His time is still wasted. Anyone can play games. It takes a very different mindset to make games. If, after playing for an hour, he goes off and starts coming up with his own ideas and trying to create games on his own... then maybe he's cut out for it. A love of playing games is different from a love of making them. It helps to have both, but without the latter, he'll never cut it.
Second, that article is BS. Starting salary is more like $35-45k for entry level engineers, even living in high cost of living areas like Southern California.
Or, if your cable company offers it, pay $5-10 extra a month for integrated DVR+ Cable Box
For $10 extra/mth I get DVR + HD (the DVR records the HD digital streams, as well as recording, rather than decoding and re-encoding, the regular digital streams). I could get a dual tuner with 80 hour capacity for no extra charge, I've just been too lazy to take it in and swap it around, I rely on it too much for the few shows that make cable worth having.
Cheaper than TIVO's monthly fee, and since Comcast upgraded their software last weekend, it's featureset has gotten better (I dont have Season Pass, the ability to copy to computer/share files - which I wouldn't use, or the 'recording similiar shows it thinks Im interested in - which I also dont want; but it records pure digital streams and HD, and integrates everything into one)
So if the cost to reproduce a work is near zero, and therefore software should be free since it can be copied, I guess the first customer should have to pay the full cost of development for their copy.
The point of charging for software is to distribute the cost among all interested parties. Once the cost is recovered, it generates profit, but that first sold copyable copy of the software will definitely not recover the cost of creating the work in the first place!
And generating the profit is not necessarily a bad thing; it allows investing in an even larger project, since now more funds are available to sustain development...
I've never gone wrong with canon products - I often heavily researched which camera and which printer to get, and ended up getting Canon both times. When I wanted to get a scanner, I went straight to Canon, and have not been disappointed.
Combining my US$100 Canon scanner (cant remember the specific model; think it was a 4200F) and my Canon Pixma iP5000 printer (US$200), I can copy printed material and get very good reproductions.
If you want to go cheaper, they have a good selection of Photo scanners from $50 to $80.
If you have one of a few supported Canon printer models, you can get a 'scanner' cartridge that turns your printer into a sheet-feed scanner.
Activision does do development; they own multiple studios, but those studios have their own brand name - Raven, Neversoft, Treyarch, to name a few.
It's not much different than EA and Ubisoft, except that Activision prefers to spread their people out, and retain a 'studio' name, whereas EA and Ubisoft prefer to group studios together for shared resources under larger campuses.
The benefits and negatives are different for each: 'boutique' studios like Activision does means there is little room for change at each studio, they will each do 1 or 2 games at a time, tops, and often specialize in the same kind of game (Neversoft doing Tony Hawk, and Raven doing FPS games, for example). The studios and teams are smaller, and there is not much cross-studio tech sharing.
EA and Ubisoft's style allows for multiple teams and therefore multiple titles at one studio, allowing more options for the people at the studios. Building a larger studio also makes feasible larger benefits like on-site cafeteria, sports field, and a gym. The downside is a perceived loss of 'individuality', but the public seems to care about that more than the employees (I know from personal experience, the benefits at the large companies rocks the socks off anything small companies struggle to provide).
It is a licensed work, with a finite number of licenses.
This is similiar to group licensing schemes, where software is licensed for a number of seats at a company but licensing is handled by a server. A limited number of users can use the software at any time. If someone needs to use it and the licenses are used up, someone else must stop using it for the time being (or more licenses must be purchased).
Im the same, although its usually about 1 to 2 am I fall asleep; it used to be worse, and its gotten much better with changes I've made lately.
Things I've found that helped, you may have tried them, but just in case you haven't, heres advice from personal experience:
No sugar, no soda, switch to water entirely, with occasional juice (this is also great for your teeth, even diet soda is too acidic). Give up caffeine entirely, or at least stop it past 10 am. It stays in your system a while. Takes a week or so to adjust to water but after 2 weeks of water even diet soda was too sweet for me.
Get off the computer 1-2 hours before bedtime and switch to something non-interactive, like reading a book. If I am on the computer up until I go to bed it takes me about half an hour longer to fall asleep; if I was doing something fun like playing a game, it might take me an extra half hour on top of that. Go to bed about an hour before you want to fall asleep and read.
Consider a new bed. The most expensive proposition, but a crappy bed can be a major cause of problems. A couple issues: if you are a side sleeper, your bed could be resulting in your hips twisting sideways and torquing your back. My wife also rolls around and that used to shake our crappy bed, which was a decent queen size double pillowtop... but it was too soft and not supportive enough, and developed a sag in the center. We switched to a king size Simmons Beautyrest (independent coils, so if I roll over or she rolls over its not nearly as jarring to the other), and latex memory foam layer so that its more conforming to the body without sacrificing firmness. A lot firmer than the old bed, and we're sleeping a lot better, and it's made a difference on my insomnia; I have a reasonably good chance of falling asleep. Too soft IS a bad thing.
Finally: Go to bed earlier, even if you're not tired. Get on a set schedule.
It's difficult for those of us who seem to have a 26 hour circadian rythym... after a sleep study, full medical exam, and trying several sleep meds (beware Ambien, you can convince yourself of anything about 20 minutes after taking it; the first time I took it, I was convinced I had just thought up the best game idea ever, and started writing stuff down; in the morning I couldn't read a damn thing I wrote, it was all nonsense)
Reminds me of the Robin Williams movie, Final Cut, where some people have an organic computational device implanted in their brain that grows with them and records all of their memories...
There is a scene in a graveyard where a man's tomb, more like a mausoleum? had a giant plasma screen that played some of his memories.
Sim Tower wasn't a Will Wright game. It was designed by Yoot Saito and his company OPeNBooK. Maxis published it.
Re:perhaps not as sure as you seem to think
on
Xbox 360 for $300
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· Score: 1
Why not give them medical software and teach them to be a doctor, or give them some legal books so they can learn to be a lawyer?
I suppose giving your children free will to grow and be who they will is too bland, compared to moulding them to be like you, or who you wish you were.
Quit yer whining - some insight into economics
on
Xbox 360 for $300
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· Score: 1
Those $10-12 DVDs also had theatrical releases to recoup most of their costs. In addition, in the case of game sales, stores keep about 50% of the purchase price. If you can buy a game in the store for $30, or buy it direct from the publisher/developer for $20, the publisher/developer gets 33% more money if you buy it direct from them, even though they price it 33% less.
Adjusted for inflation, $50/game is cheaper than Atari 2600 games were. Someone earlier did the math, a $25 Atari 2600 game in 1980 dollars, adjusted for inflation, would cost $64.50 in 2005 dollars.
Games are getting more expensive to make. The games that don't sell well need to be offset by the mega-hits. Game development costs have gone way up as gamers demand more and more from their games. A triple-A title costs 10x more to develop now than it did 5 years ago, but it is only selling 3-4x as much as triple-A titles did 5 years ago. Do the math.
Yet at the same time people are clamoring for cheaper games, they demand variety, fewer sequels and knock offs. What they are too thick skulled to understand, those sequels and knockoffs are what are selling well enough to pay for the losses endured by the 'experimental' games that gamers are demanding yet not buying enough of to offset development costs.
One publisher tried to make a triple-A title and sell it cheap - the 2K sports series - at $20. It was made at a loss, with the sole intention of driving sales away from the competition, and then after 2 iterations on the title and building a large fanbase, jacking the price up to $50. They do this in the hopes they have hooked enough people who, when given the choice of spending $50 on the sequel to a game they've bought for two years and like, or $50 on the competition they used to buy but stopped because a similiar quality game was cheaper, that they will decide to spend their $50 on the formerly-cheap title. Such good intentions they have, yes...
In short: Games are far more expensive to make, stores get a 50% cut of the sale, games are NOT making it up in volume, 80% of games are made at a loss, 'experimental' and 'creative' games tend to fall into the 80% category, so the price is going to go up, and you are whining because you can't have your cake and eat it too.
If it's just a forum, you can probably get away with very low specs... say, a 300 mhz machine and 10 gig drive. Especially with those requirements. 100 people aren't going to be reading 100 messages a second. Unless you are running a heavy utilization database, which a 100-people-at-a-time forum doesn't get close to, you don't need to worry about performance. There are other things you can do too, such as caching. Consider upgrading when you hit 1000 or more people at a time.
I host about a dozen websites off such a machine, some with forums. The hardware is between 5 and 9 years old (newer 9 gig SCSI HD, a 270 mhz G3 CPU upgrade card... it's an old Power Computing machine).
CPU usage averages 5%, and that's because of all the friggin spam it gets, for hosting a few 7-10 year old domains and email addresses that haven't changed for years (mine alone pulls in 2000-3000 spam/day).
Bandwidth and dedicated connection will be your real concern. Go for the cheapest reliable system you can get, put Linux on it, install something like phpbb or the like.
I guess I should clarify, since I moved things around before finalizing the post, and someone might decide to comment on my accidental misuse of terminology.
There is a ceremony, which is part of the DICE summit. This is all run by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, which is the game industry equivalent of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
There is a legitimate video game awards ceremony. It's called the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences (http://www.interactive.org/).
It's not publicized much, broadcast on TV, nor is it open to the public.
To be a voting member, you must have been actively employed in the games industry for at least 2 or more years, and be credited on 1 or more published commercial titles.
The annual DICE summit is when the peer-based awards, the Interactive Achievement Awards, are given out, after months of voting. The titles are nominated and voted on by members for all categories.
Whedon only wrote the themesong... the 4th DVD of the set has a bonus feature of a recording of him actually singing it, played to the opening sequence. He sang it to capture the feel of the song, how he wanted the actual artist who would perform it to portray it.
He doesn't sing all that well, so it's a good thing they got a real singer to do it. Not to slight him, it's just obviously not a talent/skill he's developed. He makes a much better writer...
Just click the little "close" box on the Ad, they'll go away (so far, it hasn't come back, and I've logged out/in, close and open new browser window, etc).
Wal-Mart sells DVDs that have had their content edited (dubbed words, cut scenes), and only mention it in small type that you have to know to look for. Otherwise the packages look almost identical to the full length versions.
It's the same kind of editing that TV stations do to show a PG-13 or R rated movie during the day.
The fact that it isn't CLEARLY labelled as such, masquerading as the real thing, IS censorship.
Do a little research before making baseless accusations of baseless assertions.
From the numbers I've seen in NPD, the Xbox has about 2x more total units sold in the US than the GC. It has roughly half the installed units as the PS2.
I didnt have the old information on hand, but some web searching pulled up the information.
NPD sales numbers for January 2005
PS2 - 488,000 Xbox - 241,000 Gamecube - 114,000
NPD sales numbers for February 2005
PS2 - 533,000 Xbox - 212,000 GCN - 116,000
NPD sales numbers for March 2005 (through April 2nd):
Read grandparent post, I was rebutting his claim that the sale of 5 million DVD box sets at $40 made FOX $200mil profit. A gross miscalculation.
I took 50% off for distributor, retail store claim off the MSRP to get a guestimate of wholesale price, counted $5 per box set for the production costs, assumed little marketting, and just gave a raw number, not taking into consideration the original production costs since it was a for-TV, not for-DVD, show (counting those as writeoffs or recouped, since the show did make at least one airing).
Have you been reading the Nitpickers Guide to Slashdot?
Slashdot Mirror
His time is still wasted. Anyone can play games. It takes a very different mindset to make games. If, after playing for an hour, he goes off and starts coming up with his own ideas and trying to create games on his own... then maybe he's cut out for it. A love of playing games is different from a love of making them. It helps to have both, but without the latter, he'll never cut it.
Second, that article is BS. Starting salary is more like $35-45k for entry level engineers, even living in high cost of living areas like Southern California.
Or, if your cable company offers it, pay $5-10 extra a month for integrated DVR+ Cable Box
For $10 extra/mth I get DVR + HD (the DVR records the HD digital streams, as well as recording, rather than decoding and re-encoding, the regular digital streams). I could get a dual tuner with 80 hour capacity for no extra charge, I've just been too lazy to take it in and swap it around, I rely on it too much for the few shows that make cable worth having.
Cheaper than TIVO's monthly fee, and since Comcast upgraded their software last weekend, it's featureset has gotten better (I dont have Season Pass, the ability to copy to computer/share files - which I wouldn't use, or the 'recording similiar shows it thinks Im interested in - which I also dont want; but it records pure digital streams and HD, and integrates everything into one)
So if the cost to reproduce a work is near zero, and therefore software should be free since it can be copied, I guess the first customer should have to pay the full cost of development for their copy.
The point of charging for software is to distribute the cost among all interested parties. Once the cost is recovered, it generates profit, but that first sold copyable copy of the software will definitely not recover the cost of creating the work in the first place!
And generating the profit is not necessarily a bad thing; it allows investing in an even larger project, since now more funds are available to sustain development...
I've never gone wrong with canon products - I often heavily researched which camera and which printer to get, and ended up getting Canon both times. When I wanted to get a scanner, I went straight to Canon, and have not been disappointed.
Combining my US$100 Canon scanner (cant remember the specific model; think it was a 4200F) and my Canon Pixma iP5000 printer (US$200), I can copy printed material and get very good reproductions.
If you want to go cheaper, they have a good selection of Photo scanners from $50 to $80.
If you have one of a few supported Canon printer models, you can get a 'scanner' cartridge that turns your printer into a sheet-feed scanner.
Activision does do development; they own multiple studios, but those studios have their own brand name - Raven, Neversoft, Treyarch, to name a few.
It's not much different than EA and Ubisoft, except that Activision prefers to spread their people out, and retain a 'studio' name, whereas EA and Ubisoft prefer to group studios together for shared resources under larger campuses.
The benefits and negatives are different for each: 'boutique' studios like Activision does means there is little room for change at each studio, they will each do 1 or 2 games at a time, tops, and often specialize in the same kind of game (Neversoft doing Tony Hawk, and Raven doing FPS games, for example). The studios and teams are smaller, and there is not much cross-studio tech sharing.
EA and Ubisoft's style allows for multiple teams and therefore multiple titles at one studio, allowing more options for the people at the studios. Building a larger studio also makes feasible larger benefits like on-site cafeteria, sports field, and a gym. The downside is a perceived loss of 'individuality', but the public seems to care about that more than the employees (I know from personal experience, the benefits at the large companies rocks the socks off anything small companies struggle to provide).
It is a licensed work, with a finite number of licenses.
This is similiar to group licensing schemes, where software is licensed for a number of seats at a company but licensing is handled by a server. A limited number of users can use the software at any time. If someone needs to use it and the licenses are used up, someone else must stop using it for the time being (or more licenses must be purchased).
Im the same, although its usually about 1 to 2 am I fall asleep; it used to be worse, and its gotten much better with changes I've made lately.
Things I've found that helped, you may have tried them, but just in case you haven't, heres advice from personal experience:
No sugar, no soda, switch to water entirely, with occasional juice (this is also great for your teeth, even diet soda is too acidic). Give up caffeine entirely, or at least stop it past 10 am. It stays in your system a while. Takes a week or so to adjust to water but after 2 weeks of water even diet soda was too sweet for me.
Get off the computer 1-2 hours before bedtime and switch to something non-interactive, like reading a book. If I am on the computer up until I go to bed it takes me about half an hour longer to fall asleep; if I was doing something fun like playing a game, it might take me an extra half hour on top of that. Go to bed about an hour before you want to fall asleep and read.
Consider a new bed. The most expensive proposition, but a crappy bed can be a major cause of problems. A couple issues: if you are a side sleeper, your bed could be resulting in your hips twisting sideways and torquing your back. My wife also rolls around and that used to shake our crappy bed, which was a decent queen size double pillowtop... but it was too soft and not supportive enough, and developed a sag in the center. We switched to a king size Simmons Beautyrest (independent coils, so if I roll over or she rolls over its not nearly as jarring to the other), and latex memory foam layer so that its more conforming to the body without sacrificing firmness. A lot firmer than the old bed, and we're sleeping a lot better, and it's made a difference on my insomnia; I have a reasonably good chance of falling asleep. Too soft IS a bad thing.
Finally: Go to bed earlier, even if you're not tired. Get on a set schedule.
It's difficult for those of us who seem to have a 26 hour circadian rythym... after a sleep study, full medical exam, and trying several sleep meds (beware Ambien, you can convince yourself of anything about 20 minutes after taking it; the first time I took it, I was convinced I had just thought up the best game idea ever, and started writing stuff down; in the morning I couldn't read a damn thing I wrote, it was all nonsense)
550W will handle a dual core Athlon, dual 7800 GTXs, 4 SATA drives, 2 optical drives, and a decent number of case fans, at peak load.
I guess, since you specified Intel, you might need an additional 100W, but thats still just 2/3s what this thing outputs.
Reminds me of the Robin Williams movie, Final Cut, where some people have an organic computational device implanted in their brain that grows with them and records all of their memories...
There is a scene in a graveyard where a man's tomb, more like a mausoleum? had a giant plasma screen that played some of his memories.
The old versions are available as mods for Nova, which work on the PC as well.
Sim Tower wasn't a Will Wright game. It was designed by Yoot Saito and his company OPeNBooK. Maxis published it.
Why not give them medical software and teach them to be a doctor, or give them some legal books so they can learn to be a lawyer?
I suppose giving your children free will to grow and be who they will is too bland, compared to moulding them to be like you, or who you wish you were.
Those $10-12 DVDs also had theatrical releases to recoup most of their costs. In addition, in the case of game sales, stores keep about 50% of the purchase price. If you can buy a game in the store for $30, or buy it direct from the publisher/developer for $20, the publisher/developer gets 33% more money if you buy it direct from them, even though they price it 33% less.
Adjusted for inflation, $50/game is cheaper than Atari 2600 games were. Someone earlier did the math, a $25 Atari 2600 game in 1980 dollars, adjusted for inflation, would cost $64.50 in 2005 dollars.
Games are getting more expensive to make. The games that don't sell well need to be offset by the mega-hits. Game development costs have gone way up as gamers demand more and more from their games. A triple-A title costs 10x more to develop now than it did 5 years ago, but it is only selling 3-4x as much as triple-A titles did 5 years ago. Do the math.
Yet at the same time people are clamoring for cheaper games, they demand variety, fewer sequels and knock offs. What they are too thick skulled to understand, those sequels and knockoffs are what are selling well enough to pay for the losses endured by the 'experimental' games that gamers are demanding yet not buying enough of to offset development costs.
One publisher tried to make a triple-A title and sell it cheap - the 2K sports series - at $20. It was made at a loss, with the sole intention of driving sales away from the competition, and then after 2 iterations on the title and building a large fanbase, jacking the price up to $50. They do this in the hopes they have hooked enough people who, when given the choice of spending $50 on the sequel to a game they've bought for two years and like, or $50 on the competition they used to buy but stopped because a similiar quality game was cheaper, that they will decide to spend their $50 on the formerly-cheap title. Such good intentions they have, yes...
In short: Games are far more expensive to make, stores get a 50% cut of the sale, games are NOT making it up in volume, 80% of games are made at a loss, 'experimental' and 'creative' games tend to fall into the 80% category, so the price is going to go up, and you are whining because you can't have your cake and eat it too.
If it's just a forum, you can probably get away with very low specs... say, a 300 mhz machine and 10 gig drive. Especially with those requirements. 100 people aren't going to be reading 100 messages a second. Unless you are running a heavy utilization database, which a 100-people-at-a-time forum doesn't get close to, you don't need to worry about performance. There are other things you can do too, such as caching. Consider upgrading when you hit 1000 or more people at a time.
I host about a dozen websites off such a machine, some with forums. The hardware is between 5 and 9 years old (newer 9 gig SCSI HD, a 270 mhz G3 CPU upgrade card... it's an old Power Computing machine).
CPU usage averages 5%, and that's because of all the friggin spam it gets, for hosting a few 7-10 year old domains and email addresses that haven't changed for years (mine alone pulls in 2000-3000 spam/day).
Bandwidth and dedicated connection will be your real concern. Go for the cheapest reliable system you can get, put Linux on it, install something like phpbb or the like.
I guess I should clarify, since I moved things around before finalizing the post, and someone might decide to comment on my accidental misuse of terminology.
There is a ceremony, which is part of the DICE summit. This is all run by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, which is the game industry equivalent of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
There is a legitimate video game awards ceremony. It's called the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences (http://www.interactive.org/).
It's not publicized much, broadcast on TV, nor is it open to the public.
To be a voting member, you must have been actively employed in the games industry for at least 2 or more years, and be credited on 1 or more published commercial titles.
The annual DICE summit is when the peer-based awards, the Interactive Achievement Awards, are given out, after months of voting. The titles are nominated and voted on by members for all categories.
The rats chewed through the backup!
Whedon only wrote the themesong... the 4th DVD of the set has a bonus feature of a recording of him actually singing it, played to the opening sequence. He sang it to capture the feel of the song, how he wanted the actual artist who would perform it to portray it.
He doesn't sing all that well, so it's a good thing they got a real singer to do it. Not to slight him, it's just obviously not a talent/skill he's developed. He makes a much better writer...
It was also fairly graphically advanced among it's contemporaries, for it's the time. It also utilized Mode 7 for pseudo-3D effects.
welcome our giant cockroach-controlled robot overlords.
Sorry, this one just had to be said...
Just click the little "close" box on the Ad, they'll go away (so far, it hasn't come back, and I've logged out/in, close and open new browser window, etc).
There is a little close box on the ads, top right corner. Click it. No more ads!
So far the ads haven't returned, even after closing the browser window and opening a new window.
I logged out, and logged back in, still no ads.
So those of us who are morally opposed to WalMart's business practices don't have to deal with their banner ads. One click makes it go away.
Wal-Mart sells DVDs that have had their content edited (dubbed words, cut scenes), and only mention it in small type that you have to know to look for. Otherwise the packages look almost identical to the full length versions.
It's the same kind of editing that TV stations do to show a PG-13 or R rated movie during the day.
The fact that it isn't CLEARLY labelled as such, masquerading as the real thing, IS censorship.
Do a little research before making baseless accusations of baseless assertions.
:
:
From the numbers I've seen in NPD, the Xbox has about 2x more total units sold in the US than the GC. It has roughly half the installed units as the PS2.
I didnt have the old information on hand, but some web searching pulled up the information.
NPD sales numbers for January 2005
PS2 - 488,000
Xbox - 241,000
Gamecube - 114,000
NPD sales numbers for February 2005
PS2 - 533,000
Xbox - 212,000
GCN - 116,000
NPD sales numbers for March 2005 (through April 2nd)
PSP 620,000
PS2 495,000
XBX 227,000
GC 94,000
NPD sales numbers for April 2005
PSP = 351,000
PS2 = 332,000
Xbox = 153,000
GCN = 63,000
Read grandparent post, I was rebutting his claim that the sale of 5 million DVD box sets at $40 made FOX $200mil profit. A gross miscalculation.
I took 50% off for distributor, retail store claim off the MSRP to get a guestimate of wholesale price, counted $5 per box set for the production costs, assumed little marketting, and just gave a raw number, not taking into consideration the original production costs since it was a for-TV, not for-DVD, show (counting those as writeoffs or recouped, since the show did make at least one airing).
Have you been reading the Nitpickers Guide to Slashdot?