I've never heard of "crapware" before, but charging money for something that has no monetary value (as it's offered for free by another entity) sounds to me like fraud.
That's complete nonsense; if true, it would mean nearly every piece of commercial software was fraud, from office software to image editing software to antivirus software.
Everybody knows that teenagers raised by good parents would never go out of their way to look for pornography. Seeing a fake picture of Salma Hayek straddling a 13-inch schlong when they were just looking for pictures to use in a report on actors' charitable works would traumatize the poor things!
Final Fantasy 11 on the 360 is, as far as I know, the only exception when it comes to requiring a hard drive. It was also the only [North American] PS2 game that required a hard drive - I remember because I was in the PS2 HD beta program.
Some 360 games do ship with "downloadable content" on disc (such as "game of the year" editions such as Fallout 3/New Vegas or Red Dead Redemption, and I've read that Forza Motorsport 3 is an example) that can't be installed without a hard drive but otherwise the base games are always playable without being installed to the hard drive.
I wouldn't be surprised if a key reason Windows Messenger hasn't been killed already is that Microsoft is waiting until their Xbox 360 Skype client is ready to go. I use my 360 for all my gaming and TV viewing, so it would be pretty convenient to be able to get my phone calls through the system as well, especially if the client was capable of multitasking which, unfortunately, some key Microsoft 360 apps (perhaps most notably Xbox Music Pass, formerly Zune Pass) are not.
True. My nephews got a Wii and loved it. I gave them my Gamecube games, and they loved those. In fact, their Wii failed, was replaced by a new one without Gamecube compatibility and they actually asked for a Gamecube. I let them have a taste of Mass Effect 3 when I brought my 360 over to their house and they loved that.
I have no doubt that there will be more people playing tablet games than console games into the future, just like there are more people playing Facebook games than Civilization V. That does not mean, however, that home game consoles are going away, any more than "big-box" PC gaming is going away. It's not so much a shift of the gaming market as it is an expansion.
Mass Effect 3's multiplayer mode may have started as something tacked on so that they could check it off a list, but it's ended up being quite a lot of fun for a lot of people (myself included). I've met more than one person in that game who bought the game specifically for the multiplayer, some of whom have played for an extended period without even touching the single-player game. In fact, one guy I talked to went out and bought the game for his brother so that they could play it together. In short, it's pretty good stuff.
In fact, I think Mass Effect 3 could be an example of the good that could come of publisher pressure. Give a good development team a new objective and they might make something that turns out to be a pleasant surprise.
Probably at about the same time as they weren't able to increase their system RAM in a relatively inexpensive upgrade. PCs with 8+ GB of system RAM are commonplace now, so why would they need to access any of the video RAM to do CPU work?
The sad thing is that it didn't really require any foresight on Sony's part to anticipate greater memory needs. PC games at the time of the PS3's design were already able to take advantage of more system RAM than they ended up putting into the PS3. It was a no-brainer that if they weren't going to allow RAM to be shared, they should have added more. Unfortunately, they were already in so deep financially that they felt they couldn't afford the increased unit cost - and in that sense they were right given how much they charged for the PS3 at launch.
"Imitation" would be one thing. If this guy was just doing the illusion on stage, Teller likely wouldn't bother suing. This guy, however, offered expensive kits for sale so that others could do it, and they don't have to go to the trouble of figuring it out for themselves or even appreciating Teller's part in its creation.
I don't know if the suit can be won, but writing this off as sincere flattery is a mistake.
apple seems really bad at coming up with dpi agnostic solutions so this is what you get. of course it's a selling point on some level, even if it means more pixels to push. of course at some version they're going to have to address this, but not this year(it's rather ridiculous that you can't configure osx to be at all usable on a screen like on the ipad though!).
I think the more important factor is maintaining aspect ratio and size, at least within product lines (iPhone/Touch and iPad).
When designing an application, being able to standardize your UI elements to a fixed display size makes things easier and is friendlier to the consumer. For example, if Apple increases the size of the iPhone display at some point, then it's possible that UI elements designed for the new display could be too small for comfort on an older one.
This was a problem for my dad when he started using a home PC with Windows and he had to reduce the display resolution so that applications operating in a fixed resolution smaller than the size of the screen would be easier to see. This applied mainly to specific shareware programs he liked but it complicated his user experience in that he had to learn to adjust properties of the OS about which he should never have had to learn. In an OS with few customization options, those adjustments might not even be available to the end user.
I could be wrong but isn't there an assault here as well? It's obviously a violent act to grab something out of another person's hand against their will and then there's the second violent act of throwing the phone through a window. If that happened to me, I'd certainly be in fear of further violence against me. Thus, it would seem to rise to the level of assault.
Of course, an assault can still be a misdemeanor but there would seem to be the potential for multiple charges arising from the incident.
One final note: Can you really be called "paparazzi" if you're doing the job with an iPhone? Yeah, the cameras in them are okay but wouldn't their quality be beaten handily by even a relatively cheap, dedicated camera?
I'm just guessing, but it may be because Microsoft Windows is still the standard OS for most desktop PCs with the ability to render high-resolution graphics. Microsoft has never been a huge game developer for PCs. Heck, they're not even a really big developer for the Xbox 360.
You're not the only one. I like my Zune and use the Zune Pass. I like the Zune's interface a lot better than that of the iPod Touch and wish they would have tried harder to compete instead of abandoning it. Maybe Microsoft will make me happy and release a phone-free Windows Phone.
Agreed, there's not much out there in Android-land as good as Skyrim or Civilization or the obscure hex-based military strategy games I like. However the PSVita games aren't that good and cost just as much.
Well played. It's good that you're not rushing to judgment on a system that's only been available (in limited quantities) in this country for a week. Wait, you are, aren't you?
Seriously, I'd never recommend buying a game system at launch. I went against my usual grain and did so with the 3DS and it was a huge mistake. Of the systems launched in this century, none of them have had great launch lineups. Even the Nintendo DS - a system with a multitude of great (and awful) games today - had a terrible lineup of games at launch.
Don't get me wrong. There are some really good reasons to hate on the Vita as it exists today, from battery life to expensive proprietary memory cards. But the game lineup, judged against other launch lineups, is either average or better given that Game Rankings has 6 Vita games listed at 80+%.
Even if there aren't individual serial numbers (and I certainly don't think there are), it would be a simple matter to test it, make sure the game is working, and then give the code. Or at least it would be a simple matter if a) game stores wanted to participate in such a boondoggle that does little or nothing for their regular business (they wouldn't) and b) licensing agreements were in place with every publisher to make their titles available online (they aren't) and allow exchanges of physical discs for downloadable copies (they surely aren't).
Sony doesn't own every game released for the PSP. They were involved in the licensing and production processes, but in the absence of a contract to the contrary, they don't get to unilaterally determine alternate methods of distributing those games.
This is all a tempest in a teapot anyway. The PSP has never been significantly popular in the US and the issue of backwards compatibility will recede into the background as new games are released for the Vita (assuming it does well and generates publisher interest). In the meantime, getting a used PSP - or a new one, for that matter - is easy and cheap. Nobody with these mythical huge collections of UMD games is losing the ability to play their games, either now or in the foreseeable future. I don't understand why they'd have any interest in the Vita anyway if they're still playing the old games so much...oh wait, I do understand: It's fun to bitch about big companies in general, and Sony in particular.
You may be on to something, though it would still be sloppy customer service. The premise that they want to sell more Kindles makes no sense given the prices they set for those devices. It's the content they want to sell; that's where the profit margins are.
If they sold 500,000 at ~$50 , but could have hypothetically moved 3 million at ~$10, they might have come out 5 million dollars ahead (negligible per-copy cost incurred, so volume can pretty well be adjusted at will without repercussion).
That's way beyond unrealistic. I don't believe even half of the pirates would pay $10 for a game, let alone 80%. By that logic, video and music -- both almost universally available for download at pretty darned reasonable prices -- piracy wouldn't be a booming business (and it is a business for some pirate sites).
That's not to say that I disagree that price reductions could be implemented that would benefit the video game industry (there's probably a sales-enhancing middle ground between $10 and $50 per game) but given that video game prices haven't changed significantly -- compared with inflation and considering increased game development costs -- in 20+ years, I think we're dealing with a situation where most people who pirate won't pay any price for what they're downloading. Of course, that means that annoying DRM practices are still an exercise in futility.:)
It's a complicated solution to a problem that doesn't really exist. Companies make good money selling games on optical discs and, again, manufacturing costs (including cases and instruction books) are miniscule. I've got a decent connection and I still wouldn't want to download a BD's worth of data. The frustration of watching a download bar instead of playing a game would drive me nuts; it's already annoying with a DVD9's worth of data. Being forced to go to a particular retail location to download the game to flash memory wouldn't make me happy either (and we could be talking some big flash cards given that Blu-ray games can already reach towards 50GB).
Honestly, the only places I see people complaining about optical discs in game consoles are on technophile sites like this one.
Indeed. I've got virtually unlimited downloads (I'm sure there's a cap somewhere if I pushed hard enough) but how long would that last if just for gaming I was downloading an additional 20+ GB per month? And there are enough people in the world with hard caps on monthly bandwidth that it makes no sense for a console game company to move to a system that would at least limit their game-buying capability ("I'd love to buy Arkham County but I already bought Mass Effect 4 this month"), if not shut them out completely.
So, just to get this straight...Move from a physical disc system where manufacturing costs per disc quickly approach zero to a complicated download system that would not only require more expensive portable physical media but an additional hardware infrastructure in retail stores? Yeah, no.
Agreed that the download latency would suck today, but it's not always as bad as your example. We have 100/100 fiber, and in principle it would take about 70 minutes to download 50GB. In practice, downloads can be slower than 100Mbps, especially when downloading stuff from other countries, but when downloading from a major reputable company we usually get 30Mbps or better per site (and can saturate the 100Mbps by downloading several items simultaneously).
In principle console game companies want everyone to want/buy their product, not just the subset with high-bandwidth, no-cap (particularly important - many caps wouldn't even allow the download of one BD game before extra fees/slowdown/disconnection) broadband connections.
I love downloading games, especially for the PC, but I've also had to wait overnight for Steam to finish downloading, usually due to either general network or Valve server congestion. Being able to decide on a game, go to Gamestop to buy it, come home and start playing over the course of 2 hours (I ride the bus) is very nice. The fact that removing this capability would also limit the available market means that optical discs aren't going away anytime soon.
While I'm sure part of the reason is whatever 3G deals Sony is negotiating around the world, there's also the fact that 3G is S-L-O-W compared to WiFi.
When you start talking about downloading 1GB+ games (this size is fairly common already among PSP games and Vita games will probably be even larger) you run into some big issues because of the time involved. This includes battery life where just about any 3G device would need to be plugged in to pull down a gigabyte of 3G data. There's also going from tower area to tower area while the download is happening; inevitably, the process would start, stop, slow, and/or stall multiple times, increasing the potential that the downloaded data will be corrupt or have to be downloaded more than once.
Granted, a good download manager would take care of both these issues, but it's still a practicality issue. Downloading huge games via 3G would be a dumb use of time, bandwidth, and battery life when one could stop by a Starbucks and get the same download in a fraction of the time.
Well, you see, now you're going down an entirely different, subjective road. Make up your mind: Either you want to criticize my "simplistic" approach for its lack of objective detail or you want to assign values based on more ephemeral factors.
For the record, I agree with you. But when you're taking me to task for how I respond to/attempt to correct a completely misguided post, it seems out of line to move the goalposts like this.
It's too simplistic an explanation that doesn't take into account multitude of variables.
If you want to do a more complex analysis, I'm certainly open to correction. However, keeping in mind the increased spending in game development, I think you'd be hard pressed to find today's games to be anything other than a significantly increased value compared to those sold in the 80s and 90s.
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I've never heard of "crapware" before, but charging money for something that has no monetary value (as it's offered for free by another entity) sounds to me like fraud.
That's complete nonsense; if true, it would mean nearly every piece of commercial software was fraud, from office software to image editing software to antivirus software.
Everybody knows that teenagers raised by good parents would never go out of their way to look for pornography. Seeing a fake picture of Salma Hayek straddling a 13-inch schlong when they were just looking for pictures to use in a report on actors' charitable works would traumatize the poor things!
Final Fantasy 11 on the 360 is, as far as I know, the only exception when it comes to requiring a hard drive. It was also the only [North American] PS2 game that required a hard drive - I remember because I was in the PS2 HD beta program.
Some 360 games do ship with "downloadable content" on disc (such as "game of the year" editions such as Fallout 3/New Vegas or Red Dead Redemption, and I've read that Forza Motorsport 3 is an example) that can't be installed without a hard drive but otherwise the base games are always playable without being installed to the hard drive.
I wouldn't be surprised if a key reason Windows Messenger hasn't been killed already is that Microsoft is waiting until their Xbox 360 Skype client is ready to go. I use my 360 for all my gaming and TV viewing, so it would be pretty convenient to be able to get my phone calls through the system as well, especially if the client was capable of multitasking which, unfortunately, some key Microsoft 360 apps (perhaps most notably Xbox Music Pass, formerly Zune Pass) are not.
True. My nephews got a Wii and loved it. I gave them my Gamecube games, and they loved those. In fact, their Wii failed, was replaced by a new one without Gamecube compatibility and they actually asked for a Gamecube. I let them have a taste of Mass Effect 3 when I brought my 360 over to their house and they loved that.
I have no doubt that there will be more people playing tablet games than console games into the future, just like there are more people playing Facebook games than Civilization V. That does not mean, however, that home game consoles are going away, any more than "big-box" PC gaming is going away. It's not so much a shift of the gaming market as it is an expansion.
Mass Effect 3's multiplayer mode may have started as something tacked on so that they could check it off a list, but it's ended up being quite a lot of fun for a lot of people (myself included). I've met more than one person in that game who bought the game specifically for the multiplayer, some of whom have played for an extended period without even touching the single-player game. In fact, one guy I talked to went out and bought the game for his brother so that they could play it together. In short, it's pretty good stuff.
In fact, I think Mass Effect 3 could be an example of the good that could come of publisher pressure. Give a good development team a new objective and they might make something that turns out to be a pleasant surprise.
Probably at about the same time as they weren't able to increase their system RAM in a relatively inexpensive upgrade. PCs with 8+ GB of system RAM are commonplace now, so why would they need to access any of the video RAM to do CPU work?
The sad thing is that it didn't really require any foresight on Sony's part to anticipate greater memory needs. PC games at the time of the PS3's design were already able to take advantage of more system RAM than they ended up putting into the PS3. It was a no-brainer that if they weren't going to allow RAM to be shared, they should have added more. Unfortunately, they were already in so deep financially that they felt they couldn't afford the increased unit cost - and in that sense they were right given how much they charged for the PS3 at launch.
"Imitation" would be one thing. If this guy was just doing the illusion on stage, Teller likely wouldn't bother suing. This guy, however, offered expensive kits for sale so that others could do it, and they don't have to go to the trouble of figuring it out for themselves or even appreciating Teller's part in its creation.
I don't know if the suit can be won, but writing this off as sincere flattery is a mistake.
apple seems really bad at coming up with dpi agnostic solutions so this is what you get. of course it's a selling point on some level, even if it means more pixels to push. of course at some version they're going to have to address this, but not this year(it's rather ridiculous that you can't configure osx to be at all usable on a screen like on the ipad though!).
I think the more important factor is maintaining aspect ratio and size, at least within product lines (iPhone/Touch and iPad).
When designing an application, being able to standardize your UI elements to a fixed display size makes things easier and is friendlier to the consumer. For example, if Apple increases the size of the iPhone display at some point, then it's possible that UI elements designed for the new display could be too small for comfort on an older one.
This was a problem for my dad when he started using a home PC with Windows and he had to reduce the display resolution so that applications operating in a fixed resolution smaller than the size of the screen would be easier to see. This applied mainly to specific shareware programs he liked but it complicated his user experience in that he had to learn to adjust properties of the OS about which he should never have had to learn. In an OS with few customization options, those adjustments might not even be available to the end user.
I could be wrong but isn't there an assault here as well? It's obviously a violent act to grab something out of another person's hand against their will and then there's the second violent act of throwing the phone through a window. If that happened to me, I'd certainly be in fear of further violence against me. Thus, it would seem to rise to the level of assault.
Of course, an assault can still be a misdemeanor but there would seem to be the potential for multiple charges arising from the incident.
One final note: Can you really be called "paparazzi" if you're doing the job with an iPhone? Yeah, the cameras in them are okay but wouldn't their quality be beaten handily by even a relatively cheap, dedicated camera?
Fingerprinting is old and mature tech.
So are acupuncture, astrology, and polygraph interpretation. I wouldn't put a lot of stock into age as a measure of reliability.
I'm just guessing, but it may be because Microsoft Windows is still the standard OS for most desktop PCs with the ability to render high-resolution graphics. Microsoft has never been a huge game developer for PCs. Heck, they're not even a really big developer for the Xbox 360.
You're not the only one. I like my Zune and use the Zune Pass. I like the Zune's interface a lot better than that of the iPod Touch and wish they would have tried harder to compete instead of abandoning it. Maybe Microsoft will make me happy and release a phone-free Windows Phone.
Agreed, there's not much out there in Android-land as good as Skyrim or Civilization or the obscure hex-based military strategy games I like. However the PSVita games aren't that good and cost just as much.
Well played. It's good that you're not rushing to judgment on a system that's only been available (in limited quantities) in this country for a week. Wait, you are, aren't you?
Seriously, I'd never recommend buying a game system at launch. I went against my usual grain and did so with the 3DS and it was a huge mistake. Of the systems launched in this century, none of them have had great launch lineups. Even the Nintendo DS - a system with a multitude of great (and awful) games today - had a terrible lineup of games at launch.
Don't get me wrong. There are some really good reasons to hate on the Vita as it exists today, from battery life to expensive proprietary memory cards. But the game lineup, judged against other launch lineups, is either average or better given that Game Rankings has 6 Vita games listed at 80+%.
Even if there aren't individual serial numbers (and I certainly don't think there are), it would be a simple matter to test it, make sure the game is working, and then give the code. Or at least it would be a simple matter if a) game stores wanted to participate in such a boondoggle that does little or nothing for their regular business (they wouldn't) and b) licensing agreements were in place with every publisher to make their titles available online (they aren't) and allow exchanges of physical discs for downloadable copies (they surely aren't).
Sony doesn't own every game released for the PSP. They were involved in the licensing and production processes, but in the absence of a contract to the contrary, they don't get to unilaterally determine alternate methods of distributing those games.
This is all a tempest in a teapot anyway. The PSP has never been significantly popular in the US and the issue of backwards compatibility will recede into the background as new games are released for the Vita (assuming it does well and generates publisher interest). In the meantime, getting a used PSP - or a new one, for that matter - is easy and cheap. Nobody with these mythical huge collections of UMD games is losing the ability to play their games, either now or in the foreseeable future. I don't understand why they'd have any interest in the Vita anyway if they're still playing the old games so much...oh wait, I do understand: It's fun to bitch about big companies in general, and Sony in particular.
You may be on to something, though it would still be sloppy customer service. The premise that they want to sell more Kindles makes no sense given the prices they set for those devices. It's the content they want to sell; that's where the profit margins are.
Please, no. I don't want to read about a Supreme Court decision in a few years establishing that fecal matter is speech.
If they sold 500,000 at ~$50 , but could have hypothetically moved 3 million at ~$10, they might have come out 5 million dollars ahead (negligible per-copy cost incurred, so volume can pretty well be adjusted at will without repercussion).
That's way beyond unrealistic. I don't believe even half of the pirates would pay $10 for a game, let alone 80%. By that logic, video and music -- both almost universally available for download at pretty darned reasonable prices -- piracy wouldn't be a booming business (and it is a business for some pirate sites).
:)
That's not to say that I disagree that price reductions could be implemented that would benefit the video game industry (there's probably a sales-enhancing middle ground between $10 and $50 per game) but given that video game prices haven't changed significantly -- compared with inflation and considering increased game development costs -- in 20+ years, I think we're dealing with a situation where most people who pirate won't pay any price for what they're downloading. Of course, that means that annoying DRM practices are still an exercise in futility.
It's a complicated solution to a problem that doesn't really exist. Companies make good money selling games on optical discs and, again, manufacturing costs (including cases and instruction books) are miniscule. I've got a decent connection and I still wouldn't want to download a BD's worth of data. The frustration of watching a download bar instead of playing a game would drive me nuts; it's already annoying with a DVD9's worth of data. Being forced to go to a particular retail location to download the game to flash memory wouldn't make me happy either (and we could be talking some big flash cards given that Blu-ray games can already reach towards 50GB).
Honestly, the only places I see people complaining about optical discs in game consoles are on technophile sites like this one.
Indeed. I've got virtually unlimited downloads (I'm sure there's a cap somewhere if I pushed hard enough) but how long would that last if just for gaming I was downloading an additional 20+ GB per month? And there are enough people in the world with hard caps on monthly bandwidth that it makes no sense for a console game company to move to a system that would at least limit their game-buying capability ("I'd love to buy Arkham County but I already bought Mass Effect 4 this month"), if not shut them out completely.
So, just to get this straight...Move from a physical disc system where manufacturing costs per disc quickly approach zero to a complicated download system that would not only require more expensive portable physical media but an additional hardware infrastructure in retail stores? Yeah, no.
Agreed that the download latency would suck today, but it's not always as bad as your example. We have 100/100 fiber, and in principle it would take about 70 minutes to download 50GB. In practice, downloads can be slower than 100Mbps, especially when downloading stuff from other countries, but when downloading from a major reputable company we usually get 30Mbps or better per site (and can saturate the 100Mbps by downloading several items simultaneously).
In principle console game companies want everyone to want/buy their product, not just the subset with high-bandwidth, no-cap (particularly important - many caps wouldn't even allow the download of one BD game before extra fees/slowdown/disconnection) broadband connections.
I love downloading games, especially for the PC, but I've also had to wait overnight for Steam to finish downloading, usually due to either general network or Valve server congestion. Being able to decide on a game, go to Gamestop to buy it, come home and start playing over the course of 2 hours (I ride the bus) is very nice. The fact that removing this capability would also limit the available market means that optical discs aren't going away anytime soon.
While I'm sure part of the reason is whatever 3G deals Sony is negotiating around the world, there's also the fact that 3G is S-L-O-W compared to WiFi.
When you start talking about downloading 1GB+ games (this size is fairly common already among PSP games and Vita games will probably be even larger) you run into some big issues because of the time involved. This includes battery life where just about any 3G device would need to be plugged in to pull down a gigabyte of 3G data. There's also going from tower area to tower area while the download is happening; inevitably, the process would start, stop, slow, and/or stall multiple times, increasing the potential that the downloaded data will be corrupt or have to be downloaded more than once.
Granted, a good download manager would take care of both these issues, but it's still a practicality issue. Downloading huge games via 3G would be a dumb use of time, bandwidth, and battery life when one could stop by a Starbucks and get the same download in a fraction of the time.
Well, you see, now you're going down an entirely different, subjective road. Make up your mind: Either you want to criticize my "simplistic" approach for its lack of objective detail or you want to assign values based on more ephemeral factors.
For the record, I agree with you. But when you're taking me to task for how I respond to/attempt to correct a completely misguided post, it seems out of line to move the goalposts like this.
It's too simplistic an explanation that doesn't take into account multitude of variables.
If you want to do a more complex analysis, I'm certainly open to correction. However, keeping in mind the increased spending in game development, I think you'd be hard pressed to find today's games to be anything other than a significantly increased value compared to those sold in the 80s and 90s.