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is a game with just one button good enough?

like this one (sfcave in 3d. defaults to two-button mode, but the one-button mode works mostly the same)

also, this article

If having a much bigger market share (e.g., Nokia at 40%, to Apple's few per cent) does not count as a "real threat", I am curious to hear what does?

In the US (yes, /. is international but the iPhone is a bit US-centric) smartphone market, Nokia is close to a non-player.

http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2009/10/28/rim-and-apple-top-u-s-smartphone-market-share/

RIM has 40%, Apple has 30%, Palm has 7%.

Worldwide Nokia had 40% of the smartphone market in Q4 2008 but that was with a 10% drop from the previous quarter.

But see how I specified the hardware/software package? Symbian is dying and Maemo has yet to catch on (witness the sales of the iPod touch compared to the Nokia handheld tablets). How many people do you know who will say that developing for Symbian and Nokia phones is easy and a joy to do? Look at the user interface experience. Just about everyone who has an iPhone loves the interface. The UI in most other phones is something that the user grudgingly puts up with, not whips out to show off to their friends.

(And if you have that low opinion of your potential customers - that if they modify their own product to get basic functionality to work, that Just Works on all other phones, then they must be pirates - then I have no sympathy if Apple rejects the "app" that you've spent months or years developing.)

As much as I love a good rant, I feel compelled to point out that I neither own an iPhone nor develop apps for them.

If you want the basic functionality that "just works" with everything else, buy that everything else. Apple and AT&T don't allow tethering. So buy a phone that does. No one is forcing anyone to get an iPhone. Don't like the features? Don't buy it.

As I linked to above (reproduced here), there is a lot of piracy on iPhones and so far as I know, the only way to pirate on an iPhone is to jailbreak it. There is a chunk of jailbreaking users who are pure of heart and are merely trying to violate the terms of service with Apple and/or AT&T, but they're part of a demographic that is not all pure and shiny and a side effect of that is that they're not going to be highly sought after as customers.

Not everyone, no. But draw me a Venn diagram. Make the center circle "People who know how to pirate iPhone apps" and the other two circles "People who have jailbroken iPhones" and "People who don't have jailbroken iPhones." What does it look like?

The basic fact is that piracy is rampant in the iPhone world: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4194/iphone_piracy_the_inside_story.php

Does it mean that you are doing it? Of course not. But it means that you're part of a demographic that isn't going to be tremendously sought after.

The gamasutra link in the /. article stated:

Greg Yardley confirms that getting ripped off by pirates is the rule rather than the exception.

It didn't say that piracy was the rule, rather than the exception. It said having some people rip off your software was the rule rather than the exception.

I would say that the /. headline kicked it up a notch. Either someone didn't read the article, or they decided to bend the truth with a sensationalist headline, to attract more readers.

The Android app store sells less because it is dominated by a culture of "free" (as in beer) and the Apple app store is not. I run Android and wish it would do well, but if I were designing games, I would not target the Android if my model was to make money by selling games. If I were Zynga, Playfish, or Playdom, however, using the "Freemium" model, I'd be all over the Android. Look at Ian Bogost's article describing the ridiculousness of people asking for refunds for 99 cent games as an indication of how hard it is to make money selling games on mobile platforms.

(Gamers, look at the future of gaming: it is Farmville, and you created it through your cheapness, greed, and immaturity.)

That would just make it so they don't get paid AT ALL for what they produce.

Radiohead, Trent Reznor and the developers of world of goo would beg to differ.

there are a lot of immoral people out there who will take the content, think it's fantastic and never pay for it

and how is that different from what happens under the current system? People pirate stuff whether or not there is a law against it. If you look at the sales for those examples i gave above, a fairly significant proportion of the consumers paid nothing or one penny. Yet the artists still raked in an amount of money they were more than happy with. The question is how many of the people who pay for music/games/movies at the moment do it because they want to pay the artist or simply because they fear punishment? It seems the fear of punishment plays little or no part in how well an artist does from sales of recordings of their work. If the law does nothing to help anyone and so much to hinder culture and destroys the lives of those it decides to make obscene examples of, what possible ethical, moral or practical reason is there for its existence? How much more agile and healthy would the ecomony of art be if there were no bureaucratic barriers to tie up billions of dollars in an "industry" of litigation that is little more than a self-financing toll gate?

I may be in the minority, but it's not as 'clear' as you make it out to be:

From earlier this year:

Headline: Study: More Americans Play Games Than Go To Movies

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=23719

Those box office receipts you like to tout indicate revenue, not numbers of people.

A.

Robotron....no story to speak of

Hey, what you do mean no story?
http://www.gamasutra.com/db_area/images/feature/4099/0501.png

Note that there's already been some counterpoints against this story posted elsewhere on the internet:
Counterpoint from John Gibson
Counterpoint from Derek Smart

Y'know, Excel can be forced into service as a surprisingly credible 2D or 3D rendering mechanism.

And, of course, Excel has both a fully functional(if low status) language embedded in it and support for external extensions. It'd be actual work; but, in principle, getting a full game running(albeit with questionable performance) running inside Excel. The easiest would likely be anything you could re-implement/port into Excel directly.

If you were really crazy, and wanted to really work at not working, the "elegant"(if you could call it that) approach would be to implement a more generic interface, so that Excel could be treated as a frame buffer, or be used to draw OpenGL, or something similarly ghastly.

Doug Neubauer's Star Raiders, a 1979 game for the Atari 8-bit line of personal computers, is a shining example of what happens when a developer is told that something can't be done, does it anyway, and then is promptly forgotten for having done it. Star Raiders is one of those rare games that can truly be said to have been ahead of its time.

Here is a nice article on WOW. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25307 The latest patch generated 4.7 petabytes of data.Somewhere else i read that they use P2P to distribute the patches.

Dreamcast was an excellent system and ahead of its time, which could be another reason it failed. Money was a big issue. Tough to go against Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo.

Gamasutra has an interesting article as well on the history:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4128/the_rise_and_fall_of_the_dreamcast.php

Luckily, a few of those GREAT games were ported over to the GameCube, which I still have, like Ikaruga(yes I know it eventually got ported to the XBOX360), Skies of Arkadia, Shenmue, etc.

Boy, that Matt Barton sure did a lot to cover up his marketing tracks, like writing a book about vintage games or being an assistant professor in Minnesota.

He's also listed right above the marketroid you mentioned - freak coincidence or the usual /. conspiracy?

You decide... (that is - if you've read that far...)

I get 25ms latency in an ideal online gaming situation

This article measures GTA IV on the PS3 as having 166ms latency -- from button press to weapon firing.

This shows that for certain types of game, latency of the kind you'd expect sending video over DSL would be acceptable.

Then you have the lack of ANY sort of "predictive" technology

I think they're doing some smart stuff in that area. Remember, this isn't just a matter of running Crysis on a VNC-like server. The game is ported to OnLive's API, which has some tricks to help out in that area.

I do think that the ideal game for this service doesn't yet exist. I think the kind of game that will work best will be some sort of MMO, where this architecture will make it easy to implement vast, detailed game worlds with lots of concurrent players.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it true that something functional cannot constitute a trademark?

Try telling that to The Tetris Company, which claims that it owns trade dress on "Geometric playing pieces formed by four equally-sized, delineated blocks" plus eight items that appear in Nintendo's Dr. Mario.

Yeah, I agree; I didn't mean to imply people didn't actually think about these problems and come up with those sorts of insights. But my impression is that there isn't nearly the same sort of discussion and shared knowledge and vocabulary on this subject, even beyond books. Are there even names for all the successful game mechanics used by important games of the past few decades?

The situation may have improved somewhat since then, but Doug Church expressed a similar sentiment in an article back in 1999, so at least some game designers seem to agree...

Gamasutra has discovered that U.S. Guitar Hero/Rock Band revenues are down 49% year on year, as discounted hardware and over 20 SKUs flood the market.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

America isn't the only country.

The article is about sales in the United States.

Game publishers put those stores out of business.

I find it much more plausible that Walmart put those stores out of business.

The simple reality is that the margin on most NEW games for GameStop is around $1.

As of the fiscal year ending in January 2009, GameStop has an average 21 cents on the dollar gross profit margin on new software sales. On a $50 game, that comes out to $10.50. (Source: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=23357)

At that margin, they simply cannot stay in business.

This might be true if your number reflected the actual state of affairs. But it doesn't.

The ONLY solution is for the publishers to give more money to retailers.

Er, wouldn't this merely create an opportunity for Walmart to undercut the specialty retailers even further?

Other industries have had to deal with the used market and somehow managed.

Try making a living as a mid-list author, sometime.

The combination of used sales and piracy ultimately drives many media publishers to succumb to the very worst aspects of their corporate natures, and become ever-increasingly blockbuster-driven, by necessity. Hype trumps quality, because it's all about the first week of sales. We're rewarding them for the wrong behavior. The content-creators don't like it and the fans don't like it, but this is how these industries have "somehow managed."

If downloadable direct-to-consumer content creates a little more wiggle room for creativity, risk, and innovation, that's a tradeoff I can live with.

In fact, I would argue that the games industry industry is driven far more by novelty than say, the book industry, which means the competition from used merchandise is is fairly weak.

The problem isn't with New Game X competing against Obsolete Used Game Y. In that scenario, the competition would, indeed, be weak. The problem is that in practice, we are faced with a scenario in which New Game X is often competing against Used Game X, a mere week after release. That is not weak competition at all.

Google is a bastardization of "Googol", a very large number. It entered the lexicon after the word's existence.

"Googol" in turn appears to a bastardization of Google

Being able to trademark "Rosetta Stone" in the domain of translation is just about the stupidest thing I've ever heard

Even worse: trying to secure trade dress protection for game rules that are common in computer puzzle games. In a lawsuit, The Tetris Company names nine elements that, when taken together, are distinctive to Tetris. But all but one (pieces made up of four unit squares connected on their sides) are also present in Dr. Mario, and several are present in Puyo Pop, Pac-Attack, and numerous other falling block games.

I think I'll trademark just "Stone" for a company that sells rocks

Or how about "Staples" for a retail store that sells office supplies such as stapler refills?

I may sound like a troll with this post, and my apologies for it. But I've lost all respect for Cliff B., ever since he used the lame-o "piracy" excuse for not porting - PORTING, mind you, not "developing from scratch" - Gears of War 2 to PC. It's a cop-out, and to me it shows a lack of understanding of the issue and ways around it.

After all, Stardock doesn't have any problems developing for PC; they don't DRM their titles beyond what's being implemented with the new GOO platform; and despite the rocky launch of Demigod mired by users connecting with warezed copies, they seem to have made it a fairly successful title.

In the video he talks about having a sub 20ms ping. I think the idea is that they would setup lots of smaller servers spread out geographically to reduce the amount of lag as much as possible. What people perhaps overlook is that games naturally have quite a large lag already, once you've pressed a button it takes up to 1 frame for that change to be registered, another frame to update the physics / animation etc, and finally a frame to render based on the previously calculated physics information. In a 30FPS game that's between 66-100ms, and that's assuming a really damn good engine which is responsive, which a lot of game engines aren't. There was an article on Gamasutra on this very topic about a year ago, if you want to read more. If the check out the third page of that article you'll see the response times for some popular games, and you might be suprised!

In the video he talks about having a sub 20ms ping. I think the idea is that they would setup lots of smaller servers spread out geographically to reduce the amount of lag as much as possible. What people perhaps overlook is that games naturally have quite a large lag already, once you've pressed a button it takes up to 1 frame for that change to be registered, another frame to update the physics / animation etc, and finally a frame to render based on the previously calculated physics information. In a 30FPS game that's between 66-100ms, and that's assuming a really damn good engine which is responsive, which a lot of game engines aren't. There was an article on Gamasutra on this very topic about a year ago, if you want to read more. If the check out the third page of that article you'll see the response times for some popular games, and you might be suprised!

Unfortunately reality seems to disagree with you.

http://kotaku.com/5222086/ps3-attach-rate-overtakes-wii-attach-rate

From a year ago:

http://playstation.joystiq.com/2008/04/25/npd-releases-home-console-attach-rate-ratios-ps3-not-so-hot/

There has not been any period at all where the PS3 has had a higher attach rate than the 360 and it's only just very recently managed to overtake the Wii.

The closest I could find to your claims was this:

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=23186

But it really doesn't make any sense, attach rate is number of games purchased per console, not number of units of certain cherry picked titles sold per console. I suppose if you're completely unobjective and a total Sony fanboy you might take away from that in your mind that Sony has a higher attach rate, but if you step back and be objective and look at the first link you'll notice that regardless of what Sony says and how they twist a few figures the cold hard truth is that they do have a lower attach rate even when adjusted for console lifetime on the market. Nintendo could play a similar game to Sony taking games that were really built for the Wii but ported to other consoles anyway and suggest they have a higher attach rate, but still, the reality is that they don't. Effectively what Sony is abusing is the fact they have a much lower selection of titles on their system, so the good titles get a higher ratio bought for their console than for the other consoles, but this makes no sense because attach rates aren't about specific individual titles. It also ignores the fact their system has sold much fewer of the titles they've cherry picked overall too which should be the real measure of per-game success on each platform. If they have sold less of a specific title because they have a smaller install base that doesn't mean anything in terms of how well they're doing, in fact, it only exagerates the problem of having a smaller install base. If you can make up for that smaller install base with greater profits from game sales (i.e. real attach rates) then you may be able to live with that, but the problem is Sony is struggling in terms of both install base AND attach rates. It looks like they're improving things on the attach rates front, but they're certainly nowhere near Microsoft and they're certainly even further from having a big enough lead on attach rates against Microsoft that they can make up the profit differences from a lower install base.

At the end of the day all a publisher like activision sees is the amount of profit gained per console they publish for, and the fact is, Sony's mangled statistics don't change that one bit, it's simply an attempt at improving PR.

Really, if you have any sources that show the PS3 really does have a higher attach rate than the other two consoles rather than a bunch of cherry picked mangled stats that actually have nothing to do with attach rate because attach rates are game neutral I'd love to see it, but I've yet to see anything that shows this and certainly nothing from independent and product neutral sources like NPD.

I don't expect you to change your mind and accept that Sony doesn't have the highest attach rate, because the fact you came out with that unsourced and clearly untrue comment in the first means you're probably not open to the idea that the PS3 isn't doing as well as it should be but it seems silly to leave such an incorrect comment uncorrected. Still, if you can somehow prove your comment then I'll step back and accept I stand corrected but mangled statistics that are effectively meaningless from the marketing department of the company you're referring to don't really count for obvious reasons, it needs to be objective 3rd party stats that really tell us something about profit from games sold per console.

It's interesting that the Wall Street Journal would publish a story trying to discourage individuals from making money on the Internet.

Not only would they publish such an article, the WSJ actually faces the digital convesrion conundrum under Murdoch.
What they point out is that in the world of blogging, much like iTunes app store publishing a creator faces perfect competition. Facing an industry with 0 economic profit, differentiation and other services are needed for economic profitability. That's why selling of merchandise, or other value added services is important for creating a viable blogging business.
This isn't just for the individual, it's for anybody getting involved in the blogging world. Corporations have the advanatage of leveraging their existing trademark, or as we often see spending millions of dollars to buy an already popular blog. Ultimately they face the same problems of selling something other than their blog to pull of a real profit.

In fact, games are expensive when they are licensed, probably 95% of the cost of a game comes from the license.

I have been a game developer for a long time, and it was known that 50% of the budget of a game was used for marketing.

Ubisoft is also well known for messing games, because they want to build the cheapest possible games (see the pitiful experience of Splinter Cell with the Shangai team http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2830/postmortem_tom_clancys_splinter_.php ).

My mother owns a wii. My father owns a wii. My sister owns a wii. My brother owns a Wii. My cousin owns a Wii. My 3 years old nephew uses a Wii. My grandparents have played on a Wii. Nursing homes have Wiis.

And the question the publishers are asking themselves is "Is your Mother/Father/Sister/Brother/Cousin/Nursing home" going to buy my games.

From attach rates the answer is generally no.

Whether this is a self-fulfilling prophecy is irrelevant. Third parties release poor games on the Wii because third party games don't sell well on the Wii because third parties release poor games on the Wii. The result is still the same: Poor third party products and support for the Wii.

Two years ago all we heard was how the PS3 was doomed to this publisher death spiral. It appears the Wii has entered it instead.

If you are comfortable only playing Nintendo's releases this isn't a problem for you. If you are interested in a broader selection then you should probably look elsewhere.

I'm sure the remaining 50,000,000 PSP owners are thrilled!

Fixed that for you.

I'd highly recommend getting hold of the BBC documentary "Tetris : From Russia with love". Link

Also, there was a game design challenge a few years ago at GDC. Mr. Pajitnov was one of the participants (and the eventual winner I think), and I loved the way he approached the problem

Link

massive new interview with Epic (Mega)Games founder Tim Sweeney

Print "readable" version here: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4035/from_the_past_to_the_future_tim_.php?print=1

When people measure game performance they usually only measure framerate. Nobody measures control latency, so this encourages design choices that trade responsiveness for framerate. Things like alternative frame rendering in multi-GPU setups instead of split frame rendering, and triple or higher n-buffering. Even if it's not a conscious choice, people get away with lazy high latency design because by nobody mentions it in reviews, so by the time the buyer finds out it will be too late. In complicated engines with many layers of abstraction it's very easily to accidentally increase latency:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1942/programming_responsiveness.php?print=1

Latency is just as important as framerate for feeling of immersion.

Let's say I write a game involving falling shapes with completely different gameplay from Tetris (say, Dr. Mario). Is this infringement?

The Tetris Company claims exclusive rights to "trade dress" over nine elements of the game. One is the use of tetrominoes (spelled "Tetriminos" by The Tetris Company) as game pieces; the other eight are present in Dr. Mario Online Rx, developed by Arika and published by Nintendo with no mention of Tetris in the opening credit screen. But then, Nintendo has a patent on the rules of Dr. Mario; Tetris doesn't have one on the rules of Tetris.

How about a game with different gameplay and the Tetris pieces?

One example of such a game would be Tetris 2 also called Tetris Flash, published by Nintendo under license from Elorg (now part of Tetris Holding). The Dr. Mario patent appears to read on Tetris 2. Another would be Zoda's Revenge: StarTropics II published by Nintendo, which has tetromino-shaped "tetrads" as artifacts to be collected much like the Dragon Balls of the anime series Dragon Ball. A third is Blockout also called Geom Cube published by Technos, which uses tetracubes (most of which are tetrominoes extruded by one unit) to be packed into 3x3 or 5x5 cell planes.

How about a game with the same gameplay and shapes, but new graphics, etc?

This is the situation of most clones, such as KSirtet and Gnometris, and this is the situation under legal dispute. But I think 17 USC 102(b) makes the gameplay uncopyrightable as a "process" and "method of operation".

How about a 100% accurate remake of one of the official Tetris games?

Some clones are reskinnable to resemble a classic Tetris game almost to the pixel, though the author doesn't distribute such infringing skins.

The Gamasutra article (the article with actual content, not wild speculation) is based on BREW -- a Qualcomm proprietary runtime with no Linux involved.

Illinois passed a video game law that got ruled unconstitutional and then they had to pay the Entertainment Software Association's lawyer bills

Isn't Guitar Hero & Rockband pretty much Dance Dance Revolution. But instead of a stomp pad you have instruments?

That means they're more like Konami's Beatmania, Guitar Freaks, and Drummania. Guitar Hero is licensed by Konami.

This study found that preventing 1000 pirated copies results in an additional 1 sale.
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350

Clearly one has to balance lost sales from piracy vs. lost sales due to people unhappy with either the concept or inconvenience of DRM. If the 1:1000 ratio is accurate, it does make me think developers should be pushing much further along the spectrum in the direction of DRM-free or DRM-light.

Except that gamers, will pay £30-40 for a game and will keep coming back for more. So not only do you need to ship 3x as many copies in a much more saturated market, but you also don't have a userbase ready to buy v2,3,4 at the drop of a pin.

Of course, maybe with all the piracy paranoia we allowed things to degenerate into a situation that companies want to be protected from ANYTHING that would hurt their sales. Not something I like.

GNU Emacs isn't licensed by The Tetris Company. Calling a Free tetromino game "Tetris" be like calling an OS based on GNOME and WINE "Microsoft Windows". Ordinarily, changing the name would fix things, as I did with my own tetromino game. But if Tetris prevails in Tetris v. BioSocia , might the company use the precedent to attack the Free Software Foundation?

The difference between stealing and copyright infrigement is the difference between losing money, and merely not gaining money, so I disagree with you on that part.

On the other hand, I feel for you, because there's no easy solution for that problem. If you have the time, you might try some sort of "creative" copy protection.

They hired 30 more artists and designers back in February pretty much for this point I'm guessing. I agree with you though.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=22530

There's a really well-written and interesting article elsewhere on Gamasutra that describes how Thief's "sensory" system worked. Great read.

The original link seems to be having trouble with broken images, so here's the Wayback-Machine version.

The original, if you are interested.

You mean back when articles were on ONE PAGE?

Here's some more appropriate prior art. The article was published 20th Jan 2000 and the patent was not filed until August. I suspect that the patent was written after reading the article. The main claim of the patent is a "scalable" system because updates are not total. That is exactly what is described in that series of articles going back to the first one.

Excel is certainly not your average programming language, but it can be used for programming. There are even some that have used it to write a 3D renderer in it.

I suspect most people would be surprised by the sheer amount of piracy there is for games on Nintendo's platforms. So here's some background reading on the issue:

"In South Korea, many video game consumers exploit illegal copies of video games, including for the Nintendo DS. In 2007, 500,000 copies of DS games were sold, while the sales of the DS hardware units was 800,000." Yes, you're reading that right; the attach rate for DS software in Korea was at one point less than 1.0, fewer pieces of software were sold than hardware devices, which is a tell-tale sign of use of piracy devices.

As for why that is, Gamesutra has a short but insightful article on the matter. DS flash carts (what Nintendo is calling "game copiers") are cheap, and the South Korean people are turning to them in part as a solution to not being able to afford every game they want.

Nintendo's biggest fear here is that other countries end up like Korea, with rampant piracy and few legit customers. Nintendo does make a profit on hardware, but much of their profit is still on software. Furthermore their 3rd party game developers who don't make a profit on hardware would love to make a profit at all, and bad/no 3rd party support just makes Nintendo's hardware and software sales that much worse. I can't see why Korean piracy levels world-wide wouldn't kill the DS, or any other console for that matter. I understand Wii piracy through mod-chips is also pretty rampant in South Korea, although I do not know to what degree.

With that said I don't know why Nintendo is going to the US government about this. Certainly it's reasonable to ask the government to clamp down on this in the United States, and perhaps even apply some pressure on China where flash carts are made with relative impunity, but I don't see the point in listing the other countries. I don't see what stake the US government has on piracy in Spain, for example.

And I'll close this out by admitting I'm a pirate. I have an R4 flash cart with many games and exactly 2 legit games (1 of which came with the DS) when I could easily afford to be completely legit. I'm exactly the kind of person Nintendo is worried about. There are many more like me, I'm afraid.

The points he makes in the Gamasutra summary sound remarkably clueful for the co-founder of a semi-major media firm. He seems to essentially "get it", that when selling content you're in a market, and if you're failing to sell as much as you'd want, the best solution is to figure out how you're failing to succeed in the market rather than whining about pirates.

Basically:

1. Price points are not given from God. There's a supply/demand curve, and if you price things higher, you'll get more profit per item but sell fewer items. What shape this curve takes, and where you ought to locate yourself on it, can vary on a lot of factors, and it's your job as a company selling things to research that, rather than decide "games cost $50/$60, and that's that". Maybe they should cost $20, maybe they should cost $100, maybe it varies based on the game and your goals.

2. There are a lot of people are willing to spend money. Some people will always get your stuff off Bittorrent purely due to the price (because it's free there, and you want money). But this is, contrary to what many media firms think, not the only or main problem. There are a lot of people who are willing to spend money on a lot of things. You'd do best to ask yourself if your company is doing something wrong that's keeping even people who would be willing to give you money from doing so (e.g. region-locked DVDs making it impossible for them to buy a legit copy).

3. Along the lines of #2, DRM can be counter-productive, by making the legit copy seem like a bigger hassle than the cracked copy off Bittorrent. People who are willing to give you money for something they like may not be willing to give you money if you come off seeming like you hate your customers.

Of course, #3 is slightly strange since Valve does in fact use DRM on Steam to authenticate your account to a particular machine. I suppose in their defense it's not nearly as draconian as much DRM, so they at least seem to be making efforts not to piss off their customers. And the existence of Steam in the first place, several years before any other major companies did anything similar, seems to indicate a certain understanding of, "if you make it easy for people to buy your things, they might do so".

Some of this is due to big developer "ego". Ignoring the Wii/DS because it isn't as sexy as the big consoles - trying to dictate to the market then listening to it and changing your strategy accordingly.

I'm not sure about that. The Wii gets plenty of 3rd party love, but those games don't sell as well. The attach rate for the Wii is friendly to existing Nintendo franchises, not 3rd parties. On the PS3 and 360, the 3rd parties get more attention from consumers. If anything, I think the Wii deserves less attention.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20988

I work kind of in this area as a researcher, so maybe I have a rosy-glass view, but the arguments seem a bit dated to me. Sure, in say 1999 this was a problem, and not that many people took games seriously. But in 2009? Yeah, people still like to kvetch ("games are rarely taken seriously blah blah and we aim to change that" is a standard opening move if you're writing a paper), and maybe the average person on the street doesn't, but there are plenty of inroads:

There are journals and academic conferences on games, in both the humanities and computer science.

MIT Press has an entire division of books about videogames. I'm currently reading one about the Atari 2600, which, yes, even covers its role as a cultural and artistic platform.

There are initiatives and companies to use games for "serious" purposes. The U.S. Army in particular takes them seriously and funds development.

Braid sold over $1m, despite being a kind of weird arty game made by a single guy. You can even get an MFA doing fine-arts stuff related to games.

Heck, Gamasutra itself frequently publishes about games as art, and it's semi-high-profile (at least to the extent that getting linked at Slashdot once a week counts as semi-high-profile).

I mean yeah, I'll agree that far more people respect, say, film than respect games. But it's not as if this is some novel argument and nobody has ever thought about taking games seriously before. Also, to some extent, it's the fault of people not making more interesting games: Hollywood may be crap, but there are a lot more innovative indie films out there than innovative indie games.