The bottom line is that whoever controlls the money that funds the development ends up with control of all the things that matter.
- Lions share of the Profit - Creative Control - Ownership of the IP for the Game
Game developers want to create kick ass games that are original (as a general rule). Publishers want to create games that will generate alot of money. As long as the balance of power favours the publishers, guess what kind of games will be made?
We would all like to see more games as original as Katamari Damacy that sell competitivly with GTA3. But under the current system, that happens extraordinarily rarely.
Market penetration for DVD's is too common to simply fade away quickly. Also, it has proven a convenient medium of distribution for data that a copyright holder wants to maintian some control over.
Things to keep in mind:
DVD's do not require an internet connection to work. DVD's are portable (watching a movie on a laptop during a flight?) DVD's are not lost when your hard drive fails. DVD's are paid for once.
I think that DVD's will continue to be the medium of choice for poeple that buy movies. But for renting movies, DVD's will be replaced by on-demand downloading.
What it will end up discouraging, if it is that different from other platforms, is porting.
If a publisher was intrested in putting a game on Revolution, it would get there. But if the publisher was on the fence, and wanted to whore the game out on every platform, the Revolution would likely be skipped.
It is possible that the Revolution will be similar enough to make porting to it a viable option, but gameplay dependent on Revolutions unique features would not be as portable.
What the hell kind of reasonable person really thinks that seeing Janet Jacksons Nipple is truly more harmful to society then the Nuclear violations?
Talk about screwed priorities.
There are more important concerns in this day and age then bad words and naked people. I just hope Canada has more sense then this with respect to their own regulatory laws.
As I recall, a former air canada employee went to work for West Jet. As part of his severance, he still had access to cheaper / free seats on air canada flights. To that end, he still had access to an internal website that had information on what flights still had open seats.
West Jet harvested that info, and used it to plan their own flights. As an example, if Air Canada was only getting 25% seat usage on one route, then Westjet would stay away. But if Air Canada was getting over booked or nearly full planes on one route, Westjet could look into offering more runs on that route.
Disclosing the information on that site to west jet was probably in violation of a non-compete agreement on the part of the former Air Canada employee.
Mario Kart was play balanced for console type multi-player. The mechanic is cheap and dirty. And it results in newbie players having a chance against moderate types. It does not, however, result in newbies completely obliterating experienced players. The only loser in this mechanic is CPU racers.
Then again, there is really no shortage of racing games out there, both Console and Arcade. By all means, if this play mechanic bothers you, feel free to play something else. I hear Gran Turismo has very realistic gamplay.
Some posts ask about what sort of rescue options Nasa has handy in the event of catastrope.
Well, Presuming that the bugger does not blow up on launch, this thing is going to the ISS. If they cannot come back down due to a safety issue, they could conceivably stay up there for a while.
Also, the ISS has a Soyuz for emergency escape. They coould come down on that.
Or they could have the Russians send another Soyuz up specifically for evacuation purposes.
Using a Shuttle for a rescue is probably overkill.
And if the shuttle is destroyed in the same manner as Columbia, well, once your in atmosphere on your way down, your either land in one piece or you land in many pieces.
This may amount to bad press, but for bad press to matter, the consumers that drive the sales would need to actually give a damn.
Now, in order to give much of a damn about EA's competition practices, labour relations, or other general bad behaviour, you have to be one of the following.
1) a follower of the goings on in the videogame industry 2) an employee within the game industry. 3) a direct relative or friend of someone who qualifies on item 2 4) a Labour activist. 5) a member of the gaming Media.
Now, the number of people who fall under those categories is quite small. Granted, members of those categories are screaming their heads off to anyone who will listen.
But the bulk of EA's sales come from the following. 1) Casual gamers. 2) Parents of casual gamers.
EA being a miserable company does not show up as even a blip on the radar of someone who cannot tell you the difference between EA and Blizzard. It does not affect their ability to do their jobs, raise their children, or search for their Pornography, or address their day to day moral concerns.
So if you want consumers to give a damn about EA being run by assholes, you need to give the disintrested consumers a much better reason then the disapperance in choice between companies they have never heard of.
By becoming a publicly traded company, the founders of Ubisoft created the possibility of having control of their company taken away from them.
They may now be rich from running a successful videogame publisher and selling stock in it. But now they get to experience the joy of watching someone they hate come along and systematically dismantle something they put a great deal of time and effort into making a success.
If they can sleep comfortably on their large piles of money with that notion, then more power to them.
But if they dont like what is happening, then they should kick them selves for permitting this to come about.
And one step further, I am betting you do not perform any sort of graphics programming.
On win32 / mac platforms, the need to know how to do this is pretty low. DirectX wraps most of it, as well as the processes needed for GPU programming. I am sure the Mac libs that do the same job as DirectX accomplish much the same.
But low level graphics programming is alive and well for game programming. I do what I can to stay well clear of that, since I dont like graphics programming much (just personal preference). But the need for this type of programming continues to exist. And it will continue to exist for a while yet.
Let us, for the sake of arguement, say there are 3 grades of titles.
Grade A: These games move systems, and are platform exclusive. Halo, Super Smash Brothers, Gran Turismo, Zelda, Metroid, Final Fantasy.
Grade B: A grade B title is a great game that does not quite move a system, or would if it were not multi-platform. EA's sports titles, Resident Evil, Viewtiful Joe, Pikmin, etc.
Grade C: A grade C title is a pure average game, most often available on many platforms.
The X-Box is a collection of a small number of A titles and a large number of C titles.
The Gamecube has a large number of A titles, and a small number of B games and an average number of C titles.
The PS2 has a merely average number of A titles, but a staggering number of B and C titles.
Grade A games do move consoles, but you actually have to like the game to buy the console. Mario Sunshine is a grade A title. But if you think its a kiddie game, then it wont move you to buy a cube. The quantity of B class titles is what makes a console a good investment. This is because there will be more B class games on a given platform then A class games, and while you may not find many 'A' games, you probably will find enough 'B' games to make a difference.
Multi-Platform games, like Activisions Spiderman 2 game and EA's sports games, are qualified as B titles because they are multi-platform. But multi-platoform games only really help the platform that already has the larger installed base. It does not matter if it looks better on the X-Box if you dont own an X-box.
Disregarding the possibility of out and out bribes, game reviews show up on gameing web sites and on gaming magazines. The bulk of the revenue for those sites and magazines is from advertising.
Sony is, at this time in the game industry, the giant. It has a huge installed user base. This means many games are published for it. This in turns means that more money is spent advertising on Sony's platform then Nintendo's.
It would not be wise for a magazines to anger Sony by being harsh on the PSP until after the damn things is in enough users hands to make such a judgement call worth while.
Sandbox was basically churning out quickie games. Working on an expansion for a game that is successful is a hell of alot better, morale wise, then working on Diva Starz and Barbie on the game boy.
I used to work for DICE Canada. I was an employee at Sandbox / DICE Canada for about 2.5 years (it was called Sandbox Studios before it was purchased by DICE).
Once the studio was purchased, there were a few rounds of layoffs. I was one of them. From what former co-workers have told me, it appears that any sort of game development at DICE Canada is mostly an afterthought. The Big New Games are developed in Sweeden. DICE Canada gets to pump out expansion packs and the like. To be fair, that is a huge improvement over the sort of games that were developed when it was still called Sandbox.
Now that DICE is pretty much owned by EA, the Canadian studio in London Ontario is pretty much redundant. It was initially setup so that DICE would have a foothold in North America, making it easier to interact with North American publishers. EA has better facilities in Vancouver. I can see nothing preventing EA from folding the London Ontario studio and relocating everyone to Vancouver or just laying off those who dont want to move.
Microsoft can easily refuse to permit certain games from showing up on the X-Box. With any of the consoles, you cannot release a game for that console unless the owners of that platform decide to permit it.
The only thing preventing Microsoft from stopping EA's plan of releasing on X-Box and X-Box 2 is the possible fear of alienating a game publisher that has become too big to ignore.
I would guess that because Digital cameras are a hardware product sold at retail, with multiple vendors competing. Having an open spec means revealing your competitive advantages to the competitors.
Why the hell is this important anyway? I would hope that even a Slashdotter would not have any real use for trying to Port linux to a Digital Camera.
If the governments concerned would just pass laws that allow them to seize all revenues generated by invasive advertising, it would come to an end. While the RCMP (Or FBI if your american) may be more concerned with gun weilding lunatics, I am sure that Customs and Revenue Canada (Or the IRS) would be quite good at locating and seizing these funds. If all your cash gets taken away, you lose the incentive to do it.
Of course, whether or not such laws violate fundamental rights are another issue.
Ever notice that the actual 'average' scores are almost never given? If a review ranks games out of 10, and there are 100 games reviewed, you would expect about half to be 5 or lower, an half to be 6 or better, with most games falling between 4 and 7.
Instead, you see most games ranging from 6 to 8.
You will never see a truly negative review for a game unless that game is indefensible. Game mags cannot afford to offend advertisers.
Rather then a post card, I would say it is more like sending a letter in an unsealed envelope.
You can see the content of a post card just at a glance. You can glance at things by accident. You can read an unsealed letter, but first you have to take it out of the envelope. You cannot do that by accident.
You cannot accidently catch a glimpse of an e-mail, you have to intentionally look at it.
I would think that having a great big gut would make sleeping uncomfortable, since the mass of your gut would either weigh down your your vitals (if you sleep on your back), or keep you from laying flat (if you sleep on your belly).
Or alternatively, game dev companies could be started up that are entirely employee owned, and the employees would have a more direct hand in negotiating the contract.
Unions could potentially solve many problems with the labour abuses that exist in game development. However, they can also create an entirely new and different set of problems.
And regardless of the pro's and con's of Unions, that solution will simply not work as long as the majority of game programmers mistrust the idea. Our mistrust may be unfounded, or based on poor examples and worst case scenarios, but the mistrust is still there. I cannot speak for all game programmers, but none of the programmers I have worked that have mentioned unions have ever done so with anything positive to say about the idea.
And even if Unions are a viable solution, I remain convinced that they are not the only solution, and that they are likely not the best possible solution.
Slashdot Mirror
The bottom line is that whoever controlls the money that funds the development ends up with control of all the things that matter.
- Lions share of the Profit
- Creative Control
- Ownership of the IP for the Game
Game developers want to create kick ass games that are original (as a general rule). Publishers want to create games that will generate alot of money. As long as the balance of power favours the publishers, guess what kind of games will be made?
We would all like to see more games as original as Katamari Damacy that sell competitivly with GTA3. But under the current system, that happens extraordinarily rarely.
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For all of us who are not tin foil wearing cryptography nuts, what the hell is two factor identification?
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Market penetration for DVD's is too common to simply fade away quickly. Also, it has proven a convenient medium of distribution for data that a copyright holder wants to maintian some control over.
Things to keep in mind:
DVD's do not require an internet connection to work.
DVD's are portable (watching a movie on a laptop during a flight?)
DVD's are not lost when your hard drive fails.
DVD's are paid for once.
I think that DVD's will continue to be the medium of choice for poeple that buy movies. But for renting movies, DVD's will be replaced by on-demand downloading.
What it will end up discouraging, if it is that different from other platforms, is porting.
If a publisher was intrested in putting a game on Revolution, it would get there. But if the publisher was on the fence, and wanted to whore the game out on every platform, the Revolution would likely be skipped.
It is possible that the Revolution will be similar enough to make porting to it a viable option, but gameplay dependent on Revolutions unique features would not be as portable.
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What the hell kind of reasonable person really thinks that seeing Janet Jacksons Nipple is truly more harmful to society then the Nuclear violations?
Talk about screwed priorities.
There are more important concerns in this day and age then bad words and naked people. I just hope Canada has more sense then this with respect to their own regulatory laws.
END COMMUNICATION
You are somewhat mistaken about the case.
As I recall, a former air canada employee went to work for West Jet. As part of his severance, he still had access to cheaper / free seats on air canada flights. To that end, he still had access to an internal website that had information on what flights still had open seats.
West Jet harvested that info, and used it to plan their own flights. As an example, if Air Canada was only getting 25% seat usage on one route, then Westjet would stay away. But if Air Canada was getting over booked or nearly full planes on one route, Westjet could look into offering more runs on that route.
Disclosing the information on that site to west jet was probably in violation of a non-compete agreement on the part of the former Air Canada employee.
END COMMUNICATION
Mario Kart was play balanced for console type multi-player. The mechanic is cheap and dirty. And it results in newbie players having a chance against moderate types. It does not, however, result in newbies completely obliterating experienced players. The only loser in this mechanic is CPU racers.
Then again, there is really no shortage of racing games out there, both Console and Arcade. By all means, if this play mechanic bothers you, feel free to play something else. I hear Gran Turismo has very realistic gamplay.
END COMMUNICATION
Some posts ask about what sort of rescue options Nasa has handy in the event of catastrope.
Well, Presuming that the bugger does not blow up on launch, this thing is going to the ISS. If they cannot come back down due to a safety issue, they could conceivably stay up there for a while.
Also, the ISS has a Soyuz for emergency escape. They coould come down on that.
Or they could have the Russians send another Soyuz up specifically for evacuation purposes.
Using a Shuttle for a rescue is probably overkill.
And if the shuttle is destroyed in the same manner as Columbia, well, once your in atmosphere on your way down, your either land in one piece or you land in many pieces.
END COMMUNICATION
This may amount to bad press, but for bad press to matter, the consumers that drive the sales would need to actually give a damn.
Now, in order to give much of a damn about EA's competition practices, labour relations, or other general bad behaviour, you have to be one of the following.
1) a follower of the goings on in the videogame industry
2) an employee within the game industry.
3) a direct relative or friend of someone who qualifies on item 2
4) a Labour activist.
5) a member of the gaming Media.
Now, the number of people who fall under those categories is quite small. Granted, members of those categories are screaming their heads off to anyone who will listen.
But the bulk of EA's sales come from the following.
1) Casual gamers.
2) Parents of casual gamers.
EA being a miserable company does not show up as even a blip on the radar of someone who cannot tell you the difference between EA and Blizzard. It does not affect their ability to do their jobs, raise their children, or search for their Pornography, or address their day to day moral concerns.
So if you want consumers to give a damn about EA being run by assholes, you need to give the disintrested consumers a much better reason then the disapperance in choice between companies they have never heard of.
END COMMUNICATION
By becoming a publicly traded company, the founders of Ubisoft created the possibility of having control of their company taken away from them.
They may now be rich from running a successful videogame publisher and selling stock in it. But now they get to experience the joy of watching someone they hate come along and systematically dismantle something they put a great deal of time and effort into making a success.
If they can sleep comfortably on their large piles of money with that notion, then more power to them.
But if they dont like what is happening, then they should kick them selves for permitting this to come about.
END COMMUNICATION
And one step further, I am betting you do not perform any sort of graphics programming.
On win32 / mac platforms, the need to know how to do this is pretty low. DirectX wraps most of it, as well as the processes needed for GPU programming. I am sure the Mac libs that do the same job as DirectX accomplish much the same.
But low level graphics programming is alive and well for game programming. I do what I can to stay well clear of that, since I dont like graphics programming much (just personal preference). But the need for this type of programming continues to exist. And it will continue to exist for a while yet.
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Very recently announced. Developed by Exile Interactive as a first party game for Nintendo.
www.pennantchasebaseball.com
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Let us, for the sake of arguement, say there are 3 grades of titles.
Grade A: These games move systems, and are platform exclusive. Halo, Super Smash Brothers, Gran Turismo, Zelda, Metroid, Final Fantasy.
Grade B: A grade B title is a great game that does not quite move a system, or would if it were not multi-platform. EA's sports titles, Resident Evil, Viewtiful Joe, Pikmin, etc.
Grade C: A grade C title is a pure average game, most often available on many platforms.
The X-Box is a collection of a small number of A titles and a large number of C titles.
The Gamecube has a large number of A titles, and a small number of B games and an average number of C titles.
The PS2 has a merely average number of A titles, but a staggering number of B and C titles.
Grade A games do move consoles, but you actually have to like the game to buy the console. Mario Sunshine is a grade A title. But if you think its a kiddie game, then it wont move you to buy a cube. The quantity of B class titles is what makes a console a good investment. This is because there will be more B class games on a given platform then A class games, and while you may not find many 'A' games, you probably will find enough 'B' games to make a difference.
Multi-Platform games, like Activisions Spiderman 2 game and EA's sports games, are qualified as B titles because they are multi-platform. But multi-platoform games only really help the platform that already has the larger installed base. It does not matter if it looks better on the X-Box if you dont own an X-box.
END COMMUNICATION
Disregarding the possibility of out and out bribes, game reviews show up on gameing web sites and on gaming magazines. The bulk of the revenue for those sites and magazines is from advertising.
Sony is, at this time in the game industry, the giant. It has a huge installed user base. This means many games are published for it. This in turns means that more money is spent advertising on Sony's platform then Nintendo's.
It would not be wise for a magazines to anger Sony by being harsh on the PSP until after the damn things is in enough users hands to make such a judgement call worth while.
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You get hired on at EA as a technical director.
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Obviously, you did not work at Sandbox.
Sandbox was basically churning out quickie games. Working on an expansion for a game that is successful is a hell of alot better, morale wise, then working on Diva Starz and Barbie on the game boy.
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I used to work for DICE Canada. I was an employee at Sandbox / DICE Canada for about 2.5 years (it was called Sandbox Studios before it was purchased by DICE).
Once the studio was purchased, there were a few rounds of layoffs. I was one of them. From what former co-workers have told me, it appears that any sort of game development at DICE Canada is mostly an afterthought. The Big New Games are developed in Sweeden. DICE Canada gets to pump out expansion packs and the like. To be fair, that is a huge improvement over the sort of games that were developed when it was still called Sandbox.
Now that DICE is pretty much owned by EA, the Canadian studio in London Ontario is pretty much redundant. It was initially setup so that DICE would have a foothold in North America, making it easier to interact with North American publishers. EA has better facilities in Vancouver. I can see nothing preventing EA from folding the London Ontario studio and relocating everyone to Vancouver or just laying off those who dont want to move.
END COMMUNICATION
Microsoft can easily refuse to permit certain games from showing up on the X-Box. With any of the consoles, you cannot release a game for that console unless the owners of that platform decide to permit it.
The only thing preventing Microsoft from stopping EA's plan of releasing on X-Box and X-Box 2 is the possible fear of alienating a game publisher that has become too big to ignore.
END COMMUNICATION
I would guess that because Digital cameras are a hardware product sold at retail, with multiple vendors competing. Having an open spec means revealing your competitive advantages to the competitors.
Why the hell is this important anyway? I would hope that even a Slashdotter would not have any real use for trying to Port linux to a Digital Camera.
END COMMUNICATION
If the governments concerned would just pass laws that allow them to seize all revenues generated by invasive advertising, it would come to an end. While the RCMP (Or FBI if your american) may be more concerned with gun weilding lunatics, I am sure that Customs and Revenue Canada (Or the IRS) would be quite good at locating and seizing these funds. If all your cash gets taken away, you lose the incentive to do it.
Of course, whether or not such laws violate fundamental rights are another issue.
END COMMUNICATION
Ever notice that the actual 'average' scores are almost never given? If a review ranks games out of 10, and there are 100 games reviewed, you would expect about half to be 5 or lower, an half to be 6 or better, with most games falling between 4 and 7.
Instead, you see most games ranging from 6 to 8.
You will never see a truly negative review for a game unless that game is indefensible. Game mags cannot afford to offend advertisers.
END COMMUNICATION
Rather then a post card, I would say it is more like sending a letter in an unsealed envelope.
You can see the content of a post card just at a glance. You can glance at things by accident. You can read an unsealed letter, but first you have to take it out of the envelope. You cannot do that by accident.
You cannot accidently catch a glimpse of an e-mail, you have to intentionally look at it.
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I would think that having a great big gut would make sleeping uncomfortable, since the mass of your gut would either weigh down your your vitals (if you sleep on your back), or keep you from laying flat (if you sleep on your belly).
Then again, I am not a doctor.
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Nintendo is probably the only company that successfully makes games under existing franchises that do not diminish the games that came before.
Even when the sequel does not enhance the franchise signifigantly, it never diminishes it.
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Or alternatively, game dev companies could be started up that are entirely employee owned, and the employees would have a more direct hand in negotiating the contract.
Unions could potentially solve many problems with the labour abuses that exist in game development. However, they can also create an entirely new and different set of problems.
And regardless of the pro's and con's of Unions, that solution will simply not work as long as the majority of game programmers mistrust the idea. Our mistrust may be unfounded, or based on poor examples and worst case scenarios, but the mistrust is still there. I cannot speak for all game programmers, but none of the programmers I have worked that have mentioned unions have ever done so with anything positive to say about the idea.
And even if Unions are a viable solution, I remain convinced that they are not the only solution, and that they are likely not the best possible solution.
END COMMUNICATION