I still don't understand how they can honestly get upset.
They (the game companies) don't. Like you said, they made their money, and they they don't make these games anymore. The music labels were mad since they still make old albums and didn't want these used CD's to dip into their sales. Plus there was concern that people would buy a CD, copy it (ala cassette) and then sell it back as a used CD. There's not much equivalence with games - you'd be better off just renting the games.
I don't see car dealers going after used car dealers.
That's an entirely different market. Besides, most of the time the car dealer is also the used car dealer. Especially nowadays with the "certified preowned" notion.
does the publisher ever see any money from used game sales?
Nope. This is why, for more recent games, game stores love used games - they keep everything above the price they paid to the person who sold them the used game. This is also why, when music stores started to carry used CD's, they got all kinds of hell from the RIAA.
I guess I was really alluding to the fact that most people like having lots of old carts, the systems for nostalgia, and the fact that you never have to worry about the quality of the emulator if you have the "real thing"
Plus, I never have to blow on a ROM to get it to work.
Well the Apple Music Store has at least some controls in place to keep people from turning right around and sharing the songs. Short of developing a SecuROM solution (hmmm, where have I heard that?) they wouldn't be interested.
Besides let's be honest here - Nintendo takes some old SNES game and places it on the GBA and sells a truckload. Why would they give that away for cheap? Plus remember that Nintendo didn't make all the NES games - hundreds of publishers did. They can't vouch for them all, and Nintendo's found a much more lucrative venue for their old products.
Right, well this is a different issue than, say, MP3's in my opinion. If Nintendo were still coming out with NES games and they were pirated almost instantly, then I can see why there would be bigger isses with ROMs.
Back when feasible emulation first started out Nintendo and others put the smack down on ROM web sites - especially sites by "big time" operations like GameSpy's ClassicGaming.com. They came down on emulators as illegal, but they've amended that stance. I think once the initial emulation hype died down the only people still interested in emulation were the ones who could go find the ROMs anyway. If Nintendo were the RIAA they would be hunting down and destroying computers and P2P networks and suing the pants off of those who download Donkey Kong. They're not. They can't condone it - so places like Mame.dk get knocked out. But they realize it's counterintuitive to try and eradicate it, so they let the people who would go download an old copy of Zelda 2 do what they want. And I think most true old school gamers would much rather pay $5 to the small time video game shop for a cart than play an emulator any day.
Ironically this bit of piracy I alluded to earlier still happens - whenever a new GBA game comes out the ROM image is all over the Internet almost automatically. However, the number of people who would play the game on their PC in lieu of on a real GBA is small - witness the number of GBA's sold, hell, GBA SP's sold, and games sold in the last three years. And notice who Nintendo goes after. Not the people ripping the games or making the emulators (past tactics of theirs) but rather the people who make and/or sell the cart linkers. It's not a problem until or unless the ROMs can be played on an actual GBx/GBA.
That's an interesting point, I think. The MPAA is going batshit over movie piracy (cameras in theaters) and DVD piracy (rip to DivX), but I don't know of anyone who would rather watch a pirated movie or download a DivX for their PC instead of buying a DVD and watching it on their TV. I consider myself someone who fell out of caring about music, but I still like to go to the movies. Oh sure, I know people who would rather get a DVD than go to the movies, but I don't think the MPAA has anything to worry about. I know people who will download a DivX and then buy the DVD, or buy the DVD when their downloaded movie goes to DVD
This is why the RIAA is so fucked - people can really see themselves doing without them.
Right, so let's get to the root of this, shall we?
The game Postal was named such so as to be like the phrase "going postal", which generically refers to getting angry to the point of snapping, sometimes resulting in violence.
The term stemmed from a rash of violent incidents in which postal workers came into their office (their post office) and would shoot up the place - sometimes due to inane stress levels and buracracy, other times because of being fired.
Why this happened mostly in post offices is anyone's guess, but the aforementioned buracracy, the pre-email volumes of mail causing stress, and the fact that since it was a government institution, striking was illegal.
Ergo, the game Postal took its name from a slang term, which took its name from the office where workplace violence was more or less common, and the reasons stemmed from the USPS themselves.
In short, it's the USPS' fault that the game got named that way. This is no different than Google trying to sue for the use of the slang term "google", except that Google's repsonse time is quicker. Oh, and no one gets killed when you go google.
The same place that gave use Turok sequel after Turok sequel, the crap that was BMX XXX and apparently isn't above suggesting that tombstones are fodder for advertising and that speeding tickets are fine so long as they're on the way to buy Burnout 2 is maybe leaving the GameCube. Big whoop. Nintendo's better off without their about-to-go-out-of-business ass.
On a more important note, anyone notice how it's always places like 3DO that make statements like this? Everyone focuses on one message "see! the GameCube sucks!" instead of the real message "we're reducing our platforms by one to see if we can stay in business".
Actually I know you're joking, but there's a company called Late for the Sky and they do Monopoly clones. Literally. For example, I went to Texas A&M and we're the Aggies, so they have Aggieopoly. They essentially went around town and looked at restaraunts and buildings and such and plugged them into Monopoly, boxed it and sold it. They do this for all kinds of colleges and cities. So, since this is a pretty blatant ripoff (IMO) of Monopoly, how do they get away with it, exactly? It's not like the "real" Monopoly isn't franchised to death at this point or that P&B aren't the suing kind.
Actually I was being serious. Some of these spammers are soccer moms - as soon as it stops paying off they'll quit. And reading code and learning "perl" is out of the question.
Where was the process that ensured the technology being used would be cross platform?
I'm not a developer or a publisher, but it seems to me that, except for products for consoles, cross-platform isn't that important to the people in the industry (bold for emphasis, not shouting). Neverwinter Nights took a long time to complete - it was even announced for BeOS, an OS long dead by the ship date. Along the way tons of decisions had to be made, and I'm sure Bink or InstallSheild didn't make any efforts to point out their little licensing snags. And why didn't Bioware notice? It might have had to do with their legal tussles with changing publishers. Plus ultimately they delivered for the biggest customers.
So right now it's "Windows, then maybe Linux and Mac". Until this changes it will either be a situation where the Linux client is announced but never promised (and doesn't ever get put in the box), or it's kept secret to keep people from getting pissed off.
Ergo, when a publisher sees 10,000 angry penguins headed their way, their first instinct will be to pull the plug. Constructive criticism is fine, but wanting Bioware's head on a stick for taking too long to deliver on their promise isn't going to advance the cause.
On the other hand the fact that they promoised might mean something. If they had cancelled the Linux port then they maybe could have gotten sued by a class-action lawsuit of people who bought the game in anticipation of Linux support, Maybe that was the plan all along - while Atari is hounding them to forget Linux and move on, Bioware points to the penguins with lawyers and says "no, we have to finish this first..."
Right, so instead of delaying the entire game for a year so they could deliver it to the other 10% of the gaming public they did that horrible thing people do and release it to the other 90% of the gaming public.
And what do they get in return? Well if this thread is to be believed, nothing but gripes and complaints. No wonder they don't want to break their nuts getting a Linux port out the door - they'll get headaches either way.
And the toolset hasn't been ported to Linux, mostly because Borland supposedly didn't come through with a compiler. And the Linux Client doesn't have movies becaue Bink's a little licensing bitch. And there's not an installer since they signed a bad contract with InstallSheild, who doesn't have a Linux version. Get over it. As Linux users you guys are supposed to be the "rebels" of the computer world - don't rebel and whine at the same time.
FYI, hit up the Bioware forums, there's a linky in there to get the toolset running in Linux using a hacked WINE. It's got some glitches but they're minor from what I've been told.
Also, get it right - Bioware didn't ship this game a year ago, Atari (then Infogrames) did. They had just spent a good load of cash getting Bioware away from Interplay and Bioware was in no position to tell them to sit on it a year.
Why would you need to buy another copy? The game assets are here (1.13GB). All you need is a CD Key and some FileShack patience (which would be cheaper than buying the game again).
Would AOL...fight for your rights just as ardently?
If I'm following the story right, these five users weren't random people who had downloaded an Eminem track or something, these were big time sharers/offenders. Ergo, why would a serious music pirate use AOL? Even "AOL For Broadband"?
Well I for one never cared for the American version of SMB2 so I avoided that one (SMA1) like the plague. SMB was released as SMBDX for the GBC, so that one's covered. I'm kinda glad they're releasing them separately.
Marvel is losing no money from this. No one is going to avoid the Spiderman movie because they have a spiderman skin in The Sims.
Maybe not in The Sims, but a game like Freedom Force is another matter - it's a superhero game. Marvel licenses their properties out to other people to make superhero games, like the two Spiderman comic book games, the Spider-Man movie game, the upcoming Spider-Man 2 movie game, and of course the multiplatform beast which is The Hulk.
Plus Marvel may have to work harder since these properties are so old - it might be easier to argue in a court that Spiderman is in the public domain since it's been around so long, something not true of Buffy.
Fairly recently I decided to change jobs. I had been working as a COBOL/Mainframe programmer for two years at the college I graduated from, and decided I wanted a job programming more modern technologies in Dallas.
I ran up against a few problems. For starters, years of programming experience, but in the wrong area. For that matter, not even enough years of those - I had been out of college two years so I had two years of "real world" experience, so even people with three or four years had me beat - plus theirs were in more recent fields. Not to mention the tons of dot-commers I was up against and trying to make my resume sound good, but not sound like one of those know-nothings that throw lots of acronyms out there.
And yet I didn't want to be like a coworker on my team - he was over thirty years older than me and desparately looking for a new job. But he knew the one thing - COBOL/Mainframes - and didn't think he needed to learn anything new. He was like the guy with a hammer who never saw a problem that wasn't a nail. For that matter he had even tried to get a job at Home Depot closer to where he lived (he had a 1.5 hour one-way commute since he figured he would have a new job where he lived soon) but places like Home Depot want to hire the 16-year-old they can strap a belt to and work 55 hours a week, or the guy in his 50's with decades of plumbing experience.
So I was in this interesting spot where I had the advantage of being young in a field which likes young people, but being almost too young. What was basically going to have to happen was that someone takes a shot with me.
And that happened. In the course of six months I made it here, and now I realize I have to work my ass off to keep up.
Ageism works both ways. The difference is that when it works against your youth you'll survive.
WinZip happens to be at the opposite end, having the worst
Even at the "maximum" setting? I haven't done comparisons myself. But still, I notice that with this day and age of Broadband, most are content to simply use ZIP as a simple archiving tool and a workaround for virus catchers. Anyone psycho about maximum compression uses RAR or ACE.
The problem lies with PKWare not giving information to WinZip, thus making WinZip to go it alone
Well then there's probably not going to be much of a problem, given that almost no one uses PKZip anymore. I'm young here but IIRC, everyone in the world used pkzip/pkunzip in the good old DOS days, but then when Windows started to rise, people started looking for a graphical frontend to it, and WinZip pretty much took the lead. I don't recall if WinZip was just a frontend in those days but before long it had integrated ZIP support.
Also, memory serves that Philip W. Katz, the late founder of PKWare, worked with IDC to make the ZIP file format public domain, both because it wasn't entirely original to either organization, and also because it would never take off were it not. So here then we have PKWare, in the wake of the death of Katz, trying to "pull a Microsoft" and make their version incompatible with others in the hopes that more people will use their version. For that matter, I think PKWare's main claim to fame for years now has been that they were "the first".
However this has the potential to backfire. PKWare may be trying to "pull a Microsoft" but they are not Microsoft and so now they're in the position where their product now creates the incompatible file. A file made with PKZip may not work with others, a file made with WinZip almost definitely will.
Well I think Dell doesn't give a Linux option since Joe User (which is Dell's average client) is going to have nothing but complaints that his new Dell PC can't run what everyone else's does - why should it matter that one choice saving him $100 should screw him up so badly?
But Dell does do Linux servers, so Microsoft doesn't have all their ghoulies.
Corel needed money badly. Why? Because they were financially screwed. Why were they financially screwed? Well partially because of Microsoft's stranglehold on various markets, and also because Corel hasn't been the most adept company over the years. Corel Linux was dead before MS gave them money, but yeah it makes sense that a company MS owns part of sheds its Linux product. But then again, MS floated Apple a big loan, and you don't see Macintoshes running Windows.
Any of the pay for a copy of windows per machine you ship deal they have with PC manufacturers.
Your post makes this sound current, but they had to cut this out a while back. I know recently some allegations have said that this is still the case but it isn't (you think places like Dell would tolerate it?)
Their dealings with Corel re: linux.
Corel bonered Linux themselves, along with most products they've ever done with the exception of Draw. They also screwed the pooch over a Java WordPerfect without Microsoft's help.
The entire sordid mess with stac over drive compression.
I remember hearing that Stac sued Microsoft since "DoubleSpace" sounded too much like their product, so they changed it to "DriveSpace". This got Stac purchased by Microsoft, which given what I know of the world now, may have been the goal all along.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I was really alluding to the fact that most people like having lots of old carts, the systems for nostalgia, and the fact that you never have to worry about the quality of the emulator if you have the "real thing"
Depends on what kinds of games you're into.Besides let's be honest here - Nintendo takes some old SNES game and places it on the GBA and sells a truckload. Why would they give that away for cheap? Plus remember that Nintendo didn't make all the NES games - hundreds of publishers did. They can't vouch for them all, and Nintendo's found a much more lucrative venue for their old products.
Back when feasible emulation first started out Nintendo and others put the smack down on ROM web sites - especially sites by "big time" operations like GameSpy's ClassicGaming.com. They came down on emulators as illegal, but they've amended that stance. I think once the initial emulation hype died down the only people still interested in emulation were the ones who could go find the ROMs anyway. If Nintendo were the RIAA they would be hunting down and destroying computers and P2P networks and suing the pants off of those who download Donkey Kong. They're not. They can't condone it - so places like Mame.dk get knocked out. But they realize it's counterintuitive to try and eradicate it, so they let the people who would go download an old copy of Zelda 2 do what they want. And I think most true old school gamers would much rather pay $5 to the small time video game shop for a cart than play an emulator any day.
Ironically this bit of piracy I alluded to earlier still happens - whenever a new GBA game comes out the ROM image is all over the Internet almost automatically. However, the number of people who would play the game on their PC in lieu of on a real GBA is small - witness the number of GBA's sold, hell, GBA SP's sold, and games sold in the last three years. And notice who Nintendo goes after. Not the people ripping the games or making the emulators (past tactics of theirs) but rather the people who make and/or sell the cart linkers. It's not a problem until or unless the ROMs can be played on an actual GBx/GBA.
Oh wait that's right - it goes down all the time, too. Not even eating the same dogfood as Slashdot can save it.
And what evidence is there that it's running on Access?
Fact is, this is bigger than Slashdot - everyone in the country is hitting this thing.
Yeah was I the only one who, when they read the rules for Quidditch, immediately thought of Calvinball?
This is why the RIAA is so fucked - people can really see themselves doing without them.
The game Postal was named such so as to be like the phrase "going postal", which generically refers to getting angry to the point of snapping, sometimes resulting in violence.
The term stemmed from a rash of violent incidents in which postal workers came into their office (their post office) and would shoot up the place - sometimes due to inane stress levels and buracracy, other times because of being fired.
Why this happened mostly in post offices is anyone's guess, but the aforementioned buracracy, the pre-email volumes of mail causing stress, and the fact that since it was a government institution, striking was illegal.
Ergo, the game Postal took its name from a slang term, which took its name from the office where workplace violence was more or less common, and the reasons stemmed from the USPS themselves.
In short, it's the USPS' fault that the game got named that way. This is no different than Google trying to sue for the use of the slang term "google", except that Google's repsonse time is quicker. Oh, and no one gets killed when you go google.
On a more important note, anyone notice how it's always places like 3DO that make statements like this? Everyone focuses on one message "see! the GameCube sucks!" instead of the real message "we're reducing our platforms by one to see if we can stay in business".
Actually I know you're joking, but there's a company called Late for the Sky and they do Monopoly clones. Literally. For example, I went to Texas A&M and we're the Aggies, so they have Aggieopoly. They essentially went around town and looked at restaraunts and buildings and such and plugged them into Monopoly, boxed it and sold it. They do this for all kinds of colleges and cities. So, since this is a pretty blatant ripoff (IMO) of Monopoly, how do they get away with it, exactly? It's not like the "real" Monopoly isn't franchised to death at this point or that P&B aren't the suing kind.
So right now it's "Windows, then maybe Linux and Mac". Until this changes it will either be a situation where the Linux client is announced but never promised (and doesn't ever get put in the box), or it's kept secret to keep people from getting pissed off.
Ergo, when a publisher sees 10,000 angry penguins headed their way, their first instinct will be to pull the plug. Constructive criticism is fine, but wanting Bioware's head on a stick for taking too long to deliver on their promise isn't going to advance the cause.
On the other hand the fact that they promoised might mean something. If they had cancelled the Linux port then they maybe could have gotten sued by a class-action lawsuit of people who bought the game in anticipation of Linux support, Maybe that was the plan all along - while Atari is hounding them to forget Linux and move on, Bioware points to the penguins with lawyers and says "no, we have to finish this first..."
And what do they get in return? Well if this thread is to be believed, nothing but gripes and complaints. No wonder they don't want to break their nuts getting a Linux port out the door - they'll get headaches either way.
And the toolset hasn't been ported to Linux, mostly because Borland supposedly didn't come through with a compiler. And the Linux Client doesn't have movies becaue Bink's a little licensing bitch. And there's not an installer since they signed a bad contract with InstallSheild, who doesn't have a Linux version. Get over it. As Linux users you guys are supposed to be the "rebels" of the computer world - don't rebel and whine at the same time.
FYI, hit up the Bioware forums, there's a linky in there to get the toolset running in Linux using a hacked WINE. It's got some glitches but they're minor from what I've been told.
Also, get it right - Bioware didn't ship this game a year ago, Atari (then Infogrames) did. They had just spent a good load of cash getting Bioware away from Interplay and Bioware was in no position to tell them to sit on it a year.
Why would you need to buy another copy? The game assets are here (1.13GB). All you need is a CD Key and some FileShack patience (which would be cheaper than buying the game again).
Well I for one never cared for the American version of SMB2 so I avoided that one (SMA1) like the plague. SMB was released as SMBDX for the GBC, so that one's covered. I'm kinda glad they're releasing them separately.
Plus Marvel may have to work harder since these properties are so old - it might be easier to argue in a court that Spiderman is in the public domain since it's been around so long, something not true of Buffy.
And that, by the way, is the first time my cat has ever stepped on my keyboard and successfully posted to Slashdot.
I ran up against a few problems. For starters, years of programming experience, but in the wrong area. For that matter, not even enough years of those - I had been out of college two years so I had two years of "real world" experience, so even people with three or four years had me beat - plus theirs were in more recent fields. Not to mention the tons of dot-commers I was up against and trying to make my resume sound good, but not sound like one of those know-nothings that throw lots of acronyms out there.
And yet I didn't want to be like a coworker on my team - he was over thirty years older than me and desparately looking for a new job. But he knew the one thing - COBOL/Mainframes - and didn't think he needed to learn anything new. He was like the guy with a hammer who never saw a problem that wasn't a nail. For that matter he had even tried to get a job at Home Depot closer to where he lived (he had a 1.5 hour one-way commute since he figured he would have a new job where he lived soon) but places like Home Depot want to hire the 16-year-old they can strap a belt to and work 55 hours a week, or the guy in his 50's with decades of plumbing experience.
So I was in this interesting spot where I had the advantage of being young in a field which likes young people, but being almost too young. What was basically going to have to happen was that someone takes a shot with me.
And that happened. In the course of six months I made it here, and now I realize I have to work my ass off to keep up.
Ageism works both ways. The difference is that when it works against your youth you'll survive.
Also, memory serves that Philip W. Katz, the late founder of PKWare, worked with IDC to make the ZIP file format public domain, both because it wasn't entirely original to either organization, and also because it would never take off were it not. So here then we have PKWare, in the wake of the death of Katz, trying to "pull a Microsoft" and make their version incompatible with others in the hopes that more people will use their version. For that matter, I think PKWare's main claim to fame for years now has been that they were "the first".
However this has the potential to backfire. PKWare may be trying to "pull a Microsoft" but they are not Microsoft and so now they're in the position where their product now creates the incompatible file. A file made with PKZip may not work with others, a file made with WinZip almost definitely will.
But Dell does do Linux servers, so Microsoft doesn't have all their ghoulies.
Corel needed money badly. Why? Because they were financially screwed. Why were they financially screwed? Well partially because of Microsoft's stranglehold on various markets, and also because Corel hasn't been the most adept company over the years. Corel Linux was dead before MS gave them money, but yeah it makes sense that a company MS owns part of sheds its Linux product. But then again, MS floated Apple a big loan, and you don't see Macintoshes running Windows.
I had forgotten all those Stac details though.