I am pretty sure that if I was able to ask every person who posted in this thread directly and in person, they would agree with the following statements.
Piracy will not prevent a top quality game become a failure. People still pay for good games. Piracy is not the reason crappy games fail. Crappy games just wont be bought anyway.
I suspect that the real effects of piracy are the following.
First, it while it wont prevent something like Starcraft 2 from being a runaway hit, it will very possibly take a game that would be 7 / 10 which might have been modestly profitable, or at least break even, and turn it into a financial failure. This is bad simply because a failed game can kill a smaller game developer, and having more developers able to make a profit will mean more good games.
The other thing that Piracy will do is that it will entirely negate the benefit of any heavy marketing campaign. A slick commercial and splashy billboard / magazine ads will not convince you to buy a game. They will convince you to try it. If you can try the game without buying it, you probably will.
So where the publishers of games are getting hurt the most is on mid quality titles that are heavily marketed. In many cases, the marketing budget of a title will at least equal or exceed the cost of making it. This is especially true for licensed games.
My take on this is that game developers do have a legitimate right to expect a fair chance to make a profit on the game, but the companies should probably look into something other then the typical DRM strategies to protect their IP rights.
What many who pirate games seem to not understand is that you are not going to teach a multi-million dollar corporation any sort of lesson by announcing you will illegally download and use a product because you disagree with the DRM policies. A broken DRM tech only means that they will try another approach.
The DRM only needs to last long enough to protect the product for as long as the game is being actively marketed, or more generally, until the game has become profitable. Also, regardless of the quality of the game, the developers of the game have a right to at least try to sell their product.
DRM is menat to solve the piracy issues. Advocating that people make the piracy issue worse for Ubisoft is only going to result in Ubisoft putting more effort into making an effective DRM solution.
When software executivies see statistics regarding pirated copies, they are going to assume that every pirated copy would have been a sale for them if the software was not possible to pirate. This is of course a false assuption. It is not going to account for people who could not afford the game. It will not account for users who bought 1 copy legitimately and then made 3 or 4 copies so he could play at work and at a friends. It is not going to account for those users who are dipsh*ts and will just rip / steal illegal copies even if they were available for 2 cents each.
Pirating a game is not a clear message of anything other then a user having an 'unauthorized' copy. If you want to indicate that the DRM is a factor you need to do something else, like starting a protest campaign that involves sending Ubisoft executives a small rock or some other useless object that has an obvious tactile presence. Mass e-mail and forum rantings can be dismissed as a few isolated and vocal cranks. But sending 6 tons of gravel from thousands of users who are annoyed sends a message that there are enough individual users who are pissed off to cover the cost of postage for 6 tons of gravel.
In any event, Ubisoft's games are multi-platform, and piracy is less of an issue on the consoles. Even if no one purchased any PC games from Ubisoft, the end result would be that they would just stop supporting that platform. It would not put them out of business.
1) Do you believe that it is inappropriate for a democratically elected government to build, maintain, and use a DNA Database? (If so, why?) 2) Do you think this was intentionally covered up, or that no one thought it was important enough to warrant mentioning.
Outside of military projects, governments do not generally go out of thier way to keep secrets. The vast majority of what any given government does is mundane and not especially important, surprising, or noteworthy. So in all fairness, I do not think this database was made secret intentionally by some moustache twirling villain type hoping to oppress the citizens of Texas.
As for the first point, I am a bit torn on it. If your willing to assume that the governments intentions for such a database are not inherently evil (ie: lets identify all them jews and forieners so we can purge them later), I am not so sure I see a problem with it. However, that only would apply as long as the government in question is using the database in a responsible fashion. That means not selling the data, taking adequate measures to keep that data safe, and requiring a warrant before running a suspects DNA against the database. If a criminal leaves DNA evidence at a crime scene, then I see no problem of having the means to run a check against it.
The difference between adult gamers and younger gamers is partly a factor of time pressure, and partly a factor of content.
The time pressure element is obvious. Aside from a typical work schedule for an adult taking more hours then going to school, an adult has more demands on their time. A 14 year boy old does not have much beyond school and some minor chores. A 24 year man old has a work day, probably has a girlfriend, and possibly has children, in addition to some amount of chores and errands. As much as the 24 year old may want to pull a 6 hour world of warcraft marathon, he probably has to make sure he has groceries, that the bills are paid. While holding onto the girlfriend is optional, it probably takes precedence over the games. The same applies to children. On top of that, the adult potentially has the money to do other activities (ie, going out to a bar, going to a rock concert, hockey game, going skydiving) that may also take precedence over video games.
The content factor is trickier. The 14 year old and the 24 year old will have a great deal of overlap for what they like in general terms. The only difference is that as the 24 year old has less time to waste, the content must be of a generally higher quality. Having mature themes is probably going to be the difference here if it is done right. The 24 year old wont play a game just because it has "hot horny nympho sex and buckets of blood". While that is still pretty sweet, it lacks the novelty value it has for the 14 year old. Having moral shades of grey, believable characters, and solid writing will help.
But gameplay is still king. Nintendo has pretty much proven beyond all doubt that if you can deliver good gameplay (Mario kart, wii sports, Mario Galaxy), you can hit the mark pretty solidly.
Ultima Online had the loosest pvp rules. This kind of play absolutely has appeal to competitive players. However, most MMO's tend to end up putting the balance of power, in terms of competition, towards those players who have been in the game the longest and who can spend the most time playing the game. This much is of course obvious, but consider the ramifications a few steps beyond that.
If you are a competitive player, but you cannot spend massive amounts of time in game, after a short time, you are not going to be able to compete effectively against the best. The game then stops being fun for you and you move on. You simply wont stick around very long. If you are the strongest, pretty soon viable competition will go away, and you will get bored. Unless your a griefer and really enjoy newbie stomping. If you are a newbie and you get into the game late, you are never going to be able to compete well against the top end players. So over time, the supply of newbies will dry up, and even the griefers will stop playing.
With UO, if you liked PVP, while pick pocket was possible, it was not very easy to practice the skill without getting murdered a great deal. And if you like the pvp, you are going to eventually leave when everyone worth playing against has also left.
Most newer MMO games, such as World of Warcraft, have chosen to address PVP by making it an opt in proposition. This will protect the newbies, but it still creates less gameplay for competitive types, and it negates any real means of looting or PvP theft. Until someone comes up with an alternate solution to PVP that will protect newbies and permit game elements like theft, it will not be a viable option in any successful MMO game.
There are several things that need to be protected, but beyond that, much of it is not important.
From a legal standpoint, there is your financial and identifying information, which is typically anything you would need to give a company that is going to be billing you on an ongoing basis, or any information that the government uses to identify you. Off the top of my head, that would be your Name, Address, Social Insurance Number (or SSN for the americans), Health Card number, credit card numbers, drivers licence, and passport. This means online banking, purchasing, and government services MUST be secure, no exceptions. You lose this, you lose the war. However, most companies that demand this will get it. If you do not believe me, just go ahead and try to get cable TV without giving a name or address.
Nearly as important is personal information. This is your political beliefs, sexual orientation, who your sleeping with, what kind of porn you like, what drug abuse issues / habits you have or had in the past, what god your worship, what you really think of your dick headed boss, who you talk to / e-mail, and who your friends are. Pre internet, these things would only be known to those you personally knew, and to those who cared enough to stalk you obsessively. With social networking and things existing on the internet forever, it is possible that what you make public knowledge will now be trivially easy to find out and use against you. As a civilization, we are still figuring out what the real impact of this may be. In general, these things are very much worth protecting.
Now, what the original poster mentions is something I am not entirely sure is important, your general consumer habits. What does it really matter if your tv company is monitoring your TV watching habits for advertisement purposes? I look forward to the day when I can watch tv and either avoid all commercials, or at least not have to watch commercials for tampons, womens cosmetics, reverse mortgages, beer, american political ads, baseball, nascar, football, or any other products I never use. There are many details about my personal life that have only marginal consequence. My choice of bank, internet provider, shoes, clothes, which Videogames, TV shows and movies I enjoy, whether I prefer Burger king or McDonalds or Wendy's, and how often I purchase Pay Per View events are not the sort of thing that can cause me problems. As long as those companies keep my purchasing info secure, it is mostly not important. And if they keep specifically identifying information about me seperate, then it is a total non issue.
When it comes to predicting the impact of a sentient AI on human civilization, there is never any shortage for alarmism. I am not an expert, but I am a programmer. And I believe three things to be true with respect to AI.
1) Until we have a better understanding of why humans are sentient in the first place, we are probably not going to get any closer to recreating that phenomenon in a computer program.
2) A Turing Complete AI is about as far off as the discovery of a room temperature super conductor or a form of fusion suitable for large scale power generation. We may be close, but probably not *that* close.
3) I seriously doubt that any AI that we are going to be able to create with anything resembling current computer technology is going to have a thought process even close to our own.
Think about it for a moment. Human intelligence is shaped as much by our 5 senses, our capability to create and understand language, our emotions, our ability to affect our surroundings and observe those effects, and to communicate with one another as it is our capability for logic and math. The factors that will shape an A.I. are so different as to create the possibility that a Human Intelligence and an Artificial Intelligence may not even be able to meaningfully communicate.
Will the first sentient AI be hosted on a single computer, or will it be a gestalt effect encompasing the entire internet? Will the sentient AI be aware of time in anything even close to the way that we are? Will the sentient AI even be capable of 'wanting' anything, given that it will have no need for sleep? Will the sentient AI be able to comprehend the nature of its existence as a program, and be able to manipulate its own variables by choice? Will the sentient AI fear its own termination, or not really care knowing it can easily be reloaded?
I would say that being threatened by a computer based AI that is better able to perform 'intellectual work' is about as reasonable as being threatened by cheetah's because they are better at running really goddamn fast.
I will admit that the idea of AI's eliminating paying jobs of a particular sort is an interesting problem to consider, but not that different from considering what will happen when we can create robots capable of performing all types of manual labour. Will that result in world wide poverty, or will it result in world wide prosperity ala StarTrek?
Game development has lagged terribly behind traditional / non game programming industries in terms of its development practices. And the most recent projects I have worked on were using a Scrum / Agile hybrid. I will admit to not knowing exactly which is which. But the great thing that Agile/Scrum did was to put in place a process where every time someone asked for a feature change, it would be reflected on the development schedule. I have worked on projects where there was at best a vague checklist of what still needed to be done with no info on how long it was expected to take. In my experience, most milestone crunch work is due to people realizing too late that something that should be in the milestone was not going to get done in time.
The problem with any development practice is that if taken too far, it will cause more problems then it solves. You should not have to write a formal task card up, and put it on the board for trivial tasks. And if you break things down too much, you end up losing sight of the bigger picture.
I do not care what process you use to get things done. As long as someone on the project (probably the project lead), is keeping track of the following:
- Break down the project into smaller tasks: This makes it at least possible to assign responsibility for specific things to specific people.
- Task / Feature prioritization: When it comes time to make cuts, knowing what things are important is highly useful.
- Task interdependency: You want to schedule your work load to make sure no one gets stuck waiting for something else, and it helps to have a list of alternate tasks you can move onto when you do get road blocked.
- Making sure things are done mostly on time: It is never a good thing to only realize that a task is not going to be done on time 2 days before it needs to be done. If something is taking too long, you should know before hand
- Making sure new features are checked against the schedule: No one wants to have a project become late because someone decided to add new features half way through the project but did not add time to it.
If you can track these things intelligently you can avoid the worst bits of milestone specific crunch. No process will prevent a deathmarch, or magically squeeze out an extra 6 months of effective development time. But it will avoid the nastiest surprises, and help create a realistic prediction of what a given development team can produce in a given time frame.
There were a great many terrible games that came out on the Wii that were made under the notion that 'those idiots will buy anything'. No matter how profitable the console, crappy games wont sell. They looked only at the install base, and made assumptions that did not hold up in reality. It also does not help that the Wii presents some interesting problems for developers; The marketing angle of 'this is not a typical game machine' worked a bit too well. This is why some companies (Ubisoft and EA) are now moving away from the Wii. I also believe that most developers are still having problems figuring out the best way to exploit the motion controls.
I am convinced that the effort to move towards the iPhone is a bigger risk then most game companies realize. The technology is there, but the price point is not where it needs to be to succeed as a mass market game platform. Also, Apple is not a game company; They can make a profit on that platform without needing successful games, and that factor is a wildcard. I expect that the iPhone will get many ported games from PC (if the game is simple or old), and current handhelds. Those games already made their profit, and porting to the iPhone is a trivial development cost that potentially adds a great deal of revenue on top of what was already made on the primary target platform. Until you have a company that can make significant profit on an iPhone game with the iPhone as the primary / only platform, it cannot be considered a real threat to existing gaming handhelds.
The iPhone does have a great deal of potential as a game platform, but not everyone who wants an iPhone is going to be a gamer, so you cannot use the existing install base by its self to estimate sales. If someone buys a Wii or PSP or whatever, you can be pretty sure they want to play video games. You cannot say that about the iPhone.
As a result, I expect many developers are going to be disappointed by the iPhone.
There are a few more factors about why no one has made a great gaming phone. The fact that the primary function of aphone is talking is one of those factors. But when you consider the iPhone's success, it is obvious that there is no reason that a phone cannot also have other functions and be successful. I would say that there are a few other factors.
Inadequate Data Medium: It is only recently that fully downloadable games have become competitive with games on a Disc or Cartridge. When your up against the DS / PSP, a simple pong / bejeweled style game is not going to drive sales of your gaming phone among gamers. This is especially critical when you consider the typical size of a modern cell phone.
Fractured Hardware market: The hardware cycle for cell phones is a bit too fast, and there are many providers. This means that of all the people buying cell phones, only a small number of them will buy a particular gaming phone. This is going to limit the number of developers that are going to target your platform for their games.
Price point: Most cell phones with sufficiently advanced features are a great deal more expensive than an Nintendo DS and the PSP. This may be overcome if enough people buy the cell phones for games. But such phones will never penetrate very much among very young gamers because no parent will ever spend $710 on an iPhone for their child (see this link for price source, in Cdn Dollars: http://www.ehphone.ca/2008/06/cost-of-buying-the-iphone-3g-without-a-contract/). That assumes they break the monthly contract. If they don't, well, do you know anyone who would buy their child an iPhone under a monthly contract?
Insufficient Profit for Developers of Games: The first two factors above have been overcome by Apple's iPhone, which has a sufficintly large install base, and the ability to hold enough game assets (art for characters and levels) to make games that are competitive against the Nintendo DS and PSP. The price element might be overcome if there are enough owners of the iPhone who are also gamers. But the app store is not making anyone but Apple rich, and most 'full scale' games are ports of other handheld titles. It is very possible that insufficient developer profit is probably the only thing holding Apple back from becoming a real threat to Nintendo in the Handheld gaming market.
Ubisoft does not care much about Indie / FOSS Hobbiest types. Ubi is a large and successful company, but they know that they are not the only ones making games. Yeah, its possible some hobbiest comes up with the next smash hit concept. But it is not that likely, and they have enough money that they can probalby buyout a hobbiest pretty easily.
This is about DRM. It is not very likely that they can find a DRM solution that cannot be hacked around and that wont cause undue problems for legit users who want to install on multiple computers. But internet access is not prevalent enough that it is not an unwarranted suggestion. In terms of validating a legit install, it is much more effective to have the game phone home. If it is multiplayer, then the access is not an issue. To their thinking, it is a perfectly viable solution.
Besides, if the user does not have an internet connection, I do not think Ubi is worried about bad press from that user going into online forums to complain. If they have the connection and the install is legit, there shouldn't be any real problems for the user to notice.
But if Ubi screws up and the scheme does not work, then there will be massive blowback.
Most of the larger companies are trying to get away from this practice, though not always with much success. I do know that even within a single company, things can vary greatly from one team to the next, so I wonder if this is due to the management at a particular studio, or if it is a problem that affects all of Rockstar. The article mentions 'despite over $1 billion in Grand Theft Auto revenue', which is deeply misleading. That was made at Rockstar North, in Scotland. There is no reason to assume that just because one studio is printing its own money that the revenues will be distributed evenly across all partner studios.
I have worked for two of the largest companies in this industry, Ubisoft and EA. At those companies, I can tell you that as far as the CEO / corporate level management are concerned, they just want to see a game get done on time and on budget, and for it to hit the sales estimates. This is because those things will have a direct affect on the quarterly and annual statements. For a game to be a hit depends on many factors that cannot be directly influenced; ie: the design, gameplay, story (if applicable), the license and the marketing campaign all have to hit the right notes to result in a hit. Most pressure that a typical developer sees, especially if there are not any direct design responsibilities, is to get stuff done On Time and On / Under budget. The incentive used is a bonus. And this is where good intentions start to break down.
The producers on a project are typically given a bonus that depends mostly on the game being done on time and on budget. They are given a budget, and after that, the rest of the company does not look at anything beyond various demo's done for the editorial boards. The CEO types would like for the employees to be happy (no one wants bad press), but they leave that up to the studio HR and project leads / producers. What most people do not realize is that even within the same company, the work experience can vary greatly from one team to the next. One team might be using wise development practices, be carefully deciding which employees work on the title, and doing what they can to keep the scope of the game manageable given their time constraints. Other teams might simply pour on the crunch hours and death march the employees to meet the goal. But if the game is done on time and on budget, the producers always get their bonus.
What I see as being a big part of the problem is that there is no incentive at any point for those who run the projects to keep their employees happy. At a company like Ubisoft, you can finish your project, and have 70% of the staff quit, burn out, or just refuse to work on the sequel. But if you got it done on time and on budget, you get the same bonus.
Getting back to the article at hand, it is entirely possible that the people running Rockstar North have great development practices and have happy employees, but for the Rockstar San Diego studio to be helmed by Captain Bligh.
The games you mention are very specifically not FPS games. They are games with RPG elements where you create a character and improve that character over time.
World of Warcraft has gameplay built around a player spending hundreds of hours developing their own personal character. You create that character from the ground up, from how it looks, the character class, the class powers, the face, and the gear. You always play the same character (disregarding alt accounts), so a player is pretty heavily invested in his character. Generally, no two characters are going to be exactly alike in capabilities. Outside of PVP (which is not how most people end up playing), you do not really care so much if the next guy is paying 'real money' for better gear. You might think the buyer is a dillweed, but you know you still have a shot at getting good crap yourself. And it is a big world, so your not obligated to play with that person in anyway. If your willing to buy gear in WoW, your probably just impatient and do not want to play for 150 hours to get leet gear and a high level.
In an FPS (generally speaking), the only difference between your character and the next guy's character is what weapons you have selected. And if your character is ineffective, its a trivial bit of effort to change your weapons. Your success depends on your skill at shooting the other players while not getting shot yourself. The game is all competitive all the time, and if one player can obtain a clear advantage over you, it will affect your enjoyment of the game. I suppose this also applies to RTS games. As long as all players in the game are roughly equal, you can enjoy the game. But if you give one player who is already your equal access to weapons (or units) that you do not have, then your going to probably get stomped. If your willing to buy weapons / units in an FPS or RTS, your only doing it to win.
The designers might get around some of that by having it so that when you buy, everyone in your current game gets access to what you paid for. But that makes the item less attractive to those most likely to want to buy in the first place.
I suppose that you have not considered the cost of licensing a likeness? EA (and any game company that makes a sports title) has to hand out a wad of cash to the player unions in order to use the names and faces of actual players in their games. I would imaging that putting the Brad Pitt's face on your player avatar would have to end up putting some money in Brad Pitt's pocket. If your trying to add a feature to a game that has the primary purpose of getting you more money, your probably not looking for a way to do so that would obligate you to surrender a cut of that to someone else.
Electronic Arts has an internal mandate to have about 15% or more of the games revenue happen from online activities. The top management does not care too much about how this goal is acheived. For some games, this is from premium content (extra levels). Some games get more creative with it.
Multiplayer FPS games though are in a bit of a bind. The point of such games is to make sure you can play with anyone else who is online. The most popular levels will never be premium content that you had to pay to own. But powerups that anyone can use in any map? Those are something you can try to monetize.
As a player, I am not convinced that these sort of powerups are the optimal way to monetize that content. There is just too narrow a window for the power and utility of those power ups. If they are really worth paying for, then the rest of the customers become 2nd class players. If they are not very powerful, who the hell would actually buy them?
If they catch enough blowback on this, they will probably abandon this type of effort and try to come up with a better idea. But everyone knew that this particular kind of fee based content had to be tried at least once, and even 8 years ago, you would probably have guessed that EA would be the first company to actually try to do it.
I am not really annoyed that they tried this. I just hope it does not become an industry wide trend to let customers buy an advantage against the other players.
I would assume that if the rail project is done correctly, it would be competitive with air travel.
As for those transfers, I do not suppose you get a direct flight to your destination? When you get off of an airplane, your either catching a Taxi, haivng someone pick your ass up, or you are getting your own car out of parking.
Those two transfers would probably be from the high speed line to the local transit system line. Assuming anything even close to competently implemented mass transit, and you will be able to get a whole hell of a lot closer to your intended destination before having to call a taxi.
From what I understand, under Bush and the Republican dominated congress, the system was Borrow and Spend. And for all those people who like to bitch about Tax and Spend, what are the alternatives?
1) Tax and Spend: Collect Taxes and then spend those taxes.
2) Borrow and Spend: This is like saying buying with a credit card is not really spending money.
3) No Tax and No Spend: Some people think that they would like this system. I suspect that they would quickly discover it is not quite so great to either have no services / infrastructure, or to be billed directly by a corporation who has no hesitation of cutting you off when you do not pay your bills.
I doubt that anyone would advocate that you kick loose dangerous offenders to reduce the prison population. It is one thing to decide to reward criminals. It is another to decide that perhaps they should not have been locked up in the first place. And it is yet another to decide that keeping them locked up is just not justified when you consider the expense of it.
I concur with the need for judicial oversight with anything the police might want to use for the purpose of law enforcement. If the Police want to get directly into my personal business, they should need to get a warrant.
But for a bluk / wholesale search where they know exactly what they are looking for, but not necessarily who has it, then getting a warrant to search 10 000 people would be a bit much. Further more, when such a search is non invasive, and would have absolutly no impact on the ability of any one searched in that manner to go about their business, should a warrant be required in the first place?
Lets say the police know for a fact that someone using YourLocalNeighborhoodISP for internet service has been distributing child porn. Or stolen credit card numbers. Or operating a phishing scam. And lets say that this dirtbag is smart enough that he is co-opting the user account info of other customers.
I say that if the police want to do a wholesale search of all traffic sent to and from YourLocalNeighborhoodISP to help identify the criminal, that they should be able to do so without a warrant. I think it is reasonable to go right up to the point where they actually have a specific suspect in that case.
But yeah, I admit that this shit would need some pretty goddamn hardcore oversight to keep bored cops from looking at things they do not need to look at.
In practical terms, what constitutes and unreasonable search where privacy is concerned? No, this is not a troll question. Just hear me out.
I think that the primary concern for most people where access to personal information is concerned is generally within the following areas.
1) Protection from 'planted evidence' when targeted by a law enforcement investigation 2) Protection from Identity Theft 3) Not having their private information used in a way that will harm their personal life. 4) Not having their private information used in a way that will harm their job.
If those things can be respected and guaranteed, how would a warrent less search of your e-mail by law enforcement be unreasonable? If those who accessed that information were held liable in the event that accessing that information caused harm, I do not really see the problem.
I do not care if the police know that I have a mistress and that I am planning on looking for a new job. But I do not want my wife or my boss or my friends to know these things.
Games that are going to be marketed as having great graphics and advanced features are not going to be made on the Wii because there is no way to have it look good in a side by side comparison with a PS3 / Xbox360 game. it is hard to brag about how good your game looks if it looks very much like something that was made about 5 years ago.
There are also other issues.
- Large worlds take a great deal of memory for textures, and level geometry. You can do this better on the 360 / PS3
- Wii has a flash drive, so while you can save games, you cannot use it for virtual memory or caching from the disk.
- Motion controls simply do not adapt very well and are not necessary to GTA3 type games, and the Wii-mote + Nunchuk does not have optimally placed buttons for most 'hard core' type games.
- While not dominant, the 360 and PS3 still have a substantial chunk of the market, having retained most of the core users from the previous generation.
- Nintendo's online policies suck for online multi-player.
So basically, you could try to put a core game out on the game out on the Wii, and end up with a stripped down version that is simply not as good as it would be on the PS3 or Xbox 360. Your sales wont be quite so strong as the typical Wii Fit customer is not going to give a damn about your action heavy game. And it wont be as technically advanced as you would like because the platform cannot support the bleeding edge. On top of that, attempts to replace an action that is best handled with a single button press with a motion control usually end up feeling very inelegant, so its possible that your game will suck because the control interface is not ideal.
Right now it is just more effective to put out certain types of games on the Xbox360 and PS3. But if Nintendo can hold its current lead into the next hardware generation, things will get better on Nintendo's platforms.
If you manage to tie up all the loose ends, then yes, you might not have a powerful and satisfying story. But you may also never be able to revisit the characters in that story. To put it bluntly, sometimes you want to have that option, since doing so can make the entire series better. The original Starwars movie was reasonably self contained. But the original trilogy as a whole is a much better story.
Shows like Lost or X-Files that seem to lurch forward with no idea what the hell they are doing may well be the result of trying to draw things out longer than you ought to. (I know this to be the case for X-Files. I am on the fence regarding Lost, since they may just have no idea how the hell they wanted it to end).
Not all shows have an obvious long term story arc though. Star Trek Original Series and the Next Generation were very episodic in nature. When should those shows have ended?
For modern media, each movie or TV season should have an arc and a good end point. But that does not mean you must tie off every possibility of continuing the story.
I remember an answer I got to a question about why the PS2 was such a pain in the ass to work with. I suspect that the answer for that applies to the PS3 as well.
The PS1 (which was professionally just before my time) apparently had a library that was easy to work with. After a while, developers kept asking Sony how to do X with the dev libraries, and the answer was generally 'you cannot do that with those libraries'. The best of those developers then just did it the hard way, writing assembly level functions to let them do things that the hardware could do but that the dev libs at the time did not allow for.
This taught Sony that the developers did not want easy to use libraries. They just wanted to have all possible functionality exposed and documented well enough to work with.
The X-Box was designed by a software company that specialized in writing non trivial software applications. So on that platform, you have a great set of developer tools. The PS3 was designed by some very smart hardware engineers. This gives you some great hardware, but its not exactly easy to work with.
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I am pretty sure that if I was able to ask every person who posted in this thread directly and in person, they would agree with the following statements.
Piracy will not prevent a top quality game become a failure. People still pay for good games.
Piracy is not the reason crappy games fail. Crappy games just wont be bought anyway.
I suspect that the real effects of piracy are the following.
First, it while it wont prevent something like Starcraft 2 from being a runaway hit, it will very possibly take a game that would be 7 / 10 which might have been modestly profitable, or at least break even, and turn it into a financial failure. This is bad simply because a failed game can kill a smaller game developer, and having more developers able to make a profit will mean more good games.
The other thing that Piracy will do is that it will entirely negate the benefit of any heavy marketing campaign. A slick commercial and splashy billboard / magazine ads will not convince you to buy a game. They will convince you to try it. If you can try the game without buying it, you probably will.
So where the publishers of games are getting hurt the most is on mid quality titles that are heavily marketed. In many cases, the marketing budget of a title will at least equal or exceed the cost of making it. This is especially true for licensed games.
My take on this is that game developers do have a legitimate right to expect a fair chance to make a profit on the game, but the companies should probably look into something other then the typical DRM strategies to protect their IP rights.
What many who pirate games seem to not understand is that you are not going to teach a multi-million dollar corporation any sort of lesson by announcing you will illegally download and use a product because you disagree with the DRM policies. A broken DRM tech only means that they will try another approach.
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The DRM only needs to last long enough to protect the product for as long as the game is being actively marketed, or more generally, until the game has become profitable. Also, regardless of the quality of the game, the developers of the game have a right to at least try to sell their product.
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DRM is menat to solve the piracy issues. Advocating that people make the piracy issue worse for Ubisoft is only going to result in Ubisoft putting more effort into making an effective DRM solution.
When software executivies see statistics regarding pirated copies, they are going to assume that every pirated copy would have been a sale for them if the software was not possible to pirate. This is of course a false assuption. It is not going to account for people who could not afford the game. It will not account for users who bought 1 copy legitimately and then made 3 or 4 copies so he could play at work and at a friends. It is not going to account for those users who are dipsh*ts and will just rip / steal illegal copies even if they were available for 2 cents each.
Pirating a game is not a clear message of anything other then a user having an 'unauthorized' copy. If you want to indicate that the DRM is a factor you need to do something else, like starting a protest campaign that involves sending Ubisoft executives a small rock or some other useless object that has an obvious tactile presence. Mass e-mail and forum rantings can be dismissed as a few isolated and vocal cranks. But sending 6 tons of gravel from thousands of users who are annoyed sends a message that there are enough individual users who are pissed off to cover the cost of postage for 6 tons of gravel.
In any event, Ubisoft's games are multi-platform, and piracy is less of an issue on the consoles. Even if no one purchased any PC games from Ubisoft, the end result would be that they would just stop supporting that platform. It would not put them out of business.
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I have one question here.
1) Do you believe that it is inappropriate for a democratically elected government to build, maintain, and use a DNA Database? (If so, why?)
2) Do you think this was intentionally covered up, or that no one thought it was important enough to warrant mentioning.
Outside of military projects, governments do not generally go out of thier way to keep secrets. The vast majority of what any given government does is mundane and not especially important, surprising, or noteworthy. So in all fairness, I do not think this database was made secret intentionally by some moustache twirling villain type hoping to oppress the citizens of Texas.
As for the first point, I am a bit torn on it. If your willing to assume that the governments intentions for such a database are not inherently evil (ie: lets identify all them jews and forieners so we can purge them later), I am not so sure I see a problem with it. However, that only would apply as long as the government in question is using the database in a responsible fashion. That means not selling the data, taking adequate measures to keep that data safe, and requiring a warrant before running a suspects DNA against the database. If a criminal leaves DNA evidence at a crime scene, then I see no problem of having the means to run a check against it.
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The difference between adult gamers and younger gamers is partly a factor of time pressure, and partly a factor of content.
The time pressure element is obvious. Aside from a typical work schedule for an adult taking more hours then going to school, an adult has more demands on their time. A 14 year boy old does not have much beyond school and some minor chores. A 24 year man old has a work day, probably has a girlfriend, and possibly has children, in addition to some amount of chores and errands. As much as the 24 year old may want to pull a 6 hour world of warcraft marathon, he probably has to make sure he has groceries, that the bills are paid. While holding onto the girlfriend is optional, it probably takes precedence over the games. The same applies to children. On top of that, the adult potentially has the money to do other activities (ie, going out to a bar, going to a rock concert, hockey game, going skydiving) that may also take precedence over video games.
The content factor is trickier. The 14 year old and the 24 year old will have a great deal of overlap for what they like in general terms. The only difference is that as the 24 year old has less time to waste, the content must be of a generally higher quality. Having mature themes is probably going to be the difference here if it is done right. The 24 year old wont play a game just because it has "hot horny nympho sex and buckets of blood". While that is still pretty sweet, it lacks the novelty value it has for the 14 year old. Having moral shades of grey, believable characters, and solid writing will help.
But gameplay is still king. Nintendo has pretty much proven beyond all doubt that if you can deliver good gameplay (Mario kart, wii sports, Mario Galaxy), you can hit the mark pretty solidly.
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Ultima Online had the loosest pvp rules. This kind of play absolutely has appeal to competitive players. However, most MMO's tend to end up putting the balance of power, in terms of competition, towards those players who have been in the game the longest and who can spend the most time playing the game. This much is of course obvious, but consider the ramifications a few steps beyond that.
If you are a competitive player, but you cannot spend massive amounts of time in game, after a short time, you are not going to be able to compete effectively against the best. The game then stops being fun for you and you move on. You simply wont stick around very long. If you are the strongest, pretty soon viable competition will go away, and you will get bored. Unless your a griefer and really enjoy newbie stomping. If you are a newbie and you get into the game late, you are never going to be able to compete well against the top end players. So over time, the supply of newbies will dry up, and even the griefers will stop playing.
With UO, if you liked PVP, while pick pocket was possible, it was not very easy to practice the skill without getting murdered a great deal. And if you like the pvp, you are going to eventually leave when everyone worth playing against has also left.
Most newer MMO games, such as World of Warcraft, have chosen to address PVP by making it an opt in proposition. This will protect the newbies, but it still creates less gameplay for competitive types, and it negates any real means of looting or PvP theft. Until someone comes up with an alternate solution to PVP that will protect newbies and permit game elements like theft, it will not be a viable option in any successful MMO game.
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It is possible, but it is also possilbe that they will use some unique identifier associated with your XBox instead.
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There are several things that need to be protected, but beyond that, much of it is not important.
From a legal standpoint, there is your financial and identifying information, which is typically anything you would need to give a company that is going to be billing you on an ongoing basis, or any information that the government uses to identify you. Off the top of my head, that would be your Name, Address, Social Insurance Number (or SSN for the americans), Health Card number, credit card numbers, drivers licence, and passport. This means online banking, purchasing, and government services MUST be secure, no exceptions. You lose this, you lose the war. However, most companies that demand this will get it. If you do not believe me, just go ahead and try to get cable TV without giving a name or address.
Nearly as important is personal information. This is your political beliefs, sexual orientation, who your sleeping with, what kind of porn you like, what drug abuse issues / habits you have or had in the past, what god your worship, what you really think of your dick headed boss, who you talk to / e-mail, and who your friends are. Pre internet, these things would only be known to those you personally knew, and to those who cared enough to stalk you obsessively. With social networking and things existing on the internet forever, it is possible that what you make public knowledge will now be trivially easy to find out and use against you. As a civilization, we are still figuring out what the real impact of this may be. In general, these things are very much worth protecting.
Now, what the original poster mentions is something I am not entirely sure is important, your general consumer habits. What does it really matter if your tv company is monitoring your TV watching habits for advertisement purposes? I look forward to the day when I can watch tv and either avoid all commercials, or at least not have to watch commercials for tampons, womens cosmetics, reverse mortgages, beer, american political ads, baseball, nascar, football, or any other products I never use. There are many details about my personal life that have only marginal consequence. My choice of bank, internet provider, shoes, clothes, which Videogames, TV shows and movies I enjoy, whether I prefer Burger king or McDonalds or Wendy's, and how often I purchase Pay Per View events are not the sort of thing that can cause me problems. As long as those companies keep my purchasing info secure, it is mostly not important. And if they keep specifically identifying information about me seperate, then it is a total non issue.
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When it comes to predicting the impact of a sentient AI on human civilization, there is never any shortage for alarmism. I am not an expert, but I am a programmer. And I believe three things to be true with respect to AI.
1) Until we have a better understanding of why humans are sentient in the first place, we are probably not going to get any closer to recreating that phenomenon in a computer program.
2) A Turing Complete AI is about as far off as the discovery of a room temperature super conductor or a form of fusion suitable for large scale power generation. We may be close, but probably not *that* close.
3) I seriously doubt that any AI that we are going to be able to create with anything resembling current computer technology is going to have a thought process even close to our own.
Think about it for a moment. Human intelligence is shaped as much by our 5 senses, our capability to create and understand language, our emotions, our ability to affect our surroundings and observe those effects, and to communicate with one another as it is our capability for logic and math. The factors that will shape an A.I. are so different as to create the possibility that a Human Intelligence and an Artificial Intelligence may not even be able to meaningfully communicate.
Will the first sentient AI be hosted on a single computer, or will it be a gestalt effect encompasing the entire internet?
Will the sentient AI be aware of time in anything even close to the way that we are?
Will the sentient AI even be capable of 'wanting' anything, given that it will have no need for sleep?
Will the sentient AI be able to comprehend the nature of its existence as a program, and be able to manipulate its own variables by choice?
Will the sentient AI fear its own termination, or not really care knowing it can easily be reloaded?
I would say that being threatened by a computer based AI that is better able to perform 'intellectual work' is about as reasonable as being threatened by cheetah's because they are better at running really goddamn fast.
I will admit that the idea of AI's eliminating paying jobs of a particular sort is an interesting problem to consider, but not that different from considering what will happen when we can create robots capable of performing all types of manual labour. Will that result in world wide poverty, or will it result in world wide prosperity ala StarTrek?
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Game development has lagged terribly behind traditional / non game programming industries in terms of its development practices. And the most recent projects I have worked on were using a Scrum / Agile hybrid. I will admit to not knowing exactly which is which. But the great thing that Agile/Scrum did was to put in place a process where every time someone asked for a feature change, it would be reflected on the development schedule. I have worked on projects where there was at best a vague checklist of what still needed to be done with no info on how long it was expected to take. In my experience, most milestone crunch work is due to people realizing too late that something that should be in the milestone was not going to get done in time.
The problem with any development practice is that if taken too far, it will cause more problems then it solves. You should not have to write a formal task card up, and put it on the board for trivial tasks. And if you break things down too much, you end up losing sight of the bigger picture.
I do not care what process you use to get things done. As long as someone on the project (probably the project lead), is keeping track of the following:
- Break down the project into smaller tasks: This makes it at least possible to assign responsibility for specific things to specific people.
- Task / Feature prioritization: When it comes time to make cuts, knowing what things are important is highly useful.
- Task interdependency: You want to schedule your work load to make sure no one gets stuck waiting for something else, and it helps to have a list of alternate tasks you can move onto when you do get road blocked.
- Making sure things are done mostly on time: It is never a good thing to only realize that a task is not going to be done on time 2 days before it needs to be done. If something is taking too long, you should know before hand
- Making sure new features are checked against the schedule: No one wants to have a project become late because someone decided to add new features half way through the project but did not add time to it.
If you can track these things intelligently you can avoid the worst bits of milestone specific crunch. No process will prevent a deathmarch, or magically squeeze out an extra 6 months of effective development time. But it will avoid the nastiest surprises, and help create a realistic prediction of what a given development team can produce in a given time frame.
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There were a great many terrible games that came out on the Wii that were made under the notion that 'those idiots will buy anything'. No matter how profitable the console, crappy games wont sell. They looked only at the install base, and made assumptions that did not hold up in reality. It also does not help that the Wii presents some interesting problems for developers; The marketing angle of 'this is not a typical game machine' worked a bit too well. This is why some companies (Ubisoft and EA) are now moving away from the Wii. I also believe that most developers are still having problems figuring out the best way to exploit the motion controls.
I am convinced that the effort to move towards the iPhone is a bigger risk then most game companies realize. The technology is there, but the price point is not where it needs to be to succeed as a mass market game platform. Also, Apple is not a game company; They can make a profit on that platform without needing successful games, and that factor is a wildcard. I expect that the iPhone will get many ported games from PC (if the game is simple or old), and current handhelds. Those games already made their profit, and porting to the iPhone is a trivial development cost that potentially adds a great deal of revenue on top of what was already made on the primary target platform. Until you have a company that can make significant profit on an iPhone game with the iPhone as the primary / only platform, it cannot be considered a real threat to existing gaming handhelds.
The iPhone does have a great deal of potential as a game platform, but not everyone who wants an iPhone is going to be a gamer, so you cannot use the existing install base by its self to estimate sales. If someone buys a Wii or PSP or whatever, you can be pretty sure they want to play video games. You cannot say that about the iPhone.
As a result, I expect many developers are going to be disappointed by the iPhone.
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There are a few more factors about why no one has made a great gaming phone. The fact that the primary function of aphone is talking is one of those factors. But when you consider the iPhone's success, it is obvious that there is no reason that a phone cannot also have other functions and be successful. I would say that there are a few other factors.
Inadequate Data Medium: It is only recently that fully downloadable games have become competitive with games on a Disc or Cartridge. When your up against the DS / PSP, a simple pong / bejeweled style game is not going to drive sales of your gaming phone among gamers. This is especially critical when you consider the typical size of a modern cell phone.
Fractured Hardware market: The hardware cycle for cell phones is a bit too fast, and there are many providers. This means that of all the people buying cell phones, only a small number of them will buy a particular gaming phone. This is going to limit the number of developers that are going to target your platform for their games.
Price point: Most cell phones with sufficiently advanced features are a great deal more expensive than an Nintendo DS and the PSP. This may be overcome if enough people buy the cell phones for games. But such phones will never penetrate very much among very young gamers because no parent will ever spend $710 on an iPhone for their child (see this link for price source, in Cdn Dollars: http://www.ehphone.ca/2008/06/cost-of-buying-the-iphone-3g-without-a-contract/). That assumes they break the monthly contract. If they don't, well, do you know anyone who would buy their child an iPhone under a monthly contract?
Insufficient Profit for Developers of Games: The first two factors above have been overcome by Apple's iPhone, which has a sufficintly large install base, and the ability to hold enough game assets (art for characters and levels) to make games that are competitive against the Nintendo DS and PSP. The price element might be overcome if there are enough owners of the iPhone who are also gamers. But the app store is not making anyone but Apple rich, and most 'full scale' games are ports of other handheld titles. It is very possible that insufficient developer profit is probably the only thing holding Apple back from becoming a real threat to Nintendo in the Handheld gaming market.
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Ubisoft does not care much about Indie / FOSS Hobbiest types. Ubi is a large and successful company, but they know that they are not the only ones making games. Yeah, its possible some hobbiest comes up with the next smash hit concept. But it is not that likely, and they have enough money that they can probalby buyout a hobbiest pretty easily.
This is about DRM. It is not very likely that they can find a DRM solution that cannot be hacked around and that wont cause undue problems for legit users who want to install on multiple computers. But internet access is not prevalent enough that it is not an unwarranted suggestion. In terms of validating a legit install, it is much more effective to have the game phone home. If it is multiplayer, then the access is not an issue. To their thinking, it is a perfectly viable solution.
Besides, if the user does not have an internet connection, I do not think Ubi is worried about bad press from that user going into online forums to complain. If they have the connection and the install is legit, there shouldn't be any real problems for the user to notice.
But if Ubi screws up and the scheme does not work, then there will be massive blowback.
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Most of the larger companies are trying to get away from this practice, though not always with much success. I do know that even within a single company, things can vary greatly from one team to the next, so I wonder if this is due to the management at a particular studio, or if it is a problem that affects all of Rockstar. The article mentions 'despite over $1 billion in Grand Theft Auto revenue', which is deeply misleading. That was made at Rockstar North, in Scotland. There is no reason to assume that just because one studio is printing its own money that the revenues will be distributed evenly across all partner studios.
I have worked for two of the largest companies in this industry, Ubisoft and EA. At those companies, I can tell you that as far as the CEO / corporate level management are concerned, they just want to see a game get done on time and on budget, and for it to hit the sales estimates. This is because those things will have a direct affect on the quarterly and annual statements. For a game to be a hit depends on many factors that cannot be directly influenced; ie: the design, gameplay, story (if applicable), the license and the marketing campaign all have to hit the right notes to result in a hit. Most pressure that a typical developer sees, especially if there are not any direct design responsibilities, is to get stuff done On Time and On / Under budget. The incentive used is a bonus. And this is where good intentions start to break down.
The producers on a project are typically given a bonus that depends mostly on the game being done on time and on budget. They are given a budget, and after that, the rest of the company does not look at anything beyond various demo's done for the editorial boards. The CEO types would like for the employees to be happy (no one wants bad press), but they leave that up to the studio HR and project leads / producers. What most people do not realize is that even within the same company, the work experience can vary greatly from one team to the next. One team might be using wise development practices, be carefully deciding which employees work on the title, and doing what they can to keep the scope of the game manageable given their time constraints. Other teams might simply pour on the crunch hours and death march the employees to meet the goal. But if the game is done on time and on budget, the producers always get their bonus.
What I see as being a big part of the problem is that there is no incentive at any point for those who run the projects to keep their employees happy. At a company like Ubisoft, you can finish your project, and have 70% of the staff quit, burn out, or just refuse to work on the sequel. But if you got it done on time and on budget, you get the same bonus.
Getting back to the article at hand, it is entirely possible that the people running Rockstar North have great development practices and have happy employees, but for the Rockstar San Diego studio to be helmed by Captain Bligh.
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The games you mention are very specifically not FPS games. They are games with RPG elements where you create a character and improve that character over time.
World of Warcraft has gameplay built around a player spending hundreds of hours developing their own personal character. You create that character from the ground up, from how it looks, the character class, the class powers, the face, and the gear. You always play the same character (disregarding alt accounts), so a player is pretty heavily invested in his character. Generally, no two characters are going to be exactly alike in capabilities. Outside of PVP (which is not how most people end up playing), you do not really care so much if the next guy is paying 'real money' for better gear. You might think the buyer is a dillweed, but you know you still have a shot at getting good crap yourself. And it is a big world, so your not obligated to play with that person in anyway. If your willing to buy gear in WoW, your probably just impatient and do not want to play for 150 hours to get leet gear and a high level.
In an FPS (generally speaking), the only difference between your character and the next guy's character is what weapons you have selected. And if your character is ineffective, its a trivial bit of effort to change your weapons. Your success depends on your skill at shooting the other players while not getting shot yourself. The game is all competitive all the time, and if one player can obtain a clear advantage over you, it will affect your enjoyment of the game. I suppose this also applies to RTS games. As long as all players in the game are roughly equal, you can enjoy the game. But if you give one player who is already your equal access to weapons (or units) that you do not have, then your going to probably get stomped. If your willing to buy weapons / units in an FPS or RTS, your only doing it to win.
The designers might get around some of that by having it so that when you buy, everyone in your current game gets access to what you paid for. But that makes the item less attractive to those most likely to want to buy in the first place.
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I suppose that you have not considered the cost of licensing a likeness? EA (and any game company that makes a sports title) has to hand out a wad of cash to the player unions in order to use the names and faces of actual players in their games. I would imaging that putting the Brad Pitt's face on your player avatar would have to end up putting some money in Brad Pitt's pocket. If your trying to add a feature to a game that has the primary purpose of getting you more money, your probably not looking for a way to do so that would obligate you to surrender a cut of that to someone else.
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Electronic Arts has an internal mandate to have about 15% or more of the games revenue happen from online activities. The top management does not care too much about how this goal is acheived. For some games, this is from premium content (extra levels). Some games get more creative with it.
Multiplayer FPS games though are in a bit of a bind. The point of such games is to make sure you can play with anyone else who is online. The most popular levels will never be premium content that you had to pay to own. But powerups that anyone can use in any map? Those are something you can try to monetize.
As a player, I am not convinced that these sort of powerups are the optimal way to monetize that content. There is just too narrow a window for the power and utility of those power ups. If they are really worth paying for, then the rest of the customers become 2nd class players. If they are not very powerful, who the hell would actually buy them?
If they catch enough blowback on this, they will probably abandon this type of effort and try to come up with a better idea. But everyone knew that this particular kind of fee based content had to be tried at least once, and even 8 years ago, you would probably have guessed that EA would be the first company to actually try to do it.
I am not really annoyed that they tried this. I just hope it does not become an industry wide trend to let customers buy an advantage against the other players.
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I would assume that if the rail project is done correctly, it would be competitive with air travel.
As for those transfers, I do not suppose you get a direct flight to your destination? When you get off of an airplane, your either catching a Taxi, haivng someone pick your ass up, or you are getting your own car out of parking.
Those two transfers would probably be from the high speed line to the local transit system line. Assuming anything even close to competently implemented mass transit, and you will be able to get a whole hell of a lot closer to your intended destination before having to call a taxi.
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From what I understand, under Bush and the Republican dominated congress, the system was Borrow and Spend. And for all those people who like to bitch about Tax and Spend, what are the alternatives?
1) Tax and Spend: Collect Taxes and then spend those taxes.
2) Borrow and Spend: This is like saying buying with a credit card is not really spending money.
3) No Tax and No Spend: Some people think that they would like this system. I suspect that they would quickly discover it is not quite so great to either have no services / infrastructure, or to be billed directly by a corporation who has no hesitation of cutting you off when you do not pay your bills.
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I doubt that anyone would advocate that you kick loose dangerous offenders to reduce the prison population. It is one thing to decide to reward criminals. It is another to decide that perhaps they should not have been locked up in the first place. And it is yet another to decide that keeping them locked up is just not justified when you consider the expense of it.
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I concur with the need for judicial oversight with anything the police might want to use for the purpose of law enforcement. If the Police want to get directly into my personal business, they should need to get a warrant.
But for a bluk / wholesale search where they know exactly what they are looking for, but not necessarily who has it, then getting a warrant to search 10 000 people would be a bit much. Further more, when such a search is non invasive, and would have absolutly no impact on the ability of any one searched in that manner to go about their business, should a warrant be required in the first place?
Lets say the police know for a fact that someone using YourLocalNeighborhoodISP for internet service has been distributing child porn. Or stolen credit card numbers. Or operating a phishing scam. And lets say that this dirtbag is smart enough that he is co-opting the user account info of other customers.
I say that if the police want to do a wholesale search of all traffic sent to and from YourLocalNeighborhoodISP to help identify the criminal, that they should be able to do so without a warrant. I think it is reasonable to go right up to the point where they actually have a specific suspect in that case.
But yeah, I admit that this shit would need some pretty goddamn hardcore oversight to keep bored cops from looking at things they do not need to look at.
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In practical terms, what constitutes and unreasonable search where privacy is concerned? No, this is not a troll question. Just hear me out.
I think that the primary concern for most people where access to personal information is concerned is generally within the following areas.
1) Protection from 'planted evidence' when targeted by a law enforcement investigation
2) Protection from Identity Theft
3) Not having their private information used in a way that will harm their personal life.
4) Not having their private information used in a way that will harm their job.
If those things can be respected and guaranteed, how would a warrent less search of your e-mail by law enforcement be unreasonable? If those who accessed that information were held liable in the event that accessing that information caused harm, I do not really see the problem.
I do not care if the police know that I have a mistress and that I am planning on looking for a new job. But I do not want my wife or my boss or my friends to know these things.
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Games that are going to be marketed as having great graphics and advanced features are not going to be made on the Wii because there is no way to have it look good in a side by side comparison with a PS3 / Xbox360 game. it is hard to brag about how good your game looks if it looks very much like something that was made about 5 years ago.
There are also other issues.
- Large worlds take a great deal of memory for textures, and level geometry. You can do this better on the 360 / PS3
- Wii has a flash drive, so while you can save games, you cannot use it for virtual memory or caching from the disk.
- Motion controls simply do not adapt very well and are not necessary to GTA3 type games, and the Wii-mote + Nunchuk does not have optimally placed buttons for most 'hard core' type games.
- While not dominant, the 360 and PS3 still have a substantial chunk of the market, having retained most of the core users from the previous generation.
- Nintendo's online policies suck for online multi-player.
So basically, you could try to put a core game out on the game out on the Wii, and end up with a stripped down version that is simply not as good as it would be on the PS3 or Xbox 360. Your sales wont be quite so strong as the typical Wii Fit customer is not going to give a damn about your action heavy game. And it wont be as technically advanced as you would like because the platform cannot support the bleeding edge. On top of that, attempts to replace an action that is best handled with a single button press with a motion control usually end up feeling very inelegant, so its possible that your game will suck because the control interface is not ideal.
Right now it is just more effective to put out certain types of games on the Xbox360 and PS3. But if Nintendo can hold its current lead into the next hardware generation, things will get better on Nintendo's platforms.
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If you manage to tie up all the loose ends, then yes, you might not have a powerful and satisfying story. But you may also never be able to revisit the characters in that story. To put it bluntly, sometimes you want to have that option, since doing so can make the entire series better. The original Starwars movie was reasonably self contained. But the original trilogy as a whole is a much better story.
Shows like Lost or X-Files that seem to lurch forward with no idea what the hell they are doing may well be the result of trying to draw things out longer than you ought to. (I know this to be the case for X-Files. I am on the fence regarding Lost, since they may just have no idea how the hell they wanted it to end).
Not all shows have an obvious long term story arc though. Star Trek Original Series and the Next Generation were very episodic in nature. When should those shows have ended?
For modern media, each movie or TV season should have an arc and a good end point. But that does not mean you must tie off every possibility of continuing the story.
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I remember an answer I got to a question about why the PS2 was such a pain in the ass to work with. I suspect that the answer for that applies to the PS3 as well.
The PS1 (which was professionally just before my time) apparently had a library that was easy to work with. After a while, developers kept asking Sony how to do X with the dev libraries, and the answer was generally 'you cannot do that with those libraries'. The best of those developers then just did it the hard way, writing assembly level functions to let them do things that the hardware could do but that the dev libs at the time did not allow for.
This taught Sony that the developers did not want easy to use libraries. They just wanted to have all possible functionality exposed and documented well enough to work with.
The X-Box was designed by a software company that specialized in writing non trivial software applications. So on that platform, you have a great set of developer tools. The PS3 was designed by some very smart hardware engineers. This gives you some great hardware, but its not exactly easy to work with.
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