I doubt this is the last we'll see of LGlass. As seems to happen often in the game industry, the core members of the company -that is, the really talented individuals- will probably go off and create a new company.
Since Eidos will still have the rights to Thief, this new company could easily continue right were they left off.
This reminds me of what happened to Viacom's Septerra Core. Viacom closed, but the Septerra team kept working on the game, without pay for a while. And they eventually finished the game and got it to stores.
Lets hope the same happens for Thief III; the "living city" idea sounds too compelling to just die.
Something I've been thinking about a lot lately is the way the net has sort of become a huge mini-mall. Ads are all over the place now and everyone's trying to sell something.
The thing is that I think there may be a light at the end of the corporate tunnel. We all know that practically every dotcom is running on over-inflated IPO money right now. Some are running out of cash because the busuiness model isn't self-sustaining. No one really knows if you can sell things online and end up with a profit. Every company that sells stuff online is too busy burning cash on acquisitions and expansions.
Wall Street is clued into all of this. Everyone is just waiting for the dotcom bubble to burst and the Federal Reserve is trying to make sure it bursts before it gets out of hand. Just look at the market cap on companies like Yahoo. Its insane. These companies have some very limited intelectual property assets and pretty much no real-world assets. Yahoo has a "portal" (what they call search engines with news services now, apparently) site, some auctions and an ecommerce thingie. All of these are done to death on the web as it is and only one item is even slightly useful (search engine, though I like Altavista more, personally). And they support the bulk of this with ads that no one really reads...Ads that just link to other dotcoms!
When the bubble breaks I think less and 5% of dotcoms will survive. There's too many people offering identical services and not making any kind of money. Lots of sites will just die off, loose their stockholders a ton of cash and make every ligitimate businessman rather disenchanted with the net in general.
I'm sure ads will continue though. Probably not on specific clients (like this IRC thing or CuteFTP-type deals), but places were they are unintrusive and can actually make some money (web sites like this one).
Then we can all get back to what the web is all about: Porn, and lots of it.
Ohh...I'm starting to sound like Katz, time to stop.
The last American-made system to succeed in the market was the Atari 2600. That was a mere 16 years ago, before the Japanese basically became the console game market. When Atari themselves tried to get back into consoles we end up with Jaguar. Other attempts (3D0) at an American-bred console have also failed.
Japan is still the largest single market for videogames on a console and they don't show much willingness to buy American-made consoles or games (its a cold day in Hell when a US game hits the top 10 in Japan). Sure, Konami, Capcom and Namco are signed on, but how much do you want to bet that they just do ports of games from other systems? Konami has already said Metal Gear Solid Remix (a remake of the PSX game) is on the way. Ports generally don't sell systems.
Besides, by 2001, the 128-bit war will be over and done. People will have bought all the consoles they can stand. Even Dolphin will be out by then.
Anyone else notice that Microsoft's press release quotes a polygon rate of 300 million/sec? Thats more than 1 polygon per pixel at 640x480@60FPS. And I thought PS2's quoted 75Million was a bloated load of PR BS!
This is a very common misconception, perhaps born of IP-industry disinformation and propoganda. But copyright -IP as a whole, actually- exists not for the benefit of the artist/inventor, but for the benefit of society. Read the Constitution, it's in there. "To promote progress and the useful arts" or something close to that. To benefit society, not to benefit anyone's pocketbook.
Clearly, current laws are contrary to this idea and instead try to attach full rights of property to what has no tangible form. This is why current IP laws are constitutionally invalid. They are completly counter to the original idea.
That people believe that copyright is to protect profits must be a great coup for copyright holders (which are companies, not artists). Since this is what people believe, how can you oppose them when they say they want to take your rights away for the sake of more profit. To most people, that's the whole idea....
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I doubt this is the last we'll see of LGlass. As seems to happen often in the game industry, the core members of the company -that is, the really talented individuals- will probably go off and create a new company.
Since Eidos will still have the rights to Thief, this new company could easily continue right were they left off.
This reminds me of what happened to Viacom's Septerra Core. Viacom closed, but the Septerra team kept working on the game, without pay for a while. And they eventually finished the game and got it to stores.
Lets hope the same happens for Thief III; the "living city" idea sounds too compelling to just die.
--
"I still believe that gamers enjoy shooting people so much because they are so annoying and dumb and just get in their way." -Dave Perry
The thing is that I think there may be a light at the end of the corporate tunnel. We all know that practically every dotcom is running on over-inflated IPO money right now. Some are running out of cash because the busuiness model isn't self-sustaining. No one really knows if you can sell things online and end up with a profit. Every company that sells stuff online is too busy burning cash on acquisitions and expansions.
Wall Street is clued into all of this. Everyone is just waiting for the dotcom bubble to burst and the Federal Reserve is trying to make sure it bursts before it gets out of hand. Just look at the market cap on companies like Yahoo. Its insane. These companies have some very limited intelectual property assets and pretty much no real-world assets. Yahoo has a "portal" (what they call search engines with news services now, apparently) site, some auctions and an ecommerce thingie. All of these are done to death on the web as it is and only one item is even slightly useful (search engine, though I like Altavista more, personally). And they support the bulk of this with ads that no one really reads...Ads that just link to other dotcoms!
When the bubble breaks I think less and 5% of dotcoms will survive. There's too many people offering identical services and not making any kind of money. Lots of sites will just die off, loose their stockholders a ton of cash and make every ligitimate businessman rather disenchanted with the net in general.
I'm sure ads will continue though. Probably not on specific clients (like this IRC thing or CuteFTP-type deals), but places were they are unintrusive and can actually make some money (web sites like this one).
Then we can all get back to what the web is all about: Porn, and lots of it.
Ohh...I'm starting to sound like Katz, time to stop.
Japan is still the largest single market for videogames on a console and they don't show much willingness to buy American-made consoles or games (its a cold day in Hell when a US game hits the top 10 in Japan). Sure, Konami, Capcom and Namco are signed on, but how much do you want to bet that they just do ports of games from other systems? Konami has already said Metal Gear Solid Remix (a remake of the PSX game) is on the way. Ports generally don't sell systems.
Besides, by 2001, the 128-bit war will be over and done. People will have bought all the consoles they can stand. Even Dolphin will be out by then.
Anyone else notice that Microsoft's press release quotes a polygon rate of 300 million/sec? Thats more than 1 polygon per pixel at 640x480@60FPS. And I thought PS2's quoted 75Million was a bloated load of PR BS!
Has porting to other OSes (BeOS maybe?) ever been considered? Or does the limited userbase of OSes other than Linux rule this out?
This is a very common misconception, perhaps born of IP-industry disinformation and propoganda. But copyright -IP as a whole, actually- exists not for the benefit of the artist/inventor, but for the benefit of society. Read the Constitution, it's in there. "To promote progress and the useful arts" or something close to that. To benefit society, not to benefit anyone's pocketbook.
Clearly, current laws are contrary to this idea and instead try to attach full rights of property to what has no tangible form. This is why current IP laws are constitutionally invalid. They are completly counter to the original idea.
That people believe that copyright is to protect profits must be a great coup for copyright holders (which are companies, not artists). Since this is what people believe, how can you oppose them when they say they want to take your rights away for the sake of more profit. To most people, that's the whole idea....