You're buying into the propaganda that communists are all automatically evil horrible people. The fact that the leaders of Russia didn't say "fuck it" and launch all their missiles has less to do with the grace of god and more to do with the fact that they were reasonable and intelligent people. Not to say that Russia didn't have some crazy rulers (Stalin was a complete nutcase), but living in communist russia did not automatically make you an insane lunatic.
If that were the case, we never would've made it through the cuban missile crisis. Kruschev didn't want war any more than we did, and for the exact same reasons. Because he didn't want millions of people to die. If leaders from either side wanted to fight, it would've happened.
Yeah, seriously, half way into Knights of the Old Republic, I was totally invested in getting my character to bang that Jedi chick. Games can be just as big a let down as real life. *sigh*
I think online retail is a pretty stupid thing to be worried about bringing an end to social interaction. A healthy adult interacts with people in many cases besides buying stuff at stores. Teenagers don't hang out at the mall to buy stuff, they hang out there to be with their friends. Sure, a few people might start purchasing everything from the internet and never leave their house, but the world would be boring without at least a few weirdos.
Beyond commerce, you can make a bit of a better argument. For example, there are a lot of people who read political blogs. Many of the blogs are divided pretty evenly along political ideologies/party lines, and basically consist of them patting each other on the back for supporting their side or bashing the others. It's easy to build up a collection of links of a bunch of blogs that all link each other and pretty much agree. You'll be told pretty much the same thing by all of them, and so it's easy to ignore other viewpoints. I think a situation like that is far more damaging than online shopping recommendations directing me towards buying stuff that I probably like.
I agree. Nintendo has too much riding on this console to screw up the controllers. They'll delay the release before they'll start shipping hardware that they have doubts over. Nintendo's biggest risk is whether or not a good number of third party developers will get on board with the new controllers.
I think even with lackluster 3rd party support, the console will still live and even be fairly profitable (a la the Gamecube). But if Nintendo hopes to make up any serious ground in terms of marketshare, they're going to need more games than they can produce on their own.
I don't think he's whining as much as just wondering where the game industry thinks it's headed. Sure, having a more expensive toy makes you look cooler, but there's a limit for the majority of consumers. If there wasn't everyone would be driving around in porsches or ferrarris, instead of settling for something more practical.
The billion dollar question is where is this line for video game consoles and the mass market? It's even more important in this industry, because you don't make the money on the console anyway, you make it back on volume sales of games. If the high price of these consoles causes them not to sell, then MS/Sony are pretty much screwed. There really isn't a niche for the "super nice, more expensive" console in this industry, because if development studios don't see a big enough customer base, then they won't develop, especially with the costs continually going up.
Believe me, Sony and MS both want to sell their systems to everyone. They're going to lose money on each box they ship, but they still want to sell as many as possible. They're both convinced that the way to move units is to pack as much hardware power into them as is possible, even at the risk of driving prices up really high. And they're just hoping that the price doesn't cross that hazy line of consumer willingness.
Your parent poster understands all too well the power of the consumer's boycott. I think he's wondering if Sony and MS do as well.
Actually, you're fairly wrong. Although a few architects try to function as if they were artists, the average architect does far more than draw pretty pictures. An architect needs to be aware of pretty much all of those little details like fire codes and such, although on complicated projects it's not unusual to consult with a multitude of engineers.
An architect may ask structural engineers to help size columns and beams and whatnot, but it's generally the architect who decides where they go. Most architects have at least a basic understanding of that sort of thing, and enough education to have an informed discussion about it with engineers. Fire codes are a little more complicated than the number of sprinklers and making sure the doors open the right way. The entire circulation patterns of high occupancy buildings can be massively influenced by fire codes, and you can be sure that an architect needs to be involved in that.
There are very few architects who have a completely personal and unique "calling-card style". FLW is one of them, a more contemporary example would be Frank Gehry. Styles in architecture generally span time periods more than particular persons, not to say that everyone doesn't have their own ideas. Architecture has a very long history. It'd be very limiting to think of it as "stealing ideas", so instead we call it "progress", and with a few exceptions, most architects are aware of how much they draw from the past, and are happy to see their own innovations and thoughts influence the profession as a whole.
Copying a building detail for detail is, of course, a slightly different story, but either way, is never good architecture. A well designed building will have made a lot of concessions to its particular location, while at the same time exploiting other properties of the site.
I'm not going to play a game that forces me to vote on whatever referendum comes up. I don't care if some people want the MMO world to have rain while others don't. If you require me to do things in the game that I don't want to do, it's going to stop being fun, and I'm going to stop sending you money in exchange for the privilege to play.
Not to mention the practical problems. What if I'm out of town for a week? When do I vote on stuff going on then? What if I'm not educated on some of the issues, should I be required to vote on those? At worst it'll just fall apart and not work at all. At best, it'll just lead to the formation of political parties and people just picking one and voting for whatever the party tells them to. I don't need a virtual world that mimics the real world that closely.
Direct democracy wouldn't work in the real world because the average person doesn't have the time/resources/knowledge to make educated decisions on all the stuff governments deal with. It wouldn't work in an online world because of all those same reasons, plus the fact that most people will view it as a game, and not want to be bothered with that sort of "practical" stuff while gaming.
I guess if you carefully vetted the membership to just people who want to be fully active in your virtual community and its government, you could do that, but I think it'd become more of a political bickering simulator than anything else. The market for something like that is probably fairly limited.
Well, the control of a central authority is certainly ripe for abuse, but in some ways, it's almost a necessity for online worlds. And that's because there's not enough consequences for being a bad citizen in an online world.
If you're running around griefing in second life, they can't throw you in a virtual jail. Even if they did teleport your avatar into some sort of prison that you couldn't leave, all you have to do is log-off and forget about it. They can't fine you real money, and if you're just in the game to harass other people, you probably don't care about the in-game currency.
Second Life has experimented with a more democratic system, but just like in the real world, most people don't want to be bothered with it. And so the job usually falls to Linden Labs.
I don't understand why so many people are planning on using this controller by pointing their whole arm at the screen all day. I can easily imagine slouching in the couch and holding the controller in my lap, making just very slight movements to control things. It isn't really like a laser pointer that has to be aimed directly where you want to go. I'd imagine the "tracking speed" can be adjusted just like a computer mouse. Just like I only have to move my mouse a couple inches to move my cursor fifteen inches across m monitor, the revolution controller should allow for short quick movements to scale up on the screen.
And for the "built for action games" deal, you sort of answered your own question. The whole interface design will be overhauled. The question is, will this new control scheme work better than the old one. It's hard to say at this point.
It's important to realize that the controllers that we have today didn't really evolve to fit today's games, but neither did the games evolve to fit the controllers. There's been a lot of back and forth compromises. Nintendo's forcing the issue a little bit here, for third party developers at least, by making them do some serious adapting to the controller. I guess they have faith in it working well. We'll just have to wait and see.
That's interesting. There's the kind of market where "convergence" really could work well. It's somewhere where the convenience of having less to carry becomes more important than the quality of the individual components. Sony should produce an extra rugged PSP, maybe with camo patterns or something. If nothing else, they'd probably get some free good publicity out of it
How about the 4th reason. When DVD's first came out, the players were a bit pricey. It doesn't matter how good a movie you had, most people don't have an extra grand to spend on a player. A PSP is much easier to swing, even if all you wanted it for was movies.
Yeah, the article summary made what I think is a stupid point. It compared some 100,000 sale UMD movies to one particular DVD which was released very early after DVD players became available. The reason that I think this is silly is due to the difference in cost of the players. How much did a DVD player cost when they first came out? Hundreds of dollars? Thousands? The PSP is significantly cheaper, and that price can also be further justified by the fact that it's a game/music player as well.
It sounds more to me like people bought some PSPs cause they're cool, and then grabbed a couple movies just to try them out. A year or two from now, if they're still selling the UMD's, that's the time to decide if they're a success or not. After the novelty wears off.
That's exactly why they did it. Except they did a bad job. They picked a lot of contemporary pop music that sounds appealing to a target audience. But when you play the game, you realize that many of the songs are not a good fit for the game.
With the original, they picked a wide variety of music types. Some of the songs are pretty stupid if you ask me, but with just a couple exceptions, the bongo-ing seems to fit. Konga 2 is missing that, in my opinion.
Of course, one could argue that after Rock Lobster, any sequel was bound to fall short.
Is using EVERY hardware feature in every game what makes games expensive to make? I wouldn't think so. I'd hope that the hardware is there to make things easier for the developer. I think that the particular point of the Lost Garden writer was that the stylized look probably requires less artist effort, and that's where the savings come from. I don't work in the industry, but it's my understanding that that's where the bulk of the money for a big game goes. Content, not programming. It would certainly seem to me that creating all the textures for mario baseball was easier than creating all the textures for GTA: San Andreas. Most of the stuff in the mario universe is just plain colors.
I don't think he was talking about your average clone game, I think he was talking about the big names. Certainly EA isn't spending millions upon millions of dollars every year adding another layer of polish to their latest Madden installment, but that's not really what he was talking about. How long did it take for Valve to finish Half-life 2? How many dollars did they spend on that? It's a great game, no doubt, but it's really just an evolution of the original HL. It has much fancier graphics, meaning it needed much fancier models, and much fancier textures, and better sounds, etc. etc. I can imagine Nintendo reusing a lot of the artwork within their franchises, and instead using their time to work more on the ideas and the gameplay. Which, i think, is one of the reasons that their fanboys are at least forgiving, and often supportive of Nintendo's constant use of franchises.
Although as a sort of relevant note, Nintendo no doubt understands how cheap it is to do a quick update (see the pile of crap that is Donkey Konga 2). So they do do that too sometimes.
I think it makes perfect sense. My mom wasn't terrified of the gamecube controller, but she couldn't manage to play any games that required you to use more than the thumbstick and the A button. So she could play Mario Kart at least halfway competently pretty quickly, but she'd get frustrated with almost immediately. And forget something like Metroid Prime.
Even I get frustrated sometimes, and I've been playing plenty of video games for almost twenty years. It took me a couple hours to get comfortable with the controls on Halo 2, and i still hit the wrong buttons often enough. It's entirely complex, and if you haven't built up the muscle memory over time, it's got to be overwhelming.
I am capable of using a controller with a whole bunch of buttons, but I'd rather not. There's nothing immersive about it, it's not particularly fun. I think Nintendo's really got a great idea here, and if the implementation is solid, it'll be a ton of fun. And that'll make people less afraid of it. Even retarded monkeys like to have fun.
I like google's products, but I don't really see them as being the biggest threat ever to MS. If MS does go down, Google will be but a small part of it. I think in the end it'll be more about MS's software being less appealing than the alternatives.
Like you said, Google can only grow so much without hitting some of the same problems that MS has. Add to that the fact that Google has nowhere near the revenue that MS has thrived on, and I don't think their future is as entirely rosy as people like to think it is. Google doesn't make anywhere near enough money to justify their stock price (granted, this is opinion), and I don't see how they're going to grow revenue at the rate people seem to be expecting. Advertising is only going to take them so far, and search technologies are quickly becoming more commodity as their competitors catch up.
I think Google's honeymoon is going to be short lived. In the end, I don't think it's going to be MS that shuts them down, it's going to be that their hype runs out, and reality sets in.
Well, there are a couple of ways to make money off of stock. The traditional way is to say, ok, I own a portion of the company, and I get a portion of the profits at regular intervals. These are called dividends, and they're nice.
The other way to make money is by trading stock, basically hoping the price of your shares goes up so that you can sell it for more than you bought it. You can make a whole lot of money really fast this way if everything goes right. You can also lose a whole lot of money too. This is all well and good, but relies on consistent growth.
The problem is that somewhere down the line, dividends ceased to be important to many people, and it's all about growth. Many companies don't even pay dividends anymore, instead just stockpiling all their cash if they make any money. Tech companies are all about this business model. Microsoft only recently paid its first dividends out. Now granted, even if you are receiving income from dividends on stock you own, growth is nice because it should mean more profit, meaning bigger dividends.
So, like you said, it's not really necessary for constant growth to make a stock valuable. But dividends are a longer term investment, so they're unattractive to a lot of people. That being the case, the stock market is basically driven by growth, and the fact that we had a short period of ridiculous growth a few years back still has a lot of people's expectations out of whack.
Granted, in reality, it's more complicated than this, but the biggest problem is just people's mindsets, and the get rich quick mentality. And since all these companies are competing for investor's dollars, they'll play the game however they can. Another factor that's led to accounting scandals.
Say there was an ocean on earth, and something big slammed into it, vaporizing all the water. Wouldn't that water just eventually precipitate back down?
I mean, vaporizing something like a person would pretty much destroy them, but it doesn't do much to eliminate individual atoms, it just moves them around. So the ocean itself might be turned into water vapor, but then where does that all go?
I'm sure a big enough impact could blow matter up into space, where it'll float away never to bother the busy earth again, but I would think that most matter gets propelled outwards from an impact, not up. So wouldn't a meteor hitting an ocean just spread the water around?
That'd be ideal, but in all honesty, I don't think the majority of the market is two system households. Especially if the PS3/Xbox360's are as expensive as they say they are.
I can more imagine something like you're saying happening further down the line, a few years into the Revolution's product cycle. Of course, by then, two thirds of the media will have written the console off as a failure. *sigh*
I'm going to add another observation on the DS. I don't have a PSP, so I can't fully compare them, but here goes my comment anyways.
When I evacuated for the hurricane a couple weeks ago, I ended up staying with some of my girlfriend's family, including six kids ranging from the ages of 1-12. Our two DS's were very popular with them, and were the cause of much fighting and grabbing. Portions of the DS even spent some time in the one year-old's mouth.
When it was all said and done, neither of them were damaged in any noticeable way, and they're both entirely functional. Surprisingly enough, I was even able to find all of the games after a mildly extensive search of the house.
The DS is a solid piece of hardware for sure. I don't think twice about throwing it in my bag and going about my day.
A couple things are different here though, that makes the Apple case a bit hard to apply. First off, Apple made some other mistakes besides just the cost of their machines. I'm not going to go through those now, but they were an issue.
Going along with the cost issue, it's looking like Nintendo is planning on costing noticeably less than their competition, which isn't going to hurt.
Third, the lack of software for Apple was made all the more worse by things like cross-platform compatibility. Meaning that having a Mac would make it very difficult to share files with other computers, so once MS got traction in one place (specifically the business world), it was able to use that to steamroll it's way everywhere else. With consoles, you don't go around trading files that same way, so it's less of an issue (although I guess wanting to play with friends on something like x-box live sort of brings that back. hmmmm...)
And the last point I'm going to make, I think it'll be a lot easier for people to wrap their heads around the differences between the Revolution and the other consoles. While computers were becoming mainstream, they were very foreign to most people. Even with a Mac, my dad was never really able to get comfortable using it, and he was a reasonably intelligent middle aged guy. He had no problem using the SNES though, and I'd imagine he'd quickly appreciate the Revolution's controller.
I think anyone who's really into fighting games has already stopped worrying about Nintendo anyways. The Gamecube controller was not built for your standard issue fighting game, so the revolution really isn't new in that regard.
If fighting games are your thing, you're probably better off with one of the other systems. Innovation is a double-edged sword. Pushing for something new sometimes means dropping "legacy" stuff. We'll just have to wait and see if the new stuff makes giving up some of the old.
I'll agree that RPG's aren't the cube's strongpoint. Although you should try Paper Mario: The Thousand Year door. I enjoyed it a lot, even though RPG's don't appeal to me all that much in general.
I think RPG's definitely lean towards the hardcore gamer category, which is one reason why Nintendo doesn't push them. I think Zelda is generally RPG-ish enough for them. *shrug* such is life.
I agree with you, I noted in my post that I was just listing my personal preferences. I know I'm not a model for the whole market, I'm just a good example of a market that's plenty big enough to keep Nintendo in business if they keep doing what they're doing.
And since you brought it up, most of my friends moved to where I am from all over the country to go to school here. While none of us are dirt poor, we cover a decent range of socioeconomic backgrounds, from city brats to rural farm families.
I'm well aware that most people don't have all three consoles. Before this generation I never had more than one console. I only paid for one of the three I have for myself. And if the PS3 and Xbox360 are as expensive as they're sounding, I certainly won't have all three next gen.
I'm not saying that since Nintendo's console is the bestest, they're going to dominate the industry and Sony and MS will be left fighting for scraps. I just think that if Zonk can up and declare the Gamecube a failure like he did, without really backing it up, then I can give a couple reasons why I don't think it's a failure, the primary one being that I think it's better than it's competitors.
Seriously. The only way the Gamecube is a failure is if you compare one set of numbers, total consoles sold. If the only way for a company to be successful is to sell the most of whatever it is they make, then the global economy is going to be in trouble. Fortunately, in the real world, you can make some good money without completely dominating your industry.
How about we judge the consoles by other means? Owning all three consoles, the GameCube gets the most playtime easily, followed by the Xbox. Actually, the PS2 was at a friend's house, and is now under water courtesy of hurricane Katrina, but I'm not shedding any tears for it.
Granted, that's just my personal opinion, but I know of a good number of my other friends who feel that way. We're all in our early twenties, we've got some disposable income, I'd say we represent a pretty desirable market segment for a video game company.
I don't see Nintendo ever dominating the industry like they did back in the NES days. I don't see anyone gaining that kind of control over it. In terms of making Nintendo money, and allowing it to continue to exist as a business, the Gamecube did just fine. In terms of providing a platform on which some fun games could be built, I think it did pretty good too. Oh, and it's even managed to be cheaper to buy than the PS2, which is a year older.
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You're buying into the propaganda that communists are all automatically evil horrible people. The fact that the leaders of Russia didn't say "fuck it" and launch all their missiles has less to do with the grace of god and more to do with the fact that they were reasonable and intelligent people. Not to say that Russia didn't have some crazy rulers (Stalin was a complete nutcase), but living in communist russia did not automatically make you an insane lunatic.
If that were the case, we never would've made it through the cuban missile crisis. Kruschev didn't want war any more than we did, and for the exact same reasons. Because he didn't want millions of people to die. If leaders from either side wanted to fight, it would've happened.
Yeah, seriously, half way into Knights of the Old Republic, I was totally invested in getting my character to bang that Jedi chick. Games can be just as big a let down as real life. *sigh*
I think online retail is a pretty stupid thing to be worried about bringing an end to social interaction. A healthy adult interacts with people in many cases besides buying stuff at stores. Teenagers don't hang out at the mall to buy stuff, they hang out there to be with their friends. Sure, a few people might start purchasing everything from the internet and never leave their house, but the world would be boring without at least a few weirdos.
Beyond commerce, you can make a bit of a better argument. For example, there are a lot of people who read political blogs. Many of the blogs are divided pretty evenly along political ideologies/party lines, and basically consist of them patting each other on the back for supporting their side or bashing the others. It's easy to build up a collection of links of a bunch of blogs that all link each other and pretty much agree. You'll be told pretty much the same thing by all of them, and so it's easy to ignore other viewpoints. I think a situation like that is far more damaging than online shopping recommendations directing me towards buying stuff that I probably like.
I agree. Nintendo has too much riding on this console to screw up the controllers. They'll delay the release before they'll start shipping hardware that they have doubts over. Nintendo's biggest risk is whether or not a good number of third party developers will get on board with the new controllers.
I think even with lackluster 3rd party support, the console will still live and even be fairly profitable (a la the Gamecube). But if Nintendo hopes to make up any serious ground in terms of marketshare, they're going to need more games than they can produce on their own.
I don't think he's whining as much as just wondering where the game industry thinks it's headed. Sure, having a more expensive toy makes you look cooler, but there's a limit for the majority of consumers. If there wasn't everyone would be driving around in porsches or ferrarris, instead of settling for something more practical.
The billion dollar question is where is this line for video game consoles and the mass market? It's even more important in this industry, because you don't make the money on the console anyway, you make it back on volume sales of games. If the high price of these consoles causes them not to sell, then MS/Sony are pretty much screwed. There really isn't a niche for the "super nice, more expensive" console in this industry, because if development studios don't see a big enough customer base, then they won't develop, especially with the costs continually going up.
Believe me, Sony and MS both want to sell their systems to everyone. They're going to lose money on each box they ship, but they still want to sell as many as possible. They're both convinced that the way to move units is to pack as much hardware power into them as is possible, even at the risk of driving prices up really high. And they're just hoping that the price doesn't cross that hazy line of consumer willingness.
Your parent poster understands all too well the power of the consumer's boycott. I think he's wondering if Sony and MS do as well.
Actually, you're fairly wrong. Although a few architects try to function as if they were artists, the average architect does far more than draw pretty pictures. An architect needs to be aware of pretty much all of those little details like fire codes and such, although on complicated projects it's not unusual to consult with a multitude of engineers.
An architect may ask structural engineers to help size columns and beams and whatnot, but it's generally the architect who decides where they go. Most architects have at least a basic understanding of that sort of thing, and enough education to have an informed discussion about it with engineers. Fire codes are a little more complicated than the number of sprinklers and making sure the doors open the right way. The entire circulation patterns of high occupancy buildings can be massively influenced by fire codes, and you can be sure that an architect needs to be involved in that.
There are very few architects who have a completely personal and unique "calling-card style". FLW is one of them, a more contemporary example would be Frank Gehry. Styles in architecture generally span time periods more than particular persons, not to say that everyone doesn't have their own ideas. Architecture has a very long history. It'd be very limiting to think of it as "stealing ideas", so instead we call it "progress", and with a few exceptions, most architects are aware of how much they draw from the past, and are happy to see their own innovations and thoughts influence the profession as a whole.
Copying a building detail for detail is, of course, a slightly different story, but either way, is never good architecture. A well designed building will have made a lot of concessions to its particular location, while at the same time exploiting other properties of the site.
I'm not going to play a game that forces me to vote on whatever referendum comes up. I don't care if some people want the MMO world to have rain while others don't. If you require me to do things in the game that I don't want to do, it's going to stop being fun, and I'm going to stop sending you money in exchange for the privilege to play.
Not to mention the practical problems. What if I'm out of town for a week? When do I vote on stuff going on then? What if I'm not educated on some of the issues, should I be required to vote on those? At worst it'll just fall apart and not work at all. At best, it'll just lead to the formation of political parties and people just picking one and voting for whatever the party tells them to. I don't need a virtual world that mimics the real world that closely.
Direct democracy wouldn't work in the real world because the average person doesn't have the time/resources/knowledge to make educated decisions on all the stuff governments deal with. It wouldn't work in an online world because of all those same reasons, plus the fact that most people will view it as a game, and not want to be bothered with that sort of "practical" stuff while gaming.
I guess if you carefully vetted the membership to just people who want to be fully active in your virtual community and its government, you could do that, but I think it'd become more of a political bickering simulator than anything else. The market for something like that is probably fairly limited.
Well, the control of a central authority is certainly ripe for abuse, but in some ways, it's almost a necessity for online worlds. And that's because there's not enough consequences for being a bad citizen in an online world.
If you're running around griefing in second life, they can't throw you in a virtual jail. Even if they did teleport your avatar into some sort of prison that you couldn't leave, all you have to do is log-off and forget about it. They can't fine you real money, and if you're just in the game to harass other people, you probably don't care about the in-game currency.
Second Life has experimented with a more democratic system, but just like in the real world, most people don't want to be bothered with it. And so the job usually falls to Linden Labs.
I don't understand why so many people are planning on using this controller by pointing their whole arm at the screen all day. I can easily imagine slouching in the couch and holding the controller in my lap, making just very slight movements to control things. It isn't really like a laser pointer that has to be aimed directly where you want to go. I'd imagine the "tracking speed" can be adjusted just like a computer mouse. Just like I only have to move my mouse a couple inches to move my cursor fifteen inches across m monitor, the revolution controller should allow for short quick movements to scale up on the screen.
And for the "built for action games" deal, you sort of answered your own question. The whole interface design will be overhauled. The question is, will this new control scheme work better than the old one. It's hard to say at this point.
It's important to realize that the controllers that we have today didn't really evolve to fit today's games, but neither did the games evolve to fit the controllers. There's been a lot of back and forth compromises. Nintendo's forcing the issue a little bit here, for third party developers at least, by making them do some serious adapting to the controller. I guess they have faith in it working well. We'll just have to wait and see.
That's interesting. There's the kind of market where "convergence" really could work well. It's somewhere where the convenience of having less to carry becomes more important than the quality of the individual components. Sony should produce an extra rugged PSP, maybe with camo patterns or something. If nothing else, they'd probably get some free good publicity out of it
How about the 4th reason. When DVD's first came out, the players were a bit pricey. It doesn't matter how good a movie you had, most people don't have an extra grand to spend on a player. A PSP is much easier to swing, even if all you wanted it for was movies.
Yeah, the article summary made what I think is a stupid point. It compared some 100,000 sale UMD movies to one particular DVD which was released very early after DVD players became available. The reason that I think this is silly is due to the difference in cost of the players. How much did a DVD player cost when they first came out? Hundreds of dollars? Thousands? The PSP is significantly cheaper, and that price can also be further justified by the fact that it's a game/music player as well.
It sounds more to me like people bought some PSPs cause they're cool, and then grabbed a couple movies just to try them out. A year or two from now, if they're still selling the UMD's, that's the time to decide if they're a success or not. After the novelty wears off.
That's exactly why they did it. Except they did a bad job. They picked a lot of contemporary pop music that sounds appealing to a target audience. But when you play the game, you realize that many of the songs are not a good fit for the game.
With the original, they picked a wide variety of music types. Some of the songs are pretty stupid if you ask me, but with just a couple exceptions, the bongo-ing seems to fit. Konga 2 is missing that, in my opinion.
Of course, one could argue that after Rock Lobster, any sequel was bound to fall short.
Is using EVERY hardware feature in every game what makes games expensive to make? I wouldn't think so. I'd hope that the hardware is there to make things easier for the developer. I think that the particular point of the Lost Garden writer was that the stylized look probably requires less artist effort, and that's where the savings come from. I don't work in the industry, but it's my understanding that that's where the bulk of the money for a big game goes. Content, not programming. It would certainly seem to me that creating all the textures for mario baseball was easier than creating all the textures for GTA: San Andreas. Most of the stuff in the mario universe is just plain colors.
I don't think he was talking about your average clone game, I think he was talking about the big names. Certainly EA isn't spending millions upon millions of dollars every year adding another layer of polish to their latest Madden installment, but that's not really what he was talking about. How long did it take for Valve to finish Half-life 2? How many dollars did they spend on that? It's a great game, no doubt, but it's really just an evolution of the original HL. It has much fancier graphics, meaning it needed much fancier models, and much fancier textures, and better sounds, etc. etc. I can imagine Nintendo reusing a lot of the artwork within their franchises, and instead using their time to work more on the ideas and the gameplay. Which, i think, is one of the reasons that their fanboys are at least forgiving, and often supportive of Nintendo's constant use of franchises.
Although as a sort of relevant note, Nintendo no doubt understands how cheap it is to do a quick update (see the pile of crap that is Donkey Konga 2). So they do do that too sometimes.
I think it makes perfect sense. My mom wasn't terrified of the gamecube controller, but she couldn't manage to play any games that required you to use more than the thumbstick and the A button. So she could play Mario Kart at least halfway competently pretty quickly, but she'd get frustrated with almost immediately. And forget something like Metroid Prime.
Even I get frustrated sometimes, and I've been playing plenty of video games for almost twenty years. It took me a couple hours to get comfortable with the controls on Halo 2, and i still hit the wrong buttons often enough. It's entirely complex, and if you haven't built up the muscle memory over time, it's got to be overwhelming.
I am capable of using a controller with a whole bunch of buttons, but I'd rather not. There's nothing immersive about it, it's not particularly fun. I think Nintendo's really got a great idea here, and if the implementation is solid, it'll be a ton of fun. And that'll make people less afraid of it. Even retarded monkeys like to have fun.
I like google's products, but I don't really see them as being the biggest threat ever to MS. If MS does go down, Google will be but a small part of it. I think in the end it'll be more about MS's software being less appealing than the alternatives.
Like you said, Google can only grow so much without hitting some of the same problems that MS has. Add to that the fact that Google has nowhere near the revenue that MS has thrived on, and I don't think their future is as entirely rosy as people like to think it is. Google doesn't make anywhere near enough money to justify their stock price (granted, this is opinion), and I don't see how they're going to grow revenue at the rate people seem to be expecting. Advertising is only going to take them so far, and search technologies are quickly becoming more commodity as their competitors catch up.
I think Google's honeymoon is going to be short lived. In the end, I don't think it's going to be MS that shuts them down, it's going to be that their hype runs out, and reality sets in.
Well, there are a couple of ways to make money off of stock. The traditional way is to say, ok, I own a portion of the company, and I get a portion of the profits at regular intervals. These are called dividends, and they're nice.
The other way to make money is by trading stock, basically hoping the price of your shares goes up so that you can sell it for more than you bought it. You can make a whole lot of money really fast this way if everything goes right. You can also lose a whole lot of money too. This is all well and good, but relies on consistent growth.
The problem is that somewhere down the line, dividends ceased to be important to many people, and it's all about growth. Many companies don't even pay dividends anymore, instead just stockpiling all their cash if they make any money. Tech companies are all about this business model. Microsoft only recently paid its first dividends out. Now granted, even if you are receiving income from dividends on stock you own, growth is nice because it should mean more profit, meaning bigger dividends.
So, like you said, it's not really necessary for constant growth to make a stock valuable. But dividends are a longer term investment, so they're unattractive to a lot of people. That being the case, the stock market is basically driven by growth, and the fact that we had a short period of ridiculous growth a few years back still has a lot of people's expectations out of whack.
Granted, in reality, it's more complicated than this, but the biggest problem is just people's mindsets, and the get rich quick mentality. And since all these companies are competing for investor's dollars, they'll play the game however they can. Another factor that's led to accounting scandals.
Say there was an ocean on earth, and something big slammed into it, vaporizing all the water. Wouldn't that water just eventually precipitate back down?
I mean, vaporizing something like a person would pretty much destroy them, but it doesn't do much to eliminate individual atoms, it just moves them around. So the ocean itself might be turned into water vapor, but then where does that all go?
I'm sure a big enough impact could blow matter up into space, where it'll float away never to bother the busy earth again, but I would think that most matter gets propelled outwards from an impact, not up. So wouldn't a meteor hitting an ocean just spread the water around?
That'd be ideal, but in all honesty, I don't think the majority of the market is two system households. Especially if the PS3/Xbox360's are as expensive as they say they are.
I can more imagine something like you're saying happening further down the line, a few years into the Revolution's product cycle. Of course, by then, two thirds of the media will have written the console off as a failure. *sigh*
I'm going to add another observation on the DS. I don't have a PSP, so I can't fully compare them, but here goes my comment anyways.
When I evacuated for the hurricane a couple weeks ago, I ended up staying with some of my girlfriend's family, including six kids ranging from the ages of 1-12. Our two DS's were very popular with them, and were the cause of much fighting and grabbing. Portions of the DS even spent some time in the one year-old's mouth.
When it was all said and done, neither of them were damaged in any noticeable way, and they're both entirely functional. Surprisingly enough, I was even able to find all of the games after a mildly extensive search of the house.
The DS is a solid piece of hardware for sure. I don't think twice about throwing it in my bag and going about my day.
A couple things are different here though, that makes the Apple case a bit hard to apply. First off, Apple made some other mistakes besides just the cost of their machines. I'm not going to go through those now, but they were an issue.
Going along with the cost issue, it's looking like Nintendo is planning on costing noticeably less than their competition, which isn't going to hurt.
Third, the lack of software for Apple was made all the more worse by things like cross-platform compatibility. Meaning that having a Mac would make it very difficult to share files with other computers, so once MS got traction in one place (specifically the business world), it was able to use that to steamroll it's way everywhere else. With consoles, you don't go around trading files that same way, so it's less of an issue (although I guess wanting to play with friends on something like x-box live sort of brings that back. hmmmm...)
And the last point I'm going to make, I think it'll be a lot easier for people to wrap their heads around the differences between the Revolution and the other consoles. While computers were becoming mainstream, they were very foreign to most people. Even with a Mac, my dad was never really able to get comfortable using it, and he was a reasonably intelligent middle aged guy. He had no problem using the SNES though, and I'd imagine he'd quickly appreciate the Revolution's controller.
I think anyone who's really into fighting games has already stopped worrying about Nintendo anyways. The Gamecube controller was not built for your standard issue fighting game, so the revolution really isn't new in that regard.
If fighting games are your thing, you're probably better off with one of the other systems. Innovation is a double-edged sword. Pushing for something new sometimes means dropping "legacy" stuff. We'll just have to wait and see if the new stuff makes giving up some of the old.
I'll agree that RPG's aren't the cube's strongpoint. Although you should try Paper Mario: The Thousand Year door. I enjoyed it a lot, even though RPG's don't appeal to me all that much in general.
I think RPG's definitely lean towards the hardcore gamer category, which is one reason why Nintendo doesn't push them. I think Zelda is generally RPG-ish enough for them. *shrug* such is life.
I agree with you, I noted in my post that I was just listing my personal preferences. I know I'm not a model for the whole market, I'm just a good example of a market that's plenty big enough to keep Nintendo in business if they keep doing what they're doing.
And since you brought it up, most of my friends moved to where I am from all over the country to go to school here. While none of us are dirt poor, we cover a decent range of socioeconomic backgrounds, from city brats to rural farm families.
I'm well aware that most people don't have all three consoles. Before this generation I never had more than one console. I only paid for one of the three I have for myself. And if the PS3 and Xbox360 are as expensive as they're sounding, I certainly won't have all three next gen.
I'm not saying that since Nintendo's console is the bestest, they're going to dominate the industry and Sony and MS will be left fighting for scraps. I just think that if Zonk can up and declare the Gamecube a failure like he did, without really backing it up, then I can give a couple reasons why I don't think it's a failure, the primary one being that I think it's better than it's competitors.
Seriously. The only way the Gamecube is a failure is if you compare one set of numbers, total consoles sold. If the only way for a company to be successful is to sell the most of whatever it is they make, then the global economy is going to be in trouble. Fortunately, in the real world, you can make some good money without completely dominating your industry.
How about we judge the consoles by other means? Owning all three consoles, the GameCube gets the most playtime easily, followed by the Xbox. Actually, the PS2 was at a friend's house, and is now under water courtesy of hurricane Katrina, but I'm not shedding any tears for it.
Granted, that's just my personal opinion, but I know of a good number of my other friends who feel that way. We're all in our early twenties, we've got some disposable income, I'd say we represent a pretty desirable market segment for a video game company.
I don't see Nintendo ever dominating the industry like they did back in the NES days. I don't see anyone gaining that kind of control over it. In terms of making Nintendo money, and allowing it to continue to exist as a business, the Gamecube did just fine. In terms of providing a platform on which some fun games could be built, I think it did pretty good too. Oh, and it's even managed to be cheaper to buy than the PS2, which is a year older.
Go Nintendo, Go!