Because governments care about accountability, and businesses care about efficiency.
That's always the way in reasonably democratic governments. When you're spending the publics money they have a right to know how it is being spent, and to know it's not being wasted. The problem is that every time there's a fuckup a new layer of oversight gets added, to the point that you spend as much on accounting for spending as you do on spending.
And because as we just saw with the 38 studios closing yesterday. People get really pissed when the government wastes their money.
Which investors were screwed exactly? Lots of people bought into facebook when it was valued at 1, 5, 10, 15, 40 billion etc. They made money. A lot of of it. Even with the stock price being down from opening day they still made money.
Supposing it's a zero sum game is wrong.
If I bought facebook shares at 10 dollars, privately I then have some to sell. And on opening day I offered to sell at 40. And couldn't sell. So I sold at 38. The price when down 2 dollars, but I didn't lose any money. I made money. Now the person who has those shares could only get 32 for them today, but then other people like me who bought at 10 are still making money selling at 32, just not as much as I made selling at 38. But they haven't lost money yet. The guy who bought at 38 will only lose money if they decide to sell at 32, or if they decide the stock is never going back up to 38. If they look at it like googles opening dip, that it will go up to 70 dollars in 3 years then they could still make a pile of money.
Yes, if (and when) Facebook goes bankrupt anyone who has money will lose everything that can't be covered by sale of company assets. But that doesn't make it zero sum, the total economy is growing, if nothing else by population, and there's productivity and so on. So there really is an expanding of wealth. There's also what facebook does with that money. If they buy bars of gold, and only bars of gold (not that that plan makes any sense) then post 0 revenue and decide to shut down the business the owners (i.e. investors) still get claims on their bars of gold, which can then be sold. In practice their 'bars of gold' will be patents, real-estate, physical hardware, potentially customer lists and any information they have that might have value.
The people selling facebook shares on opening day wasn't just 'the company' as a company. It was all of their investors, employees who were paid with stock rather than cash, Russian investment firms, Microsoft, American investment firms etc. Those are actual investors.
And no, I don't own, nor do I intend to own facebook stock. I'm being illustrative not telling a personal story.
This isn't the industry of 10 years ago. Pretty much everything in your post assumes it's the industry of 10 years go.
1) used games aren't a different product. Gamestop insures the disk, and no one reads manuals so people stopped printing them. 2)Right. And? If it gets resold 5x that's 5 copies that didn't kick cash back to me. The problem isn't so much that people sell their old collection of PS2 games. It's that the afternoon of release there are used copies on the shelf at gamestop for 5 dollars less than whatever you were charging. 3) Not true. They're deciding on price. 4)No, they got money to spend on a cycle of used games, which is outside of the creation of the games themselves. 5) I said somewhere else. Making games that people have to play for 80 hours to properly see and experience probably isn't a great plan, and a 20 hour game kids will take home, play in one continuous sitting and then resell because they get the maximum value that way (gamestop paying the most money for their re-used copy). We actually track these kinds of things with achievements, and that isn't really good behaviour for anyone, the player or the industry either.
I'm 32. But that's beside the point. Do you seriously think anyone in the industry wants to build always on systems? Obviously when you're making WoW you do, but most of the rest of them, no way. That's a huge amount of work that isn't making an actual game. It's a significant testing and development exercise to try and contrive some justification that 'benefits the player' for this online service that they aren't actually using. In the same way that 200 million dollar advertising budgets to ensure first day hype and sales are not the 60 million dollars spent actually making the game. All of these things are done because if you sell your game once and it's re-sold used 4 or 5 times in the first couple of weeks I'm only making one sale on the back of gamestop.
but don't fool yourself for a second that all people will put up with buying a license for $60 or more.
In the same way people won't put up with all the privacy invasions of facebook? That's the argument you just made, well that and a veiled death threat, clearly you've been around the industry long enough to have adopted the appropriate level of maturity for what is a business and technical discussion. The 60 dollar price point is convention, as is layered throughout this thread, steam can quite successful iterate on price if people are into that sort of thing. You can't really do much on the 60 dollar price point when gamestop will always sell for 5 dollars less though.
Oh and yes, I remember when id (note they officially spell it id not iD ) was giving away free demo's and so on. Hell, I still have my commander keen floppies. Back then you could make a game for 300 or 400k and make money as long as it did kind of OK. A lot of us are at a similiar price point now (give or take inflation, and a 40% government kickback and you can buy a lot of stuff that cost about 600k to make for the publisher). But the market has changed, if id was doing so well they wouldn't have had to sell themselves to Zenimax. As I recall the strategy was to give away either the demo or a full game for free and sell later installments (lets call them MLC or mail loaded content) by passing retail and maximizing their revenue per user.
When you employ 10 people, and make 3 games a year your business plan can be very different than when you employ 200 and release a new game every 3.
Ending used game sales won't grow the industry. It will put more money in the hands of developers and give more pricing options for developers willing to take those risks.
Which is exactly what steam does on the PC. Although steam sets the prices a lot of the time, not developers, I've been bitten by that twice now. Getting 59 cents for a game you were selling for 14 dollars a week earlier isn't as great as it sounds.
This is pretty much it. Although students will want the regular desktop version more than the metro one, they have a portal for academic licencing now (where it's still free).
The chunk of the market that uses free visual studio for anything important that can't get it for free legally is probably pretty small, and it might just be that it's not worth the effort when VS 2010 will do the job.
It's based on the number of shareholders, so you're right, if you have 4 owners you can stay private and be a 200 billion dollar business for all it matters.
At some point, and that point is arbitrary, it becomes a matter of so many people owning shares that there is a responsibility to those people to make sure they are fairly informed about the status of their investment. That 'fairly informed' in a matter of making it public. Because shareholders will need, or want to do a lot of things with those assets, including borrow against them. If you're lending money to a facebook shareholder you need a way to value that investment for example.
As other people have said, there are things like insider information implications as well, and all of that stuff.
Yea, no used game sales for PC titles and have you noticed how PC game sales have been in the toilet for nearly 20 years? Diablo may have broken some PC records, but Its a drop in the bucket to what Consoles expect to make regularly. Million unit sellers on the PC are very rare.
Your bit about diablo is factually not true. 4 million units would be a big hit on any console. 4 million units combined between all the consoles and PC's would be very successful game. Not record breaking successful necessarily, but hugely successful. 5 million units and up is Madden and Call of duty territory (and bundled software like zelda, mario, kinect adventures wii fit). For comparison sake, the uncharted games each are under 4 million units in sales, as were the call of duty titles in 2007. If you sold 4 million units on either the 360 or PS3 you'd be in their top 10 best sellers ever.
And yes, Blizzard can shit virtual gold out their asses that becomes real gold by the time it's in the water in the toilet bowl. But that's not the point.
That little trick they did could also be what cost them sales, but you can't actually measure sales lost because the user-base decided that they weren't going to take it. It breads negative sentiment for the brand.
Again, not true. Our userbase is growing not shrinking. There are a handful of people that refuse to use facebook on privacy grounds too, that doesn't mean their market isn't expanding. Steam and consoles have numbers for how many unique user ID's etc etc. etc. are active. I'm not privy to console information but I know those guys can get reports if they move more than something like 6000 units on how many unique consoles access their games and so on. Why a number like 6000 I have no idea. We also have focus group testing and statistical analysis of surveys of game players and so on. This isn't the tiny little niche industry of 15 years ago. All of the tools every other industry can use to find out why people are (or aren't) buying/viewing/using their product we can use now. The big dogs are big enough to have actually capable analysts for just this sort of thing.
Most of the rest of your wall of text is full of gibberish. Yes gamestop has a shitload of revenue from used game sales, which is used to further used game sales. That's the whole problem. When you buy used you're giving money to gamestop. It inflates the value of the 'industry' but it pulls money away from the full production chain. When you buy from me you're giving money to me to make new games. There's no equivalent to a 'rental copy' with games like there is with movies. This really is not a difficult concept. The 'industry' can be bigger, but when the people who actually create the content for the industry aren't getting paid the industry as a whole is going to have to change. We don't have speaking fees and live performances to monetize the way movie stars and musicians do. Well ok, some of us get speaking and teaching fees, especially if you can speak multiple languages, and can train other game developers in the latest techniques.
The industry as a whole is doing 'badly' if you can call it that, because governments are rightly sick of giving huge kickbacks to developers, because new IP projects (like Kingdoms of Amalur) are tremendously risky bets, so most of the big publishers are not doing that, and because there's haven't been a great many games worth buying. Sure, I can sound off half a dozen or so that most gamers would like, a dozen or so niche titles that are popular. And then what? You know why that is? There's never enough money for big risks. That's party because budgets have shifted to advertising (first day sales), partly because as the industry has grown into a proper business it has to give shareholders value for their money, and neat ideas that might not make any money tend to be frowned upon. Overall the 'industry' is simply manouvring around the used game market and around piracy
I understand completely. And it's not an issue. If anything they made more money doing it this way and needed to sell less copies. I know you don't want to hear that because you believe used game sales add value, but frankly, they don't. The huge array of very successful titles through steam should give you a clue as to why this works.
On the other side of this, which is where I am, used game sales have been an unmitigated disaster for the industry as a whole. It has created a perverse adversarial relationship between us, the developers, and gamestop the prime seller of our games (well, 25% of the overall market) as well as the prime purveyor of used games.
Notice how there are no used game sales for diablo? MMO's? Anything on any of the online marketplaces etc? Right. Physical boxes exist to build interest in a brand, and even then it's usually a money pit these days, because who the hell wants to print 40k copies of a game for walmart and gamestop when it probably won't even sell 40k copies. You are far more likely to be successful with a banner ad on steam than boxed copies in stores (where the big brands of maddens, skyrim, etc all pay for the good shelf space).
Preventing used game sales, for example, by only releasing our titles through online distributors (PSN, XBL, Steam, etc.) you make a shit load more money, even if the total number of copies sold is less. Now when you're really big, skyrim big, you can afford used game sales because people will play your game long enough, and enough people will be there day one, that the used market will be lost profit on top of a mountain of profit. For everyone else it has been a giant plague on the industry. Where we could sell 100k units, and make a living before used games were prevalent, now we'll sell 50k units, that are resold 3 times. It shifts the entire industry to an advertising exercise making sure your game is bought on day one, because after that you're basically fucked (and btw, having a game that spends 4x as much on advertising as making the actual game will piss you off too, which is what the big guys do these days). Sure, more people are playing the game, but you're getting half as much money (and actually the numbers are generally dramatically worse than that but I don't have them in front of me at the moment*).
And I don't care that you didn't play ANNO 2070. Really, I don't. They've sold a shitload of copies for what is a crushingly niche game. As in hundreds of thousands of copies. As as ARMA II on the PC. Where there are no used sales via steam. That's the future. Because it has to be. We cannot keep running an industry on 40% government subsidies.
Remember, I'm advocating (perhaps later in this thread) that they cut their price to boost sales. That is a good idea absent used game sales. But you can *never* compete with the identical product for less money used. Ever. People have tried. It fails.
This also ties into another thread from today, about games wrecking kids. The article itself is overblown, but it's decidedly not healthy to have people rush out, buy a game, play it for 8-20-40 hours straight, sell it used. Which is what happens a lot. We can track these things you know.
*I'm sure I've posted it before on here somewhere. But I think for the last big project I worked on it was something like a factor of 6 or 7 x as many players as copies sold, which were down around 50% from the previous title in the series. But don't quote me. It was brutal though.
Or maybe the facebook guys did a really good job of getting the maximum value for their previous investors.
If you guess the value of a company as 110 billion dollars, and it turns out it's actually 95 that's a lot closer to reality than if you guess 20 and find out it's really 160. If you look at google, that opened at around 90 immediately jumped to 110 ish, then dropped to 100 not too long after, the next major local minimum is 243, which comes 3 years later, and it's now around 600. Feel free to pick your own preference for what counts as the 'correct' value of google stock, but pretty clearly the answer has been a hell of a lot more than 100 dollars a share for the last 7 years.
The point of the IPO was in part to get cash so they can build and capitalize on new ideas. I have no idea what those ideas are, but then I wouldn't have anticipated amazon's cloud service (and I have a close person friend who works on it, and was working on developing it). Facebook bought themselves time, with cash, both to get regulators off their back (fairly, you can't have that many shareholders and not be public for long) and to invest in and build new revenue streams. Again, no idea what those are. Mark Cuban clearly doesn't see them either, and he's presumably more credible on the topic than I am, but that doesn't mean Zuck is without a plan to make more money.
Of course you're right, the whole thing could be hype or stupidity. Zuckerberg might be a naive idealist who's happy to never pay a cent to shareholders and run Facebook like a charity with enough revenue to keep everyone paid and then nothing else. That would be a disaster for facebook stock in the not too distant future, but he does have a chance to make it into a proper greedy profit building enterprise, rather than just an invasive leech on your privacy.
Sure, as I say, people playing video games, watching movies, watching TV, reading newspapers, playing softball whatever, are all perfectly normal.
It's a matter of degree. And self control, and reinforcing different types of self control. If you could be sure people wouldn't ever play more than (for sake of argument) 25 hours of games a week, well then you have a baseline to work with. When that number is more like 70 or 80 hours for schoolkids you're causing a problem.
If it's just one game, for just one week a year... well then so what? That's the same as taking a week off on holiday. The problem is that it's not just one game for one week. It's one game this week. One game the next. Another the week after that. Repeat.
I'm not putting the blame on parents here. That's a young children problem and yes, then it's a parenting issue. When you're 14 or 15 years old, it's up to you to have, and develop your own self control and responsibility. Games are decidedly not helping. In fact by making single player games into competitive social experiences (achievements/trophies) we are reinforcing the reward mechanisms in the brain with rewards people care about, but ultimately don't mean anything, at least not compared to the relevant rewards in life like learning to get a skill set that you can get paid for.
And yes, the issue is then beyond games. Maybe it requires a 'gamification' of school, maybe it requires a rethink of how we approach education and job training in general to make sure that people feel like there actually *are* rewards for paying attention, which, as you say, right now in many cases there aren't.
Keep in mind that a lot of their staff were for other projects that never finished.
And yes, I agree, as I said, it wasn't a particularly awesome RPG. It isn't bad, but it's certainly not spectacular. They executed reasonably well, but it just wasn't a great game.
In practice that's not an issue. Not enough of the user base has any clue what those things are for it to matter to sales. If you have a PS3 or Xbox that it logs you into their onlines services doesn't even warrant a shoulder shrug, and via steam or origin phoning home isn't a shock either.
ANNO 2070 has one of the more obtrusive login to play your single player game setups possible and it seems to manage quite well.
my complaint about the 60 dollar price point is specific to this week. Or I suppose the last 2 weeks. At this point they could have (not necessarily needed to but could have) tried anything possible to generate cash.
And yes, that was point about Skryim, it had enough momentum and a few 'holy shit' moments that really helped.
Uh... you realize that the market for video games is a hell of a lot bigger than just the US right?
Diablo 3 had 4.7 million sales *on day 1*. And that's without korean cafes. Skyrim (which was cross platform) is up around 9 and a half million copies in about a week.
The problem with Kingdoms of Amalur:reckoning is that no one has any fucking clue what an Amalur is, and it's not obvious that is the world they were creating, which immediately turns attention away. And as an RPG it's nothing spectacular, run around do quests. It's decent enough, and well executed, but there's nothing in it that you call your friend and say 'you have to play this game to see this' the way skyrim or fallout has.
No one knows what the fuck skyrim is either, but when you're an established series you can build press and momentum for whatever name you want, and people will go for it. Kingdoms of Amalur may have failed in part because they didn't invest enough in press and marketing, released at the wrong time, etc. But it's certainly not a huge barrier for a game at the production quality they had to sell 3 million copies, especially across all 3 platforms. Granted, it has been out for 3 months and is *still* 60 bucks on steam, so that's not helping either. They'd have been well served to do a sale at say 20 bucks and use it as an experiment to see if they can get more sales. At this point, there's nothing else to lose, so it can't hurt to try.
On a multi lane highway with entrances and exits going just the speed limit even in the rightmost lane can cause traffic flow problems. Especially in heavy traffic as everyone is moving to get around you.
By only driving the speed limit when everyone else wants to drive 10Km/h or 10Mph faster means they're likely do reckless things to get around you, that's bad.
Conventions are just that, it's just how people behave. You don't expect to have to judge the speed of a car that's doing 80 in a 100 zone, you don't really want to move around him, because maybe you're happy doing 110 when the next lane over is doing 120 etc.
I chose it specifically because it's a stupid problem to have.
Men's problems are compounded by a labour market that is shifting traditional mens jobs overseas, and we're not catching up. Sure engineering and 'science' are generally dominated by men, even still, but they are, on the whole, a relatively small fraction of the overall labour market.
That shifting labour market is catching up to women now too though. I know a lot of women who became teachers 10 years ago that are now at best only part time employed in teaching. Actually that's all of the women that tried to become teachers that I know unless they moved overseas to teach. I know a lot of women who got degrees in psychology, drama and english who now can't find work in anything related to those (if they ever could) because guess what, those fields are massively oversupplied and people wasted their money on those degrees.
As a game developer I would say some companies have gotten really really really good at getting and keeping attention. They're better at it than teachers are, and because 70 or 80% of games can fail at keeping attention for long it's a self selecting problem. But think about something like Diablo 3 that has been out for what, a week. How many kids, primarily young men, have spent 70, or 80 hours on that already, or will by the end of this weekend (long weekend). A 4th year computer science course around here is 12 weeks, 3 hours a week of instruction. If we're lucky kids will spend 100 hours on a course total including that in class instruction, in 4 months (x5 courses/term = 1000 hours of 'work' in 8 months). We are, in all seriousness, looking at a lot of kids who will have spent 2 or 3x as much time playing diablo this semester as they have on one of their courses. That cannot be good for them in terms of preparing for the future. Socially is another matter, in that games are social experiences and rather than going to a bar after work or plopping in front of the TV people are going home and plopping in front of the computer. I doubt the relative effect is any different, but it is a different effect.
In short, I think the point about the social balance changing that you're making is correct. TV, computers, video games, on demand TV, bars, prohibition etc. will all change how people socialize, and at each transition there's a learning curve.
The second point, about the changing face of attention, and the fact that men are spending it on video games and not education is probably accurate and problematic. And I say that as someone who tries to sell games to people. But I suppose it's a bit like a movie director. I'm happy you watched my movie. I'm thrilled if you saw it twice in theatres and bought the DVD. I can find the people camping out on opening night a quirky kind of charming. I'm more than a little concerned for your health if you watched it every day for its entire release though. Video games have a habit of reinforcing the latter behaviour a bit too well, not that I have any solutions that would fit sensibly in a/. post.
You can't be an honest man in india, never paying bribes, and still get anything done. One of my Uncles tried, it kept landing him in prison.
Just the same as everyone speeds in north america, we all know it's against the rules, but it's what everyone does. If you aren't speeding on the road you can be endangering yourself and everyone else because that's just the convention.
But the only people who are institutionally allowed to steal are banks. And that's a whole other topic.
You do realize that probably a quarter of the population has no income to tax, as they are under 18 and don't work, and another 10% are unemployed? Another bunch are pensioners on fixed income, or low income labourers, or labourers new to the workforce or students (college/university) who don't work a full year and therefore have very low incomes as well?
You realize that the 'bottom 80%' of the population controls about 7% of the wealth? http://www.forbes.com/sites/deborahljacobs/2011/11/01/occupy-wall-street-and-the-rhetoric-of-equality/
In other words, about half of that group (50/80ths) is paying close to it's fair share, if not more, because of the effect I stated (which is that a large chunk of the total population isn't old enough to earn income, and another chunk, especially pensioners and people just starting to work, have very low incomes).
This is also one of the core differences between running an economy and running a business. If you tax the people at the 'bottom' who are spending all of their money already you simply depress their standard of living and inhibit their ability to become tax paying citizens.
Now the US situation, and I presume that's what you're talking about given the talking point you re-vomited back up is a specific case of one government. Unnecessary tax cuts, bridges to nowhere, 'pork barrel' projects, general looting of the public purse, ridiculously wasteful schemes are in no way unique to the US, if anything, on the scale of things, it's not bad, which is a sad commentary on the rest of the world.
No, that money is used to steal oil, coerce people into using US dollars or guarantee access to resources and personal kickbacks.
NASA very much was always implemented in a pork barrel way, guaranteeing jobs to a string of places that were politically expeditious not necessarily financially sensible.
And true, politicians only care about the next election, but the next election is 4 years away, and finding yourself having to explain billions of dollars in a half built moon base isn't a great position to be in.
As of November, to actually board a train required a 'service fee' to the conductor beyond the posted and paid ticket price. I'm sorry sir that seat is not available.
In fact, to question if this was still going on I asked my relatives who live variously between New Delhi and Allahabad and every single one of them had to pay a bribe to actually board a train the last time they did (which would in fact be today).
I suppose it depends what class of ticket you have, where you're going, and what state(s) you're in. But UP at least, is corrupt top to bottom.
Being a white guy with an indian last name has it's odd quirks when traveling to the area. My father is an indian guy with an indian name, he gets the same deal every other indian gets, even though he's obviously an expat. I on the other hand get one deal over the phone, and another in person. Naturally I have no problem paying the tourist price when asked, as that is probably appropriate. It's the odd in betweens, where I'm standing around with half a dozen locals and no one is quite sure whether to just charge me a pile of money as a tourist, or make me pay the customary unlisted fees.
Uh... the moment someone decides that plan is worthwhile they can go ahead and do it. To this point no one has decided it's worth doing, or more to the point worth the risk that the project would get half completed before more immediate problems require the money, and then you could end up with half a moonbase, or a moonbase and no mars mission or the like. None of which would be a good use of public finances that could be spent elsewhere.
With a goal of 'going to the moon and back' at any meaningful intermediate step you can cut your losses if it's not working and not be out a whole lot. There are dozens of useful intermediate steps and goals. A moonbase can't be half hearted, you either build a moonbase, or you build a very expensive scrap heap. All of the intermediate steps were done in the apollo programme already.
Or farsighted politicians who don't want to have a multi hundred billion dollar base on the moon sucking up cash for no reason 10 years from now in circumstances they can't predict.
When you have money to burn a lot of things look like ideas you can fling money at, including tax cuts for people who don't need tax cuts, bridges to nowhere etc. The problem is that when the economy takes a negative dip (as it always does) you need to cut things which aren't necessary so you can focus resources on something that really needs it.
Any sort of adventure like a moon base needs to be as part of an investment into something. Maybe that's as a jumping off point to Mars, maybe that's for mining asteroids, or maybe it's just because we desperately need living space and it looks like it might be viable. But right now, it's none of those things.
National prestige is worth something, as is general investment in scientific curiosity. So you pay a bunch of scientists to figure out what is a good use of scientific money, and if they tell you 'not a moon base' then you should probably follow that. There are lots of other problems to be solved that look far more likely to be successful at this point.
You realize that fraud and scamming people in india is a crime too right?
I don't begrudge and indian guy a job at Infosys or IBM or actual microsoft. You may not like outsourcing, but you can't fault someone for taking a decent job that's a step up from what they have, and you can't expect them to feel bad about taking your job when you get paid 50x as much as they do.
But you still don't feel bad for the guy trying to rob you on the street in New Delhi. He's as much a criminal by indian standards as by western ones.
I admit, there *is* a grey area. Not the area you talked about. But there is a grey area. I feel bad for people there who have to pay bribes to buy a train ticket (which is everyone), and I feel worse when they come here and think they have to do the same thing. But there is a matter of different cultures, and pervasive corruption and ciminality that honest people can't avoid. Fine, I'll forgive some of that. But trying to theft is theft, and I have relatively little tolerance for it, and none at all when it's an intentional organized corporate activity.
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No, governments care about accountability. When they get only the appearance of accountability they add another layer of accounting.
Because governments care about accountability, and businesses care about efficiency.
That's always the way in reasonably democratic governments. When you're spending the publics money they have a right to know how it is being spent, and to know it's not being wasted. The problem is that every time there's a fuckup a new layer of oversight gets added, to the point that you spend as much on accounting for spending as you do on spending.
And because as we just saw with the 38 studios closing yesterday. People get really pissed when the government wastes their money.
Which investors were screwed exactly? Lots of people bought into facebook when it was valued at 1, 5, 10, 15, 40 billion etc. They made money. A lot of of it. Even with the stock price being down from opening day they still made money.
Supposing it's a zero sum game is wrong.
If I bought facebook shares at 10 dollars, privately I then have some to sell. And on opening day I offered to sell at 40. And couldn't sell. So I sold at 38. The price when down 2 dollars, but I didn't lose any money. I made money. Now the person who has those shares could only get 32 for them today, but then other people like me who bought at 10 are still making money selling at 32, just not as much as I made selling at 38. But they haven't lost money yet. The guy who bought at 38 will only lose money if they decide to sell at 32, or if they decide the stock is never going back up to 38. If they look at it like googles opening dip, that it will go up to 70 dollars in 3 years then they could still make a pile of money.
Yes, if (and when) Facebook goes bankrupt anyone who has money will lose everything that can't be covered by sale of company assets. But that doesn't make it zero sum, the total economy is growing, if nothing else by population, and there's productivity and so on. So there really is an expanding of wealth. There's also what facebook does with that money. If they buy bars of gold, and only bars of gold (not that that plan makes any sense) then post 0 revenue and decide to shut down the business the owners (i.e. investors) still get claims on their bars of gold, which can then be sold. In practice their 'bars of gold' will be patents, real-estate, physical hardware, potentially customer lists and any information they have that might have value.
The people selling facebook shares on opening day wasn't just 'the company' as a company. It was all of their investors, employees who were paid with stock rather than cash, Russian investment firms, Microsoft, American investment firms etc. Those are actual investors.
And no, I don't own, nor do I intend to own facebook stock. I'm being illustrative not telling a personal story.
This isn't the industry of 10 years ago. Pretty much everything in your post assumes it's the industry of 10 years go.
1) used games aren't a different product. Gamestop insures the disk, and no one reads manuals so people stopped printing them.
2)Right. And? If it gets resold 5x that's 5 copies that didn't kick cash back to me. The problem isn't so much that people sell their old collection of PS2 games. It's that the afternoon of release there are used copies on the shelf at gamestop for 5 dollars less than whatever you were charging.
3) Not true. They're deciding on price.
4)No, they got money to spend on a cycle of used games, which is outside of the creation of the games themselves.
5) I said somewhere else. Making games that people have to play for 80 hours to properly see and experience probably isn't a great plan, and a 20 hour game kids will take home, play in one continuous sitting and then resell because they get the maximum value that way (gamestop paying the most money for their re-used copy). We actually track these kinds of things with achievements, and that isn't really good behaviour for anyone, the player or the industry either.
I'm 32. But that's beside the point. Do you seriously think anyone in the industry wants to build always on systems? Obviously when you're making WoW you do, but most of the rest of them, no way. That's a huge amount of work that isn't making an actual game. It's a significant testing and development exercise to try and contrive some justification that 'benefits the player' for this online service that they aren't actually using. In the same way that 200 million dollar advertising budgets to ensure first day hype and sales are not the 60 million dollars spent actually making the game. All of these things are done because if you sell your game once and it's re-sold used 4 or 5 times in the first couple of weeks I'm only making one sale on the back of gamestop.
but don't fool yourself for a second that all people will put up with buying a license for $60 or more.
In the same way people won't put up with all the privacy invasions of facebook? That's the argument you just made, well that and a veiled death threat, clearly you've been around the industry long enough to have adopted the appropriate level of maturity for what is a business and technical discussion. The 60 dollar price point is convention, as is layered throughout this thread, steam can quite successful iterate on price if people are into that sort of thing. You can't really do much on the 60 dollar price point when gamestop will always sell for 5 dollars less though.
Oh and yes, I remember when id (note they officially spell it id not iD ) was giving away free demo's and so on. Hell, I still have my commander keen floppies. Back then you could make a game for 300 or 400k and make money as long as it did kind of OK. A lot of us are at a similiar price point now (give or take inflation, and a 40% government kickback and you can buy a lot of stuff that cost about 600k to make for the publisher). But the market has changed, if id was doing so well they wouldn't have had to sell themselves to Zenimax. As I recall the strategy was to give away either the demo or a full game for free and sell later installments (lets call them MLC or mail loaded content) by passing retail and maximizing their revenue per user.
When you employ 10 people, and make 3 games a year your business plan can be very different than when you employ 200 and release a new game every 3.
Ending used game sales won't grow the industry. It will put more money in the hands of developers and give more pricing options for developers willing to take those risks.
Which is exactly what steam does on the PC. Although steam sets the prices a lot of the time, not developers, I've been bitten by that twice now. Getting 59 cents for a game you were selling for 14 dollars a week earlier isn't as great as it sounds.
This is pretty much it. Although students will want the regular desktop version more than the metro one, they have a portal for academic licencing now (where it's still free).
The chunk of the market that uses free visual studio for anything important that can't get it for free legally is probably pretty small, and it might just be that it's not worth the effort when VS 2010 will do the job.
It's based on the number of shareholders, so you're right, if you have 4 owners you can stay private and be a 200 billion dollar business for all it matters.
At some point, and that point is arbitrary, it becomes a matter of so many people owning shares that there is a responsibility to those people to make sure they are fairly informed about the status of their investment. That 'fairly informed' in a matter of making it public. Because shareholders will need, or want to do a lot of things with those assets, including borrow against them. If you're lending money to a facebook shareholder you need a way to value that investment for example.
As other people have said, there are things like insider information implications as well, and all of that stuff.
Yea, no used game sales for PC titles and have you noticed how PC game sales have been in the toilet for nearly 20 years? Diablo may have broken some PC records, but Its a drop in the bucket to what Consoles expect to make regularly. Million unit sellers on the PC are very rare.
Your bit about diablo is factually not true. 4 million units would be a big hit on any console. 4 million units combined between all the consoles and PC's would be very successful game. Not record breaking successful necessarily, but hugely successful. 5 million units and up is Madden and Call of duty territory (and bundled software like zelda, mario, kinect adventures wii fit). For comparison sake, the uncharted games each are under 4 million units in sales, as were the call of duty titles in 2007. If you sold 4 million units on either the 360 or PS3 you'd be in their top 10 best sellers ever.
And yes, Blizzard can shit virtual gold out their asses that becomes real gold by the time it's in the water in the toilet bowl. But that's not the point.
That little trick they did could also be what cost them sales, but you can't actually measure sales lost because the user-base decided that they weren't going to take it. It breads negative sentiment for the brand.
Again, not true. Our userbase is growing not shrinking. There are a handful of people that refuse to use facebook on privacy grounds too, that doesn't mean their market isn't expanding. Steam and consoles have numbers for how many unique user ID's etc etc. etc. are active. I'm not privy to console information but I know those guys can get reports if they move more than something like 6000 units on how many unique consoles access their games and so on. Why a number like 6000 I have no idea. We also have focus group testing and statistical analysis of surveys of game players and so on. This isn't the tiny little niche industry of 15 years ago. All of the tools every other industry can use to find out why people are (or aren't) buying/viewing/using their product we can use now. The big dogs are big enough to have actually capable analysts for just this sort of thing.
Most of the rest of your wall of text is full of gibberish. Yes gamestop has a shitload of revenue from used game sales, which is used to further used game sales. That's the whole problem. When you buy used you're giving money to gamestop. It inflates the value of the 'industry' but it pulls money away from the full production chain. When you buy from me you're giving money to me to make new games. There's no equivalent to a 'rental copy' with games like there is with movies. This really is not a difficult concept. The 'industry' can be bigger, but when the people who actually create the content for the industry aren't getting paid the industry as a whole is going to have to change. We don't have speaking fees and live performances to monetize the way movie stars and musicians do. Well ok, some of us get speaking and teaching fees, especially if you can speak multiple languages, and can train other game developers in the latest techniques.
The industry as a whole is doing 'badly' if you can call it that, because governments are rightly sick of giving huge kickbacks to developers, because new IP projects (like Kingdoms of Amalur) are tremendously risky bets, so most of the big publishers are not doing that, and because there's haven't been a great many games worth buying. Sure, I can sound off half a dozen or so that most gamers would like, a dozen or so niche titles that are popular. And then what? You know why that is? There's never enough money for big risks. That's party because budgets have shifted to advertising (first day sales), partly because as the industry has grown into a proper business it has to give shareholders value for their money, and neat ideas that might not make any money tend to be frowned upon. Overall the 'industry' is simply manouvring around the used game market and around piracy
I understand completely. And it's not an issue. If anything they made more money doing it this way and needed to sell less copies. I know you don't want to hear that because you believe used game sales add value, but frankly, they don't. The huge array of very successful titles through steam should give you a clue as to why this works.
On the other side of this, which is where I am, used game sales have been an unmitigated disaster for the industry as a whole. It has created a perverse adversarial relationship between us, the developers, and gamestop the prime seller of our games (well, 25% of the overall market) as well as the prime purveyor of used games.
Notice how there are no used game sales for diablo? MMO's? Anything on any of the online marketplaces etc? Right. Physical boxes exist to build interest in a brand, and even then it's usually a money pit these days, because who the hell wants to print 40k copies of a game for walmart and gamestop when it probably won't even sell 40k copies. You are far more likely to be successful with a banner ad on steam than boxed copies in stores (where the big brands of maddens, skyrim, etc all pay for the good shelf space).
Preventing used game sales, for example, by only releasing our titles through online distributors (PSN, XBL, Steam, etc.) you make a shit load more money, even if the total number of copies sold is less. Now when you're really big, skyrim big, you can afford used game sales because people will play your game long enough, and enough people will be there day one, that the used market will be lost profit on top of a mountain of profit. For everyone else it has been a giant plague on the industry. Where we could sell 100k units, and make a living before used games were prevalent, now we'll sell 50k units, that are resold 3 times. It shifts the entire industry to an advertising exercise making sure your game is bought on day one, because after that you're basically fucked (and btw, having a game that spends 4x as much on advertising as making the actual game will piss you off too, which is what the big guys do these days). Sure, more people are playing the game, but you're getting half as much money (and actually the numbers are generally dramatically worse than that but I don't have them in front of me at the moment*).
And I don't care that you didn't play ANNO 2070. Really, I don't. They've sold a shitload of copies for what is a crushingly niche game. As in hundreds of thousands of copies. As as ARMA II on the PC. Where there are no used sales via steam. That's the future. Because it has to be. We cannot keep running an industry on 40% government subsidies.
Remember, I'm advocating (perhaps later in this thread) that they cut their price to boost sales. That is a good idea absent used game sales. But you can *never* compete with the identical product for less money used. Ever. People have tried. It fails.
This also ties into another thread from today, about games wrecking kids. The article itself is overblown, but it's decidedly not healthy to have people rush out, buy a game, play it for 8-20-40 hours straight, sell it used. Which is what happens a lot. We can track these things you know.
*I'm sure I've posted it before on here somewhere. But I think for the last big project I worked on it was something like a factor of 6 or 7 x as many players as copies sold, which were down around 50% from the previous title in the series. But don't quote me. It was brutal though.
Or maybe the facebook guys did a really good job of getting the maximum value for their previous investors.
If you guess the value of a company as 110 billion dollars, and it turns out it's actually 95 that's a lot closer to reality than if you guess 20 and find out it's really 160. If you look at google, that opened at around 90 immediately jumped to 110 ish, then dropped to 100 not too long after, the next major local minimum is 243, which comes 3 years later, and it's now around 600. Feel free to pick your own preference for what counts as the 'correct' value of google stock, but pretty clearly the answer has been a hell of a lot more than 100 dollars a share for the last 7 years.
The point of the IPO was in part to get cash so they can build and capitalize on new ideas. I have no idea what those ideas are, but then I wouldn't have anticipated amazon's cloud service (and I have a close person friend who works on it, and was working on developing it). Facebook bought themselves time, with cash, both to get regulators off their back (fairly, you can't have that many shareholders and not be public for long) and to invest in and build new revenue streams. Again, no idea what those are. Mark Cuban clearly doesn't see them either, and he's presumably more credible on the topic than I am, but that doesn't mean Zuck is without a plan to make more money.
Of course you're right, the whole thing could be hype or stupidity. Zuckerberg might be a naive idealist who's happy to never pay a cent to shareholders and run Facebook like a charity with enough revenue to keep everyone paid and then nothing else. That would be a disaster for facebook stock in the not too distant future, but he does have a chance to make it into a proper greedy profit building enterprise, rather than just an invasive leech on your privacy.
You can tell its fantasy, but not the genre. Is it a hack and slash? RPG? Strategy? Does the box art help? What do the screenshots look like?
Sure, as I say, people playing video games, watching movies, watching TV, reading newspapers, playing softball whatever, are all perfectly normal.
It's a matter of degree. And self control, and reinforcing different types of self control. If you could be sure people wouldn't ever play more than (for sake of argument) 25 hours of games a week, well then you have a baseline to work with. When that number is more like 70 or 80 hours for schoolkids you're causing a problem.
If it's just one game, for just one week a year... well then so what? That's the same as taking a week off on holiday. The problem is that it's not just one game for one week. It's one game this week. One game the next. Another the week after that. Repeat.
I'm not putting the blame on parents here. That's a young children problem and yes, then it's a parenting issue. When you're 14 or 15 years old, it's up to you to have, and develop your own self control and responsibility. Games are decidedly not helping. In fact by making single player games into competitive social experiences (achievements/trophies) we are reinforcing the reward mechanisms in the brain with rewards people care about, but ultimately don't mean anything, at least not compared to the relevant rewards in life like learning to get a skill set that you can get paid for.
And yes, the issue is then beyond games. Maybe it requires a 'gamification' of school, maybe it requires a rethink of how we approach education and job training in general to make sure that people feel like there actually *are* rewards for paying attention, which, as you say, right now in many cases there aren't.
Keep in mind that a lot of their staff were for other projects that never finished.
And yes, I agree, as I said, it wasn't a particularly awesome RPG. It isn't bad, but it's certainly not spectacular. They executed reasonably well, but it just wasn't a great game.
In practice that's not an issue. Not enough of the user base has any clue what those things are for it to matter to sales. If you have a PS3 or Xbox that it logs you into their onlines services doesn't even warrant a shoulder shrug, and via steam or origin phoning home isn't a shock either.
ANNO 2070 has one of the more obtrusive login to play your single player game setups possible and it seems to manage quite well.
my complaint about the 60 dollar price point is specific to this week. Or I suppose the last 2 weeks. At this point they could have (not necessarily needed to but could have) tried anything possible to generate cash.
And yes, that was point about Skryim, it had enough momentum and a few 'holy shit' moments that really helped.
Uh... you realize that the market for video games is a hell of a lot bigger than just the US right?
Diablo 3 had 4.7 million sales *on day 1*. And that's without korean cafes.
Skyrim (which was cross platform) is up around 9 and a half million copies in about a week.
The problem with Kingdoms of Amalur:reckoning is that no one has any fucking clue what an Amalur is, and it's not obvious that is the world they were creating, which immediately turns attention away. And as an RPG it's nothing spectacular, run around do quests. It's decent enough, and well executed, but there's nothing in it that you call your friend and say 'you have to play this game to see this' the way skyrim or fallout has.
No one knows what the fuck skyrim is either, but when you're an established series you can build press and momentum for whatever name you want, and people will go for it. Kingdoms of Amalur may have failed in part because they didn't invest enough in press and marketing, released at the wrong time, etc. But it's certainly not a huge barrier for a game at the production quality they had to sell 3 million copies, especially across all 3 platforms. Granted, it has been out for 3 months and is *still* 60 bucks on steam, so that's not helping either. They'd have been well served to do a sale at say 20 bucks and use it as an experiment to see if they can get more sales. At this point, there's nothing else to lose, so it can't hurt to try.
On a multi lane highway with entrances and exits going just the speed limit even in the rightmost lane can cause traffic flow problems. Especially in heavy traffic as everyone is moving to get around you.
By only driving the speed limit when everyone else wants to drive 10Km/h or 10Mph faster means they're likely do reckless things to get around you, that's bad.
Conventions are just that, it's just how people behave. You don't expect to have to judge the speed of a car that's doing 80 in a 100 zone, you don't really want to move around him, because maybe you're happy doing 110 when the next lane over is doing 120 etc.
I chose it specifically because it's a stupid problem to have.
Men's problems are compounded by a labour market that is shifting traditional mens jobs overseas, and we're not catching up. Sure engineering and 'science' are generally dominated by men, even still, but they are, on the whole, a relatively small fraction of the overall labour market.
That shifting labour market is catching up to women now too though. I know a lot of women who became teachers 10 years ago that are now at best only part time employed in teaching. Actually that's all of the women that tried to become teachers that I know unless they moved overseas to teach. I know a lot of women who got degrees in psychology, drama and english who now can't find work in anything related to those (if they ever could) because guess what, those fields are massively oversupplied and people wasted their money on those degrees.
As a game developer I would say some companies have gotten really really really good at getting and keeping attention. They're better at it than teachers are, and because 70 or 80% of games can fail at keeping attention for long it's a self selecting problem. But think about something like Diablo 3 that has been out for what, a week. How many kids, primarily young men, have spent 70, or 80 hours on that already, or will by the end of this weekend (long weekend). A 4th year computer science course around here is 12 weeks, 3 hours a week of instruction. If we're lucky kids will spend 100 hours on a course total including that in class instruction, in 4 months (x5 courses/term = 1000 hours of 'work' in 8 months). We are, in all seriousness, looking at a lot of kids who will have spent 2 or 3x as much time playing diablo this semester as they have on one of their courses. That cannot be good for them in terms of preparing for the future. Socially is another matter, in that games are social experiences and rather than going to a bar after work or plopping in front of the TV people are going home and plopping in front of the computer. I doubt the relative effect is any different, but it is a different effect.
In short, I think the point about the social balance changing that you're making is correct. TV, computers, video games, on demand TV, bars, prohibition etc. will all change how people socialize, and at each transition there's a learning curve.
The second point, about the changing face of attention, and the fact that men are spending it on video games and not education is probably accurate and problematic. And I say that as someone who tries to sell games to people. But I suppose it's a bit like a movie director. I'm happy you watched my movie. I'm thrilled if you saw it twice in theatres and bought the DVD. I can find the people camping out on opening night a quirky kind of charming. I'm more than a little concerned for your health if you watched it every day for its entire release though. Video games have a habit of reinforcing the latter behaviour a bit too well, not that I have any solutions that would fit sensibly in a /. post.
That was my point.....
You can't be an honest man in india, never paying bribes, and still get anything done. One of my Uncles tried, it kept landing him in prison.
Just the same as everyone speeds in north america, we all know it's against the rules, but it's what everyone does. If you aren't speeding on the road you can be endangering yourself and everyone else because that's just the convention.
But the only people who are institutionally allowed to steal are banks. And that's a whole other topic.
You do realize that probably a quarter of the population has no income to tax, as they are under 18 and don't work, and another 10% are unemployed? Another bunch are pensioners on fixed income, or low income labourers, or labourers new to the workforce or students (college/university) who don't work a full year and therefore have very low incomes as well?
You realize that the 'bottom 80%' of the population controls about 7% of the wealth? http://www.forbes.com/sites/deborahljacobs/2011/11/01/occupy-wall-street-and-the-rhetoric-of-equality/
In other words, about half of that group (50/80ths) is paying close to it's fair share, if not more, because of the effect I stated (which is that a large chunk of the total population isn't old enough to earn income, and another chunk, especially pensioners and people just starting to work, have very low incomes).
This is also one of the core differences between running an economy and running a business. If you tax the people at the 'bottom' who are spending all of their money already you simply depress their standard of living and inhibit their ability to become tax paying citizens.
Now the US situation, and I presume that's what you're talking about given the talking point you re-vomited back up is a specific case of one government. Unnecessary tax cuts, bridges to nowhere, 'pork barrel' projects, general looting of the public purse, ridiculously wasteful schemes are in no way unique to the US, if anything, on the scale of things, it's not bad, which is a sad commentary on the rest of the world.
No, that money is used to steal oil, coerce people into using US dollars or guarantee access to resources and personal kickbacks.
NASA very much was always implemented in a pork barrel way, guaranteeing jobs to a string of places that were politically expeditious not necessarily financially sensible.
And true, politicians only care about the next election, but the next election is 4 years away, and finding yourself having to explain billions of dollars in a half built moon base isn't a great position to be in.
As of November, to actually board a train required a 'service fee' to the conductor beyond the posted and paid ticket price. I'm sorry sir that seat is not available.
In fact, to question if this was still going on I asked my relatives who live variously between New Delhi and Allahabad and every single one of them had to pay a bribe to actually board a train the last time they did (which would in fact be today).
I suppose it depends what class of ticket you have, where you're going, and what state(s) you're in. But UP at least, is corrupt top to bottom.
Being a white guy with an indian last name has it's odd quirks when traveling to the area. My father is an indian guy with an indian name, he gets the same deal every other indian gets, even though he's obviously an expat. I on the other hand get one deal over the phone, and another in person. Naturally I have no problem paying the tourist price when asked, as that is probably appropriate. It's the odd in betweens, where I'm standing around with half a dozen locals and no one is quite sure whether to just charge me a pile of money as a tourist, or make me pay the customary unlisted fees.
Uh... the moment someone decides that plan is worthwhile they can go ahead and do it. To this point no one has decided it's worth doing, or more to the point worth the risk that the project would get half completed before more immediate problems require the money, and then you could end up with half a moonbase, or a moonbase and no mars mission or the like. None of which would be a good use of public finances that could be spent elsewhere.
With a goal of 'going to the moon and back' at any meaningful intermediate step you can cut your losses if it's not working and not be out a whole lot. There are dozens of useful intermediate steps and goals. A moonbase can't be half hearted, you either build a moonbase, or you build a very expensive scrap heap. All of the intermediate steps were done in the apollo programme already.
Or farsighted politicians who don't want to have a multi hundred billion dollar base on the moon sucking up cash for no reason 10 years from now in circumstances they can't predict.
When you have money to burn a lot of things look like ideas you can fling money at, including tax cuts for people who don't need tax cuts, bridges to nowhere etc. The problem is that when the economy takes a negative dip (as it always does) you need to cut things which aren't necessary so you can focus resources on something that really needs it.
Any sort of adventure like a moon base needs to be as part of an investment into something. Maybe that's as a jumping off point to Mars, maybe that's for mining asteroids, or maybe it's just because we desperately need living space and it looks like it might be viable. But right now, it's none of those things.
National prestige is worth something, as is general investment in scientific curiosity. So you pay a bunch of scientists to figure out what is a good use of scientific money, and if they tell you 'not a moon base' then you should probably follow that. There are lots of other problems to be solved that look far more likely to be successful at this point.
You realize that fraud and scamming people in india is a crime too right?
I don't begrudge and indian guy a job at Infosys or IBM or actual microsoft. You may not like outsourcing, but you can't fault someone for taking a decent job that's a step up from what they have, and you can't expect them to feel bad about taking your job when you get paid 50x as much as they do.
But you still don't feel bad for the guy trying to rob you on the street in New Delhi. He's as much a criminal by indian standards as by western ones.
I admit, there *is* a grey area. Not the area you talked about. But there is a grey area. I feel bad for people there who have to pay bribes to buy a train ticket (which is everyone), and I feel worse when they come here and think they have to do the same thing. But there is a matter of different cultures, and pervasive corruption and ciminality that honest people can't avoid. Fine, I'll forgive some of that. But trying to theft is theft, and I have relatively little tolerance for it, and none at all when it's an intentional organized corporate activity.