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Put your Minecraft fanboyism aside, Mojang isn't even at 100m USD in revenue yet. The guy himself may be 'hideously rich' but the company isn't some juggernaut.

They definitely have over 100 million in revenue now. Minecraft has built 80 million in sales since March

The XBox 360 version came out in May, and has sold over 3 million units. The Xbox 360 version costs $20 USD (1600 MS Points). Simple arithmetic gives me $60 million in XBLA sales. Mojang gets at least 1/3rd of that, which is enough too push them over the $100 million mark.

Yeah, I wouldn't say 'hideously rich'. While Mojang's revenue is relatively high, their EBITDA is relatively low. I believe they are making a much higher margin on their pocket editions and XBox 360 version (linked article is before these) so that's good. If it was just Notch still working on these then I'd agree but he's got a fair-sized business running now with all the associated costs. Not to say he's poor, I think he's just in the 'extremely comfortable' zone right now.

Put your Minecraft fanboyism aside, Mojang isn't even at 100m USD in revenue yet. The guy himself may be 'hideously rich' but the company isn't some juggernaut.

They definitely have over 100 million in revenue now. Minecraft has built 80 million in sales since March

The XBox 360 version came out in May, and has sold over 3 million units. The Xbox 360 version costs $20 USD (1600 MS Points). Simple arithmetic gives me $60 million in XBLA sales. Mojang gets at least 1/3rd of that, which is enough too push them over the $100 million mark.

Actyally Skyrim did ship without any DRM at first. Turned out to be an accident. See http://www.joystiq.com/2011/11/22/skyrim-pc-patch-arrives-adds-mandatory-steam-drm-kills-some-tw/

You are right. http://www.joystiq.com/2011/05/18/new-xbox-360-update-incompatible-with-some-models-ms-offering-r/2

From the link:
Following a recent update to our system software, we have become aware of an issue that is preventing a very small number of Xbox 360 owners from playing retail game discs. This issue manifests itself as a unique 'disc unreadable' or 'disc unsupported' error on the screen and is unrelated to our recent public beta. We are also able to detect this issue over Xbox LIVE and are proactively reaching out to customers that may be impacted to replace their console.

Not that it's something I would expect but I don't see Apple reaching out to its customers to replace older unsupported Macs from 2006+ with new ones. Again, not saying they should or would be expected to do that, just that this situation with the XBox is clearly not analogous.

You are right. http://www.joystiq.com/2011/05/18/new-xbox-360-update-incompatible-with-some-models-ms-offering-r/2 and there is this list of problems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_problems

That said it's down more to rushed / cost cutting hardware design for most of their problems so even if the system were more open it wouldn't really have helped.

He is right and there was an offer to replace units so while it sucks you get a new xbox out of it. Between RROD and all the other issues I'm sure MS has given away more hardware than anyone else.

http://www.joystiq.com/2011/05/18/new-xbox-360-update-incompatible-with-some-models-ms-offering-r/2

Just for your viewing pleasure http://www.joystiq.com/2008/10/12/one-wow-player-controls-36-characters-simultaneously/

Are you saying Diablo 3 is not a good benchmark? It's been announced as Retina ready.

http://i.joystiq.com/2012/06/11/diablo-3-updated-with-retina-display-support-for-next-generatio/

>Mouse and keyboard is what would make Goldeneye worthwhile.
>In a browser, preferably, with others, because without multiplayer
>it is meh.

Mouse and keyboard as a control scheme don't interest me --- and it has multi-player:

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/06/19/goldeneye-007-wii-multiplayer-preview/

So I don't understand your point.

>And frankly, it was only amazing because of the lack
>of concurrent competent company on consoles

I really don't care about what else is available when, but the fun value which a game affords, and Goldeneye was a _lot_ of fun.

William

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/05/18/38-studios-successfully-pays-1-125-million-to-rhode-island/

Anything interesting written yet on this?

I did find:

http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/05/15/an-introduction-to-the-diablo-3-economy-for-wow-players/

and was surprised to see the 1 week lockout from launch for the sales.

I'm still surprised that they haven't run afoul of anti-gambling legislation and am curious as to what is in place to prevent money-laundering, &c.

That said, I'd still love to see an instance like to that of the short story ``Catacomb'' from _Dragon Magazine_ May 1985. For those who haven't read the story it begins here:

http://henrysstories.blogspot.com/2011/03/catacomb-part-1-of-5.html

William

Actually, Blizzard is stepping in and issuing refunds to players who buy the game online tonight and submit their preorder receipt.

http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/05/14/blizzard-fixing-game-australias-mess-giving-diablo-3-to-those/

DOTA = "Defense of the Ancients".

The basics of the game are that you control a single unit (a hero), and you work with a team of people (normally 5 other players). So it becomes a 6 vs 6 battle where you are trying to destroy the other teams base. This game style has been dubbed ARTS (action real time strategy).

  It originally started as a Warcraft 3 mod. Since then, numerous companies have copied the style.

1) You have Blizzard creating a DOTA mod for Starcraft 2.
2) You have Valve creating DOTA 2. (note that Valve and Blizzard are having a trademark war right now over DOTA). Dota 2 is a stand-alone game.
3) LoL (League of Legends) is a DOTA style came released back in 2009. It's a stand-alone game with persistant characters.

Sounds familiar... is this a repost or did they sue other companies already? If the latter, what happened to those cases?

They already went after NCSoft, and it appeared the result of that was a settlement / dismissal of the case. The settlement is confidential, so we'll never really know what the real result was. Activision is one of my least-favorite companies, but I hope they tear Worlds.com a new one.

http://massively.joystiq.com/2010/04/27/worlds-com-vs-ncsoft-lawsuit-settled/

3DS [is] doing fine

The 3DS is a flop. It's an overpriced child's toy with a gimmick that they don't even recommend children use. Their last 'AAA' title, Kid Icarus requires a specialized stand to play and has been thrashed by critics and ignored by players.

Normally I wouldn't defend Nintendo, and I certainly haven't owned any of their systems since the SNES, but it's hard to call the 3DS a flop when you've got news reports like this: http://www.joystiq.com/2012/03/06/nintendo-3ds-sales-hit-4-5-million-units-in-first-year-outperfo/

Microsoft wrote some good libraries for the Kinect (human pose detection, etc), but the hardware tech and low-level depth-map drivers came from PrimeSense:
http://www.joystiq.com/2010/06/19/kinect-how-it-works-from-the-company-behind-the-tech/

This guy has the right idea and this is what I meant.

I was once part of a particular arcade game emulation community (smaller than MAME) and the copy protections there ranged from non-existant, to the trivial, to the standard baked serial codes on the ROMs/hard drives and boards, to ones with security chips that performed very obnoxious operations in place for the main code itself, or outright served as an encryption device for the whole game data bank, decrypting on the fly for the CPU. The only way these particular ones were beaten were because the encryption method was simple and after patching out the security chip calls, the program could use the unencrypted data files natively. If you need an example of popular arcade games that took literally years to break because of aggressive copy protections of this sort, take a look at the CPS boards, made by Capcom. The early boards took a significant amount of time to emulate and make physical boards revivable - the CPS-3 board protection's death can be dated to approximately the year 2007. Not bad for hardware from 1996, I think. An intelligently designed system that used an encryption like AES would be an absolute nightmare to defeat, and would likely have to be defeated in similar, insane ways like burning off a chip's casing, then taking a photo of the physical layout of the chip in order to get at the data, as was the case for Mask ROMs. For a PC where you can take a dump from memory to snatch the key or the decrypted executable which you can then crack in standard ways, so this is less relevant, but it's still a higher entry bar - but most cracker groups voluntarily challenge themselves to defeat software packers and encrypters, so if your program is big enough to attract attention of one of those, it will be a matter of days rather than minutes. And then there are the folk that create home made replica server programs for MMOs so that they can hack the rules and drop rates, so there's always someone with the skill to write the assembly code to do what has to be done, even if they can't SEE what they're trying to copy.

At a significant cost, you CAN briefly deter pirates, except for only the most dedicated. If your software is niche enough (you imply that it is, at this stage) then you can survive with moving functionality off onto the hardware dongle. There are PC games that save profile data directly onto a USB stick, and some of these have been niche enough to make this barrier to cracking too high to overcome for years.

Is your software small enough, is your need big enough to foot this cost and inconvenience to your users? Can't answer that one for you.

If you want to know what a "good game" is, look at the top played games on Steam. They don't represent the whole market (since not everything is available on Steam), but are a much better indicator for games people actually play longer than a few hours.

Steam & Game Stats

The awesome storytelling of L4D2, CIV 5 and CS must be responsible for their staying power. ;-)

Geeks and Linux enthusiasts were outraged at the move ...

And the United States Air Force.

That judge needs to learn to read is he a twat or just plain thick . The Play Station 3 was Advertised with the ability to install Other O/S'es Sony then removed that ability now unless your trading standards over there are somewhat lax that is an trading standards infringement they are therefore Guilty as charged

Geeks and Linux enthusiasts were outraged at the move ...

And the United States Air Force.

Bulldozers are turing complete, so they are computers. They're just slow, as the articles says. Whoever thought moving earth around to store bits for the infinite tape part was kidding themselves.

At least you could run a simulation before actually building one.

Except that this never actually happened.

Actually, it did happen, just not as part of the PSN breach.

Sony Confirms Stolen Credit Card Information
Sony Online loses 12,700 credit card account numbers, 24.6 million accounts compromised

It was stolen from SOE (the part that does the MMOs) and not the part that does PSN.

But none-the-less Sony did have unencrypted credit card data stolen from them, and it happened just after Sony announced 77 million PSN accounts had been compromised, so it's not hard to see why people confuse the two.

Forget Rentals, and demos aren't much better. Even selling your used games is the same as stealing money out of the mouths of the developer's children. Renting is effectively a legal sex slave brothel where a Pimp (your local rental place, or gamefly, or, now, Qwikster) buys a child slave (a copy of a game) then pimps it out to be used... nay not used... RAPED HORRIBLY... by strangers, who then return the sad sad little creature to it's pimp who puts it back in its proprietary case and puts it back on display to be drooled on by further perverse strangers.

And the worst part of all this? The Parents who sold the child to the renter, only get paid once, whereas the pimp gets paid until the end of time. So you should not only feel bad for the poor developers. You should immediately report yourself or anyone you know who's borrowed or bought a used game to the police for grand larceny, because you have stolen $13million from the developers of a crappy game. If you borrowed a GOOD game, god help you, you caused the financial collapse of 2008.

I wonder what Nintendo has to say about all this. If I remember correctly, they tend to protect their trademarks and other intellectual property.

That newgrounds link to a cease and desist letter was an April fools joke. Skip to the end.

I wonder what Nintendo has to say about all this. If I remember correctly, they tend to protect their trademarks and other intellectual property.

I haven't bought new from GameStop in years because of their general practice of lending new copies of games to employees and then later selling those games as new. Last time I tried to buy a new game from them, it looked like this guy's game, so I just walked away without buying. Now I only buy new from my local Target store, or online from Amazon.

I still go to GameStop to buy and sell used games, though.

Ok, found more information from a farily reputable source

Bottom line - Gamestop are probably - though not certainly - ok in terms of criminal law - there is indeed no marking on the box. But depending on the nature of their contract with Square-Enix, they may be in line for a world of butt-hurt from that direction.

I found a couple of articles too. I suspect with the power of the $50 video card and the recurring obsolescence of the console that PC Gaming has a very bright future.

You call it risky, I call it reckless. You try what you're doing in any other field and you'd be fired pretty damn quick.
That said, I'm not so much angry at you as I am at the people who ask you to do this.

That's kind of funny coming from you, Mr. Freeman

I reckon Star Wars Galaxies was always the wrong game for the license. Particularly in its original form, and even to an extent after the Combat Update/New Game Experience, it was a sandbox where it was viable to make a living as an entertainer dancing in a bar or a merchant harvesting materials and manufacturing furniture; not exactly a world of non-stop blaster fights and lightsabre battles. I'm sure there were a core of Star Wars die-hards, especially those who wanted to live in that universe, but I suspect a larger part of the initial playerbase that stuck around did so for the depth of the world, the player-created towns and such, rather than the IP.

NGE tried to make it more Star-Wars-y and more appealing to the WoW market (more theme park than sandbox), but kludged almost everything so badly that it alienated swathes of existing players while attracting few new ones. They have admitted it was a mistake, though (Smedley in an interview with Massively: "We've apologized for it. It was a mistake, and not one we're going to make as a company ever again.)

If it didn't have a licensed IP I think the original Star Wars Galaxies could have carved out its own niche as a deep sandbox MMO; maybe they could relaunch it as War Stars or something.

The "Sonic Cycle" has already been broken.

Thinkgeek sold a Stealth Switch that did that for years, apparently they don't sell it anymore though. http://www.joystiq.com/2006/10/01/foot-activated-boss-button-enables-gaming-at-work/

"So until smart phones get their act together I think there will be scope for the likes of the Vita & 3DS."

The 3DS will do fine but the Vita will flop, as has all recent portable game systems released by Sony. Their market now plays games on smartphones while the market for the 3DS are usually too young for expensive smartphones and people will buy it for the innovative 3D.

Smartphone gaming is the future. Apparently you guys have a bit of a problem with touchscreens but hundreds of millions of iOS devices have been sold, the public has spoken. Call of Duty: Zombies was one of the most popular iOS games of 2010 and it features those two onscreen joysticks you hate so much.

It comes down to this: new game came out, you can either buy $200 portable system and pay $40 for the game or download it to your iOS device for $10. Guess what most people will do?

I find it odd that Blizzard offers more security for a World of Warcraft account than your average bank.

Then why was RSA hacked?

WoW does not use RSA tokens, they use Vasco tokens [1].

[1] http://wow.joystiq.com/2011/03/18/rsa-security-hack-not-affecting-blizzard-authenticators/

I was wondering that myself. From a high-level point of view, the thing practically looks like a PS Vita on its own - dual thumbsticks, same number of buttons otherwise, display, stereo sound, microphone, camera...

I'm now regretting submitting the link to the Reuters blog, but at the time I submitted the story, it was probably one of the "most trustworthy" (well, "least fanboyish") sources.

But now Joystiq has scant details on the console itself along with more on the controller itself.

Still... looks neat. I guess. I'm interested in just how mobile that controller is - you can apparently browse the web and video chat with it. It might be an interesting tablet on its own.

Or not. It's something I'll be interested in looking at when it comes out, but I don't think I'll be getting one at launch.

I was wondering that myself. From a high-level point of view, the thing practically looks like a PS Vita on its own - dual thumbsticks, same number of buttons otherwise, display, stereo sound, microphone, camera...

I'm now regretting submitting the link to the Reuters blog, but at the time I submitted the story, it was probably one of the "most trustworthy" (well, "least fanboyish") sources.

But now Joystiq has scant details on the console itself along with more on the controller itself.

Still... looks neat. I guess. I'm interested in just how mobile that controller is - you can apparently browse the web and video chat with it. It might be an interesting tablet on its own.

Or not. It's something I'll be interested in looking at when it comes out, but I don't think I'll be getting one at launch.

I was wondering that myself. From a high-level point of view, the thing practically looks like a PS Vita on its own - dual thumbsticks, same number of buttons otherwise, display, stereo sound, microphone, camera...

I'm now regretting submitting the link to the Reuters blog, but at the time I submitted the story, it was probably one of the "most trustworthy" (well, "least fanboyish") sources.

But now Joystiq has scant details on the console itself along with more on the controller itself.

Still... looks neat. I guess. I'm interested in just how mobile that controller is - you can apparently browse the web and video chat with it. It might be an interesting tablet on its own.

Or not. It's something I'll be interested in looking at when it comes out, but I don't think I'll be getting one at launch.

Nintendo is easily the most homebrew friendly.

Wrong: http://www.joystiq.com/2008/07/29/nintendo-files-lawsuit-to-curb-ds-piracy/

If they wanted to make it easy to do homebrew, they'd allow it as built-in functionality. Instead, they keep on trying to lock users out of their devices, and keep going after the companies that allow homebrew (and piracy, because Nintendo doesn't separate the two).

The Eve Online database server uses ramsan, becasue SSD's are too slow. They have 2Tb of network attached RAM.

Actually, that's not the only thing they're giving out. The "Welcome Back" program includes some choices of free game downloads for 30 days after the Playstation Store finally comes back online. http://www.joystiq.com/2011/05/16/sony-reveals-choice-of-free-game-downloads-in-psn-welcome-back-p/ I don't use my PS3 for online anything except Netflix so this didn't affect me one way or the other, and this won't make me forget how mediocre PS3's online services are, but free is free.

As it turns out, I do: Sony: Hackers Exploited Known Vulnerability

You can also find it in this JoyStiq article, but it's kind of hidden in there and is just one line:

The vulnerability in the web server was a vulnerability known about that particular type of server, one of the execs on stage said.

Someone else did some NetCraft sleuthing and determined that the "particular type of server" in question was apparently Apache 2.2.3, but I don't know how accurate that is and can't find the link to that.

From the press conference:

The web server was cracked through a known exploit - in other words, it wasn't patched.
Passwords were NOT encrypted.
The credit card data WAS accessed. It was encrypted, and the crackers MIGHT not be able to use it.

Apparently not dead in NA markets at this time

Oops, posted the same link twice.

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/04/23/xbox-division-posts-165-million-profit-in-fiscal-q3/

Are you serious?

MW2 and the Halo games are two good examples off the top of my head. Lots of asshats cheat at console games, just like lots of asshats cheat at PC games.

but the machine itself isn't much more than a reboxed Gamecube

Oblig: it's actually two gamecubes duct taped together.

Apparently not a lot since despite many people saying how they'd only buy more games if they had no DRM that is mostly bullshit. Hence why, for example, 2D Boy had to file for bankruptcy. Apparently despite doing all you can to please these pirates with making your game cheap, making it DRM-free, etc they will still download it for free and screw you over.

From your link:

Winner of the IGF award for Design Innovation and Technical Excellence, World of Goo recently made NPD Top 10 sales list for the week ending January 17. The NPD listing was a surprise, considering World of Goo designer Ron Carmel revealed the game to have staggering 90% piracy rate in November.

Yeah - damn those bastards buying the DRM-free game and generating sales that put it on a short list with the likes of World of Warcraft, Left 4 Dead, Spore, and The Sims. Way to screw them over.

Who the hell would buy a game without DRM?

Apparently not a lot since despite many people saying how they'd only buy more games if they had no DRM that is mostly bullshit. Hence why, for example, 2D Boy had to file for bankruptcy. Apparently despite doing all you can to please these pirates with making your game cheap, making it DRM-free, etc they will still download it for free and screw you over.

I would lay the blame for the cheating in PS3 games squarely at the feet of the developers. The Modern Warfare games where apparently "unplayable" after Geohotz published the keys.

The closed environment on consoles made developers lazy and they forgot rule number 1: DON'T TRUST THE CLIENT. PS3 gamers should be mad, but their anger is focused in the wrong place.

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/12/18/dungeon-defenders-delivers-unreal-engine-to-android-next-week/ .

    http://code.google.com/p/kwaak3/