There are more lawsuits today then there were in Edison's time, but business was a lot dirtier then. Such as the instance where Edison fought Tesla's AC power by killing an elephant with it.
Used games exist so deal with it. There are a lot of things that would affect how many people bought your games. If used games were outlawed then more people might buy games. If computers had hardware DRM that prevented any game from being played unless it phoned home to the game manufacturer, people might buy more games. If the government mandated that people buy at least 2 games a week, people would buy more games. That's not the world we're living in, so I guess the games industry has to do what everyone else has to do and cater to their existing customers. They're not entitled to protection for their business plans, and them saying that it's used games that's causing decrease in quality and affecting price is bullshit. When the demand for new games drops because there are used games, the rules of the market dictate that the companies have to LOWER their prices to compensate. Not raise them. People aren't buying them already! Why would they buy them at a higher cost? And, in turn, if the market forces you to lower your price, then you have to spend less making games. This doesn't necessarily dictate a decrease in quality. Look at World of Goo, Penny Arcade Adventures, Enigmo, Field Runners, Castle Crashers or Braid. Those games are dirt cheap to make, and are fun and original. This means that there might not be a Gears of War 3 or a Call of Duty 5, but you could make 10 Portals for the price of 1 Gears of War. I've been playing more games than ever before, and they haven't been AAA titles. They've been $20 games that I buy off XBox Live Arcade or the iPhone App Store, or from indie developers. I also bought The Force Unleashed, a highly anticipated AAA title, and it's been sitting on my shelf collecting dust. From my perspective it's never been better to be a gamer. There are so many choices for distribution and the barrier to entry has never been lower so there are a lot of inexpensive, entertaining games out. That's the biggest danger to the mainstream game market. And next time I think about putting up $60 for a supposed AAA title, I'll hold out a week and get it used.
Many others put their resources into making the book available.
This is the difference between the print of the book and the content of the book. The content is created by 1 person - the copyright owner, and it is the same no matter how many times the book gets printed and reprinted and bought and sold and resold - that person will always be the copyright owner (unless he transfers the copyright). Many people, however, put their resources into the print of the book, that is printing, shipping, stocking, etc. Those people don't deserve to be compensated once the specific print edition they were a part of becomes out of print. In this situation, the book is out of print, and the poster either buys a used copy and downloads the pirated e-book, or skips the used copy altogether and gets the e-book. Either way, the author isn't compensated. I say just get the e-book. Book publishers are trying to find ways to cut out the used book market as well, since it doesn't bring them any profit. Any used book someone buys is a new book that the publishers don't get to sell (or so they say.) Either way, you're screwing somebody.
There aren't a billion other people who want to write games. The people who write games are usually freelance writers who are at the right place at the right time when a job opens up on Craigslist. Then they're given a crappy cliche sci-fi story that they have to fill in with dialog and they have a few weeks to do it. That's in the lucky occasion that they hire a writer at all, and not have the game designer throw some copy together over the weekend. Writing just isn't really on the radar in the games industry. There are a couple of companies where that's their bread and butter like Bioware or Bethesda, but other than that writing is tacked on as an afterthought. If there were a billion kids out there whose dream is to write for games, don't you think there would be better writing in games?
Man, I can't wait for "Average Mid-Sized City the RPG!" Procedural content is alright for some things, but where's the gameplay in it? People loved Grand Theft Auto in large part to the amount of care that went into each area that most players would never notice - such as the mural in an out of the way subway station. Also, the little differences in the various boroughs from the design to the locals that made it feel authentic. You could generate a thousand square miles of procedural city, but it will make for crappy level design and people will still be more impressed with the hand-modeled statue near the town hall and not the span of how much content you have. At the end, you're just left with a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Re:Both franchise shared the same fate.
on
New Star Trek Trailer
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· Score: 4, Interesting
If you want good Trek, watch Battlestar Galactica. What made Trek good in the first place was that it tackled issues of the day in a sci-fi environment. That was the only way they could even show something like the first interracial kiss, or having a Russian as a good guy alongside Americans. BSG does just that. It talks about modern problems through the sci-fi setting. The reason BSG is so good now is that they didn't worry about the canon from the original cheesy show. They just took the premise and ran with it.
Star Trek is outdated and needs a kick in the ass to be good sci-fi again. This movie probably won't be a resurgence of what made the original great, but neither would a movie based completely off of Star Trek canon.
Not reading the article = Fail. They acknowledge their math is off and give reasons it would be off - such as static/dynamic ips and people who choose not to check the box. They're saying it's around 82% after that is taken into account.
Braid is 15 bucks and hasn't sold as well as Gears of War. Penny Arcade Adventures is also 15 bucks and hasn't sold as well either and both of those are great games. There's a ton of puzzle games that are 10 bucks that give hundreds of hours of replay value and aren't selling as well as AAA titles. The problem is people want Gears of War for 15 bucks, but games like that cost millions to make. Games will always be inherently less appealing than movies because games can't put you in a big theater for 2 hours. Games require a large investment of time and money, since you need to have the hardware to run the game, even if the game was 15 bucks. Pricing them the same as movies is not feasible. Also, in terms of value, games give you an average of 30 hours of entertainment for 60 bucks. This is $2/hour in comparison to movies which are $10/hour, but people still complain that games don't have the replay value or are too short.
If the game industry wants to kill off the used game market...and piracy for the most part too...in one fell swoop, all they need to do is lower the average game's price to around $20-30.
That's just a temporary solution. There are games for 20 bucks that aren't flying off the shelves as well as the $60 ones. The best way to stop the used game market and piracy is by not making any games. Which is the direction they're headed if they continue to treat customers as crooks and potential customers as freeloaders.
I want electronic voting because I don't believe in humans to perform so many calculations accurately and without inputting their bias. As Stalin said, "It's not the people who vote that count. It's the people who count the votes." Why is there so much trouble creating a reliable voting machine? There are much more complicated issues that computers and technology have solved, but we can't solve this one? Voting machines are unreliable and untrusted because the people who are making them are untrustworthy and partisan.
McCain was an honorable candidate coming in and he lost all of his honor in my eyes with the type of campaign he ran. If McCain stuck to his values, I would have considered voting for him, but after all the negative ads, the "us vs. them" mentality that his campaign team threw together, the Palin pick, the robocalls, the blaming of his negative campaign on Obama not doing town-hall meetings, the never backing down and admitting any error even after the gaffe where he said he wouldn't sit down with the President of Spain, and the break down of the "Straight Talk Express.". As Colbert said (paraphrased because I can't find the clip) - If you want a candidate for Change, vote McCain because he changed into everything he hated.
What is the number of people in Texas who believe the moon landing was fake? Some states might have a higher ratio of crazy conspiracy theorists than other states, so I'm just gonna say Texas is one of those states.
I got pretty annoyed quickly when my speakers kept buzzing after I got the iPhone so I looked it up. You could get rid of it by attaching a tin-foil hat to your iPhone, pretty literally. Here's a link to a mini-how-to. Personally, I didn't tape the aluminum foil to my iPhone or anything, but I do have a small patch of aluminum foil that I keep on my desk and put my iPhone onto when I'm at my computer. It cuts out the interference, but it's not a very pretty solution. Someone in this thread said wrapping your speaker wire around magnets will help too, so I'm gonna try it.
What is with EVERY SINGLE THREAD about video games turning into anti-DRM rants. Sorry, DRM is today's copy protection. Copy protection has been in games since they put spin wheels and decoder cards into the game box. This will not be going away. Yes, some of you will refuse to buy games because of it, but you're not gamers. Playing the original Zork over 20 years ago doesn't qualify you as a gamer. CDs were their very own copy protection when they first came out since nobody had the patience to transfer 650 megs over their 9600 baud modem. Then came security keys, and then DVDs. Now it's DRM since people will gladly download 8GB games, and it will take a single night. Enough already. I came in here to read about the game and there isn't a single post about it.
How can doctors get away with this? With the cost of medicine, how dare they make people go out and buy something they don't need. How about honesty and good bedside manner? Is that too difficult to provide outside of looking over a patient, writing out a prescription and charging 75 bucks for the visit?
Slashdot Mirror
There are more lawsuits today then there were in Edison's time, but business was a lot dirtier then. Such as the instance where Edison fought Tesla's AC power by killing an elephant with it.
Used games exist so deal with it. There are a lot of things that would affect how many people bought your games. If used games were outlawed then more people might buy games. If computers had hardware DRM that prevented any game from being played unless it phoned home to the game manufacturer, people might buy more games. If the government mandated that people buy at least 2 games a week, people would buy more games. That's not the world we're living in, so I guess the games industry has to do what everyone else has to do and cater to their existing customers. They're not entitled to protection for their business plans, and them saying that it's used games that's causing decrease in quality and affecting price is bullshit. When the demand for new games drops because there are used games, the rules of the market dictate that the companies have to LOWER their prices to compensate. Not raise them. People aren't buying them already! Why would they buy them at a higher cost? And, in turn, if the market forces you to lower your price, then you have to spend less making games. This doesn't necessarily dictate a decrease in quality. Look at World of Goo, Penny Arcade Adventures, Enigmo, Field Runners, Castle Crashers or Braid. Those games are dirt cheap to make, and are fun and original. This means that there might not be a Gears of War 3 or a Call of Duty 5, but you could make 10 Portals for the price of 1 Gears of War. I've been playing more games than ever before, and they haven't been AAA titles. They've been $20 games that I buy off XBox Live Arcade or the iPhone App Store, or from indie developers. I also bought The Force Unleashed, a highly anticipated AAA title, and it's been sitting on my shelf collecting dust. From my perspective it's never been better to be a gamer. There are so many choices for distribution and the barrier to entry has never been lower so there are a lot of inexpensive, entertaining games out. That's the biggest danger to the mainstream game market. And next time I think about putting up $60 for a supposed AAA title, I'll hold out a week and get it used.
According to Wired, an Obama advisor says he's an iPod man.
They're releasing the motion plus add on to make the controller sensors better already.
Verizon takes an arm and leg for text messages every month, so amputation by text message isn't anything new.
Look, you right wing nuts, Obama is the next President so enough with the ACORN stuff! Let's get to the REAL issues, like Global Warming!
This is the difference between the print of the book and the content of the book. The content is created by 1 person - the copyright owner, and it is the same no matter how many times the book gets printed and reprinted and bought and sold and resold - that person will always be the copyright owner (unless he transfers the copyright). Many people, however, put their resources into the print of the book, that is printing, shipping, stocking, etc. Those people don't deserve to be compensated once the specific print edition they were a part of becomes out of print. In this situation, the book is out of print, and the poster either buys a used copy and downloads the pirated e-book, or skips the used copy altogether and gets the e-book. Either way, the author isn't compensated. I say just get the e-book. Book publishers are trying to find ways to cut out the used book market as well, since it doesn't bring them any profit. Any used book someone buys is a new book that the publishers don't get to sell (or so they say.) Either way, you're screwing somebody.
There aren't a billion other people who want to write games. The people who write games are usually freelance writers who are at the right place at the right time when a job opens up on Craigslist. Then they're given a crappy cliche sci-fi story that they have to fill in with dialog and they have a few weeks to do it. That's in the lucky occasion that they hire a writer at all, and not have the game designer throw some copy together over the weekend. Writing just isn't really on the radar in the games industry. There are a couple of companies where that's their bread and butter like Bioware or Bethesda, but other than that writing is tacked on as an afterthought. If there were a billion kids out there whose dream is to write for games, don't you think there would be better writing in games?
Man, I can't wait for "Average Mid-Sized City the RPG!" Procedural content is alright for some things, but where's the gameplay in it? People loved Grand Theft Auto in large part to the amount of care that went into each area that most players would never notice - such as the mural in an out of the way subway station. Also, the little differences in the various boroughs from the design to the locals that made it feel authentic. You could generate a thousand square miles of procedural city, but it will make for crappy level design and people will still be more impressed with the hand-modeled statue near the town hall and not the span of how much content you have. At the end, you're just left with a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
If you want good Trek, watch Battlestar Galactica. What made Trek good in the first place was that it tackled issues of the day in a sci-fi environment. That was the only way they could even show something like the first interracial kiss, or having a Russian as a good guy alongside Americans. BSG does just that. It talks about modern problems through the sci-fi setting. The reason BSG is so good now is that they didn't worry about the canon from the original cheesy show. They just took the premise and ran with it.
Star Trek is outdated and needs a kick in the ass to be good sci-fi again. This movie probably won't be a resurgence of what made the original great, but neither would a movie based completely off of Star Trek canon.
That's why I only drink Diet Coke.
I don't think the writers of the movie cared about the canon too much.
With AJAX, obviously.
That would be a brilliant move
The important thing is to balance the TV time with video gamespot.
There. Fixed that for you.
Not reading the article = Fail. They acknowledge their math is off and give reasons it would be off - such as static/dynamic ips and people who choose not to check the box. They're saying it's around 82% after that is taken into account.
Same here. I bought the game a few hours ago and it's awesome.
Braid is 15 bucks and hasn't sold as well as Gears of War. Penny Arcade Adventures is also 15 bucks and hasn't sold as well either and both of those are great games. There's a ton of puzzle games that are 10 bucks that give hundreds of hours of replay value and aren't selling as well as AAA titles. The problem is people want Gears of War for 15 bucks, but games like that cost millions to make. Games will always be inherently less appealing than movies because games can't put you in a big theater for 2 hours. Games require a large investment of time and money, since you need to have the hardware to run the game, even if the game was 15 bucks. Pricing them the same as movies is not feasible. Also, in terms of value, games give you an average of 30 hours of entertainment for 60 bucks. This is $2/hour in comparison to movies which are $10/hour, but people still complain that games don't have the replay value or are too short.
That's just a temporary solution. There are games for 20 bucks that aren't flying off the shelves as well as the $60 ones. The best way to stop the used game market and piracy is by not making any games. Which is the direction they're headed if they continue to treat customers as crooks and potential customers as freeloaders.
I want electronic voting because I don't believe in humans to perform so many calculations accurately and without inputting their bias. As Stalin said, "It's not the people who vote that count. It's the people who count the votes." Why is there so much trouble creating a reliable voting machine? There are much more complicated issues that computers and technology have solved, but we can't solve this one? Voting machines are unreliable and untrusted because the people who are making them are untrustworthy and partisan.
McCain was an honorable candidate coming in and he lost all of his honor in my eyes with the type of campaign he ran. If McCain stuck to his values, I would have considered voting for him, but after all the negative ads, the "us vs. them" mentality that his campaign team threw together, the Palin pick, the robocalls, the blaming of his negative campaign on Obama not doing town-hall meetings, the never backing down and admitting any error even after the gaffe where he said he wouldn't sit down with the President of Spain, and the break down of the "Straight Talk Express.". As Colbert said (paraphrased because I can't find the clip) - If you want a candidate for Change, vote McCain because he changed into everything he hated.
What is the number of people in Texas who believe the moon landing was fake? Some states might have a higher ratio of crazy conspiracy theorists than other states, so I'm just gonna say Texas is one of those states.
I got pretty annoyed quickly when my speakers kept buzzing after I got the iPhone so I looked it up. You could get rid of it by attaching a tin-foil hat to your iPhone, pretty literally. Here's a link to a mini-how-to. Personally, I didn't tape the aluminum foil to my iPhone or anything, but I do have a small patch of aluminum foil that I keep on my desk and put my iPhone onto when I'm at my computer. It cuts out the interference, but it's not a very pretty solution. Someone in this thread said wrapping your speaker wire around magnets will help too, so I'm gonna try it.
What is with EVERY SINGLE THREAD about video games turning into anti-DRM rants. Sorry, DRM is today's copy protection. Copy protection has been in games since they put spin wheels and decoder cards into the game box. This will not be going away. Yes, some of you will refuse to buy games because of it, but you're not gamers. Playing the original Zork over 20 years ago doesn't qualify you as a gamer. CDs were their very own copy protection when they first came out since nobody had the patience to transfer 650 megs over their 9600 baud modem. Then came security keys, and then DVDs. Now it's DRM since people will gladly download 8GB games, and it will take a single night. Enough already. I came in here to read about the game and there isn't a single post about it.
How can doctors get away with this? With the cost of medicine, how dare they make people go out and buy something they don't need. How about honesty and good bedside manner? Is that too difficult to provide outside of looking over a patient, writing out a prescription and charging 75 bucks for the visit?