You know, it's funny how people grab the snippet they want to argue about, and conveniently ignore the part that already countered their argument before they even made it.
Of course, Vista and 7 tried to be a $500 way of running Windows apps, while XP was a $100 way of running Windows apps. And compared to XP, Vista also needed $400 worth of hardware.
Depressing proof that it's all in the marketing.
If you read carefully, you may perhaps notice that he's using past tense here. In light of that, it's a pretty fair assumption that he's referring to Vista prices at release. And yes, Vista Ultimate was indeed $400+ at release, while Home clocked in at $200+. And a PC that met the minimum requirements to be "Vista ready" also needed about $400 worth of hardware upgrades to run it properly. So yes, he did indeed hit the nail on the head.
And in regards to a response...
Vista cost me $100 the week it came out - legally at that. You're either doing it wrong or you're being disingenuous for the sake of argument.
Bullshit. Either your statement is an outright lie, or you got it through some kind of commercial channel that is not available to most people. Other people are not "doing it wrong" if they can't get it legally for $100. In fact, the only versions of Vista that have ever been legally available to all people for $100 are Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium System Builder or Upgrade. And those didn't get to that price until it had been out for well over a year.
And stupid shit like your post makes me homicidal. There's no data anywhere to support the common misconception that C02 is bad. There's also no data to support the common misconception that C02 causes global warming.
I use Verizon, as do almost all my friends and family. For $5/month you get 250 messages. Up until very recently their unlimited SMS plan was $15/month, but they've finally lowered it to $10/month.
The reason it's never going to work is because unlike passwords/encryption/captcha methods it's not something that can be continuously changed or updated when it gets compromised. Even if just one large company uses it you still know that eventually the algorithm will get out into the wild. If everyone uses it, the algorithm will be trivially easy for anyone to get their hands on almost immediately. And just like it's trivially easy for a computer to "crack" an encryption if it has the key, it's also going to be trivially easy for it to mimic behavior that passes the test if it has the algorithm.
So basically, yeah it can work until the first time the algorithm gets into the wrong hands. Then it's permanently useless.
Not surprising at all. They also pass off used, defective items as "refurbished". I imagine they turn them on to make sure they get power and then pack them up for shipping.
NewEgg is a better deal at twice the price. No, I'm not exaggerating.
Rantings? Dunno about that, but you're definitely correct about the rest. I quit playing a few months ago, when I discovered how easy the end-game content was in WotLK. I will never see Ulduar and it doesn't bother me in the least. I would bet the Twin Emps are still harder at level 80 than any boss in Ulduar, if I still cared at all. Even with the trash that was Arena, TBC was still pretty solid thanks to the good difficulty range and variety in end-game dungeons. Heroics were actually somewhat difficult (as much as can be really, in a themepark MMO) in TBC, but everything's been nerfed so much in TBC that not only are heroics a cakewalk, they're not even useful for progression.
More than 50% of the players in the game required more than a month to hit endgame.
FTFY.
And eventually they got there and have done end-game dungeon content. By far the majority of players who have stuck around for longer than a month eventually got to level cap and have done end-game dungeons. Most of the players who don't like the game well enough to stick around for end-game quit within their first month.
Also, there's not that many new players in the game any more. I would put money on it that 90+% of the current players have hit the level cap either in WotLK or some time in the past.
I'm with you. I love the old-school games with "bad" graphics.
My favorite NFS is still Porsche Unleashed, but NFS2 is right up there too. (There's all kinds of bad jokes to be made about logs and outhouses and skidmarks...)
But I have to admit, it's not necessarily because the games were better than current fare. I still believe they were, but I know that's my own biased opinion. Some things to consider...
1. When we played those games, it was some of our first video game experiences. It was all shiny and new. They were great, and the fact that we had no prior games we had played to compare them with made them beyond great.
2. We had a lot more time to play video games back then. We were kids with no real responsibilities. Of course we were gonna love the best games we had.
3. A rehash of a rehash of a rehash when you've played all the previous rehashes as well as the original just comes off unoriginal and lack-luster at best. But when the current rehash is your first experience with that type of game, well it's probably pretty damn good.
That said, a lot of those games *were* genre-changing or even genre-creating games. Obviously if they were good enough to cause trends we still see today, they had to be pretty damn good. They were also a lot more original than most games today. But on the flip side, it's a lot harder to make original games today because most of the good ideas have already been done at least once.
The resurgence of casual gaming is indelibly tied to the new wave of game peripherals. From chick-friendly sing-alongs to the genre-crossing Guitar Hero,
Sorry guy. Guitar Hero has never been casual. If by "casual" you mean a game that you can play casually for a few minutes/hours here and there and have fun, then basically every decent video game ever made qualifies. There is absolutely nothing casual about truly 'beating' Guitar Hero. Just ask the players who got a legit 5-star performance of Through the Fire and Flames on expert.
A truly casual game is one with no real incentive to ever play more than a few minutes at a time. The Klondike Solitaire that comes with Windows would be a perfect example. The instant the game includes some kind of reward/incentive that requires you to invest significant time blocks or lots of practice it is no longer casual. Now sure, it can still be played casually, but then so can every good video game under the sun. You just have to avoid the non-casual parts.
Not really. Even during the early stages of TBC when things were "difficult" (in Wow terms...) your '99.9%' is a gross exaggeration. In fact, I daresay the majority of players who stuck with WoW for more than a month have done dungeons. But it's mostly irrelevant, because the game itself has always been somewhat casual, and now in WotLK it's so pathetically easy I'm not sure it's even hard enough to be considered "casual". I mean really, games like Warioland, Mario Party, and Solitaire are more difficult.
Actually you skipped the only options that should even be considered.
a) They need to pony up and install the extra infrastructure they've already been paid to install with our tax dollars and then actually provide the service they are currently selling.
b) Since they're apparently unwilling or incapable of doing A, relieve them of their monopolies and introduce more competition.
"If your game is really good, then won't people be willing to pay more money for it, making you more money?"
The problem is, no matter how little the game is sold for, there is still only a certain number of people that will buy it. Obviously if only 10,000 people will buy your game if you sell it for $1, but 9,000 will still buy it if you sell it for $10, choosing between $1 and $10 is a no-brainer. The hard part is finding the sweet spot that gives you the most profit. If your game is good enough, it's possible that you will still sell 8,000 copies of it at $40, which again would make the price increase decision an easy one to make. But of course, no one can know for sure exactly what the results will be until after the fact. And then you still don't know what the results would have been if you had started with a different price. So most publishers set the price high to begin with, and hope they can make up most of the lost sales by reducing the price later. So maybe you only got 1,500 sales at $40, but if you can reduce the price to $10 later and pick up another 5,000 sales, you're still doing better than the original hypothetical 9,000 sales at $10 from the get-go... except of course, at this point for all you know you may have actually gotten 20,000 sales if you had set the price at $10 initially.
It's just really hard to establish causation in this type of thing. So the large publishers set the price high because they know they'll sell a lot of copies initially regardless (which is great for them, because then even if the game is a stinker, they might still get a good return on it before word-of-mouth kicks in), and the indie's set them low because if they don't, their game might not get purchased at all no matter how good it is. For them, by the time word-of-mouth kicks in the game might already be too outdated to be worth buying.
How can anyone sound so "tech savvy" yet be so incredibly misinformed.
They don't need to "find" your email to send spam to it. They find the domain, and then they have the spam computer send test spam messages to the most common addresses at that domain (ie. webmaster@domain.com) and possibly even a few thousand (possibly even millions) of the most likely email addresses and/or permutations. Remember, a lot of spam comes from botnets, so they're not even using their own resources to do it. They can certainly afford sending wasted test emails to millions of invalid addresses to find a couple valid ones.
And then of course as others have mentioned, friends and/or family members entering your email address on ecard sites, joke sites, etc.
First, PC games are not long-term. Even Starcraft has only been around for about 10 years, and its replacement is coming up this year or next. FPS's typically remain popular for 2-3 years at the most. Compare that with any real pro sport. Some of them have been around longer than the US has been a country; almost all of them have been around before computers existed. So when this year's $BIG_POPULAR_FPS dies out next year, which one is going to replace it as the next "pro" FPS? No one really knows until they've been out for a while, and it's more or less selected by how popular it is. Of course by then, it's going to be popular for probably another 1-2 years, and then it's on to the next game.
The second problem is that watching someone play a PC game really just is not that fun.
Back then you could do a clean "upgrade" install using the upgrade disk. All you had to do was put in the disk for your old version when it was requested. In fact Vista was the first version where an upgrade had to literally be an upgrade.
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Remember, its human error that accounts for roughly 100% of accidents. Not hardware failure. So, go ahead and keep making those cars more "safe".
I think you need to take another look at the statistics. It's entirely possible for failed brakes or a busted tie-rod end to cause an accident.
You know, it's funny how people grab the snippet they want to argue about, and conveniently ignore the part that already countered their argument before they even made it.
Of course, Vista and 7 tried to be a $500 way of running Windows apps, while XP was a $100 way of running Windows apps. And compared to XP, Vista also needed $400 worth of hardware.
Depressing proof that it's all in the marketing.
If you read carefully, you may perhaps notice that he's using past tense here. In light of that, it's a pretty fair assumption that he's referring to Vista prices at release. And yes, Vista Ultimate was indeed $400+ at release, while Home clocked in at $200+. And a PC that met the minimum requirements to be "Vista ready" also needed about $400 worth of hardware upgrades to run it properly. So yes, he did indeed hit the nail on the head.
And in regards to a response...
Vista cost me $100 the week it came out - legally at that. You're either doing it wrong or you're being disingenuous for the sake of argument.
Bullshit. Either your statement is an outright lie, or you got it through some kind of commercial channel that is not available to most people. Other people are not "doing it wrong" if they can't get it legally for $100. In fact, the only versions of Vista that have ever been legally available to all people for $100 are Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium System Builder or Upgrade. And those didn't get to that price until it had been out for well over a year.
And stupid shit like your post makes me homicidal. There's no data anywhere to support the common misconception that C02 is bad. There's also no data to support the common misconception that C02 causes global warming.
I use Verizon, as do almost all my friends and family. For $5/month you get 250 messages. Up until very recently their unlimited SMS plan was $15/month, but they've finally lowered it to $10/month.
Sounds like a good candidate for their next camera.
I was Person of the Year 2006 you insensitive clod!!
I know because I saw myself on the front cover!
Personally, I could justify limiting all copyright to 50 years, period.
I could justify limiting it to 5 years, period.
The reason it's never going to work is because unlike passwords/encryption/captcha methods it's not something that can be continuously changed or updated when it gets compromised. Even if just one large company uses it you still know that eventually the algorithm will get out into the wild. If everyone uses it, the algorithm will be trivially easy for anyone to get their hands on almost immediately. And just like it's trivially easy for a computer to "crack" an encryption if it has the key, it's also going to be trivially easy for it to mimic behavior that passes the test if it has the algorithm.
So basically, yeah it can work until the first time the algorithm gets into the wrong hands. Then it's permanently useless.
Not surprising at all. They also pass off used, defective items as "refurbished". I imagine they turn them on to make sure they get power and then pack them up for shipping.
NewEgg is a better deal at twice the price. No, I'm not exaggerating.
but everything's been nerfed so much in WotLK that...
Edit...
Rantings? Dunno about that, but you're definitely correct about the rest. I quit playing a few months ago, when I discovered how easy the end-game content was in WotLK. I will never see Ulduar and it doesn't bother me in the least. I would bet the Twin Emps are still harder at level 80 than any boss in Ulduar, if I still cared at all. Even with the trash that was Arena, TBC was still pretty solid thanks to the good difficulty range and variety in end-game dungeons. Heroics were actually somewhat difficult (as much as can be really, in a themepark MMO) in TBC, but everything's been nerfed so much in TBC that not only are heroics a cakewalk, they're not even useful for progression.
More than 50% of the players in the game required more than a month to hit endgame.
FTFY.
And eventually they got there and have done end-game dungeon content. By far the majority of players who have stuck around for longer than a month eventually got to level cap and have done end-game dungeons. Most of the players who don't like the game well enough to stick around for end-game quit within their first month.
Also, there's not that many new players in the game any more. I would put money on it that 90+% of the current players have hit the level cap either in WotLK or some time in the past.
I would bet more than 50% of the players who stick around for more than a month do.
I'm with you. I love the old-school games with "bad" graphics.
My favorite NFS is still Porsche Unleashed, but NFS2 is right up there too. (There's all kinds of bad jokes to be made about logs and outhouses and skidmarks...)
But I have to admit, it's not necessarily because the games were better than current fare. I still believe they were, but I know that's my own biased opinion. Some things to consider...
1. When we played those games, it was some of our first video game experiences. It was all shiny and new. They were great, and the fact that we had no prior games we had played to compare them with made them beyond great.
2. We had a lot more time to play video games back then. We were kids with no real responsibilities. Of course we were gonna love the best games we had.
3. A rehash of a rehash of a rehash when you've played all the previous rehashes as well as the original just comes off unoriginal and lack-luster at best. But when the current rehash is your first experience with that type of game, well it's probably pretty damn good.
That said, a lot of those games *were* genre-changing or even genre-creating games. Obviously if they were good enough to cause trends we still see today, they had to be pretty damn good. They were also a lot more original than most games today. But on the flip side, it's a lot harder to make original games today because most of the good ideas have already been done at least once.
...the article author doesn't.
The resurgence of casual gaming is indelibly tied to the new wave of game peripherals. From chick-friendly sing-alongs to the genre-crossing Guitar Hero,
Sorry guy. Guitar Hero has never been casual. If by "casual" you mean a game that you can play casually for a few minutes/hours here and there and have fun, then basically every decent video game ever made qualifies. There is absolutely nothing casual about truly 'beating' Guitar Hero. Just ask the players who got a legit 5-star performance of Through the Fire and Flames on expert.
A truly casual game is one with no real incentive to ever play more than a few minutes at a time. The Klondike Solitaire that comes with Windows would be a perfect example. The instant the game includes some kind of reward/incentive that requires you to invest significant time blocks or lots of practice it is no longer casual. Now sure, it can still be played casually, but then so can every good video game under the sun. You just have to avoid the non-casual parts.
Not really. Even during the early stages of TBC when things were "difficult" (in Wow terms...) your '99.9%' is a gross exaggeration. In fact, I daresay the majority of players who stuck with WoW for more than a month have done dungeons. But it's mostly irrelevant, because the game itself has always been somewhat casual, and now in WotLK it's so pathetically easy I'm not sure it's even hard enough to be considered "casual". I mean really, games like Warioland, Mario Party, and Solitaire are more difficult.
Most cable companies offer a lesser package for the same price. So yeah, it's a good deal.
In answer to your second question: TWC doesn't have similar service, at any price.
Thank goodness you don't do any multiplayer gaming, because then you would have a problem.
Taken from Microsoft(TM) Dictionary:
start-er [stahr-ter]
-adjective
1. constituting an intentionally limited or crippled version of something
Synonyms:
1: demo, trial, evaluation
Actually you skipped the only options that should even be considered.
a) They need to pony up and install the extra infrastructure they've already been paid to install with our tax dollars and then actually provide the service they are currently selling.
b) Since they're apparently unwilling or incapable of doing A, relieve them of their monopolies and introduce more competition.
One could just as easily say...
"If your game is really good, then won't people be willing to pay more money for it, making you more money?"
The problem is, no matter how little the game is sold for, there is still only a certain number of people that will buy it. Obviously if only 10,000 people will buy your game if you sell it for $1, but 9,000 will still buy it if you sell it for $10, choosing between $1 and $10 is a no-brainer. The hard part is finding the sweet spot that gives you the most profit. If your game is good enough, it's possible that you will still sell 8,000 copies of it at $40, which again would make the price increase decision an easy one to make. But of course, no one can know for sure exactly what the results will be until after the fact. And then you still don't know what the results would have been if you had started with a different price. So most publishers set the price high to begin with, and hope they can make up most of the lost sales by reducing the price later. So maybe you only got 1,500 sales at $40, but if you can reduce the price to $10 later and pick up another 5,000 sales, you're still doing better than the original hypothetical 9,000 sales at $10 from the get-go... except of course, at this point for all you know you may have actually gotten 20,000 sales if you had set the price at $10 initially.
It's just really hard to establish causation in this type of thing. So the large publishers set the price high because they know they'll sell a lot of copies initially regardless (which is great for them, because then even if the game is a stinker, they might still get a good return on it before word-of-mouth kicks in), and the indie's set them low because if they don't, their game might not get purchased at all no matter how good it is. For them, by the time word-of-mouth kicks in the game might already be too outdated to be worth buying.
How can anyone sound so "tech savvy" yet be so incredibly misinformed.
They don't need to "find" your email to send spam to it. They find the domain, and then they have the spam computer send test spam messages to the most common addresses at that domain (ie. webmaster@domain.com) and possibly even a few thousand (possibly even millions) of the most likely email addresses and/or permutations. Remember, a lot of spam comes from botnets, so they're not even using their own resources to do it. They can certainly afford sending wasted test emails to millions of invalid addresses to find a couple valid ones.
And then of course as others have mentioned, friends and/or family members entering your email address on ecard sites, joke sites, etc.
First, PC games are not long-term. Even Starcraft has only been around for about 10 years, and its replacement is coming up this year or next. FPS's typically remain popular for 2-3 years at the most. Compare that with any real pro sport. Some of them have been around longer than the US has been a country; almost all of them have been around before computers existed. So when this year's $BIG_POPULAR_FPS dies out next year, which one is going to replace it as the next "pro" FPS? No one really knows until they've been out for a while, and it's more or less selected by how popular it is. Of course by then, it's going to be popular for probably another 1-2 years, and then it's on to the next game.
The second problem is that watching someone play a PC game really just is not that fun.
Back then you could do a clean "upgrade" install using the upgrade disk. All you had to do was put in the disk for your old version when it was requested. In fact Vista was the first version where an upgrade had to literally be an upgrade.
We're in ur brainz, stealin ur ipz.