Unfortunately for SOE, the market for fantasy-based MMOGs is all but saturated currently. The companies making these games are squabbling over each others' former customers to a large degree.
This is where Blizzard's reputation for well-executed, polished games (or more to the point, their massive, dedicated fan base) is going to help a ton. SOE may be targeting their current and past customers, but Blizzard's got a whole base of MMOG virgins that'll give WoW a try because they loved Craft and Diablo.
(Add to that the free open beta as you mentioned, and it could be a killing.)
It is a great service. The fact that they're charging for part of it, though, shows that they really don't understand their current underdog status. (Yes, despite their high number of EQ subscribers, Blizzard's huge, loyal fan base makes Blizzard top dog.)
They've got a chance here to say, "look-- those Blizzard rookies don't know what goes in a MMOG. We know how it's done. Don't leave your gaming to novices, come play with the experts.".
Instead, they go off and charge 99 cents extra a month for some of the extra features. They need to fight Blizzard like crazy to keep them from destroying their primary revenue stream, and that includes locking up players ASAP. Instead of pulling all the stops, they're pretending EQ2 is entirely threatened by this, what do you call it, "World of Warcraft"?
Combine this with their premature launch date and lack of real outreach to new MMOGers, and things look grim for SOE. If they don't wake up in a hurry, Blizzard's gonna eat their lunch.
If you like checking out new ideas on how to create a game played by a massive audience, give it a try-- it's really well done. Or if you just like really excellent radio drama, or figuring out brain teasers with a bunch of other people.
If you don't like any of that, it's not for you, in which case you could probably find something of more interest to you here.
Why would I trust a fictional blog meant to increase sales of Halo 2? This is even worse than regular advertising.
It's a game. Play it. It's fun. Whee! Enjoy life.
If you don't enjoy it, don't play it. I don't see where "trust" comes into the picture, except that you have to "trust" yourself to determine if you are having fun.
"'One of the most important things that has made XBOX a somewhat sucess is the ability to mod it.'
Actually, that made it a spectacular failure."
I still haven't seen anything to pull me away from the third option: the small community of XBox modders hasn't had any significant impact on the success or failure of the XBox, or Microsoft's probability.
Should there be any intellectualy property expectations of a playlist?
I'd say no, but if you click on over there, there are some much more questionable elements to the page. In particular, they list the station's callsign and slogans in a way that someone could make a compelling argument is confusing to the average person (the average person being a dolt:) ).
Off to the left, you get this non-confusing bit: "Like 96.5 FM" But then separated into another column, it says this: "96.5 KOIT LITE ROCK LESS TALK"
Now, it may not be a clear-cut case of trademark infringement, but I can guarantee that if Microsoft own these stations and someone else tried this, there'd be a cease-and-desist in the mail already.
That is to say, they're distributing all of HL2, except for the part they haven't written yet. Then, they just wait for the online community to "crack", aka "finish" it.
The coolest thing about gmail is the software itself, not the storage. It's excellent. I wish we had it at work-- no more searching for that e-mail someone sent you 6 months ago that you're sure you put in the "coding" folder-- or was it "scripting", or "ai", or "todo"? You could always use that global e-mail search function that only takes about 20 minutes. But hey, you're too busy slogging through tons of other e-mail you just got, because your filters suck.
I don't see why I'd WANT to keep 2 gigs on my hotmail account, unless they make it as full-featured and easy to use as gmail.
if you get a format (FF, FPS games) you can make endeless sequals and be 99% sure of getting your money and a bit more back.
Actually, that's the irony of this reactionary shift to clones-- most games still lose money. Unless you're a sequel to a big IP, making a clone is often a sure-fire way to tank.
If you look at a lot of the sure-fire big hits this season, a lot of them are at least sequels to games that broke ground: Half-Life 2, Doom 3, GTA San Andreas. The Sims is EA's huge money maker; though it's all expansions now, at one point it was stunningly original.
Failure to realize that many of their cash cows are the ones that were groundbreaking is going to spell financial trouble (well, hopefully) for some of these companies. Eventually people get sick of IP x (well, except Star Wars), and if you don't have something new lined up, you're going to pull an Eidos.
Agreed. I don't think "controversial" applies when someone gets pissed that their pick for Best Game Evar only got a 90%. (That's not an exaggeration-- I know reviewers who've caught shit from PR departments for giving something a lowly 9/10.) "Inflated" is the word I'd use for game reviews.
Hopefully this will decrease development times with some form of cooperative graphics system, and thereby reduce costs and speed production.
Unfortunately, the increase in resource requirements for a next-gen title (Xbox2, PS3) is huge. This may be Sony's attempts to get a handle on that, but they're slowing the trend down-- not reversing it. Next-gen titles will require larger teams (and larger budgets) than the current generation.
Which, of course, will make publishers even more risk-averse than they are now. Get ready for the real Attack of the Clones.
Looks like this guy, and some members of IGDA, might have read the Mythical Man Month, and perhaps even The Deadline.
Come on. We should all know this by now. The extra hours are turning into people too tired to notice obvious defects, just plain crappy games, and an exodus of experienced people from the industry. It's not a shock-- the entire computer software industry knows this except, apparently, the people who run game companies.
Hell, they know it too. But then they fuck up their schedules, fail to design, hire rookies on the cheap, and try to make up for it all at the last minute when they realize "oh crap-- how am I going to make up for the dozens of major mistakes I made over the past 2 years, in only 4 months?".
The video games industry is notoriously bad at what it does. Eventually, it will stop sucking. It's clearly going to take a while.
"This isn't a surprise. No, really. More fundamentally, all this points to the fact that somebody in EA's headcheese department is scared stiff of potentially sapping subscribers from the only truly successful title [Ultima Online] to come out of the company's development sweatshops."
Sure, but unfortunately for EA, none of the higher-ups were "scared stiff" of dropping a few million dollars each on TWO separate, canceled UO sequels. Both canceled for the same reason, no less. Way to learn from your mistakes, guys.
"I can only conclude that Nihilistic was creating code on the order of the Matrix in terms of sheer bug ridden nightmareishness, and they want to pull it in house to try to salvage something."
That's far from the only conclusion. Here's another one you could draw: the game's more or less done, but the art and level design suck. The engine's excellent, so Blizz is pulling it in-house to redo some content. That means they barely have to touch the engine code at all.
There are quite a few other conclusions you could draw, and not all of them are dire.
"Pay $15 a month, AFAIK 50% more than any other major MMORPG on the market, for a month of use-it-or-lose-it gaming time. If you're playing it for only an hour every other day, you're paying a lot more per gaming hour than you are when you buy a game like Baldur's Gate that doesn't go away after a month."
Then again, I don't calculate my purchases for maximum value versus every other purchase I could have made.:)
If it's worth it to me, I continue subscribing. If not, I cancel. CoH gives me my fifteen bucks worth. If anyone is subscribing who believes otherwise, I agree with you-- they should cancel immediately.
"Look around. There is probably something to do that would be much more important, and eventually more fun, than the game-playing."
Clearly, one should optimize every second of one's time. If one is not doing the absolutely highest-impact activity one can do at all times, one must calculate the more efficient path!
"You're not paying $720 for a console. Actually, if this service provides 1 free game a month, you'd save $20 a month on any of the systems you mentioned, plus the cost of those machines. You'd have an extra $630 in your pocket at the end of the 2 years."
Or, buy a PS2, XBox, or Cube for $100-$150, then get Blockbuster's unlimited game rentals for $20 a month (no 2-year commitment). After 2 years, that's $580-$630. So you've saved roughly $100 off the Phantom, you have a popular, well-supported console, and if you want to cancel early, there aren't any penalties except the up-front cost of the console. Also, you don't have to have broadband (but come on, we all have broadband).
The drawbacks are also steep: you have to drive to Blockbuster to get the games; you can only have one at a time; you're restricted to Blockbuster's open hours.
(IANAL, but I've recently discussed this issue with one. Talk to a real lawyer for the real deal, this is not legal advice, blah blah blah. Also, this may only apply to California.)
It is illegal. Many companies have (fairly recently) been found in violation, and had to pay every employee all their owed overtime pay. By docking you 2 hours of pay, the company has firmly classified you as an hourly employee, and they now owe you 26 hours (just math from your hypothetical situation) of overtime pay, regardless of whether you're even still employed there.
If there's no dispute over the fact that you were docked for sub-40 hours, this is cut and dried. If the company made a practice of this and is reasonably large, they are in very real danger of getting hit with a class action, and having to pay a massive amount of back overtime pay.
"The learning curve with ANY new operating system is large. Every tried to teach someone with no experience how to use Windows? It's hard."
Absolutely. For quite some time I believed, as do most, that Windows was simply more usable than Linux, hence its popularity.
Then I set some people up using Windows that had no computer experience, or had only Mac experience, or had only DOS experience.
What an eye-opener. These people were absolutely as perplexed by Windows as you can imagine. It's as if you shoved them in front of a strange screen with thousands of dials and knobs, none with an obvious purpose. They didn't understand some of the metaphors-- folders even confused one of the Mac users!
So, in reality, people like Windows because they've already learned how to use it.
"I'm sure it's more sensational to talk about the modchips and pirates and oh look at all that money that the industry loses to illegal copies of games! But a real opportunity was missed here to discuss what can really be done, within the limits of the law, with a modified console."
Exactly. He makes a flawed assumption ("a mod chip only enhances a console by allowing it to play backed up or pirated games") so that he can set up his straw man ("no, really, we're just backing them up!").
Never mind that my modded XBox is an excellent living room media hub, and I've never once used it to run a pirated (or backed up, for that matter) game.
I bet Mythica was a lot more than 5 mil in when they canned it. He's being a bit optimistic there.
How does that happen? They bought Sigil, thinking at the time that they could have two MMOGs, I suppose. Then a lot of the management staff changed, and the new guys said, "are you fucking crazy? Two PC fantasy MMOGs?".
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately for SOE, the market for fantasy-based MMOGs is all but saturated currently. The companies making these games are squabbling over each others' former customers to a large degree.
This is where Blizzard's reputation for well-executed, polished games (or more to the point, their massive, dedicated fan base) is going to help a ton. SOE may be targeting their current and past customers, but Blizzard's got a whole base of MMOG virgins that'll give WoW a try because they loved Craft and Diablo.
(Add to that the free open beta as you mentioned, and it could be a killing.)
It is a great service. The fact that they're charging for part of it, though, shows that they really don't understand their current underdog status. (Yes, despite their high number of EQ subscribers, Blizzard's huge, loyal fan base makes Blizzard top dog.)
They've got a chance here to say, "look-- those Blizzard rookies don't know what goes in a MMOG. We know how it's done. Don't leave your gaming to novices, come play with the experts.".
Instead, they go off and charge 99 cents extra a month for some of the extra features. They need to fight Blizzard like crazy to keep them from destroying their primary revenue stream, and that includes locking up players ASAP. Instead of pulling all the stops, they're pretending EQ2 is entirely threatened by this, what do you call it, "World of Warcraft"?
Combine this with their premature launch date and lack of real outreach to new MMOGers, and things look grim for SOE. If they don't wake up in a hurry, Blizzard's gonna eat their lunch.
I try not to let my paranoia get in the way of a good time.
It's a fun and innovative game.
If you like checking out new ideas on how to create a game played by a massive audience, give it a try-- it's really well done. Or if you just like really excellent radio drama, or figuring out brain teasers with a bunch of other people.
If you don't like any of that, it's not for you, in which case you could probably find something of more interest to you here.
Why would I trust a fictional blog meant to increase sales of Halo 2? This is even worse than regular advertising.
It's a game. Play it. It's fun. Whee! Enjoy life.
If you don't enjoy it, don't play it. I don't see where "trust" comes into the picture, except that you have to "trust" yourself to determine if you are having fun.
Good point. Lack of divergent viewpoints on a media site is certainly good cause for FBI investigation.
"'One of the most important things that has made XBOX a somewhat sucess is the ability to mod it.'
Actually, that made it a spectacular failure."
I still haven't seen anything to pull me away from the third option: the small community of XBox modders hasn't had any significant impact on the success or failure of the XBox, or Microsoft's probability.
Should there be any intellectualy property expectations of a playlist?
:) ).
I'd say no, but if you click on over there, there are some much more questionable elements to the page. In particular, they list the station's callsign and slogans in a way that someone could make a compelling argument is confusing to the average person (the average person being a dolt
Off to the left, you get this non-confusing bit:
"Like 96.5 FM"
But then separated into another column, it says this:
"96.5 KOIT LITE ROCK LESS TALK"
Now, it may not be a clear-cut case of trademark infringement, but I can guarantee that if Microsoft own these stations and someone else tried this, there'd be a cease-and-desist in the mail already.
They're distributing a crippled version.
That is to say, they're distributing all of HL2, except for the part they haven't written yet. Then, they just wait for the online community to "crack", aka "finish" it.
The coolest thing about gmail is the software itself, not the storage. It's excellent. I wish we had it at work-- no more searching for that e-mail someone sent you 6 months ago that you're sure you put in the "coding" folder-- or was it "scripting", or "ai", or "todo"? You could always use that global e-mail search function that only takes about 20 minutes. But hey, you're too busy slogging through tons of other e-mail you just got, because your filters suck.
I don't see why I'd WANT to keep 2 gigs on my hotmail account, unless they make it as full-featured and easy to use as gmail.
if you get a format (FF, FPS games) you can make endeless sequals and be 99% sure of getting your money and a bit more back.
Actually, that's the irony of this reactionary shift to clones-- most games still lose money. Unless you're a sequel to a big IP, making a clone is often a sure-fire way to tank.
If you look at a lot of the sure-fire big hits this season, a lot of them are at least sequels to games that broke ground: Half-Life 2, Doom 3, GTA San Andreas. The Sims is EA's huge money maker; though it's all expansions now, at one point it was stunningly original.
Failure to realize that many of their cash cows are the ones that were groundbreaking is going to spell financial trouble (well, hopefully) for some of these companies. Eventually people get sick of IP x (well, except Star Wars), and if you don't have something new lined up, you're going to pull an Eidos.
Agreed. I don't think "controversial" applies when someone gets pissed that their pick for Best Game Evar only got a 90%. (That's not an exaggeration-- I know reviewers who've caught shit from PR departments for giving something a lowly 9/10.) "Inflated" is the word I'd use for game reviews.
There is a reason you don't see "Teach yourself physics in 24 hours" books.
Because physics is useless?
Hopefully this will decrease development times with some form of cooperative graphics system, and thereby reduce costs and speed production.
Unfortunately, the increase in resource requirements for a next-gen title (Xbox2, PS3) is huge. This may be Sony's attempts to get a handle on that, but they're slowing the trend down-- not reversing it. Next-gen titles will require larger teams (and larger budgets) than the current generation.
Which, of course, will make publishers even more risk-averse than they are now. Get ready for the real Attack of the Clones.
Looks like this guy, and some members of IGDA, might have read the Mythical Man Month, and perhaps even The Deadline.
Come on. We should all know this by now. The extra hours are turning into people too tired to notice obvious defects, just plain crappy games, and an exodus of experienced people from the industry. It's not a shock-- the entire computer software industry knows this except, apparently, the people who run game companies.
Hell, they know it too. But then they fuck up their schedules, fail to design, hire rookies on the cheap, and try to make up for it all at the last minute when they realize "oh crap-- how am I going to make up for the dozens of major mistakes I made over the past 2 years, in only 4 months?".
The video games industry is notoriously bad at what it does. Eventually, it will stop sucking. It's clearly going to take a while.
"This isn't a surprise. No, really. More fundamentally, all this points to the fact that somebody in EA's headcheese department is scared stiff of potentially sapping subscribers from the only truly successful title [Ultima Online] to come out of the company's development sweatshops."
Sure, but unfortunately for EA, none of the higher-ups were "scared stiff" of dropping a few million dollars each on TWO separate, canceled UO sequels. Both canceled for the same reason, no less. Way to learn from your mistakes, guys.
"I can only conclude that Nihilistic was creating code on the order of the Matrix in terms of sheer bug ridden nightmareishness, and they want to pull it in house to try to salvage something."
That's far from the only conclusion. Here's another one you could draw: the game's more or less done, but the art and level design suck. The engine's excellent, so Blizz is pulling it in-house to redo some content. That means they barely have to touch the engine code at all.
There are quite a few other conclusions you could draw, and not all of them are dire.
Aye, another success here-- just hit up for Matrix, and it automatically sent Gran Tourismo DVD. Cool.
"Pay $15 a month, AFAIK 50% more than any other major MMORPG on the market, for a month of use-it-or-lose-it gaming time. If you're playing it for only an hour every other day, you're paying a lot more per gaming hour than you are when you buy a game like Baldur's Gate that doesn't go away after a month."
:)
Then again, I don't calculate my purchases for maximum value versus every other purchase I could have made.
If it's worth it to me, I continue subscribing. If not, I cancel. CoH gives me my fifteen bucks worth. If anyone is subscribing who believes otherwise, I agree with you-- they should cancel immediately.
"Look around. There is probably something to do that would be much more important, and eventually more fun, than the game-playing."
Clearly, one should optimize every second of one's time. If one is not doing the absolutely highest-impact activity one can do at all times, one must calculate the more efficient path!
"You're not paying $720 for a console. Actually, if this service provides 1 free game a month, you'd save $20 a month on any of the systems you mentioned, plus the cost of those machines. You'd have an extra $630 in your pocket at the end of the 2 years."
Or, buy a PS2, XBox, or Cube for $100-$150, then get Blockbuster's unlimited game rentals for $20 a month (no 2-year commitment). After 2 years, that's $580-$630. So you've saved roughly $100 off the Phantom, you have a popular, well-supported console, and if you want to cancel early, there aren't any penalties except the up-front cost of the console. Also, you don't have to have broadband (but come on, we all have broadband).
The drawbacks are also steep: you have to drive to Blockbuster to get the games; you can only have one at a time; you're restricted to Blockbuster's open hours.
(IANAL, but I've recently discussed this issue with one. Talk to a real lawyer for the real deal, this is not legal advice, blah blah blah. Also, this may only apply to California.)
It is illegal. Many companies have (fairly recently) been found in violation, and had to pay every employee all their owed overtime pay. By docking you 2 hours of pay, the company has firmly classified you as an hourly employee, and they now owe you 26 hours (just math from your hypothetical situation) of overtime pay, regardless of whether you're even still employed there.
If there's no dispute over the fact that you were docked for sub-40 hours, this is cut and dried. If the company made a practice of this and is reasonably large, they are in very real danger of getting hit with a class action, and having to pay a massive amount of back overtime pay.
"The learning curve with ANY new operating system is large. Every tried to teach someone with no experience how to use Windows? It's hard."
Absolutely. For quite some time I believed, as do most, that Windows was simply more usable than Linux, hence its popularity.
Then I set some people up using Windows that had no computer experience, or had only Mac experience, or had only DOS experience.
What an eye-opener. These people were absolutely as perplexed by Windows as you can imagine. It's as if you shoved them in front of a strange screen with thousands of dials and knobs, none with an obvious purpose. They didn't understand some of the metaphors-- folders even confused one of the Mac users!
So, in reality, people like Windows because they've already learned how to use it.
"I'm sure it's more sensational to talk about the modchips and pirates and oh look at all that money that the industry loses to illegal copies of games! But a real opportunity was missed here to discuss what can really be done, within the limits of the law, with a modified console."
Exactly. He makes a flawed assumption ("a mod chip only enhances a console by allowing it to play backed up or pirated games") so that he can set up his straw man ("no, really, we're just backing them up!").
Never mind that my modded XBox is an excellent living room media hub, and I've never once used it to run a pirated (or backed up, for that matter) game.
I bet Mythica was a lot more than 5 mil in when they canned it. He's being a bit optimistic there.
How does that happen? They bought Sigil, thinking at the time that they could have two MMOGs, I suppose. Then a lot of the management staff changed, and the new guys said, "are you fucking crazy? Two PC fantasy MMOGs?".