Yup, I burned out a Pentium 166 that was overclocked to 200, and a Winchip C6 that was overclocked to 266 Mhz. They both ran stable for months until the day they didn't.
I don't overclock anymore, because the reward is so tiny for the amount of money you save, and because the amount of money you save is so tiny for the amount of effort that goes into it. That is, if you're saving money at all... It's easy to lose sight of the fact that you spent more on cooling than you would have paid to just get the higher rated processor in the first place.
However, what I do fault them for is abusing that policy. Putting it right up in your face and saying "Look at the power we have!"
I don't think they're abusing their policy, they're using it proactively. If they let the DEA's dogs sniff out the packages there will never be reason for a DEA agent with probabale cause and a warrant to come in and shut down their hub for a few hours... Which would probably happen pretty frequently.
FedEx should be worried about covering their ass, not about covering your ass. I'm sure they don't want the customers that are shipping illegal items anyway. Why should they incur the risk? They probably want to scare off those people.
Again with the right and wrong based merely upon speculation -- it's nonsensical. In any case, I thought that using Samuel jackson and Chris Penn as the first two voice actors in GTA:SA was a really nice touch. I recgonized them right away, and liked it -- I didn't mind paying for that. The fact that you don't care is only a matter of opinion, and I have a feeling that the market disagrees with you. Similarly, RS chose to use major label music. I also miss the days of cheap music in games, but RS took a different angle, and I also felt that it was a nice touch.
GTA:SA was one of those games where the music was justified. They were trying to portray a real-world time period. It was necessary. You'll get no disagreement from me for that game regarding music. Would changing the music to something cheaper have made it a lesser game that would have actually sold less copies? Probably.
Would having used talented, but not recognisable voice actors that wouldn't have cost percentage points of the games development budget have made it a lesser game? To the point where you wouldn't have gotten that two second twang of recognition, perhaps, but on the whole, no. Would it have made it such that it actually sold less copies? I'd bet a big pile of cash that difference in sales would have been statistically insignifigant. The only games where the celebrity voice talent is a driving force for sales are typically the ones that aren't worth playing. If they were, they'd have sold regardless.
Am I speculating as to what episodic content from Rockstar is going to look like? Hell, yes, but considering what platform they're targeting the content at, and what all the other such content so far on Microsoft's platform has been, they don't get the benefit of the doubt. My default position is that it's going to be like all the rest of it, and I'll be surprised (pleasently) if it's otherwise. I'm not sure why you think Rockstar is deserving of any different treatment than other developers though. If anything I'd be *more* skeptical of them. Look at their history as a development company. The only games they have put out that have a high standard of quality come from thrid parties that they purchased. The games that come from/came from what was originally Rockstar have a notoriously low quality level (ever play Midnight Club? Summoner? Whatever the name of that dune buggy game was...?), and even with the stuff they bought like DMA Design's GTA3 series, they've shown they're not above rehashing it haphazardly and slapping a full pricetag on it (witness Liberty City Stories for the PSP). No, I'm not convinced that when Rockstar says 'episodic content' they don't mean the same thing that every other Xbox publisher has meant when they said it: Expansion content in little pieces for too much money.
You are consistently confusing fact with opinion.
You're confusing speculative analysis with opinion. You'll be hard pressed to find things in my previous posts in this thread that aren't at the very least educated guesses. You say I guessed at what talent costs/did cost, but I didn't pull most of those numbers out of my ass, and the ones I did were generously conservative. I'm not some kid off the street. I have first hand knowledge of the economics of the game industry.
You, like most people I try to discuss this with, take the developers perspective and assume that the only argument that can be made is from their profitability standpoint. I won't argue that this content isn't a profitable business practice for developers (though I may argue that other practices might be more profitable even if they don't have as high a price tag), or that developers are unjustified in trying to wring out every last cent they can from their potential customers. My argument is merely that it is a marketing gimmick to get a lot more money for the same amount of stuff, that they've exceeded my price threshold, and that it makes me mad because it doesn't decrease my desire for the product but only my w
Clearly the game is going to be an outlet for all that combat that wasn't in the movies.
I mean, they were adventure movies. There is no corresponding game genre for that, is there?
If you're not killing somebody, moving fast, using a ball, or falling off the edge of something, it's not a fun game.
</sarcasm>
Game genres are a scale from First person shooter to Cartoon Golf. It looks something like this:
First person shooter -> First person combat w/o guns -> Third Person Combat -> Plaftorm -> Racing -> Sports -> Cartoon Sports
Somebody went back in time and deleted all references to the Adventure genre from the industry, and the strategy and RPG genres have been diluted such that they can only be funded if they also fall into one of the other categories, so where do you put an Indiana Jones game these days? Well, even though you could count the number of man-on-man fights Indy finished in the movies on one hand, clearly it has to fall between First Person combat and Third Person combat. There just isn't any other genre to put it in.
<sarcasm>
Personally, I can't wait for the mahogany water taxi race level, but I'm sure the bi-plane dogfight scene will be fun too. I just hope you can skip the little plot interludes, and if there are any puzzles I'll have to buy the strategy guide.
especially since Microsoft has stated that the components in the 360 are getting cheaper to manufacture, would boost 360 sales by a huge amount, while at the same time making the PS3's price even more outrageous
If they're already on the course to victory, though, why would they turn down the extra cash? Unless Sony is winning the hype war and 360 sales are in the toilet, Microsoft won't have any incentive to lower price.
I'm willing to take your bet. I'll bet one next generation console game of your choice that the premium edition Xbox 360 costs the same amount on November 17th 2006 that it does today.
You are out of your mind if you think there is going to be a 360 price drop before they start to turn a profit on it. The only way that happens is if Microsoft perceives that they are losing the market share battle in a horrible way.
I also wouldn't be shocked by Nintendo announcing a $199 price tag for their offering.
I also think that within the price range you're talking about, history has shown they won't make much of a difference. After all, the PS2 cost $100 more than the Dreamcast and the Gamecube at launch, and $100 isn't what it used to be back in 1999/2000. The platform exclusive titles will, as always, be the deciding factor, and we won't know which of the three will have what yet.
What parents are willing to spend only has limited effect too. If Junior asks for a Playstation 3, Mom and Dad don't go to the store and buy an Xbox 360 because it's cheaper. They buy the PS3, or they tell the kid it's too expensive. They certainly don't spend $300 on something the kid didn't ask for.
I don't think it's inaccurate to present PS3 in a poor light right now.
That's fine. Perhaps even correct. Time will tell, etc, etc...
That's not what happened here though. The title says Sony vs. Microsoft, the story talks about Sony and Microsoft, and the summary only talks about how great Microsoft is. He didn't say anything negative about Sony, he just said great stuff about Microsoft. Doesn't that seem a little unusual to you? I don't care who you think is going to 'win'. That's not the issue. The issue is that the games section reads like a paid advertisement these days...
Enough people actually pay for Alcohol to keep them in business though. I doubt many people would pirate games, but then get all altruistic and pay for Alcohol.
If you're using DT for it's copy protection emulation, I figure chances are better than not you don't have a problem with downloading software in the first place. So might as well use Alcohol?
That is where you'd be wrong.
Using CD emulation software doesn't make you a pirate. I started using Daemon Tools because I had a Vaio laptop with no CD drive. It was the only way I could game on it. I kept using it when I got my gaming desktop because it's just so damned convienient not to need to swap CDs. My hard drive is also a *lot* quieter than my CD-ROM drive.
I own a copy of Alcohol. Yes, I paid for it. I use it to rip, but I still use Daemon Tools to emulate. It just plain has better compatability.
Our stupid 1950's, highschool football culture doesn't value science and tech geeks, but our businesses do. The prizes in that competition are too puny to be worth the time, had I or other people I've asked even known about it before it now. If I were going to enter some coding competition, I'd rather enter the IOCCC. At least people have, you know, heard of it.
Just curious... Let's say somebody got my vonage username and password. Aside from checking my voicemail and canceling my service, what exactly do you think they'd do with it? Phishing scams usually phish for something, you know... Profitable. You can't even get enough personal info out of somebody's Vonage account page to make a reasonable attempt at identity theft.
Go ahead and try to log in. Go ahead - I'll wait. Can't can you?
I hadn't tried it until I saw your post, but I went back and dug up the e-mail figuring I could always change my vonage password afterward... You can indeed log in. I got bored with the forms, so I didn't go through the whole process, but the summary says they don't take any of your financial information, they just do the standard risk tolerance questions that you have before buying any IPO stock and then refer you to an independent brokerage.
If this is a phishing scam, it's run by clinically dumb people.
So...because other shops pay a dozen coders to churn out a mod, it makes this one just the same? What about the hollywood talent that they hire, does that come cheap? What about the major label music that they license, how much does that cost them? What about the other costs associated with a project like this (testers, project management, voice actors, graphics, etc)? What about their legal fees incurred in order to fight off the jokers who blame video games for violence? What about all of the other costs associated with running a business (these are far too numerous to list)?
Your cost estimates make absolutely no sense, which doesn't say much for your profit margin numbers.
Ok, you bought into their crap and you actually believe that they're creating suffcient 'new' stuff here to inflate the costs. You're wrong because they don't actually generate any of the new expensive in any of these types of add-ons that I've seen so far, but OK, you believe it.
That still doesn't make it a good value. When I said $1/hr I was being generous. That's the *best case scenario*. Would you still consider $2 for 10 minutes a good value? Those types of these things exist too.
Everything else I would say to you I've already said in another post.
Also, I could care less what it costs to go see a movie, because that has exceeded my cost tolerance years ago, and I don't go anymore. And Hollywood talent and pop music in video games is a stupid waste of money in most cases. You can make a case for the music in some games, but there are plenty of talented voice actors who would kill for a job that there is no need to pay a name premium. You can't name a single game that would have suffered for lack of hollywood star level voice talent (If you think you can, you'd be wrong), and I could name a dozen - two from the last year - that suffered because they cast a name over an appropriate voice.
That was an extreme example in every way. In reality it doesn't cost them nearly that much, even if they don't sell very many. The difficult to create assets are re-used in these add-ons. None of the "next-gen" aspects are new.
In reality you're talking a couple of artists and a script writer/programmer for a week, and then a QA person and maybe a few play testers for a week. The artists and script writer will be lucky to be making $75k, the QA person slightly less, and depending on the company there's a good chance the play testers aren't even payed at all. So now you're down to $5500 of people time in the most likely case to make one of these "episodic" add ons.
Now, let's look at these game's marketing budgets. How much do you think that TV time costs? Are they charging the customers to watch the ads? Was the business development department asleep the day Captian Obvious handed out the memo that taught how cheap add ons could be used as marketing to lower advertising costs and increase sales? There is a good chance that the $2 add on that sold 400,000 copies actually cost the company more in the long run than if they had given it away in lieu of TV time.
I'm sure that the two dollar mod that sells 400,000 copies is a highly atypical example.
I hope the $2 mod that sells any copies will be an atypical example. When people start learning how little they're getting from their money, hopefully they will stop buying. I hope, but I have very little hope.
If you remember, the uproar over the horse armor pack led them to offer the next content at a much better price.
No it didn't. It prompted them to offer the later content at a slightly reduced price. ($0.10 less? Give me a break.) I have the game. I love the game. I have the Orrery add-on... If taken as a fraction of a $35 expansion pack, there is about $0.25 worth of content in it.
I'd buy the "expensive to create next-gen content" argument if the game weren't 10% content and 90% cut and paste copies of that content, or perhaps if there were more that 10 minutes of gameplay in there for $1.89. Episodic content is just a marketing ruse to get people to pay 10x more for expansion content than they used to. Next gen content isn't 10x more expensive to create, and it's not worth 10x more to buy. End of story.
Let's say they have a team of twelve guys working on some episodic content. I pick that number because I know for a fact that there are developers who create the content with less, and because it makes the math obvious. Let's say it takes a month to create and test a $1 add-on. I pick that time period and price because the price is representitive and the time period is demostrably conservative. Let's say all ten of those people make a quarter million dollars a year. Which, quite frankly, isn't likely. I know plenty of people in the industry, and I can tell you that the average salary is signifigantly less than that. I personally don't work in the industry because they don't pay nearly that well.
That's a quarter million dollars to develop the mod. There are some notable recent examples of $2 mods that have sold 400,000 copies in the first two days. What's the profit margin there? And that's if you assume there are no further sales after the first few days.
In reality, the teams are smaller, the salaries are smaller, and you're totally full of shit if you try and tell anybody that the content has to cost $1/hour of play time to be profitable.
the point is that we actually would like to live off making games. If you don't like that, just make your own and release them as open source.
My point wasn't that people shouldn't be able to charge whatever they want. My point was twofold. First, that I'm not going to pay that much for mere minutes of content, and second, that I don't think other people should either. You can think I'm wrong all you want, but I have just as much a right and reason to try and convince people not to fund this crap as the developers do to pull it.
If you're going to call somebody ignorant, you'd damned well better know what you're talking about first. Complex carbs have nothing to do with it, as both honey and table sugar are simple sugars.
Honey is sweeter tasting because it has a higher fructose content, but that also means it has more calories per unit volume. The only reason the argument can be made that honey is healther is that you don't need to use as much to sweeten your beverage to get the same sweetness as you would have from table sugar.
Arguments can be made that the fructose is worse for you than the glucose because it is more likely to become fat, but arguments can also be made that the glucose can lead to diabetes, so I think that the jury is still out on which one is 'healthier' if you want to take it beyond the net caloric intake level.
If you were going to go with a full teaspoon of one or the other straight up, though, I'd go with the sugar. 20% less calories, and they probably won't turn to fat. The point is that you wouldn't use a full teaspoon of honey to replace a full teaspoon of sugar.
Episodic content is just a way for them to raise the price of the game without raising the price on the pricetag in the stores.
I'm sick of this crap where game companies think they can get $1.00 out of us for what would have been $0.10 of content had it been in an expansion pack, or included in the game to begin with. I'm also pissed at all the stupid moron gamers that buy this crap that 'costs less than a cup of coffee' because they don't understand that they're paying way more money in the long run; thus letting the micropayment mind-games continue.
I wish one of the next-gen consoles didn't have an online component, so they wouldn't be able to pull this crap. I'd buy that console instead of the other ones.
I found the other PDF, but it wasn't clear whether there was no digital video out, or just no HDMI jack. There is no reason that the multi-out can't support digital video, even HDCP digital video. Leaving the jack off the back in the cheaper version would enable Sony to charge extra for a fancy accessory cable instead of allowing users to use an HDMI cable... Sony has already overloaded the multi-out pins via a software switch for component video.
It is unfortunate that they chose to eliminate the memory card slots on the lower end model. That is the only difference that actually changes functionality in a way that can't be worked around...
I'm still not buying Microsoft's or Sony's console until there is a compelling library of titles anyway. The price seems fairly irrelevant from my perspective since I spend way more on the games. Between all the previous generation consoles, I own probably $4500 in games... The hardware costs are incidental compared to that.
This makes no sense on two levels. First of all, the price is NOT the same (see above).
That is true, which, combined with TiVo availablity is why I'm a DirecTV customer. DirecTV is movint towards their new DVR platform, however, and if I have to choose between that and Comcast with a CableCARD TiVO to get digital recordings, well... I'd switch in a second. Customer service is nice, but the good DVR software seals the deal (yeah, yeah, MythTV... It can't do digital recordings without a re-encode off an analog input yet unless you are one of the lucky few with a firewire cablebox and a cable company that doesn't encrypt. End of story. I am working on making my DSR7000 into a MythTV source though...)
In many ways, Tivo's relationship with DirecTV is "contracturally worse" than using a Comcast DVR, since Rupert Murdoch can control not only the network but the satellite dish that transmits the network. So, whether you pick Tivo, Comcast's DVR or DISH Network's DVR, you still have "contractural ties" to worry about.
DirecTV doesn't have the ability to change the software on my box. The important aspect here is that I know a network isn't going to be able to tell DirecTV to delete a show off my TiVO. The software on my box doesn't have that capability, and they are unable to put such software on my box. Try guaranteeing that with your Comcast or Dish DVR.
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It doesn't matter what Sony or intel come out with, neither company is likely to convert PC gamers to console gamers or console gamers to PC gamers.
Then again, what do I know? I fall into the "has too much money/buys them all" camp.
Yup, I burned out a Pentium 166 that was overclocked to 200, and a Winchip C6 that was overclocked to 266 Mhz. They both ran stable for months until the day they didn't.
I don't overclock anymore, because the reward is so tiny for the amount of money you save, and because the amount of money you save is so tiny for the amount of effort that goes into it. That is, if you're saving money at all... It's easy to lose sight of the fact that you spent more on cooling than you would have paid to just get the higher rated processor in the first place.
However, what I do fault them for is abusing that policy. Putting it right up in your face and saying "Look at the power we have!"
I don't think they're abusing their policy, they're using it proactively. If they let the DEA's dogs sniff out the packages there will never be reason for a DEA agent with probabale cause and a warrant to come in and shut down their hub for a few hours... Which would probably happen pretty frequently.
FedEx should be worried about covering their ass, not about covering your ass. I'm sure they don't want the customers that are shipping illegal items anyway. Why should they incur the risk? They probably want to scare off those people.
Again with the right and wrong based merely upon speculation -- it's nonsensical. In any case, I thought that using Samuel jackson and Chris Penn as the first two voice actors in GTA:SA was a really nice touch. I recgonized them right away, and liked it -- I didn't mind paying for that. The fact that you don't care is only a matter of opinion, and I have a feeling that the market disagrees with you. Similarly, RS chose to use major label music. I also miss the days of cheap music in games, but RS took a different angle, and I also felt that it was a nice touch.
GTA:SA was one of those games where the music was justified. They were trying to portray a real-world time period. It was necessary. You'll get no disagreement from me for that game regarding music. Would changing the music to something cheaper have made it a lesser game that would have actually sold less copies? Probably.
Would having used talented, but not recognisable voice actors that wouldn't have cost percentage points of the games development budget have made it a lesser game? To the point where you wouldn't have gotten that two second twang of recognition, perhaps, but on the whole, no. Would it have made it such that it actually sold less copies? I'd bet a big pile of cash that difference in sales would have been statistically insignifigant. The only games where the celebrity voice talent is a driving force for sales are typically the ones that aren't worth playing. If they were, they'd have sold regardless.
Am I speculating as to what episodic content from Rockstar is going to look like? Hell, yes, but considering what platform they're targeting the content at, and what all the other such content so far on Microsoft's platform has been, they don't get the benefit of the doubt. My default position is that it's going to be like all the rest of it, and I'll be surprised (pleasently) if it's otherwise. I'm not sure why you think Rockstar is deserving of any different treatment than other developers though. If anything I'd be *more* skeptical of them. Look at their history as a development company. The only games they have put out that have a high standard of quality come from thrid parties that they purchased. The games that come from/came from what was originally Rockstar have a notoriously low quality level (ever play Midnight Club? Summoner? Whatever the name of that dune buggy game was...?), and even with the stuff they bought like DMA Design's GTA3 series, they've shown they're not above rehashing it haphazardly and slapping a full pricetag on it (witness Liberty City Stories for the PSP). No, I'm not convinced that when Rockstar says 'episodic content' they don't mean the same thing that every other Xbox publisher has meant when they said it: Expansion content in little pieces for too much money.
You are consistently confusing fact with opinion.
You're confusing speculative analysis with opinion. You'll be hard pressed to find things in my previous posts in this thread that aren't at the very least educated guesses. You say I guessed at what talent costs/did cost, but I didn't pull most of those numbers out of my ass, and the ones I did were generously conservative. I'm not some kid off the street. I have first hand knowledge of the economics of the game industry.
You, like most people I try to discuss this with, take the developers perspective and assume that the only argument that can be made is from their profitability standpoint. I won't argue that this content isn't a profitable business practice for developers (though I may argue that other practices might be more profitable even if they don't have as high a price tag), or that developers are unjustified in trying to wring out every last cent they can from their potential customers. My argument is merely that it is a marketing gimmick to get a lot more money for the same amount of stuff, that they've exceeded my price threshold, and that it makes me mad because it doesn't decrease my desire for the product but only my w
CRPGs
:)
They're slowly becoming a combination of platform/third person combat games.
You're right about the RTS games, But the other types? They're in the vast minority, would wreck my ranting!
/me bookmarks this thread for November reference...
Just like the analysts, I think Microsoft has (foolishly) written Nintendo off.
It's too bad. It looks like they are poised for first place this round.
Clearly the game is going to be an outlet for all that combat that wasn't in the movies.
I mean, they were adventure movies. There is no corresponding game genre for that, is there?
If you're not killing somebody, moving fast, using a ball, or falling off the edge of something, it's not a fun game.
</sarcasm>
Game genres are a scale from First person shooter to Cartoon Golf. It looks something like this:
First person shooter -> First person combat w/o guns -> Third Person Combat -> Plaftorm -> Racing -> Sports -> Cartoon Sports
Somebody went back in time and deleted all references to the Adventure genre from the industry, and the strategy and RPG genres have been diluted such that they can only be funded if they also fall into one of the other categories, so where do you put an Indiana Jones game these days? Well, even though you could count the number of man-on-man fights Indy finished in the movies on one hand, clearly it has to fall between First Person combat and Third Person combat. There just isn't any other genre to put it in.
<sarcasm>
Personally, I can't wait for the mahogany water taxi race level, but I'm sure the bi-plane dogfight scene will be fun too. I just hope you can skip the little plot interludes, and if there are any puzzles I'll have to buy the strategy guide.
especially since Microsoft has stated that the components in the 360 are getting cheaper to manufacture, would boost 360 sales by a huge amount, while at the same time making the PS3's price even more outrageous
If they're already on the course to victory, though, why would they turn down the extra cash? Unless Sony is winning the hype war and 360 sales are in the toilet, Microsoft won't have any incentive to lower price.
I'm willing to take your bet. I'll bet one next generation console game of your choice that the premium edition Xbox 360 costs the same amount on November 17th 2006 that it does today.
You are out of your mind if you think there is going to be a 360 price drop before they start to turn a profit on it. The only way that happens is if Microsoft perceives that they are losing the market share battle in a horrible way.
I also wouldn't be shocked by Nintendo announcing a $199 price tag for their offering.
I also think that within the price range you're talking about, history has shown they won't make much of a difference. After all, the PS2 cost $100 more than the Dreamcast and the Gamecube at launch, and $100 isn't what it used to be back in 1999/2000. The platform exclusive titles will, as always, be the deciding factor, and we won't know which of the three will have what yet.
What parents are willing to spend only has limited effect too. If Junior asks for a Playstation 3, Mom and Dad don't go to the store and buy an Xbox 360 because it's cheaper. They buy the PS3, or they tell the kid it's too expensive. They certainly don't spend $300 on something the kid didn't ask for.
I don't think it's inaccurate to present PS3 in a poor light right now.
That's fine. Perhaps even correct. Time will tell, etc, etc...
That's not what happened here though. The title says Sony vs. Microsoft, the story talks about Sony and Microsoft, and the summary only talks about how great Microsoft is. He didn't say anything negative about Sony, he just said great stuff about Microsoft. Doesn't that seem a little unusual to you? I don't care who you think is going to 'win'. That's not the issue. The issue is that the games section reads like a paid advertisement these days...
Maybe.
Enough people actually pay for Alcohol to keep them in business though. I doubt many people would pirate games, but then get all altruistic and pay for Alcohol.
...Zonk only posts the pro-Xbox part in summary.
Did Microsoft give him free hardware to earn his loyalty, or does he just not want to have blown his cash on the second place finisher?
If you're using DT for it's copy protection emulation, I figure chances are better than not you don't have a problem with downloading software in the first place. So might as well use Alcohol?
That is where you'd be wrong.
Using CD emulation software doesn't make you a pirate. I started using Daemon Tools because I had a Vaio laptop with no CD drive. It was the only way I could game on it. I kept using it when I got my gaming desktop because it's just so damned convienient not to need to swap CDs. My hard drive is also a *lot* quieter than my CD-ROM drive.
I own a copy of Alcohol. Yes, I paid for it. I use it to rip, but I still use Daemon Tools to emulate. It just plain has better compatability.
Not only don't you have to install it, but it's not installed by default. You have to check the box, and they explain that it's ad-ware before you do.
There isn't anything better out there for free. There isn't anything better out there for pay either, if you want the copy protection emulation.
We don't value science and tech geeks here.
The number on my paycheck says otherwise.
Our stupid 1950's, highschool football culture doesn't value science and tech geeks, but our businesses do. The prizes in that competition are too puny to be worth the time, had I or other people I've asked even known about it before it now. If I were going to enter some coding competition, I'd rather enter the IOCCC. At least people have, you know, heard of it.
Just curious... Let's say somebody got my vonage username and password. Aside from checking my voicemail and canceling my service, what exactly do you think they'd do with it? Phishing scams usually phish for something, you know... Profitable. You can't even get enough personal info out of somebody's Vonage account page to make a reasonable attempt at identity theft.
Go ahead and try to log in. Go ahead - I'll wait. Can't can you?
I hadn't tried it until I saw your post, but I went back and dug up the e-mail figuring I could always change my vonage password afterward... You can indeed log in. I got bored with the forms, so I didn't go through the whole process, but the summary says they don't take any of your financial information, they just do the standard risk tolerance questions that you have before buying any IPO stock and then refer you to an independent brokerage.
If this is a phishing scam, it's run by clinically dumb people.
So...because other shops pay a dozen coders to churn out a mod, it makes this one just the same? What about the hollywood talent that they hire, does that come cheap? What about the major label music that they license, how much does that cost them? What about the other costs associated with a project like this (testers, project management, voice actors, graphics, etc)? What about their legal fees incurred in order to fight off the jokers who blame video games for violence? What about all of the other costs associated with running a business (these are far too numerous to list)?
Your cost estimates make absolutely no sense, which doesn't say much for your profit margin numbers.
Ok, you bought into their crap and you actually believe that they're creating suffcient 'new' stuff here to inflate the costs. You're wrong because they don't actually generate any of the new expensive in any of these types of add-ons that I've seen so far, but OK, you believe it.
That still doesn't make it a good value. When I said $1/hr I was being generous. That's the *best case scenario*. Would you still consider $2 for 10 minutes a good value? Those types of these things exist too.
Everything else I would say to you I've already said in another post.
Also, I could care less what it costs to go see a movie, because that has exceeded my cost tolerance years ago, and I don't go anymore. And Hollywood talent and pop music in video games is a stupid waste of money in most cases. You can make a case for the music in some games, but there are plenty of talented voice actors who would kill for a job that there is no need to pay a name premium. You can't name a single game that would have suffered for lack of hollywood star level voice talent (If you think you can, you'd be wrong), and I could name a dozen - two from the last year - that suffered because they cast a name over an appropriate voice.
That was an extreme example in every way. In reality it doesn't cost them nearly that much, even if they don't sell very many. The difficult to create assets are re-used in these add-ons. None of the "next-gen" aspects are new.
In reality you're talking a couple of artists and a script writer/programmer for a week, and then a QA person and maybe a few play testers for a week. The artists and script writer will be lucky to be making $75k, the QA person slightly less, and depending on the company there's a good chance the play testers aren't even payed at all. So now you're down to $5500 of people time in the most likely case to make one of these "episodic" add ons.
Now, let's look at these game's marketing budgets. How much do you think that TV time costs? Are they charging the customers to watch the ads? Was the business development department asleep the day Captian Obvious handed out the memo that taught how cheap add ons could be used as marketing to lower advertising costs and increase sales? There is a good chance that the $2 add on that sold 400,000 copies actually cost the company more in the long run than if they had given it away in lieu of TV time.
I'm sure that the two dollar mod that sells 400,000 copies is a highly atypical example.
I hope the $2 mod that sells any copies will be an atypical example. When people start learning how little they're getting from their money, hopefully they will stop buying. I hope, but I have very little hope.
If you remember, the uproar over the horse armor pack led them to offer the next content at a much better price.
No it didn't. It prompted them to offer the later content at a slightly reduced price. ($0.10 less? Give me a break.) I have the game. I love the game. I have the Orrery add-on... If taken as a fraction of a $35 expansion pack, there is about $0.25 worth of content in it.
I'd buy the "expensive to create next-gen content" argument if the game weren't 10% content and 90% cut and paste copies of that content, or perhaps if there were more that 10 minutes of gameplay in there for $1.89. Episodic content is just a marketing ruse to get people to pay 10x more for expansion content than they used to. Next gen content isn't 10x more expensive to create, and it's not worth 10x more to buy. End of story.
You're right, I'm not getting forced.
As for having no clue...
Let's say they have a team of twelve guys working on some episodic content. I pick that number because I know for a fact that there are developers who create the content with less, and because it makes the math obvious. Let's say it takes a month to create and test a $1 add-on. I pick that time period and price because the price is representitive and the time period is demostrably conservative. Let's say all ten of those people make a quarter million dollars a year. Which, quite frankly, isn't likely. I know plenty of people in the industry, and I can tell you that the average salary is signifigantly less than that. I personally don't work in the industry because they don't pay nearly that well.
That's a quarter million dollars to develop the mod. There are some notable recent examples of $2 mods that have sold 400,000 copies in the first two days. What's the profit margin there? And that's if you assume there are no further sales after the first few days.
In reality, the teams are smaller, the salaries are smaller, and you're totally full of shit if you try and tell anybody that the content has to cost $1/hour of play time to be profitable.
the point is that we actually would like to live off making games. If you don't like that, just make your own and release them as open source.
My point wasn't that people shouldn't be able to charge whatever they want. My point was twofold. First, that I'm not going to pay that much for mere minutes of content, and second, that I don't think other people should either. You can think I'm wrong all you want, but I have just as much a right and reason to try and convince people not to fund this crap as the developers do to pull it.
If you're going to call somebody ignorant, you'd damned well better know what you're talking about first. Complex carbs have nothing to do with it, as both honey and table sugar are simple sugars.
Honey is sweeter tasting because it has a higher fructose content, but that also means it has more calories per unit volume. The only reason the argument can be made that honey is healther is that you don't need to use as much to sweeten your beverage to get the same sweetness as you would have from table sugar.
Arguments can be made that the fructose is worse for you than the glucose because it is more likely to become fat, but arguments can also be made that the glucose can lead to diabetes, so I think that the jury is still out on which one is 'healthier' if you want to take it beyond the net caloric intake level.
If you were going to go with a full teaspoon of one or the other straight up, though, I'd go with the sugar. 20% less calories, and they probably won't turn to fat. The point is that you wouldn't use a full teaspoon of honey to replace a full teaspoon of sugar.
Episodic content is just a way for them to raise the price of the game without raising the price on the pricetag in the stores.
I'm sick of this crap where game companies think they can get $1.00 out of us for what would have been $0.10 of content had it been in an expansion pack, or included in the game to begin with. I'm also pissed at all the stupid moron gamers that buy this crap that 'costs less than a cup of coffee' because they don't understand that they're paying way more money in the long run; thus letting the micropayment mind-games continue.
I wish one of the next-gen consoles didn't have an online component, so they wouldn't be able to pull this crap. I'd buy that console instead of the other ones.
I found the other PDF, but it wasn't clear whether there was no digital video out, or just no HDMI jack. There is no reason that the multi-out can't support digital video, even HDCP digital video. Leaving the jack off the back in the cheaper version would enable Sony to charge extra for a fancy accessory cable instead of allowing users to use an HDMI cable... Sony has already overloaded the multi-out pins via a software switch for component video.
It is unfortunate that they chose to eliminate the memory card slots on the lower end model. That is the only difference that actually changes functionality in a way that can't be worked around...
I'm still not buying Microsoft's or Sony's console until there is a compelling library of titles anyway. The price seems fairly irrelevant from my perspective since I spend way more on the games. Between all the previous generation consoles, I own probably $4500 in games... The hardware costs are incidental compared to that.
This makes no sense on two levels. First of all, the price is NOT the same (see above).
That is true, which, combined with TiVo availablity is why I'm a DirecTV customer. DirecTV is movint towards their new DVR platform, however, and if I have to choose between that and Comcast with a CableCARD TiVO to get digital recordings, well... I'd switch in a second. Customer service is nice, but the good DVR software seals the deal (yeah, yeah, MythTV... It can't do digital recordings without a re-encode off an analog input yet unless you are one of the lucky few with a firewire cablebox and a cable company that doesn't encrypt. End of story. I am working on making my DSR7000 into a MythTV source though...)
In many ways, Tivo's relationship with DirecTV is "contracturally worse" than using a Comcast DVR, since Rupert Murdoch can control not only the network but the satellite dish that transmits the network. So, whether you pick Tivo, Comcast's DVR or DISH Network's DVR, you still have "contractural ties" to worry about.
DirecTV doesn't have the ability to change the software on my box. The important aspect here is that I know a network isn't going to be able to tell DirecTV to delete a show off my TiVO. The software on my box doesn't have that capability, and they are unable to put such software on my box. Try guaranteeing that with your Comcast or Dish DVR.