MacIntels are horribly overpriced*. I mean I appreciate OSX and stuff, but every single Mac is overpriced by at least 20-30% compared to similar pile of MSRP PC hardware. More if you hunt for discounts and/or use white box systems as comparison. Mac Mini is the only system that is anywhere close to sane price considering the contents of the box, and it's bit too entry level for my use. Every other model so far is priced silly. I keep looking at those shiny things, but every time I take the price, and look up what I could buy for that on the Windows side, the result is not pretty for the Mac - even if I do price in some software to match the pile Macs come with.
20-30% pricecut across the line and I might belive that they can dent the Windows PC marketshare.
I mean MacBook Pros are 'competing' in price/features with Thinkpads, and those are one of the most expensive PC laptops. Yet MacBooks seem to be built to similar quality as low end crap laptops you can get considerably cheaper (Acer, HP etc massmarket low end crap pushers).
They either have to come down in price, or start putting out stuff that has the quality that the pricetag implies. This means dumping bottom-of-the-barrel taiwanese contract builders, and not skimping on parts costs at the expense of quality. Plus better warranty terms. Similarily priced Thinkpads come with 3 year warranty out of the box. Macs come with 90 day phone support and 1 year warranty. For a 2.5keuro+ laptop. Getting that 3 years is over 300 euros extra for AppleCare plan...
Shiny, average-quality manufacturing, overpriced. Nice OS and application bundle tho.
*I'm comparing prices in europe. If US prices are bit more sane, more power to you. Doesn't change my opinion.
None of the titles you list have been released yet.
By the time they are, I can choose between them, and PS3 & Wii launch games. We'll see then. Vapor, previews and other crap are worthless junk. Right now there are no compelling reasons to buy X360.
Correct. I play consoles to play games I can't get on PC, or which are more suitable for a console. I have PS2, and I have small but still noticeable collection of games for it - all something that isn't available for PC (or was made available MUCH later as a poor port), and/or is actually best played on a console. There just isn't stuff like MGS series, Ace Combat series, ICO or Shadow of the Colossus available for PC (I'm disregarding the crappy MGS2 port)
X360 seems to have lots of FPSs, which I consider mostly unplayable with a pad, and a huge lack of exclusive titles. I rather play PC-available titles with keyboard-mouse-wheel-gamepad selection than just a gamepad, at 1600x1200 on my 20" screen.
PGR3 is one of the 'hmm, I might buy that' I've seen so far. That's one title, not enough to fork out for the box. PS2 had more 'mmm want that' exclusives 2 weeks after launch, X360 is over six months old. And most comments pointing to good X360 stuff are pointing to upcoming titles nobody knows are any good. Yes, there's Oblivion, which runs much better on my PC. Yes, there's Prey that runs quite fine on my PC (and is way too short for it's price even on a PC, let alone X360 with it's more expensive games).
I'm hardware neutral as far as consoles go. I choose between X360, PS3 and Wii based on the orginality and quality of the titles.
Right now it's a tossup between Wii and PS3, because, frankly, X360 games selection is poor. Now things might change before I actually get to pick and choose between all three consoles, and right now Wii and PS3 both have exactly zero games avilable, but had MS had stronger lineup, I would have most likely already gone with the X360 had there been even 3-4 games worth the price. However, that quota of good exclusive and/or console-suitable games won't be filled before xmas shopping season, at which point I might as well wait and choose between all three based on PS3 and Wii launch lineups.
And I'm sure I'm not the only one doing so. MS had nice lead, so far MS has mostly squandered it. If late-year '2nd generation' X360 titles continue to be uninteresting, they can definitely take a beating in the console fight, regardless of the advantage of being first.
However, Intel will milk the mobo makers as long as 975X and P965 or whatever the new one was are the only chipsets validated for Core 2 Duo. Considering how late nVidia chipsets are, I expect personally to see high end boards go for 200-250e all the way until the new year, and that's the main reason why I personally can't recommend Core 2 Duo, unless your goal is to build the ultimate killer system ignoring the cost. You will be paying 50-100 euros premium for identically performing system.
Additional hidden cost is that many high end Core 2 Duo boards have EPS12V connectors - meaning they need more expensive server-type power supplies. Yes, you can find ones with normal 24+4pin setups, but the most feature rich ones have 8pin extra power connectors near the CPU.
So exactly how they plan on selling them, with no worthy software?
Or in other words, why should I - already having a top-end gaming PC - buy one? Which games does it offer that I can't play otherwise, and that are worth the ridiculously high prices (70e+ in some parts of europe)
Gears of War has some potential, but so far its a shiny graphics demo. Nothing launched exclusively so far has had any real meat to it. X360 is missing it's 'Halo' to sell it, unlike the original Xbox at launch, and most announced shiny thingys at E3 are multiplatform, with versions also for PC and/or PS3. As long as PS3 has some major exclusives (Metal Gear series and Gran Turismo series alone will sell fuckton of overpriced PS3s), and Xbox 360 has only shinyed-up ports and crap, it won't sell.
Consoles live and die by their _exclusive_ triple-A titles. Microsoft seems to have forgotten this one...
Sure it would, assuming you ran it as root - just like you run your Windows XP.
True, XP is a huge pain to use without admin rights due to braindead apps, but that problem is going to get fixed soon with Vista, as it will push non-admin account as default, and developers have to get their braindead apps fixed.
Okay. Found the reason. Stupid paperpushers fighting over the site of the test plant. For the past *FIVE YEARS*. Plus the fact that energy is too cheap.
I would imagine people who managed to spend five years delaying the project due to stupid turf wars would've already been shot and cleaned from the gene pool for wasting everyone's time and money.
I personally hope we have further major problems with oil supplies, raising the price enough so that big energy companies finally can get their spreadsheets to show profit in investing to fusion power. And once there's profit, there's a will to deepsix all the stupid paperpushing and actually build the damn thing(s). Yes, it might required scaling up the construction capabilities of the exotic stuff like superconductors, but so what?
The current plan 'yeah, we'll have first real plant producing electricity by 2040' just sounds so damn unambitious. *34 years*. People went from 0 to moon in less than 10... and that was in the sixties!
Whats so damn complex about building these things?
I mean, building your ole average fission plant takes maybe 3-4 years from zero to electricity production. ITER is under works, and supposedly 9 years away?
What kind of building project takes 9 years? If the tech is pretty well understood by now, and all that is needed is a scale-up, what's taking so long? How damn huge this thing has to be?
Not trying to troll, just trying to understand how it can take more than 9 years to build a (test) power plant. I can understand taking years to make it work perfectly and to conduct all kinds tests and development work, but the parent makes it sound like the actual 'put bricks together, pour some concrete, craft some metals' part is gonna take *9 years*!?
Now it tells you that "This add-on is managed by your Administrator", and the button is grayed out. I guess BillG and/or Microsoft is my 'Administrator' now, as I can't change it while being logged in as LocalAdmin.
MS is slowly but surely pissing off the clueful audience by taking away control. Just wait for the boos with Vista when you can't install unsigned kernel drivers, plus other 'security features' that ensure you can't just crack the thing in 2 seconds by replacing a key DLL with a modified one.... and here I thought being root/admin meant that you could modify and generally fuck up everything if you so chose. Now MS is telling you 'I'm sorry, we say you can't do that...'
In the days of DVI connectors, this product is DOA. It uses VGA connectors only. 3840x1024 outta analog VGA is going to look.. umm.. less than perfect.
Besides, with sli/crossfire board setups you can already get three screens with DVI - even with 1600x1200 displays, and couple of dual DVI 6600s are not that much more expensive than this thingy. The only thing this has going for is that it's external, so it works for laptops.
This is Matrox once again playing the 'stuff for 3-screen stock market gamblers'-market. Same as with parhelia - most common use for Parhelia in the real world was by stock traders who wanted their three screens full of graphs and stuff. They can't get Parhelia sold to laptops (Which are the New Toy of the stock gamblers), so they made an external triple head thingy, so you can bring your laptop to your desk, stick in this and turn on your three screens of crappy fuzzy picture and look like a l33t stock market specialist.
You are underestimating the MMO playerbase. Also many MMO players play multiple games. What's meaningful here is 'how much gaming dollars are MMOs pulling'.
My bet is on a serious chunk per month.
I mean I personally spend about 50$ a month on MMO subs fees, and that's more than 75% of my monthly 'games budget' I spend (so I buy very few games, spending my time with MMOs).
Let's take your 4 million MMO subscribers, and then note that many of them play multiple games and/or multiple accounts on single game. Let's assume they spend 30$ a month on MMOs on average (so average 2 accounts and/or 2 games played, at 14.95$ a month per account). 4 million subscribers, 30$ per person spent on MMOs, comes to 120 million USD per month going to MMO subscriptions.
How much were the monthly game sales again? Original article does not say, but it refers to 445M as monthly consoles sales. 120M is a serious bite out of that, in fact, umm, over 20% of total console sales + my estimation of MMO subscription money spent.
PC sales are not a huge bite of the market, so that 18% could be pretty much what goes to MMOs. Maybe there is a slight downward trend from other things (people waiting for worthwhile X360 purchases and/or PS3), but as long as this 'study' doesn't include subscription fees, it's worthless as a 'total game sales' indicator. And we get constant 'SKY IS FALLING!!111' spam from the clueless 'analysts'.
I also doubt it counts Xbox live fees and online purchases, which are nibbling away the 'console $$$ spent' pie.
As long as the 'Game Sales' keep on counting just the amount of game boxes sold in stores, and do not include ;
- MMO Subscription fees - Online game purchases via Steam, Direct2Drive etc digital downloads
They will get continuous slide well into future, and lots of 'OMG! SKY IS FALLING!!!oneone!!1111' articles. Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics, as always. 5 Million people paying 15$ a month to Blizzard (in addition to all the other MMOs collecting subscription fees) must show somewhere - that's 75 million dollars a month, WoW alone - and there are plenty of others out there.
Actual gaming dollars spent is not changing, however it's shifting towards online services & downloads. If you have stock in brick & mortar games retailer, you should dump it now. It's a deadend business destined to go only down.
(Grossly overpriced 'next gen' console games are not helping either. XBox 360 looks fine, but 70 euros (inc VAT) per game for 'quick action' style title that you enjoy at best a few weeks = no FCKING way. Never)
PS2, at launch, had a silly BASIC disc included with it, to get it classified as a 'computer', since you could, in theory, plug in an USB keyboard, and program it. I think I still have the disc somewhere...
So, you bring 10 friends and blow the wannabe pirate gatecamp to bits.
I Do agree that EVE sucks if you want to play your _multiplayer games_ alone. However, as a cooperative game, in big corp belonging to a 0.0 alliance, it just rocks. Sure, you need to have some social skills, and be willing to play with others towards common goals, but if you don't want that, why play multiplayer games at all?
- Everyone plays in a single huge server - There are no levels - You gain skill over time. Meaning you set a skill to train, and it trains - even when you are offline. Instead of 'grinding exp' it becomes 'optimize your skill train choices and train time'. Yes, it also means you won't be uber in two weeks if you madly whack the bunnies, but thankfully you can do lots of stuff in EVE just after couple of days of training (and learn the ropes from the get go). You, however, won't be flying a shiny dreadnought popping player built stations anytime soon:)
Now, getting money and/or materials for manufacturing can be considered as 'grinding' in EVE, but to be honest, it's not _that_ bad. After 6 months of playing, I need to 'grind' (well, obtain cash to fund my ship losses) maybe one evening per week. And if you feel like playing a little trading/manufacturing tycoon, after a while you can run a business that will fund your PvP losses with little issue - you just need some business skills (real life ones, including knowing how to identify a good business opportunity in the game) and little bit of initial investment.
So it doesn't look bad on Intel when it all blows up (the format fails, or it's cracked or whatever)
This way Intel can milk the profits out of the subsdiary, but they get the blame if everything goes boom.
And it will go boom. One way or the other. I'm currently betting on 'irrelevant piece of expensive technology nobody will use'. High res movies are just not that huge of a leap from DVD, and we'll have a new betamax in our hands.
I dunno.. 4600+ X2, X1900XT and 2GB ram can happily push out most of my games at 1600x1200 60-120FPS. I could live with 30-60FPS if I could use two 20" screens productively.
Besides, if the '3D viewport' part would be limited to one 1600x1200 screen, with mostly 2D UI parts on the second screen, it would not really tax the videocard any more than it does with a single screen.
But in any case - once games look 'good enough' with one screen, the logical way to justify faster 3D hardware would be to properly support two or three screens for more immersive gameworld view and/or more room for UI and additional information screens.
For now, I'd just settle if I could move stuff like maps, inventories, quest lists, friends lists etc off to the 2nd screen to minimize clutter on top of the 3D gameworld view.
No information of any established MMO dev/publisher being tied into this leads me to belive that this will crash and burn in the most spectacular way ever. All they mention are couple of 'names' and unknown startups. Those poor souls... they have no clue what they are getting themselves into.
Either the 'game' will suck horribly, or if it doesn't, their infrastructure will implode under the onslaught of gamers, they'll be overrun by exploiters and farmers. See: Blizzard, WoW launch. And Blizzard was a pro developer with years of experience with online games (just not MMOs).
Looks to me some big name hollywood guys noticed that Blizzard is taking in 300M$/year off MMOs, and that's big hollywood-grade wad of cash. So the hollywood guys are locking onto the 'money detected'-signal, and desperately trying to cash into the market with an unique spin.
Now the idea of the show about a team in a 'spaceship simulator' sounds intriguing, but I'd never let outsiders break everything by adding 'MMO universe' to the mix - at least not without *minimum* 5 year development schedule to get a working game, before adding the TV show bits to the mix.
Now lets assume for a minute that their nice pitch can somehow be made into reality... If they'd try the described system by tossing a 'simulator spaceship' into, for example, EVE Online, the 'TV show ship' would get podded to hell and back over and over again, and the 'crew' would end up sitting in a station trying to refit a new ship 99% of the time, with dozens of nolifers camping the station for the chance of getting to show their l33t ships and guns on TV. Not very exiting after the first couple of explosions. PvP-enabled game universes can be harsh, and the only real way to avoid repeated ganking is to look unimportant - which doesn't work if there's a "celebrity" in the game. And if they make sure nobody can kill anyone, the "celebrity" people will just get mobbed by a horde of players that will just lag everything until servers go 'boom'.
There *is* a reason why MMOs don't generally do 'live events' - as soon as word spreads something 'unusual' is going on, everyone online wants to get to see it and participate and/or grief. Just ask Lord British about his 'celebrity visit' to Ultima Online way back... (hint: he got killed by a player, and yes, servers almost croaked as everyone on the server tried to get to the hotspot)
Their profits tanked, because their 'biggest' christmas title, Godfather, was delayed. Apparently it was so buggy and incomplete that even EA could not hash together a shippable build in time for holidays, and now it's been pushed back to late spring.
One 'major' title is easily 20-30% of their bottom line in a quarter.
Now the reason why they aren't improving otherwise is because they treat their customers like shit, and are ran by clueless idiots that chase the quick buck over long-term sales and customer loyalty - bit like every other megacorp on the planet.
Supporting wide 'oddball' resolutions is easy. Many games do it 'accidentally'. However, gameworld viewport is 99% of the time fixed as 'full screen' (or two or three) - so the 3D view is stretched across the screens, and with even number of screens, center is at the split point of two displays.
Only games that I know of where you can change the viewport to the gameworld without changing the actual size of the game window are Anarchy Online and World of Warcraft (via UI MOD). I also think some Flight Simulators allow you to do it, but I don't really play those.
With viewport resize/move options, you can have full 3D screen on your main display, yet drag most of the 'other UI' to the 2nd display (which has just black background, or maybe some 2d graphic). MMOs would really benefit with proper dual display support where you could stick the inventory, map and all the other random windows to secondary display. Currently I'm really annoyed due to the fact that EVE doesn't support this - it would really benefit from it as you could put overview, scanner and map view to secondary monitor, really helping with the 'information overload' in PvP situations.
What we'd need is a videocard/monitor manufacturer 'alliance' sponsoring game devs to support proper dual monitor setups via specific extra options in the games - it would sell a lot of secondary screens and beefier videocards. It isn't *that* hard to do when you just make 'game desktop' to use whatever oddball resolution multimonitor system gives you, but allow separate definition of the '3D viewport' inside this 'desktop' of a game, and then make UI customizable/movable, and make sure all UI bits can be moved outside the 3D viewport, to the 'game desktop'. Add support to 'side/rear views' in secondary 3D viewports for extra brownie points so you can have 'rearview mirros' or outright 'surround game setup' if you have too much money, displays and too uber videocards.
When the first person enters, a new 'copy' of the instance is created. Then only those persons who are in the same pre-created 'raid group' can enter the same copy. Maximum amount of players in a single raid is 40.
So, maximum of 40 players can enter. (8 groups of 5 players each)
If someone else tries to enter without being in the same raid group, he creates another copy of the instance, and won't see the other raid. So in theory 10 separate raids of 40 players each could be tackling the same bosses.
Effectively, a system to ensure that the top end mobs are never 'camped' by same top players, blocking access by others.
And to ensure that same people won't just sit at the boss spot for hours and kill it over and over again, each high end raid instance has a 'reset timer' between several days and a week. Nothing respawns until the whole instance resets. Also if you re-enter the area before it has been reset, it's status is the same as when you left it - you will enter the same copy, with the stuff you killed earlier still dead. Then people in your raid group can enter it with you, letting you continue clearing the instance where you left off the previous day.
In sane, civilized countries, like Finland for example, this practice is blatantly illegal.
Over here you cannot advertise a discount, unless it is based on an actual retail price that the product has actually been sold for prior to the discount in the same store. Failure to follow the law carries steep fines.
Yes, there are ways to 'milk' this as well - say, sell some product for a few weeks for an inflated price, then drop it to a 'big' discount, but in general scams like the one you describe do not happen over here. Mostly discounts are 'real' discounts - companies clearing out excess stock to make room for new stuff. Or just outright advertising stuff cheap *without* silly '50% off' stickers. You can sell cheap to pull in people, you just can't claim it's 50% off some imaginary 'retail' price that has no basis in reality.
Re:I can't justify that sort of monthly expense
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MMOGs Branch Out
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually, you are gravely mistaken.
I'm not a 'ganker d00d'. I derive no enjoyment from ganking defenseless people. But the 'alternative' offered - nobody can hurt you, so you might as well be playing single player - is kinda pointless as well.
To me, enjoyment comes from playing MMOs that do not feel like a padded cells with everyone wielding a foam rubber bat.
My current favourite is EVE Online. The whole core of the game is PvP. Note, this is different from 'ganking' and 'griefing'. In EVE once you learn the ropes, in order to advance, you need to leave the kiddie pool of Empire Space, and either sink or swim.
In order to survive in the 'open' areas of 0.0 space, where everything goes and whoever has the biggest guns & largest fleets says if you can ever enter the areas, you need to have diplomatic skill, combat skill and solid gameplan. Pointless ganking will get you labelled as pirate, and every living soul in 0.0 will shoot you to small bits on sight - which is way too expensive in the long run, as every ship going 'boom' actually costs ingame currency, and the amounts are NOT tiny. Make yourself worthwhile to a big alliance, and soon you have people funding your PvP ships that you then use to defend the people that do the funding. Or you can go other way around - get to (ab)use the riches of the low security space with the protection of player 'guards' keeping the space secure, but in return you pay a share of your profits to fund said defense.
So, in EVE, if you want to kill someone, you *can* do so, but like in real life, murdering sprees rarely pay off. Sure, there is no 'permadeath' in EVE, but it's as close to it as you can have in an MMO. High end combat ship going BOOM with all the shiny stuff can mean several weeks of recouping your losses. When everyone is packing big guns, and every death truly hurts, people tend to use those big guns responsibly. Diplomacy plays a lot bigger role - large alliance just threatening to use those big guns (in large numbers, with large alliance bankroll to cover any losses) is a much bigger deal than the actual battles that follow. Unsurprisingly EVE's playerbase is quite mature compared to general maturity level of MMOs.
Large scale wars, diplomacy, manufacturing, mining... with hundreds of players in cooperative alliances watching each other's back to survive in the most 'hostile' environment there is in a MMO just makes any 'padded cell, go ahead, fight a bit, nobody will lose anything meaningful and if you die you'll be back ready to fight in 30 seconds' games kinda weak.
And Guild Wars is kinda weak, because the combat is ultimately pointless, and there is no game universe with any kind of immersiveness. A nice medieval quake in a padded cell with no real stakes, but not really to my taste.
Bit like, say, WoW battlegrounds. Or your average quick bash on a public CounterStrike server.
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At least not with the current pricing.
MacIntels are horribly overpriced*. I mean I appreciate OSX and stuff, but every single Mac is overpriced by at least 20-30% compared to similar pile of MSRP PC hardware. More if you hunt for discounts and/or use white box systems as comparison. Mac Mini is the only system that is anywhere close to sane price considering the contents of the box, and it's bit too entry level for my use. Every other model so far is priced silly. I keep looking at those shiny things, but every time I take the price, and look up what I could buy for that on the Windows side, the result is not pretty for the Mac - even if I do price in some software to match the pile Macs come with.
20-30% pricecut across the line and I might belive that they can dent the Windows PC marketshare.
I mean MacBook Pros are 'competing' in price/features with Thinkpads, and those are one of the most expensive PC laptops. Yet MacBooks seem to be built to similar quality as low end crap laptops you can get considerably cheaper (Acer, HP etc massmarket low end crap pushers).
They either have to come down in price, or start putting out stuff that has the quality that the pricetag implies. This means dumping bottom-of-the-barrel taiwanese contract builders, and not skimping on parts costs at the expense of quality. Plus better warranty terms. Similarily priced Thinkpads come with 3 year warranty out of the box. Macs come with 90 day phone support and 1 year warranty. For a 2.5keuro+ laptop. Getting that 3 years is over 300 euros extra for AppleCare plan...
Shiny, average-quality manufacturing, overpriced. Nice OS and application bundle tho.
*I'm comparing prices in europe. If US prices are bit more sane, more power to you. Doesn't change my opinion.
I only count games actually released.
None of the titles you list have been released yet.
By the time they are, I can choose between them, and PS3 & Wii launch games. We'll see then. Vapor, previews and other crap are worthless junk. Right now there are no compelling reasons to buy X360.
Correct. I play consoles to play games I can't get on PC, or which are more suitable for a console. I have PS2, and I have small but still noticeable collection of games for it - all something that isn't available for PC (or was made available MUCH later as a poor port), and/or is actually best played on a console. There just isn't stuff like MGS series, Ace Combat series, ICO or Shadow of the Colossus available for PC (I'm disregarding the crappy MGS2 port)
X360 seems to have lots of FPSs, which I consider mostly unplayable with a pad, and a huge lack of exclusive titles. I rather play PC-available titles with keyboard-mouse-wheel-gamepad selection than just a gamepad, at 1600x1200 on my 20" screen.
PGR3 is one of the 'hmm, I might buy that' I've seen so far. That's one title, not enough to fork out for the box. PS2 had more 'mmm want that' exclusives 2 weeks after launch, X360 is over six months old. And most comments pointing to good X360 stuff are pointing to upcoming titles nobody knows are any good. Yes, there's Oblivion, which runs much better on my PC. Yes, there's Prey that runs quite fine on my PC (and is way too short for it's price even on a PC, let alone X360 with it's more expensive games).
I'm hardware neutral as far as consoles go. I choose between X360, PS3 and Wii based on the orginality and quality of the titles.
Right now it's a tossup between Wii and PS3, because, frankly, X360 games selection is poor. Now things might change before I actually get to pick and choose between all three consoles, and right now Wii and PS3 both have exactly zero games avilable, but had MS had stronger lineup, I would have most likely already gone with the X360 had there been even 3-4 games worth the price. However, that quota of good exclusive and/or console-suitable games won't be filled before xmas shopping season, at which point I might as well wait and choose between all three based on PS3 and Wii launch lineups.
And I'm sure I'm not the only one doing so. MS had nice lead, so far MS has mostly squandered it. If late-year '2nd generation' X360 titles continue to be uninteresting, they can definitely take a beating in the console fight, regardless of the advantage of being first.
Maybe once VIA gets their budget chipset out.
However, Intel will milk the mobo makers as long as 975X and P965 or whatever the new one was are the only chipsets validated for Core 2 Duo. Considering how late nVidia chipsets are, I expect personally to see high end boards go for 200-250e all the way until the new year, and that's the main reason why I personally can't recommend Core 2 Duo, unless your goal is to build the ultimate killer system ignoring the cost. You will be paying 50-100 euros premium for identically performing system.
Additional hidden cost is that many high end Core 2 Duo boards have EPS12V connectors - meaning they need more expensive server-type power supplies. Yes, you can find ones with normal 24+4pin setups, but the most feature rich ones have 8pin extra power connectors near the CPU.
So exactly how they plan on selling them, with no worthy software?
Or in other words, why should I - already having a top-end gaming PC - buy one? Which games does it offer that I can't play otherwise, and that are worth the ridiculously high prices (70e+ in some parts of europe)
Gears of War has some potential, but so far its a shiny graphics demo. Nothing launched exclusively so far has had any real meat to it. X360 is missing it's 'Halo' to sell it, unlike the original Xbox at launch, and most announced shiny thingys at E3 are multiplatform, with versions also for PC and/or PS3. As long as PS3 has some major exclusives (Metal Gear series and Gran Turismo series alone will sell fuckton of overpriced PS3s), and Xbox 360 has only shinyed-up ports and crap, it won't sell.
Consoles live and die by their _exclusive_ triple-A titles. Microsoft seems to have forgotten this one...
Sure it would, assuming you ran it as root - just like you run your Windows XP.
True, XP is a huge pain to use without admin rights due to braindead apps, but that problem is going to get fixed soon with Vista, as it will push non-admin account as default, and developers have to get their braindead apps fixed.
So you want to pay for it? Even if you dont use a spying ISP?
Goverment rips all that money in the form of taxes... everyone pays.
If ISPs paid for this themselves, then only the customers of those ISPs would pay.
Okay. Found the reason. Stupid paperpushers fighting over the site of the test plant. For the past *FIVE YEARS*. Plus the fact that energy is too cheap.
I would imagine people who managed to spend five years delaying the project due to stupid turf wars would've already been shot and cleaned from the gene pool for wasting everyone's time and money.
I personally hope we have further major problems with oil supplies, raising the price enough so that big energy companies finally can get their spreadsheets to show profit in investing to fusion power. And once there's profit, there's a will to deepsix all the stupid paperpushing and actually build the damn thing(s). Yes, it might required scaling up the construction capabilities of the exotic stuff like superconductors, but so what?
The current plan 'yeah, we'll have first real plant producing electricity by 2040' just sounds so damn unambitious. *34 years*. People went from 0 to moon in less than 10... and that was in the sixties!
Whats so damn complex about building these things?
I mean, building your ole average fission plant takes maybe 3-4 years from zero to electricity production. ITER is under works, and supposedly 9 years away?
What kind of building project takes 9 years? If the tech is pretty well understood by now, and all that is needed is a scale-up, what's taking so long? How damn huge this thing has to be?
Not trying to troll, just trying to understand how it can take more than 9 years to build a (test) power plant. I can understand taking years to make it work perfectly and to conduct all kinds tests and development work, but the parent makes it sound like the actual 'put bricks together, pour some concrete, craft some metals' part is gonna take *9 years*!?
Plus the fact that EA released a lot of crappy (and buggy) shit last year.
They already fixed that ActiveX control disable.
... and here I thought being root/admin meant that you could modify and generally fuck up everything if you so chose. Now MS is telling you 'I'm sorry, we say you can't do that...'
Now it tells you that "This add-on is managed by your Administrator", and the button is grayed out. I guess BillG and/or Microsoft is my 'Administrator' now, as I can't change it while being logged in as LocalAdmin.
MS is slowly but surely pissing off the clueful audience by taking away control. Just wait for the boos with Vista when you can't install unsigned kernel drivers, plus other 'security features' that ensure you can't just crack the thing in 2 seconds by replacing a key DLL with a modified one.
In the days of DVI connectors, this product is DOA. It uses VGA connectors only. 3840x1024 outta analog VGA is going to look .. umm.. less than perfect.
Besides, with sli/crossfire board setups you can already get three screens with DVI - even with 1600x1200 displays, and couple of dual DVI 6600s are not that much more expensive than this thingy. The only thing this has going for is that it's external, so it works for laptops.
This is Matrox once again playing the 'stuff for 3-screen stock market gamblers'-market. Same as with parhelia - most common use for Parhelia in the real world was by stock traders who wanted their three screens full of graphs and stuff. They can't get Parhelia sold to laptops (Which are the New Toy of the stock gamblers), so they made an external triple head thingy, so you can bring your laptop to your desk, stick in this and turn on your three screens of crappy fuzzy picture and look like a l33t stock market specialist.
You are underestimating the MMO playerbase. Also many MMO players play multiple games. What's meaningful here is 'how much gaming dollars are MMOs pulling'.
My bet is on a serious chunk per month.
I mean I personally spend about 50$ a month on MMO subs fees, and that's more than 75% of my monthly 'games budget' I spend (so I buy very few games, spending my time with MMOs).
Let's take your 4 million MMO subscribers, and then note that many of them play multiple games and/or multiple accounts on single game. Let's assume they spend 30$ a month on MMOs on average (so average 2 accounts and/or 2 games played, at 14.95$ a month per account). 4 million subscribers, 30$ per person spent on MMOs, comes to 120 million USD per month going to MMO subscriptions.
How much were the monthly game sales again? Original article does not say, but it refers to 445M as monthly consoles sales. 120M is a serious bite out of that, in fact, umm, over 20% of total console sales + my estimation of MMO subscription money spent.
PC sales are not a huge bite of the market, so that 18% could be pretty much what goes to MMOs. Maybe there is a slight downward trend from other things (people waiting for worthwhile X360 purchases and/or PS3), but as long as this 'study' doesn't include subscription fees, it's worthless as a 'total game sales' indicator. And we get constant 'SKY IS FALLING!!111' spam from the clueless 'analysts'.
I also doubt it counts Xbox live fees and online purchases, which are nibbling away the 'console $$$ spent' pie.
As long as the 'Game Sales' keep on counting just the amount of game boxes sold in stores, and do not include ;
- MMO Subscription fees
- Online game purchases via Steam, Direct2Drive etc digital downloads
They will get continuous slide well into future, and lots of 'OMG! SKY IS FALLING!!!oneone!!1111' articles. Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics, as always. 5 Million people paying 15$ a month to Blizzard (in addition to all the other MMOs collecting subscription fees) must show somewhere - that's 75 million dollars a month, WoW alone - and there are plenty of others out there.
Actual gaming dollars spent is not changing, however it's shifting towards online services & downloads. If you have stock in brick & mortar games retailer, you should dump it now. It's a deadend business destined to go only down.
(Grossly overpriced 'next gen' console games are not helping either. XBox 360 looks fine, but 70 euros (inc VAT) per game for 'quick action' style title that you enjoy at best a few weeks = no FCKING way. Never)
That won't avoid VAT.
It might avoid some duties.
PS2, at launch, had a silly BASIC disc included with it, to get it classified as a 'computer', since you could, in theory, plug in an USB keyboard, and program it. I think I still have the disc somewhere...
So, you bring 10 friends and blow the wannabe pirate gatecamp to bits.
I Do agree that EVE sucks if you want to play your _multiplayer games_ alone. However, as a cooperative game, in big corp belonging to a 0.0 alliance, it just rocks. Sure, you need to have some social skills, and be willing to play with others towards common goals, but if you don't want that, why play multiplayer games at all?
Maybe you should play EVE online then?
:)
- Everyone plays in a single huge server
- There are no levels
- You gain skill over time. Meaning you set a skill to train, and it trains - even when you are offline. Instead of 'grinding exp' it becomes 'optimize your skill train choices and train time'. Yes, it also means you won't be uber in two weeks if you madly whack the bunnies, but thankfully you can do lots of stuff in EVE just after couple of days of training (and learn the ropes from the get go). You, however, won't be flying a shiny dreadnought popping player built stations anytime soon
Now, getting money and/or materials for manufacturing can be considered as 'grinding' in EVE, but to be honest, it's not _that_ bad. After 6 months of playing, I need to 'grind' (well, obtain cash to fund my ship losses) maybe one evening per week. And if you feel like playing a little trading/manufacturing tycoon, after a while you can run a business that will fund your PvP losses with little issue - you just need some business skills (real life ones, including knowing how to identify a good business opportunity in the game) and little bit of initial investment.
So it doesn't look bad on Intel when it all blows up (the format fails, or it's cracked or whatever)
This way Intel can milk the profits out of the subsdiary, but they get the blame if everything goes boom.
And it will go boom. One way or the other. I'm currently betting on 'irrelevant piece of expensive technology nobody will use'. High res movies are just not that huge of a leap from DVD, and we'll have a new betamax in our hands.
I dunno.. 4600+ X2, X1900XT and 2GB ram can happily push out most of my games at 1600x1200 60-120FPS. I could live with 30-60FPS if I could use two 20" screens productively.
Besides, if the '3D viewport' part would be limited to one 1600x1200 screen, with mostly 2D UI parts on the second screen, it would not really tax the videocard any more than it does with a single screen.
But in any case - once games look 'good enough' with one screen, the logical way to justify faster 3D hardware would be to properly support two or three screens for more immersive gameworld view and/or more room for UI and additional information screens.
For now, I'd just settle if I could move stuff like maps, inventories, quest lists, friends lists etc off to the 2nd screen to minimize clutter on top of the 3D gameworld view.
Making MMOs is Difficult. Very Difficult.
No information of any established MMO dev/publisher being tied into this leads me to belive that this will crash and burn in the most spectacular way ever. All they mention are couple of 'names' and unknown startups. Those poor souls... they have no clue what they are getting themselves into.
Either the 'game' will suck horribly, or if it doesn't, their infrastructure will implode under the onslaught of gamers, they'll be overrun by exploiters and farmers. See: Blizzard, WoW launch. And Blizzard was a pro developer with years of experience with online games (just not MMOs).
Looks to me some big name hollywood guys noticed that Blizzard is taking in 300M$/year off MMOs, and that's big hollywood-grade wad of cash. So the hollywood guys are locking onto the 'money detected'-signal, and desperately trying to cash into the market with an unique spin.
Now the idea of the show about a team in a 'spaceship simulator' sounds intriguing, but I'd never let outsiders break everything by adding 'MMO universe' to the mix - at least not without *minimum* 5 year development schedule to get a working game, before adding the TV show bits to the mix.
Now lets assume for a minute that their nice pitch can somehow be made into reality... If they'd try the described system by tossing a 'simulator spaceship' into, for example, EVE Online, the 'TV show ship' would get podded to hell and back over and over again, and the 'crew' would end up sitting in a station trying to refit a new ship 99% of the time, with dozens of nolifers camping the station for the chance of getting to show their l33t ships and guns on TV. Not very exiting after the first couple of explosions. PvP-enabled game universes can be harsh, and the only real way to avoid repeated ganking is to look unimportant - which doesn't work if there's a "celebrity" in the game. And if they make sure nobody can kill anyone, the "celebrity" people will just get mobbed by a horde of players that will just lag everything until servers go 'boom'.
There *is* a reason why MMOs don't generally do 'live events' - as soon as word spreads something 'unusual' is going on, everyone online wants to get to see it and participate and/or grief. Just ask Lord British about his 'celebrity visit' to Ultima Online way back... (hint: he got killed by a player, and yes, servers almost croaked as everyone on the server tried to get to the hotspot)
Just my two cynical eurocents...
Their profits tanked, because their 'biggest' christmas title, Godfather, was delayed. Apparently it was so buggy and incomplete that even EA could not hash together a shippable build in time for holidays, and now it's been pushed back to late spring.
One 'major' title is easily 20-30% of their bottom line in a quarter.
Now the reason why they aren't improving otherwise is because they treat their customers like shit, and are ran by clueless idiots that chase the quick buck over long-term sales and customer loyalty - bit like every other megacorp on the planet.
Supporting wide 'oddball' resolutions is easy. Many games do it 'accidentally'. However, gameworld viewport is 99% of the time fixed as 'full screen' (or two or three) - so the 3D view is stretched across the screens, and with even number of screens, center is at the split point of two displays.
Only games that I know of where you can change the viewport to the gameworld without changing the actual size of the game window are Anarchy Online and World of Warcraft (via UI MOD). I also think some Flight Simulators allow you to do it, but I don't really play those.
With viewport resize/move options, you can have full 3D screen on your main display, yet drag most of the 'other UI' to the 2nd display (which has just black background, or maybe some 2d graphic). MMOs would really benefit with proper dual display support where you could stick the inventory, map and all the other random windows to secondary display. Currently I'm really annoyed due to the fact that EVE doesn't support this - it would really benefit from it as you could put overview, scanner and map view to secondary monitor, really helping with the 'information overload' in PvP situations.
What we'd need is a videocard/monitor manufacturer 'alliance' sponsoring game devs to support proper dual monitor setups via specific extra options in the games - it would sell a lot of secondary screens and beefier videocards. It isn't *that* hard to do when you just make 'game desktop' to use whatever oddball resolution multimonitor system gives you, but allow separate definition of the '3D viewport' inside this 'desktop' of a game, and then make UI customizable/movable, and make sure all UI bits can be moved outside the 3D viewport, to the 'game desktop'. Add support to 'side/rear views' in secondary 3D viewports for extra brownie points so you can have 'rearview mirros' or outright 'surround game setup' if you have too much money, displays and too uber videocards.
When the first person enters, a new 'copy' of the instance is created. Then only those persons who are in the same pre-created 'raid group' can enter the same copy. Maximum amount of players in a single raid is 40.
So, maximum of 40 players can enter. (8 groups of 5 players each)
If someone else tries to enter without being in the same raid group, he creates another copy of the instance, and won't see the other raid. So in theory 10 separate raids of 40 players each could be tackling the same bosses.
Effectively, a system to ensure that the top end mobs are never 'camped' by same top players, blocking access by others.
And to ensure that same people won't just sit at the boss spot for hours and kill it over and over again, each high end raid instance has a 'reset timer' between several days and a week. Nothing respawns until the whole instance resets. Also if you re-enter the area before it has been reset, it's status is the same as when you left it - you will enter the same copy, with the stuff you killed earlier still dead. Then people in your raid group can enter it with you, letting you continue clearing the instance where you left off the previous day.
In sane, civilized countries, like Finland for example, this practice is blatantly illegal.
Over here you cannot advertise a discount, unless it is based on an actual retail price that the product has actually been sold for prior to the discount in the same store. Failure to follow the law carries steep fines.
Yes, there are ways to 'milk' this as well - say, sell some product for a few weeks for an inflated price, then drop it to a 'big' discount, but in general scams like the one you describe do not happen over here. Mostly discounts are 'real' discounts - companies clearing out excess stock to make room for new stuff. Or just outright advertising stuff cheap *without* silly '50% off' stickers. You can sell cheap to pull in people, you just can't claim it's 50% off some imaginary 'retail' price that has no basis in reality.
Actually, you are gravely mistaken.
I'm not a 'ganker d00d'. I derive no enjoyment from ganking defenseless people. But the 'alternative' offered - nobody can hurt you, so you might as well be playing single player - is kinda pointless as well.
To me, enjoyment comes from playing MMOs that do not feel like a padded cells with everyone wielding a foam rubber bat.
My current favourite is EVE Online. The whole core of the game is PvP. Note, this is different from 'ganking' and 'griefing'. In EVE once you learn the ropes, in order to advance, you need to leave the kiddie pool of Empire Space, and either sink or swim.
In order to survive in the 'open' areas of 0.0 space, where everything goes and whoever has the biggest guns & largest fleets says if you can ever enter the areas, you need to have diplomatic skill, combat skill and solid gameplan. Pointless ganking will get you labelled as pirate, and every living soul in 0.0 will shoot you to small bits on sight - which is way too expensive in the long run, as every ship going 'boom' actually costs ingame currency, and the amounts are NOT tiny. Make yourself worthwhile to a big alliance, and soon you have people funding your PvP ships that you then use to defend the people that do the funding. Or you can go other way around - get to (ab)use the riches of the low security space with the protection of player 'guards' keeping the space secure, but in return you pay a share of your profits to fund said defense.
So, in EVE, if you want to kill someone, you *can* do so, but like in real life, murdering sprees rarely pay off. Sure, there is no 'permadeath' in EVE, but it's as close to it as you can have in an MMO. High end combat ship going BOOM with all the shiny stuff can mean several weeks of recouping your losses. When everyone is packing big guns, and every death truly hurts, people tend to use those big guns responsibly. Diplomacy plays a lot bigger role - large alliance just threatening to use those big guns (in large numbers, with large alliance bankroll to cover any losses) is a much bigger deal than the actual battles that follow. Unsurprisingly EVE's playerbase is quite mature compared to general maturity level of MMOs.
Large scale wars, diplomacy, manufacturing, mining... with hundreds of players in cooperative alliances watching each other's back to survive in the most 'hostile' environment there is in a MMO just makes any 'padded cell, go ahead, fight a bit, nobody will lose anything meaningful and if you die you'll be back ready to fight in 30 seconds' games kinda weak.
And Guild Wars is kinda weak, because the combat is ultimately pointless, and there is no game universe with any kind of immersiveness. A nice medieval quake in a padded cell with no real stakes, but not really to my taste.
Bit like, say, WoW battlegrounds. Or your average quick bash on a public CounterStrike server.