The positive thing about the button mashers is that they're growing... and they don't stop spending money... what will get those gamers to stop spending money?
As a gamer who has spent a ton of money on console games over the years, I think growing up is going to get them to stop spending money. I've been putting more and more money into games for my iPhone than I have for games on my PS3, XBox or Wii, since I don't have as much time at home to play games anymore. On top of that, the AAA titles don't even interest me as much. I've been keeping up with all the titles coming out, but I just can't justify spending $60 anymore on something like Arkham Asylum, which has been getting great reviews but I know I'll only be able to put a few hours into. This is the same story I hear from many of my co-workers. The big 3 console companies aren't making games for their aging audience. Games are getting more expensive and take longer to finish and require more of an investment. I want the exact opposite - shorter games that are less expensive. Every time I read a review that boasts how a game takes 60 - 120 hours to complete, that's a game that's immediately not getting my money. In order to get what I want, I have to go to the iPhone or the PSN Home or XBL Marketplace.
The biggest problem most billionaires have is figuring out how to make more billions. There is nothing really stopping a person who has a billion dollars, even if those assets are primarily caught up in stocks and real estate to just sell off everything he can and live off the 500 million he could get liquid. In a billionaire's mind that's a bad investment as he's losing half his fortune (which is still more than an average person will ever make in a lifetime)! This is a problem I'd love to have in comparison to the ones that poor people have, namely how can I pay my rent this month and how much money can I save by spending 39 cents on generic beans as opposed to the 69 cent name brand ones that have less sodium and taste better. Even a rich man's prison sentence - such as the case in Bernie Maddoff - is a better fate than many poor people's regular lives. Sure, you can redefine happiness however you see fit, but quality of life can be estimated objectively. I'd love for you to find a single millionaire/billionaire who would trade it all for the problems of a poor - middle class person.
you don't need a billion dollars to be happy, but if he loses his job, he still could continue doing whatever he wants to do for the rest of his life, and his children (if he has any) don't have to work a single day of their lives. You might be happy, but you're happiness hangs on the state of the company you work for. If they start downsizing, or go completely bust, you could say goodbye to your 35 hour/week job that's 5 minutes away from home. I don't know about you, but my happiness being beholden to a third party I have no control over adds a certain level of stress which eats away at that happiness. A billion dollars to relieve that stress would be nice.
It was an mp3 player. Now it's also a video player, radio, recording device, and video camera. Have you stopped to wonder what is wrong with adding functionality to this or any device? It's still as small as ever, the user interface hasn't been bogged down and bloated, and now it's got another use if you're jogging and feel the need to record a reminder or something. Better have it and not need it than need it and not have it.
Thanks for finding the cloud in-between the silver lining. I'm sure you also had a negative response stored away if Twitter did the exact opposite and claimed ownership of every tweet their users make.
Both children need to learn their multiplication tables.
Every single person who has went to a public school has learned their multiplication tables. I have yet to meet a single person my age who can still recite them. Usually, most people just shrug it off as "Oh, I'm bad with math" and go on with their lives. Learning happens when a person uses the information consistently and is interested in the information in the first place. A kid who isn't taught their multiplication tables but is taught a love and appreciation of math and science will find the multiplication tables and memorize the crap out of them on their own, without rote memorization just to pass a quiz.
I'd much much much rather have a billboard in the background than a loading screen with a full screen advertisement. It's the difference between a banner ad at the top of a website or one of those really annoying full-page ads that you have to click to skip that are now on every major site.
I predict at this new price point, sales will skyrocket once MS hits the kill switch on all the remaining XBox360s. With a 54% failure rate, people will just figure it's business as usual from owning a 360 and 96% of those people will go out and purchase a new one.
Sorry, but everyone doesn't carry quarters. I, for instance, am one of those crazy people who sometimes doesn't carry any cash at all, let alone a dozen quarters rattling around in my pocket! Weird, huh? Well, I assure you, I am not alone, and parking machines that take credit cards are a godsend.
The reason eBay's system works is that both parties stand to benefit from the transaction. A buyer wants the product and a seller wants to get rid of it to a paying customer. If the transaction goes smoothly on both ends, both parties get a positive rating. Gaming is different. Everyone wants to win, but even moreso than that everyone HATES losing. If you're really good at any online game, you're automatically labeled a cheater even if you've spent hundreds of hours mastering the craft and the other person is still trying to figure out the controls. Winners can judge their opponents pretty well, but losers will think the winner is the biggest asshole on the internet. eBay's system definitely wouldn't work in this environment. In order for it to actually work, you'd need a referee, but that would require way too many resources to monitor every game.
Seeing as how "radio" also denotes an ancient run-down technology, the combination "Radio Shack" seemed like something the professor would build on Gilligan's Island. Getting rid of the "Radio" is probably a good move.
Yeah, when Chrysler decides to make their cars useless to people who drive on gravel roads, then people who drive on gravel roads will not buy Chrysler. Doesn't take a genius to figure that out. There are vehicles, though, that aren't made to drive on gravel or dirt roads - such as smart cars or motorcycles and people still buy them in droves because they're aware of the limitations and could accept that. Guess what, if Chrysler tomorrow released a car that only drove on paved roads according to the EULA and they sold it for a fraction of the price as their gravel driving roads, there will be a ton of people who will purchase it because they know they don't drive on gravel. As for software, who cares if I don't own it? Software is useful for me for a very short time. I have no expectation that I will be using any of the software I have currently installed in 10 years time, and most of it won't be applicable in 2 years time, so why do I need to know that I own it indefinitely? It's useful to me now, so I'll pay the amount of worth.
When I buy something, I want it to be a useful product for it's purposes. I don't care if I have complete and utter ownership of everything about it, and I don't know why that would factor into anybody's buying decisions. I do professional work on a mac system, and I'm a number of times more efficient in MacOS than I am in Windows and in an even greater amount Linux. As long as Apple continues making a useful product, people will continue to buy it. By shutting Google Voice out, the product is a bit less useful but that doesn't make it useless, as even without Google Voice I continue to use my iPhone and am extremely happy with it. Calling people "mindless masses" because they don't follow your buying habits is ridiculously arrogant.
Making a great brand can net you millions of dollars, so once such a brand has been created the company has to do everything in their power to protect it. This fake Professor Layton account can be just innocuous fun but it's the marketing form of vigilante justice. If the twitter account gets ridiculously popular and starts getting linked as an official Nintendo account, then the owner of the account can essentially hold the brand hostage and turn against Nintendo at will. This can cost Nintendo big money, so they (or any company in such a situation) has to either distance themselves from it and make it perfectly clear to everyone that it's not Nintendo affiliated, or hire them so they are Nintendo affiliated and now Nintendo retains full control over the branding, or just sue and get rid of the account altogether.
I say put them in front of a blinking cursor, the apt ones will just get it.
Yeah, I take the same view about life in general. I put my kids in the jungle and let them fend for themselves. If my forefathers could survive there, my kids should be able to do the same. Although so far, none of them have come back to me, which is strange because I wrote my address down on a pair of dog tags around their neck.
The AAAS publishes the Science journal which has a distinctly liberal bias.
Is it liberal because the members are liberal or are the members liberal because the society has a liberal agenda? What is an "unbiased sample" in this case? If most scientists are liberal, are we going to have to find an equal subset of conservative and liberal scientists and then ask them what their association is just so it starts to match up with the rest of America?
You can't really compare the graphics between Pokemon and Crysis because the purpose of their graphics are completely different. Games that are trying to get as close to realistic as possible are doing so because there is more immersion than in a top-down RPG like Pokemon. Not immersion in the sense that "I could play this game for hours" but immersion in the "I'm actually there" variety. Pokemon is trying to be more cute and iconic as a way of making the characters more lovable. Pokemon with realistic graphics would be a completely different game for a different purpose. There's nothing wrong with either of them and both types can be beautiful, as you said.
When picking an art design, you have to know the audience and the type of feelings you want to evoke. Also, more often than not, your design is dictated by your budget. If you're a single developer working on a game in his/her spare time, then chances are something like Crysis will be way out of your budget, as opposed to a game with a few stylized icons or models. The reason why it seems more emphasis is placed on realistic graphics is that realism is a challenge that only the big budget guys can attempt to accomplish. It takes millions of dollars to have hours of mocap sessions, hire cleanup artists, high-res modelers, animators, texture painters, environment designers, etc to make a full city of locations and characters. Then it's also a lot more challenging to figure out how to make that world realistic and still function on modern day machines, with physics, animation interpolation, various gameplay mechanics and effects, etc.
While it seems that most games are going for the realistic look, I'd wager that the vast majority of games are going the more stylistic approach. Pretty much anything on the biggest gaming platforms right now (Web, iPhone, Nintendo DS, and Wii) take the stylized route, whereas only the $20 million AAA titles on the XBox 360 and PS3 are going the realistic route, of which there are only a few dozen a year.
You wouldn't buy a car that required you to call the manufacturer and get authorisation every time you wanted to put petrol in it or attach those sickly fluffy dice to the rear vision mirror, would you?
Why frame this debate with one of the worst car analogies I've ever heard? The equivalent of petrol in a phone is battery charge... last I checked, I didn't need to get apple authorization when I plug my phone into an outlet. I don't even need an Apple-certified outlet. The fluffy dice is the iPhone equivalent of an iPhone case. The last case I bought wasn't one from Apple but from a third party case manufacturer. This debate is more equivalent to changing your Ford engine for a VW engine and then trying to get it serviced at a Ford dealer. I haven't tried it but I doubt Ford will really honor your warranty if you do make such a change.
If you read Outliers, you'd see that the point of the book is not to show that you need a unique genetic makeup to be successful. You just need the passion and experience and the right opportunities to present themselves. If the original poster gets his 10,000 hours of experience doing game design or programming or whatever, he can become proficient in his chosen profession. He's not asking how to be a super-star game developer, just a heads up on how to get in the industry. I'm shocked at the extreme negativity in the thread toward this person and his dream. There are thousands of would-be game developers theorizing games over bong smoke, yes... but some of those end up being game designers and developers because when they got sober (or even while they were high) continued programming or designing or animating or whatever. That's what separated them from the people who just made up some game design and never took any initiative to go past the concept stage.
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The positive thing about the button mashers is that they're growing ... and they don't stop spending money... what will get those gamers to stop spending money?
As a gamer who has spent a ton of money on console games over the years, I think growing up is going to get them to stop spending money. I've been putting more and more money into games for my iPhone than I have for games on my PS3, XBox or Wii, since I don't have as much time at home to play games anymore. On top of that, the AAA titles don't even interest me as much. I've been keeping up with all the titles coming out, but I just can't justify spending $60 anymore on something like Arkham Asylum, which has been getting great reviews but I know I'll only be able to put a few hours into. This is the same story I hear from many of my co-workers. The big 3 console companies aren't making games for their aging audience. Games are getting more expensive and take longer to finish and require more of an investment. I want the exact opposite - shorter games that are less expensive. Every time I read a review that boasts how a game takes 60 - 120 hours to complete, that's a game that's immediately not getting my money. In order to get what I want, I have to go to the iPhone or the PSN Home or XBL Marketplace.
The biggest problem most billionaires have is figuring out how to make more billions. There is nothing really stopping a person who has a billion dollars, even if those assets are primarily caught up in stocks and real estate to just sell off everything he can and live off the 500 million he could get liquid. In a billionaire's mind that's a bad investment as he's losing half his fortune (which is still more than an average person will ever make in a lifetime)! This is a problem I'd love to have in comparison to the ones that poor people have, namely how can I pay my rent this month and how much money can I save by spending 39 cents on generic beans as opposed to the 69 cent name brand ones that have less sodium and taste better. Even a rich man's prison sentence - such as the case in Bernie Maddoff - is a better fate than many poor people's regular lives. Sure, you can redefine happiness however you see fit, but quality of life can be estimated objectively. I'd love for you to find a single millionaire/billionaire who would trade it all for the problems of a poor - middle class person.
you don't need a billion dollars to be happy, but if he loses his job, he still could continue doing whatever he wants to do for the rest of his life, and his children (if he has any) don't have to work a single day of their lives. You might be happy, but you're happiness hangs on the state of the company you work for. If they start downsizing, or go completely bust, you could say goodbye to your 35 hour/week job that's 5 minutes away from home. I don't know about you, but my happiness being beholden to a third party I have no control over adds a certain level of stress which eats away at that happiness. A billion dollars to relieve that stress would be nice.
It was an mp3 player. Now it's also a video player, radio, recording device, and video camera. Have you stopped to wonder what is wrong with adding functionality to this or any device? It's still as small as ever, the user interface hasn't been bogged down and bloated, and now it's got another use if you're jogging and feel the need to record a reminder or something. Better have it and not need it than need it and not have it.
Thanks for finding the cloud in-between the silver lining. I'm sure you also had a negative response stored away if Twitter did the exact opposite and claimed ownership of every tweet their users make.
Both children need to learn their multiplication tables.
Every single person who has went to a public school has learned their multiplication tables. I have yet to meet a single person my age who can still recite them. Usually, most people just shrug it off as "Oh, I'm bad with math" and go on with their lives. Learning happens when a person uses the information consistently and is interested in the information in the first place. A kid who isn't taught their multiplication tables but is taught a love and appreciation of math and science will find the multiplication tables and memorize the crap out of them on their own, without rote memorization just to pass a quiz.
I'd much much much rather have a billboard in the background than a loading screen with a full screen advertisement. It's the difference between a banner ad at the top of a website or one of those really annoying full-page ads that you have to click to skip that are now on every major site.
I predict at this new price point, sales will skyrocket once MS hits the kill switch on all the remaining XBox360s. With a 54% failure rate, people will just figure it's business as usual from owning a 360 and 96% of those people will go out and purchase a new one.
Sorry, but everyone doesn't carry quarters. I, for instance, am one of those crazy people who sometimes doesn't carry any cash at all, let alone a dozen quarters rattling around in my pocket! Weird, huh? Well, I assure you, I am not alone, and parking machines that take credit cards are a godsend.
any links to that story?
I think at this point, we should start a white list instead of a black list.
Given that her first instinct is to sue for something so frivolous, I think her family/school did a great job of teaching her how the world works.
The reason eBay's system works is that both parties stand to benefit from the transaction. A buyer wants the product and a seller wants to get rid of it to a paying customer. If the transaction goes smoothly on both ends, both parties get a positive rating. Gaming is different. Everyone wants to win, but even moreso than that everyone HATES losing. If you're really good at any online game, you're automatically labeled a cheater even if you've spent hundreds of hours mastering the craft and the other person is still trying to figure out the controls. Winners can judge their opponents pretty well, but losers will think the winner is the biggest asshole on the internet. eBay's system definitely wouldn't work in this environment. In order for it to actually work, you'd need a referee, but that would require way too many resources to monitor every game.
yeah, but try telling that to the majority of the population who think radio is Clear Channel and Wi-Fi is magic that some people are allergic to.
They should merge with "The Hut" so you could now get your 2nd rate electronics and pizza all under the same roof!
Seeing as how "radio" also denotes an ancient run-down technology, the combination "Radio Shack" seemed like something the professor would build on Gilligan's Island. Getting rid of the "Radio" is probably a good move.
Yeah, when Chrysler decides to make their cars useless to people who drive on gravel roads, then people who drive on gravel roads will not buy Chrysler. Doesn't take a genius to figure that out. There are vehicles, though, that aren't made to drive on gravel or dirt roads - such as smart cars or motorcycles and people still buy them in droves because they're aware of the limitations and could accept that. Guess what, if Chrysler tomorrow released a car that only drove on paved roads according to the EULA and they sold it for a fraction of the price as their gravel driving roads, there will be a ton of people who will purchase it because they know they don't drive on gravel. As for software, who cares if I don't own it? Software is useful for me for a very short time. I have no expectation that I will be using any of the software I have currently installed in 10 years time, and most of it won't be applicable in 2 years time, so why do I need to know that I own it indefinitely? It's useful to me now, so I'll pay the amount of worth.
When I buy something, I want it to be a useful product for it's purposes. I don't care if I have complete and utter ownership of everything about it, and I don't know why that would factor into anybody's buying decisions. I do professional work on a mac system, and I'm a number of times more efficient in MacOS than I am in Windows and in an even greater amount Linux. As long as Apple continues making a useful product, people will continue to buy it. By shutting Google Voice out, the product is a bit less useful but that doesn't make it useless, as even without Google Voice I continue to use my iPhone and am extremely happy with it. Calling people "mindless masses" because they don't follow your buying habits is ridiculously arrogant.
Making a great brand can net you millions of dollars, so once such a brand has been created the company has to do everything in their power to protect it. This fake Professor Layton account can be just innocuous fun but it's the marketing form of vigilante justice. If the twitter account gets ridiculously popular and starts getting linked as an official Nintendo account, then the owner of the account can essentially hold the brand hostage and turn against Nintendo at will. This can cost Nintendo big money, so they (or any company in such a situation) has to either distance themselves from it and make it perfectly clear to everyone that it's not Nintendo affiliated, or hire them so they are Nintendo affiliated and now Nintendo retains full control over the branding, or just sue and get rid of the account altogether.
I say put them in front of a blinking cursor, the apt ones will just get it.
Yeah, I take the same view about life in general. I put my kids in the jungle and let them fend for themselves. If my forefathers could survive there, my kids should be able to do the same. Although so far, none of them have come back to me, which is strange because I wrote my address down on a pair of dog tags around their neck.
The AAAS publishes the Science journal which has a distinctly liberal bias.
Is it liberal because the members are liberal or are the members liberal because the society has a liberal agenda? What is an "unbiased sample" in this case? If most scientists are liberal, are we going to have to find an equal subset of conservative and liberal scientists and then ask them what their association is just so it starts to match up with the rest of America?
You can't really compare the graphics between Pokemon and Crysis because the purpose of their graphics are completely different. Games that are trying to get as close to realistic as possible are doing so because there is more immersion than in a top-down RPG like Pokemon. Not immersion in the sense that "I could play this game for hours" but immersion in the "I'm actually there" variety. Pokemon is trying to be more cute and iconic as a way of making the characters more lovable. Pokemon with realistic graphics would be a completely different game for a different purpose. There's nothing wrong with either of them and both types can be beautiful, as you said.
When picking an art design, you have to know the audience and the type of feelings you want to evoke. Also, more often than not, your design is dictated by your budget. If you're a single developer working on a game in his/her spare time, then chances are something like Crysis will be way out of your budget, as opposed to a game with a few stylized icons or models. The reason why it seems more emphasis is placed on realistic graphics is that realism is a challenge that only the big budget guys can attempt to accomplish. It takes millions of dollars to have hours of mocap sessions, hire cleanup artists, high-res modelers, animators, texture painters, environment designers, etc to make a full city of locations and characters. Then it's also a lot more challenging to figure out how to make that world realistic and still function on modern day machines, with physics, animation interpolation, various gameplay mechanics and effects, etc.
While it seems that most games are going for the realistic look, I'd wager that the vast majority of games are going the more stylistic approach. Pretty much anything on the biggest gaming platforms right now (Web, iPhone, Nintendo DS, and Wii) take the stylized route, whereas only the $20 million AAA titles on the XBox 360 and PS3 are going the realistic route, of which there are only a few dozen a year.
The trailer for it seems very tongue-in-cheek so maybe they are still maintaining the happy and upbeat feel of the first.
You wouldn't buy a car that required you to call the manufacturer and get authorisation every time you wanted to put petrol in it or attach those sickly fluffy dice to the rear vision mirror, would you?
Why frame this debate with one of the worst car analogies I've ever heard? The equivalent of petrol in a phone is battery charge... last I checked, I didn't need to get apple authorization when I plug my phone into an outlet. I don't even need an Apple-certified outlet. The fluffy dice is the iPhone equivalent of an iPhone case. The last case I bought wasn't one from Apple but from a third party case manufacturer. This debate is more equivalent to changing your Ford engine for a VW engine and then trying to get it serviced at a Ford dealer. I haven't tried it but I doubt Ford will really honor your warranty if you do make such a change.
If you read Outliers, you'd see that the point of the book is not to show that you need a unique genetic makeup to be successful. You just need the passion and experience and the right opportunities to present themselves. If the original poster gets his 10,000 hours of experience doing game design or programming or whatever, he can become proficient in his chosen profession. He's not asking how to be a super-star game developer, just a heads up on how to get in the industry. I'm shocked at the extreme negativity in the thread toward this person and his dream. There are thousands of would-be game developers theorizing games over bong smoke, yes... but some of those end up being game designers and developers because when they got sober (or even while they were high) continued programming or designing or animating or whatever. That's what separated them from the people who just made up some game design and never took any initiative to go past the concept stage.