In order to get publishers to throw cash at a game, you need to impress them in some manner. In order for a high profile AAA game to sell, you need to be able to put together an effective commercial.
A 'Saving Private Ryan' intro is impressive. It can show off the graphics, and anyone seeing that can intuitively understand what is going on. But if you throw a controller / mouse + keyboard into the hands of a marketing executive to get them to play the game for 10 minutes, your going to have 10 minutes of an executive trying to figure out unfamiliar controls and getting killed.
Gameplay can be king, but in order to get the several million dollars needed to make the damn game, you need a strong visual element. It is easier to sell a damn good story then to sell a game description of "a deep and fast pace fighting game like Soul Calibur with better controls".
Basically, the bigger the budget, the more likely you are to be railroaded into a story.
The other side of it is that a wide open world with lots of branching in the story is cripplingly expensive to create. Do you really think they sat on Grand Theft Auto 5 so long because they had problems convincing the accountants it was a good plan? They needed the time to build the vast amount of content for that game. Same for Skyrim.
I do not mean in the 'bubble boy' sense. Specifically, I do not think that Sherman interacts with anyone not in a position where piracy has caused real damage to their income, or who does not have a personal interest in maintaining the current copyright laws. There is no one who Sherman is talking to who is going to say anything negative about copyright.
Talking to Sherman about the privacy situation is like trying to talk to your grandmother about the internet. You may work with the internet every day and you may be aware of what Meme's are, you have an opinion on Facebooks privacy policies, and you know enough not to click on links to a certain.cx domain. If you work in that world every day, and all of your friends work in that world every day, it gets harder to relate to people who chose to live a life without an internet connection.
I have no doubt that Sherman was truly surprised at the amount of visible and high profile backlash because in Shermans world, he cannot understand why a 'normal' every day person would have a problem with SOPA and PIPA. So clearly someone else must have manipulated the agenda to turn the masses against his agenda. So I bet that Sherman is certain that once he carefully explains his position that everyone will understand why SOPA / PIPA is a good thing.
Microsoft may have resolved their security issues.
But a bridge builder who fuxked one goat 5 years ago is still a goat fuxker. It takes longer to fix a damaged reputation than it does to fix the problems that created the reputation.
Angry Birds is a great game, and the iOS DRM that ties phones to accounts and prevents jailbreaking combined with a very low purchase cost make it easier to purchase the game than pirate it for the vast majority of users. Given the vast amount of Angry Birds merchandising, the viewpoint of Mikael Hed is not too surprising.
But for digital products that are just not that good, piracy can destroy the profit margin. The experience of Rovio with Angry Birds does not necessarily apply to all digital products.
Most game development studios that are supporting iOS tend to use the minimal amount of Objective C required to access the underlying system libraries and features. The rest of the code is either C / C++. This is not only true within my workplace, but it seems to hold true for new hires relating their experience with the Objective C language.
For programmers used to reading C++ code and languages derived primarily from C, the Objective C syntax is an eyesore that makes figuring out the code at a glance much more difficult. While the language has some very compelling features, the atypical syntax makes using those features more of a chore.
The reason for that rigidity is that too many players and too many DM's get screwed over. The dice are involved as much to keep the DM honest as anything else.
As a player, it sucks to have the DM railroad something by to let a beloved villain escape even though you just scored a crit and the target ran out of HP 5 rounds and 70 HP ago. While there is an argument to be made for preserving the story, a good DM adapts the story to the actions of the players without negating the players actions. Too many DMs just hand wave it.
And on the flip side, a lenient DM with 4 casual gamers and 1 power gamer is going to end up with a single player game once the player using 'Ingar the Invincible' starts to dominate all the ingame combat.
Finally, not everyone is interested in playing a powerless protagonist while the DM recites 5 hours of marginally interactive amateur fiction. As long as everyone at the table has fun, there is no wrong way to play.
There is no reason for college text books to be as expensive as they are now. Any educational institution that takes money from any level of government should be using text books that are open sourced. Anything that can drive down the costs of getting an education without decreasing the quality of that education should be encouraged.
One of the most frustrating things to deal with as a game developer is the tendency for publishers to try very damn hard to hit a Christmas shiping target. To get through the lot check / TRC process, you pretty much have to be finishing up by September or October. That leaves November for going in and out of lotcheck and giving enough lead time to manufacture the game (if your not shipping a digital product).
For any software project that is tied to a consumer retail project, your probably going to have to hit a similar deadline. Based on that, I can see this result coming about. People are rushed to hit the deadline and the scrutiny is higher.
Inheriting someone elses work is never easy, but your doing well enough. You have to resist the urge to re-implement everything wholesale and simply take the time to learn how the hell everything is working.
In your case I would suggest documenting the discovered issues and noting exactly what your concerns are. Also throw in some time estimates (with a healthy error margin) describing how long it would take you to fix such a problem if it manifested, and estimates describing how much time and effort it will take to replace and re-implement the systems that would cause the problems. Then send this stuff out as an e-mail no one will ever read.
Then when shit breaks, you at least have the paper trail and you can give the 'I tried to warn you' speech to preempt your bosses from having you eat the big bowl of dogshit that will result.
How many of you have seen a subway train have its doors held open by some idiot trying to get on at the last moment? Some idiot will try the same crap even with this system. And because everything is moving, the potential for an accident is greatly increased. This system would not be failure tolerant to the degree it would need to work.
Most game companies (Ubisoft and EA for certain, Activision and the rest highly likely) have API's that have the app phone home and send metrics / telemetry data back about the usage stats. This is even done in games that have no multi-player component. Some of this is done for determining how much ad revenue is generated from ingame advertisements. Some of it is just marketing and research data. (ie: If only 2% of users actually use the mode that took 15% of the development resources to create, chances are that the mode will be dropped or at least not developed any further. If 90% of users die in the room with 13 snipers, they may patch the game to remove some snipers). I suspect that some portion of this data includes unique user id / cd keys.
I would expect that titles with a great deal of piracy are somehow detected by this. If they know that they have actually sold X units through retail, and they have X+Y connections, then the number of pirated instances is Y.
Lets say a game without this DRM has 150 000 users, and that 75000 users are legit. If they are taking a beating in the press, but the number of legit users has increased, the system is a success. Ubisoft is happier to have 80 000 legit users in a pool of 90 000 total users, even if they drove off 46% of the total user base to do it.
Losing a user means nothing except in subscription based games. Losing a sale means a whole lot more.
It sounds very good for EA to be able to sell a game once and have the user able to play it on any platform. But in order to sell a game on any platforms, the platform owner tends to demand a price. There is no issue if the platform is PC or Mac or Linux. But Apple demands 30% of all iTunes store sales. There are licensing fee's to be paid for each console (Wii, Xbox360, PS3, 3DS, the PSP), the cost of which I am not sure of. Even if each platform holder was able to get its rights fees for the game, how the hell do they split it?
I also do not see Sony being all that willing to go along with a plan that can let their own users easily migrate to the Xbox.
I think that the best that they will really manage will be to allow the user to get the Console + PC version.
I expect that any government that is not technologically backward will end up wanting to try to break the system rather than prosecute against it. The likely hood of someone figuring out how to generate counterfit bitcoins will approach 1 as the potential profit for doing so increases. It will only take one person breaking the system for the entire system to be rendered useless.
Arresting people will cost money. But generating counterfit bitcoins is profitable in the short term and will acheive the longer term goal of getting rid of the system.
If the goal is to make a game with bleeding edge graphics that blow everything else out of the water, then yes, going directly 'to the metal' would work.
If the goal is to make a game that is actually profitable, or if the goal is to make a game that can be used with the least amount of grief by the majority of your customers, then that kind of thinking is not going to help you meet that goal.
I think that any demand for PC specific API's that can take full advantage of the newest video cards is overstated. Simply put, while the PC user base is especially vocal, it is not especially profitable, and cash speaks louder then long and ranting forum posts about how the PC is a superior platform. At the moment, most developers are racing head long towards the iOS / Android smart phone platforms because the combination of low dev costs and large potential user base are extraordinarily tempting. Whether or not you think this is a good or especially wise thing (which I do not) is beside the point.
Do any of you think that so many developers are rushing to that platform because they expect to push bleeding edge graphics on it? If anything, DirectX is most likely going to be modified to make it easier to put decent graphics on the Windows phone long before improving the utilization of PC graphics cards becomes a priority.
I will disagree with the premise that the emphasis on console development is as harmful to innovation as is implied. I will concede that games which are developed initially for a console are going to suffer from many of the points that are listed. However, many of those issues are more due to the fact that some games benefit more from a given control interface.
As a gaming platform, the PC only has a few very specific advantages over console games; Bleeding edge graphics, Ease of use for games that work better with mouse and keyboard (RTS games, FPS Shooters), and looser restrictions on the games content.
I do not consider high level graphics to be especially indicative of innovation. Once in a while you are going to end up with some spectacular new rendering tech that involves a previously underused or unknown method of rendering geometry. But texture compression and a higher polygon count are not innovative; They are iterative.
As far as ease of control goes, that cuts both ways. You are not going to see as many high level sports titles, platformers, fighters. You also do not see much in the way of games like Wii sports, Kinect, or Guitar Hero / Rockband. All other game types are typically a wash, though racing games tend to favor Consoles. Assassins Creed gave us some of the best interactive environments to ever come around. The Grand Theft Auto series gave us wide open do anything environments and GTA3 was a PS2 game.
In any event, developers and publishers chase the money, and Console titles pay best. My concern is that many publishers are now chasing the iPod / mobile market for games. We will see how that turns out, but if it does become the dominant platform, your precious PC will fare even worse than it does now.
You got the quote wrong. It was Libyans, not Iranians.
Marty McFly: Doc, you don't just walk into a store and-and buy plutonium. Did you rip that off? Dr. Emmett Brown: Shhhhhh. Of course. From a group of Libyan nationalists. They wanted me to build them a bomb, so I took their plutonium and in turn, gave them a shiny bomb-casing full of used pinball machine parts! Come on! Let's get you a radiation suit. We must prepare to reload.
I just do not see how anyone can actually say that a 90% piracy rate is an acceptable outcome. Making a popular game is nice, but in all seriousness being paid for your work is nicer. Money may not buy happiness, but I think we can rest assured that poverty wont make you happy either.
Yes, I will absolutely concede that if there were a perfect DRM system in place it is entirely possible that the game may not have sold quite as much as it has even now. I will also concede that the piracy has probably magnified the word of mouth awareness of the game. And not every one who pirates a game would have paid for it anyway.
But for anyone who is actually trying to make a living developing games, I can say with certanty that I would prefer to not make a sale due to someone not wanting to pay for the game and choosing not to play it then to not make a sale due to someone pirating the game outright. And until someone can create a truly repeatable and verifiable experiment that can compare how many people pay for a game with no DRM vs how many pay for it with effectively perfect DRM, no one is going to be able to say with 'bet your right testicle on it' certainty whether wholesale piracy is a good thing.
I am not saying that totally intrusive DRM that blocks legitimate use is the best answer here. But I am sure that allowing 90% piracy is not the solution either.
You seem to be taking what I said happens to middle tier titles and applying it to independent titles.
I probably should not have described a middle tier title and an indie title using nearly identical terms.
In general, a low profile / low budget indie game wont be known enough to attract a significant number of pirates. In addition, the low budget title wont need that many sales to at least break even.
The middle tier title though might have just enough publicity to be known, but might not be good enough to get enough of the people who pirated the game to actually pay for it.
You cannot look at top grossing games (or movies or music) to get an idea of the economic impact of software piracy. You have to look at the not so successful games.
The kinds of games that are going to have problems from piracy are the games that are good but not great. Think of any game that you do not ever see a commercial for on television. The impact of piracy on a high profile title is probably the difference between making 50 million dollars and 40 million dollars profit. Significant, but not really that damaging to the company that made that title.
The impact of piracy on a low profile title is probably the difference between making a modest profit and having to shut down the studio that made it.
An indie title is probably not going to be popular enough to attract that much piracy.
Why try to run this down yourself when you can hire a Lawyer to work out the jurisdictional stuff. Or maybe get some help from your universities law school students.
The chances of getting a DA to prosecute a case and get the guy jail time might be slim. But you should be able to get your laptop back. Before you go to far with it though, you may want to figure out exactly how much your willing to spend to get some measure of justice out of this.
Even the most ardent advocates of gun ownership being available to any and everyone will probably agree that selling a gun to someone who has no idea how to use and store it safely is a bad idea.
So other then what I imagine to be the joy of setting things on fire with a laser, what purpose can this thing serve? This kind of product should be sold with the same level of precaution as explosives and firearms.
An earlier poster described police as "Unelected Thugs", which I do think is unfair to the police. When 90% the people you deal with professionally on a day to day basis are truly reprehensible lying shit bags, it is difficult to treat anyone else you deal with professionally with any amount of respect. This does not make such things excusable, but it is the reality of the situation.
Also keep in mind that not everyone is going to submit quietly to arrest, and when the police do use force, there is absolutely no way it will look good on camera.
Having said that, I do think that it would be a good idea for police to be recorded during every moment that they interact with the public. Doing this will do a great deal to protect the rights of those the police interact with, and protect the police from false accusations.
The CPU power has less to do with the Wii's difficulties then you might think. The only affect that the machines power has is that it makes it more difficult to port Xbox or PS3 games over.
The 2 most significant factors are that the marketing position of the Wii, and the unique control system.
The controls are different enough that it makes porting a game directly across that much more difficult. And if your not going to port a game over, then you are going to have to deal with figuring out a control scheme that is suitable to the platform. This has proven to be a non trivial challenge.
The marketing position of the Wii has managed to alienate the core gamers. This is more of a problem for the 3rd party publishers. Nintendo is the only company that has come out with anything that even looks appealing to a core gamer (think Legend of Zelda, Mario Kart, Smash Brothers, and Metroid) for the platform. Those games can sell based on the strength of the brand. But for the 3rd party publishers, there is not much incentive to create something like Gears of War, Assassins Creed or Rainbow 6 Vegas for the platform when doing so will require dramatically reworking the interface for the controller (which makes it a non port of a game) and the art assets to fit that platform (those publishers depend on multi platform sales). Because no one managed this in 2006 to 2007, that customer base moved to the Xbox 360 and PS3. And now that those gamers are entrenched on that platform, none of the major publishers are going to bother trying.
The publishers that could have managed to make those games for the Wii spend the last 4 years making craptastic party games trying to emulate what Nintendo did with Wii sports. And because no one was able to do the job better than Nintendo, and because the non core market is a great deal more picky than the core gamers (only buying a few games a year), no one else made money.
A Wii 2 console will only help the situation if everyone who did buy a Wii can be convinced to buy the new system. Otherwise the Wii 2 will only have an install base that can be determined by the number of people who bought any 3 of Smash brothers Brawl, Metroid, Zelda, Mario Galaxy, and Mario Kart.
Telemetry data is great for telling you what players actually do within your game. However, it will tell you nothing at all about what they think of your game, except in the most indirect manner. It will only tell you what the player did, not why.
If someone plays a game for 5 hours, that is about enough time to fully familiarize yourself with the interface and the controls, and to sample the game play. If you think about it, 5 hours is also about the amount of time that a TV viewer will give to a tv series they are interested in to decide if he likes it or not.
In addition, if a user stops playing a game, the telemetry will show that the user has stopped playing (by the obvious indicator of no further telemetry from that particular user). It will not say if he stopped playing because the game was too difficult, the only indicator will be if the telemetry can tell you he had to replay the last section they were in a few times in a row unsuccessfully. But if your 60 hours of content were just really goddamn boring, then the only way you can find out if the problem was specific to your game is to compare it to other games that the user in question plays. However, last time I checked Activision does not share its user info with EA, or Ubisoft. Or vice versa.
Slashdot Mirror
In order to get publishers to throw cash at a game, you need to impress them in some manner. In order for a high profile AAA game to sell, you need to be able to put together an effective commercial.
A 'Saving Private Ryan' intro is impressive. It can show off the graphics, and anyone seeing that can intuitively understand what is going on. But if you throw a controller / mouse + keyboard into the hands of a marketing executive to get them to play the game for 10 minutes, your going to have 10 minutes of an executive trying to figure out unfamiliar controls and getting killed.
Gameplay can be king, but in order to get the several million dollars needed to make the damn game, you need a strong visual element. It is easier to sell a damn good story then to sell a game description of "a deep and fast pace fighting game like Soul Calibur with better controls".
Basically, the bigger the budget, the more likely you are to be railroaded into a story.
The other side of it is that a wide open world with lots of branching in the story is cripplingly expensive to create. Do you really think they sat on Grand Theft Auto 5 so long because they had problems convincing the accountants it was a good plan? They needed the time to build the vast amount of content for that game. Same for Skyrim.
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I do not mean in the 'bubble boy' sense. Specifically, I do not think that Sherman interacts with anyone not in a position where piracy has caused real damage to their income, or who does not have a personal interest in maintaining the current copyright laws. There is no one who Sherman is talking to who is going to say anything negative about copyright.
Talking to Sherman about the privacy situation is like trying to talk to your grandmother about the internet. You may work with the internet every day and you may be aware of what Meme's are, you have an opinion on Facebooks privacy policies, and you know enough not to click on links to a certain .cx domain. If you work in that world every day, and all of your friends work in that world every day, it gets harder to relate to people who chose to live a life without an internet connection.
I have no doubt that Sherman was truly surprised at the amount of visible and high profile backlash because in Shermans world, he cannot understand why a 'normal' every day person would have a problem with SOPA and PIPA. So clearly someone else must have manipulated the agenda to turn the masses against his agenda. So I bet that Sherman is certain that once he carefully explains his position that everyone will understand why SOPA / PIPA is a good thing.
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Microsoft may have resolved their security issues.
But a bridge builder who fuxked one goat 5 years ago is still a goat fuxker. It takes longer to fix a damaged reputation than it does to fix the problems that created the reputation.
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Angry Birds is a great game, and the iOS DRM that ties phones to accounts and prevents jailbreaking combined with a very low purchase cost make it easier to purchase the game than pirate it for the vast majority of users. Given the vast amount of Angry Birds merchandising, the viewpoint of Mikael Hed is not too surprising.
But for digital products that are just not that good, piracy can destroy the profit margin. The experience of Rovio with Angry Birds does not necessarily apply to all digital products.
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Most game development studios that are supporting iOS tend to use the minimal amount of Objective C required to access the underlying system libraries and features. The rest of the code is either C / C++. This is not only true within my workplace, but it seems to hold true for new hires relating their experience with the Objective C language.
For programmers used to reading C++ code and languages derived primarily from C, the Objective C syntax is an eyesore that makes figuring out the code at a glance much more difficult. While the language has some very compelling features, the atypical syntax makes using those features more of a chore.
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The reason for that rigidity is that too many players and too many DM's get screwed over. The dice are involved as much to keep the DM honest as anything else.
As a player, it sucks to have the DM railroad something by to let a beloved villain escape even though you just scored a crit and the target ran out of HP 5 rounds and 70 HP ago. While there is an argument to be made for preserving the story, a good DM adapts the story to the actions of the players without negating the players actions. Too many DMs just hand wave it.
And on the flip side, a lenient DM with 4 casual gamers and 1 power gamer is going to end up with a single player game once the player using 'Ingar the Invincible' starts to dominate all the ingame combat.
Finally, not everyone is interested in playing a powerless protagonist while the DM recites 5 hours of marginally interactive amateur fiction. As long as everyone at the table has fun, there is no wrong way to play.
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There is no reason for college text books to be as expensive as they are now. Any educational institution that takes money from any level of government should be using text books that are open sourced. Anything that can drive down the costs of getting an education without decreasing the quality of that education should be encouraged.
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One of the most frustrating things to deal with as a game developer is the tendency for publishers to try very damn hard to hit a Christmas shiping target. To get through the lot check / TRC process, you pretty much have to be finishing up by September or October. That leaves November for going in and out of lotcheck and giving enough lead time to manufacture the game (if your not shipping a digital product).
For any software project that is tied to a consumer retail project, your probably going to have to hit a similar deadline. Based on that, I can see this result coming about. People are rushed to hit the deadline and the scrutiny is higher.
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Inheriting someone elses work is never easy, but your doing well enough. You have to resist the urge to re-implement everything wholesale and simply take the time to learn how the hell everything is working.
In your case I would suggest documenting the discovered issues and noting exactly what your concerns are. Also throw in some time estimates (with a healthy error margin) describing how long it would take you to fix such a problem if it manifested, and estimates describing how much time and effort it will take to replace and re-implement the systems that would cause the problems. Then send this stuff out as an e-mail no one will ever read.
Then when shit breaks, you at least have the paper trail and you can give the 'I tried to warn you' speech to preempt your bosses from having you eat the big bowl of dogshit that will result.
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How many of you have seen a subway train have its doors held open by some idiot trying to get on at the last moment? Some idiot will try the same crap even with this system. And because everything is moving, the potential for an accident is greatly increased. This system would not be failure tolerant to the degree it would need to work.
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Most game companies (Ubisoft and EA for certain, Activision and the rest highly likely) have API's that have the app phone home and send metrics / telemetry data back about the usage stats. This is even done in games that have no multi-player component. Some of this is done for determining how much ad revenue is generated from ingame advertisements. Some of it is just marketing and research data. (ie: If only 2% of users actually use the mode that took 15% of the development resources to create, chances are that the mode will be dropped or at least not developed any further. If 90% of users die in the room with 13 snipers, they may patch the game to remove some snipers). I suspect that some portion of this data includes unique user id / cd keys.
I would expect that titles with a great deal of piracy are somehow detected by this. If they know that they have actually sold X units through retail, and they have X+Y connections, then the number of pirated instances is Y.
Lets say a game without this DRM has 150 000 users, and that 75000 users are legit. If they are taking a beating in the press, but the number of legit users has increased, the system is a success. Ubisoft is happier to have 80 000 legit users in a pool of 90 000 total users, even if they drove off 46% of the total user base to do it.
Losing a user means nothing except in subscription based games. Losing a sale means a whole lot more.
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It sounds very good for EA to be able to sell a game once and have the user able to play it on any platform. But in order to sell a game on any platforms, the platform owner tends to demand a price. There is no issue if the platform is PC or Mac or Linux. But Apple demands 30% of all iTunes store sales. There are licensing fee's to be paid for each console (Wii, Xbox360, PS3, 3DS, the PSP), the cost of which I am not sure of. Even if each platform holder was able to get its rights fees for the game, how the hell do they split it?
I also do not see Sony being all that willing to go along with a plan that can let their own users easily migrate to the Xbox.
I think that the best that they will really manage will be to allow the user to get the Console + PC version.
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I expect that any government that is not technologically backward will end up wanting to try to break the system rather than prosecute against it. The likely hood of someone figuring out how to generate counterfit bitcoins will approach 1 as the potential profit for doing so increases. It will only take one person breaking the system for the entire system to be rendered useless.
Arresting people will cost money. But generating counterfit bitcoins is profitable in the short term and will acheive the longer term goal of getting rid of the system.
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If the goal is to make a game with bleeding edge graphics that blow everything else out of the water, then yes, going directly 'to the metal' would work.
If the goal is to make a game that is actually profitable, or if the goal is to make a game that can be used with the least amount of grief by the majority of your customers, then that kind of thinking is not going to help you meet that goal.
I think that any demand for PC specific API's that can take full advantage of the newest video cards is overstated. Simply put, while the PC user base is especially vocal, it is not especially profitable, and cash speaks louder then long and ranting forum posts about how the PC is a superior platform. At the moment, most developers are racing head long towards the iOS / Android smart phone platforms because the combination of low dev costs and large potential user base are extraordinarily tempting. Whether or not you think this is a good or especially wise thing (which I do not) is beside the point.
Do any of you think that so many developers are rushing to that platform because they expect to push bleeding edge graphics on it? If anything, DirectX is most likely going to be modified to make it easier to put decent graphics on the Windows phone long before improving the utilization of PC graphics cards becomes a priority.
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I am very comfortable implementing C++ templates.
The only issue I have is when I am trying to debug them, as most debuggers give output that is barely legible for non trivial template code.
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I will disagree with the premise that the emphasis on console development is as harmful to innovation as is implied. I will concede that games which are developed initially for a console are going to suffer from many of the points that are listed. However, many of those issues are more due to the fact that some games benefit more from a given control interface.
As a gaming platform, the PC only has a few very specific advantages over console games; Bleeding edge graphics, Ease of use for games that work better with mouse and keyboard (RTS games, FPS Shooters), and looser restrictions on the games content.
I do not consider high level graphics to be especially indicative of innovation. Once in a while you are going to end up with some spectacular new rendering tech that involves a previously underused or unknown method of rendering geometry. But texture compression and a higher polygon count are not innovative; They are iterative.
As far as ease of control goes, that cuts both ways. You are not going to see as many high level sports titles, platformers, fighters. You also do not see much in the way of games like Wii sports, Kinect, or Guitar Hero / Rockband. All other game types are typically a wash, though racing games tend to favor Consoles. Assassins Creed gave us some of the best interactive environments to ever come around. The Grand Theft Auto series gave us wide open do anything environments and GTA3 was a PS2 game.
In any event, developers and publishers chase the money, and Console titles pay best. My concern is that many publishers are now chasing the iPod / mobile market for games. We will see how that turns out, but if it does become the dominant platform, your precious PC will fare even worse than it does now.
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You got the quote wrong. It was Libyans, not Iranians.
Marty McFly: Doc, you don't just walk into a store and-and buy plutonium. Did you rip that off?
Dr. Emmett Brown: Shhhhhh. Of course. From a group of Libyan nationalists. They wanted me to build them a bomb, so I took their plutonium and in turn, gave them a shiny bomb-casing full of used pinball machine parts! Come on! Let's get you a radiation suit. We must prepare to reload.
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I just do not see how anyone can actually say that a 90% piracy rate is an acceptable outcome. Making a popular game is nice, but in all seriousness being paid for your work is nicer. Money may not buy happiness, but I think we can rest assured that poverty wont make you happy either.
Yes, I will absolutely concede that if there were a perfect DRM system in place it is entirely possible that the game may not have sold quite as much as it has even now. I will also concede that the piracy has probably magnified the word of mouth awareness of the game. And not every one who pirates a game would have paid for it anyway.
But for anyone who is actually trying to make a living developing games, I can say with certanty that I would prefer to not make a sale due to someone not wanting to pay for the game and choosing not to play it then to not make a sale due to someone pirating the game outright. And until someone can create a truly repeatable and verifiable experiment that can compare how many people pay for a game with no DRM vs how many pay for it with effectively perfect DRM, no one is going to be able to say with 'bet your right testicle on it' certainty whether wholesale piracy is a good thing.
I am not saying that totally intrusive DRM that blocks legitimate use is the best answer here. But I am sure that allowing 90% piracy is not the solution either.
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You seem to be taking what I said happens to middle tier titles and applying it to independent titles.
I probably should not have described a middle tier title and an indie title using nearly identical terms.
In general, a low profile / low budget indie game wont be known enough to attract a significant number of pirates. In addition, the low budget title wont need that many sales to at least break even.
The middle tier title though might have just enough publicity to be known, but might not be good enough to get enough of the people who pirated the game to actually pay for it.
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You cannot look at top grossing games (or movies or music) to get an idea of the economic impact of software piracy. You have to look at the not so successful games.
The kinds of games that are going to have problems from piracy are the games that are good but not great. Think of any game that you do not ever see a commercial for on television. The impact of piracy on a high profile title is probably the difference between making 50 million dollars and 40 million dollars profit. Significant, but not really that damaging to the company that made that title.
The impact of piracy on a low profile title is probably the difference between making a modest profit and having to shut down the studio that made it.
An indie title is probably not going to be popular enough to attract that much piracy.
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Why try to run this down yourself when you can hire a Lawyer to work out the jurisdictional stuff. Or maybe get some help from your universities law school students.
The chances of getting a DA to prosecute a case and get the guy jail time might be slim. But you should be able to get your laptop back. Before you go to far with it though, you may want to figure out exactly how much your willing to spend to get some measure of justice out of this.
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Even the most ardent advocates of gun ownership being available to any and everyone will probably agree that selling a gun to someone who has no idea how to use and store it safely is a bad idea.
So other then what I imagine to be the joy of setting things on fire with a laser, what purpose can this thing serve? This kind of product should be sold with the same level of precaution as explosives and firearms.
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An earlier poster described police as "Unelected Thugs", which I do think is unfair to the police. When 90% the people you deal with professionally on a day to day basis are truly reprehensible lying shit bags, it is difficult to treat anyone else you deal with professionally with any amount of respect. This does not make such things excusable, but it is the reality of the situation.
Also keep in mind that not everyone is going to submit quietly to arrest, and when the police do use force, there is absolutely no way it will look good on camera.
Having said that, I do think that it would be a good idea for police to be recorded during every moment that they interact with the public. Doing this will do a great deal to protect the rights of those the police interact with, and protect the police from false accusations.
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The CPU power has less to do with the Wii's difficulties then you might think. The only affect that the machines power has is that it makes it more difficult to port Xbox or PS3 games over.
The 2 most significant factors are that the marketing position of the Wii, and the unique control system.
The controls are different enough that it makes porting a game directly across that much more difficult. And if your not going to port a game over, then you are going to have to deal with figuring out a control scheme that is suitable to the platform. This has proven to be a non trivial challenge.
The marketing position of the Wii has managed to alienate the core gamers. This is more of a problem for the 3rd party publishers. Nintendo is the only company that has come out with anything that even looks appealing to a core gamer (think Legend of Zelda, Mario Kart, Smash Brothers, and Metroid) for the platform. Those games can sell based on the strength of the brand. But for the 3rd party publishers, there is not much incentive to create something like Gears of War, Assassins Creed or Rainbow 6 Vegas for the platform when doing so will require dramatically reworking the interface for the controller (which makes it a non port of a game) and the art assets to fit that platform (those publishers depend on multi platform sales). Because no one managed this in 2006 to 2007, that customer base moved to the Xbox 360 and PS3. And now that those gamers are entrenched on that platform, none of the major publishers are going to bother trying.
The publishers that could have managed to make those games for the Wii spend the last 4 years making craptastic party games trying to emulate what Nintendo did with Wii sports. And because no one was able to do the job better than Nintendo, and because the non core market is a great deal more picky than the core gamers (only buying a few games a year), no one else made money.
A Wii 2 console will only help the situation if everyone who did buy a Wii can be convinced to buy the new system. Otherwise the Wii 2 will only have an install base that can be determined by the number of people who bought any 3 of Smash brothers Brawl, Metroid, Zelda, Mario Galaxy, and Mario Kart.
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Telemetry data is great for telling you what players actually do within your game. However, it will tell you nothing at all about what they think of your game, except in the most indirect manner. It will only tell you what the player did, not why.
If someone plays a game for 5 hours, that is about enough time to fully familiarize yourself with the interface and the controls, and to sample the game play. If you think about it, 5 hours is also about the amount of time that a TV viewer will give to a tv series they are interested in to decide if he likes it or not.
In addition, if a user stops playing a game, the telemetry will show that the user has stopped playing (by the obvious indicator of no further telemetry from that particular user). It will not say if he stopped playing because the game was too difficult, the only indicator will be if the telemetry can tell you he had to replay the last section they were in a few times in a row unsuccessfully. But if your 60 hours of content were just really goddamn boring, then the only way you can find out if the problem was specific to your game is to compare it to other games that the user in question plays. However, last time I checked Activision does not share its user info with EA, or Ubisoft. Or vice versa.
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