Didn't Halo 2 just come out less than a year ago? Wasn't it a massive hit? Wasn't the X-Box already several years old at that point?
Didn't the Playstation get released in 1994? Wasn't it still selling well enough in 2000 for Sony to find it worthwhile to repackage it as the "PSOne" and keep selling it? Weren't games still being made for it right up until the release of the PS2 (also in 2000)?
Suddenly, the well-informed opinion that "NOTHING lasts longer than two years" sounds like total bullshit.
The life cycle of a game console (provided it's not a major flop) is about five years, not two.
Would you like something to drink with your plate of crow?
Could I get a link validating the claim of access to games going back to 1985
I believe the apt onomatopoeia for this situation is "woosh."
The post you are responding to is a good example of the need for a "sarcasm" tag around here. No matter how obvious your ironic humor is, there's always a few people who will reply before realizing the intention of your remarks.
Pffft! You know what he needs to get? He needs to get... over himself.
For cryin' out loud. Game design is a fun job. If it wasn't, companies would have to pay more to get people to do it.
Everybody who works in game design is probably qualified to work at a bank somewhere making twice the money in fewer hours per week with an easier job. If you choose to shoulder your way into the ultra-glamourous game industry, you should not be surprised that you are treated about as well as a 1930s Hollywood dancing chorus girl, and paid at about the same rate.
Games are possibly the one and only tech industry in all the world where there are more developers trying to get into it than there are jobs available. It's actually harder to find qualified Mac-toting hippies to design good artwork than it is to find code monkeys who will stay up all weekend to work on the physics modeling engine.
If that bugs you, then get out of the business. Do the same tasks in a field where your skills are not only appreciated, but where CFOs will beg you to work for them while licking your shoes clean with their tongues. The best thing about doing so is, unlike those working in the game industry, you will actually have time to play computer games once in a while.
Is hotel PPV really that much of a revenue stream? Most hotels already offer free cable TV, and the ritzier ones sometimes even include the premium channels in that package. The service costs almost as much as going out to the theater to watch a movie, so I can't imagine a high percentage of guests actually use the service.
I see it as kind of like the hotel laundry pick-up service. People like to know it's there if they really want it, but generally don't want to pay for it if they don't need to.
Then again, maybe hotel pr0n is way better than the stuff out on the Internets, and I'm missing out on something really spectacular by not buying it when I travel. Somehow I doubt it.
He's re-posting a high-moderated post from an earlier thread as a means of Karma-whoring, probably so he can crapflood more effectively later. Oldest trick in the book.
Too bad a quick scan of my recent posting history will show you that he cut-and pasted the whole damned thing (from a thread where it was far more relevant), and I happened to log in and see it, so I could point it out. Kindy spend mod points to bitchslap him into oblivion.
Hey Karma whore, next time, at least take the trouble to plagiarize from some other site.
I've never had a group of friends to sit around with and play video games, especially not handholds. I was hoping that this time the wireless intenet play...
The page begins by attributing a quote to Napoleon which he probably never said.
"Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence."
The most reliable available evidence out there is that "never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity" was originally said by Robert J. Hanlon, a relatively unknown humorist who wrote it for a contest to extend Murphy's Law. It's sometimes called "Hanlon's Razor."
If you think I'm wrong, please cite the publication in which Napoleon is recorded as having said it.
The industry needs to learn, remaking a good film or series is a losing proposition: at best, people will say "it was as good as the original".
They will "learn" when people stop watching them.
Nobody makes a movie or TV show for the sake of getting Slashdot visitors to talk about how good it is. That might be helpful towards their goal, but it's not the goal. The goal is to make money.
Remakes make money. As long as this is true, they will continue to be churned out.
You don't understand! It's not that we made way too few! It's that we could have sold way too many more than we made! It's not a supply shortage!!! It's a demand over-run!!! Uh... These aren't the droids your looking for! We can go about our business! Move along! Uh... Hmmm... Damn, how does Steve Jobs guy get that hand-waving thing to work?"
I just knew some humorless dickhead would react to my tongue-in-cheek little post (which teasingly pretened to assume the parent poster was too old and out of touch to know television actually was) by spewing a rage-filed and condescending defense of the greatness of audio plays on the radio, and how anybdoy who can't appreciate their merits over the "idiot box" must be badly stunted intellectually.
I just didn't realize it would happen so quickly. That's the Internet Age for you, I guess.:)
In spite of all the catterwalling you've heard, the truth is that the majority of artists who fail to go platinum once or twice don't really make much money for either themselves or the label.
Once an artist on a three or five album deal starts enjoying a bit of mainstream success, that's when there's real money involved, and therefore it's also when there's something worth arguing over. Battles between hit artists and their labels are sometimes legendary.
Here's the usual path:
New artist establishes a scene in some local market as a live act, or is the cousin of a hot-shit producer, or the favorite new project of Madonna or Prince or Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, or whoever. Anyway, they get a deal to make a record.
The record, usually made up of their best ideas from years of being a struggling performer, becomes a hit, but not enough of a hit for the artist to pay back all the money the label fronted them. The artist is living well on their advances, but also badly in debt and constantly on tour to promote sales.
It is, however, enough of a hit for the label to sign the artist for a few more albums.
In order for the artist to keep their head above water (and in order for the label to cash in on the "new artist" hype) a second album is rushed out. If the artist is out of material and can't write new songs fast enough, half-thought-out songs are slapped togther, other writers are hired, or licenses are bought for a cover-song or two to pad out the album. Whatever it takes to get 35-40 minutes of music on a disk and get it out to the shopping malls.
More often than not, the album sucks and hardly anybody wants to buy it. This is often called "the sophomore jynx" among music critics. Artists who manage to work well enough under pressure to dodge this particular bullet often become the ones which the labels will latch on to and try to turn in to "the next Beatles."
Since there's a contract for a third album, and (for the bands who bombed on the second) no real rush to get another one out, the artist is able to take their time and make something which is guided more by their creative vision (or the creative vision of their producer, in the case of disposable pop acts), and generally a slightly better album is put out. If the critics like it, the artist just might get a chance to re-emerge as a hit machine.
At this point, the artists who had a hit on either their second or third album are likely to be in the black (unless they were ripped off by their management or ran out and bought their own soccer teams or something). This is when it gets interesting.
A label has a contract with that artist, one which is very profitable at this point. They want to keep that artist in their "stable", but doing so is likely to get a whole lot more expensive when the time comes to negotiate the next deal. There's two ways they can respond.
1. They can promote the shit out of the artist, make as much money as they can off the next album or two, and let the future take care of itself. Even if the artist bolts for another label, you can always exploit the material of theirs you own with yet another "greatest hits" collection or "retrospective" or "complete box set" every few years.
2. They can let the artist's popularity dwindle to next to nothing, making it cheaper to re-sign them, and then ramp the machine up again when you have a mutual committment for a few more years... or not. You can also make money off them as a "niche" act (as Crysalis did for years with Jethro Tull), by spending almost nothing to promote them while loyal fans buy their albums based on the artist's name alone.
Either choice is a risk. A lot of labels go with option #2, and that's when you get the really, truly entertaining hair-pulling, eye-poking, bitch-fests of rage from the likes of Prince or Metallica. The artist became a multi-millionaire by working with the label, but now they see vast sums of potential money their label seems to be ignoring, all while keep
Apple said in so many words that it wants to know what EMI is smoking and where it can get some
Don't be absurd. Anybody who has sat and watched the iTunes visualizer for more than five minutes is well aware that the people at Apple clearly already know how to get their hands on the really good shit.
They're tripping the light fantastic at One Infinite Loop... no need for any substance EMI has to offer.
The Slashdot FAQ states that the Politics section was for stories related the US government. Nowadays, we get stories in there about Canada, Britain, and everywhere else that have nothing to do with US politics. In fact, there are hardly any stories dealing with real politics in here.
Well, they could have run with the YRO story I submitted about Congress recently reaching a compromise deal to scale back some of the spookier elements of the PATRIOT Act, but I guess what kind of TV format the brits will be using to tune in their crap reality shows is far more important to discuss.
Also, what I neglected to observe is that only bad news about PATRIOT is ever newsworthy. Moderation of the bill, and stories of cool heads prevailing, don't really do much to help with EFF fund-raising, or provoke long threads of tirades about the current President which consistantly trigger Godwin's Law.
What exactly are the benefits of digital TV anyway? I don't understand this HD TV and digital TV stuff, to me TV is good enough as is.
Sir, I believe what you are enjoying is a family radio. If you are wondering why you can't seen to tune in Gunsmoke and Little Orphan Anne these days, it's because TV has made radio plays somewhat obsolete.
TV is like radio, except with moving pictures, kind of like the "talkies" you might have seen demonstrated at a World's Fair.
Digital HDTV displays these pictures with even more detail and clarity. A lot of those confounded durn-blasted whippersnappers you see hustling about are actually rather happy about it.
I hope you get modded "troll" for that "ghetto fantasy" comment.
Why? That's what 90% of the Hip-hop industry is. A shallow, absurd portrait of urban street life, carefully honed and crafted to appeal to white people (who buy the vast majority of rap CD's) and their craving for escapist tough-guy fantasy.
Counterpoint to your devil's advocate - the countless project managers, receptionists, engineers, promoters, executives and more are completely replaceable and interchangeable.
You pretty much described every pop princess of the last 10 years. Or am I wrong about Miss Spears?
On his own label (not without a label... he got backers and started one): "Feel My Power" sold 60,000 copies. This is considered a "jackpot" in the indie music scene, even though it's not enough to sustain a comfortable lifestyle. Think about it... after taking out expenses to pay off the handful of employees involved in promoting the record, and taking out an even bigger chunk to pay off those who backed it, he still had to split the remaining money two ways with his business partner. Maybe if he was able to release another record per year for the rest of his working life, it would be enough to go on, but the fact is that he caught lighting in a bottle once, and it gave him just enough success to get the attention of the major labels.
On Capitol Records: "Hammer Please Don't Hurt 'Em" sold well over 10,000,000 copies. In three albums in about as many years he personally made $30 Million. (He pissed it all away, but that's another story.)
Since leaving Capitol, he's had to file for bankruptcy, and has not released a single new hit.
Master P owns a record label which he set up with a $100,000 inheritence.
He didn't sign with a label because he bought one.
Furthermore, most of his fortune came after His label fell under the umbrella of Priority Records, and Priority Records cut a distribution deal with EMI.
Sorry to ruin your ghetto fantasy, but Master P is, and always was, Part Of The Machine.
I simply said that a determination needs to be made when a timeline is exceeded about why that happened.
Right, and I'm saying that if you're asking that question after the product is ready, you were not really as in the loop as you should have been when it was ongoing. On a project of that scale, asking for an estimate at the beginning and then not hearing about progress until it is done (and happens to be done early) is a much more serious problem than somebody who's turn-around time didn't match their estimate.
More to the point, if I am given a task by my boss, and we agree that it will take me all day, and I get it done in an hour, if the first question he asks me is "why did you screw up the estimate so badly?", I'll answer with my two weeks notice.
I would like to say, however, from experience, that it's not so much "singing at a microphone for a couple hours." It's more like "honing your craft for years at one's own expense, laboring over every note and word of the song--sometimes for months, and sometimes spending days on each track before you're happy with it, then sometimes days working with your engineer and/or producer (I prefer fewer cooks to spoiling the pot) agreeing over a basic mix, THEN you can go home and let the staffers take care of the rest." Not that I've ever enjoyed that last step.
Okay, I'm nitpicking here, I realize, but it's still a little too easy...
Recording engineers, the really good ones like Doug Sax for example, also spend years "honing their craft for years." Likewise, many in the music business need to go out and get a degree on their own dime before they can be considered for the most attractive jobs in the industry. The top sales people start out with a desk, a phone, and a threat to be fired if they don't move product, and claw their way to the top... yet none of them get a cut of the gross.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't Halo 2 just come out less than a year ago? Wasn't it a massive hit? Wasn't the X-Box already several years old at that point?
Didn't the Playstation get released in 1994? Wasn't it still selling well enough in 2000 for Sony to find it worthwhile to repackage it as the "PSOne" and keep selling it? Weren't games still being made for it right up until the release of the PS2 (also in 2000)?
Suddenly, the well-informed opinion that "NOTHING lasts longer than two years" sounds like total bullshit.
The life cycle of a game console (provided it's not a major flop) is about five years, not two.
Would you like something to drink with your plate of crow?
Could I get a link validating the claim of access to games going back to 1985
I believe the apt onomatopoeia for this situation is "woosh."
The post you are responding to is a good example of the need for a "sarcasm" tag around here. No matter how obvious your ironic humor is, there's always a few people who will reply before realizing the intention of your remarks.
Pffft! You know what he needs to get? He needs to get... over himself.
For cryin' out loud. Game design is a fun job. If it wasn't, companies would have to pay more to get people to do it.
Everybody who works in game design is probably qualified to work at a bank somewhere making twice the money in fewer hours per week with an easier job. If you choose to shoulder your way into the ultra-glamourous game industry, you should not be surprised that you are treated about as well as a 1930s Hollywood dancing chorus girl, and paid at about the same rate.
Games are possibly the one and only tech industry in all the world where there are more developers trying to get into it than there are jobs available. It's actually harder to find qualified Mac-toting hippies to design good artwork than it is to find code monkeys who will stay up all weekend to work on the physics modeling engine.
If that bugs you, then get out of the business. Do the same tasks in a field where your skills are not only appreciated, but where CFOs will beg you to work for them while licking your shoes clean with their tongues. The best thing about doing so is, unlike those working in the game industry, you will actually have time to play computer games once in a while.
Is hotel PPV really that much of a revenue stream? Most hotels already offer free cable TV, and the ritzier ones sometimes even include the premium channels in that package. The service costs almost as much as going out to the theater to watch a movie, so I can't imagine a high percentage of guests actually use the service.
I see it as kind of like the hotel laundry pick-up service. People like to know it's there if they really want it, but generally don't want to pay for it if they don't need to.
Then again, maybe hotel pr0n is way better than the stuff out on the Internets, and I'm missing out on something really spectacular by not buying it when I travel. Somehow I doubt it.
He's re-posting a high-moderated post from an earlier thread as a means of Karma-whoring, probably so he can crapflood more effectively later. Oldest trick in the book.
Too bad a quick scan of my recent posting history will show you that he cut-and pasted the whole damned thing (from a thread where it was far more relevant), and I happened to log in and see it, so I could point it out. Kindy spend mod points to bitchslap him into oblivion.
Hey Karma whore, next time, at least take the trouble to plagiarize from some other site.
I've never had a group of friends to sit around with and play video games, especially not handholds. I was hoping that this time the wireless intenet play...
Or you could just go out and make some friends.
Just sayin' is all.
Is a Linux study funded by GNU/FSF/OSI/OSDL or whatever any more impartial? No. Do you have problems finding people doing it?
Yes. As far as I'm concerned, they are whores, just like this guy.
[sarcasm]What? Wouldn't they be afraid to be considered communist hippies?[/sarcasm].
Oh! You assumed I was going to answer some other way. Huh. So much for your whole damned post having any point at all.
I'm a bit confused, if video games don't influence kids why should we be worried about a TV show influencing adults?
T3h Win!!!
Might as well close this whole thread down. shawn(at)fsu's post should pretty much be considered the final word on the matter.
IMHO YMMV yadda yadda yadda.
Ummmm, where's the foot icon? It's good to know that the author considers this a joke, but I'm afraid that Hemos might not be in on it...
If you've seen the Slashcode, you would know why this joke would be lost on Hemos and the rest of the staff here.
Zing!
The page begins by attributing a quote to Napoleon which he probably never said.
"Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence."
The most reliable available evidence out there is that "never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity" was originally said by Robert J. Hanlon, a relatively unknown humorist who wrote it for a contest to extend Murphy's Law. It's sometimes called "Hanlon's Razor."
If you think I'm wrong, please cite the publication in which Napoleon is recorded as having said it.
Good Lord... Somebody buy that poor soul a sense of humor.
The industry needs to learn, remaking a good film or series is a losing proposition: at best, people will say "it was as good as the original".
They will "learn" when people stop watching them.
Nobody makes a movie or TV show for the sake of getting Slashdot visitors to talk about how good it is. That might be helpful towards their goal, but it's not the goal. The goal is to make money.
Remakes make money. As long as this is true, they will continue to be churned out.
You don't understand! It's not that we made way too few! It's that we could have sold way too many more than we made! It's not a supply shortage!!! It's a demand over-run!!! Uh... These aren't the droids your looking for! We can go about our business! Move along! Uh... Hmmm... Damn, how does Steve Jobs guy get that hand-waving thing to work?"
It was a joke. Breathe. Relax. Nobody was injured. Everything will be okay.
Holy crap.
:)
I just knew some humorless dickhead would react to my tongue-in-cheek little post (which teasingly pretened to assume the parent poster was too old and out of touch to know television actually was) by spewing a rage-filed and condescending defense of the greatness of audio plays on the radio, and how anybdoy who can't appreciate their merits over the "idiot box" must be badly stunted intellectually.
I just didn't realize it would happen so quickly. That's the Internet Age for you, I guess.
In spite of all the catterwalling you've heard, the truth is that the majority of artists who fail to go platinum once or twice don't really make much money for either themselves or the label.
Once an artist on a three or five album deal starts enjoying a bit of mainstream success, that's when there's real money involved, and therefore it's also when there's something worth arguing over. Battles between hit artists and their labels are sometimes legendary.
Here's the usual path:
New artist establishes a scene in some local market as a live act, or is the cousin of a hot-shit producer, or the favorite new project of Madonna or Prince or Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, or whoever. Anyway, they get a deal to make a record.
The record, usually made up of their best ideas from years of being a struggling performer, becomes a hit, but not enough of a hit for the artist to pay back all the money the label fronted them. The artist is living well on their advances, but also badly in debt and constantly on tour to promote sales.
It is, however, enough of a hit for the label to sign the artist for a few more albums.
In order for the artist to keep their head above water (and in order for the label to cash in on the "new artist" hype) a second album is rushed out. If the artist is out of material and can't write new songs fast enough, half-thought-out songs are slapped togther, other writers are hired, or licenses are bought for a cover-song or two to pad out the album. Whatever it takes to get 35-40 minutes of music on a disk and get it out to the shopping malls.
More often than not, the album sucks and hardly anybody wants to buy it. This is often called "the sophomore jynx" among music critics. Artists who manage to work well enough under pressure to dodge this particular bullet often become the ones which the labels will latch on to and try to turn in to "the next Beatles."
Since there's a contract for a third album, and (for the bands who bombed on the second) no real rush to get another one out, the artist is able to take their time and make something which is guided more by their creative vision (or the creative vision of their producer, in the case of disposable pop acts), and generally a slightly better album is put out. If the critics like it, the artist just might get a chance to re-emerge as a hit machine.
At this point, the artists who had a hit on either their second or third album are likely to be in the black (unless they were ripped off by their management or ran out and bought their own soccer teams or something). This is when it gets interesting.
A label has a contract with that artist, one which is very profitable at this point. They want to keep that artist in their "stable", but doing so is likely to get a whole lot more expensive when the time comes to negotiate the next deal. There's two ways they can respond.
1. They can promote the shit out of the artist, make as much money as they can off the next album or two, and let the future take care of itself. Even if the artist bolts for another label, you can always exploit the material of theirs you own with yet another "greatest hits" collection or "retrospective" or "complete box set" every few years.
2. They can let the artist's popularity dwindle to next to nothing, making it cheaper to re-sign them, and then ramp the machine up again when you have a mutual committment for a few more years... or not. You can also make money off them as a "niche" act (as Crysalis did for years with Jethro Tull), by spending almost nothing to promote them while loyal fans buy their albums based on the artist's name alone.
Either choice is a risk. A lot of labels go with option #2, and that's when you get the really, truly entertaining hair-pulling, eye-poking, bitch-fests of rage from the likes of Prince or Metallica. The artist became a multi-millionaire by working with the label, but now they see vast sums of potential money their label seems to be ignoring, all while keep
Apple said in so many words that it wants to know what EMI is smoking and where it can get some
Don't be absurd. Anybody who has sat and watched the iTunes visualizer for more than five minutes is well aware that the people at Apple clearly already know how to get their hands on the really good shit.
They're tripping the light fantastic at One Infinite Loop... no need for any substance EMI has to offer.
The Slashdot FAQ states that the Politics section was for stories related the US government. Nowadays, we get stories in there about Canada, Britain, and everywhere else that have nothing to do with US politics. In fact, there are hardly any stories dealing with real politics in here.
Well, they could have run with the YRO story I submitted about Congress recently reaching a compromise deal to scale back some of the spookier elements of the PATRIOT Act, but I guess what kind of TV format the brits will be using to tune in their crap reality shows is far more important to discuss.
Also, what I neglected to observe is that only bad news about PATRIOT is ever newsworthy. Moderation of the bill, and stories of cool heads prevailing, don't really do much to help with EFF fund-raising, or provoke long threads of tirades about the current President which consistantly trigger Godwin's Law.
What exactly are the benefits of digital TV anyway? I don't understand this HD TV and digital TV stuff, to me TV is good enough as is.
Sir, I believe what you are enjoying is a family radio. If you are wondering why you can't seen to tune in Gunsmoke and Little Orphan Anne these days, it's because TV has made radio plays somewhat obsolete.
TV is like radio, except with moving pictures, kind of like the "talkies" you might have seen demonstrated at a World's Fair.
Digital HDTV displays these pictures with even more detail and clarity. A lot of those confounded durn-blasted whippersnappers you see hustling about are actually rather happy about it.
I hope you get modded "troll" for that "ghetto fantasy" comment.
Why? That's what 90% of the Hip-hop industry is. A shallow, absurd portrait of urban street life, carefully honed and crafted to appeal to white people (who buy the vast majority of rap CD's) and their craving for escapist tough-guy fantasy.
Counterpoint to your devil's advocate - the countless project managers, receptionists, engineers, promoters, executives and more are completely replaceable and interchangeable.
You pretty much described every pop princess of the last 10 years. Or am I wrong about Miss Spears?
Oh, and MC Hammer is another good example.
On his own label (not without a label... he got backers and started one): "Feel My Power" sold 60,000 copies. This is considered a "jackpot" in the indie music scene, even though it's not enough to sustain a comfortable lifestyle. Think about it... after taking out expenses to pay off the handful of employees involved in promoting the record, and taking out an even bigger chunk to pay off those who backed it, he still had to split the remaining money two ways with his business partner. Maybe if he was able to release another record per year for the rest of his working life, it would be enough to go on, but the fact is that he caught lighting in a bottle once, and it gave him just enough success to get the attention of the major labels.
On Capitol Records: "Hammer Please Don't Hurt 'Em" sold well over 10,000,000 copies. In three albums in about as many years he personally made $30 Million. (He pissed it all away, but that's another story.)
Since leaving Capitol, he's had to file for bankruptcy, and has not released a single new hit.
Master P owns a record label which he set up with a $100,000 inheritence.
He didn't sign with a label because he bought one.
Furthermore, most of his fortune came after His label fell under the umbrella of Priority Records, and Priority Records cut a distribution deal with EMI.
Sorry to ruin your ghetto fantasy, but Master P is, and always was, Part Of The Machine.
I simply said that a determination needs to be made when a timeline is exceeded about why that happened.
Right, and I'm saying that if you're asking that question after the product is ready, you were not really as in the loop as you should have been when it was ongoing. On a project of that scale, asking for an estimate at the beginning and then not hearing about progress until it is done (and happens to be done early) is a much more serious problem than somebody who's turn-around time didn't match their estimate.
More to the point, if I am given a task by my boss, and we agree that it will take me all day, and I get it done in an hour, if the first question he asks me is "why did you screw up the estimate so badly?", I'll answer with my two weeks notice.
I would like to say, however, from experience, that it's not so much "singing at a microphone for a couple hours." It's more like "honing your craft for years at one's own expense, laboring over every note and word of the song--sometimes for months, and sometimes spending days on each track before you're happy with it, then sometimes days working with your engineer and/or producer (I prefer fewer cooks to spoiling the pot) agreeing over a basic mix, THEN you can go home and let the staffers take care of the rest." Not that I've ever enjoyed that last step.
Okay, I'm nitpicking here, I realize, but it's still a little too easy...
Recording engineers, the really good ones like Doug Sax for example, also spend years "honing their craft for years." Likewise, many in the music business need to go out and get a degree on their own dime before they can be considered for the most attractive jobs in the industry. The top sales people start out with a desk, a phone, and a threat to be fired if they don't move product, and claw their way to the top... yet none of them get a cut of the gross.