_Elder_Scrolls.php

There's a really interesting article about that here http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3030/keeping_the_pirates_at_bay.php. It's written by a developer of Spyro: Year of the Dragon. It is another really interesting take on how to implement copy protection.

the insight I gained from reading Jamey Pittman's The Pac-Man Dossier.

FTFY. The article is fantastic and really deserves linkage.