Yes, it is true. You can see the list for yourself from an old post of my (I'm too lazy to repost it). Five years has been the standard for console generations since the 70's.
It's wrong from the simple fact that the lifespan of a console is not defined by the fact that its successor is out. The PS2 has not finished selling, but the PS3 is out since 2006.
Sony has had over 3 years to "trounce" them. This hasn't happened yet. Why would the stronger hardware aspect of the PS3 all of the sudden start attracting gamers away from the 360?
The PS3 is not even 3 years old yet, and not even 2.5 years old in Europe! Hyperbole? The XB360 has one entire year of sales without competition of headstart too. And the PS3 is now far less expensive. I don't think hardware will do anything though. These are videogame consoles, not technology items, but entertainment items. The games are what will count. The thing is that the poor output of exclusive games on the PS3 will have some of its best ones soon: GT5 and FFXIII (well, not completely exclusive).
The expanded market that bought a Wii, and Wii Fit, and Wii Sports Resort, and...oh. Nothing else.
You can argue until you're blue in the face about how Nintendo's going in a different direction, but I bought a Wii early on and have felt the burn everytime I walk past that useless piece of crap in the living room. It does nothing better than the Gamecube and has only garnered the same old same old only Nintendo could get away with rereleasing over and over again. While the "expanded market" has already purchased, played and probably moved on from their Wii's (I know my circle of friends have, especially the non gamers), Nintendo's busy developing and tinkering as if people still care.
So much anger and rage that it becomes nonsense. Nothing else eh ? Let's see : Mario Kart Wii : 17+ millions sold Super Mario Galaxy : 8+ millions sold Super Smash Bros Brawl : 8+ millions sold Mario Party 8 : 6+ millions sold Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess : 5+ millions sold on Wii alone... The list of huge million sellers is going on. Well, but that's nothing (LOL!).
Some people like to live in their fairy tale world.
I think that they're going to stick with the Xbox 360 for a while longer.
I think if they do that they will continue to crash and burn. Seems like they think Natal is their next console, their console rebirth. I bet this will crash and burn badly, and finish destroying their hopes of breaking even.
First of all, they have previously stated that they wanted to be profitable this go around. [...] They probably would reach profitability on this current generation and have started making up for the losses of the original Xbox if they hadn't run into the red ring problems. That probably set them back a year or so at least.
No! Their only profitable fiscal year, they made less than $500 M (million) profit, and this was the Halo 3 fiscal year. They already lost $3 B (billion) dollars this generation on XB360, and lost $4 B on XBox (that's $7 billions in the hole for XBox brand at the very least). So the RRoD set them back at least 2 years back, most likely 3, and they have no chance of breaking even on the XB360 before 8 more years. That's because you should keep in mind that they're back to losing money since their first price drop, despite selling several internal development studios and cutting off others. And here comes another price drop. Their revenus also declined since their first price drop: sales didn't make up for the price drop of last year. They're in a very bad position.
They're also in no real danger of being one-upped by Sony either. The PS3 may have technical superiority, but it's not by a large enough margin to cause people to move away from the Xbox 360. Sony also has a lot of costs to recoup as well and it doesn't appear as though they're in a hurry to release a new console any time soon.
The problem is that technology or competitor doesn't decide what the consumer will buy. What will make them in a hurry to do anything is the gaming market. The problem of both HD consoles, is that they can't release a new console now, while at the same time they must release one soon, as their sales are dropping and they're not making money, but their business model requires that they sell lots of games.
It also seems as though Nintendo has begun to hit market saturation with the Wii at its current price. The sales have been down over the last few months and there's still no word of a price cut. I'm expecting one around Christmas, but they may be running out of steam. If anyone needs to come out with a new piece of hardware it's Nintendo.
This is pure nonsense. How come the Wii has hit market saturation while it sells more than the HD consoles put together at the worldwide level? Even in the USA alone, the biggest market, the Wii still sells more than any of the HD console. That's without a single price drop, in soon to be 3 years! And with a XB360 model cheaper than the Wii since more than a year worldwide! Given that, saying that Wii has hit any market saturation is pure nonsense. If anyone needs to come out with a new piece of hardware, it sure enough is NOT Nintendo. At best that's wishful thinking.
My bet is on Nintendo just because they're flush with cash and really lagging behind in terms of hardware, especially with both Sony and Microsoft releasing motion control features in the near future.
That's the problem: Nintendo will go on riding this generation and making lots of money while the others will painfully sell less and less. The HD consoles motion controls have not even a date of release, not even a price, they're just plain vaporware for now, but vaproware doesn't work in gaming. Nintendo doesn't care that they are lagging behind, as that is precisely part of their plan. Nintendo just moves like they want, completely unaffected by the HD consoles. On the contrary, those are the HD consoles that painfully try to catch up in Wii's path, but fail miserably for now. How come the fact that PS3 and XB360 are playing catchup to the Wii with motion control is seen as a strength? Especially when the Wii is still selling more than both combined?
The 360 is nearing the end of the typical console lifespan (which has always been about 5 years
This is not true. 5 years is the typical lifespan of the losers home consoles. The winner home console is defined by the one that sells the most, and the losers are the other ones. The winner typically lasts 10 years or more.
Now we just need to know how often people play their consoles. I have a Wii. I bought it because it looked fun and it wasn't overprices. Now, I'm not and avid gamer. I only play maybe 1 or 2 hours every couple of weeks. At such low usage, I would be surprised if the thing didn't last for 20 years. Many people I know with Wii's fall into this same category. Contrast that with XBox, where I think many more people are avid gamers, and would use their machines much more. A higher failure rate would be expected. Probably not this much more of a failure rate, but a higher one none the less. Also, take into account the fact that MS will replace your broken unit with a refurb, and that most people who get a replacement unit, will put the unit back in the exact same spot, with poor ventilation and cooling that the previous one was at, and you have a recipe for disaster.
NOw, all of this is speculation and doesn't hold water, especially since we know why the situation is like it is. What is needed to know is not how often people play their consoles, but how much care the manufacturer puts in its console. We know Nintendo always valued solid hardware that lasts forever. Lots of NES are still working till this very day. I still have my SNES working, most people have their Gameboy still working. The fact is that Nintendo puts lots of care in building its hardware, it's a priority for them, and they even had shortages due to a bad line of assembly at the Wii's first months on the market, that slowed down production. As soon as the problem was known, they made the decision to correct the problem now, even if it meant less sales, instead of going on and hoping it will work out well.
It is the complete opposite with MS, whose console has a design problem, that they never intend to fix, and instead put workarounds for the console to at least last some years. Their consoles are just not built to last years, contrary to Nintendo ones. To add insult to injury, some Wii are up 24/24 with Wii Connect 24, as it's the only console where you can do this. I know mine is on Wii COnnect 24, so is always on.
To add another insult to the insult, I bet avid gamers supposedly more on XB360, are less likely to be as uninformed as Wii owners, and put their consoles in poor ventilation places, and not those with Wii. Or does this mean Wii owners have more common sense than XB360 owners?
Even knowing this, it was a survey, as I'm pretty sure the failure rate of Nintendo consoles are far below 6 %. 6 % would be unacceptable to Nintendo, who even were changing your DS for 1 dead pixel. I bet Nintendo doesn't cope with anything above 2 %. I also doubt the failure rate is 54 %, I don't think that's sustainable for any company, that's just too high.
So when they say "PC gaming is dying", what they really mean is: "our business model is dying".
They can't really expect me to deal with an arbitrary, unspecified definition of "PC gaming", can they? Using your own custom definition of a word can be a useful rhetorical trick, but something like "PC gaming" sounds just too generic for lots of PC gamers to accept without some more thorough spin.
Think about it: would people be sympathetic to them if they said right away the true meaning of what they're saying? No! Englobing all the PC gaming scene as if they cared is a far better way to bring them support. Next time you see these talks about "PC gaming" is dying, try to replace "PC gaming" or the term they are using, with sth like "famous developers". You'll see that it always goes from nonsense to making perfect sense.
But others have taken their place. Pretending a few famous developers constitute "PC gaming" may sound like a cool idea to them, but it's not exactly accurate or even useful. All they mean when they say "PC gaming is dying" is that they're seeing more revenue elsewhere for their business model. But it has little relation with what gamers call "PC gaming", so it only makes those developers look silly.
I agree, and that's the problem (but only when you realize what they really call "PC gaming"). You can't have sympathy for their real goal, so they use "PC gaming". The goal is not to make you a friend, but to make friend with analysts, who influence venture capitalists or other entities with money. It's all PR, and it works. What I despise about all this is that the gamer is less and less a priority, but it's the real customer!
I don't care about the fame of developers. Brad Wardel of Stardock is one of the few I know by name, and he develops very successful games entirely for PC.
Look, I agree on everything you say, I wasn't even adressing you directly. I say you, but I'm actually talking about the gamer. Most gamers care only about the games. Next time you disagree with these kind or articles, try to put them in another frame, in another context. Put it in the context I'm talking about, and you'll see what they say actually make sense and is often despicable. If it wasn't, they wouldn't have to use such tactics. These game developers have change from the old ones, the ones that basically launched the game industry. Nowadays, I noticed lots of the famous ones that can make big budget games want to be stars, and behave like movie stars. I wouldn't mind if this attitude didn't alter their games.
This morning as I started to see news feeds coming in that the price was being dropped to $300, a reasonable price for somethign that primarily would be used a blu-ray player. I was willing to purchase since there were some other areas I could explore in the system, including installing outside operating systems. The fact that this was something I could do with the system and now the fact that Sony can retroactively remove it, is not worth my time or my money.
Good! That means what they're doing is working. You see, the problem with the failure of a business strategy used by Sony, is that they lose money on the consoles, and have to make it back by selling lots of other content: games or BRD movies. Which goes in complete contradiction with people buying the console primarily to install other OS. Because these people won't buy the lot of content necessary to subsidize the loss on the console. Basically, Sony doesn't want a customer like you, as they lose money with people like you. So their strategy is working, they manage to repel people like you from buying their console. Why didn't they think of that before? That's because they were stuck in trying to be the media hub in the living room.
Sony abandoning Linux on new skus means they are effectively doing the same for the old ones.
Epic failure.
To me, that means that Sony decided to rebrand its console as a gaming console, like it always should have, instead of a mini PC with DRM in the living room. That means they decided to focus, as their plan to takeover the living room clearly is not working. So yes that's an eppic failure, but I'm not sure that's not good for their future.
Sony is retarded for removing backwards compatibility. It's the only one of the 3 consoles where the developer got the bright idea to remove features.
Do you realize that they were forced to do that because they were bleeding too much money? I understand your anger but that was not a retarded decision at all for them. They bled billions of dollars despite this cost reduction.
Also, LCD and plasma look like hell. That's the reason I haven't replaced my CRT. At least that's the case on every single one I've ever seen, no matter what feed it's using.
Blue-Ray feed with HDMI cables on a 240Hz LCD still has ghosting and jitter.
Plasma is like watching a slideshow.
Seems like you missed the last 3 years in HDTV development. I agree with LCD, as this technology is the more widespread because it's cheaper under certain sizes, but it's also the worst for displaying any SD content. But plasmas actually display SD content better than SDTV. The only problems is that the ones that do are very expensive and only available above a certain size. I'm thinking of some of the Pioneer Kuro line of HDTV.
The higher number of Hz in a HDTV specs doesn't make it better at all, quite the contrary. Usually, people into HC disable all these useless features that break the video quality.
Next gen games are quite simply unplayable on anything less than 720p.
However, the big problem here is that Last gen games are unplayable at anything above 576p!
OK, you have a crystal ball and all. Now what about current gen games? Joke aside, last gen games are not at all unplayable at anything above 576p. Saying that they are unplayable in this case is not just a slight exaggeration, it's a blatant lie.
OK slight exaggeration, but old games do look awful on a HD TV.
No they don't. Some HDTV are awful at displaying SD content, like most LCD based TV. You put the blame on the last gen games (and consoles) when clearly the problem is with the TV. I have a 55" 1080p HDTV and I bought it specially for my Wii, and every single games (specially the Gamecube games) looked better on this HDTV than on my old 52" CRT. Besides, the look of the game has nothing to do with it being playable or not. Except perhaps if people equate games with FPS only, and even then, they were playable on SDTV which have less precise image.
It's funny because it's always the people with such high standards regarding content on their TV (so much that games become unplayable to them because they look awful) that manage to not buy the best equipment (HDTV with actually good logic able to display SD content at least as well as a SDTV) and complain about it (people into HC usually know that their TV is the problem and don't complain about the content being the problem).
And therein lies the biggest reason that Sony and Microsoft need to keep up backwards compatibility. I can tell you that PS2 games played on a PS3 instead of a PS2 look a hell of a lot better.
LOL, are you kidding? You just proved that your HDTV is the problem: the PS3 is doing the exact same thing with the PS2 output that your HDTV should be doing. The PS3 just does it better than your TV, which must have very crappy logic for upscaling SD content. In my case, the HDTV and the PS3 are doing as good a job as each other. But the PS2 games are actually the games that look the worst among all my games, as they're the only ones where the aliasing is visible even with the PS3 or my TV upscaling logic. Of course, that still don't make them unplayable. This has no incidence on why Sony and MS need to keep up BC. People just don't care: lots of these machines are hooked up to SDTV or through composite cables anyway.
It's like night and day. Add to this the convienicen factor, and I'm pretty irritated with Sony for dropping this feature and refusing to reimplement it. There are still loads of fantastic PS2 titles I haven't played, and more are still coming out!
See? The content is not the problem: you still want to play the PS2 games despite them being in SD and you having a HDTV.
For you in America and Europe yes they did that but not in Australia where it was done in software.
That's not true. No PS3 emulates the PS2 entirely. The US PS3 had all the PS2 hardware and emulated nothing. In both Australia and Europe, the PS3 emulated most of the PS2 in software, except one chip, I think that's the Emotion Engine. That's why I can play Shadow of the Colossus on my PS3 without any slowdown compared to the PS2, for example.
"If your enjoyment of the game is purely with those that have "cutting edge graphics and great gameplay""
This isn't quite what I was trying to say. I enjoy games other than the AAA blockbusters. What I have issues with is those games costing just as much as the the AAA titles. The latest Harry Potter game shouldn't cost as much as say Mass Effect 2. The graphics are no where near the same quality, the amount of time and effort on the developers part is no where near the same.
There are several problems in what you say, except in the effort. I agree that the effort invested in the licensed movie games is far more important than in other games, because these people are the most talented, being able to make games that don't fall apart despite time constraints, small budgets, having to support most of the platforms,... Also, what you say give me a hint that you believe price of products is determined by returns cost. That's just not true of course. Price of a product is based on its value. The closer the price is to the value the consumer find in the product, the better it sells. So the latest Harry Potter should have the same price as Mass Effect 2 if its value is the same for most of its buyers. I assure you some people will find far greater value in Harry Potter game, and will find Mass Effect 2 overpriced.
And this relates to non-licensed games as well. Heavenly Sword, great game not worth anywhere near $60 for a 6 hour game, yet that one stayed at $60 for a couple years. It wasn't worth $60 new, it sure as hell wasn't worth $60 2 years after release. But it was a fun game that I really enjoyed renting and would have purchased it if it wasn't so overpriced for so long. Currently playing Sacred 2. Definitely not a AAA title, graphics are meh, lots of bugs, but it's fun and I don't feel bad about paying full price because it is fun and has hours upon hours of gameplay.
OK, but not everyone has your tastes. Heavenly Sword has other problems, as it surely stayed so high for so long because it didn't sell enough to break even. It's just another examples that shows the market can't sustain these kind of games on the HD consoles. There's a serious problem with the industry because like I said already, there are tons of HD games that get discounted very quickly below the price of even DS games that keep selling for months at their launch price. This just can't be sustainable, and the dev studios closing left and right is some kind of evidence of the problem.
So what? Not every single genre out there has to be popular on the PC for PC gaming not to be dead. PC gaming is very much alive due to plenty of genres that only work well on PC.
And even if all genres were more popular on consoles (unlikely, but let's assume it happens), then PC gaming would still not be dead due to lots of people having PCs and feeling the occasional urge to play a game on it. The only way to kill PC gaming is to kill the PC.
I agree with all that. I know where's the problem: it's the definition of "PC gaming". You went with the correct definition of "PC gaming", meaning all kind of games on PC including Solitaire, while I went with the context in which these guys are when they talk about "PC gaming". And keep in mind that in their context, Solitaire in not at all part of "PC gaming". "PC gaming" in their context only include a select kind of games with some arbitrary amount of cost. Games that need so many resources that they have a barrier of entry for the smaller developers. That "PC gaming" is the one dead for them on PC, but "PC gaming" in your context is still very well alive. When they talk about "PC gaming", they're actually talking about a selective group of developers.
These developers calling themselves "PC gaming" are the ones who make the biggest games, and their games are the one advertised in the gaming media. No wonder then that PC gamers don't understand when these people say "PC gaming" is dieing: they're just not talking about the same thing.
Could you possibly write even bigger nonsense? PC gaming is alive because people play games on consoles, and it's dying because some developers develop for PCs, but give it lower priority than consoles.
There are a lot of developers developing only for PC, and there are a lot of people playing games only on PC. What the hell do consoles have to do with anything? There's room for more than one platform.
Besides, the biggest selling game ever in the history of mankind is on PC. As long as that's the case, any claim of PC gaming dying is just plain silly.
Again, I was talking in the context of the "PC gaming" they are talking about, not your context. In your context of "PC gaming" being all kind of games on the PC, of course what I write is nonsense. The selective group of developers that call themselves "PC gaming", I'll call them the "famous developers", nearly all fled to the consoles though. They develop first for the consoles, and then try to adapt it for the PC, which makes very awkward games for PC. Only the most succesful ones among the famous developers go on making games with the PC as the main platform in mind.
I own an Xbox 360 and a PC (obviously). If I can get a game on the PC I will choose that over the console usually. Stuff like TF2, L4D etc... I fail to see the point of them on the consoles. FPS games on a console are a big bag of fail IMO. Only people who defend them in my experience are ones who haven't spent years using the superior mouse/keyboard combination.
You're right, and that's because these are really PC games, and because the HD consoles are not handled or even made like consoles, but like PC with DRM. Most of their games are PC games too. PC games tend to be played alone in front of a screen that is dedicated to one player.
The games I have on my Xbox are ones you can't GET on the PC, or ones that work best with a gamepad. Like Burnout Paradise. The PC version is out, but I'd much rather sit on my couch and play on my HDTV with my kids than sit at my desk and play it.
Which is exactly the difference between console games and PC games. Consoles are usually meant to be played with several people behind a single screen, so with several controllers. That's why consoles always had the possibility to plug at least two controllers (those that didn't were failures). Console games are more worthwile on consoles, and don't work as well on PC. During Playstation reign, there were other uses found that worked well with consoles (like cinematics, as usually consoles were played on a TV).
Worse still is that it's already been announced what the first paid DLC will be for Beatles Rock Band. Game isn't even OUT yet and they've already basically said "You're getting an incomplete game and will have to pay again."
The whole DLC thing really annoys me. If it's something really does add to the game, like Big Surf Island for Burnout Paradise, then fine. (I bought the game used, so even with that the game still only cost me about $20). But announcing stuff you're going to have to pay for before the game is even released?! That is just despicable. But then I guess at least you have warning and can say "I'm not going to buy that." (Like anybody will actually do that.)
Companies now realise that instead of a full expansion for, say, $20, they can now put it out in chunks and make twice that.
The problem with DLC is it's a GREAT idea, but greed has, like with so many other things in life, ruined it.
The "problem" is that people accepted that. See MS congratulates itself for making their customers pay for their content at financial reports. And they're adding more paying content as it works for now. Why not if people are paying? In this case, the consumer took the bait. Now they just have to manage their greed or they take the risk of wearying their customers. This just shows that there's a big problem in the games industry, because most of the actors don't care about their customers: they see them as milking cows.
This has not killed PC gaming. Therefore, your claim that popularising them will kill PC gaming is transparently false.
Of course it's false. It's not exactly the situation. PC gaming is not dead, it has fled on what is believed to be consoles, but actually are mini PC with DRM. These are the HD consoles. Did you notice how most developers on these HD consoles are historically PC developers that didn't develop for consoles? Now they all are making their main games for consoles, PC coming after. This is killing the gaming on PC even more, meaning decreasing revenues, but PC gaming still lives on these HD consoles, which really are mini PC with DRM. At least that's how the PC developers see them.
The single-screen multiplayer case is not even something the PC "can't handle". The PC handled it very nicely when it last made sense, which was with split-screen games about 15 years ago.
The PC can technically do local multiplayer, but no, PC can't handle it, which is why it never worked on PC. The PC is related to "work", and it's a strongly entrenched feeling that most people share. That's why most PC games are solitary games, where you play alone on one monitor, disconnected from others around you. But on consoles, the local multiplayer is the big thing, it's natural to have several players around a console, playing together on one single screen. Consoles are more social things and that's the main difference with PC.
Then the internet made split screen look very silly. It's only very recently that the growth in popularity of party games has given shared-screen multiplayer a new purpose.
This is BS. Ever since the NES came out and beat the PC games market (with lots of PC only companies dying in the process), local multiplayer never looked silly. It looked silly perhaps to those that stayed on the "better" PC gaming, because that's what they always wanted to believe. Party games have not been growing the popularity of local multiplayer, it has always been here. It's just that most developers were not making games around this concept anymore even on consoles. BUt you know that already, as your second sentence contradicted your first one. You say the Internet made split screen silly, and the Internet is still there, yet "shared-screen multiplayer" is growing. So either it never looked silly, or people never cared about it looking silly.
The second problem is the utter lack of story telling these days. The most telling sign for this is the downfall of the graphics adventure genre. There are some exceptions, but in general the state there is terrible.
But the downfall of the graphics adventure genre contradicts your point! Some adventure games are released continuously, and they never sell a lot. Also, the fact that most of the best selling games have no story telling contradicts your point too. Games are not movies, the amount of story telling doesn't affect how much they sell at all.
This is nonsense. "Consumers should change" is sth you should never have to say, or it shows you are having a very big problem. Consumer is NEVER the problem. No industry has ANY right of sales that consumers should abide to. If consumers don't buy your product, obviously the industry is the problem.
It would be nice if economic troubles caused gamers themselves to be more selective about which games they bought. A few years ago when I worked at gamestop, most of the customers (children especially) seemed to buy games based ENTIRELY OFF THE BOXART. "Hey, I have a PS2. Hey, I enjoyed the movie 'fight club". Hey, this box which appears to have been the first game I picked up is Fight club for the PS2. That's GOT to be a good one!"
I see lots of problem in that, and none are the consumer's fault. Why couldn't the specialised store inform the consumer? Why did the developer make a bad game out of this license? Why are the licensee making the developers do such bad games? Why the gamer should assume that the game can't be good? What will happen when he realise that the game he bought has no interest compared to the movie ? He won't buy game again. Fatigue will set in, and a time will arrive (like now) where he will have to make a choice, and he will dump buying games. The industry is the problem in all that.
Many people are apparently buying wii games at random, the effect being that most of the games for the wii are barely playable.
No, that's not true at all! 3rd parties are making lots of bad Wii games, hoping to screw the Wii customers. What happens is that less and less people buy games from those companies, and more and more people buy Nintendo games, which are good games. People start to recognise which companies make good games, when before they wouldn't pay attention. The 3rd parties have done that to themselves, the consumer is not at fault. People new to games assumed that games for the Wii were at least as good as the game that comes with the console. These people are not the problem for being disappointed, those that made these games are the problem. And remember that 3rd parties are the ones responsible for this situation. Before PS1, there was regulation by the console maker as to the quality and quantity of games that every 3rd parties could put out every year on their console. This ensured at least some level of quality, and even then there was lots of shovelware. Then came PS1 which allowed anyone to make anything on the console, and the 3rd parties flocked to the PS1, sending a clear message that it was what they wanted.
it would be nice if gamers were more supportive, or at least more forgiving, of games that try to do new things. A lot of "hardcore" gamers get very entrenched opinions about what a game should and should not be according to genre. It's like if moviegoers complained that a movie wasn't formulaic enough.
True enough. This usually leads to a decreasing market, as more and more people are left behind by the level of sophistication that goes higher and higher, and becomes inaccessible to newcomers.
Not to mention that fact that with the rise of Xbox Live and other online services, split screen even on the console is pretty much dieing. Being a known "computer guy" has led to me getting talked into setting up more than a few home networks in my area. I've not only seen the multiple computers thing going on, but it's also fairly common to see each kid with their own Xbox360 connected to the network for online play too. If the kids want to play together then the online services facilitate that.
I agree that the split screen thing is dieing on XBox and on PS3, but not on consoles. That's because these consoles are not really consoles, they're mini PC with DRM. That's because Sony and MS are not console companies and don't understand consoles. Look at the only console company remaining, which is Nintendo, and you will see that local multiplayer (part of which is split screen with 4 pads or more) is not dieing at all, far from it. Playing together in local multiplayer is a far different experience than playing on a network, each people having its own monitor, like a LAN party, even if all the players are in the same room. It's just not the same, as everyone is completely disconnected from each other. These are the characteristics of PC gaming. It's funny to read that online services facilitate kids playing together. That's just not true.
"The big budget phenomena has been the very thing that's lowering my enjoyment of games. IMHO, the obsession with graphics, sequels/IP and marketing (all big budget things) has detracted from the biggest part of games: gameplay."
I don't think that's quite the case. There have been some exceptional games released that have both excellent gameplay and great graphics. Call of Duty, Bioshock, Mass Effect, Dragon Age is looking to be awesome, the list of great games really goes on and on.
What I have a problem with is the games that don't have cutting edge graphics and great gameplay yet still cost the same.
This attitude is exactly the problem. If your enjoyment of the game is purely with those that have "cutting edge graphics and great gameplay", it explains why the profitability problem is so rampant. Keep in mind that profitability is actually not stagnant at all among developers, it's going down. It's stagnant only because Nintendo is making so much profit that it levels up the profitability of the industry. Remove Nintendo, and you see a huge drop in profitability since the start of this generation of home consoles.
This attitude of games which must have "cutting edge graphics and great gameplay" is the problem, because as you don't have any way to know that the gameplay is great before trying the game, people with this attitude will only go to the sequels, and that's what we're seeing. You will tell me "what about reviews, demos?". Only the huge budget games get high budget for marketing, skewing reviews (see GTA4), which then cannot be trusted, and gamers know that. As for demos, those that have been released didn't work as to show the gameplay, gamers constantly complain about them most often than not. The cutting edge graphics part automatically means "big budget", there's no way around it.
So this attitude just shuts off any game that isn't a big budget sequel, which explains why those are the only ones that work in these environments, and why there's a big problem with profitability. That's because big budget sequels can't be produced fast enough, and the market targeted for these isn't large enough to sustain them.
Even those big budget sequel games have very poor value: you can see them getting price dropped, sometimes one month after release, where they are already half price. This just shows how poor values these games have, despite being big budget sequels. Most HD console games get discounted very quickly, and fall below the price of even Nintendo DS games that still have their launch price 4 years later, and are still in the top 10! These are the games that retain their value, these are the really good games. None of these games have "cutting edge graphics", being on the Nintendo DS (but they have great gameplay). Actually, some Wii games are the same.
I thought these nonsensical cherry-picking comparisons using Secunia or any other site that doesn't track Linux, were dead? To show how stupid it was to make an argument with Secunia, and how you tried to make the number fulfill your agenda, I will use Secunia too : Linux 2.0 : 1 Secunia advisory, 0 vulnerability Linux 2.5 : 2 Secunia advisory, 0 vulnerability I can be kind too : Linux 2.2 : 8 Secunia advisory, 5 vulnerability
Seriously, this is nonsense. And saying comparing an entire Windows OS with just the Linux kernel makes sense in theory, but not in the context of vulnerabilities, especially in privilege escalation context. Especially since usually these are related to drivers in the Linux kernel, and Linus has far more of them than a basic Windows OS.
We geeks find it hard to "get in touch with our emotional side" sometimes...
Concentrate on enjoying each other's company. Enjoy being with each other. Stop trying to analyse the hell out of it and just ENJOY it:)
Seconded! It's too late to learn anything anyway, and usually these kind of things isn't learnt in books. Books can give you a method to follow, but actually to learn anything you have to interact with people. And as you're going to get married, it's too late to learn anything with other people. Just manages like you always have, you'll learn along the way, like everybody else.
Hell most Mac and Windows users don't even know there IS a CLI interface, and they sure as hell don't want to be using it!
You're so mad that you're bordering on saying nonsense. How come you know that the users don't want to use something they don't even know about? Are you the god thinking for all these people? What did strike such a nerve into you? Seriously. It's hatred at this level.
Look, I'll be the first to admit that Linux rocks on servers. It is rock solid, secure, a real tank of an OS. But we are talking Windows 7 here, which is most definitely NOT targeted at servers. It is targeted at home users. Home users, I might add, who often can't even find their way around control panel without someone holding their hand. Windows is quite good at that BTW.
I agree with everything you say, even the part where you say that Windows is quite good at making people unable to find their way around control panel. Me too, I always have problem finding the correct option in control panel, usually I have to parse all of them. Just because they're inconsistent. It's sad really, after all these years.
But Linux? You better be bestest friends with Mr. CLI if you want to play in that sandbox. It seems like every time there is an update something breaks and requires CLI. Sound broke? Ooops..CLI. Monitor isn't showing the right resolution? CLI baby.
Now you're really looking like an ignorant fool. You didn't use Linux in the latest 10 years, right ? You shouldn't talk about what you obviously don't know about, seriously.
And server admins live and die CLI and hate GUIs, as they just suck precious resources.
This shows clearly that you have no idea what the CLI is in Linux and Unix OS. You seem to believe CLI in these OS is just some kind of, well,... interface. Which shows just how ignorant you are about it. These are shells, and are much more powerful than DOS.
Being a fanboy is one thing, being delusional is another.
Yet you are both.
I can make an example that will prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Linux isn't ready for home users. Ready? Remove Bash.
Now you're retarded. You just said "remove the OS". I hope you didn't believe you were smart. Seriously... Go learn what Linux is before talking about it, you're not qualified, at all.
But Windows home users will NEVER use CLI. Let me repeat that: Windows home users will NEVER EVER use CLI. In fact most power users don't care for it either. They don't like it, don't want it, and if you make them use CLI you might as well say "please have someone go install Windows for you" because that is EXACTLY what will happen. I truly hope that a day comes when you can actually remove CLI from Linux and still have a usable machine, but I won't hold my breath.
LOL. Repeating wrong things won't make them true. But I agree this part is done like a good fanboy coupled with a delusional guy. You know also perfectly well what people want and what they hate. But do you have any evidence of what you're saying?
Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K
on
KDE 4.3 Released
·
· Score: 1
Okay, you want to split hairs? Japanese words are not "spelled", they are written using a mix of Chinese and phonetic symbols. As noted above æ"å- is how one should write the Japanese word for "improvement". Unfortunately, many people outside East Asia has no idea how to read or pronounce that, so we "romanize" words based on a commonly accepted latin alphabet equivalent.
But he's not splitting hair, he's right. And the alphabet you're talking about is called romaji (literally meaning "roman characters"), and sorry but in this alphabet, of which there are several variants, "k" is always used for "ka", in all the variants.
The usual Latin alphabet equivalent is kaizen with a k. Lately, a lot of bars and brands in Japan are trying to use the 'c' instead of the 'k'-- the most common example is the NTT wireless provider Docomo (meaning "anywhere").
But why are they trying to do that. You read like they all do this just because, which is not true. There's always a reason behind these uses of a c instead of k. Usually, it's to look like a french (or other roman based language) word, or for a pun, often coupled with the abbreviations that is an entertaining particularity of japanese language. For example, for DoCoMo, it's the abbreviation of "DO COmmunication over MObile", thus why it's written DoCoMo with several capitals. And of course, "dokomo" also means "anywhere", so this is a pun.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it is true. You can see the list for yourself from an old post of my (I'm too lazy to repost it). Five years has been the standard for console generations since the 70's.
It's wrong from the simple fact that the lifespan of a console is not defined by the fact that its successor is out. The PS2 has not finished selling, but the PS3 is out since 2006.
Sony has had over 3 years to "trounce" them. This hasn't happened yet. Why would the stronger hardware aspect of the PS3 all of the sudden start attracting gamers away from the 360?
The PS3 is not even 3 years old yet, and not even 2.5 years old in Europe!
Hyperbole?
The XB360 has one entire year of sales without competition of headstart too.
And the PS3 is now far less expensive.
I don't think hardware will do anything though. These are videogame consoles, not technology items, but entertainment items. The games are what will count.
The thing is that the poor output of exclusive games on the PS3 will have some of its best ones soon: GT5 and FFXIII (well, not completely exclusive).
The expanded market that bought a Wii, and Wii Fit, and Wii Sports Resort, and...oh. Nothing else.
You can argue until you're blue in the face about how Nintendo's going in a different direction, but I bought a Wii early on and have felt the burn everytime I walk past that useless piece of crap in the living room. It does nothing better than the Gamecube and has only garnered the same old same old only Nintendo could get away with rereleasing over and over again. While the "expanded market" has already purchased, played and probably moved on from their Wii's (I know my circle of friends have, especially the non gamers), Nintendo's busy developing and tinkering as if people still care.
So much anger and rage that it becomes nonsense. ...
Nothing else eh ? Let's see :
Mario Kart Wii : 17+ millions sold
Super Mario Galaxy : 8+ millions sold
Super Smash Bros Brawl : 8+ millions sold
Mario Party 8 : 6+ millions sold
Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess : 5+ millions sold on Wii alone
The list of huge million sellers is going on.
Well, but that's nothing (LOL!).
Some people like to live in their fairy tale world.
I think that they're going to stick with the Xbox 360 for a while longer.
I think if they do that they will continue to crash and burn.
Seems like they think Natal is their next console, their console rebirth.
I bet this will crash and burn badly, and finish destroying their hopes of breaking even.
First of all, they have previously stated that they wanted to be profitable this go around. [...] They probably would reach profitability on this current generation and have started making up for the losses of the original Xbox if they hadn't run into the red ring problems. That probably set them back a year or so at least.
No!
Their only profitable fiscal year, they made less than $500 M (million) profit, and this was the Halo 3 fiscal year. They already lost $3 B (billion) dollars this generation on XB360, and lost $4 B on XBox (that's $7 billions in the hole for XBox brand at the very least). So the RRoD set them back at least 2 years back, most likely 3, and they have no chance of breaking even on the XB360 before 8 more years.
That's because you should keep in mind that they're back to losing money since their first price drop, despite selling several internal development studios and cutting off others.
And here comes another price drop. Their revenus also declined since their first price drop: sales didn't make up for the price drop of last year.
They're in a very bad position.
They're also in no real danger of being one-upped by Sony either. The PS3 may have technical superiority, but it's not by a large enough margin to cause people to move away from the Xbox 360. Sony also has a lot of costs to recoup as well and it doesn't appear as though they're in a hurry to release a new console any time soon.
The problem is that technology or competitor doesn't decide what the consumer will buy.
What will make them in a hurry to do anything is the gaming market.
The problem of both HD consoles, is that they can't release a new console now, while at the same time they must release one soon, as their sales are dropping and they're not making money, but their business model requires that they sell lots of games.
It also seems as though Nintendo has begun to hit market saturation with the Wii at its current price. The sales have been down over the last few months and there's still no word of a price cut. I'm expecting one around Christmas, but they may be running out of steam. If anyone needs to come out with a new piece of hardware it's Nintendo.
This is pure nonsense.
How come the Wii has hit market saturation while it sells more than the HD consoles put together at the worldwide level? Even in the USA alone, the biggest market, the Wii still sells more than any of the HD console.
That's without a single price drop, in soon to be 3 years! And with a XB360 model cheaper than the Wii since more than a year worldwide!
Given that, saying that Wii has hit any market saturation is pure nonsense.
If anyone needs to come out with a new piece of hardware, it sure enough is NOT Nintendo.
At best that's wishful thinking.
My bet is on Nintendo just because they're flush with cash and really lagging behind in terms of hardware, especially with both Sony and Microsoft releasing motion control features in the near future.
That's the problem: Nintendo will go on riding this generation and making lots of money while the others will painfully sell less and less. The HD consoles motion controls have not even a date of release, not even a price, they're just plain vaporware for now, but vaproware doesn't work in gaming.
Nintendo doesn't care that they are lagging behind, as that is precisely part of their plan.
Nintendo just moves like they want, completely unaffected by the HD consoles. On the contrary, those are the HD consoles that painfully try to catch up in Wii's path, but fail miserably for now.
How come the fact that PS3 and XB360 are playing catchup to the Wii with motion control is seen as a strength? Especially when the Wii is still selling more than both combined?
The 360 is nearing the end of the typical console lifespan (which has always been about 5 years
This is not true.
5 years is the typical lifespan of the losers home consoles.
The winner home console is defined by the one that sells the most, and the losers are the other ones.
The winner typically lasts 10 years or more.
Now we just need to know how often people play their consoles. I have a Wii. I bought it because it looked fun and it wasn't overprices. Now, I'm not and avid gamer. I only play maybe 1 or 2 hours every couple of weeks. At such low usage, I would be surprised if the thing didn't last for 20 years. Many people I know with Wii's fall into this same category. Contrast that with XBox, where I think many more people are avid gamers, and would use their machines much more. A higher failure rate would be expected. Probably not this much more of a failure rate, but a higher one none the less. Also, take into account the fact that MS will replace your broken unit with a refurb, and that most people who get a replacement unit, will put the unit back in the exact same spot, with poor ventilation and cooling that the previous one was at, and you have a recipe for disaster.
NOw, all of this is speculation and doesn't hold water, especially since we know why the situation is like it is. What is needed to know is not how often people play their consoles, but how much care the manufacturer puts in its console.
We know Nintendo always valued solid hardware that lasts forever. Lots of NES are still working till this very day. I still have my SNES working, most people have their Gameboy still working. The fact is that Nintendo puts lots of care in building its hardware, it's a priority for them, and they even had shortages due to a bad line of assembly at the Wii's first months on the market, that slowed down production. As soon as the problem was known, they made the decision to correct the problem now, even if it meant less sales, instead of going on and hoping it will work out well.
It is the complete opposite with MS, whose console has a design problem, that they never intend to fix, and instead put workarounds for the console to at least last some years.
Their consoles are just not built to last years, contrary to Nintendo ones.
To add insult to injury, some Wii are up 24/24 with Wii Connect 24, as it's the only console where you can do this. I know mine is on Wii COnnect 24, so is always on.
To add another insult to the insult, I bet avid gamers supposedly more on XB360, are less likely to be as uninformed as Wii owners, and put their consoles in poor ventilation places, and not those with Wii. Or does this mean Wii owners have more common sense than XB360 owners?
Even knowing this, it was a survey, as I'm pretty sure the failure rate of Nintendo consoles are far below 6 %. 6 % would be unacceptable to Nintendo, who even were changing your DS for 1 dead pixel. I bet Nintendo doesn't cope with anything above 2 %.
I also doubt the failure rate is 54 %, I don't think that's sustainable for any company, that's just too high.
So when they say "PC gaming is dying", what they really mean is: "our business model is dying".
They can't really expect me to deal with an arbitrary, unspecified definition of "PC gaming", can they? Using your own custom definition of a word can be a useful rhetorical trick, but something like "PC gaming" sounds just too generic for lots of PC gamers to accept without some more thorough spin.
Think about it: would people be sympathetic to them if they said right away the true meaning of what they're saying? No!
Englobing all the PC gaming scene as if they cared is a far better way to bring them support.
Next time you see these talks about "PC gaming" is dying, try to replace "PC gaming" or the term they are using, with sth like "famous developers". You'll see that it always goes from nonsense to making perfect sense.
But others have taken their place. Pretending a few famous developers constitute "PC gaming" may sound like a cool idea to them, but it's not exactly accurate or even useful. All they mean when they say "PC gaming is dying" is that they're seeing more revenue elsewhere for their business model. But it has little relation with what gamers call "PC gaming", so it only makes those developers look silly.
I agree, and that's the problem (but only when you realize what they really call "PC gaming"). You can't have sympathy for their real goal, so they use "PC gaming".
The goal is not to make you a friend, but to make friend with analysts, who influence venture capitalists or other entities with money. It's all PR, and it works. What I despise about all this is that the gamer is less and less a priority, but it's the real customer!
I don't care about the fame of developers. Brad Wardel of Stardock is one of the few I know by name, and he develops very successful games entirely for PC.
Look, I agree on everything you say, I wasn't even adressing you directly. I say you, but I'm actually talking about the gamer. Most gamers care only about the games.
Next time you disagree with these kind or articles, try to put them in another frame, in another context.
Put it in the context I'm talking about, and you'll see what they say actually make sense and is often despicable. If it wasn't, they wouldn't have to use such tactics.
These game developers have change from the old ones, the ones that basically launched the game industry.
Nowadays, I noticed lots of the famous ones that can make big budget games want to be stars, and behave like movie stars. I wouldn't mind if this attitude didn't alter their games.
They lost my purchase.
This morning as I started to see news feeds coming in that the price was being dropped to $300, a reasonable price for somethign that primarily would be used a blu-ray player. I was willing to purchase since there were some other areas I could explore in the system, including installing outside operating systems. The fact that this was something I could do with the system and now the fact that Sony can retroactively remove it, is not worth my time or my money.
Good!
That means what they're doing is working.
You see, the problem with the failure of a business strategy used by Sony, is that they lose money on the consoles, and have to make it back by selling lots of other content: games or BRD movies.
Which goes in complete contradiction with people buying the console primarily to install other OS. Because these people won't buy the lot of content necessary to subsidize the loss on the console.
Basically, Sony doesn't want a customer like you, as they lose money with people like you.
So their strategy is working, they manage to repel people like you from buying their console.
Why didn't they think of that before? That's because they were stuck in trying to be the media hub in the living room.
Sony abandoning Linux on new skus means they are effectively doing the same for the old ones.
Epic failure.
To me, that means that Sony decided to rebrand its console as a gaming console, like it always should have, instead of a mini PC with DRM in the living room.
That means they decided to focus, as their plan to takeover the living room clearly is not working.
So yes that's an eppic failure, but I'm not sure that's not good for their future.
Sony is retarded for removing backwards compatibility. It's the only one of the 3 consoles where the developer got the bright idea to remove features.
Do you realize that they were forced to do that because they were bleeding too much money?
I understand your anger but that was not a retarded decision at all for them.
They bled billions of dollars despite this cost reduction.
Also, LCD and plasma look like hell. That's the reason I haven't replaced my CRT. At least that's the case on every single one I've ever seen, no matter what feed it's using.
Blue-Ray feed with HDMI cables on a 240Hz LCD still has ghosting and jitter.
Plasma is like watching a slideshow.
Seems like you missed the last 3 years in HDTV development.
I agree with LCD, as this technology is the more widespread because it's cheaper under certain sizes, but it's also the worst for displaying any SD content.
But plasmas actually display SD content better than SDTV. The only problems is that the ones that do are very expensive and only available above a certain size.
I'm thinking of some of the Pioneer Kuro line of HDTV.
The higher number of Hz in a HDTV specs doesn't make it better at all, quite the contrary. Usually, people into HC disable all these useless features that break the video quality.
Next gen games are quite simply unplayable on anything less than 720p.
However, the big problem here is that Last gen games are unplayable at anything above 576p!
OK, you have a crystal ball and all. Now what about current gen games?
Joke aside, last gen games are not at all unplayable at anything above 576p.
Saying that they are unplayable in this case is not just a slight exaggeration, it's a blatant lie.
OK slight exaggeration, but old games do look awful on a HD TV.
No they don't. Some HDTV are awful at displaying SD content, like most LCD based TV.
You put the blame on the last gen games (and consoles) when clearly the problem is with the TV. I have a 55" 1080p HDTV and I bought it specially for my Wii, and every single games (specially the Gamecube games) looked better on this HDTV than on my old 52" CRT.
Besides, the look of the game has nothing to do with it being playable or not.
Except perhaps if people equate games with FPS only, and even then, they were playable on SDTV which have less precise image.
It's funny because it's always the people with such high standards regarding content on their TV (so much that games become unplayable to them because they look awful) that manage to not buy the best equipment (HDTV with actually good logic able to display SD content at least as well as a SDTV) and complain about it (people into HC usually know that their TV is the problem and don't complain about the content being the problem).
And therein lies the biggest reason that Sony and Microsoft need to keep up backwards compatibility. I can tell you that PS2 games played on a PS3 instead of a PS2 look a hell of a lot better.
LOL, are you kidding?
You just proved that your HDTV is the problem: the PS3 is doing the exact same thing with the PS2 output that your HDTV should be doing. The PS3 just does it better than your TV, which must have very crappy logic for upscaling SD content.
In my case, the HDTV and the PS3 are doing as good a job as each other.
But the PS2 games are actually the games that look the worst among all my games, as they're the only ones where the aliasing is visible even with the PS3 or my TV upscaling logic.
Of course, that still don't make them unplayable.
This has no incidence on why Sony and MS need to keep up BC.
People just don't care: lots of these machines are hooked up to SDTV or through composite cables anyway.
It's like night and day. Add to this the convienicen factor, and I'm pretty irritated with Sony for dropping this feature and refusing to reimplement it. There are still loads of fantastic PS2 titles I haven't played, and more are still coming out!
See?
The content is not the problem: you still want to play the PS2 games despite them being in SD and you having a HDTV.
For you in America and Europe yes they did that but not in Australia where it was done in software.
That's not true.
No PS3 emulates the PS2 entirely.
The US PS3 had all the PS2 hardware and emulated nothing.
In both Australia and Europe, the PS3 emulated most of the PS2 in software, except one chip, I think that's the Emotion Engine.
That's why I can play Shadow of the Colossus on my PS3 without any slowdown compared to the PS2, for example.
"If your enjoyment of the game is purely with those that have "cutting edge graphics and great gameplay""
This isn't quite what I was trying to say. I enjoy games other than the AAA blockbusters. What I have issues with is those games costing just as much as the the AAA titles. The latest Harry Potter game shouldn't cost as much as say Mass Effect 2. The graphics are no where near the same quality, the amount of time and effort on the developers part is no where near the same.
There are several problems in what you say, except in the effort. ...
I agree that the effort invested in the licensed movie games is far more important than in other games, because these people are the most talented, being able to make games that don't fall apart despite time constraints, small budgets, having to support most of the platforms,
Also, what you say give me a hint that you believe price of products is determined by returns cost.
That's just not true of course. Price of a product is based on its value. The closer the price is to the value the consumer find in the product, the better it sells.
So the latest Harry Potter should have the same price as Mass Effect 2 if its value is the same for most of its buyers. I assure you some people will find far greater value in Harry Potter game, and will find Mass Effect 2 overpriced.
And this relates to non-licensed games as well. Heavenly Sword, great game not worth anywhere near $60 for a 6 hour game, yet that one stayed at $60 for a couple years. It wasn't worth $60 new, it sure as hell wasn't worth $60 2 years after release. But it was a fun game that I really enjoyed renting and would have purchased it if it wasn't so overpriced for so long. Currently playing Sacred 2. Definitely not a AAA title, graphics are meh, lots of bugs, but it's fun and I don't feel bad about paying full price because it is fun and has hours upon hours of gameplay.
OK, but not everyone has your tastes. Heavenly Sword has other problems, as it surely stayed so high for so long because it didn't sell enough to break even. It's just another examples that shows the market can't sustain these kind of games on the HD consoles.
There's a serious problem with the industry because like I said already, there are tons of HD games that get discounted very quickly below the price of even DS games that keep selling for months at their launch price.
This just can't be sustainable, and the dev studios closing left and right is some kind of evidence of the problem.
So what? Not every single genre out there has to be popular on the PC for PC gaming not to be dead. PC gaming is very much alive due to plenty of genres that only work well on PC.
And even if all genres were more popular on consoles (unlikely, but let's assume it happens), then PC gaming would still not be dead due to lots of people having PCs and feeling the occasional urge to play a game on it. The only way to kill PC gaming is to kill the PC.
I agree with all that. I know where's the problem: it's the definition of "PC gaming".
You went with the correct definition of "PC gaming", meaning all kind of games on PC including Solitaire, while I went with the context in which these guys are when they talk about "PC gaming".
And keep in mind that in their context, Solitaire in not at all part of "PC gaming". "PC gaming" in their context only include a select kind of games with some arbitrary amount of cost. Games that need so many resources that they have a barrier of entry for the smaller developers.
That "PC gaming" is the one dead for them on PC, but "PC gaming" in your context is still very well alive.
When they talk about "PC gaming", they're actually talking about a selective group of developers.
These developers calling themselves "PC gaming" are the ones who make the biggest games, and their games are the one advertised in the gaming media. No wonder then that PC gamers don't understand when these people say "PC gaming" is dieing: they're just not talking about the same thing.
Could you possibly write even bigger nonsense? PC gaming is alive because people play games on consoles, and it's dying because some developers develop for PCs, but give it lower priority than consoles.
There are a lot of developers developing only for PC, and there are a lot of people playing games only on PC. What the hell do consoles have to do with anything? There's room for more than one platform.
Besides, the biggest selling game ever in the history of mankind is on PC. As long as that's the case, any claim of PC gaming dying is just plain silly.
Again, I was talking in the context of the "PC gaming" they are talking about, not your context. In your context of "PC gaming" being all kind of games on the PC, of course what I write is nonsense.
The selective group of developers that call themselves "PC gaming", I'll call them the "famous developers", nearly all fled to the consoles though.
They develop first for the consoles, and then try to adapt it for the PC, which makes very awkward games for PC.
Only the most succesful ones among the famous developers go on making games with the PC as the main platform in mind.
I own an Xbox 360 and a PC (obviously). If I can get a game on the PC I will choose that over the console usually. Stuff like TF2, L4D etc... I fail to see the point of them on the consoles. FPS games on a console are a big bag of fail IMO. Only people who defend them in my experience are ones who haven't spent years using the superior mouse/keyboard combination.
You're right, and that's because these are really PC games, and because the HD consoles are not handled or even made like consoles, but like PC with DRM.
Most of their games are PC games too. PC games tend to be played alone in front of a screen that is dedicated to one player.
The games I have on my Xbox are ones you can't GET on the PC, or ones that work best with a gamepad. Like Burnout Paradise. The PC version is out, but I'd much rather sit on my couch and play on my HDTV with my kids than sit at my desk and play it.
Which is exactly the difference between console games and PC games. Consoles are usually meant to be played with several people behind a single screen, so with several controllers. That's why consoles always had the possibility to plug at least two controllers (those that didn't were failures). Console games are more worthwile on consoles, and don't work as well on PC. During Playstation reign, there were other uses found that worked well with consoles (like cinematics, as usually consoles were played on a TV).
Worse still is that it's already been announced what the first paid DLC will be for Beatles Rock Band. Game isn't even OUT yet and they've already basically said "You're getting an incomplete game and will have to pay again."
The whole DLC thing really annoys me. If it's something really does add to the game, like Big Surf Island for Burnout Paradise, then fine. (I bought the game used, so even with that the game still only cost me about $20). But announcing stuff you're going to have to pay for before the game is even released?! That is just despicable. But then I guess at least you have warning and can say "I'm not going to buy that." (Like anybody will actually do that.)
Companies now realise that instead of a full expansion for, say, $20, they can now put it out in chunks and make twice that.
The problem with DLC is it's a GREAT idea, but greed has, like with so many other things in life, ruined it.
The "problem" is that people accepted that. See MS congratulates itself for making their customers pay for their content at financial reports. And they're adding more paying content as it works for now. Why not if people are paying?
In this case, the consumer took the bait. Now they just have to manage their greed or they take the risk of wearying their customers.
This just shows that there's a big problem in the games industry, because most of the actors don't care about their customers: they see them as milking cows.
Those genres are already very popular.
Yes but not on PC.
This has not killed PC gaming. Therefore, your claim that popularising them will kill PC gaming is transparently false.
Of course it's false. It's not exactly the situation. PC gaming is not dead, it has fled on what is believed to be consoles, but actually are mini PC with DRM.
These are the HD consoles. Did you notice how most developers on these HD consoles are historically PC developers that didn't develop for consoles? Now they all are making their main games for consoles, PC coming after.
This is killing the gaming on PC even more, meaning decreasing revenues, but PC gaming still lives on these HD consoles, which really are mini PC with DRM. At least that's how the PC developers see them.
The single-screen multiplayer case is not even something the PC "can't handle". The PC handled it very nicely when it last made sense, which was with split-screen games about 15 years ago.
The PC can technically do local multiplayer, but no, PC can't handle it, which is why it never worked on PC. The PC is related to "work", and it's a strongly entrenched feeling that most people share. That's why most PC games are solitary games, where you play alone on one monitor, disconnected from others around you. But on consoles, the local multiplayer is the big thing, it's natural to have several players around a console, playing together on one single screen. Consoles are more social things and that's the main difference with PC.
Then the internet made split screen look very silly. It's only very recently that the growth in popularity of party games has given shared-screen multiplayer a new purpose.
This is BS. Ever since the NES came out and beat the PC games market (with lots of PC only companies dying in the process), local multiplayer never looked silly. It looked silly perhaps to those that stayed on the "better" PC gaming, because that's what they always wanted to believe. Party games have not been growing the popularity of local multiplayer, it has always been here. It's just that most developers were not making games around this concept anymore even on consoles.
BUt you know that already, as your second sentence contradicted your first one. You say the Internet made split screen silly, and the Internet is still there, yet "shared-screen multiplayer" is growing. So either it never looked silly, or people never cared about it looking silly.
The second problem is the utter lack of story telling these days. The most telling sign for this is the downfall of the graphics adventure genre. There are some exceptions, but in general the state there is terrible.
But the downfall of the graphics adventure genre contradicts your point!
Some adventure games are released continuously, and they never sell a lot.
Also, the fact that most of the best selling games have no story telling contradicts your point too. Games are not movies, the amount of story telling doesn't affect how much they sell at all.
This is nonsense. "Consumers should change" is sth you should never have to say, or it shows you are having a very big problem. Consumer is NEVER the problem. No industry has ANY right of sales that consumers should abide to.
If consumers don't buy your product, obviously the industry is the problem.
It would be nice if economic troubles caused gamers themselves to be more selective about which games they bought. A few years ago when I worked at gamestop, most of the customers (children especially) seemed to buy games based ENTIRELY OFF THE BOXART. "Hey, I have a PS2. Hey, I enjoyed the movie 'fight club". Hey, this box which appears to have been the first game I picked up is Fight club for the PS2. That's GOT to be a good one!"
I see lots of problem in that, and none are the consumer's fault.
Why couldn't the specialised store inform the consumer? Why did the developer make a bad game out of this license? Why are the licensee making the developers do such bad games?
Why the gamer should assume that the game can't be good? What will happen when he realise that the game he bought has no interest compared to the movie ? He won't buy game again.
Fatigue will set in, and a time will arrive (like now) where he will have to make a choice, and he will dump buying games. The industry is the problem in all that.
Many people are apparently buying wii games at random, the effect being that most of the games for the wii are barely playable.
No, that's not true at all!
3rd parties are making lots of bad Wii games, hoping to screw the Wii customers. What happens is that less and less people buy games from those companies, and more and more people buy Nintendo games, which are good games. People start to recognise which companies make good games, when before they wouldn't pay attention. The 3rd parties have done that to themselves, the consumer is not at fault. People new to games assumed that games for the Wii were at least as good as the game that comes with the console.
These people are not the problem for being disappointed, those that made these games are the problem.
And remember that 3rd parties are the ones responsible for this situation. Before PS1, there was regulation by the console maker as to the quality and quantity of games that every 3rd parties could put out every year on their console. This ensured at least some level of quality, and even then there was lots of shovelware. Then came PS1 which allowed anyone to make anything on the console, and the 3rd parties flocked to the PS1, sending a clear message that it was what they wanted.
it would be nice if gamers were more supportive, or at least more forgiving, of games that try to do new things. A lot of "hardcore" gamers get very entrenched opinions about what a game should and should not be according to genre. It's like if moviegoers complained that a movie wasn't formulaic enough.
True enough.
This usually leads to a decreasing market, as more and more people are left behind by the level of sophistication that goes higher and higher, and becomes inaccessible to newcomers.
Not to mention that fact that with the rise of Xbox Live and other online services, split screen even on the console is pretty much dieing. Being a known "computer guy" has led to me getting talked into setting up more than a few home networks in my area. I've not only seen the multiple computers thing going on, but it's also fairly common to see each kid with their own Xbox360 connected to the network for online play too. If the kids want to play together then the online services facilitate that.
I agree that the split screen thing is dieing on XBox and on PS3, but not on consoles. That's because these consoles are not really consoles, they're mini PC with DRM.
That's because Sony and MS are not console companies and don't understand consoles.
Look at the only console company remaining, which is Nintendo, and you will see that local multiplayer (part of which is split screen with 4 pads or more) is not dieing at all, far from it.
Playing together in local multiplayer is a far different experience than playing on a network, each people having its own monitor, like a LAN party, even if all the players are in the same room. It's just not the same, as everyone is completely disconnected from each other. These are the characteristics of PC gaming.
It's funny to read that online services facilitate kids playing together. That's just not true.
"The big budget phenomena has been the very thing that's lowering my enjoyment of games. IMHO, the obsession with graphics, sequels/IP and marketing (all big budget things) has detracted from the biggest part of games: gameplay."
I don't think that's quite the case. There have been some exceptional games released that have both excellent gameplay and great graphics. Call of Duty, Bioshock, Mass Effect, Dragon Age is looking to be awesome, the list of great games really goes on and on.
What I have a problem with is the games that don't have cutting edge graphics and great gameplay yet still cost the same.
This attitude is exactly the problem.
If your enjoyment of the game is purely with those that have "cutting edge graphics and great gameplay", it explains why the profitability problem is so rampant. Keep in mind that profitability is actually not stagnant at all among developers, it's going down. It's stagnant only because Nintendo is making so much profit that it levels up the profitability of the industry. Remove Nintendo, and you see a huge drop in profitability since the start of this generation of home consoles.
This attitude of games which must have "cutting edge graphics and great gameplay" is the problem, because as you don't have any way to know that the gameplay is great before trying the game, people with this attitude will only go to the sequels, and that's what we're seeing. You will tell me "what about reviews, demos?". Only the huge budget games get high budget for marketing, skewing reviews (see GTA4), which then cannot be trusted, and gamers know that. As for demos, those that have been released didn't work as to show the gameplay, gamers constantly complain about them most often than not.
The cutting edge graphics part automatically means "big budget", there's no way around it.
So this attitude just shuts off any game that isn't a big budget sequel, which explains why those are the only ones that work in these environments, and why there's a big problem with profitability. That's because big budget sequels can't be produced fast enough, and the market targeted for these isn't large enough to sustain them.
Even those big budget sequel games have very poor value: you can see them getting price dropped, sometimes one month after release, where they are already half price. This just shows how poor values these games have, despite being big budget sequels.
Most HD console games get discounted very quickly, and fall below the price of even Nintendo DS games that still have their launch price 4 years later, and are still in the top 10!
These are the games that retain their value, these are the really good games. None of these games have "cutting edge graphics", being on the Nintendo DS (but they have great gameplay).
Actually, some Wii games are the same.
I thought these nonsensical cherry-picking comparisons using Secunia or any other site that doesn't track Linux, were dead?
To show how stupid it was to make an argument with Secunia, and how you tried to make the number fulfill your agenda, I will use Secunia too :
Linux 2.0 : 1 Secunia advisory, 0 vulnerability
Linux 2.5 : 2 Secunia advisory, 0 vulnerability
I can be kind too :
Linux 2.2 : 8 Secunia advisory, 5 vulnerability
Seriously, this is nonsense.
And saying comparing an entire Windows OS with just the Linux kernel makes sense in theory, but not in the context of vulnerabilities, especially in privilege escalation context.
Especially since usually these are related to drivers in the Linux kernel, and Linus has far more of them than a basic Windows OS.
Small piece of advice.
We geeks find it hard to "get in touch with our emotional side" sometimes...
Concentrate on enjoying each other's company. Enjoy being with each other. Stop trying to analyse the hell out of it and just ENJOY it :)
Seconded!
It's too late to learn anything anyway, and usually these kind of things isn't learnt in books. Books can give you a method to follow, but actually to learn anything you have to interact with people. And as you're going to get married, it's too late to learn anything with other people.
Just manages like you always have, you'll learn along the way, like everybody else.
Hell most Mac and Windows users don't even know there IS a CLI interface, and they sure as hell don't want to be using it!
You're so mad that you're bordering on saying nonsense.
How come you know that the users don't want to use something they don't even know about?
Are you the god thinking for all these people?
What did strike such a nerve into you? Seriously. It's hatred at this level.
Look, I'll be the first to admit that Linux rocks on servers. It is rock solid, secure, a real tank of an OS. But we are talking Windows 7 here, which is most definitely NOT targeted at servers. It is targeted at home users. Home users, I might add, who often can't even find their way around control panel without someone holding their hand. Windows is quite good at that BTW.
I agree with everything you say, even the part where you say that Windows is quite good at making people unable to find their way around control panel.
Me too, I always have problem finding the correct option in control panel, usually I have to parse all of them. Just because they're inconsistent. It's sad really, after all these years.
But Linux? You better be bestest friends with Mr. CLI if you want to play in that sandbox. It seems like every time there is an update something breaks and requires CLI. Sound broke? Ooops..CLI. Monitor isn't showing the right resolution? CLI baby.
Now you're really looking like an ignorant fool. You didn't use Linux in the latest 10 years, right ? You shouldn't talk about what you obviously don't know about, seriously.
And server admins live and die CLI and hate GUIs, as they just suck precious resources.
This shows clearly that you have no idea what the CLI is in Linux and Unix OS. ... interface.
You seem to believe CLI in these OS is just some kind of, well,
Which shows just how ignorant you are about it.
These are shells, and are much more powerful than DOS.
Being a fanboy is one thing, being delusional is another.
Yet you are both.
I can make an example that will prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Linux isn't ready for home users. Ready? Remove Bash.
Now you're retarded. You just said "remove the OS".
I hope you didn't believe you were smart. Seriously...
Go learn what Linux is before talking about it, you're not qualified, at all.
But Windows home users will NEVER use CLI. Let me repeat that: Windows home users will NEVER EVER use CLI. In fact most power users don't care for it either. They don't like it, don't want it, and if you make them use CLI you might as well say "please have someone go install Windows for you" because that is EXACTLY what will happen. I truly hope that a day comes when you can actually remove CLI from Linux and still have a usable machine, but I won't hold my breath.
LOL. Repeating wrong things won't make them true. But I agree this part is done like a good fanboy coupled with a delusional guy. You know also perfectly well what people want and what they hate. But do you have any evidence of what you're saying?
Okay, you want to split hairs? Japanese words are not "spelled", they are written using a mix of Chinese and phonetic symbols. As noted above æ"å- is how one should write the Japanese word for "improvement". Unfortunately, many people outside East Asia has no idea how to read or pronounce that, so we "romanize" words based on a commonly accepted latin alphabet equivalent.
But he's not splitting hair, he's right.
And the alphabet you're talking about is called romaji (literally meaning "roman characters"), and sorry but in this alphabet, of which there are several variants, "k" is always used for "ka", in all the variants.
The usual Latin alphabet equivalent is kaizen with a k. Lately, a lot of bars and brands in Japan are trying to use the 'c' instead of the 'k'-- the most common example is the NTT wireless provider Docomo (meaning "anywhere").
But why are they trying to do that. You read like they all do this just because, which is not true.
There's always a reason behind these uses of a c instead of k. Usually, it's to look like a french (or other roman based language) word, or for a pun, often coupled with the abbreviations that is an entertaining particularity of japanese language.
For example, for DoCoMo, it's the abbreviation of "DO COmmunication over MObile", thus why it's written DoCoMo with several capitals.
And of course, "dokomo" also means "anywhere", so this is a pun.