Looking Glass died because a series of problems compounded each other into a financially lethal situation. No single factor is to blame. No single person or entity killed Looking Glass. No one problem was enough, on its own, to kill the company. Nonetheless, the problems were deadly when combined.
Interestingly, you'll find that piracy isn't even mention. Piracy did not kill Looking Glass studios. Difficult financials did, same as Origin, Westwood, and a multitude of other classic studios.
And take "world of goo", an awesome game, that (like mine) ships totally DRM-free. It's pirated to oblivion, and they are no doubt losing tons of sales.
"No doubt" is not a real-world metric. In fact, 2D Boy EXPLICITLY shipped with no DRM on the honor system. So far, it has not hurt them. And with the recent release on the Nintendo Wii, 2D Boy is flying high with the first 10/10 review from WiiWare World.
As much as I'd like to believe your post is simply ignorant, I cannot ignore your posting history. All posts on copyright topics, all in favor of stronger copyrights. You are most certainly a shill. The question is, for whom do you shill?
What do you do when you want to play a game that isn't on the consoles?
I don't. I'd love to play Little Big Planet, but I'm not going to invest in a PS3 to do it. So I just don't play.
For example, a lot of indie games are PC exclusives because the developer isn't a big enough company for a WiiWare license.
In the past I did purchase a few indie games. Especially the kick-ass Puppy Games titles. That being said, you need something absolutely incredible to overcome my current ambivalence of PC gaming. I simply don't care enough to endure the pain and anguish of PC gaming. Even though AAA games like Halo, Mass Effect, and Spore COULD be played on my PC, I. SIMPLY. DON'T. CARE.
Crazy, isn't it?
What's even better is that if I wait long enough, the great indie games will reach the WiiWare service. Defend Your Castle, World of Goo, Cave Story, Lost Winds, and other incredible titles are at my finger tips. All it takes is a credit/debit card and a bit of Wii Remote clicking.
Even good games from small companies?
Any game that did not reach its target audience is not being pirated, either. There have been good games throughout history that received a cult following ex post facto, but no one paid them any heed when they were released. If there is a healthy pirate market for the game, there is a healthy consumer market for it. Pure and simple.
If you query the number of gamers you have left, of course you're going to get a 99.8% figure. (Though honestly, that exact figure sounds like bullshit to me. Did you know that 85.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot?) The question is, how many customers have you already lost where DRM was a contributing factor? Of those customers, how many can identify DRM as the problem rather than stating "the game doesn't work"?
I almost guarantee that any study EA has done resulting in these figures was flawed. Based on his statements however, I don't think EA has done that research. Riccitiello pulled that number out of thin air. Even if EA did research that suggests that only 0.2% of users should have a problem, there's a huge gap between theory and practice.
I'm an example of a PC gamer lost by the industry. I used to read PC Gamer regularly, wait for the awesome new titles coming out, and get lost in the worlds of these games. Eventually I stopped and gave up on the industry. If you're interesting in why, here are the key points:
-- Lackluster games. The majority of games felt like regurgitated first person shooters. They were all the same with new skins. Hardly an interesting market.
-- Technological problems. There's nothing more irritating than purchasing a game or getting a game as a gift, then not being able to run it. At least two of those instances were clearly DRM problems. The games would not even start. No error, no reason, just fail. Tech support then explains some BS about having a CD Burner. Because, you know, those are so uncommon in computers. (This guy explains it WAY better than I can.) Not to mention the video card driver treadmill. Having problems with that game? Oh, well you need to update to Super Destructo Detonation Drivers version 34120123.1239213213 release 8231 patch -0123 revision B. It will make your system super-unstable, but your games will kick ass!
-- Time. As I got older, I simply had fewer hours in the day to game. I no longer have the time nor the patience to work around the previous two problem. So I just stopped buying PC games. Nowhere was there a concious decision of "screw them", it was simply, "This does not interest me anymore".
These days I have a console that lets me get the maximum amount of enjoyment out of the least possible time investment. Life is so much better than when PC games clogged my system's arteries.
In closing, I'd like to say this: History has shown that good games sell. Period, end of story. Piracy has always been and always will be a scapegoat for the real problem of poor quality merchandise. Implementing draconian anti-piracy measures will only drive away the few customers you have left.
Do you even understand what trolling is? Generally speaking, providing correct and knowledgeable information is the antithesis of trolling. Which makes me wonder if you're some kind of elaborate anti-slashdot troll.:-/
1. Flash supports local shared objects, not "cookies". Cookies are submitted back to the server. Shared Objects are bits of storage available to movies from a particular domain. They must explicitly submit the information back to cause an information leak.
2. Using shared objects to save browsing history is dumb. If you wanted to do evil Flash tracking, use a unique id that you can look up on the server side.
3. You can delete and/or restrict the contents from inside a Flash movie. Use the right-click menu in Flash to access settings and set the storage level to 0 bytes. That will wipe everything out. It will also force Flash to prompt you every time it wishes to save something to disk.
4. This was added in Flash 6, which was released back in 2002. Since then, it has been used by a variety of Flash applications. Many of which you probably use every day. From saving your progress in your favorite Flash game to remembering the volume settings in that Youtube video, Local Shared Objects have been shown to be a valuable feature.
5. If you're worried about this, just wait until you guys see the Storage APIs in HTML5. You're going to freak.
The unfortunate fact about the Internet is that dripping sarcasm doesn't always come through. The point of my post is that if Qantas and Airbus REALLY want us to believe that their planes can't take a wireless mouse, then screw them. I'll happily fly a competitor who does NOT blame wireless mice.
In any case, Airbus's control systems screw up far too often for my tastes. Boeing is still the way to go.
If Airbus is that susceptible to electronic interference, then I'd rather not fly in their planes. The last thing I need is to plunge into the Atlantic because some disgruntled-fellow-gone-terrorist on the ground is jamming the flight controls with a generator and a pringles can.
A full adder is simple in theory, and quite easy to implement in electronics. It's not nearly as easy to implement when you're looking at mechanical parts. Granted, this particular mechanical calculator is virtual, so it doesn't need to worry about mechanical stresses. But that doesn't mean that it lacks the complexity of wiring up 16 bits via mechanical means. (7 bits for the number, one bit for the sign, two numbers.)
It's not like he can simply call "add(8)" and have an 8-bit full adder with carry flags magically created for him. (As so many modern electronics toolkits can do.)
I think we're talking about the same thing. The GCN/GBA connectivity was a true party idea. Same with the 4-GBA linkup. Wifi opens up a huge field of cooperative and competitive play between those who have a console and those who have a handheld. And that's why I say that it's not entirely accidental that the Wii and DS can communicate.:)
As I recall, Walmart shipped Linspire as the OEM OS for a while. Deals like that tend to infuse quite a bit of cash into a small company like Linspire. Michael Roberts might have you believe that they had hundreds of engineers pouring their souls into improving Windows compatibility, but that's most likely Roberts being Roberts. (Which is to say an extreme exaggerator at best, an outright liar at worst.) Their actual burn rate doesn't sound like it was all that high based on the descriptions of the company.
I'm figuring more out with this tool. (Nifty!) The other spot was: "A team of mavericks, of course we're not going to agree on 100 percent of everything."
Ah, nm. I just noticed the built-in search box. It claims two results for "mavericks", but only shows one. The text is: "And I've joined this team that is a team of mavericks..."
No, that's not his problem. The Wii is that slow with ALL SD Cards. Either Nintendo totally screwed up the I/O (e.g. byte by byte transfers rather than buffered I/O) or they run the encryption engine at times when it's not needed.
No, not really. A basic CD-ROM is about 650MB in size. Such CD-ROMs were in use back when hard drives were 1.6GB in size. Figuring that the games from CD-ROMs would be installed to hard disk rather than run from the CD, a user could fill up a 1.6GB hard drive rather quickly.
Basically, I was attempting to make the example realistic rather than contriving something.
I don't understand. How is that a "better" solution? A 2GB card already holds nearly 20,000 blocks of memory. To put that into perspective, WiiWare games tend to range between 100-400 blocks. That's where the 60 games figure comes from. That's a lot of space, to be honest.
The real issue is the fact that you have to rearrange the Wii's memory every time you want to play a game. Think of it like having a PC with a 1.6GB hard drive. You can install a few games at a time, but if you want to play more than 2 or 3, you have to start uninstalling game in order to install others. If you have more than 2 or 3 you want to play at the moment, you will find yourself uninstalling/reinstalling A LOT. That's the situation of Wii owners today.
1. I had no trouble getting a Wii without a bundle. Neither did anyone I know. In fact, it seems that those who fell for the bundle deal were in the minority. FINDING a Wii in the first place was the greater challenge.
2. The article means SD Cards in general. No proprietary card is needed.
3. The article is wrong anyway. No expansion solution was announced. All that was announced was the ability to download directly to SD Cards + an "easy" way of copying games to main memory. In effect, nothing has changed.
Nintendo finally came out with a solution to the Wii's lack of storage capacity -- a 2GB SD card from which users can execute games
TFA is a lie. Iwata stated that the solution would be direct download to SD Card + a solution that will allow users to quickly copy from the SD Card to main memory. Early in the morning, the HOPE was that it was a translation issue and Iwata meant the Wii would cache the game in internal memory before running it.
Unfortunately, Reggie dashed those hopes. He repeated Iwata's solution in plain english. From the Wired article:
9:21: Instead of dealing with the current hassles of Wii storage, you'll be able to download Wii software from the shopping channel to your SD card, and the process of transferring that software will become "dramatically easier."
So don't believe everything you read. Half the stuff coming out of these press conferences is pure malarky. (e.g. 2 touch screens? False. 3 Megapixels? Disputed. New Pikmin? False. Street Fighter IV? False. Launch from SD? False.)
The good news is that the GameCube remakes are going to include Metroid Prime 1 & 2. So if you liked the control scheme in Metroid 3, you'll have a chance to go back and play the previous titles with those controls! (Whoo hoo!)
Where in the world are you getting your figures? GH:OT has already sold 1.35m copies. Nintendo even has a limited edition DS Lite/Guitar Hero bundle for sale! Also, I think you are underestimating the extent of these features. We're talking about the ability to emulate old game and play downloadable games at a minimum. Likely, we're also talking about boosts in CPU/GPU performance, which means that DSi games will be better games as well. A bit like the GBC was to the original GB.
ROM was a wonderful thing. Simply flip the switch and the software is already loaded into memory. There was about a second or two of initialization (on a ~1MHz 8-bit processor!) and you were ready to go. It's still possible to create such fast boot times using ROM. Especially with re-flashable ROM. These sorts of boot times are seen in systems like Game Consoles.
Unfortunately, desktop OSes are so complex that using re-flashable ROM adds a great deal of complexity and cost to the design. Thus you aren't likely to see any systems keep their OS in Flash. Compounding the problem is that modern OSes are rarely designed to boot from a ROM configuration and would require substantial changes to boot properly.
Chicago. And Mayor Daley would take you to task if he ever heard you refer to the city that way. (If you know what I mean... punk!:-P)
Around these parts, most GameStops usually have a full set of shelves with GameCube games on them. Most are available for around $10 or less, though a few (Mario Party, Zelda, etc.) can go as high as $30-$40. Granted, the selection pales compared to the PS2 selection, but we are talking about a console that only sold ~21 million units worldwide.
Slashdot Mirror
Your post sounds perfectly reasonable and solid on the outset. Too bad it's complete nonsense.
On the matter of Thief, here is the Looking Glass post-mortem.
Interestingly, you'll find that piracy isn't even mention. Piracy did not kill Looking Glass studios. Difficult financials did, same as Origin, Westwood, and a multitude of other classic studios.
"No doubt" is not a real-world metric. In fact, 2D Boy EXPLICITLY shipped with no DRM on the honor system. So far, it has not hurt them. And with the recent release on the Nintendo Wii, 2D Boy is flying high with the first 10/10 review from WiiWare World.
As much as I'd like to believe your post is simply ignorant, I cannot ignore your posting history. All posts on copyright topics, all in favor of stronger copyrights. You are most certainly a shill. The question is, for whom do you shill?
Mod parent -1 Troll.
I don't. I'd love to play Little Big Planet, but I'm not going to invest in a PS3 to do it. So I just don't play.
In the past I did purchase a few indie games. Especially the kick-ass Puppy Games titles. That being said, you need something absolutely incredible to overcome my current ambivalence of PC gaming. I simply don't care enough to endure the pain and anguish of PC gaming. Even though AAA games like Halo, Mass Effect, and Spore COULD be played on my PC, I. SIMPLY. DON'T. CARE.
Crazy, isn't it?
What's even better is that if I wait long enough, the great indie games will reach the WiiWare service. Defend Your Castle, World of Goo, Cave Story, Lost Winds, and other incredible titles are at my finger tips. All it takes is a credit/debit card and a bit of Wii Remote clicking.
Any game that did not reach its target audience is not being pirated, either. There have been good games throughout history that received a cult following ex post facto, but no one paid them any heed when they were released. If there is a healthy pirate market for the game, there is a healthy consumer market for it. Pure and simple.
If you query the number of gamers you have left, of course you're going to get a 99.8% figure. (Though honestly, that exact figure sounds like bullshit to me. Did you know that 85.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot?) The question is, how many customers have you already lost where DRM was a contributing factor? Of those customers, how many can identify DRM as the problem rather than stating "the game doesn't work"?
I almost guarantee that any study EA has done resulting in these figures was flawed. Based on his statements however, I don't think EA has done that research. Riccitiello pulled that number out of thin air. Even if EA did research that suggests that only 0.2% of users should have a problem, there's a huge gap between theory and practice.
I'm an example of a PC gamer lost by the industry. I used to read PC Gamer regularly, wait for the awesome new titles coming out, and get lost in the worlds of these games. Eventually I stopped and gave up on the industry. If you're interesting in why, here are the key points:
-- Lackluster games. The majority of games felt like regurgitated first person shooters. They were all the same with new skins. Hardly an interesting market.
-- Technological problems. There's nothing more irritating than purchasing a game or getting a game as a gift, then not being able to run it. At least two of those instances were clearly DRM problems. The games would not even start. No error, no reason, just fail. Tech support then explains some BS about having a CD Burner. Because, you know, those are so uncommon in computers. (This guy explains it WAY better than I can.) Not to mention the video card driver treadmill. Having problems with that game? Oh, well you need to update to Super Destructo Detonation Drivers version 34120123.1239213213 release 8231 patch -0123 revision B. It will make your system super-unstable, but your games will kick ass!
-- Time. As I got older, I simply had fewer hours in the day to game. I no longer have the time nor the patience to work around the previous two problem. So I just stopped buying PC games. Nowhere was there a concious decision of "screw them", it was simply, "This does not interest me anymore".
These days I have a console that lets me get the maximum amount of enjoyment out of the least possible time investment. Life is so much better than when PC games clogged my system's arteries.
In closing, I'd like to say this: History has shown that good games sell. Period, end of story. Piracy has always been and always will be a scapegoat for the real problem of poor quality merchandise. Implementing draconian anti-piracy measures will only drive away the few customers you have left.
C-SPAN posts the complete debate videos on their YouTube account. If you ever miss a debate, check there first.
Do you even understand what trolling is? Generally speaking, providing correct and knowledgeable information is the antithesis of trolling. Which makes me wonder if you're some kind of elaborate anti-slashdot troll. :-/
If you think I'm new here, you must be new here... ;-)
1. Flash supports local shared objects, not "cookies". Cookies are submitted back to the server. Shared Objects are bits of storage available to movies from a particular domain. They must explicitly submit the information back to cause an information leak.
2. Using shared objects to save browsing history is dumb. If you wanted to do evil Flash tracking, use a unique id that you can look up on the server side.
3. You can delete and/or restrict the contents from inside a Flash movie. Use the right-click menu in Flash to access settings and set the storage level to 0 bytes. That will wipe everything out. It will also force Flash to prompt you every time it wishes to save something to disk.
4. This was added in Flash 6, which was released back in 2002. Since then, it has been used by a variety of Flash applications. Many of which you probably use every day. From saving your progress in your favorite Flash game to remembering the volume settings in that Youtube video, Local Shared Objects have been shown to be a valuable feature.
5. If you're worried about this, just wait until you guys see the Storage APIs in HTML5. You're going to freak.
The unfortunate fact about the Internet is that dripping sarcasm doesn't always come through. The point of my post is that if Qantas and Airbus REALLY want us to believe that their planes can't take a wireless mouse, then screw them. I'll happily fly a competitor who does NOT blame wireless mice.
In any case, Airbus's control systems screw up far too often for my tastes. Boeing is still the way to go.
Fly Boeing instead of Airbus.
If Airbus is that susceptible to electronic interference, then I'd rather not fly in their planes. The last thing I need is to plunge into the Atlantic because some disgruntled-fellow-gone-terrorist on the ground is jamming the flight controls with a generator and a pringles can.
A full adder is simple in theory, and quite easy to implement in electronics. It's not nearly as easy to implement when you're looking at mechanical parts. Granted, this particular mechanical calculator is virtual, so it doesn't need to worry about mechanical stresses. But that doesn't mean that it lacks the complexity of wiring up 16 bits via mechanical means. (7 bits for the number, one bit for the sign, two numbers.)
It's not like he can simply call "add(8)" and have an 8-bit full adder with carry flags magically created for him. (As so many modern electronics toolkits can do.)
I think we're talking about the same thing. The GCN/GBA connectivity was a true party idea. Same with the 4-GBA linkup. Wifi opens up a huge field of cooperative and competitive play between those who have a console and those who have a handheld. And that's why I say that it's not entirely accidental that the Wii and DS can communicate. :)
As I recall, Walmart shipped Linspire as the OEM OS for a while. Deals like that tend to infuse quite a bit of cash into a small company like Linspire. Michael Roberts might have you believe that they had hundreds of engineers pouring their souls into improving Windows compatibility, but that's most likely Roberts being Roberts. (Which is to say an extreme exaggerator at best, an outright liar at worst.) Their actual burn rate doesn't sound like it was all that high based on the descriptions of the company.
Whoops! That link will take you to a page full of entries. Here is the direct link to the specific entry:
http://kevincarmony.blogspot.com/2008/07/michael-robertson-speaks-intentions.html
...other than the caption in the article, "Michael Robertson - Greedy, crook or just incompetent?"
Then I found this earlier entry: http://kevincarmony.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2008-07-12T08:40:00-07:00&max-results=7
It gives details on the company's structure and what Roberts was doing to steal money from the company. Interesting stuff.
I'm figuring more out with this tool. (Nifty!) The other spot was: "A team of mavericks, of course we're not going to agree on 100 percent of everything."
Ah, nm. I just noticed the built-in search box. It claims two results for "mavericks", but only shows one. The text is: "And I've joined this team that is a team of mavericks..."
As I recall, she used the phrase "we are the mavericks". And you won't be able to search the text in this tool. It's completely Flash-based.
No, that's not his problem. The Wii is that slow with ALL SD Cards. Either Nintendo totally screwed up the I/O (e.g. byte by byte transfers rather than buffered I/O) or they run the encryption engine at times when it's not needed.
No, not really. A basic CD-ROM is about 650MB in size. Such CD-ROMs were in use back when hard drives were 1.6GB in size. Figuring that the games from CD-ROMs would be installed to hard disk rather than run from the CD, a user could fill up a 1.6GB hard drive rather quickly.
Basically, I was attempting to make the example realistic rather than contriving something.
I don't understand. How is that a "better" solution? A 2GB card already holds nearly 20,000 blocks of memory. To put that into perspective, WiiWare games tend to range between 100-400 blocks. That's where the 60 games figure comes from. That's a lot of space, to be honest.
The real issue is the fact that you have to rearrange the Wii's memory every time you want to play a game. Think of it like having a PC with a 1.6GB hard drive. You can install a few games at a time, but if you want to play more than 2 or 3, you have to start uninstalling game in order to install others. If you have more than 2 or 3 you want to play at the moment, you will find yourself uninstalling/reinstalling A LOT. That's the situation of Wii owners today.
1. I had no trouble getting a Wii without a bundle. Neither did anyone I know. In fact, it seems that those who fell for the bundle deal were in the minority. FINDING a Wii in the first place was the greater challenge.
2. The article means SD Cards in general. No proprietary card is needed.
3. The article is wrong anyway. No expansion solution was announced. All that was announced was the ability to download directly to SD Cards + an "easy" way of copying games to main memory. In effect, nothing has changed.
TFA is a lie. Iwata stated that the solution would be direct download to SD Card + a solution that will allow users to quickly copy from the SD Card to main memory. Early in the morning, the HOPE was that it was a translation issue and Iwata meant the Wii would cache the game in internal memory before running it.
Unfortunately, Reggie dashed those hopes. He repeated Iwata's solution in plain english. From the Wired article:
So don't believe everything you read. Half the stuff coming out of these press conferences is pure malarky. (e.g. 2 touch screens? False. 3 Megapixels? Disputed. New Pikmin? False. Street Fighter IV? False. Launch from SD? False.)
The good news is that the GameCube remakes are going to include Metroid Prime 1 & 2. So if you liked the control scheme in Metroid 3, you'll have a chance to go back and play the previous titles with those controls! (Whoo hoo!)
Where in the world are you getting your figures? GH:OT has already sold 1.35m copies. Nintendo even has a limited edition DS Lite/Guitar Hero bundle for sale! Also, I think you are underestimating the extent of these features. We're talking about the ability to emulate old game and play downloadable games at a minimum. Likely, we're also talking about boosts in CPU/GPU performance, which means that DSi games will be better games as well. A bit like the GBC was to the original GB.
ROM was a wonderful thing. Simply flip the switch and the software is already loaded into memory. There was about a second or two of initialization (on a ~1MHz 8-bit processor!) and you were ready to go. It's still possible to create such fast boot times using ROM. Especially with re-flashable ROM. These sorts of boot times are seen in systems like Game Consoles.
Unfortunately, desktop OSes are so complex that using re-flashable ROM adds a great deal of complexity and cost to the design. Thus you aren't likely to see any systems keep their OS in Flash. Compounding the problem is that modern OSes are rarely designed to boot from a ROM configuration and would require substantial changes to boot properly.
Chicago. And Mayor Daley would take you to task if he ever heard you refer to the city that way. (If you know what I mean... punk! :-P)
Around these parts, most GameStops usually have a full set of shelves with GameCube games on them. Most are available for around $10 or less, though a few (Mario Party, Zelda, etc.) can go as high as $30-$40. Granted, the selection pales compared to the PS2 selection, but we are talking about a console that only sold ~21 million units worldwide.