Look... I'm sorry but 15 years ago games were $10-$15.
No, they were not. $50 was the standard price for new console games since at least the mid-1980s, and still is on the Wii.
Most developers use other engines to produce their games so don't give me the BS about how much a game costs to make.
You'd be surprised at just how little difference this makes. It has been a very long time since the majority of a game's development budget went into its code.
in fact ALL games should cost a LOT less.
The last few games I've bought were all PC games off of steam because they were reasonably priced. If it's more than $30... you're over charging. Period. You can try to argue this with me... but everything past that mark is greed pure and simple.
In other words, you're just being cheap. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, as long as you're not using that as an argument to steal games, which I suspect you probably are.
If you absolutely must pay less, buy used. This will not kill you, make you any less of a gamer, or shrink your genitals.
Oh, I agree with you completely as far as all of this goes. I am not quite prepared to rule out the possibility that there might be some justifiable reason for this, but if so then it is completely beyond any situation I can imagine. Certainly, however, if such a threat were to exist, then its mere existence would have to damage national security so badly that a basic explanation could not possibly do any further harm.
Also, to be frank, if such a threat actually exists, then we are already screwed beyond screwed. As a people and as a culture, the US has on occasion managed -barely- to withstand some pretty severe threats in the past, though often including actions which those threats did not justify. Consider, for example, the internment camps of WWII: certainly a severe threat presented itself, but the ends did not justify the means. Since the last time threats like these are known to have presented themselves -decades ago, at the most recent- the US has frankly not provided convincing evidence of its ability to withstand another one, and anything that might actually justify such abominable practices would have to be orders of magnitude worse.
So it's starting to sound like one of several things is going on here:
Obama is ultimately cut from the same power-hungry mold as Bush, even if he often seeks a different sort of power from his predecessor. This particular case just happens to serve both of their ends, so meet the new boss, same as the old boss. OR...
Bush actually had good reasons to do what he did, and Obama continues these odious policies as a distasteful but very real necessity.
I'm not sure which of these possibilities would worse.
It would help, however, if Obama would be more forthcoming as to the reasons behind the continuation, though; surely some more substantial explanation than "it's all a state secret" can be given without damaging national security.
Remember the April Fool's joke a while back, where they talked about adding an "Evil" bit flag to IP packets? The idea was that malicious network traffic would turn this flag on, and then firewalls which didn't want to accept such traffic could block it out.
This was, of course, just a joke. Even had anyone tried to implement it, no malicious coder in their right mind would turn the bit on. The problem with robots.txt is that it suffers the same weakness: malicious code can simply ignore it. Thus, it provides no real protection; it's useful as a guide for well-behaved robots, but not as any sort of defense.
You didn't think the tiered-pricing scam was actually going to save you money, did you? No company ever does stuff like this unless they think they can squeeze more money out of their customers.
Obama's voting record on this issue as a Senator is what disillusioned me during his campaign. Part of me wanted to hope that the vote in question was nothing more than ruthless pragmatism on his part, but this defense of the indefensible shows otherwise.
Linux doesn't readily inspire quite the same brand of slavering zeal on both ends of the equation as, for example, Mac OS (original or X) or even Windows does. This much is true.
But this doesn't mean it has "virtually no critics." It just means that they have a stronger tendency toward subtlety and diplomacy, just as the fanboys do. Sure, there are a few outliers on both sides, but the writer of this article appears to believe that these are the only critics and fanboys out there, and that simply isn't true.
The open nature of Linux may also help mask some fanboys and critics, because they are more able to channel their opinions into more directly useful tasks. Short of getting hired by Microsoft, a Windows fanboy or critic has little choice but to write essays about how Feature X sucks, Algorithm Y is the one true path, and Pattern Z doesn't meet the needs of users: articles that may or may not be listened to. There's nothing else they can really do. Things aren't much better on the Mac side of things, despite the source being available; in this case it's matter of development model rather than licensing. The more open developer community around Linux (and many other OSS systems) is different; assuming your code is decent and your reasoning is sound, you actually have a fairly reasonable chance of getting accepted. It's not perfect, but it sucks less, and this likely results in a greater number of critics and fanboys becoming developers rather than pundits.
But the whole point behind Achievements is to promote Achievement-whoring: get people to overplay their games to death as quickly as possible, so that they get bored and buy new games for MOAR POINTZ. Replay value isn't profitable, and Achievements were designed as a cure.
If the 360's attach rates are any indicator, it's worked brilliantly.
Netcraft also confirmed today that Linux, BSD, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, AmigaOS, vi, emacs, and that super-secret OS no one's ever heard of outside the NSA are all dying.
And here I thought your post was going to be about announcing losses of The Game.
Quick summary, once again: 1) Everyone who is aware of The Game is playing The Game. 2) Every time you think of The Game, you lose The Game. 3) You must announce whenever you lose The Game.
Gameplay has also been OK for quite a while now. It's been a long time since we had too little RAM for anything too complex, so you can go quite a bit back in time with your gaming before you run into problems.
Then why has only one demographic been gaming in any numbers? The fact is, gameplay has been languishing for ten years under the graphics-are-everything mindset of the developers and the pwn-the-n00bs mentality of the players. It's time to get back to things that matter in gaming, and here's a hint: high technology doesn't help them at all.
It's amazing how someone can say so much and yet get so much wrong.
The Wii market isn't actually as big as it appears. In reality, it's quite possibly smaller than the 360 and PS3 markets.
Wrong. Your desperate fanboy mewlings fail to take into account any semblance of reality, as I will explain below.
Nintendo did a great job of selling the Wii to non-gamers. They've got a huge installed base out there now and should, in theory, have the kind of market dominance that the PS2 enjoyed last time around.
Actually, they shouldn't. Neither their installed base nor their market share is the same as the PS2's at any point in its lifetime. While the 360 and PS3 continue to founder and fail, they have managed to keep enough of the marketshare that the Wii doesn't even have 50%, while the PS2 had well over 65% of the market by the end.
There is no reason for the Wii to have PS2-like market dominance when it hasn't even crossed the 50% psychological barrier. This can all be explained without resorting to your childish stereotyping.
See, the flip side of selling consoles to non-gamers is that they are... well... non-gamers.
New gamers, non non-gamers.
If you look at the weekly games sales charts, the only Wii games that really make an impact are Wii Sports, Wii Fit and, to a lesser degree, Mario Kart Wii. All games that are bundled with the Wii console in the most common packages.
Not true, actually. There are many games which have made significant impact without being bundled. In fact, even in regions where Wii Sports isn't bundled, it is still selling extremely well.
People who actually buy games, as opposed to non-gamers who pick up a Wii and embittered slashdot posters nostalgic for the 80s, do actually tend to make HD graphics and high production values a factor in their purchase.
...and they drive the market into the ground in the process, because they're caring about mere marketing Kool-Aid rather than things that actually matter. The cost of making a game has risen so much that it's barely even possible to make a profit on a console-exclusive anymore, because of all the marketing fluff you have to bolt on to sell to the fratcore.
Your best chance to sell a game with the Wii is at the point of sale with the console itself. Once this has passed, a large majority of the consoles will sit in a cupboard unused.
Patently false. This is more invalid stereotyping.
It's pretty much a three way race in terms of actual games sales (and there are signs that the Wii is really struggling here).
And there it is: the "Non-hardcore games aren't real games" slur. Your attitude and the people who carry it have been poisoning this industry for ten years, and the crash has finally come. Go back to the margins where you belong, because your demographic has proven itself unworthy of its dominance.
If you develop for the Wii as your main platform, you're also, by tying yourself into its control system, ensuring that you'll need significant changes to port your games over to other systems, widening the target audience.
The target audience doesn't need to be any wider when it's already everyone. Sure, you'll lose some creepy adolescent males who strive to define themselves by driving others away, but who cares? You've got everyone else; you don't need that tiny sliver of the market.
On the other hand, develop for the 360, PS3 or PC and it's not that hard to get your game onto the other two out of those 3 platforms.
...which you pretty much have to do to make any money, because none of these markets is big enough anymore to sustain third parties on its own.
The hell of it is, that still doesn't work. Or rather, it only works for devices that have updateable filesystem drivers. Good luck getting the newer SD cards working with, for example, digital cameras.
Unfortunately, open alternatives are only feasible for a limited time: once the proprietary lock-in "standard" gets too common, open alternatives are pretty much condemned to also-ran status.
Consider PNG. It's a great format, and I prefer it over GIF whenever possible, but the fact remains that by the time real PNG support got widespread enough matter, the GIF patents had expired and so the original point of PNG was moot.
FAT, sad as it is, seems to be in the same position as GIF was. It's so widespread that by the time any open alternative could possibly take hold, it won't matter anymore because the invalid patents on FAT will be dead anyway.
When Firefox was created, it was a spinoff of the Mozilla project for people who wanted 'just a browser' with extensions to fill in the rest.
Part of me wonders if it's time to do that again: spin something new off of the Firefox project for people who want 'just a browser' with extensions to fill in the rest. Firefox has done a lot of good, just like Mozilla before it, but it seems to me like it's starting to suffer from the same bloat-over-standards problem that made the original project necessary in the first place.
Maybe this is a cyclic thing; I don't know. Perhaps it's just plain going to be necessary to do this every few years: when a Mozilla browser gets too large, a lean child project emerges, eventually takes over, bloats up, and another lean child project emerges, and so the cycle continues.
Re:no assault on free speech but support for belie
on
UN Attacks Free Speech
·
· Score: 1
Well,
only americans are "free speech nazies" because they fail to understand the difference between censorship and limitations in speech.
Americans are one of the few who aren't "free speech nazies," because they understand that limitations in speech are merely censorship muttered under one's breath. There is no difference between them.
Not shielding people from the consequences of their speech is one thing. For example, the actual crime behind the oft-misunderstood example of shouting 'Fire!' in a crowded theater is inciting a panic, not the speech itself (this is why you can't be prosecuted if, for example, there really is a fire). But to actually criminalize speech itself, no matter the reason, is reprehensible and unconscionable. Free speech must be absolute and sacrosanct, or it is worthless.
Are you telling me you don't have a DVD player yet? You can get those things for less than the cost of a Wii game nowadays, never mind the Wii console.
The querystrings get passed to the CGI script, but that's done completely server-side: the bandwidth isn't wasted because the querystring never goes through the pipes. So you end up saving a little bit bandwidth-wise
In any case, this is a case of grossly premature optimization. Very, very few URLs even come close to the bandwidth of a favicon.ico file, which is itself considered a pittance. There are far more effective ways to cut down on bandwidth than these near-trivial aspects.
The thing is, if you give up trying to be unbiased, you get Fox News.
Only if you try to conceal your bias under cheap slogans like "fair and balanced." If media outlets were open about their bias, so that people could be aware of that bias and account for it themselves, it would make for a much more informed bias.
Ultimately, I think this is more where regulation ought to go. True neutrality is impossible, and so the public, which depends on the media for information, has a legitimate need-to-know concerning that media's bias.
Another way I've heard it rendered is 'period of work,' which again doesn't necessarily mean 24 hours. The argument I like to use, though, refers to a phrase that never appears in the Bible at all. The KJV -not my favorite translation by a long shot, but useful as a point of reference- would have rendered it as "And the evening and the morning were the seventh day."
Corresponding phrases appear for the first six days. Those days, in fact, are written in an almost mechanical style: there are clear beginnings, middles, and ends using very specific wordings. Yet the seventh day, despite being mentioned as starting, is never said to have ended, not in Genesis or anywhere else.
What does this mean? Well, if we're assuming a literal interpretation, then if the Bible doesn't say that the seventh day ended, then it must not have ended. It's still in progress, thousands of years after the Bible was written.
So at least one of the days -the seventh- has lasted for thousands of years: exactly how long can't really be measured until there's a definite endpoint, but if we use the young-earthers' own calculations then the lower bound is currently more than 6000 years, and it's growing. If the lock-step, mechanical manner of the way the previous days were written are any indication, then the first six days must be about the same length as the seventh: still an unknown length, but thousands of years at the absolute least. Not 24 hours.
Slashdot Mirror
Look... I'm sorry but 15 years ago games were $10-$15.
No, they were not. $50 was the standard price for new console games since at least the mid-1980s, and still is on the Wii.
Most developers use other engines to produce their games so don't give me the BS about how much a game costs to make.
You'd be surprised at just how little difference this makes. It has been a very long time since the majority of a game's development budget went into its code.
in fact ALL games should cost a LOT less.
The last few games I've bought were all PC games off of steam because they were reasonably priced. If it's more than $30... you're over charging. Period. You can try to argue this with me... but everything past that mark is greed pure and simple.
In other words, you're just being cheap. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, as long as you're not using that as an argument to steal games, which I suspect you probably are.
If you absolutely must pay less, buy used. This will not kill you, make you any less of a gamer, or shrink your genitals.
Oh, I agree with you completely as far as all of this goes. I am not quite prepared to rule out the possibility that there might be some justifiable reason for this, but if so then it is completely beyond any situation I can imagine. Certainly, however, if such a threat were to exist, then its mere existence would have to damage national security so badly that a basic explanation could not possibly do any further harm.
Also, to be frank, if such a threat actually exists, then we are already screwed beyond screwed. As a people and as a culture, the US has on occasion managed -barely- to withstand some pretty severe threats in the past, though often including actions which those threats did not justify. Consider, for example, the internment camps of WWII: certainly a severe threat presented itself, but the ends did not justify the means. Since the last time threats like these are known to have presented themselves -decades ago, at the most recent- the US has frankly not provided convincing evidence of its ability to withstand another one, and anything that might actually justify such abominable practices would have to be orders of magnitude worse.
So it's starting to sound like one of several things is going on here:
I'm not sure which of these possibilities would worse.
It would help, however, if Obama would be more forthcoming as to the reasons behind the continuation, though; surely some more substantial explanation than "it's all a state secret" can be given without damaging national security.
Your statement makes no sense. If they sold you a PDf you still have it on your computer.
Unless, of course, you don't. Things happen, stuff breaks, and when it does, you now lose access to your legitimately-purchased work.
Remember the April Fool's joke a while back, where they talked about adding an "Evil" bit flag to IP packets? The idea was that malicious network traffic would turn this flag on, and then firewalls which didn't want to accept such traffic could block it out.
This was, of course, just a joke. Even had anyone tried to implement it, no malicious coder in their right mind would turn the bit on. The problem with robots.txt is that it suffers the same weakness: malicious code can simply ignore it. Thus, it provides no real protection; it's useful as a guide for well-behaved robots, but not as any sort of defense.
You didn't think the tiered-pricing scam was actually going to save you money, did you? No company ever does stuff like this unless they think they can squeeze more money out of their customers.
Obama's voting record on this issue as a Senator is what disillusioned me during his campaign. Part of me wanted to hope that the vote in question was nothing more than ruthless pragmatism on his part, but this defense of the indefensible shows otherwise.
Just another power grab.
Linux doesn't readily inspire quite the same brand of slavering zeal on both ends of the equation as, for example, Mac OS (original or X) or even Windows does. This much is true.
But this doesn't mean it has "virtually no critics." It just means that they have a stronger tendency toward subtlety and diplomacy, just as the fanboys do. Sure, there are a few outliers on both sides, but the writer of this article appears to believe that these are the only critics and fanboys out there, and that simply isn't true.
The open nature of Linux may also help mask some fanboys and critics, because they are more able to channel their opinions into more directly useful tasks. Short of getting hired by Microsoft, a Windows fanboy or critic has little choice but to write essays about how Feature X sucks, Algorithm Y is the one true path, and Pattern Z doesn't meet the needs of users: articles that may or may not be listened to. There's nothing else they can really do. Things aren't much better on the Mac side of things, despite the source being available; in this case it's matter of development model rather than licensing. The more open developer community around Linux (and many other OSS systems) is different; assuming your code is decent and your reasoning is sound, you actually have a fairly reasonable chance of getting accepted. It's not perfect, but it sucks less, and this likely results in a greater number of critics and fanboys becoming developers rather than pundits.
But the whole point behind Achievements is to promote Achievement-whoring: get people to overplay their games to death as quickly as possible, so that they get bored and buy new games for MOAR POINTZ. Replay value isn't profitable, and Achievements were designed as a cure.
If the 360's attach rates are any indicator, it's worked brilliantly.
Netcraft also confirmed today that Linux, BSD, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, AmigaOS, vi, emacs, and that super-secret OS no one's ever heard of outside the NSA are all dying.
And here I thought your post was going to be about announcing losses of The Game.
Quick summary, once again:
1) Everyone who is aware of The Game is playing The Game.
2) Every time you think of The Game, you lose The Game.
3) You must announce whenever you lose The Game.
Welcome to Hell. Have fun!
As if Achievements haven't poisoned the gaming industry enough, now forums are starting to use them? This is nuts.
It's April 1 in the country of whoever "leaked" this "news," right? Note to self: just stay off the whole frickin Internet tomorrow.
Ah, who am I kidding...
Perhaps, but that doesn't change the fact that the only lyrics that belong in any Star Trek open start with "ahhhh AHHHHH ahh ahhh-ahhh ahh ahhh...."
Gameplay has also been OK for quite a while now. It's been a long time since we had too little RAM for anything too complex, so you can go quite a bit back in time with your gaming before you run into problems.
Then why has only one demographic been gaming in any numbers? The fact is, gameplay has been languishing for ten years under the graphics-are-everything mindset of the developers and the pwn-the-n00bs mentality of the players. It's time to get back to things that matter in gaming, and here's a hint: high technology doesn't help them at all.
It's amazing how someone can say so much and yet get so much wrong.
The Wii market isn't actually as big as it appears. In reality, it's quite possibly smaller than the 360 and PS3 markets.
Wrong. Your desperate fanboy mewlings fail to take into account any semblance of reality, as I will explain below.
Nintendo did a great job of selling the Wii to non-gamers. They've got a huge installed base out there now and should, in theory, have the kind of market dominance that the PS2 enjoyed last time around.
Actually, they shouldn't. Neither their installed base nor their market share is the same as the PS2's at any point in its lifetime. While the 360 and PS3 continue to founder and fail, they have managed to keep enough of the marketshare that the Wii doesn't even have 50%, while the PS2 had well over 65% of the market by the end.
There is no reason for the Wii to have PS2-like market dominance when it hasn't even crossed the 50% psychological barrier. This can all be explained without resorting to your childish stereotyping.
See, the flip side of selling consoles to non-gamers is that they are... well... non-gamers.
New gamers, non non-gamers.
If you look at the weekly games sales charts, the only Wii games that really make an impact are Wii Sports, Wii Fit and, to a lesser degree, Mario Kart Wii. All games that are bundled with the Wii console in the most common packages.
Not true, actually. There are many games which have made significant impact without being bundled. In fact, even in regions where Wii Sports isn't bundled, it is still selling extremely well.
People who actually buy games, as opposed to non-gamers who pick up a Wii and embittered slashdot posters nostalgic for the 80s, do actually tend to make HD graphics and high production values a factor in their purchase.
...and they drive the market into the ground in the process, because they're caring about mere marketing Kool-Aid rather than things that actually matter. The cost of making a game has risen so much that it's barely even possible to make a profit on a console-exclusive anymore, because of all the marketing fluff you have to bolt on to sell to the fratcore.
Your best chance to sell a game with the Wii is at the point of sale with the console itself. Once this has passed, a large majority of the consoles will sit in a cupboard unused.
Patently false. This is more invalid stereotyping.
It's pretty much a three way race in terms of actual games sales (and there are signs that the Wii is really struggling here).
And there it is: the "Non-hardcore games aren't real games" slur. Your attitude and the people who carry it have been poisoning this industry for ten years, and the crash has finally come. Go back to the margins where you belong, because your demographic has proven itself unworthy of its dominance.
If you develop for the Wii as your main platform, you're also, by tying yourself into its control system, ensuring that you'll need significant changes to port your games over to other systems, widening the target audience.
The target audience doesn't need to be any wider when it's already everyone. Sure, you'll lose some creepy adolescent males who strive to define themselves by driving others away, but who cares? You've got everyone else; you don't need that tiny sliver of the market.
On the other hand, develop for the 360, PS3 or PC and it's not that hard to get your game onto the other two out of those 3 platforms.
...which you pretty much have to do to make any money, because none of these markets is big enough anymore to sustain third parties on its own.
The hell of it is, that still doesn't work. Or rather, it only works for devices that have updateable filesystem drivers. Good luck getting the newer SD cards working with, for example, digital cameras.
Unfortunately, open alternatives are only feasible for a limited time: once the proprietary lock-in "standard" gets too common, open alternatives are pretty much condemned to also-ran status.
Consider PNG. It's a great format, and I prefer it over GIF whenever possible, but the fact remains that by the time real PNG support got widespread enough matter, the GIF patents had expired and so the original point of PNG was moot.
FAT, sad as it is, seems to be in the same position as GIF was. It's so widespread that by the time any open alternative could possibly take hold, it won't matter anymore because the invalid patents on FAT will be dead anyway.
When Firefox was created, it was a spinoff of the Mozilla project for people who wanted 'just a browser' with extensions to fill in the rest.
Part of me wonders if it's time to do that again: spin something new off of the Firefox project for people who want 'just a browser' with extensions to fill in the rest. Firefox has done a lot of good, just like Mozilla before it, but it seems to me like it's starting to suffer from the same bloat-over-standards problem that made the original project necessary in the first place.
Maybe this is a cyclic thing; I don't know. Perhaps it's just plain going to be necessary to do this every few years: when a Mozilla browser gets too large, a lean child project emerges, eventually takes over, bloats up, and another lean child project emerges, and so the cycle continues.
Well,
only americans are "free speech nazies" because they fail to understand the difference between censorship and limitations in speech.
Americans are one of the few who aren't "free speech nazies," because they understand that limitations in speech are merely censorship muttered under one's breath. There is no difference between them.
Not shielding people from the consequences of their speech is one thing. For example, the actual crime behind the oft-misunderstood example of shouting 'Fire!' in a crowded theater is inciting a panic, not the speech itself (this is why you can't be prosecuted if, for example, there really is a fire). But to actually criminalize speech itself, no matter the reason, is reprehensible and unconscionable. Free speech must be absolute and sacrosanct, or it is worthless.
Are you telling me you don't have a DVD player yet? You can get those things for less than the cost of a Wii game nowadays, never mind the Wii console.
Pygmalion would like to have a word with you.
The querystrings get passed to the CGI script, but that's done completely server-side: the bandwidth isn't wasted because the querystring never goes through the pipes. So you end up saving a little bit bandwidth-wise
In any case, this is a case of grossly premature optimization. Very, very few URLs even come close to the bandwidth of a favicon.ico file, which is itself considered a pittance. There are far more effective ways to cut down on bandwidth than these near-trivial aspects.
The thing is, if you give up trying to be unbiased, you get Fox News.
Only if you try to conceal your bias under cheap slogans like "fair and balanced." If media outlets were open about their bias, so that people could be aware of that bias and account for it themselves, it would make for a much more informed bias.
Ultimately, I think this is more where regulation ought to go. True neutrality is impossible, and so the public, which depends on the media for information, has a legitimate need-to-know concerning that media's bias.
Another way I've heard it rendered is 'period of work,' which again doesn't necessarily mean 24 hours. The argument I like to use, though, refers to a phrase that never appears in the Bible at all. The KJV -not my favorite translation by a long shot, but useful as a point of reference- would have rendered it as "And the evening and the morning were the seventh day."
Corresponding phrases appear for the first six days. Those days, in fact, are written in an almost mechanical style: there are clear beginnings, middles, and ends using very specific wordings. Yet the seventh day, despite being mentioned as starting, is never said to have ended, not in Genesis or anywhere else.
What does this mean? Well, if we're assuming a literal interpretation, then if the Bible doesn't say that the seventh day ended, then it must not have ended. It's still in progress, thousands of years after the Bible was written.
So at least one of the days -the seventh- has lasted for thousands of years: exactly how long can't really be measured until there's a definite endpoint, but if we use the young-earthers' own calculations then the lower bound is currently more than 6000 years, and it's growing. If the lock-step, mechanical manner of the way the previous days were written are any indication, then the first six days must be about the same length as the seventh: still an unknown length, but thousands of years at the absolute least. Not 24 hours.