EULAs are unenforcable in the EU if they're for a packaged product you bought in a store. If you buy something online on Steam, where you only "subscribe" to an online service, they are part of the contract and very much enforceable.
However, we don't really have class action lawsuits here, or punitive damages...
Re:Hate to put a damper on the celebration
on
Diablo III Released
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· Score: 1
Well, you *should* play another game. This one is sold as an online multiplayer game, apparently you're looking for something else.
Some of it will be protest, but the German Pirate Party is also consistently getting votes from people who had previously stopped voting. Maybe going to vote again is protest for you too, but in Germany's on-going trend of sinking participation in elections, the Pirate Party is the only political party that is gaining votes in absolute numbers.
It should be noted that the German Pirate Party has strayed a little from its root of copyright criticism. It's pretty much a left-wing liberal party now that has some ideas concerning copyright and privacy, but also advocates other concepts such as free education, a citizen's income, deregulation in certain areas, voting rights for foreign citizens, sustainable energy sources, and so on.
Even in traditionally tech-savvy Germany, a party that only focuses on copyright and patents can't get 8% in parliamentary elections. An important factor in the Pirate Party's success in Germany is that it's very easy for anyone to participate in the political discourse within the party, but after 6 years and with 30k members now, that was bound to produce something more than just "copyright law is broken".
It's not only the votes of the disappointed. Less Germans are voting overall, and this has been a trend for years, but while the established parties are all losing votes and pretty much only gain percentage points when they just don't lose as much as the others, the Pirate Party has been gaining votes, including from people who had previously decided not to vote in past elections. Their success is not only an expression of disappointment, it's also an expression of renewed hope and belief in the democratic system at a time when more and more Germans are losing that belief.
Seconding that statement about Avadon. It's one of the best CRPGs available for tablets. It's still great on PC, especially if you don't need a multi million dollar graphics budget in your games. Admittedly the graphics are a weak point, the developer has been making this kind of game for a long time (since the 90ies) and I remember seeing some of the sprites and tiles used in Avadon in some very old games:) Name is "Spiderweb Software", if you've been around long enough you may remember Exile: Escape from The Pit that is going to get its second remake this April (or a couple months ago if you're on a Mac).
Zen Bound 2 is also an awesome game, but it kind of works better on a tablet as touching the object you're wrapping feels much more natural. Along with Canabalt, Zen Bound is one of the games that really stood out when they initially appeared on iOS. Canabalt has the "problem" that there are tons of side scrolling running games on tablets now.
Was about to post this... the summary gives an entirely wrong idea. All four linked sources have it right, but slashdot being slashdot manages to get it all wrong...
Note that in some countries this is also a language issue. There is a difference between defects liability (two years in the EU, applies to the business that actually sold you the product, first six months the burden of proof is on the seller) and a warranty (a promise that a business may make as part of a business transaction, such as the one year warranty that Apple provides voluntarily but that is not required at all by EU law). In German these are also clearly distinguished ("Gewährleistung" vs. "Garantie") but in French, for example, as far as I know it's one word for both ("garantie").
So the problem here is that Apple is being misleading due to a language issue and failing to explain the difference between different types of a "garantie". There isn't really a story in this anyway, anyone who knows how warranties and defects liability work in the EU knows that Apple as a manufacturer can only be offering a voluntary warranty, and that the store where you actually buy the product is subject to defects liability, and it's not Apple's job as a manufacturer to explain that on its web site.
He could file for trespassing at least (more if the door is not unlocked). But not for theft. And he would of course have to explain how the stolen iPad ended up in his house. So he probably wouldn't do it.
It might be worth to try and just walk up to the door and knock, then offer the person a chance to give the device back without involving the police.
That's funny because mainframes indeed died eventually after the PC came out, and today, your typical server is a PC in a slightly different box, possibly with more hard drives.
First off, Cyan did actually port Myst and Riven to iOS and are working on a port of realMyst.
As for the fast movement, you can hook up an iPad to a TV via HDMI just like any other console, and you can use an iPod Touch as a touch controller like Nintendo thinks is a good idea to do with the Wii-U. There aren't that many games that are made with this in mind right now, presumably because customers aren't really interested in doing it, but it's what I think will happen. Consoles will disappear and people will instead hook up their current mobile phone to a TV set and a controller.
No, that's exactly not what he's saying. "Games people want to run" being available on a different platform is not the same thing as "content that requires less mental effort" available through a only slightly different channel.
In reality of course both books and magazines as media (not the content) are dying for the entirely same reasons why consoles are dying.
First, you didn't read the title of his presentation.
"When the Consoles die..."
He is using the word "DIE", not gradually shift or decrease. This is a hint that he is going the Tabloid route with sensationalistic (no credibility) headlines just to grab your attention.
I don't really believe in only reading titles. He explains what he means by "die", including that it can mean that the "dying" platform doesn't even lose sales, but just becomes less and less relevant compared to an overpowering newcomer.
He does not have a graph showing the profit for tablet and phone games.
In particular, he notes that there were 500 million downloads of Angry Birds. However, on ITunes, Angry Birds is a free game! This is not making massive profit.
This is incorrect. On iTunes, Angry Birds is a $0.99 game. The Android version is free, and according to wikipedia (I'm not going to call Rovio and ask), Rovio is making about $1 million per month from ad revenues from the Android version alone.
I'm not sure the argument stands and falls with Angry Birds, though. It's just one of his examples.
The discussion is there because in the past, X has died when Y appeared. Especially in the computing market but also elsewhere. You can compare current trends to trends back then and draw parallels and based on that you can argue that X may be dying.
Consoles have never been ahead of PCs in technology. They're nothing but gaming appliances with enough performance to run games decently. How are they technologically ahead of PCs??
The current generation of consoles is six years old. Still, PCs are only just reaching them in terms of e.g. parallelization (what consumer PC had a six core CPU in 2006 when the PS3 came out?) or the insane bandwidth between CPU and GPU (Xbox 360: 10.8 GB/s each direction, PCIe 3.0 x16: 16 GB/s, but that only became available in the last two years).
Most of the games you find on mobile phones *right now* are still only good for a few minutes.
But when you compare on a technical level then the devices are already pretty much equal in capabilities. Not even the PS Vita is much more powerful than an iPhone. You also have ports of handheld console games appearing on smartphones, e.g. there are several iOS ports of DS and PSP games like GTA CTW, Final Fantasy 1-3, Chrono Trigger, etc. There are also ports of older PC games starting to appear - I can play GTA 3 on my phone. A few years ago I played silly J2ME text adventures on it. There's definitely a trend toward parity, and from past experience with the computing market I'm fairly convinced that mobile integrated devices will take over the console market in the near future. PCs are different - but the target audience of consoles is pretty much "people who want to play the latest games on a system where they don't have to bother with technical details". I'm certain that iOS or Android integrated devices can appeal to that market, they are not quite there yet, but I don't really see a reason why their dramatic rise in processing power can't continue.
My wife btw. is also an example, but slightly different from yours. My wife owns a DSi, and she used to play the occasional game on a desktop computer. She even had a C64 when she was a kid. She's not a gamer, but she's definitely grown up with games and various gaming systems, but I only find her playing a game regularly since she got an iPad. And she doesn't play Angry Birds, she basically plays the same games she's always played, which in her case (point and click adventures) happen to work very well on mobile touch devices. The type of game I like to play isn't quite there yet - I like RPGs including modern 3rd person 3D RPGs - but they're already starting to appear. So I'm expecting I'll stop buying consoles right about now (I have a PS3, a Wii, a DSi and a 3DS) and instead wait for more powerful mobile phones.
Did you watch the slide show? He argues how movies did not die when the cinema died because movie producers adapted to the new formats, specifically VHS and so on. So of course movies don't need to die because of YouTube - producers and distributors alike are adapting to the new channels, there are countless ways to watch streamed movies online today.
That's half of his argument really. He's saying that game developers may want to adapt to the changing environment and focus more on mobile. The console as a platform paradigm may die but his entire point is that the game developers don't have to die with it, just like movies are still around.
I wouldn't equate Facebook games with PC games. They're either HTML or Flash. Mobile devices these days can all handle HTML. Some of them can handle Flash. Some Facebook gaming companies like Zynga make their games available on devices that can't handle Flash on web pages, e.g. there's a Farmville app for iOS. So the ability to play Facebook games is not something that sets the PC apart as a product that you need to buy if you're interested in playing Facebook games. Actually I'd see Facebook games as a prime example of something that PCs are losing as mobile devices are becoming more powerful.
In the slide show he's, however, showing absolute figures that are shrinking.
He does also argue the shrinking relative market share point because that's, frankly, what you're interested in as a game developer: Where can you make the most money with games? When you can make 10% more year-over-year in one market but 200% more in another then you'll go for the 200% growth market.
How is he a moron when he's saying what you're saying? His argument is that there is a larger audience for games, which makes the relative market share of console games smaller, and means there's more money to be made in the mobile market.
The console market doesn't have to shrink - it is, of course, but that's not his main point. His point as a game developer is that he can make more money in the mobile market, and that he predicts this trend will continue.
It doesn't mean consoles will go away. He's comparing to mainframes and personal computers, among other things. Mainframes continued to sell after the PC boom started but suddenly there was much more money in the PC business. Now today we have big companies using PCs for tasks that mainframes were used, but this is decades after they were introduced. He's also comparing consoles to arcades, which still exist and aren't really doing *that* much worse than they used to (just worse than they did in their prime), but they also never got anywhere near the amount of money you can make with consoles.
He's not arguing that ngmoco competes with consoles or PCs. He's arguing that the relative market share of console games will go down as the mobile games industry boom continues. He clearly states that he believes that mobile games haven't disrupted the AAA console game industry yet, but are on par with handheld consoles - which as far as I can see from the handheld devices that I own and from published sales data is an accurate assessment of the situation.
In my state in the USA, if you circumvent some barrier, like a fence or door, it is a crime.
Here in Germany, that's the case as well - but the distinction is that there has to be a barrier. A railroad track is not a barrier. An open tunnel entrance is not a barrier. TFA makes it seem like they only used openly accessible tunnels, and in one instance explicitly mentions that a closed gate meant they had to take another route.
Slashdot Mirror
EULAs are unenforcable in the EU if they're for a packaged product you bought in a store. If you buy something online on Steam, where you only "subscribe" to an online service, they are part of the contract and very much enforceable.
However, we don't really have class action lawsuits here, or punitive damages...
Well, you *should* play another game. This one is sold as an online multiplayer game, apparently you're looking for something else.
Some of it will be protest, but the German Pirate Party is also consistently getting votes from people who had previously stopped voting. Maybe going to vote again is protest for you too, but in Germany's on-going trend of sinking participation in elections, the Pirate Party is the only political party that is gaining votes in absolute numbers.
It should be noted that the German Pirate Party has strayed a little from its root of copyright criticism. It's pretty much a left-wing liberal party now that has some ideas concerning copyright and privacy, but also advocates other concepts such as free education, a citizen's income, deregulation in certain areas, voting rights for foreign citizens, sustainable energy sources, and so on.
Even in traditionally tech-savvy Germany, a party that only focuses on copyright and patents can't get 8% in parliamentary elections. An important factor in the Pirate Party's success in Germany is that it's very easy for anyone to participate in the political discourse within the party, but after 6 years and with 30k members now, that was bound to produce something more than just "copyright law is broken".
It's not only the votes of the disappointed. Less Germans are voting overall, and this has been a trend for years, but while the established parties are all losing votes and pretty much only gain percentage points when they just don't lose as much as the others, the Pirate Party has been gaining votes, including from people who had previously decided not to vote in past elections. Their success is not only an expression of disappointment, it's also an expression of renewed hope and belief in the democratic system at a time when more and more Germans are losing that belief.
Seconding that statement about Avadon. It's one of the best CRPGs available for tablets. It's still great on PC, especially if you don't need a multi million dollar graphics budget in your games. Admittedly the graphics are a weak point, the developer has been making this kind of game for a long time (since the 90ies) and I remember seeing some of the sprites and tiles used in Avadon in some very old games :) Name is "Spiderweb Software", if you've been around long enough you may remember Exile: Escape from The Pit that is going to get its second remake this April (or a couple months ago if you're on a Mac).
Zen Bound 2 is also an awesome game, but it kind of works better on a tablet as touching the object you're wrapping feels much more natural. Along with Canabalt, Zen Bound is one of the games that really stood out when they initially appeared on iOS. Canabalt has the "problem" that there are tons of side scrolling running games on tablets now.
Was about to post this... the summary gives an entirely wrong idea. All four linked sources have it right, but slashdot being slashdot manages to get it all wrong...
Note that in some countries this is also a language issue. There is a difference between defects liability (two years in the EU, applies to the business that actually sold you the product, first six months the burden of proof is on the seller) and a warranty (a promise that a business may make as part of a business transaction, such as the one year warranty that Apple provides voluntarily but that is not required at all by EU law). In German these are also clearly distinguished ("Gewährleistung" vs. "Garantie") but in French, for example, as far as I know it's one word for both ("garantie").
So the problem here is that Apple is being misleading due to a language issue and failing to explain the difference between different types of a "garantie". There isn't really a story in this anyway, anyone who knows how warranties and defects liability work in the EU knows that Apple as a manufacturer can only be offering a voluntary warranty, and that the store where you actually buy the product is subject to defects liability, and it's not Apple's job as a manufacturer to explain that on its web site.
He could file for trespassing at least (more if the door is not unlocked). But not for theft. And he would of course have to explain how the stolen iPad ended up in his house. So he probably wouldn't do it.
It might be worth to try and just walk up to the door and knock, then offer the person a chance to give the device back without involving the police.
Or like servers died when PCs came out?
That's funny because mainframes indeed died eventually after the PC came out, and today, your typical server is a PC in a slightly different box, possibly with more hard drives.
First off, Cyan did actually port Myst and Riven to iOS and are working on a port of realMyst.
As for the fast movement, you can hook up an iPad to a TV via HDMI just like any other console, and you can use an iPod Touch as a touch controller like Nintendo thinks is a good idea to do with the Wii-U. There aren't that many games that are made with this in mind right now, presumably because customers aren't really interested in doing it, but it's what I think will happen. Consoles will disappear and people will instead hook up their current mobile phone to a TV set and a controller.
No, that's exactly not what he's saying. "Games people want to run" being available on a different platform is not the same thing as "content that requires less mental effort" available through a only slightly different channel.
In reality of course both books and magazines as media (not the content) are dying for the entirely same reasons why consoles are dying.
OK. enough silliness.
First, you didn't read the title of his presentation.
"When the Consoles die..."
He is using the word "DIE", not gradually shift or decrease. This is a hint that he is going the Tabloid route with
sensationalistic (no credibility) headlines just to grab your attention.
I don't really believe in only reading titles. He explains what he means by "die", including that it can mean that the "dying" platform doesn't even lose sales, but just becomes less and less relevant compared to an overpowering newcomer.
He does not have a graph showing the profit for tablet and phone games.
In particular, he notes that there were 500 million downloads of Angry Birds. However, on ITunes, Angry Birds
is a free game! This is not making massive profit.
This is incorrect. On iTunes, Angry Birds is a $0.99 game. The Android version is free, and according to wikipedia (I'm not going to call Rovio and ask), Rovio is making about $1 million per month from ad revenues from the Android version alone.
I'm not sure the argument stands and falls with Angry Birds, though. It's just one of his examples.
The discussion is there because in the past, X has died when Y appeared. Especially in the computing market but also elsewhere. You can compare current trends to trends back then and draw parallels and based on that you can argue that X may be dying.
There is an X-Plane version for iPad. Sure it doesn't have the same texture resolution as on the desktop, but if that's all...
Consoles have never been ahead of PCs in technology. They're nothing but gaming appliances with enough performance to run games decently. How are they technologically ahead of PCs??
The current generation of consoles is six years old. Still, PCs are only just reaching them in terms of e.g. parallelization (what consumer PC had a six core CPU in 2006 when the PS3 came out?) or the insane bandwidth between CPU and GPU (Xbox 360: 10.8 GB/s each direction, PCIe 3.0 x16: 16 GB/s, but that only became available in the last two years).
In that case... there's a Minecraft Pocket Edition that runs on Android and iOS phones. :)
Most of the games you find on mobile phones *right now* are still only good for a few minutes.
But when you compare on a technical level then the devices are already pretty much equal in capabilities. Not even the PS Vita is much more powerful than an iPhone. You also have ports of handheld console games appearing on smartphones, e.g. there are several iOS ports of DS and PSP games like GTA CTW, Final Fantasy 1-3, Chrono Trigger, etc. There are also ports of older PC games starting to appear - I can play GTA 3 on my phone. A few years ago I played silly J2ME text adventures on it. There's definitely a trend toward parity, and from past experience with the computing market I'm fairly convinced that mobile integrated devices will take over the console market in the near future. PCs are different - but the target audience of consoles is pretty much "people who want to play the latest games on a system where they don't have to bother with technical details". I'm certain that iOS or Android integrated devices can appeal to that market, they are not quite there yet, but I don't really see a reason why their dramatic rise in processing power can't continue.
My wife btw. is also an example, but slightly different from yours. My wife owns a DSi, and she used to play the occasional game on a desktop computer. She even had a C64 when she was a kid. She's not a gamer, but she's definitely grown up with games and various gaming systems, but I only find her playing a game regularly since she got an iPad. And she doesn't play Angry Birds, she basically plays the same games she's always played, which in her case (point and click adventures) happen to work very well on mobile touch devices. The type of game I like to play isn't quite there yet - I like RPGs including modern 3rd person 3D RPGs - but they're already starting to appear. So I'm expecting I'll stop buying consoles right about now (I have a PS3, a Wii, a DSi and a 3DS) and instead wait for more powerful mobile phones.
Did you watch the slide show? He argues how movies did not die when the cinema died because movie producers adapted to the new formats, specifically VHS and so on. So of course movies don't need to die because of YouTube - producers and distributors alike are adapting to the new channels, there are countless ways to watch streamed movies online today.
That's half of his argument really. He's saying that game developers may want to adapt to the changing environment and focus more on mobile. The console as a platform paradigm may die but his entire point is that the game developers don't have to die with it, just like movies are still around.
I wouldn't equate Facebook games with PC games. They're either HTML or Flash. Mobile devices these days can all handle HTML. Some of them can handle Flash. Some Facebook gaming companies like Zynga make their games available on devices that can't handle Flash on web pages, e.g. there's a Farmville app for iOS. So the ability to play Facebook games is not something that sets the PC apart as a product that you need to buy if you're interested in playing Facebook games. Actually I'd see Facebook games as a prime example of something that PCs are losing as mobile devices are becoming more powerful.
In the slide show he's, however, showing absolute figures that are shrinking.
He does also argue the shrinking relative market share point because that's, frankly, what you're interested in as a game developer: Where can you make the most money with games? When you can make 10% more year-over-year in one market but 200% more in another then you'll go for the 200% growth market.
How is he a moron when he's saying what you're saying? His argument is that there is a larger audience for games, which makes the relative market share of console games smaller, and means there's more money to be made in the mobile market.
The console market doesn't have to shrink - it is, of course, but that's not his main point. His point as a game developer is that he can make more money in the mobile market, and that he predicts this trend will continue.
It doesn't mean consoles will go away. He's comparing to mainframes and personal computers, among other things. Mainframes continued to sell after the PC boom started but suddenly there was much more money in the PC business. Now today we have big companies using PCs for tasks that mainframes were used, but this is decades after they were introduced. He's also comparing consoles to arcades, which still exist and aren't really doing *that* much worse than they used to (just worse than they did in their prime), but they also never got anywhere near the amount of money you can make with consoles.
He's not arguing that ngmoco competes with consoles or PCs. He's arguing that the relative market share of console games will go down as the mobile games industry boom continues. He clearly states that he believes that mobile games haven't disrupted the AAA console game industry yet, but are on par with handheld consoles - which as far as I can see from the handheld devices that I own and from published sales data is an accurate assessment of the situation.
I doubt that a court would see it as borrowing when you (as one previous poster wrote) wipe the phone and change the IMEI.
In my state in the USA, if you circumvent some barrier, like a fence or door, it is a crime.
Here in Germany, that's the case as well - but the distinction is that there has to be a barrier. A railroad track is not a barrier. An open tunnel entrance is not a barrier. TFA makes it seem like they only used openly accessible tunnels, and in one instance explicitly mentions that a closed gate meant they had to take another route.