Amazon's Double-Helix Acquisition Hints At Gaming Console

Nerval's Lobster writes "A more prominent role in video-game development could prove the latest territory on Amazon's 'attempt to conquer' list. Yes, there's already Amazon Game Studios, which produces smaller games such as Air Patriots (a tower-defense title), but that evidently wasn't enough — Amazon has acquired Double Helix, most notably the developer behind Killer Instinct and other big-action games for PCs and consoles. Amazon confirmed the deal to multiple media outlets, suggesting that it would use Double Helix's developers and intellectual property 'as part of our ongoing commitment to build innovative games for customers.' Why would Amazon want to bulk out its game-creation abilities? Rumors have floated for the past couple weeks (hat tip to Gamespot) that the company is hard at work on an Android-based gaming console that will retail for below $300. Over the past year, it's also hired gaming luminaries such as Halo author Eric Nylund, which it probably wouldn't have done without something big — or at least interesting — in the works. Amazon would doubtlessly position such a device (if it actually becomes a reality) as the low-cost alternative to Microsoft's Xbox One and Sony's PlayStation 4. But even the cheapest console won't sell without some killer games to attract customers — and that's where Double Helix might come in. ... With Nintendo flagging, there's potentially an opening for a third console ecosystem to take hold."

Comments

So, about Beta

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck it

Re:So, about Beta

[dmbasso]

<blink>FUCK BETA</blink>

Where's the blink tag when we need it...

For those building slashdot alternatives, I suggest the name "backlashdot".
No slash in the name, but the logo can be \.

Dice have already written off Slashdot

[2phar]

"Slashdot Media was acquired to provide content and services that are important to technology professionals in their everyday work lives and to leverage that reach into the global technology community benefiting user engagement on the Dice.com site. The expected benefits have started to be realized at Dice.com. However, advertising revenue has declined over the past year and there is no improvement expected in the future financial performance of Slashdot Media's underlying advertising business. Therefore, $7.2 million of intangible assets and $6.3 million of goodwill related to Slashdot Media were reduced to zero."

Re:Dice have already written off Slashdot

[dmbasso]

So instead of turning off the lights, they're burning down the house?

Re:Dice have already written off Slashdot

[Trepidity]

My guess is it's a combination of:

1. Belief that the current Slashdot will provide declining and not that meaningful revenue in the future; and

2. Gamble that the "Slashdot brand" can be resurrected as a vaguely tech-oriented blog/news site positioned as something more like Valleywag or Gawker.

The problem seems to be that category #2 is making a ton more money than Slashdot at the moment, so a redesign to look like those shitty sites, even if a gamble, might have positive expected returns. Even if it alienates the existing community, if the existing community just isn't making them much money, some bean-counters might not care about razing it and just repurposing the Slashdot brand for something else.

Re:Dice have already written off Slashdot

[OzPeter]

1. Belief that the current Slashdot will provide declining and not that meaningful revenue in the future; and

Well its a big question as to whether slashdot is worth more $$$ to Dice Holdings as a success or as a failure. Wiping that $13 or so million off the books will have an effect on their end of year financials

Re:Dice have already written off Slashdot

[Baloroth]

Ars Technica generally covers a lot of the same material that Slashdot does, except with proper editing and writing. News-wise they're quite a lot better than Slashdot, IMO (I only really come here for the comments, since Slashdot's moderation system and sheer quantity of comments means you can often find some real gems).

Re:Dice have already written off Slashdot

[TWiTfan]

Ooh, looks like the Slashdot editors are running in here with limitless mod points trying to put out the fire. I guess they finally got out of their weekly circle-jerk, cleaned the spooge off Timothy's shirt, and noticed what was going on.

Re:Dice have already written off Slashdot

[JustinOpinion]

This is probably right. We are all looking at the beta redesign as an obvious failure. But the people in power may well believe that overall the loss of the community of commenters will be "worth it" to transform the site into a higher-traffic (and thus higher-profit) news aggregator. On some level this makes sense: the active community of Slashdot commentors is far smaller than the size of the people who just visit the site. So if one can piss off the commentors but increase web traffic overall, then it's worth it.

The problem with this logic is that all of those visitors only come to the site to read (if not engage in) the commenting that goes on. Really the (relatively high-quality) comments are the only thing that differentiate Slashdot from any other website. Once you make commenting/discussion more cumbersome, it will go away, and all you will be left with is the Slashdot "brand". But does that brand really have any weight? It only does with the small community of tech-enthusiasts that you just drove away from your site. It's not like the average person is going to see a "friendlier jazzier Slashdot" and immediately think "Wow, finally a Slashdot I can enjoy!".

If you look into the financial details, it appears that Dice considers Slashdot a loser:

... advertising revenue has declined over the past year and there is no improvement expected in the future financial performance of Slashdot.

Note that this isn't saying that Slashdot's ad revenue isn't enough to pay for operating Slashdot; merely saying that the ad revenue is falling with time. They are no doubt desperate to increase profits. It's actually quite possible that Slashdot's ad revenue is undervalued (because it isn't taking into account that many Slashdot users hold key positions where they influence what tech is purchased by companies, friends come to them for tech advice, etc.). But overall the idea that they can increase ad revenue by revamping the entire site is a bad gamble: the community will disappear in a flash, and ad revenue will drop to zero.

Ultimately, Dice management appears willing to take the gamble. It is one they will most likely lose, and we will lose Slashdot in the process. But they won't care much, since Slashdot as-is just isn't pulling in that much money. It's a sad reality that even a community as big and stable as Slashdot (generating constant ad revenue) is still too small/niche to satisfy their money-lost. Our last hope may lie in efforts to build a new site that we can migrate to (e.g. AltSlashdot.org).

Re:Dice have already written off Slashdot

[NoImNotNineVolt]

It has failed and continues to fail everywhere its tried.

Show me one country that actually tried communism, where the means of production were owned by the people. Not a shithole under the yoke of some dictator or despot with "socialist" or "communist" in its official name. We don't use "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" or "Democratic Republic of the Congo" as examples of democratic republics because, well, there's more to it than just a name. The same holds for the SSRs, which were never even close to implementing anything that would be better described as communism than despotism.

Curiously, you bring up Vietnam, which wikipedia tells me something about: "Since 2000, Vietnam's economic growth rate has been among the highest in the world, and in 2011 it had the highest Global Growth Generators Index among 11 major economies." Hardly the bleak picture you were trying to paint. Regardless, you're talking about Vietnam, a country that adopted "communism" under Ho Chi Minh, the same guy who had countless Trotskyists purged and killed (just like Stalin, another great "communist" figure). Please, point out at which point Mr. Ho was able to ensure that the means of production in Vietnam were owned by the Vietnamese people as a whole, and explain why it looks to the rest of the world as though that never actually happened.

You'd be right to say I'm committing the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, except that my definition for communism is consistent and static. Show me one country where the means of production are owned (or were owned in the past) by the population as a whole, and then we can talk about the efficacy of communism in the real world. Until then, you're not being honest with yourself when you say that communism has failed or continues to fail. The only failure of communism is that it has failed to be implemented anywhere.

They're designing Amazon Beta

[Antipater]

Amazon's redesigning their site. They're removing the whole shopping functionality. beta.amazon.com will simply show you pictures of things you might want to buy, one at a time with blinding whitespace surrounding all the pictures. You can't actually buy them, though.

Original story link

[2phar]

http://www.twst.com/update/388...

Slashdot BETA

[mrpacmanjel]

For the time being you can do this: www.slashdot.org?nobeta=1

Make you voice heard here:
http://beta.slashdot.org/fireh...

To quote Steve Jobs (rip) - "..and one more thing.."

"..FUCK BETA..."

Beta Sucks

[aardvarkjoe]

By now, a professional organization would have at least acknowledged the complaints. Slashdot hasn't yet, and I'm willing to bet they never do. For a site that posts so many stories complaining about what other people do, they're remarkably slow to admit when they make a mistake.

Continue to turn the comments threads into a trash heap to drive people away. And don't forget to turn on your ad blocker. Do what you can to get their attention until they publically acknowledge that this is a mistake -- because they're not going to pay attention otherwise.

Re:I'm switching to Lynx.

[sunderland56]

From a productivity standpoint,

If you're interested in productivity, you won't visit slashdot, beta or classic.

So isn't Slashdot.org code open source?

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

What is stopping someone from reopening Slashdot on another site under another name?

Re:So isn't Slashdot.org code open source?

[Koen Lefever]

What is stopping someone from reopening Slashdot on another site under another name?

Check out AltSlashdot.

Fuck Beta, Fork Alpha.Time to resurrect slashcode?

[seandiggity]

http://www.slashcode.com/www.slashcode.com/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/slashcode/

food for thought: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SlashDot

I don't think that's lockdown

[tepples]

Google is locking down Android by close-sourcing most of the apps

Bundling proprietary applications with a free operating system is not "locking down" any more than Windows 7 or Windows XP or OS X is "locked down". Removing the "Unknown sources" and "Enable USB debugging" checkboxes and charging a substantial fee to restore it, as Apple and the major console makers do, would be "locking down".