I saw a sizeable number of those PSP ads, and they pretty much sucked. I don't know how many crappy ads it takes to equal one good ad, but that ratio couldn't possibly be helping Sony.
Games are what sell consoles, everyone knows that. Yet the PSP ads don't tell you squat about the games available. Sony was trying to stylize the PSP, turn it into a cultural phenomenon, like what Apple has seen with the iPod. Unfortunately for Sony, you can't entirely force that image, the product needs to live up to the hype. That was much easier for the iPod, because it does so much less than the PSP tries to do.
That plus the fact that even the coolest looking video game machine still has a reasonably high nerd-factor, and you don't end up with a bunch of people running around with a PSP hanging around their neck like in Sony's early ads.
Whatever dumbass. And you probably believe the government when they tell you that the moon landings were real. It is impossible to go to the moon, spaceflight is too hard to ever get figured out! Also, there are aliens all over the earth, the government just keeps it secret!
Puma, 10.1, was a free update. 4 x $129 + 10% sales tax is just under $570. That's still a good bit of money, but for the majority of macintosh users, the need to upgrade each and every time was not there. I think most people upgrade when they see a benefit worth the cost. While many people don't mind paying Apple's premium for what they believe is good quality stuff, nobody likes just giving them money for the hell of it.
I don't think Mr. Thurrott is as interested in bringing Apple down as much as he's trying to make MS look better. He's basically built a career out of singing Windows' praises, and I'm sure it's tough for him to watch their killer upcoming OS flounder in development, and have feature after feature cut. All the while watching Apple gain huge brand recognition and consistently improving their software. It's got to be tough for him. If my job was to try and convince people that Vista is moving along wonderfully and will be the greatest thing ever, I'd have a hard time getting myself out of bed in the morning too.
You see, the neat thing about the world is that we don't have to completely get rid of something just because a newer way of doing it comes along.
I love having wireless networking, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't run cables through all the walls if I was building myself a house. I mostly use my cordless phone at home, but having one phone always attached to the wall means that I'll always be able to easily find it if I need it. I can't remember the battery on that phone ever dying on me.
We can have the wireless revolution without actually getting rid of all the wires. My printer can keep its wires. I don't move it very often. My iSight camera wire doesn't bother me at all. My USB hub would probably be far less useful if we got rid of all the wires, so let's not worry about that. I can't even remember the last time my keyboard's cable was a problem. My keyboard just sits there, on the keyboard drawer.
Rather than making parts of a non-mobile computer mobile, I'm much more interested in making already mobile computers better. Give us better PDA's, make a tablet computer that is useable and affordable. The cord on my mouse is not that big of a problem.
Exactly. This guy can yell to us about how Apple is hurting us with the iTMS until his face turns blue, but it doesn't matter. Most people don't have more money than they can spend, so they've tended to develop a pretty good sense of when they're getting screwed over. Apple's sales numbers clearly demonstrate that plenty of people don't feel so completely bothered by this little thing that keeps Mr. Doctorow up at night.
And most of those that don't feel like the convenience of the iTMS makes up for its limitations don't spend money there. Cory Doctorow is taking a purely ideological stand, and condemning others based on his reasonably extreme stance. He's a reasonably smart guy, he has to understand that just because he thinks the something should work a certain way doesn't mean that everyone agrees. And the neat thing about a capitalistic system is that you can try to sell things pretty much any way you want, and the consumer gets to decide. It sounds like he's just upset that the average consumer has other things to be concerned about besides how many times they're allowed to burn the same CD over and over. In other words, he's upset that the average person isn't more like him.
Anyways, that's enough Cory Doctorow bashing for now. The dude just seems so whiny at times.
My fiancee is in school for a degree in Library Studies, which mostly consists of learning research methods. It's been amazing how many of her classmates have put down wikipedia as a reputable source.
I think you're seeing the comparison too much as a "You should buy this one instead of this other one" type deal, when in reality, it's a comparison for almost a historical sake.
A catepillar and a civic have purposes that are much more different from each other than a Q1 and a Newton. I would say this comparison was more like a 13 year old Civic with a new Ford Mustang. While the Mustang is certainly flashier, and can do things that the civic could never hope to accomplish, that doesn't mean that there aren't qualities to the Civic that we might appreciate, and which we wish had made it to this new Mustang. Although in this case, let's pretend that the Mustang can only go 20 miles before needing to refuel, while the Civic can go well over 200+. (You've probably noticed that I feel the Q1's battery life makes it mostly useless). If that were the case, it'd be even closer to the Q1 vs. Newton comparison. And I think in that scenario, the 13 year old Civic would come out the winner.
I guess what I'm really trying to say is that the comparison in the original argument does has some value. It shows that the growth in capabilities that we've seen in handhelds over the past 10 years has come at the expense of some good features (battery life), and that that trade-off might not be for the best.
I think the point is that "functionality" is a little more complicated than how much you can actually cram inside a particular sized box.
The Q1 technically can do all of these bullet points that it has listed, but in every day use, the limitations in the design make those bullet points infeasible in real, everyday use. The battery life being the most significant example. It sounds to me like the Q1 needs to spend half its time plugged in to the wall, which basically kills the whole "handheld" aspect of it.
I'm sure there are a handful of people who have particular computing needs that the Q1 fits perfectly into. But that doesn't mean that it's any less flawed for the rest of us, nor does it mean there's nothing that it can't learn from the Newton. As for Newton vs. palm pilot/windows mobile, I'm sure you can find plenty of those comparisons already done. In this case, the newton was compared with the Q1 because the Q1 is the new hotness, looks a whole lot like the Netwon, and many of the comparisons are obvious.
Yup. In the end, just like everyone says, it comes down to the games.
I've been a big Nintendo fan for as long as I can remember, and I was enjoying life just fine having never owned a Playstation. Then one day I played GTA3 at a friend's house, and ended up buying my own copy along with a PS2 to go with it that next weekend.
Now granted, it'd probably take an unbelievably amazing new game to get me to drop $500+ bucks just like that, but a couple years down the line, if the price has dropped to something reasonable, a killer exclusive just might convince me.
I'm just interested in how can you decide for sure that you aren't going to buy any of the three, when two of them haven't even been released, and the third still has plenty of time to produce some killer games. Do you plan out all of your purchases at least five years in advance, or just video game related ones?
Or perhaps this slashdot post was your last act before giving up all material posessions and moving to a hut at the top of a very cold and remote mountain?
A mouse is basically just an indirect way of pointing. That's why the default mouse cursor is generally an arrow. A mouse has a couple of buttons to click on as well, and so will the Wiimote.
As far as I can imagine, the Wiimote doesn't seem to duplicate keyboard functionality in any way that would work in an RTS. So the question is, how important is the keyboard to RTS games? While I'm sure it's possible, and some people already have made games that rely on all those buttons, I also believe that it'd be more than possible to design a game so that it doesn't need it. Same goes for the resolution issues.
So it won't be possible to just take any random RTS game and port it over to the Wii, but there's certainly the potential for a better experience than you're likely to get moving a cursor around with an analog stick.
Anti-aliasing is one thing, but for many games (particularly older games, and games for Nintendo's systems), this wouldn't work as well. The reason for this is because the artwork was often stylized, whether for artistic effect, or to make up for a lack of graphics power.
Mario games are a prime example. Even as Mario has moved to 3D, and polygon counts have improved and so on, he and his mushroom kingdom buddies have remained cartoony and simple. It's part of that universe, and is the same for many other games as well.
Procedural stuff is neat because it tries to generate complexity automatically, because adding complexity by hand is very time consuming. But the strength in many kinds of artwork is not complexity, it's often the simplicity. Or at least a very direct and purposeful direction that informs all the other decisions.
I would go so far as to say that for most good games, the level of visual detail should be dictated by what serves the game best, not by what pushes the hardware the most. Of course, with many games going for as much realism as possible, it's easier to hit the limits of both the silicon, as well as the economics of hiring artists and shipping in a reasonable amount of time. Those sorts of games could benefit from this the most.
Since Nintendo is taking a generally different approach to games, I don't see as much value in this for them. The artwork and the environments it's used to create are essential and deliberate parts of the gameplay. For many other games, the artwork is just a compromise between reality and what the hardware can simulate.
100 years isn't that long in the grand scheme of things. But humanity, overall, is nothing if not industrious. Basically, we can make a lot happen on Earth in 100 years. And as technology increases, the amount of change that we as a species can create over a given period of time continues to increase.
Earth is a reasonably big place, but it's not limitless, and even with the decent amount of technology that we already have, a majority of the planet's surface is not human habitable in any practical sense. And we already have the technology to turn the good parts to be basically uninhabitable over a very short time scale. Weeks maybe.
Not to mention that besides our technology, human beings are generally pretty frail and physically unprepared creatures. In just a purely biological sense, we require significant resources to live, and probably need some significant social structures in place to survive for any extended period of time. In big extinction events of the past, it's often the more complex creatures that die off, while the simpler ones are able to squeek past the chaos and scrape by.
I'm much more interested in civilization continuing to exist than the species. The greatest value of humanity isn't our genes and our biological qualities. It's the stuff we've created, and the things we've discovered that are really worthwhile.
It's not a flight(space) sim in any sense that'd be familiar to someone who's played Descent. You can't play the game with a joystick. Your mouse does not directly control your space craft. There's never a cockpit view. You don't aim your weapons, you just tell which ones which opponent to fire on.
Think of it sort of like Star Trek, where you're a guy sitting at a control panel telling the ship's computer what you want it to do. Except that the control panel is your computer screen, and you push the buttons using the mouse cursor. And your view is outside of your spaceship, not from inside it.
The really interesting parts of the game, in my opinion, are the social aspects of it. The organization involved in running a succesful alliance or corporation, the logistics of big wars and holding territory, the strategy and tactics used in big fleet battles. It all requires a lot of coordination, and it's a lot of fun if you get yourself into a big group.
Then there's a lot of technical depth that you can get involved in. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of different fittings that can be piled onto dozens of different ships. The economy is player driven, very deep, and very active. There are people who really enjoy producing, collecting and trading minerals, creating stuff, and selling it. There are some people who can't get enough of the mining, while other people find mining to be boring as all hell.
There really are enough options in EVE that just about anyone should be able to find a niche that they enjoy. The biggest problem with the game is that that complexity can be overwhelming at first, so it's not surprising when people give up before they can find a niche they want to fill. Unless you're lucky enough to fall into a corporation that actively trains its newbies, you'll have to stick out a rough beginning.
You certainly can get scammed in EVE, and the GM's consider it to be part of the game. But if you're reasonably careful, you most likely won't have any problems.
That story must have occured earlier in the game's lifetime, because the amounts of money that he's talking about are not so outrageous now. Many of the larger corps move around billions of isk per day. There are ships that cost billions of isk. There have also been scams involving billions of isk.
A well organized corp/alliance can find uses for newer players, and allow them not only to feel productive, but actually allow them to be productive. A six week old player is not going to have much of a chance one-on-one with a two year vet, but that's not really any different from any other game.
But the PC basically does act as a standard for 5-6 years. You could write a game today that will work on Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, and probably Vista in the future. Naturally, if you're aiming for the latest and greatest, then you're limiting your market for a while (and since the majority of sales for a game are right at release, that can be bad), but windows has some pretty consistent backwards compatibility.
Making a console standard that didn't change for 5-6 years would provide marginally lower prices (the makers already generally sell for a loss), while taking away choice from consumers. It'd make life easier for developers, so theoretically game prices could decrease, but do you honestly think that would happen?
There is a standard for gaming, it's called PC/Windows/DirectX. It's somewhat cheaper, especially if you only upgrade your rig about as often as the consoles cycle. Of course, if you want to play all of the latest games in all their glory, you'll have to upgrade more often and at an increased price.
You'll also have to deal with a lot more driver issues, and game patches. On the upside, you'll probably get to play with a lot of cool free mods and easily mess with the game files if that's your thing.
But then again, you'll most likely be stuck with a keyboard and a mouse as the primary input devices until the end of time, because that's the lowest denominator, and it's unlikely to change with the system being commoditized. It's not a bad system, but it's not always the best either.
The commoditization of PC's made sense, mostly because of their non-gaming purposes. Gaming just sort of followed along with that(A giant OS monopoly certainly helped). A universal console standard would just squash out the already rare innovation.
Yeah, it's just a weird situation. I've got a dell that's a couple years old that I'm using in the meantime, hopefully I can make do with it until a good option comes up.
It's just that windows pisses me off about a thousand times a day. Usually just little things, but they add up. My powermac doesn't have the little annoyances, it only breaks in big ways. What the hell.
Agreed. I've got an LC from 1991, a PowerMac 7500 from '96, and Rev C iMac from '99 that all still run just fine. I carried my G3 powerbook in my backpack for 4 years and generally beat the hell out of it, and it just recently gave up. My G5 powermac, on the other hand, has not aged as well. The optical drive stopped working literally the day after the warranty ran out, and the machine has decided not to turn on at all as of about a week ago(Most likely the power supply, haven't had much time to diagnostic it yet). It hasn't even been 18 months, and it's already crapped out. I even waited for the rev. B G5's to try and avoid some of the common glitches.
The Apple price premium was not such a big deal when I expected to get five years of use out of a machine. But spreading that extra cash out over just a year and a half makes the whole equation look way less appealing to me. It's too bad I find windows so damn annoying, or else I'd be able to leave Apple behind and not look back. Right now I can't figure out what I want to do.
Agreed, although I think Nintendo is doing a few things to try and combat that. Lining up more third party devs is the big one, as you noted. They seem to be trying, I don't know if it'll work.
But in a more fundamental sense, the whole shift towards the "casual gamer" is an attempt to find a market that is more interested in quality over quantity. People who couldn't possibly ever find the time to play even a fraction of all those PS2 games, and would rather just buy one occasionally, and be pretty sure that it'll be a worthwhile purchase.
The other thing is that with the pricing being significantly lower than the competition, it has the potential to move into more of an "impulse buy" category. Maybe not in the sense of you're walking through BestBuy looking for a DVD and it catches your eye out of the blue sort of impulse. (Although if they set up some nice in-store kiosks with a really crazy fun game, the novelty of the controller would probably sell a few on the spot). But I'm thinking more along these lines; I'm a teenager really wanting a PS3, and as I stare at the box in the store wondering how I'm ever going to manage to find $600 bucks, I notice the Wii next to it, maybe bundled with an extra controller and a game, for half the price. Sure it's not what I really wanted, but it'll still be fun, I have a much better chance of convincing Mom to pay for it, and I won't leave empty handed.
And there's still the 2nd console strategy. Basically saying that the Wii is different enough that it's not an either or between it and another console. You can buy an Xbox360 and get most of the same stuff that you'd get with a PS3. But even having both of those won't let you play most of the games that you can get for the Wii.
Nintendo doesn't care if you buy another console. They only care if you buy a Wii. If you buy a PS3, Steve Ballmer might throw a chair at you (are chair-throwing jokes still funny? were they ever?), because he knows that a large percentage of purchases for Sony are a loss for MS.
If Nintendo ends up shipping more systems than Sony, then their shelf space will increase to match. The way Walmart works is to sell as much stuff as possible. If there are more potential customers for Wii games than there are for PS3 and/or Xbox360 games, then Walmart will stock more Wii games on their shelves.
Hype is a powerful thing, but in the long term, it's not going to save Sony if the PS3 is crap. It helped create a crazy when the PS2 came out, but if they didn't have the games to back it, their success would have been short lived. At the end of the day, the PS2 has been an excellent console, and its sales reflect that more than any hype or marketing. They're still selling them by the truckload.
I'm not saying that the PS3 is going to be a piece of garbage, it's just really hard to figure out what Sony's trying to do right now. Marketing will only get you so far.
Yeah, a good video game is a lot of value for the money. The only problem is that it's often a bit of a crapshoot, due to facts such as publishers willing to ruin promising games by forcing them out early, or review mags/websites giving higher than deserved scores in order to keep the pre-release games coming.
If I knew that every time I was spending $70 that I'd get at least 50 hours of entertainment, I'd happily spend that money. But I've been disappointed enough times that I really think a purchase like that through. And of course, as the price increases, the consideration increases, all lessening the chances I'll walk out of the store with that game.
Interestingly, there's another dynamic that's starting to come into play in my life. Namely, getting 50 hours of entertainment out of a game is likely going to take me months, because I'm consistently finding myself with less free time as I get older. I'd rather spend $30 for 15-20 hours of playtime, because in as long as it'll take me to spend 20 total hours gaming, there will be something else out that will make me forget about the previous game.
Add in the fact that I've still got a handful of longer games that I've never gotten around to finishing, and I've got more than I can manage to play already without spending a dime. That, in a way, decreases the value of new games to me, and makes a high price tag that much less appealing.
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I saw a sizeable number of those PSP ads, and they pretty much sucked. I don't know how many crappy ads it takes to equal one good ad, but that ratio couldn't possibly be helping Sony.
Games are what sell consoles, everyone knows that. Yet the PSP ads don't tell you squat about the games available. Sony was trying to stylize the PSP, turn it into a cultural phenomenon, like what Apple has seen with the iPod. Unfortunately for Sony, you can't entirely force that image, the product needs to live up to the hype. That was much easier for the iPod, because it does so much less than the PSP tries to do.
That plus the fact that even the coolest looking video game machine still has a reasonably high nerd-factor, and you don't end up with a bunch of people running around with a PSP hanging around their neck like in Sony's early ads.
Whatever dumbass. And you probably believe the government when they tell you that the moon landings were real. It is impossible to go to the moon, spaceflight is too hard to ever get figured out! Also, there are aliens all over the earth, the government just keeps it secret!
Puma, 10.1, was a free update. 4 x $129 + 10% sales tax is just under $570. That's still a good bit of money, but for the majority of macintosh users, the need to upgrade each and every time was not there. I think most people upgrade when they see a benefit worth the cost. While many people don't mind paying Apple's premium for what they believe is good quality stuff, nobody likes just giving them money for the hell of it.
I don't think Mr. Thurrott is as interested in bringing Apple down as much as he's trying to make MS look better. He's basically built a career out of singing Windows' praises, and I'm sure it's tough for him to watch their killer upcoming OS flounder in development, and have feature after feature cut. All the while watching Apple gain huge brand recognition and consistently improving their software. It's got to be tough for him. If my job was to try and convince people that Vista is moving along wonderfully and will be the greatest thing ever, I'd have a hard time getting myself out of bed in the morning too.
You see, the neat thing about the world is that we don't have to completely get rid of something just because a newer way of doing it comes along.
I love having wireless networking, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't run cables through all the walls if I was building myself a house. I mostly use my cordless phone at home, but having one phone always attached to the wall means that I'll always be able to easily find it if I need it. I can't remember the battery on that phone ever dying on me.
We can have the wireless revolution without actually getting rid of all the wires. My printer can keep its wires. I don't move it very often. My iSight camera wire doesn't bother me at all. My USB hub would probably be far less useful if we got rid of all the wires, so let's not worry about that. I can't even remember the last time my keyboard's cable was a problem. My keyboard just sits there, on the keyboard drawer.
Rather than making parts of a non-mobile computer mobile, I'm much more interested in making already mobile computers better. Give us better PDA's, make a tablet computer that is useable and affordable. The cord on my mouse is not that big of a problem.
Exactly. This guy can yell to us about how Apple is hurting us with the iTMS until his face turns blue, but it doesn't matter. Most people don't have more money than they can spend, so they've tended to develop a pretty good sense of when they're getting screwed over. Apple's sales numbers clearly demonstrate that plenty of people don't feel so completely bothered by this little thing that keeps Mr. Doctorow up at night.
And most of those that don't feel like the convenience of the iTMS makes up for its limitations don't spend money there. Cory Doctorow is taking a purely ideological stand, and condemning others based on his reasonably extreme stance. He's a reasonably smart guy, he has to understand that just because he thinks the something should work a certain way doesn't mean that everyone agrees. And the neat thing about a capitalistic system is that you can try to sell things pretty much any way you want, and the consumer gets to decide. It sounds like he's just upset that the average consumer has other things to be concerned about besides how many times they're allowed to burn the same CD over and over. In other words, he's upset that the average person isn't more like him.
Anyways, that's enough Cory Doctorow bashing for now. The dude just seems so whiny at times.
My fiancee is in school for a degree in Library Studies, which mostly consists of learning research methods. It's been amazing how many of her classmates have put down wikipedia as a reputable source.
I think you're seeing the comparison too much as a "You should buy this one instead of this other one" type deal, when in reality, it's a comparison for almost a historical sake.
A catepillar and a civic have purposes that are much more different from each other than a Q1 and a Newton. I would say this comparison was more like a 13 year old Civic with a new Ford Mustang. While the Mustang is certainly flashier, and can do things that the civic could never hope to accomplish, that doesn't mean that there aren't qualities to the Civic that we might appreciate, and which we wish had made it to this new Mustang. Although in this case, let's pretend that the Mustang can only go 20 miles before needing to refuel, while the Civic can go well over 200+. (You've probably noticed that I feel the Q1's battery life makes it mostly useless). If that were the case, it'd be even closer to the Q1 vs. Newton comparison. And I think in that scenario, the 13 year old Civic would come out the winner.
I guess what I'm really trying to say is that the comparison in the original argument does has some value. It shows that the growth in capabilities that we've seen in handhelds over the past 10 years has come at the expense of some good features (battery life), and that that trade-off might not be for the best.
I think the point is that "functionality" is a little more complicated than how much you can actually cram inside a particular sized box.
The Q1 technically can do all of these bullet points that it has listed, but in every day use, the limitations in the design make those bullet points infeasible in real, everyday use. The battery life being the most significant example. It sounds to me like the Q1 needs to spend half its time plugged in to the wall, which basically kills the whole "handheld" aspect of it.
I'm sure there are a handful of people who have particular computing needs that the Q1 fits perfectly into. But that doesn't mean that it's any less flawed for the rest of us, nor does it mean there's nothing that it can't learn from the Newton. As for Newton vs. palm pilot/windows mobile, I'm sure you can find plenty of those comparisons already done. In this case, the newton was compared with the Q1 because the Q1 is the new hotness, looks a whole lot like the Netwon, and many of the comparisons are obvious.
Yup. In the end, just like everyone says, it comes down to the games.
I've been a big Nintendo fan for as long as I can remember, and I was enjoying life just fine having never owned a Playstation. Then one day I played GTA3 at a friend's house, and ended up buying my own copy along with a PS2 to go with it that next weekend.
Now granted, it'd probably take an unbelievably amazing new game to get me to drop $500+ bucks just like that, but a couple years down the line, if the price has dropped to something reasonable, a killer exclusive just might convince me.
I'm just interested in how can you decide for sure that you aren't going to buy any of the three, when two of them haven't even been released, and the third still has plenty of time to produce some killer games. Do you plan out all of your purchases at least five years in advance, or just video game related ones?
Or perhaps this slashdot post was your last act before giving up all material posessions and moving to a hut at the top of a very cold and remote mountain?
A mouse is basically just an indirect way of pointing. That's why the default mouse cursor is generally an arrow. A mouse has a couple of buttons to click on as well, and so will the Wiimote.
As far as I can imagine, the Wiimote doesn't seem to duplicate keyboard functionality in any way that would work in an RTS. So the question is, how important is the keyboard to RTS games? While I'm sure it's possible, and some people already have made games that rely on all those buttons, I also believe that it'd be more than possible to design a game so that it doesn't need it. Same goes for the resolution issues.
So it won't be possible to just take any random RTS game and port it over to the Wii, but there's certainly the potential for a better experience than you're likely to get moving a cursor around with an analog stick.
Anti-aliasing is one thing, but for many games (particularly older games, and games for Nintendo's systems), this wouldn't work as well. The reason for this is because the artwork was often stylized, whether for artistic effect, or to make up for a lack of graphics power.
Mario games are a prime example. Even as Mario has moved to 3D, and polygon counts have improved and so on, he and his mushroom kingdom buddies have remained cartoony and simple. It's part of that universe, and is the same for many other games as well.
Procedural stuff is neat because it tries to generate complexity automatically, because adding complexity by hand is very time consuming. But the strength in many kinds of artwork is not complexity, it's often the simplicity. Or at least a very direct and purposeful direction that informs all the other decisions.
I would go so far as to say that for most good games, the level of visual detail should be dictated by what serves the game best, not by what pushes the hardware the most. Of course, with many games going for as much realism as possible, it's easier to hit the limits of both the silicon, as well as the economics of hiring artists and shipping in a reasonable amount of time. Those sorts of games could benefit from this the most.
Since Nintendo is taking a generally different approach to games, I don't see as much value in this for them. The artwork and the environments it's used to create are essential and deliberate parts of the gameplay. For many other games, the artwork is just a compromise between reality and what the hardware can simulate.
100 years isn't that long in the grand scheme of things. But humanity, overall, is nothing if not industrious. Basically, we can make a lot happen on Earth in 100 years. And as technology increases, the amount of change that we as a species can create over a given period of time continues to increase.
Earth is a reasonably big place, but it's not limitless, and even with the decent amount of technology that we already have, a majority of the planet's surface is not human habitable in any practical sense. And we already have the technology to turn the good parts to be basically uninhabitable over a very short time scale. Weeks maybe.
Not to mention that besides our technology, human beings are generally pretty frail and physically unprepared creatures. In just a purely biological sense, we require significant resources to live, and probably need some significant social structures in place to survive for any extended period of time. In big extinction events of the past, it's often the more complex creatures that die off, while the simpler ones are able to squeek past the chaos and scrape by.
I'm much more interested in civilization continuing to exist than the species. The greatest value of humanity isn't our genes and our biological qualities. It's the stuff we've created, and the things we've discovered that are really worthwhile.
It's not a flight(space) sim in any sense that'd be familiar to someone who's played Descent. You can't play the game with a joystick. Your mouse does not directly control your space craft. There's never a cockpit view. You don't aim your weapons, you just tell which ones which opponent to fire on.
Think of it sort of like Star Trek, where you're a guy sitting at a control panel telling the ship's computer what you want it to do. Except that the control panel is your computer screen, and you push the buttons using the mouse cursor. And your view is outside of your spaceship, not from inside it.
The really interesting parts of the game, in my opinion, are the social aspects of it. The organization involved in running a succesful alliance or corporation, the logistics of big wars and holding territory, the strategy and tactics used in big fleet battles. It all requires a lot of coordination, and it's a lot of fun if you get yourself into a big group.
Then there's a lot of technical depth that you can get involved in. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of different fittings that can be piled onto dozens of different ships. The economy is player driven, very deep, and very active. There are people who really enjoy producing, collecting and trading minerals, creating stuff, and selling it. There are some people who can't get enough of the mining, while other people find mining to be boring as all hell.
There really are enough options in EVE that just about anyone should be able to find a niche that they enjoy. The biggest problem with the game is that that complexity can be overwhelming at first, so it's not surprising when people give up before they can find a niche they want to fill. Unless you're lucky enough to fall into a corporation that actively trains its newbies, you'll have to stick out a rough beginning.
You certainly can get scammed in EVE, and the GM's consider it to be part of the game. But if you're reasonably careful, you most likely won't have any problems.
That story must have occured earlier in the game's lifetime, because the amounts of money that he's talking about are not so outrageous now. Many of the larger corps move around billions of isk per day. There are ships that cost billions of isk. There have also been scams involving billions of isk.
A well organized corp/alliance can find uses for newer players, and allow them not only to feel productive, but actually allow them to be productive. A six week old player is not going to have much of a chance one-on-one with a two year vet, but that's not really any different from any other game.
But the PC basically does act as a standard for 5-6 years. You could write a game today that will work on Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, and probably Vista in the future. Naturally, if you're aiming for the latest and greatest, then you're limiting your market for a while (and since the majority of sales for a game are right at release, that can be bad), but windows has some pretty consistent backwards compatibility.
Making a console standard that didn't change for 5-6 years would provide marginally lower prices (the makers already generally sell for a loss), while taking away choice from consumers. It'd make life easier for developers, so theoretically game prices could decrease, but do you honestly think that would happen?
Damn dude. You just disqualified yourself for the easiest job on the planet.
Perhaps being an industry analyst is harder than I thought.
There is a standard for gaming, it's called PC/Windows/DirectX. It's somewhat cheaper, especially if you only upgrade your rig about as often as the consoles cycle. Of course, if you want to play all of the latest games in all their glory, you'll have to upgrade more often and at an increased price.
You'll also have to deal with a lot more driver issues, and game patches. On the upside, you'll probably get to play with a lot of cool free mods and easily mess with the game files if that's your thing.
But then again, you'll most likely be stuck with a keyboard and a mouse as the primary input devices until the end of time, because that's the lowest denominator, and it's unlikely to change with the system being commoditized. It's not a bad system, but it's not always the best either.
The commoditization of PC's made sense, mostly because of their non-gaming purposes. Gaming just sort of followed along with that(A giant OS monopoly certainly helped). A universal console standard would just squash out the already rare innovation.
Yeah, it's just a weird situation. I've got a dell that's a couple years old that I'm using in the meantime, hopefully I can make do with it until a good option comes up.
It's just that windows pisses me off about a thousand times a day. Usually just little things, but they add up. My powermac doesn't have the little annoyances, it only breaks in big ways. What the hell.
Sadly, I do a lot of graphics work, and Linux doesn't run the software I need.
Agreed. I've got an LC from 1991, a PowerMac 7500 from '96, and Rev C iMac from '99 that all still run just fine. I carried my G3 powerbook in my backpack for 4 years and generally beat the hell out of it, and it just recently gave up. My G5 powermac, on the other hand, has not aged as well. The optical drive stopped working literally the day after the warranty ran out, and the machine has decided not to turn on at all as of about a week ago(Most likely the power supply, haven't had much time to diagnostic it yet). It hasn't even been 18 months, and it's already crapped out. I even waited for the rev. B G5's to try and avoid some of the common glitches.
The Apple price premium was not such a big deal when I expected to get five years of use out of a machine. But spreading that extra cash out over just a year and a half makes the whole equation look way less appealing to me. It's too bad I find windows so damn annoying, or else I'd be able to leave Apple behind and not look back. Right now I can't figure out what I want to do.
Agreed, although I think Nintendo is doing a few things to try and combat that. Lining up more third party devs is the big one, as you noted. They seem to be trying, I don't know if it'll work.
But in a more fundamental sense, the whole shift towards the "casual gamer" is an attempt to find a market that is more interested in quality over quantity. People who couldn't possibly ever find the time to play even a fraction of all those PS2 games, and would rather just buy one occasionally, and be pretty sure that it'll be a worthwhile purchase.
The other thing is that with the pricing being significantly lower than the competition, it has the potential to move into more of an "impulse buy" category. Maybe not in the sense of you're walking through BestBuy looking for a DVD and it catches your eye out of the blue sort of impulse. (Although if they set up some nice in-store kiosks with a really crazy fun game, the novelty of the controller would probably sell a few on the spot). But I'm thinking more along these lines; I'm a teenager really wanting a PS3, and as I stare at the box in the store wondering how I'm ever going to manage to find $600 bucks, I notice the Wii next to it, maybe bundled with an extra controller and a game, for half the price. Sure it's not what I really wanted, but it'll still be fun, I have a much better chance of convincing Mom to pay for it, and I won't leave empty handed.
And there's still the 2nd console strategy. Basically saying that the Wii is different enough that it's not an either or between it and another console. You can buy an Xbox360 and get most of the same stuff that you'd get with a PS3. But even having both of those won't let you play most of the games that you can get for the Wii.
Nintendo doesn't care if you buy another console. They only care if you buy a Wii. If you buy a PS3, Steve Ballmer might throw a chair at you (are chair-throwing jokes still funny? were they ever?), because he knows that a large percentage of purchases for Sony are a loss for MS.
If Nintendo ends up shipping more systems than Sony, then their shelf space will increase to match. The way Walmart works is to sell as much stuff as possible. If there are more potential customers for Wii games than there are for PS3 and/or Xbox360 games, then Walmart will stock more Wii games on their shelves.
Hype is a powerful thing, but in the long term, it's not going to save Sony if the PS3 is crap. It helped create a crazy when the PS2 came out, but if they didn't have the games to back it, their success would have been short lived. At the end of the day, the PS2 has been an excellent console, and its sales reflect that more than any hype or marketing. They're still selling them by the truckload.
I'm not saying that the PS3 is going to be a piece of garbage, it's just really hard to figure out what Sony's trying to do right now. Marketing will only get you so far.
Yeah, a good video game is a lot of value for the money. The only problem is that it's often a bit of a crapshoot, due to facts such as publishers willing to ruin promising games by forcing them out early, or review mags/websites giving higher than deserved scores in order to keep the pre-release games coming.
If I knew that every time I was spending $70 that I'd get at least 50 hours of entertainment, I'd happily spend that money. But I've been disappointed enough times that I really think a purchase like that through. And of course, as the price increases, the consideration increases, all lessening the chances I'll walk out of the store with that game.
Interestingly, there's another dynamic that's starting to come into play in my life. Namely, getting 50 hours of entertainment out of a game is likely going to take me months, because I'm consistently finding myself with less free time as I get older. I'd rather spend $30 for 15-20 hours of playtime, because in as long as it'll take me to spend 20 total hours gaming, there will be something else out that will make me forget about the previous game.
Add in the fact that I've still got a handful of longer games that I've never gotten around to finishing, and I've got more than I can manage to play already without spending a dime. That, in a way, decreases the value of new games to me, and makes a high price tag that much less appealing.