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If you look carefully, you'll notice that's a cast on his left arm. He broke it skiing. Fortunately he didn't break his design arm.

-Don

Will Wright is probably so smart because he's been working out. Did you see how buff he is in that article?

All kidding aside, yeah, video games do have the potential to change the world, both for the better, and the worse. In instances like WoW or Evercrack, people have let it ruin their lives through loss of jobs, divorces, etc. That's not the games' faults though. I play WoW for maybe 4-5 hours a week, sometimes less. It can still be fun, and it doesn't dominate my life.

But then there's the "Serious Games" that can be used to train people on doing many real world tasks while helping to keep them from making deadly mistakes.

The New York Times article explains why SimCity is one of the ten most important video games of all time:

SimCity helped establish the genre known as god games, in which players take on an omnipotent role, controlling the game world rather than simply participating in it. It also broke convention by refusing to establish criteria for winning, leaving the decision of what constituted success up to the player.

SimCity was selected by Mr. Bittanti, a researcher at the Humanities Lab at Stanford who works with Mr. Lowood. The game is "one of the most important art works of the 20th century," Mr. Bittanti said, adding: "It completely reinvented the whole notion of games. And then it transcended the game world to become a cultural phenomenon."

SimCity and its four follow-ups have sold 17 million copies, and the franchise it spawned, the Sims, has sold 85 million copies.

SimCity exemplifies Seymour Papert's ideas about Constructionist Learning:

Constructionism (in the context of learning) is inspired by constructivist theories of learning that propose that learning is an active process wherein learners are actively constructing mental models and theories of the world around them. Constructionism hold that learning can happen felicitously when people are actively making things in the real world. Constructionism is connected with experiential learning and builds on some of the ideas of Jean Piaget.

The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project is based on Seymour Papert's ideas about Learning Learning by fun immersive play, and his experience teaching the Logo programming language to elementary school students: Constructionist Learning and Constructivism are central to the goals of the OLPC.

At the Game Developer's Conference, SJ Klein (Director of Content for the One Laptop Per Child project) gave the keynote address at the Serious Games Summit. He explained the philosophy behind the project, and asked developers to join in the project to develop a game platform, games, tools and courseware to distribute to classrooms and homes of some two billion children across the globe.

SJ Klein said: "Existing games are nice, and cute," but games for things like learning language are the "gem they're targeting." Most importantly, Klein said in a direct plea to the serious game developers in front of him, the project needed frameworks and scripting environments -- tools with which children themselves could create their own content.

-Don

I've heard about constraints on Nintendo giving info due to stock goings-on, but labelling this as "developer-oriented" instead of "boring fluff" is a cop-out. It wasn't interesting: especially to developers. Interesting would be demos of new motion-sensing and touchscreen concepts. Interesting would be the forward direction of Nintendo platforms and the tools Nintendo will be providing. Miyamoto parroting earlier propaganda is not interesting.

Gamasutra had a good article on this recently. The thing that caught my eye was that the patent office is supported by fees collected for each patent application. They had a signed framed that read Our Patent Mission: To Help Our Customers Get Patents.

To me, that speaks volumes. Any system with an incentive to do crazy things, tends to do crazy things over time. In this case, the goal is to get as many patents issued as possible, so that more people patent odd things and more money flows into the patent office. Break that incentive and people might start behaving rationally again.

We're talking even the smallest retailers have a a stack of half a dozen machines, with the big stores having stacks of the things.

You're right, I was just in Best Buy and Circuit City last night, and thanks to Sony's console I now have two pending lawsuits due to negligence from stumbling over the damn boxes! They're piled up outside and the retailers can't even give them away!

Let's cut the hyperbole for a second. If the crisis was as bad as you say it is, two things would be happening.

1) Retailers would be screaming for a price cut or motivational factor to move the consoles. They don't want them sitting on the floor, they want them moving, especially due to the high price of the investment that it represents in inventory. If it was really bad, they'd be willing to take the loss that a price drop to consumers represents and would demand that Sony reimburse them. There have been no public reports of this.

2) Sony wouldn't be shipping as many consoles as they are currently. How many consoles have they shipped to date? 2 million?. If they are not selling like you say they are, then the next quarterly report will note a decrease in console shipments (so less than 2 million more shipped). Until then, you can make no conclusions about how the actual console is selling because retailers won't report this information fast enough!

First person comments do not count! Give me a statistic - a published report of 24 consoles per big box retailer or something. But piles and piles doesn't mean anything to me. Besides, you don't know how many of those are empty boxes. To have a $600 console just sitting on the floor without protection (especially in the smaller Gamestops and EBGames) is kind of stupid since someone will just run out the door with them.

This is not troubling for Sony - let's check Xbox 360 last year at this time. Gamasutra reports that last January 2006 Xbox 360 sold approximately 250,000 units, about the same as PS3 this year. That's without a competitor with an excellent games library or a competitor which is the newest fad and phenomenon that outsold you 2:1. In fact, this January the Xbox only sold 40,000 more than last January. And that's without the supply issue that last year's sales displayed. So basically, the 360 isn't exactly red hot either. If the 360 was so amazing, it'd be killing the PS3. As it is, it's barely holding on.

No, I considered it. These numbers are US and Canada only, so the comparison is perfectly apt. NPD does not monitor oversees sales figures. In Japan, the numbers are actually worse for Sony. I think this article sums up the situation well. As for Europe, the fact that they haven't released yet there is a bad thing, not an excuse. It would be better for the PS3 to be selling poorly in Europe at this point rather than not selling at all.

I always think of EA in its mid '80s form, back when their logo was also their loading screen. (I could swear I read somewhere that the circle was a softball that got lodged in the typesetting, but maybe that's my imagination.) I suppose the point of the Gamasutra article is, in part, that during that period, EA put its designers out there, front and center, whereas nowadays, they're more an amalgam of smaller studios.

One thing that always stuck with me was how, upon seeing the cover for Pinball Construction Set, everyone would assume that the game was called "Bill Budge." Even Sid Meier didn't get that big a billing!
____________________________
Indie Superstar - Our video webcast about the latest indie games.
Galaxy Rage - Our upcoming first-person rock opera. Hooray!

I always think of EA in its mid '80s form, back when their logo was also their loading screen. (I could swear I read somewhere that the circle was a softball that got lodged in the typesetting, but maybe that's my imagination.) I suppose the point of the Gamasutra article is, in part, that during that period, EA put its designers out there, front and center, whereas nowadays, they're more an amalgam of smaller studios.

One thing that always stuck with me was how, upon seeing the cover for Pinball Construction Set, everyone would assume that the game was called "Bill Budge." Even Sid Meier didn't get that big a billing!
____________________________
Indie Superstar - Our video webcast about the latest indie games.
Galaxy Rage - Our upcoming first-person rock opera. Hooray!

Games are coming for the PS3 for sure. But keep in mind that programming games for the platform is a real hassle. "Commenting specifically on the internal architecture of the PlayStation 3, Carmack said: "I think the decision to use an asymmetric CPU by Sony was a wrong one. There are aspects that could make it a winning decision, but they're not helpful to the developers."" - http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?st ory=12351

there's something to say about it: PS2 but no Wii?? fuck!
I want it on the Wii!! there was a mock-up video on youtube about what it'd be like to fling clone troopers through walls by swinging your wiimote. I WANT that.

And since we're on the Wii + StarWars subject.. when are they going to release a lightsaber duel game for the wii? I mean, It's clearly what the console was designed for ;) First time i saw it, the first thing that came to my mind was "DAMN! LIGHTSABER FIGHTS!!!". More so when we learned there was a speaker on it. Kinda like my ForceFX replica, except the blade is on the screen and it might actually cut stuff!.. I mean.. what the hell are they waiting for? SW fans have been waiting for this for AGES (there was even a guy who did something to capture a toy lightsaber movement with a webcam and use that as the interface for a duelling game.. sort of.. but I can't find the link :( ).

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid= 22479

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?st ory=12559

I'm sure with ethics like that they are really judging the games by their content and not lest say how much the companies "donated" this year.

This award ceremony is nothing but an Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences fund raiser and advertising campaign.

The Unreal Engine is designed for hardware with shaders. The Wii hardware doesn't have full-fledged shaders like the PS3 and 360 have.

What the fuck? All modern GPUs have shaders, Wii included. Hell, even the GameCube GPU had shaders. I honestly have no idea why you would make the ridiculous claim that the Wii "doesn't have shaders".

look ma, no ads!

Accordian Hero

Big name and buzz can help, but it's certainly not required

There really were very few games worth playing released last year (that is, of the games released early enough to have any real impact on sales for last year), and the few that were are all on the top 10 list.

Gamasutra has a brief article up including a quote from Harmonix producer Daniel Sussman. Harmonix Talks Guitar Hero, New Music Franchise

Those who can, do. Those who can't, whine. It's a hard problem. There were some spectacular failures in the early days of game physics, the most notable being Trespasser, the licensed Jurassic Park game. That was the first attempt at a major physics-based game, and it was a disaster. The Trespasser post-mortem (Gamasutra login required) describes what went wrong and who blew it. Dreamworks lost a lot of money on that debacle.

Only those with deep enough pockets should be able to threaten system stability. It's about access to resources. You wouldn't want the end user to get the notion that s/he could write and distribute software (shudder).

Here's some key points that I want to comment on from is article.

Investing a lot of time in something is worth more than actual skill.

This is just not true in WoW. This is my Rogue's gear... full epics, some of the best on the server I play on. So you can safely say I've spent a lot of time playing (my /played is 250 days or so). So, according to this article, me having spent all this time playing means I'll automatically be awesome in pvp because of my gear, right? Right, except for the fact that I've been killed by Rogues, Hunters, Warlocks, and Priests in gear not only worse than mine, but gear so bad they might as well have been naked. Skill matters. Gear only helps people enhance skill they already had, it does not magically one shot your enemies. Some classes are more gear dependent than others (an undergeared warrior, for example, is going to have a really hard time beating a rogue like mine) but that's more of a problem with class balance than some huge design flaw.

Group > Solo

Yes, even though it has the most single player content of any MMORPG ever, WoW is not a single player game and I'm sorry. I really, truly am, this is not sarcasm. I used to be introverted online too, so I can understand people that don't want to group. But after I finally came out of my online shell, so to speak, I found that I loved interacting with people in MMOs, as much if not more (heh) than interacting with them IRL. It's so easy to run up to someone and start a conversation in an MMO. I can give you an example. Once I was in Silithus, killing some mobs that drop an item I needed for one of my tradeskills. I accidentally aggroed a few too many of these mobs and nearly died. This priest walked up to me, we weren't grouped and I hadn't ever seen him before, and said "Looks like they took a bite out of you!" and buffed me up and healed me to full. This is an example of how easy it is to reach out and make a difference, even to complete strangers in an MMO. I think it actually helps people who are introverted in real life venture out of their shell a bit and experiment with being a more social creature. It worked for me, at least, and it's one of the reasons I love the game.

At this point the article talks about guilds, and says, "It's a very weird social environment with the same dangers as nationalism and flag-waving." Sure, some guilds are like that. Some aren't, and I've found that the best guilds on a server almost always have good relations with most if not all of the other guilds on a server. Of course you get the occasional elitist attitude guilds, but take my guild for example. On Whisperwind, we're one of the most progressed guilds (several bosses down in Naxx, the hardest 40-man raid dungeon) yet we don't snub new players that apply to our guild. The rule is, two sponsors and you're in. That's almost the only requirement. We've had people way below 60 join because they had a couple friends sponsor them. I guess my advice to someone that thinks guilds are bad is to find a better guild or start your own. It may be a hard search, but well worth it.

[you can be banned for using] profanity (even though there is an in-game language filter, to say nothing of free speech)

I'm a pretty die-hard liberal but I had to laugh at this point. Someone is seriously demanding free speech in a video game?

Where did Sony mess up?
Aside from doing a shitty fake blog and making some stupid comments, probably by not doing much of anything to counter all the bad press and comments from Microsoft's astroturfer.

Then again, with the "anonymity" of the internet, it is going to be hard to report it to the FTC. Plus I would like to see what they do to those posting with NO disclaimer as to whom they work for.

According to the firm's preliminary estimates, as reported by CNBC, around 2 million Xbox 360 units were sold in North America from November up until December 25.

The figure for Nintendo Wii stood at 1.8 million units - despite the fact the console only launched in North America on November 19, and the first batch of stock sold out within hours.

link

In addition, Wedbush is estimating that Sony sold 600,000 units (800,000 cumulative) of PS3 and that Nintendo sold 1.3 million (1.8 million cumulative) units of Wii in December.

link

So NPD (the most accurate tracking company in North America) is predicting that Nintendo sold 1.8 Million Wii in North America as of December 25th, the analyst firm Wedbush Morgan is saying 1.8 in 2006, and your number says 1.2 (likely 1.2 Million in December).

On top of that in Japan the current numbers are 1,000,250 Wii vs. 456,750 PS3 where the Wii has been out for 5 weeks compared to 8 for the PS3; Nintedo has also launched in Europe and sold 325,000 consoles in 2 Days in Europe. So we have a number of 3,125,000 Wii sold before we know how many Wii systems were sold in europe over the past 4 weeks; if you assume sales of approximately 200,000 per week (a reasonable estimate) the Wii as sold ~4 Million units to 1.5 Million PS3 systems shipped.

I have had the most fun on the 360, followed very closely by the Wii and I have had NO fun with any of the PS3 games. Sony has already lost this war, and everyone knows it.

Oops, perhaps I jumped the gun on the lifetime XBox 360 sales number. According to gamasutra, 178,069 XBox 360 consoles have sold in Japan during its lifetime as of last week. That's much higher than 100K and I doubt that the extra 78K units were sold just last week. ...or did they?

Looks like the first of the games developed with this license will be an Alien RPG deveoped by Obsidian.

Hopefully Sega aren't as bad to work with as Lucasarts are. I don't want to see another good Obsidian RPG forced out three or four months before it's ready. Knights of the Old Republic 2 would have been a fantastic game had they been allowed to finish it. With all the bugs and missing bits it ended up at the low end of average. Neverwinter Nights 2 is undercooked too.

Maybe they are siding with ESRB because parents/voters agree that the ESRB works just fine, as shown repeatedly in consumer surveys, such as the one recently conducted by Activision. Clinton and Lieberman are, hopefully, finally getting the message that accepting personal responsibilty is better than trying to push unconstitutional legislation.

Sorry I didn't use the sarcasm tag there. I didn't realize I needed to qualify a summary of another site's post. This is where I got my great spin from:

"Legendary Nintendo producer Shigeru Miyamoto also commented on the problem, saying: 'We are encouraging people to understand that you really don't have to be so excited, but rather you need to understand the control and then you're going to be the best player. We are looking into the situation to see if there are additional methods to encourage people to kind of calm down so they would never throw away the controller itself.'"

Of course they think it's expensive to produce their games... They actually have to pay their developers now.

I think I found his source: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?st ory=11555

He fails to mention the part about an estimated four million sales in the last three months.

I wouldn't agree that it will take a PS4 to kill off the PS line- there's a lot of press out in all media that's already declaring the Wii as the winner over the PS3...

And vice versa if you look around such as this one which was referenced in What Analysts Will Be Buying For Christmas

...citing the early sales numbers...

Both the PS3 and the Wii have sold out all available units, with the Wii actually having a slightly longer average shelf life than the PS3 (probably due to supply rather than actual demand).

the $600 price tag is daunting... there's still a perceived price ceiling with consoles that the 360 seemed to actually push against, and Sony has jumped completely over.

This again is based on misleading information. No previously high priced console had a marketed predecessor let alone a market dominant one, which should only be seen to mean that there is a price ceiling for entry into the console market, which is why no respectable analyst has mentioned the price ceiling issue. Second in real/relative cost the PS3 is cheaper than any of the examples commonly used to illustrate the price ceiling.

The average person... looks at a game console, sees a $600 price tag, ... then look next door, see a $400 or a $250 price tag

Or the average person looks at High Definition Video players and sees $1000 price tag, then looks next door and sees $500 or $600, plus gets the ability to play the most extensive line up of video games currently available.

...and the semi-negative press about the PS3 being mainly for "true gamers" with HDTV's, and I would expect Sony's market share to fall considerably.

The HDTV market share is rising and a significant rate and will continue to do so until it is the dominant format. There is no doubt in anyones mind that HDTV will eventually be the dominant format. As the HDTV market share increases so will the desire for peripherals capable of High Definition output. Secondly the difference between "true gamers" and casual gamers shrinks every year, but that is just an opinion (from a casual gamer) so take it how ever you like.

...the explosive sales of DSs among non-gaming adults and the relative failure of the PSP...

If you consider selling 1 million more units a failure, or if you prefer 8% less in world wide sales, let alone the fact that the PSP is the 36th and 40th best seller in Amazon's computer & video games category (all be it well behind the DS, but certainly not a failure). The Idea that the PSP is a failure is yet another fallacy which is commonly passed.

And worse-case scenario for Sony, if they lose enough in system sales, and don't recoup the amount, the entire company may fail or at least downsize drastically, considering the problems they've had in other areas, such as laptop batteries and digital cameras

Beyond my previous comments, which fairly debunk the argument, I would like someone to give me examples of a $72 Billion in revenue company (30th world wide), or even close, that has failed catastrophically without the involvement of illegal activity. I mean look how bad the Valdez global catastrophe did to Exxon (#1 rank, $370 billion in revenue company).

It's nice to think that a company we don't like is going to fail or if our preferred manufacture and products ar

Nintendo has managed to get major numbers out there (4million estimated before Christmas).

No numbers for November (expect those mid December) yet, so the Wii might have passed depending on launch numbers, but it did beat the 360 easily in October.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?st ory=11648

The PlayStation 2 came in at around 235,000, with the Xbox 360 slightly disappointingly selling just under 220,000 units.

Your numbers are incorrect. (Probably just out of date.)

The PS3 shipped 80,000 units in Japan, and another 200,000 to 400,000 to the U.S. (No one is entirely sure of the exact number.) The Wii shipped over a million units to the U.S. with some reports saying it was as high as 1.2 million.

According to Sony, the PS3 is expected to ship about 2 million units worldwide by the end of the year. They admit that their figures are "more of a target" though. According to Nintendo, they are committed to bringing at least 4 million units worldwide by the end of the year.

The PS2 didn't reach 40 million until September 2002, 2.5 years after it went on sale in March 2000. It took it until November 2005 to reach 100 million. I couldn't find any reference to the PS2 hitting 150 million. All I could find was a cite from this month saying the entire "installed base" for all gaming number 150 million.

So I really don't forsee this as being a coup for Sony. It might be, but I don't think so. I bought an N65 and then a Playstation. I bought a Playstation2 and then a Gamecube. I would have bought an original Xbox if any of my friends had them.

At $600, I will never buy a PS3, regardless of the fact that I've already pre-ordered a Wii. Ken was right - at that price, it's not a gaming machine anymore. If I buy a second console, it will be an Xbox 360, even though I loathe Microsoft.

With the high price of the PS3, the initial install base will grow very slowly. This will cause a low volume of game sales, which will further cause fewer games to come out, which will cause fewer people to buy a PS3. It will just snowball from there. Sony simply does not have the first party games to pull this off. I think Nintendo MIGHT be able to do it, but it would take a radical marketing and focus shift. But their first party titles would guarantee an initial install base to get the ball rolling. Microsoft might be able to get it going due to Halo and its penchant for just buying up game developers. Sony would have a small chance of doing it based on games that tend to be exclusive to it (at least initially), but with the pricing they have just guaranteed it will not happen.

It really just comes down to a VERY simple fact - $600. Even at $500, it's a bad deal. $500 is right around the price for a lot of people where purchases move from "do I want this?" to "do I need this?". And when you add on the price of a game and an extra controller, bumping it up around $100, most people will decide they don't need it. I think this would be true even if the Xbox and Wii were launching two years later than the PS3.

And Blu-Ray will do absolutely nothing to help sell more than a few million or so PS3s. Studies have shown that the average household income for HDTV owners is nearly $90k. The people with that kind of money would probably have bought the PS3 anyway. But the people at the lower end of the scale who really stretched their finances to buy the HDTV to begin with will be hard put to shell out for the PS3. And if you look at that study, only about half the people watch HD programming on their HDTVs. These people aren't exactly clamoring for higher quality video.

So while I could completely be wrong, I predict this could be a complete catastrophe for Sony. This opinion doesn't come from fanboism. Nintendo cured me of that with the N64 debacle. Since then I have been fairly platform neutral. Even my disgust with Microsoft wouldn't have kept me from buying an Xbox if I could have convinced my brother to get broadband so we could play online.

My prediction for hitting the different milestones are:
5 million sales in the first 9 months
30 million sales three years from launch
50 million sales five years from launch

The MGS team is not sure yet what the problem is, but a micrometeorite could have jolted the spacecraft's main antenna out of alignment with Earth.

If it's a MGS problem, then there's only one man for the job ...
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20040709/mgs%20i mage.jpg/

I think the ads in bf2142 are crap as well but to call them spyware is a bit ehhhhh. If you check the link, you will also see that others besides EA are guilty.
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?st ory=11300
I should add that I am still undecided as to whether I'll buy bf2142.

There is a lot of very reasonable commentary there. And a few whiners. The whiners are more fun.

From Anonymous at the University of Texas, "Perhaps a moratorium on the sale of used copies of a title within the first month of its release." If you have a serious problem with used sales in the first month of release, your game is probably either too short, or just plain sucks. My friends with tigher budgets note that they typically have to what two or three months before the find used copies of game they want available.

I'm also fond of Pierre-Luc Lachance at Ubisoft's response, "We can only try to sensitize people to the ethical integrity and fairness of buying new, first hand games." Ethical integrity? I'm curious about Pierre-Luc's view of the ethical integrity of purchasing a used car or a used book. Idiot.

This anonymous comment takes the cake:

I NEVER buy used games, nor do I sell my old games. I am continually disappointed by the fact that I cannot convince many gamers to buy new. The age of hard copy is at an end. Digital distribution is coming and will be here to stay. Developers hands have been forced. Soon, small games presented on X Box Live and Nintendo Virtual Console will challenge hard copy games for profits. At this time the age of hard copy will end. Used game stores are pushing themselves out of business with hard handed tactics designed to force players to buy and sell used games.

Again, I'm curious if anonymous has ever bought or sold a used car, CD, or book. Have the car, book, and music industries been forced to online distribution by resales? ("Now downloading Subaru Impreza 2006. 3% complete. Downloading at 6.02 zeptoatoms/second.") Also, exactly what "hard handed" tactics have used game stores engaged in? How do they force me to buy and sell used games? I've never been "forced" to sell them a game. When I buy a new game, they do sometimes offer me a used game ("You can save five bucks on a used copy"), but that's hardly a hard sell. They've never refused to sell me a new copy when one was available (which I usually do, as it's worth $5 to me to get a shiny new copy).

There is a subset of the video game industry who are giant whiners. This isn't some conspiracy against video games; it's the free market. Resale of copyright protected works existed for hundreds of years before your industry even existed. Expecting to get some special protection makes you piss-poor capitalists.

There is a lot of very reasonable commentary there. And a few whiners. The whiners are more fun.

From Anonymous at the University of Texas, "Perhaps a moratorium on the sale of used copies of a title within the first month of its release." If you have a serious problem with used sales in the first month of release, your game is probably either too short, or just plain sucks. My friends with tigher budgets note that they typically have to what two or three months before the find used copies of game they want available.

I'm also fond of Pierre-Luc Lachance at Ubisoft's response, "We can only try to sensitize people to the ethical integrity and fairness of buying new, first hand games." Ethical integrity? I'm curious about Pierre-Luc's view of the ethical integrity of purchasing a used car or a used book. Idiot.

This anonymous comment takes the cake:

I NEVER buy used games, nor do I sell my old games. I am continually disappointed by the fact that I cannot convince many gamers to buy new. The age of hard copy is at an end. Digital distribution is coming and will be here to stay. Developers hands have been forced. Soon, small games presented on X Box Live and Nintendo Virtual Console will challenge hard copy games for profits. At this time the age of hard copy will end. Used game stores are pushing themselves out of business with hard handed tactics designed to force players to buy and sell used games.

Again, I'm curious if anonymous has ever bought or sold a used car, CD, or book. Have the car, book, and music industries been forced to online distribution by resales? ("Now downloading Subaru Impreza 2006. 3% complete. Downloading at 6.02 zeptoatoms/second.") Also, exactly what "hard handed" tactics have used game stores engaged in? How do they force me to buy and sell used games? I've never been "forced" to sell them a game. When I buy a new game, they do sometimes offer me a used game ("You can save five bucks on a used copy"), but that's hardly a hard sell. They've never refused to sell me a new copy when one was available (which I usually do, as it's worth $5 to me to get a shiny new copy).

There is a subset of the video game industry who are giant whiners. This isn't some conspiracy against video games; it's the free market. Resale of copyright protected works existed for hundreds of years before your industry even existed. Expecting to get some special protection makes you piss-poor capitalists.

There is a lot of very reasonable commentary there. And a few whiners. The whiners are more fun.

From Anonymous at the University of Texas, "Perhaps a moratorium on the sale of used copies of a title within the first month of its release." If you have a serious problem with used sales in the first month of release, your game is probably either too short, or just plain sucks. My friends with tigher budgets note that they typically have to what two or three months before the find used copies of game they want available.

I'm also fond of Pierre-Luc Lachance at Ubisoft's response, "We can only try to sensitize people to the ethical integrity and fairness of buying new, first hand games." Ethical integrity? I'm curious about Pierre-Luc's view of the ethical integrity of purchasing a used car or a used book. Idiot.

This anonymous comment takes the cake:

I NEVER buy used games, nor do I sell my old games. I am continually disappointed by the fact that I cannot convince many gamers to buy new. The age of hard copy is at an end. Digital distribution is coming and will be here to stay. Developers hands have been forced. Soon, small games presented on X Box Live and Nintendo Virtual Console will challenge hard copy games for profits. At this time the age of hard copy will end. Used game stores are pushing themselves out of business with hard handed tactics designed to force players to buy and sell used games.

Again, I'm curious if anonymous has ever bought or sold a used car, CD, or book. Have the car, book, and music industries been forced to online distribution by resales? ("Now downloading Subaru Impreza 2006. 3% complete. Downloading at 6.02 zeptoatoms/second.") Also, exactly what "hard handed" tactics have used game stores engaged in? How do they force me to buy and sell used games? I've never been "forced" to sell them a game. When I buy a new game, they do sometimes offer me a used game ("You can save five bucks on a used copy"), but that's hardly a hard sell. They've never refused to sell me a new copy when one was available (which I usually do, as it's worth $5 to me to get a shiny new copy).

There is a subset of the video game industry who are giant whiners. This isn't some conspiracy against video games; it's the free market. Resale of copyright protected works existed for hundreds of years before your industry even existed. Expecting to get some special protection makes you piss-poor capitalists.

Gamasutra has a section called postmortem, with commentary on already written games.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/article_display.p hp?category=5

Here is an interview with the CEO of IGA, the company delivering the ads to BF2142. Pretty brief really.

Explains what they capture and why they capture it.. Basically, they need the IP so that they're serving Pontiac ads in the US and Holden ads in Australia.

isn't relative motion all you need?

You can of course do some 3D motion if you only have relative data, but sooner or later (most likly in a matter of minutes) it will declaibrate and the console won't have any idea where the heck your controller truely is. It might be possible to recalibrate it with the optical sensor, but that assumes that the sensor gives depth information, quite possible, but given all the talk about the Wiimote basically gets out of control when you get closer to the TV I am not so sure and that of course also assumes that you point the Wiimote at the TV, which you might not do in a lot of situations.

Looking at the current games shows that none of them tries to do a real 1:1 mapping, which, if nothing else, it at least a strong indication that it might be very problematic or simply impossible. Announcements of software like this also suggest that 1:1 mapping won't play much of a role on the Wii.

I am not sure if 1:1 mapping will be completly impossible or can be approximated reasonablly well, but the Wii definitvly isn't build to do it out of the box.

This is a serious question.

I have read that PAX is not, cannot, be a replacement for E3.

I can accept this; I just wonder aloud: "What is the purpose of E3?" What essential role did it play?

Ok, so this next part is important for the game companies: THERE IS NO COPY PROTECTION, NOR WILL THERE EVER BE, THAT CAN STOP PIRACY.

Yup, they know that copy protection doesn't STOP piracy; but that's not the point of using copy protection. Copy protection, when properly thought out, should act like a safe: no safe can keep people out forever, but what a safe buys you is time. Check out this article for a good example of copy protection done right: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20011017/dodd_01 .htm

Of course, the article details a PS2 game, and most of the discussion on this forum has been about PC games. The best solution I've seen on the PC so far is Valve's Steam. No discs at all, instead the games are packaged inside a system that is built from the ground up for digital distribution. Other people have touched on the topic of simply having a CD-key and an online verification, and although that screws over people who can't easily get online, overall I think it's a much more satisfying experience than having a game be rejected because of something stupid like third party software you happen to have installed.

Personally, I wish that PC games could come on DVD's, like console games, and just work right out of the box, without an installer. Maybe the DVD drives would need a special certification to be game-compatible (to ensure minimum read & seek times, etc). Then use some sort of software, approved by the publisher, to allow copies to be made to the hard drive, maybe with a quick online verification of some sort to keep it all legit. Basically, I'm saying the publishers should innovate, and allow people to do what it is they have to break the DMCA to do now. And while I'm arbitrarily demanding objects of fantasy, I'd like a unicorn.

For some reason the second last page has a wrong link. The 1st place really goes to Fallout and not Half-Life.

"I currenrly have my DVR, my Xbox, and my reciever all in a stereo cabinet with a closed door. All work fine with no overheating. Is Sony trying to say that if I want to get a PS3 I need to buy a new stereo cabinet too?"

No, Sony is saying that you can get rid of everything else in the stereo cabinet, because remeber, the PS3 is an entertainment system, not a console
 

2005 NPD console software sales:
$3.014 billion
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?st ory=10798

2005 NPD PC game software sales:
$953 million
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?st ory=7832

Now the hard part:

$3,014,000,000.00 + $953,000,000.00 = $3,967,000,000 (total video game sales for 2005)

which makes PC game sales just over 24% of 2005's Video game software sales.


For the 6% of total sales figure to be correct, console game sales would have to be increased to $14.93 billion
or PC game sales decreased to $238 million.

2005 NPD console software sales:
$3.014 billion
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?st ory=10798

2005 NPD PC game software sales:
$953 million
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?st ory=7832

Now the hard part:

$3,014,000,000.00 + $953,000,000.00 = $3,967,000,000 (total video game sales for 2005)

which makes PC game sales just over 24% of 2005's Video game software sales.


For the 6% of total sales figure to be correct, console game sales would have to be increased to $14.93 billion
or PC game sales decreased to $238 million.