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This is hardly a new problem or something that people haven't been aware of for decades. The EA Spouse blog is almost 15 years old at this point and its the same story.

With the rise of Steam and in a broader sense digital distribution itself, there's no reason you can't make your own game. Minecraft became one of the biggest and most successful games of all times. More recently, Stardew Valley has sold millions of copies, and it too was made by an independent developer. You can even make big 3D games thanks to things like Kickstarter. Kingdom Come Deliverance raised money through crowdfunding and produced a title that's similar in scope to an Elder Scrolls games, so you're hardly limited to just 2D sprite graphics. I think Star Citizen raised more than any other Kickstarter project ever.

So if you think working for the man sucks, then quit and start your own company, make your own game, and be the one to reap the rewards of your own effort.

I feel for you. Unfortunately, I think most people who read your post are going to see "analytics are incredibly valuable. Metrics tell about the player. This identifies the users and stores personally identifiable information"

You might find the following article interesting: Fractured Space - Analysing our Free Weekend

Am I the only person left willing to pay for games

No, but fewer and fewer publishers are willing to accept your one-time payment when they could instead leech off "freemium" transactions for years, not to mention their hopes of catching a whale.

I do like often the Free to play first chapter, or limited world just so I can determine if the game is worth my money or not.

The free-to-play idea is what started the trip down this road to microtransaction hell. And determining the value of a game before buying it was something we solved decades ago with the game demo -- but that's pretty much been killed off by early access games, another horrible money grab.

There's a funny screenshot here from Spyro : Enter The Dragon (Playstation) where a fairy tells you you're playing with a hacked copy and 'may experience problems'. Spyro : EOTD had a multiple checksum routines. If the pirates patched some but not all of them the game would crash

https://www.gamasutra.com/view...

At one point Microsoft had an unkillable elite with a laser sword which wasn't actually a player - it was a software bot which targeted pirates (Halo?/XBox?)

Counterpoint - most of the total sales happen in the first couple of months after release. Crack protection can delay for about that.

Incidentally if your game contacts a server, the server can request checksum checks from the clients and kick ones that have get the answer wrong. So you can ban cracked copies from online play. I.e. the current popularity of online multiplayer makes it easier to do crack detection because you've got a trusted server doing the checks rather than potentially cracked client code.

https://www.gamasutra.com/view...

So you've worked 10- to 12-hour days for the past two years, trying to make your latest game the best ever. You even added copy protection to try to stop the pirates, but within a few days of release there are already crack patches flying around the Internet. Now anyone can help themselves to your hard work, without so much as a "please" or "thank you."

This is what happened to Insomniac's 1999 Playstation release, Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage. Even though it had good copy protection, it was cracked in a little over a week. So when we moved on to Spyro: Year of the Dragon (YOTD), we decided that something more had to be done to try to reduce piracy. The effort was largely successful. Though a cracked version of YOTD has become available, it took over two months for the working patch to appear, after numerous false starts on the part of the pirates (the patch for the European version took another month on top of that). The release of patches that didn't work caused a great deal of confusion among casual pirates and plenty of wasted time and disks among the commercial ones.

Two months may not seem like a long time, but between 30 and 50 percent of most games' total sales occur in that time. Approximately 50 percent of the total sales of Spyro 2, up to December 2000, were in the first two months. Even games released in the middle of the year rather than the holiday season, such as Eidetic's Syphon Filter, make 30 percent of their total sales in the first two months. If YOTD follows the same trend, as it almost certainly will, those two to three months when pirated versions were unavailable must have reduced the overall level and impact of piracy. On top of this, since YOTD was released in Europe one month after the U.S., those two months protected early European sales from pirated copies of the U.S. version.

So why did it take so long to crack YOTD when a patch was available for Spyro 2 so quickly? The difference was that Spyro 2 only had copy protection, while YOTD added crack protection. The crack protection complemented the copy protection by checking for alterations to the game, rather than just making sure the game was run from an original disk. This extra layer of protection slowed down the crackers significantly, because removing the copy protection had to be done without triggering the crack protection. Basically, YOTD is booby-trapped â" one wrong bit and it will blow up in your face. This article will explain the techniques that we used in YOTD, what we learned from using them, and some ideas about how to take our techniques even farther. However, I will not go into explicit detail, as most of the coding involved is relatively simple. Crack protection is more about out-thinking the crackers than out-coding them. A great advantage of any method of protection is novelty. Even a new implementation will give an advantage over simply reusing code, regardless of whether it was successful in previously delaying a crack.

Once you understand it, it's very easy because there's so few parts, it's easier to understand. But they had trouble understanding it. So maybe some engineer there was trying to make some kind of modification to it, slight modification, and by not even understanding, who knows what part of that they mean. Was it my vertical horizontal counters or something else? If they don't understand it, that was the problem. They never called me.

source

You cannot copyright game mechanics.

Surfers in Denver can't compete either, and neither can skiers in Phoenix!

Another place you can't compete as a gamer is *most places in the United States*. In order to compete in a latency-relevant game online, you pretty much need to be in one of several major metropolitan areas. Because those areas are population dense, they serve plenty of people. But it doesn't take anyone a very far car trip to get somewhere that you can end up with no broadband.

The real reason Hawai'i, with pretty high population per land, is screwed, is because the servers are never really in Hawai'i either. But try to play competitive games with folks in Europe, or Asia- either you end up with a crappy ping, or they do. If a server set is in Chicago, then it effectively serves most of the US and Canada, but it won't help Tokyo or Berlin.

It's not particularly surprising, and I doubt that anything will change until the infrastructure does. We've already seen a lot of gaming get redesigned around the internet's latency (plenty of instant-fire guns, plenty of server-side driven movements of environment, not many projectile weapons that are barely dodgeable or physics effects that players originate and share), favoring the types of games that can be played over tens of milliseconds instead of milliseconds or less, and the types of games that require limited data from the server to the client. The semi-famous article about X-Wing versus TIE Fighter being designed for a reasonably less capable internet ( http://www.gamasutra.com/view/... ) might have aged a bit on its tech requirements, but remains relevant when pointing out how the internet already fundamentally limits games.

Oh, look! It's already happening.

But I'm sure Microsoft did not profit in any way financially from that ad.

Your phrase "not profit financially" is shifting the goalposts. The thread was about whether the telemetry data is being monetized.

Your first link was about pointing users, based on their usage, to apps that might might be relevant but they hadn't considered or noticed. Unless and until MS goes down Apple's allegedly planned route of paid app-store search, that's not an example.

Your second example was about an ad for Tomb Raider being shown on the lock screen. Again, unless the telemetry influenced the decision to show that ad in such a way as to make Microsoft more money, it's again not an example. Maybe the ad would only be shown to users who have launched non-casual games in the past six months based on telemetry? and this would have made Microsoft money because they could sell the ad spot to Square Enix for a higher price? I can imagine that. (and indeed have never seen the ad myself, nor launched any games myself...)

Even before the poll closed I read that they wouldn't accept the name despite the fact it was leading in the poll. No shit. Meanwhile, Dave Needle died two months ago and there hasn't been a single story about him.

a walk through on how it was done can be read here: http://gamasutra.com/blogs/Rub... or here: https://medium.com/@rubiimeow/...

"Inclusive avatars" itself makes sense if the software's purpose supports it. Mass Effect Andromeda has no reason to avoid having a black female option for the new Shepherd. Witcher 3, a game based on Slavic mythology does. You aren't going to find a lot of diversity in that universe except on the distant periphery. Seeing a black person in such a game without a damn good reason for their inclusion would harm suspension of disbelief.

There was (what I thought) a pretty solid response to precisely your point at the recent GDC. The speaker said to beware the "Authenticity Trap"...

Recognizing that authenticity and accuracy are not end goals in themselves for videogames. This appertains particularly to the “but it’s based on Medieval Europe!” Trope, used to justify everything from rank sexism to an absence of non-white characters. Put another way, authenticity and accuracy are multifaceted; there are plenty of authentic ways of representing the past that are inclusive. People of color, women, and queer folks did exist in the past, after all. In Jayanth’s efficient phrase, “respectfulness is the opposite of nostalgia.” Nostalgia for an imagined history can often obviate humane characterization and originality alike.

Don’t squander the opportunity to do something new.

“Stories are suppressed because they are dangerous,” Jayanth said. “Let’s not fall into the trap of thinking that because diversity is a moral good that it is boring.”

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/...

The only important thing to know is that "Gamergate" ceased to be about "games" very, very quickly. Some indie game developer (who happened to be female) received a glowing review of her game from a game journalist. Said journalist was accused of being her boyfriend and demonstrating favoritism. Even if it was true (and it was likely not,) it was just another tempest in a teapot - games journalists have been fired for giving bad reviews to games whom their publication were currently running expensive advertisements for, so the low standards of game journalism were hardly news to anyone. Gamers accused reviewers of being biased, reviewers accused them of being sexist basement-dwellers, the Earth revolved around the sun, etc. It would've ended there, but for what the journalists did next.

About a day after the #Gamergate hashtag was created, several game journalism media outlets published almost the same article - all of them consistent in tone, topic and message. The message was "Gamers Are Dead." The Gamergate wiki has a fairly comprehensive list of said articles, the archive links are dead, but googling the article names brings them up on their own site. The Gamasutra article is fairly typical, so I'll quote from it briefly:

‘Games culture’ is a petri dish of people who know so little about how human social interaction and professional life works that they can concoct online ‘wars’ about social justice or ‘game journalism ethics,’ straight-faced, and cause genuine human consequences. Because of video games.

Subtle, they were not. These articles basically said two things: gamers (especially the ones criticizing the journalists) were all angry white males (and this implicitly without legitimacy) and it was high time they all just fucked off and died. And they were published by multiple media outlets all around the same time. This isn't news to anyone who follows politics, of course - but for the 20-something video-game playing college students who'd never showed great interest in politics, it was a very rude shock, and a crash-course introduction to identity politics as used in the modern age. This event is what put GamerGate on the map, because it drew in a huge groundswell of support. Overnight it had went from sniping over a mostly-forgettable spat to a full-on cultural war.

Note that this isn't acknowledged by the "anti-gamergate" crowd - they still portray "gamergate" (insofar as it can be identified as a unified entity, which isn't much,) as a bunch of angry white misogynistic males who're just screaming because girls with cooties got into their clubhouse. That, alone, is a testament to the power of identity politics. By portraying her game as some sort of feminist critique, that original developer was able to decry any criticism as sexism - and in so doing, immediately tapped a much, much, much more powerful bloc of people; pundits and writers who've been involved in real politics for decades. And they wasted no time in bringing the brunt of it to bear on their opponents in a coordinated campaign to demolish their legitimacy - character assassination by the city block, you might say. This is the heart of complaints about "Social Justice Warriors"- their critics consider them people who exploit the legitimacy of worthy causes to destroy the legitimacy of anyone who opposes their views, on almost any topic.

"Gamergate" isn't clean or innocent, of course. I'm familiar with the communities from which it spawned; mostly occupied by young college students with too much time on their hands. They follow the "game industry" like others follow Hollywood gossip or the internal politics of major-league sports; i.e. as a hobby. Combine this over-investment with the air of young folk who believe they've

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/... is a basic reference but hides how abusive the game companies are.

http://toucharcade.com/2015/09... is the most damning, but also check http://motherboard.vice.com/re... and the coercive monetisation part of http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs...

Allowed? Here's the big secret about these types of games:

It's ENCOURAGED.

Free to play games are based on attracting "whales." The vast majority of players pay nothing and just use whatever free stuff they get. The "whales" on the other hand spend thousands of dollars on the game. It's not unexpected for someone to spend that much money on virtual dinosaurs. In fact, it's what Apple EXPECTS.

i've kickstarted maybe 8-10 things, i've received my reward for all of them, certainly, almost always, not in a timely fashion, and one of them, i'm not sure was "worth it." but all things done in good faith.

I'm just saying, if it smells like a scam... or if it smells like they're biting off a bit much for them. use your discretion to wait.

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

lawsuits will determine what the relationship is.

A good place to start might be the talks archived at the GDC Vault.
http://gdcvault.com/

You can read all back-issues of Game Developer Magazine there as well.
http://www.gdcvault.com/gdmag

And sister website Gamasutra has loads of stuff like this.
http://gamasutra.com/

More low-level and rudimentary topics are covered by a couple of good YouTube channels.
https://www.youtube.com/user/B...
https://www.youtube.com/user/c...

If you want to dip your toes into game development without needing to know anything, check out Tom Francis' GameMaker tutorials.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

vocational school / tech schools have there place but lot's of them have become just get people in on to the loans that have no cap and take anyone.

I'm friends with the principal of a local tech school. They've almost broken that stereotype. He said he can't graduate highschoolers fast enough. They're learning internet security, coding, CNC, 2015 automotive repair. I sat in on one of his tech classes, 16 year olds had a better grasp of how CAN networking works and how to debug problems in engines than a lot of PhDs. I'm trying to talk him into opening the school part time as a MakerSpace, it has better equipment than I had going though college. (Oscilloscopes, CNC machines, 3D printers, etc).

These are the trades of the next century. It's why H1Bs are being hired into the spot, a lot of these jobs don't need someone with a masters degree. They need someone that has been training to do it since they were 14-15. It's still how Germany structures their school system.

Not everyone needs to go to university. They have 21 century trades. It's why Simulator games are a huge hit there.

"Even though the average purchasing power is very different between say the UK and Poland, we actually sell more copies in Poland than in bigger Western Europe countries," he notes. "We also have lots of fans in developing market countries like Brazil or Turkey, and incredible number of players in China, but it's really hard to actually sell any games in those markets."

Meanwhile, the Farming Simulator series is a very similar story. Marc Schwegler, associate producer at Giants Software in Germany, tells me that the main audience for its annual farming series is kids, especially boys who love tractors. Oh, and farmers, of course.

Kids that grow up playing 'stupid simulation' games will be trained to run a fleet of automated trucks or tractors. We already see military implementation with drones. Doctors are starting to do it with DaVinci. You could work anywhere with fast enough internet. There are still things that require a human, we have the technology such that the human doesn't need to be where the actual process is going on.

IT is already doing it with support Apple and other companies have house moms with VOIP answering tech support questions.

First, you do crowdfunding and maybe even some crowdsourcing. At some point, you may want to do some early access. Put as much or as little DRM as you want, but it shouldn't be illegal to crack it. Spyro 3 had notable DRM. [1][2] Get your game on GamersGate, GOG, and/or Steam. Steam has some early access features, and puts reviews right on the software's store page. Also, there are many websites that resell Steam keys. There are software bundle sites for when sales are lagging. Not that popular, but product placement, like a racing game having actual ads on billboard can happen. Then there are the free-to-play, pay to unlock shiny objects, MMOs. Skylanders and amiibo and Disney Infinity show another way to earn money. When trademarks actually involve a confusion of source the confusion of source should be prosecuted, but putting a large swish that looks like Nike's logo as a decoration on a shirt should not be prosecuted, but on a tag that is designed to prove source should. I was reviewing my philosophy of key generators, but if you go to the company's website, like Steam or Playstation Network to redeem a key, that should be prosecutable as you are misrepresenting your situation to those sites. Now that may sound like EULA's but you are usually presented with a EULA after you already bought the software, and there is some room to argue that the person who clicks on accept might be liable, but the people he enabled to use a copy of it without seeing the EULA didn't agree to it, so are not liable. Now that can be gotten around by cracking the installer too, but that means that there's more time to sell your product without the pressure of unauthorized copies.

Understanding the equations and implementing them, and even understanding that integration is what you need are the parts that math helps you with

The point is that you don't have to understand them to implement them. You actually need to know very little. Yes, it's helpful, but it's far from essential. That's the point. No one is arguing that you're better-off knowing nothing about math or physics, only that it's not that important for developers even when it superficially appears that that understanding is necessary.

Now we're having a completely different discussion...

How do you make characters move intuitively? By making them inhabit a world that follows physical laws similar to our own.

If I remember correctly, in Super Mario you could move left and right while in the air. That is pretty obviously outside the physical laws of our universe. They did this to give the player more control over their jumps. It feels intuitive, even though it's completely different from the laws of the universe we inhabit.

How do you make sure that a character follows a realistic, predictable, intuitive parabola through the air when they jump?

By abandoning Newton and developing a system that works well for the game. Give it a try. Write a simple side-scroller that accurately reflects the physics of the natural world. You'll be amazed at how terrible it plays. I did a quick search, and found a number of discussions that seem to support this. I also found a few breakdowns that may interest you: Sonic Physics, Super Mario Galaxy Demystified, Mario Gravity, SMB Physics.

That second link has a nice quote: "Obviously, real world physics have a place in today's games. However, they take a backseat to psychology when it comes to making real world gameplay"

Perhaps we can put this issue to rest.

You don't "need" 2 video feeds, it would be nice but it isn't necessary.
Imagine the following scenario: Instead of having a VR helmet you display a panoramic video on all walls of a room.
Will this cause nausea? No, not if done right. VR developer Jesse Schell wrote down a few simple rules in a blog about "I Expect You To Die"

Now instead of projecting the video on the walls you place the panoramic video on a skybox and place around the consumers head.
The consumer is free to move his or her head freely within the skybox. This means that you can tilt your head, move it back and forth. There will be a slight difference between right and left eye, and the difference you get will tell your brain that the video is mapped on a flat surface not that far away from you.
It will still be possible to get immersion from the video even with the lack to parallax effect. You still have perspective.

If you have an oculus and want proof of concept you can just follow this guide to make a panoramic view of your choice.
There is a similar guide for still photos if you find that more convenient.

You have a different definition of "gamer" to the one being used by the people you hate so much. When they say that there is a problem with "gamer" culture, they mean the hard core of arseholes who harass and abuse, and who get pissy when someone points out that games are an important part of our culture and so, like movies and books, have some responsibility to portray people in a way that doesn't suck.

The do NOT mean all people who play games. In fact if you read a the original article that sparked this claim it's extremely obvious that the author is saying the vast majority of people playing games are not part of this "gamer" subculture where the problem is.

I work at a bar that installed four of the things in an upstairs level that they built specifically to host them. Four player games. Currently they're running off Oculus DK2 hardware but yes, I have tried them because I'm responsible for operating them once the manager actually orders the non-devkit versions.

Yes, I have tried a VR horror game and it wasn't particularly good. What you'll find is that quite often these games are...set in a living room, with a screen that the game is playing on represented by a virtual TV set. We have had a chance to try the prototype of the game Alone, for instance:

http://gamasutra.com/view/news...

It was fucking awful. There's no way getting around it. Maybe if it was actually the fully immersive experience people _promised_ it would be, sure. But take a look at VR demonstrations on Youtube and the like, see how many of them are actually virtual living room simulators with a television that happens to be playing the game you bought. That's not immersive, it's utterly pointless. If the visualization of the game is going to be of a living room and a TV set anyway, then a) it's not going to be any more scary than that same game, in an actual living room, on an actual TV and b) it's never going to reel me in because 25% of the screen real estate is devoted to reminding me I'm _IN A GAME_.

So yeah, enjoy belting your cellphone to your face I suppose, but default cynic mode? Being cynical would be suggesting that you're one of the developers of Dreadhalls and you're trying to boost sales, that would be cynical. Having actual experience with the stuff and not finding it very impressive isn't being cynical, it's reacting to what I've actually seen. And yes, I'm afraid it is "just strapping a monitor to your head," or your phone if you can't afford anything better. The graphics in Dreadhalls are awful and even if you can get past that, there's the minor problem of it being a long series of jump-scares that stopped working on me after the first Paranormal Activity.

"Any gamer who has an S6 and isn't prone to motion sickness should get Gear VR," eh? You use yours "every day?" I get the feeling you're shilling for someone. There's some healthy cynicism for you.

I realize that PCs are quirky beasts; but they are quirky beasts architecturally very similar to(typically more powerful than, for any vaguely serious gaming system) both contemporary consoles
How does this happen?

You are thinking like a PC gamer and thinking about ONLY the CPU and GPU when you compare the PC to the current gen consoles. Machines aren't just CPU's and GPU's, they have internal busses, I/O, RAM. Those matter.

And when it comes to those things, consoles are still specialized beasts.

Lets take the PS2. There were PC gamers claiming their GeForce 3 was better, their CPU faster, etc etc. That may have been true, but the PS2 wasn't an ordinary PC, it had specialized RAM and specialized internal busses. It could do things that a PC of that era simply could not do.

http://archive.arstechnica.com...

http://archive.arstechnica.com...

Watch the vector unit demos. They're running entirely on the vector unit in 16K of RAM, no CPU involved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

IIRC, somebody came up with a Zlib implementation that ran entirely on a PS2 vector unit.

The PS3 is similar, fast Rambus RAM, SPU's, and fast internal busses. IIRC somebody smarter than me referred to it as "taking the multiprocessin ideas introduced with the PS2, further"

The PS4 is more "normal", but still has specialized RAM and internal busses. You simply can't buy a PC with GDDR5 main ram. Imagine if you had a PC with ALL of it's RAM as fast as the RAM on the video card. That would be nice, wouldn't it? But that can't happen, the PC is limited by PCIe.

The PS4 isn't.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/...

It can move data around in ways a PC simply can not do. It also doesn't have to deal with the problem that is Windows. Windows is a general purpose OS, even when it runs games.

The PS4 runs BSD, while it is also a general purpose OS, there's no need on the PS4 to keep "desktop computer services" running. The PS4 doesn't have to keep a print spool up, have a java updater constantly running, . It doesn't have to worry about the "needs" of an Office suite, or SMB shares, or Norton/Kaspersky/AVG, or any of the other things a PC does. It runs games. It can do other things as well but it's design focus is on games more than anything else.

Women and minority developers are also being driven out of this industry because it is an inherently racist, sexist, misogynist boy's club.

Professional videogame programmer here, closing in on two decades in the industry. My thoughts, if anyone cares...

Don't confuse a few unpleasant but vocal gamers with videogame industry professionals. I've never seen any such behavior among my professional peers. Female programmers (and audio specialists, oddly) are somewhat rare, but there are lots of very talented female artists, writers, and designers that I've worked with over the years. I'm closing in on two decades in the industry, and there are more females developers than ever. Some minorities are still underrepresented, but that's slowly changing as well. The industry wants talented and creative individuals. It has absolutely nothing to do with institutionalized racism or sexism, as far as I can tell. I'm sure it probably exists out there, but I've never seen it personally.

The story of people getting exploited, stressed out, and quitting the industry is nothing new. Lots of people quit the videogame industry, because yes, it is stressful. It's got highly complex, multimillion dollar projects with a fixed deadline, and that means things are going to get stressful before the ship date. Of course, when a company forces people to crunch for months at a time (or even years in some horrible death marches), that's crappy management. Nine months of 80 hour weeks? That's abuse, pure and simple. For the love of God, find a new job NOW. I'd quit the industry as well if that was my only alternative. But it's not. Not every company abuses their workers like that, believe it or not. But if you don't think you're going to be putting in some long hours at the end of a three to five year project, that seems a little optimistic.

Also, to clarify, very few developers earn under $50K. A better indication is the annual Game Developer Salary Survey, which states the average salary is a bit over $83K. Keep in mind when you break this down by job, the differences are made clear. Programmers average $93K, for instance. If you've been in the industry for a decade or two, you can earn quite a bit more than that. QA *average* about $53K, so I'm guessing the Dice writers were talking mostly to QA, who unfortunately tend to get the raw end of the industry stick in just about every way, being the least skilled of the labor pool and often hired as short-term temps (but again, this isn't universal either).

Frankly, I absolutely love my job, and can't imagine doing anything else. I'm aware that I could probably earn more money in a different industry, but I still earn a good living and absolutely love what I do. I'd rather not get painted as a victim, because I feel pretty fortunate. There are a lot of guys that work far harder than me digging ditches in the hot sun or freezing rain and earning a hell of a lot less for it.

I concur. Visually it is mildly interesting but it ignores the elephant in the room:

* Modern game design spends more time focusing on form then function

Grind-Grind-Grind! /glares at Warframe, Path of Exile, Diablo, etc.

When your refer to your customers as whales attempting to suck as much money out of them as possible, the industry of shovelware is fucked

According to this article http://www.gamasutra.com/view/... the demise of Sega was mainly caused by simply having not enough advertizing money to compete against bigger opponents, combined with a number of small mistakes in management.
The original XBox was a far bigger failure than the Dreamcast but it managed to survive because the giant Microsoft was behind.

Breakable technologies can still serve a purpose by delaying a crack. Here's an interesting article that covers a real game that had high demand.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/...

One example of Metacritic scores being contractually tied to bonuses was with Fallout: New Vegas. Gamasutra reported on it almost 3 years ago: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/...

I never played Fallout:NV, but I remember hearing Jeff Gerstmann describe it as "...very well written... and kinda broken." I also remember someone posting a Windows 7 Reliability Monitor graph, with the only crashes reported coming from "FalloutNV.exe".

One thing I really like about Eurogamer's approach is that they're simultaneously:

1. Moving away from a traditional arbitrary numeric score (which is among the old systems of 100-point, 10-point, 5-star, and academic-style scoring)

2. Retaining a set of summary badges where they can make it easy for readers to find the most notable games, and avoid the games that are broken (as much as the AAA games industry wants to deflect and deny it, broken games are released, and are marketed as though they are 100% functional and are the most outstanding game ever... because that's how all AAA games are marketed).

3. Forbidding Metacritic from aggregating their scores. This is probably the most important point here; Eurogamer is essentially saying, "Yeah, we're going to score our game reviews with an honest, non-traditional ratings system, and you can't subvert it for your commercially exploitative purchases."

I hope that more game reviewing outlets take this stand, in order to attempt to stem the worst aspect of Metacritic: its influence on game development. Of course, that won't stop the bigger problem of dishonest marketing plans (E3 shenanigans, mock reviews, cherry-picking outlets for review copies, or not sending review copies at all for games that are forecast to tank while customers who are none the wiser may still be eagerly preordering or obsessing over screenshot and video galleries).

> According to Joanna Rothkopf Disneyland is already a huge petri dish of disease

Lol, look, Disneyland is gamergate! OMG! (Too bad ABC Nightline is full of liar anti-ethics assholes, so is Joss "The Marvel Disney Movies Director" Whedon)

This has nothing to do with the relations between Brazil and Japan and everything to do with the fact that Nintendo is dying. This company has shown time and again that all they can do is release tired useless gimmick after tired useless gimmick and pass that off as "innovation". They release the same games every single year with absolutely no change and force their customers to pay a massive premium. The Wii was a massive joke, except no one laughed. Their 3DS handheld has less power than the original PlayStation Portable and costs 3 times as much and has no games. The Wii U has less power than the original XBOX much less the 360. Don't get me started on that abomination of a controller that weighs as much as a cinder-block, has a range of about 1 foot, and a battery life measured in minutes and not hours.

Nintendo is the corporate equivalent of the walking dead. I doubt they will even be around in five years. Even their own shareholders can't stand them. They would just be better selling off all their IP to a company that knows how to actually produce something, like Disney. Then Miyamoto and Iwata should do the world a favor and commit sepuku to atone for the massive failures they have inflicted on the game industry.

Ooo, this should be fun. I'mma go ahead and debunk basically everything you've just said that can be proven with numbers.

The Wii was a massive joke.: FALSE. The Wii has sold over 100 million units, and about 9 times as much software (so, about 9 games per console. Not bad!)

The 3DS handheld has less power than the original Playstation Portable and costs 3 times as much and has no games: FALSE. The 3DS runs an ARM11 Dual-core at 268 Mhz compared to the PSP's CPU held back to 222MHz. The only way it's more powerful is through mods/hacking. In addition, the 3DS has had over 186 million software units sold, compared to psp's 5.2 million. In addition, the PSP retailed for $199. The 3DS retailed for $249, and later went down to $149. So, no, not three times more.

The Wii U has less power than the original XBOX much less the 360: FALSE.The WII U is lcocked at 1.24 GHz, compared to the original Xbox's 733Mhz. Now, the Wii U does have a slower clock than the 360, but has more memory and a higher GPU clock. Raw CPU power will only get you so far, and the Wii U is more than capable of out-shining the 360.

Controller weighs as much as a cinder-block, has a range of 1 foot and battery life measured in minutes, not hours.: FALSE. The Wii U gamepad weighs about 1.1 pounds. Cinder blocks, on the other hand, usually come in at 30 to 35 pounds. The range goes up to 27.5 feet, but typically works best up to 15. The Battery life CAN be measured in minutes, but only if you consider that 180 to 300 minutes a better way of saying it than 3 to 5 hours.

Nintendo is the corporate equivalent of the walking dead. I doubt they'll even be around in five years.: FALSE. Nintendo has enough money saved up to last 52 years, assuming an annual deficit of 250 million. That seems unlikely given that they had a profit of over

Not exactly. Alexander's article advised game developers to target everyone EXCEPT the old school gamers who she referred to in derogatory ways.

That's not true.

Here, let's let people decide for themselves whether or not this article is arguing for excluding anyone or including more voices in game development. That's something that GamerGators seem to hate doing: letting people decide for themselves.

This is the Leigh Alexander article that made gamergate shit the bed.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/...

Of course, anyone paying attention knows that GamerGate really didn't start with the Leigh Alexander article, but long before, when it was revealed that someone who wrote for an indie gaming blog actually knew an indie game developer. Then, GamerGate was born specifically to shame, not the blogger, but the female game developer, using rape and murder threats, online attacks, doxxing and otherwise abhorrent behavior, because ethics. It turns out that the ringleaders behind the whole thing were the reactionaries at 8chan's /pol/ imageboard and a bunch of hard core "men's rights activist" and "pickup artists". And by the way, "men's rights activists" are exactly what it sounds like: total assholes. Guys who smell like Axe body spray and Sen-Sen, who think the way to get into a woman's pants is to break down her self-esteem and self-respect to the point where they can be drugged and date-raped.

Here is the story, presented in the most complete, well-sourced and thoroughly vetted manner (which, as you would expect, makes GamerGate really really mad): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Fortunately, it's all over now.

http://www.gamasutra.com/

...It will sustain losses year after year to deny revenue to the competition. Once the competition folds it has the market for itself. Look how long it was able to sustain losses to gain dominance with XBox franchise.

It didn't work and Microsoft has little hope of ever recovering its losses.

Gamasutra did a great interview with Burger a few years ago: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/...

Wrong. Women and men gravitate to certain career paths. Women choose NOT to sit for hours in front of computers learning to code.

Anecdote: When I introduced RPG Maker in an after-school program at the urging of one boy, more girls than boys asked if they could also participate. The girls also stuck with it longer than every boy, save the original. (The girls averaged about three weeks vs the boys four days, not counting the first boy, who spent 4 months on his creation.)

Children, regardless of gender, enjoy creative activities. Moving on...

The only female writers in games I can name off the top of my head

You'd be amazed at how many games were written and designed by women, even in the old days. Sticking with just well-known titles: River Raid (Carol Shaw), Centipede (Dona Bailey, later driven from the industry by male co-workers), Archon (Anne Westfall), [bunch of Sierra games] (Jane Jensen), Laser Surgeon [okay, not as well known, but the name you'll recognize] (Brenda Laurel), Plundered Hearts, Zork Zero (Amy Briggs), I could go on all day, it seems.

That doesn't even begin to touch on the countless influential women in game design, who bring talents aside from programming to the table like Lucy Bradshaw, Robin Hunicke (who you dismissed without naming earlier), Brenda Brathwaite, Alyssa Finley, Linda Currie ... like the earlier list, this just doesn't end.

The point of all this? That you're not aware of many famous women in games does not mean that there aren't many famous women in games.

Do you know what keeps women out of game development? Attitudes like yours, as illustrated by the aforementioned Dona Bailey.

And before you give me some presto intellectual argument about how they're just conditioned to not want to do these things... Wrong. Women and men gravitate to certain career paths. Women choose NOT to sit for hours in front of computers learning to code.

Back in the early 80's something like 40% of CS graduates were women. Why do you think they seem to have collectively chosen to avoid it and related fields? It clearly wasn't a problem earlier, after all.

I think that you know why. You just don't like the answer.

Often you don't know until people complain. Loudly.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/...

This is the actual article that caused Intel to pull out of advertising at Gamasutra.

This Slashdot writeup is incredibly shit, because it's not linking to the actual article that caused Intel to pull out.

Ask yourself why Intel would continue advertising in a site whose chief editor wrote that.

I don't even think it had to do with gamergaters "pressure", other than that they brought attention to it.

You are deliberately misrepresenting the article.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/...

"Gamer" is in quotes because she's not talking about "people who play games" but adolescent boys or emotionally stunted man-children that have typically been the prime target audience for video games since marketers in the early 1990s arbitrarily decided video games were "for boys." The "gamers" she is referring to are the same people who shout racist and misogynistic garbage over voice chat on Xbox Live, and are the very reason many Slashdot posters either only play single player games or disable voice chat the second they enter an online game. This is pretty clearly spelled out in her article, and is obvious to anyone with half a brain.

Her article is about how gaming has finally grown and evolved to the point where the audience is large enough and diverse enough that game companies no longer have to make games specifically designed to appeal to this small niche group of men physically or mentally aged between 10 and 18. Games no longer have to be about the adolescent male fantasy of murdering all of their foes and rescuing the large breasted, scantily clad woman. We can still have those games, just like we still have those books, those comics, those movies, etc. But those experiences no longer have to be the primary focus of the industry. There are other gamers aching to be catered to that don't fit into that classical "gamer" demographic box the marketers constructed 20 years ago.

'Gamer' isn't just a dated demographic label that most people increasingly prefer not to use. Gamers are over. That's why they’re so mad.

This is in particular a contradiction. If Gamers are over then why do a portion of those PC Gamer Enthusiasts continue to buy Intel's processors for a premium which happens to pay for the advertising?

I'd want to have an intellectual discussion on this, but both sides have had it and are at the point of being stupid so that's not going to happen.

Read this article five times, and then promptly fire the brain-dead fuckwit who decided to pull your ads because of complaints from a mob of psychos.

"These obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers -- they are not my audience. They don’t have to be yours. There is no ‘side’ to be on, there is no ‘debate’ to be had. "

The best example of contempt for one's own consumers is here:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/...

has [players choosing one platform over another on the basis of graphical detail] actually happened?

I imagine that a lot of hardcore gamers chose PS3 over Wii and PS4 over Wii U for just this reason: graphical detail.

Do you really think it's going to happen [with Steam Machine]? I don't think so.

I must respectfully disagree on this point. A Steam Machine would have the extra detail plus Steam sales, which I'll grant decrease revenue per copy but often dramatically increase the publisher's continuing revenue from a title long after launch. And though the reviewed machine is set to cost $100 more than the PS4, I imagine Steam games are less likely to need the recurring fee of a subscription to PlayStation Plus.

That's how the Kinect 1 works. It projects structured light and then reconstructs the world based on deviations from the expected pattern. It's built from off-the-shelf parts. The Kinect 2 measures the time it takes for an emitted laser light to be reflected back to the sensor. It's much more accurate and reliable, but requires purpose-made sensors, thus increasing the cost. Here's a good article with technical descriptions of the two methods: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs...

While anybody can issue a DMCA take-down request, you can also fire a counter-protest to any such action as a content holder. All it takes is to send a formal letter to the ISP and demand that the content is restored. The ISP is then found blameless and if the person who issued the take-down notice wants to go further they need to take the whole issue to a judge and resolve it through a normal legal process rather than getting the ISP caught in the cross-hairs.

If you do file a counter-protest though, make damn sure you really do have copyright licensing on everything you are asserting is legal, or that you are on the very sunny side of fair-use (such as a legitimate parody or even a review/commentary.... as appropriate) for whatever content you try to issue the counter-protest.

You don't need to roll over and play dead claiming you are helpless with the onslaught of stupid DMCA requests.

While not about GitHub, this article about the DMCA and its application of take-down notices done on YouTube (which is notorious about such things) and what you can do in a similar situation is very informative:

http://gamasutra.com/blogs/StephenMcArthur/20140624/219589/

You really don't need to roll over, especially for something really stupid like a take-down request applied on Linux Kernel code.

Omega Race gets my vote for underrated game of its time. It immerses you, relies on reflex gaming, is pretty fair, and there are several strategies to employ of various success rates. If you're good at it, you can play for quite some time. Try it sometime on Mame, though realize the dial control of the game doesn't translate perfectly to keyboard. It took me some time adjusting the sensitivity to have an okay time.

Another great feature of Omega Race was that you could still control the ship to a degree in attract mode if you were out of quarters. If I remember right, you could at least control the thrust and weapons fire. It was a good way to get just a little more of your fix even if you were broke but still not ready to go home.

Oh, and amazingly, I found that the best home port ever for Omega Race was on the Commodore VIC-20 (need to see about getting Omega Chase Deluxe for my Vectrex to see how it compares). That was one of the most faithful renditions ever of the arcade version. And back when I was a big time classic video games collector, I discovered the best controller to use with it was the Starplex. Back when I had time to have my systems set up, that I totally kicked ass on Omega Race and several other games with that controller.

It's not an identical core, it's only of the same generation. And there's only one to the PS3's three.

Obviously, I meant to the 360's three. But if I don't issue a correction, surely some wag will pounce. Here, I'll add in an actual link to a real comparison of the architectures. Or you know, This old thing. The 360's PPC cores have twice as many LSUs, integer and fp cores as the PPC core in the PS3 — two of each instead of one. That's right, each PPC core in the 360 can do twice as much math as the PPC core in Cell. That's because you were meant to do all your heavy lifting in the cell cores.

>Publishers have limited resources, so they bet on what's making them money -- microtransactions.

So fucking wrong. The problem with standalone one time purchase games, like Super Hexagon, is that people pirate (oh, excuuuuuuse me, princess; "copyright infringe") the hell out of them.

So, what's a developer to do other than pray to the FSM that some kind players will deign to pay them? Wire the game up to a online service and make the player pay as they go along (a.k.a. f2p). If they have to be a little sociopathic* along the way, well, "the pirates started it".

Hmm. What got me was that it all fell apart when the Mountan Dewd Bro started instigating sexist shite.

"Do you think you're at an advantage because you have a pretty girl on your team?"
and
"Do you think the teams with women on them are at a disadvantage?"

As expected the indies didn't putting up with corporate sell-out nonsense or reality-TV false shit-stirring of sexism in games. Marketdroids should have known better.

Protip: Developers are not the players. That's really two separate communities, and there is zero barrier to entry, just like romance novel writing. There are far more female romance novelists. There are far more male indie gamedevs. It's not sexist. Different sexes make different choices in general since Men and women are different. A generalization doesn't limit the individuals who are free to be outliers. To get rid of the sexism and racism we've got to stop looking at things in terms of those constructed identity labels, and focus on what the individuals are actually creating and deciding and experiencing for themselves.