Gold stored in a bank is the only money you can count on
not really no. Gold can float in price wildly (http://goldprice.org/charts/history/gold_10_year_o_usd.png ). That's only a 10 year, during which gold has done very well, until the 2008 crash, and then it's been down 15% or so since then.
Gold (and diamonds) are just commodities like any other. Sometimes they do well, sometimes they do badly. In the same 10 years gold has gone from the 300-400 ish (not sure exactly for 2002) to 1600 roughly a factor of 4-5, oil has gone from 22 to 93 dollars a barrel (with a spike in between just like gold) which is a factor of 4 and a bit.
http://inflationdata.com/inflation/inflation_rate/historical_oil_prices_table.asp If you notice, in 1998 oil was just under 12 dollars a barrel. It went up to 27 in 2000, dropped to 20 ish and then has a long climb since.
So ok, we looked at some 10 year trends and proved lots of commodities swing wildly, including fake money (gold). Now lets have some real fun. Lets look at the price of gold since the unification of germany (1871) on an inflation adjusted (rather than just nominal) basis http://www.vanguardblog.com/2010.07.26/gold-rush.html now that's interesting. Notice the batshit crazy spikes in the late 70's and 2010. Uh huh. That doesn't mean it will go down, but if you'd bought gold in 1981 and needed to retire 20 years later you would have lost most of your buying power.
I think they are two different things though. Just because your pay hasn't kept pace with productivity doesn't mean you aren't earning over the median household income. I suspect most 2 income working families in the US would be over the median income, they're still getting the shaft on hourly wages, but they are going to be over the median.
one runs the risk here of confusing nominal and PPP numbers. On a nominal basis US bottom 99% workers have seen constant wage increases since the 1970's, the real buying power of that money has been flat.
The median income in the US has actually gone up by almost 20% on a PPP basis since 1970, it's clear a lot of that has been transfer to those at the top of the income curve (the top 0.1% and to a lesser degree the top 1%), which is what you are correctly getting at - and that's true. But what TheSync is getting at is that you can be on the top half of that curve by being very productive, that's harder to verify, it's certainly likely to be true, essentially an average worker gets a 2% raise, a good worker 3 a bad worker 1. Productivity increased by 5%, so you're actually falling behind your own productivity, but you're still doing better than the bad worker, which would then reasonably stratify into good being above the median income.
Probably true. Though I think most of the executives at facebook have actually done a good job. Odd to say I know, but Facebook does pretty much what they they were asked to make it do, it performs reasonably well from everywhere in the world, it has systems to collect monies, backup, replication, deliveries etc. Most of the real work at facebook isn't much different than any other web business, and in that regard the people in charge seem to have more or less produced what Zuck told them to. So they can point to that as their successes.
The *design* of facebook, and the policies they have on privacy and so on they can always blame on Zuckerberg. I just had an interview myself where someone looked at the most recent project I worked on and basically said 'that was horrible what happened' and I said 'well my part was this this and this, the guy with the money made very clear it had to do this other stupid thing, so it does, which is hwy it's horrible', that's something anyone can do, and especially at facebook, so much of what is wrong is legal and design, it's not technology, their technology isn't anything spectacular but it gets the job done.
Yes and no, I picked 75k for a reason. The highest median income in the US is just under 70k, the lowest is about 35 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_income) . Now you don't expect to start at 75k unless you have a particularly well chosen degree, but if you can get there at a reasonable point in your career you can do fine anywhere. Sure new york city isn't exactly the best place to be on only 75k, nor silicon valley, but even there with 75k you can afford to live in a cheap area and commute in and that sort of thing.
Sure, but keep in mind median household income includes 20 somethings who you don't really expect to make a lot and that sort of thing, and old retirees who are beyond saving, have fixed income pensions and so on. My dad's pension income is about 18k or something now (
Well that, and a LOT of people in the US have really shitty employers. That's the way it goes. Wages for the average working person haven't kept up with productivity since the 1970's, so they really are out to screw working people. Unfortunately a lot of those people, due to the education system, are basically not capable of managing their own business either. For them a steady paycheque might be better than a little bit more money, but more risk. I also figure that's not the/. crowd, if you're here, you can make 40k a year within a couple of years of school anywhere in the US or canada.
As long as you can make about 75K from someone else you can do quite well for yourself. Manage your money. That's the key to pretty much the entirety of being successful.
My dad made 74k a year on a team of guys who all made 74k a year (this was about a decade ago). Some of them bought boats, some cottages, some had expensive wives etc. The ones who bought stuff with resale value (the cottages for example, or mutual funds and bonds) are all doing fine in retirement, they can afford holidays, etc. The ones who bought boats, and planes (and god help them, both), the ones who landed wives with expensive tastes in things that are worth nothing, they're struggling now.
Working for someone else does have significant advantages, pension plans, fixed hours that sort of thing. When you work for yourself you can very easily slide into working 12 hours a day and not having vacation time, and still not making very much money. And if you get sick, your whole business can fall apart, and you might not have customers to go back to as they've found someone else.
Ultimately, it's up to you to manage your money, if you can do that you can manage your business or you can manage your paycheque. Working for yourself is always better than a bad boss, and working for yourself *can* be better than a good boss, but not always.
Stock options will have a vesting period to keep people attached, where if they leave before a certain point they won't get them and so on. Because of the way facebook managed to delay its IPO for so long I suspect a lot of people are starting to run out of their options vesting period, and more will in the next year or two.
The fact that people are leaving usually indicates that it's a shitty place to work and/or they see no future for themselves or for the company
Not true at all. Especially when you're talking about the facebook pay bracket. A lot of these people (especially top executives) will have been making a few hundred thousand a year, which is a lot, but suddenly they have millions in the bank, they can even buy boring government bonds and other relatively safe securities and live off the interest and retire. Why work if you don't have to? Or they'll have significantly more lucrative offers elsewhere.
Especially really top executives, who suddenly have tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in cash, they have a lot of opportunities to do their own things too. That might be owning a little league or making a facebook competitor, or anything in between. They don't even need to think about facebook.
Now admittedly, with a share price, and a share price that's going down the job will have changed and be significantly more stressful than it was. That's probably making a lot of people like their jobs a lot less.
Without a doubt. Unfortunately you don't always know what people will buy.
I think that's the point here, MS made a form factor people will buy, but the manufacturers didn't pick it up and even try. So MS is really unhappy. Whether or not they make anything people will buy is hard to say, but credit for trying.
No, this means if you are smart enough to not live in the US, or are lucky enough to work at one of the few competitive industries in the US you can still get reasonable benefits.
Everyone else is being treated as parasite on the system and will need to see their pay and benefits reduced accordingly until the only competitive businesses revolve around extremely profitable high tech industries and/or the exploitation of slave labour where you are now competing for a job by offering to lower your salary to that of a Chinese factory worker, then an indian factory worker, then a nigerian, then a citizen of the congo.
True, but the plan of developing software, prototyping hardware and hoping the 3rd party manufacturers would make something materialize that was worth buying didn't work, and they tried that plan for 10 years.
Trying something else may not go anywhere either. But clearly the last plan didn't work, and somehow android has been adopted for slate form factors even though no one ever tried that with windows, when it could have been tried* years before the iPad. I suspect this is microsofts way of negotiating with it's hardware providers, they better get off their collective arses and start at least trying different things, or microsoft will.
*caveats. Yes they had convertible tablets, I've owned several over the years and they worked quite well for a lot of things. And yes, they had slate form prototypes in what, 2002, but no one tried to market those for whatever reason.
Right, now, but when they named it SARS they weren't exactly clear that it was just one thing. That was kind of my point. Fibromyalgia might be one thing, it might be 3 or 4 different things that have all been wrongly lumped together.
This seems to be it, it's a guess as to something that fits some symptoms but has no known cause. Researchers and the medical community need to be clear they're talking about the same disease when they try and study it, so someone makes a mostly wild guess, sticks a name on it, and off you go. Cancer is actually a lot like that, there are probably a dozen different types of cancers (viral, environmental etc.) but they're all called cancer because they're symptomatically similar.
A few years ago there was a disease names "SARS". SARS stands for: sudden acute respiratory syndrome. As thought that conveys anything helpful.
There's definitely something wrong causing people to have various pains and so on, but no one knows specifically what it is, so they called it fibromyalgia because that makes the person who named it, and people who use the phrase sound like they have a clue (just like SARS!) even when they don't.
I'm wondering if it's a stress response, which manifests differently in different people. For some people the idea that they're finally getting some help, or at least potentially getting it, is a huge stress reliever, which makes them better. For others the placebo isn't having the desired effect which stresses them out more, and it sort of feeds on itself making even their condition worse.
That would probably correlate to increased stress over time, but without the desire to dig through data and try and actually quantify it I'm just guessing.
depends, how much are they willing to pay to get a good ranking back? Gun's are a profitable business, so they're probably safe. Profitable porn purveyors are probably safe.
Bad spellers, well... that's everyone. So that shouldn't be a problem.
political correct
I suspect this happens already around election time in the US. Campaigns will pay to have their results over top of the other guy, he who has the most money available wins sort of thing. In this they are competing with (relatively) neutral parties who are trying to drive advertising dollars on news sites and blogs, but those guys are small fry compared to campaign spending in the US.
I suspect though general political correctness google already censors depending on where you are. Think china, muslim countries, germany that sort of thing.
Niche games dont return as much money as general appeal games. therefore, they no longer get produced with the same level of funding as other games
I understand what you're getting at, but this statement isn't quite correct. The premium games market has exploded in costs as you get professional voice talent, motion capture, tie in licences, high quality art and story telling etc. Those products can make a LOT of money an there are a lot of them. Indie titles cost about as much as they always have, the platform for under a million bucks has moved to mobile, but generally the product types are still there. But you are competing for player time against skyrim and wow and call of duty and battlefield etc.
It's a bit like movies. there are still cheap indie movies that aren't bad. But you can go to a new movie with 100 million dollar production costs every week. So why would you go to a movie with 100k production costs unless you know it's good (minecraft for example, which started out pretty indie)? Or put another way, you only have one friday night a week, given the choice between a movie that's 10 bucks and probably good, or a movie that is 10 bucks and of unknown quality which do you choose?
Which still goes back to piracy as a serious problem. Why pay for it at all when you can just pirate it? I've had personal friends tell me "I spend enough on games already" ya... you buy skyrim and call of duty and WoW etc. because those are much harder to pirate, to keep working, you don't want to risk your online account etc. But that doesn't help me in the slightest, less sales due to piracy of my game and I'm out of business.
As much as it's common to have piracy rates up in the 90% of active copies, those aren't all lost sales. But even a 10 or 15% drop in sales is the difference between being able to pay the bank back, and not, and having to lay staff off or change businesses. For the big producers they are skeptical of PC for a lot of reasons, piracy and support being the main ones, and that certainly hinders the platform a bit, but they have all moved to online accounts and distributions systems and online games that are not really online games precisely because that makes piracy much much much riskier for the pirate - or at least the pirate who cares about access to his entire steam account, his achievements, friends list etc.
That's essentially the hope with all of this is that a current pirate is a future buyer. It hasn't worked out that way for the last two releases though (but then it's not like can track specific churn, maybe we lose players, because they decide the series is bad, and pick up a new set of players who have lower standards).
You'd kind of think people playing a really niche game a year after release would translate into future customers if they can be, they like the game enough.
Though that goes to the next problem which is when they buy it on a steam sale for 5 bucks, meaning steam takes 30%, it's a 50/50 publisher split (which is pretty common for indie studios), so the publisher takes 35%, and that's 35% of 5 bucks left. So at a $1.75 per copy (less if it's part of a publisher bundle) you need to move an astronomical number of copies to make any money. I know stardock was thrilled they sold 100k of their latest title, which was a record for them, so putting numbers in perspective, for a 6 person team working 2 years taking 35% of the take means you need ~1.2 million dollars in revenue you need about 3.5 million dollars in sales to break even. When a record breaking title in a related genre moves 100k units you need charge about 35 bucks a unit. Stardock doesn't really have a publisher so they get 70% of the take straight up (but then they have higher costs too). If it wasn't for the government kicking in 40% we'd be in trouble, I'm not sure if Stardock gets any breaks like that.
Customers are only worth having if they pay for themselves so to speak, and for 1.75 a copy you're almost better off if they pirate it because your per unit costs for support, patches etc. can average out to more than that.
I've discussed in previous posts our piracy rate and dropoff in sales with the proliferation of bit torrent.
Steam has pushed back the other direction, but well, it's an online service, and you pay them 30% for the privilege of using their infrastructure rather than your own.
For us, because we only use steam for retail sales and not authentication or matchmaking well... guess what, even now a year after release 50% of the copies in active use right now are using 1 CD key (with only 4000 concurrent users that's a small sample, and well, time zones and so on), and none of those pirated copies are steam users. I'm not 100% sure how anyone else does it, but I know we give steam a list of keys and only those keys authenticate blah blah blah so their service it's just those. But gamersgate, impulse etc. not so much. And in this case the key in question was part of a broad allotment to the publisher.
Now I wouldn't equate 1 pirated copy to one lost sale, I think, given the previous sales figures (for previous games in the series and so on) I think about 20% of total players (40% of pirates since we're at 50/50 right now) equate to lost sales given our estimates, and some of the pirates are in china and can't buy our game anyway, so it's not all lost sales. But there's certainly a lot of hurt from it.
Obviously you can't know exactly. There's no way to have a synthetic test knowing exactly how many copies would sell if it wasn't for piracy. But sales are way down, forum use and active play sessions are about flat, so guess what, people are pirating the game and not paying for it. Fortunately in the intervening period the government of ontario started kicking in a bunch of money (about 40% of peoples pay) or the guys I work with would be out of business.
hence the real money auction house. That you've quit playing reduces the value of the real money auction house (even if you never use it it's connected to the regular auction house as part of the broader economy).
If you read anything they've been saying it's pretty clear they fucked up, badly. And they realize it. They aren't sure what to do about it, but they definitely aren't happy with how much people are (or aren't) playing the game, because that's their revenue model. Think of it like a free to play MMO, even if you never give them any money, you're there so that someone else has a good time and does give them money, and without you playing they are in trouble.
I think blizzard was very much counting on this new fully multiplayered up diablo as a cash cow they could milk alongside Mists of Pokemon and Starcraft 2: why sell one game when we can sell three?.
There are lots of single player games that are a special case of multiplayer (where for example you still connect to a server, albeit a local one) with special rules, lots of FPS single player campaigns are like that, and there are single player games that have no support for multiplayer at all.
Diablo isn't either of those. Because of the auction house and achievements connection the game depends on connecting you to a server to facilitate those things. Now I grant you that those things didn't need to be part of the game (obviously) but blizzard deliberately made them critical to the whole experience, especially the auction house. For D3 playing the game without other players directly you're still playing multiplayer, the drops are still as though you are going to sell on the auction house and buy from the auction house, and because at any point you could take your character multiplayer (which is actually a feature) they have to treat your character as a multiplayer character all the time. In this case 'single player' isn't a special ruleset case of multiplayer, it's just multiplayer before anyone else joined.
And to not have to balance two different games. As a purely single player experience D3 is like 8 hours, or 8000 if you want to farm stuff. With multiplayer it's a good 50-200 hours, and then significantly diminishing returns after that.
The real money auction house is an example of a free to play concept, and players were exchanging real money through unofficial channels. That poses huge security problems (like the one's people are talking about with WoW), which translate to customer support problems, and blizzard figured they could get a cut.
Even without the real money though, the regular auction house is your entire region, and a main source of gear for high level balance. The ability to dupe items in D2 caused no end of balance grief and problems that arise from that, and having a consistent relatively locked down platform for their main community, which is the multiplayer community is important then.
Also, yes, piracy has ravaged the PC game business (including the companies I contract with) and so everyone who can afford the infrastructure is moving to online setups.
You also have to keep in mind that from Blizzards perspective their main product is WoW, and everything else is an offshoot from that. They want WoW players to still be connected to other WoW players who happen to be in Starcraft or Diablo, and things like that. They're aiming for a total connected product line (sort of the way steam, XBL and PSN let you chat with your friends outside of the game you're playing), so your achievements in WoW carry over to diablo and the reverse, your friends are in both and so on. Again, not really sure that plan is working too well, but I can certainly see what they're trying to do. Blizzard isn't really the right outfit to pull that off though, mostly because it's the wrong level.
As I mentioned below, because i'd forgotten about them, when I typed this flash exploits as well (which of course had keyloggers of various sorts). Strategy videos and all that.
Slashdot Mirror
Gold stored in a bank is the only money you can count on
not really no. Gold can float in price wildly (http://goldprice.org/charts/history/gold_10_year_o_usd.png ). That's only a 10 year, during which gold has done very well, until the 2008 crash, and then it's been down 15% or so since then.
Gold (and diamonds) are just commodities like any other. Sometimes they do well, sometimes they do badly. In the same 10 years gold has gone from the 300-400 ish (not sure exactly for 2002) to 1600 roughly a factor of 4-5, oil has gone from 22 to 93 dollars a barrel (with a spike in between just like gold) which is a factor of 4 and a bit.
http://inflationdata.com/inflation/inflation_rate/historical_oil_prices_table.asp If you notice, in 1998 oil was just under 12 dollars a barrel. It went up to 27 in 2000, dropped to 20 ish and then has a long climb since.
So ok, we looked at some 10 year trends and proved lots of commodities swing wildly, including fake money (gold). Now lets have some real fun. Lets look at the price of gold since the unification of germany (1871) on an inflation adjusted (rather than just nominal) basis http://www.vanguardblog.com/2010.07.26/gold-rush.html now that's interesting. Notice the batshit crazy spikes in the late 70's and 2010. Uh huh. That doesn't mean it will go down, but if you'd bought gold in 1981 and needed to retire 20 years later you would have lost most of your buying power.
I think they are two different things though. Just because your pay hasn't kept pace with productivity doesn't mean you aren't earning over the median household income. I suspect most 2 income working families in the US would be over the median income, they're still getting the shaft on hourly wages, but they are going to be over the median.
one runs the risk here of confusing nominal and PPP numbers. On a nominal basis US bottom 99% workers have seen constant wage increases since the 1970's, the real buying power of that money has been flat.
Median income in PPP and nominal for 40 odd years
The median income in the US has actually gone up by almost 20% on a PPP basis since 1970, it's clear a lot of that has been transfer to those at the top of the income curve (the top 0.1% and to a lesser degree the top 1%), which is what you are correctly getting at - and that's true. But what TheSync is getting at is that you can be on the top half of that curve by being very productive, that's harder to verify, it's certainly likely to be true, essentially an average worker gets a 2% raise, a good worker 3 a bad worker 1. Productivity increased by 5%, so you're actually falling behind your own productivity, but you're still doing better than the bad worker, which would then reasonably stratify into good being above the median income.
Probably true. Though I think most of the executives at facebook have actually done a good job. Odd to say I know, but Facebook does pretty much what they they were asked to make it do, it performs reasonably well from everywhere in the world, it has systems to collect monies, backup, replication, deliveries etc. Most of the real work at facebook isn't much different than any other web business, and in that regard the people in charge seem to have more or less produced what Zuck told them to. So they can point to that as their successes.
The *design* of facebook, and the policies they have on privacy and so on they can always blame on Zuckerberg. I just had an interview myself where someone looked at the most recent project I worked on and basically said 'that was horrible what happened' and I said 'well my part was this this and this, the guy with the money made very clear it had to do this other stupid thing, so it does, which is hwy it's horrible', that's something anyone can do, and especially at facebook, so much of what is wrong is legal and design, it's not technology, their technology isn't anything spectacular but it gets the job done.
Yes and no, I picked 75k for a reason. The highest median income in the US is just under 70k, the lowest is about 35 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_income) . Now you don't expect to start at 75k unless you have a particularly well chosen degree, but if you can get there at a reasonable point in your career you can do fine anywhere. Sure new york city isn't exactly the best place to be on only 75k, nor silicon valley, but even there with 75k you can afford to live in a cheap area and commute in and that sort of thing.
Sure, but keep in mind median household income includes 20 somethings who you don't really expect to make a lot and that sort of thing, and old retirees who are beyond saving, have fixed income pensions and so on. My dad's pension income is about 18k or something now (
Well that, and a LOT of people in the US have really shitty employers. That's the way it goes. Wages for the average working person haven't kept up with productivity since the 1970's, so they really are out to screw working people. Unfortunately a lot of those people, due to the education system, are basically not capable of managing their own business either. For them a steady paycheque might be better than a little bit more money, but more risk. I also figure that's not the /. crowd, if you're here, you can make 40k a year within a couple of years of school anywhere in the US or canada.
As long as you can make about 75K from someone else you can do quite well for yourself. Manage your money. That's the key to pretty much the entirety of being successful.
My dad made 74k a year on a team of guys who all made 74k a year (this was about a decade ago). Some of them bought boats, some cottages, some had expensive wives etc. The ones who bought stuff with resale value (the cottages for example, or mutual funds and bonds) are all doing fine in retirement, they can afford holidays, etc. The ones who bought boats, and planes (and god help them, both), the ones who landed wives with expensive tastes in things that are worth nothing, they're struggling now.
Working for someone else does have significant advantages, pension plans, fixed hours that sort of thing. When you work for yourself you can very easily slide into working 12 hours a day and not having vacation time, and still not making very much money. And if you get sick, your whole business can fall apart, and you might not have customers to go back to as they've found someone else.
Ultimately, it's up to you to manage your money, if you can do that you can manage your business or you can manage your paycheque. Working for yourself is always better than a bad boss, and working for yourself *can* be better than a good boss, but not always.
Stock options will have a vesting period to keep people attached, where if they leave before a certain point they won't get them and so on. Because of the way facebook managed to delay its IPO for so long I suspect a lot of people are starting to run out of their options vesting period, and more will in the next year or two.
The fact that people are leaving usually indicates that it's a shitty place to work and/or they see no future for themselves or for the company
Not true at all. Especially when you're talking about the facebook pay bracket. A lot of these people (especially top executives) will have been making a few hundred thousand a year, which is a lot, but suddenly they have millions in the bank, they can even buy boring government bonds and other relatively safe securities and live off the interest and retire. Why work if you don't have to? Or they'll have significantly more lucrative offers elsewhere.
Especially really top executives, who suddenly have tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in cash, they have a lot of opportunities to do their own things too. That might be owning a little league or making a facebook competitor, or anything in between. They don't even need to think about facebook.
Now admittedly, with a share price, and a share price that's going down the job will have changed and be significantly more stressful than it was. That's probably making a lot of people like their jobs a lot less.
Without a doubt. Unfortunately you don't always know what people will buy.
I think that's the point here, MS made a form factor people will buy, but the manufacturers didn't pick it up and even try. So MS is really unhappy. Whether or not they make anything people will buy is hard to say, but credit for trying.
No, this means if you are smart enough to not live in the US, or are lucky enough to work at one of the few competitive industries in the US you can still get reasonable benefits.
Everyone else is being treated as parasite on the system and will need to see their pay and benefits reduced accordingly until the only competitive businesses revolve around extremely profitable high tech industries and/or the exploitation of slave labour where you are now competing for a job by offering to lower your salary to that of a Chinese factory worker, then an indian factory worker, then a nigerian, then a citizen of the congo.
There is nothing about Microsoft Tablet that says
True, but the plan of developing software, prototyping hardware and hoping the 3rd party manufacturers would make something materialize that was worth buying didn't work, and they tried that plan for 10 years.
Trying something else may not go anywhere either. But clearly the last plan didn't work, and somehow android has been adopted for slate form factors even though no one ever tried that with windows, when it could have been tried* years before the iPad. I suspect this is microsofts way of negotiating with it's hardware providers, they better get off their collective arses and start at least trying different things, or microsoft will.
*caveats. Yes they had convertible tablets, I've owned several over the years and they worked quite well for a lot of things. And yes, they had slate form prototypes in what, 2002, but no one tried to market those for whatever reason.
Right, now, but when they named it SARS they weren't exactly clear that it was just one thing. That was kind of my point. Fibromyalgia might be one thing, it might be 3 or 4 different things that have all been wrongly lumped together.
This seems to be it, it's a guess as to something that fits some symptoms but has no known cause. Researchers and the medical community need to be clear they're talking about the same disease when they try and study it, so someone makes a mostly wild guess, sticks a name on it, and off you go. Cancer is actually a lot like that, there are probably a dozen different types of cancers (viral, environmental etc.) but they're all called cancer because they're symptomatically similar.
A few years ago there was a disease names "SARS". SARS stands for: sudden acute respiratory syndrome. As thought that conveys anything helpful.
There's definitely something wrong causing people to have various pains and so on, but no one knows specifically what it is, so they called it fibromyalgia because that makes the person who named it, and people who use the phrase sound like they have a clue (just like SARS!) even when they don't.
I'm wondering if it's a stress response, which manifests differently in different people. For some people the idea that they're finally getting some help, or at least potentially getting it, is a huge stress reliever, which makes them better. For others the placebo isn't having the desired effect which stresses them out more, and it sort of feeds on itself making even their condition worse.
That would probably correlate to increased stress over time, but without the desire to dig through data and try and actually quantify it I'm just guessing.
and patents, and staff.
For all we know IBM may have supplied the servers RIM uses, so I agree, the physical infrastructure isn't worth much.
Then why not avoid violent sites? porn sites?
depends, how much are they willing to pay to get a good ranking back? Gun's are a profitable business, so they're probably safe. Profitable porn purveyors are probably safe.
Bad spellers, well... that's everyone. So that shouldn't be a problem.
political correct
I suspect this happens already around election time in the US. Campaigns will pay to have their results over top of the other guy, he who has the most money available wins sort of thing. In this they are competing with (relatively) neutral parties who are trying to drive advertising dollars on news sites and blogs, but those guys are small fry compared to campaign spending in the US.
I suspect though general political correctness google already censors depending on where you are. Think china, muslim countries, germany that sort of thing.
Niche games dont return as much money as general appeal games. therefore, they no longer get produced with the same level of funding as other games
I understand what you're getting at, but this statement isn't quite correct. The premium games market has exploded in costs as you get professional voice talent, motion capture, tie in licences, high quality art and story telling etc. Those products can make a LOT of money an there are a lot of them. Indie titles cost about as much as they always have, the platform for under a million bucks has moved to mobile, but generally the product types are still there. But you are competing for player time against skyrim and wow and call of duty and battlefield etc.
It's a bit like movies. there are still cheap indie movies that aren't bad. But you can go to a new movie with 100 million dollar production costs every week. So why would you go to a movie with 100k production costs unless you know it's good (minecraft for example, which started out pretty indie)? Or put another way, you only have one friday night a week, given the choice between a movie that's 10 bucks and probably good, or a movie that is 10 bucks and of unknown quality which do you choose?
Which still goes back to piracy as a serious problem. Why pay for it at all when you can just pirate it? I've had personal friends tell me "I spend enough on games already" ya... you buy skyrim and call of duty and WoW etc. because those are much harder to pirate, to keep working, you don't want to risk your online account etc. But that doesn't help me in the slightest, less sales due to piracy of my game and I'm out of business.
As much as it's common to have piracy rates up in the 90% of active copies, those aren't all lost sales. But even a 10 or 15% drop in sales is the difference between being able to pay the bank back, and not, and having to lay staff off or change businesses. For the big producers they are skeptical of PC for a lot of reasons, piracy and support being the main ones, and that certainly hinders the platform a bit, but they have all moved to online accounts and distributions systems and online games that are not really online games precisely because that makes piracy much much much riskier for the pirate - or at least the pirate who cares about access to his entire steam account, his achievements, friends list etc.
That's essentially the hope with all of this is that a current pirate is a future buyer. It hasn't worked out that way for the last two releases though (but then it's not like can track specific churn, maybe we lose players, because they decide the series is bad, and pick up a new set of players who have lower standards).
You'd kind of think people playing a really niche game a year after release would translate into future customers if they can be, they like the game enough.
Though that goes to the next problem which is when they buy it on a steam sale for 5 bucks, meaning steam takes 30%, it's a 50/50 publisher split (which is pretty common for indie studios), so the publisher takes 35%, and that's 35% of 5 bucks left. So at a $1.75 per copy (less if it's part of a publisher bundle) you need to move an astronomical number of copies to make any money. I know stardock was thrilled they sold 100k of their latest title, which was a record for them, so putting numbers in perspective, for a 6 person team working 2 years taking 35% of the take means you need ~1.2 million dollars in revenue you need about 3.5 million dollars in sales to break even. When a record breaking title in a related genre moves 100k units you need charge about 35 bucks a unit. Stardock doesn't really have a publisher so they get 70% of the take straight up (but then they have higher costs too). If it wasn't for the government kicking in 40% we'd be in trouble, I'm not sure if Stardock gets any breaks like that.
Customers are only worth having if they pay for themselves so to speak, and for 1.75 a copy you're almost better off if they pirate it because your per unit costs for support, patches etc. can average out to more than that.
Unfortunately being invulnerable doesn't make drop rates better. Earns you lots of money from the AH though.
I've discussed in previous posts our piracy rate and dropoff in sales with the proliferation of bit torrent.
Steam has pushed back the other direction, but well, it's an online service, and you pay them 30% for the privilege of using their infrastructure rather than your own.
For us, because we only use steam for retail sales and not authentication or matchmaking well... guess what, even now a year after release 50% of the copies in active use right now are using 1 CD key (with only 4000 concurrent users that's a small sample, and well, time zones and so on), and none of those pirated copies are steam users. I'm not 100% sure how anyone else does it, but I know we give steam a list of keys and only those keys authenticate blah blah blah so their service it's just those. But gamersgate, impulse etc. not so much. And in this case the key in question was part of a broad allotment to the publisher.
Now I wouldn't equate 1 pirated copy to one lost sale, I think, given the previous sales figures (for previous games in the series and so on) I think about 20% of total players (40% of pirates since we're at 50/50 right now) equate to lost sales given our estimates, and some of the pirates are in china and can't buy our game anyway, so it's not all lost sales. But there's certainly a lot of hurt from it.
Obviously you can't know exactly. There's no way to have a synthetic test knowing exactly how many copies would sell if it wasn't for piracy. But sales are way down, forum use and active play sessions are about flat, so guess what, people are pirating the game and not paying for it. Fortunately in the intervening period the government of ontario started kicking in a bunch of money (about 40% of peoples pay) or the guys I work with would be out of business.
they already suckered me out of my money
hence the real money auction house. That you've quit playing reduces the value of the real money auction house (even if you never use it it's connected to the regular auction house as part of the broader economy).
If you read anything they've been saying it's pretty clear they fucked up, badly. And they realize it. They aren't sure what to do about it, but they definitely aren't happy with how much people are (or aren't) playing the game, because that's their revenue model. Think of it like a free to play MMO, even if you never give them any money, you're there so that someone else has a good time and does give them money, and without you playing they are in trouble.
I think blizzard was very much counting on this new fully multiplayered up diablo as a cash cow they could milk alongside Mists of Pokemon and Starcraft 2: why sell one game when we can sell three?.
There are lots of single player games that are a special case of multiplayer (where for example you still connect to a server, albeit a local one) with special rules, lots of FPS single player campaigns are like that, and there are single player games that have no support for multiplayer at all.
Diablo isn't either of those. Because of the auction house and achievements connection the game depends on connecting you to a server to facilitate those things. Now I grant you that those things didn't need to be part of the game (obviously) but blizzard deliberately made them critical to the whole experience, especially the auction house. For D3 playing the game without other players directly you're still playing multiplayer, the drops are still as though you are going to sell on the auction house and buy from the auction house, and because at any point you could take your character multiplayer (which is actually a feature) they have to treat your character as a multiplayer character all the time. In this case 'single player' isn't a special ruleset case of multiplayer, it's just multiplayer before anyone else joined.
And to not have to balance two different games. As a purely single player experience D3 is like 8 hours, or 8000 if you want to farm stuff. With multiplayer it's a good 50-200 hours, and then significantly diminishing returns after that.
The real money auction house is an example of a free to play concept, and players were exchanging real money through unofficial channels. That poses huge security problems (like the one's people are talking about with WoW), which translate to customer support problems, and blizzard figured they could get a cut.
Even without the real money though, the regular auction house is your entire region, and a main source of gear for high level balance. The ability to dupe items in D2 caused no end of balance grief and problems that arise from that, and having a consistent relatively locked down platform for their main community, which is the multiplayer community is important then.
Also, yes, piracy has ravaged the PC game business (including the companies I contract with) and so everyone who can afford the infrastructure is moving to online setups.
You also have to keep in mind that from Blizzards perspective their main product is WoW, and everything else is an offshoot from that. They want WoW players to still be connected to other WoW players who happen to be in Starcraft or Diablo, and things like that. They're aiming for a total connected product line (sort of the way steam, XBL and PSN let you chat with your friends outside of the game you're playing), so your achievements in WoW carry over to diablo and the reverse, your friends are in both and so on. Again, not really sure that plan is working too well, but I can certainly see what they're trying to do. Blizzard isn't really the right outfit to pull that off though, mostly because it's the wrong level.
No, not just the real money auction house. The regular one too. The RM AH is so blizzard can get a cut of the real money changing hands.
As I mentioned below, because i'd forgotten about them, when I typed this flash exploits as well (which of course had keyloggers of various sorts). Strategy videos and all that.