Slashdot Mirror

There's nothing about Live that excludes dedicated server. FFXI (an MMORPG) is already running on the 360, which gives me pause to claims that Live is somehow not ready for MMOs. Left 4 Dead uses dedicated servers hosted by Valve. Section 8 plans to allow you to host dedicated servers for XBox players on your PC. Given that other companies don't seem to be having issues with Live, is there really a problem, or is the whole "Live is haaaaaard" thing just a cop-out to shift the blame for slipped scheduled onto Microsoft?

They also strive to show they are actually doing things, like endorsing 43 bills aimed at regulating content or controlling access to video games -- with not a single one of them making it into law. They did put some into effect at the state level; mostly making it a crime to sell mature games to minors.

You have that backwards. The ESA is against these laws because it would limit their sales numbers. They're the ones suing to have these laws repealed.

where exactly is the ps3 a top seller? not here: http://media.arstechnica.com/news.media/npd-1108-a.png

M$ "me-too" entry in the console market continues in last place, sixth out of six as of August 2009:

• 01 Nintendo Wii - 95,357
• 02 Nintendo DS - 85,737
• 03 PlayStation Portable - 33,049
• 04 PlayStation 3 - 8760
• 05 PlayStation 2 - 3617
• 06 Xbox 360 - 3552

PS2, PSP, and PS3 fluctuate a bit, but Wii keeps climbing albeit not steadily.

The Red Ring o Death we all passed in the stores whenever Xbox was on display is only minor compared to the quality and duration of the eipc failure. The M$ console hardware failures have been around forever, on about as long as the unit has been on the market. It's not just bricked units and years of scotched discs. It's been four or five years of property damage and even occasional injury and death, with fires in many countries.

But, hey, if defective M$ hardware burns down your family, it's your fautlt. To be fair M$ is right about that: The buyers were warned in prior to purchase by the M$ brand clearly marked on the packaging. C'mon, M$ hardware is as poor as M$ software. The fault lies with those who decided to deploy xbox instead of one of the top-selling game consoles like Wii, PS2, or PS3.

Games are optional. Other activities are not. At some point families will ask the courts to ask how hospitals decided to deploy M$ products like C#-based gewgaws or for-novelty-purposes-only systems like XP on the desktop or server instead of functinal Java- or Python-based applications or systems actually designed for a networked environemnt, such as Solaris and Linux. The Microsofot brand is a warning, those who ignore that warning and deploy the product anyway are in the wrong. Multiple counts of { voluntary | criminally negligent } manslaughter. Who goes to the gas chamber, the techs deploying the known defective technology or the administrators who bullied them into doing so? "Just following orders" is not a valid defense for any politically motivated group, even one with heavy marketing and lobbying.

where exactly is the ps3 a top seller? not here: http://media.arstechnica.com/news.media/npd-1108-a.png

M$ "me-too" entry in the console market continues in last place, sixth out of six as of August 2009:

• 01 Nintendo Wii - 95,357
• 02 Nintendo DS - 85,737
• 03 PlayStation Portable - 33,049
• 04 PlayStation 3 - 8760
• 05 PlayStation 2 - 3617
• 06 Xbox 360 - 3552

PS2, PSP, and PS3 fluctuate a bit, but Wii keeps climbing albeit not steadily.

The Red Ring o Death we all passed in the stores whenever Xbox was on display is only minor compared to the quality and duration of the eipc failure. The M$ console hardware failures have been around forever, on about as long as the unit has been on the market. It's not just bricked units and years of scotched discs. It's been four or five years of property damage and even occasional injury and death, with fires in many countries.

But, hey, if defective M$ hardware burns down your family, it's your fautlt. To be fair M$ is right about that: The buyers were warned in prior to purchase by the M$ brand clearly marked on the packaging. C'mon, M$ hardware is as poor as M$ software. The fault lies with those who decided to deploy xbox instead of one of the top-selling game consoles like Wii, PS2, or PS3.

Games are optional. Other activities are not. At some point families will ask the courts to ask how hospitals decided to deploy M$ products like C#-based gewgaws or for-novelty-purposes-only systems like XP on the desktop or server instead of functinal Java- or Python-based applications or systems actually designed for a networked environemnt, such as Solaris and Linux. The Microsofot brand is a warning, those who ignore that warning and deploy the product anyway are in the wrong. Multiple counts of { voluntary | criminally negligent } manslaughter. Who goes to the gas chamber, the techs deploying the known defective technology or the administrators who bullied them into doing so? "Just following orders" is not a valid defense for any politically motivated group, even one with heavy marketing and lobbying.

We need to know a lot more than that. It would be interesting if they found a way to break it down by redesigned 360 vs old 360. It would also be interesting if they broke it down by error type. The infamous red ring of death (or rather, red 3/4 circle of death) was a specific hardware problem that went wrong a lot before the redesign and was responsible for most of the failures. The redesign did two things, the big thing was to correct that problem, and the second was to add HDMI output on at least some of the models.

But microsoft didn't make a console that had only one flaw, there are still plenty of other ways the 360 can and does break. I got a redesigned 360, havent had the RROD. I did get an E74 error message, which has something to do with the video feed. I sent it in and got back a refurbished 360. Another problem arose: the cheap disc drives. About a week after I got it back, the disc drive quit, I had to send it back again. To attempt to address that third problem, MS did the update where you could install a game to the hard drive, so the disc drive wouldn't have to work as hard.

I've seen several polls that tried to get an idea of 360 failure rate, but none which even measured the new consoles. There has got to be a higher error rate than any of us consumers would like, but I'd expect it to be lower than the consoles that were more prone to RROD. Furthermore, the disc drive fix may have a temporary fix, but the E74 problem I'm still worried about.

Is it too much to ask that MS come forward and publish the actual numbers? If they don't, you wonder if the real number is actually higher than 54%, which doesn't sound right.

Seeing as how heat is the predominate cause of these machines giving up the ghost (whether it be heat killing components, heat changes warping solder, or cheap solder being affected by predictable heat), it would be interesting to compare the failure rate of small form factor computers, laptops, or pre-built gaming computers.

We've all known for a long time what happens when you let a computer run for 3 years and let the case fans get caked up...

It's not just the quantity of the epic failure of the M$ console, it's the quality and duration of the failure. It's been four or five years of property damage and even injury and death.

To be fair, the buyers were warned: The boxes did have the M$ brand clearly marked on the packaging. The fault lies with those who decided to deploy xbox instead of one of the top-selling game consoles like Wii, PS2, or PS3. It's a can of worms to be sure, just wait till courts ask how hospitals decided to deploy M$ products like C# or XP on the desktop or server instead of Solaris / Linux or Java / Python. Who goes to the gas chamber for multiple counts of { voluntary | criminally negligent } manslaughter, the techs deploying the known defective technology or the administrators who bullied them into doing so? "Just following orders" is not a valid defense.

The failure rates were published on joystiq a couple of days ago: http://www.joystiq.com/2009/08/17/game-informer-xbox-360-at-54-2-

If you read the article they surveyed 5000 people although they did not say what was the breakup of the number of PS3, Xbox360 and Wii owners surveyed. Assuming say approx 1,600 per console (3 way equal split) that is not a very good population statistically speaking. I wonder what their demographic (geographical, console age ... etc) and confidence factor were and how did they actually extrapolate the results? Sounds like poor statical analysis techniques, still if you get more readers then I suppose they have done their job. Too bad that these results will be quoted verbatim as "truth" by other bloggers with an axe to grind.

First off, there is still plenty of coding involved to support PS2 titles even when one has the Emotion Engine chip present only on earlier PS3s. The chip doesn't just work on its own without associated driver software that needs to be maintained, and there's specific features like the PS2 upscaling involved too.

And product development resources aren't just coding. The work that was going into the PS2 Support List wasn't trivial either, and in a real product every feature you advertise needs its own dedicated QA. My guess is that the QA effort here is why there hasn't been any success on the long-rumoured software-only PS2 emulation; it's just a giant support mess for Sony relative to what it's worth to them in terms of product sales.

The failure rates were published on joystiq a couple of days ago: http://www.joystiq.com/2009/08/17/game-informer-xbox-360-at-54-2-percent-failure-rate/.

xbox: 54.2%
ps3 10.3%
wii 6.8%

Too bad Greenpeace didn't consider those when they named Nintendo such a non-green company.

"If you've paid for your software, you can usually [expect] that they wont fuck you over with that crap"
So why are there ads in some PC games that cost over fifty bucks to buy?

Probably because the average gamer is less likely to notice shenanigans and get upset by them. Wipeout had ads added, they were pulled because of gamer outrage, but most of that was likely because the ads noticeably slowed down the loading times. I suspect if there wasn't a slowdown, gamers wouldn't have enough of a problem with it.

Keep in mind that most gamers are young not to realize that advertising shouldn't be something you can't help breathing constantly, and many just don't care. I admit I still play burnout paradise even though there are in-game ads.

I don't know how much WoW grossed but it is is important to remember that the account totals announced are always worldwide. WoW does not have 11 million accounts in North America/Europe. There are more accounts based in China than anywhere else. WoW does not charge $15/mo. in China.

From: http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/50881
Blizzard Entertainment's unavoidable MMORPG sensation World of Warcraft (PC) now sports over 10 million active subscribers, the company has announced. Of those, about 2.5 million are located in North America, 2 million in Europe, and 5.5 million in Asia."

"the subscription model for WoW in China is different from other parts of the world. Instead of a monthly subscription fee, Chinese gamers purchase WoW Points cards for 30 Yuan ($3.64) that are worth 600 points. Points expire at a rate of 9 per hour of play, so this amounts to 66 hours and 40 minutes of play for each card at an average of .45 Yuan ($.06) per hour"

The link below is the article where it was said, it is from 2006, however it has the link to the company page in China who handled WoW until recently and it is the same.

http://www.joystiq.com/2006/02/11/joystiq-interview-hoyt-ma-the9/

These are the people who said they "kind of have to" monetize certain features of battle net (source: http://www.joystiq.com/2008/10/11/blizzards-wilson-some-battle-net-features-to-be-monetized/ ) As if even they are being hit by this recession, but we know they make more than enough on wow alone ($15.98/mo x 11,000,000 players = $175,780,000 per month x 12 months in a year = $2,109,360,000 per year. minus about $250,000,000 due to larger subcription deals) then they turn around and announce that they are making a live action warcraft movie directed by Sam Raimi? (source: http://www.joystiq.com/2009/07/22/aicn-sam-raimi-set-to-direct-world-of-warcraft-movie/ ) So let me get this straight.... you "kind of have to" bitch slap all of the Starcraft and Diablo fans to impress your warcraft followers? We wait years for sequels only to have LAN stripped and a new Battle.net that isn't exactly free.... While the in the same amount of time the warcraft people got warcraft 3 plus its own expansion and an MMO plus several expansions to that MMO now a delay due to bnet. I'd like to quote some fellow Slashdot users on blizzard's actions "Blizzard right now reminds me of Sony three years ago. Drunk with success, and making every wrong decision." - Toonol "Blizzard flat out has made a *stupid* call that serves *no* purpose. It costs them *nothing* to implement LAN play and in fact this very well could *increase* the chances their game gets pirated, because the pirated game will eventually have LAN play. Blizzard issued a challenge and the crackers of the world are going to take it up." - Cowmonaut

These are the people who said they "kind of have to" monetize certain features of battle net (source: http://www.joystiq.com/2008/10/11/blizzards-wilson-some-battle-net-features-to-be-monetized/ ) As if even they are being hit by this recession, but we know they make more than enough on wow alone ($15.98/mo x 11,000,000 players = $175,780,000 per month x 12 months in a year = $2,109,360,000 per year. minus about $250,000,000 due to larger subcription deals) then they turn around and announce that they are making a live action warcraft movie directed by Sam Raimi? (source: http://www.joystiq.com/2009/07/22/aicn-sam-raimi-set-to-direct-world-of-warcraft-movie/ ) So let me get this straight.... you "kind of have to" bitch slap all of the Starcraft and Diablo fans to impress your warcraft followers? We wait years for sequels only to have LAN stripped and a new Battle.net that isn't exactly free.... While the in the same amount of time the warcraft people got warcraft 3 plus its own expansion and an MMO plus several expansions to that MMO now a delay due to bnet. I'd like to quote some fellow Slashdot users on blizzard's actions "Blizzard right now reminds me of Sony three years ago. Drunk with success, and making every wrong decision." - Toonol "Blizzard flat out has made a *stupid* call that serves *no* purpose. It costs them *nothing* to implement LAN play and in fact this very well could *increase* the chances their game gets pirated, because the pirated game will eventually have LAN play. Blizzard issued a challenge and the crackers of the world are going to take it up." - Cowmonaut

The Wii is by far the worst platform for playing Rock Band 2. Just the most obvious points:

• Because of the lack of hard drive, can't assimilate content from other RB titles into the game--can't even play the Wii RB1 song

• Downloadable content is still a small fraction of what's available for the other platforms, and since there's no bundles available on the Wii it costs far more to purchase a large library of songs from favorite artists.

• The instrument compatibility situation is a disaster. Check out the instrument compatibility matrix, and note that for the most part you'll need to a buy a whole second set of instruments if you also want to play the Guitar Hero band games too--the cross-game situations is much better on the other consoles. The compatibility is better for guitars if you have the right ones, complete mess for drums on the Wii no matter what you buy (and those are of course the last thing you want two sets of!)

• Video quality is awful, particularly if you have large hi-def TV. You can have three clear instrument tracks on a big screen on the other platforms, there's just not enough resolution for it to look right available on the Wii.

• Wii song downloads are more tightly bound to a single console than on other platforms.

If you've already got a Wii, want a fairly cheap solution, and don't plan to buy very much downloadable content, RB2 for the Wii might still make sense for you anyway. But it's a very poor platform if you expect a great RB2 experience.

We are all screwed. As bandwidth increases, and people become continually used to having their data online (gmail, gdocs, dropbox) there is no more need for operating systems besides the kernel and windowing. Every application that you need can run from something that access the internet, and obtains data necessary to render the app from the cloud. All data will be in the cloud. Even now, in its early stages, there are impressive photoshop-like online apps with good responsiveness. The last bastion that still needs an OS is games, but that limitation too is dead. I can't think of any application that isn't amenable to cloud computing: incremental data updates, with potentially a lot of computation being done in memory (games and whatnot) or on large amounts of data (movie encoding), all of which gets done on the hosting side. Only the updates of progress and GUI need to be sent to the client. The only exception I can think of is processing of large amounts of data that is local (for example, plugging in a camcorder and wanting to encode the movie). In that case, the data will be sent to the cloud if bandwidth is high enough eventually, or else a small (few gig) harddrive could easily substitute and you can work on your new data as it is being transferred online. Once computers become less powerful though, this won't be viable so it will be first transferred online.

Think about it. There are millions (billions?) of computers everywhere, holding parts of data, much of it redundant, processing computations a small portion of the time. The rest of the time it sits idle, most likely taking up energy for sleep mode. In the future, there will just be large hosting sites, constantly being used by everyone. No wasted disk, no wasted CPUs doing nothing.

As I see it, computers will become glorified screens, a GPU, and drivers for the physical stuff (cameras, etc., although one can envision those devices using the internet directly as always-on-internet becomes ubiquitous). All the bulk from CPUs, cooling, etc. will be gone. All data and applications will be in massive host sites, containing everything. Computation will be done remotely too, so if you need a huge cluster to run calculations, you have it.

Here are my predictions, benefits, and why we are screwed:
- No more backing up. Data will be distributed across the world and backed up.
- Patches, upgrades, etc., long a bane of administration and especially games, will be gone. One app that everyone runs.
- And hence... no need for an IT budget besides the cloud fees. No more small shops with a patchwork of bad policies and worse admins.
- Piracy is dead: Once applications are hosted, there is no such thing as pirating. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as verifying who is using the app. It'll be tied to the computer, but it'll still be impossible to verify that you're not letting a friend use your login to run the app.
- Getting all the processing you can, all the time, will be dangerous as presumably you will be charged for processing being done. For example, fork bombs might become costly! There has to be some mechanism of letting the user throttle how much he is charged for. Everybody has access to cluster computing though, which will be awesome.
- Security: Application separation will be total. Definitely there will be no inter-app memory accessing, and preferably each application will only have access to its own sandbox in terms of data. For inter-app sharing, maybe you will be able to specify what pieces of data can be access by what program?
- At first, I thought Google would position itself as the gateway to everything, but this is not possible. Anyone can make a new operating system now (with the linux kernel), simply provid

I'm a sucker for good graphics found in many modern games, but they often lack the depth found in the older LucasArts titles.

From http://www.joystiq.com/2009/07/06/discover-the-secret-of-monkey-island-again-on-july-15/ (cited in the summary):
"The Secret of Monkey Island: ... rendered in splendid HD graphics, surrounded by newly recorded voices ..."

That does sound like a worthwhile update.

I would welcome the campaigns and scenarios of the Star Wars space sims being ported to a newer engine, even if it is only Star Wars Alliance's.

Note also that publishing games through Steam will delay their becoming abandonware, which is good for the seller, but bad for the public if the games are just re-released without brushing up.

Yes, there is one. http://nintendo.joystiq.com/2008/11/21/super-famicom-classic-controller-available-at-play-asia/

Unfortunately reality seems to disagree with you.

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

From a year ago:

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

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

The closest I could find to your claims was this:

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

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

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

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

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

What happened to head tracking? They demoed it a year ago http://www.joystiq.com/2008/02/27/ps3-head-tracking-only-needs-camera/ - however TFA doesn't even mention it. A pity, it would have been a killer feature...

Nay, both games will ALSO be released on the good old PC.

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/06/01/the-secret-of-monkey-island-special-edition-coming-to-xbla-pc/

http://e3.gamespot.com/story/6210601/the-secret-of-monkey-island-special-edition-first-look

Curt Schilling (Major Leage Baseball Pitcher) plays(ed) EverquestEverquest2. http://www.joystiq.com/2006/03/16/curt-schilling-looses-the-mitt-for-the-ole-mouse-and-keyboard/

Dave Chappelle the comedian plays Warcraft. http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/2-23-2006-89653.asp

Eric Bloom from Blue Oyster Cult plays Warcraft. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Bloom

The prolific fantasy artist Ruth Thompson plays Warcraft (and I can tell you she is CERTAINLY not wanted in the attractiveness category) : http://www.tarnishedimages.com/

I've also read that that author Michael Moorcock plays WoW. I've heard rumor of Steven King. I know with certainty about 4 semi-pro hockey players, and rumor of 4 more pro hockey players.

This list could continue indefinately. And these are just the ones that I knew of offhand that were easy to find evidence for. The point being that there are plenty of very successful, influential, wealthy and talented people who find the escape of an online fantasy world to be not only entertaining, but also a healthy distraction from the pressures in their every day lives.

I'm sure there are hundreds of household names that could be added to the list, if not thousands. But would you make it public knowledge if you knew you'd be judged, or worse, stalked, in the one place you might be able to socialize regularly with total anonymity? Especially if you literally couldn't leave your home with people taking photos of your every step?

Sony didn't copy Nintendo, they've been working on this stuff for years, even during the development of the eyetoy for the PS2 they demonstrated a prototype "wand" controller. Remember, the PS2 eyetoy came out before the Wii.

If this is something that would have otherwise died in R&D instead of being turned into a product, then in some sense they are copying Nintendo. They may not have been convinced it was a worthwhile idea until Nintendo had a ton of success with it.

Also, if they change their tech to match the Wiimote capabilities, that would be copying. Their original eyetoy method would work much like drawing on an invisible whiteboard right in front of you. If they change it to function in more of a point-and-shoot style, it is probably due to the Wii's success.

The deal was for Wayport to service Nintendo Wi-Fi connections at participating McDonald's restaurants, but that agreement expired.
http://nintendo.joystiq.com/2008/05/28/free-wi-fi-for-ds-no-more-at-north-american-mcdonalds-now/

Oh, if people are wondering what I mean by that comment, I'm referring to Microsoft's Cease and Desist order to the makers of Halogen, an RTS mod that used many of Halo's assets. Halo Wars was announced shortly thereafter, so one can see why the request was made. You have to wonder, however, if Halo Wars was never created, would MS still have ordered it shut down..?

The only trick would be convincing game developers to write anything for a platform with fewer users.

You should definitely read this then. The rumor on the street is that Apple might buy EA. Now, I know better than to listen to these types of rumors, but if that did happen, they would suddenly have a lot of games being written for them. Who knows if this is true or not, but it is makes a hell of a lot more sense than Apple buying Twitter of all things.

Forgetting that both iPhone and Mac can be programmed with C/C++ and OpenGL for games...

Oh, you mean like id games:
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/02/25/carmack-quake-live-on-mac-linux-high-on-my-priority-list/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_engine "Originally developed on NeXT computers"

Or maybe you meant http://www.stepwise.com/Articles/Business/NuclearStrike.html

There doesn't seem to be a shortage iPhone games...

Plus, Objective-C and Cocoa are Awesome(tm)

Although I never really understood why MS wants to penetrate entrenched markets, I thought the Xbox was turning a profit now... so that must be new R&D or the Zune totally bombing.

2008 Q1
http://www.joystiq.com/2008/01/24/the-xbox-turns-a-profit/

2008 Q2
http://www.joystiq.com/2008/04/25/the-xbox-360-turns-a-profit-again/

Although I never really understood why MS wants to penetrate entrenched markets, I thought the Xbox was turning a profit now... so that must be new R&D or the Zune totally bombing.

2008 Q1
http://www.joystiq.com/2008/01/24/the-xbox-turns-a-profit/

2008 Q2
http://www.joystiq.com/2008/04/25/the-xbox-360-turns-a-profit-again/

Nope:
more like the xbox 360 pad
http://www.joystiq.com/2007/02/05/us-army-using-xbox-360-controller-in-future-combat-systems-tests:

Or you could just get a PS2

And there's 1900 games for it (plus 1200 PS1).

Good luck competing with that.

Probably what Namco, EA and Capcom have learned. Namely, you don't have to actually let the user access the full game they bought for full price anymore. You're free to lock content on their disc, then charge them for it again later (or even on release day) via DLC. Best of all, after basically spitting in the faces of your biggest fans, they'll fall over themselves to defend you for it on the Interwebs.

Sure it's a design flaw, but not a Microsoft design flaw.

From the article for those too lazy to go to the top:The E74 error seems to be related to video problems. It's occasionally caused by a faulty AV cord, but more often than not, the solder on the ANA/HANA (in HDMI models) scaling chip has come loose.

Seems potentially a change in the material being used in the construction of the box. Maybe not, but it is the material failing based on a decision at MS. Changing materials would be something that needs to be tested thoroughly, as well as receiving a new batch of a material already being used (I work in manufacturing these days and that IS how it IS done. Now, it may be that they got a bad batch, or it may not, but however it comes out, what I said still stands. It would still be my ass on the line. I selected whatever supplier, or I changed the design specs. Whichever it might be, it would be my decision to use whatever was used that was then causing the error.

InnerWeb

Second, Gabe himself said that if steam were ever to go down, he would remove any and all restrictions from playing your game, without the steam servers.

And he has agreements from the third-party games to do so? I doubt it.

And if Steam hits a bad year, or is crushed under, say, a patent lawsuit, and gets taken over in a hostile takeover, perhaps out of bankruptcy, and the new owner decides to shut down Steam because they just wanted to scavenge assents, is Gabe's promise binding on the new owner? I doubt it.

Bioshock lead designer Ken Levine promised that Bioshock's online DRM would eventually be removed. It's been over a year and a half. I'll see that patch any day now. right? I doubt it.

Gabe seems like a nice guy. I genuinely believe he means what he says. But the sort of circumstances that mean that Steam goes down are exactly the sort of circumstances that would render Gabe's promise void. If the company goes into bankruptcy and I ask the bankrupt company to spend more money to pay developers to unlock games I purchased (and testers to test it, and for servers and bandwidth to distribute the patch), the judge will laugh me out of the courtroom.

I had an XBOX360, and I had a PS3. Sold both a while back when I realized I hadn't played a console game in over six months.

I don't have a vested interest in this article. I don't measure my self-worth by what strangers think of my choice in consoles. I don't give a damn about the RROD, or about the E74 error.

However, I hate stupid articles like this one.

Everything you need to know about the worth of this article is contained in this chart

Lovely, isn't it? And no, the numbers aren't "in thousands". They're talking about reports over the last year going from 3 per month to 15. That's not failures - that's "emails to joystiq.com". It's worse than useless.

Did the emails spike because owners are, in fact, seeing spiking numbers of failures? Did the spike occur because some other site mentioned it with a link to related materials on joystiq.com? Did the emails say if the failures occured this month, or if some people were reporting failures from a couple years ago?

Al Gore would most assuredly approve of that chart.

They point out that their "little study" isn't perfect, and that it's unscientific, but then they say, "as we interpret the data...". Of course that data is statistically insignificant and hopelessly flawed.

If you're going to start beating the drum on something like this you should get your shit together in advance. Otherwise you're going to look like an idiot.

That was my first trip to joystiq.com. Probably my last, too.

It's not the number of console's that important in terms of saying who is winning, it's the attach rate that determines profitability (especially for 3rd party games developers) as that's where the money is made. The higher the attach rate the more you can afford to make a loss on the console and make it up in income from software sales.

There's an article here from last year with attach rates listed: http://playstation.joystiq.com/2008/04/25/npd-releases-home-console-attach-rate-ratios-ps3-not-so-hot/

The 360 has a significantly higher attach rate. I'll let you do the math to work out the number of games sold

Unfortunately I do believe attach rates include bundled games.

Let us test this theory-shall we? Here is the Google for bioshock. For those that don't want to click the link, And I count 5 of them trying to sell me something, namely the game. Sure if I clicked a half dozens links IN on those first results I would EVENTUALLY get to patches and cheats and etc, but mostly all I see here is reviews and sale pages.

Here is the same search on Yahoo. While I will agree that the first three links are identical, this is where that handy dandy "more" button comes in. Because while Google has their "related" links at the bottom, which are just the top 6 things connected to bioshock, on Yahoo I not ONLY have the related on the left, but ALSO the "concepts" link on the right, which gives me such links as Rapture, Little Sisters, Plasmids, and Ken Levine, which has some nice interviews with the lead designer about why things are the way they are in Bioshock.

So while I agree that both sites will eventually take you to where you are going, i find with Yahoo I am able to get quicker to the data that I want, even if it is a little off the most searched results than I am with Google. But if Google is what sizzles your bacon, good for you. I was simply suggesting that those who had not tried Yahoo's Search in awhile really ought to give it a try. It works really nice now and the "More" and "concepts" links at the top of the screen really make it easy to drill down to the exact data you are after. And after all, isn't that what we really want from a search engine anyway? To help us find what we want without clicking all over the place? I know that's what I want. Just help me find what I want and get out of my way. And for me Yahoo Search does that really well.

rocket scientists... all of them... it only took them from the inception of gaming to realize their prices are assinine...

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/02/20/steams-left-4-dead-sale-increased-purchase-infection-by-3000/ 50% off 3000% increase in sales...

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/03/ut3-steam-sale-extended-due-to-2000-play-increase.ars 40% off 2000% percent increase in sales

I think what they are trying to say is they don't want just any jackass writing a game for there console. They want a smart jackass

Guess it's the same for Nintendo:
Bob's game

The PS3 has supported PS2 games using the hard disk for *two years*: http://www.joystiq.com/2006/12/13/ps3-firmware-1-31-adds-final-fantasy-xi-support/

Charles Barkley RPG has many humans undergoing surgery to become half-animals, in the sewers of post-cyberpocalypse Neo New York.

Check it out:

http://www.joystiq.com/2008/01/22/fan-made-charles-barkley-rpg-sees-full-release/

Forty, actually.

http://www.joystiq.com/2006/12/08/use-the-wii-mote-in-mac-os-x-with-darwiinremote/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/darwiin-remote/

This is just patently false.

Wii: 24,658,719
Xbox 3: 21,774,542
Playstation 3: 12,769,838

Approximate numbers from nexgenwars.com, methodology is here.

Further to this, the Xbox division is earning $178 million per quarter..

By the way, did you know that the Xbox 360 is a PowerPC box too?

PS3 is being outsold by a good margin month to month,

I don't know how the recent economic climate and the recent xbox 360 price drops have affected it, but at from October 07 until sometime in the middle of this year (latest articles on it I can find with a quick search is may) the PS3 was outselling the Xbox 360 in Europe, month on month.

And according to this article the PS3 outsold the Xbox360 worldwide in Q208.

Now, that doesn't mean that there are more PS3s around, the 360 has a bigger install base, but that old "PS3 is failing" meme needs to die, badly. Maybe it's true in the US, but the rest of the world does exist, ya know.

"I don't use my PS3 online, but from what I am to understand, it's not even close to Xbox live."

I don't see what's so great about xbox live?

You can still send messages, have 'friends' lists, play games online, download demos and whole games, everything that live can do. Plus it's free.

You forgot to mention that the new 80GB model, the only 80GB model currently sold, doesn't have any backward compatibility because Sony cut the software "to save costs."

Joystiq has a handy-dandy chart comparing the various PS3 models.

Albeit, $6.

I had the same problem you and your friend did, and it completely ruined my early playing experience (I set the game down in disgust and didn't get back into it for two months). But there are fixes for the glitch (at least for most people). Usually a combination of deleting save data and/or applying the 1.01 patch does the trick (it did for me). See more here:

Bungie already said in their comment from one of the linked FA's in the summary, that "The risks of [patching Halo 3 to make it faster when installed] and the resources required has to be carefully considered against what could really be a rather insignificant change to the player experience"

Good to know they cease and desisted Halogen and then didn't even work on a PC port!

Actually, that division is currently making money.

As a game developer, I'd hate to see MS shut down their Xbox division. They basically took some great developers, gave them a real budget, and said "do what you want." So far MS corporate has avoided messing with the console games division, keeping them from becoming another MS Bob.

On consoles, Microsoft is basically responsible for: Digital game sales, digital movie rentals, add-on downloads, HDD's on consoles, cross-title friends lists, and the general concept of a cross-title global experience. While they're also responsible for the most godawfully painful log-in/log-out scenarios of any console manufacturer, they did a lot of things right and really pushed Sony and Nintendo kicking and screaming into an online world.