So at $8 a month per series you are over the cost of basic cable at 3 series. You're approach might be cheaper in the case of one individual in a household who watches less than 4 series a month. Oh and if the shows you want to watch happen to be available in the limited selection on ITMS. What if you live in a household with two parents and two kids? Each who have their own selection of programs they like to watch? If they each watched 3 series a month assuming 4 episodes of each thats $96 a month in ITMS fees.
All I have to do with Dell is run their diagnostics before calling. Then place the call, tell them what the diagnostics says is borked. They either send a part or send someone by to install.
As you say, the cost of materials is not really a factor for CDs at this point. Also those other products compete on price and features. So brand x could have the same features as brand y at a better cost. Cost is often the differentiating factor in making the purchase. Content such as movies or music doesn't work the same way. Generally speaking, you aren't going to buy a similar sounding musicians CD if you like the song that the higher priced musician has on his CD. And we know that only a smaller portion goes to the artist. So where does the money go? Well the RIAA says it's due to the higher cost of promotion. Of course most of the bands I listen to never get any promotion even if they are on a major label. So I guess that extra money goes to pay for Britney Spears promotion. Looking at the breakdown in where the money goes it basically seems like it goes to feed all the parasites that have latched onto the mainstream music sales model. I personally find it amazing that "the cartel" even managed to arrange it so that artists get less money from downloaded songs than from CD sales.
You'll find $11 in 1992 money is equal to just under $16 of 2007 money. So if you're paying $15 you are saving almost a whole 2007 dollar! See they weren't lying CDs ARE cheaper!
(Actually a lot of places I see CDs for $17-$25 - although I don't know why anybody would by them there. Sam Goody are you listening?)
LOTRO offered $10/month if you preordered the game or a $200 lifetime subscription. You could in fact purchase a preorder, receive the open beta key and then cancel your order if you didn't like it (I did this with my son as it turned out he didn't like the game). The open beta was also heavily advertised and they gave out something like a million keys. There were also two weekend stress test events prior to launch with keys given out to anyone who signed up. If you had any interest at all in LOTRO I really don't see how you could have missed that. LOTRO had considerably more opportunities to try the game before launch than WOW did (when it launched). Oh and my copy of WOW had one buddy key in it - same as LOTRO. Maybe this changed, mine was purchased from the original batch at launch.
How come no one seems to remember the WoW launch? Serious bugs, serious server instability, missing content, hour long queues, class imbalances. The fixes came much like any other MMO - in patches. Blizzard did add additional content along with the bug fixes and nerfs - but it was the same drill. When I left WoW in December of 2005 after a year of playing I was still dealing with:
1. bugs present since launch 2. server instability 3. long wait times to logon (and I don't even play at peak hours)
I came back for awhile when Burning Crusade and on the whole the game seems much more stable. While WoW's launch was no where NEAR as bad as say Anarchy Online, it was not perfect.
There is a large contingent of younger players. My 10 year old son plays and so do several of his friends from school. I think one of the reasons is that pretty much any computer can play it as you don't need an expensive video card. Mom's Dell with the built in graphics will work fine. The other factor is cost - you can play free or pay $5 a month. I think it's easier to convince a parent to pay $5 a month than $15 for a game like WoW.
You can call it a Zelfoborian Nergsnurker for all I care but if it throws fireballs and casts spells, cant wear heavy armor, carries a staff and looks only like a person or an elf its a fucking wizard to me.
You have a bad experience with one brand of laptop and all Windows laptops are terrible. You have a good experience with one MacBook (seems like it would be a PowerBook if it's 5 years old) and Apple makes the best hardware. Try supporting a wide selection of Windows PCs and Apples and you will find that every manufacturer makes a lemon sometimes. I've had 3 Macs die within a week of receiving them in the past year. Just today I had an iMac fail on me (1 and a half years old). I see comparable failure rates on Apples in our business versus Dells. I have Dells running at 5+ years. I have an old Compaq Proliant doing file server duty going on 7 years. I have some G4 Macs about 4 years old still working fine. Oh and regarding the spilled milk, I just had a Mac user bring his friend keyboard up to me today. Had a bad run in with water. Macs are not invincible. Windows PCs are not all terribly made.
The Loremaster class does in fact sling fireballs. They are described as getting their powers from "ancient lore". Not all that different from a Wizard in Dungeons and Dragons. However you want to write it, the Loremaster is essentially the magic class in the game. They have abilities which can for example:
Transfer health to an ally Throw a fireball Weaken an enemies resistance to fire Summon pets (admittedly a raven and a bear not the usual demon or skelly - but the effect sure looks like a summon spell) Harness the power of the wind to slow enemies Buff their pets Etc.
They frequently wield staffs and can't use heavy armor. You can be an Elf or Human Loremaster - just as in most games which don't allow Dwarves to play Wizards.
The roll they play is more of pet class and crowd control than conventional nuking wizard. The ranged nuker in the game is the Hunter class. A lot of die hard LOTR fans have taken issue with the Loremaster class.
Locally we have a company that provides Ethernet hand off at Layer 2 (no multicast though) with speeds currently up to 19Mbps. What they do is pretty simple. They have a central hub office with several gigabit fiber backhauls to the local MAE. They connect this hub to customers via dry pair circuits leased from the local telco. These are circuits only with no data or phone traffic on them. They cost about $30/month from the local telco. They then use WAN Ethernet boxes or similar things (SDSL for example) to provide transport over the link between the customer and the hub. It works great for tying in remote offices without the need for VPN. You can create private networks (even a single subnet) over the links. Internal office traffic goes from circuit to circuit and doesn't traverse the Internet. Internet requests are routed out at the ISP level. A 9Mbps circuit costs about the same as a T1 from the telco.
There are plenty of boutique online system builders that cater to gamers. Try www.ibuypower.com, Falcon, Voodoo, Alienware etc. I prefer the smaller guys because you can choose off the shelf components and they are cheaper. Dell XPS systems are by no means cheap for what you get. The same goes for the more well known brands such as Alienware. That's the price you pay for going with a popular brand.
"The PS2 and PS3 both can run Linux so they're PC's too."
Good luck getting that discontinued PS2 Linux kit. Oh and boy what a powerful system that would be. Even a PS3 is RAM and hard drive limited versus a PC that cost the same amount.
What would be absurd would be having to pay for a high end 3D graphics processor if you had no intention of ever using it. Your laptop is less expensive because it lacks a decent 3D chip. Oh and my son's system cost $700 and plays everything out there just fine. That's with a mid-range 7600GT graphics card. So yeah that's pricier than a PS2 but it also is used for homework, research, Internet etc.
I think you meant to say "MMO players that play something besides World of Warcraft". Also just because something is released on a Mac doesn't mean it is released at the same time as on Windows. It usually takes 6 or more months to get out on the Mac. This might not seem like a problem but with something like an online FPS it is a huge problem. Jump on a server with people that have been playing for six months and you will get your ass kicked in two seconds. Either that or half the fans have moved on to the next game. A perfect example is Battlefield 1942 which came out much later on the Mac.
"Over all, retail sales of PC-based games in the United States exceeded $970 million in 2006, an increase of about 1 percent of sales the previous year of $953 million, which represented about a 14 percent drop from $1.1 billion in 2004."
So you have:
2004: $1.1 billion 2005: $953 million 2006: $970 million
The Core chip series is based off the Pentium M which was initially created to be a better low power notebook chip than the Pentium 4M. Intel cancelled further chip plans based off the Pentium 4 when it became clear that the architecture would not scale up in GHz as anticipated and was resulting in other problems (excessive heat, huge power usage). Power usage and heat generation also became a driving force in server purchases due to increased cpu per rack densities (such as in blade servers). Yes Core was a long time in the making but no Intel did not initially mean for it to be their flagship desktop processor.
I was talking about the facial/body adjustments in CoH/CoV not the costumes. It changed since launch. You can now adjust numerous body segment length and width. In addition to face models and textures you can adjust the faces to be tall or wide etc. Not as much slider adjustment possible as say SWG or EQ2 but much more than WoW or LOTRO. With SWG I had more of problem with the building models and architecture being screwed up or delayed (popping in) than I did with player lag. Of course I didn't mess around with it until it was past it's prime so I'm sure that has a lot to do with it. On the whole that engine seemed pretty unstable and badly coded. But you could make a fat character!
WoW goes wholesale on the cartoony side, LOTRO is somewhere in the middle versus the plastic barbie doll look of EQ2 (before the asian models) and Vanguard. The one thing I really don't like about WoW is the lack of customization for your character appearance. LOTRO isn't much better in that regard. Games like City of Heroes/Villains and Star Wars Galaxies have much greater customization in terms of facial features and body type. I would agree that the models in LOTRO need quite a bit of work. I'm pretty tired of the low poly WoW stuff though.
I find that the graphic quality in the game on lower end cards is pretty bland and unattractive. I've played on a Macbook Pro using Boot Camp and had to turn the settings pretty low. On the other hand on a Core2Duo desktop with a 7900GT the game looks amazing. The character models aren't great but the environments look fantastic on high detail.
Keep in mind also that Wiis are available for purchase from some online retailers. The thing is places like Walmart.com are still only offering the $650 bundled setup. I would imagine these bundles don't sell as quickly so there is some stock just sitting for now.
"I'd say Apple users are relatively much less locked in than Windows users. "
Lets do see:
Proprietary OS: Windows yep Mac OSX yep
Available closed source software for purchase: Windows - a huge amount Mac OSX - a good selection but significantly less
Available open source or freeware: Windows - a lot Mac OSX - a lot
Able to dual boot into Linux: Windows - yep Mac OSX - yep
Proprietary hardware from one vendor: Windows - nope Mac OSX - yep
Ability to boot the competing OS: Windows - nope, no OSX on a standard PC without hacking and breaking licenses Mac OSX - yes through BootCamp for free or through virtualization with a pay software
I'll consider Macs less locked in when OSX runs on more hardware options than just a few configurations from Apple. I have a Macbook Pro and a Windows PC. On the Windows side I have way more options for hardware. I can get exactly the hardware configuration I want on the Windows PC. With Apple I have very limited choices. Both operating systems have their merits but because of the hardware choices I feel much more locked in to Apple than I do to Microsoft.
"I'm in the game industry, and honestly, I can't think of anybody I currently know who has ever mentioned having owned an Amiga"
Are you by any chance American? The Amiga (the A500 in particular) was more common as a game machine in the European market. The US install base was relatively small. I owned an Amiga in the US from 87-94 and the majority of games were European in origin (like the Bullfrog stuff, Psygnosis or stuff like Another World). I had a number of friends who also gamed on Amigas. Prior to affordable VGA cards the Amiga was the best gaming computer available.
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So at $8 a month per series you are over the cost of basic cable at 3 series. You're approach might be cheaper in the case of one individual in a household who watches less than 4 series a month. Oh and if the shows you want to watch happen to be available in the limited selection on ITMS.
What if you live in a household with two parents and two kids? Each who have their own selection of programs they like to watch? If they each watched 3 series a month assuming 4 episodes of each thats $96 a month in ITMS fees.
All I have to do with Dell is run their diagnostics before calling. Then place the call, tell them what the diagnostics says is borked. They either send a part or send someone by to install.
As you say, the cost of materials is not really a factor for CDs at this point. Also those other products compete on price and features. So brand x could have the same features as brand y at a better cost. Cost is often the differentiating factor in making the purchase. Content such as movies or music doesn't work the same way. Generally speaking, you aren't going to buy a similar sounding musicians CD if you like the song that the higher priced musician has on his CD.
And we know that only a smaller portion goes to the artist. So where does the money go? Well the RIAA says it's due to the higher cost of promotion. Of course most of the bands I listen to never get any promotion even if they are on a major label. So I guess that extra money goes to pay for Britney Spears promotion.
Looking at the breakdown in where the money goes it basically seems like it goes to feed all the parasites that have latched onto the mainstream music sales model. I personally find it amazing that "the cartel" even managed to arrange it so that artists get less money from downloaded songs than from CD sales.
If you are getting them at $15 today and $11 15 years ago - that difference is covered by inflation. Here check it out at this page:
Calculate Consumer Price Index (CPI) from 1665-2012
You'll find $11 in 1992 money is equal to just under $16 of 2007 money. So if you're paying $15 you are saving almost a whole 2007 dollar! See they weren't lying CDs ARE cheaper!
(Actually a lot of places I see CDs for $17-$25 - although I don't know why anybody would by them there. Sam Goody are you listening?)
"If you are asked to collect X from an enemy they ALL drop that item and X so far has not gone double digit."
HAHA! Yesterday I had to do a quest to get 10 wolf teeth! So there!
LOTRO offered $10/month if you preordered the game or a $200 lifetime subscription. You could in fact purchase a preorder, receive the open beta key and then cancel your order if you didn't like it (I did this with my son as it turned out he didn't like the game). The open beta was also heavily advertised and they gave out something like a million keys.
There were also two weekend stress test events prior to launch with keys given out to anyone who signed up.
If you had any interest at all in LOTRO I really don't see how you could have missed that. LOTRO had considerably more opportunities to try the game before launch than WOW did (when it launched).
Oh and my copy of WOW had one buddy key in it - same as LOTRO. Maybe this changed, mine was purchased from the original batch at launch.
How come no one seems to remember the WoW launch? Serious bugs, serious server instability, missing content, hour long queues, class imbalances. The fixes came much like any other MMO - in patches. Blizzard did add additional content along with the bug fixes and nerfs - but it was the same drill.
When I left WoW in December of 2005 after a year of playing I was still dealing with:
1. bugs present since launch
2. server instability
3. long wait times to logon (and I don't even play at peak hours)
I came back for awhile when Burning Crusade and on the whole the game seems much more stable.
While WoW's launch was no where NEAR as bad as say Anarchy Online, it was not perfect.
There is a large contingent of younger players. My 10 year old son plays and so do several of his friends from school. I think one of the reasons is that pretty much any computer can play it as you don't need an expensive video card. Mom's Dell with the built in graphics will work fine. The other factor is cost - you can play free or pay $5 a month. I think it's easier to convince a parent to pay $5 a month than $15 for a game like WoW.
You can call it a Zelfoborian Nergsnurker for all I care but if it throws fireballs and casts spells, cant wear heavy armor, carries a staff and looks only like a person or an elf its a fucking wizard to me.
You have a bad experience with one brand of laptop and all Windows laptops are terrible. You have a good experience with one MacBook (seems like it would be a PowerBook if it's 5 years old) and Apple makes the best hardware.
Try supporting a wide selection of Windows PCs and Apples and you will find that every manufacturer makes a lemon sometimes. I've had 3 Macs die within a week of receiving them in the past year. Just today I had an iMac fail on me (1 and a half years old). I see comparable failure rates on Apples in our business versus Dells. I have Dells running at 5+ years. I have an old Compaq Proliant doing file server duty going on 7 years. I have some G4 Macs about 4 years old still working fine.
Oh and regarding the spilled milk, I just had a Mac user bring his friend keyboard up to me today. Had a bad run in with water.
Macs are not invincible. Windows PCs are not all terribly made.
The Loremaster class does in fact sling fireballs. They are described as getting their powers from "ancient lore". Not all that different from a Wizard in Dungeons and Dragons. However you want to write it, the Loremaster is essentially the magic class in the game. They have abilities which can for example:
Transfer health to an ally
Throw a fireball
Weaken an enemies resistance to fire
Summon pets (admittedly a raven and a bear not the usual demon or skelly - but the effect sure looks like a summon spell)
Harness the power of the wind to slow enemies
Buff their pets
Etc.
They frequently wield staffs and can't use heavy armor. You can be an Elf or Human Loremaster - just as in most games which don't allow Dwarves to play Wizards.
The roll they play is more of pet class and crowd control than conventional nuking wizard. The ranged nuker in the game is the Hunter class.
A lot of die hard LOTR fans have taken issue with the Loremaster class.
Locally we have a company that provides Ethernet hand off at Layer 2 (no multicast though) with speeds currently up to 19Mbps. What they do is pretty simple. They have a central hub office with several gigabit fiber backhauls to the local MAE. They connect this hub to customers via dry pair circuits leased from the local telco. These are circuits only with no data or phone traffic on them. They cost about $30/month from the local telco. They then use WAN Ethernet boxes or similar things (SDSL for example) to provide transport over the link between the customer and the hub. It works great for tying in remote offices without the need for VPN. You can create private networks (even a single subnet) over the links. Internal office traffic goes from circuit to circuit and doesn't traverse the Internet. Internet requests are routed out at the ISP level. A 9Mbps circuit costs about the same as a T1 from the telco.
There are plenty of boutique online system builders that cater to gamers. Try www.ibuypower.com, Falcon, Voodoo, Alienware etc. I prefer the smaller guys because you can choose off the shelf components and they are cheaper. Dell XPS systems are by no means cheap for what you get. The same goes for the more well known brands such as Alienware. That's the price you pay for going with a popular brand.
"The PS2 and PS3 both can run Linux so they're PC's too."
Good luck getting that discontinued PS2 Linux kit. Oh and boy what a powerful system that would be.
Even a PS3 is RAM and hard drive limited versus a PC that cost the same amount.
What would be absurd would be having to pay for a high end 3D graphics processor if you had no intention of ever using it. Your laptop is less expensive because it lacks a decent 3D chip.
Oh and my son's system cost $700 and plays everything out there just fine. That's with a mid-range 7600GT graphics card. So yeah that's pricier than a PS2 but it also is used for homework, research, Internet etc.
I think you meant to say "MMO players that play something besides World of Warcraft".
Also just because something is released on a Mac doesn't mean it is released at the same time as on Windows. It usually takes 6 or more months to get out on the Mac. This might not seem like a problem but with something like an online FPS it is a huge problem. Jump on a server with people that have been playing for six months and you will get your ass kicked in two seconds. Either that or half the fans have moved on to the next game.
A perfect example is Battlefield 1942 which came out much later on the Mac.
"$1.5 billion difference between 2004 and 2005"
From the summary:
"Over all, retail sales of PC-based games in the United States exceeded $970 million in 2006, an increase of about 1 percent of sales the previous year of $953 million, which represented about a 14 percent drop from $1.1 billion in 2004."
So you have:
2004: $1.1 billion
2005: $953 million
2006: $970 million
The Core chip series is based off the Pentium M which was initially created to be a better low power notebook chip than the Pentium 4M. Intel cancelled further chip plans based off the Pentium 4 when it became clear that the architecture would not scale up in GHz as anticipated and was resulting in other problems (excessive heat, huge power usage). Power usage and heat generation also became a driving force in server purchases due to increased cpu per rack densities (such as in blade servers). Yes Core was a long time in the making but no Intel did not initially mean for it to be their flagship desktop processor.
I was talking about the facial/body adjustments in CoH/CoV not the costumes. It changed since launch. You can now adjust numerous body segment length and width. In addition to face models and textures you can adjust the faces to be tall or wide etc. Not as much slider adjustment possible as say SWG or EQ2 but much more than WoW or LOTRO.
With SWG I had more of problem with the building models and architecture being screwed up or delayed (popping in) than I did with player lag. Of course I didn't mess around with it until it was past it's prime so I'm sure that has a lot to do with it. On the whole that engine seemed pretty unstable and badly coded. But you could make a fat character!
WoW goes wholesale on the cartoony side, LOTRO is somewhere in the middle versus the plastic barbie doll look of EQ2 (before the asian models) and Vanguard. The one thing I really don't like about WoW is the lack of customization for your character appearance. LOTRO isn't much better in that regard. Games like City of Heroes/Villains and Star Wars Galaxies have much greater customization in terms of facial features and body type.
I would agree that the models in LOTRO need quite a bit of work. I'm pretty tired of the low poly WoW stuff though.
I find that the graphic quality in the game on lower end cards is pretty bland and unattractive. I've played on a Macbook Pro using Boot Camp and had to turn the settings pretty low. On the other hand on a Core2Duo desktop with a 7900GT the game looks amazing. The character models aren't great but the environments look fantastic on high detail.
Well at least one. We use an iPod shuffle to play music on hold for our phone system ever since the cd player died.
Keep in mind also that Wiis are available for purchase from some online retailers. The thing is places like Walmart.com are still only offering the $650 bundled setup. I would imagine these bundles don't sell as quickly so there is some stock just sitting for now.
"I'd say Apple users are relatively much less locked in than Windows users. "
Lets do see:
Proprietary OS:
Windows yep
Mac OSX yep
Available closed source software for purchase:
Windows - a huge amount
Mac OSX - a good selection but significantly less
Available open source or freeware:
Windows - a lot
Mac OSX - a lot
Able to dual boot into Linux:
Windows - yep
Mac OSX - yep
Proprietary hardware from one vendor:
Windows - nope
Mac OSX - yep
Ability to boot the competing OS:
Windows - nope, no OSX on a standard PC without hacking and breaking licenses
Mac OSX - yes through BootCamp for free or through virtualization with a pay software
I'll consider Macs less locked in when OSX runs on more hardware options than just a few configurations from Apple.
I have a Macbook Pro and a Windows PC. On the Windows side I have way more options for hardware. I can get exactly the hardware configuration I want on the Windows PC. With Apple I have very limited choices. Both operating systems have their merits but because of the hardware choices I feel much more locked in to Apple than I do to Microsoft.
"I'm in the game industry, and honestly, I can't think of anybody I currently know who has ever mentioned having owned an Amiga"
Are you by any chance American? The Amiga (the A500 in particular) was more common as a game machine in the European market. The US install base was relatively small.
I owned an Amiga in the US from 87-94 and the majority of games were European in origin (like the Bullfrog stuff, Psygnosis or stuff like Another World). I had a number of friends who also gamed on Amigas. Prior to affordable VGA cards the Amiga was the best gaming computer available.