Nice thing about MMO's is that the companies actually *have to* listen to customers or they will stop playing and paying. Blizzard alone has 2500+ people working on customer support related jobs.
You of course cant listen to or adjust the game by every single person, but you have to listen to the larger group. This is true even more because Aion is NCSoft's try to create real competitor in the western markets.
And the game does look good with its Crytek Engine and with some of the gameplay mechanics. I haven't played it myself, but some friends have been playing the beta and say it is quite fun. However I will wait for more reviews first, as I cant concentrate on WoW that much either. What I'm worried about is that it will have lots of grinding like WoW, specially because thats even more common in Asian games.
I agree. Seems people just like to throw "DRM" word around because of its bad image here on slashdot.
GameGuard is anticheating software that protects the game from various hacking tools and methods same way that PunkBuster and VAC are. It's just a lot more invasive and is mainly used in Asian games.
WoW and other gamers are quite easy to make hacking tools to too, but players reporting cheaters to gamemasters and the fact one account costs whole new game limits it goodly.
Those are definitely not revenue streams. The costs of server transfers, name changes, and factions changes exist to discourage abuse and to recoup sunk costs in designing and supporting the systems that allow those features, all of which were added based on player demand.
Even if they exist for that purpose, they are still extra revenue streams.
I must say I haven't tried looking at it and while I know that Skype has lots of obfuscation and different layers of protection, the guys who developed it most likely know also how to get around it. And these protections were in Skype even before the sale to eBay.
My question - how do they know the source doe was altered?
You dont need the source code to see changes. Assembly code is always available via debugger like ollydbg or others. Also, these guys are the ones who created kazaa/fasttrack and skype's algorithm, they probably have the technical intelligence to check it themself too or just hire someone to do it.
Its pretty hard, one could say almost impossible, to hide the algorithm changes since all the code is available as assembly.
This is just about eBay's stupidity on the point of purchase, because they didnt buy the whole thing.
You can blame "insecurity" of Windows all you want, but do you actually have an answer to how to make it better then? Before all the usual arguments come:
- These malware work just aswell on user account, you do not need admin/root access. - Locking up the whole OS so that user is in 100% controlled environment is a no go, as seeing here on slashdot about iphone and other systems that do it. - Malware goes where the user is. If linux had ~95% marketshare on desktops, majority of malware would be there because thats where the users are. - Theres nothing on Linux that does anything to prevent this kind of malware - you only get more security because there's not many users. If you suggest everyone moving to it, what happens? - Conficker excluded, theres not really exploits in the Windows itself now a days. They're mostly from third party software like Flash and PDF reader.
This isn't about OS security, its about user stupidity to install random crap. That wouldn't change even if the OS marketshare would be different.
4600 is the amount of people working on WoW, including the support staff and "two full-time lore historians, keepers of blizzard's past.". I'd like to have a work title "Warcraft Lore Historian"
The interesting question with the amount of people working at blizzard is that will indie mmo's stand any change?
World of Warcraft utilizes 20,000 computer systems, 1.3 petabytes of storage, and more than 4600 people.
That's quite hard to compete with, and it only seems to be growing. Even other big MMO's have trouble competing with WoW, with Eve Online pretty much the only true competitor (and its more targeted for hardcore players)
Not much detailing about their data centers. It seemed more of a Blizzard PR piece than anything else, and without technical details, this is just another Blizzard ad.
"The PR and community teams were Brack's next focus, the groups responsible for public interaction. The PR team has helped to ensure some 10,000 articles have been written about World of Warcraft"
Did you read the article? They employ around 4000+ people on WoW alone.
Support staff:
Brack went on to talk about the customer support staff, a group with 2,056 game masters, 340 billing managers, and a host of other background staffers. These tireless staffers also work from locations around the world, ensuring that any local variations in culture (or the game) are respected.
You do not need such massive infrastructure to run a MMO, its just being wasteful about resources. Sure, the uptime could suffer a little bit and its possible you would sometimes run over the allowed bandwidth with Comcast, but you CAN run these things just fine on your living room behind the TV. If you want redundancy, you could have another server at your friends place.
Just because its "cool" and you have some money, it doesn't mean you have to waste it. Hell, even Slashdot runs just fine on CmdrTaco's mom's basement..
This all 3D-to-the-eyes is an old trick, but over the past year I've started to think that now theres actually good technology available for it.
I purchased myself the NVIDIA 3D Vision and played with it on various games. My favourite game for the past year has been left4dead and the 3D effect on it is really outstanding - everything looks so much scarier and you actually feel like being there.
The old cheap tricks are quite obsolote now as tech has improvent. But the future of gaming and movies surely is in this 3D and "be there" experience. Even MS and Sony have admitted that just pushing megapixels and polygony amount isn't the best thing, as they're at their maximum already anyway. We always see these things in movies, but the technology isn't really far from there now.
Now the only thing is about making it convenient for end users.
Wikipedia article also seems to have an another interesting marketing plot
Electronic Arts partnered with GameStop for a one-day only promotion of Dante's Inferno on 09-09-09. Those that pre-ordered the game were offered a $6.66 discount, the Number of the Beast.[5]
all of this makes for delicious copy, and much of the gnashing of teeth seems to be centered on the fact that the gaming press continues to fall for the contrived controversy to give the company exactly what it wants: coverage.
Submitter and the editor didn't actually see the ironic thing here?
For that matter I didn't actually had heard or read about this game, but thanks to slashdot now reporting about this, I think I will just google it. Just to know what it is about. Maybe I even buy it - after all everyone is talking about it. Good work Slashdot!
So what kind of game it is? Does it look good? What features are there? Is it fun? Is there multiplayer, and how is it? Is it fun to play with friends?
In the latest chapter of this fun tale, EA has finally decided to simply send editors of prominent gaming sites checks for $200. The point? If the checks are cashed, the gaming press is greedy. If they're not, the gaming press is wasteful. "By cashing this check you succumb to avarice by harding filthy lucre, but by not cashing it, you waste it, and thereby surrender to prodigality. Make your choice and suffer the consequence for your sin," the included note stated. "And scoff not, for consequences are imminent." The sin theme remains, if nothing else, on-topic.
This has to be one of the first times money has been sent directly to reviewers and editors with the hope that the story is broken publicly, and that's what makes the stunt so devious; of course it's going to be written about. Joystiq cashed the check and donated the money to charity, Kotaku posted video of their check burning. Without having a list of sites that received the faux bribe, it's impossible to tell if anyone actually cashed the check and kept the money.
Cheapy D, who runs the popular deals site CheapAssGamer, weighed in on the check. "Kotaku charges an $8 CPM (cost per 1,000 banner impressions) for their standard advertising banners. Their news post about this PR stunt will likely surpass 40,000 views," he explained. "To err on the safe side, let's say the total cost of the check and fancy box is $300. Since [the post's author] burned the check, EA basically spent the equivalent of a $2.50 CPM for a front page news post on Kotaku. That is an incredible value. Nice job, EA Marketing!"
This sounds like a fun stunt. And now it continues on slashdot too. Someone is going to get a nice christmas bonus!
The P2P part is used mostly for just the most popular tracks, it would be too slow and unreliable otherwise. For that matter I havent ever noticed it using upload bandwidth so much that I would, well, notice it. It makes sense to try to P2P the most listened tracks, as theres probably thousands of people listening them at the same time.
Do you pay for cable subscription? Do you go to movies? Do you eat food? Those are something you pay once but after that they're gone forever.
If you want to keep the products, you buy a cd or digital download for 10-20 euros an album. But if you're fine with streaming and just listening to what you feel like then, it makes a lot more sense to pay the 9e/month and listen to as much as you want, even if you cant keep them. It's a cheaper and I dont understand why you except to keep the music you listen on a (cheap) streaming music service.
Why ad-supported is not available everywhere is probably just that they havent got ad deals in those countries yet. Spotify is still invite only and beta after all.
So it's the media reproduction and artist extortion industry's wet dream: You never actually own anything, and really pay every time you listen to the track.
It's not a this or that situation. Just like cable channels that you pay monthly payment to show movies, you can still buy them too to actually own them. There's good sides on both; when you buy them, you get the products as your own. When you rent/stream/watch from tv, you dont get to own the products but you can enjoy them then for a lot lower price (or like tv and spotify, for free with ads)
Universal Music Sweden has admitted that Spotify makes it more money than iTunes does. "In five months from the launch, Spotify became our largest digital source of income and so passed by iTunes", said Per Sundin, managing director of Universal Music.
"It's a fantastic development, explained by the fact that Spotify really has exploded", he added. The admission brings with it a whole host of questions - none of which we have many answers to. How much is Spotify paying the labels? Could this be why the iPhone app still hasn't been approved? Does this validate ad-funded music as a business model?
The interesting thing will be how it works on US market however. They can potentially get a lot more from advertising in USA than in Sweden, but is USA itself got so used to iTunes and such that it will hurt the sales and labels? However, Spotify is a perfect way to turn those pirating and "sending mp3's to friends in msn" to customers you can get income from, even if its in form of ads revenue.
Also: "The service is not currently available in the United States or Canada. Spotify Founder, Daniel Ek, has expressed a desire to change this. It is expected that Spotify will be available in the United States before the end of 2009.[20]"
Slashdot Mirror
Nice thing about MMO's is that the companies actually *have to* listen to customers or they will stop playing and paying. Blizzard alone has 2500+ people working on customer support related jobs.
You of course cant listen to or adjust the game by every single person, but you have to listen to the larger group. This is true even more because Aion is NCSoft's try to create real competitor in the western markets.
And the game does look good with its Crytek Engine and with some of the gameplay mechanics. I haven't played it myself, but some friends have been playing the beta and say it is quite fun. However I will wait for more reviews first, as I cant concentrate on WoW that much either. What I'm worried about is that it will have lots of grinding like WoW, specially because thats even more common in Asian games.
I agree. Seems people just like to throw "DRM" word around because of its bad image here on slashdot.
GameGuard is anticheating software that protects the game from various hacking tools and methods same way that PunkBuster and VAC are. It's just a lot more invasive and is mainly used in Asian games.
WoW and other gamers are quite easy to make hacking tools to too, but players reporting cheaters to gamemasters and the fact one account costs whole new game limits it goodly.
Those are definitely not revenue streams. The costs of server transfers, name changes, and factions changes exist to discourage abuse and to recoup sunk costs in designing and supporting the systems that allow those features, all of which were added based on player demand.
Even if they exist for that purpose, they are still extra revenue streams.
I must say I haven't tried looking at it and while I know that Skype has lots of obfuscation and different layers of protection, the guys who developed it most likely know also how to get around it. And these protections were in Skype even before the sale to eBay.
My question - how do they know the source doe was altered?
You dont need the source code to see changes. Assembly code is always available via debugger like ollydbg or others. Also, these guys are the ones who created kazaa/fasttrack and skype's algorithm, they probably have the technical intelligence to check it themself too or just hire someone to do it.
Its pretty hard, one could say almost impossible, to hide the algorithm changes since all the code is available as assembly.
This is just about eBay's stupidity on the point of purchase, because they didnt buy the whole thing.
Always when I think I've seen the most stupidity ever, there comes a next sucker and tops it.
Next on news, casino robbers twitter about the process using @heist tag while executing their plan.
You can blame "insecurity" of Windows all you want, but do you actually have an answer to how to make it better then? Before all the usual arguments come:
- These malware work just aswell on user account, you do not need admin/root access.
- Locking up the whole OS so that user is in 100% controlled environment is a no go, as seeing here on slashdot about iphone and other systems that do it.
- Malware goes where the user is. If linux had ~95% marketshare on desktops, majority of malware would be there because thats where the users are.
- Theres nothing on Linux that does anything to prevent this kind of malware - you only get more security because there's not many users. If you suggest everyone moving to it, what happens?
- Conficker excluded, theres not really exploits in the Windows itself now a days. They're mostly from third party software like Flash and PDF reader.
This isn't about OS security, its about user stupidity to install random crap. That wouldn't change even if the OS marketshare would be different.
Yes, WoW coders are actually from GetAFreelancer.com.
4600 is the amount of people working on WoW, including the support staff and "two full-time lore historians, keepers of blizzard's past.". I'd like to have a work title "Warcraft Lore Historian"
The interesting question with the amount of people working at blizzard is that will indie mmo's stand any change?
World of Warcraft utilizes 20,000 computer systems, 1.3 petabytes of storage, and more than 4600 people.
That's quite hard to compete with, and it only seems to be growing. Even other big MMO's have trouble competing with WoW, with Eve Online pretty much the only true competitor (and its more targeted for hardcore players)
Not much detailing about their data centers. It seemed more of a Blizzard PR piece than anything else, and without technical details, this is just another Blizzard ad.
"The PR and community teams were Brack's next focus, the groups responsible for public interaction. The PR team has helped to ensure some 10,000 articles have been written about World of Warcraft"
Job well done, PR team!
Did you read the article? They employ around 4000+ people on WoW alone.
Support staff:
Brack went on to talk about the customer support staff, a group with 2,056 game masters, 340 billing managers, and a host of other background staffers. These tireless staffers also work from locations around the world, ensuring that any local variations in culture (or the game) are respected.
You do not need such massive infrastructure to run a MMO, its just being wasteful about resources. Sure, the uptime could suffer a little bit and its possible you would sometimes run over the allowed bandwidth with Comcast, but you CAN run these things just fine on your living room behind the TV. If you want redundancy, you could have another server at your friends place.
Just because its "cool" and you have some money, it doesn't mean you have to waste it. Hell, even Slashdot runs just fine on CmdrTaco's mom's basement..
"Zune HD" is the device's name..
Thats Firefox for you. Get Opera 10.
This all 3D-to-the-eyes is an old trick, but over the past year I've started to think that now theres actually good technology available for it.
I purchased myself the NVIDIA 3D Vision and played with it on various games. My favourite game for the past year has been left4dead and the 3D effect on it is really outstanding - everything looks so much scarier and you actually feel like being there.
The old cheap tricks are quite obsolote now as tech has improvent. But the future of gaming and movies surely is in this 3D and "be there" experience. Even MS and Sony have admitted that just pushing megapixels and polygony amount isn't the best thing, as they're at their maximum already anyway. We always see these things in movies, but the technology isn't really far from there now.
Now the only thing is about making it convenient for end users.
Wikipedia article also seems to have an another interesting marketing plot
Electronic Arts partnered with GameStop for a one-day only promotion of Dante's Inferno on 09-09-09. Those that pre-ordered the game were offered a $6.66 discount, the Number of the Beast.[5]
all of this makes for delicious copy, and much of the gnashing of teeth seems to be centered on the fact that the gaming press continues to fall for the contrived controversy to give the company exactly what it wants: coverage.
Submitter and the editor didn't actually see the ironic thing here?
For that matter I didn't actually had heard or read about this game, but thanks to slashdot now reporting about this, I think I will just google it. Just to know what it is about. Maybe I even buy it - after all everyone is talking about it. Good work Slashdot!
So what kind of game it is? Does it look good? What features are there? Is it fun? Is there multiplayer, and how is it? Is it fun to play with friends?
In the latest chapter of this fun tale, EA has finally decided to simply send editors of prominent gaming sites checks for $200. The point? If the checks are cashed, the gaming press is greedy. If they're not, the gaming press is wasteful. "By cashing this check you succumb to avarice by harding filthy lucre, but by not cashing it, you waste it, and thereby surrender to prodigality. Make your choice and suffer the consequence for your sin," the included note stated. "And scoff not, for consequences are imminent." The sin theme remains, if nothing else, on-topic.
This has to be one of the first times money has been sent directly to reviewers and editors with the hope that the story is broken publicly, and that's what makes the stunt so devious; of course it's going to be written about. Joystiq cashed the check and donated the money to charity, Kotaku posted video of their check burning. Without having a list of sites that received the faux bribe, it's impossible to tell if anyone actually cashed the check and kept the money.
Cheapy D, who runs the popular deals site CheapAssGamer, weighed in on the check. "Kotaku charges an $8 CPM (cost per 1,000 banner impressions) for their standard advertising banners. Their news post about this PR stunt will likely surpass 40,000 views," he explained. "To err on the safe side, let's say the total cost of the check and fancy box is $300. Since [the post's author] burned the check, EA basically spent the equivalent of a $2.50 CPM for a front page news post on Kotaku. That is an incredible value. Nice job, EA Marketing!"
This sounds like a fun stunt. And now it continues on slashdot too. Someone is going to get a nice christmas bonus!
Russia is not really considered to be part of Europe.
The P2P part is used mostly for just the most popular tracks, it would be too slow and unreliable otherwise. For that matter I havent ever noticed it using upload bandwidth so much that I would, well, notice it. It makes sense to try to P2P the most listened tracks, as theres probably thousands of people listening them at the same time.
Do you pay for cable subscription? Do you go to movies? Do you eat food? Those are something you pay once but after that they're gone forever.
If you want to keep the products, you buy a cd or digital download for 10-20 euros an album. But if you're fine with streaming and just listening to what you feel like then, it makes a lot more sense to pay the 9e/month and listen to as much as you want, even if you cant keep them. It's a cheaper and I dont understand why you except to keep the music you listen on a (cheap) streaming music service.
Premium is available in other countries too
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spotify_Availability.png
Dark green: Ad-supported and Premium
Light green: Premium
Why ad-supported is not available everywhere is probably just that they havent got ad deals in those countries yet. Spotify is still invite only and beta after all.
So it's the media reproduction and artist extortion industry's wet dream: You never actually own anything, and really pay every time you listen to the track.
It's not a this or that situation. Just like cable channels that you pay monthly payment to show movies, you can still buy them too to actually own them. There's good sides on both; when you buy them, you get the products as your own. When you rent/stream/watch from tv, you dont get to own the products but you can enjoy them then for a lot lower price (or like tv and spotify, for free with ads)
However by far they seem to be happy.
Spotify makes more cash for Universal than iTunes
Universal Music Sweden has admitted that Spotify makes it more money than iTunes does. "In five months from the launch, Spotify became our largest digital source of income and so passed by iTunes", said Per Sundin, managing director of Universal Music.
"It's a fantastic development, explained by the fact that Spotify really has exploded", he added. The admission brings with it a whole host of questions - none of which we have many answers to. How much is Spotify paying the labels? Could this be why the iPhone app still hasn't been approved? Does this validate ad-funded music as a business model?
The interesting thing will be how it works on US market however. They can potentially get a lot more from advertising in USA than in Sweden, but is USA itself got so used to iTunes and such that it will hurt the sales and labels? However, Spotify is a perfect way to turn those pirating and "sending mp3's to friends in msn" to customers you can get income from, even if its in form of ads revenue.
Actually, the big labels are shareholders on Spotify so they do have seen the opportunity.
Shareholders in Spotify on 10/7 2009
Bolag Andel Rosello (Lorentzon) 28,6%
Instructus (Ek) 23,3%
Northzone Ventures 11,9%
Enzymix Systems (F. HagnÃ) 5,8%
Sony BMG 5,8%
Universal Music 4,8%
Warner Music 3,8%
Wellington IV Tech 3,8%
Creandum II LP 3,5%
Swiftic (Strigéus) 2,6%
Creandum II KB 2,4%
EMI 1,9%
Merlin 1,0%
SBH Capital (B. HagnÃ) 0,8%
Also: "The service is not currently available in the United States or Canada. Spotify Founder, Daniel Ek, has expressed a desire to change this. It is expected that Spotify will be available in the United States before the end of 2009.[20]"