On the other hand, something that isn't well-enough realised is that ultimately what banks are playing with is quite close to a fixed-total-reward game. If you make a huge profit then someone has to be making a huge loss to compensate.
1) It's not really a zero sum game the way you're pitching it. It's not even close. If you're expecting to make money day in and day out on the market, then yes, you are essentially gambling. But for folks who follow an advisable savings plan of gradually moving from a diversified portfolio of equities early in their career to a diversified portfolio of fixed income assets later in their career, it's actually a miracle of the modern age. We're fairly fortunate that, unlike all of humanity up till now, we don't actually have to work until the day we die. Every single person who claims "Hey, my 401k disappeared and I'm one year from retirement!" was either an idiot or got greedy gambling on high-risk investments.
2) Banks don't make payroll by winning bets against other bankers- they're the realtors of the financial world taking a commission on every transaction that happens. NYC, London, Hong Kong exist because there is a net influx of cash into the regions, not because the banks are only betting against each other. The way it works is primarily that the banks take a small amount of money from all of us and concentrate the wealth in a small number of people. Those people then spend their money on fancy kitchens, nice cars, etc, and "support" the whole region. Your 401(k) could have made 6 percent, but instead it made 5.5 percent because of the management fee. Add all that up across all savings in the world, and you're talking about a massive amount of money flowing into bank coffers. Sure, they trade money back and forth every day making big bets, but those bets tend to cancel each other out and are dwarfed by the management fees they collect. It's not a coincidence that the resurgence of NYC from 1985 to present also happened to coincide with the largest growth of the financial industry in history (from roughly 10% of US GDP in 1985 to ~22% today).
They don't have large actual cash reserves. That is just slang for liquid accounts. They have a whole team of people who sit around forecast the exact amount of cash necessary to do things like make payroll and A/P at certain times. Then, they manage a whole slew of really low risk investments that come due around the time they need the cash. The rate on really low risk investments investments is by defintion the expected rate of inflation for that period + the time value of money. It's not hard to find investments like TIPS (Treasury Inflation protected securities) that guarantee the proper rate of return.
And they each bring just as much revenue into Blizzard as the most obsessed raider, probably at a lower cost.
A minor point. Most of the hardcore raiders I know have more than one account- some up to five for multiboxing. I'd actually be quite curious what the ratio is of accounts in the game to credit cards charged.
The thought of people registering to vote through an XBox is frightening.
1. Please enter your Full Name and Address below. 2. What is your political affiliation? (Please Check Only One) - Enjoy Screaming Racial/Homosexual Epithets (Republican) - Teabagger (Democrat) - Spawn Camper (Libertarian)
It seems more likely to me that an engineer made the decision to bypass an ASIC vendor. Regarding the design-it-ourself vs. buy-it-from-vendor decision, my personal experience has been:
* Engineers lean towards design-it-ourself because they overestimate their expertise in technologies they're not familiar with.
* MBAs lean towards buying-it-from-vendor because they overestimate their ability to negotiate a good deal with the vendor.
I would imagine the decision-making process is a bit more complicated than simply looking at current and forecast market shares of the consoles. Most consumers have a limited budget to buy games- say 6 per year. If there are 10 amazing games coming out Wii and 2 for the PS3, then I can imagine a scenario where my chances of securing a PS3 owner would be better than for a Wii owner.
Gamers would choose from the best games available for their platform, and my chances for being in the consideration set for an individual gamer would be higher for the PS3 than the Wii. I would then multiply my probabilities for being in the consideration set for an individual gamer on each console times the number of consoles sold to come up with an estimate of sales.
There's a reason some developers are Mac exclusive, and I think it's based on the above logic.
They're a company. Thats all companies do care about
The problem with your statement is that corporations/companies are run by humans, not robots. It's far cheaper (profitable) to send executives on commercial airlines, and yet we see almost all major companies flying their execs around in private jets. I would posit that most executives run their companies out of self-interest rather than some lofty ambition to maximize profits.
For the guys out there that have gone up in the ranks and achieved astounding financial success, the next step is to boost their own ego by being seen as "a good citizen." Some CEOs use their companies as extensions of their own charitable intentions, securing personal satisfaction from giving out millions and getting a front seat at the Red Cross Annual giving awards. Many publicly held companies give far more than they need to secure public goodwill.
Milton Friedman wrote a famous article deriding corporate leadership for giving too much to charity, claiming "the business of business is business." His point was that public corporations should give money to the shareholders, who then get to decide how to spend their money.
Then, you always have the oddball company that is not privately held and does "profit-irresponsible" things. Bosch Gmbh, with $50 billion a year in revenues (auto parts, primarily), was set up as a charitable entity and gives 96% of shareholder dividends to charity. Privately held companies have no responsibility to do whatever the hell they want, and their actions primarily depends on the mood of the founder or owner.
I would propose that the folks who work at Nintendo would rank making good games above being profitable. Doing well-enough financially allows them to keep their jobs and keep doing what they're passionate about.
Of course they found emails saying this. It's blatantly obvious to any armchair strategist. The only way you wouldn't find an email somewhere in the MS vault saying something anti-competitive is if the entire organization had been coached not to use this type of language. In fact, this is how corporate America operates today. Employees at market leader companies are specifically taught not to use phrases like crush, damage, etc when refering to the competition in electronic communications. It's perfectly fine to advocate these types of tactics in verbal communications, though.
Everyone these days knows enough not to say anything incriminating in emails, but rather to save it for face-to-face meetings.
Pay should be based on qualifications and performance, not experience.
The only way around this would be to break the teacher's union.
As far as I've seen, unions and "pay-for-performance" are completely incompatible. The people who design union structures are not dummies. As soon as you start paying someone more than someone else for performance, you plant the seeds of competition between individuals. This would completely undermine the ONE thing that holds a union together and allows them to exercise power - solidarity.
I call BS on Sony claiming rumble is a "last-gen" technology considering they wanted to integrate it into the PS3 controller all the way up until the date they lost the initial claim.
However, this case is all about settling the damages related to sales of PS2 controllers and has nothing to with the PS3 now that the design has been changed. Microsoft's settlement is far less than Sony's for two reasons- they settled earlier in the process and, most importantly, Sony sold a hell of a lot more PS2 rumble controllers than MS sold Xbox rumble controllers. As far as a court is concerned, Sony deserves to pay more damages which are based on some sort of cost-per-unit-sold calculation.
Sony only licensed the patent until 2009. I find it unlikely they would sell a new rumble PS3 controller for 2 more years, then scramble to come up with an alternative. This settlement is all about the past, not the future.
The responses you'll get to this question are well intentioned, but I can tell you definitively the answer to this question. The internet should not be your primary source for answers to these questions. Human beings will.
I've got a successful startup under my belt- almost 100 employees, throws off a lot of cash, happy customers, etc. Get in the habit of talking to people to find answers to questions rather than running to the internet. Need legal help? Contact the bar association. Talk to a couple lawyers. See if you can develop a friendship with them. Same goes for accounting issues. Need entrepreneurship help? Join your local e'ship club and have lunch with 10 of them. Ask them for advice. People love to talk about their businesses. Milk them for info. See if you can share costs on something or other. Potential customer ideas, whatever.
Entrepreneurship (not a product design) is about talking with contacts to do whatever it takes to get the business off the ground.
Yeah a making a game base off a movie will sell 2M copies, but how much did you have to pay for the license?
This is a nice point. Let's say I'm an investor and have a choice between two investments: 1) A game that will cost $2 million in development, $8 million in license fees, and $0 million in marketing and will sell X copies. 2) A game that will cost $5 million in development, $0 million in license fees, and $5 million in marketing and will sell X copies.
Of course, we don't know how many copies will sell, but bear with me for a moment. Market theory dicates that the total cost of the game should yield a certain number of game sales. If we knew #1 would sell more games, then the licenser should theoretically charge more money.
At the end of the day, I'd rather invest in #2. Here's why- at the end of the product life, I've now got a brand/franchise that I can sequel and make a nice bit of money on. Essentially, I've gotten profits and built up an asset. Halo/Warcraft are great examples of the value of building a franchise.
With choice #1, I've gotten some profits, but next time, I'll have to again pay those licensing fees. Essentially, I'm back to square one.
If you want to take things a step further, I would bet the return on investment for a licensed game is less than that of an original game because the licensed game is more a "sure bet." Just like in the stock market, low risk investments typically yield lower returns.
These guys waited till point 6 out of 10 to explain the REAL problem:
6. Games Are Better Suited for Brick and Mortar Retailers: There is not a huge selection of games; it is a new release industry (majority of sales are in the first two weeks of release). Large retailers make money on other products after they get you in the door. We do not; most people come to a website to purchase a video game, not a video game and a bunch of movies. There is also no game catalog market, if you wanted to buy an old copy you would buy it used. So retailers are able to stock all new games, and they can return the ones that don't sell. Games bring in great foot traffic for physical retailers and they make money elsewhere. EB Games/Gamestop relies heavily on their used business. It is very difficult for online retailers to have an advantage, except for convenience.
If this is the case, then why did they bother to get into the game business? Why not stick with something they do well at- selling DVD's online? It sounds like they're bitter at making a terrible decision and pointing the finger at everyone but themselves.
This is just another boutique retailer who got burned by the big guys who manage to get games into gamers hands cheaply. Heck, one Walmart store probably sells more games than these guys. It shouldn't be a huge surpise that they can't do well when they buy through a distributor. It doesn't mean there's some huge structural problem in the industry.
Oh, and by the way, 8.5% retail margins are not horrible. These guys should talk to independent grocers if they think they've got it bad.
There's some pretty hilarious comments on Jaffe's blog that talk about the interview before it went mainstream. There's also some classic 'nerd at the Playboy mansion' type of commentary along with him posing with bunnies:
"So I get drunk and Jeff 'let's fuck with Jaffe's career' Resse- who is a MARKETING guy- brings me in front of the gametrailers.com cameras and we just go at it, tossing insults, doing a totally drunk interview, screaming at the camera (I think at one point I told EGM to fuck off for calling me THE KING OF BULLSHIT in this month's Q-MAN!)...it was total fun and I'm sure I've just made like 100 more people on the message boards hate me because of it. Ah well:) Watch for it....I hope they do some editing! Be nice, Gametrailers!"
I found it interesting that the Wii was 10th on the most edited list. I suppose the "newsworthiness" of this is not the fact that vandalism is happening- period. The interesting fact is the magnitude of the vandalism.
I wouldn't find it interesting that a subway car got spray-painted. I would find it interesting that all the subway cars in NYC got vandalized overnight.
I love the tirades in it about "just work" and "Your average user doesn't have the time, the energy or the inclination to deal with uncertainty"...
No kidding... Anytime I see someone talking about the "average" customer, I sigh. The average American has 1 breast and 1 testicle, but you don't see anyone out there designing 1 cup bras.
Product Design 101 teaches you how to segment your market into useful groups, and then figure out how to develop a product offering (or products) that appeals to each of the segments. Designing a product for the average rarely results in success.
Yours is an interesting post. I would add one point though.
I tend to sit much closer to my television when I'm playing games than when I'm watching TV- the whole lean forward vs. lean back interaction... I'd estimate maybe 5 feet vs. 10 feet, respectively. I'm not sure if this is common or not, but it could explain why folks care more about resolution when gaming.
You guys are both right. Sony has managed to piss off the analysts with their poor performance and information sharing, mainstream customers with the PS3 pricing, and early adopters with their other shenanigans. Taken individually, "people" tend to write these things off as a screw-up. Taken together, people interpret this as a corporate culture that is in serious trouble.
This is one of those (-1) + (-1) + (-1) = (-5) public perception situations.
There is a term for this type of political extortion: Mud Farming. It comes from the story of a farmer who owned a plot of land next to a dirt road. Each night, he'd plough up and water down the road, then wait for cars to get stuck. He would then, of course, be ready to pull them out of the mud with his tractor for a tidy sum.
In politics, it goes like this: Give money to my campaign, or I'll go after your industry. Although I don't necessarily agree, many political analysts feel the Microsoft Monopoly case occured not out of public concern, but due to the simple fact that MS was not spending enough money on lobbyists or campagins. The tech industry as a whole during the 80s-90s spent orders of magnitude less %-wise of their revenues on impacting political legislation. Mature industries like the automotive, steel, lumber, oil, etc. industries have learned to "pay the piper." The high tech industry has finally come around, and the result has been much more favorable attention from our legislators.
The video game industry finds itself in the same quagmire. Young, fast-growth industries often do. Management is focused more on putting out product than seeing "the big picture." It takes a slap on the wrist to learn. We don't see legislators going after the movie and music industries, after all.
Many would say this is due to the public's fear of "new things for kids." In part, I agree. But, the mechanics of the process of legislation involve two things: money and public opinion. Unfortunately the video game industry is losing on both fronts these days.
Parasites in the brain are a baaaad thing and not as uncommon as you might think.
Around 90% of French have been infected by Toxoplasma gondii, a nasty little parasite that infects the brain and is suspected to cause changes to the host's personality.
This explains a lot.
(Disclaimer: some facts may have been omitted to make a joke about the French)
Look at what most public companies are spending their cash on right now: share price pumping, ie. stock buybacks. Is there no better use for that capital?
Look at the tax rate for personal income (which dividends are taxed at) and then compare it to the tax rate for capital gains (which share buybacks are effectively taxed at). That is about 99% of the reason why companies choose buybacks over dividends. Significantly more money ends up in the shareholders' hands through a stock buyback.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, something that isn't well-enough realised is that ultimately what banks are playing with is quite close to a fixed-total-reward game. If you make a huge profit then someone has to be making a huge loss to compensate.
1) It's not really a zero sum game the way you're pitching it. It's not even close. If you're expecting to make money day in and day out on the market, then yes, you are essentially gambling. But for folks who follow an advisable savings plan of gradually moving from a diversified portfolio of equities early in their career to a diversified portfolio of fixed income assets later in their career, it's actually a miracle of the modern age. We're fairly fortunate that, unlike all of humanity up till now, we don't actually have to work until the day we die. Every single person who claims "Hey, my 401k disappeared and I'm one year from retirement!" was either an idiot or got greedy gambling on high-risk investments.
2) Banks don't make payroll by winning bets against other bankers- they're the realtors of the financial world taking a commission on every transaction that happens. NYC, London, Hong Kong exist because there is a net influx of cash into the regions, not because the banks are only betting against each other. The way it works is primarily that the banks take a small amount of money from all of us and concentrate the wealth in a small number of people. Those people then spend their money on fancy kitchens, nice cars, etc, and "support" the whole region. Your 401(k) could have made 6 percent, but instead it made 5.5 percent because of the management fee. Add all that up across all savings in the world, and you're talking about a massive amount of money flowing into bank coffers. Sure, they trade money back and forth every day making big bets, but those bets tend to cancel each other out and are dwarfed by the management fees they collect. It's not a coincidence that the resurgence of NYC from 1985 to present also happened to coincide with the largest growth of the financial industry in history (from roughly 10% of US GDP in 1985 to ~22% today).
They don't have large actual cash reserves. That is just slang for liquid accounts. They have a whole team of people who sit around forecast the exact amount of cash necessary to do things like make payroll and A/P at certain times. Then, they manage a whole slew of really low risk investments that come due around the time they need the cash. The rate on really low risk investments investments is by defintion the expected rate of inflation for that period + the time value of money. It's not hard to find investments like TIPS (Treasury Inflation protected securities) that guarantee the proper rate of return.
And they each bring just as much revenue into Blizzard as the most obsessed raider, probably at a lower cost.
A minor point. Most of the hardcore raiders I know have more than one account- some up to five for multiboxing. I'd actually be quite curious what the ratio is of accounts in the game to credit cards charged.
"the most powerful video card in history", it's "the most powerful videocard yet".
FACT: The Rebel Alliance used significantly more powerful videocards to render the Death Star in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.
FACT: This event occured a long time ago in a galaxy far far away.
[/pet peeve]
So your bank knows that your money has been transferred to some "bank" in $THIRD_WORLD_SHITHOLE
Aha... Now I know why my friends in New Jersey can't cash my checks.
The thought of people registering to vote through an XBox is frightening.
1. Please enter your Full Name and Address below.
2. What is your political affiliation? (Please Check Only One)
- Enjoy Screaming Racial/Homosexual Epithets (Republican)
- Teabagger (Democrat)
- Spawn Camper (Libertarian)
It seems more likely to me that an engineer made the decision to bypass an ASIC vendor. Regarding the design-it-ourself vs. buy-it-from-vendor decision, my personal experience has been:
* Engineers lean towards design-it-ourself because they overestimate their expertise in technologies they're not familiar with.
* MBAs lean towards buying-it-from-vendor because they overestimate their ability to negotiate a good deal with the vendor.
The term "several orders of magnitude" is used incorrectly several orders of magnitude more often incorrectly than correctly.
There... I just helped make my own case.
I would imagine the decision-making process is a bit more complicated than simply looking at current and forecast market shares of the consoles. Most consumers have a limited budget to buy games- say 6 per year. If there are 10 amazing games coming out Wii and 2 for the PS3, then I can imagine a scenario where my chances of securing a PS3 owner would be better than for a Wii owner.
Gamers would choose from the best games available for their platform, and my chances for being in the consideration set for an individual gamer would be higher for the PS3 than the Wii. I would then multiply my probabilities for being in the consideration set for an individual gamer on each console times the number of consoles sold to come up with an estimate of sales.
There's a reason some developers are Mac exclusive, and I think it's based on the above logic.
They're a company. Thats all companies do care about
The problem with your statement is that corporations/companies are run by humans, not robots. It's far cheaper (profitable) to send executives on commercial airlines, and yet we see almost all major companies flying their execs around in private jets. I would posit that most executives run their companies out of self-interest rather than some lofty ambition to maximize profits.
For the guys out there that have gone up in the ranks and achieved astounding financial success, the next step is to boost their own ego by being seen as "a good citizen." Some CEOs use their companies as extensions of their own charitable intentions, securing personal satisfaction from giving out millions and getting a front seat at the Red Cross Annual giving awards. Many publicly held companies give far more than they need to secure public goodwill.
Milton Friedman wrote a famous article deriding corporate leadership for giving too much to charity, claiming "the business of business is business." His point was that public corporations should give money to the shareholders, who then get to decide how to spend their money.
Then, you always have the oddball company that is not privately held and does "profit-irresponsible" things. Bosch Gmbh, with $50 billion a year in revenues (auto parts, primarily), was set up as a charitable entity and gives 96% of shareholder dividends to charity. Privately held companies have no responsibility to do whatever the hell they want, and their actions primarily depends on the mood of the founder or owner.
I would propose that the folks who work at Nintendo would rank making good games above being profitable. Doing well-enough financially allows them to keep their jobs and keep doing what they're passionate about.
Of course they found emails saying this. It's blatantly obvious to any armchair strategist. The only way you wouldn't find an email somewhere in the MS vault saying something anti-competitive is if the entire organization had been coached not to use this type of language. In fact, this is how corporate America operates today. Employees at market leader companies are specifically taught not to use phrases like crush, damage, etc when refering to the competition in electronic communications. It's perfectly fine to advocate these types of tactics in verbal communications, though.
Everyone these days knows enough not to say anything incriminating in emails, but rather to save it for face-to-face meetings.
Pay should be based on qualifications and performance, not experience.
The only way around this would be to break the teacher's union.
As far as I've seen, unions and "pay-for-performance" are completely incompatible. The people who design union structures are not dummies. As soon as you start paying someone more than someone else for performance, you plant the seeds of competition between individuals. This would completely undermine the ONE thing that holds a union together and allows them to exercise power - solidarity.
I call BS on Sony claiming rumble is a "last-gen" technology considering they wanted to integrate it into the PS3 controller all the way up until the date they lost the initial claim.
However, this case is all about settling the damages related to sales of PS2 controllers and has nothing to with the PS3 now that the design has been changed. Microsoft's settlement is far less than Sony's for two reasons- they settled earlier in the process and, most importantly, Sony sold a hell of a lot more PS2 rumble controllers than MS sold Xbox rumble controllers. As far as a court is concerned, Sony deserves to pay more damages which are based on some sort of cost-per-unit-sold calculation.
Sony only licensed the patent until 2009. I find it unlikely they would sell a new rumble PS3 controller for 2 more years, then scramble to come up with an alternative. This settlement is all about the past, not the future.
The responses you'll get to this question are well intentioned, but I can tell you definitively the answer to this question. The internet should not be your primary source for answers to these questions. Human beings will.
I've got a successful startup under my belt- almost 100 employees, throws off a lot of cash, happy customers, etc. Get in the habit of talking to people to find answers to questions rather than running to the internet. Need legal help? Contact the bar association. Talk to a couple lawyers. See if you can develop a friendship with them. Same goes for accounting issues. Need entrepreneurship help? Join your local e'ship club and have lunch with 10 of them. Ask them for advice. People love to talk about their businesses. Milk them for info. See if you can share costs on something or other. Potential customer ideas, whatever.
Entrepreneurship (not a product design) is about talking with contacts to do whatever it takes to get the business off the ground.
Yeah a making a game base off a movie will sell 2M copies, but how much did you have to pay for the license?
This is a nice point. Let's say I'm an investor and have a choice between two investments:
1) A game that will cost $2 million in development, $8 million in license fees, and $0 million in marketing and will sell X copies.
2) A game that will cost $5 million in development, $0 million in license fees, and $5 million in marketing and will sell X copies.
Of course, we don't know how many copies will sell, but bear with me for a moment. Market theory dicates that the total cost of the game should yield a certain number of game sales. If we knew #1 would sell more games, then the licenser should theoretically charge more money.
At the end of the day, I'd rather invest in #2. Here's why- at the end of the product life, I've now got a brand/franchise that I can sequel and make a nice bit of money on. Essentially, I've gotten profits and built up an asset. Halo/Warcraft are great examples of the value of building a franchise.
With choice #1, I've gotten some profits, but next time, I'll have to again pay those licensing fees. Essentially, I'm back to square one.
If you want to take things a step further, I would bet the return on investment for a licensed game is less than that of an original game because the licensed game is more a "sure bet." Just like in the stock market, low risk investments typically yield lower returns.
These guys waited till point 6 out of 10 to explain the REAL problem:
6. Games Are Better Suited for Brick and Mortar Retailers:
There is not a huge selection of games; it is a new release industry (majority of sales are in the first two weeks of release). Large retailers make money on other products after they get you in the door. We do not; most people come to a website to purchase a video game, not a video game and a bunch of movies. There is also no game catalog market, if you wanted to buy an old copy you would buy it used. So retailers are able to stock all new games, and they can return the ones that don't sell. Games bring in great foot traffic for physical retailers and they make money elsewhere. EB Games/Gamestop relies heavily on their used business. It is very difficult for online retailers to have an advantage, except for convenience.
If this is the case, then why did they bother to get into the game business? Why not stick with something they do well at- selling DVD's online? It sounds like they're bitter at making a terrible decision and pointing the finger at everyone but themselves.
This is just another boutique retailer who got burned by the big guys who manage to get games into gamers hands cheaply. Heck, one Walmart store probably sells more games than these guys. It shouldn't be a huge surpise that they can't do well when they buy through a distributor. It doesn't mean there's some huge structural problem in the industry.
Oh, and by the way, 8.5% retail margins are not horrible. These guys should talk to independent grocers if they think they've got it bad.
Wow, Oscar... You are quite the grouch...
At least when the oceans melt, your trash can will keep you afloat.
There's some pretty hilarious comments on Jaffe's blog that talk about the interview before it went mainstream. There's also some classic 'nerd at the Playboy mansion' type of commentary along with him posing with bunnies:
:) Watch for it....I hope they do some editing! Be nice, Gametrailers!"
"So I get drunk and Jeff 'let's fuck with Jaffe's career' Resse- who is a MARKETING guy- brings me in front of the gametrailers.com cameras and we just go at it, tossing insults, doing a totally drunk interview, screaming at the camera (I think at one point I told EGM to fuck off for calling me THE KING OF BULLSHIT in this month's Q-MAN!)...it was total fun and I'm sure I've just made like 100 more people on the message boards hate me because of it. Ah well
I found it interesting that the Wii was 10th on the most edited list. I suppose the "newsworthiness" of this is not the fact that vandalism is happening- period. The interesting fact is the magnitude of the vandalism.
I wouldn't find it interesting that a subway car got spray-painted. I would find it interesting that all the subway cars in NYC got vandalized overnight.
I love the tirades in it about "just work" and "Your average user doesn't have the time, the energy or the inclination to deal with uncertainty"...
No kidding... Anytime I see someone talking about the "average" customer, I sigh. The average American has 1 breast and 1 testicle, but you don't see anyone out there designing 1 cup bras.
Product Design 101 teaches you how to segment your market into useful groups, and then figure out how to develop a product offering (or products) that appeals to each of the segments. Designing a product for the average rarely results in success.
Yours is an interesting post. I would add one point though.
I tend to sit much closer to my television when I'm playing games than when I'm watching TV- the whole lean forward vs. lean back interaction... I'd estimate maybe 5 feet vs. 10 feet, respectively. I'm not sure if this is common or not, but it could explain why folks care more about resolution when gaming.
You guys are both right. Sony has managed to piss off the analysts with their poor performance and information sharing, mainstream customers with the PS3 pricing, and early adopters with their other shenanigans. Taken individually, "people" tend to write these things off as a screw-up. Taken together, people interpret this as a corporate culture that is in serious trouble.
This is one of those (-1) + (-1) + (-1) = (-5) public perception situations.
There is a term for this type of political extortion: Mud Farming. It comes from the story of a farmer who owned a plot of land next to a dirt road. Each night, he'd plough up and water down the road, then wait for cars to get stuck. He would then, of course, be ready to pull them out of the mud with his tractor for a tidy sum.
In politics, it goes like this: Give money to my campaign, or I'll go after your industry. Although I don't necessarily agree, many political analysts feel the Microsoft Monopoly case occured not out of public concern, but due to the simple fact that MS was not spending enough money on lobbyists or campagins. The tech industry as a whole during the 80s-90s spent orders of magnitude less %-wise of their revenues on impacting political legislation. Mature industries like the automotive, steel, lumber, oil, etc. industries have learned to "pay the piper." The high tech industry has finally come around, and the result has been much more favorable attention from our legislators.
The video game industry finds itself in the same quagmire. Young, fast-growth industries often do. Management is focused more on putting out product than seeing "the big picture." It takes a slap on the wrist to learn. We don't see legislators going after the movie and music industries, after all.
Many would say this is due to the public's fear of "new things for kids." In part, I agree. But, the mechanics of the process of legislation involve two things: money and public opinion. Unfortunately the video game industry is losing on both fronts these days.
Parasites in the brain are a baaaad thing and not as uncommon as you might think.
Around 90% of French have been infected by Toxoplasma gondii, a nasty little parasite that infects the brain and is suspected to cause changes to the host's personality.
This explains a lot.
(Disclaimer: some facts may have been omitted to make a joke about the French)
Look at what most public companies are spending their cash on right now: share price pumping, ie. stock buybacks. Is there no better use for that capital?
Look at the tax rate for personal income (which dividends are taxed at) and then compare it to the tax rate for capital gains (which share buybacks are effectively taxed at). That is about 99% of the reason why companies choose buybacks over dividends. Significantly more money ends up in the shareholders' hands through a stock buyback.