Apparently you haven't looked at the squirrelmail plugin page very closely. If you had you would have seen the Filters and Spam section that has things as a SpamCop, Spam Assasin, and my favorite, BayeseSpam. Of course I haven't seen any spam plugins for Twig, so maybe that would be a better example.
I don't necessarily think NASA is the problem. I think our government, and the general public are the problem. Every time there is a space related accidant the public gets upset and questions support of the programs. Our elected officials seize these opportunities to take money out of the NASA budget.
If we truly want to succeed in space I think we have to understand that there are "acceptable losses" of both life and equipment. Do people really think that when Europeans started sailing across the Atlantic everyone survived? Of course they didn't, they were acceptable losses in the face of the potential gain of exploring this "new world" across the oceans. Space is very similar. I think in general the US consists of a bunch of greedy cry babies that are unwilling to take risks, and this analyst is right. It will take a bunch of millionaires that don't have to answer to the general public for what they do to truly make the next big leap into space exploration or commercialization.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to belittle the people that gave up thier lives to be a part of the space program or anything by calling them acceptable losses. I'm just trying to point out that this type of thing is going to happen and should be expected if we are truly going to start taking advantage of the potential of space.
The excursion is about 3 times the size of most SUV's being that it is built upon the frame of a large truck, the F150 I believe. Hence there is a huge differance when talking about capacity.
Senator Hatch is selling cds from his site as well. That would make it qualify for commercial uses and require a $900 registration fee as well. So, based on those criteria the maintainers of his site are the pirates. However, if you follow what the BSA says about software "theft" the senator is actually responsible for the actions of the people hired to do the work for him, just as a company would be responsible for the actions of thier employees. It remains to be seen if the senator will be allowed to simply use the non profit version or not.
This does damage his stance against copyright violaters as this makes him look very hipocritical. Software piracy is nothing more than copyright violation just as trading music and movies is.
Being that all the hardware that I've bought lately has been IEEE 1394 equiped anyway... yes I would be firewire devices over USB. The whole iLink, Firewire, IEEE 1394 issue is a lot easier to figure out than USB 2 and USB 2, especially when the differances are supposed to be noticable by High Speed and Full Speed. USB 2 Full Speed (1.1) doesn't properly use the word full so it also helps to mislead the consumer. In fact based on that wording I would guess that the USB 2 High Speed was the slower of the two if I didn't know better.
Why they would actually want to sell more 1.1's is beyond me though.
Existing inventory of products based on 1.1? That's the first thing that comes to my mind. Of course that certainly isn't a very good reason to relabel it USB 2, and I can gaurantee you I would never purchase anything from one of the companies that sold hardware labeled like this.
All good points and nothing I really disagree with. As with anything you get in "bulk" the price is useallly reduced, sometimes significantly. I certainly should have recognized that initially.
In any case, the current model uses the initial $50 price point to pay the setup costs from the first X number of sales. The long time that it takes for that price to come down reflects the company's unwillingness to take less of a profit on a successful game, even though in the long term the majority of their profit comes from subscriptions that last 6 months or more, not from people buying the game in the first place. This, I'm sure, is why SWG's subscription doesn't come into line with EQ's rate until you go out to 12 months, and iirc EQ has a lower rate at that level as well.
I think this is more than just an unwillingness to take lower profits from a successful title. I think that Sony/Verant appears to believe that they can gain greater profit based on the titles history, influence, and desireability. Either that or Lucas is charging an arm and a leg for the rights to create, produce, and run the game. I am interested in playing Galaxies but I'm not interested in paying for a year in advance and I'm not really interested in paying $15 per month for a game. I certainly don't see any compelling reason for this game to be priced like it is.
I can see why expansions are beneficial for marketing as it gets a shiny new box in front of people that may not have played. I can see it as even a source of additional revenue to fund further development as the expansions seem to be priced similarily to original retail releases. I would even be willing to pay for expansions more often if they contained "substantial new features" as you pointed out. The problem is that when you are already getting updates on a monthly basis and are told that your monthly fee goes in part to the development of those monthly features, and expansion has to be much better than those monthly updates. Up to this point, in my opinion only of course, these expansions have failed on this particular point.
This may or may not be true. As was hashed out in another part of the thread we are all just making our points with conjecture. Without hard sales data we can't really know how well expansion packs work at bringing in new customers. I do know that many of the people I played AC with left when the expansion came out because they didn't want to spend another $30 on an expansion that didn't appear to offer much. These people mostly had more than one account and also didn't want to buy the expansion multiple times. The other problem with that particular expansion is that it tended to be unbalanced and concentrate most of the players in one area. This of course caused unbearable lag due to the server load. Of course I don't know how the EQ expansions helped or hindered the game because I played the game for about 6 weeks before cancelling my account. Maybe thier constant releases increased the number of newer players enough to make it worth it for Sony/Verant. However, did they lose any clients due to the high price of the expansion? Again, there is no way to know without hard sales data, and after googling for some I couldn't find any.
You have good points, but there is one thing I think I should touch on.
I realize that part of what you're saying, though, is that they still have to pay for the bandwidth to allow downloads, too, but then they should already be paying for massive amounts of bandwidth to host their game in the first place.
While it takes large amounts of bandwidth to host a MMORG with a lot of clients I would be willing to bet it is significantly smaller than we all think. For the most part all the clients are sending is tons of small UDP packets. These add up, but with cutting out the overhead of TCP I would think it is less bandwidth than we are thinking. They have to have even more bandwidth to handle the download of updates. This is extra bandwidth on top of what you normally have because you will have a portion of the world population downloading updates at differant times. The majority will get them the day of the update release, so maybe the increase isn't significant, but it is still additional bandwidth. Now lets add in downloading ISO images for a game. Many of these new games are multiple CD games due to the massive size of the textures. The bandwidth required to provided downloads needs to be seperate in my opinion because it is going to be a large amount of bandwidth needed constantly. Because it will take each person downloading the game a long time to do so you can't rely on bandwidth for the game servers without damaging the playability of the game. Also, because you have connections being taken up for very long periods of time you will need more bandwidth simply to handle a large number of connections. I seriously doubt that the amount of bandwidth these companies are currently getting could also handle dedicated downloads of game isos. Of course this is why I mentioned distributed downloads such as bit torrent, or even file shack or file planet could work. Anyway, just something to think about. Is bandwidth so cheap now that the extra bandwidth wouldn't cost as much if not more? I don't know, but I know that it still looks pretty darn expensive to me.
That depends on the state, and the circumstances. After having complained about it to a friend in the local police force a couple of times he looked into it for me. Government officials can exceed the speed limit if they have cause and if it does not put the public in danger. Otherwise they have to follow the same traffic laws as the rest of us. Of course no officer in thier right mind will ever enforce these rules so it's pretty much pointless. That's another reason that if Hatch gets his way I want to personally handle my reprasentatives vehicles;)
Actually, I don't care much about the remote part. I wouldn't mind having them watch me take a baseball bat to thier care among other tools of car devastation;)
Don't be so sure. The last time this exact same thing came up there were specific provisions in the bill protecting the various media cartels in case of an accident. You had to prove that they screwed up and that the damages exceeded a certain dollar value. Therefor it would be nearly impossible for you to prove that they made a mistake. Of course it didn't pass that time, but you never know the second time around. Especially if people just ignore the issue.
the next time I see one of my legislators driving around massivly exceeding the speed limit and failing to use thier turn signals I get to follow them home and destroy thier vehicle. To paraphrase Hatch in my context: This may be the only way you can teach somebody about traffic laws. and "There's no excuse for anyone violating traffic laws." The only reason I draw this parrallel is I live close to and grew up near the state capital and this is something that irritates me beyond belief.
The stupidity of our elected officials never ceases to amaze me.
The leach issue is why I mentioned bit torrent. You still have leaches, but it puts some of the distribution cost back on the consumers which could offset a portion of the bandwidth costs. I don't think most people would mind this being that you are paying for the bandwidth anyway and you wouldn't have to pay the cost of the shiny box. Of course they could also come up with an advertisment based download system as well so that the bandwidth was payed for by other peoples advertising dollars. Write a custom download and installer app that requires a small fee to get access to your game key and the installer executable and then it downloads from various servers while displaying banner ad type advertisments. Most people would just walk away from the computer at that point but it's worth a thought.
Anyway, I doubt that any of the game companies are going to change thier distribution and pricing schemes any time soon. You are also absolutely correct. Without more concrete sales and marketing data this thread loses much of its value.
No, actually, it doesn't. I mentioned direct sales by Sony and/or Lucas. I'm also pretty certain that most (not all) users of these games have broadband of some sort.
A few months (year+ ?) ago one of the PC Game magazines had a breakdown of costs. The 'development costs' were only about 25% of a game's cost. The remainder went to wholesaler markup, dealer markup, and, the bulk, to advertising. Why does SWG need advertising? (Actually, marketing, which includes advertising) All of the online and print mags are falling all over themselves to cover this game.
Ok, you have me there. You didn't completly ignore dial up users. However, you have to consider if the game distributors are set up to handle direct distribution and if not factor in the cost of setting up the new facilities. Of course this will eliminate a portion of thier traditional shipping overhead because they don't distribute to the various middlemen. After playing several MMORG type games as well as other online games I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers of dial up players was equal if not greater than broadband users. Especially for the larger player bases such as EQ. In all of the games I've played at least half of the people I played with on a regular basis were still on dial up. Mostly because they were in areas where broadband was either not available or too expensive.
As to the marketing costs, I don't know why a game with a title as big as Galaxies needs as much advertising as it is getting. However, it isn't surprising. Game advertising is becoming just as bad as movie advertising. I don't think that advertising needs to go away completly but I certainly wouldn't mind saving a buck or two on say.. the overpriced monthly fee due to reduced advertising budgets.
As you've forced me to think about the topic a bit more (thanks:) I think that direct sales will lower the price. Cut out the middleman. No, it won't work for those Activision budget titles, but for something with the Star Wars moniker?
Again cutting out the middle man is only a portion. Distribution costs are shifted under your model but may actually be increased due to shipping units to individuals rather than to wholesalers etc. While cutting out the middle man would certainly reduce costs you would have to do a serious analysis of how many projected sales you would lose because people wouldn't be able to walk into Wal Mart or Best Buy and pick up your game. How many game sales are not premeditated, but are initiated after the consumer picks up the shiny box and views the pretty picures on the back. Or sees the game being played on a floor demo unit. Again, those are questions that I certainly am not in a position to answer, but it is something else that fits into the equation.
All of this is your conjecture, which is why I have no problem battling it with my mere conjecture. Have either of us seen the projections on lowering/eliminating the cost of the game? Have we seen the surveys asking how likely you would be to purchase this game if it cost $0/$15/$90? Nope. Even if there were large, but small as a percentage, improvements from the models, you wouldn't see a change. Why? These are corporations. Corporations aren't risk takers. Which is sad, since they are in the best position to survive a failed gamble.
I hate having to battle with conjuecture, unfortunatly I can't back up my points with statistics because those pesky corporations not only like to not take risks, but they like to keep most of thier sales information under wraps. Other than total subscribers or units sold we probably will never know exactly how much each portion of the process costs and how much could be saved by an alternative method until someone tries it.
Which points to the fact that we are stuck in a paradigm where the creators don't view end users as customers, but the retailers and wholesalers. End users didn't ask for these changes; retailers and wholesalers did. Not that there's anything wro
There is no reason to pay for distribution. With a game like this, Sony and/or Lucas could EASILY distribute the game online or directly. If the game has any hope of success, they'll have to be making enough money to reimburse the development costs.
That's right because bandwidth is free.... oh wait.. it isn't. Even if they set up a bunch of servers on high speed connections and add bit torrent links there is the problem of distribution, and it's expenses. It may not be as expensive to provide the game in a downloadable format, or it may be just as expensive, I haven't seen any formal statistics on the subject. It is obvious however that there is a cost associated with both the traditional method of distribution and internet distribution. It also completly ignores those people that cannot download the images due to a lack of adequate bandwidth. Of course you could distribute in both mediums, but that will probably increase the cost of traditional distribution due to decreased volume. I have a hard time believing that those increased costs will be offset by any reduction in cost due to internet based distribution.
I've said this a dozen times already, but I guess I'll say it again. There are plenty of people willing to pay the full retail box price and still pay the monthly fee for these games. If nothing else, why should these companies change the model if they don't feel they are losing a significant number of customers. The fact that a few people bitch about the price of the boxed copy and don't buy the game is probably not the biggest concern of the bean counters when it comes to the bottom line as that group of people is clearly in the minority. If they weren't I'm fairly certain we would start seeing alternative distribution methods. If you don't think that these companies are willing to change thier distribution methods go take a look at the box sizes of older games and then compare them to the newer smaller boxes you see on all the store shelves. It may have taken a long time for that to happen, but it is progressing rapidly at this point. If enough people decide that they aren't going to play the games because of the initial cost the distributors may reduce the initial cost. Until then don't expect anything to change.
If you want to know for you sure you might want to contact Funcom as they had downloadable versions of AO though at the full retail price. Though I doubt they will give that information out.
You should probably pay a lot more attention to what the parent poster says. While those that get into a game early do have some advantages, they become pointless if the game is no fun later. It should also be pointed out that he is suggesting the game launch will be like Anarchy Online. I was a part of the AO beta and launch and it was so painfull I still have nightmares. So far I believe that AO has the record for worst MMORG launch. If Galaxies is only as finished as AO then the game won't even be playable for the first 90 days if not longer.
Actually I don't think not being able to sell future licenses is nearly as devastating as telling everyone you've already sold a license to that thier license is no longer valid and needs to be destroyed. At that point not only do you lose any potential future sales but your previous customers are totally screwed and don't trust doing business with you anymore.
You can get SDSL now. However it's expensive as heck. I get 1.1Mbit SDSL for a whopping $200 per month. The tech is there and there are companies willing to provide it however most "consumers" aren't willing to pay for the speed they want.
Believe it or not I owned all of the above listed "toys" as well as others like the intellavision, turbografx 16, game gear, etc. The references coupled with "Shouldn't they pick on someone their own size?" makes the parent comment make no sense to me as Nintendo currently is the large market share holder in the handheld gaming market and is not a small company.
Your comparisons don't make a bit of sense. In the handheld gaming market Nintendo is the 800 pund gorilla. Nokia is a giant company that holds a good percentage of the cell phone market, but they are a newcomer to handheld gaming. Thier tactics are funny because they are resorting to mud slinging rather than introducing a good product. Cause I know that I would much rather have a handheld that requires me to remove the battery to change games and can't be used on an airplane instead of a Gameboy SP. Oh, and I'm part of thier 18-25 year old target demographic (I'm 24).
Not only is the handheld unappealing because of its design and poor cell phone integration it seems to me to be a trend with thier current line of cell phones. Why in the world would anyone want a cell phone that is layed out like a rotary phone?
That was exactly what I thought when I first saw the N'Gage and then read Gabes post yesterday. It is an absolute perfect summary of the handheld. I particularly liked the part about people playing snake on thier cell and not being able to use the cell game combo on a plane. Long flights are the reason I loved my old game gear and now the gameboy advance.
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Apparently you haven't looked at the squirrelmail plugin page very closely. If you had you would have seen the Filters and Spam section that has things as a SpamCop, Spam Assasin, and my favorite, BayeseSpam. Of course I haven't seen any spam plugins for Twig, so maybe that would be a better example.
I don't necessarily think NASA is the problem. I think our government, and the general public are the problem. Every time there is a space related accidant the public gets upset and questions support of the programs. Our elected officials seize these opportunities to take money out of the NASA budget.
If we truly want to succeed in space I think we have to understand that there are "acceptable losses" of both life and equipment. Do people really think that when Europeans started sailing across the Atlantic everyone survived? Of course they didn't, they were acceptable losses in the face of the potential gain of exploring this "new world" across the oceans. Space is very similar. I think in general the US consists of a bunch of greedy cry babies that are unwilling to take risks, and this analyst is right. It will take a bunch of millionaires that don't have to answer to the general public for what they do to truly make the next big leap into space exploration or commercialization.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to belittle the people that gave up thier lives to be a part of the space program or anything by calling them acceptable losses. I'm just trying to point out that this type of thing is going to happen and should be expected if we are truly going to start taking advantage of the potential of space.
Thanks, I knew it was on one of the FX50 frames. I guess it's the expedition that is on the F150 frame.
The excursion is about 3 times the size of most SUV's being that it is built upon the frame of a large truck, the F150 I believe. Hence there is a huge differance when talking about capacity.
Senator Hatch is selling cds from his site as well. That would make it qualify for commercial uses and require a $900 registration fee as well. So, based on those criteria the maintainers of his site are the pirates. However, if you follow what the BSA says about software "theft" the senator is actually responsible for the actions of the people hired to do the work for him, just as a company would be responsible for the actions of thier employees. It remains to be seen if the senator will be allowed to simply use the non profit version or not.
This does damage his stance against copyright violaters as this makes him look very hipocritical. Software piracy is nothing more than copyright violation just as trading music and movies is.
Being that all the hardware that I've bought lately has been IEEE 1394 equiped anyway... yes I would be firewire devices over USB. The whole iLink, Firewire, IEEE 1394 issue is a lot easier to figure out than USB 2 and USB 2, especially when the differances are supposed to be noticable by High Speed and Full Speed. USB 2 Full Speed (1.1) doesn't properly use the word full so it also helps to mislead the consumer. In fact based on that wording I would guess that the USB 2 High Speed was the slower of the two if I didn't know better.
Why they would actually want to sell more 1.1's is beyond me though.
Existing inventory of products based on 1.1? That's the first thing that comes to my mind. Of course that certainly isn't a very good reason to relabel it USB 2, and I can gaurantee you I would never purchase anything from one of the companies that sold hardware labeled like this.
All good points and nothing I really disagree with. As with anything you get in "bulk" the price is useallly reduced, sometimes significantly. I certainly should have recognized that initially.
In any case, the current model uses the initial $50 price point to pay the setup costs from the first X number of sales. The long time that it takes for that price to come down reflects the company's unwillingness to take less of a profit on a successful game, even though in the long term the majority of their profit comes from subscriptions that last 6 months or more, not from people buying the game in the first place. This, I'm sure, is why SWG's subscription doesn't come into line with EQ's rate until you go out to 12 months, and iirc EQ has a lower rate at that level as well.
I think this is more than just an unwillingness to take lower profits from a successful title. I think that Sony/Verant appears to believe that they can gain greater profit based on the titles history, influence, and desireability. Either that or Lucas is charging an arm and a leg for the rights to create, produce, and run the game. I am interested in playing Galaxies but I'm not interested in paying for a year in advance and I'm not really interested in paying $15 per month for a game. I certainly don't see any compelling reason for this game to be priced like it is.
Interesting chart, I hadn't seen that before.
I can see why expansions are beneficial for marketing as it gets a shiny new box in front of people that may not have played. I can see it as even a source of additional revenue to fund further development as the expansions seem to be priced similarily to original retail releases. I would even be willing to pay for expansions more often if they contained "substantial new features" as you pointed out. The problem is that when you are already getting updates on a monthly basis and are told that your monthly fee goes in part to the development of those monthly features, and expansion has to be much better than those monthly updates. Up to this point, in my opinion only of course, these expansions have failed on this particular point.
This may or may not be true. As was hashed out in another part of the thread we are all just making our points with conjecture. Without hard sales data we can't really know how well expansion packs work at bringing in new customers. I do know that many of the people I played AC with left when the expansion came out because they didn't want to spend another $30 on an expansion that didn't appear to offer much. These people mostly had more than one account and also didn't want to buy the expansion multiple times. The other problem with that particular expansion is that it tended to be unbalanced and concentrate most of the players in one area. This of course caused unbearable lag due to the server load. Of course I don't know how the EQ expansions helped or hindered the game because I played the game for about 6 weeks before cancelling my account. Maybe thier constant releases increased the number of newer players enough to make it worth it for Sony/Verant. However, did they lose any clients due to the high price of the expansion? Again, there is no way to know without hard sales data, and after googling for some I couldn't find any.
You have good points, but there is one thing I think I should touch on.
I realize that part of what you're saying, though, is that they still have to pay for the bandwidth to allow downloads, too, but then they should already be paying for massive amounts of bandwidth to host their game in the first place.
While it takes large amounts of bandwidth to host a MMORG with a lot of clients I would be willing to bet it is significantly smaller than we all think. For the most part all the clients are sending is tons of small UDP packets. These add up, but with cutting out the overhead of TCP I would think it is less bandwidth than we are thinking. They have to have even more bandwidth to handle the download of updates. This is extra bandwidth on top of what you normally have because you will have a portion of the world population downloading updates at differant times. The majority will get them the day of the update release, so maybe the increase isn't significant, but it is still additional bandwidth. Now lets add in downloading ISO images for a game. Many of these new games are multiple CD games due to the massive size of the textures. The bandwidth required to provided downloads needs to be seperate in my opinion because it is going to be a large amount of bandwidth needed constantly. Because it will take each person downloading the game a long time to do so you can't rely on bandwidth for the game servers without damaging the playability of the game. Also, because you have connections being taken up for very long periods of time you will need more bandwidth simply to handle a large number of connections. I seriously doubt that the amount of bandwidth these companies are currently getting could also handle dedicated downloads of game isos. Of course this is why I mentioned distributed downloads such as bit torrent, or even file shack or file planet could work. Anyway, just something to think about. Is bandwidth so cheap now that the extra bandwidth wouldn't cost as much if not more? I don't know, but I know that it still looks pretty darn expensive to me.
That depends on the state, and the circumstances. After having complained about it to a friend in the local police force a couple of times he looked into it for me. Government officials can exceed the speed limit if they have cause and if it does not put the public in danger. Otherwise they have to follow the same traffic laws as the rest of us. Of course no officer in thier right mind will ever enforce these rules so it's pretty much pointless. That's another reason that if Hatch gets his way I want to personally handle my reprasentatives vehicles ;)
Actually, I don't care much about the remote part. I wouldn't mind having them watch me take a baseball bat to thier care among other tools of car devastation ;)
Don't be so sure. The last time this exact same thing came up there were specific provisions in the bill protecting the various media cartels in case of an accident. You had to prove that they screwed up and that the damages exceeded a certain dollar value. Therefor it would be nearly impossible for you to prove that they made a mistake. Of course it didn't pass that time, but you never know the second time around. Especially if people just ignore the issue.
the next time I see one of my legislators driving around massivly exceeding the speed limit and failing to use thier turn signals I get to follow them home and destroy thier vehicle. To paraphrase Hatch in my context: This may be the only way you can teach somebody about traffic laws. and "There's no excuse for anyone violating traffic laws." The only reason I draw this parrallel is I live close to and grew up near the state capital and this is something that irritates me beyond belief.
The stupidity of our elected officials never ceases to amaze me.
The leach issue is why I mentioned bit torrent. You still have leaches, but it puts some of the distribution cost back on the consumers which could offset a portion of the bandwidth costs. I don't think most people would mind this being that you are paying for the bandwidth anyway and you wouldn't have to pay the cost of the shiny box. Of course they could also come up with an advertisment based download system as well so that the bandwidth was payed for by other peoples advertising dollars. Write a custom download and installer app that requires a small fee to get access to your game key and the installer executable and then it downloads from various servers while displaying banner ad type advertisments. Most people would just walk away from the computer at that point but it's worth a thought.
Anyway, I doubt that any of the game companies are going to change thier distribution and pricing schemes any time soon. You are also absolutely correct. Without more concrete sales and marketing data this thread loses much of its value.
No, actually, it doesn't. I mentioned direct sales by Sony and/or Lucas. I'm also pretty certain that most (not all) users of these games have broadband of some sort.
.. the overpriced monthly fee due to reduced advertising budgets.
A few months (year+ ?) ago one of the PC Game magazines had a breakdown of costs. The 'development costs' were only about 25% of a game's cost. The remainder went to wholesaler markup, dealer markup, and, the bulk, to advertising. Why does SWG need advertising? (Actually, marketing, which includes advertising) All of the online and print mags are falling all over themselves to cover this game.
Ok, you have me there. You didn't completly ignore dial up users. However, you have to consider if the game distributors are set up to handle direct distribution and if not factor in the cost of setting up the new facilities. Of course this will eliminate a portion of thier traditional shipping overhead because they don't distribute to the various middlemen. After playing several MMORG type games as well as other online games I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers of dial up players was equal if not greater than broadband users. Especially for the larger player bases such as EQ. In all of the games I've played at least half of the people I played with on a regular basis were still on dial up. Mostly because they were in areas where broadband was either not available or too expensive.
As to the marketing costs, I don't know why a game with a title as big as Galaxies needs as much advertising as it is getting. However, it isn't surprising. Game advertising is becoming just as bad as movie advertising. I don't think that advertising needs to go away completly but I certainly wouldn't mind saving a buck or two on say
As you've forced me to think about the topic a bit more (thanks:) I think that direct sales will lower the price. Cut out the middleman. No, it won't work for those Activision budget titles, but for something with the Star Wars moniker?
Again cutting out the middle man is only a portion. Distribution costs are shifted under your model but may actually be increased due to shipping units to individuals rather than to wholesalers etc. While cutting out the middle man would certainly reduce costs you would have to do a serious analysis of how many projected sales you would lose because people wouldn't be able to walk into Wal Mart or Best Buy and pick up your game. How many game sales are not premeditated, but are initiated after the consumer picks up the shiny box and views the pretty picures on the back. Or sees the game being played on a floor demo unit. Again, those are questions that I certainly am not in a position to answer, but it is something else that fits into the equation.
All of this is your conjecture, which is why I have no problem battling it with my mere conjecture. Have either of us seen the projections on lowering/eliminating the cost of the game? Have we seen the surveys asking how likely you would be to purchase this game if it cost $0/$15/$90? Nope. Even if there were large, but small as a percentage, improvements from the models, you wouldn't see a change. Why? These are corporations. Corporations aren't risk takers. Which is sad, since they are in the best position to survive a failed gamble.
I hate having to battle with conjuecture, unfortunatly I can't back up my points with statistics because those pesky corporations not only like to not take risks, but they like to keep most of thier sales information under wraps. Other than total subscribers or units sold we probably will never know exactly how much each portion of the process costs and how much could be saved by an alternative method until someone tries it.
Which points to the fact that we are stuck in a paradigm where the creators don't view end users as customers, but the retailers and wholesalers. End users didn't ask for these changes; retailers and wholesalers did. Not that there's anything wro
There is no reason to pay for distribution. With a game like this, Sony and/or Lucas could EASILY distribute the game online or directly. If the game has any hope of success, they'll have to be making enough money to reimburse the development costs.
That's right because bandwidth is free.... oh wait.. it isn't. Even if they set up a bunch of servers on high speed connections and add bit torrent links there is the problem of distribution, and it's expenses. It may not be as expensive to provide the game in a downloadable format, or it may be just as expensive, I haven't seen any formal statistics on the subject. It is obvious however that there is a cost associated with both the traditional method of distribution and internet distribution. It also completly ignores those people that cannot download the images due to a lack of adequate bandwidth. Of course you could distribute in both mediums, but that will probably increase the cost of traditional distribution due to decreased volume. I have a hard time believing that those increased costs will be offset by any reduction in cost due to internet based distribution.
I've said this a dozen times already, but I guess I'll say it again. There are plenty of people willing to pay the full retail box price and still pay the monthly fee for these games. If nothing else, why should these companies change the model if they don't feel they are losing a significant number of customers. The fact that a few people bitch about the price of the boxed copy and don't buy the game is probably not the biggest concern of the bean counters when it comes to the bottom line as that group of people is clearly in the minority. If they weren't I'm fairly certain we would start seeing alternative distribution methods. If you don't think that these companies are willing to change thier distribution methods go take a look at the box sizes of older games and then compare them to the newer smaller boxes you see on all the store shelves. It may have taken a long time for that to happen, but it is progressing rapidly at this point. If enough people decide that they aren't going to play the games because of the initial cost the distributors may reduce the initial cost. Until then don't expect anything to change.
If you want to know for you sure you might want to contact Funcom as they had downloadable versions of AO though at the full retail price. Though I doubt they will give that information out.
You should probably pay a lot more attention to what the parent poster says. While those that get into a game early do have some advantages, they become pointless if the game is no fun later. It should also be pointed out that he is suggesting the game launch will be like Anarchy Online. I was a part of the AO beta and launch and it was so painfull I still have nightmares. So far I believe that AO has the record for worst MMORG launch. If Galaxies is only as finished as AO then the game won't even be playable for the first 90 days if not longer.
Actually I don't think not being able to sell future licenses is nearly as devastating as telling everyone you've already sold a license to that thier license is no longer valid and needs to be destroyed. At that point not only do you lose any potential future sales but your previous customers are totally screwed and don't trust doing business with you anymore.
You can get SDSL now. However it's expensive as heck. I get 1.1Mbit SDSL for a whopping $200 per month. The tech is there and there are companies willing to provide it however most "consumers" aren't willing to pay for the speed they want.
Ah sorry. I was being dumb today and trying to post in the thread while also attempting to work and it was lost on me.
Believe it or not I owned all of the above listed "toys" as well as others like the intellavision, turbografx 16, game gear, etc. The references coupled with "Shouldn't they pick on someone their own size?" makes the parent comment make no sense to me as Nintendo currently is the large market share holder in the handheld gaming market and is not a small company.
Your comparisons don't make a bit of sense. In the handheld gaming market Nintendo is the 800 pund gorilla. Nokia is a giant company that holds a good percentage of the cell phone market, but they are a newcomer to handheld gaming. Thier tactics are funny because they are resorting to mud slinging rather than introducing a good product. Cause I know that I would much rather have a handheld that requires me to remove the battery to change games and can't be used on an airplane instead of a Gameboy SP. Oh, and I'm part of thier 18-25 year old target demographic (I'm 24).
Not only is the handheld unappealing because of its design and poor cell phone integration it seems to me to be a trend with thier current line of cell phones. Why in the world would anyone want a cell phone that is layed out like a rotary phone?
That was exactly what I thought when I first saw the N'Gage and then read Gabes post yesterday. It is an absolute perfect summary of the handheld. I particularly liked the part about people playing snake on thier cell and not being able to use the cell game combo on a plane. Long flights are the reason I loved my old game gear and now the gameboy advance.