The decision that the "bundling" actually took place will be important, because it will allow for more competition. Here's a good example:
Last weekend we were building an install program for a demo of our current project.
Anyway, the first "install" program was built with the included VB "Toolkit" It produced a broken, unstable mess of an install program that did everything wrong and complained about "compatibility" every step of the way. It also produced complaints from potential customers, which is a real problem.
Then I remembered that Installshield Express was included on the Borland C++ Builder disk, but I was having trouble finding it. So I went to Installshield's site. The purchase price: $350 (not an option) After an hour of looking, I finally found it and installed it.
Ten minutes later, we had an excellent setup program. No dialogs, errors, warnings, or problems of any kind. No further complaints from customers. It was awesome. It was without doubt, the best Windows program I have ever used.
Without good competition, programs like this would never be written. Hopefully the MS case can lead to more competition and benefits for everyone.
What reason does a licensor have to offer anything above the compulsory rate? Doesn't this create a ceiling on the amount a writer or musician can make on their work?
Wouldn't it be better to just limit the *term* of the copyright instead of 95 years of minimal royalties?
An attempt to file an infringement suit against a library (the only law which, in my IANAL amateur legal opinion applies) will be dismissed instantly because Fair Use applies in the text of the statue itself.
There is also no infringement possible since no "copy" of the work is being made, and furthermore, if a copy *was* made, the library could only be accused of contributory infringement, which would *also* be dismissed on common sense grounds.
This is a non-starter. The publishing industry should find something else to do, like publish something people want to *own* rather than borrow.
Its just like the kid in school that finishes their work early. They are bored. Class doesn't challenge them, therefore they lose interest and become a distraction.
The solution is NOT TO STOMP THEIR DESIRE FOR A CHALLENGE INTO THE GROUND!
Give them a more difficult challenge. Encourage them to succeed! Give them more interesting work to do. ASK THEM WHAT THEY WANT MOST AND FIGURE OUT A WAY TO DO WHAT THEY WANT!
See, there is such a thing as a prima donna MANAGER too. "You will agree with me or I will fire you."
Don't allow the leaders on the team to focus their determination on arguing with the manager and the rest of the team. Give them a challenge to overcome, and they will outproduce everyone else.
..and you're instantly called a "prima donna" if you aren't a team player, which means "agree with us even if we're wrong."
Just do what all managers do: sacrifice the quality of the project in the interests of the personality contest. Nobody cares if the work gets done, just as long as everyone agrees.
I don't care if someone wants to be a prima donna as long as the work gets done. Most managers, OTOH, are far more interested in consensus than leadership, which is, in turn, why the dot-coms couldn't ship anything.
A search engine that returned five results of extremely high quality with precise and exact information regarding the search terms or question, and did so with 90% reliability.
Cost to subscribe: $99/year.
I think such a site would probably do quite well. Its primary value would be its quality. You can go wade through 100,000 results on a free engine or get 5 high quality results on the pay engine.
For development information and documentation, I think the value of such an engine would far exceed its cost. This is one potential business plan that might succeed.
Because there is a demand for better content. Producing that content takes time and materials, and equipment to deliver it, and all of that costs money. Those costs have to be recovered. Food, housing and clothing costs money. People have to make a living.
You can not like it. You can complain about it, but the bills arrive at the same time every month. That's the reality.
Its funny. This is the second time in less than a month that a Slashdot article has been addressing a question we are covering in our "editorial" page.:)
Look for an article titled "Got to pay the Freight" in the July edition of
Cat Tracks (available later this week at http://www.heavycat.com/cattracks/)
Here is a preview of our thoughts:
The bottom line (pun intended) is that small businesses are being hurt by this irrational distrust of anyone who even attempts to sell something on line. There is a huge amount of inertia in the "get it free at any price" approach to doing business on the internet.
Yet, every single one of the IP addresses from which the complaints are heard is purchased at a monthly subscription rate (even the "free" ones). So there is money out there somewhere.
Anything good on the internet costs money to produce. Sometimes a lot of money. People complain all the time that they are tired of all the content being produced by big faceless passionless corporations, yet when a small company comes along and takes a risk to produce something worth paying for, everyone starts carping "oh, they're just trying to rip us off."
In reality, they are trying to make a profit so they can continue to produce cool stuff. There is now a means for producers to reach their customers directly, with little or no markup. Here's a good example:
Our company is getting ready to release our first game volume. We found a way to reduce our bandwidth costs (costs of delivering the game) substantially, and so we immediately cut our prices by almost 50%. Why? Because we want people to play and enjoy our game. We want to be good business participants on the Internet and not just be "in it for the money." We think that will invite people to continue to buy our products precisely because we aren't trying to rip them off.
However, we have to make a profit, otherwise we can't justify doing the next project. If we have to cancel our plans, that will deprive people who like our games of future products, and they'll have to go back to the faceless corporations for their games.
Its simple economics. There is a demand for good content on-line, and therefore there are businesses, many of them small businesses, that are trying to provide it. Don't automatically assume that everyone with a credit card logo on their site is a greedy, money-grubbing profiteer. Vote with your dollars. If you find something you like on-line, help that company continue to produce it. That company likely spent a lot of money to get that content produced in the first place.
Our $0.02:)
Now, how about the others?
on
Net Cemetery
·
· Score: 1
Are they going to make a list of the dot coms that succeeded? I'm sure there are some.
The "bad" economy will begin to feed on itself if the only articles published focus on failed businesses and bankruptcy.
No, he or she doesn't have an "attitude problem." This is exactly what its like. I am technically better qualified, in most cases, than the recruiter, everyone else at the agency, the hiring manager, everyone else on the team they are hiring for, and the CIO.
These people are not qualified to evaluate my technical skills, so they make it a personality contest, or just outright waste my time.
They are not interested in getting the work done. They are interested in finding a "team player," which means "someone that will agree with us when we're wrong."
If the companies over-compensated, tough. Its their responsibility. Like I said, let 'em program their own databases and polymorphic objects if they're so #%*&#% qualified to judge other people's technical skills.
There is a very thin band of time between "skilled" and "too old" where, if you don't get a solid stable job, you will not get another offer.
The more experience you have, the more likely it is that you're too old and too "expensive." Of course, I've never quite understood that last one since its the company that decides how much salary to pay.
As usual, bureaucratically-operated businesses have it totally backwards. Hire the young, inexperienced people to work long hours for low pay, and lay off the guy that just figured out how the product cycle works.
Besides, even if you get the job after tap-dancing your way through four interviews with a big smile.. BIG SMILE (while you're paying your electric bill with a credit card) and signing an 87-page agreement, you're out after the project is completed anyway. Who are they kidding?
I say, guaranteed contract or forget it. Pay the full annual salary plus 20% as severance REGARDLESS of the reason for concluding employment, or find some other poor sap who's willing to put up with this crap and have his family depend on some semi-ethical, whining simp's day-to-day mood for their livelihoods.
Waste of time too. TOTAL waste of time to try and have a job in an industry where all the technical decisions are made by non-technical people for all the wrong reasons.
So you get a job in the "IT" industry? What have you got? A flimsy promise that there'll be a paycheck for a while? Other than that its "one week of bad economic rumors and you're out on your resume." Bah. Forget it. Let 'em figure out how to develop their own n-tier databases with MS Project.
but what about PayPal? Its got to be the easiest and best system we've seen yet, and it costs $.30 to send up to $15
Granted, that won't work for micro-micro payments, like $.10 or something, but for say, a $2 or $3 payment, it at least begins to approach "economical," especially given all the possible payment options and being able to offload the payment processing hassles.
that with the umpty-billion dollars that Disney makes just for sneezing, they could afford to hire a writer or three that could come up with an original story here and there.
I was also especially happy to hear they plan to lay off 4000 people right between the releases of two movies that will each gross eight figures at least.
Something about their overly-happy sounding commercials rings a little off at times like these.
What would be the ideal situation? Publish it yourself.
First, is it a video game (Playstation 2 et al.) or a computer game (PC)? The economics are totally different.
If its a video game, you have no choice but to go to a publisher, since the likelihood of negotiating an independent marketing deal with a console manufacturer is zero.
There is also the matter of the manufacturing of the game media and the development kit and tools, which are very expensive for a small developer.
If you go to a publisher for anything: funding, marketing, distribution; you are going to have to give up several things at a minimum:
Creative Control
50%-85% of the net proceeds
90% of the IP rights
All of the marketing rights
Venture capital is almost impossible to get for a computer game, because the economics are broken. Its a little better for video games, but not much. The problem is simple.
Computer games, led by the publishers, have the entire economy of development exactly backwards: they ruthlessly focus on a very small market while trying to outspend each other in development costs and marketing. Result? 10 games a year make money, 50 others break even, the other 300+ lose millions.
Until this problem is fixed, no venture capital is going to even listen to a computer game pitch. Publishers will listen, but only to a point.
You have a 100% chance of getting a publishing deal if you walk into the company with the following:
A finished, shrink-wrapped, guaranteed blockbuster game
Seven figures to cover marketing and distribution
Your own publishing proposal with a line for a signature
10,000 paid pre-orders for the game
Anything less, and its a roll of the dice whether you'll even get 10 minutes to make your pitch. I'd suggest not wasting the time, but we're an independent developer, and learned these lessons the hard way over three years.
Each pitch will cost your company $10,000 in time, materials and effort. Without a referral, your game has to start at the receptionist's desk like the other ninety-seven billion ideas. If you can afford it, and you can keep the company going in the meantime, you might find funding this way.
On the other hand, if you have a good idea, and the team to develop it, and you can keep costs reasonable (you don't have to spend four million dollars to make a computer game, despite what the game media would have you believe) its far better (IMNSHO) to develop and publish it yourself.
This prevents several problems, not the least of which is your break-even number. Our break-even number would make most publishers turn eight shades of green, and we like it that way.
I don't even proof for Netscape anymore. Our pages work in Netscape 6, Mozilla, IE and Lynx.
If someone is still using Netscape 4.x, that's fine, but I'm not going to write two fifty-page web sites, one of which is a hacked, broken, non-standard monstrosity just so those people can see our site without a bunch of errors.
..and I'm *certainly* not going to waste time on two sets of stylesheets, Javascripts, etc. Every minor update to the site would take days.
You know, there is something *seriously* wrong when the market leader is in a "bit of a spot."
What is this? What is going on? How on Earth can a company that has sold hundreds of thousands of units and made untold millions of dollars *ever* be in a "bit of a spot?"
Are companies really run so poorly and so inefficiently that the slightest downturn in sales puts them on the verge of Chapter 11?
Is this dll only included with the FrontPage extensions, or is it part of IIS normally? Frankly, I've never been a big fan of the whole "FrontPage" system, the program or the "extensions."
As far as I can tell, FrontPage extensions make as big a mess out of a web server as FrontPage itself makes out of its HTML.:)
When you think of the game idea, and the process for building it, and your first thought is "that's easy!" then it is possible. If there is a big grey area between starting and completing development, then it might be better to do something easier.
Come up with a good idea and build it. A finished product, or at the very least, something that works goes a long way towards learning how to develop games, which is more important than how fast they go or how many polygons there are.
These "you agree to the jurisdiction of.." clauses are somewhat problematic. A citizen may not have the authority or the power to choose which jurisdiction to which they are subject.
Of course, there's no *signature* on this agreement either, so I suppose that would be the first legal challenge, if there were one.
Perhaps AOL could fix the incompatibilities between different AIM clients?
The IM that comes with Netscape isn't 100% compatible with the members' AIM (yes, even with the eeeeeeeeeasy version 6)
It would be really nice if there could *just once* be a program or a format or something that was released and remained unchanged for a couple of years, and continued to work because it didn't change. sigh...
Having articles on Salon.com and so forth sure helps.:) This article would actually be a great *answer* to the recent article about how to get good PR. Sounds like this site did quite well.
A combination of moderate promotion and word of mouth advertising is really the best way to go it seems.
This is also a good reference for companies that want to build high-traffic, *quick* web sites. By quick I mean that during any given limited time interval, there may be a large increase in traffic over the average, then another interval of average traffic. I wonder how many of the managed hosting companies have programs designed to deal with these kinds of sites?
On page one, the article says "three years... team of 25 people" My first thought was to run the numbers: break-even is 273,000 units (conservative estimate). No way this gets funded. No way. This game would have been rejected again in the first meeting when there was no "good" answer to the question "what genre is it?"
Page two explains why the game got made: it was self-funded.
Its really a shame that the "big companies" in the game industry can't support efforts like these. Black and White looks like its going to be an amazing game, and it would have been a great thing for a publisher to have participated in its development.
Good to see that better and better games are being developed.
Slashdot Mirror
Which was less expensive: Windows with ALL the equivalent programs included on a Linux distribution, or the Linux distribution?
We've purchased three Linux distributions in about four years, not counting the free ones that came with various books, etc.
Coincidentally, we've purchased three versions of Windows in about five years.
Linux was less expensive overall and a far greater value for the money.
The decision that the "bundling" actually took place will be important, because it will allow for more competition. Here's a good example:
Last weekend we were building an install program for a demo of our current project.
Anyway, the first "install" program was built with the included VB "Toolkit" It produced a broken, unstable mess of an install program that did everything wrong and complained about "compatibility" every step of the way. It also produced complaints from potential customers, which is a real problem.
Then I remembered that Installshield Express was included on the Borland C++ Builder disk, but I was having trouble finding it. So I went to Installshield's site. The purchase price: $350 (not an option) After an hour of looking, I finally found it and installed it.
Ten minutes later, we had an excellent setup program. No dialogs, errors, warnings, or problems of any kind. No further complaints from customers. It was awesome. It was without doubt, the best Windows program I have ever used.
Without good competition, programs like this would never be written. Hopefully the MS case can lead to more competition and benefits for everyone.
What reason does a licensor have to offer anything above the compulsory rate? Doesn't this create a ceiling on the amount a writer or musician can make on their work?
Wouldn't it be better to just limit the *term* of the copyright instead of 95 years of minimal royalties?
Black letter law.
An attempt to file an infringement suit against a library (the only law which, in my IANAL amateur legal opinion applies) will be dismissed instantly because Fair Use applies in the text of the statue itself.
There is also no infringement possible since no "copy" of the work is being made, and furthermore, if a copy *was* made, the library could only be accused of contributory infringement, which would *also* be dismissed on common sense grounds.
This is a non-starter. The publishing industry should find something else to do, like publish something people want to *own* rather than borrow.
Its just like the kid in school that finishes their work early. They are bored. Class doesn't challenge them, therefore they lose interest and become a distraction.
The solution is NOT TO STOMP THEIR DESIRE FOR A CHALLENGE INTO THE GROUND!
Give them a more difficult challenge. Encourage them to succeed! Give them more interesting work to do. ASK THEM WHAT THEY WANT MOST AND FIGURE OUT A WAY TO DO WHAT THEY WANT!
See, there is such a thing as a prima donna MANAGER too. "You will agree with me or I will fire you."
Don't allow the leaders on the team to focus their determination on arguing with the manager and the rest of the team. Give them a challenge to overcome, and they will outproduce everyone else.
..and you're instantly called a "prima donna" if you aren't a team player, which means "agree with us even if we're wrong."
Just do what all managers do: sacrifice the quality of the project in the interests of the personality contest. Nobody cares if the work gets done, just as long as everyone agrees.
I don't care if someone wants to be a prima donna as long as the work gets done. Most managers, OTOH, are far more interested in consensus than leadership, which is, in turn, why the dot-coms couldn't ship anything.
Hypothetical product:
A search engine that returned five results of extremely high quality with precise and exact information regarding the search terms or question, and did so with 90% reliability.
Cost to subscribe: $99/year.
I think such a site would probably do quite well. Its primary value would be its quality. You can go wade through 100,000 results on a free engine or get 5 high quality results on the pay engine.
For development information and documentation, I think the value of such an engine would far exceed its cost. This is one potential business plan that might succeed.
Just a thought.
Because there is a demand for better content. Producing that content takes time and materials, and equipment to deliver it, and all of that costs money. Those costs have to be recovered. Food, housing and clothing costs money. People have to make a living.
You can not like it. You can complain about it, but the bills arrive at the same time every month. That's the reality.
Its funny. This is the second time in less than a month that a Slashdot article has been addressing a question we are covering in our "editorial" page. :)
Look for an article titled "Got to pay the Freight" in the July edition of Cat Tracks (available later this week at http://www.heavycat.com/cattracks/)
Here is a preview of our thoughts:
The bottom line (pun intended) is that small businesses are being hurt by this irrational distrust of anyone who even attempts to sell something on line. There is a huge amount of inertia in the "get it free at any price" approach to doing business on the internet.
Yet, every single one of the IP addresses from which the complaints are heard is purchased at a monthly subscription rate (even the "free" ones). So there is money out there somewhere.
Anything good on the internet costs money to produce. Sometimes a lot of money. People complain all the time that they are tired of all the content being produced by big faceless passionless corporations, yet when a small company comes along and takes a risk to produce something worth paying for, everyone starts carping "oh, they're just trying to rip us off."
In reality, they are trying to make a profit so they can continue to produce cool stuff. There is now a means for producers to reach their customers directly, with little or no markup. Here's a good example:
Our company is getting ready to release our first game volume. We found a way to reduce our bandwidth costs (costs of delivering the game) substantially, and so we immediately cut our prices by almost 50%. Why? Because we want people to play and enjoy our game. We want to be good business participants on the Internet and not just be "in it for the money." We think that will invite people to continue to buy our products precisely because we aren't trying to rip them off.
However, we have to make a profit, otherwise we can't justify doing the next project. If we have to cancel our plans, that will deprive people who like our games of future products, and they'll have to go back to the faceless corporations for their games.
Its simple economics. There is a demand for good content on-line, and therefore there are businesses, many of them small businesses, that are trying to provide it. Don't automatically assume that everyone with a credit card logo on their site is a greedy, money-grubbing profiteer. Vote with your dollars. If you find something you like on-line, help that company continue to produce it. That company likely spent a lot of money to get that content produced in the first place.
Our $0.02 :)
Are they going to make a list of the dot coms that succeeded? I'm sure there are some.
The "bad" economy will begin to feed on itself if the only articles published focus on failed businesses and bankruptcy.
Does anyone else find it ironic that "impossible for a commercial company..." is right next to a story about Red Hat being profitable?
Just an early morning, pre-coffee observation.
No, he or she doesn't have an "attitude problem." This is exactly what its like. I am technically better qualified, in most cases, than the recruiter, everyone else at the agency, the hiring manager, everyone else on the team they are hiring for, and the CIO.
These people are not qualified to evaluate my technical skills, so they make it a personality contest, or just outright waste my time.
They are not interested in getting the work done. They are interested in finding a "team player," which means "someone that will agree with us when we're wrong."
If the companies over-compensated, tough. Its their responsibility. Like I said, let 'em program their own databases and polymorphic objects if they're so #%*&#% qualified to judge other people's technical skills.
False.
There is a very thin band of time between "skilled" and "too old" where, if you don't get a solid stable job, you will not get another offer.
The more experience you have, the more likely it is that you're too old and too "expensive." Of course, I've never quite understood that last one since its the company that decides how much salary to pay.
As usual, bureaucratically-operated businesses have it totally backwards. Hire the young, inexperienced people to work long hours for low pay, and lay off the guy that just figured out how the product cycle works.
Besides, even if you get the job after tap-dancing your way through four interviews with a big smile.. BIG SMILE (while you're paying your electric bill with a credit card) and signing an 87-page agreement, you're out after the project is completed anyway. Who are they kidding?
I say, guaranteed contract or forget it. Pay the full annual salary plus 20% as severance REGARDLESS of the reason for concluding employment, or find some other poor sap who's willing to put up with this crap and have his family depend on some semi-ethical, whining simp's day-to-day mood for their livelihoods.
Waste of time too. TOTAL waste of time to try and have a job in an industry where all the technical decisions are made by non-technical people for all the wrong reasons.
So you get a job in the "IT" industry? What have you got? A flimsy promise that there'll be a paycheck for a while? Other than that its "one week of bad economic rumors and you're out on your resume." Bah. Forget it. Let 'em figure out how to develop their own n-tier databases with MS Project.
Ironic too, we just published an article on this:
http://www.heavycat.com/cattracks/ (in case the link doesn't work)
but what about PayPal? Its got to be the easiest and best system we've seen yet, and it costs $.30 to send up to $15
:)
Granted, that won't work for micro-micro payments, like $.10 or something, but for say, a $2 or $3 payment, it at least begins to approach "economical," especially given all the possible payment options and being able to offload the payment processing hassles.
No, we don't work for PayPal.
that with the umpty-billion dollars that Disney makes just for sneezing, they could afford to hire a writer or three that could come up with an original story here and there.
I was also especially happy to hear they plan to lay off 4000 people right between the releases of two movies that will each gross eight figures at least.
Something about their overly-happy sounding commercials rings a little off at times like these.
What would be the ideal situation? Publish it yourself.
First, is it a video game (Playstation 2 et al.) or a computer game (PC)? The economics are totally different.
If its a video game, you have no choice but to go to a publisher, since the likelihood of negotiating an independent marketing deal with a console manufacturer is zero.
There is also the matter of the manufacturing of the game media and the development kit and tools, which are very expensive for a small developer.
If you go to a publisher for anything: funding, marketing, distribution; you are going to have to give up several things at a minimum:
Venture capital is almost impossible to get for a computer game, because the economics are broken. Its a little better for video games, but not much. The problem is simple.
Computer games, led by the publishers, have the entire economy of development exactly backwards: they ruthlessly focus on a very small market while trying to outspend each other in development costs and marketing. Result? 10 games a year make money, 50 others break even, the other 300+ lose millions.
Until this problem is fixed, no venture capital is going to even listen to a computer game pitch. Publishers will listen, but only to a point.
You have a 100% chance of getting a publishing deal if you walk into the company with the following:
Anything less, and its a roll of the dice whether you'll even get 10 minutes to make your pitch. I'd suggest not wasting the time, but we're an independent developer, and learned these lessons the hard way over three years.
Each pitch will cost your company $10,000 in time, materials and effort. Without a referral, your game has to start at the receptionist's desk like the other ninety-seven billion ideas. If you can afford it, and you can keep the company going in the meantime, you might find funding this way.
On the other hand, if you have a good idea, and the team to develop it, and you can keep costs reasonable (you don't have to spend four million dollars to make a computer game, despite what the game media would have you believe) its far better (IMNSHO) to develop and publish it yourself.
This prevents several problems, not the least of which is your break-even number. Our break-even number would make most publishers turn eight shades of green, and we like it that way.
Hope it works out for you and your game!
I don't even proof for Netscape anymore. Our pages work in Netscape 6, Mozilla, IE and Lynx.
If someone is still using Netscape 4.x, that's fine, but I'm not going to write two fifty-page web sites, one of which is a hacked, broken, non-standard monstrosity just so those people can see our site without a bunch of errors.
..and I'm *certainly* not going to waste time on two sets of stylesheets, Javascripts, etc. Every minor update to the site would take days.
You know, there is something *seriously* wrong when the market leader is in a "bit of a spot."
What is this? What is going on? How on Earth can a company that has sold hundreds of thousands of units and made untold millions of dollars *ever* be in a "bit of a spot?"
Are companies really run so poorly and so inefficiently that the slightest downturn in sales puts them on the verge of Chapter 11?
This is absolutely ridiculous.
Is this dll only included with the FrontPage extensions, or is it part of IIS normally? Frankly, I've never been a big fan of the whole "FrontPage" system, the program or the "extensions."
:)
As far as I can tell, FrontPage extensions make as big a mess out of a web server as FrontPage itself makes out of its HTML.
When you think of the game idea, and the process for building it, and your first thought is "that's easy!" then it is possible. If there is a big grey area between starting and completing development, then it might be better to do something easier.
Come up with a good idea and build it. A finished product, or at the very least, something that works goes a long way towards learning how to develop games, which is more important than how fast they go or how many polygons there are.
These "you agree to the jurisdiction of.." clauses are somewhat problematic. A citizen may not have the authority or the power to choose which jurisdiction to which they are subject.
Of course, there's no *signature* on this agreement either, so I suppose that would be the first legal challenge, if there were one.
Perhaps AOL could fix the incompatibilities between different AIM clients?
The IM that comes with Netscape isn't 100% compatible with the members' AIM (yes, even with the eeeeeeeeeasy version 6)
It would be really nice if there could *just once* be a program or a format or something that was released and remained unchanged for a couple of years, and continued to work because it didn't change. sigh...
Having articles on Salon.com and so forth sure helps. :) This article would actually be a great *answer* to the recent article about how to get good PR. Sounds like this site did quite well.
A combination of moderate promotion and word of mouth advertising is really the best way to go it seems.
This is also a good reference for companies that want to build high-traffic, *quick* web sites. By quick I mean that during any given limited time interval, there may be a large increase in traffic over the average, then another interval of average traffic. I wonder how many of the managed hosting companies have programs designed to deal with these kinds of sites?
On page one, the article says "three years... team of 25 people" My first thought was to run the numbers: break-even is 273,000 units (conservative estimate). No way this gets funded. No way. This game would have been rejected again in the first meeting when there was no "good" answer to the question "what genre is it?"
Page two explains why the game got made: it was self-funded.
Its really a shame that the "big companies" in the game industry can't support efforts like these. Black and White looks like its going to be an amazing game, and it would have been a great thing for a publisher to have participated in its development.
Good to see that better and better games are being developed.