The reason that some might find this sick is that money should probably not have anywhere near the effect on elections as it currently does.
A group or individual that contributed a greater amount of money to a campaign tends to be favored over those who may have voted for a given canidate, but did not actually throw any money into the campaign.
It basically puts a spotlight on how politicians prostitute out thier influence for cash and encourages that sort of behaviour.
"Advertising executives, in television and the Internet market, note that consumers who block the ads are undercutting the economic model that provides them with free entertainment and information."
So explain to me why the hell I should care if I am undercutting your economic model?
If I want to surf with popups turned off, thats my business. I have occasionally come across sites that wont serve the page if the ads are blocked. I see no problem with that sort of exchange, since I have yet to visit a site I like enough to warrant putting up with a mass of pop up ads.
The problem is that there are too many sites out there where the content is not good enough to warrant putting up with so many damned ads. The economic model that these people are defending is just not viable.
If the service providers economic model is endangered by the content provider, then its the content provider that is out of luck. I have nothing against someone trying to make money, unless their method ends up harassing non-customers.
Popup advertising might work at the moment, but it wont for much longer. Its time to find a new business model that does not piss people off.
The simple reason is that Starwars is both helped and hindered by its vocal and rabid fan base.
The fan base helps keep the series popular, and provides a very steady market for Starwars based merchandise (Novels, Games, and Toys).
The fan base hurts the franchise for two very specific reasons. The first is that it prevents Starwars from evolving much beyond what its fan base expects. If you read some of the novels, they always have the characters from the movies paraphrasing their own quotes, and expanding on people and places mentioned off hand in one line of dialog.
The other problem is that the fans have had 20 years to fill in the blanks themselves, and often they find that Lucas's ideas just dont seem as cool to them as their ideas did. That, and some of the ideas introduced were just simply very bad.
The final problem is that while the franchise cannot evolve for fear of alienating its fan base, the fan base has evolved. Fans that absolutely thought that Ewoks and a Muppet Yoda were awesome 20 years ago would not think so today.
Just because windows now has the basic POSIX functions does not mean Unix / Linux is going to have support for, say, Win32 dialog boxes, the windows specific "Load File" commands, or the DirectX API.
It may be of use to corporate apps that arent intended for an end user, but it wont really manage to help port gui dependant user apps, which is where windows really does have its death grip.
All anti MS rhetoric aside, this is a smart move for them to make. By making support for POSIX api's freely available, it allows someone to port a unix type app over with a re-compile and perhaps some changes to the make file.
People like to roast MS for not adhering to standards, among other things. This partly answers that.
Of course, this does not make MS a "Good Corporate Citizen" any more then donating money to a homeless shelter makes a tobbaco company a "Good Corporate Citizen". But it does show that once in a while, even bad people can do good things, even if the motives are questionable.
And I have no doubt that Microsofts motives will be questioned here.
For very simple games where joystick movement is the most important factor, maybe you have a point.
But if your manipulating 3 or more buttons, and need to be able to do complicated button combinations, then the better dexterity of your primary hand is probably going to be required.
Think about this: PC based FPS shooters have people using mouse and keyboard controls. In those games, aiming is most important. So you end up doing it with your right hand, and moving with your left hand.
Game developers are typically at the mercy of their publishers when it comes to taking in money. As an example, its not like DICE is seeing the bulk of the profits generated from Battlefield 1942. EA is gettting the bulk of the profits on it.
If Turbine can put out a decent MMPORG (which is likely), they will be getting all of the profits generated by the subscribers. And once they pay back the venture capitol, they will quite likely still be pulling in money from the MMPORG, and own the rights to the sequel them selves.
The only downside to this is if they totally screw this up.
As a game developer myself, I hope this succeeds for them in a big way. Anything that puts the developers in a stronger position at the expense of the publishers is probably a good thing.
This is the sort of thing that happens when the intrests of the developer and the publisher diverge. Interplay wanted to make money, and probably worked its developers at a death march pace. No developer can sustain that for an extended period of time.
Interplay wanted Bioware to churn out its games faster and faster, and make them larger and larger. It also wanted to pay Bioware alot less then what they had coming. Since Bioware was not owned by Interplay, Bioware told them to f**k right off, and went to Infogrames / Atari.
I guess the same sort of crap went on at Black Isle.
Black Isle was owned, so they could not just walk away from Interplay. Their core group of experienced developers probably told their bosses to stick it where the sun doesnt shine, and took a walk. That, or they dug in and refused to work a death march. Either way, Interplay decided to shut down the studio.
Anyway, this is all guess work. But it seems plausible enough to me to explain what happened.
They make their money through advertising. Its hard to get Capcom to advertise on your site when you gave the last 3 games they put out a 3 out of 10.
Anyway, Game review sites have a tenuous existence anyway. Internet advertising is a very unreliable source of income. And no one I know of is likely to want to pay money specifically to read game reviews.
Happily, the Internet is a great place for word of mouth to spread. It's not hard to get an idea of how entertaining a game really is.
"I've long wondered why the game design community has not paid more attention to gender issues given that the gaming industry has now eclipsed the movie industry in terms of overall sales."
Simple enough to answer. Game designers like to make games that they want to play. The team morale for a group of 22 - 30 year old programmers working on a barbie title is just slightly less enthusiastic then the guy who scrubs toilets for a living.
If they get this off the drawing boards, and solve the problem of a user eating pavement in the event of a hardware failure, they should probably market this in asia first.
Think about it. Asian cities are much more crowded then north american cities, and have much worse traffic problems. The appeal of rapid personal transportation over there would be much greater, I think.
I for one like the idea of using Embrio type personal transportation combined with mass transit for longer distances.
One of the primary problems with game development is that in most cases, the financial backer of the game and the developer of the game have slightly opposing goals.
The Developer wants to make the best game they possibly can. This improves the developers crediblity, and makes it easier to get backing for future games.
The Developer wants to make the most profitiable game they possibly can. This allows them to back more projects, attract further investment, and insure that they can eat.
The goals do mostly work together, but it can cause problems. Some developers end up spending years developing a game at great expense until the game can not hope to recoup the cost. Other developers try to churn out a quick game to make a quick buck.
Often, only one of the goals is met. Big Game Hunters is a great selling game, but no one will say it is a great game. Capcom tends to come out with one excellent idea every 6 years or so, and then proceeds to make 18 or so games on it (Megaman, Street Fighter, Resident Evil).
The trick is to realize two things.
1) A Bug budget does not guarantee a great game. 2) A great game does not necessarily need to be original, meerly different enough to stand apart.
Quebec is one of the harder to understand parts of Canada because of the French bit.
Quebec's nationalists are of the opinion that their culture is eroding because of the diminishing prevalence of French. To them, the language essentially is the culture, and if their own citizens do not use the language, then they are culturally screwed. Aside from the language, the only thing that Quebec has to set it apart from the rest of Canada is a vague reputation of flagrantly indulging in social substance abuse (heavier incidence of smoking, drinking and drugs).
And so they try to preserve their culture through arbitrary legislation. And like the RIAA suing its users, it wont really accomplish too much in the long run. You cannot protect a culture by passing laws that punish those who do not participate in it. And you cannot protect a failing buisiness model by going to court to attack your customers.
For Quebec culture to mean something, it must have an audience to appreciate it. If it has no audience, then it has no purpose.
The proof in this is that every province in Canada that is not Quebec does not particularly care for their whining.
Selling more singles online vs meatspace is not going to get the RIAA's attention in the magnitude that the typical Slashdot Music Lover wants it to.
What will get the RIAA to grab a clue is when one or more of the following happens:
1) More music is distributed online then in meat space. 2) Profits from downloaded music surpass the profits from sales of CD's.
The music downloads allow a way around the CD price fixing that led to the RIAA's problem. Once the online services surpass the RIAA, the RIAA will really be in an Adapt or Perish situation.
I think your being both paranoid and unreasonable.
1) The box does not transmit data, it collects it. In order for someone to access this data, they would need to check the box.
2) These boxes apparantly only store about 5 minutes of information at a time.
3) The only way this info is likely to be accessed is if a law enforcment agency wants to do so. For this purpose, lets assume it happens when your being pulled over, after an accident, or under a search warrant.
In these cases, your big brother concerns are at best misdirected. Worry more about someone getting accessing this data on a bogus warrant, or about this data being transmitted and archived for long periods of time and in combination with GPS data.
About the worst thing I see happening from this sort of black box is people losing alot of arguments with Police about their speeding, or being exonerated. And given how people who drive are always bitching about how everyone else is a crappy driver, I welcome this development.
If an AOL user gets a random advertising popup at some in-opportune time, odds are that the customers call up AOL to complain about a popup. This puts AOL in a situation where they need to fix a problem caused by Microsoft. After all, a customer complaint costs AOL time to deal with. So this solution is their best option. No pop ups mean no complaints.
AOL's best option would be to have the Install process for thier internet suite offer to disable the relevant settings and prompt for a Yes / No as a final step to the install.
" Sales of the GCN are just a blip for the moment. There are lots of people who already have a PS2 or XBOX who are interested in the GCN simply because it has some really nice games."
Why the hell else would someone buy a game console? Because it matches thier curtains?
I will admit that Hominids takes it a bit too far in making it clear that the story is taking place in some small towns in Ontario.
But before you come down on Canada for being parochial Nationalists, consider that every morning in schools that the first thing school children do is recite the Pledge of Allegiance and salute a flag. From where I stand, that seems damn near cultish.
If the only reason that you cannot stand the book is because it is blatently pro Canadian, then perhaps you were paying too much attention to the wrong bits. I liked Hominids a fair bit. The reason I liked it is because it is a story that takes a path much different then typical Sci-Fi. Not many Sci-Fi books manage to examine things like Religion and Violence in a primarily modern context.
You are right, the primary reason that game development is more expensive is because the tool tech has not kept up with the hardware. It takes a long time for an artists to generate a high polygon 3d character.
The rest of your post is not correct.
The most likely way developers will deal with the problem of generating increasingly complicated worlds will be to create tools that do more of the work for them. More of the task will become procedural. Part of that will be using fractal algorithims to generate large terrain and and textures. Other parts of it will just be the general improvement of tools like 3d Studio Max and Maya. Also, the use of middleware in game development is on the rise. Take a good look at many of the games out there, many are using Renderware's engine on the Ps2, Gamecube, and X-box.
Also, regarding your comment on long games going out the window is wrong. The typical gamer does not care if a game took 4 years, or 4 hours to develop. If it is not fun, he wont play it. The reason that so many people do not finish the games they play is that many games are not good enough to warrant it. Its one thing to sit through 2 hours of a bad movie. Its quite another do so for 40 hours. Another thing to consider is how many games do you rent once and never play again?
When you take a look at say, any 10 or 50 games, and take a look at how those games are played, you will notice that for the vast majority of those games, you are using one or two buttons much more often then the others. In a shooter, your mostly shooting. In a platformer, your mostly jumping. Also, in the games menu system you are tyically using one button to confirm and another to cancel / back out.
Having a controller where all the buttons are equal in size only makes sense when all the buttons are going to see equal use. This really only happens in typical Fighter games (Hard punch, hard kick, light punch, light kick.
To get an idea of which controller is really the best designed, just pick up the controller and do the following:
1) Press every analog stick / directional pad in every direction. Are any of them in a bad position to reach quickly without changing your grip? Can you comfortably hold each in any direction for any amount of time? How likely are you to cause the wrong direction to be entered on the directionl pad on a quick press?
2) Press every button 10 times as fast as you can. Which buttons are hard to reach without altering your grip? Which buttons cause you to miss and hit the wrong button most often?
On the Game Cube, the directional pad is too small to easily press the direction if you just want a quick tap. The Z button is awkward to reach, and the X button is a bit awkward for your thumb. Any other problems with the arrangement are most likely due to the controller just fitting in your hand badly (If you like the big X-box controller, you tend to hate the game cube controller).
On the PS2, the R2 and L2 buttons are likley to have you hit R1 and R2 if you need to use them in a hurry. And the primary buttons arent perfect either. When you grab the controller, your thumb naturally rests on Square. Being able to easily reach Triangle or X means you have to shift your grip a little. If you need to hit circle quickly, you need to shift your grip alot more. If you rest your thumb on circle instead, the reverse is true. And the left analog and directional pad are not in ideal positions, because most games assume analog input now, not the directional pad.
The X-Box controller is worse. Most of the primary buttons are not only hard to reach, but they are shaped in a way that makes it very easy to hit the wrong button. And the origional controller (not the S type) only had two of the 4 primary buttons positioned for easy rapid access.
There are two reasons why Original games (As in original game play AND original IP) are hard to find.
1) Most Companies make games to turn a profit. 2) Most Gamers play games to have fun.
From a gamers standpoint, a truly Original game is a mystery. They cannot ask their friends if it is any good. They cannot say "This game is just like X" to help them make a decision. All they can really do is rent it, and risk being out the $5 dollars for the rental.
And sure, if a game is truly excellent, it will do excellently and become a huge success. But that magnitude of success is rare. In the last 5 years, the only truly original game to take off that strongly is Pokemon. A strong "2nd Tier" Title like Super Monkey Ball will do ok as well, but it will take a while for it to become main stream accepted. In Monkey Balls case, it is only successful, I think, because the people who do like it, generally wont shut up about it to their friends. I have yet to meet someone who has played Monkey Ball say the game is terrible.
A game that is just average will probably fade into oblivion, remembered by only a handful of enthusiasts. And only the most successful games will have a sequel made for them.
Your comment is so painfully wrong that I cannot post my initial thoughts if I dont want to be labeled flamebait.
Todays current crop of gamers is largly composed of yester days crop of gamers. People like you, and myself, dont need to be sold on gaming as a viable hobby. The problem is that the games you and I like are not attracting any new gamers. Let me put this more plainly.
Everyone who wants to play complicated games is already doing so.
Further more, your understanding of the idea of simple games is way off. Carmack and Nintendo are not saying that we need to make games for the mentally deficient. They are saying that there is a shortage of games that you can just pick up and play for 5 or 15 minutes at a time.
As an example, take a serious look at Chu-Chu-Rocket (Dreamcast), or Super Monkey Ball (1 or 2, both on Game Cube). You dont need to play a 15 tutorial to figure out everything that you can do in the game. If your not brain damaged, you figure it out in about 3 minutes. Super Monkey Ball is especially good for this. You can literally hand it to any random person on the street and they will know basically what they are doing in 30 seconds. Can you say the same for Quake? Starcraft? Warcraft?
The Old School games that fit this are Donkey Kong, Pac Man, Asteroids, Space Invaders, and the like.
No one is going to pick up a game for the joy of feeling like an idiot.
That this person got jail time is in my own opinion a good thing, but I dont think that a year is appropriate. This is because I think that this individual is just stupid, and that stupidity on that magnitude should carry a criminal penalty.
Posting bomb instructions online is just stupid. Doing so within a site that openly advocates violence against the authorities that you are subject to is even more so. Freedom of speech does not give an individual the right to make death threats.
Slashdot Mirror
One has to wonder if this is because Nintendo's first party titles are still selling strongly enough to warrent their standard retail price.
Its also telling that pretty much all of the greatest hits games are published by Nintendo.
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The reason that some might find this sick is that money should probably not have anywhere near the effect on elections as it currently does.
A group or individual that contributed a greater amount of money to a campaign tends to be favored over those who may have voted for a given canidate, but did not actually throw any money into the campaign.
It basically puts a spotlight on how politicians prostitute out thier influence for cash and encourages that sort of behaviour.
END COMMUNICATION
"Advertising executives, in television and the Internet market, note that consumers who block the ads are undercutting the economic model that provides them with free entertainment and information."
So explain to me why the hell I should care if I am undercutting your economic model?
If I want to surf with popups turned off, thats my business. I have occasionally come across sites that wont serve the page if the ads are blocked. I see no problem with that sort of exchange, since I have yet to visit a site I like enough to warrant putting up with a mass of pop up ads.
The problem is that there are too many sites out there where the content is not good enough to warrant putting up with so many damned ads. The economic model that these people are defending is just not viable.
If the service providers economic model is endangered by the content provider, then its the content provider that is out of luck. I have nothing against someone trying to make money, unless their method ends up harassing non-customers.
Popup advertising might work at the moment, but it wont for much longer. Its time to find a new business model that does not piss people off.
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The simple reason is that Starwars is both helped and hindered by its vocal and rabid fan base.
The fan base helps keep the series popular, and provides a very steady market for Starwars based merchandise (Novels, Games, and Toys).
The fan base hurts the franchise for two very specific reasons. The first is that it prevents Starwars from evolving much beyond what its fan base expects. If you read some of the novels, they always have the characters from the movies paraphrasing their own quotes, and expanding on people and places mentioned off hand in one line of dialog.
The other problem is that the fans have had 20 years to fill in the blanks themselves, and often they find that Lucas's ideas just dont seem as cool to them as their ideas did. That, and some of the ideas introduced were just simply very bad.
The final problem is that while the franchise cannot evolve for fear of alienating its fan base, the fan base has evolved. Fans that absolutely thought that Ewoks and a Muppet Yoda were awesome 20 years ago would not think so today.
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At least, not nearly as much as you imply.
Just because windows now has the basic POSIX functions does not mean Unix / Linux is going to have support for, say, Win32 dialog boxes, the windows specific "Load File" commands, or the DirectX API.
It may be of use to corporate apps that arent intended for an end user, but it wont really manage to help port gui dependant user apps, which is where windows really does have its death grip.
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All anti MS rhetoric aside, this is a smart move for them to make. By making support for POSIX api's freely available, it allows someone to port a unix type app over with a re-compile and perhaps some changes to the make file.
People like to roast MS for not adhering to standards, among other things. This partly answers that.
Of course, this does not make MS a "Good Corporate Citizen" any more then donating money to a homeless shelter makes a tobbaco company a "Good Corporate Citizen". But it does show that once in a while, even bad people can do good things, even if the motives are questionable.
And I have no doubt that Microsofts motives will be questioned here.
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For very simple games where joystick movement is the most important factor, maybe you have a point.
But if your manipulating 3 or more buttons, and need to be able to do complicated button combinations, then the better dexterity of your primary hand is probably going to be required.
Think about this:
PC based FPS shooters have people using mouse and keyboard controls. In those games, aiming is most important. So you end up doing it with your right hand, and moving with your left hand.
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Game developers are typically at the mercy of their publishers when it comes to taking in money. As an example, its not like DICE is seeing the bulk of the profits generated from Battlefield 1942. EA is gettting the bulk of the profits on it.
If Turbine can put out a decent MMPORG (which is likely), they will be getting all of the profits generated by the subscribers. And once they pay back the venture capitol, they will quite likely still be pulling in money from the MMPORG, and own the rights to the sequel them selves.
The only downside to this is if they totally screw this up.
As a game developer myself, I hope this succeeds for them in a big way. Anything that puts the developers in a stronger position at the expense of the publishers is probably a good thing.
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This is the sort of thing that happens when the intrests of the developer and the publisher diverge. Interplay wanted to make money, and probably worked its developers at a death march pace. No developer can sustain that for an extended period of time.
Interplay wanted Bioware to churn out its games faster and faster, and make them larger and larger. It also wanted to pay Bioware alot less then what they had coming. Since Bioware was not owned by Interplay, Bioware told them to f**k right off, and went to Infogrames / Atari.
I guess the same sort of crap went on at Black Isle.
Black Isle was owned, so they could not just walk away from Interplay. Their core group of experienced developers probably told their bosses to stick it where the sun doesnt shine, and took a walk. That, or they dug in and refused to work a death march. Either way, Interplay decided to shut down the studio.
Anyway, this is all guess work. But it seems plausible enough to me to explain what happened.
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They make their money through advertising. Its hard to get Capcom to advertise on your site when you gave the last 3 games they put out a 3 out of 10.
Anyway, Game review sites have a tenuous existence anyway. Internet advertising is a very unreliable source of income. And no one I know of is likely to want to pay money specifically to read game reviews.
Happily, the Internet is a great place for word of mouth to spread. It's not hard to get an idea of how entertaining a game really is.
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"I've long wondered why the game design community has not paid more attention to gender issues given that the gaming industry has now eclipsed the movie industry in terms of overall sales."
Simple enough to answer. Game designers like to make games that they want to play. The team morale for a group of 22 - 30 year old programmers working on a barbie title is just slightly less enthusiastic then the guy who scrubs toilets for a living.
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If they get this off the drawing boards, and solve the problem of a user eating pavement in the event of a hardware failure, they should probably market this in asia first.
Think about it. Asian cities are much more crowded then north american cities, and have much worse traffic problems. The appeal of rapid personal transportation over there would be much greater, I think.
I for one like the idea of using Embrio type personal transportation combined with mass transit for longer distances.
END COMMUNICATION
One of the primary problems with game development is that in most cases, the financial backer of the game and the developer of the game have slightly opposing goals.
The Developer wants to make the best game they possibly can. This improves the developers crediblity, and makes it easier to get backing for future games.
The Developer wants to make the most profitiable game they possibly can. This allows them to back more projects, attract further investment, and insure that they can eat.
The goals do mostly work together, but it can cause problems. Some developers end up spending years developing a game at great expense until the game can not hope to recoup the cost. Other developers try to churn out a quick game to make a quick buck.
Often, only one of the goals is met. Big Game Hunters is a great selling game, but no one will say it is a great game. Capcom tends to come out with one excellent idea every 6 years or so, and then proceeds to make 18 or so games on it (Megaman, Street Fighter, Resident Evil).
The trick is to realize two things.
1) A Bug budget does not guarantee a great game.
2) A great game does not necessarily need to be original, meerly different enough to stand apart.
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"About 88 percent of broadband users and 87 percent of dial-up users in North America find that pop-ups interfere with their Web surfing experience"
Who are those 12% and 13% of users that like the popups? I would like to break their fingers for making the popups viable.
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Quebec is one of the harder to understand parts of Canada because of the French bit.
Quebec's nationalists are of the opinion that their culture is eroding because of the diminishing prevalence of French. To them, the language essentially is the culture, and if their own citizens do not use the language, then they are culturally screwed. Aside from the language, the only thing that Quebec has to set it apart from the rest of Canada is a vague reputation of flagrantly indulging in social substance abuse (heavier incidence of smoking, drinking and drugs).
And so they try to preserve their culture through arbitrary legislation. And like the RIAA suing its users, it wont really accomplish too much in the long run. You cannot protect a culture by passing laws that punish those who do not participate in it. And you cannot protect a failing buisiness model by going to court to attack your customers.
For Quebec culture to mean something, it must have an audience to appreciate it. If it has no audience, then it has no purpose.
The proof in this is that every province in Canada that is not Quebec does not particularly care for their whining.
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Selling more singles online vs meatspace is not going to get the RIAA's attention in the magnitude that the typical Slashdot Music Lover wants it to.
What will get the RIAA to grab a clue is when one or more of the following happens:
1) More music is distributed online then in meat space.
2) Profits from downloaded music surpass the profits from sales of CD's.
The music downloads allow a way around the CD price fixing that led to the RIAA's problem. Once the online services surpass the RIAA, the RIAA will really be in an Adapt or Perish situation.
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I think your being both paranoid and unreasonable.
1) The box does not transmit data, it collects it. In order for someone to access this data, they would need to check the box.
2) These boxes apparantly only store about 5 minutes of information at a time.
3) The only way this info is likely to be accessed is if a law enforcment agency wants to do so. For this purpose, lets assume it happens when your being pulled over, after an accident, or under a search warrant.
In these cases, your big brother concerns are at best misdirected. Worry more about someone getting accessing this data on a bogus warrant, or about this data being transmitted and archived for long periods of time and in combination with GPS data.
About the worst thing I see happening from this sort of black box is people losing alot of arguments with Police about their speeding, or being exonerated. And given how people who drive are always bitching about how everyone else is a crappy driver, I welcome this development.
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If an AOL user gets a random advertising popup at some in-opportune time, odds are that the customers call up AOL to complain about a popup. This puts AOL in a situation where they need to fix a problem caused by Microsoft. After all, a customer complaint costs AOL time to deal with. So this solution is their best option. No pop ups mean no complaints.
AOL's best option would be to have the Install process for thier internet suite offer to disable the relevant settings and prompt for a Yes / No as a final step to the install.
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" Sales of the GCN are just a blip for the moment. There are lots of people who already have a PS2 or XBOX who are interested in the GCN simply because it has some really nice games."
Why the hell else would someone buy a game console? Because it matches thier curtains?
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I will admit that Hominids takes it a bit too far in making it clear that the story is taking place in some small towns in Ontario .
But before you come down on Canada for being parochial Nationalists, consider that every morning in schools that the first thing school children do is recite the Pledge of Allegiance and salute a flag. From where I stand, that seems damn near cultish.
If the only reason that you cannot stand the book is because it is blatently pro Canadian, then perhaps you were paying too much attention to the wrong bits. I liked Hominids a fair bit. The reason I liked it is because it is a story that takes a path much different then typical Sci-Fi. Not many Sci-Fi books manage to examine things like Religion and Violence in a primarily modern context.
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You are right, the primary reason that game development is more expensive is because the tool tech has not kept up with the hardware. It takes a long time for an artists to generate a high polygon 3d character.
The rest of your post is not correct.
The most likely way developers will deal with the problem of generating increasingly complicated worlds will be to create tools that do more of the work for them. More of the task will become procedural. Part of that will be using fractal algorithims to generate large terrain and and textures. Other parts of it will just be the general improvement of tools like 3d Studio Max and Maya. Also, the use of middleware in game development is on the rise. Take a good look at many of the games out there, many are using Renderware's engine on the Ps2, Gamecube, and X-box.
Also, regarding your comment on long games going out the window is wrong. The typical gamer does not care if a game took 4 years, or 4 hours to develop. If it is not fun, he wont play it. The reason that so many people do not finish the games they play is that many games are not good enough to warrant it. Its one thing to sit through 2 hours of a bad movie. Its quite another do so for 40 hours. Another thing to consider is how many games do you rent once and never play again?
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When you take a look at say, any 10 or 50 games, and take a look at how those games are played, you will notice that for the vast majority of those games, you are using one or two buttons much more often then the others. In a shooter, your mostly shooting. In a platformer, your mostly jumping. Also, in the games menu system you are tyically using one button to confirm and another to cancel / back out.
Having a controller where all the buttons are equal in size only makes sense when all the buttons are going to see equal use. This really only happens in typical Fighter games (Hard punch, hard kick, light punch, light kick.
To get an idea of which controller is really the best designed, just pick up the controller and do the following:
1) Press every analog stick / directional pad in every direction. Are any of them in a bad position to reach quickly without changing your grip? Can you comfortably hold each in any direction for any amount of time? How likely are you to cause the wrong direction to be entered on the directionl pad on a quick press?
2) Press every button 10 times as fast as you can. Which buttons are hard to reach without altering your grip? Which buttons cause you to miss and hit the wrong button most often?
On the Game Cube, the directional pad is too small to easily press the direction if you just want a quick tap. The Z button is awkward to reach, and the X button is a bit awkward for your thumb. Any other problems with the arrangement are most likely due to the controller just fitting in your hand badly (If you like the big X-box controller, you tend to hate the game cube controller).
On the PS2, the R2 and L2 buttons are likley to have you hit R1 and R2 if you need to use them in a hurry. And the primary buttons arent perfect either. When you grab the controller, your thumb naturally rests on Square. Being able to easily reach Triangle or X means you have to shift your grip a little. If you need to hit circle quickly, you need to shift your grip alot more. If you rest your thumb on circle instead, the reverse is true. And the left analog and directional pad are not in ideal positions, because most games assume analog input now, not the directional pad.
The X-Box controller is worse. Most of the primary buttons are not only hard to reach, but they are shaped in a way that makes it very easy to hit the wrong button. And the origional controller (not the S type) only had two of the 4 primary buttons positioned for easy rapid access.
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There are two reasons why Original games (As in original game play AND original IP) are hard to find.
1) Most Companies make games to turn a profit.
2) Most Gamers play games to have fun.
From a gamers standpoint, a truly Original game is a mystery. They cannot ask their friends if it is any good. They cannot say "This game is just like X" to help them make a decision. All they can really do is rent it, and risk being out the $5 dollars for the rental.
And sure, if a game is truly excellent, it will do excellently and become a huge success. But that magnitude of success is rare. In the last 5 years, the only truly original game to take off that strongly is Pokemon. A strong "2nd Tier" Title like Super Monkey Ball will do ok as well, but it will take a while for it to become main stream accepted. In Monkey Balls case, it is only successful, I think, because the people who do like it, generally wont shut up about it to their friends. I have yet to meet someone who has played Monkey Ball say the game is terrible.
A game that is just average will probably fade into oblivion, remembered by only a handful of enthusiasts. And only the most successful games will have a sequel made for them.
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Your comment is so painfully wrong that I cannot post my initial thoughts if I dont want to be labeled flamebait.
Todays current crop of gamers is largly composed of yester days crop of gamers. People like you, and myself, dont need to be sold on gaming as a viable hobby. The problem is that the games you and I like are not attracting any new gamers. Let me put this more plainly.
Everyone who wants to play complicated games is already doing so.
Further more, your understanding of the idea of simple games is way off. Carmack and Nintendo are not saying that we need to make games for the mentally deficient. They are saying that there is a shortage of games that you can just pick up and play for 5 or 15 minutes at a time.
As an example, take a serious look at Chu-Chu-Rocket (Dreamcast), or Super Monkey Ball (1 or 2, both on Game Cube). You dont need to play a 15 tutorial to figure out everything that you can do in the game. If your not brain damaged, you figure it out in about 3 minutes. Super Monkey Ball is especially good for this. You can literally hand it to any random person on the street and they will know basically what they are doing in 30 seconds. Can you say the same for Quake? Starcraft? Warcraft?
The Old School games that fit this are Donkey Kong, Pac Man, Asteroids, Space Invaders, and the like.
No one is going to pick up a game for the joy of feeling like an idiot.
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That this person got jail time is in my own opinion a good thing, but I dont think that a year is appropriate. This is because I think that this individual is just stupid, and that stupidity on that magnitude should carry a criminal penalty.
Posting bomb instructions online is just stupid. Doing so within a site that openly advocates violence against the authorities that you are subject to is even more so. Freedom of speech does not give an individual the right to make death threats.
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