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E3 Wrapup

Posted by michael on from the game-till-you-drop dept.

If you read Slashdot with any sort of regularity you probably noticed a lot of game posts last week - new stuff being shown off at the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Let's wrap up the last few submissions and put the Expo to bed for a year. Neil Yates writes "210 pictures, 56 booth babe shots, spread over five pages - what more can we say; this is the killer E3 Expo pictorial feature - only on Envy News. Dial-up users beware - this is broadband territory!" angkor submits a link to a NYTimes story noting that sales of video games were way up last year, no doubt driven by the new consoles. And we had another submission, but the link seems to be broken, so I guess that's about it.

2 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. Let me get this... by edgrale · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The music, movie (was on /. a while ago) and now the game industry is doing profit records and yet they claim that piracy is going to driving them out of business?

    Excuse me? Could someone explain?

    (not inteded as a troll/flamebait, mod me down if you wish)

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    1. Re:Let me get this... by tfreport · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Ah see, but the Gaming Industry is different from the Recording and Film Industries in that it grew up with piracy. There has always been computer piracy. Back in the day it was simple to copy floppy disks and all your friends had the game. Game Companies began to come up with ways to combat this from simple methods like "What is the third word in the fourth paragraph on the 25th page" to pinwheels. Eventually many other ways to combat piracy came to be such as the hidden tracks and CD keys. But it has always been a part of the industry and if asked most of the industry will say that it always will be apart of the industry. So the goal is not to stop piracy but to make it hard for the average person and make it more worth their while to simply buy the game legally.

      That is a whole different mindset than the Recording and Film industries that take the opinion that all piracy must stop. This is just plain stupid. There never will be a way to stop all piracy. Instead, if you set your prices at a place where it is more cost efficent to buy the movie or CD then spend hours working on it online, then people will buy. But when CDs have reached $16 a pop and DVDs are cheaper to produce than VHS but cost almost $10 as much, yes piracy is going to happen. And in this way it is their own fault. If they simply would realize that some piracy is going to happen and instead focus on making it so that it simply is not a cost efficent way to go, then piracy would go down and they would not be affecting fair use.