When you are advocating a third choice in a system designed for only two choices, its very hard to get a third choice accepted.
Actually, if you look at how the system was actually designed originally, there were no parties at all.
The problem is that over the years our system has been corrupted and bastardized to the point where it really just doesn't work anymore.
I suppose it's better than a straight-up dictatorship... But it's nearly impossible to affect any actual change at all in this system. As you said, it's impossible to get a viable third party going... And the existing two parties are just variations on a theme... And when election time rolls around it isn't even about who's the better (least-bad) candidate - but rather who runs the best commercials.
This is the 'old-school' tried-and-true method for learning to play in a rock band, as opposed to paying $100+ dollars for a plastic guitar controller and "Rock Band" game.
You, good sir, have completely missed the point.
Neither Guitar Hero nor Rock Band are intended to teach you how to play musical instruments. No more than Halo is going to teach you how to fight a war or Madden will teach you to play football or The Sims will teach you life skills.
So get off of your bloody high horses and realise that this is all about ENTERTAINMENT, not CREATIVITY.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
Halo is a fairly predictable game. It is fun, it is entertaining, but it is predictable. The single-player is very linear. There's generally only one way to complete a level. If there's an obstacle in front of you, there's generally only one way to deal with it. There really isn't any creativity involved in playing Halo.
Deus Ex, on the other game, encourages creativity. There will typically be multiple ways around the obstacle... And if you really want to be creative, you can do all sorts of bizarre things the developers hadn't planned on. But Deus Ex is also entertaining.
The summary doesn't really say anything about people learning to play guitar, so I'm not sure where your comments come from... But if you read the summary you'll see that originally they were trying to build a game that wanted you to improvise. And people didn't want to improvise, they just wanted to play their favorite songs. This is where creativity comes into the discussion. Folks didn't want to create new music, they just wanted to replicate the music they knew.
Yes, they did. And they made every effort to correct the flaws in the original game and increase its appeal to a wider audience.
This means it had simpler controls, only one type of ammunition, shinier graphics, more linear gameplay, and a less confusing storyline. In short, they made it more like a rail shooter.
It has sold more than 1 million copies, as of April 23, 2009.
If that's a flop, then let my games be flops too!
Deus Ex received quite a bit of critical acclaim, but it really didn't sell all that well. Yeah, 1 million copies sounds impressive... But how many copies does the latest incarnation of Madden sell every year?
And of those million copies, a number of them were re-releases for budget prices. And some got bundled with video cards. And some of them were re-sales to folks who liked the game and needed a new disc.
I guess as long as the publisher is getting money from it, a sale is a sale...
But I personally bought the original game when it was released for $50, and then later re-purchased the "Game Of The Year" edition for $20 because my disc was shot. Yes, that's more money for the publisher... But that isn't actually two human beings playing the game.
This is a case where one tour operator is trying to force another to change the product itself - the experience of the tour. Their being very clever about it; but as I do with any IP-abuser, I hope they suffer an expensive failure in this effort.
If I understand correctly, the duck calls are not an integral part of the tour. They aren't used to actually attract ducks. They're part of the "theme" of this particular tour company's product.
This isn't a tour where you putter around the bay for a while, call some ducks, feed them, and then go home.
This is a tour where you putter around the bay, make goofy duck sounds for the hell of it, and then go home.
It is possible that the duck sounds have taken on an additional meaning in the context of this tour company. People may hear those duck sounds and think "oh, that's the tour boat with the goofy duck sounds, that was fun!" People may very well go home and tell their friends about how they went on a tour and made goofy duck sounds, and how much fun it was. Their friends might then show up looking to take a tour and ask "Is this the one where you make goofy duck sounds?"
If this is the case, then those duck sounds are indeed being used to identify a specific product/service.
After about a year in space you cannot walk when you land on earth.
This isn't necessarily a problem. Sure, if you want to walk around Earth then you're going to be in a bit of a fix... But what if you plan on spending the rest of your days in space? What if it's a one-way trip?
If we are going to live in space we are going to have to figure out how to create gravity on whatever structure we decide to inhabit.
I thought we'd already figured this bit out? All you have to do is spin the structure.
I really doubt we would mutate fast enough to take advantage of weightlessness to survive.
We don't need to.
When's the last time you saw somebody sitting out in a snowstorm waiting to mutate and grow an insulating fur coat? Around here we just but on a coat. We're human beings, we have brains, we can make and use tools.
That's the whole point of experiments like this one. We're not going to wait around for environmental forces to craft us into better organisms... We're going to identify the problems and fix them, just like we have for thousands of years. That's what we do.
In that case, you really are reliant on a game long having been a success. The initial point not only stands, but is reinforced.
I disagree. Marketing may sell a few additional copies of the game, but it isn't going to make the game successful.
Spore had tons of marketing. Even with my minimal consumption of game-related media I heard about that thing for years. I'm sure they sold tons of copies. But after folks actually played it, people weren't impressed. I saw lots of outcry about the DRM and the accounts and whatnot... But people basically stopped talking about the game. They certainly had nothing good to say about it.
On the other hand, Counter Strike had basically no marketing. There was no million-dollar ad campaign to convince people they ought to be playing it. It was a freely-available mod that was just plain fun. People had lots of good stuff to say about it.
Just because a good advertising campaign gets you to buy a game today, doesn't mean you'll recommend it to a friend in six months time.
Developers have always been able to do that - or have you forgotten about shareware? Nowadays it's easier than ever, thanks to the Internet and downloadable content for consoles.
Nope, haven't forgotten about shareware. The first computer I personally owned was a Macintosh and just about every game I owned for that computer came in the form of shareware.
But, like it or not, shareware has largely faded in favor of big-budget boxed titles these days.
No, it's the cost of development that's the bottleneck.
Yes, I realize that. That's why I said:
I wonder how long it will be before developers are able to effectively develop and distribute their own titles without the big publishers?
There was a time when things were fairly simple... You didn't need much more than a computer and a compiler, and you could produce a game. You didn't even need to be able to produce decent graphics because the best you could manage was a few pixels anyway.
These days you're looking at buying some kind of development kit if you're aiming at a console... A professional artist or two... Maybe some voice actors... A sound guy... And that's all in addition to the compilers and coders you still need...
I realize that it costs more to produce a game these days.
But the same could be said about the recording industry a few years ago. They went from basically all-live with no overhead but the musician and his instruments, to all kinds of crazy overhead from recording engineers and marketers and distributors and everything else... And now, you can almost get away with nothing more than a musician and a PC.
I'm wondering if we'll see the same kind of arc in the game industry. Just about anybody can roll out a game on the iPhone... And I've seen tons of homebrew stuff for the GameBoy... Downloadable content and micropayments are becoming more and more popular...
I wonder if these giant game publishers will find themselves un-necessary before too long. If we'll see a return to quality games being developed by a few people working out of their garage.
I generally hear about a new game by word-of-mouth advertising
And why do you think the people are talking about that specific game. Simple, it is the marketed game of the month.
Unlikely.
Or, if that's the case, they need to spend their marketing money better.
Generally, by the time I'm playing something everyone else has moved on to the latest shiny thing. There'll usually be tons of walkthroughs available, but the forums will be dead.
Here's another way to look at it. If marketing increases the number of people who buy a game four-fold, then, without marketing, games would need to cost four times as much (minus the cost o marketing, of course.) The more people who buy a game, the smaller the margin can be and the lower the price can go, particularly since the marginal unit cost of a game is pennies.
I don't buy this at all.
First of all, spending 4x the money on marketing is not going to generate 4x sales. Just isn't going to happen. A large chunk of marketing money is wasted because you're hitting the wrong audience - the problem is that you never know which dollar is actually hitting the target.
I personally don't subscribe to any gaming magazines, I don't watch G4, I don't frequent any gaming websites... I generally hear about a new game by word-of-mouth advertising. So all that money they're blowing on magazine ads and banners and commercials is just wasted on me.
And while the price can go lower, it isn't. Sure, in theory the actual cost of a game is pennies... But everybody wants their cut. And if they can charge an extra few dollars, and people will pay it, then they will. Regardless of the volume sold or the actual margins involved, prices just keep going up.
So, that marketing may very well sell more copies... But that isn't going to lower my price at all. It is just going to make someone else a few more dollars in their paycheck. Which wouldn't be so bad, if it was going in a developer's paycheck - they're the ones who made the game I'm paying for, after all.
I don't think it's necessarily as bad as you make it out to be.
There's marketing costs, there's development costs... the article says the former is three times the latter, but that doesn't including other costs, DRM is something they usually purchase to add on, or it's a standard for the company (they don't redevelop it for each title); other costs are also involved that may not technically be considered "development" costs, like shipping, like the cost of the office space and so forth, licensing fees for many games, even much of the equipment... do the developers get new machines each title? Then a lot of what you pay is people skimming off the top... the retailer gets their cut, the publisher (not always the same as the developer) gets their cut, the CEO gets his cut and adds nothing to the title (not that I have anything against CEOs or executives, they have their place in companies, but they aren't part of "development" costs).
The figure I gave - $40 - is not a realistic one. Games these days retail for closer to $60. I was kind of ignoring all the middle-men and shipping and whatever else. I'm also assuming that the cost of DRM is factored into the "development" budget - maybe this isn't true.
None of that changes the fact that they're spending three times as much on marketing as development.
For every dollar that goes into writing code (whether it be some programmer's hourly wages or a new computer for a manager) three dollars go into marketing (whether it be a magazine ad or a new computer for a manager). That just seems wrong to me.
Yes, I know, good marketing should increase sales... But wouldn't a good product increase sales as well?
I don't subscribe to gaming magazines, I don't watch G4, I don't frequent gaming websites. Most of the advertising I consume is of the "word of mouth" variety. I wind up playing a game because folks say it is good. And it's somewhat galling to me to know that I'm paying for magazine ads and standees and whatever else that I'm not even seeing.
Starting from the premise that EA is a successful company, it is safe to assume that most of their marketing costs are made up for in increased sales (part of being a successful company is taking in more money than you spend).
You might feel better knowing that you spent $12 that mostly went to the people who created the game, but it isn't particularly likely EA could sit on the other side of that transaction and still make money (because the $5 per box that you have going to the creators is spread across some significant multiple of the boxes they would sell without the marketing).
I guess my question, then, is how necessary is it for EA to get a piece of the pie?
Right now the big publishing companies seem fairly necessary... But I look at the video game industry today, and it looks fairly similar to the recording industry a few years back.
I wonder how long it will be before developers are able to effectively develop and distribute their own titles without the big publishers?
Software development is a lot like a having a baby. 1 woman, 9 months = 1 baby. You can't add 8 more women to the equation and get a baby in one month. And as projects get larger, the success is dependent on cohesive management, not necessarily additional resources.
However, with marketing -- you can send any number of suit-monkeys out to cut deals with drink manufacturers, t-shirt companies, magazines.. etc. All without detracting from the potential quality of your final product.
If it's in the game, it's likely because one of these marketing people said it needed to be in the game. Thank them for in-game advertising and in-game shops that accept real world money.
Makes sense, I suppose... But it is still galling to me as a customer.
That means that if I spend $40 on a video game only $10 of it actually went to manufacturing the game - the remaining $30 went to marketing.
Of course... That $10 didn't actually go to manufacturing the game either, because part of it went into DRM and packaging and whatever else...
So we're looking at maybe $5 or so of my money actually making it back to the folks who genuinely worked on producing my video game.
Yes, I understand there's lots of expense involved in producing a video game. You need development kits and office space and beta testers and all that good stuff. You can't very well turn out a modern video game in your garage. I get it.
But it seems kind of self-defeating to me... You aren't making enough money, so you throw in some DRM to stop piracy and do a bunch of marketing to draw in more cash. But you have to pay for the DRM and marketing... So you aren't making enough money to cover your new expenses... So you throw in some more marketing to draw in more cash...
Somewhere along the line it stops being about producing a game that people enjoy playing and want to buy. Somewhere along the line it starts being about micropayments and subscription fees and sequels and product placement and toys and tie-ins...
And then the publishers wonder why sales are down.
I disagree. If the persecution itself was wrong, then the treatment of each individual was wrong. It is not okay for the government to just arbitrarily make laws against something and say "Oh, well, you knew that was against the law, bad on you for breaking the law!" Government needs to be held accountable for these grievous human rights violations -- repealing the law is not good enough.
But how are you going to hold anyone accountable? They're pretty much all dead, or out of power at the very least. Or are you going to lock up the abstract concept of "Government"?
And where do you propose we stop holding governments accountable for their grievous human rights violations of the past? You going to go after Italy because of how the Romans mistreated the Christians back in the day?
Yeah, Alan Turing was really important to computer science. And he suffered because of a law that we currently find injust. But what's the point of this posthumous apology? The guy is dead. He's not going to feel any better if someone says they're sorry.
Is the point to get his name out there? To increase his fame? To get him the recognition he deserves? Why? Yeah, he's a big deal to computer scientists... But the world doesn't revolve around us. Why is it so necessary for the world to recognize his contribution specifically?
Is the point to make the British government apologize for treating people badly in the past? Again - why? They don't do that anymore, do they? Homosexuality isn't currently on the books as a crime, is it? Isn't that enough then? And if it isn't, where do you stop apologizing? Are you going to ask for a formal apology to every single person who was convicted of a crime that we now disagree with?
The past is the past. Bad things happened, innocent people suffered, but it is over now. Time to move on.
I'm not suggesting that we sweep all this nastiness under the rug, hide it, or forget about it... By all means, let's learn from our mistakes... But apologizing to dead people just doesn't get you very far.
Tv is a weird media these days - chasing 'large audiences' on a system with 100's of channels, that's a zero sum game and explains much about what is on it.
Chasing large audiences, I think, is a bad idea.
I used to like the Sci-Fi Channel when they ran all sorts of old sci-fi shows. Then they decided they needed larger audiences... Now they've re-branded themselves and they're showing wrestling. I hardly watch it any more.
Cartoon network used to be pretty good, too. They showed lots of old cartoons from my childhood, had some decent programming on Adult Swim, routinely showed some anime... Now they've decided they need larger audiences and they're actually producing their own live action programming. And, once again, I hardly watch this channel any more.
TLC used to be even nerdier and drier than Discovery... Now it's all about reality TV and home improvement.
The History Channel hardly shows anything related to history these days.
It seems to me that the only way you're going to get viewers in an overly-crowded market like we have today is by specializing. If everyone is showing the same stuff, why would I bother watching your channel instead of the competition's?
The nice thing about my DVR is that I can program it to grab the odd genuinely sci-fi program, or bit of anime, or something about history - regardless of what channel it is on or what time of day it airs. My DVR has the ability to browse for stuff by genre and subject matter... I don't generally even know what channel something was recorded from, unless there's an obvious tag in the corner.
Yes, it's all the hardware makers' fault, they won't give kernel developers enough information to build fully functional drivers. It's not fair to compare it against Windows, since Microsoft relies on the hardware developers to build their own working drivers. But at the same time, Linus refuses to create a stable driver API/ABI. This is 2009, not 1999. If there was a stable, supported binary interface for 3rd party devices to use, vendors would use it, and you'd have a lot more fully functional device drivers.
Life's a compromise and if you aren't willing to compromise, you're going to miss out on things. Like battery life.
The problem is that lots of software written for home users makes the assumption that you'll have 4 GB RAM and does weird/stupid/bad things with PAE enabled.
These days it really doesn't matter though... There's x64 versions of Vista and Windows 7 available for the same price as x86. If you've got that much RAM, just install the appropriate OS and call it done.
Seems to me that Nielsen's metrics are just about useless these days.
How many people actively watch television without a DVR? Wouldn't it be fairly easy for those DVRs to simply report back what shows you're watching? Yeah, I know, privacy and all that... But your average person is just renting it from their cable/dish provider and doesn't have much say in what the box does anyway.
And folks watching television programs through on-line services like hulu or whatever can easily be tracked as well. Just record the number of views a given show's gotten - much like the counters on YouTube.
Hell, even folks who don't use a DVR typically have some kind of cable/dish de-scrambler box... Those could report viewing habits as well.
I certainly understand the appeal of having an impartial party responsible for the data... But it doesn't seem like this kind of data collection should be terribly difficult to do these days. Seems like the bigger challenge would be for viewers who don't want to participate to keep their usage private.
Good battery life is not cool. Open source software, especially a mutt like linux, is all about cool.
Good battery life requires annoyingly huge amounts of microoptimizations and chipset-dependent tricks. Which is most definatly NOT cool.
Incorrect, at least in this case.
This problem has nothing to do with whether it is cool or not to squeeze and extra hour or two out of your notebook... This problem has to do with hardware support.
Linux developers continue to have trouble getting access to the hardware they need. Hardware developers are frequently unwilling to divulge the necessary secrets for F/OSS developers to write good drivers... And those same hardware developers are frequently unwilling to devote the time/money/effort necessary to write good drivers themselves...
So you wind up with half-crippled hardware under Linux. You get video cards, motherboards, hard drives, motherboards, etc. that won't properly spin down or hibernate or sleep or whatever.
Other folks in this thread have mentioned that this particular notebook ships with an ATI video card. ATI has notoriously crappy Linux support. This is a video card we're talking about... Geeks love video cards. It doesn't get much cooler than 3D graphics - look at all the time and effort going into projects like Compiz.
I can almost guarantee that if ATI would open up their documentation you'd see better battery life just as quickly as folks could code it.
just don't include any batteries! batteries can leak over time and ruin the electronics, as well as anything else in the time capsule....
Right. Should've specified that... That's why you want easily-replaceable batteries like AA/AAA - so you don't have to pack any in the time capsule and can easily purchase some whenever it is opened.
My niece just turned one year old and her parents have asked that, instead of the usual gifts, we each contribute something to a time capsule to be opened on her 17th birthday. Multiple members of my family want to contribute digital data - text, video, music files.
Data doesn't go into time capsules. There's absolutely no reason why you couldn't share that text, video, or music with her at any point over the next 17 years. And she'll likely be exposed to it anyway... Music will be playing on the radio, books will be available, folks will share family pictures and videos...
It might make sense to include a photograph with a note on the back, or a couple-page letter to her... But you don't just stuff the capsule full of digital data. That stuff would be better archived on a live computer and updated over the next few years.
What you put into a time capsule are physical objects. Think back to 17 years ago... What would be more fun to stumble across - an mp3 of I'm Too Sexy, or a working minidisc player?
What physical objects are new/cool/important/meaningful right now, that may not be later? Maybe throw a pair of her baby shoes in there... Grab something small off your dining room table or out of your front yard... Maybe the cell phone you just replaced... A couple ticket stubs to something that just opened... Toss in a cheap mp3 player (something that takes disposable batteries, like AA/AAA) loaded with some current songs on it...
In 17 years, when she opens it, you'll be able to say "Those shoes were on your feet 17 years ago. I talked on that cell phone 17 years ago. That's what we used to listen to music 17 years ago." And she'll be able to pick the things up, handle them, feel them, turn them on, see how they worked, compare them to whatever is current. Instead of just firing up a home-made version of I Love the '80s
I'm not sure that the "Open Source" moniker has any relevance to hardware projects like this. In software, the "source code" is the actual raw material that a complied application is made of. In hardware, the "source" is physical electronic components.
I guess you could call the freely-available plans and schematics "the source" but that doesn't make much sense, because without hardware components, you can't compile it into a working device. So the term doesn't really apply, especially as we've had freely available electronic schematics for decades, and nobody ever called them "open source." This terminology just seems to be a way to seem cool and trendy.
So, what can you do with the source code to a piece of software if you have no hardware? If someone just hands you a stack of paper with source code printed on it, and you've got no computer to run it on, what good is it?
Or maybe we're the hardware. Source code is instructions that tell hardware what to do... These are instructions that tell us how to build a clock... Not much different from the control programs that run industrial robots.
Regardless, I think the term applies. OSS is about the freedom to distribute and modify source code. These instructions are available for modification and distribution - unlike the instructions on how to build the RCA clock/radio I've got sitting on my bedstand. Someone else out there might take these instructions and expand upon them by adding an AM/FM tuner or something.
Does Mr. T. reprise his commercial role as the http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZV0DtmxYFuE"Night Elf Mohawk" in Avatar? Serious, I thought WoW when I saw this. Even the live-action stuff looked CGI. There WAS live action, right?
The blue aliens with the big ears looked like Night Elves. They were using bows. They were flying around on the backs of vaguely dragon-y creatures. It reminded me a lot of Warcraft III.
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When you are advocating a third choice in a system designed for only two choices, its very hard to get a third choice accepted.
Actually, if you look at how the system was actually designed originally, there were no parties at all.
The problem is that over the years our system has been corrupted and bastardized to the point where it really just doesn't work anymore.
I suppose it's better than a straight-up dictatorship... But it's nearly impossible to affect any actual change at all in this system. As you said, it's impossible to get a viable third party going... And the existing two parties are just variations on a theme... And when election time rolls around it isn't even about who's the better (least-bad) candidate - but rather who runs the best commercials.
Allow me to suggest an alternative...
This is the 'old-school' tried-and-true method for learning to play in a rock band, as opposed to paying $100+ dollars for a plastic guitar controller and "Rock Band" game.
You, good sir, have completely missed the point.
Neither Guitar Hero nor Rock Band are intended to teach you how to play musical instruments. No more than Halo is going to teach you how to fight a war or Madden will teach you to play football or The Sims will teach you life skills.
So get off of your bloody high horses and realise that this is all about ENTERTAINMENT, not CREATIVITY.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
Halo is a fairly predictable game. It is fun, it is entertaining, but it is predictable. The single-player is very linear. There's generally only one way to complete a level. If there's an obstacle in front of you, there's generally only one way to deal with it. There really isn't any creativity involved in playing Halo.
Deus Ex, on the other game, encourages creativity. There will typically be multiple ways around the obstacle... And if you really want to be creative, you can do all sorts of bizarre things the developers hadn't planned on. But Deus Ex is also entertaining.
The summary doesn't really say anything about people learning to play guitar, so I'm not sure where your comments come from... But if you read the summary you'll see that originally they were trying to build a game that wanted you to improvise. And people didn't want to improvise, they just wanted to play their favorite songs. This is where creativity comes into the discussion. Folks didn't want to create new music, they just wanted to replicate the music they knew.
BTW - they made a Deux Ex sequel.
Yes, they did. And they made every effort to correct the flaws in the original game and increase its appeal to a wider audience.
This means it had simpler controls, only one type of ammunition, shinier graphics, more linear gameplay, and a less confusing storyline. In short, they made it more like a rail shooter.
From the Wikipedia article about Deus Ex:
It has sold more than 1 million copies, as of April 23, 2009.
If that's a flop, then let my games be flops too!
Deus Ex received quite a bit of critical acclaim, but it really didn't sell all that well. Yeah, 1 million copies sounds impressive... But how many copies does the latest incarnation of Madden sell every year?
And of those million copies, a number of them were re-releases for budget prices. And some got bundled with video cards. And some of them were re-sales to folks who liked the game and needed a new disc.
I guess as long as the publisher is getting money from it, a sale is a sale...
But I personally bought the original game when it was released for $50, and then later re-purchased the "Game Of The Year" edition for $20 because my disc was shot. Yes, that's more money for the publisher... But that isn't actually two human beings playing the game.
This is a case where one tour operator is trying to force another to change the product itself - the experience of the tour. Their being very clever about it; but as I do with any IP-abuser, I hope they suffer an expensive failure in this effort.
If I understand correctly, the duck calls are not an integral part of the tour. They aren't used to actually attract ducks. They're part of the "theme" of this particular tour company's product.
This isn't a tour where you putter around the bay for a while, call some ducks, feed them, and then go home.
This is a tour where you putter around the bay, make goofy duck sounds for the hell of it, and then go home.
It is possible that the duck sounds have taken on an additional meaning in the context of this tour company. People may hear those duck sounds and think "oh, that's the tour boat with the goofy duck sounds, that was fun!" People may very well go home and tell their friends about how they went on a tour and made goofy duck sounds, and how much fun it was. Their friends might then show up looking to take a tour and ask "Is this the one where you make goofy duck sounds?"
If this is the case, then those duck sounds are indeed being used to identify a specific product/service.
After about a year in space you cannot walk when you land on earth.
This isn't necessarily a problem. Sure, if you want to walk around Earth then you're going to be in a bit of a fix... But what if you plan on spending the rest of your days in space? What if it's a one-way trip?
If we are going to live in space we are going to have to figure out how to create gravity on whatever structure we decide to inhabit.
I thought we'd already figured this bit out? All you have to do is spin the structure.
I really doubt we would mutate fast enough to take advantage of weightlessness to survive.
We don't need to.
When's the last time you saw somebody sitting out in a snowstorm waiting to mutate and grow an insulating fur coat? Around here we just but on a coat. We're human beings, we have brains, we can make and use tools.
That's the whole point of experiments like this one. We're not going to wait around for environmental forces to craft us into better organisms... We're going to identify the problems and fix them, just like we have for thousands of years. That's what we do.
In that case, you really are reliant on a game long having been a success. The initial point not only stands, but is reinforced.
I disagree. Marketing may sell a few additional copies of the game, but it isn't going to make the game successful.
Spore had tons of marketing. Even with my minimal consumption of game-related media I heard about that thing for years. I'm sure they sold tons of copies. But after folks actually played it, people weren't impressed. I saw lots of outcry about the DRM and the accounts and whatnot... But people basically stopped talking about the game. They certainly had nothing good to say about it.
On the other hand, Counter Strike had basically no marketing. There was no million-dollar ad campaign to convince people they ought to be playing it. It was a freely-available mod that was just plain fun. People had lots of good stuff to say about it.
Just because a good advertising campaign gets you to buy a game today, doesn't mean you'll recommend it to a friend in six months time.
Developers have always been able to do that - or have you forgotten about shareware? Nowadays it's easier than ever, thanks to the Internet and downloadable content for consoles.
Nope, haven't forgotten about shareware. The first computer I personally owned was a Macintosh and just about every game I owned for that computer came in the form of shareware.
But, like it or not, shareware has largely faded in favor of big-budget boxed titles these days.
No, it's the cost of development that's the bottleneck.
Yes, I realize that. That's why I said:
I wonder how long it will be before developers are able to effectively develop and distribute their own titles without the big publishers?
There was a time when things were fairly simple... You didn't need much more than a computer and a compiler, and you could produce a game. You didn't even need to be able to produce decent graphics because the best you could manage was a few pixels anyway.
These days you're looking at buying some kind of development kit if you're aiming at a console... A professional artist or two... Maybe some voice actors... A sound guy... And that's all in addition to the compilers and coders you still need...
I realize that it costs more to produce a game these days.
But the same could be said about the recording industry a few years ago. They went from basically all-live with no overhead but the musician and his instruments, to all kinds of crazy overhead from recording engineers and marketers and distributors and everything else... And now, you can almost get away with nothing more than a musician and a PC.
I'm wondering if we'll see the same kind of arc in the game industry. Just about anybody can roll out a game on the iPhone... And I've seen tons of homebrew stuff for the GameBoy... Downloadable content and micropayments are becoming more and more popular...
I wonder if these giant game publishers will find themselves un-necessary before too long. If we'll see a return to quality games being developed by a few people working out of their garage.
I generally hear about a new game by word-of-mouth advertising
And why do you think the people are talking about that specific game. Simple, it is the marketed game of the month.
Unlikely.
Or, if that's the case, they need to spend their marketing money better.
Generally, by the time I'm playing something everyone else has moved on to the latest shiny thing. There'll usually be tons of walkthroughs available, but the forums will be dead.
I'm usually at least six months behind the curve.
Here's another way to look at it. If marketing increases the number of people who buy a game four-fold, then, without marketing, games would need to cost four times as much (minus the cost o marketing, of course.) The more people who buy a game, the smaller the margin can be and the lower the price can go, particularly since the marginal unit cost of a game is pennies.
I don't buy this at all.
First of all, spending 4x the money on marketing is not going to generate 4x sales. Just isn't going to happen. A large chunk of marketing money is wasted because you're hitting the wrong audience - the problem is that you never know which dollar is actually hitting the target.
I personally don't subscribe to any gaming magazines, I don't watch G4, I don't frequent any gaming websites... I generally hear about a new game by word-of-mouth advertising. So all that money they're blowing on magazine ads and banners and commercials is just wasted on me.
And while the price can go lower, it isn't. Sure, in theory the actual cost of a game is pennies... But everybody wants their cut. And if they can charge an extra few dollars, and people will pay it, then they will. Regardless of the volume sold or the actual margins involved, prices just keep going up.
So, that marketing may very well sell more copies... But that isn't going to lower my price at all. It is just going to make someone else a few more dollars in their paycheck. Which wouldn't be so bad, if it was going in a developer's paycheck - they're the ones who made the game I'm paying for, after all.
I don't think it's necessarily as bad as you make it out to be.
There's marketing costs, there's development costs... the article says the former is three times the latter, but that doesn't including other costs, DRM is something they usually purchase to add on, or it's a standard for the company (they don't redevelop it for each title); other costs are also involved that may not technically be considered "development" costs, like shipping, like the cost of the office space and so forth, licensing fees for many games, even much of the equipment... do the developers get new machines each title? Then a lot of what you pay is people skimming off the top... the retailer gets their cut, the publisher (not always the same as the developer) gets their cut, the CEO gets his cut and adds nothing to the title (not that I have anything against CEOs or executives, they have their place in companies, but they aren't part of "development" costs).
The figure I gave - $40 - is not a realistic one. Games these days retail for closer to $60. I was kind of ignoring all the middle-men and shipping and whatever else. I'm also assuming that the cost of DRM is factored into the "development" budget - maybe this isn't true.
None of that changes the fact that they're spending three times as much on marketing as development.
For every dollar that goes into writing code (whether it be some programmer's hourly wages or a new computer for a manager) three dollars go into marketing (whether it be a magazine ad or a new computer for a manager). That just seems wrong to me.
Yes, I know, good marketing should increase sales... But wouldn't a good product increase sales as well?
I don't subscribe to gaming magazines, I don't watch G4, I don't frequent gaming websites. Most of the advertising I consume is of the "word of mouth" variety. I wind up playing a game because folks say it is good. And it's somewhat galling to me to know that I'm paying for magazine ads and standees and whatever else that I'm not even seeing.
Starting from the premise that EA is a successful company, it is safe to assume that most of their marketing costs are made up for in increased sales (part of being a successful company is taking in more money than you spend).
You might feel better knowing that you spent $12 that mostly went to the people who created the game, but it isn't particularly likely EA could sit on the other side of that transaction and still make money (because the $5 per box that you have going to the creators is spread across some significant multiple of the boxes they would sell without the marketing).
I guess my question, then, is how necessary is it for EA to get a piece of the pie?
Right now the big publishing companies seem fairly necessary... But I look at the video game industry today, and it looks fairly similar to the recording industry a few years back.
I wonder how long it will be before developers are able to effectively develop and distribute their own titles without the big publishers?
Software development is a lot like a having a baby. 1 woman, 9 months = 1 baby. You can't add 8 more women to the equation and get a baby in one month. And as projects get larger, the success is dependent on cohesive management, not necessarily additional resources.
However, with marketing -- you can send any number of suit-monkeys out to cut deals with drink manufacturers, t-shirt companies, magazines.. etc. All without detracting from the potential quality of your final product.
If it's in the game, it's likely because one of these marketing people said it needed to be in the game. Thank them for in-game advertising and in-game shops that accept real world money.
Makes sense, I suppose... But it is still galling to me as a customer.
That means that if I spend $40 on a video game only $10 of it actually went to manufacturing the game - the remaining $30 went to marketing.
Of course... That $10 didn't actually go to manufacturing the game either, because part of it went into DRM and packaging and whatever else...
So we're looking at maybe $5 or so of my money actually making it back to the folks who genuinely worked on producing my video game.
Yes, I understand there's lots of expense involved in producing a video game. You need development kits and office space and beta testers and all that good stuff. You can't very well turn out a modern video game in your garage. I get it.
But it seems kind of self-defeating to me... You aren't making enough money, so you throw in some DRM to stop piracy and do a bunch of marketing to draw in more cash. But you have to pay for the DRM and marketing... So you aren't making enough money to cover your new expenses... So you throw in some more marketing to draw in more cash...
Somewhere along the line it stops being about producing a game that people enjoy playing and want to buy. Somewhere along the line it starts being about micropayments and subscription fees and sequels and product placement and toys and tie-ins...
And then the publishers wonder why sales are down.
I disagree. If the persecution itself was wrong, then the treatment of each individual was wrong. It is not okay for the government to just arbitrarily make laws against something and say "Oh, well, you knew that was against the law, bad on you for breaking the law!" Government needs to be held accountable for these grievous human rights violations -- repealing the law is not good enough.
But how are you going to hold anyone accountable? They're pretty much all dead, or out of power at the very least. Or are you going to lock up the abstract concept of "Government"?
And where do you propose we stop holding governments accountable for their grievous human rights violations of the past? You going to go after Italy because of how the Romans mistreated the Christians back in the day?
Yeah, Alan Turing was really important to computer science. And he suffered because of a law that we currently find injust. But what's the point of this posthumous apology? The guy is dead. He's not going to feel any better if someone says they're sorry.
Is the point to get his name out there? To increase his fame? To get him the recognition he deserves? Why? Yeah, he's a big deal to computer scientists... But the world doesn't revolve around us. Why is it so necessary for the world to recognize his contribution specifically?
Is the point to make the British government apologize for treating people badly in the past? Again - why? They don't do that anymore, do they? Homosexuality isn't currently on the books as a crime, is it? Isn't that enough then? And if it isn't, where do you stop apologizing? Are you going to ask for a formal apology to every single person who was convicted of a crime that we now disagree with?
The past is the past. Bad things happened, innocent people suffered, but it is over now. Time to move on.
I'm not suggesting that we sweep all this nastiness under the rug, hide it, or forget about it... By all means, let's learn from our mistakes... But apologizing to dead people just doesn't get you very far.
Tv is a weird media these days - chasing 'large audiences' on a system with 100's of channels, that's a zero sum game and explains much about what is on it.
Chasing large audiences, I think, is a bad idea.
I used to like the Sci-Fi Channel when they ran all sorts of old sci-fi shows. Then they decided they needed larger audiences... Now they've re-branded themselves and they're showing wrestling. I hardly watch it any more.
Cartoon network used to be pretty good, too. They showed lots of old cartoons from my childhood, had some decent programming on Adult Swim, routinely showed some anime... Now they've decided they need larger audiences and they're actually producing their own live action programming. And, once again, I hardly watch this channel any more.
TLC used to be even nerdier and drier than Discovery... Now it's all about reality TV and home improvement.
The History Channel hardly shows anything related to history these days.
It seems to me that the only way you're going to get viewers in an overly-crowded market like we have today is by specializing. If everyone is showing the same stuff, why would I bother watching your channel instead of the competition's?
The nice thing about my DVR is that I can program it to grab the odd genuinely sci-fi program, or bit of anime, or something about history - regardless of what channel it is on or what time of day it airs. My DVR has the ability to browse for stuff by genre and subject matter... I don't generally even know what channel something was recorded from, unless there's an obvious tag in the corner.
Yes, it's all the hardware makers' fault, they won't give kernel developers enough information to build fully functional drivers. It's not fair to compare it against Windows, since Microsoft relies on the hardware developers to build their own working drivers. But at the same time, Linus refuses to create a stable driver API/ABI. This is 2009, not 1999. If there was a stable, supported binary interface for 3rd party devices to use, vendors would use it, and you'd have a lot more fully functional device drivers.
Life's a compromise and if you aren't willing to compromise, you're going to miss out on things. Like battery life.
Agreed on pretty much all counts.
You can enable PAE on pretty much any XP machine.
The problem is that lots of software written for home users makes the assumption that you'll have 4 GB RAM and does weird/stupid/bad things with PAE enabled.
These days it really doesn't matter though... There's x64 versions of Vista and Windows 7 available for the same price as x86. If you've got that much RAM, just install the appropriate OS and call it done.
Seems to me that Nielsen's metrics are just about useless these days.
How many people actively watch television without a DVR? Wouldn't it be fairly easy for those DVRs to simply report back what shows you're watching? Yeah, I know, privacy and all that... But your average person is just renting it from their cable/dish provider and doesn't have much say in what the box does anyway.
And folks watching television programs through on-line services like hulu or whatever can easily be tracked as well. Just record the number of views a given show's gotten - much like the counters on YouTube.
Hell, even folks who don't use a DVR typically have some kind of cable/dish de-scrambler box... Those could report viewing habits as well.
I certainly understand the appeal of having an impartial party responsible for the data... But it doesn't seem like this kind of data collection should be terribly difficult to do these days. Seems like the bigger challenge would be for viewers who don't want to participate to keep their usage private.
This is just the same problem Noted in XKCD.
Good battery life is not cool. Open source software, especially a mutt like linux, is all about cool.
Good battery life requires annoyingly huge amounts of microoptimizations and chipset-dependent tricks. Which is most definatly NOT cool.
Incorrect, at least in this case.
This problem has nothing to do with whether it is cool or not to squeeze and extra hour or two out of your notebook... This problem has to do with hardware support.
Linux developers continue to have trouble getting access to the hardware they need. Hardware developers are frequently unwilling to divulge the necessary secrets for F/OSS developers to write good drivers... And those same hardware developers are frequently unwilling to devote the time/money/effort necessary to write good drivers themselves...
So you wind up with half-crippled hardware under Linux. You get video cards, motherboards, hard drives, motherboards, etc. that won't properly spin down or hibernate or sleep or whatever.
Other folks in this thread have mentioned that this particular notebook ships with an ATI video card. ATI has notoriously crappy Linux support. This is a video card we're talking about... Geeks love video cards. It doesn't get much cooler than 3D graphics - look at all the time and effort going into projects like Compiz.
I can almost guarantee that if ATI would open up their documentation you'd see better battery life just as quickly as folks could code it.
just don't include any batteries!
batteries can leak over time and ruin the electronics, as well as anything else in the time capsule....
Right. Should've specified that... That's why you want easily-replaceable batteries like AA/AAA - so you don't have to pack any in the time capsule and can easily purchase some whenever it is opened.
My niece just turned one year old and her parents have asked that, instead of the usual gifts, we each contribute something to a time capsule to be opened on her 17th birthday. Multiple members of my family want to contribute digital data - text, video, music files.
Data doesn't go into time capsules. There's absolutely no reason why you couldn't share that text, video, or music with her at any point over the next 17 years. And she'll likely be exposed to it anyway... Music will be playing on the radio, books will be available, folks will share family pictures and videos...
It might make sense to include a photograph with a note on the back, or a couple-page letter to her... But you don't just stuff the capsule full of digital data. That stuff would be better archived on a live computer and updated over the next few years.
What you put into a time capsule are physical objects. Think back to 17 years ago... What would be more fun to stumble across - an mp3 of I'm Too Sexy , or a working minidisc player?
What physical objects are new/cool/important/meaningful right now, that may not be later? Maybe throw a pair of her baby shoes in there... Grab something small off your dining room table or out of your front yard... Maybe the cell phone you just replaced... A couple ticket stubs to something that just opened... Toss in a cheap mp3 player (something that takes disposable batteries, like AA/AAA) loaded with some current songs on it...
In 17 years, when she opens it, you'll be able to say "Those shoes were on your feet 17 years ago. I talked on that cell phone 17 years ago. That's what we used to listen to music 17 years ago." And she'll be able to pick the things up, handle them, feel them, turn them on, see how they worked, compare them to whatever is current. Instead of just firing up a home-made version of I Love the '80s
I'm not sure that the "Open Source" moniker has any relevance to hardware projects like this. In software, the "source code" is the actual raw material that a complied application is made of. In hardware, the "source" is physical electronic components.
I guess you could call the freely-available plans and schematics "the source" but that doesn't make much sense, because without hardware components, you can't compile it into a working device. So the term doesn't really apply, especially as we've had freely available electronic schematics for decades, and nobody ever called them "open source." This terminology just seems to be a way to seem cool and trendy.
So, what can you do with the source code to a piece of software if you have no hardware? If someone just hands you a stack of paper with source code printed on it, and you've got no computer to run it on, what good is it?
Or maybe we're the hardware. Source code is instructions that tell hardware what to do... These are instructions that tell us how to build a clock... Not much different from the control programs that run industrial robots.
Regardless, I think the term applies. OSS is about the freedom to distribute and modify source code. These instructions are available for modification and distribution - unlike the instructions on how to build the RCA clock/radio I've got sitting on my bedstand. Someone else out there might take these instructions and expand upon them by adding an AM/FM tuner or something.
what are those night elves doing in there?
Does Mr. T. reprise his commercial role as the http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZV0DtmxYFuE"Night Elf Mohawk" in Avatar? Serious, I thought WoW when I saw this. Even the live-action stuff looked CGI. There WAS live action, right?
The blue aliens with the big ears looked like Night Elves. They were using bows. They were flying around on the backs of vaguely dragon-y creatures. It reminded me a lot of Warcraft III.