Some people have already posted comparing file sharing the use of guns and the like. That because a tool can be used to commit a crime does not invalidate the usefulness of the tool.
The powers that be dont care that much about what your sharing. What they do care about is their ability to enforce various laws. A gun can be traced. Vehicles have to be registered. But the article specifically mentions two things that stand out.
1) People are trading child porn and copyrighted material over these networks. 2) These networks are in some way encrypted.
So these file sharing networks are having much the same effect as a popular crack house. They are generating alot of complaints that they are unable to adequately respond to.
Now, its another question entirely about how valid those complaints are. The child porn and the spyware are worth looking into. The copyright violations might not be.
Big Games (when measured by install size) typically make for Big Load Times.
Copying a full CD to your hard drive takes a few minutes, and that is approximately 650 Mb. If someone manages to use all that disk space, how much load time would a user experience in order to actually experience and benefit from all that bloody content?
Learning to type properly is a very useful skill. Using a keyboard is a very efficient way to write out your thoughts.
The subtle benefit of knowing how to type properly is that you can actually type in complete sentences, and not come accross as being retarded in an e-mail or instant message conversation. You will still make typos and spelling mistakes (as I am sure I have in this post), but the post is in recognizable english.
when u dont use sentences nd use lots of abbreviations but not punctuation it tends to b noticd
Bioware has a pretty strong pedigree to it now. They probably want more control over the game, and more royalties then the publisher cares to part with. Part of the reason for Jade Empire and Dragon Age is to make Bioware less reliant on external IP. By cutting Wizards / Lucasarts out of the picture, Bioware can keep a bigger part of the profits.
Having Obsidian do the follow ups probably makes the game cheaper all around. Expect NWN2 to be very much an incremental improvement over NWN1. More polygons / lights / spells and the like. I seriously doubt that Bioware would want Obsidian to completely re-implement more then 30% of the engine anyway.
Do not confuse games currently in development with games available at launch. Besides, Do you really think that EB / Walmart / whatever will want to give up the shelf space for 120+ games for an unproven console?
And while there is a chance that the in development also includes the GBA titles currently on the go, I dont think that Nintendo is going go play that sort of game with this launch.
The beast may feed its self to some extent, as you suggest. However, the basic fact still remains that christmas is one of the few times of the year when pretty much every consumer can be counted on to be spending money on non-essential crap.
While a video gaming consumer cannot be expected to drop 30-50 on every game they would want at that time of year, the consumer can be counted on to do that at least once.
You are half right though. A good game release in Feburary can exceed a good game released in December. But an excellent game will do better when released in December then it could in February. Gamers will pick up a good game any time of year. But casual gamers probably only buy once in a while, and December is one of those times.
Over the short term, putting talking meatbags into space and keeping them alive is cripplingly expensive. So it makes sense to put up robots / computers / etc.
But once you get around the problems in keeping that talking meatbag alive, you will find that the talking meatbag can try a whole lot more and do a whole lot more then the robot.
So which is easier long term? Solving all the known issue problems in keeping a talking meatbag functioning in space, or creating a device that can improvise and use tools, is capable of learning and higher reasoning, and can interpret situational input and act on it in real time?
Some games, particulary some RPG's, but also other games, end up doing what I call time whoring. I imagine that the circumstances come up like this:
Designer A: Ok, we have a great game, but it is beaten too quickly, what can we do to extend the game play time?
Designer B: We can take all the monsters at point X in the game, and make them stronger, so the player needs to be a higher level to beat them.
Designer A: Sure, why not?
This results in adding a few hours of waking around in circles killing mosters for experience (XP Bashing). You play an RPG typically to advance the story, and meet story goals. How does spending a few extra hours make the game better?
It doesnt, not if you dont want to spend those hours bashing monsters aimlessly. Being able to do this sort of thing is not the same as wanting / needing to do it. Final fantasy games are somewhat bad for this because you end up feeling the need to have many fights that carry no real risk to you and can be won by just selecting fight over and over again, stopping about one time in ten to heal.
Any game that requires you to spend time doing repetitive tasks that require no real decision making and carry no real risk is guilty of time whoring. I concede that the threshold for crossing from gameplay to time whoring is subjective, however.
It was for the Game Developers, Publishers, and Press.
E3 is not about getting gamers on board with the latest products. It never was, and for that point, is barely needed. What it is about is giving a chance for developers to get publishers to look at their games that they would never otherwise get. It is about getting the suits with money to figure out where to spend that money.
Also, it allows the press a chance to play two games likely to compete against one another and figure out which is more fun.
And it lets game programmers like me figure out what the hell everyone else is doing so we can try to do the same, only better.
END COMMUNICATION
The real problems wont be predictible
on
VoIP Questioned
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· Score: 1
And the inability to predict them are why they will be problems. Foreseeable problems, with VoiP as with any other endeavour, are just that. You know the problem exists, and solutions and / or workarounds will be discovered in turn. But until you end up trying to implement this on a wide scale, you simply will not know what the problems will ultimately be.
At the risk of sounding too damn much like a archtypical communist (which I am not)...
At the moment, there are many jobs that are not compensated for very well. Stock brokers, advertising / marketing types, lawyers, and executives make a great deal of money. Scientists, Teachers, Police, Firemen, and the like probably contribute more to civilization then the types listed above, but they certaintly dont reap much of a benefit for it.
About the only profession that makes the kind of money they ought to are Surgeons. And that is only because they have a pretty compelling way to get the compensation they deserve. "Oh, you dont want to pay me that much? Ok. Let someone else perform that arterial bypass then."
Scientists / Inventors in theory can use Patents to generate their income. But research costs money. And they end up having to sign the patents over to the company that employed them.
I think that Patents / Copyright should never pass completely beyond the control of the creator for that reason. But Patents and Copyright are broken.
However, for all my complaints, its not like I have a solution handy either.
One thing that Slashdotters tend to forget in their eagerness to hold Microsoft in contempt is that they are not stupid.
They may not have much respect for the typical consumer, be slow to respond, and ship buggy software, but they are anything but stupid.
From their standpoint, there really is not much imperative need to respond to complaints until they become critical enough to convince a common user to switch to a competing product.
But when it becomes apparant that such a thing is happening, they can and will respond.
"As far as I'm concerned, Nintendo has no inherent right to being the sole makers of GBAs, be it in hardware or software."
On this I will disagree with you, but I will concede that it is a potentially grey area. It falls in the same area as GM making an exact copy of the Toyota Prius, and calling it a Prius. It is not so much innovation as it is someone else trying to reap the benefit of anothers efforts to the detriment of the originator.
While I dont much care about a hobbiest making an emulator, I would say that no company should be able to make a GBA or GBA emulator for a profit without Nintendo's consent. Nintendo did the R&D on the Gameboy. Nintnedo marketed it and made it popular. Nintendo did all the legwork. Why the hell should another reap the profit from Nintendo's work?
If I make myself a nice big sandwich, I expect to be able to eat it. I would be mighty angry if you ate it. But if you make your own damn sanwhich and eat it, what do I care?
non competes are often stupid. They should be able to prevent you from exploiting something that existed before you were hired that you learned of during your employment. IE: You should not be allowed to walk out with the business plan and trade secrets.
But they should not prevent you from exploiting basic skills and methods you learn through work. And they absolutely should not prevent you from exploiting something you bloody well were hired to create.
No one gets in the game industry to make great cash on an 'easy' job. Those that try usually quit when they realize how hard it is. And more money can generally be made doing other programming work, at least before mass outsourcing of such non-game work became common.
So yes, Game programmers typically make games because they want to, first and foremost.
Now, some people are workaholics, and would do the 80 hour thing, or near to it, by choice. But not everyone. Scheduling is pushed by the publishers, and management agree to it, and the programmers have to deal with it.
If a game company schedules a project assuming all staff will want to work 14 hour days for 3 and 4 month stretches, the game will suck.
Now, if a project starts to go bad and you start to have to work a death march that the employees were not told to expect at the outset, then the employer has breached the agreement. Salary is not a commission. Salary is "Perform Task X over time Y for amount of Cash Z". If they change the nature of X or Y, then Z should also change.
My boss compensates for overtime. Lord knows we have to work it, but it is ultimately compensated. Perhaps your company just is not as good as mine?
Offering 8 different ways to solve a given game problem is great from the player point of view, but it creates huge problems on the QA end of the game.
How so? Glad you asked.
If your game is meant to have some sort of storyline, its nice to know that "If player has reached this point, he has done X, Y, and Z". If you can stealth your way past an enemy rather then kill him, then the revenge subplot no longer works, since you did not kill some guys brother.
Also, providing 8 different solutions to a problem where 2 of them are too difficult to pull off and one is too far outside the box menas you only really have 5 solutions to the problem. If one of the solutions is very easy, you may as well only have the one solution.
Finally, if you do have very open solutions to all of the game problems / challenges in a given level, you can conceivably have the player defeat every challenge in the level and still not complete the goals needed to advance the level. Game programmers tend to only test for the intended solution to a problem (I know this from experience, as I am a game developer). Finding and killing crash bugs is easy. Finding fundamental design flaws is not.
In addition to being destroyed by Sony's marketing, a good deal of the Dreamcasts failure can be attributed to Sega's earlier and frequent console cockups. They shot themselves in the ass with the Saturn. They made an excellent 2d system when Sony made a cheap 3d system. Saturn could do 3d, but doing so was difficult.
It also did not help that the Saturn sold for a much higher pricepoint and was rushed to market to fend off Sony.
In the end, the publishers had no confidence in Sega to make the Dreamcast viable.
but the level of detail for a 3d mesh is affected by how close you will end up zooming in. This can be tweaked by using vertex normals to smooth out a mesh, but the loss of detail for this sort of compresssion is a pretty risky tradeoff.
Can it reliably restore the level of detail after compression? How does it handle animated objects vs static objects? What is the intended use for this compression?
Still, it is intresting enough to warrant a closer look, I suppose.
Convergence can and will, and already has happened for items where it makes sense to combine the features. It is simply a matter of defining an item in the broadest possible terms.
Cell Phone: A device that can make noise, store small amounts of info, has a display, and can take input. The above featurs overlap with various PDA functions, MP3 players, and alarm clocks.
Game Console: A device that can take complex inputs, read CD / DVD based media, and can output to a display and to speakers. This overlaps with Cd player, DVD player. With an X-Box like HD, you also have a digital VCR.
But most consumers, I think, will buy something based on the primary need, and buy something specific for that need. But the item they buy can be influenced by the secondary features, and the secondary features can allow for other impulse features. (Hmm, I have a PS2, and I want to buy that DVD. I can watch it on my PS2. Sure, why not).
The problem this causes is you end up with 2 or more potential solutions to a single problem, and inputting / configuring both is a pain in the ass, especially if you want to get full use of both. For convergence to really catch on, you will need to be able to have objects that provide similar features communicate with each other to swap settings / media.
Want to download a movie and watch it on your TV? Sure, just upload the file from your PC to your movie player, OR, steam the movie directly from your PC, OR specify the movie player as the destination for your download. You need a reminder for an appointment? Set the reminder on your PC, and receive it on your PC, OR your cell phone, OR your TV, OR your wristwatch...
That is what I hope happens. I just hope one of our beloved Super Corp Overlords(TM) finds a reasonable way to make such a model profitiable without totally reaming us in the process.
The ad's cost X per click for the twit paying for them. The rate is based on the amount of legitimate click throughs for the site.
How hard would it be to create a browser plugin that will hide the ads, but still 'click' on them? If the the number of such plugins in use became prevalent enough, then the advertisers would be charged more money, since their accounts show more click throughs. But since these are false positives, the increase in sales associated with those click throughs would not materialize.
Once this hits a critical mass, all such ads will become useless, nothing more then costly traffic that drains dramatically more revenue then it creates.
You wont get rats to stop trying to eat your food by hiding it. They just look harder for it because they know its still there. But if you can poison the food, they will die painfully.
Getting some of these tech giants involved in creating MMPORG middle ware is probably a great thing. The developers should focus on making the game fun. So why spend their time on the 'boring' aspects (customer billing, database system for account management, server maintenence, etc).
If IBM and the rest can provide software and hardware services to do this, it will be a good thing. Does a customer really need to know or give a damn if their Everquest game uses the same server back end as Dark age of Camelot or City of Heros?
Its like any other media endeavour. The talent that is actually most directly responsible for creating the product gets a very small chunk of the pie.
For animation, the publishers get the money. For videogames, the publishers get the money. For books, the publishers get the money. For music, the publishers get the money most of the time.
The only exception is for movies and for music, where the stars get a big chunk of money. But that is because a singer is always directly associated with the song, and can choose not to sing so no one gets any money.
TV and Movies (moreso for TV though), a particular actor usually comes to be known for the character and can destroy the endeavour by not co-operating.
And the same happens with authors, though they need to hit it big before they can get a reasonable deal.
Animation and videogames are more collaborative though, and one person is not able to just pull the plug on the deal as above.
You will not get paid adequately for your services if your reasonably replaceible, or of the publisher can do the deal without you.
I am quite fond of Illuminatti. Lots of strategic thinking, and the ability to interfere with rolls calls in alot of deal making and diplomacy.
And how can you not love a game that specifically allows any sort of 'meta game' deal that you can arrange? And also explicitly allows you to break those deals?
The only flaw is that the game can bog down when players try to calculate best / worst case scenarios for making thier rolls.
Split screen may be inconvenient, but its either that or setting up a LAN for home gaming with a friend. Some of us do actually have friends over to play once in a while. And only racing games really seem to be split screen. The rest either share a screen, or have alternating turns.
Fair point I suppose. More correctly, I should say that I dont like playing long style games on a handheld. Thats why I own a GameBoy Player.
Well, if you saw a Turbo Grafix 16 game at all, you also saw the hand held game. Their hand held played the same media as the console.
I disagree about the scope of games that will be put on the handheld, not from a play duration point of view, but from a development point of view. At lest at the present, the handhelds have games that are simpler to develop being released on them. The long playing games that have come out are mostly ports of SNES and NES titles on the GBA, though there certaintly are exceptions.
Also, I will say that the experience of playing a game made for the DS (as opposed to a half assed multi platoform "it will run on that system too" port is going to be very different. The dual screens will have a huge effect on the nature of the control interface, assuming the designers adequately exploit it. A DS game is going to be a different playing experience then a PSP game. So while the dominant screen will not look as good as the PSP, the play experience may be that much better.
Anyway, E3 demos are too pre-mature to adequately judge. Right now, its whos media spin you find more adequately beleivable. We will know which is better in practical terms about 4 to 8 months after the launches.
Slashdot Mirror
Some people have already posted comparing file sharing the use of guns and the like. That because a tool can be used to commit a crime does not invalidate the usefulness of the tool.
The powers that be dont care that much about what your sharing. What they do care about is their ability to enforce various laws. A gun can be traced. Vehicles have to be registered. But the article specifically mentions two things that stand out.
1) People are trading child porn and copyrighted material over these networks.
2) These networks are in some way encrypted.
So these file sharing networks are having much the same effect as a popular crack house. They are generating alot of complaints that they are unable to adequately respond to.
Now, its another question entirely about how valid those complaints are. The child porn and the spyware are worth looking into. The copyright violations might not be.
END COMMUNICATION
Big Games (when measured by install size) typically make for Big Load Times.
Copying a full CD to your hard drive takes a few minutes, and that is approximately 650 Mb. If someone manages to use all that disk space, how much load time would a user experience in order to actually experience and benefit from all that bloody content?
END COMMUNICATION
Learning to type properly is a very useful skill. Using a keyboard is a very efficient way to write out your thoughts.
The subtle benefit of knowing how to type properly is that you can actually type in complete sentences, and not come accross as being retarded in an e-mail or instant message conversation. You will still make typos and spelling mistakes (as I am sure I have in this post), but the post is in recognizable english.
when u dont use sentences nd use lots of abbreviations but not punctuation it tends to b noticd
END COMMUNICATION
Bioware has a pretty strong pedigree to it now. They probably want more control over the game, and more royalties then the publisher cares to part with. Part of the reason for Jade Empire and Dragon Age is to make Bioware less reliant on external IP. By cutting Wizards / Lucasarts out of the picture, Bioware can keep a bigger part of the profits.
Having Obsidian do the follow ups probably makes the game cheaper all around. Expect NWN2 to be very much an incremental improvement over NWN1. More polygons / lights / spells and the like. I seriously doubt that Bioware would want Obsidian to completely re-implement more then 30% of the engine anyway.
END COMMUNICATION
Do not confuse games currently in development with games available at launch. Besides, Do you really think that EB / Walmart / whatever will want to give up the shelf space for 120+ games for an unproven console?
And while there is a chance that the in development also includes the GBA titles currently on the go, I dont think that Nintendo is going go play that sort of game with this launch.
END COMMUNICATION
The beast may feed its self to some extent, as you suggest. However, the basic fact still remains that christmas is one of the few times of the year when pretty much every consumer can be counted on to be spending money on non-essential crap.
While a video gaming consumer cannot be expected to drop 30-50 on every game they would want at that time of year, the consumer can be counted on to do that at least once.
You are half right though. A good game release in Feburary can exceed a good game released in December. But an excellent game will do better when released in December then it could in February. Gamers will pick up a good game any time of year. But casual gamers probably only buy once in a while, and December is one of those times.
END COMMUNICATION
Over the short term, putting talking meatbags into space and keeping them alive is cripplingly expensive. So it makes sense to put up robots / computers / etc.
But once you get around the problems in keeping that talking meatbag alive, you will find that the talking meatbag can try a whole lot more and do a whole lot more then the robot.
So which is easier long term? Solving all the known issue problems in keeping a talking meatbag functioning in space, or creating a device that can improvise and use tools, is capable of learning and higher reasoning, and can interpret situational input and act on it in real time?
END COMMUNICATION
Some games, particulary some RPG's, but also other games, end up doing what I call time whoring. I imagine that the circumstances come up like this:
Designer A: Ok, we have a great game, but it is beaten too quickly, what can we do to extend the game play time?
Designer B: We can take all the monsters at point X in the game, and make them stronger, so the player needs to be a higher level to beat them.
Designer A: Sure, why not?
This results in adding a few hours of waking around in circles killing mosters for experience (XP Bashing). You play an RPG typically to advance the story, and meet story goals. How does spending a few extra hours make the game better?
It doesnt, not if you dont want to spend those hours bashing monsters aimlessly. Being able to do this sort of thing is not the same as wanting / needing to do it. Final fantasy games are somewhat bad for this because you end up feeling the need to have many fights that carry no real risk to you and can be won by just selecting fight over and over again, stopping about one time in ten to heal.
Any game that requires you to spend time doing repetitive tasks that require no real decision making and carry no real risk is guilty of time whoring. I concede that the threshold for crossing from gameplay to time whoring is subjective, however.
END COMMUNICATION
It was for the Game Developers, Publishers, and Press.
E3 is not about getting gamers on board with the latest products. It never was, and for that point, is barely needed. What it is about is giving a chance for developers to get publishers to look at their games that they would never otherwise get. It is about getting the suits with money to figure out where to spend that money.
Also, it allows the press a chance to play two games likely to compete against one another and figure out which is more fun.
And it lets game programmers like me figure out what the hell everyone else is doing so we can try to do the same, only better.
END COMMUNICATION
And the inability to predict them are why they will be problems. Foreseeable problems, with VoiP as with any other endeavour, are just that. You know the problem exists, and solutions and / or workarounds will be discovered in turn. But until you end up trying to implement this on a wide scale, you simply will not know what the problems will ultimately be.
END COMMUNICATION
At the risk of sounding too damn much like a archtypical communist (which I am not)...
At the moment, there are many jobs that are not compensated for very well. Stock brokers, advertising / marketing types, lawyers, and executives make a great deal of money. Scientists, Teachers, Police, Firemen, and the like probably contribute more to civilization then the types listed above, but they certaintly dont reap much of a benefit for it.
About the only profession that makes the kind of money they ought to are Surgeons. And that is only because they have a pretty compelling way to get the compensation they deserve. "Oh, you dont want to pay me that much? Ok. Let someone else perform that arterial bypass then."
Scientists / Inventors in theory can use Patents to generate their income. But research costs money. And they end up having to sign the patents over to the company that employed them.
I think that Patents / Copyright should never pass completely beyond the control of the creator for that reason. But Patents and Copyright are broken.
However, for all my complaints, its not like I have a solution handy either.
END COMMUNICATION
One thing that Slashdotters tend to forget in their eagerness to hold Microsoft in contempt is that they are not stupid.
They may not have much respect for the typical consumer, be slow to respond, and ship buggy software, but they are anything but stupid.
From their standpoint, there really is not much imperative need to respond to complaints until they become critical enough to convince a common user to switch to a competing product.
But when it becomes apparant that such a thing is happening, they can and will respond.
END COMMUNICATION
"As far as I'm concerned, Nintendo has no inherent right to being the sole makers of GBAs, be it in hardware or software."
On this I will disagree with you, but I will concede that it is a potentially grey area. It falls in the same area as GM making an exact copy of the Toyota Prius, and calling it a Prius. It is not so much innovation as it is someone else trying to reap the benefit of anothers efforts to the detriment of the originator.
While I dont much care about a hobbiest making an emulator, I would say that no company should be able to make a GBA or GBA emulator for a profit without Nintendo's consent. Nintendo did the R&D on the Gameboy. Nintnedo marketed it and made it popular. Nintendo did all the legwork. Why the hell should another reap the profit from Nintendo's work?
If I make myself a nice big sandwich, I expect to be able to eat it. I would be mighty angry if you ate it. But if you make your own damn sanwhich and eat it, what do I care?
END COMMUNICATION
non competes are often stupid. They should be able to prevent you from exploiting something that existed before you were hired that you learned of during your employment. IE: You should not be allowed to walk out with the business plan and trade secrets.
But they should not prevent you from exploiting basic skills and methods you learn through work. And they absolutely should not prevent you from exploiting something you bloody well were hired to create.
END COMMUNICATION
And I somewhat disagree with your statement.
No one gets in the game industry to make great cash on an 'easy' job. Those that try usually quit when they realize how hard it is. And more money can generally be made doing other programming work, at least before mass outsourcing of such non-game work became common.
So yes, Game programmers typically make games because they want to, first and foremost.
Now, some people are workaholics, and would do the 80 hour thing, or near to it, by choice. But not everyone. Scheduling is pushed by the publishers, and management agree to it, and the programmers have to deal with it.
If a game company schedules a project assuming all staff will want to work 14 hour days for 3 and 4 month stretches, the game will suck.
Now, if a project starts to go bad and you start to have to work a death march that the employees were not told to expect at the outset, then the employer has breached the agreement. Salary is not a commission. Salary is "Perform Task X over time Y for amount of Cash Z". If they change the nature of X or Y, then Z should also change.
My boss compensates for overtime. Lord knows we have to work it, but it is ultimately compensated. Perhaps your company just is not as good as mine?
END COMMUNICATION
Offering 8 different ways to solve a given game problem is great from the player point of view, but it creates huge problems on the QA end of the game.
How so? Glad you asked.
If your game is meant to have some sort of storyline, its nice to know that "If player has reached this point, he has done X, Y, and Z". If you can stealth your way past an enemy rather then kill him, then the revenge subplot no longer works, since you did not kill some guys brother.
Also, providing 8 different solutions to a problem where 2 of them are too difficult to pull off and one is too far outside the box menas you only really have 5 solutions to the problem. If one of the solutions is very easy, you may as well only have the one solution.
Finally, if you do have very open solutions to all of the game problems / challenges in a given level, you can conceivably have the player defeat every challenge in the level and still not complete the goals needed to advance the level. Game programmers tend to only test for the intended solution to a problem (I know this from experience, as I am a game developer). Finding and killing crash bugs is easy. Finding fundamental design flaws is not.
Anyway, I am still looking forward to this game.
END COMMUNICATION
In addition to being destroyed by Sony's marketing, a good deal of the Dreamcasts failure can be attributed to Sega's earlier and frequent console cockups. They shot themselves in the ass with the Saturn. They made an excellent 2d system when Sony made a cheap 3d system. Saturn could do 3d, but doing so was difficult.
It also did not help that the Saturn sold for a much higher pricepoint and was rushed to market to fend off Sony.
In the end, the publishers had no confidence in Sega to make the Dreamcast viable.
END COMMUNICATION
but the level of detail for a 3d mesh is affected by how close you will end up zooming in. This can be tweaked by using vertex normals to smooth out a mesh, but the loss of detail for this sort of compresssion is a pretty risky tradeoff.
Can it reliably restore the level of detail after compression? How does it handle animated objects vs static objects? What is the intended use for this compression?
Still, it is intresting enough to warrant a closer look, I suppose.
END COMMUNICATION
Convergence can and will, and already has happened for items where it makes sense to combine the features. It is simply a matter of defining an item in the broadest possible terms.
Cell Phone: A device that can make noise, store small amounts of info, has a display, and can take input. The above featurs overlap with various PDA functions, MP3 players, and alarm clocks.
Game Console: A device that can take complex inputs, read CD / DVD based media, and can output to a display and to speakers. This overlaps with Cd player, DVD player. With an X-Box like HD, you also have a digital VCR.
But most consumers, I think, will buy something based on the primary need, and buy something specific for that need. But the item they buy can be influenced by the secondary features, and the secondary features can allow for other impulse features. (Hmm, I have a PS2, and I want to buy that DVD. I can watch it on my PS2. Sure, why not).
The problem this causes is you end up with 2 or more potential solutions to a single problem, and inputting / configuring both is a pain in the ass, especially if you want to get full use of both. For convergence to really catch on, you will need to be able to have objects that provide similar features communicate with each other to swap settings / media.
Want to download a movie and watch it on your TV? Sure, just upload the file from your PC to your movie player, OR, steam the movie directly from your PC, OR specify the movie player as the destination for your download. You need a reminder for an appointment? Set the reminder on your PC, and receive it on your PC, OR your cell phone, OR your TV, OR your wristwatch...
That is what I hope happens. I just hope one of our beloved Super Corp Overlords(TM) finds a reasonable way to make such a model profitiable without totally reaming us in the process.
END COMMUNICATION
The ad's cost X per click for the twit paying for them. The rate is based on the amount of legitimate click throughs for the site.
How hard would it be to create a browser plugin that will hide the ads, but still 'click' on them? If the the number of such plugins in use became prevalent enough, then the advertisers would be charged more money, since their accounts show more click throughs. But since these are false positives, the increase in sales associated with those click throughs would not materialize.
Once this hits a critical mass, all such ads will become useless, nothing more then costly traffic that drains dramatically more revenue then it creates.
You wont get rats to stop trying to eat your food by hiding it. They just look harder for it because they know its still there. But if you can poison the food, they will die painfully.
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Getting some of these tech giants involved in creating MMPORG middle ware is probably a great thing. The developers should focus on making the game fun. So why spend their time on the 'boring' aspects (customer billing, database system for account management, server maintenence, etc).
If IBM and the rest can provide software and hardware services to do this, it will be a good thing. Does a customer really need to know or give a damn if their Everquest game uses the same server back end as Dark age of Camelot or City of Heros?
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Its like any other media endeavour. The talent that is actually most directly responsible for creating the product gets a very small chunk of the pie.
For animation, the publishers get the money.
For videogames, the publishers get the money.
For books, the publishers get the money.
For music, the publishers get the money most of the time.
The only exception is for movies and for music, where the stars get a big chunk of money. But that is because a singer is always directly associated with the song, and can choose not to sing so no one gets any money.
TV and Movies (moreso for TV though), a particular actor usually comes to be known for the character and can destroy the endeavour by not co-operating.
And the same happens with authors, though they need to hit it big before they can get a reasonable deal.
Animation and videogames are more collaborative though, and one person is not able to just pull the plug on the deal as above.
You will not get paid adequately for your services if your reasonably replaceible, or of the publisher can do the deal without you.
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I am quite fond of Illuminatti. Lots of strategic thinking, and the ability to interfere with rolls calls in alot of deal making and diplomacy.
And how can you not love a game that specifically allows any sort of 'meta game' deal that you can arrange? And also explicitly allows you to break those deals?
The only flaw is that the game can bog down when players try to calculate best / worst case scenarios for making thier rolls.
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The max sentence is a bit much, but 3 or so years for what he did sounds more then adequate.
Spamming is a pain in the ass, and this guy did use shady means to actually begin his spamming.
Do you think this guy is likely to re-offend on release? I doubt it.
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Split screen may be inconvenient, but its either that or setting up a LAN for home gaming with a friend. Some of us do actually have friends over to play once in a while. And only racing games really seem to be split screen. The rest either share a screen, or have alternating turns.
Fair point I suppose. More correctly, I should say that I dont like playing long style games on a handheld. Thats why I own a GameBoy Player.
Well, if you saw a Turbo Grafix 16 game at all, you also saw the hand held game. Their hand held played the same media as the console.
I disagree about the scope of games that will be put on the handheld, not from a play duration point of view, but from a development point of view. At lest at the present, the handhelds have games that are simpler to develop being released on them. The long playing games that have come out are mostly ports of SNES and NES titles on the GBA, though there certaintly are exceptions.
Also, I will say that the experience of playing a game made for the DS (as opposed to a half assed multi platoform "it will run on that system too" port is going to be very different. The dual screens will have a huge effect on the nature of the control interface, assuming the designers adequately exploit it. A DS game is going to be a different playing experience then a PSP game. So while the dominant screen will not look as good as the PSP, the play experience may be that much better.
Anyway, E3 demos are too pre-mature to adequately judge. Right now, its whos media spin you find more adequately beleivable. We will know which is better in practical terms about 4 to 8 months after the launches.
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