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Global Agenda creators Hi-Rez have acquired the rights to make an MMO using the Tribes IP. Given that their previous offering was already tribes-like, they were clearly fans, so maybe they'll do something nice with it.

Gamasutra article on the issue from the end of October

You know how to use the web, right?

http://slashdot.org/tag/rage
http://www.google.com/#q=iD+RAGE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rage_(video_game)
http://www.moddb.com/games/rage
http://ragegame.net/
http://twitter.com/RAGEgame
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=iD+RAGE
http://gamasutra.com/search/index.php?search_text=Carmack+RAGE&submit=Search&from_news=Y&from_features=Y&from_blogs=Y&from_press=Y
http://arstechnica.com/search/#iD+RAGE

Companies will hire depending on who they are looking for. There is some stigma about the trade schools sometimes, and a CS degree will get you to other jobs aswell. While it is a flame-war-able debate, I'd argue on the side of a CS degree over the tradeschools. Trade schools are good, as I work with several people who came from those degrees. But there is a divide on knowelege. Trade school degrees like FullSail give a good overview of the game aspects of programming and design, but they lack some of the more fundemental courses of Computer Science and Mathmatics (like compilers, languages and automata, operating systems, parallel programming, etc.) The CS degrees on the other hand lack a lot of the hands on programming courses focused on game specific technology like Graphics, AI, and Design. Really, the best bet would be trying to get the best of both worlds.

Also, let them know that the pay is lower for the hours worked when compared to other computer programming positions out there in the world. They have to be motivated to make games or they are going to burn out fast. And, yes, the ones who actually want to make games should already be making them. If you start making games/programming when you get into the industry you are 10-15 years behind the people of the same age who were actually motivated to work in their free time.

Point them at good side resources. What are they interested in? Send them to Wii/PSP/PS2/PS3 homebrew sites to learn to hack away on real hardware. Send them to modding communities to make HalfLife 2 mods, or Quake maps, or Starcraft 2 maps. Send them to places like http://www.gamedev.net/ http://aigamedev.com/ http://www.gamasutra.com/ or other high profile programming forums.

Encourage them to do ACM programming contests or topcoder.com programming contests. Get them to learn to solve problems, debug programs, and use source control. Get them to explore stuff other than programming; having a good understanding of art, music, or some other set of game related tallents helps out the team flow.

Even after doing a tonne of programming on the side since forever ago, I still don't feel like I learned enough before becoming a dev. And after two shipped titles, I can say you still have to learn on the way. Technology changes too quickly to ever stop learning. Getting to the goal of being a game developer isn't the end of the road.

I have never heard of a console game that didn't work without net access.

Phantasy Star Online. Final Fantasy XI. Even apart from MMORPGs, when you're playing an Xbox 360 game that isn't on a disc and was purchased on a different console, you have to log in to Xbox Live so that the console can get the decryption key to load the game. Some PS3 games published by Capcom and sold through PSN require an online check to make sure the player isn't using the "game sharing" feature of PSN; Final Fight is an example.

There's something stinky about flash on mobiles. They tried to make it the next big mobile platform before (aka Flashlite) and it flopped.

Three big flash developers Nitrome, Semi Secret Software and Astro Ape Studios, are rewriting their games for iPhone natively rather than using CS5, because flash is too slow.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/30368/InDepth_iOS_Flash_Devs_Cautiously_Optimistic_Of_Apples_New_Tools_Policy.php

I'm actually looking for the article - it was in the XBox Magazine that dealt with the release. In one of the MM9 stages there are platforms that rotate and your character will rotate with them. The graphical rotation was impossible, if I recall the article correctly. The closest article I can find online is http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3752/he_is_8bit_capcoms_hironobu_.php - it talks about the flicker and the limits on enemies on screen at once, but nothing about the elements that made it into the final release that would have been impossible 20 years ago.

GtkRadiant-GPL.zip Feb 17 2006

Which seems a bit old. As I look through each of these files, none seem to be related to Castle Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein – Enemy Territory, Return to Castle Wolfenstein single-player or Return to Castle Wolfenstein multiplayer. A few directories up I see Wolfenstein 3D for the iPhone but all I'm seeing are older games that have been open sourced with notes from John Carmack. There are a lot of Doom and Quake utilities and Wolfenstein 3D but ... I cannot find these other engines. Am I missing something? Is the Quake code the same engine?

Gamasutra ran a similar story back in August but there's no press release on id's site about such a commitment to the GPL. One would think that if this did happen at QuakeCon it would be on QuakeCon's news site. Did someone make an announcement and confuse Wolfenstein 3D with the later games or is there a legit place you can get the source with a GPL license alongside it?

Gamasutra recently ran a story from an ex-employee that summed up how to not make an MMO.

"Fun never seemed to be a criterion for what they were doing; managers with little clipboards would go around and tick off things, saying 'OK that's done' and moving on. There was never any consideration for whether or not what had been done was any fun."

The FTC gave the games industry high marks in rising awareness levels of the ESRB system, with 87 percent of parents and 75 percent of children showing awareness of the ratings, up from 61 percent and 73 percent in 2000.

94 percent of parents said the ESRB system was easy to understand, up from 77 percent in 2000, and parental involvement in buying games was up 5 percent from 2000 to 89 percent. The number of parents actively restricting the games their children play was also up from 69 percent in 2000 to 85 percent this year.

So either the past three years have had parents drastically changing their outlook and knowledge, or the results are intentionally skewed.

Exactly. I would say the thread on Penny-Arcade alone has probably driven more traffic to his website (and influenced people to purchase the game) than anything else. In March Gamasutra ran an interview with Notch discussing the game's development. Just because you didn't know about the game doesn't mean that it isn't popular. I can't believe ANYONE modded this guy insightful.

Once it got into the public perception that pirating games was easy and virtually risk free, I think you'd see a whole new floodgate open that really would destroy the gaming market.

ROFL

What alternate universe did you come from? Pirating software is and always has been easy and virtually risk free. Look at the experiences of Reflexive and 2D Boy, for example. Reflexive released a game with DRM and 2D Boy released one without... both found piracy rates were around 90%. Reflexive estimated that, for every 1,000 pirated copies their DRM eliminated, they gained 1 sale.

Do you think the 90% of people who pirated those programs suffered any reprisal at all? Can you find even a single instance of someone being punished for copying either program? Of course not. Piracy is virtually risk free.

Breaking DRM may be difficult, but it only has to be broken once. The vast majority of the people who download pirated software are just grabbing a copy that's already broken and know absolutely nothing about DRM. For the majority, it's as easy as clicking a link.

And yet... not only has the gaming industry continued to exist, it has grown enormously. Your declaration that piracy being easy and risk free would destroy the game industry is completely, utterly wrong because piracy IS easy and virtually risk free and the game industry has not been destroyed.

The undeniable truth is that the vast majority of pirates aren't interested in buying software. No amount of DRM is going to change that. It's just as true that removing DRM doesn't turn the 10% or so who do buy software into pirates. The figures stay the same regardless of DRM.

Despite what you believe, it seems that about 10% of humanity is selfless enough to support a thriving software market on what is, in fact, mostly an honor system.

The attach rate on the 360 is still higher than the PS3 (and seems to be climbing), although the PS3 is making strides compared to early in its life.

I guess if you make up your facts, you can conclude anything. That's a real no-brainer right there.

Ah yes, the cover art, the storyline communicated in an included comic book or short novella, the minimal attempt to tie either to the game itself. I remember the 80's console & computer game microcosm well.

And I sort of miss it.

After reading things like this, I've begun to realize that in many cases it's still the same setup (story tacked on after they decide what the game is going to be) but with far less effort put into attempting drawing the eye away from it.

At least back then the game didn't match the story for technical reasons, not because the developer didn't bother to involve the story writers till the game was almost already complete.

Indeed. If you look at the World of Goo post you just mentioned, they reference a previous study on Gamasutra of an indie title that also estimated their piracy rate to be about 90%. Considering 2D Boys rationale seems fairly rushed and decidedly innacurate, isn't it surprising that they came up with the exact same 90% figure? For a game with a totally different copy protection structure, in a totally different genre, calculated 9 months apart? How much do you want to bet that they knew about that article before they calculated that figure.

So now this Machinarium article appears for a game released 2 years later, in yet another totally different genre, and they find an estimated piracy rate of 85% to 95%. You can bet they were aware to the 2D-Boy 90% figure, since it was well publicised on /. and in the gaming media. Do we think this figure we have an existing bias to might have some relation? Hello, this is just the same 90% figure with a 5% error rate on either side!

The problem here is that, without any competent statistics having been done, the popular media are giving people the impression that a 90% piracy figure has been established, with numbers people have pulled out of their rear ends. Piracy issues aside, one thing that gets on my nerves is bad statistics. It's basically the same as lying to people.

Here's some perspective, from the creators of Ricochet Infinity, which has a 92% piracy rate (taken directly from this Gamasutra article). Pay particular attention to the second half, which has their conclusions. The emphasis is mine:

Below are the results of Reflexive.com sales and downloads immediately following each update:

Fix 1 – Existing Exploits & Keygens made obsolete – Sales up 70%, Downloads down 33%

Fix 2 – Existing Keygens made obsolete – Sales down slightly, Downloads flat

Fix 3 – Existing Cracks made obsolete – Sales flat, Downloads flat

Fix 4 – Keygens made game-specific – Sales up 13%, Downloads down 16% (note: fix made after the release of Ricochet Infinity)

From the results above, it seems clear that eliminating piracy through a stronger DRM can result in significantly increased sales – but sometimes it can have no benefit at all. So what does that mean for the question about whether a pirated copy means a lost sale? The decreases in downloads may provide a clue to that

As we believe that we are decreasing the number of pirates downloading the game with our DRM fixes, combining the increased sales number together with the decreased downloads, we find 1 additional sale for every 1,000 less pirated downloads. Put another way, for every 1,000 pirated copies we eliminated, we created 1 additional sale.

Though many of the pirates may be simply shifting to another source of games for their illegal activities, the number is nonetheless striking and poignant. The sales to download ratio found on Reflexive implies that a pirated copy is more similar to the loss of a download (a poorly converting one!) than the loss of a sale.

Though that doesn’t make a 92% piracy rate of one of our banner products any less distressing, knowing that eliminating 50,000 pirated copies might only produce 50 additional legal copies does help put things in perspective.

In other words, the easy barriers to piracy, like being clever with storing state information and keys, can be well worth the effort. Beyond that, though, it's probably not worth the money you spend trying to stop the piracy for most games. For Ricochet Infinity, only 0.1% of pirateers were willing to purchase the game.

The full article is worth reading.

> Most games, with a few exceptions, are single-threaded applications. Gamers are much better off with a higher clocked dual core system than a slower-clocked, 6 core system.

False, for games written after 2006 - 2008. If a game is cross platform such that it is meant to run on PS3 or XBox360, then it is pretty much garanteed to be multi-threaded - you'll never get great performance if your game is single threaded on those consoles, especially on the PS3 where you have 6 SPUs.

References:
* http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060906/monkkonen_01.shtml
* http://techreport.com/articles.x/11237
* http://software.intel.com/file/1478
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-core_processor#Disadvantages
* http://scrawlfx.com/2008/06/killzone-2-uses-4-12-of-ps3s-6-cell-chip-cores

except they're using disposable stolen credit cards to pay for it, so really, they don't care about the $10 a pop.

Not sure why parent is modded funny; there is likely a lot of truth to it. Sony Online Entertainment discovered this:

It isn't just issues of game balance and gold farming, Smedley says. "We're seeing a lot of stolen credit cards. Say you buy gold from a service in China -- you may not know it's in China, but you give them your credit card and buy gold only once. They use these credit card numbers to set up new accounts in these games. They buy an EverQuest account key, farm for a month, and then charge it back to the stolen credit card."

And this isn't just damaging to the consumer. "What happens is that over time, as that rate of chargebacks rises, we start getting fined. We have been fined over a million dollars since June. That's not the chargebacks themselves -- just the chargeback fine. It's brutal; it's the dirty little secret of the industry."

These temporary accounts, paid for with stolen credit cards, are additionally used to spam in-game (although spam filtering has improved the situation significantly).

It would not surprise me in the least if this applied to temporary domain registration for spam/malware purposes as well.

[quote]Crysis is a well known example of a video game. While technically profitable, it was not competitively profitable, in that it performed much worse than other games of its scope in the past (for example, Doom 3) as a consequence of piracy.[/quote]

and this is proven ... how? Doom 3 is by id Software. Makers of Doom 1, Doom 2, Quake, Quake 3 Arena, etc., and coded by John Carmack. There are lots of people who would anything from that development house at that time, unseen.

Now Crysis was not bad, but not exactly great, either. It's the same genre, but really not the same thing.

[quote]
This would imply a substantive loss due to piracy.[/quote]

Again, proven how?

[quote]Try Googling crysis piracy, or read a link here: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=19203%5B/quote%5D

Which is full of speculation -- and not backed up by even a speck of actual data.

Don't get me wrong -- Crysis sure was pirated.

[quote]The CEO of Stardock wrote an excellent article explaining business models for accounting for piracy, specifically commenting on the Crysis case. http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/post.aspx?postid=303512%5B/quote%5D

There is no mention on Crysis in that article, and no mention of piracy harming their business model either.

[quote]Later, piracy would prove to damage his game Demigod's short term viability, though technical measures (DRM in abstraction, though in practice just a method to detect pirated copies of the games) recovered it from likely failure. [/quote]

Backup, please? As asked in the original question?

[quote]Piracy is perceived to be a sufficiently significant problem that dealing with piracy is as important as dealing with marketing, deadlines, etc.[/quote]

Indeed. And all I can read out of that is that it's greed at work -- after all, if you have 100k pirates playing your game, the greedy mind will think "wow, 100k sales !" and go on to try to implement DRM, restrictive licensing, crappy always-online "protections", etc. to make that happen -- which does nothing to actually curb 100k pirates, and it really doesn't convert 100k pirates into sales. But a greedy mind will still feel as if they just lost 100k sales. (Not to say pirates are not greedy, I am looking at it from the other side in this argument).

[quote]It's a core business concern. What you're asking for then is "prove to me that measles is a horrible disease. Can you show me evidence of large populations dying due to measles in recent history?" You won't accept the answer, "we vaccinate against measles, everyone knows its bad but there aren't population-wide failures precisely because we vaccinate." [/quote]

Bad analogies and trying to subsume other people's reasoning is not exactly a good discussion tactic.

[quote]DRM and other measures have made serious problems due to piracy unlikely, but they still harm the product.[/quote]

How have DRM made serious problems due to piracy unlikely? Backup, please? Data?

[quote]You also are problematic with "provably": "provably" by mathematical standards or by, say, business standards? No one can "prove" why a product is a success or failure, but merely provide persuasive evidence for it. I would imagine you have the same misunderstanding with the legal system, which does not require proof of "no possible doubt" but rather proof of "no reasonable doubt." [/quote]

Again you assume unrelated things in this discussion. It makes you look stupid.

[quote]There is no reasonable doubt that piracy harmed Crysis, making it (compared to other games) a financial failure for Crytek.[/quote]

But indeed there is reasonable doubt. One could ask whether its system requirements were simply too high, whether its marketing plan was decently executed, whether its prospective customer base

Crysis is a well known example of a video game. While technically profitable, it was not competitively profitable, in that it performed much worse than other games of its scope in the past (for example, Doom 3) as a consequence of piracy. This would imply a substantive loss due to piracy. Try Googling crysis piracy, or read a link here: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=19203 The CEO of Stardock wrote an excellent article explaining business models for accounting for piracy, specifically commenting on the Crysis case. http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/post.aspx?postid=303512 Later, piracy would prove to damage his game Demigod's short term viability, though technical measures (DRM in abstraction, though in practice just a method to detect pirated copies of the games) recovered it from likely failure. Piracy is perceived to be a sufficiently significant problem that dealing with piracy is as important as dealing with marketing, deadlines, etc. It's a core business concern. What you're asking for then is "prove to me that measles is a horrible disease. Can you show me evidence of large populations dying due to measles in recent history?" You won't accept the answer, "we vaccinate against measles, everyone knows its bad but there aren't population-wide failures precisely because we vaccinate." DRM and other measures have made serious problems due to piracy unlikely, but they still harm the product. You also are problematic with "provably": "provably" by mathematical standards or by, say, business standards? No one can "prove" why a product is a success or failure, but merely provide persuasive evidence for it. I would imagine you have the same misunderstanding with the legal system, which does not require proof of "no possible doubt" but rather proof of "no reasonable doubt." There is no reasonable doubt that piracy harmed Crysis, making it (compared to other games) a financial failure for Crytek. To the readers of my comment: my point is that there's clear, reasonable evidence of the harms of piracy. But we're faced with a questioner who has an adversarial and unconvertible frame of mind.

AFAIK, FPS games are precisely the ones that don't trust the client at all. They just send commands to the server and receive state updates; any simulation that happens on the client side is entirely for prediction (i.e., aesthetic) purposes.

It's RTS games that tend to trust clients more, simply because of the extremely large game states involved. These often run deterministic simulations for all players, and exchange user inputs. Cheating is ameliorated here because any modification to the game state will cause the two players to get "out of sync," but maphacks are hard to avoid with these sorts of implementations. See e.g. this article; it's not exactly new but AFAIK this is still how things are done.

I am aware of narbacular drop (the original game). However the fact that not many other people do kind of shows my point. It isn't well known and it wasn't nearly as good because while the mechanics were similar and engaging, the graphics and writing was meh. Before the portal project Valve hired 2 (or 3, I forget) writers and basically let them do whatever the hell they wanted for a while until the portal project started and they decided to work on it. That's one of Valve's strengths. They let people do whatever they want. You want to spend 10 years making a game? You can! That's how valve time happens. They don't force deadlines because they're so far in the black they don't have to. A smaller company can't do that sort of thing because they need a product on the market before they all starve to death.

Valve can afford to hire people they don't even need yet because they think they might be useful later. Their Cabal system of game development requires ridiculous amounts of time and money to implement properly but it makes games like HL, HL2, TF2 and Portal.

But enough of my flagrant Valve Fanboying.

Yes special effects will get cheaper, but a movie is more than special effects. You need costumes, you need sets, you need film equipment and most importantly, you need actors. no matter how cheap equipment gets, people don't. Extras, crew, actors etc. For a full scale movie you're probably going to need a significant financial investment. Plus marketing costs (viral will only get you so far) food for the actors your already paying if you need to travel anywhere. Travel costs etc. You can't use JUST cgi. Lucas tried that. It was terrible.

There is NO equivalent of game for 'work' (i.e. productive) - in fact games other than those meant for 'play' (non-productive), are usually called 'serious' games or something similar - (Tom Clancy used that in Airborne for example).

Games are merely something we DO in a structured competitive environment. The nature of what we do, the competition, or the structure involved DOES NOT MATTER. (Hence the use of 'game' during the first world war). For this reason, until someone comes up with an exact equivalent for 'work' games can be 'serious' too, and therefore 'fun' does not matter for games in general.

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

(Not gotten round to the post about games yet - (next one!) (Competition/competitions and games)).

A blatant copy would be a near-likeness game, released sometime after the (seemingly derived) game, and with no historical record to prove its independent conception.

A non-infringing game can (and have been) sued for derivation, because it looks of similar appearance to the original. A judge is likely only to compare screenshots of the two games. A competent lawyer should be able to prove otherwise, of course.

I am not trying to tell you what to do with your work. I am saying, be aware of the possibility of a lawsuit. Don't rely on your own interpretation of the law -- computer geeks mistakenly fall for this all the time. The owner of a work does not need a compellingly persuasive reason to sue you -- they will more than likely win for reasons of money alone.

Not that it is particularly relevant to the discussion, but a still-good article on copyright infringement for game development (written in '97): Myths and Facts in Avoiding Copyright Infringement.

As a bonus, if you get the game now, you can also check out some of the hilarious bugs in the game, like the amazing donkey-lady or the woman flapping her wings.

I knew I was going to get something full of bugs when the Rockstar Spouse told us about the mismanagement at Rockstar San Diego - burned out coders and testers working 6-7 days a week don't notice things like women with the face of a donkey, or dogs that shoot guns, or flying people.

...and lived to tell the tale (on Gamasutra)

I don't get it; why is grinding necessary? I always thought it was because the subscription based model required that the developers build BF Skinner's rat in the box model to get the players addicted by incrementally and randomly providing rewards. This is explained in great detail by John Hopson who has a PHD in behavioral and brain sciences. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3085/behavioral_game_design.php?page=1 Grinding for XP, items or whatever isn't a feature, it's a mechanism designed to do one thing only; get the players to behave a certain way. In other words, keep them playing and paying the subscription fee forever.

From the article: "April 2010 may have been a disappointing month for video game industry numbers, but new top 20 U.S. console retail game from the NPD Group reveals that 14 titles sold more than 100,000 units -- above analyst expectations, and more than the 9 that were sold in April of last year." http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/28566/NPD_Top_20_Reveals_Aprils_Hits_FFXIIIs_Chart_Miss.php

IT does not matter if games are fun or not in themselves - it only matters if your audience wants them to be.

Although we use the word 'play' with a game, since there is no equivalent of game under 'work', games (things we do in a structured, competitive environment), can be used for both work AND play.

Of course, understanding what the word game truly represents is the real underlying cause of most of it's problems anyway...

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DarrenTomlyn/20100505/5089/An_objective_foundation_upon_which_to_build_a_theory_of_games.php

In 2001, a developer at Insomniac wrote an article about how they went about protecting their new Spyro game. It also took two months to be cracked. But as he says in the article, the goal was not to be unbreakable, but to delay the hackers -- 50 percent of the total sales occurred in the first 2 months.

Effectively, Ubisoft has already won.

I agree with Will Wright...playing something like Advance Wars is a great way to exercise the brain, especially to get it jumpstarted in the morning.

I personally prefer to play a few songs on Guitar Hero or play 20-30 minutes of Muramasa: The Demon Blade while on my recumbent bike. My mornings are always much easier and I'm much more awake when I give myself the time to do that.

Taken from the Playstation.com forums (nice work!):
----------------

CREDIT goes to Xrobx who posted these in another thread and i wanted to make sure that everyone sees them...

Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.:
"In addition to playing games, watching movies, listening to music, and viewing photos, you can use the PS3 system to run the Linux operating system. By installing the Linux operating system, you can use the PS3 system not only as an entry-level personal computer with hundreds of familiar applications for home and office use, but also as a complete development environment for the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.)."
http://www.playstation.com/ps3-openplatform/index.html

(http://74.125.113.132/search?q=cache:byasL-PxEiMJ:www.playstation.com/ps3-openplatform/index.html+http://www.playstation.com/ps3-openplatform/index.html&cd=1&hl=en&ct=cln
k&gl=us&client=safari) - google's cached page of the above hyperlink from March 30th 2010 which does not say anything about FW 3.21 removing Other OS. I've saved the page in case it goes offline, copy http address into browser as link probably won't work. Or, just search google and get the cached page. - kiyyto.

Phil Harrison, February 2007,
President of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios 2005-2008:
"One of the most powerful things about the PS3 is the 'Install Other OS' option."
http://kotaku.com/235049/20-questions-with-phil-harrison-at-dice

Sony Computer Entertainment Inc., 2006-2009:
"The Linux Distributor's Starter Kit provides information, binary and source codes to Linux Distribution developers who wants to make their distro support PS3."
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux

Izumi Kawanishi, Sony, May 2006:
"Because we have plans for having Linux on board [the PS3], we also recognize Linux programming activities... Other than game studios tied to official developer licenses, we'd like to see various individuals participate in content creation for the PS3."
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=9290

Geoffrey Levand, August 2009,
Principal Software Engineer at Sony Corporation:
"Please be assured that SCE is committed to continue the support for previously sold models that have the "Install Other OS" feature and that this feature will not be disabled in future firmware releases."
mailing list to PS3 customers using Linux

Phil Harrison, May 2006,
President of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios 2005-2008:
"The Playstation 3 is a computer. We do not need the PC."
http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/0,1518,418642,00.html
SONY
Make.Believe... you didn't see that

Turbine's in dire financial straits. I have no insider information, but it's pretty obvious.

Obvious to who? There have been regular updates to DDO on schedule since going free to play, and their revenue went up by 500% since going free to play. The number of subscribers has doubled, and I don't think that even includes the pay-to-play people such as me, who spend as much or more each month on buying content packs as a subscriber would. As long as they keep releasing content, they'll keep the revenue stream alive from people like me.

LOTRO is the second most popular US MMO, and it has some great expansions, including the new Moria one that just came out... It's like World of Warcraft only done *right*. But that's not going to last, for the same reason AC and DDO died.

{princess bride}Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.{/princess bride}

DDO went free after it slowly decayed. It's probably on the downswing from that huge influx right now.

Don't think so. But then, why look for real numbers when you can just spout FUD and pull stuff out of your ass.

What Turbine needs to do is make a new "boxed collection" every 6 months and sell it in stores for $20. That would keep the new players flowing in and might -- MIGHT -- save them.

You might not have heard, but brick and mortar games stores already have a few nails in the coffin, and could soon go the way of the arcade, the video store, and the buggy whip manufacturer. Ever heard of Steam?

And I have no doubt this spyware thing is a misunderstanding or exaggeration of the facts.

Just by viewing a page on a Turbine site, DDO players have confirmed (by inspecting packets) that the account name and email address were transmitted from the "Offer Wall" page. Add the pre-fetching comment here, and you might be able to see the problem. Sure, my password and credit card were not transmitted, and I only browse with NoScript, but I am probably not representative of the most vulnerable portions of the player base.

EA _used_ to be evil. They've actually reformed a lot, partially through lawsuits (the EA Spouse thing) and partly through the actions of their new CEO John Riccitiello. He instituted a lot of changes when he took over, including a focus on developing new games rather than just making sequel after sequel after sequel. Unfortunately the game buying public has responded by... not buying the new games they've always said they wanted, which has driven down EA stock prices and puts Riccitiello at serious risk of being ousted and EA at potential risk of being acquired by someone who would probably be more willing to exploit their existing library rather than developing new ideas.

Plus, you've got to love their response to this current situation, which was reported in 1UP's and Gamasutra's articles. Since EA was supposedly part of the reason West and Zampella got fired, reporters contacted EA's "director of corporate communications" Jeff Brown, who said "We don't have the time to comment on the many lawsuits Activision files against its employees and creative partners."

And for my own thoughts, as i said in response to an earlier Slashdot article, if the Justice Department doesn't think a company refusing to hire someone who previously worked at a competitor is legal, my gut feeling is that they won't look too kindly on a company firing someone for talking to a competitor about a possible job either. Of course i am not a lawyer, so we'll have to wait to see if Activision is actually as screwed as i think they probably are.

You forget to factor in the fact that console hardware is sold at a loss.

Actually, that's wrong.

Except that in some cases, the cost of copy protection can effectively kill the console.

See the case of Playstation vs Nintendo 64. The cost of copy protection was one of the main reasons that gave the victory to PS. The N64 cartridge system, although it virtually prevented any piracy, also meant the game copies were much more expensive and space limited. While I personally prefer my N64 to my PSOne, especially due to its more robust construction (having no moving parts in a major plus), it was a very bad business decision.
Of course, current copy protection are different, and don't rely on special hardware per-game copy, but they cost money nevertheless.

Remember that the PS3 (which is the less pirated console) only had one of the game on the top ten list of sales of 2009.

Again, there's always right and always wrong decisions, it's cost analysis.

But it wasn't even advertised as one. To wit :

"In remarks made to Japanese website Impress Watch, and translated by consumer website Beyond3D, President and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment Ken Kutaragi has commented in more detail on the concept that the PlayStation 3 is a computer, rather than a game console.

Kutaragi pointedly commented of the next-gen console, which is due to launch this November at dual price points of $499 and $599 in North America: "We don't say it's a game console (*laugh*) - PlayStation 3 is clearly a computer, unlike the PlayStations [released] so far."

He went on to outline a scenario where many parts of the PS3 were upgradable, much more like a PC, noting: "Since PS3 is a computer, there are no "models" but "configurations"", and continuing (though talking in the theoretical): "I think it's okay to release a [extended PS3] configuration every year". It's clear from the comments that Sony is indicating that it will be possible to upgrade hard drives and perhaps even other components easily.

The Sony CEO gave another example in the interview: "As PS3 is a computer... it also wants to evolve. We'll want to upgrade the HDD size very soon - if new standards appear on the PC, we will want to support them. We may want the [Blu-ray] drive to [have a writable version upgrade]." He then tempered his comments: "Well, BD may not develop like that, though." But extensibility is what Sony is stressing that you get for the price of a PS3, nonetheless.

Kutaragi's comments echo a recent Phil Harrison interview in which he commented: "We believe that the PS3 will be the place where our users play games, watch films, browse the Web, and use other computer functions. The PlayStation 3 is a computer. We do not need the PC." The combined executive comments appear to signify a change in marketing tactics for the company, who may have always had this scenario in mind, but are pushing it much more strongly following a somewhat mixed E3 showing from a PR perspective."

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=9642

But really, why drop a feature?

How did one home menu item screw with my enjoying god of war or metal gear?

Was there some system menu bug? They could have at least PRETENDED there was one..

Should you choose to write a game engine that doesn't use MS's crap, you're free to do so.

No you are not!

Sure you'll probably have to jump through some hoops to get it to work but all the functions and calls are still in the hardware.

But not the drivers.

For example, Darkest of Days uses 8MonkeyLabs own proprietary Marmoset Engine, which in turn uses OpenGL, Physx, SpeedTree and OpenAL.

FFS don't just misquote when you have no freakin idea what you are talking about, maybe actually RTFA that is linked from the page you are quoting from. No Darkest of Days did NOT use OpenGL in the 360 version, which you would know if you had bothered to read the actual article YOU quoted from!

The rendering code had to be almost completely rewritten, creating a second Direct3D renderer in addition to the OpenGL-based PC version.

the market nintendo targets (non-gamers) makes the wii/ds a very very attractive target for shovelware producers

No it doesn't. Third parties are just idiots with zero understanding of what people want, they can only copy what succeeds and even then they'll often fail to realize what was the important part of the successful game. The "casual" gamers don't fall for the shovelware (people keep citing Carnival Games but from what I heard it's actually fun to play, even a blind chicken finds a corn once in a while).

You can get a 2nd controller with Wii Play which effectively gives you a "free" controller with a game. It comes with wireless where as, at least with the 360, you need to buy that and Wii games are generally at least $10 cheaper.

The attach rate as of last summer was 6 games per Wii which is a savings of $60 on software. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=23308

Supposedly the attach rate jumped up to 8 games per Wii over Xmas giving purchasers a $80 savings on software. http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/01/wii-attach-rate-soared-to-81-for-december.ars

Sure some people will buy a lot of peripherals but even then they're generally better deals. For instance you can get Monster Hunter Wii and a classic controller together for less than a PS3/360 game.

Here's the problem - that works wonderfully as a theory. It fails utterly in practice.

Really? Based on what metric?

The simple fact that PC game developers are still in business and still making money, despite wasting who knows how many millions of dollars every year on failed anti-piracy measures is all it takes to prove otherwise. And that's not even mentioning the small developers that are being successful despite using no DRM whatsoever. Here's just one excellent example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sins_of_a_solar_empire. Here's a bit I'm quoting from the page itself: "As of September 2008, Stardock's CEO, Brad Wardell, has stated that the game has sold over 500,000 units, with 100,000 of those being digital download sales, on a budget of less than $1,000,000. It sold 200,000 copies in the first month after release alone." And since the sources for that quote are extremely relevant here, I'll link those as well. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20026 http://www.techreport.com/discussions.x/14383

The only possible metric you can use that would make what you said in any way correct is the one the big corporations use: that every pirated copy is a lost sale. So I guess it "fails utterly" if your metric is that they aren't making near as much money as they "could" be.

This was actually done with the PS1 game Spyro: Year of the Dragon. They actually built crack protection into the game code itself. There was a really interesting article on Gamasutra about it at the time. This, of course, added mountains of extra work for the programmers, but it's interesting from a technical perspective.

I've never said it won't be possible. Of course it will be possible. In the worst-case, you just reimplement the entire game. However, they can make it really stunningly difficult - the question is how difficult it will be, when it will be truly working, how many false releases they'll make that almost work, etc, etc, etc.

Yes, of course it's crackable. But it may be nowhere near "easy".

I've linked this before, but check out http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3030/keeping_the_pirates_at_bay.php - it goes over some of the real goals and issues involved with copy protection.

Input is a binary dump from every important structure in the game, appended end-to-end, with details like "size" and "type" and "what's coming next" inferred from the internal representation. Output is a bytecode program that fills structures by calling their APIs. Note that the APIs do not directly set fields - some fields are unimportant, some fields are only important if they have specific flags, some fields are set in different formats than they're internally stored in, etc etc etc.

If they are doing this, their goal is to make it as annoying to "get right" as possible. Maybe a first version will be released in a week, with one major improvement per week after that - if it takes ten versions to actually get every case right, they've pretty much succeeded.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3030/keeping_the_pirates_at_bay.php is a good example of the kind of subtlety and complexity that, if I were designing this system, I would be trying to create.

DirectX took shortcuts and was more geared toward fast output. Is this not the case?

No. However, it is true that Direct3D is a bit faster on some drivers, because of more tuning by the driver developers.

There's a nice article about this on gamasutra.

So you're saying that OpenGL has parity with DirectX 11 in terms of functionality, then?

Yes and no. OpenGL 3.1 is on par with DirectX 10, nothing more. All other things are exposed through OpenCL (a separate standard, which allows close interaction with OpenGL) and some extensions.

Besides that, the latest-and-greatest features of the graphics cards are not that important for game developers anyways, since only the top 1% of the customers actually have hardware that supports it.

Are you guys officially the entirety of 2D Boy?

KG: Yeah, we're just two people for the bulk of this project. We don't have an office, but we're not allowed to say that, so we just work out of coffee shops and stuff.

I'd be interested to know how wide (and how common) the gap is between Nintendo's stated devkit policy and reality, because there's plenty of WiiWare titles that I can't see how they ever came out of a professional studio.

I place most of the blame for the lack of good games for the the Wii squarely on the publishers and not on the technical limitations of the console.

The wii is almost literally an overclocked Gamecube and Nintendo's SDK sucks. Nor did they give developers any good guides to using motion controls. Nintendo's attitude was "we'll build it, they will come, and they will make the tools". This, plus Nintendo's licensing scheme and content limitations, have really cooled third parties on the console.

Believe me, the hardware limitations are crippling if you're making a "serious" game. The big problem is that you really have to commit to the wii and it's control scheme to make a decent game, that means no multiplatform. Your game won't look very good unless you have a keen understanding of the wii's limitations (which involve very small environments). And remember the lack of good tools, so you have to make your own. All of this drives up the cost of developing a wii game.
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=23118

too bad given today's computing power, they must divide and reassign universe to nodes manually during downtime. imagine what it could be like if it ran on mainframe+cell addon cards: http://www.eetindia.co.in/ART_8800463141_1800001_NT_b30dcef8.HTM http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/13685/IBM_Integrates_Cell_Into_Mainframes_For_Virtual_Worlds.php one truly self-contained universe...

To further your point it's probably worth looking at the article on DAoC, Mythic's older MMO from back in 2002 in relation.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3009/postmortem_mythic_entertainments_.php

Yes, daily active users is a proxy for revenue. Furthermore, 11% decline in revenue is >= 11% decline in profit, right? This certainly has Zynga's attention. This is an interesting example of a company pissing off their customers in an extremely lubricated market.

Note that Zynga was never particularly concerned with the quality of their gameplay.

At what point do clones represent a genre? Reference Material: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25003

Now I'm stuck in this dilemma of whether or not to watch even just a part of it. Having never seen it, the worst piece of anything I've ever watched was the Sequel to Starship Troopers, which is similar in to how you describe it. It's so bad I had to turn it off, and I can not possibly bring myself to watch it again.

But since I know there is something worse... something so terrible... It's like I have to see it to broaden my perspectives. Maybe it will be a life changing situation for me (Like someone else commented, it drove his friend to drink). Maybe I will reach an ultimate state of enlightenment after seeing the worst piece of recorded entertainment. Just to push the boundaries of what is possible, seems like a goal anyone would set.

But on the other hand, I -LIKE- Star Wars. Like, more than like, but not quite obsessive fan love. See when I was a Kid I owned the entire Star Wars: The Essential Guide collection of books. I had every line memorized and could spew the dialogue back to you without any hesitation. I -WAS- a fanboy. But I've kind of grown out of it, but it still holds a special place in my heart. I still play X-Wing vs Tie Fighter every now and then. I still claim that Dark Forces were the highlight of Lucas Art's first person shooters, and that Battlefront 2 still doesn't reach the entertainment value of Jedi Academy (though Jedi Outcast was a much better storyline by far). And while Force Unleashed was good in it's own right, it never earned an emotional spot like Droid Works.

So what will it be - A gift to perception to help me better understand the world around me, despite how painful it might be to endure...

Or a horrible piece of Malice that will destroy everything my childhood has loved and charished, leaving me a half empty shell of a human being not worth living...