You're comparing web to bricks-and-mortar. The buying behaviors are very different.
GameStop makes nearly 50 cents on the dollar for the sale of used products. Usually, more than 80% of the money from Amazon used sales go to the seller, so Amazon has far less incentive to push used products instead of new products.
On Amazon, the prominent "Add to Shopping Cart" button on the product page is for purchasing a new item from Amazon.
On Amazon, buying the new item is always the path of least resistance, and requires the least time and analysis. If you go to the used page, you have to contemplate things like shelf wear, missing dust jackets, and whether or not you trust the seller, before making a decision.
After you have selected a new item, Amazon never asks you if you want a used one, instead. Nor have I ever seen them go out of their way to remind you that you can sell used books to them.
GameStop is a used game store. They may sell some new copies of the latest and greatest games, but that is not their market.
Really? Most stores that sell used products don't advertise on TV, take pre-orders, and tout the fact that they have the hottest new stuff. Replay Games is a real example of a used game store.
In most cases, the people going to GameStop are actively looking for used items.
I have never gotten this impression at all. Maybe the GameStops are different where you live? Most of the ones I've been in used to be Electronics Boutiques, to be honest. EB sold used games, and was even pushy about it, but most of the folks in there were there to buy new stuff.
Why would you go there if your prime goal was to get a new copy of a game. There are plenty of other places that have copies and are usually at a better price.
OK, then, what is our equivalent to Borders? If I want to buy a new game, and possibly browse other new games, and make totally irresponsible impulse purchases in a damn bricks-and-mortar game store (and not Best Buy or Walmart), where, exactly, do I go?
You know, to be perfectly honest with you, I was just pondering that very idea. That is, after all, what the auto industry did. I am occasionally disconcerted by Toyota's efforts to buy back my 9-year-old car.:-D
When I was in 9th grade, we made AM tuners! I remember making the coil by very carefully wrapping copper wire around a cardboard toilet paper tube. That was kind of fun.
However, selling used games or DVDs or books whether you are a person, a store or a chain is still legal.
This isn't about the legality of the matter. Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's not abusive, in some cases. My whole point was that the industry's issue is not with the customers, who are behaving in a perfectly rational manner.
Game developers need to factor that into their business model and get on with it.
The retail stores who are reselling used games need to factor into their business model the very real possibility that the game companies will increasingly take measures to circumvent their secondary sales market (and even, to a degree, the boxes-on-shelves model, entirely), since this is already in the process of taking place.
Consider used book stores (and libraries).
People expect to find used books in a used book store. The last time I checked, Borders doesn't put used books on the shelf next to new books for 10% less, and then confront you at the checkout to ask you if you didn't really want to buy the cheaper used book instead of the new one. That would be pretty trashy, would't it?
The real solution is to sell games that I would want to continue playing longer than 3 months.
Huh?
"Portal" is an inexpensive, very fun, innovative game, which received rave reviews from countless people who played it, and won numerous awards. However, "Portal" also a relatively short game. It would certainly not keep you entertained for three whole months, unless you're a very strange duck, indeed.
In your world, "Portal" is "the same old crap," and those shameful developers deserve to have their game resold on the secondary market, simply because it can't keep you entertained for three months.
Replay value is not the only thing that gives a game value. It is only one small part of a bigger picture.
Game developers need to respect the rights of their customers and shut up.
Game developers don't have a problem with their customers. Most people in the industry are customers. If you ask most game developers, they have absolutely no problem with their customers buying or selling used games.
What really bugs them is parasitic retail chains moving massive quantities of used games -- even going so far as to try to foist used games on people who were looking to buy new ones. They can only bite the hand that feeds them for so long before they stop being fed. I assume that this is why Gamestop had to recently change their policies, so their employees were no longer obligated to try to push a used copy on someone who is trying to buy a new game that has been released less than a month ago. It's still not enough, though, and I expect to see further turmoil on this front.
Ultimately, it's the retailers' fault that game companies have been putting increasing barriers to resale in place. If it weren't for the huge size of these resale operations, there wouldn't be a sufficient ROI for the game companies to develop (or buy) technology to restrict resale. They don't really care about some random guy Craigslisting his console games. That's not really going to show up on anyone's bottom line, at the end of the day.
It's interesting that you note the vibration issue. Even though you lost a couple of CFLs to vibration, holy cow, CFLs are WAY more vibration-tolerant than incandescents, over the long haul. This is the thing that finally pushed me to replace the incandescents in the ceiling fixtures in my apartment. With kids and dogs running around in the apartment above mine all the time, my incandescents were lasting me 1-2 months. The CFLs I replaced them with have yet to burn out.
I'll be honest with you: The DRM in Photoshop causes a very real and direct problem for me, as a single user who previously used her Photoshop license on three machines, all of which are not used by anyone else. I am a legitimate user, not attempting to defraud the company in any way, and Adobe's DRM is nonetheless extremely inconvenient for me. However, I have the same exact problem with the DRM in Autodesk Maya, which also limits me to two machines. So I don't understand why you're picking on Adobe, here. The Flex notification was every bit as useful and/or relevant as the Autodesk one. In fact, I would have posted about it myself, if someone else hadn't.
Moreover, I don't think that most of your complaints about Adobe's products really apply to Flex, as a product, per se. Flex is, in my opinion, more reasonably priced than Adobe's other software, and it doesn't seem to use the same noxious DRM system that's used in the Creative Suite products. (If someone has better information, feel free to correct me on that.)
Agreed. What I REALLY want to do on an airplane is play Civilization, since that has the amazing power to make the next ten hours of my life disappear. That's the perfect thing for a long, boring flight! Unfortunately, in spite of the fact that my laptop is not much of a beast, it just doesn't last very long playing games. Moreover, if I had to carry around heavy spare batteries, it would nullify some of the benefits of owning a very lightweight laptop. I don't even care about the WiFi. What I REALLY want is some damn power jacks in the Economy class seating area. I can plug into regular power jacks on Amtrak, but planes have been driving me nuts for years.
I've seen plenty of older programmers (and other IT folk) do just fine, even in industries that are notorious for harboring the dreaded Puer Aeturnus, like the game development industry. However, as ideonexus points out, you need to be prepared for lifelong learning. The older folks I have seen be successful are rabid technologists. They are interested in new technologies, and they're constantly investigating new avenues. In contrast, the folks who have become "obsolete" are the ones who either never made any effort to learn anything new, or over-specialized in something that fell out of vogue.
I didn't get any math education during 6th grade, because I tested into Pre-Algebra, but it was too much trouble for my school to get their hands on any Pre-Algebra books, or to bother teaching me, and the small handful of other kids who qualified. (I'm not sure why they bothered testing us, in the first place, under the circumstances.) We were told that we would have to take general math again, in spite of the fact that it was a complete waste of time. We were so bored, we would have been willing to self-teach, if we could've just gotten our hands on some damn books, but no. And my neighborhood wasn't rich; the families couldn't afford to buy textbooks out-of-pocket.
This is probably why I roll my eyes, every time I hear someone going on about how "evil" tracking and labeling kids is. If you lump all the kids together indiscriminantly, whether you're teahcing to the highest common denominator, the lowest common denominator, or the average, you're always screwing somebody over.
It would be a real shame if next gen, devs get their way and it moves all to digital downloads, specifically because then there's no way to buy a game used, and they will have effectively moved us to a leasing system.
The more common used sales become, the more likely this future is, though. In the grand scheme of things, the devs have to eat, and they would understandably rather sell one new game to you than for you to use that same money to buy, say, two used games that some middle-man reaps the (substantial) profits for. It wouldn't be so bad if they weren't forced to compete with their own work being resold at a lower price, at no benefit to them. It's a little like releasing a movie, and having to sell all your tickets in the first three days, because after that, someone else makes all the money for your movie, and you're basically screwed. Releasing a game with fantastic word-of-mouth is of no use to you, if there are ample used copies on the shelves, by the time friends and friends-of-friends go out to buy them. As a publisher, you're better off funding shovelware with a big, glitzy license attached to it, than you are funding something great that will have reliable sales over months to come. In other words, the used market often rewards the wrong things.
Dare nMc does have a point in that, if the industry can limit used game sales (and also piracy), they can also afford to provide games at a lower price. However, there's a small hurdle to overcome in the whole "perceived value" issue. When people see a new game that sells for $25, they assume it's a "budget" title, and that they're not going to get a AAA experience out of it. This is changing, though, with the renaissance of exceptional indie games on the market, and a lot of high-quality smaller products (such as Portal). There is currently a lot more price experimentation and variability of prices in the downloadable segment -- even from the big publishers. So, I think you're going to see some new stable states in pricing emerge in the next couple of years, reflecting the different delivery models we're seeing.
I agree with wrook. If you are using speech to describe a high-level abstraction of a system, someone still, ultimately, has to write the code that goes underneath it. Moreover, speech is a messy and often incorrect way to describe such a thing. Diagrams and text are much clearer. As for writing the code, itself, our computers don't program themselves yet, and speech is a horrifically poor way for humans to write code. Most people who are relegated to using speech for this purpose end up spending years developing custom macros, to make the whole effort less painful.
Personally, I find it bizarre that anyone could possibly think that dictation was a viable means for most people to enter text. In a typical office setting, the noise pollution would drive everyone insane within fifteen minutes. Perhaps Kurzweil has the luxury of a private office, but most people don't.
1) Benefits - how much energy can an orbital solar array produce, relative to the same size solar array on Earth? About twice as much - it's lit for 24 instead of 12 hours. (plus benefit of always-perpendicular incident radiation, but minus losses in conversion & transmission.) Ultimately, ~2x power from the same array.
You forgot to take into account cloud albedo, smog, and other types of atmospheric attenuation of the sunlight, all of which substantially reduce the amount of energy collected by terrestrial-based panels.
I'm definitely in favor of introducing kids to programming via game-modding. Most of them play games, anyway, and showing them how to make their OWN games is even cooler. Making games was what first motivated me to learn to program, way back when I was a kid.
Lua is used by some games. Other games use python, or their own custom languages. I recommend checking around, and seeing what (youth-appropriate) games have good, active scripting scenes. An older game might be a good choice, both because you can get copies for cheap, and also because there might be a more extensive modding scene.
I often hear this argument, but it's based on the fallacy that poor resale potential is the sole property worth rewarding publishers and developers for. You have to understand -- this is one of the reasons why you have umpteen-hundred iterations of Sports: Roster Update 2008 on the shelves. Those games have poor resale value, due to the frequent updates. This is what you consider to be the market "working correctly." I don't.
Consider a game like "Portal," which was adored both by the critics and the public, and -- from what I understand -- sold quite well. It was a short single-player game, with relatively limited replay value. Had it been released as a shrinkwrap console title down at the Gamestop, it would have been back on shelves, with its (already bargain) price marked down by $5, a mere two days after release. In your "working correctly" market, "Portal" is not a worthy game, because it can be finished quickly. You are making the argument that Valve deserves to suffer financially for making a short game (even at a low price point), and trying to "grab more market share" via Steam will only backfire.
For some reason, I just don't find myself buying this argument.
If games cost $30,000 to buy, and people played them for eight years before reselling them, I don't think the industry would have as much reason to complain. As it is, I do not find your snarky and ill-informed analogy the least bit compelling.
As long as we've had microcomputers, this strange fallacy has persisted that if you just put enough computers and kids in the same room together, somehow, magical learning will ensue. In a way, both m0s3m8n and neokushan are right. Computers are a horrendous waste, if they aren't being used in effective ways. We can't expect their mere presence to enrich students through osmosis. They are only useful if they are integrated into the curriculum in some kind of meaningful way.
That said, I think things are getting better. I know a 12-year-old who just went through a class on assembling desktop computers from parts. That's a far cry from the idiotically useless 30-minutes of typing tutor software that was waved in front of me, when I was her age. Yay, homerow! Bye!
I guarantee you that if you talk to men who aren't interested in science and computers, they'll perk up when you discuss music and movies, too. Maybe you're just hanging out with the wrong women.:-)
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Really? Most stores that sell used products don't advertise on TV, take pre-orders, and tout the fact that they have the hottest new stuff. Replay Games is a real example of a used game store.
I have never gotten this impression at all. Maybe the GameStops are different where you live? Most of the ones I've been in used to be Electronics Boutiques, to be honest. EB sold used games, and was even pushy about it, but most of the folks in there were there to buy new stuff.
OK, then, what is our equivalent to Borders? If I want to buy a new game, and possibly browse other new games, and make totally irresponsible impulse purchases in a damn bricks-and-mortar game store (and not Best Buy or Walmart), where, exactly, do I go?
You know, to be perfectly honest with you, I was just pondering that very idea. That is, after all, what the auto industry did. I am occasionally disconcerted by Toyota's efforts to buy back my 9-year-old car. :-D
When I was in 9th grade, we made AM tuners! I remember making the coil by very carefully wrapping copper wire around a cardboard toilet paper tube. That was kind of fun.
This isn't about the legality of the matter. Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's not abusive, in some cases. My whole point was that the industry's issue is not with the customers, who are behaving in a perfectly rational manner.
The retail stores who are reselling used games need to factor into their business model the very real possibility that the game companies will increasingly take measures to circumvent their secondary sales market (and even, to a degree, the boxes-on-shelves model, entirely), since this is already in the process of taking place.
People expect to find used books in a used book store. The last time I checked, Borders doesn't put used books on the shelf next to new books for 10% less, and then confront you at the checkout to ask you if you didn't really want to buy the cheaper used book instead of the new one. That would be pretty trashy, would't it?
Huh?
"Portal" is an inexpensive, very fun, innovative game, which received rave reviews from countless people who played it, and won numerous awards. However, "Portal" also a relatively short game. It would certainly not keep you entertained for three whole months, unless you're a very strange duck, indeed.
In your world, "Portal" is "the same old crap," and those shameful developers deserve to have their game resold on the secondary market, simply because it can't keep you entertained for three months.
Replay value is not the only thing that gives a game value. It is only one small part of a bigger picture.
Game developers don't have a problem with their customers. Most people in the industry are customers. If you ask most game developers, they have absolutely no problem with their customers buying or selling used games.
What really bugs them is parasitic retail chains moving massive quantities of used games -- even going so far as to try to foist used games on people who were looking to buy new ones. They can only bite the hand that feeds them for so long before they stop being fed. I assume that this is why Gamestop had to recently change their policies, so their employees were no longer obligated to try to push a used copy on someone who is trying to buy a new game that has been released less than a month ago. It's still not enough, though, and I expect to see further turmoil on this front.
Ultimately, it's the retailers' fault that game companies have been putting increasing barriers to resale in place. If it weren't for the huge size of these resale operations, there wouldn't be a sufficient ROI for the game companies to develop (or buy) technology to restrict resale. They don't really care about some random guy Craigslisting his console games. That's not really going to show up on anyone's bottom line, at the end of the day.
It's interesting that you note the vibration issue. Even though you lost a couple of CFLs to vibration, holy cow, CFLs are WAY more vibration-tolerant than incandescents, over the long haul. This is the thing that finally pushed me to replace the incandescents in the ceiling fixtures in my apartment. With kids and dogs running around in the apartment above mine all the time, my incandescents were lasting me 1-2 months. The CFLs I replaced them with have yet to burn out.
Which differs from Autodesk... how, exactly?
I'll be honest with you: The DRM in Photoshop causes a very real and direct problem for me, as a single user who previously used her Photoshop license on three machines, all of which are not used by anyone else. I am a legitimate user, not attempting to defraud the company in any way, and Adobe's DRM is nonetheless extremely inconvenient for me. However, I have the same exact problem with the DRM in Autodesk Maya, which also limits me to two machines. So I don't understand why you're picking on Adobe, here. The Flex notification was every bit as useful and/or relevant as the Autodesk one. In fact, I would have posted about it myself, if someone else hadn't.
Moreover, I don't think that most of your complaints about Adobe's products really apply to Flex, as a product, per se. Flex is, in my opinion, more reasonably priced than Adobe's other software, and it doesn't seem to use the same noxious DRM system that's used in the Creative Suite products. (If someone has better information, feel free to correct me on that.)
Agreed. What I REALLY want to do on an airplane is play Civilization, since that has the amazing power to make the next ten hours of my life disappear. That's the perfect thing for a long, boring flight! Unfortunately, in spite of the fact that my laptop is not much of a beast, it just doesn't last very long playing games. Moreover, if I had to carry around heavy spare batteries, it would nullify some of the benefits of owning a very lightweight laptop. I don't even care about the WiFi. What I REALLY want is some damn power jacks in the Economy class seating area. I can plug into regular power jacks on Amtrak, but planes have been driving me nuts for years.
I've seen plenty of older programmers (and other IT folk) do just fine, even in industries that are notorious for harboring the dreaded Puer Aeturnus, like the game development industry. However, as ideonexus points out, you need to be prepared for lifelong learning. The older folks I have seen be successful are rabid technologists. They are interested in new technologies, and they're constantly investigating new avenues. In contrast, the folks who have become "obsolete" are the ones who either never made any effort to learn anything new, or over-specialized in something that fell out of vogue.
Because there wouldn't be any large corporations left?
I didn't get any math education during 6th grade, because I tested into Pre-Algebra, but it was too much trouble for my school to get their hands on any Pre-Algebra books, or to bother teaching me, and the small handful of other kids who qualified. (I'm not sure why they bothered testing us, in the first place, under the circumstances.) We were told that we would have to take general math again, in spite of the fact that it was a complete waste of time. We were so bored, we would have been willing to self-teach, if we could've just gotten our hands on some damn books, but no. And my neighborhood wasn't rich; the families couldn't afford to buy textbooks out-of-pocket.
This is probably why I roll my eyes, every time I hear someone going on about how "evil" tracking and labeling kids is. If you lump all the kids together indiscriminantly, whether you're teahcing to the highest common denominator, the lowest common denominator, or the average, you're always screwing somebody over.
The more common used sales become, the more likely this future is, though. In the grand scheme of things, the devs have to eat, and they would understandably rather sell one new game to you than for you to use that same money to buy, say, two used games that some middle-man reaps the (substantial) profits for. It wouldn't be so bad if they weren't forced to compete with their own work being resold at a lower price, at no benefit to them. It's a little like releasing a movie, and having to sell all your tickets in the first three days, because after that, someone else makes all the money for your movie, and you're basically screwed. Releasing a game with fantastic word-of-mouth is of no use to you, if there are ample used copies on the shelves, by the time friends and friends-of-friends go out to buy them. As a publisher, you're better off funding shovelware with a big, glitzy license attached to it, than you are funding something great that will have reliable sales over months to come. In other words, the used market often rewards the wrong things.
Dare nMc does have a point in that, if the industry can limit used game sales (and also piracy), they can also afford to provide games at a lower price. However, there's a small hurdle to overcome in the whole "perceived value" issue. When people see a new game that sells for $25, they assume it's a "budget" title, and that they're not going to get a AAA experience out of it. This is changing, though, with the renaissance of exceptional indie games on the market, and a lot of high-quality smaller products (such as Portal). There is currently a lot more price experimentation and variability of prices in the downloadable segment -- even from the big publishers. So, I think you're going to see some new stable states in pricing emerge in the next couple of years, reflecting the different delivery models we're seeing.
In other news, water is wet and there are seven days in a week.
I agree with wrook. If you are using speech to describe a high-level abstraction of a system, someone still, ultimately, has to write the code that goes underneath it. Moreover, speech is a messy and often incorrect way to describe such a thing. Diagrams and text are much clearer. As for writing the code, itself, our computers don't program themselves yet, and speech is a horrifically poor way for humans to write code. Most people who are relegated to using speech for this purpose end up spending years developing custom macros, to make the whole effort less painful.
Personally, I find it bizarre that anyone could possibly think that dictation was a viable means for most people to enter text. In a typical office setting, the noise pollution would drive everyone insane within fifteen minutes. Perhaps Kurzweil has the luxury of a private office, but most people don't.
Uh... you didn't actually read the article, did you?
You forgot to take into account cloud albedo, smog, and other types of atmospheric attenuation of the sunlight, all of which substantially reduce the amount of energy collected by terrestrial-based panels.
I'm definitely in favor of introducing kids to programming via game-modding. Most of them play games, anyway, and showing them how to make their OWN games is even cooler. Making games was what first motivated me to learn to program, way back when I was a kid.
Lua is used by some games. Other games use python, or their own custom languages. I recommend checking around, and seeing what (youth-appropriate) games have good, active scripting scenes. An older game might be a good choice, both because you can get copies for cheap, and also because there might be a more extensive modding scene.
Replay value and play length are not the sole determining factors of quality.
I often hear this argument, but it's based on the fallacy that poor resale potential is the sole property worth rewarding publishers and developers for. You have to understand -- this is one of the reasons why you have umpteen-hundred iterations of Sports: Roster Update 2008 on the shelves. Those games have poor resale value, due to the frequent updates. This is what you consider to be the market "working correctly." I don't.
Consider a game like "Portal," which was adored both by the critics and the public, and -- from what I understand -- sold quite well. It was a short single-player game, with relatively limited replay value. Had it been released as a shrinkwrap console title down at the Gamestop, it would have been back on shelves, with its (already bargain) price marked down by $5, a mere two days after release. In your "working correctly" market, "Portal" is not a worthy game, because it can be finished quickly. You are making the argument that Valve deserves to suffer financially for making a short game (even at a low price point), and trying to "grab more market share" via Steam will only backfire.
For some reason, I just don't find myself buying this argument.
If games cost $30,000 to buy, and people played them for eight years before reselling them, I don't think the industry would have as much reason to complain. As it is, I do not find your snarky and ill-informed analogy the least bit compelling.
As long as we've had microcomputers, this strange fallacy has persisted that if you just put enough computers and kids in the same room together, somehow, magical learning will ensue. In a way, both m0s3m8n and neokushan are right. Computers are a horrendous waste, if they aren't being used in effective ways. We can't expect their mere presence to enrich students through osmosis. They are only useful if they are integrated into the curriculum in some kind of meaningful way.
That said, I think things are getting better. I know a 12-year-old who just went through a class on assembling desktop computers from parts. That's a far cry from the idiotically useless 30-minutes of typing tutor software that was waved in front of me, when I was her age. Yay, homerow! Bye!
I guarantee you that if you talk to men who aren't interested in science and computers, they'll perk up when you discuss music and movies, too. Maybe you're just hanging out with the wrong women. :-)
I have long argued that the Feminist Revolution will never be complete until we liberate the men, too!