If you look at console games, you'll note that the price point is now roughly between 60 and 70 dollars, whereas it was 50 a generation or two ago.
No, you won't note that. You'll note that the price point is now roughly between 50 and 60 dollars, assuming you're talking US dollars. You'll also note that $50 was the standard price for console games for much longer than "a generation or two" - more like over 20 years. Heck, I remember Super Nintendo games up to $75 at retail and N64 games sometimes debuted at even higher prices!
Playstation prices bucked the trend (and in fact set a new trend) by being cheaper because pressing CDs cost publishers next to nothing (just as DVD and even Blu-ray duplication is extremely cheap compared to cartridges).
In short, adjusting for inflation, retail console game prices have gone down over the years. This is thanks, again, to the disc formats replacing cartridges and the economies of scale. Even with significantly higher game development costs, more games sold means profits can be realized at lower retail prices.
I think the reason people think that game prices are higher today is that the average age of gamers has risen steadily over the years which means that more people playing games today bought them with their own money. I was buying games with my own money before the Genesis and Super Nintendo hit the scene, so I've had to know game prices for over 20 years.
In looking back over your post and the GP, it's clear that either a) I clicked on the wrong "reply to this" and/or b) I was in a bleary-eyed haze and barely read your post (the latter is possible, though less likely). In any case, I didn't have to write from the "dick's point of view" and I apologize.
I suggest that you read the goddamned article. The author goes into detail explaining why you and your ilk are wrong. Read it. It's a worthwhile way to spend a couple hours if you're actually interested in learning some of the facts about PC piracy, rather than blindly accepting the rationalizations and outright lies spread by those who either a) don't know any better and/or b) just want to keep infringing the copyrights of games because's it's fun and free.
I had a similarly pleasant experience with people in New York on my one visit there (apart from a somewhat aggressive beggar). Of course, that was 20 years ago, so what the hell do I know?:)
Seriously, what you describe in your first paragraph is exactly why many of us who cordially dislike Internet anonymity (I'm Aaron Babb, by the way, hello) understand that sometimes it can be a good thing.
When I'm willing to use my real name it's not that I'm looking for people to see my e-mail address and say "Wow, that's Aaron Babb! Isn't he awesome?" (I'm not). Rather, it's my way of saying that this is my real name and I don't mind if you know it because I'm not going to be an asshole who is unwilling to back up what he says and/or admit when I'm wrong.
Not everybody uses their Internet anonymity to be a jerk, but enough do that I wonder if things would be different if they were using their real names. Still, I have no interest in forcing people to use their real names, mainly because it's not really any of my business if someone doesn't want to do so. I'm free to ignore anonymous jerks, just as I'm free to ignore jerks who use their real names.
In the public domain, it is absolutely right and proper that if I want to make an animation of some Godzilla-like dolls duking it out on YouTube, and call it "Godzilla" I should be allowed to do so as long as I do not profit from it.
Clarification: You're free to make as much profit on material in the public domain as you want/can.
What's worse is that we knew the game was fixed over 2 years ago. Rockstar announced that Xbox 360 had "dibs" on downloadable content for GTA4 around the time that the PS3 was released. So, anyone who bought a PS3 wanting GTA4 with the extras was pretty far out of a loop that included, well, most gamers who were interested in GTA4.
Personally I currently only play games like GoW2, Fallout 3, Rainbow Six series and so on, and my avatar would most definately be out of place in any of those. (Perhaps with the exception of in the brochures, bobbleheads etc in Fallout 3. They are pretty cartoon-like already.
Actually, since the avatar options are fairly limited (I hope this changes to some extent), it wouldn't be that hard for a developer to create models that match up to the various parts of the avatar and then generate an in-game character that looks more appropriate to the setting but still is identifiable as one's avatar. This would be perfect for a game like GTA IV where you could be wandering out Liberty City and see representations of your and your friends' avatars running around.
Agreed, and they apparently have no interest in obese avatars. This was a serious disappointment to me. I wanted to create the fattest, ugliest guy I could, balding, not-shaven, shirt not covering belly. No luck.
Yeah! I wanted to see myself on the screen, not some slim guy with good hygiene and well-fitting clothes! Viva la fat loser!
I like having the best of both worlds. I bought my Xbox 360 last week (after going without for 2 years when I sold my first 360 for a cash infusion), and one of the first things I downloaded was Sid Meier's Pirates! for the 360, a boxed game that's now downloadable. All of this made me glad that the first person on Craigslist who offered to sell me a used 360 was selling an Elite.:)
When we start getting into the 500GB/1TB capacity territory in consoles, combined with high-bandwidth broadband, physical game discs are truly going to be obsolete, much as they're becoming obsolete in terms of video with increased streaming/downloads.
Developers could also optimize their products so that gamers could start playing before the download is complete to compensate for slower downloads. For example, GTA IV installs to the 360 at 6.8GB. When you start the game, you don't need every cutscene, radio station and location, so a downloadable version could probably start being playable at, say, 300MB downloaded.
I'm going to be very happy when discs go the way of, well, all that other stuff that we've replaced with much better stuff.:)
I'm pretty certain this feature was created just to sell more high-priced 120GB hard drives during this Christmas season, and then 250GB hard drives next year (I'm predicting March or April for the introduction of a new hard drive). Accessories = big bucks in consoleland.
One thing to be careful of is that few people care about Christopher Pike and no one outside but the hardcore knows about Robert April...I guess I do on both counts, but it's irrelevant when you're producing a movie targeting the masses.
I'd be tempted to hack the 360, especially as I don't play online. I'm not in the business of losing to 14 year-olds with more time on their hands.
I could probably give up online play, but the idea of potentially losing the XBL Marketplace? Fuhgeddaboutit. Way too much cool stuff to download and play (Pinball FX being my current obsession).
The difference between Max Hardcore and most of the porn industry is that his videos are entirely about dressing "barely legal" girls up to look like "non-legal" girls and then humiliate them, often involving urination...not that I think that should be illegal (if somebody wants to buy it and the people involved are consenting adults), but he's definitely at the more extreme edge of porn.
Why wouldn't they? The "true" professionals would likely be more than happy to pay taxes if they could eliminate the chance to get arrested for conducting their day-to-day business. As it is, I'm also sure that many of them already pay income taxes to some degree to avoid legal hassles if they're investigated by the IRS, declaring themselves to be an "escort" or some such.
Keeping prostitution illegal is misguided and based on a puritanical ideal that has never, and will never, be achieved.
Mix it with the biological details of SimLife and that would be a game I'd play until OS updates render it inoperable (even then I might keep an old PC around for it).
All cliches aside, what are the repercussions if this thing BSODs (or equivalent) during surgery?
Probably minimal. Even with total failure, the solution would be to pull the needle and switch to a standard valve replacement surgery. Once that happens, anything done by the machine can be reversed and damage repaired, if necessary. Of course, something more terrible could happen (I'll save the descriptions for a horror screenplay) but the more catastrophic potential complications are far more likely to be operator error than a problem with the software of the device.
The whole notion of users not broadcasting their real name - well, that's a pretty good idea in general, right? But by codifying it into the terms of service, they protect themselves when some idiot smack-talking kid actually gets the crap beat out of him when someone learns his real name and home address. Or is the target of a scam. Or any number of a thousand bad things that can happen if you aren't careful with your identity online.
Definitely! It's long past time that everyone in the world legislated for the worst case scenario and therefore fucked over 99.999% of people to protect the 0.001% to whom something terrible happens. And, shit, it's not like this has anything to do with free speech. After all, there are plenty of online networks on the PS3, right? You know, ones where the company running it isn't informing their customer base that they're going to be monitoring communications in order to enforce their TOS that says I can be banned for saying, "Hey, good to meet ya. I'm Aaron."
The above is hyperbolic, and if I was playing online games on a PS3 I wouldn't really worry about Sony listening to me talking on their system, any more than I worry about federal employees listening to me via the Echelon system. Still, it doesn't mean that Sony's policies aren't pieces of shit, nor does it mean that Sony's management aren't pieces of shit. They are, in case I'm not being clear.
Lawyers keep puking up these kinds of stupid agreements because, well damn, they get paid to do so. It still isn't going to stop someone from suing them - at least not in MY country - and whatever protection they think these "terms of service" agreements provide will be useless in the face of real damages (I just don't see a judge dismissing a case based on click-through legalese). Meanwhile, Sony gets the benefit of crappy PR and making some of their customers paranoid. Oh, Sony, you're so smart!
I like Hulu enough to sit through 30 seconds of advertising which I think is a fair trade for the programming they offer.
Seriously. How commercial-intolerant would one have to be in order to get annoyed with Hulu's commercials? If network TV had that level of advertising, I'd never skip a comercial again, even with convenient 15/30-second skip buttons. I'll go further, in fact. For a 40- to 50-minute program, I'll take a full five minutes of commercials, perhaps one minute for every ten minutes of content. Sponsors willing to participate in that could expect me to give them significant consideration when I'm making purchasing decisions.
Slashdot Mirror
If you look at console games, you'll note that the price point is now roughly between 60 and 70 dollars, whereas it was 50 a generation or two ago.
No, you won't note that. You'll note that the price point is now roughly between 50 and 60 dollars, assuming you're talking US dollars. You'll also note that $50 was the standard price for console games for much longer than "a generation or two" - more like over 20 years. Heck, I remember Super Nintendo games up to $75 at retail and N64 games sometimes debuted at even higher prices! Playstation prices bucked the trend (and in fact set a new trend) by being cheaper because pressing CDs cost publishers next to nothing (just as DVD and even Blu-ray duplication is extremely cheap compared to cartridges). In short, adjusting for inflation, retail console game prices have gone down over the years. This is thanks, again, to the disc formats replacing cartridges and the economies of scale. Even with significantly higher game development costs, more games sold means profits can be realized at lower retail prices. I think the reason people think that game prices are higher today is that the average age of gamers has risen steadily over the years which means that more people playing games today bought them with their own money. I was buying games with my own money before the Genesis and Super Nintendo hit the scene, so I've had to know game prices for over 20 years.
Most politicians are dip-da-da-dipsticks.
So were Half-Life and Half-Life 2...
In looking back over your post and the GP, it's clear that either a) I clicked on the wrong "reply to this" and/or b) I was in a bleary-eyed haze and barely read your post (the latter is possible, though less likely). In any case, I didn't have to write from the "dick's point of view" and I apologize.
I suggest that you read the goddamned article. The author goes into detail explaining why you and your ilk are wrong. Read it. It's a worthwhile way to spend a couple hours if you're actually interested in learning some of the facts about PC piracy, rather than blindly accepting the rationalizations and outright lies spread by those who either a) don't know any better and/or b) just want to keep infringing the copyrights of games because's it's fun and free.
I had a similarly pleasant experience with people in New York on my one visit there (apart from a somewhat aggressive beggar). Of course, that was 20 years ago, so what the hell do I know? :)
Indeed, which is why I "wonder" instead of being absolutely certain. :)
...said "Brian Gordon?" :)
Seriously, what you describe in your first paragraph is exactly why many of us who cordially dislike Internet anonymity (I'm Aaron Babb, by the way, hello) understand that sometimes it can be a good thing.
When I'm willing to use my real name it's not that I'm looking for people to see my e-mail address and say "Wow, that's Aaron Babb! Isn't he awesome?" (I'm not). Rather, it's my way of saying that this is my real name and I don't mind if you know it because I'm not going to be an asshole who is unwilling to back up what he says and/or admit when I'm wrong.
Not everybody uses their Internet anonymity to be a jerk, but enough do that I wonder if things would be different if they were using their real names. Still, I have no interest in forcing people to use their real names, mainly because it's not really any of my business if someone doesn't want to do so. I'm free to ignore anonymous jerks, just as I'm free to ignore jerks who use their real names.
Clarification: You're free to make as much profit on material in the public domain as you want/can.
What's worse is that we knew the game was fixed over 2 years ago. Rockstar announced that Xbox 360 had "dibs" on downloadable content for GTA4 around the time that the PS3 was released. So, anyone who bought a PS3 wanting GTA4 with the extras was pretty far out of a loop that included, well, most gamers who were interested in GTA4.
Actually, since the avatar options are fairly limited (I hope this changes to some extent), it wouldn't be that hard for a developer to create models that match up to the various parts of the avatar and then generate an in-game character that looks more appropriate to the setting but still is identifiable as one's avatar. This would be perfect for a game like GTA IV where you could be wandering out Liberty City and see representations of your and your friends' avatars running around.
Yeah! I wanted to see myself on the screen, not some slim guy with good hygiene and well-fitting clothes! Viva la fat loser!
I like having the best of both worlds. I bought my Xbox 360 last week (after going without for 2 years when I sold my first 360 for a cash infusion), and one of the first things I downloaded was Sid Meier's Pirates! for the 360, a boxed game that's now downloadable. All of this made me glad that the first person on Craigslist who offered to sell me a used 360 was selling an Elite. :)
:)
When we start getting into the 500GB/1TB capacity territory in consoles, combined with high-bandwidth broadband, physical game discs are truly going to be obsolete, much as they're becoming obsolete in terms of video with increased streaming/downloads.
Developers could also optimize their products so that gamers could start playing before the download is complete to compensate for slower downloads. For example, GTA IV installs to the 360 at 6.8GB. When you start the game, you don't need every cutscene, radio station and location, so a downloadable version could probably start being playable at, say, 300MB downloaded.
I'm going to be very happy when discs go the way of, well, all that other stuff that we've replaced with much better stuff.
I'm pretty certain this feature was created just to sell more high-priced 120GB hard drives during this Christmas season, and then 250GB hard drives next year (I'm predicting March or April for the introduction of a new hard drive). Accessories = big bucks in consoleland.
One thing to be careful of is that few people care about Christopher Pike and no one outside but the hardcore knows about Robert April...I guess I do on both counts, but it's irrelevant when you're producing a movie targeting the masses.
I could probably give up online play, but the idea of potentially losing the XBL Marketplace? Fuhgeddaboutit. Way too much cool stuff to download and play (Pinball FX being my current obsession).
Definitely, although I would note that Florida's actions as regards decency have been out of synch with the rest of the country for a very long time.
The difference between Max Hardcore and most of the porn industry is that his videos are entirely about dressing "barely legal" girls up to look like "non-legal" girls and then humiliate them, often involving urination...not that I think that should be illegal (if somebody wants to buy it and the people involved are consenting adults), but he's definitely at the more extreme edge of porn.
Wow. Then I've watched a lot of illegal porn then. Movies with no dialog and no plot are quite common.
Why wouldn't they? The "true" professionals would likely be more than happy to pay taxes if they could eliminate the chance to get arrested for conducting their day-to-day business. As it is, I'm also sure that many of them already pay income taxes to some degree to avoid legal hassles if they're investigated by the IRS, declaring themselves to be an "escort" or some such.
Keeping prostitution illegal is misguided and based on a puritanical ideal that has never, and will never, be achieved.
Why can't one single Slashdot user buy a defective product without boycotting the company in perpetuity?
Mix it with the biological details of SimLife and that would be a game I'd play until OS updates render it inoperable (even then I might keep an old PC around for it).
Probably minimal. Even with total failure, the solution would be to pull the needle and switch to a standard valve replacement surgery. Once that happens, anything done by the machine can be reversed and damage repaired, if necessary. Of course, something more terrible could happen (I'll save the descriptions for a horror screenplay) but the more catastrophic potential complications are far more likely to be operator error than a problem with the software of the device.
Definitely! It's long past time that everyone in the world legislated for the worst case scenario and therefore fucked over 99.999% of people to protect the 0.001% to whom something terrible happens. And, shit, it's not like this has anything to do with free speech. After all, there are plenty of online networks on the PS3, right? You know, ones where the company running it isn't informing their customer base that they're going to be monitoring communications in order to enforce their TOS that says I can be banned for saying, "Hey, good to meet ya. I'm Aaron."
The above is hyperbolic, and if I was playing online games on a PS3 I wouldn't really worry about Sony listening to me talking on their system, any more than I worry about federal employees listening to me via the Echelon system. Still, it doesn't mean that Sony's policies aren't pieces of shit, nor does it mean that Sony's management aren't pieces of shit. They are, in case I'm not being clear.
Lawyers keep puking up these kinds of stupid agreements because, well damn, they get paid to do so. It still isn't going to stop someone from suing them - at least not in MY country - and whatever protection they think these "terms of service" agreements provide will be useless in the face of real damages (I just don't see a judge dismissing a case based on click-through legalese). Meanwhile, Sony gets the benefit of crappy PR and making some of their customers paranoid. Oh, Sony, you're so smart!
Seriously. How commercial-intolerant would one have to be in order to get annoyed with Hulu's commercials? If network TV had that level of advertising, I'd never skip a comercial again, even with convenient 15/30-second skip buttons. I'll go further, in fact. For a 40- to 50-minute program, I'll take a full five minutes of commercials, perhaps one minute for every ten minutes of content. Sponsors willing to participate in that could expect me to give them significant consideration when I'm making purchasing decisions.