because marketing buzz has always turned out to be indicative of the finished product in the past right? please.
you can't judge the systems until they're sitting on the shelf. picking sides now is just a fanboy exercise.
if the nextbox and the ps3 hit with the exact same features, i'd go MS for the online play. if sony had a comparable network gaming experience, i'd just pick the one that had a better library of the games i play.
right now that's the xbox.
but i'm not about to join a flamewar suggesting that it will be in the next generation, or that my decisions and opinions are the only 'right' ones for all gamers.
this doesn't sound like any sort of knee-jerk feature competition. the PSX added dtv-tuning and pvr capability. this basically just lets your xbox access data from your home network. Sony doesn't do that (yet), and MS doesn't do PVR (yet).
though, i'm fairly certain MS is going to have a bigger HD and PVR in the nextbox. Sony will probably make market and sell two seperate products, the ps3, and a pricier ps3+pvr. i'd also be surprised if they don't have a firmward update for the PSX, to allow them some sort of 'access your network' capability in short order.
and yes, going on the info from the announcement, the extender kit will not function unless xp media center is installed on some pc on the network (i'm guessing xp: mce includes a data streaming server the extender kit taps into - it wouldn't be long before an open-source option is available).
competition, sure - but not kneejerk. you could see this coming from miles away. particularly following the slap-dash hacked-together method you can transfer mp3s/jpgs from pc->xbox with that xbox karaoke title. they see the demand - and they have to realize that the current methodology -sucks-.
i'll still either download the devkit version of the server or wait for the OS flavor though. i would like to stream mp3s, mpgs, and pics to my tv. but i will not have my OS dictated.
i think the idea is that it does proscan dvd (which is essentially standard equipment anymore) and it can stream other data from a wireless network to your tv.
basically, a dvd player with built-in 'view your pron on your big screen' functionality.
which in marketing speak translates to: 'share pictures of your loving wife and children'... with a slideshow feature for convenience... and mpg support for... vacation movies...;p
in my politically-unaffiliated opinion: 'greed' is a subjective term that we use only when describing the economic behavior of others. being subjective, it's general usage is so broad that it's useless.
but 'greed' as webster defines it is not wrong. which is what I was trying to point out.
if a person performs an illegal, immoral, or unethical act in the name of greed - it is that particular implementation that is wrong, the person who performed it that is wrong; not 'greed'.
outsourcing is a perfectly legal business practice and can be done in an ethical and moral way.
Deriding and dismissing a perfectly legal business practice and all who apply it simply because of the illegal, unethical, or immoral implementations of others is wrong.
I do not advocate business without ethics and morals. But neither do I judge a legal practice 'wrong', just because improper implementations can be made.
Calling outsourcing immoral or unethical altogether is akin to damning the personal video recorder and all who use it. Yes, it can be used illegaly and immorally. but substantial legitimate applications also exist. One must judge the individual use, not the tool.
BTW: the ad hominem is unnecessary. people who believe I'm a monster already had that impression from my original post. and your opinion of me was all too clear.
because most 3rd party developers have walked away from the GC. simple as that.
3rd party developer interest is the key indicator into console health, and the GameCube doesn't have much, if any, left.
consider the dreamcast. it had some fantastic games. it wasn't too far behind the ps and n64 after a year or two of release - but it was still dead in the water because 3rd party developers didn't consider it worth the risk. it continued to have some really great games released for it - but the overall trend was what mattered.
nintendo's situation isn't quite as desperate, but it's certainly similar.
there would be a factorial increase in problems between players, except that the effective playerbase caps at the max number of players per 'shard'.
EQ doesn't really have 400k players. they have ~25 shards with 8k players each who can never interact between shards. sure, the cost of CS is O(n!) for a single shard (n being population). but since there is no interaction across groups, and n has a max cap per group (max population per shard), adding 2 more groups doesn't effectively triple that max n. it's merely O(n!)+O(n!)+O(n!). and (8000! + 8000! + 8000!) is much much smaller than (24000!). so CS per shard stays constant as shards are added.
Yes, colocation is quickly not an option, but once you absorb the cost to create a proper netops center (something the big money fellers do day 1), you find that your bandwidth per player is dramatically lower.
as i was saying, the more popular they become, the greater the profit margin for big money massmogs. naturally there's a big of a hiccup when you only need, say, twice the capacity of an OC-3, yet the OC-24 costs three times as much. yes, in that situation, bandwidth per player will be higher until your population reaches the breakeven point. but very quickly (if growth is maintained) the costs will plummet to all-time lows. (per player)
again, what i've outlined are the economics for the big money games. the games that have Microsoft, Sony, and EA throwing money at them, looking for that $5.2m/mo payday with the healthy profit margin.
the economics are different for smaller massmogs. particularly those that do not use the 'shard' business model. I'd imagine 2nd life for example has an increase CS cost, as I don't believe they use 'shards'. the bandwidth cost 'hiccup' between lines can be crushing - but i maintain that as they grow, the average costs will drop all the same.
i'd also like to point out that i hate the shard model. i never liked it as a technical solution for a truly massively multiuser system. i hate it all the more since i discovered that it's now primarily an economic tool used to maximize profit margin.
again, and i think i've said this before, kudos on bringing m59 back - and i'm glad to hear the economics work out so that it'll be able to persist. I can't imagine the financial risk you guys took, and I'm truly glad it worked out. Here's to hoping Turbine can do the same for AC.
Gemstone, Airwarrior, DragonRealms - of course those are fairly old for-pay games, but what other persistant online games have been around long enough to try sequels? (aside from the cancelled UO2 and the disasterous AC2). It's also noteworthy that their predecessors didn't really survive the transition to the sequels.
Thing is, the suits don't particularly care if the 'old game' folks move over to the 'new game' or not. because odds are, if the new game doesn't appeal to you, you'll keep playing the old one. and if that has to be folded, so be it - they figure they can make more money from the same investment with their newer game anyway. that's why they decided to do a sequel in the first place.
sequels evolved in the oral, written and film traditions because the stories were static, but the audience wanted -more-. Of course, business realized that you could pass off a lower quality story for higher returns if it was a 'sequel'. you already made your money on the original, so you don't particularly care if the sequel isn't as good.
the business idea is to leverage past success to mitigate the risk of the new endeavor - integrity of the original is not often a serious consideration.
In a massmog, theoretically, you're paying a monthly fee because the game and the story isn't static. So naturally it doesn't feel like any 'sequel' as such is necessary. But the suits treat it just like any other business. and at this point, there's no reason for them to treat massmog's any differently.
The true crux will be when Everquest 2 launches. Either it will be successful or it will fail. If it fails, it may take down the idea of massmog sequels. but if it is a success, for whatever reason - AC2 will be forgotten, and i guarantee that sequel-fever will hit every popular massmog.
and the only reason i nitpicked the use of 'developer' is that I truly believe that many developers in this genre 'get it' - but most simply don't have the authority to challenge the decisions made by the suits, or the financial means to strike out on their own.
the original developers of m59 buying that game back and resurrecting it, and turbine buying AC from Microsoft are primary examples of the developers demonstrating that they indeed 'get it'. I have my suspicions about other people in the industry, but they haven't had the chance to prove it yet:)
MMOGs do get stale. people leave. eventually the publisher decides that it isn't worth the resources to continue to operate on the lower profit margin than what they previously enjoyed when it was more popular.
what they want to do, instead of closing shop, is to try to pull back in all those people who tried their last game, and start the profit cycle over again.
i think the people making business decisions want to cannibalize the old player base. new games mean new purchases, higher fees, and a brand new level treadmill. but doing a sequel gives them a built-in market that reduces the risk in developing a new game.
(i also think these suits are very different people from the actual devs, but i digress)
And quite frankly, so long as these games are defined primarily by their underlying systems - the devs will always want to try to start over with a clean slate, to 'fix' all the things that went wrong last time. Yet they likely are still in love with the world, fiction, and genre of the old game. so i doubt they'd protest too strongly.
Not until a disaster like AC2 is duplicated elsewhere, and the players no longer fall back to its predecessor, but instead become disillusioned and quit altogether will this trend stop.
like everything else the publishers and devs do 'wrong' - it won't change until consumers stop paying for the product.
until players -don't- buy into a massmog with a terrible release, publishers won't care about a couple weeks or months of instability. until a sequel fails to cannibalize the playerbase of its predecessor in the franchise, or until a sequel fails to secure enough purchases from the old playerbase, pubilshers will always try.
it's easy to be better when your feature list is merely promises.:)
imo, the only truly interesting thing that will occur in the next generation of massmog launches - is seeing how EQ2 cannibalizes EQ's playerbase - and seeing if Blizzard actually 'gets it' in regards to bringing a massmog to the mass market.
will they actually bring in casual gamers? or will they just leverage their built-in fanbase and their usual attention to detail?
i personally don't think there's a soul in a decision-making position at any major massmog company who truly 'gets it' in regards to attracting and retaining the casual gamer.
when the massmog hits that blows the market open (which it'll need to do pretty soon if the market is going to double every year for the next 10) - it won't be any of the offerings currently on the table. and it likely won't be from a publisher who's ever done a massmog before.
the problem is that pay-for-loot/pay-for-level systems acknowledge that these games demand too much time, and most of it is not fun.
level-based systems punish the casual gamer as is. 'cheapening' the experience by selling advancement only alienates more of the small market segment they do have. of course i'd imagine the increased revenue will likely outweigh the losses from those who would quit.
but i certainly don't think the systems will draw in casual gamers the way these analysts think. all they do is offer the option of paying even more money to merely stall the games' punishment of the casual player.
the happy math for corporations is that the costs of a massmog fall as it becomes more popular.
consider bandwidth: an OC-24 can handle 8 times more players than an OC-3, and yet it costs far less than 8 times more per month. (more like 3-4 times as much.) as the game becomes popular, and bandwidth usage increases -- bandwidth cost per player drops.
consider bugs: using the 'shard' model (several 'copies' of the world that each serve a subset of the total playerbase) - the number of bugs to fix holds steady as the number of shards is increased. You don't have to make twice as much content to appease twice as many players - you just plug in another shard.
Also, as the game ages and becomes more popular, the bugs decline. (bugs such as anything that isn't a GM-request like harassment and such) the number of calls to customer support (eg. hardware compatibility problems, crashing problems) decline. the growth of the 'known bugs' means average call time itself drops. the cost of customer support per player drops.
consider hardware: hardware costs decline as time goes on (and it takes time to become popular). what was a very expensive server farm for Sony when Everquest started in 1996 is now slower than the much cheaper server farm they last added around 4 years later. Hardware cost per player drops. Assuming the worst case, the cost of hardware doesn't measureably fall, still only means that hardware costs would hold steady as the game becomes more popular.
consider staff: you need a certain number of people to ensure 24x7 service at a constant level of quality for a single server farm. yet you do not need twice as many people to cover twice as many servers. furthermore, over time, utilities and procedures will make the most commonn problems easier to deal with, and the bug fixes will make exceptions less frequent. server-maintenance staffing costs fall as the game becomes more popular and the game ages.
customer support for bugs also decreases as outlined above.
the only staff that need to increase in proportion to the growth in playerbase are in-game customer service staff (GMs). this at worst is another cost that holds steady as the game becomes more popular.
consider content: also using the shard model (purely a business decision, not a technical one, i assure you) the same number of designers/artists that supply an expansion that will keep 1 shard of 2000 players happy, will keep an infinite number of shards of 2000 players happy. average cost of content per player decreases.
also keep in mind that Sony had a 60% profit margin on monthly fees for Everquest when it cost $10/mo. now it costs 30% more (at the least), and do you honestly think they're spending a dime more on service and support?
Sony even had a profit on retail box sales, for the game and expansions, over their costs to develop the software and install the hardware. (the reason everyone charges for the box on the shelf - even if subscriptions flop they break even if they can sucker a couple hundred thousand people into trying it).
the way these games are designed, the bigger the game gets - the more they profit.
only when the player population starts to dwindle do the profit margins fall again. when you have too many underutilized servers. when you have too much staff. many companies will slowly consolidate and layoff to maintain their profit margins for awhile - but eventually running the game just won't be worth their time. They could put those resources on the Next Big Thing and go back to their old profit margin.
things like increasing the assistance from 'auto-aim' are ideal for making adjustments in difficulty.
and particularly, aside from whether it's the 'right' way to adjust difficulty, wasting time coding and testing varying levels of enemy behaviors that most people will never see is just plain waste.
i don't think i conveyed myself clearly as i think the original responder did not get my intent.
yes, i think that -reaction- speed should be a factor adjusted by difficulty, not movement speed.
and yes - i never meant that a civilian should be an expert tactician if you turn a game to 'difficult'. i was suggesting that a civilian should behave like a civilian no matter what the difficulty. just because you select 'hard' doesn't mean that joe-blow on the street is suddenly a kung fu master. similarly a military opponent shouldn't just stand still and fire 1 shot a minute at you on 'easy'.
of course, it isn't all misunderstanding: i still do not think enemies should change their tactics based on a difficulty slider. perhaps adjust their 'resolve' to determine at what point they flee/surrender - but i don't think sudden increases in tactical operation are appropriate.
quite frankly that's a waste of developer effort, to make the enemy more intelligent, and then have 80% of the game players never encounter that intelligence. it is not an efficient use of AI resources, especially considering that every game to date has had some basic AI that could use much more attention. Perhaps if all else were perfect, i wouldn't mind. but when enemies have code to allow them to use cover and suppressing fire on 'hard' - but they all have terrible pathfinding on any difficulty -- it makes it a bit hard to understand.
increased number of enemies doesn't always make sense on a difficulty slider, but sometimes it can. the difference for me on that point is: does combat still essentially play the same, or are they just throwing waves of mindless guys at me to test ammo management?
increasing the -number- of sentries in a game like Deus Ex makes sense. but increasing them to the point that sneaking and hacking become essentially impossible doesn't.
i only suggested scaling up enemy accuracy as one of many factors. it is not a silver bullet, but it's much preferrable to simply giving enemies bigger guns or making their shots do more damage.
and mana from heaven is not at all the kind of difficulty adjustment i was proposing. i was thinking more like adjusting the number of friendly units you have at your disposal or adjusting the prevalence of resources in a strategy or sim game.
old iPod: 4 x 2.6 x.6 : 6.24 cu " (@ 5.6oz) new iPod: 3.6 x 2 x.5 : 3.60 cu " (@ 3.6oz)
2.64 cu " difference, or about a 40% reduction.
that's a pretty sizeable decrease in volumetric terms. and it's still around a 30% decrease if you discount the change in depth, and only consider top surface area. it also sports a 35% reduction in weight - though the 2/3 decrease in capacity pretty much represents all of that -- one man's improvement is another's bad design decision.
i'm just saying that i consider it notably smaller. not that that justifies their price.
Jobs' comparison to much longer-lived solid state devices isn't fair; and it just doesn't compare favorably to dell's HD-based competitor.
the catch 22 is: make the game too easy, and players will complain. make the game too tough, and players will complain.
personally, i don't think a 'difficulty' slider should come into affect with AI. The AI should always -try- to behave the same way.
Whether you intend for them to be tacticians, civilians, or just mindless grunts. on 'Easy' or 'Difficult' a bad guy should still know he should take cover, call for backup, etc.
The 'difficulty' should come into play when deciding their accuracy, movement speed, 'scoring' (penalties for shooting hostages, raizing conquested territory, etc). It could also come into play in deciding the scarcity of resources. on Easy, there should be extra resources for the hero, and less for the enemy.
Adaptive -AI- is the wrong approach. Adaptive -difficult- is still a good idea though. but don't make enemies dumber; just make them slower, more inaccurate, fewer in number - don't give them as many grenades and leave more health packs around.
oh, and i also don't appreciate the 'difficulty' sliders that just scale the damage you receive up and down. that is an awfully 'cheap' hack imo.
$100, or even $150, would be much too low of a profit-margin for apple. Half their mystique and customer loyalty comes from the niche 'clique' their users create.
don't get me wrong - they have great product with some of the best design -- but it's never been cheap. never close to even competitive. i don't think they even -want- to dominate the mass market anymore.
the fanatical devotion of their users seems to stem mostly from the fact that only the fanatically devoted can justify purchasing their product.
at 3.6x2" i guess it's pretty small, but i don't really think size was much of a showstopper. i never looked at an ipod and said 'gee, if it were only 25% smaller, and purple, i'd be happy with 60% less capacity'.
if they could extend the battery life, that'd be notable, but they're only claiming 8 hours - which is still under average for a portable.
though i'd imagine their target market isn't clamoring to store more than 5gb of data on it, and will definitely be salivating over its new size and color.
as always - apple captures the minds and imaginations of geeks everywhere -- and then prices it beyond the rational budget of the majority.
stocks move faster than that. Yahoo had announced its intention to split from Google for some time, and signalled it for much longer. (You don't retain your internal search companies, and buy more search IP if you intend to use a 3rd party forever).
Google however is finding a larger market in advertising than it thought it could, and despite your claim makes most of its profit from smaller private contracts.
Yahoo is just about the -only- large portal contract they had. I mean, who else is there? And it was far from their only revenue source.
Yes, when this split happens, it would depress their share price, but I doubt it signals a longterm marketability problem. This is Yahoo prepping their investors to believe the impending split is in -their- best interests - instead of signalling that Yahoo itself can no longer afford to own search companies and still pay for Google.
After all, it's Yahoo that has been in a business tailspin for the last few years. Not Google.
And this won't bother their prospective IPO, as the large financial institutions that would have first shot at IPO shares have analysts that have known this plan for some time.
'no one had discovered alcoholic beverages; you'd've never become drunk.'
firstly, GTA doesn't depict things that haven't been covered ad nauseum in other media. Grand Theft Auto was merely an interactive 'Scarface' or 'Casino'; a connection Vice City makes almost literal. Yet Brian De Palma and Martin Scorcese are hailed as luminaries whilst Rockstar games is lynched. The irony is bitter.
Secondly, there is nothing in our world that is new. I hate to be the one to break this to the Curmudgeon, but these ideas (even the terrible ones) haven't destroyed civilization in the thousands of years of recorded history. War, murder, rape -- these are not things that Rockstar games invented in a lab 4 years ago. Carjacking, senseless mayhem, even these ideas are not new to anyone. Hell, the Greek myth of Zeus and Ganymede had child molestation and abduction as its core issue, and the original Sleeping Beauty covered rape. These myths did not make rapists and child molesters out of the Greeks and Saxons.
'Seeing ideas fleshed out allows you to think of them. Becoming desensitized to them helps you think fantastic, outrageous ideas are doable.'
I've played GTA, and I admit, I've had those thoughts: 'if i were playing, i'd just carjack someone for a lift'. Thing is, I've had moments where i wished my car was a tank or a helicopter after watching a war flick too. In traffic, I've wished that someone would release a plague ala Twelve Monkees, so I could enjoy a 'Stand'-type peace without the pressing crush of humanity around me.
But these ideas don't make me act. They don't make me a criminal and thereby the ideas themselves can not be considered criminal. Hell they're not any more likely to cause me to take up pursuing those realities than my daydreams of winning the lotto, commuting via a bobcat with a saddle on its back, or becoming Hugh Hefner's successor. And I didn't need video games to 'flesh out' those ideas for me, and seeing them in a video game is doubtfully going to make me consider them actually doable.
The Curmudgeon is suggesting that we are powerless to decide whether certain ideas, dreams or myths are appropriate ways to actually act -- and thus we should be protected from these ideas that will invariably turn us into rapists, druggies, murderers, bank robbers, and pimps.
For some reason that just doesn't make sense to me. Maybe its because I believe people have free will, and no fleeting thought is dangerous. Or maybe its because the last 2 decades of gaming haven't exactly churned out a generation of brainwashed turtle-killing plumbers, vandal paperboys, whip-wielding vampire hunters, or mercenary soldiers.
this seems to be clear cut evidence that gamers prefer virtual gunfights to real gunfights, even when the latter is cheaper and more widely available.;p
as is the attitude in all 'indy' art forms. indy music, indy film, and now indy gaming -- all suggest the mainstream just isn't 'as good'.
Because their market is smaller, the costs and therefore the risk is lower - indy artists can afford to vary more. Furthermore, they get most of their attention for 'new' ideas. Even if the ideas aren't very good, their community and market celebrates 'new', and so innovation itself (despite actual resultant value) is the goal.
mainstream publishers put too much cash into projects to try to 'innovate' the way indy artists can. regardless of subjective artistic merit, if an innovative game doesn't sell, the publisher is punished -- so why should they be revolutionary?
anyway, despite their pretention - indy artists are actually right. most mainstream 'innovation' will actually arrive due to inspiration from the indy product. but not because the indy artists or games are always better, but because of their market realities. they can afford to throw more proverbial shit at the wall to see what sticks.
and again, i qualify the 'value' of a game the only objective way one can: by the number of people who are willing to buy the game.
art is only good if people appreciate it. and there's no other objective way to measure how much people appreciate something, than how much they're willing to spend on it.
abstract it to that level and nothing is original. i mean, at that level The Lord of the Rings is just a FedEx quest and The Matrix was a 'blue key, blue door' shooter.
in general, there is genre innovation and gameplay innovation. genre innovation is something like stair dismount, or tetris (when it was released). this is very difficult and very rare. if this is your sole qualification for 'innovation', you're going to be disappointed an awful lot.
gameplay innovation is more like the sims, pikmin, or gta. it's the refinement of a fairly well-known genre with a fresh focus. the sims is just an isometric sim in your abstraction. but the -play- is so wildly different from any other previous title in the genre, you can't help but hail it as a great innovative achievement.
Of course, I haven't played half of those games, and the ones I am familiar with i'd be dubious about calling 'innovative', I just think you're being a little overly strict in your definition of game innovation.
and frankly, at this point in the indy game industry, just getting a fun game finished and out there is deserving of an award, even if it is inappropriately titled for the achievement;p
point was that anime as a media industry is not considered 'kids stuff' in japan.
no one over there gets their knickers in a twist when a boob or a syringe shows up depicted in the anime 'cartoon' style.
the company man reading a manga strip with his morning coffee on the train to tokyo isn't automatically considered some creepy guy with an adolescent fixation on superheroes in tights.
Movies like Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Spirited Away are made every year. The mainstream press reviews anime feature films in japan alongside any other feature film. While in America, only child-safe anime like Spirited Away (that coincide with our cartoon conventions) get feature film releases. Ghost in the Shell and Akira go to video for daring to cover sex, gunfights or street racing.
the point is letting teh consumer decide for themselves whether any given piece is good or bad, without watering down the entire artform to what Walt Disney allowed.
that's what i'm saying. all these other media have gone through numerous fazes where people have challenged the content of a single work.
most of the industries leave it as an issue regarding the content in question. they stick by the rights of people to publish whatever consumers want to buy, and letting consumers judge for themselves.
but some industries willingly cave when public outcry complains about content.
Consider the comic code of the 60s~70s for a specific example. it was wholly self-applied by the mainstream comic publishers. It wasn't a government action against the freedom of speech, so there was no room for the ACLU or anyone else to argue it. The mainstream publishers agreed that stories containing sex, drug use, rape, etc. just would not be in comic books. hence, comics were and are marginalized by the mainstream as a 'kids' medium, instead of having its content considered alongside any other art.
to most people there are no indy books, there are no 'graphic novels'. it's all just 'comics'. superheroes in tights fighting communists.
i'm not worried about someone suing take2 for the content in GTA. I know their are legions of freedom loving people who would leap to its defense. I'm worried about Sony and Microsoft following Nintendo's lead, and publishing only games that are appropriate for minors.
public opinion would lump anyone in a gaming store into the 'childish' group with comic book readers, instead of judging them based only on the content of the games they play.
note how consumer computer gaming has been around for nigh on 20 years, but only -now- it's getting any mainstream attention. why is that? it isn't market share. it isn't glitz and glam. the mainstream snapped up film long before it overtook the theatre (as gaming has surpassed the domestic boxoffice), long before it demonstrated an advantage in pizazz over stage acting.
in my opinion it's because Sony didn't restrict content the way Nintendo did. Stories in playstation games started to mature, started to -deserve- attention.
If the other publishers decide to 'defend' themselves from the kind of negative attention Take2 is getting, and adopt Nintendo-esque content rules -- gaming will go back to being as ignored and condescended to as comics and roleplaying games before them.
Slashdot Mirror
because marketing buzz has always turned out to be indicative of the finished product in the past right? please.
you can't judge the systems until they're sitting on the shelf. picking sides now is just a fanboy exercise.
if the nextbox and the ps3 hit with the exact same features, i'd go MS for the online play. if sony had a comparable network gaming experience, i'd just pick the one that had a better library of the games i play.
right now that's the xbox.
but i'm not about to join a flamewar suggesting that it will be in the next generation, or that my decisions and opinions are the only 'right' ones for all gamers.
this doesn't sound like any sort of knee-jerk feature competition. the PSX added dtv-tuning and pvr capability. this basically just lets your xbox access data from your home network. Sony doesn't do that (yet), and MS doesn't do PVR (yet).
though, i'm fairly certain MS is going to have a bigger HD and PVR in the nextbox. Sony will probably make market and sell two seperate products, the ps3, and a pricier ps3+pvr. i'd also be surprised if they don't have a firmward update for the PSX, to allow them some sort of 'access your network' capability in short order.
and yes, going on the info from the announcement, the extender kit will not function unless xp media center is installed on some pc on the network (i'm guessing xp: mce includes a data streaming server the extender kit taps into - it wouldn't be long before an open-source option is available).
competition, sure - but not kneejerk. you could see this coming from miles away. particularly following the slap-dash hacked-together method you can transfer mp3s/jpgs from pc->xbox with that xbox karaoke title. they see the demand - and they have to realize that the current methodology -sucks-.
i'll still either download the devkit version of the server or wait for the OS flavor though. i would like to stream mp3s, mpgs, and pics to my tv. but i will not have my OS dictated.
i think the idea is that it does proscan dvd (which is essentially standard equipment anymore) and it can stream other data from a wireless network to your tv.
... vacation movies... ;p
basically, a dvd player with built-in 'view your pron on your big screen' functionality.
which in marketing speak translates to:
'share pictures of your loving wife and children'...
with a slideshow feature for convenience...
and mpg support for
in my politically-unaffiliated opinion:
'greed' is a subjective term that we use only when describing the economic behavior of others. being subjective, it's general usage is so broad that it's useless.
but 'greed' as webster defines it is not wrong. which is what I was trying to point out.
if a person performs an illegal, immoral, or unethical act in the name of greed - it is that particular implementation that is wrong, the person who performed it that is wrong; not 'greed'.
outsourcing is a perfectly legal business practice and can be done in an ethical and moral way.
Deriding and dismissing a perfectly legal business practice and all who apply it simply because of the illegal, unethical, or immoral implementations of others is wrong.
I do not advocate business without ethics and morals. But neither do I judge a legal practice 'wrong', just because improper implementations can be made.
Calling outsourcing immoral or unethical altogether is akin to damning the personal video recorder and all who use it. Yes, it can be used illegaly and immorally. but substantial legitimate applications also exist. One must judge the individual use, not the tool.
BTW: the ad hominem is unnecessary. people who believe I'm a monster already had that impression from my original post. and your opinion of me was all too clear.
greed is the primary motivator in our economic system.
'consumer' and 'capitalist' are just the slightly nicer terms we use for ourselves.
because most 3rd party developers have walked away from the GC.
simple as that.
3rd party developer interest is the key indicator into console health, and the GameCube doesn't have much, if any, left.
consider the dreamcast. it had some fantastic games. it wasn't too far behind the ps and n64 after a year or two of release - but it was still dead in the water because 3rd party developers didn't consider it worth the risk. it continued to have some really great games released for it - but the overall trend was what mattered.
nintendo's situation isn't quite as desperate, but it's certainly similar.
there would be a factorial increase in problems between players, except that the effective playerbase caps at the max number of players per 'shard'.
EQ doesn't really have 400k players. they have ~25 shards with 8k players each who can never interact between shards. sure, the cost of CS is O(n!) for a single shard (n being population). but since there is no interaction across groups, and n has a max cap per group (max population per shard), adding 2 more groups doesn't effectively triple that max n. it's merely O(n!)+O(n!)+O(n!). and (8000! + 8000! + 8000!) is much much smaller than (24000!). so CS per shard stays constant as shards are added.
Yes, colocation is quickly not an option, but once you absorb the cost to create a proper netops center (something the big money fellers do day 1), you find that your bandwidth per player is dramatically lower.
as i was saying, the more popular they become, the greater the profit margin for big money massmogs. naturally there's a big of a hiccup when you only need, say, twice the capacity of an OC-3, yet the OC-24 costs three times as much. yes, in that situation, bandwidth per player will be higher until your population reaches the breakeven point. but very quickly (if growth is maintained) the costs will plummet to all-time lows. (per player)
again, what i've outlined are the economics for the big money games. the games that have Microsoft, Sony, and EA throwing money at them, looking for that $5.2m/mo payday with the healthy profit margin.
the economics are different for smaller massmogs. particularly those that do not use the 'shard' business model. I'd imagine 2nd life for example has an increase CS cost, as I don't believe they use 'shards'. the bandwidth cost 'hiccup' between lines can be crushing - but i maintain that as they grow, the average costs will drop all the same.
i'd also like to point out that i hate the shard model. i never liked it as a technical solution for a truly massively multiuser system. i hate it all the more since i discovered that it's now primarily an economic tool used to maximize profit margin.
again, and i think i've said this before, kudos on bringing m59 back - and i'm glad to hear the economics work out so that it'll be able to persist. I can't imagine the financial risk you guys took, and I'm truly glad it worked out.
Here's to hoping Turbine can do the same for AC.
Gemstone, Airwarrior, DragonRealms - of course those are fairly old for-pay games, but what other persistant online games have been around long enough to try sequels?
:)
(aside from the cancelled UO2 and the disasterous AC2). It's also noteworthy that their predecessors didn't really survive the transition to the sequels.
Thing is, the suits don't particularly care if the 'old game' folks move over to the 'new game' or not. because odds are, if the new game doesn't appeal to you, you'll keep playing the old one. and if that has to be folded, so be it - they figure they can make more money from the same investment with their newer game anyway. that's why they decided to do a sequel in the first place.
sequels evolved in the oral, written and film traditions because the stories were static, but the audience wanted -more-. Of course, business realized that you could pass off a lower quality story for higher returns if it was a 'sequel'. you already made your money on the original, so you don't particularly care if the sequel isn't as good.
the business idea is to leverage past success to mitigate the risk of the new endeavor - integrity of the original is not often a serious consideration.
In a massmog, theoretically, you're paying a monthly fee because the game and the story isn't static. So naturally it doesn't feel like any 'sequel' as such is necessary. But the suits treat it just like any other business. and at this point, there's no reason for them to treat massmog's any differently.
The true crux will be when Everquest 2 launches. Either it will be successful or it will fail. If it fails, it may take down the idea of massmog sequels. but if it is a success, for whatever reason - AC2 will be forgotten, and i guarantee that sequel-fever will hit every popular massmog.
and the only reason i nitpicked the use of 'developer' is that I truly believe that many developers in this genre 'get it' - but most simply don't have the authority to challenge the decisions made by the suits, or the financial means to strike out on their own.
the original developers of m59 buying that game back and resurrecting it, and turbine buying AC from Microsoft are primary examples of the developers demonstrating that they indeed 'get it'. I have my suspicions about other people in the industry, but they haven't had the chance to prove it yet
MMOGs do get stale. people leave. eventually the publisher decides that it isn't worth the resources to continue to operate on the lower profit margin than what they previously enjoyed when it was more popular.
what they want to do, instead of closing shop, is to try to pull back in all those people who tried their last game, and start the profit cycle over again.
i think the people making business decisions want to cannibalize the old player base. new games mean new purchases, higher fees, and a brand new level treadmill. but doing a sequel gives them a built-in market that reduces the risk in developing a new game.
(i also think these suits are very different people from the actual devs, but i digress)
And quite frankly, so long as these games are defined primarily by their underlying systems - the devs will always want to try to start over with a clean slate, to 'fix' all the things that went wrong last time. Yet they likely are still in love with the world, fiction, and genre of the old game. so i doubt they'd protest too strongly.
Not until a disaster like AC2 is duplicated elsewhere, and the players no longer fall back to its predecessor, but instead become disillusioned and quit altogether will this trend stop.
like everything else the publishers and devs do 'wrong' - it won't change until consumers stop paying for the product.
until players -don't- buy into a massmog with a terrible release, publishers won't care about a couple weeks or months of instability.
until a sequel fails to cannibalize the playerbase of its predecessor in the franchise, or until a sequel fails to secure enough purchases from the old playerbase, pubilshers will always try.
it's easy to be better when your feature list is merely promises. :)
imo, the only truly interesting thing that will occur in the next generation of massmog launches - is seeing how EQ2 cannibalizes EQ's playerbase - and seeing if Blizzard actually 'gets it' in regards to bringing a massmog to the mass market.
will they actually bring in casual gamers? or will they just leverage their built-in fanbase and their usual attention to detail?
i personally don't think there's a soul in a decision-making position at any major massmog company who truly 'gets it' in regards to attracting and retaining the casual gamer.
when the massmog hits that blows the market open (which it'll need to do pretty soon if the market is going to double every year for the next 10) - it won't be any of the offerings currently on the table. and it likely won't be from a publisher who's ever done a massmog before.
the problem is that pay-for-loot/pay-for-level systems acknowledge that these games demand too much time, and most of it is not fun.
level-based systems punish the casual gamer as is. 'cheapening' the experience by selling advancement only alienates more of the small market segment they do have. of course i'd imagine the increased revenue will likely outweigh the losses from those who would quit.
but i certainly don't think the systems will draw in casual gamers the way these analysts think. all they do is offer the option of paying even more money to merely stall the games' punishment of the casual player.
quite to the contrary.
the happy math for corporations is that the costs of a massmog fall as it becomes more popular.
consider bandwidth:
an OC-24 can handle 8 times more players than an OC-3, and yet it costs far less than 8 times more per month. (more like 3-4 times as much.) as the game becomes popular, and bandwidth usage increases -- bandwidth cost per player drops.
consider bugs:
using the 'shard' model (several 'copies' of the world that each serve a subset of the total playerbase) - the number of bugs to fix holds steady as the number of shards is increased. You don't have to make twice as much content to appease twice as many players - you just plug in another shard.
Also, as the game ages and becomes more popular, the bugs decline. (bugs such as anything that isn't a GM-request like harassment and such) the number of calls to customer support (eg. hardware compatibility problems, crashing problems) decline. the growth of the 'known bugs' means average call time itself drops. the cost of customer support per player drops.
consider hardware:
hardware costs decline as time goes on (and it takes time to become popular). what was a very expensive server farm for Sony when Everquest started in 1996 is now slower than the much cheaper server farm they last added around 4 years later. Hardware cost per player drops. Assuming the worst case, the cost of hardware doesn't measureably fall, still only means that hardware costs would hold steady as the game becomes more popular.
consider staff:
you need a certain number of people to ensure 24x7 service at a constant level of quality for a single server farm. yet you do not need twice as many people to cover twice as many servers. furthermore, over time, utilities and procedures will make the most commonn problems easier to deal with, and the bug fixes will make exceptions less frequent. server-maintenance staffing costs fall as the game becomes more popular and the game ages.
customer support for bugs also decreases as outlined above.
the only staff that need to increase in proportion to the growth in playerbase are in-game customer service staff (GMs). this at worst is another cost that holds steady as the game becomes more popular.
consider content:
also using the shard model (purely a business decision, not a technical one, i assure you) the same number of designers/artists that supply an expansion that will keep 1 shard of 2000 players happy, will keep an infinite number of shards of 2000 players happy.
average cost of content per player decreases.
also keep in mind that Sony had a 60% profit margin on monthly fees for Everquest when it cost $10/mo. now it costs 30% more (at the least), and do you honestly think they're spending a dime more on service and support?
Sony even had a profit on retail box sales, for the game and expansions, over their costs to develop the software and install the hardware. (the reason everyone charges for the box on the shelf - even if subscriptions flop they break even if they can sucker a couple hundred thousand people into trying it).
the way these games are designed, the bigger the game gets - the more they profit.
only when the player population starts to dwindle do the profit margins fall again. when you have too many underutilized servers. when you have too much staff. many companies will slowly consolidate and layoff to maintain their profit margins for awhile - but eventually running the game just won't be worth their time. They could put those resources on the Next Big Thing and go back to their old profit margin.
things like increasing the assistance from 'auto-aim' are ideal for making adjustments in difficulty.
and particularly, aside from whether it's the 'right' way to adjust difficulty, wasting time coding and testing varying levels of enemy behaviors that most people will never see is just plain waste.
i don't think i conveyed myself clearly as i think the original responder did not get my intent.
yes, i think that -reaction- speed should be a factor adjusted by difficulty, not movement speed.
and yes - i never meant that a civilian should be an expert tactician if you turn a game to 'difficult'. i was suggesting that a civilian should behave like a civilian no matter what the difficulty. just because you select 'hard' doesn't mean that joe-blow on the street is suddenly a kung fu master. similarly a military opponent shouldn't just stand still and fire 1 shot a minute at you on 'easy'.
of course, it isn't all misunderstanding: i still do not think enemies should change their tactics based on a difficulty slider. perhaps adjust their 'resolve' to determine at what point they flee/surrender - but i don't think sudden increases in tactical operation are appropriate.
quite frankly that's a waste of developer effort, to make the enemy more intelligent, and then have 80% of the game players never encounter that intelligence. it is not an efficient use of AI resources, especially considering that every game to date has had some basic AI that could use much more attention. Perhaps if all else were perfect, i wouldn't mind. but when enemies have code to allow them to use cover and suppressing fire on 'hard' - but they all have terrible pathfinding on any difficulty -- it makes it a bit hard to understand.
increased number of enemies doesn't always make sense on a difficulty slider, but sometimes it can. the difference for me on that point is: does combat still essentially play the same, or are they just throwing waves of mindless guys at me to test ammo management?
increasing the -number- of sentries in a game like Deus Ex makes sense. but increasing them to the point that sneaking and hacking become essentially impossible doesn't.
i only suggested scaling up enemy accuracy as one of many factors. it is not a silver bullet, but it's much preferrable to simply giving enemies bigger guns or making their shots do more damage.
and mana from heaven is not at all the kind of difficulty adjustment i was proposing. i was thinking more like adjusting the number of friendly units you have at your disposal or adjusting the prevalence of resources in a strategy or sim game.
old iPod: 4 x 2.6 x .6 : 6.24 cu " (@ 5.6oz) .5 : 3.60 cu " (@ 3.6oz)
new iPod: 3.6 x 2 x
2.64 cu " difference, or about a 40% reduction.
that's a pretty sizeable decrease in volumetric terms. and it's still around a 30% decrease if you discount the change in depth, and only consider top surface area. it also sports a 35% reduction in weight - though the 2/3 decrease in capacity pretty much represents all of that -- one man's improvement is another's bad design decision.
i'm just saying that i consider it notably smaller. not that that justifies their price.
Jobs' comparison to much longer-lived solid state devices isn't fair; and it just doesn't compare favorably to dell's HD-based competitor.
the catch 22 is: make the game too easy, and players will complain. make the game too tough, and players will complain.
personally, i don't think a 'difficulty' slider should come into affect with AI. The AI should always -try- to behave the same way.
Whether you intend for them to be tacticians, civilians, or just mindless grunts. on 'Easy' or 'Difficult' a bad guy should still know he should take cover, call for backup, etc.
The 'difficulty' should come into play when deciding their accuracy, movement speed, 'scoring' (penalties for shooting hostages, raizing conquested territory, etc). It could also come into play in deciding the scarcity of resources. on Easy, there should be extra resources for the hero, and less for the enemy.
Adaptive -AI- is the wrong approach. Adaptive -difficult- is still a good idea though. but don't make enemies dumber; just make them slower, more inaccurate, fewer in number - don't give them as many grenades and leave more health packs around.
oh, and i also don't appreciate the 'difficulty' sliders that just scale the damage you receive up and down. that is an awfully 'cheap' hack imo.
you had to see this coming.
$100, or even $150, would be much too low of a profit-margin for apple. Half their mystique and customer loyalty comes from the niche 'clique' their users create.
don't get me wrong - they have great product with some of the best design -- but it's never been cheap. never close to even competitive. i don't think they even -want- to dominate the mass market anymore.
the fanatical devotion of their users seems to stem mostly from the fact that only the fanatically devoted can justify purchasing their product.
at 3.6x2" i guess it's pretty small, but i don't really think size was much of a showstopper. i never looked at an ipod and said 'gee, if it were only 25% smaller, and purple, i'd be happy with 60% less capacity'.
if they could extend the battery life, that'd be notable, but they're only claiming 8 hours - which is still under average for a portable.
though i'd imagine their target market isn't clamoring to store more than 5gb of data on it, and will definitely be salivating over its new size and color.
as always - apple captures the minds and imaginations of geeks everywhere -- and then prices it beyond the rational budget of the majority.
stocks move faster than that. Yahoo had announced its intention to split from Google for some time, and signalled it for much longer. (You don't retain your internal search companies, and buy more search IP if you intend to use a 3rd party forever).
Google however is finding a larger market in advertising than it thought it could, and despite your claim makes most of its profit from smaller private contracts.
Yahoo is just about the -only- large portal contract they had. I mean, who else is there? And it was far from their only revenue source.
Yes, when this split happens, it would depress their share price, but I doubt it signals a longterm marketability problem. This is Yahoo prepping their investors to believe the impending split is in -their- best interests - instead of signalling that Yahoo itself can no longer afford to own search companies and still pay for Google.
After all, it's Yahoo that has been in a business tailspin for the last few years. Not Google.
And this won't bother their prospective IPO, as the large financial institutions that would have first shot at IPO shares have analysts that have known this plan for some time.
'no one had discovered alcoholic beverages; you'd've never become drunk.'
firstly, GTA doesn't depict things that haven't been covered ad nauseum in other media. Grand Theft Auto was merely an interactive 'Scarface' or 'Casino'; a connection Vice City makes almost literal. Yet Brian De Palma and Martin Scorcese are hailed as luminaries whilst Rockstar games is lynched. The irony is bitter.
Secondly, there is nothing in our world that is new. I hate to be the one to break this to the Curmudgeon, but these ideas (even the terrible ones) haven't destroyed civilization in the thousands of years of recorded history. War, murder, rape -- these are not things that Rockstar games invented in a lab 4 years ago. Carjacking, senseless mayhem, even these ideas are not new to anyone. Hell, the Greek myth of Zeus and Ganymede had child molestation and abduction as its core issue, and the original Sleeping Beauty covered rape. These myths did not make rapists and child molesters out of the Greeks and Saxons.
'Seeing ideas fleshed out allows you to think of them. Becoming desensitized to them helps you think fantastic, outrageous ideas are doable.'
I've played GTA, and I admit, I've had those thoughts: 'if i were playing, i'd just carjack someone for a lift'. Thing is, I've had moments where i wished my car was a tank or a helicopter after watching a war flick too. In traffic, I've wished that someone would release a plague ala Twelve Monkees, so I could enjoy a 'Stand'-type peace without the pressing crush of humanity around me.
But these ideas don't make me act. They don't make me a criminal and thereby the ideas themselves can not be considered criminal. Hell they're not any more likely to cause me to take up pursuing those realities than my daydreams of winning the lotto, commuting via a bobcat with a saddle on its back, or becoming Hugh Hefner's successor. And I didn't need video games to 'flesh out' those ideas for me, and seeing them in a video game is doubtfully going to make me consider them actually doable.
The Curmudgeon is suggesting that we are powerless to decide whether certain ideas, dreams or myths are appropriate ways to actually act -- and thus we should be protected from these ideas that will invariably turn us into rapists, druggies, murderers, bank robbers, and pimps.
For some reason that just doesn't make sense to me. Maybe its because I believe people have free will, and no fleeting thought is dangerous. Or maybe its because the last 2 decades of gaming haven't exactly churned out a generation of brainwashed turtle-killing plumbers, vandal paperboys, whip-wielding vampire hunters, or mercenary soldiers.
this seems to be clear cut evidence that gamers prefer virtual gunfights to real gunfights, even when the latter is cheaper and more widely available. ;p
as is the attitude in all 'indy' art forms. indy music, indy film, and now indy gaming -- all suggest the mainstream just isn't 'as good'.
Because their market is smaller, the costs and therefore the risk is lower - indy artists can afford to vary more. Furthermore, they get most of their attention for 'new' ideas. Even if the ideas aren't very good, their community and market celebrates 'new', and so innovation itself (despite actual resultant value) is the goal.
mainstream publishers put too much cash into projects to try to 'innovate' the way indy artists can. regardless of subjective artistic merit, if an innovative game doesn't sell, the publisher is punished -- so why should they be revolutionary?
anyway, despite their pretention - indy artists are actually right. most mainstream 'innovation' will actually arrive due to inspiration from the indy product. but not because the indy artists or games are always better, but because of their market realities. they can afford to throw more proverbial shit at the wall to see what sticks.
and again, i qualify the 'value' of a game the only objective way one can: by the number of people who are willing to buy the game.
art is only good if people appreciate it. and there's no other objective way to measure how much people appreciate something, than how much they're willing to spend on it.
abstract it to that level and nothing is original. i mean, at that level The Lord of the Rings is just a FedEx quest and The Matrix was a 'blue key, blue door' shooter.
;p
in general, there is genre innovation and gameplay innovation. genre innovation is something like stair dismount, or tetris (when it was released). this is very difficult and very rare. if this is your sole qualification for 'innovation', you're going to be disappointed an awful lot.
gameplay innovation is more like the sims, pikmin, or gta. it's the refinement of a fairly well-known genre with a fresh focus. the sims is just an isometric sim in your abstraction. but the -play- is so wildly different from any other previous title in the genre, you can't help but hail it as a great innovative achievement.
Of course, I haven't played half of those games, and the ones I am familiar with i'd be dubious about calling 'innovative', I just think you're being a little overly strict in your definition of game innovation.
and frankly, at this point in the indy game industry, just getting a fun game finished and out there is deserving of an award, even if it is inappropriately titled for the achievement
my only experience with wireless controls is on the PC, and wireless mice are -not- good for gaming.
are wireless gamepads for consoles better? and how are the batteries? how long can you play on one charge? 6 hours? 10 hours? how's the range?
i mean, i've read the specs, but i've learned not to trust them for things like functional range, response time, and actual battery life.
any honest reviews are quite welcome.
point was that anime as a media industry is not considered 'kids stuff' in japan.
no one over there gets their knickers in a twist when a boob or a syringe shows up depicted in the anime 'cartoon' style.
the company man reading a manga strip with his morning coffee on the train to tokyo isn't automatically considered some creepy guy with an adolescent fixation on superheroes in tights.
Movies like Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Spirited Away are made every year. The mainstream press reviews anime feature films in japan alongside any other feature film. While in America, only child-safe anime like Spirited Away (that coincide with our cartoon conventions) get feature film releases. Ghost in the Shell and Akira go to video for daring to cover sex, gunfights or street racing.
the point is letting teh consumer decide for themselves whether any given piece is good or bad, without watering down the entire artform to what Walt Disney allowed.
(and yeah, tentacle pron is farked up.)
that's what i'm saying. all these other media have gone through numerous fazes where people have challenged the content of a single work.
most of the industries leave it as an issue regarding the content in question. they stick by the rights of people to publish whatever consumers want to buy, and letting consumers judge for themselves.
but some industries willingly cave when public outcry complains about content.
Consider the comic code of the 60s~70s for a specific example. it was wholly self-applied by the mainstream comic publishers. It wasn't a government action against the freedom of speech, so there was no room for the ACLU or anyone else to argue it. The mainstream publishers agreed that stories containing sex, drug use, rape, etc. just would not be in comic books. hence, comics were and are marginalized by the mainstream as a 'kids' medium, instead of having its content considered alongside any other art.
to most people there are no indy books, there are no 'graphic novels'. it's all just 'comics'. superheroes in tights fighting communists.
i'm not worried about someone suing take2 for the content in GTA. I know their are legions of freedom loving people who would leap to its defense. I'm worried about Sony and Microsoft following Nintendo's lead, and publishing only games that are appropriate for minors.
public opinion would lump anyone in a gaming store into the 'childish' group with comic book readers, instead of judging them based only on the content of the games they play.
note how consumer computer gaming has been around for nigh on 20 years, but only -now- it's getting any mainstream attention. why is that? it isn't market share. it isn't glitz and glam. the mainstream snapped up film long before it overtook the theatre (as gaming has surpassed the domestic boxoffice), long before it demonstrated an advantage in pizazz over stage acting.
in my opinion it's because Sony didn't restrict content the way Nintendo did. Stories in playstation games started to mature, started to -deserve- attention.
If the other publishers decide to 'defend' themselves from the kind of negative attention Take2 is getting, and adopt Nintendo-esque content rules -- gaming will go back to being as ignored and condescended to as comics and roleplaying games before them.