My father-in-law ordered a $250 digital camera from Newegg, on my recommendation (both the camera and Newegg). The box arrived completely empty... that is, the shipping box did not contain the camera box. Newegg swore that 'they never ship empty boxes' and it took them a while, being treated like criminals on tech support. First they were told they'd get a new camera, then they were told 'sorry, no camera for you, deal with it'. Eventually they got their camera, but they swore off Newegg. The additional kicker is, they ordered a Canon printer with the camera, and the printer was DOA and had to be returned, but that went through Canon direct and went very smoothly.
Bullshit. Utter and complete bullshit. They may make less of a profit, but they're damn sure making a profit. You know why they're making less of a profit? Because, as you noted, the economy there can't sustain a 50 dollar per game rate. What about initial development costs? You, like the grandparent poster I originally responded to, seem to assume there is no cost of development, only a small cost of production per unit. My initial statement still. If they sold it for $10/unit everywhere, and stores take half of that sale, cost of production is $2-3, so they see $2-3 revenue per unit. If they have $15 to 20 million dollar initial development cost to recoup, they're going to have to sell a lot of units just to recover initial development costs, excluding other overhead (such as the TV ad, which probably cost a few million). A million units sold on a PC title is actually a very large number to sell on PC, even though it pales in comparison to what some console titles manage to sell.
No, they'd lose money if they sold it at $10 EVERYWHERE. They make maybe $2-3 per copy sold in Russia... almost not even worth the effort. If they only made $2-3/copy sold everywhere, they'd need to sell 15-20 million units just to break even. That would be an astouding number of sales for ANY game, and unachievable, even for Valve.
By your logic, they should either sell it at $10 everywhere and lose massive amounts of money (i.e, they get screwed), or not sell it in markets where they have to mark it down to make it affordable (customers in those markets get screwed).
God forbid your sense of entitlement be trampled on by a company wanting to both make money by offering you a great product for a good price, and to only make a tiny profit offering that same great value to others who can barely afford it.
I didn't go to E For All (bleh, I couldnt stand going to E3, skipped out on it last couple years despite my free industry pass), but I did go to VGL. It was only about half full. I went to VGL last year as well, at the Hollywood Bowl. The music selection this year was better (they ditched the 10 minute "Advent Rising" selection), but the Nokia Theater has horrible acoustics (echoes), very uncomfortable seats, and the food prices are abominable.
I won't be going to VGL LA 2008 if its at the Nokia Theater, but I will consider going to see it again if it is at the Hollywood Bowl.
I never saw ads in Hellgate London demo or the retail version of BF2142. I think it may be because I'm behind a hardware firewall (Linksys WRT54GL, yay).
On the other hand, Hellgate London demo was a real yawner. Very disappointing. Unplayably buggy in the gameplay department (everything else ran smoothly though) - I literally reached a dead end along the linear path that I had to take to get to the next zone and complete the main questline, which I assume upon completion the demo would end. Went back, and could find no alternative path through either of the last two areas on the path.
I used to play D&D with the original blue-and-white box in the mid 80s, then during the late 80s went to the Basic/Expert/Companion/Master/Immortal box versions, and switched to AD&D 2nd edition around 1990.
D&D was not, during those versions, a tactical game. In my opinion, the feats, skill points, and tactical combat in 3rd edition have slowed down the game and made it feel more like a CRPG brought to pen and paper.
I could always go back to 2nd edition, but despite the things 3rd edition added that I dont like, it did improve on the system as a whole. Unfortunately, Feats and Skills are something that balance out the classes, so it is hard to house-rule around them.
I think most of my future roleplaying will be with the Mythic system from Word Mill Games, rather than D20 or D&D4th. The "Game Master Emulator" can provide for some interesting adventures, whether playing with a GM or without (yes... multi player roleplaying without a GM! It actually works.)
D&D has too much focus on tactical combat and encourages dice-festing. Maybe Mike Mearls can turn it around - I liked some of his work in Iron Heroes - but if a player has to have an intricate knowledge of the rules AND spend an hour making a first level character to play 4th edition, then I can't see myself spending money on it. Last game I ran, involving 5 players, 3 had no knowledge of the rules, and it took us 3 hours to make characters.
and that was with Sid Meier's Railroads. I did the Analysis, sent it in to SecuROM, and the next day they sent me a modified binary that would supposedly ignore the specific authentication failure. However, I didnt encounter the issue once I had rebooted, so did not need the modded binary.
I installed BioShock Demo, which did install SecuROM... uninstalled the demo, and SecuROM was uninstalled with it.
While I dislike DRM, SecuROM is probably one of the more benign forms. Anyone remember Starforce?
TF2 is great for small map tight shooters, ala traditional Quake/early UT style play. Quake Wars, however, is also a very good shooter, and makes a fine addition into the Battlefield/Battlefront/vehicle UT (call it strategic shooter?) FPS sub-genre.
It wasn't 'free', but they had a $5 pre-order package (no commitment to buy full, but no refund) which had guaranteed beta access as well as some bonuses if you do buy the full version. It's allowed me 2 full months of access at no additional cost during. I'm on the fence with purchasing - it plays halfway between a shooter and a traditional MMO.
Sony has to QA each patch themselves, and then they charge for each patch. We're not talking just a couple thousand dollars, either.
Its a pretty safe bet that the PC version will receive many patches over its lifetime, while the PS3 version will receive only those absolutely necessary.
Except, it doesn't even do that. It's a pretty obvious service, that you can stop, set to Manual start, or even disable, and it is removed on uninstall. (Yes, the service itself is removed even if the registry keys got left behind).
The ONLY reason it has been referred to as a 'rootkit' is because SecuROM used a NUL character in their registry key, which the MS-provided Rootkit scanner flags as suspicious. By the way, it also flags some keys for MS software as 'suspicious' on a clean install, so how is that for reliable?
Stop perpetuating misinformation that you have heard second hand from unreliable sources. You look like an alarmist for doing it.
My launch 360 just died with the Red Ring of Death. While I didn't play it regularly, I wasn't playing it that much when it started to fail, compared to when, say, Dead Rising and Viva Pinata came out. Hopefully it'll be repaired and back before Bioshock comes out.
The term is used extensively in the games industry as well.
When a game is being developed for multiple consoles, each target platform version of the game (the PS3 version, the 360 version, etc) is referred to as a different SKU, even though it may be developed simultaneously and we aren't making the game differently for the different consoles (beyond platform-specific code and perhaps minor asset changes).
On the other hand, Victoria crater is pretty big (about a kilometer across), and could take many months to explore. The next closest crater is 25km away. In 3 years, Opportunity has travelled less than 11 km.
Oh, there was definitely bad management, but the financial situation on top of that was not very favorable; see my other post in this same thread where I cover the logistics of simultaneous Mac/PC ports and dealing with two separate publishers for the same title.
Most developers didn't bother to port it in the first place. Obviously it wasnt worthwhile to them to do the port. The reasons for this are financial mostly - often the publisher doesn't publish Mac titles. The game I worked on that was cross PC/Mac was like that - we had two separate publishers for our title, even though it would be a (near) simultaneous release, and was developed simultaneously on both platforms. We had features we shipped with support for, but never activated, because the publishers couldnt agree who was going to pay for the 3rd party support with Gamespy (ranked gameplay). Each publisher contributed a share to the game's development costs, and it was a sort of 3-way contract deal.
Simultaneous cross-platform development increases the amount of work required, and not by an insigificant amount. Even today, working on cross PC/360/PS3 titles, we have to dedicate engineers to the specific platforms, as well as additional QA. This can get expensive - if a Mac title requires an additional 2 engineers to be added to a project, for a year's development (assuming an 18 month cycle with the engineers only needed during the latter 12 months), that can add an additional $150-250k cost to the project (including overhead). Most of the publishers we worked with would not pay $100k to port a game, and would even hesitate at $50k (at the time).
Since most developers didn't want to deal with the hassle, or couldn't get a Mac publisher to pay for the extra effort to port to Mac, most games that came to the Mac needed to be ported to the Mac after their PC release (and usually after proving they were worth porting).
Doing PC/360/PS3 is difficult enough - development methods must change for this to become more standard, at least from an engineering standpoint (frankly Cell will finally force more engineers to learn parallel development, and developing for the Cell can actually result in more efficient code on all 3 platforms! I still dislike the PS3 as a platform though.) Few games will also be brought to PS2/Wii. It isn't realistic to try to simultaneously develop a game for all 5, at least, not a high end title. It's possible, but you'll never see a hit game do 4 platforms simultaneous, let alone 5 (and be the same game, that is). These days it's still hard enough for developers to do all 3 simultaneous release.
I would not say it is substantially easier to port, just that the rendering part is much easier to port. If it is written for Direct3D, it sometimes means rewriting the underlying rendering engine. However, the rendering engine, while a major concern, was not always the biggest concern, and given how many other areas of a program had to be dealt with, even being the largest concern it could still be less than 20% of the project.
Other things to deal with included threading, system API usage, endian issues in file formats and poor coding, networking, user interface additions, memory management, sound.
Yes, but if the companies I was working at had the budget to do that, we wouldn't have been 'porting' the games to the Mac.
To be fair, during one of those stints, after finishing a Mac port of a big name RPG, I moved on to help out with a PC/Mac game (a real time strategy) within the same studio. The game itself was funded by the publisher, not by the company I worked for. As soon as that project finished, we all got let go, and the studio shut down, a little less than 1 year after starting operation.
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Not true with Newegg, see my note here: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=343527&cid=21161167
My father-in-law ordered a $250 digital camera from Newegg, on my recommendation (both the camera and Newegg). The box arrived completely empty... that is, the shipping box did not contain the camera box. Newegg swore that 'they never ship empty boxes' and it took them a while, being treated like criminals on tech support. First they were told they'd get a new camera, then they were told 'sorry, no camera for you, deal with it'. Eventually they got their camera, but they swore off Newegg. The additional kicker is, they ordered a Canon printer with the camera, and the printer was DOA and had to be returned, but that went through Canon direct and went very smoothly.
No, they'd lose money if they sold it at $10 EVERYWHERE. They make maybe $2-3 per copy sold in Russia... almost not even worth the effort. If they only made $2-3/copy sold everywhere, they'd need to sell 15-20 million units just to break even. That would be an astouding number of sales for ANY game, and unachievable, even for Valve.
By your logic, they should either sell it at $10 everywhere and lose massive amounts of money (i.e, they get screwed), or not sell it in markets where they have to mark it down to make it affordable (customers in those markets get screwed).
God forbid your sense of entitlement be trampled on by a company wanting to both make money by offering you a great product for a good price, and to only make a tiny profit offering that same great value to others who can barely afford it.
I didn't go to E For All (bleh, I couldnt stand going to E3, skipped out on it last couple years despite my free industry pass), but I did go to VGL. It was only about half full. I went to VGL last year as well, at the Hollywood Bowl. The music selection this year was better (they ditched the 10 minute "Advent Rising" selection), but the Nokia Theater has horrible acoustics (echoes), very uncomfortable seats, and the food prices are abominable.
I won't be going to VGL LA 2008 if its at the Nokia Theater, but I will consider going to see it again if it is at the Hollywood Bowl.
I never saw ads in Hellgate London demo or the retail version of BF2142. I think it may be because I'm behind a hardware firewall (Linksys WRT54GL, yay).
On the other hand, Hellgate London demo was a real yawner. Very disappointing. Unplayably buggy in the gameplay department (everything else ran smoothly though) - I literally reached a dead end along the linear path that I had to take to get to the next zone and complete the main questline, which I assume upon completion the demo would end. Went back, and could find no alternative path through either of the last two areas on the path.
I used to play D&D with the original blue-and-white box in the mid 80s, then during the late 80s went to the Basic/Expert/Companion/Master/Immortal box versions, and switched to AD&D 2nd edition around 1990.
D&D was not, during those versions, a tactical game. In my opinion, the feats, skill points, and tactical combat in 3rd edition have slowed down the game and made it feel more like a CRPG brought to pen and paper.
I could always go back to 2nd edition, but despite the things 3rd edition added that I dont like, it did improve on the system as a whole. Unfortunately, Feats and Skills are something that balance out the classes, so it is hard to house-rule around them.
I think most of my future roleplaying will be with the Mythic system from Word Mill Games, rather than D20 or D&D4th. The "Game Master Emulator" can provide for some interesting adventures, whether playing with a GM or without (yes... multi player roleplaying without a GM! It actually works.)
D&D has too much focus on tactical combat and encourages dice-festing. Maybe Mike Mearls can turn it around - I liked some of his work in Iron Heroes - but if a player has to have an intricate knowledge of the rules AND spend an hour making a first level character to play 4th edition, then I can't see myself spending money on it. Last game I ran, involving 5 players, 3 had no knowledge of the rules, and it took us 3 hours to make characters.
and that was with Sid Meier's Railroads. I did the Analysis, sent it in to SecuROM, and the next day they sent me a modified binary that would supposedly ignore the specific authentication failure. However, I didnt encounter the issue once I had rebooted, so did not need the modded binary.
I installed BioShock Demo, which did install SecuROM... uninstalled the demo, and SecuROM was uninstalled with it.
While I dislike DRM, SecuROM is probably one of the more benign forms. Anyone remember Starforce?
TF2 is great for small map tight shooters, ala traditional Quake/early UT style play. Quake Wars, however, is also a very good shooter, and makes a fine addition into the Battlefield/Battlefront/vehicle UT (call it strategic shooter?) FPS sub-genre.
I would think it would be "OTGH"... but that only makes sense if you've read "A Mote in God's Eye". Definitely worth reading, if you haven't.
It wasn't 'free', but they had a $5 pre-order package (no commitment to buy full, but no refund) which had guaranteed beta access as well as some bonuses if you do buy the full version. It's allowed me 2 full months of access at no additional cost during. I'm on the fence with purchasing - it plays halfway between a shooter and a traditional MMO.
er, huh, whu? I'm sorry, were you saying something?
Portal is sold seperately for like $20... same with TF2.
Sony has to QA each patch themselves, and then they charge for each patch. We're not talking just a couple thousand dollars, either.
Its a pretty safe bet that the PC version will receive many patches over its lifetime, while the PS3 version will receive only those absolutely necessary.
Except, it doesn't even do that. It's a pretty obvious service, that you can stop, set to Manual start, or even disable, and it is removed on uninstall. (Yes, the service itself is removed even if the registry keys got left behind).
The ONLY reason it has been referred to as a 'rootkit' is because SecuROM used a NUL character in their registry key, which the MS-provided Rootkit scanner flags as suspicious. By the way, it also flags some keys for MS software as 'suspicious' on a clean install, so how is that for reliable?
Stop perpetuating misinformation that you have heard second hand from unreliable sources. You look like an alarmist for doing it.
My launch 360 just died with the Red Ring of Death. While I didn't play it regularly, I wasn't playing it that much when it started to fail, compared to when, say, Dead Rising and Viva Pinata came out. Hopefully it'll be repaired and back before Bioshock comes out.
The term is used extensively in the games industry as well.
When a game is being developed for multiple consoles, each target platform version of the game (the PS3 version, the 360 version, etc) is referred to as a different SKU, even though it may be developed simultaneously and we aren't making the game differently for the different consoles (beyond platform-specific code and perhaps minor asset changes).
... and frankly, US tax law already handles the situation, but it is up to the individual to report their income.
South Korea simply made a law that requires the transaction service being used to apply the tax.
On the other hand, Victoria crater is pretty big (about a kilometer across), and could take many months to explore. The next closest crater is 25km away. In 3 years, Opportunity has travelled less than 11 km.
Oh, there was definitely bad management, but the financial situation on top of that was not very favorable; see my other post in this same thread where I cover the logistics of simultaneous Mac/PC ports and dealing with two separate publishers for the same title.
Most developers didn't bother to port it in the first place. Obviously it wasnt worthwhile to them to do the port. The reasons for this are financial mostly - often the publisher doesn't publish Mac titles. The game I worked on that was cross PC/Mac was like that - we had two separate publishers for our title, even though it would be a (near) simultaneous release, and was developed simultaneously on both platforms. We had features we shipped with support for, but never activated, because the publishers couldnt agree who was going to pay for the 3rd party support with Gamespy (ranked gameplay). Each publisher contributed a share to the game's development costs, and it was a sort of 3-way contract deal.
Simultaneous cross-platform development increases the amount of work required, and not by an insigificant amount. Even today, working on cross PC/360/PS3 titles, we have to dedicate engineers to the specific platforms, as well as additional QA. This can get expensive - if a Mac title requires an additional 2 engineers to be added to a project, for a year's development (assuming an 18 month cycle with the engineers only needed during the latter 12 months), that can add an additional $150-250k cost to the project (including overhead). Most of the publishers we worked with would not pay $100k to port a game, and would even hesitate at $50k (at the time).
Since most developers didn't want to deal with the hassle, or couldn't get a Mac publisher to pay for the extra effort to port to Mac, most games that came to the Mac needed to be ported to the Mac after their PC release (and usually after proving they were worth porting).
Doing PC/360/PS3 is difficult enough - development methods must change for this to become more standard, at least from an engineering standpoint (frankly Cell will finally force more engineers to learn parallel development, and developing for the Cell can actually result in more efficient code on all 3 platforms! I still dislike the PS3 as a platform though.) Few games will also be brought to PS2/Wii. It isn't realistic to try to simultaneously develop a game for all 5, at least, not a high end title. It's possible, but you'll never see a hit game do 4 platforms simultaneous, let alone 5 (and be the same game, that is). These days it's still hard enough for developers to do all 3 simultaneous release.
I would not say it is substantially easier to port, just that the rendering part is much easier to port. If it is written for Direct3D, it sometimes means rewriting the underlying rendering engine. However, the rendering engine, while a major concern, was not always the biggest concern, and given how many other areas of a program had to be dealt with, even being the largest concern it could still be less than 20% of the project.
Other things to deal with included threading, system API usage, endian issues in file formats and poor coding, networking, user interface additions, memory management, sound.
Yes, but if the companies I was working at had the budget to do that, we wouldn't have been 'porting' the games to the Mac.
To be fair, during one of those stints, after finishing a Mac port of a big name RPG, I moved on to help out with a PC/Mac game (a real time strategy) within the same studio. The game itself was funded by the publisher, not by the company I worked for. As soon as that project finished, we all got let go, and the studio shut down, a little less than 1 year after starting operation.