Analysts? The same analysts who've been telling us online console gaming is going to be "like, so huge, maaan" and Nintendo should quit while they're drowning in money for the past five years now?
The Xbox did not fail because it was American. It failed because it has no games that appeal to anyone outside of the US.
To all of the clueless idiots talking about 'pride': this is a system that only sold in any numbers near release, to Tecmo completists who wanted to play DOA3. The Xbox no longer registers as a going concern in Japan (or most other Asian markets). It's not just 'underperforming', it's dead. And yet MS still try to put a brave face on it. Just as they do with the (moderately successful among US teenagers, utterly rejected by gamers and developers worldwide) Xbox Live system.
MS have subscribed to the belief that hardware brute force, suffocating software conservatism, spiralling production costs and infintely deep pockets can overcome the need for support and cooperation from the rest of the industry. Obviously, they think, the consumer is expected to buy what they are told is cool. This is why they have failed to make much of a dent in Sony's dominance of the sector (the sole objective of the Xbox's existence in the first place). And they still can't figure out why.
"Fantasy already has more environments, enemies, vehicles, items, skills, classes, monsters, pets, and foods than any console RPG to date..."...and thanks to being locked into Xbox Live, will always be doomed to have far fewer players, crippled means of interaction and player expression and a less varied community than any other MMO. (I wonder if they'll have territory-divided servers again like PSO?)
Consider for a moment why no third party publisher has launched or plans to launch an MMO game on the Xbox. Their model doesn't work.
"we're clearly expecting them to be on Xbox Live by the end of the year"
EA have made no announcement regarding LSP.
Visual Concepts have signed a potentially lucrative deal with MS to continue supporting Xbox Live. So Greg Thomas is hardly going to say 'no, the Live revenue model is still completely unworkable for EA and all the other major publishers, but on the other hand we're getting our asses kicked by EA on the PS2 and we're really, really desperate.'
The changes made by LSP don't address the fundamental problems with how Xbox Live is organised and run.
When did they say they were going to release the Phantom again? Perhaps you can refresh my memory.
I am sceptical of the Phantom's potential to bring anything new to the table, but can't fathom why this would give online sources carte blanche to libel the company and its employees.
"You might have a point except the market for Xbox games (yes, even the lowly 2nd place Xbox) is much larger than the market for PC games."
This statement is so inaccurate it isn't even funny.
PC and PS2 titles sell to userbases many, many times the size of the Xbox userbase. The XB's top selling game (by a huge margin), Halo, has taken over two years to rack up 3 million sales worldwide. The Xbox has still to break the 1m online user barrier. I could go on, but you get the idea.
Well, they sold 300,000 copies of DOA3 and Halo so I guess so. Xbox Live sales probably aren't that healthy though.
I think that 100,000 figure sounds more like the whole of the Asian territories Live has launched in (including Taiwan and Korea, and possibly even Australia).
I am saddened by this ongoing, self-perpetuating saga, but unfortunately I am not at all surprised.
If Hard OCP and Penny Arcade's goal is to drag the public perception of games journalism through the shit by acting like clueless, attention-seeking, frustrated adolescents (as usual, in Penny Arcade's case), they are doing a fine job.
Hard OCP's story was notable at the time, and was seen as a great scoop. Unfortunately, Infinium's response blows some fairly large holes in the credibility and journalistic integrity of that story. I suggest reading Hard OCP's original article, and then Infinium's letter. Note the profusion of readily apparent falsehoods and intentional omissions that Hard OCP are still not addressing, for all their bluster. It really is that simple.
Of course, the majority of the respondents here have had their opinions formed for them by Penny Arcade, who have cultivated an inexplicable (and laughably histrionic) vendetta against Infinium Labs, for no apparent reason that could be explained while still sounding like a rational adult.
(Is seems the concept of an independent hardware company manufacturing and selling a games console was beyond their grasp. Perhaps they never heard about the GP32, Tapwave Zodiac, or that plucky outside of 1995, the Sony Playstation. Anyway...)
Still, if this ever comes to court it's a clear cut case of libel. Completely avoidable if H-OCP stop thinking with their dicks for five seconds.
I look forward to the lawsuit, and Penny Arcade inevitably wheeling out the "we're so victimised, and we represent YOUR hobby" panhandling bullshit for the millionth time. Excuse me while I puke.
That is quite simply bullshit. Violence has always been used in entertainment everywhere. In the innocent days of Pitfall, movies, comics, television, theatre, art, sport, music and trading cards were awash with violent thrills.
It's not to do with graphics, it's to do with choice.
Anyway, on the graphics (and technical advancement in general) side, consider for a minute that the PS2 has reached the point in its lifespan where Sony now think that the only way for it to compete in technical terms is to pay off developers to bury the versions of their games for other systems. This amount of power in the market is what kept the aging PSOne alive far beyond what was healthy, and probably does more damage to simple principle of 'making better games should = more profit' than any number of these alledged 'graphics whores' you complain about.
The problem you identify is due to a kind of unspoken cooperation between all the current major players in the MMOG sector.
All the existing MMOG games use the same basic client server model. This is fantastically expensive to set up and maintain (acting as an effective barrier to entry stopping smaller developers entering the market), and horribly inadequate at meeting the demands of a modern game.
When UO came out it basically allowed the player to do everything they could in single player RPGs of the time, in an MMO setting. The monolithic client server model prevents modern MMOGs from having even a fraction of the interactivity, physical simulation or world detail of a modern offline game. Instead, the developers can concentrate on making lots of cheap, dumb content to bloat up the client to multiple gigs.
Splitting players over many small shards (another horrible legacy limitation) limits the ability of players somewhat to cooperate and bring the developers to account over the game's shortcomings. In FFXI this is even cynically used to keep players playing until they can 'afford' to move to the servers where their friends are.
Nobody wants to put the investment into a distributed MMOG architecture, because nobody wants to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Until such time someone (or more likely, several competing someones) delivers a licensable distributed MMOG architecture, we will be stuck with microscopically variated EverQuest clones.
Why link to their 'stories'? They're not news. They're not editorial. They're just the random dribblings of some unpaid high school kid used to break up a stream of Flash advertisments.
Nobody cares. games.slashdot.org could raise its credibility by several notches by ignoring them outright.
Yes, how dare they bring appreciation of a lesser-known company to a wider audience, in the form of an exhaustive and meticulously researched article no less. At this rate the 'hardcore' will have no one left to sneer at!
"Afterwards, we saved up dearly to get the Super Grafx, Sega Genesis, Sega Saturn, and Sega Dreamcast. Obviously, me and my brother were bad gamblers as systems go. We he left for the Navy, I bought him a Neo Get Pocket color to bring with him on the ship. That sealed my title as worst video game purchaser ever."
You need to be hurt in so. many. ways.
Perhaps if you'd bought some games for any of those excellent machines you would have learnt to appreciate them.
Slashdot Mirror
Analysts? The same analysts who've been telling us online console gaming is going to be "like, so huge, maaan" and Nintendo should quit while they're drowning in money for the past five years now?
Pardon me while I laugh hysterically.
The Xbox did not fail because it was American. It failed because it has no games that appeal to anyone outside of the US.
To all of the clueless idiots talking about 'pride': this is a system that only sold in any numbers near release, to Tecmo completists who wanted to play DOA3. The Xbox no longer registers as a going concern in Japan (or most other Asian markets). It's not just 'underperforming', it's dead. And yet MS still try to put a brave face on it. Just as they do with the (moderately successful among US teenagers, utterly rejected by gamers and developers worldwide) Xbox Live system.
MS have subscribed to the belief that hardware brute force, suffocating software conservatism, spiralling production costs and infintely deep pockets can overcome the need for support and cooperation from the rest of the industry. Obviously, they think, the consumer is expected to buy what they are told is cool. This is why they have failed to make much of a dent in Sony's dominance of the sector (the sole objective of the Xbox's existence in the first place). And they still can't figure out why.
"Fantasy already has more environments, enemies, vehicles, items, skills, classes, monsters, pets, and foods than any console RPG to date..." ...and thanks to being locked into Xbox Live, will always be doomed to have far fewer players, crippled means of interaction and player expression and a less varied community than any other MMO. (I wonder if they'll have territory-divided servers again like PSO?)
Consider for a moment why no third party publisher has launched or plans to launch an MMO game on the Xbox. Their model doesn't work.
"we're clearly expecting them to be on Xbox Live by the end of the year"
EA have made no announcement regarding LSP.
Visual Concepts have signed a potentially lucrative deal with MS to continue supporting Xbox Live. So Greg Thomas is hardly going to say 'no, the Live revenue model is still completely unworkable for EA and all the other major publishers, but on the other hand we're getting our asses kicked by EA on the PS2 and we're really, really desperate.'
The changes made by LSP don't address the fundamental problems with how Xbox Live is organised and run.
Well, I'm glad you've read the original article and Infinium's complaint, and aren't just parroting Penny Arcade.... oh wait...
When did they say they were going to release the Phantom again? Perhaps you can refresh my memory.
I am sceptical of the Phantom's potential to bring anything new to the table, but can't fathom why this would give online sources carte blanche to libel the company and its employees.
Which has what bearing on a libel case, exactly?
Codemasters have never supported the GC, so how can they pull out?
LucasArts have not dropped the GC, this is pure speculation.
Neither have Ubisoft.
EA are only going to release one football game on the GC this year (FIFA 2005) instead of two. Holy shit, man the lifeboats.
GI.biz and Eurogamer are already well known as sites with a vendetta against the Gamecube.
"You might have a point except the market for Xbox games (yes, even the lowly 2nd place Xbox) is much larger than the market for PC games."
This statement is so inaccurate it isn't even funny.
PC and PS2 titles sell to userbases many, many times the size of the Xbox userbase. The XB's top selling game (by a huge margin), Halo, has taken over two years to rack up 3 million sales worldwide. The Xbox has still to break the 1m online user barrier. I could go on, but you get the idea.
Your analogy is garbage.
The names you reel of do not create games in a vacuum - with the exception of Carmack they're little more than figureheads these days anyway.
A 'hotshot' (media whore) designer is nothing without development talent to back them up.
So these games were good because the coders' name was on the box? Uh-huh...
Well, they sold 300,000 copies of DOA3 and Halo so I guess so. Xbox Live sales probably aren't that healthy though.
I think that 100,000 figure sounds more like the whole of the Asian territories Live has launched in (including Taiwan and Korea, and possibly even Australia).
I am saddened by this ongoing, self-perpetuating saga, but unfortunately I am not at all surprised.
If Hard OCP and Penny Arcade's goal is to drag the public perception of games journalism through the shit by acting like clueless, attention-seeking, frustrated adolescents (as usual, in Penny Arcade's case), they are doing a fine job.
Hard OCP's story was notable at the time, and was seen as a great scoop. Unfortunately, Infinium's response blows some fairly large holes in the credibility and journalistic integrity of that story. I suggest reading Hard OCP's original article, and then Infinium's letter. Note the profusion of readily apparent falsehoods and intentional omissions that Hard OCP are still not addressing, for all their bluster. It really is that simple.
Of course, the majority of the respondents here have had their opinions formed for them by Penny Arcade, who have cultivated an inexplicable (and laughably histrionic) vendetta against Infinium Labs, for no apparent reason that could be explained while still sounding like a rational adult.
(Is seems the concept of an independent hardware company manufacturing and selling a games console was beyond their grasp. Perhaps they never heard about the GP32, Tapwave Zodiac, or that plucky outside of 1995, the Sony Playstation. Anyway...)
Still, if this ever comes to court it's a clear cut case of libel. Completely avoidable if H-OCP stop thinking with their dicks for five seconds.
I look forward to the lawsuit, and Penny Arcade inevitably wheeling out the "we're so victimised, and we represent YOUR hobby" panhandling bullshit for the millionth time. Excuse me while I puke.
That is quite simply bullshit. Violence has always been used in entertainment everywhere. In the innocent days of Pitfall, movies, comics, television, theatre, art, sport, music and trading cards were awash with violent thrills.
Normal people can tell fantasy from reality.
"Desert Strike was originally made by EA, and its generic nature is completely typical of their product."
That's interesting. I can't think of a game remotely like DS in setting or mechanics appearing before it. Choplifter maybe, at a stretch.
You do realise of course that the majority of Bullfrog's games (including Syndicate) were funded and published by EA, yes?
...as voted by readers (gawpers? droolers?) of GameSpy. Can you see the inherent flaw in this plan?
I say again, no more fucking GameSpy non-stories. We don't want to give them *more* ad revenue.
It's not to do with graphics, it's to do with choice.
Anyway, on the graphics (and technical advancement in general) side, consider for a minute that the PS2 has reached the point in its lifespan where Sony now think that the only way for it to compete in technical terms is to pay off developers to bury the versions of their games for other systems. This amount of power in the market is what kept the aging PSOne alive far beyond what was healthy, and probably does more damage to simple principle of 'making better games should = more profit' than any number of these alledged 'graphics whores' you complain about.
The problem you identify is due to a kind of unspoken cooperation between all the current major players in the MMOG sector.
All the existing MMOG games use the same basic client server model. This is fantastically expensive to set up and maintain (acting as an effective barrier to entry stopping smaller developers entering the market), and horribly inadequate at meeting the demands of a modern game.
When UO came out it basically allowed the player to do everything they could in single player RPGs of the time, in an MMO setting. The monolithic client server model prevents modern MMOGs from having even a fraction of the interactivity, physical simulation or world detail of a modern offline game. Instead, the developers can concentrate on making lots of cheap, dumb content to bloat up the client to multiple gigs.
Splitting players over many small shards (another horrible legacy limitation) limits the ability of players somewhat to cooperate and bring the developers to account over the game's shortcomings. In FFXI this is even cynically used to keep players playing until they can 'afford' to move to the servers where their friends are.
Nobody wants to put the investment into a distributed MMOG architecture, because nobody wants to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Until such time someone (or more likely, several competing someones) delivers a licensable distributed MMOG architecture, we will be stuck with microscopically variated EverQuest clones.
Why link to their 'stories'? They're not news. They're not editorial. They're just the random dribblings of some unpaid high school kid used to break up a stream of Flash advertisments.
Nobody cares. games.slashdot.org could raise its credibility by several notches by ignoring them outright.
You're boycotting EA because of Microsoft's overly zealous licensing terms? Smart.
Yes, how dare they bring appreciation of a lesser-known company to a wider audience, in the form of an exhaustive and meticulously researched article no less. At this rate the 'hardcore' will have no one left to sneer at!
Or, y'know, maybe the DS isn't intended for massive (100m+) mainstream sales like the GBA. Nintendo have stated it's not a successor to the GB line.
Ah, but they you're an idiot ("Nobody wants games about plumbers who have turtle problems anymore.") so your punditry can safely be ignored.
This is what happens when they model their awards after the worst elements of the Oscars.
The nominees are just the games with the largest marketing budgets, irrespective of quality.
This is just a cynical PR exercise used to milk some cash from publishers willing to stump up to have their games nominated.
(Site doesn't seem to work properly either.)
I'd probably have more sympathy for Bungie if the Mac and PC ports of Halo weren't so hopelessly late and sloppily ported.
Still, they can surely find some comfort in the fact that the Xbox version is, absurdly, still selling at full price.
They're really in no position to whine about anything.
You need to be hurt in so. many. ways.
Perhaps if you'd bought some games for any of those excellent machines you would have learnt to appreciate them.