Well I would imagine that they complain because the majority of games that are put onto the shelves do not break even.
In fact, the article states that the sales of games has reached 7 billion, not the profit made from those games. The cost of making a modern game is in the tens of millions now, and each runaway hit has to support about 10 lackluster releases. Besides the fact that a good portion of the money goes to the publisher who provides the marketing, advertising, and distribution of the game instead of to the studio who creates the code and content.
This last year it appears that the market has expanded to having more than the usual 10% of the games released taking the lion share of the sales, although who knows if that will repeat itself. This last quarter we had how many major titles being released in only a small number of weeks.
they really don't make that much money.... I've seen numbers where around 5% of the games released make 90% of the money... which is comparable to the movie industry but much more severe... an indie film might not make alot of box office, but they can still end up being profitable; not so with the lesser known game titles. which is unfortunate as it leads to less innovation than the common formulaic blockbuster movie.
I actually beta-tested for Eve Online for about a week or so, hoping as you did that it would be a suitable successor to TradeWars... but, at least when I played it, it fell extremely short... there were a large number of items to trade and such, and a fair number of ships... however the trading was entirely based off of your character's skills... also, the differential between two ports was miniscule... most items having exactly the same price in every single port for an entire constellation of stars
My point being is that it fell short of being anything near TradeWars in terms of gameplay and balance and such...
I promptly quit after about a week, when I realized that you had to mine for several weeks to get enough money to do really basic trading... it just didn't seem fun to me... the majority of the game was navigating between two jumpgates and avoiding PKing bastards.
Having thought about this quite a bit... I've come to the conclusion that there's probably not going to be a MMO that even approaches TW because the basis of the game was it's episodic consistency... you kept wanting to play because everyone gets wiped out and you'll have a reasonable chance to outwit and outplay them this next time... there's just not going to be a massive game that a) limits how much you do every day and b) wipes everyone's accounts in a non-beta situation
at least not one that a huge amount of people would play on
Actually Microsoft is trying to standardize the PC as a gaming platform. Also Microsoft has a great number of affliated studios that produce games for both the X-Box and the PC platforms.
I agree that most independent games are less than AAA quality, which is fairly analogous to the movie industry.
Anyway, I doubt that the commercial PC gaming industry will ever truly die; the industry is just currently in the nadir of the innovation. I mean how many different FPSs that add a single tiny feature, tweak the graphics and change the art assets to fit into a different themed environment can gamers really stand before they start looking elsewhere?
I agree that there were tons of different ways to get around in Morrowind.
I might be in the minority here, but I found that things were too compressed in Morrowind, every five steps you would find a "hidden dungeon" filled with fantastic creatures of immense power... you'd think that there'd be more corpses on the road ways and alot fewer civilians just wandering around.
The skill system was more interesting than alot of class-based systems, but suffered badly from a non-progressive response to increasing stimuli, in other words, casting a 1 mana spell would give you the same bump in skill as casting a 100 mana spell successfully. Such a system encourages the player to follow absurd behaviors. For instance I once sat in front of a Hound wearing a bit of heavy armor, light armor and medium armor, for about 4 hrs; I would just go and get a drink, watch a bit of TV and so forth, so that I could increase my AC, so that my character could survive against much harder creatures.
I was dissappointed by the magic system in Morrowind, which is one of my specialties. Custom spells were more expensive than developer-made spells, and it was only through some serious min-maxing that I could actually play a mage.. oh and I ended up just using a big blunt instrument.
Anyway, congrats for anyone who has actually read all the way through this little tirade
You're obviously referring to Deus Ex: Invisible War, as you couldn't really choose a side in the first Deus Ex until the very end of the game.
as for the spoiler warning, the reason you could change sides as much as you wanted was that every side was the same side... it was choice wihtout choice, which was one of the main themes of the first game
I personally think that the first DX was one of the most literary games available. As for the second game, it's main flaw was that it didn't keep that same level of excellance and was far from exceeding it. Perhaps Specter should have been more involved
There are still people who seriously believe in the Flat Earth theory, so I imagine that Dark Matter and Energy will be around for quite awhile, until the next generation of physicists are born and trained by the current rebels claiming that DM and DE is bunk. Course it would be much faster if a plausible and provable theory existed to replace the current paradigm.
Also, during the Renaissance and the birth of the modern scientific method, (al)chemists believed that flammable objects contained a substance called Phlogiston which could have positive, zero or negative weight. It took several decades after Lavoisier performed his Pelican urn experiment that disproved the existence of Phlogiston before it was taken as gospel.
I once heard a joke by my physics professor, A student was looking through a building directory of his campus and thought it odd that the theoretical physics department was in the same building as the religious studies department. He asked his professor about this, who told him... the theoretical physics dept is the religion dept. "I BELIEVE!"
A theory is a statement(hypothesis) that has been proven inductively by empirical evidence. If however, new empirical evidence was found or discovered, the theory could easily be disproven, as it's only true until something proving it wrong was found... i.e. inductive
also, all theories are models of reality, reality is always more complicated than its models... the whole point of the scientific method is to refine the overal theoretical understanding of reality over time.
Actually, copying previously successful games has its own pitfalls. One of the reasons that companies like Acclaim are doing so poorly is that they never innovate; they simply look at the current top ten selling games and say, lets do one of those. Often companies like that end up missing out on the original target audience for any number of reasons, including the fact that those people already own the original game and don't want to pay another 50 USD for a substandard clone. There's already so many titles on the shelves right now, most people don't even hear about 60-80% of the games out there.
As for Black Isle, I think their main problem is that they focused on the PC platform, which sadly isn't nearly as large a market as the consoles. The problem of piracy in consoles is so much smaller than PC that it's laughable, and in fact, the casual gamers that are the backbone of the console market aren't going to have the know-how or gumption to figure out how to copy games.
Really, I feel saddened by the lose of such a great company and the Fallout franchise. Hopefully the main players in the studio can pick themselves up and create a situation like Warren Spector did after Looking Glass Studios was shut down.
If you create ships of a similar size as your transports at around the same cost, then your planets will start to produce those as well as the transports
The AI also determines which ship to build based off of your military economy setting... Holy War would mean more focus on ships and probably more expensive ones.
Although the obsoletion method seems the only full proof method
actually it's fairly easy to appreciate cyberpunk without reading Neuromancer, given the proliferation of the genre into the mainstream. By way of movies, terminology, and whatnot.
I personally find reading Gibson to be painful at times because all of his conventions and ideas have been so assimilated that the originals seem... rough and unpolished. But that's just my opinion.
Well don't know about anyone else, but i'm looking for a reasonably intelligent woman, one who doesn't have to ask me what i'm talking about every two minutes, and i don't mean computers, just general conversation, and have an average appearance, otherwise doesn't require a paper bag accessory when going out. Of course, the understanding about priorities is also important, school has to come first.
Re:Ender's Game - The Movie
on
Ender's Shadow
·
· Score: 1
Well it definately couldn't be done like a normal Hollywood film, to do the story true justice it would need to be in the Indy style. But you could definately have children acting like adults in that type of movie... look at the movie Kids... but most definately would not want big name kid stars, they would not be willing to take a role that would tarnish their image as a upstanding, formulaic star, and the film would probably get a high rating, what with the graphic violence and at least partial nudity needed to be true to the story... well probably not the nudity, who wants to see kids naked? although you would think that the mass genocide of a sentient race would be enough for a R rating, but that would be the least from any critics minds most likely...
Personally.... I would call it a mud. Everquest uses most of the same commands as your standard dikuMUD. The only thing that is really new is the 3d environment, not the fact that there are hundreds or even thousands of people playing the same game....
The Man in an Iron Mask which came out after Titanic had Dicaprio in it, and acting was still second rate.... don't know who the director on that one was, but it just seemed to be a rehash of his Titantic character in 16 century France... completely wooden emotions and characterization...
while this might be a fluke along with Titanic, I would have to honest and say it would detract from my personal enjoyment of the movie if he were cast. Besides Lucas has tryed to use lesser known acters just for this reason, so the viewer does not bring excess baggage from previous roles to the theater that ruins their enjoyment of the movie....
But it really is too early in the process to jump to such conclusions, and i agree that it is ultimately up to Lucas to decide, we can only cast our ballet for or against the movie with our money.
what are you talking about... singers don't need to understand what they are saying!!!! its just sounds they are emitting, while it is easier to sing something you can understand it is not a necessity...
You quote Adam Smith as if he were the bible, and I do agree that it is absurd to just disregard the ownership of an object because the government must enforce the ownership. However, his theories of economics is based on the ideas and concepts of his era, during the classical economics age, since his seminal work there has been changes to our system that make a great majority of his theory moot.
So if our generation wishes to view ideas and intellectual property as a public good, then what is the problem? The FS/OS movement shows that a good portion of the elite out there favor this idea, so its feasible for certain general programs to be, or nearly be, free as long as everyone plays along.
Well I know for sure that many schools' semesters will be over for May 19. But for the business' I agree, although a few people will want to skip out to the theater during business hours to be able to beat the rush.
This film is not just a movie, it's a cultural experience. Calling it just a movie is like calling a Shakespearian play, just a play. You will of course believe this is hyperbole, but for people who love a good story it is the truth.
It is a modern classic, which unfortunately is so very rare these days.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, the article states that the sales of games has reached 7 billion, not the profit made from those games. The cost of making a modern game is in the tens of millions now, and each runaway hit has to support about 10 lackluster releases. Besides the fact that a good portion of the money goes to the publisher who provides the marketing, advertising, and distribution of the game instead of to the studio who creates the code and content.
This last year it appears that the market has expanded to having more than the usual 10% of the games released taking the lion share of the sales, although who knows if that will repeat itself. This last quarter we had how many major titles being released in only a small number of weeks.
they really don't make that much money.... I've seen numbers where around 5% of the games released make 90% of the money... which is comparable to the movie industry but much more severe... an indie film might not make alot of box office, but they can still end up being profitable; not so with the lesser known game titles. which is unfortunate as it leads to less innovation than the common formulaic blockbuster movie.
I actually beta-tested for Eve Online for about a week or so, hoping as you did that it would be a suitable successor to TradeWars... but, at least when I played it, it fell extremely short... there were a large number of items to trade and such, and a fair number of ships... however the trading was entirely based off of your character's skills... also, the differential between two ports was miniscule... most items having exactly the same price in every single port for an entire constellation of stars
My point being is that it fell short of being anything near TradeWars in terms of gameplay and balance and such...
I promptly quit after about a week, when I realized that you had to mine for several weeks to get enough money to do really basic trading... it just didn't seem fun to me... the majority of the game was navigating between two jumpgates and avoiding PKing bastards.
Having thought about this quite a bit... I've come to the conclusion that there's probably not going to be a MMO that even approaches TW because the basis of the game was it's episodic consistency... you kept wanting to play because everyone gets wiped out and you'll have a reasonable chance to outwit and outplay them this next time... there's just not going to be a massive game that a) limits how much you do every day and b) wipes everyone's accounts in a non-beta situation
at least not one that a huge amount of people would play on
Actually Microsoft is trying to standardize the PC as a gaming platform. Also Microsoft has a great number of affliated studios that produce games for both the X-Box and the PC platforms.
I agree that most independent games are less than AAA quality, which is fairly analogous to the movie industry.
Anyway, I doubt that the commercial PC gaming industry will ever truly die; the industry is just currently in the nadir of the innovation. I mean how many different FPSs that add a single tiny feature, tweak the graphics and change the art assets to fit into a different themed environment can gamers really stand before they start looking elsewhere?
I agree that there were tons of different ways to get around in Morrowind.
I might be in the minority here, but I found that things were too compressed in Morrowind, every five steps you would find a "hidden dungeon" filled with fantastic creatures of immense power... you'd think that there'd be more corpses on the road ways and alot fewer civilians just wandering around.
The skill system was more interesting than alot of class-based systems, but suffered badly from a non-progressive response to increasing stimuli, in other words, casting a 1 mana spell would give you the same bump in skill as casting a 100 mana spell successfully. Such a system encourages the player to follow absurd behaviors. For instance I once sat in front of a Hound wearing a bit of heavy armor, light armor and medium armor, for about 4 hrs; I would just go and get a drink, watch a bit of TV and so forth, so that I could increase my AC, so that my character could survive against much harder creatures.
I was dissappointed by the magic system in Morrowind, which is one of my specialties. Custom spells were more expensive than developer-made spells, and it was only through some serious min-maxing that I could actually play a mage.. oh and I ended up just using a big blunt instrument.
Anyway, congrats for anyone who has actually read all the way through this little tirade
You're obviously referring to Deus Ex: Invisible War, as you couldn't really choose a side in the first Deus Ex until the very end of the game.
as for the spoiler warning, the reason you could change sides as much as you wanted was that every side was the same side... it was choice wihtout choice, which was one of the main themes of the first game
I personally think that the first DX was one of the most literary games available. As for the second game, it's main flaw was that it didn't keep that same level of excellance and was far from exceeding it. Perhaps Specter should have been more involved
There are still people who seriously believe in the Flat Earth theory, so I imagine that Dark Matter and Energy will be around for quite awhile, until the next generation of physicists are born and trained by the current rebels claiming that DM and DE is bunk. Course it would be much faster if a plausible and provable theory existed to replace the current paradigm.
Also, during the Renaissance and the birth of the modern scientific method, (al)chemists believed that flammable objects contained a substance called Phlogiston which could have positive, zero or negative weight. It took several decades after Lavoisier performed his Pelican urn experiment that disproved the existence of Phlogiston before it was taken as gospel.
I once heard a joke by my physics professor, A student was looking through a building directory of his campus and thought it odd that the theoretical physics department was in the same building as the religious studies department. He asked his professor about this, who told him... the theoretical physics dept is the religion dept. "I BELIEVE!"A theory is a statement(hypothesis) that has been proven inductively by empirical evidence. If however, new empirical evidence was found or discovered, the theory could easily be disproven, as it's only true until something proving it wrong was found... i.e. inductive
also, all theories are models of reality, reality is always more complicated than its models... the whole point of the scientific method is to refine the overal theoretical understanding of reality over time.
Actually, copying previously successful games has its own pitfalls. One of the reasons that companies like Acclaim are doing so poorly is that they never innovate; they simply look at the current top ten selling games and say, lets do one of those. Often companies like that end up missing out on the original target audience for any number of reasons, including the fact that those people already own the original game and don't want to pay another 50 USD for a substandard clone. There's already so many titles on the shelves right now, most people don't even hear about 60-80% of the games out there.
As for Black Isle, I think their main problem is that they focused on the PC platform, which sadly isn't nearly as large a market as the consoles. The problem of piracy in consoles is so much smaller than PC that it's laughable, and in fact, the casual gamers that are the backbone of the console market aren't going to have the know-how or gumption to figure out how to copy games.
Really, I feel saddened by the lose of such a great company and the Fallout franchise. Hopefully the main players in the studio can pick themselves up and create a situation like Warren Spector did after Looking Glass Studios was shut down.
If you create ships of a similar size as your transports at around the same cost, then your planets will start to produce those as well as the transports
The AI also determines which ship to build based off of your military economy setting... Holy War would mean more focus on ships and probably more expensive ones.
Although the obsoletion method seems the only full proof method
actually it's fairly easy to appreciate cyberpunk without reading Neuromancer, given the proliferation of the genre into the mainstream. By way of movies, terminology, and whatnot.
I personally find reading Gibson to be painful at times because all of his conventions and ideas have been so assimilated that the originals seem... rough and unpolished. But that's just my opinion.
actually found something else that seems like a bug, targeting his right upper arm, heading 6.88, pitch -66.51, with 10 bars of force
actually got him to fall off the side of the stairs, ended up with over 90k
garibald
*Insert Witty Comment here*
Well don't know about anyone else, but i'm looking for a reasonably intelligent woman, one who doesn't have to ask me what i'm talking about every two minutes, and i don't mean computers, just general conversation, and have an average appearance, otherwise doesn't require a paper bag accessory when going out. Of course, the understanding about priorities is also important, school has to come first.
Well it definately couldn't be done like a normal Hollywood film, to do the story true justice it would need to be in the Indy style. But you could definately have children acting like adults in that type of movie... look at the movie Kids... but most definately would not want big name kid stars, they would not be willing to take a role that would tarnish their image as a upstanding, formulaic star, and the film would probably get a high rating, what with the graphic violence and at least partial nudity needed to be true to the story... well probably not the nudity, who wants to see kids naked? although you would think that the mass genocide of a sentient race would be enough for a R rating, but that would be the least from any critics minds most likely...
Personally.... I would call it a mud.
Everquest uses most of the same commands as your standard dikuMUD. The only thing that is really new is the 3d environment, not the fact that there are hundreds or even thousands of people playing the same game....
Actually I would have to say two cheesy movies...
The Man in an Iron Mask which came out after Titanic had Dicaprio in it, and acting was still second rate.... don't know who the director on that one was, but it just seemed to be a rehash of his Titantic character in 16 century France... completely wooden emotions and characterization...
while this might be a fluke along with Titanic, I would have to honest and say it would detract from my personal enjoyment of the movie if he were cast. Besides Lucas has tryed to use lesser known acters just for this reason, so the viewer does not bring excess baggage from previous roles to the theater that ruins their enjoyment of the movie....
But it really is too early in the process to jump to such conclusions, and i agree that it is ultimately up to Lucas to decide, we can only cast our ballet for or against the movie with our money.
what are you talking about... singers don't need to understand what they are saying!!!! its just sounds they are emitting, while it is easier to sing something you can understand it is not a necessity...
Economics is 5/8 Psychology and 3/8 Accounting,
You quote Adam Smith as if he were the bible, and I do agree that it is absurd to just disregard the ownership of an object because the government must enforce the ownership. However, his theories of economics is based on the ideas and concepts of his era, during the classical economics age, since his seminal work there has been changes to our system that make a great majority of his theory moot.
So if our generation wishes to view ideas and intellectual property as a public good, then what is the problem? The FS/OS movement shows that a good portion of the elite out there favor this idea, so its feasible for certain general programs to be, or nearly be, free as long as everyone plays along.
Well I know for sure that many schools' semesters will be over for May 19. But for the business' I agree, although a few people will want to skip out to the theater during business hours to be able to beat the rush.
This film is not just a movie, it's a cultural experience. Calling it just a movie is like calling a Shakespearian play, just a play. You will of course believe this is hyperbole, but for people who love a good story it is the truth.
It is a modern classic, which unfortunately is so very rare these days.