Could you help us out by pointing out the previous times when a new control scheme added to a console a couple of years after it released became sufficiently universal and widespread on that console that games could rely on it and still find a real market? Not talking about stuff like Guitar Hero, where the game exists to sell the peripheral. I'm asking for an example like EyeToy, only where it got >80% market penetration and it was genuinely practical for AAA titles to strictly require it to play.
Because if that doesn't happen, then no, adding motion control as an extra-cost addon which many games will never support does not catch them up.
If I were putting money into a gaming console today, I'd do exactly what I did four years ago; I'd get the Wii, 'cuz it's the one that has the most games I want to play. (In particular, the most games which are interesting to me, not just expensive.) And I'd be happy with that. And if I were developing for a console, I'd pick the Wii, because it's much cheaper to target and has a much larger installed base.
I love it. You're taking their statement that they're not releasing a new console any time soon as proof that they're releasing a new console. That is, perhaps, the part of your post that made the most sense. You "anticipated" something that isn't happening. Heck, if they release a Wii 2 next year, that won't even be an unusually short life -- five full years is pretty common in the console industry. Nintendo's previous consoles tended to make it around five years before a new model came out.
But here's the thing. I don't care about the hypothetical "Wii 2". I didn't buy the Wii because it was "cheap". I bought it because it had the games I wanted to play the most, and it still has the games I'm most interested in, so I'm still happy with it. The theory that the Wiimote "hinders gameplay" is not something I've found to be true, but then, what do I know, all I do is actually play games. Your whole post reads as though you've never actually played games on a Wii.
That said, even if I went out and bought a hypothetical Wii 2 for $300 tomorrow, I'd still be $50 up compared to my PS3, which has played video games for all of about two hours of its life so far.
In short, you're wrong, and you're using the clear statement that you're wrong as evidence that you're right. This is... not clever.
I still have a Wii. Got it launch day. Still love it. Still buying new games for it.
My PS3 has been collecting dust for over a year. I've never gotten a 360.
Nintendo got it right the first time. I am not buying hardware, I'm buying games. Hardware is something I put up with so I can play games. I don't need a higher resolution display, or a faster CPU, to play games. I just need people who are willing to put in the time and effort to develop an interesting game to play.
In short, I don't think the lack of a "Wii 2" is hurting them. The motion sensing afterthoughts tacked onto the PS3 and 360 are unlikely to ever come anywhere close to the market penetration the Wii has, so who cares? When Sony and MS release new consoles that come with motion sensing out of the box, built to work with it from day 1, then they'll have real, credible, direct competition. But even then, as long as they view "casual" games as something you put second-string developers on so you can focus on making the best shooters, they're still not getting it.
Sure, some day Nintendo will release a new console, but I'm not expecting them to hurry it up. 5 years is not a very long time for a console life cycle, historically, and it's a pretty short time for a console that's doing well. Come on, think this through. The PS2 released at $300, and got multiple price cuts during its lifetime. The Wii released at $250, and has gotten... one. I doubt the Wii will go away before getting down to $100, which I'd guess would take a couple more years.
Basically, there's no need. The Wii isn't trying to compete on graphics quality to begin with, so who cares if its graphics aren't as impressive as the PS3's? Not the people buying the Wii to play video games, that's for sure.
I am surrounded by gadget geeks. I personally have an iPhone, a blackberry, and a G2. I used to have a Sidekick. I have friends who swear by the Pre, and friends who have gotten three iPhones so far, and I wrote some code for an OpenMoko at one point. I regularly see people who aren't even Mac users discussing the benefits and problems of new Mac models, or iPods. When someone announces a new device which has a CPU in it and some kind of display or network connection, I normally know someone who's planning to get it within the first week.... and while I knew MS was doing a Windows Phone at some point, I haven't heard a thing about it. No one cares. No one wants one. People who compulsively buy extra computers (like me), people who go to at least one electronics store per day on their lunch break, are not even aware of the release date.
Now, there's probably still a market for it, but hell, even the Zune is more popular than this, I think I know someone who has one. So I think this is a pretty good indicator of a product which has not found a receptive audience.
There were hearing aids at the time which were large (compared to a modern hearing aid) things you held up to your ear. Large, rectangular, metal things. Shaped a bit like a cell phone.
Re:Glad I play games just to have fun
on
Diablo 3 Hands-On
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
I play games to have fun, but I recognize that I am always making societal statements when I spend money, whether or not I intend those statements.
Blizzard's attitude towards Real ID has made it no longer fun for me to support them. I really enjoyed the game in and of itself, but if every time I log in, I'm reminded of all the ways in which Blizzard has been contemptuous of gamers and/or hostile to them recently, it stops being as much fun.
I dunno if I woulda bought Diablo 3. I would certainly have bought at least three copies of Cataclysm (I had three accounts), though. I might have gotten Diablo 3, but the DRM, plus Blizzard's general attitude of late, have made it a definite "no".
It's easy to make your own challenges. When I played WoW I used to try to duo five-man dungeons at level with friends. We could sometimes do it, sometimes not. But it was definitely a way to have more challenge.
There is no intrinsic difficulty of the game itself, just difficulty of what you're trying to do. You think it's too easy, go do something further above your level or current gear, or introduce arbitrary handicapping (smaller team, take off some gear, whatever).
Difficulty and "dumbed down" are not the same thing. World of Warcraft is much more complicated than Mario Bros, but that doesn't mean it's harder to "do well" at it. It's also not always easy to define the boundary between "dumbed down" and "streamlined". Comparing modern D&D to 1st Edition AD&D, for instance, I find that many things are much, much, simpler -- I no longer have to look up multiple numbers in tables most of the time -- but that the game as a whole has a much, much, more diverse set of options and choices at any given time.
Furthermore, it's not entirely obvious that there's any intrinsic virtue to games being "hard". Take a game you like. Now, modify it as follows: Every five minutes, there is a 20% chance that you instantly lose the game, including any and all "lives" or "continues" or whatever that you might have had. Now, is this game better than the one you started with?
Games used to be "hard" because arcade games were built around a business model where you had to put in twenty five cents to play the game "once". They had to have a definite end, and the end had to be as close to inevitable as possible. We aren't using that model anymore, and it is no longer particularly relevant whether games are "hard" in that sense. Instead, we start thinking in terms of whether games are challenging, because that's part of what makes them fun to us.
In many cases, games that have been "dumbed down" or "made easy" have actually been moved to a higher level of abstraction or thought. Modern MMOs are, in many cases, much easier to survive in than they were five or ten years ago... But this doesn't mean that there's no room for skilled play, it just means that what you get from being skilled is different from what it used to be. On the whole, I find them a lot more interesting now. With upcoming changes to CoH to make life easier on pretty much all characters (we'll get some combination of more powers to use or more energy to use our powers with), I don't expect that suddenly the game will "stop being challenging". I expect that it will be less frustrating in some cases, and that I'll spend less time easily winning a fight and then waiting a minute with nothing interesting to do while my character regenerates.
The Apple employees I know are having a good time doing interesting and challenging work on projects they think are important. So they are standing up for what they believe in.
Apple has its upsides and downsides as an employer, but they aren't doing the things that Oracle's been doing to drive developers away.
Speaking as seebs, who I actually am, I think this addon is a brilliant example of the importance of making a threat concrete and specific in order for people to understand it. I, for one, welcome our new us overlords.
This is not a new technique. This is not a bad thing, particularly. And compared to the severity of the problem, I think it's pretty tastefully understated.
About twenty years ago, I was dating someone who was working on what she called the "Taco Bell theory of fashion", which was that you have a smallish number of items of clothing which all go together.
I think it's just that they're a particularly impressive example, familiar to a lot of people, of an extremely broad variety of foods made from a very small number of ingredients.... And yes, stringing commands together is, empirically, news to many people, because I keep finding people who can't do it.
Yeah, that's not how the Real ID thing seems to have gone. People who know Blizzard employees regularly reported during the forums fiasco that it was essentially 100% opposed by Blizzard staff, but that Activision declared it was a "marketing" issue and thus under their control.
So far as I can tell, if Blizzard had a vote, Real ID would be a nickname-based system that people actually liked, not an adjunct to Facebook.
Huh, I'd heard some complaints about it being used more heavily, maybe they were confused.
In WoW, it's not "required", but it's the only way to get access to decent friend functionality (say, being able to track a friend across multiple alts).
Will Diablo 3 be sticking with the new model of requiring people to use real names to interact with other players significantly, or are they introducing some kind of way for people to pick a nickname?
I push all my non-techie friends towards Macs because it's super easy for me to support them, and if worst comes to worst, I can get a shell and poke around. But 99% of the time, the app-type stuff is good enough.
If I had spare money, I'd be pretty tempted by those machines -- consider that my current netbook, that I take everywhere, is something like a 1.2GHz "Celeron". It's competing with Atom, not with a desktop i7.
The fact remains, most of the things you cited are normal and convenient if you're used to them. I quite like Apple's menu bar. In theory, we may well be in the days of multiple displays, but in practice, I spend well over 99% of my computing time on single displays, and Apple's menu bar remains easier and faster for me to use.
It's largely a matter of what you're used to; you haven't exactly presented compelling evidence that there's an objective disadvantage to the OS X ways, you've just listed things that don't work the way you're used to them working.
It also makes it easier for other people to find that book, who may be specifically looking for it.
Keep in mind that "interesting to me" and "worth money online" are not particularly good proxy emasurements for each other.
In general, if you can make money buying stuff and reselling it, you're moving it from a low-demand area to a high-demand area, making life better on both ends.
And the war continued, with progressively more redundant copies using progressively more of the disk farm, and the encryption methods evolving under the selection pressure of the system administrators' decryption efforts.
That would be a totally coherent or relevant comment in an alternate universe where the question had to do with a replacement for MS Word. Please tell us how you get to that universe, so we can loot their alternate technology to improve our own.
In short, "let's say an open office variant" is a pure non-sequitur, because "competition for MS Word" is a field where compatibility is widely imagined to be important. (Note: I've had a lot of trouble with compatibility between MS Word and MS Word -- in fact, more than I've had between MS Word and OpenOffice.) We're talking about a tool for internal use, at which point, all that matters is its compatibility with itself -- it's not something that other people send you stuff for. And, even if it were, the chances that the commercial one is an effective monopoly aren't high.
MS Word is really a very special case, and no example based on it is likely to be relevant to other cases.
FWIW, we use Foswiki at work these days, I think, and we're pretty happy with it. Search is sorta frustrating, though -- it really does need someone keeping it maintained.
You mean the one they just did a refresh of in April? Normally it's more like a year between updates. April got us new CPUs (the shift to i5/i7) and new video hardware (although it sorta sucks).
Slashdot Mirror
Could you help us out by pointing out the previous times when a new control scheme added to a console a couple of years after it released became sufficiently universal and widespread on that console that games could rely on it and still find a real market? Not talking about stuff like Guitar Hero, where the game exists to sell the peripheral. I'm asking for an example like EyeToy, only where it got >80% market penetration and it was genuinely practical for AAA titles to strictly require it to play.
Because if that doesn't happen, then no, adding motion control as an extra-cost addon which many games will never support does not catch them up.
If I were putting money into a gaming console today, I'd do exactly what I did four years ago; I'd get the Wii, 'cuz it's the one that has the most games I want to play. (In particular, the most games which are interesting to me, not just expensive.) And I'd be happy with that. And if I were developing for a console, I'd pick the Wii, because it's much cheaper to target and has a much larger installed base.
I love it. You're taking their statement that they're not releasing a new console any time soon as proof that they're releasing a new console. That is, perhaps, the part of your post that made the most sense. You "anticipated" something that isn't happening. Heck, if they release a Wii 2 next year, that won't even be an unusually short life -- five full years is pretty common in the console industry. Nintendo's previous consoles tended to make it around five years before a new model came out.
But here's the thing. I don't care about the hypothetical "Wii 2". I didn't buy the Wii because it was "cheap". I bought it because it had the games I wanted to play the most, and it still has the games I'm most interested in, so I'm still happy with it. The theory that the Wiimote "hinders gameplay" is not something I've found to be true, but then, what do I know, all I do is actually play games. Your whole post reads as though you've never actually played games on a Wii.
That said, even if I went out and bought a hypothetical Wii 2 for $300 tomorrow, I'd still be $50 up compared to my PS3, which has played video games for all of about two hours of its life so far.
In short, you're wrong, and you're using the clear statement that you're wrong as evidence that you're right. This is... not clever.
I still have a Wii. Got it launch day. Still love it. Still buying new games for it.
My PS3 has been collecting dust for over a year. I've never gotten a 360.
Nintendo got it right the first time. I am not buying hardware, I'm buying games. Hardware is something I put up with so I can play games. I don't need a higher resolution display, or a faster CPU, to play games. I just need people who are willing to put in the time and effort to develop an interesting game to play.
In short, I don't think the lack of a "Wii 2" is hurting them. The motion sensing afterthoughts tacked onto the PS3 and 360 are unlikely to ever come anywhere close to the market penetration the Wii has, so who cares? When Sony and MS release new consoles that come with motion sensing out of the box, built to work with it from day 1, then they'll have real, credible, direct competition. But even then, as long as they view "casual" games as something you put second-string developers on so you can focus on making the best shooters, they're still not getting it.
Sure, some day Nintendo will release a new console, but I'm not expecting them to hurry it up. 5 years is not a very long time for a console life cycle, historically, and it's a pretty short time for a console that's doing well. Come on, think this through. The PS2 released at $300, and got multiple price cuts during its lifetime. The Wii released at $250, and has gotten... one. I doubt the Wii will go away before getting down to $100, which I'd guess would take a couple more years.
Basically, there's no need. The Wii isn't trying to compete on graphics quality to begin with, so who cares if its graphics aren't as impressive as the PS3's? Not the people buying the Wii to play video games, that's for sure.
ha-ha-only-serious.
I am surrounded by gadget geeks. I personally have an iPhone, a blackberry, and a G2. I used to have a Sidekick. I have friends who swear by the Pre, and friends who have gotten three iPhones so far, and I wrote some code for an OpenMoko at one point. I regularly see people who aren't even Mac users discussing the benefits and problems of new Mac models, or iPods. When someone announces a new device which has a CPU in it and some kind of display or network connection, I normally know someone who's planning to get it within the first week. ... and while I knew MS was doing a Windows Phone at some point, I haven't heard a thing about it. No one cares. No one wants one. People who compulsively buy extra computers (like me), people who go to at least one electronics store per day on their lunch break, are not even aware of the release date.
Now, there's probably still a market for it, but hell, even the Zune is more popular than this, I think I know someone who has one. So I think this is a pretty good indicator of a product which has not found a receptive audience.
There were hearing aids at the time which were large (compared to a modern hearing aid) things you held up to your ear. Large, rectangular, metal things. Shaped a bit like a cell phone.
I play games to have fun, but I recognize that I am always making societal statements when I spend money, whether or not I intend those statements.
Blizzard's attitude towards Real ID has made it no longer fun for me to support them. I really enjoyed the game in and of itself, but if every time I log in, I'm reminded of all the ways in which Blizzard has been contemptuous of gamers and/or hostile to them recently, it stops being as much fun.
I dunno if I woulda bought Diablo 3. I would certainly have bought at least three copies of Cataclysm (I had three accounts), though. I might have gotten Diablo 3, but the DRM, plus Blizzard's general attitude of late, have made it a definite "no".
It's easy to make your own challenges. When I played WoW I used to try to duo five-man dungeons at level with friends. We could sometimes do it, sometimes not. But it was definitely a way to have more challenge.
There is no intrinsic difficulty of the game itself, just difficulty of what you're trying to do. You think it's too easy, go do something further above your level or current gear, or introduce arbitrary handicapping (smaller team, take off some gear, whatever).
Pretty much exactly as true as the observation that there are no new stories to tell.
Which is to say, it's not true, but if you carefully avoid ever reading any stories, you'd never know.
Difficulty and "dumbed down" are not the same thing. World of Warcraft is much more complicated than Mario Bros, but that doesn't mean it's harder to "do well" at it. It's also not always easy to define the boundary between "dumbed down" and "streamlined". Comparing modern D&D to 1st Edition AD&D, for instance, I find that many things are much, much, simpler -- I no longer have to look up multiple numbers in tables most of the time -- but that the game as a whole has a much, much, more diverse set of options and choices at any given time.
Furthermore, it's not entirely obvious that there's any intrinsic virtue to games being "hard". Take a game you like. Now, modify it as follows: Every five minutes, there is a 20% chance that you instantly lose the game, including any and all "lives" or "continues" or whatever that you might have had. Now, is this game better than the one you started with?
Games used to be "hard" because arcade games were built around a business model where you had to put in twenty five cents to play the game "once". They had to have a definite end, and the end had to be as close to inevitable as possible. We aren't using that model anymore, and it is no longer particularly relevant whether games are "hard" in that sense. Instead, we start thinking in terms of whether games are challenging, because that's part of what makes them fun to us.
In many cases, games that have been "dumbed down" or "made easy" have actually been moved to a higher level of abstraction or thought. Modern MMOs are, in many cases, much easier to survive in than they were five or ten years ago... But this doesn't mean that there's no room for skilled play, it just means that what you get from being skilled is different from what it used to be. On the whole, I find them a lot more interesting now. With upcoming changes to CoH to make life easier on pretty much all characters (we'll get some combination of more powers to use or more energy to use our powers with), I don't expect that suddenly the game will "stop being challenging". I expect that it will be less frustrating in some cases, and that I'll spend less time easily winning a fight and then waiting a minute with nothing interesting to do while my character regenerates.
The Apple employees I know are having a good time doing interesting and challenging work on projects they think are important. So they are standing up for what they believe in.
Apple has its upsides and downsides as an employer, but they aren't doing the things that Oracle's been doing to drive developers away.
Speaking as seebs, who I actually am, I think this addon is a brilliant example of the importance of making a threat concrete and specific in order for people to understand it. I, for one, welcome our new us overlords.
Consider:
http://www.csd.uwo.ca/staff/magi/personal/humour/Computer_Folklore/Robin%20Hood%20And%20Friar%20Tuck.html
This is not a new technique. This is not a bad thing, particularly. And compared to the severity of the problem, I think it's pretty tastefully understated.
And again, this is actually seebs. Really!
About twenty years ago, I was dating someone who was working on what she called the "Taco Bell theory of fashion", which was that you have a smallish number of items of clothing which all go together.
I think it's just that they're a particularly impressive example, familiar to a lot of people, of an extremely broad variety of foods made from a very small number of ingredients. ... And yes, stringing commands together is, empirically, news to many people, because I keep finding people who can't do it.
Yeah, that's not how the Real ID thing seems to have gone. People who know Blizzard employees regularly reported during the forums fiasco that it was essentially 100% opposed by Blizzard staff, but that Activision declared it was a "marketing" issue and thus under their control.
So far as I can tell, if Blizzard had a vote, Real ID would be a nickname-based system that people actually liked, not an adjunct to Facebook.
I sincerely hope that most of us don't write our code like that, because EOF is a past-tense check, not a future-tense check. The usual idiom is:
while (fgets(stream)) /* do something */
because feof(f) tells you whether the LAST read ALREADY FAILED due to EOF.
Huh. I have a bunch of Mac apps, and I'd never heard of Sparkle.
Neat concept, though.
Huh, I'd heard some complaints about it being used more heavily, maybe they were confused.
In WoW, it's not "required", but it's the only way to get access to decent friend functionality (say, being able to track a friend across multiple alts).
Will Diablo 3 be sticking with the new model of requiring people to use real names to interact with other players significantly, or are they introducing some kind of way for people to pick a nickname?
I dunno, I love having it as an option.
I push all my non-techie friends towards Macs because it's super easy for me to support them, and if worst comes to worst, I can get a shell and poke around. But 99% of the time, the app-type stuff is good enough.
If I had spare money, I'd be pretty tempted by those machines -- consider that my current netbook, that I take everywhere, is something like a 1.2GHz "Celeron". It's competing with Atom, not with a desktop i7.
The fact remains, most of the things you cited are normal and convenient if you're used to them. I quite like Apple's menu bar. In theory, we may well be in the days of multiple displays, but in practice, I spend well over 99% of my computing time on single displays, and Apple's menu bar remains easier and faster for me to use.
It's largely a matter of what you're used to; you haven't exactly presented compelling evidence that there's an objective disadvantage to the OS X ways, you've just listed things that don't work the way you're used to them working.
It also makes it easier for other people to find that book, who may be specifically looking for it.
Keep in mind that "interesting to me" and "worth money online" are not particularly good proxy emasurements for each other.
In general, if you can make money buying stuff and reselling it, you're moving it from a low-demand area to a high-demand area, making life better on both ends.
http://www.langston.com/Fun_People/1994/1994AXP.html
Excerpt:
That would be a totally coherent or relevant comment in an alternate universe where the question had to do with a replacement for MS Word. Please tell us how you get to that universe, so we can loot their alternate technology to improve our own.
In short, "let's say an open office variant" is a pure non-sequitur, because "competition for MS Word" is a field where compatibility is widely imagined to be important. (Note: I've had a lot of trouble with compatibility between MS Word and MS Word -- in fact, more than I've had between MS Word and OpenOffice.) We're talking about a tool for internal use, at which point, all that matters is its compatibility with itself -- it's not something that other people send you stuff for. And, even if it were, the chances that the commercial one is an effective monopoly aren't high.
MS Word is really a very special case, and no example based on it is likely to be relevant to other cases.
FWIW, we use Foswiki at work these days, I think, and we're pretty happy with it. Search is sorta frustrating, though -- it really does need someone keeping it maintained.
You mean the one they just did a refresh of in April? Normally it's more like a year between updates. April got us new CPUs (the shift to i5/i7) and new video hardware (although it sorta sucks).
Trivia point: USB never got close to the performance of firewire. What they did was figure out how to get a bigger number out there on the box.
A 400Mb/s FireWire connection runs rings around a "480"Mb/s USB2.