Kesmai Corporation (Air Warrior, Legend of Kesmai, Battletech 3025, etc...) was purchased by News Corp in the mid '90s. It was sold to EA (as part of the now failed EA.com) in 2000.
First of the "City of Heroes" model would be better named the "Asheron's Call" model, as Turbine was the first to do free content expansions. They did it on a more predictable schedule (monthly) than Cryptic has managaged.
That being said, given players a small taste and then charging them for the rest isn't anything like a "free content on a regular basis as part of your monthly fees" model. Asheron's Call and City of Heroes offered everything to all players, effectively changing the base-level game for everyone at one time. EQII is going to be more like those vogue "manager's theater" things you see at multiplexes where you pay extra for nicer seats but are still seeing the same content as everyone else.
If Microsoft based their business on being reactive to eBay they'd have stopped development of Windows Server products by now. More likely the eBay decision was made because Microsoft let them know they were dropping support for it.
The definition of "strawman argument" on wikipedia should just point to your post.
If you have no money for food there are social programs and community outreach programs that can help. If you have no money for food you aren't granted a free pass to steal, though.
I just don't care to pay fucking money for a movie.
Then don't watch it. It's that simple.
Your flawed analogy to donuts and a Tim Horton's is just another illogical rationalization by yet another person who doesn't respect the hard work of others yet can't see that what he does is stealing. If there are donuts in a dumpster behind a TH's that is because the people working in the TH value the donuts at $0 and consider them garbage. The stuff you are downloading wasn't tossed out by the people who made it. It was stolen and redistributed. Your analogy would be more properly stated as, "I view it as taking donuts from an anonymous person who walked into a Tim Horton's and stole them off of the shelf."
I'm glad you feel bad about the people in Asia. That's great. Why don't you tally up all of the money you've kept from deserving people who worked both behind and in front of the cameras on those movies you watched and send it to a charity in their names?
So you're down to 1 point, a negative trend in subscriber numbers currently.
Hello, this was the biggest year for MMO games ever. AO had an expansion (and went free), City of Heroes, Lineage 2, EQ22, and WOW were released, and Dark Age of Camelot had large free content patch and a boxed expansion pack. That UO should take a bit of a hit from the "new and shiny" syndrome isn't startling.
You used MMOCharts to prove your point, but completely forgot to mention that Lineage's subscriber numbers are dropping off at a rate that is proportional to the growth curve for Lineage 2. Yet no one is claiming that Lineage is dying.
Factor in the fall start of school, the holidays, and the crappy economy here in the States and there are lots of reasons as to why the numbers in UO might currently be trending downward.
The new expansion is in the top 20, as I said. An expansion pack for a game that is dying wouldn't have managed to bust into the top 20. Not this holiday season with so many quality PC games available.
UO's been running close to a quarter million subscribers since the day it was released. It's paid for itself many many many times over. From a business perspective it can go away now and still be a huge success.
UO still has a quarter million subscribers, the latest expansion was in the top 20 for PC games sales last month, and the players of UO have shown, historically, that no matter how inept the developer and support staff can be they will continue to pay and play the game.
To counter some of your points directly:
a) Anyone involved with the games "inception" (aka "creation") left, or was told to leave long ago. There's no reason why that should affect the game in the present, as UO has been running without the oversite of the people who designed and implemented it for a long time.
b) EA's tried to push UO in different directions quite a number of times: The failed 3D client, the Steampunk expansion made with unused UO2 assets, this new Japanese themed expansion. None of those ideas destroyed the game and they all tried to push UO in a direction different than its original design. Even if the relics are making it a "Diablo clone", why can the only conclusion be that such a change will be bad for the game? Maybe the players want a different combat system.
c)Since you didn't like the promotion last year the game is dying.....ok.
d) The game had a peak of 240K and is now running around 170k. Nice statistics. What you either don't know, or didn't include, is what number of subs are required to be above a break-even point for the hardware maintenance and salaries of the live team. It's reasonable to assume, based on the age and relative popularity of the game, that it has been in the black for quite some time. The number of players needed to continue to make a profit from the game is quite probably far far less than 165K. It wouldn't be unreasonable to think that a game such as UI could survive on as few as 20K-40K users. There are long running MMOs that have never had player bases that have grown beyond 40K, yet those games are still running.
e)Compared to the subscribers from North America and Europe I can't fathom that Australian subscribers represent a very large percentage of the UO playerbase. As far as I know, from my frequent perusal of the game's section in Best Buy, the only UO disc on the shelves these days is Samurai Empires. Which, as I stated above, is selling amazingly well. Are you implying that SE isn't going to be released in AU, or that it hasn't been released yet?
None of your points, either singly or all taken together, gives any overwhelming evidence that UO is doing anything other than what it's done for years....just existed.
They also have to develop the Blackhawk helicopter that can fly from Mexico to NYC without needing to refuel.
I'm guessing Bush's misguided idea to shut the GPS system down is what forces climatologists on a hike from DC to NYC to take a route that goes out to the North Atlantic and then turns due West...so they can walk by the Statue of Liberty on their way.
Oh, and the British need to develop a helicopter that can withstand such cold temperatures that only the fuel freezing can take it down. They have to lick that whole "rotor blades icing up" problem pretty quickly.
If this card were meant to be sold primarily at retail, yes, but you and I are not the target market for this card. Dell, IBM, HP, eMachines, Apple, etc... are the customers nVidia wants with this.
To a systems integrator "Runs the latest DX9 (or OGL) apps and is dirt cheap because it uses system RAM" is a huge selling point. nVidia wants a lucrative contract to supply this things to Dell for 12-18 months.
You mean like it was written by someone who is a certified pilot, deals with FAA regs, and has seen how long it takes to get something as simple as a fuel tank modification to a 50+ year old airplane approved, certified, installed, and the plane re-certificated? Yeah....almost inteligent.
I like your strawman argument of "wire is going everywhere, why not more?" My entire post, the one you tried to minimize with a self-righteous snide comment answers "why not more". The logistics of stringing a new data carrying wire throughout an airplane are astronomical. People who are uneducated in how the FAA certifcation process works will say things like, "They're already putting wire all over the place. Why not put a little bit more...?" Because every new wire, no matter how short and seemingly insignificant, has to be shown to not disrupt any of the other systems that are already available and certified. The unit testing, regression testing, reliability over aging testing, &c. &c. &c would cost the manufacturers and carriers millions of dollars and would push the rollout of wired internet access out by years and years.
The carriers want to provide reliable internet access now and do it with equipment that is easily installed, adapts to changing seat layouts, and doesn't take forever to get approved by the FAA.
Go read the 2005 FAR/AIM manual...every last stinking page of it, and then you can almost begin to comment on what it takes to do something under the FAAs rules.
'Cause retrofitting miles of wire into a certified and certificated aircraft is a total PITA. You can't just string from wire from seat to seat and call it done. Any major design change has to be designed, documented, prototyped, and tested to death by the FAA. Is the CAT5 too close to some other important wire and causing cross talk? Is it interfering with the hydraulics and causing undo wear over time, etc..., ad infintum. And even if/when the new design gets certifed and the carriers can make the changes each and every aircraft that gets modified as to be inspected to death and re-certificated. The time required to put CAT-5 in every, say 737, flying would literally be years....easily a decade.
The changes required to mount some WAPs are quite minimal compared to re-wiring an aircraft for CAT5. The inspection and certification process would be a lot quicker and the modifications and re-certification for each bird could be quickly installed.
So, would you like to string a cat-5 from your laptop to the seatback and trip your neighbor who needs to go to the bathroom in 2015, or have wireless internet access sometime in 2006?
Yeah, right, considering that PocketPCs outsell Palms three ways from Sunday. Could it be that the PocketPC platform is selling better because it offers greater functionality, a better user experience, and applications that users want?
Agreed. Thinking a few hours behind a DualShock and a copy of GT3 puts you at the same level as the Schummachers, Truli, Alonso, Montoya, Rikkonen, or Barrichelo is just pure hubris.
How do you reach the flawed logical conclusion of "If T-Bird doesn't do combination then Usenet users will have to use Oulook Express"?
There's a whole class of applications called "newsgroup readers" that might be of some interest to you. I can easily name five freeware ones for Windows off the top of my head. I'll leave it as an excerise to the poster to see if he can find some on his own.
OE is a singuarly bad newsgroup program. Newsgroup functionality is the worst aspect of that program. Do yourself a favor and get a real tool for the job.
Ah, the old "Ostritch" defense. Yes, please go bury your head in the sand and repeat "make the bad men go away!" over and over. That makes it all better, doesn't it?
If this is true the *last* thing we should do is convince ourselves to not believe it. If bringing the truth to light sends us to civil war, so be it. The Constitution specifically says we have the right and the duty to overthrow the government if it becomes opressive. If we don't do that, if and when it becomes absolutely necessary, we aren't patriots.
The new terms and conditions were only being imposed if the original agreement stated that HL multiplayer would be available through WON inperpetuity. If that was never stipulated then the closure of WON has no bearing whatsoever on what the user did afterwards. If it was never stipulated then the user chose to agree to the Steam agreement when HL MP moved there. His other option was to not agree and to not play HL MP.
300 stations
$5000 / 73" projection TV (price based on a 70" Wega projection TV on pricegrabber.com)
$1800 / Alienware Aurora PC (middle of the road configuration from their web page)
300 * (5000 + 1800) = $2,040,000. Now even if they managed to get a huge bulk rate discount for those setups it would still be horrendously expensive. Let's be gracious and give them a 50% discount, though. So, about a cool $1M to equip the place.
$1,000,000 / $5 per hour = 200,000 hrs. Divide that by 300 and you get approximately 667 hrs / machine to pay off the hardware. Figuring there's about 180 business hrs in a month (5hr per weekday and 10hrs per weekend for 30 days) means that every single one of those stations has to run continuously for about 15 weeks to pay off the hardware.
Now factor in broadband for 300 stations, rent, insurance, wages, benefits, advertising, security, etc... those things can easily rack up another $1m annually. So now all 300 machines need to run continually for 30 weeks, or 7.5 months, to cover the cost of the business.
Now the never ending sink-hole that is new game acquisitions. $50/title * 300 means it will cost them close to $15,000.00 for every game they have installed. Lets say the publishers give them a break of $35 / box. that's still $10,5000 / title. What's an average loadout for a LAN box? Four titles? Five? Let's say five. That's $52,500 for the software Figure new titles come out quarterly, but not new ones. Maybe 10 new titles a year? So, $105,000. In machine hours that's another 70 per machine, or another two business weeks. That brings the / machine total to roughly 32 weeks.
8 months of 35 hr weeks, for every machine in the place is a huge huge number.
100% utilization of that facility for 2/3rds of the year is extremely agressive.
So what, right? If they manage it then they have the cost of the hardware covered and the rest is pure sweet profit. Nope. After a year a ton of revolving costs will come in to play:
* Those projectors don't last forever. The bulbs aren't exactly cheap, either.
* Some of that hardware is going to break beyond repair and have to be replaced entirely.
* People expect a LAN center to offer them the current bleeding edge hardware...something better than what they have at home. Machines will have to be upgraded/replaced at a very fast clip.
None of this even takes in to account the R&D and manufacturing costs for those spheres.
Unfortunately for you I doubt PCI-E machines show the stuttering. The problem is caused by uploading the texures from where they were stored in system memory to the video card. The AGP bus gets saturated and everything stutters.
The vastly increased bandwith of PCI-E can probably handle the paging without issue.
There's no special type of physics called "Havok physics". Havok is just a company that makes a middle-ware product. Many many games used Havok before HL2 did. HL2 isn't even using Havok 2 (which is 2 years old now). HL2 is using the quite old Havok 1 libraries.
There are myriad physics libraries, both commercial and free-ware out there. Havok is but one of them. Novadex, by Aegia, is, imho, much more interesting and easier to use than Havok. It's free too, which is a big plus over having to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a middle-ware package.
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Kesmai Corporation (Air Warrior, Legend of Kesmai, Battletech 3025, etc...) was purchased by News Corp in the mid '90s. It was sold to EA (as part of the now failed EA.com) in 2000.
The conversion rate from the free month to the paid subscription is never 100%. 30-50% is a more reasonable expectation.
That being said, given players a small taste and then charging them for the rest isn't anything like a "free content on a regular basis as part of your monthly fees" model. Asheron's Call and City of Heroes offered everything to all players, effectively changing the base-level game for everyone at one time. EQII is going to be more like those vogue "manager's theater" things you see at multiplexes where you pay extra for nicer seats but are still seeing the same content as everyone else.
If Microsoft based their business on being reactive to eBay they'd have stopped development of Windows Server products by now. More likely the eBay decision was made because Microsoft let them know they were dropping support for it.
If you have no money for food there are social programs and community outreach programs that can help. If you have no money for food you aren't granted a free pass to steal, though.
Then don't watch it. It's that simple.
Your flawed analogy to donuts and a Tim Horton's is just another illogical rationalization by yet another person who doesn't respect the hard work of others yet can't see that what he does is stealing. If there are donuts in a dumpster behind a TH's that is because the people working in the TH value the donuts at $0 and consider them garbage. The stuff you are downloading wasn't tossed out by the people who made it. It was stolen and redistributed. Your analogy would be more properly stated as, "I view it as taking donuts from an anonymous person who walked into a Tim Horton's and stole them off of the shelf."
I'm glad you feel bad about the people in Asia. That's great. Why don't you tally up all of the money you've kept from deserving people who worked both behind and in front of the cameras on those movies you watched and send it to a charity in their names?
brilliance, no?
Hello, this was the biggest year for MMO games ever. AO had an expansion (and went free), City of Heroes, Lineage 2, EQ22, and WOW were released, and Dark Age of Camelot had large free content patch and a boxed expansion pack. That UO should take a bit of a hit from the "new and shiny" syndrome isn't startling.
You used MMOCharts to prove your point, but completely forgot to mention that Lineage's subscriber numbers are dropping off at a rate that is proportional to the growth curve for Lineage 2. Yet no one is claiming that Lineage is dying.
Factor in the fall start of school, the holidays, and the crappy economy here in the States and there are lots of reasons as to why the numbers in UO might currently be trending downward.
The new expansion is in the top 20, as I said. An expansion pack for a game that is dying wouldn't have managed to bust into the top 20. Not this holiday season with so many quality PC games available.
UO still has a quarter million subscribers, the latest expansion was in the top 20 for PC games sales last month, and the players of UO have shown, historically, that no matter how inept the developer and support staff can be they will continue to pay and play the game.
To counter some of your points directly:
a) Anyone involved with the games "inception" (aka "creation") left, or was told to leave long ago. There's no reason why that should affect the game in the present, as UO has been running without the oversite of the people who designed and implemented it for a long time.
b) EA's tried to push UO in different directions quite a number of times: The failed 3D client, the Steampunk expansion made with unused UO2 assets, this new Japanese themed expansion. None of those ideas destroyed the game and they all tried to push UO in a direction different than its original design. Even if the relics are making it a "Diablo clone", why can the only conclusion be that such a change will be bad for the game? Maybe the players want a different combat system.
c)Since you didn't like the promotion last year the game is dying.....ok.
d) The game had a peak of 240K and is now running around 170k. Nice statistics. What you either don't know, or didn't include, is what number of subs are required to be above a break-even point for the hardware maintenance and salaries of the live team. It's reasonable to assume, based on the age and relative popularity of the game, that it has been in the black for quite some time. The number of players needed to continue to make a profit from the game is quite probably far far less than 165K. It wouldn't be unreasonable to think that a game such as UI could survive on as few as 20K-40K users. There are long running MMOs that have never had player bases that have grown beyond 40K, yet those games are still running.
e)Compared to the subscribers from North America and Europe I can't fathom that Australian subscribers represent a very large percentage of the UO playerbase. As far as I know, from my frequent perusal of the game's section in Best Buy, the only UO disc on the shelves these days is Samurai Empires. Which, as I stated above, is selling amazingly well. Are you implying that SE isn't going to be released in AU, or that it hasn't been released yet?
None of your points, either singly or all taken together, gives any overwhelming evidence that UO is doing anything other than what it's done for years....just existed.
The storms didn't want to have to pierce their ears as they crossed over the Equator.
They also have to develop the Blackhawk helicopter that can fly from Mexico to NYC without needing to refuel. I'm guessing Bush's misguided idea to shut the GPS system down is what forces climatologists on a hike from DC to NYC to take a route that goes out to the North Atlantic and then turns due West...so they can walk by the Statue of Liberty on their way. Oh, and the British need to develop a helicopter that can withstand such cold temperatures that only the fuel freezing can take it down. They have to lick that whole "rotor blades icing up" problem pretty quickly.
If this card were meant to be sold primarily at retail, yes, but you and I are not the target market for this card. Dell, IBM, HP, eMachines, Apple, etc... are the customers nVidia wants with this. To a systems integrator "Runs the latest DX9 (or OGL) apps and is dirt cheap because it uses system RAM" is a huge selling point. nVidia wants a lucrative contract to supply this things to Dell for 12-18 months.
You mean like it was written by someone who is a certified pilot, deals with FAA regs, and has seen how long it takes to get something as simple as a fuel tank modification to a 50+ year old airplane approved, certified, installed, and the plane re-certificated? Yeah....almost inteligent.
I like your strawman argument of "wire is going everywhere, why not more?" My entire post, the one you tried to minimize with a self-righteous snide comment answers "why not more". The logistics of stringing a new data carrying wire throughout an airplane are astronomical. People who are uneducated in how the FAA certifcation process works will say things like, "They're already putting wire all over the place. Why not put a little bit more...?" Because every new wire, no matter how short and seemingly insignificant, has to be shown to not disrupt any of the other systems that are already available and certified. The unit testing, regression testing, reliability over aging testing, &c. &c. &c would cost the manufacturers and carriers millions of dollars and would push the rollout of wired internet access out by years and years.
The carriers want to provide reliable internet access now and do it with equipment that is easily installed, adapts to changing seat layouts, and doesn't take forever to get approved by the FAA.
Go read the 2005 FAR/AIM manual...every last stinking page of it, and then you can almost begin to comment on what it takes to do something under the FAAs rules.
The changes required to mount some WAPs are quite minimal compared to re-wiring an aircraft for CAT5. The inspection and certification process would be a lot quicker and the modifications and re-certification for each bird could be quickly installed.
So, would you like to string a cat-5 from your laptop to the seatback and trip your neighbor who needs to go to the bathroom in 2015, or have wireless internet access sometime in 2006?
Yeah, right, considering that PocketPCs outsell Palms three ways from Sunday. Could it be that the PocketPC platform is selling better because it offers greater functionality, a better user experience, and applications that users want?
Agreed. Thinking a few hours behind a DualShock and a copy of GT3 puts you at the same level as the Schummachers, Truli, Alonso, Montoya, Rikkonen, or Barrichelo is just pure hubris.
Like Mario Kart DS?
There's a whole class of applications called "newsgroup readers" that might be of some interest to you. I can easily name five freeware ones for Windows off the top of my head. I'll leave it as an excerise to the poster to see if he can find some on his own.
OE is a singuarly bad newsgroup program. Newsgroup functionality is the worst aspect of that program. Do yourself a favor and get a real tool for the job.
If this is true the *last* thing we should do is convince ourselves to not believe it. If bringing the truth to light sends us to civil war, so be it. The Constitution specifically says we have the right and the duty to overthrow the government if it becomes opressive. If we don't do that, if and when it becomes absolutely necessary, we aren't patriots.
* No VIC 20s
* No PETs
* No TRS80s
* No Ti-99s
* No Timex Sinclairs
* No Colecovision ADAMs
* No Amstrads
* No Compaqs
You must've grown up in a truly boring place.
The new terms and conditions were only being imposed if the original agreement stated that HL multiplayer would be available through WON inperpetuity. If that was never stipulated then the closure of WON has no bearing whatsoever on what the user did afterwards. If it was never stipulated then the user chose to agree to the Steam agreement when HL MP moved there. His other option was to not agree and to not play HL MP.
The answer is 10. Buy a calendar, it'll make your life easier.
$5000 / 73" projection TV (price based on a 70" Wega projection TV on pricegrabber.com)
$1800 / Alienware Aurora PC (middle of the road configuration from their web page)
300 * (5000 + 1800) = $2,040,000. Now even if they managed to get a huge bulk rate discount for those setups it would still be horrendously expensive. Let's be gracious and give them a 50% discount, though. So, about a cool $1M to equip the place. $1,000,000 / $5 per hour = 200,000 hrs. Divide that by 300 and you get approximately 667 hrs / machine to pay off the hardware. Figuring there's about 180 business hrs in a month (5hr per weekday and 10hrs per weekend for 30 days) means that every single one of those stations has to run continuously for about 15 weeks to pay off the hardware.
Now factor in broadband for 300 stations, rent, insurance, wages, benefits, advertising, security, etc... those things can easily rack up another $1m annually. So now all 300 machines need to run continually for 30 weeks, or 7.5 months, to cover the cost of the business.
Now the never ending sink-hole that is new game acquisitions. $50/title * 300 means it will cost them close to $15,000.00 for every game they have installed. Lets say the publishers give them a break of $35 / box. that's still $10,5000 / title. What's an average loadout for a LAN box? Four titles? Five? Let's say five. That's $52,500 for the software Figure new titles come out quarterly, but not new ones. Maybe 10 new titles a year? So, $105,000. In machine hours that's another 70 per machine, or another two business weeks. That brings the / machine total to roughly 32 weeks.
8 months of 35 hr weeks, for every machine in the place is a huge huge number.
100% utilization of that facility for 2/3rds of the year is extremely agressive.
So what, right? If they manage it then they have the cost of the hardware covered and the rest is pure sweet profit. Nope. After a year a ton of revolving costs will come in to play:
* Those projectors don't last forever. The bulbs aren't exactly cheap, either.
* Some of that hardware is going to break beyond repair and have to be replaced entirely.
* People expect a LAN center to offer them the current bleeding edge hardware...something better than what they have at home. Machines will have to be upgraded/replaced at a very fast clip.
None of this even takes in to account the R&D and manufacturing costs for those spheres.
The vastly increased bandwith of PCI-E can probably handle the paging without issue.
There are myriad physics libraries, both commercial and free-ware out there. Havok is but one of them. Novadex, by Aegia, is, imho, much more interesting and easier to use than Havok. It's free too, which is a big plus over having to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a middle-ware package.