As I understand it, Google video is actually charging the People who sell the vidoes a fee for handling the transaction.
Google isn't charging any end users for the service. I didn't have to pay to browse the videos, and neither did anyone else. Your argument that "I want quality products" is completely misplaced, the only people who should be bitching about this being a "beta" are the people whe sell on it.
You may view it as a technicality, but it's very clear in a business sense. This software IS beta, it's not finished. Google is charging vendors who wish to participate in this beta a fee for handling the transaction. When Google gets adequate feedback, they will alter the software. When the software becomes extremely user friendly, Google will raise the transaction rate and possibly begin charging the end user.
The product is marketed as a service for selling and finding videos. You mistake the fact that you have to pay for a video with that of having to pay for a googles product.
You make a very interesting point. I thought the decision to make a game off the Warriors franchise was a mistake. It is completely irrelevant to most of the gamers today. These kids had never heard of the movie before the game was announced, and after they thought it was some lame ass concept.
The target market was too small.
But Jack fanning the flames didn't help either, and to take a position on the board to criticise a company for a problem you augmented is kind of idiotic.
However, Take-Two's stock has taken a serious hit over the past year. Now the damage is obvious, and the audience is more receptive.
So, since I stirred up all of this trouble for you and now hold stock in your company, I would like to point out the error of your ways. This is ridiculous, this is a shakedown.
In reality because she doesn't have computer skills. She is a trained monkey. I love her to death, but she just doesn't get it.
I have tried and tried to teach computing concepts to her, she doesn't understand them at all. The concepts of downloading and installing are the same to her. After much time, and much repeating, she can perform the tasks she wants to because she repeats a memorized process. If I move her task bar from the bottom to the top she can't do anything. When I changed her browser from IE to Firefox it took her all of Christmas vacation to get it down.
I live out of town and cannot explain on a daily basis to her the simularities of the green/yellow/red and the line/windows/cross. Not only do the concepts of minimize, maximize, and resize not register - but she would get hung up on them being on the other side. Let's not get into the fact that none of the programs having the same name or the fact that OSX doesn't use double click.
There are different types of users out there. The type that memorizes a process without understanding the underlying concepts will have a much harder time converting than someone who understands the concepts and can fiddle around with the GUI for a few moments to get the desired commands to execute.
Windows was made for my Mom and I'm ok with that. But she still wants her laptop to "look cool."
I got that damn magazine too. PSM. I was so shocked that I had to count the pages. I counted 32. I was so pissed when I finished counting. The 4 page Peter Jackson's King Kong ad's that were made to look like articles were bad enough. Yet these guys went and accepted a 32 page advertisement on CELL PHONE GAMES!
CELL PHONE GAMES!
The subscription was free when I signed up for Gamefly, but I stall canceled it after that junk.
I agree with both of your points, but it still doesn't defend the lack of "journalism" in th industry today.
As far as your first point, I completely agree. Not alot of people are going to self demote and take a pay cut to gain "journalistic integrity". It will probably come from a grass roots movement that grows in numbers and credibility over time.
I would like to add to your second point. I think you're correct in the fact that alot of gamers just want to know if a game is going to rock when it comes out, but this trend will change. Being a first waver (30 years old), I have been playing games since the beginning. The wave of gamers behind me isn't neccesarily interested in a more in depth analysis of the industry, yet. As TFA stated, the industry is still pretty young. When the demographics begin to stack up with a significant amount of people in their 30's 40's and 50's is probably when you will see a bigger demand for more thought inspiring content.
But there is another possibility. With all the comparisons between movies and video games I can't help but wonder, does the subject matter really deserve that level of journalism? Most of the movie industry magazines I see are focused around the cult of the celebrity. Game magazines seem to parallel this by substituting characters and developers. Does anyone know of any movie publications with a serious journalistic approach that provides quality content? Off the top of my head all I can come up with is stuff like Fangora, People, and Entertainment Weekly - not exactly the New Yoker if you know what I mean.
You know, not just that, but there are plenty of people who want a mac because "it looks cool." My mom is one of them, she's been begging me to buy an Powerbook and get it to run Windows. Everytime I explain why I can't she gets confused.
This may sound ridiculous, but I'm really looking forward to seeing my mom's face when I give her a windows enabled Powerbook.
I have never heard a journalist whine that their sources weren't cooperative as a justification for why they are mostly advertainment.
The real problem is the underlying business model, if you need advertising to generate revenue you're going to leave out stories and content that has the most journalistic integrity in favor of profitable material. That's just a fact of life. That having been said, don't try to defend the position as something else.
Journalists must posess a certain amount of leverage in order to get sources to talk, video game media doesn't have that leverage. What are they going to do, tell a publisher that they won't print a story about thier product in their magazine? Hideo Kojima would laugh that shit off in a second. Go ahead and take the loss in sales that month while I give exclusives to the competition.
Game publications have no leverage in the game world other than the review section, and even that is pretty minute and after the fact. Until a publication gains the subscription base to influence the market, getting good content will be an uphill battle. Unfortunately, alot of publishers think the way to get that base is by serving up content using demographic information - which causes a catch 22. How do you gain credibility and market influence when the only way to do it is by providing polished marketing fluff?
Peole like magazines like "US" because their trash, not because they're chock full of journalistic integrity. It's the same thing with video game mags. Publications with a percieved journalistic integrity will publish stories that will outright piss off the population with their content, but it will also cause the reader to think. All it takes is one game mag revealing a "travesty" in the gaming world to gain this type of credibility. They have passed on multiple opportunities (EA and the NFL; Jack Thompson) because they didn't want to loose advertising revenue or the ability to do reviews (EA).
Someone is going to have to grow a pair and lay it out there.
I don't frequent 1up because I don't like discussions consisting of "OMG! did u c the l8est scrns?" But, I do subscribe to OPM and their reviews tend to be pretty accurate and uninfluenced, so I think they're trying. Yet the harshest stance I could see on the EA and NFL was "It could stifle improvements and innovation." No shit. How about coming to the defence of the industry as a whole and calling EA out as the profit driven asses they are, then maybe a smaller game studio would see that you care about the industry in a more mature manner than fanboyism and would probably grant you some never before seen level of access. Rinse and repeat until you have leverage in the industry as an agent of journalsim.
Unfortunately this will never happen until a publisher decides to sacrifice short term profits for long term gain.
That's just racist. How dare you say we're undead, as if we aren't as good as the dead? Jesus Christ, it even ostracizes us from our bretheren the living. We prefer the more positive term Reanimated-American.
Only other Reanimated-Americans are allowed to use the word Undead, not the living.
Whats sad is you're the only person who understands why he makes such crap movies.
Under the German tax system, if the movie tanks, the investors make a mint through a tax loophole. Video game movie rights are sometimes really easy to obtain if your a big studio. Big studio execs then form a shell German corporation and invest in the movie through that. When the movie tanks, the investors (studio) makes a mint.
Hollywood is too cutthroat to allow this kind of crap to be released for no reason.
You are correct in a sense. Arcades that require you to pay quarters for gameplay are done. Yet, there are planty of Dave and Buster type places that still make a mint.
They offer peripheral perks that enhance the male driven game market of America like alcohol and the posibility of hooking up with a girl.
I offer that the real reason arcades in America died is due to the gaming mechanics we enjoyed and the real world manifestations of those games. Fighting games ruled at the arcade I used to frequent. There were multiple machines lined up offering the same titles. Marvel vs. Capcom and Soul Caliber were flooded with aggresive males that wanted to own people.
The problem arose when some skilled player could play for $0.50 all day as long as the competition lined up. Once the herd caught on to the fadt that they were going to loose if they played, they attempted to wait out the leading player by having him play the AI. Since the player could wax the AI at will, you usually just stood around while the player beat the game.
That's not alot of fun, especially when you could have been playing Tekken 3 at home while getting drunk with your buds.
American game culture is not about entertainment, it is about winning. Waiting to win is not fun.
True, now browsers often offer their own functionality, but cookies are also used for the same purpose by a lot of developers. Banking websites use cookies to trigger secondary security routines. No cookie = extra check.
Also, I may be mistaken here, but as I understood it modern browsers would not allow other websites to read your cookies because your domain did not place them. I am aware of cross domain cookie capabilites between co-operating domains, but your one shot cookie was protected by a "sandbox." Please constructively inform me if I am mistaken.
I wonder how many people who think that cookies are horrible intrusions into their privacy really dig websites that auto populate their username and password when they visit them.
Yeah, but now I can't find out who we're playing in the big basketball game tonight. I have been stripped of my tax funded services. This is an outrage, it should be punishable by death.
Seriously, do you know how important this game is to us? No you don't. Who are you guys to judge what is or isn't a critical service in our city. We voted this guy in and we trust him to make the best decisions regarding the well being of our community. I for one am glad that they are trying to take this punk out of the equation.
What would you do if one day this kid, understanding the subtle nature of the intraweb, begins to refresh the shopping list on your internet enable refrigerator. You might run out of milk, or worse, beer. That would be a travesty.
People like this should be put into special camps. My daughter is in tears because she can't find out if she is supposed to paint her face blue or yellow for tonight game.
Actually I think Google's game plan is going of nicely.
Google is attempting to position themselves as a credible information broker. First they created a search engine that many people regard as being the best available for general purpose use. This gives them a userbase that will most likely accept them when they slowly change their role of information provider to broker.
The people who might not go along are kept happy with the unending flow of free services Google keeps releasing.
Now, as a service providing a blind two way conduit for demographic information/raw information they can sell the searching habits of demographics to marketing people as a first step into accurately targeting ads to match shows. They currently sell blind interaction with these people already through AdWords. This will place them nicely for the third step.
You stated: Worse, unlike the Internet, which is comparatively open and standards compliant, the cable and satellite networks as well as content producers/distributors are comparatively very closed and non-standard.
This is true for now, but wireless video and iTunes like interfaces for obtaining shows to watch are coming on strong. These formats most certainly DO have a standard. When this happens, Google will be in a prime position to implement this initiative full on. Not only that, but TiVo type boxes work off of standards also, even if they are proprietary. In a few years I don't see too many of these services existing, maybe 5 at most. Thats not alot of strategic relationships for the worlds biggest information conglomerate to make. Also, they will probably release an API for those open source cats who want to write their own interface for this.
This also has backwards cascading effects. Imagine doing a google search for "Lost" and having the last episode showing up in the top right corner, available for download. They could possibly wedge themselves into being the defacto delivery vehicle for these shows, with targeted commercials, circumventing the partisan iTunes like interfaces that are being created today. Google is already hard at work making their video indexing easy and accurate, which would only make this process much easier to implement.
Plus, the whole process is actually fired off by you in the first place. That cuts down the "telephone" factor by a significant amount.
I have to agree with you here. Marketing now does not mean putting together pretty pictures with bland words in an attempt to make people buy your stuff. A few people with half a clue are at least making interesting or funny commercials that don't necessarily influence your purchasing decision, but entertain you enough so you don't change the channel.
With information being as available as it is today I think the modern marketer needs to realize that their new role will be to understand what it is certain people want accurately enough to give it to them in a non intrusive manner, all the while proving themselves trustworthy enough to be given access to the personal data it will take to execute this task properly.
That's significantly different than combing through blind demographic data to find the lowest common denominator for the largest applicable target. The explosion of advertising space in both webspace and meatspace has allowed alot of people to pass themselves off as marketing profesionals. This has resulted in alot of crap being thrown out everywhere with enough frequency to piss off just about everyone.
No doubt. While I loved both Katamari and Colossus I can't deny that they weren't exactly mainstream. Mainstream games sell consoles.
The reason that these sequels are being hyped on the next gens is because that is the message that will get the most gamers to by the next gen systems in the least amount of time. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo aren't talking to the hardcore gamer demographic - we do all our own research without needing it fed to us. Most hardcore gamers already have a biased view on what system they are going to purchase and why, changing that opinion through marketing hype won't work - the big three know that.
Instead they choose to spend their money on getting the casual gamer to convert earlier than they normally would. The path of least resistance is to offer these gamers an experience that they are familiar with and would like to see more of. Casual gamers whos favorite game is Madden are more easily converted to buying a next gen if the Madden on that system looks amazing. Its that simple.
Hardcore and elite gamers need to quit whining about not being catered to in the marketing arena. Why should we be? We don't listen to it anyways. As a whole we rip any marketing aimed at us a new one, regardless of if its for our box or not. So pushing games to us through overt marketing is a negative action.
Games like Katamari and Colossus don't need the same kind of hype. Harcore gamers read every little bit of fanboi material they can get there hands on. In fact, we know these games are coming out well before their overt marketing is apparent. Groundbreaking games need to maximize their budgets, so they keep marketing costs down. Word of mouth works just fine for these games initially as our click is really vocal and has plenty of online outlets. If the hardcore demographic adopts a new title in droves, it's a safe bet that a large chunk of the mainstream demo will also. That's when these games start spending money on the hype.
People need to realize that not everyone shares our passion, and for a business to cater to a smaller group exclusively is a bad business move. We are catered to, we HAVE games like Katamari and Colossus. Don't get jealous because they don't get the face time people because not everyone will appreciate them.
It may have been the number one grossing game, but a more telling statistic would be the number one netting game.
WoW has to pay for servers, server admins, developers for patches, artist for artwork, paid GMs, rules localization of their many servers (PvP vs. Non-PvP), account processing and maintenance (financial), and a help desk - just to name a few.
Take another online heavy game like SOCOM 3. They have to maintain servers, but not persistently - that is a much easier task, and one I would say is cheaper too.
Also, since there is no financial account to maintain you can get rid of that cost, and the cost of GMs since they don't exist either. Help desk doesn't have to be as expansive as its most likely only technical help.
I believe in the free online method. If a game wants to have online components, let the company making the game cover the costs. I personally could care less what my stats are across all games compared to other players. The cross game friend feature is pretty cool, but not a deal breaker.
A bigger problem with online subscribtion methods for consoles is that they unfairly leverage their costs against people who only play a few hours a week, while those that play multiple games online reap the greatest benefit. If you played all of your games online, then I can see how XBOX Live would be pretty cool. What if you only play one game online like me? It's just not worth the cost.
I would only consider one of these statements to be praising it. Let me address these one at a time.
"The Xbox 360 is the best solution [to delivering the highest quality gaming] at the current time," said Tecmo producer Tomonobu Itagaki.
That would be because it is the only next gen console available at the current time. More a statement of fact than a statement of support.
Capcom producer Keiji Inafune said the console offers plenty of potential, but how much of that gamers get to see depends on how developers use its multicore architecture. "I believe that we'll be seeing two kinds of games for a while after the Xbox 360's launch," Inafune said. "Games that feel like something on current-generation consoles and games that feel like they're Xbox 360 titles."
Where does he endorse the XBOX 360 in that quote? He doesn't. He merely states his opinion on the scene, that some developers are going to take advantage of the next gen capabilities beyond better textures. This is a cookie cutter statement made by all developers at the time of a new hardware launch. These guys do make statements about the xbox 360, they're just not lighting themselves on fire about it.
Says Konami producer Akari Uchida, "It's as though we need to bring the quality graphics from prerendered movies into the actual game."
Taken out of context. Japanese 3rd party developers prefer prerenders with a layer of realtime over it. When I heard this statement it was refereing to the limited space on the game delivery medium and how that would affect their design. Now, I'm not claiming to know the originating point of this quote, but it doesn't sound to me like he is going "XBOX YAY!"
I do concur though that they all said it would be pretty easy to develop for, I also maintain my stance that none of them are drooling all over themselves with the prospect of actually doing it.
All in all, you tend to perceive compensation for ideas as a natural right, which it isn't.
I do have a right to it, because this is how it works now. You are the one who wants change in the system, so the burned of proof on why it should change is on you.
You harp on and on about reverse engineering and being able to redesign for similar results, all of which I agree with, but thats all you have. An idea is not like a hammer in that an idea can be implemented many different ways, a hammer can only be sold until you run out of your supply. An idea doesn't have a limited supply, it has a limited lifespan.
Your model does nothing to protect an inventor from shopping around his idea. Once he shows it to a company, that company can build another design based on his idea - they can do this well within the contracts signed by both parties beforehand. Your model does nothing to protect the inventor, it actually promotes the interest of big corporations who have the legal muscle do behave this way.
A patent is a little more difficult to work around. A design or method patent is pretty clear, and any violation of patent law related to them is black and white. The problem lies in people patenting things that shouldn't be patentable - such as simple concepts. If I wanted to patent the fork, I'd be laughed out of the country - but I can patent my own design for a fork. And if someone likes it enough they can pay me to manufacture it.
Also, your idea of the origination of the patent is made up in your head, please quit attempting to pass it off as fact. The origin is Article 1, section 8 of the United States Constitution, which authorizes Congress "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Slashdot Mirror
As I understand it, Google video is actually charging the People who sell the vidoes a fee for handling the transaction.
Google isn't charging any end users for the service. I didn't have to pay to browse the videos, and neither did anyone else. Your argument that "I want quality products" is completely misplaced, the only people who should be bitching about this being a "beta" are the people whe sell on it.
You may view it as a technicality, but it's very clear in a business sense. This software IS beta, it's not finished. Google is charging vendors who wish to participate in this beta a fee for handling the transaction. When Google gets adequate feedback, they will alter the software. When the software becomes extremely user friendly, Google will raise the transaction rate and possibly begin charging the end user.
The product is marketed as a service for selling and finding videos. You mistake the fact that you have to pay for a video with that of having to pay for a googles product.
You make a very interesting point. I thought the decision to make a game off the Warriors franchise was a mistake. It is completely irrelevant to most of the gamers today. These kids had never heard of the movie before the game was announced, and after they thought it was some lame ass concept.
The target market was too small.
But Jack fanning the flames didn't help either, and to take a position on the board to criticise a company for a problem you augmented is kind of idiotic.
However, Take-Two's stock has taken a serious hit over the past year. Now the damage is obvious, and the audience is more receptive.
So, since I stirred up all of this trouble for you and now hold stock in your company, I would like to point out the error of your ways. This is ridiculous, this is a shakedown.
In reality because she doesn't have computer skills. She is a trained monkey. I love her to death, but she just doesn't get it.
I have tried and tried to teach computing concepts to her, she doesn't understand them at all. The concepts of downloading and installing are the same to her. After much time, and much repeating, she can perform the tasks she wants to because she repeats a memorized process. If I move her task bar from the bottom to the top she can't do anything. When I changed her browser from IE to Firefox it took her all of Christmas vacation to get it down.
I live out of town and cannot explain on a daily basis to her the simularities of the green/yellow/red and the line/windows/cross. Not only do the concepts of minimize, maximize, and resize not register - but she would get hung up on them being on the other side. Let's not get into the fact that none of the programs having the same name or the fact that OSX doesn't use double click.
There are different types of users out there. The type that memorizes a process without understanding the underlying concepts will have a much harder time converting than someone who understands the concepts and can fiddle around with the GUI for a few moments to get the desired commands to execute.
Windows was made for my Mom and I'm ok with that. But she still wants her laptop to "look cool."
I got that damn magazine too. PSM. I was so shocked that I had to count the pages. I counted 32. I was so pissed when I finished counting. The 4 page Peter Jackson's King Kong ad's that were made to look like articles were bad enough. Yet these guys went and accepted a 32 page advertisement on CELL PHONE GAMES!
CELL PHONE GAMES!
The subscription was free when I signed up for Gamefly, but I stall canceled it after that junk.
I agree with both of your points, but it still doesn't defend the lack of "journalism" in th industry today.
As far as your first point, I completely agree. Not alot of people are going to self demote and take a pay cut to gain "journalistic integrity". It will probably come from a grass roots movement that grows in numbers and credibility over time.
I would like to add to your second point. I think you're correct in the fact that alot of gamers just want to know if a game is going to rock when it comes out, but this trend will change. Being a first waver (30 years old), I have been playing games since the beginning. The wave of gamers behind me isn't neccesarily interested in a more in depth analysis of the industry, yet. As TFA stated, the industry is still pretty young. When the demographics begin to stack up with a significant amount of people in their 30's 40's and 50's is probably when you will see a bigger demand for more thought inspiring content.
But there is another possibility. With all the comparisons between movies and video games I can't help but wonder, does the subject matter really deserve that level of journalism? Most of the movie industry magazines I see are focused around the cult of the celebrity. Game magazines seem to parallel this by substituting characters and developers. Does anyone know of any movie publications with a serious journalistic approach that provides quality content? Off the top of my head all I can come up with is stuff like Fangora, People, and Entertainment Weekly - not exactly the New Yoker if you know what I mean.
You know, not just that, but there are plenty of people who want a mac because "it looks cool." My mom is one of them, she's been begging me to buy an Powerbook and get it to run Windows. Everytime I explain why I can't she gets confused.
This may sound ridiculous, but I'm really looking forward to seeing my mom's face when I give her a windows enabled Powerbook.
Call it a social hack.
I have never heard a journalist whine that their sources weren't cooperative as a justification for why they are mostly advertainment.
The real problem is the underlying business model, if you need advertising to generate revenue you're going to leave out stories and content that has the most journalistic integrity in favor of profitable material. That's just a fact of life. That having been said, don't try to defend the position as something else.
Journalists must posess a certain amount of leverage in order to get sources to talk, video game media doesn't have that leverage. What are they going to do, tell a publisher that they won't print a story about thier product in their magazine? Hideo Kojima would laugh that shit off in a second. Go ahead and take the loss in sales that month while I give exclusives to the competition.
Game publications have no leverage in the game world other than the review section, and even that is pretty minute and after the fact. Until a publication gains the subscription base to influence the market, getting good content will be an uphill battle. Unfortunately, alot of publishers think the way to get that base is by serving up content using demographic information - which causes a catch 22. How do you gain credibility and market influence when the only way to do it is by providing polished marketing fluff?
Peole like magazines like "US" because their trash, not because they're chock full of journalistic integrity. It's the same thing with video game mags. Publications with a percieved journalistic integrity will publish stories that will outright piss off the population with their content, but it will also cause the reader to think. All it takes is one game mag revealing a "travesty" in the gaming world to gain this type of credibility. They have passed on multiple opportunities (EA and the NFL; Jack Thompson) because they didn't want to loose advertising revenue or the ability to do reviews (EA).
Someone is going to have to grow a pair and lay it out there.
I don't frequent 1up because I don't like discussions consisting of "OMG! did u c the l8est scrns?" But, I do subscribe to OPM and their reviews tend to be pretty accurate and uninfluenced, so I think they're trying. Yet the harshest stance I could see on the EA and NFL was "It could stifle improvements and innovation." No shit. How about coming to the defence of the industry as a whole and calling EA out as the profit driven asses they are, then maybe a smaller game studio would see that you care about the industry in a more mature manner than fanboyism and would probably grant you some never before seen level of access. Rinse and repeat until you have leverage in the industry as an agent of journalsim.
Unfortunately this will never happen until a publisher decides to sacrifice short term profits for long term gain.
The proper term is Undead-American.
That's just racist. How dare you say we're undead, as if we aren't as good as the dead? Jesus Christ, it even ostracizes us from our bretheren the living. We prefer the more positive term Reanimated-American.
Only other Reanimated-Americans are allowed to use the word Undead, not the living.
Whats sad is you're the only person who understands why he makes such crap movies.
Under the German tax system, if the movie tanks, the investors make a mint through a tax loophole. Video game movie rights are sometimes really easy to obtain if your a big studio. Big studio execs then form a shell German corporation and invest in the movie through that. When the movie tanks, the investors (studio) makes a mint.
Hollywood is too cutthroat to allow this kind of crap to be released for no reason.
You are correct in a sense. Arcades that require you to pay quarters for gameplay are done. Yet, there are planty of Dave and Buster type places that still make a mint.
They offer peripheral perks that enhance the male driven game market of America like alcohol and the posibility of hooking up with a girl.
I offer that the real reason arcades in America died is due to the gaming mechanics we enjoyed and the real world manifestations of those games. Fighting games ruled at the arcade I used to frequent. There were multiple machines lined up offering the same titles. Marvel vs. Capcom and Soul Caliber were flooded with aggresive males that wanted to own people.
The problem arose when some skilled player could play for $0.50 all day as long as the competition lined up. Once the herd caught on to the fadt that they were going to loose if they played, they attempted to wait out the leading player by having him play the AI. Since the player could wax the AI at will, you usually just stood around while the player beat the game.
That's not alot of fun, especially when you could have been playing Tekken 3 at home while getting drunk with your buds.
American game culture is not about entertainment, it is about winning. Waiting to win is not fun.
True, now browsers often offer their own functionality, but cookies are also used for the same purpose by a lot of developers. Banking websites use cookies to trigger secondary security routines. No cookie = extra check.
Also, I may be mistaken here, but as I understood it modern browsers would not allow other websites to read your cookies because your domain did not place them. I am aware of cross domain cookie capabilites between co-operating domains, but your one shot cookie was protected by a "sandbox." Please constructively inform me if I am mistaken.
I wonder how many people who think that cookies are horrible intrusions into their privacy really dig websites that auto populate their username and password when they visit them.
Thanks, I'm trying it on for size.
Yeah, but now I can't find out who we're playing in the big basketball game tonight. I have been stripped of my tax funded services. This is an outrage, it should be punishable by death.
Seriously, do you know how important this game is to us? No you don't. Who are you guys to judge what is or isn't a critical service in our city. We voted this guy in and we trust him to make the best decisions regarding the well being of our community. I for one am glad that they are trying to take this punk out of the equation.
What would you do if one day this kid, understanding the subtle nature of the intraweb, begins to refresh the shopping list on your internet enable refrigerator. You might run out of milk, or worse, beer. That would be a travesty.
People like this should be put into special camps. My daughter is in tears because she can't find out if she is supposed to paint her face blue or yellow for tonight game.
Actually I think Google's game plan is going of nicely.
Google is attempting to position themselves as a credible information broker. First they created a search engine that many people regard as being the best available for general purpose use. This gives them a userbase that will most likely accept them when they slowly change their role of information provider to broker.
The people who might not go along are kept happy with the unending flow of free services Google keeps releasing.
Now, as a service providing a blind two way conduit for demographic information/raw information they can sell the searching habits of demographics to marketing people as a first step into accurately targeting ads to match shows. They currently sell blind interaction with these people already through AdWords. This will place them nicely for the third step.
You stated:
Worse, unlike the Internet, which is comparatively open and standards compliant, the cable and satellite networks as well as content producers/distributors are comparatively very closed and non-standard.
This is true for now, but wireless video and iTunes like interfaces for obtaining shows to watch are coming on strong. These formats most certainly DO have a standard. When this happens, Google will be in a prime position to implement this initiative full on. Not only that, but TiVo type boxes work off of standards also, even if they are proprietary. In a few years I don't see too many of these services existing, maybe 5 at most. Thats not alot of strategic relationships for the worlds biggest information conglomerate to make. Also, they will probably release an API for those open source cats who want to write their own interface for this.
This also has backwards cascading effects. Imagine doing a google search for "Lost" and having the last episode showing up in the top right corner, available for download. They could possibly wedge themselves into being the defacto delivery vehicle for these shows, with targeted commercials, circumventing the partisan iTunes like interfaces that are being created today. Google is already hard at work making their video indexing easy and accurate, which would only make this process much easier to implement.
Plus, the whole process is actually fired off by you in the first place. That cuts down the "telephone" factor by a significant amount.
I have to agree with you here. Marketing now does not mean putting together pretty pictures with bland words in an attempt to make people buy your stuff. A few people with half a clue are at least making interesting or funny commercials that don't necessarily influence your purchasing decision, but entertain you enough so you don't change the channel.
With information being as available as it is today I think the modern marketer needs to realize that their new role will be to understand what it is certain people want accurately enough to give it to them in a non intrusive manner, all the while proving themselves trustworthy enough to be given access to the personal data it will take to execute this task properly.
That's significantly different than combing through blind demographic data to find the lowest common denominator for the largest applicable target. The explosion of advertising space in both webspace and meatspace has allowed alot of people to pass themselves off as marketing profesionals. This has resulted in alot of crap being thrown out everywhere with enough frequency to piss off just about everyone.
No doubt. While I loved both Katamari and Colossus I can't deny that they weren't exactly mainstream. Mainstream games sell consoles.
The reason that these sequels are being hyped on the next gens is because that is the message that will get the most gamers to by the next gen systems in the least amount of time. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo aren't talking to the hardcore gamer demographic - we do all our own research without needing it fed to us. Most hardcore gamers already have a biased view on what system they are going to purchase and why, changing that opinion through marketing hype won't work - the big three know that.
Instead they choose to spend their money on getting the casual gamer to convert earlier than they normally would. The path of least resistance is to offer these gamers an experience that they are familiar with and would like to see more of. Casual gamers whos favorite game is Madden are more easily converted to buying a next gen if the Madden on that system looks amazing. Its that simple.
Hardcore and elite gamers need to quit whining about not being catered to in the marketing arena. Why should we be? We don't listen to it anyways. As a whole we rip any marketing aimed at us a new one, regardless of if its for our box or not. So pushing games to us through overt marketing is a negative action.
Games like Katamari and Colossus don't need the same kind of hype. Harcore gamers read every little bit of fanboi material they can get there hands on. In fact, we know these games are coming out well before their overt marketing is apparent. Groundbreaking games need to maximize their budgets, so they keep marketing costs down. Word of mouth works just fine for these games initially as our click is really vocal and has plenty of online outlets. If the hardcore demographic adopts a new title in droves, it's a safe bet that a large chunk of the mainstream demo will also. That's when these games start spending money on the hype.
People need to realize that not everyone shares our passion, and for a business to cater to a smaller group exclusively is a bad business move. We are catered to, we HAVE games like Katamari and Colossus. Don't get jealous because they don't get the face time people because not everyone will appreciate them.
yep, in some crazy glowing limo with a "Brick Girl"
Dogs in Space
It may have been the number one grossing game, but a more telling statistic would be the number one netting game.
WoW has to pay for servers, server admins, developers for patches, artist for artwork, paid GMs, rules localization of their many servers (PvP vs. Non-PvP), account processing and maintenance (financial), and a help desk - just to name a few.
Take another online heavy game like SOCOM 3. They have to maintain servers, but not persistently - that is a much easier task, and one I would say is cheaper too.
Also, since there is no financial account to maintain you can get rid of that cost, and the cost of GMs since they don't exist either. Help desk doesn't have to be as expansive as its most likely only technical help.
I believe in the free online method. If a game wants to have online components, let the company making the game cover the costs. I personally could care less what my stats are across all games compared to other players. The cross game friend feature is pretty cool, but not a deal breaker.
A bigger problem with online subscribtion methods for consoles is that they unfairly leverage their costs against people who only play a few hours a week, while those that play multiple games online reap the greatest benefit. If you played all of your games online, then I can see how XBOX Live would be pretty cool. What if you only play one game online like me? It's just not worth the cost.
Good luck enforcing that without becoming a fascist.
Obviously you haven't played much of it, but if it makes you happy to pick on the underdog-gone-overnight-success that Bungie has become, so be it.
Actually, I have played plenty of it - and I still think it sucks. It's an opinion.
As for Bungie, I never said a bad thing about them, in fact - I think their product got screwed by MS. That's it. I don't have a foul word for them.
I would only consider one of these statements to be praising it. Let me address these one at a time.
"The Xbox 360 is the best solution [to delivering the highest quality gaming] at the current time," said Tecmo producer Tomonobu Itagaki.
That would be because it is the only next gen console available at the current time. More a statement of fact than a statement of support.
Capcom producer Keiji Inafune said the console offers plenty of potential, but how much of that gamers get to see depends on how developers use its multicore architecture. "I believe that we'll be seeing two kinds of games for a while after the Xbox 360's launch," Inafune said. "Games that feel like something on current-generation consoles and games that feel like they're Xbox 360 titles."
Where does he endorse the XBOX 360 in that quote? He doesn't. He merely states his opinion on the scene, that some developers are going to take advantage of the next gen capabilities beyond better textures. This is a cookie cutter statement made by all developers at the time of a new hardware launch. These guys do make statements about the xbox 360, they're just not lighting themselves on fire about it.
Says Konami producer Akari Uchida, "It's as though we need to bring the quality graphics from prerendered movies into the actual game."
Taken out of context. Japanese 3rd party developers prefer prerenders with a layer of realtime over it. When I heard this statement it was refereing to the limited space on the game delivery medium and how that would affect their design. Now, I'm not claiming to know the originating point of this quote, but it doesn't sound to me like he is going "XBOX YAY!"
I do concur though that they all said it would be pretty easy to develop for, I also maintain my stance that none of them are drooling all over themselves with the prospect of actually doing it.
All in all, you tend to perceive compensation for ideas as a natural right, which it isn't.
I do have a right to it, because this is how it works now. You are the one who wants change in the system, so the burned of proof on why it should change is on you.
You harp on and on about reverse engineering and being able to redesign for similar results, all of which I agree with, but thats all you have. An idea is not like a hammer in that an idea can be implemented many different ways, a hammer can only be sold until you run out of your supply. An idea doesn't have a limited supply, it has a limited lifespan.
Your model does nothing to protect an inventor from shopping around his idea. Once he shows it to a company, that company can build another design based on his idea - they can do this well within the contracts signed by both parties beforehand. Your model does nothing to protect the inventor, it actually promotes the interest of big corporations who have the legal muscle do behave this way.
A patent is a little more difficult to work around. A design or method patent is pretty clear, and any violation of patent law related to them is black and white. The problem lies in people patenting things that shouldn't be patentable - such as simple concepts. If I wanted to patent the fork, I'd be laughed out of the country - but I can patent my own design for a fork. And if someone likes it enough they can pay me to manufacture it.
Also, your idea of the origination of the patent is made up in your head, please quit attempting to pass it off as fact. The origin is Article 1, section 8 of the United States Constitution, which authorizes Congress "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."