Sorry, but your argument is pure question-begging. You claim that people are "probably" profiting at whatever the wholesale rate is... Except that the entire question is whether that's true in the case of consoles. You've offered no evidence at all for your claim that, contrary to everything anyone else says about the video game industry, consoles are sold at a profit throughout their life cycle, rather than being sold at a loss or at cost to push game sales.
That's a pretty amazing claim, and without concrete numbers, it's not believable.
I'm not gonna believe it without actual evidence. Sony are liars; they say all sorts of stuff about how they make money, and I don't have any reason to believe them.
Sony's claim that the PS2 "made money" includes licensing money for games. If you think otherwise, go ahead and show concrete numbers and sources. Everyone has always made money on games, and sold consoles at a loss to sell games, with the arguable exception of Nintendo (whose consoles are often panned for being built on cheap hardware).
Where do you get the idea that they're NOT selling at a loss? Analyst estimates of the cost of making the PS2 were always substantially higher than retail value; I've seen estimates of $300 THIS year.
Sony gets substantially less than the retail price, too.
I have no reason to believe that Sony has ever made money selling a console; it's always been game licensing.
When people say that only the Xbox has been a loss, they mean the WHOLE BUSINESS is a loss -- Microsoft lost money even taking licensing into account. Without licensing income, nearly all consoles are losses.
The boxwave people make small retractable USB charging cables for a lot of devices. www.boxwave.com
I have a handful of these for most of my gizmos, and since most devices need only an hour or two a day of charging, a single laptop USB port is probably plenty.
The "long term" for a console is, as you note, under a decade. The Wii is interesting enough that I think it'll still be popular in five years -- and by that time, Nintendo should have a replacement. But I think the poster's question was contrasting "still interesting in four years" with "lose all interest within a month". I am pretty sure the Wii will stay viable easily that long.
However, your analysis on the economics is off; Sony gets money every time you buy a game for the PS2 or PS3. They lose money on consoles. Same with Microsoft and the xbox.
That would explain not reviewing the Wii ports of games; it wouldn't explain omitting the Wii from system lists of games that were ported to it.
I don't think it's quite "bias" to point out problems in Sony's handling of things. Of course, I am biased against Sony, after a long series of DRM pushes, rootkits, copy protection schemes, and other abuses. So far as I can tell, as long as I can enjoy books and movies, they will never rest.
I picked up a subscription to Game Informer (it was free with a discount card which saved me more money on the games I was buying that day than it cost).
The December issue practically ignores the Wii, and their review of Marvel Ultimate Alliance says that some characters are "only available on the PS3 and Xbox 360". They are also on the Wii version -- but the review doesn't even mention that there's a wii port.
I think it's pretty clear that the people at that magazine are blowing off the Wii, and given the reviews of everyone I know who's played on one (including me), I think that's gotta be because loyalty to Sony is a big deal in getting advertising dollars.
That said, I'm getting a PS3 the moment I can, because it will cost a fraction of the price of a "real" cell server, and be good enough to play around and doodle code on.
Haven't seen any surviving in stores; I stood in line in the cold (sub-freezing) for a couple of hours to get mine and have no regrets at all.
However, the production rates are supposed to be HUGE, so I bet there will be some soon.
The killer, for me, is that I can't get the 4th nunchuck for my system. No one has ANY Wii accessories in stock; they sell out so fast it's not even funny.
It's better than Starforce, certainly. That's why I bought a couple of their games this year... But after the massively increased hassle of recent SecuROM, I'm not buying games using that either.
Oblivion and GalCiv 2 have proven the viability of omitting copy protection.
The NWN 1.02 patch's horrible problems, confirmed BY THE DEVELOPERS to be caused entirely by SecuROM, are proving the non-viability of using it.
They inherited the Might & Magic line from now-defunct 3DO, and frankly, Ubi's entries in the field sorta scare me with their incompetence. Nevermind that I can't even play them half the time due to new patches introducing new crash-at-load SecuROM bugs. The error "Not enought movement points" pretty much kills any hope I have for them. If they can't be bothered to spell-check one of the most common messages in a game, which scrolls up on screen just about every turn, I can't take them seriously.
Some of their work is pretty interesting, anyway, but the quality control is poor; I think this story explains it, if they're trying to push growth, they're going to have to hire more people than they can find qualified people.
I think there's a big difference between "works only with our own music player" and "works only with a new, sucky, music player that is not the one we've been pushing for the last few years".
It's useful to me; the amount of the year during which I can go outside and play sports casually is fairly small. The amount of time I can arrange to play tennis solo is virtually nil.
Well, actually, that would be rather wrong. One of the innovations of OS X's GUI is closer tie-ins with the rendering hardware; the GUI really does make more direct use of the GPU than a typical X11 interface does. The X11 interface is written in very generic terms to make rendering calls which are then handled in an optimized way... But it's still a bunch of separate rendering calls. Aqua knows quite a bit about what GPU features are necessarily available to it, and tweaks the GPU directly.
On the other hand, an X11 interface may well be enough simpler to more than make up the difference.
I don't mind a few interrupts coming in. Last year, I had a vacation, and we stayed in a cozy resort playing with the fireplace. Yeah, stuff happened. I had to talk someone through replacing a malfunctioning UPS, for instance. It was okay, though; the rest of the time, I didn't have to do anything. I've done some writing while on vacation, and it doesn't bug me; a lot of the vacation thing is knowing that I don't have to work, but since I enjoy writing, sometimes I do anyway. Fine by me.
That said, given the huge difference in hardware requirements and licensing, and the comparative ease of maintenance of many things, I have to wonder what exactly is being compared.
Where do you get the idea that I need special permission for non-literal interpretation of content?
The way we read any piece of writing in the world other than the Bible includes looking at the writing, looking at the context, and rom that forming a theory of how the writer intended a given passage. There is no basis for the assumption that every last word of the Bible is literal without explicit proof otherwise.
That said, an obvious starting point would be to notice the heavy use of parables in the Gospels, and the heavy use of analogies in Paul's writing, and the obviously poetic language of Psalms...
But seriously, there's no other text for which you would demand specific statements that it's permissible to interpret the text non-literally. The Bible is a collection of writings from different times and cultures, originally in different languages; expecting every one of them to be interpreted the same way is simply incoherent.
To get picky, weak atheism (mere non-belief) is extremely defensible, although it's very hard to present an affirmative case for it. Strong atheism (active disbelief) is justifiable for some entities, less so for others.
I have certainly met people who were religiously zealous about their atheism; I have seen someone call other people fake atheists and accuse them of believing things that are wrong for atheists to believe. I've seen an atheist who believed firmly that he had seen convincing evidence for psychic stuff get mercilessly shredded by other people who insisted that a REAL atheist wouldn't believe that.
I would argue that, from a scientific standpoint, the God question is just plain ill-formed; the only scientifically viable position is probably "we will act as though there isn't". But not all of life is science; it's no different from the way that, most of the time, we apply brakes rather than waiting to see whether a hypothesized car-stopping-fairy will materialize.
You know, that's the thing that struck me. If this guy is willing to call a kid a liar, knowing full well that the kid isn't the liar...
Well, lemme just say that I wouldn't want him teaching anybody. I wouldn't kick him out of church, and in fact, I sorta hope he starts going to one regularly and listening to the guy up in front who keeps yapping about some kind of code of moral conduct.
>The idea that people will to hell if they don't accept christ as their personal savior >is, to my understanding, fairly mainstream Christianity.
It's certainly a common sound-bite description for Protestants in the US. The "personal savior" line is very rarely found outside of Protestant groups. Of course, the question of what exactly it means is somewhat debated. The majority of Christians worldwide are in churches that teach that there are people who do not claim to be "Christian", but who are nonetheless participating in the salvation thing.
The map is not the territory; accepting religious dogma about Jesus is not the same thing as accepting Jesus. Most groups will grant that many people who are "not Christian" are nonetheless going to end up in Heaven, and many groups will grant that at least some people who claim to be "Christian" will not.
Of course, not all Christians believe anyone ends up in Hell. Universalism is arguably a heresy, but then, so is Protestantism.
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Sorry, but your argument is pure question-begging. You claim that people are "probably" profiting at whatever the wholesale rate is... Except that the entire question is whether that's true in the case of consoles. You've offered no evidence at all for your claim that, contrary to everything anyone else says about the video game industry, consoles are sold at a profit throughout their life cycle, rather than being sold at a loss or at cost to push game sales.
That's a pretty amazing claim, and without concrete numbers, it's not believable.
I'm not gonna believe it without actual evidence. Sony are liars; they say all sorts of stuff about how they make money, and I don't have any reason to believe them.
Sony's claim that the PS2 "made money" includes licensing money for games. If you think otherwise, go ahead and show concrete numbers and sources. Everyone has always made money on games, and sold consoles at a loss to sell games, with the arguable exception of Nintendo (whose consoles are often panned for being built on cheap hardware).
Where do you get the idea that they're NOT selling at a loss? Analyst estimates of the cost of making the PS2 were always substantially higher than retail value; I've seen estimates of $300 THIS year.
Sony gets substantially less than the retail price, too.
I have no reason to believe that Sony has ever made money selling a console; it's always been game licensing.
When people say that only the Xbox has been a loss, they mean the WHOLE BUSINESS is a loss -- Microsoft lost money even taking licensing into account. Without licensing income, nearly all consoles are losses.
I got really lucky; a local Walmart had two left over after they sold out their Wii systems stock. I'm still one short.
The boxwave people make small retractable USB charging cables for a lot of devices. www.boxwave.com
I have a handful of these for most of my gizmos, and since most devices need only an hour or two a day of charging, a single laptop USB port is probably plenty.
The "long term" for a console is, as you note, under a decade. The Wii is interesting enough that I think it'll still be popular in five years -- and by that time, Nintendo should have a replacement. But I think the poster's question was contrasting "still interesting in four years" with "lose all interest within a month". I am pretty sure the Wii will stay viable easily that long.
However, your analysis on the economics is off; Sony gets money every time you buy a game for the PS2 or PS3. They lose money on consoles. Same with Microsoft and the xbox.
That would explain not reviewing the Wii ports of games; it wouldn't explain omitting the Wii from system lists of games that were ported to it.
I don't think it's quite "bias" to point out problems in Sony's handling of things. Of course, I am biased against Sony, after a long series of DRM pushes, rootkits, copy protection schemes, and other abuses. So far as I can tell, as long as I can enjoy books and movies, they will never rest.
First off, it's substantially more powerful than a gamecube.
Secondly, you say:
>And now all of these games which look like budget titles (Wii sports, Excite Truck) are $60 just like all the other new consoles.
Actually, no. Wii games peak at $50.
And frankly, I don't think they look like budget titles. They look like titles running on cheaper hardware, but... That's okay.
I picked up a subscription to Game Informer (it was free with a discount card which saved me more money on the games I was buying that day than it cost).
The December issue practically ignores the Wii, and their review of Marvel Ultimate Alliance says that some characters are "only available on the PS3 and Xbox 360". They are also on the Wii version -- but the review doesn't even mention that there's a wii port.
I think it's pretty clear that the people at that magazine are blowing off the Wii, and given the reviews of everyone I know who's played on one (including me), I think that's gotta be because loyalty to Sony is a big deal in getting advertising dollars.
That said, I'm getting a PS3 the moment I can, because it will cost a fraction of the price of a "real" cell server, and be good enough to play around and doodle code on.
Haven't seen any surviving in stores; I stood in line in the cold (sub-freezing) for a couple of hours to get mine and have no regrets at all.
However, the production rates are supposed to be HUGE, so I bet there will be some soon.
The killer, for me, is that I can't get the 4th nunchuck for my system. No one has ANY Wii accessories in stock; they sell out so fast it's not even funny.
Without some more specific details, I don't see how we could form an opinion on this.
In general, though... You have to live with yourself a lot longer than you'll be at any given job, in general.
It's better than Starforce, certainly. That's why I bought a couple of their games this year... But after the massively increased hassle of recent SecuROM, I'm not buying games using that either.
Oblivion and GalCiv 2 have proven the viability of omitting copy protection.
The NWN 1.02 patch's horrible problems, confirmed BY THE DEVELOPERS to be caused entirely by SecuROM, are proving the non-viability of using it.
They inherited the Might & Magic line from now-defunct 3DO, and frankly, Ubi's entries in the field sorta scare me with their incompetence. Nevermind that I can't even play them half the time due to new patches introducing new crash-at-load SecuROM bugs. The error "Not enought movement points" pretty much kills any hope I have for them. If they can't be bothered to spell-check one of the most common messages in a game, which scrolls up on screen just about every turn, I can't take them seriously.
Some of their work is pretty interesting, anyway, but the quality control is poor; I think this story explains it, if they're trying to push growth, they're going to have to hire more people than they can find qualified people.
I think there's a big difference between "works only with our own music player" and "works only with a new, sucky, music player that is not the one we've been pushing for the last few years".
It's useful to me; the amount of the year during which I can go outside and play sports casually is fairly small. The amount of time I can arrange to play tennis solo is virtually nil.
I seem to recall having spent upwards of 8 hours on two consecutive days playing Wii games, and only a couple tired me out at all.
It actually hurts less than a traditional controller, because I can keep my hands comfortably separated.
Well, actually, that would be rather wrong. One of the innovations of OS X's GUI is closer tie-ins with the rendering hardware; the GUI really does make more direct use of the GPU than a typical X11 interface does. The X11 interface is written in very generic terms to make rendering calls which are then handled in an optimized way... But it's still a bunch of separate rendering calls. Aqua knows quite a bit about what GPU features are necessarily available to it, and tweaks the GPU directly.
On the other hand, an X11 interface may well be enough simpler to more than make up the difference.
I don't mind a few interrupts coming in. Last year, I had a vacation, and we stayed in a cozy resort playing with the fireplace. Yeah, stuff happened. I had to talk someone through replacing a malfunctioning UPS, for instance. It was okay, though; the rest of the time, I didn't have to do anything. I've done some writing while on vacation, and it doesn't bug me; a lot of the vacation thing is knowing that I don't have to work, but since I enjoy writing, sometimes I do anyway. Fine by me.
Licensing isn't the whole story for TCO.
That said, given the huge difference in hardware requirements and licensing, and the comparative ease of maintenance of many things, I have to wonder what exactly is being compared.
Where do you get the idea that I need special permission for non-literal interpretation of content?
The way we read any piece of writing in the world other than the Bible includes looking at the writing, looking at the context, and rom that forming a theory of how the writer intended a given passage. There is no basis for the assumption that every last word of the Bible is literal without explicit proof otherwise.
That said, an obvious starting point would be to notice the heavy use of parables in the Gospels, and the heavy use of analogies in Paul's writing, and the obviously poetic language of Psalms...
But seriously, there's no other text for which you would demand specific statements that it's permissible to interpret the text non-literally. The Bible is a collection of writings from different times and cultures, originally in different languages; expecting every one of them to be interpreted the same way is simply incoherent.
To get picky, weak atheism (mere non-belief) is extremely defensible, although it's very hard to present an affirmative case for it. Strong atheism (active disbelief) is justifiable for some entities, less so for others.
I have certainly met people who were religiously zealous about their atheism; I have seen someone call other people fake atheists and accuse them of believing things that are wrong for atheists to believe. I've seen an atheist who believed firmly that he had seen convincing evidence for psychic stuff get mercilessly shredded by other people who insisted that a REAL atheist wouldn't believe that.
I would argue that, from a scientific standpoint, the God question is just plain ill-formed; the only scientifically viable position is probably "we will act as though there isn't". But not all of life is science; it's no different from the way that, most of the time, we apply brakes rather than waiting to see whether a hypothesized car-stopping-fairy will materialize.
Well said.
You know, that's the thing that struck me. If this guy is willing to call a kid a liar, knowing full well that the kid isn't the liar...
Well, lemme just say that I wouldn't want him teaching anybody. I wouldn't kick him out of church, and in fact, I sorta hope he starts going to one regularly and listening to the guy up in front who keeps yapping about some kind of code of moral conduct.
>The idea that people will to hell if they don't accept christ as their personal savior
>is, to my understanding, fairly mainstream Christianity.
It's certainly a common sound-bite description for Protestants in the US. The "personal savior" line is very rarely found outside of Protestant groups. Of course, the question of what exactly it means is somewhat debated. The majority of Christians worldwide are in churches that teach that there are people who do not claim to be "Christian", but who are nonetheless participating in the salvation thing.
The map is not the territory; accepting religious dogma about Jesus is not the same thing as accepting Jesus. Most groups will grant that many people who are "not Christian" are nonetheless going to end up in Heaven, and many groups will grant that at least some people who claim to be "Christian" will not.
Of course, not all Christians believe anyone ends up in Hell. Universalism is arguably a heresy, but then, so is Protestantism.