MMO's have a disadvantage, they require a subscribtion.
Monthly fees are not a requirement.
Publishers need to add the option of hourly pricing; with daily, weekly and monthly caps. Structure it so the hardcore users fees cap at the going rate (~$15/mo), but make it possible for people to casually play a few hours a week at a buck an hour or so.
Give people the option of 'precharging' a sort of game-/publisher-specific debit card. Deduct costs from that as they play (instead of trying to charge them after the fact). When the debit card runs dry: they can recharge if they like. Have an option for a regular monthly recharge, but don't require it.
MMO's are also the most expensive type of game to develop
Perhaps true in certain instances, but pretty far from necessary. I'm certain that City of Heroes cost NCSoft less money to develop and launch than Valve has spent on Half-life2, for example.
These games can be made with titanic budgets, but by no means must they.
They are all try to grab at the same small audience.
When UO released, it didn't take any significant chunk of customers from M59. EQ didn't take any significant chunk of customers from UO. AC, AO, DAoC, et al -- they didn't steal customers from anyone else.
There is no reason to assume these games are fighting over the same customers. That sort of situation has not been born out by the data. These games attract their own audiences -- mostly made up of people who just weren't happy with any of the other offerings.
While the genre may run into a barrier at some point (particularly if they continue to insist on monthly fees), it isn't there yet.
There are going to be alot more that will get canceled or not last long after release.
Most games never make it. In the persistent world gaming niche, hyping games still well in development is even more egregiously done than anywhere else in gaming. Seeing more and more cancellations is inevitable. The cancelling of UO2, Hero's Journey, and MEO (the first time), was not indicative of any sort of audience cap or uncertainty in the genre. It was just a couple hyped worlds that got canned for various reasons. It was only indicative of game development being a long and difficult process that not many projects survive through.
Look at the games we're talking about here: Warhammer Online, and TFLO -- both projected to be somewhere around 18 months late if financed through completion. Cancelling a project that's a year and a half behind doesn't sound to me like the market dried up. It sounds to me like the momentum fell apart months ago, and they're cutting their losses.
Mythica might well have been on-time, but MS doesn't invest like NCSoft does. It spends big on everything, and it only needed one monolithic persistent world game -- and McQuaid and co draw more press, more fan-base, and more investor confidence.
The speculation is that they're going for several gig of flash ram instead of a hard drive.
The idea is to get away from moving parts that keep costs up. Flash memory has just about all the desireable features of a disk - except rewrite lifespan. Flash is faster and follows semiconductor economies of scale (gets cheaper, like chips; not bigger like discs). It just can't be used for swap space and you can count the number of titles that use it for that on one hand. (the frequent rewrites of swap usage would burn through flash memory so fast consumers would sue)
But there's no reason they can't have the huge save games, custom soundtracks and downloadable content.
And if they allow the neXtBox to access songs/video from a network share/feed, I'll be its number 1 fan even without backwards compat.
Hell, no other the only other 'under the tv' console had backwards compat, and they did fine. Backwards compat would kick ass, but I sincerely doubt it's a deal-breaker for a significant portion of gamers. I mean... it's not like the XBox itself was backwards compatible with anything.
I wasn't picking on levelling, I was picking on the earlier post in the thread suggesting that treadmills were required for MMORPGs.
I'm just suggesting there are other ways to do it. Some people love EQ, and that's great. But alot of people don't -- in fact most people who actually got as far as buying EQ didn't stay past the first month. So there's no reason to assume that what worked for EQ is the way things have to be. As I recall original UO was about as different from EQ as it could be -- and it was pretty darn popular too (until it was mismanaged into the ground).
Your basic precept, at least in my opinion, is that leveling was bad and an unneeded and an unnecessary arbitrary constraint and that 'pure content' should replace it.
Slight adjustment to that: the core of my posts was meant to convey that all persistent worlds do not have to confrom to the designs that have been used in the past. (treadmill-based levelling)
I think replacing the treadmill with pure content can indeed create a game that will find its own market, and potentially a larger market than Yet-Another-EQ-Clone. Mostly because the mechanics of the treadmill are not conducive to retaining casual players.
Waaaay back at the top of this thread, was the post that suggested that all MMOs were necessarily treadmills, and that stratifying the playerbase was necessary. While that may be true for a subset of persistent worlds - I take issue with the assumption of 'this is the way it has to be, because this is the way it has always been'. Personally I don't care too much for treadmill worlds, but I do recognize that many people do like them.
What I'm suggesting is that there is also a market for a different type of game. One that is prefaced on bringing players together and engaging them, rather than sorting them out and keeping them busy with 'winning the prize'.
In my opinion a pure content game can't succeed, at least not on the level of EQ.
Well, when a pure content game comes out - we'll have a reference to argue the point. In the meantime, I'm happy to agree to disagree.
You get missions to go out and beat up 15 thugs. When you move through a warehouse there is a certain degree of staggering out the enemies to create a 'grind' before you get to the boss
I think you're abstracting gameplay a bit too far by calling that a 'grind'. We don't want to provide just a choose-your-own-adventure book after all. In my opinion, it only becomes a 'grind' when the path to progression lacks context.
Thugs in a warehouse protecting the boss, while that isn't sweeping dramatic tension, it's a bit more context than yet another repop. If your goal is to defeat the boss, and you don't have to 'level' off X number of thug pops before you can defeat him - then I think that's a great step forward.
Hell, if the thugs could be defeated or avoided by clever play that leverages the context and not just straight combat - that's even better. (E.g. bribing mercenaries to walk away, threatening crooked cops, promising junkies a smooth ride, distracting guard dogs with a scooby snack, sneaking through shadows, hacking security systems, etc)
Because pure content games naturally constrict your progression...
How is it that pure content game constricts progression?
So we are at an impasse. It's at this point that I make a reference to the Princess Bride's duel of wits, and we duck out of the economic side of the discussion.
Having read the entirety of your comment, I went ahead and deleted the response in progress that I'd had. We're going to just have to politely agree to disagree on the economic viability side.
Feel free to disregard my positions as opinion; it won't bother me. But those numbers do not sound even remotely correct to me. Until I read their context so I can point out where I believe they've gone wrong and why, or a second source and its analysis weighs in - it's really not worth further discussion.
I can't well convince you of anything, because you have a set of numbers from industry types that runs counter to what I'm saying, and I'm just some pseudonymous/.'er. And you can't well convince me of anything, because I haven't seen the full context of their assumptions and figures, and all my professional experience with turneky networked software solutions tells me they're wrong.... so how about that weather?
Yeah, but it's also inflammatory and does nothing to progress a dialogue. Only those in denial of the truth find it inflammatory. It's not a comment that says "EQ's a bad game", or "those playing EQ are bad people". All the statement does is state that EQ is not played for the story. Tetris isn't played for the story either - and it's a hell of a game.
It was that your statements that a game could be pure content without leveling (at least in some form) is false. Whoa now - it's a bit early to call that assertion false, particularly since no-one has tested it. You could say that it's just my opinion, and that it's totally unproven - but to say it's false outright is a bit dismissive. I'd go so far as to call that statement inflammatory. That said, my contention that a completely level-free game is possible isn't really related to my suggestion that new games shouldn't stick to treadmills just because that works for EQ-style games.
EQ is non-linear. Overall you are not forced to go from Zone A to Zone B to Zone C. I beg to differ. Whereas there may be some minor choices in involved in choosing hunting areas - just about every person plays through the same zones at the same levels. There is a 'best' spawn for a particular level, and hunting anywhere else is discouraged by the mechanics. (Travel time, organizational time of finding a group or filling open spots, additional risk by not having anyone near by to bail you out, etc)
You can't take on the big Turtle Boss until you first defeat the big Goomba Boss.
Yet SMB doesn't require you to jump on the same goomba 80 times before you can defeat the big goomba boss. If you can get through the level without squashing a single goomba minion, you can still fight and defeat the boss.
I think it is more an issue of balance than in having it occur at all.
I absolutely agree with that. If such instances are balanced and don't make up the entire game, it can be done reasonably.
Your objection is that with weak storylines the main goal is to level and the storyline is only an afterthought Absolutely. Keep in mind I'm not saying that it isn't a valid game type. I'm suggesting there are other ways to design persistent world games, and developers shouldn't feel constrained to keeping their designs all in the same vein.
However, this is notoriously tricky to do and rarely draws the same audience as a more traditional 'winning the prize' storyline It doesn't have to draw the same audience, that's the thing. There's a different audience out there. The problem in this genre is that we're overfishing one stream - within eyeshot of the lake.
Look at the movies and see how many of them are about reaching and winning some objective
Levels aren't 'objectives' the way that 'defeating the Empire' or 'winning the girl' is. The analogues to those objectives in a game world would be: 'defeating the empire' or 'winning the girl', not 'grinding the death star until I hit 25 and can do Dantooine', or 'saving the girl -- so I can can get this sweet +4 crossbow!'.
I think it's dangerous to use too large a brush when painting these situations.
I didn't mean to label people 'EQ player' or 'CoH player' -- I perhaps chose bad wording. I was just trying to point out that there are a subset of gamers who really are only looking for levels and loot. They 'get' EQ, but they don't 'get' CoH. The fact that many EQ players do 'get' CoH and have fun with it is indicative that there is a different audience out there, and aiming for it doesn't necessarily mean you're rejecting the players of all the existing games.
Considering the popularity of EQ I think you are looking at more than a 'niche'. Considering that 2/3-rds of those who were open-minded enough to buy EQ in stores, didn't subscribe after the first month -- I think EQ is still a niche. I think the potential
Really? Watch nearly any network television series. Assuming they even have an overall story arc that continues through the season you will still have a variety of 'filler' shows that have nothing to do with advancement of the character or promotion of the storyline.
Are you honestly suggesting that the non-big-conspiracy-plot episodes of X-Files are equivalent to camping a static spawn in Everquest?
A tangential episode may not progress the overall story arc - but it has a story and progression of its own. Mulder isn't just spawn camping El Chupacabra until the Smoking Man is ready to kick off the next step of a sinister plot.
He's presented with a smaller, perhaps self-contained or mini-arc mystery that he has to work through. People watch week-to-week. If a series actually employed 'filler' on par with EQ, it'd fail in a heartbeat. If 'filler' episodes of ER weren't engaging, no-one would care who is HIV positive, or has a brain tumor.
The lack of a central story arc is also fine -- provided that each episode is entertaining and the dramatic context is existent.
Online games likewise need to keep people playing in order to survive
Absolutely true. The incorrect assumption there, is that they need to keep the same people playing without any further development cost - and that if a hardcore subset 'finishes' before the next content expansion is available, everyone will quit.
I also don't buy into your pessimistic view of the profit margins of a persistent world game.
they need methods to make players continue to remain in the game
The content should do that. Providing them a string of slightly larger foozles to whack with slightly larger sticks unnecessarily limits your audience. It's more counterproductive than offering an achievable 'end'.
That won't turn a profit
Yes, your example is not fiscally sound. The solution there is not to spend $20m and not have a target of 400k copies. The solution is to spend $6-8m and have a break-even at somewhere around 200k copies. City of Heroes reportedly cost in the $8m range, and has sold very well to date. Though I cannot find exact unit numbers, the fact that it's been at NPD's number 1 spot for PC game sales in the US for the last 2 months bespeaks a genuine hit. (200k copies is not an unreasonable estimate for what its total run will be)
or cover the costs of other games that are partially completed before being cancelled
Come on now, these 'other games' should have their own theoretical $20m budgets. If you're going to suggest part of the revenue pie from one project has to float others - then you have to be honest about the cost. If there is more than 1 game in development to float, then it doesn't actually cost $20m to make one of these games -- and one game being unable to support the development of several isn't really indicative of its economic viability.
What it is saying, however, is that your idea of simply letting people proceed through the content at a breakneck pace does not work for an MMO. And once again, you're assuming the entirety of the audience, or at least the fiscally significant portion, does indeed go through content at a breakneck pace.
You are ignoring that there is a large audience of gamers that simply does not have the time, nor the desire to spend 6 hours a day gaming, let alone with a single game. I'm saying the much larger audience will be consuming content at somewhere around 6 hours a week.
You are also ignoring that the mechanics of treadmill design disincentives new players. A treadmill game has to sell a ton of copies out of the gate, because the level stratification of players effectively alienates late-comers.
All good episodic content provides suitable hooks to let late-comers get up to speed fairly quickly, and have enough context to enjoy even a single episode -- even if it means they 'miss out' on old cont
I think it's optimistic to call the storyline of Everquest 'non-linear'. I think 'non-existent' would be more fair. I think equating the position within a storyline or set of levels of SMB, to a set of numbers associated with an EQ character is a mistake.
It is precisely EQ's lack of context given to its gameplay that is the problem. It isn't 'levelling' per se, it's that true progression in EQ requires takes place outside of any sort of story context.
In a single player RPG, character progression and story progression are fairly neck-and-neck. You level as a matter of course while experiencing the world. You dont experience some story, then go camp gnolls until you're ready for the next bit.
In treadmill games, the context to progression is nonexistant, or too far behind character progression. Everquest requires repetition outside of the progressive context of the story, in order to unlock the next chapter.
The treadmill accusation isn't an indictment of levelling overall - because one could easily run into the same problems in a skill-based system. But rather a charge against levelling for the sake of levelling -- power gain for the sake of power gain.
The idea that a tangible reward at the end of play is required is another point of departure between us. My contention is that if the journey is good, the total enjoyment is enough of a reward. A player doesn't have to be given a pile of fake money or a bigger sword to validate the adventure of killing the dragon. He needs something to ensure that he's capable of meeting the next challenge - but the desire should be to meet the new challenge - not to get a widget that makes the current challenge easier.
As you note, doing levelling 'right', where it is a byproduct of having fun doing quests is expensive - but that's where persistent worlds are going. Blizzard is aiming to do exactly that with World of Warcraft, and for the most part City of Heroes offers that today. Actually, CoH is something akin to what I'm advocating. It has no loot to speak of - and levels are largely a by product of going through the story. The EQ crowd isn't very fond of CoH -- because they burn through the content very fast, and there isn't any 'loot'. But the game has pulled in a very respectable number of subscriptions thus far - particularly for a nearly unmarketed game.
Now there's certainly a viable niche for games that have no predefined story. Free-form sandbox games closer to UO, and The Sims Online. But treadmills and 'loot' have even less of a place in such games.
Your general population would burn through that content much too quickly for your MMO to have any legs at all
No, your hardcore population would burn through that in no time. But they'll burn through your treadmill in (comparatively) no time as well. The only benefit to a treadmill is that it is easy to tune to slow people down. Actual content -- well that has to be fun, and well crafted. The negatives of treadmills -- that could fill a book.
The rub is that the casual market, the people who have rejected the treadmill, is thus far undefined. Unfortunately every game to this point has either exposed casual players as victims in a harsh PvP environment, been a technical disaster, alienated them with treadmills, or some combination of the three.
Repetitive content is a sure thing to capture a known crowd -- but that doesn't make it a must. What it does, unfortunately, is make it a must for corporate funding. SOE, EA, and Vivendi won't very well sink $10m+ into an MMO that's aiming for an unproven market. Particularly not after The Sims Online.
But no other form of entertainment dares to subject their consumers to repetitive content just to slow them down. What author pads a novel with repetitive slag, just to ensure that speed readers don't finish in a day? What TV series pads its DVDs with timesinks to ensure that hardcore fans can't watch an entire season in a night? Is it really so awful if a subset of your fans finish?
The hardcore, obsessive, audience is not the audience; It is an audience. This subset of the potential audience should never be confused for the entirety of that potential audience.
No other genre outside of RPGs seems to need levelling treadmills to engage players.
They all have to use this thing called 'content' to keep players involved with their game.
Gameplay for Super Mario Brothers doesn't revolve around getting progressively bigger in order to jump onto progressively larger mushroom men. Grand Theft Auto tends to keep players engaged without giving Tommy Vercetti successively more armor and health so he can defeat successively stronger bad guys.
Power progression is fine, to an extent. But it is by no means a reasonable design for the entirety of gameplay. The Strategy genres have done well by unlocking additional units, and powers over time -- but they don't make players grind a map 10 to 20 times to unlock the next unit.
Sure, actual content is much more difficult to create, and there's a very definite end to it. But there's a definite end to the treadmill too. The only difference between the two, is that the treadmill can be slowed down so that you have to experience their distinct lack of content over and over and over again. It's very hard to slow down progression through actual content.
Power progression is dismissable in single player RPGs - but in an MMO it creates too many problems to be considered a harmless tradition.
I'm going off the numbers upthread, i never challenged those assumptions. They're entirely in the same ballpark as what you're stating.
My only comment on the numbers you just reiterated is: for games for which MS acted as publisher and distributor (1st and 2nd party games) even $10 revenue per box sounds awfully low. And given the number of units sold, a statistically significant number have been first and second party titles, enough to bring up the average.
Therefore I figure that a straight average of $7.50 revenue per game is a perfectly reasonably pessimistic estimate. Figuring that against 4 titles per Xbox per year -- it should take only 4 years for MS to break even. Sure there'll be falloff in XBox revenue as it ages and the next generation comes around (and XBoxs bought last year may never break even) - which is why I find the MS estimate of $900m in losses after 5 years to be perfectly reasonable.
lets go back to the alegory of the den Is that related to Plato's Allegory of the Cave?;) I'll assume its the same; you can correct me if I'm wrong in that.
There are going to be people whose primary experience is through the neural tap, and who only ever see the incomplete approximations that computers can produce. Primary experience is one thing, 'only ever' is quite another. If a person were to be born and raised with a nueral tap presenting an 'incomplete' version of reality, then arguably they would be fine with their 'incomplete' reality. That however would be a minor point, as without stimulation of the physical eyes, the retina simply won't attach to the optic nerve. People who 'grow up' with a neural tap would be blind if they were unplugged.
If a person does grow up and learn to see with their eyes, then even if it isn't the primary method of sensation, the incomplete reality will still be subject to the uncanny valley.
Those growing up knowing/only/ the feed from their neural tap might well perfectly accept their incomplete reality. Arguably, hardware revisions that increase resolution and accuracy would also be acceptable to them. In a nutshell, that's how perfectly normal children go through the process of learning to see: a slow refinement of their visual resolution. I think it's only the step backwards in delivery that causes a problem.
Just look what Television has done to the art of communication... I think it may be a bit early to wade into this side of the pool. I believe the jury on ADD and entertainment is still out.
I'm often called on cast a technical eye on a report or communication that was prepared by a layman. Inevitably that document includes an comment or extrapolation that, while in everyday experience is accurate, it only holds under a controlled set of circumstances. I'm missing the relevance here. It seems as if you are simply restating that laymen are incompletely trained. Isn't that the definition of being a layperson? And how does this relate to the human revulsion toward the almost-real?
One still has to render a photorealistic 'image' to transmit, even assuming neural taps are going to happen that soon. And rendering realism takes alot of horsepower. Maybe we'll have it in 20-30 years, I dunno. I'm not one of the people who is saying we can't achieve a perfect facsimile of reality. I honestly don't know; but there is more than one researcher out there who believes it. I was simply expressing their opinion because they've studied it for years, and I haven't, so I figured they deserved a bit of a mention.
However, until we do achieve a perfect facsimile of reality (regardless of whether its impossible or not), the author of the article has a good point. Our attempts at realism are producing images that create an unsettling feeling that we don't have watching a Disney flick.
The last numbers I saw had total game sales pegged at about 4 game sales per year per Xbox sold. Therefore it'd only take them just over 3 years to get to 'break even', assuming a loss of $100 per console (which is a little high) and revenue of $7.50 per game (which is a little low - particularly because it ignores profits as publisher for first and second party games: given the success of their first/party lineup, that's a not-insignificant amount of dough, enough to bump the average)
The home and entertainment division reports huge losses for tax purposes. Everything they buy or dev that fails to produce a product gets written off as a 'loss' even though they retain the tech. And remember, it's much more than just the XBox.
That big number around the top of the thread ($2.3B) includes WebTV losses, cable set-top development losses, a pvr deal written off as a loss, and all the PC and Console games they've sacked (which includes a bunch of losses for this seasons sports games and double-digit millions on Mythica and TFLO alone)
Whittle it down to the truth, and that $900m estimate of losses on XBox1 after 5 years starts to look like a pretty darn accurate guess.
But I'm probably just nitpicking semantics.... No, that's actually the whole point of the Uncanny Valley.
To take the red pants, red shirt analogy: The point is: we're trying to get the pants ever closer to matching the shirt, but it's proving really difficult to do. As we get closer and closer to matching, we're finding out that human perception has a finer resolution than we previously though. And the closer the shirt and pants get to matching, the more distracting it becomes, and the more the detail and not the whole becomes the focus of our attention.
The previous poster was trying to suggest that as technology improves, we will indeed be able to make the pants match the shirt perfectly, and there will be no divide.
Many people tend to doubt that. Most feel we're working with two entirely different fabrics, and human perception is so good that exact matching just isn't possible. Therefore, they feel it's better to focus on complementary style.
Neither of these things require a centralized service and both can be run by publishers.
And yet no PS2 game offers anything of the sort. It can be done - but it hasn't. They haven't even tried.
In the meantime, the service means alot to me, the gamer - and I'm willing to pay for it. I don't particularly care who's delivering cheat-free gaming. All that matters is that it only exists on one platform today, that platform has games I want to play, and the price for the service is extremely reasonable.
If they implemented an open standandard (or even a closed standard like Oscar) to provide between-game communication they could provide decentralized presence and allow out-of-game invites.
Once again, sure, it's something publishers could do - but they don't. Hell, how many PC games have shipped with native voicecomm support? Someone could do it - but they don't. In the meantime, I'm playing with voicecomm in every title by default. I'm not firing up firetalk or teamspeak or whatever 3rd party product fills that gaping hole in the PC multiplayer experience today.
Again, I don't care who is providing the service. There's a platform that delivers it as a default feature for a reasonable price. The PS2 provides voicecomm as a default and should be commended (over PC internet gaming) for it. With some effort by Sony it could easily be just about as good. But it isn't.
I attacked the quality factor, but none of those need to be exclusive to XBox.
Of course they needn't be exclusive. But MS is the only one who has sacked-up and provided gamers with internet play the way it should be. For that, I gladly pay them $50 per year. They have their online shit together more than any other platform - period; and they deserve to be rewarded and acknowledged for that.
The one aspect of XBL that you can reasonably gripe about - is those high performance servers. MS did promise it, and at least one of the early titles did deliver MS-hosted servers with higher player-counts. (Unreal championship notably had dedicated servers allowing 32 player matches).
Thing is: this is the one promised feature of XBL that MS left up to the individual publishers to follow through on. And none of them have opted to implement it.
So when a first-party game doesn't have MS-hosted dedicated servers, there isn't really much of an excuse -- MS did say one thing and fail to deliver on it consistantly across its titles.
But that becomes a fairly minor quibble when the rest of the service is weighed against the cost. The rest of the system is still worth $50 to me - because it exists, and it works, the right way, right now.
With the PS2 or PC you get the privilege of playing on people's laggy analog modems - along with poorly secured protocols that can, and have been, repeatedly hacked. Sure PC internet gaming can have good servers and good connections -- but it comes with a PITA I don't have to deal with.
Consoles should have seperate servers because a console can ensure the integrity of the experience. I get no HPBs, headshot scripts, wallhacks when I play counterstrike on XBL.
I can get out-of-game invites that don't cause compatability problems or suck performance like Gamespy does.
I get voice comm in every title. Then there's a myriad of new and smaller bells and whistles it's got - but those weren't there when I made my purchasing decision, and frankly - they're insignificant compared to the big 3 of quality/security, out-of-game invites, and voice comm.
That's the quality of service I pay $50 a year for. If you're going to slam the service, apparently without ever having tried it, or knowing much about it, you could at least get the numbers accurate.
This writer seems to have misguided his disappointment with big-money-controlled game publishing. The Golden Age of Gaming he remembers so well has largely been gone for more than a decade.
It didn't disappear when console-centric ports started showing up. It disappeared when big publishers started making big money, started becoming risk-averse, and started pushing the glitz envelope to sell the same-old-game.
With the consoles getting an increasing share of publisher attention, PC Gaming is going to be forced to adapt to its strong suit: independent games, innovation, and user modifications.
If you ask me, this is a Good Thing and is going to usher in a new golden age of gaming: One where the PC market returns to its small-team, innovative roots, as the me-too game-publishing sticks to the console arena.
"Hi-res" Palm screens are a mere 300x300 pixels. This is not an extremely pricey screen Cost is cost. if I could opt for a 200x120 screen like my Nex, I'm sure that'd save considerable money for the manufacturer, and battery life for me. (considering backlight)
At the same time, do you really want to put your your 300x300 on a data object with theoretical 2x3" dimensions? Maybe you would, I dunno. I'm just looking at my Nex and thinking it'd be too small. Then again, I'm not a PDA kinda guy in the first place, so you'd know better than me.
And I didn't mean that the stylus and touch screen would make a significant cost difference themselves - but rather the added CPU demands for processing scribble-recognition and running worthwhile PDA apps. It'd be much higher than something that just needs to interpret network requests for data storage/retrieval run data to the small display and process input from a couple buttons wheels or pads.
Again, my reason for wanting to seperate data and PDA is to keep the cost and size of the data object as small as possible - since I have no intention of acquiring PDA functionality.
Whereas you're looking for a PDA interface primarily, which pretty much means you're going to have plenty of room behind a suitable PDA screen for the data object too.
Which is why I agreed to disagree and suggested room for 2 'types' of storage objects. Hell you could throw in a third that was an outright super convergence device if it was marketable. I just want the wireless data standard and the option to buy a minimalist product. No need to try to make the standard dictate a one-size-fits-all implementation.
As for power, you're going to lose most of it in your Bluetooth connection and micro hard drive Well... power considerations is why I'd opt for a flash-based storage solution myself. Though I did not know bluetooth was powerhungry -- that's unfortunate.
Your phone still needs an antenna. Sorry if that wasn't clear - but that was intended to be included in my capitulation to your (admittedly better) idea of putting the fundamentals of wireless internet/phone connectivity into the data object. My phone's smaller than my Nex, so I figured that form factor would be sufficient for an antennae.
The theoretical 'phone' add on in my mind, would just be a specialized interface for dialing, speaker, mic and voice codec. Which is why I figure it could fit in a contemporary hands-free set. It could always use the "bigger than my phone's" 200x120 screen on the data object for a visual interface, or just use voice dialing outright.
The camera/mp3 player point was only to contrast against your example 'convergence device' (DVD/CD/VCD player) which, imo, isn't.
The only things we don't seem to agree on needing to stay seperate due core interface differences is perhaps PDA and phone. But that's not really pertinent to the discussion at this point either, so let's skip it.
An LCD screen on the data object is one thing. Making the data object large enough to support a worthwhile PDA screen/interface is quite another. Let alone the costs for the touch-screen and stylus, and costs for the processing/battery power to run an OS and applications.
I don't imagine a wireless data device by itself would be any larger than my current NexIIe. It's pretty big as MP3 players go - but that doesn't mean I'd want to try to do PDA apps on it.
not to mention that the camera would probably be as big as a ~3" long highlighter (they're already this small in USB keychain variety, I just want remote storage to my data object), the music player could be even smaller (about the size of the 'remotes' that currently exist in MP3 players) and the phone wouldn't be much bigger than the music player (if it wasn't just crammed into a headset altogether).
So we're talking about carrying around the rough equivalent of a Nex, and 3, 3" long highlighters. I don't think that's asking for too much. particularly not when the data object can be left in a briefcase, coat pocket, jansport, etc.
How about we just agree that the cross platform wireless data transmission format is the most important thing? Then you can have a compliant data object+PDA, and i'll just get the compliant data object:)
When the difference in quality is largely imperceptible while the difference in cost is 2 to 300% - I can think of better places.
Particularly when that difference in cost for largely imperceptible performance can cover a pretty swanky vacation, and when the depreciation on that top 2% performance is so extreme.
Your example isn't quite what most consider a convergence device. It's performing essentially the same operations through slightly different media. It plays audio, or it plays audio and video.
I'm talking more about devices that try to take functionality that is dissimilar at its core: say talking on the phone, and taking pictures.
A single-purpose DVD player interface looks and functions much like a single-purpose CD player interface. The hardware requirements for both are quite similar. laser, decoders, spindle, etc. Combining them is natural.
Now, I challenge you to find a stand-alone camera that has an interface anything like a standalone phone. They're completely dissimilar. They work on dissimilar media, with dissimilar interfaces. Combining them is most unnatural.
My judgement of convergence devices being crap is based on rolling dissimilar interfaces together. Where we wind up with phones whose screens make them too narrow to be comfortable PDAs, or too wide to be comfortable phones. We get camera's that have to chew up LCD time when taking pictures, because there is no viewfinder or optical zoom. We get crappy output options. (try finding camera phones with decent expansion slot options, let alone USB connectors)
Your theoretical device would be fine IMO, so long as it doesn't attempt to make itself into a phone or PDA form-factor/interface by default. Let it be a simple sleek featureless obelisk (except for connectivity ports or removable media bays) - kept in your pocket.
Then, keep the screen and stylus (and all that processing, ROM, etc) off of it, and roll that into a wireless add-on for your internet/bluetooth enabled HD. Then add a wireless phone unit (probably not much bigger than a headset anymore) and we'd be right on the same page.
Then when OLED screens come out, or bigger/better/faster mobile processor/palmOS comes out - it's easier and cheaper to upgrade your PDA functionality.
No messing around with moving data, no lugging around redundant capability, no being without your phone because your PDA screen died/faded/got smashed, and no losing juice to functionality you're not using at the time.
The thrust of my point is: 1. Keep the data seperate from the device 2. Keep devices with dissimilar interfaces the hell away from each other.
You clearly would rather have the data storage be a PDA at it's core. I would like to abstract that functionality out and make the data object be even smaller, more durable, and more abstracted from capability.
I'd rather see a standard for wireless personal data network access and portable storage -- and let individual devices miniaturize and specialize.
E.g. I don't want a camera phone with a bad camera interface, crappy resolution, limited features, tiny memory and nonexistant output choices.
Instead I'd like to be able to buy a wireless data storage device: HD, Flash, Removable media, whatever - it doesn't matter. Just an independent device that stores data and can wirelessly transmit it to devices that need it over a common protocol (bluetooth would be fine).
Then I can buy a phone that grabs my contact list, ringtones and games from there. No more having content locked to a service provider or a device. Then I can buy a PDA which uses the portable storage for apps, data, contact list, etc. Then I can buy an MP3 player, a digital camera, etc, etc.
I don't need my screen and battery life being sucked out of my phone when I'm just listening to MP3s. I don't need PDA processing burning through my battery when I just want to use the phone. I don't need a device which tries to wrap one bad interface around a half dozen sepcialized functions.
Furthermore, I want to be able to take my mp3 player or my phone into the gym, or the corporate offices of my clients, while leaving the camera functionality in the car so I don't violate the camera bans.
Not to mention the benefit of finally being free of the nonportability of data. No more duplicating contact lists to new devices. No more shuffling CF cards between the MP3 player, the camera, and the PDA. No more waiting for the right device to show up with the right storage solution.
And those would be... uh... all those... uh... online fantasy titles like...uh... Brad McQuaid & Sigil Studios' Vanguard... for the PC of course. This, following the cancellation of Mythica, and the sale of Asheron's Call's hosting and administration back to Turbine Entertainment.
My guess is that TFLO was going to get pushed back again - and what's the point of releasing a massmog for the XBox in mid 2005 - when the neXtBox is going to hit at xmas05?
This likely indicates they're going to back off their push to get Japanese adoption for the current XBox. Instead, I expect them to try to launch the neXtBox with a Japanese 'must have' from Level 5. I never quite understood the point in pushing so hard for adoption this late in the generation anyway.
I'd also be surprised if the neXtBox didn't have a massmog title very early in its life.
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Monthly fees are not a requirement.
Publishers need to add the option of hourly pricing; with daily, weekly and monthly caps. Structure it so the hardcore users fees cap at the going rate (~$15/mo), but make it possible for people to casually play a few hours a week at a buck an hour or so.
Give people the option of 'precharging' a sort of game-/publisher-specific debit card. Deduct costs from that as they play (instead of trying to charge them after the fact). When the debit card runs dry: they can recharge if they like. Have an option for a regular monthly recharge, but don't require it.
Perhaps true in certain instances, but pretty far from necessary. I'm certain that City of Heroes cost NCSoft less money to develop and launch than Valve has spent on Half-life2, for example.
These games can be made with titanic budgets, but by no means must they.
When UO released, it didn't take any significant chunk of customers from M59. EQ didn't take any significant chunk of customers from UO. AC, AO, DAoC, et al -- they didn't steal customers from anyone else.
There is no reason to assume these games are fighting over the same customers. That sort of situation has not been born out by the data. These games attract their own audiences -- mostly made up of people who just weren't happy with any of the other offerings.
While the genre may run into a barrier at some point (particularly if they continue to insist on monthly fees), it isn't there yet.
Most games never make it. In the persistent world gaming niche, hyping games still well in development is even more egregiously done than anywhere else in gaming. Seeing more and more cancellations is inevitable. The cancelling of UO2, Hero's Journey, and MEO (the first time), was not indicative of any sort of audience cap or uncertainty in the genre. It was just a couple hyped worlds that got canned for various reasons. It was only indicative of game development being a long and difficult process that not many projects survive through.
Look at the games we're talking about here: Warhammer Online, and TFLO -- both projected to be somewhere around 18 months late if financed through completion. Cancelling a project that's a year and a half behind doesn't sound to me like the market dried up. It sounds to me like the momentum fell apart months ago, and they're cutting their losses.
Mythica might well have been on-time, but MS doesn't invest like NCSoft does. It spends big on everything, and it only needed one monolithic persistent world game -- and McQuaid and co draw more press, more fan-base, and more investor confidence.
The speculation is that they're going for several gig of flash ram instead of a hard drive.
The idea is to get away from moving parts that keep costs up. Flash memory has just about all the desireable features of a disk - except rewrite lifespan. Flash is faster and follows semiconductor economies of scale (gets cheaper, like chips; not bigger like discs). It just can't be used for swap space and you can count the number of titles that use it for that on one hand.
(the frequent rewrites of swap usage would burn through flash memory so fast consumers would sue)
But there's no reason they can't have the huge save games, custom soundtracks and downloadable content.
And if they allow the neXtBox to access songs/video from a network share/feed, I'll be its number 1 fan even without backwards compat.
Hell, no other the only other 'under the tv' console had backwards compat, and they did fine. Backwards compat would kick ass, but I sincerely doubt it's a deal-breaker for a significant portion of gamers. I mean... it's not like the XBox itself was backwards compatible with anything.
If it has the games, the gamers will follow.
I wasn't picking on levelling, I was picking on the earlier post in the thread suggesting that treadmills were required for MMORPGs.
I'm just suggesting there are other ways to do it. Some people love EQ, and that's great. But alot of people don't -- in fact most people who actually got as far as buying EQ didn't stay past the first month.
So there's no reason to assume that what worked for EQ is the way things have to be.
As I recall original UO was about as different from EQ as it could be -- and it was pretty darn popular too (until it was mismanaged into the ground).
Your basic precept, at least in my opinion, is that leveling was bad and an unneeded and an unnecessary arbitrary constraint and that 'pure content' should replace it.
Slight adjustment to that: the core of my posts was meant to convey that all persistent worlds do not have to confrom to the designs that have been used in the past. (treadmill-based levelling)
I think replacing the treadmill with pure content can indeed create a game that will find its own market, and potentially a larger market than Yet-Another-EQ-Clone. Mostly because the mechanics of the treadmill are not conducive to retaining casual players.
Waaaay back at the top of this thread, was the post that suggested that all MMOs were necessarily treadmills, and that stratifying the playerbase was necessary.
While that may be true for a subset of persistent worlds - I take issue with the assumption of 'this is the way it has to be, because this is the way it has always been'. Personally I don't care too much for treadmill worlds, but I do recognize that many people do like them.
What I'm suggesting is that there is also a market for a different type of game. One that is prefaced on bringing players together and engaging them, rather than sorting them out and keeping them busy with 'winning the prize'.
In my opinion a pure content game can't succeed, at least not on the level of EQ.
Well, when a pure content game comes out - we'll have a reference to argue the point. In the meantime, I'm happy to agree to disagree.
You get missions to go out and beat up 15 thugs. When you move through a warehouse there is a certain degree of staggering out the enemies to create a 'grind' before you get to the boss
I think you're abstracting gameplay a bit too far by calling that a 'grind'. We don't want to provide just a choose-your-own-adventure book after all. In my opinion, it only becomes a 'grind' when the path to progression lacks context.
Thugs in a warehouse protecting the boss, while that isn't sweeping dramatic tension, it's a bit more context than yet another repop. If your goal is to defeat the boss, and you don't have to 'level' off X number of thug pops before you can defeat him - then I think that's a great step forward.
Hell, if the thugs could be defeated or avoided by clever play that leverages the context and not just straight combat - that's even better.
(E.g. bribing mercenaries to walk away, threatening crooked cops, promising junkies a smooth ride, distracting guard dogs with a scooby snack, sneaking through shadows, hacking security systems, etc)
Because pure content games naturally constrict your progression...
How is it that pure content game constricts progression?
Exactly.
So we are at an impasse.
It's at this point that I make a reference to the Princess Bride's duel of wits, and we duck out of the economic side of the discussion.
Having read the entirety of your comment, I went ahead and deleted the response in progress that I'd had. We're going to just have to politely agree to disagree on the economic viability side.
/.'er. And you can't well convince me of anything, because I haven't seen the full context of their assumptions and figures, and all my professional experience with turneky networked software solutions tells me they're wrong. ... so how about that weather?
Feel free to disregard my positions as opinion; it won't bother me. But those numbers do not sound even remotely correct to me. Until I read their context so I can point out where I believe they've gone wrong and why, or a second source and its analysis weighs in - it's really not worth further discussion.
I can't well convince you of anything, because you have a set of numbers from industry types that runs counter to what I'm saying, and I'm just some pseudonymous
Yeah, but it's also inflammatory and does nothing to progress a dialogue.
Only those in denial of the truth find it inflammatory. It's not a comment that says "EQ's a bad game", or "those playing EQ are bad people". All the statement does is state that EQ is not played for the story. Tetris isn't played for the story either - and it's a hell of a game.
It was that your statements that a game could be pure content without leveling (at least in some form) is false.
Whoa now - it's a bit early to call that assertion false, particularly since no-one has tested it. You could say that it's just my opinion, and that it's totally unproven - but to say it's false outright is a bit dismissive. I'd go so far as to call that statement inflammatory. That said, my contention that a completely level-free game is possible isn't really related to my suggestion that new games shouldn't stick to treadmills just because that works for EQ-style games.
EQ is non-linear. Overall you are not forced to go from Zone A to Zone B to Zone C.
I beg to differ. Whereas there may be some minor choices in involved in choosing hunting areas - just about every person plays through the same zones at the same levels. There is a 'best' spawn for a particular level, and hunting anywhere else is discouraged by the mechanics. (Travel time, organizational time of finding a group or filling open spots, additional risk by not having anyone near by to bail you out, etc)
You can't take on the big Turtle Boss until you first defeat the big Goomba Boss.
Yet SMB doesn't require you to jump on the same goomba 80 times before you can defeat the big goomba boss. If you can get through the level without squashing a single goomba minion, you can still fight and defeat the boss.
I think it is more an issue of balance than in having it occur at all.
I absolutely agree with that. If such instances are balanced and don't make up the entire game, it can be done reasonably.
Your objection is that with weak storylines the main goal is to level and the storyline is only an afterthought
Absolutely. Keep in mind I'm not saying that it isn't a valid game type. I'm suggesting there are other ways to design persistent world games, and developers shouldn't feel constrained to keeping their designs all in the same vein.
However, this is notoriously tricky to do and rarely draws the same audience as a more traditional 'winning the prize' storyline
It doesn't have to draw the same audience, that's the thing. There's a different audience out there. The problem in this genre is that we're overfishing one stream - within eyeshot of the lake.
Look at the movies and see how many of them are about reaching and winning some objective
Levels aren't 'objectives' the way that 'defeating the Empire' or 'winning the girl' is. The analogues to those objectives in a game world would be: 'defeating the empire' or 'winning the girl', not 'grinding the death star until I hit 25 and can do Dantooine', or 'saving the girl -- so I can can get this sweet +4 crossbow!'.
I think it's dangerous to use too large a brush when painting these situations.
I didn't mean to label people 'EQ player' or 'CoH player' -- I perhaps chose bad wording. I was just trying to point out that there are a subset of gamers who really are only looking for levels and loot. They 'get' EQ, but they don't 'get' CoH. The fact that many EQ players do 'get' CoH and have fun with it is indicative that there is a different audience out there, and aiming for it doesn't necessarily mean you're rejecting the players of all the existing games.
Considering the popularity of EQ I think you are looking at more than a 'niche'.
Considering that 2/3-rds of those who were open-minded enough to buy EQ in stores, didn't subscribe after the first month -- I think EQ is still a niche. I think the potential
Really? Watch nearly any network television series. Assuming they even have an overall story arc that continues through the season you will still have a variety of 'filler' shows that have nothing to do with advancement of the character or promotion of the storyline.
Are you honestly suggesting that the non-big-conspiracy-plot episodes of X-Files are equivalent to camping a static spawn in Everquest?
A tangential episode may not progress the overall story arc - but it has a story and progression of its own. Mulder isn't just spawn camping El Chupacabra until the Smoking Man is ready to kick off the next step of a sinister plot.
He's presented with a smaller, perhaps self-contained or mini-arc mystery that he has to work through. People watch week-to-week. If a series actually employed 'filler' on par with EQ, it'd fail in a heartbeat. If 'filler' episodes of ER weren't engaging, no-one would care who is HIV positive, or has a brain tumor.
The lack of a central story arc is also fine -- provided that each episode is entertaining and the dramatic context is existent.
Online games likewise need to keep people playing in order to survive
Absolutely true. The incorrect assumption there, is that they need to keep the same people playing without any further development cost - and that if a hardcore subset 'finishes' before the next content expansion is available, everyone will quit.
I also don't buy into your pessimistic view of the profit margins of a persistent world game.
they need methods to make players continue to remain in the game
The content should do that. Providing them a string of slightly larger foozles to whack with slightly larger sticks unnecessarily limits your audience. It's more counterproductive than offering an achievable 'end'.
That won't turn a profit
Yes, your example is not fiscally sound. The solution there is not to spend $20m and not have a target of 400k copies. The solution is to spend $6-8m and have a break-even at somewhere around 200k copies. City of Heroes reportedly cost in the $8m range, and has sold very well to date. Though I cannot find exact unit numbers, the fact that it's been at NPD's number 1 spot for PC game sales in the US for the last 2 months bespeaks a genuine hit. (200k copies is not an unreasonable estimate for what its total run will be)
or cover the costs of other games that are partially completed before being cancelled
Come on now, these 'other games' should have their own theoretical $20m budgets. If you're going to suggest part of the revenue pie from one project has to float others - then you have to be honest about the cost. If there is more than 1 game in development to float, then it doesn't actually cost $20m to make one of these games -- and one game being unable to support the development of several isn't really indicative of its economic viability.
What it is saying, however, is that your idea of simply letting people proceed through the content at a breakneck pace does not work for an MMO.
And once again, you're assuming the entirety of the audience, or at least the fiscally significant portion, does indeed go through content at a breakneck pace.
You are ignoring that there is a large audience of gamers that simply does not have the time, nor the desire to spend 6 hours a day gaming, let alone with a single game. I'm saying the much larger audience will be consuming content at somewhere around 6 hours a week.
You are also ignoring that the mechanics of treadmill design disincentives new players. A treadmill game has to sell a ton of copies out of the gate, because the level stratification of players effectively alienates late-comers.
All good episodic content provides suitable hooks to let late-comers get up to speed fairly quickly, and have enough context to enjoy even a single episode -- even if it means they 'miss out' on old cont
I think it's optimistic to call the storyline of Everquest 'non-linear'. I think 'non-existent' would be more fair. I think equating the position within a storyline or set of levels of SMB, to a set of numbers associated with an EQ character is a mistake.
It is precisely EQ's lack of context given to its gameplay that is the problem. It isn't 'levelling' per se, it's that true progression in EQ requires takes place outside of any sort of story context.
In a single player RPG, character progression and story progression are fairly neck-and-neck. You level as a matter of course while experiencing the world. You dont experience some story, then go camp gnolls until you're ready for the next bit.
In treadmill games, the context to progression is nonexistant, or too far behind character progression. Everquest requires repetition outside of the progressive context of the story, in order to unlock the next chapter.
The treadmill accusation isn't an indictment of levelling overall - because one could easily run into the same problems in a skill-based system. But rather a charge against levelling for the sake of levelling -- power gain for the sake of power gain.
The idea that a tangible reward at the end of play is required is another point of departure between us. My contention is that if the journey is good, the total enjoyment is enough of a reward. A player doesn't have to be given a pile of fake money or a bigger sword to validate the adventure of killing the dragon. He needs something to ensure that he's capable of meeting the next challenge - but the desire should be to meet the new challenge - not to get a widget that makes the current challenge easier.
As you note, doing levelling 'right', where it is a byproduct of having fun doing quests is expensive - but that's where persistent worlds are going. Blizzard is aiming to do exactly that with World of Warcraft, and for the most part City of Heroes offers that today.
Actually, CoH is something akin to what I'm advocating. It has no loot to speak of - and levels are largely a by product of going through the story. The EQ crowd isn't very fond of CoH -- because they burn through the content very fast, and there isn't any 'loot'. But the game has pulled in a very respectable number of subscriptions thus far - particularly for a nearly unmarketed game.
Now there's certainly a viable niche for games that have no predefined story. Free-form sandbox games closer to UO, and The Sims Online. But treadmills and 'loot' have even less of a place in such games.
Your general population would burn through that content much too quickly for your MMO to have any legs at all
No, your hardcore population would burn through that in no time. But they'll burn through your treadmill in (comparatively) no time as well. The only benefit to a treadmill is that it is easy to tune to slow people down. Actual content -- well that has to be fun, and well crafted. The negatives of treadmills -- that could fill a book.
The rub is that the casual market, the people who have rejected the treadmill, is thus far undefined. Unfortunately every game to this point has either exposed casual players as victims in a harsh PvP environment, been a technical disaster, alienated them with treadmills, or some combination of the three.
Repetitive content is a sure thing to capture a known crowd -- but that doesn't make it a must. What it does, unfortunately, is make it a must for corporate funding. SOE, EA, and Vivendi won't very well sink $10m+ into an MMO that's aiming for an unproven market. Particularly not after The Sims Online.
But no other form of entertainment dares to subject their consumers to repetitive content just to slow them down. What author pads a novel with repetitive slag, just to ensure that speed readers don't finish in a day? What TV series pads its DVDs with timesinks to ensure that hardcore fans can't watch an entire season in a night? Is it really so awful if a subset of your fans finish?
The hardcore, obsessive, audience is not the audience; It is an audience. This subset of the potential audience should never be confused for the entirety of that potential audience.
No other genre outside of RPGs seems to need levelling treadmills to engage players.
They all have to use this thing called 'content' to keep players involved with their game.
Gameplay for Super Mario Brothers doesn't revolve around getting progressively bigger in order to jump onto progressively larger mushroom men. Grand Theft Auto tends to keep players engaged without giving Tommy Vercetti successively more armor and health so he can defeat successively stronger bad guys.
Power progression is fine, to an extent. But it is by no means a reasonable design for the entirety of gameplay. The Strategy genres have done well by unlocking additional units, and powers over time -- but they don't make players grind a map 10 to 20 times to unlock the next unit.
Sure, actual content is much more difficult to create, and there's a very definite end to it. But there's a definite end to the treadmill too. The only difference between the two, is that the treadmill can be slowed down so that you have to experience their distinct lack of content over and over and over again. It's very hard to slow down progression through actual content.
Power progression is dismissable in single player RPGs - but in an MMO it creates too many problems to be considered a harmless tradition.
I'm going off the numbers upthread, i never challenged those assumptions. They're entirely in the same ballpark as what you're stating.
My only comment on the numbers you just reiterated is: for games for which MS acted as publisher and distributor (1st and 2nd party games) even $10 revenue per box sounds awfully low.
And given the number of units sold, a statistically significant number have been first and second party titles, enough to bring up the average.
Therefore I figure that a straight average of $7.50 revenue per game is a perfectly reasonably pessimistic estimate.
Figuring that against 4 titles per Xbox per year -- it should take only 4 years for MS to break even. Sure there'll be falloff in XBox revenue as it ages and the next generation comes around (and XBoxs bought last year may never break even) - which is why I find the MS estimate of $900m in losses after 5 years to be perfectly reasonable.
lets go back to the alegory of the den ;)
/only/ the feed from their neural tap might well perfectly accept their incomplete reality. Arguably, hardware revisions that increase resolution and accuracy would also be acceptable to them. In a nutshell, that's how perfectly normal children go through the process of learning to see: a slow refinement of their visual resolution. I think it's only the step backwards in delivery that causes a problem.
Is that related to Plato's Allegory of the Cave?
I'll assume its the same; you can correct me if I'm wrong in that.
There are going to be people whose primary experience is through the neural tap, and who only ever see the incomplete approximations that computers can produce.
Primary experience is one thing, 'only ever' is quite another. If a person were to be born and raised with a nueral tap presenting an 'incomplete' version of reality, then arguably they would be fine with their 'incomplete' reality. That however would be a minor point, as without stimulation of the physical eyes, the retina simply won't attach to the optic nerve. People who 'grow up' with a neural tap would be blind if they were unplugged.
If a person does grow up and learn to see with their eyes, then even if it isn't the primary method of sensation, the incomplete reality will still be subject to the uncanny valley.
Those growing up knowing
Just look what Television has done to the art of communication...
I think it may be a bit early to wade into this side of the pool. I believe the jury on ADD and entertainment is still out.
I'm often called on cast a technical eye on a report or communication that was prepared by a layman. Inevitably that document includes an comment or extrapolation that, while in everyday experience is accurate, it only holds under a controlled set of circumstances.
I'm missing the relevance here. It seems as if you are simply restating that laymen are incompletely trained. Isn't that the definition of being a layperson? And how does this relate to the human revulsion toward the almost-real?
One still has to render a photorealistic 'image' to transmit, even assuming neural taps are going to happen that soon. And rendering realism takes alot of horsepower. Maybe we'll have it in 20-30 years, I dunno. I'm not one of the people who is saying we can't achieve a perfect facsimile of reality. I honestly don't know; but there is more than one researcher out there who believes it. I was simply expressing their opinion because they've studied it for years, and I haven't, so I figured they deserved a bit of a mention.
However, until we do achieve a perfect facsimile of reality (regardless of whether its impossible or not), the author of the article has a good point. Our attempts at realism are producing images that create an unsettling feeling that we don't have watching a Disney flick.
The last numbers I saw had total game sales pegged at about 4 game sales per year per Xbox sold. Therefore it'd only take them just over 3 years to get to 'break even', assuming a loss of $100 per console (which is a little high) and revenue of $7.50 per game (which is a little low - particularly because it ignores profits as publisher for first and second party games: given the success of their first/party lineup, that's a not-insignificant amount of dough, enough to bump the average)
The home and entertainment division reports huge losses for tax purposes. Everything they buy or dev that fails to produce a product gets written off as a 'loss' even though they retain the tech. And remember, it's much more than just the XBox.
That big number around the top of the thread ($2.3B) includes WebTV losses, cable set-top development losses, a pvr deal written off as a loss, and all the PC and Console games they've sacked (which includes a bunch of losses for this seasons sports games and double-digit millions on Mythica and TFLO alone)
Whittle it down to the truth, and that $900m estimate of losses on XBox1 after 5 years starts to look like a pretty darn accurate guess.
But I'm probably just nitpicking semantics....
No, that's actually the whole point of the Uncanny Valley.
To take the red pants, red shirt analogy:
The point is: we're trying to get the pants ever closer to matching the shirt, but it's proving really difficult to do. As we get closer and closer to matching, we're finding out that human perception has a finer resolution than we previously though. And the closer the shirt and pants get to matching, the more distracting it becomes, and the more the detail and not the whole becomes the focus of our attention.
The previous poster was trying to suggest that as technology improves, we will indeed be able to make the pants match the shirt perfectly, and there will be no divide.
Many people tend to doubt that. Most feel we're working with two entirely different fabrics, and human perception is so good that exact matching just isn't possible. Therefore, they feel it's better to focus on complementary style.
Neither of these things require a centralized service and both can be run by publishers.
And yet no PS2 game offers anything of the sort.
It can be done - but it hasn't. They haven't even tried.
In the meantime, the service means alot to me, the gamer - and I'm willing to pay for it. I don't particularly care who's delivering cheat-free gaming. All that matters is that it only exists on one platform today, that platform has games I want to play, and the price for the service is extremely reasonable.
If they implemented an open standandard (or even a closed standard like Oscar) to provide between-game communication they could provide decentralized presence and allow out-of-game invites.
Once again, sure, it's something publishers could do - but they don't. Hell, how many PC games have shipped with native voicecomm support? Someone could do it - but they don't. In the meantime, I'm playing with voicecomm in every title by default. I'm not firing up firetalk or teamspeak or whatever 3rd party product fills that gaping hole in the PC multiplayer experience today.
Again, I don't care who is providing the service. There's a platform that delivers it as a default feature for a reasonable price. The PS2 provides voicecomm as a default and should be commended (over PC internet gaming) for it. With some effort by Sony it could easily be just about as good. But it isn't.
I attacked the quality factor, but none of those need to be exclusive to XBox.
Of course they needn't be exclusive. But MS is the only one who has sacked-up and provided gamers with internet play the way it should be. For that, I gladly pay them $50 per year. They have their online shit together more than any other platform - period; and they deserve to be rewarded and acknowledged for that.
The one aspect of XBL that you can reasonably gripe about - is those high performance servers. MS did promise it, and at least one of the early titles did deliver MS-hosted servers with higher player-counts. (Unreal championship notably had dedicated servers allowing 32 player matches).
Thing is: this is the one promised feature of XBL that MS left up to the individual publishers to follow through on. And none of them have opted to implement it.
So when a first-party game doesn't have MS-hosted dedicated servers, there isn't really much of an excuse -- MS did say one thing and fail to deliver on it consistantly across its titles.
But that becomes a fairly minor quibble when the rest of the service is weighed against the cost. The rest of the system is still worth $50 to me - because it exists, and it works, the right way, right now.
With the PS2 or PC you get the privilege of playing on people's laggy analog modems - along with poorly secured protocols that can, and have been, repeatedly hacked. Sure PC internet gaming can have good servers and good connections -- but it comes with a PITA I don't have to deal with.
Consoles should have seperate servers because a console can ensure the integrity of the experience. I get no HPBs, headshot scripts, wallhacks when I play counterstrike on XBL.
I can get out-of-game invites that don't cause compatability problems or suck performance like Gamespy does.
I get voice comm in every title.
Then there's a myriad of new and smaller bells and whistles it's got - but those weren't there when I made my purchasing decision, and frankly - they're insignificant compared to the big 3 of quality/security, out-of-game invites, and voice comm.
That's the quality of service I pay $50 a year for. If you're going to slam the service, apparently without ever having tried it, or knowing much about it, you could at least get the numbers accurate.
This writer seems to have misguided his disappointment with big-money-controlled game publishing. The Golden Age of Gaming he remembers so well has largely been gone for more than a decade.
It didn't disappear when console-centric ports started showing up. It disappeared when big publishers started making big money, started becoming risk-averse, and started pushing the glitz envelope to sell the same-old-game.
With the consoles getting an increasing share of publisher attention, PC Gaming is going to be forced to adapt to its strong suit: independent games, innovation, and user modifications.
If you ask me, this is a Good Thing and is going to usher in a new golden age of gaming: One where the PC market returns to its small-team, innovative roots, as the me-too game-publishing sticks to the console arena.
"Hi-res" Palm screens are a mere 300x300 pixels. This is not an extremely pricey screen
Cost is cost. if I could opt for a 200x120 screen like my Nex, I'm sure that'd save considerable money for the manufacturer, and battery life for me. (considering backlight)
At the same time, do you really want to put your your 300x300 on a data object with theoretical 2x3" dimensions? Maybe you would, I dunno. I'm just looking at my Nex and thinking it'd be too small. Then again, I'm not a PDA kinda guy in the first place, so you'd know better than me.
And I didn't mean that the stylus and touch screen would make a significant cost difference themselves - but rather the added CPU demands for processing scribble-recognition and running worthwhile PDA apps. It'd be much higher than something that just needs to interpret network requests for data storage/retrieval run data to the small display and process input from a couple buttons wheels or pads.
Again, my reason for wanting to seperate data and PDA is to keep the cost and size of the data object as small as possible - since I have no intention of acquiring PDA functionality.
Whereas you're looking for a PDA interface primarily, which pretty much means you're going to have plenty of room behind a suitable PDA screen for the data object too.
Which is why I agreed to disagree and suggested room for 2 'types' of storage objects. Hell you could throw in a third that was an outright super convergence device if it was marketable. I just want the wireless data standard and the option to buy a minimalist product. No need to try to make the standard dictate a one-size-fits-all implementation.
As for power, you're going to lose most of it in your Bluetooth connection and micro hard drive
Well... power considerations is why I'd opt for a flash-based storage solution myself. Though I did not know bluetooth was powerhungry -- that's unfortunate.
Your phone still needs an antenna.
Sorry if that wasn't clear - but that was intended to be included in my capitulation to your (admittedly better) idea of putting the fundamentals of wireless internet/phone connectivity into the data object. My phone's smaller than my Nex, so I figured that form factor would be sufficient for an antennae.
The theoretical 'phone' add on in my mind, would just be a specialized interface for dialing, speaker, mic and voice codec. Which is why I figure it could fit in a contemporary hands-free set. It could always use the "bigger than my phone's" 200x120 screen on the data object for a visual interface, or just use voice dialing outright.
The camera/mp3 player point was only to contrast against your example 'convergence device' (DVD/CD/VCD player) which, imo, isn't.
The only things we don't seem to agree on needing to stay seperate due core interface differences is perhaps PDA and phone. But that's not really pertinent to the discussion at this point either, so let's skip it.
An LCD screen on the data object is one thing.
:)
Making the data object large enough to support a worthwhile PDA screen/interface is quite another. Let alone the costs for the touch-screen and stylus, and costs for the processing/battery power to run an OS and applications.
I don't imagine a wireless data device by itself would be any larger than my current NexIIe. It's pretty big as MP3 players go - but that doesn't mean I'd want to try to do PDA apps on it.
not to mention that the camera would probably be as big as a ~3" long highlighter (they're already this small in USB keychain variety, I just want remote storage to my data object), the music player could be even smaller (about the size of the 'remotes' that currently exist in MP3 players) and the phone wouldn't be much bigger than the music player (if it wasn't just crammed into a headset altogether).
So we're talking about carrying around the rough equivalent of a Nex, and 3, 3" long highlighters.
I don't think that's asking for too much. particularly not when the data object can be left in a briefcase, coat pocket, jansport, etc.
How about we just agree that the cross platform wireless data transmission format is the most important thing? Then you can have a compliant data object+PDA, and i'll just get the compliant data object
it's all about flexibility after all.
When the difference in quality is largely imperceptible while the difference in cost is 2 to 300% - I can think of better places.
Particularly when that difference in cost for largely imperceptible performance can cover a pretty swanky vacation, and when the depreciation on that top 2% performance is so extreme.
Your example isn't quite what most consider a convergence device. It's performing essentially the same operations through slightly different media. It plays audio, or it plays audio and video.
I'm talking more about devices that try to take functionality that is dissimilar at its core: say talking on the phone, and taking pictures.
A single-purpose DVD player interface looks and functions much like a single-purpose CD player interface. The hardware requirements for both are quite similar. laser, decoders, spindle, etc. Combining them is natural.
Now, I challenge you to find a stand-alone camera that has an interface anything like a standalone phone. They're completely dissimilar. They work on dissimilar media, with dissimilar interfaces. Combining them is most unnatural.
My judgement of convergence devices being crap is based on rolling dissimilar interfaces together. Where we wind up with phones whose screens make them too narrow to be comfortable PDAs, or too wide to be comfortable phones. We get camera's that have to chew up LCD time when taking pictures, because there is no viewfinder or optical zoom. We get crappy output options. (try finding camera phones with decent expansion slot options, let alone USB connectors)
Your theoretical device would be fine IMO, so long as it doesn't attempt to make itself into a phone or PDA form-factor/interface by default. Let it be a simple sleek featureless obelisk (except for connectivity ports or removable media bays) - kept in your pocket.
Then, keep the screen and stylus (and all that processing, ROM, etc) off of it, and roll that into a wireless add-on for your internet/bluetooth enabled HD. Then add a wireless phone unit (probably not much bigger than a headset anymore) and we'd be right on the same page.
Then when OLED screens come out, or bigger/better/faster mobile processor/palmOS comes out - it's easier and cheaper to upgrade your PDA functionality.
No messing around with moving data, no lugging around redundant capability, no being without your phone because your PDA screen died/faded/got smashed, and no losing juice to functionality you're not using at the time.
The thrust of my point is:
1. Keep the data seperate from the device
2. Keep devices with dissimilar interfaces the hell away from each other.
You clearly would rather have the data storage be a PDA at it's core. I would like to abstract that functionality out and make the data object be even smaller, more durable, and more abstracted from capability.
Convergence devices are crap.
I'd rather see a standard for wireless personal data network access and portable storage -- and let individual devices miniaturize and specialize.
E.g.
I don't want a camera phone with a bad camera interface, crappy resolution, limited features, tiny memory and nonexistant output choices.
Instead I'd like to be able to buy a wireless data storage device: HD, Flash, Removable media, whatever - it doesn't matter. Just an independent device that stores data and can wirelessly transmit it to devices that need it over a common protocol (bluetooth would be fine).
Then I can buy a phone that grabs my contact list, ringtones and games from there. No more having content locked to a service provider or a device. Then I can buy a PDA which uses the portable storage for apps, data, contact list, etc. Then I can buy an MP3 player, a digital camera, etc, etc.
I don't need my screen and battery life being sucked out of my phone when I'm just listening to MP3s. I don't need PDA processing burning through my battery when I just want to use the phone. I don't need a device which tries to wrap one bad interface around a half dozen sepcialized functions.
Furthermore, I want to be able to take my mp3 player or my phone into the gym, or the corporate offices of my clients, while leaving the camera functionality in the car so I don't violate the camera bans.
Not to mention the benefit of finally being free of the nonportability of data. No more duplicating contact lists to new devices. No more shuffling CF cards between the MP3 player, the camera, and the PDA. No more waiting for the right device to show up with the right storage solution.
Of course, I'm not holding my breath.
And those would be... uh... all those... uh... online fantasy titles like...uh...
Brad McQuaid & Sigil Studios' Vanguard... for the PC of course.
This, following the cancellation of Mythica, and the sale of Asheron's Call's hosting and administration back to Turbine Entertainment.
My guess is that TFLO was going to get pushed back again - and what's the point of releasing a massmog for the XBox in mid 2005 - when the neXtBox is going to hit at xmas05?
This likely indicates they're going to back off their push to get Japanese adoption for the current XBox. Instead, I expect them to try to launch the neXtBox with a Japanese 'must have' from Level 5. I never quite understood the point in pushing so hard for adoption this late in the generation anyway.
I'd also be surprised if the neXtBox didn't have a massmog title very early in its life.