That sounds like a big gamble... (oh ha ha. oh it hurts. ha ha. ha)
(To add a thin veneer of content to this otherwise horrible joke, Tulalip is a town near Seattle, much as Whistler and Blackcomb are nearby mountains. Tulalip is best known in the Seattle area for several casinos. I wouldn't be surprise if MS intended the name to be a nod towards the gamble of it all.)
But even assuming we're going to let you stretch the Fifth Amendment to say what you think it says, it still doesn't apply. Net Neutrality's not "taking" anything; that would be forcing a company to transmit internet packets whether they wanted to or not. It's just saying that, if you are going to transmit packets, you need to transmit all the ones you're handed without bias. You're not required to quarter soldiers in your home, but if you're running a boarding house, you can't prevent soldiers from staying. You're not required to run a restaurant, but if you do, you can't disallow a given race/religion/other protected class.
There are many good arguments both for and against Net Neutrality legislation. This is not one of them.
My uncle used his six-year-old as that "smart adaptive application". Kid loved talking on the phone, so he got any telemarketer. Would often take them quite a while to work out that the excited claims of "Gosh!" and "Wow!" weren't really leading to a sale.
Reminds me of a time I was implementing the HUD for a game. This was about 10 years ago, so back when HUD graphics still meant blting actual bits rather than rendering textured tris. The publisher was a movie company, so very concerned about how an image looks but largely uninformed about how computers function.
I was working on the HUD layouts for the different resolutions with their art director. Great guy, great eye, great art director, but this was his first time working on a computer-based project. He was happy with how the 640x480 and 1024x768 screens looked, but felt there was something off with 800x600.
"Could you...", he pauses, searching. "No, that's too much. Could you move it over half a pixel?"
I chuckle. "You know Roger, there are a lot of times that I say I can't do something, when what I really mean is that it would take too long or consume too many resources to be practical. In this case, I really mean I *can't*."
>Second, just because the current systems (and most current US military systems in general) are expensive doesn't mean one couldn't come up with an economic system.
I agree; just because we've never seen an economical approach to military procurement in modern history, and only rarely throughout recorded history, that's no reason to assume it's not going to happen soon. Maybe even tomorrow! We could fund it by buying lottery tickets!
> Build a sub? Not cheap nor easy. Build a cruise missile? Not cheap nor easy.
Minisubs are used by drug runners all the time, and cruise missiles have been built in people's backyards. ( http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/29/1857212 ) Just because you're used to seeing something done in a huge, expensive way doesn't mean that's the only way to do it.
Is a missile really the most likely delivery vehicle? North Korea has not shown any capability to hit mainland USA with a missile, and given the likely small number of warheads they would initially be able to create, they would be unlikely to risk them on unproven technology.
I would expect the bomb to get here through cargo shipping or some similar civilian means. Long-range missile programs are the domain of large, well-funded enemy countries, the foes of the past. Smaller rogue nations and terrorist groups are the more likely, and more serious, threats to consider for the future, and I don't think a missile defense system (even at 100%) buys us much against them.
Posting anon since I probably shouldn't be this specific, but the market for DS software has totally collapsed in Europe, particularly in Spain and Italy, where you sell virtually nothing. Titles in Europe are moving literally 10% of of what they do in NA. Many, if not most, major publishers are currently abandoning the DS completely, since the loss of Europe knocks out a huge chunk of their projected ROI.
Now, I'm in the radical camp that actually reads scientific studies and approaches new phenomena with an eye to determine how they work, rather than shut them down, so I think a lot of the focus on piracy as theft is misplaced. An R40, or similar "piracy" device, also makes your DS dramatically more useful since you can carry around a large library of titles at once. Even better for kids, obviously a key demographic, it prevents the tiny cartridges getting lost or destroyed. When they came out, probably 50% of the people I knew immediately got them, and many for their kids as well. (Note that this is a very skewed sample: I work at a game development company, so we're all pretty hardcore, often each of our kids has their own DS, things like that.) Many of these people started off determined not to pirate and just use it for the convenience. (again, skewed sample - we're voracious, hardcore gamers, but we make them for a living, so we take piracy a little more seriously. Doesn't mean we don't do it, but it often does mean we try not to.) Then they were just downloading the titles to try them out. And so on.
I think piracy is usually as much about convenience as free product. It's just like prohibition: if you try to prevent behavior that everyone sees as reasonable, people will ignore those rules and proceed to behavior they wouldn't have considered reasonable before. The best way to fight piracy on the DS is to give us an easy way to store games on the device digitally. You'll probably want to pair this with a digital distribution scheme, which is fine, and gives you a nice place to ensure that we get free demos of all games. Yes, this will mean that people won't buy the crappy games, which leads to lower licensing revenues for Nintendo, but the DS badly needs to have the wheat cut from the chaff to restore confidence in the platform.
These are just two examples, and more than this is needed to defeat the piracy problem, but the key is the strategy. Don't focus on preventing piracy, focus on your products delivering the real value that your customers want better than the pirates can. You've got economies of scale all over them, and if you don't know your own products and consumers better than the pirates do, you don't deserve either.
tl;dr Massive piracy on DS ensures fewer risky, expensive titles like The World Ends With You and more of the easy, safe, "40 different versions of Imagine Babysitter and Pony Lover DS". The best way to fix the piracy problem is to give people what they want, which isn't really games for free.
> What kind of asshole reports a lost item as stolen after he gets it back?
Wait, what? About a year ago, the police knocked on my door at 3 AM to tell me that they pulled over two teenagers who had stolen my car. The theft and recovery happened while I slept, so I'm an asshole for not telling the police to drop charges?
If I found your phone, spread some private data around the web, and then gave you the phone back before you noticed it was missing, that would be cool with you?
Bad games suck long-term value out of the IP and into short-term profits; great games add enduring value to the IP. I've made games with licensed IP before, and I'm almost certain to do so again, so I care about this sinking in. There are lots of reasons that movie games are usually poor, but one of the biggest is that the license holders think that the added value of the license will make up for a rushed job*. The license will sucker some people into buying, but there's a big cost to that. Please, Hollywood, find a way to work with us so that we can both make great product. There's more fun (and more money) for everyone that way.
*Why is the job rushed you ask? That's the biggest problem with movie games - differing production cycles. Movies have a really long pre-prod with ~3 guys on it, followed by production in something like 1 yr. Games (good, big, AAA ones) want around 6 months pre-prod with ~10 (plus ideally engine dev with 10-20). Then it's 18-24 months of full production, and you can see where the problem comes in. Especially when the game usually needs to wait to design key assets/areas until they can see what the movie is doing.
Cause and effect are getting confused here. It's not that going from single-platform to multi-platform takes your budget from 10M to 20M, it's that having a 20M budget means you have to be multi-platform, while a smaller, 10M game can make its money back on a single platform.
Multiplatform dev does increase cost by a bit, but not a staggering amount. The main costs are usually in engineering (and QA, but the cost of QA guys is miniscule next to the cost of programmers). Several people have pointed out that higher-level content like models, levels, and audio is usually portable, but when the different platforms want differing model descriptions, data layouts, and audio formats, it's a lot of programming work to make that happen.
So anything that's unclaimed like this defaults back to the city? I wonder what they're going to do with the remainder of everyone's unclaimed, unlimited internet access each month. Did they pool the unused hours off of old AOL CDs? What about all-you-can-eat buffets? Solved DC's hunger problems right there.
There are already tons of service providers we use (bank, credit card, hospital, ISP, cable company, cell phone company, etc.) that have a similar or greater amount of data. How does this pose any new problems?
I'd certainly like to see more clearly defined legal standards for how this kind of data may be used, but I'd assume that the tangled mess we have now would apply to the data that the power companies gather as well.
OT, but a chance to wheel out a favorite story. On the Super Nintendo, there was a classic puzzle game called Tetris Attack. Gameplay consisted, as it often does, of shifting blocks around to make larger groupings disappear, causing those above to fall, etc. There was also a system of combos, chains, and hidden tiles, which could all add up to tons of effects and motion going on when someone pulled off a big move. The number of particles and sprites would frequently overwhelm the SNES, causing the framerate to bog down.
Years later, when they were remaking the game for the Nintendo 64 (this time with a Pokemon license), they made sure to keep that same slowdown when the chaos hit. There was no technical reason for it anymore, but it slowed the world down right when you needed the extra reaction time.
Any highly-evolved, highly-specialized form will make use of, and even become dependent on, the defects in its environment. (If you don't believe, go into any game company and listen to the howls of pain when you turn on the overhead lights.)
Speaking as a developer that's gone through this process, folding the DLC team into the main team wouldn't necessarily have helped speed things up much.
There are a lot of different roles in game development (programmer, artist, designer, QA, each with dozens of specialties within them), and these different roles taper off at different rates as a project finishes up. Usually your art guys are done well before the programmers, then a chunk of designers and programmers come off, then the more of those, and finally QA.
So the DLC team isn't really a totally new set of guys; they were almost certainly part of the main team for a while, but as their areas got finished, it made more sense to roll them onto DLC than clutter someone else's area with too many cooks. QA, especially, wouldn't have the bandwidth to test to the additional content at the same time as the main game. By making it DLC, QA can hit it after the main game passes cert, but before it actually ships. There's usually a 2-3 month lag time (duplication, printing, etc.) after you're done making the game before it appears on shelves, which DLC doesn't have to wait through.
That's a nice idea, but the problem is that, as the summary says, enabling ubiquitous touch would require some radical changes to our current UIs - anything interactive must become much bigger, toolbars are favored over menus, you lose a mouse button, etc. Most of these would make the mouse-based experience worse in order to enable the touch-based experience. *That's* why no one is doing this. You can't just add it in cheaply, and there's little evidence it's worth a large cost.
If I could show you a graph of marketing budget vs sales, you'd see that the correlation is much stronger. Making a great game doesn't immediately make people aware of it, and the public isn't the most sophisticated video game consumer.
Remember Daikatana? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana (I can't believe I'm posting a wp link in case people on Slashdot don't know what Daikatana is. No one click that.)) It was famous for being over-hyped and a total mess. It looked good once, but by launch anyone who knew about games knew that it would not be good. And it was still a top-10 seller for 3 months on the back of name recognition. Because the majority of game buyers don't know much about games (just like most industries). People had heard of the game, and they forgot that what they heard was a joke, so they bought it. Oh yeah, it had a big marketing budget too...
The reality is, sales (and therefore income) are better correlated to investment in advertising than the game itself. That pains me (as a game designer) deeply, but it's true. Things like this article used to peg my rage meter, but there's no point in getting upset at EA for realizing the way the market works.
Luckily, that's changing. The market is becoming more savvy, and quality is finally becoming important to publishers. I'm not spilling inside secrets when I say that WB is very excited about the high quality of Arkham Asylum. They knew it would be good, but you can never be sure that a game will be great, and their faces light up whenever they talk about it. It's very encouraging to me to see executives this excited about quality; that's new.
It's now common to hear people say things like "They're an 80+ developer" or "We're targetting 85+", which is also really encouraging. People used to talk about making good games, but now it's important that you be able to clearly establish that. It used to be only sales that mattered, but now people are more willing to accept that if you make quality games, the sales will come. That's huge, and you can expect to see it shift more resources from marketing to production, where they belong.
I wouldn't want to throw out a number like 50%, but if you took your average PC game, got it to compile, and threw it on a 360, I'd expect to performance anywhere from 20%-80% of what you'd get after optimizing it for the console. It's largely going to depend on how multithreaded your architecture was. I can't give you a source, but I've been doing exactly this for 7-8 years, so I trust me.
I don't have nearly the experience with Sony platforms (doing my first title on those now), but the idiot's-port performance would be much worse. That's not a knock on the PS3; it's just much further removed from a PC than a 360 is.
Anyone who's spent time seriously optimizing knows that there's a lot you can do if you know that it will only be built by this compiler, run on this architecture, with this much RAM, etc.
I'm an old-school PC shooter developer, so I definitely felt like you, that there's no way a controller can match mouse+keyboard. Until I watched this exact scenario play out every day for months. Then I changed my mind.
When TF2 came out, my office of game developers was quite excited. We had an official TF2 flag that would go up whenever the servers did; we played every lunchtime and after work, often for hours.
Two of the players were young guys who grew up on Halo, not Marathon/Pathways the way a good person should. Since we're making 360 games, we all have 360 controllers that plug into our PCs, so that's what they used.
I only know details about one of the guys, but he was very good. He was heavily recruited by professional Halo teams, that sort of thing. When the games began, he claimed that he'd show them all that a controller was just as good. They laughed. Then he (and the other guy too, I think) showed up at or near the top of the leaderboards every day. And they stopped.
The PC players are no slouches either, lest you get the wrong idea. There's at least one guy that was in a top quake clan for years (not thresh's, killcreek's), that sort of thing. We all thought there was no way, but the controller players held their own.
We still never stopped making fun of the controller players, of course, and eventually got them to try out mouse+keyboard. After the learning curve they did admit that it was better, which restores some of my faith in life, but controller players can definitely compete with mouse+keyboard players, if they're good enough.
Really? Palm had an App Store? I had a Palm V, VII, and a first-gen Treo, and I never saw a centralized place to buy a wide variety of apps. There were a few, scattered sites that each sold their own product, and a few boxes (mostly office-lite, Tetris, and Bejeweled) at the big box stores, but that was all I ever ran across.
Palm may have had thousands of apps, but without a centralized distribution mechanism, an individual user only ever saw a tiny fraction of those. Where they did find them, sure, a Palm can be just as sticky as an iPhone. To get anecdotal, my father clung to his palm forever because of a few key reference programs he used as a physician. Changing to any phone without those apps would cost him a significant amount of money, so he held off upgrading until he could get an iPhone, which has equivalents.
I think that having crucial apps worked out great for Palm, they just didn't work it enough. And spent a lot of time and money shooting themselves in the foot, face, and anything else handy, which didn't help.
I ended up going with the one simply called "Todo". It's been a while since the auditions, but I believe the winning features were the way it allowed me to quickly enter and order tasks, the ability to maintain multiple, independent task lists, and the support for nested task lists (though only one level deep).
I don't have any evidence, but if I had to guess I'd say that it's the app store that made the difference. The app store is truly transformative, in many non-obvious ways.
It brings network effects to the phone. For a while it seemed everyone I knew had a RAZR, but the popularity of the phone added no value to the individual user. With the iPhone, however, the popularity of the phone brings increased developer attention, which the app store translates to improved functionality, creating a positive feedback loop. Friends will also recommend apps to each other, further creating a network effect, and reminding the non-iphone-owning friends what they're missing.
The app store brings the best form of lock-in Windows ever had - But will it run my apps? - to the phone. Suddenly no non-iPhone can be a true upgrade, since you will likely lose some of your app functionality. Common things, like interfaces for major social sites, etc., will likely be standard, but everyone will have a different set of apps they consider crucial, which will make upgrading difficult. The breadth of the app store has brought the long tail to the phone. It also allows people to be very picky. I spent a several weeks testing out various todo lists on the iPhone, and I won't be happy to change phones unless it has a todo list that meets the very specific criteria I developed.
Certainly other phones will soon have access to app stores of their own, but the huge lead that Apple now has will make it very hard for someone else to catch up. They'll tout how they don't have the same approval headaches that the iPhone does, and that openness will be great. But we don't have to look far for lessons on how the popular operating system can be vastly inferior, yet still more successful than competitors.
The iPhone app store sets the iPhone up to succeed for all the reasons that Windows has. I think it's going to take a significant technology leap or other serious market disruption to stop them at this point. Regardless of how you feel about Apple, you have to respect the the way they've played this.
You say that if you own stock in a company, you own part of its buildings, factories, etc., but what does ownership give you in this case? Can you take your part of that building and go sell it to someone else? Can you take it and use it in your house? Can you have the workers you own get you coffee? What you "own" in this case is entirely virtual. There's a theoretical mapping onto some real items, but the "ownership" that you have over those is very different than the ownership you have over a piece of furniture in your home.
I've conducted dozens of programmer interviews, and I totally disagree. The point of the interview is not to get a job, it's to allow both parties a chance to see if this pairing will work. If I can tell that a prospective employee is just concerned with getting hired, that's a huge red flag. I want to hire someone passionate about the same things that my team is passionate about, someone who will have a good sense of humor when we're both still there at 2 AM, and, of course, someone who has the skills required.
The vast majority of candidates, when they get to the "Do you have any questions for us?" bit, just clam up. "Uh, no, not really." Oh? You're about to commit 40+ hours a week to working for me, and you can't think of anything you'd like to get reassurance on before that happens? I think of this part of the interview as a critical thinking test. You're about to be thrown into a new project; what are the important questions to ask?
Sticking to the job is fine; there are a lot of questions that are good to ask there, but I view going outside the job, to questions about fit, demographics, team structure and interaction, etc as a sign of experience. You've got a lot less to worry about from the guy who asks if his cynical style will be a problem than from the guy who doesn't. Questions about fit show me that you know what it takes to make you happy, which is great. We can check to see if our culture matches, if not, no hard feelings. I work in video games, so the attitude might be a bit different; every company says you should be excited about your work, but most people here actually are, and if you're not it's often a problem. The more people like that we can weed out, the better.
As an interviewer, I love the questions the interviewee asks. As parent poster implies, they tell you a lot about what the candidate thinks is important. Questions that focus solely on job function, ignoring job environment, show someone inexperienced or uninterested. If the questions show that the candidate is trying to find a good fit, a place where he can be himself and excel, that's the guy that gets the thumbs up.
Though Halo obviously wasn't concerned with balancing classes, they iterated on their single-player maps and combat design through multiplayer gameplay. At GDC a few years ago they said that their basic process was to rough out a campaign level, get a bunch of people to jump into a multiplayer game there, and see what developed. After they would group up and discuss where the natural choke points are, spots with great vistas or cover for sniping, and just generally where a fun battle develops. Tweak the level to emphasize those areas, throw some AI in, set them up to do that really cool thing Bob did that one time, and you've got a hit game.
I don't think techniques like this are really all that uncommon. I've worked on a number of FPS titles, and while we were never clever enough to test out the SP levels in MP, most other balance decisions were made there. There are a lot of reasons this makes sense. First off (and Bungie mentioned this as well), you often have your multiplayer up and running well before you have your AI written. (If you don't build the MP in from the beginning, it will usually be a nightmare to work with for the rest of the project.) Also, many of these decisions are made, or at least informed, by a consensus. When we were balancing weapons, we would usually get the whole team to play multiplayer for a few rounds, group up and get some quick impressions, modify and distribute new config files, then repeat. Those discussions are more useful when everyone is coming from the same context.
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds like a big gamble... (oh ha ha. oh it hurts. ha ha. ha)
(To add a thin veneer of content to this otherwise horrible joke, Tulalip is a town near Seattle, much as Whistler and Blackcomb are nearby mountains. Tulalip is best known in the Seattle area for several casinos. I wouldn't be surprise if MS intended the name to be a nod towards the gamble of it all.)
I do not think it means what you think it means.
But even assuming we're going to let you stretch the Fifth Amendment to say what you think it says, it still doesn't apply. Net Neutrality's not "taking" anything; that would be forcing a company to transmit internet packets whether they wanted to or not. It's just saying that, if you are going to transmit packets, you need to transmit all the ones you're handed without bias. You're not required to quarter soldiers in your home, but if you're running a boarding house, you can't prevent soldiers from staying. You're not required to run a restaurant, but if you do, you can't disallow a given race/religion/other protected class.
There are many good arguments both for and against Net Neutrality legislation. This is not one of them.
My uncle used his six-year-old as that "smart adaptive application". Kid loved talking on the phone, so he got any telemarketer. Would often take them quite a while to work out that the excited claims of "Gosh!" and "Wow!" weren't really leading to a sale.
Reminds me of a time I was implementing the HUD for a game. This was about 10 years ago, so back when HUD graphics still meant blting actual bits rather than rendering textured tris. The publisher was a movie company, so very concerned about how an image looks but largely uninformed about how computers function.
I was working on the HUD layouts for the different resolutions with their art director. Great guy, great eye, great art director, but this was his first time working on a computer-based project. He was happy with how the 640x480 and 1024x768 screens looked, but felt there was something off with 800x600.
"Could you...", he pauses, searching. "No, that's too much. Could you move it over half a pixel?"
I chuckle. "You know Roger, there are a lot of times that I say I can't do something, when what I really mean is that it would take too long or consume too many resources to be practical. In this case, I really mean I *can't*."
>Second, just because the current systems (and most current US military systems in general) are expensive doesn't mean one couldn't come up with an economic system.
I agree; just because we've never seen an economical approach to military procurement in modern history, and only rarely throughout recorded history, that's no reason to assume it's not going to happen soon. Maybe even tomorrow! We could fund it by buying lottery tickets!
> Build a sub? Not cheap nor easy. Build a cruise missile? Not cheap nor easy.
Minisubs are used by drug runners all the time, and cruise missiles have been built in people's backyards. ( http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/29/1857212 ) Just because you're used to seeing something done in a huge, expensive way doesn't mean that's the only way to do it.
Is a missile really the most likely delivery vehicle? North Korea has not shown any capability to hit mainland USA with a missile, and given the likely small number of warheads they would initially be able to create, they would be unlikely to risk them on unproven technology.
I would expect the bomb to get here through cargo shipping or some similar civilian means. Long-range missile programs are the domain of large, well-funded enemy countries, the foes of the past. Smaller rogue nations and terrorist groups are the more likely, and more serious, threats to consider for the future, and I don't think a missile defense system (even at 100%) buys us much against them.
Or not posting anon, since the box got unchecked somewhere along the line. Oh well.
Posting anon since I probably shouldn't be this specific, but the market for DS software has totally collapsed in Europe, particularly in Spain and Italy, where you sell virtually nothing. Titles in Europe are moving literally 10% of of what they do in NA. Many, if not most, major publishers are currently abandoning the DS completely, since the loss of Europe knocks out a huge chunk of their projected ROI.
Now, I'm in the radical camp that actually reads scientific studies and approaches new phenomena with an eye to determine how they work, rather than shut them down, so I think a lot of the focus on piracy as theft is misplaced. An R40, or similar "piracy" device, also makes your DS dramatically more useful since you can carry around a large library of titles at once. Even better for kids, obviously a key demographic, it prevents the tiny cartridges getting lost or destroyed. When they came out, probably 50% of the people I knew immediately got them, and many for their kids as well. (Note that this is a very skewed sample: I work at a game development company, so we're all pretty hardcore, often each of our kids has their own DS, things like that.) Many of these people started off determined not to pirate and just use it for the convenience. (again, skewed sample - we're voracious, hardcore gamers, but we make them for a living, so we take piracy a little more seriously. Doesn't mean we don't do it, but it often does mean we try not to.) Then they were just downloading the titles to try them out. And so on.
I think piracy is usually as much about convenience as free product. It's just like prohibition: if you try to prevent behavior that everyone sees as reasonable, people will ignore those rules and proceed to behavior they wouldn't have considered reasonable before. The best way to fight piracy on the DS is to give us an easy way to store games on the device digitally. You'll probably want to pair this with a digital distribution scheme, which is fine, and gives you a nice place to ensure that we get free demos of all games. Yes, this will mean that people won't buy the crappy games, which leads to lower licensing revenues for Nintendo, but the DS badly needs to have the wheat cut from the chaff to restore confidence in the platform.
These are just two examples, and more than this is needed to defeat the piracy problem, but the key is the strategy. Don't focus on preventing piracy, focus on your products delivering the real value that your customers want better than the pirates can. You've got economies of scale all over them, and if you don't know your own products and consumers better than the pirates do, you don't deserve either.
tl;dr
Massive piracy on DS ensures fewer risky, expensive titles like The World Ends With You and more of the easy, safe, "40 different versions of Imagine Babysitter and Pony Lover DS". The best way to fix the piracy problem is to give people what they want, which isn't really games for free.
> What kind of asshole reports a lost item as stolen after he gets it back?
Wait, what? About a year ago, the police knocked on my door at 3 AM to tell me that they pulled over two teenagers who had stolen my car. The theft and recovery happened while I slept, so I'm an asshole for not telling the police to drop charges?
If I found your phone, spread some private data around the web, and then gave you the phone back before you noticed it was missing, that would be cool with you?
Attention every IP holder looking to create licensed games: the reason this worked is that the game was truly excellent. (PC 90, Xbox 88 http://www.gamerankings.com/browse.html?search=chronicles+of+riddick&numrev=3&site=)
Bad games suck long-term value out of the IP and into short-term profits; great games add enduring value to the IP. I've made games with licensed IP before, and I'm almost certain to do so again, so I care about this sinking in. There are lots of reasons that movie games are usually poor, but one of the biggest is that the license holders think that the added value of the license will make up for a rushed job*. The license will sucker some people into buying, but there's a big cost to that. Please, Hollywood, find a way to work with us so that we can both make great product. There's more fun (and more money) for everyone that way.
*Why is the job rushed you ask? That's the biggest problem with movie games - differing production cycles. Movies have a really long pre-prod with ~3 guys on it, followed by production in something like 1 yr. Games (good, big, AAA ones) want around 6 months pre-prod with ~10 (plus ideally engine dev with 10-20). Then it's 18-24 months of full production, and you can see where the problem comes in. Especially when the game usually needs to wait to design key assets/areas until they can see what the movie is doing.
Cause and effect are getting confused here. It's not that going from single-platform to multi-platform takes your budget from 10M to 20M, it's that having a 20M budget means you have to be multi-platform, while a smaller, 10M game can make its money back on a single platform.
Multiplatform dev does increase cost by a bit, but not a staggering amount. The main costs are usually in engineering (and QA, but the cost of QA guys is miniscule next to the cost of programmers). Several people have pointed out that higher-level content like models, levels, and audio is usually portable, but when the different platforms want differing model descriptions, data layouts, and audio formats, it's a lot of programming work to make that happen.
So anything that's unclaimed like this defaults back to the city? I wonder what they're going to do with the remainder of everyone's unclaimed, unlimited internet access each month. Did they pool the unused hours off of old AOL CDs? What about all-you-can-eat buffets? Solved DC's hunger problems right there.
There are already tons of service providers we use (bank, credit card, hospital, ISP, cable company, cell phone company, etc.) that have a similar or greater amount of data. How does this pose any new problems?
I'd certainly like to see more clearly defined legal standards for how this kind of data may be used, but I'd assume that the tangled mess we have now would apply to the data that the power companies gather as well.
> Sometimes flaws improve art,
OT, but a chance to wheel out a favorite story.
On the Super Nintendo, there was a classic puzzle game called Tetris Attack. Gameplay consisted, as it often does, of shifting blocks around to make larger groupings disappear, causing those above to fall, etc. There was also a system of combos, chains, and hidden tiles, which could all add up to tons of effects and motion going on when someone pulled off a big move. The number of particles and sprites would frequently overwhelm the SNES, causing the framerate to bog down.
Years later, when they were remaking the game for the Nintendo 64 (this time with a Pokemon license), they made sure to keep that same slowdown when the chaos hit. There was no technical reason for it anymore, but it slowed the world down right when you needed the extra reaction time.
Any highly-evolved, highly-specialized form will make use of, and even become dependent on, the defects in its environment. (If you don't believe, go into any game company and listen to the howls of pain when you turn on the overhead lights.)
Speaking as a developer that's gone through this process, folding the DLC team into the main team wouldn't necessarily have helped speed things up much.
There are a lot of different roles in game development (programmer, artist, designer, QA, each with dozens of specialties within them), and these different roles taper off at different rates as a project finishes up. Usually your art guys are done well before the programmers, then a chunk of designers and programmers come off, then the more of those, and finally QA.
So the DLC team isn't really a totally new set of guys; they were almost certainly part of the main team for a while, but as their areas got finished, it made more sense to roll them onto DLC than clutter someone else's area with too many cooks. QA, especially, wouldn't have the bandwidth to test to the additional content at the same time as the main game. By making it DLC, QA can hit it after the main game passes cert, but before it actually ships. There's usually a 2-3 month lag time (duplication, printing, etc.) after you're done making the game before it appears on shelves, which DLC doesn't have to wait through.
That's a nice idea, but the problem is that, as the summary says, enabling ubiquitous touch would require some radical changes to our current UIs - anything interactive must become much bigger, toolbars are favored over menus, you lose a mouse button, etc. Most of these would make the mouse-based experience worse in order to enable the touch-based experience. *That's* why no one is doing this. You can't just add it in cheaply, and there's little evidence it's worth a large cost.
I've been working in games for 10 years, and I really, *really* wish I could agree with you.
Did you know that it's only been in the last few years that review scores and sales started to correlate? Until recently, there was virtually no connection between the review scores of your game and how well it sold, and it's still somewhat tenuous.
(see http://games.venturebeat.com/2009/05/29/does-game-quality-translate-into-better-financial-performance/ and http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/features/sales_vs_score.php for some backup on that.)
If I could show you a graph of marketing budget vs sales, you'd see that the correlation is much stronger. Making a great game doesn't immediately make people aware of it, and the public isn't the most sophisticated video game consumer.
Remember Daikatana? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana (I can't believe I'm posting a wp link in case people on Slashdot don't know what Daikatana is. No one click that.)) It was famous for being over-hyped and a total mess. It looked good once, but by launch anyone who knew about games knew that it would not be good. And it was still a top-10 seller for 3 months on the back of name recognition. Because the majority of game buyers don't know much about games (just like most industries). People had heard of the game, and they forgot that what they heard was a joke, so they bought it. Oh yeah, it had a big marketing budget too...
The reality is, sales (and therefore income) are better correlated to investment in advertising than the game itself. That pains me (as a game designer) deeply, but it's true. Things like this article used to peg my rage meter, but there's no point in getting upset at EA for realizing the way the market works.
Luckily, that's changing. The market is becoming more savvy, and quality is finally becoming important to publishers. I'm not spilling inside secrets when I say that WB is very excited about the high quality of Arkham Asylum. They knew it would be good, but you can never be sure that a game will be great, and their faces light up whenever they talk about it. It's very encouraging to me to see executives this excited about quality; that's new.
It's now common to hear people say things like "They're an 80+ developer" or "We're targetting 85+", which is also really encouraging. People used to talk about making good games, but now it's important that you be able to clearly establish that. It used to be only sales that mattered, but now people are more willing to accept that if you make quality games, the sales will come. That's huge, and you can expect to see it shift more resources from marketing to production, where they belong.
I wouldn't want to throw out a number like 50%, but if you took your average PC game, got it to compile, and threw it on a 360, I'd expect to performance anywhere from 20%-80% of what you'd get after optimizing it for the console. It's largely going to depend on how multithreaded your architecture was. I can't give you a source, but I've been doing exactly this for 7-8 years, so I trust me.
I don't have nearly the experience with Sony platforms (doing my first title on those now), but the idiot's-port performance would be much worse. That's not a knock on the PS3; it's just much further removed from a PC than a 360 is.
Anyone who's spent time seriously optimizing knows that there's a lot you can do if you know that it will only be built by this compiler, run on this architecture, with this much RAM, etc.
I'm an old-school PC shooter developer, so I definitely felt like you, that there's no way a controller can match mouse+keyboard. Until I watched this exact scenario play out every day for months. Then I changed my mind.
When TF2 came out, my office of game developers was quite excited. We had an official TF2 flag that would go up whenever the servers did; we played every lunchtime and after work, often for hours.
Two of the players were young guys who grew up on Halo, not Marathon/Pathways the way a good person should. Since we're making 360 games, we all have 360 controllers that plug into our PCs, so that's what they used.
I only know details about one of the guys, but he was very good. He was heavily recruited by professional Halo teams, that sort of thing. When the games began, he claimed that he'd show them all that a controller was just as good. They laughed. Then he (and the other guy too, I think) showed up at or near the top of the leaderboards every day. And they stopped.
The PC players are no slouches either, lest you get the wrong idea. There's at least one guy that was in a top quake clan for years (not thresh's, killcreek's), that sort of thing. We all thought there was no way, but the controller players held their own.
We still never stopped making fun of the controller players, of course, and eventually got them to try out mouse+keyboard. After the learning curve they did admit that it was better, which restores some of my faith in life, but controller players can definitely compete with mouse+keyboard players, if they're good enough.
Really? Palm had an App Store? I had a Palm V, VII, and a first-gen Treo, and I never saw a centralized place to buy a wide variety of apps. There were a few, scattered sites that each sold their own product, and a few boxes (mostly office-lite, Tetris, and Bejeweled) at the big box stores, but that was all I ever ran across.
Palm may have had thousands of apps, but without a centralized distribution mechanism, an individual user only ever saw a tiny fraction of those. Where they did find them, sure, a Palm can be just as sticky as an iPhone. To get anecdotal, my father clung to his palm forever because of a few key reference programs he used as a physician. Changing to any phone without those apps would cost him a significant amount of money, so he held off upgrading until he could get an iPhone, which has equivalents.
I think that having crucial apps worked out great for Palm, they just didn't work it enough. And spent a lot of time and money shooting themselves in the foot, face, and anything else handy, which didn't help.
I ended up going with the one simply called "Todo". It's been a while since the auditions, but I believe the winning features were the way it allowed me to quickly enter and order tasks, the ability to maintain multiple, independent task lists, and the support for nested task lists (though only one level deep).
I don't have any evidence, but if I had to guess I'd say that it's the app store that made the difference. The app store is truly transformative, in many non-obvious ways.
It brings network effects to the phone. For a while it seemed everyone I knew had a RAZR, but the popularity of the phone added no value to the individual user. With the iPhone, however, the popularity of the phone brings increased developer attention, which the app store translates to improved functionality, creating a positive feedback loop. Friends will also recommend apps to each other, further creating a network effect, and reminding the non-iphone-owning friends what they're missing.
The app store brings the best form of lock-in Windows ever had - But will it run my apps? - to the phone. Suddenly no non-iPhone can be a true upgrade, since you will likely lose some of your app functionality. Common things, like interfaces for major social sites, etc., will likely be standard, but everyone will have a different set of apps they consider crucial, which will make upgrading difficult. The breadth of the app store has brought the long tail to the phone. It also allows people to be very picky. I spent a several weeks testing out various todo lists on the iPhone, and I won't be happy to change phones unless it has a todo list that meets the very specific criteria I developed.
Certainly other phones will soon have access to app stores of their own, but the huge lead that Apple now has will make it very hard for someone else to catch up. They'll tout how they don't have the same approval headaches that the iPhone does, and that openness will be great. But we don't have to look far for lessons on how the popular operating system can be vastly inferior, yet still more successful than competitors.
The iPhone app store sets the iPhone up to succeed for all the reasons that Windows has. I think it's going to take a significant technology leap or other serious market disruption to stop them at this point. Regardless of how you feel about Apple, you have to respect the the way they've played this.
You say that if you own stock in a company, you own part of its buildings, factories, etc., but what does ownership give you in this case? Can you take your part of that building and go sell it to someone else? Can you take it and use it in your house? Can you have the workers you own get you coffee? What you "own" in this case is entirely virtual. There's a theoretical mapping onto some real items, but the "ownership" that you have over those is very different than the ownership you have over a piece of furniture in your home.
I've conducted dozens of programmer interviews, and I totally disagree. The point of the interview is not to get a job, it's to allow both parties a chance to see if this pairing will work. If I can tell that a prospective employee is just concerned with getting hired, that's a huge red flag. I want to hire someone passionate about the same things that my team is passionate about, someone who will have a good sense of humor when we're both still there at 2 AM, and, of course, someone who has the skills required.
The vast majority of candidates, when they get to the "Do you have any questions for us?" bit, just clam up. "Uh, no, not really." Oh? You're about to commit 40+ hours a week to working for me, and you can't think of anything you'd like to get reassurance on before that happens? I think of this part of the interview as a critical thinking test. You're about to be thrown into a new project; what are the important questions to ask?
Sticking to the job is fine; there are a lot of questions that are good to ask there, but I view going outside the job, to questions about fit, demographics, team structure and interaction, etc as a sign of experience. You've got a lot less to worry about from the guy who asks if his cynical style will be a problem than from the guy who doesn't. Questions about fit show me that you know what it takes to make you happy, which is great. We can check to see if our culture matches, if not, no hard feelings. I work in video games, so the attitude might be a bit different; every company says you should be excited about your work, but most people here actually are, and if you're not it's often a problem. The more people like that we can weed out, the better.
As an interviewer, I love the questions the interviewee asks. As parent poster implies, they tell you a lot about what the candidate thinks is important. Questions that focus solely on job function, ignoring job environment, show someone inexperienced or uninterested. If the questions show that the candidate is trying to find a good fit, a place where he can be himself and excel, that's the guy that gets the thumbs up.
Though Halo obviously wasn't concerned with balancing classes, they iterated on their single-player maps and combat design through multiplayer gameplay. At GDC a few years ago they said that their basic process was to rough out a campaign level, get a bunch of people to jump into a multiplayer game there, and see what developed. After they would group up and discuss where the natural choke points are, spots with great vistas or cover for sniping, and just generally where a fun battle develops. Tweak the level to emphasize those areas, throw some AI in, set them up to do that really cool thing Bob did that one time, and you've got a hit game.
I don't think techniques like this are really all that uncommon. I've worked on a number of FPS titles, and while we were never clever enough to test out the SP levels in MP, most other balance decisions were made there. There are a lot of reasons this makes sense. First off (and Bungie mentioned this as well), you often have your multiplayer up and running well before you have your AI written. (If you don't build the MP in from the beginning, it will usually be a nightmare to work with for the rest of the project.) Also, many of these decisions are made, or at least informed, by a consensus. When we were balancing weapons, we would usually get the whole team to play multiplayer for a few rounds, group up and get some quick impressions, modify and distribute new config files, then repeat. Those discussions are more useful when everyone is coming from the same context.