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Sam and Max Hit the GameTap
Gamespot reports that the episodic sequels to the original Sam and Max title will be available on GameTap starting next month. Sam & Max Episode 1: Culture Shock will be available starting on October 17th for subscribers to the PC-download service. Non-subscribers will be able to download the game at some future point. From the article: "Just under a year ago, indie studio Telltale Games acquired the rights to make games based on the underground comic Sam & Max: Freelance Police. The news was a godsend to many old-school gamers who loved the first game the comic inspired, 1993's Sam & Max Hit the Road, and lamented the 2004 cancellation of its sequel, Sam & Max: Freelance Police." Update: 09/08 19:24 GMT by Z : Jake Rodkin from TellTale wrote to make sure we pointed out the copious details that didn't make it into the Gamespot piece. For those of us without GameTap, we can look forward to the non-subscription release on November 1st.
Why is the new business model to turn products into services?
With a product you pay once. With a service you pay over and over.
Future business models will involve you paying over and over, and also having to become an employee.
Future future business models will involve you paying over and over, being an employee, and requiring your children to do the same.
The future is feudalism.
That's kinda like saying: My Toyota keys won't work in Hondas. They won't start, so they MUST suck! *sheesh*
Without regulation, it would be lawful to trade copies of any software, period. For that matter, without regulation it would not be illegal for me to take a dump on your front lawn. And it would not be illegal for you to kill me for it. Or for looking at you funny, for that matter. Very few people argue for no laws whatsoever. It then becomes very like the apocryphal story about Mark Twain, who supposedly met a woman and asked if she would sleep with him for $10,000, to which she responded certainly. Then he asked if she would sleep with him for $10, to which she responded "What kind of a woman do you think I am?" and he said, "My dear, we've already established that. Now we're just haggling over the price." Well, we're just haggling over how much regulation is good.
I'm familiar with all the counter arguments involving natural rights and intiation of force. Going on to someone else's property is not intitiation of force. Fencing that property off in the first place, in order to mix your labor with it and claim some kind of 'natural right' to keep it is initiation of force. That kind of justification is tantamount to saying that the bicycle I "found" parked on the street and then painted a new color is mine because I mixed my labor with it.
Microsoft is not the only company to use unfair practices such as leveraging monopoly power to game the free market, and there have been plenty of cases (such as the railroads, or the canals before them) where (for instance) the high marginal cost of entry into a market provides that power, rather than the regulation of intellectual property. And as I pointed out, the regulation of real property is no less coercive than the regulation of intellectual property. The free market also has other weaknesses and failure modes which can be gamed in a similar fashion to provide unfair advantage and lock out real competition.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Pandora Tomorrow was released for PC! That's no porting bug.
Incidentally, I saw GameTap had Toy Commander, one of my favourite Dreamcast games and probably the only half-decent one that didn't get ported to something else already. Does it actually work? Is it running in a Dreamcast emulator or a port?