...found that the materials inside the unit cost Microsoft $470 before assembly. The console sells at retail for $399, meaning a loss of $71 per unit -- and that is just the start.
This would be true is Microsoft were selling every unit directly to the consumer. But alas, those evil bastards at Best Buy want to actually make money by selling things! (The nerve!) So, they get to buy the XBox 360 for roughly half the retail price. Or maybe 60%. Or 40%... I don't have first-hand knowledge of the deals the big box stores have with Microsoft.
The point is: MS is probably losing something closer to $150 or maybe $200 a unit (before you add in the extras).
The product you are thinking of is "X-Band" released by Catapult/THQ circa 1994. It plugged into the SNES or Genesis cartridge slot, and you plugged your game into THAT on top.
I played NHL on it way back in the day. Ir was pretty good, but most people would pull the plug rather than lose the game.
What X-Band did was emulate one control input on each player's system. So I'd be player two on both systems, and you'd be player one (for instance).
You let something resolve. Now you must go through the OK? step again and again and again.
Magic Online is sucessful in spite of itself.
If you wanted to play a CCG without spending $500 to compete and without clicking OK all day, and with no broken cards and dowzens of strategies, you could always play my online CCG, Chron X. The game has been online since 1997. You'd think that Wizards (and Leaping Lizards) would have looked at Chron X and copied what we did right.
Anyways, sorry about the blatant ad. Chron X is a better game. Download it and let me prove myself right.
Transgendered people can physically reshape their bodies, though you need a ton of time, money, and ability to cut through miles of red tape. Transwomen can get hormones to grow the chest they want, and Transmen can get their breasts removed with surgery. Sexual-reassignment surgery is long-documented as well. You can even get your Adam's Apple "shaved" down, if you want! (Ouch!)
One persistent problem for Transpeople to "pass" as their inner gender is their face. Some women faces just can't "wear" a male gender. And in reverse, it can be even harder.
I guess the Transgendered community can add this to the list of expensive surgeries that can't be afforded.
Bandwidth is not a right. If they say everything loud and clear (not buried in an EULA, tied up in legaljumble) then you pretty much have no right to complain.
Or, even better -- complain with your feet and dollars. Go to a different school.
As the designer and producer of the #1 online collectible card game, WWE With Authority!, and the producer of the longest-running online collectible card game Chron X (over 5 years!), I speak with some "authority" on this subject.
Magic: The Gathering is a brilliant game. I have played it since 1993. I have watched the development of the game from day one. Richard Garfield is a genius, and all people in the CCG industry need to tip their cap to him whenever they design any game. That said, it uses a horrible business model, one that was never intended to work on a real player level. This shows up on the tournament level and will show up in MTGO.
When the game was designed, the most powerful cards were the rarest. Black Lotus, a card that lets you get 3 mana for free (where you normally only get to produce one on the first turn and two on the second and so on), is one of the rarest of all tournament-legal Magic cards. This was done because Wizards naively believed that hardcore players couldn't collect all of the cards, so the harder it was to get something the more powerful it should be.
Unfortunately, the tournament players learned that to compete you HAD to have one copy of each of the "Power Nine," the most-abusable cards in the game. Cards quickly spiraled into the $20, $30 and even (gasp) $50 range! If those cards weren't restricted to one-per-deck (where most cards are four-per-deck), their prices would have been even higher on the secondary market.
Well, Wizards learned that those cards were too powerful and stopped printing them. Again, naively assuming that if you limit the supply that eventually things will become more fair. That wasn't what happened -- the cards became more and more expensive. Today, to get the "Power Nine," you're talking about $800 or more.
Wizards learned that having a group of "haves" and "have nots" was not good for the long-term success of the game. So they created a new tournament format that didn't use any really old cards. This was called Type II, and eventually called Standard. What the Standard tournament format did was to "ban" hundreds of cards without specifically choosing to do so. Invalidating the early players' purchases.
If Magic was an online game from day one, they could have tweaked the costs and gameplay effects of their most-broken (and most-useless) cards. But in Magic, you are stuck. Since MTG-Online must mirror MTG-card board, you get all of the drawbacks of being online but none of the benefits.
Further, when you are dealing with an online game the FIRST priority must be "how will the abusers play this game?", because if it isn't you are screwed. With MTG-card board you have tons of social gaming groups that don't have to deal with the tournament gaming scene. This is extremely unlikely to happen in MTG-Online. Again, since it is linked to a nine-year-old game with sloppy, very complex rules, problems arise.
And my biggest point: Magic is just too expensive. To play in a constructed Standard tournament with just one deck, you usually need to spend $100. Many of the most popular decks run north of $200. And these use cards that are IN PRINT! Then, when Standard has a set rotation (banning another 700 cards to make room for the new sets that have just been released) you need to buy more and more.
You can avoid this by entering Sealed Deck tournaments, but then you are paying around $20 to make a deck with a limited set of cards. I like them, but how many $20 tournaments can you enter a month? Even one every other week makes MTGO a $500/year online game.
For the record, to play any of the online CCGs that I have developed, players need to spend $10 to jump in, $35 to have a serious tournament deck and about $100 to have a full "play set" of any given expansion.
When Wizards gives up on MTG-Online, much like it has the Magic Interactive Encyclopedia and the original Magic PC game, the people who have spent their money will be left with exactly nothing. Our games allow peer-to-peer play (albiet awkwardly) such that if something ever happens to us, you can keep on playing.
Disclaimer time: I speak for Blue Sky Red Design and myself only, not for my employer, our parent company or World Wrestling Entertainment in any way.
OK, so this isn't anywhere near as important as other things in life...
...but why would you post a story like this? Why not say "Matrix Reloaded Has Interesting Request Of Sydney" and put details AWAY FROM THE MAIN PAGE? I mean, I left the theater when I saw a trailer for Matrix 2 and 3 was coming...
Forcing SonicBlue to install "spyware" was a non-starter. (It wouldn't have been spyware, SonicBlue did tell everyone this could be happening, but I digress.) It was a moronic ruling and wasn't even germane to the case. It isn't about "what are people watching", it's about "is this devicing being used solely as a copyright-infringing device"?
The skipping-commercials feature gets Hollywood steamed. And I don't blame them -- it is the crux of their business model. No one likes their business model ruined, just ask the RIAA. The thing is, in the USA we get free, over-the-air TV in return for advertisements being pushed into our houses. That isn't going to change. Instead, where the advertisements are put will change.
On the third-to-last ER of the season, in the ultra-emotional opening segment where we saw people's reactions to Carter dying, the local NBC affiliate had a scrolling text banner across the top of the screen. "Important Details About The Crisis In Boston's Catholic Churches -- stay tuned to Channel 7 The News Station for an important news story tonight at 11!" (Or something close to that.) To the people that really care about ER, this was a major distraction and hurt the content.
It isn't just local affiliates that do this sort of thing. Sticking with NBC for a minute (though they aren't the only ones who do this), is anyone else sick of the text overlays when they come back from commercial? They state the show that you are watching (NBC logo + "The West Wing"), but right before they wipe it away, they REPLACE IT WITH AN AD for something else like "The Friends Baby Is Born This Thursday! (Check local listings.)"
This is only going to get worse. I'm not talking about product-placement stuff that has gone on for decades, I'm talking about how our television will very quickly resemble a poorly-designed web page. Navigation banner on the top, news/stock/other update scroll on the bottom, advertisement on either side and less than 40% of the on-screen space used for content, right in the middle. This will be extra-great with the poor NTSC standard we have in the US.
Sigh. [STRIKETHRU]At least we can point out drastic flaws in our administration when we need to.[/STRIKETHRU] The United States will win the war on terror, and dissenting voices will be quashed. This is wartime, people!
Page 2, under "The Broadcast Flag"
"Detection and response to the Broadcast Flag does not mean less functionality for video devices, including PCs that receive DTV. Rather it adds to these devices the ability to determine the difference between protected and unprotected works. The MPAA and its member companies have no desire to reduce the functionality of PCs or other devices and in fact want them to be MORE functional, not less. That is, so that they are able to provide a secure environment for digital over-the-air broadcast television content, in addition to everything else they do today."
That is right up there with "[insert Spyware of choice] doesn't infringe on your rights as a consumer -- it is giving your PC more functionality by allowing us to market to you in select ways with select business partners."
Look, if you are going to ripoff one of the most forward-thinking games of all time, at least have the decency to credit the source.
I'm not talking about EA, I'm talking about Dani Berry (who was known as Dan Bunten at that time). She created Modem Wars, Command HQ, Global Conquest, and M.U.L.E. She was an innovator of multiplayer online games in the 1980's. She was way ahead of her time, and it is a shame that just as the games business was ready for her again, she lost her battle with lung cancer (July 1998).
As the Publisher of the first gaming newsletter/magazine online, Game Master Journal (which later became Intelligent Gamer Online), I can tell you that this has been going on for over a decade. Basically, the only companies that didn't try to perk me were the huge ones of the time, but even Sega would send me (and others) on all-paid trips to "Editor's Day" -- just a huge party, putting their games in the best possible light.
To call this "payola" is a bit too much, though. I don't know of any reviewer that was actually paid cash-money to make their review of a game better. And, if you game is pretty lame no amount of perks will change that.
The frustrating thing is that the industry really, really needs something that is a cross between "Consumer Reports" and "Ebert and Roeper". A few print magazines have done this (the first incarnation Next Generation, the print version of our own Intelligent Gamer, and a few others) but they don't seem to succeed.
Oh well, time to fire up "Batman Returns" for my NES. I remember EGM telling me that it would be the greatest game ever...
Microsoft pulled every single trick in the book and basically won the case. They got lucky with Judge Penfeld Jackson talking a bit too much to the press... but that wasn't enough. The main thing is that since we had a change at the White House, and therefore the DOJ, everything about this case has been a sham.
If Gore was given the election (he did win it, but he wasn't given the keys) would this case have been settled? If it were settled, would it have been so generous? (Even with the current changes, it is a sweetheart deal.)
Here is a small list, off the top of my head, of the things Microsoft has done or has used to get an advantage in this case:
Delayed the case from coming to trial for almost two years
Made the trial take much longer than needed
Committed perjury -- remember that icon in the system tray that gave it all away?
Claimed in court that Linux was a threat while simultaneously dismissing it in the press and in the industry
Argued that if they didn't get the result they liked that they would appeal to the Supreme Court
Judge Penfeld Jackson rules that Microsoft was guilty of illegally maintaining a monopoly -- this was on April 3, 2000. He then talks way too much to the press
When indications were that they wouldn't win in the Supreme Court, Microsoft tried in the court of appeals AGAIN
Court of appeals vacates Jackson's breakup judgment
Gore win the election but the White House goes to Bush
Bush talks-down the economy. Microsoft uses this as an excuse to end the trial as soon as possible, for the good of the economy.
September 11th. Microsoft uses that grizzly act as an excuse to end the trial as soon as possible, for security (??) reasons as well as for the good of the country. "We don't need internal strife in a time of war" or something like that...
Justice gives a sweetheart deal. 9 states go with it while 9 others do not, including California and Massachusetts.
Microsoft makes some slight changes to the agreement in an attempt to make people happy. It barely works, but hey, they were working "in good faith."
To quote an article from Salon.com, Microsoft also argued that the trial judge's role in approving the proposed settlement is "almost ministerial," and urged her to defer to the judgment of the Justice Department about whether the agreement "is the most appropriate mechanism to resolve the competing interests at stake." To do otherwise, the company argued, would risk constitutional questions over the separation of powers between the executive and judicial branches of government.
I was the founder of the Internet's First Online Game Magazine, "Game Master Journal." It later was renamed Intelligent Gamer Online. We were on Prodigy, Compuserve, AOL (back when it was just AOL) and even the then-new World Wide Web in 1994.
We had THE scoop on the Nintendo 64 (then called "Project Reality" or "Ultra 64") -- we were the first site on the entire planet that had mockups and the Editor-In-Chief, Jer Horowitz, created an image that turned out to be EXACTLY what the N64 controller looked like.
Imagine how thrilled I was to see that image ripped off in a pair of print magazines 8 weeks later. Video Games and Computer Entertainment (now defunct) and Electronic Gaming Monthly both lifted the image and claimed it as their own. I was irate, and made some phone calls.
The publisher of EGM, Sendai Media Group (aka Sendai New Media) purchased us 6 weeks later. It was, without a doubt, the worst business decision of my life. =) Not only were we vastly underpaid (they bought Gamespot 3 months later for $10 million -- we were not paid in the millions -- or even in the hundred-thousands) but our entire culture was ripped apart.
We took advertising. Yep, people were paying for online advertising in 1994. And not $0.000003 CPM! We never let that advertising money affect our journalistic integrity. We were rock-solid. Anything that was a review was labeled as a review and we told people what state the game was in when we reviewed it.
We had news and rumors too. Guess what? All rumors had a bright green label saying "RUMOR." Hey, we got some of those wrong too -- but at least you knew that could happen going in.
Sendai was bought by Ziff-Davis. They killed the magazine in 9 months. We had 250,000 paid subscribers but everyone started hating the magazine when we became a "me too" clone. In order to be first in print we were forced to play fast and loose -- and never write anything bad about anyone spending money with us.
HARRY POTTER FIRST LOOK INSIDE!!!!!
How many magazines had that just to get a bigger buy rate? More than a few. How many of them really reviewed that dog of a game? Not too many.
Sigh. The reality of the situation is that money drives the magazine business. Very few magazines -- and none in the US -- actually cover the video game/PC software business as real journalists. They are ALL hoars to the software publishers. All of them.
My company, Blue Sky Red Design, puts things into beta test before trying to shop them to major publishers. Everyone involved in the process signs something to the effect of "I, the undersigned, own no moral rights in -ProjectName-". There are clauses in there about the fact that any idea the beta testers come up with even remotely related to the game or software become my property.
Yes, those are amazingly-harsh terms. If we didn't have them we would be screwed. Every major company has those terms for a reason. If you don't like those terms, don't beta test.
For the record, we've never had to sic our barely-paid lawyers at anyone. Yet.
[potential ad content] I'm the game designer for Genetic Anomalies, the online arm of THQ. We've been doing online virtual game collectibles since 1997. Chron X, a post apoc/gritty science fiction collectible card game, went on sale in May of 1997. We have had 5 card sets released and some cards from the first set fetch between $10 and $14. Why? Because they are useful. [/ad content]
Why is this OK? Because the expensive, rare cards in Chron X aren't signifigantly more powerful than the other cards in the game... or if they are more powerful they come with a hefty in-game cost. In Everquest, Ashron's Call, Ultima Online or Diablo II there is no in-game cost to using a very rare item or spell or whatever. And since many of the games have a direct head-to-head component, it quickly turns into whoever-spend-the-most-wins. A horrible game mechanic if there ever was one.
We actively encourage the secondary market of our products (Chron X, Star Trek Conquest Online, and WWF With Authority). We do this because we think it gives people a way out if they dislike the game -- their money isn't wrapped up into something they can't cash out of. IF they like the game and stay in it and win (or buy) extra cards, they can sell the cards they don't want or can't use.
The idea that you should restrict the sale of virtual components to a game is a fallacy. You can't prevent it. So embrace it instead. Give users good tools to use like secure trading online, offline trading (where the two characters don't need to be in the same virtual space at the same time to trade goods), and trading histories. Then make sure that the rare items have a gameplay cost and you're all set.
A Diablo II example: You could have this great, all-powerful sword but make it take up almost all of the spots you get to carry items. Now the rarer items are great but require real thought to use. Isn't this a more fair way to do it?
Apple and Sony are both playing hardball versus the GPL. Now is the time we finally see if the GPL stands up in court or not. "Not supporting Clie" is not good enough. Someone needs to haul their asses to the 9th Circut and get this settled once and for all.
No one should be surprised by the actions of either company. It's all about the game, and how you play it. And they play to win, which means make the most money (for them). Releasing stuff under GPL isn't obviously good for business to them, so they don't. =(
I just decided to start making games. I had been making games of various sorts since age ten so I had a ton of practice at making bad games and hanging on to good ones.
The best bit of advice is to just make them. Don't worry about how they look or sound, because someone will always come along and do it better than you. Just strive to make a fun game on any platform -- including index cards or IRC or Shockwave -- and you'll get noticed.
My first commercial product, Acrophobia, was originally a game played by 500 people on IRC. Now, it's been played by something like 1.5 million people. (You can see Acro at flipside.com whenever they get their newest merger crap out of the way.)
Too many replies to this story amount to "but with Junkbuster, we don't see the ads so we don't have to pay anything." I use AdSubtract, myself, and I find it to be nearly perfect. And I even paid for AdSubtract Pro...
The bottom line is this: if you enjoy the use of a service you should pay for it. But people don't want to pay anything they don't have to -- it hurts them on the road towards getting to the top of the capitalism heap. The big problem with not paying is that if you don't pay, and no one else pays, people stop making the content or providing the services you like. You might make it to the top of the heap, but it will be a heap of nothing worth having.
I find that US$30 per year is too much. But US$12? A dollar a month? No problem. I would pay Slashdot this $12 per year, as would I for Salon and CNN. There are other business models waiting to be used as well -- "buy a book from ThinkGeek and get 6 months of Slashdot Premium for free."
Advertising does not work. Gated communities don't work either, unless you have gates the size of AOL. I hope that "voluntary payments" work because if something doesn't work in the next year or two there will be no commercial Internet for content. Or context.
The big companies will always be ahead of crusade sites like Slashdot. Even though we will eventually find out what is going on, it is always after some form of privacy trampling has taken place.
There needs to be a law on the books that prevents the transmission of any information without the user's express consent. I'm not talking about the "If you install this software, you agree to these terms" type of consent, but the "we are sending the following information to our central database: connection speed, monitor type,..." with a OK/Cancel popup. This becomes important when you start sending things like "We are sending the following to the Microsoft database: Your hard drive's serial number, your mother board's serial number, your up-to-date billing statement ensuring you have paid for this week's use of Windows XP,..."
Of course, the odds of such a law happening are slim; the odds of a well-crafted law passing are about zero. We need some Slashdotters in Congress, I guess...
Slashdot Mirror
This would be true is Microsoft were selling every unit directly to the consumer. But alas, those evil bastards at Best Buy want to actually make money by selling things! (The nerve!) So, they get to buy the XBox 360 for roughly half the retail price. Or maybe 60%. Or 40%... I don't have first-hand knowledge of the deals the big box stores have with Microsoft.
The point is: MS is probably losing something closer to $150 or maybe $200 a unit (before you add in the extras).
I played NHL on it way back in the day. Ir was pretty good, but most people would pull the plug rather than lose the game.
What X-Band did was emulate one control input on each player's system. So I'd be player two on both systems, and you'd be player one (for instance).
6+ years and still supported. Not bad for an online game, if I do say so myself. =)
OK? Cancel
You get a chance to counter it.
That triggers an effect.
That triggers another effect.
OK? Cancel
You let something resolve. Now you must go through the OK? step again and again and again.
Magic Online is sucessful in spite of itself.
If you wanted to play a CCG without spending $500 to compete and without clicking OK all day, and with no broken cards and dowzens of strategies, you could always play my online CCG, Chron X. The game has been online since 1997. You'd think that Wizards (and Leaping Lizards) would have looked at Chron X and copied what we did right.
Anyways, sorry about the blatant ad. Chron X is a better game. Download it and let me prove myself right.
...I liked this idea better when it was called TotalFark. Maybe they should get a patent?
One persistent problem for Transpeople to "pass" as their inner gender is their face. Some women faces just can't "wear" a male gender. And in reverse, it can be even harder.
I guess the Transgendered community can add this to the list of expensive surgeries that can't be afforded.
Or, even better -- complain with your feet and dollars. Go to a different school.
Magic: The Gathering is a brilliant game. I have played it since 1993. I have watched the development of the game from day one. Richard Garfield is a genius, and all people in the CCG industry need to tip their cap to him whenever they design any game. That said, it uses a horrible business model, one that was never intended to work on a real player level. This shows up on the tournament level and will show up in MTGO.
When the game was designed, the most powerful cards were the rarest. Black Lotus, a card that lets you get 3 mana for free (where you normally only get to produce one on the first turn and two on the second and so on), is one of the rarest of all tournament-legal Magic cards. This was done because Wizards naively believed that hardcore players couldn't collect all of the cards, so the harder it was to get something the more powerful it should be.
Unfortunately, the tournament players learned that to compete you HAD to have one copy of each of the "Power Nine," the most-abusable cards in the game. Cards quickly spiraled into the $20, $30 and even (gasp) $50 range! If those cards weren't restricted to one-per-deck (where most cards are four-per-deck), their prices would have been even higher on the secondary market.
Well, Wizards learned that those cards were too powerful and stopped printing them. Again, naively assuming that if you limit the supply that eventually things will become more fair. That wasn't what happened -- the cards became more and more expensive. Today, to get the "Power Nine," you're talking about $800 or more.
Wizards learned that having a group of "haves" and "have nots" was not good for the long-term success of the game. So they created a new tournament format that didn't use any really old cards. This was called Type II, and eventually called Standard. What the Standard tournament format did was to "ban" hundreds of cards without specifically choosing to do so. Invalidating the early players' purchases.
If Magic was an online game from day one, they could have tweaked the costs and gameplay effects of their most-broken (and most-useless) cards. But in Magic, you are stuck. Since MTG-Online must mirror MTG-card board, you get all of the drawbacks of being online but none of the benefits.
Further, when you are dealing with an online game the FIRST priority must be "how will the abusers play this game?", because if it isn't you are screwed. With MTG-card board you have tons of social gaming groups that don't have to deal with the tournament gaming scene. This is extremely unlikely to happen in MTG-Online. Again, since it is linked to a nine-year-old game with sloppy, very complex rules, problems arise.
And my biggest point: Magic is just too expensive. To play in a constructed Standard tournament with just one deck, you usually need to spend $100. Many of the most popular decks run north of $200. And these use cards that are IN PRINT! Then, when Standard has a set rotation (banning another 700 cards to make room for the new sets that have just been released) you need to buy more and more.
You can avoid this by entering Sealed Deck tournaments, but then you are paying around $20 to make a deck with a limited set of cards. I like them, but how many $20 tournaments can you enter a month? Even one every other week makes MTGO a $500/year online game.
For the record, to play any of the online CCGs that I have developed, players need to spend $10 to jump in, $35 to have a serious tournament deck and about $100 to have a full "play set" of any given expansion.
When Wizards gives up on MTG-Online, much like it has the Magic Interactive Encyclopedia and the original Magic PC game, the people who have spent their money will be left with exactly nothing. Our games allow peer-to-peer play (albiet awkwardly) such that if something ever happens to us, you can keep on playing.
Disclaimer time: I speak for Blue Sky Red Design and myself only, not for my employer, our parent company or World Wrestling Entertainment in any way.
When my partner read this she laughed for about 10 minutes. Yep, shows I don't know as much about ER as I could...
I did get offtopic with my anti-Bush rant there. But I still got a +5. Go figure. =)
The skipping-commercials feature gets Hollywood steamed. And I don't blame them -- it is the crux of their business model. No one likes their business model ruined, just ask the RIAA. The thing is, in the USA we get free, over-the-air TV in return for advertisements being pushed into our houses. That isn't going to change. Instead, where the advertisements are put will change.
On the third-to-last ER of the season, in the ultra-emotional opening segment where we saw people's reactions to Carter dying, the local NBC affiliate had a scrolling text banner across the top of the screen. "Important Details About The Crisis In Boston's Catholic Churches -- stay tuned to Channel 7 The News Station for an important news story tonight at 11!" (Or something close to that.) To the people that really care about ER, this was a major distraction and hurt the content.
It isn't just local affiliates that do this sort of thing. Sticking with NBC for a minute (though they aren't the only ones who do this), is anyone else sick of the text overlays when they come back from commercial? They state the show that you are watching (NBC logo + "The West Wing"), but right before they wipe it away, they REPLACE IT WITH AN AD for something else like "The Friends Baby Is Born This Thursday! (Check local listings.)"
This is only going to get worse. I'm not talking about product-placement stuff that has gone on for decades, I'm talking about how our television will very quickly resemble a poorly-designed web page. Navigation banner on the top, news/stock/other update scroll on the bottom, advertisement on either side and less than 40% of the on-screen space used for content, right in the middle. This will be extra-great with the poor NTSC standard we have in the US.
Sigh. [STRIKETHRU]At least we can point out drastic flaws in our administration when we need to.[/STRIKETHRU] The United States will win the war on terror, and dissenting voices will be quashed. This is wartime, people!
Page 2, under "The Broadcast Flag" "Detection and response to the Broadcast Flag does not mean less functionality for video devices, including PCs that receive DTV. Rather it adds to these devices the ability to determine the difference between protected and unprotected works. The MPAA and its member companies have no desire to reduce the functionality of PCs or other devices and in fact want them to be MORE functional, not less. That is, so that they are able to provide a secure environment for digital over-the-air broadcast television content, in addition to everything else they do today." That is right up there with "[insert Spyware of choice] doesn't infringe on your rights as a consumer -- it is giving your PC more functionality by allowing us to market to you in select ways with select business partners."
I'm not talking about EA, I'm talking about Dani Berry (who was known as Dan Bunten at that time). She created Modem Wars, Command HQ, Global Conquest, and M.U.L.E. She was an innovator of multiplayer online games in the 1980's. She was way ahead of her time, and it is a shame that just as the games business was ready for her again, she lost her battle with lung cancer (July 1998).
To call this "payola" is a bit too much, though. I don't know of any reviewer that was actually paid cash-money to make their review of a game better. And, if you game is pretty lame no amount of perks will change that.
The frustrating thing is that the industry really, really needs something that is a cross between "Consumer Reports" and "Ebert and Roeper". A few print magazines have done this (the first incarnation Next Generation, the print version of our own Intelligent Gamer, and a few others) but they don't seem to succeed.
Oh well, time to fire up "Batman Returns" for my NES. I remember EGM telling me that it would be the greatest game ever...
That game convinced me that I needed more than Windows and Mac. Nothing on the PC convinced me to stay up playing for 20 hours straight.
Old graphics for sure -- but in '93 and '94 it really was way ahead of the game as far as multiplayer online games were concerned...
If Gore was given the election (he did win it, but he wasn't given the keys) would this case have been settled? If it were settled, would it have been so generous? (Even with the current changes, it is a sweetheart deal.)
Here is a small list, off the top of my head, of the things Microsoft has done or has used to get an advantage in this case:
We had THE scoop on the Nintendo 64 (then called "Project Reality" or "Ultra 64") -- we were the first site on the entire planet that had mockups and the Editor-In-Chief, Jer Horowitz, created an image that turned out to be EXACTLY what the N64 controller looked like.
Imagine how thrilled I was to see that image ripped off in a pair of print magazines 8 weeks later. Video Games and Computer Entertainment (now defunct) and Electronic Gaming Monthly both lifted the image and claimed it as their own. I was irate, and made some phone calls.
The publisher of EGM, Sendai Media Group (aka Sendai New Media) purchased us 6 weeks later. It was, without a doubt, the worst business decision of my life. =) Not only were we vastly underpaid (they bought Gamespot 3 months later for $10 million -- we were not paid in the millions -- or even in the hundred-thousands) but our entire culture was ripped apart.
We took advertising. Yep, people were paying for online advertising in 1994. And not $0.000003 CPM! We never let that advertising money affect our journalistic integrity. We were rock-solid. Anything that was a review was labeled as a review and we told people what state the game was in when we reviewed it.
We had news and rumors too. Guess what? All rumors had a bright green label saying "RUMOR." Hey, we got some of those wrong too -- but at least you knew that could happen going in.
Sendai was bought by Ziff-Davis. They killed the magazine in 9 months. We had 250,000 paid subscribers but everyone started hating the magazine when we became a "me too" clone. In order to be first in print we were forced to play fast and loose -- and never write anything bad about anyone spending money with us.
HARRY POTTER FIRST LOOK INSIDE!!!!!
How many magazines had that just to get a bigger buy rate? More than a few. How many of them really reviewed that dog of a game? Not too many.
Sigh. The reality of the situation is that money drives the magazine business. Very few magazines -- and none in the US -- actually cover the video game/PC software business as real journalists. They are ALL hoars to the software publishers. All of them.
Yes, those are amazingly-harsh terms. If we didn't have them we would be screwed. Every major company has those terms for a reason. If you don't like those terms, don't beta test.
For the record, we've never had to sic our barely-paid lawyers at anyone. Yet.
I'm the game designer for Genetic Anomalies, the online arm of THQ. We've been doing online virtual game collectibles since 1997. Chron X, a post apoc/gritty science fiction collectible card game, went on sale in May of 1997. We have had 5 card sets released and some cards from the first set fetch between $10 and $14. Why? Because they are useful.
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Why is this OK? Because the expensive, rare cards in Chron X aren't signifigantly more powerful than the other cards in the game... or if they are more powerful they come with a hefty in-game cost. In Everquest, Ashron's Call, Ultima Online or Diablo II there is no in-game cost to using a very rare item or spell or whatever. And since many of the games have a direct head-to-head component, it quickly turns into whoever-spend-the-most-wins. A horrible game mechanic if there ever was one.
We actively encourage the secondary market of our products (Chron X, Star Trek Conquest Online, and WWF With Authority). We do this because we think it gives people a way out if they dislike the game -- their money isn't wrapped up into something they can't cash out of. IF they like the game and stay in it and win (or buy) extra cards, they can sell the cards they don't want or can't use.
The idea that you should restrict the sale of virtual components to a game is a fallacy. You can't prevent it. So embrace it instead. Give users good tools to use like secure trading online, offline trading (where the two characters don't need to be in the same virtual space at the same time to trade goods), and trading histories. Then make sure that the rare items have a gameplay cost and you're all set.
A Diablo II example: You could have this great, all-powerful sword but make it take up almost all of the spots you get to carry items. Now the rarer items are great but require real thought to use. Isn't this a more fair way to do it?
No one should be surprised by the actions of either company. It's all about the game, and how you play it. And they play to win, which means make the most money (for them). Releasing stuff under GPL isn't obviously good for business to them, so they don't. =(
The best bit of advice is to just make them. Don't worry about how they look or sound, because someone will always come along and do it better than you. Just strive to make a fun game on any platform -- including index cards or IRC or Shockwave -- and you'll get noticed.
My first commercial product, Acrophobia, was originally a game played by 500 people on IRC. Now, it's been played by something like 1.5 million people. (You can see Acro at flipside.com whenever they get their newest merger crap out of the way.)
The bottom line is this: if you enjoy the use of a service you should pay for it. But people don't want to pay anything they don't have to -- it hurts them on the road towards getting to the top of the capitalism heap. The big problem with not paying is that if you don't pay, and no one else pays, people stop making the content or providing the services you like. You might make it to the top of the heap, but it will be a heap of nothing worth having.
I find that US$30 per year is too much. But US$12? A dollar a month? No problem. I would pay Slashdot this $12 per year, as would I for Salon and CNN. There are other business models waiting to be used as well -- "buy a book from ThinkGeek and get 6 months of Slashdot Premium for free."
Advertising does not work. Gated communities don't work either, unless you have gates the size of AOL. I hope that "voluntary payments" work because if something doesn't work in the next year or two there will be no commercial Internet for content. Or context.
There needs to be a law on the books that prevents the transmission of any information without the user's express consent. I'm not talking about the "If you install this software, you agree to these terms" type of consent, but the "we are sending the following information to our central database: connection speed, monitor type, ..." with a OK/Cancel popup. This becomes important when you start sending things like "We are sending the following to the Microsoft database: Your hard drive's serial number, your mother board's serial number, your up-to-date billing statement ensuring you have paid for this week's use of Windows XP,..."
Of course, the odds of such a law happening are slim; the odds of a well-crafted law passing are about zero. We need some Slashdotters in Congress, I guess...