Our justice system isn't just about deterrence. There is a theoretical sense of balance to it, in that the punishment should fit the crime. If you break a minor law, you recieve a minor punishment. Break a major law, and receive a major punishment. That's why people don't recieve life inprisonment for running stop signs. Sure it would deter the crime, but at what cost?
The fact of the matter is that downloading a copy of a crime that somebody else committed is not the same as committing that crime yourself. They are two distinct actions, and by lumping them together the moral high ground occupied by the system gets extremely muddy.
Indeed, one of the facts of life is that everyone gets topped by somebody who is better, or by somebody who will take it to the next level.
Or the next somebody who is roughly as good as you are, once your legend starts getting torn down.
Remember, Jobs was huge before he was torn down as being a has-been, before being built up again to who he is now. His legend will fade... We like to tear down our heroes.
Video game developers manage to do something which Hollywood has never been able to do - The sequels that we make are consistantly BETTER than the previous entry in the series. How many movies can say that?
People love to talk about how so many new games coming out are sequels, and they are - But so what? If the games are high quality and you have fun playing them, then just enjoy!
What we're selling is a visceral experience. When you first get a game like, say, Dance Dance Revolution USA, you have an amazing experience that is like none you've ever had before. You're blown away by the experience.
But players acclimate. If you find an arcade with DDR 5th mix, the increase in framerate and the addition of hold arrows is a nice touch that helps keep you interested. And maybe DDR Max 2 has a ton of new songs, many of which are in genres that you're interested in. Even though they're both technically superior, neither of these creates the same sense of awe that you had the first time you found this amazing new game. By DDR Extreme 2, the 9th or 13th in the series, you're burned out on it all and want to recapture that original rush.
Sure, in many ways it is the player's fault for buying something they're familiar with instead of taking a chance on something new. But it is also our fault for not providing them with new experiences, but rather more content.
Gamers in some ways are drug addicts. They get that amazing high of the new game. But their systems get acclimated and they take larger and larger doses for less and less payoff. In reality what they need is a new drug, one their system hasn't adapted to.
Why do I think that last paragraph is going to be taken out of context someday?
We screw up, too, in thinking that just because we devote our lives to an experience that the player should too. Game designs don't last forever... not even close. Yet we keep pushing ones we've felt were successful because, while everyone else has moved on, we still think the original game was pretty awesome.
And it was. That's great. Get over it and make something else.
(remember that we're not counting movies and other forms of entertainment as "real life", this argument could be made for movies, etc. as well, but applies more to games for me personally)
There is more depth that comes through in movies than in most videogames. There is a scene in Pulp Fiction where they blow a kid's head off in a car. Gore, blood, grizzle everywhere. Most videogames would stop there, with the gnarly exploding brain effect. These guys paniced, pulled their car off the road, and had to scrape the brains off the windows for hours. They nearly lost a friend over it. They suffered, they slaved, they argued over the mistake.
In movies, violence *can* have nasty and deep effects. Videogame violence rarely elevates to that level, because if it did it wouldn't be much of a game. Videogames rely upon predictability to allow people to learn to control a system. Movies rely upon the inherently unpredictable nature of humanity to put viewers in ambiguous and uncertain situations.
Sometimes in videogames you get caught putting a hampster in a microwave by the owner, but rarely do you face the consequences yourself.
At some point videogames will get to a depth where behaviors modeled on moral situations will have predictable but emotionally complex results. But we're nowhere near that level of artistic sophistication right now.
It is the difference between Sociology and Psychology, and a lot of people seem to take it personally.
If food stores in a given country drop below a certain level, you can make a reasonable prediction of the chances of open rebellion breaking out. That's Sociology. If socioeconomic indicators drop X%, you can predict with relative accuracy an increase in suicide rates of Y%. That's Sociology. If you put a million people in a trust game, you know roughly how many of them are going to stab eachother in the back for a given payout level. That's Sociology.
If you tried to make the same predictions about an individual person, you'd find that you had no fucking clue what that one person was going to do. That's Psychology.
Sociologists aren't making predictions about you, they make predictions about the average behaviors of average groups of people.
But you're not average. You're special. Everyone is special. That's fine, and not far from the truth. But people have weights pulling them towards one decision or another, and maybe you will say no and two of your friends will say yes. And you're all special. And throw a thousand people into that decision, and 60% will say no and 40% will say yes. And throw a million people in there and 64% will say no and 36% will say yes. And throw a billion people in there and 63.3% will say no and 36.7% will say yes.
Every individual person is special and unique, but take lots and lots and lots of people and patterns emerge. No one can predict what one person is going to do anymore than anyone can predict where a molecule in a cloud of gas is going to go. But you can still make accurate predictions about which way the wind is blowing.
My grandmother is going through this exact same process, and it is interesting to watch. She has gone from thinking that she just got to her new home, to "I think I've been here a few weeks." (years, actually) She's stopped recognizing a lot of people, but she's learned to pretend to know everyone. She learned to walk over to the calendar to see if people were there yesterday, even though she doesn't recognize the calendar or know why she's going to that part of the room.
She even learned how to sneak out and buy beer, and did so repeatedly. We were all impressed by that one. Of course, she pled innocent, and as far as she knows she was.
The commentator has an advantage that the players don't have in the match: he can see everything.
"MacKenzie is dropping back from the blue team pack, twisting in behind an oil drum. Jason from the Red team is sneaking up on them from behind, but he has no idea who lies in wait for him."
"Mayatama is trying a box style defense on the Zerg, but it doesn't seem to be holding. Will Jerrelly's Protos style seems unbeatable at this point. You know, Bill, Will played with Mayatama's Okinawa team for his last two years in college, but this is the first time these two men have ever met in person."
Most sports banter is just that, banter. Background on the players, the event, putting things into perspective. It's also a lot of obvious filler. "Unitas goes back to pass. Ohhh! And they've sacked him at the 15 yard line. That's got to hurt. They're going to need to make up some yardage to get a first down... Ok, I've got nothing. Over to you, Bill."
Sports commentator on videogames could be good, but they've got to improve significantly before they're up to the entertaining-but-empty level of professional sports commentators. Even tennis has commentators, and look at how much explainable strategy is in that game.
Unfortunately the Wiki article doesn't include stability, which seems to be the major problem with bittorrent clients these days.
Azurus is a great client, but it had the annoying tendency to take down the entire system. I still use ABC for its simplicity, but it will occasionally lock your network.
Can anyone recommend a robust, simple bittorrent client (for windows, natch)... preferably one that can automatically grep RSS feeds.
Steve's genius is finding amazing people and putting them in positions of power, then keeping them happy.
That's why John Lasseter is responsible for Pixar. That's why Woz designed the Apple II. That's why Jonathan Ive has free reign over Apple's hardware.
The CEO of a company doesn't need to be a genius himself, if he can recognize talent when he sees it and can drive that talent in the direction he wants to go. Jobs has a history of finding amazing people and driving them to do amazing things.
And Jobs did it with one thing: Quality. And Marketing. Ok, two things.
They invested a ton of effort to get an easy human computer interface, which got them the MAC. Jobs re-did that success to a degree with NeXT, which didn't pay off right away but got him even more money when NeXT becamse OSX. He bought Pixar while it was struggling, and helped drive it into one of the most creative, quality-focused entertainment companies in the world. The iPod was designed and re-designed and recieved constant feedback from Jobs himself... when was the last time you heard about Ballmer getting dirty in the trenches? Same with iTunes.
Years ago Jobs and Apple realized that quality and clarity commanded a premium, and have been working dilligently to create and milk that. MS's strategy has been to crush the competition from a business legal standpoint. The former has made Jobs and Apple welcome in new areas and businesses, while the latter leaves Microsoft having an uphill battle every time it enters a new market.
MSNBC was an interesting idea, but it didn't do anything better or more original than the competition.
I'm glad to see that sometimes quality is rewarded.
A related point is that we probably needn't worry about inventing a device that annihilates the entire Universe, either. If such a device could exist, it probably would have already been invented elsewhere, and we wouldn't be here thinking about it.
Yeah, or a device that makes the entire universe completely screwed up and illogical.
You need a portable drive that works with USB and firewire, has about 40GB of space, and lives comfortably in OSX and XP land. And money isn't a big deal.
If you're supporting I.E. 5, Firefox, Opera, and Safari, you're miles ahead of the pack. Really, how much extra effort do you need to put in to support those 10,000 full-time Lynx users, considering that maybe one will surf into your site?
You may think your (website / application / organization) is going to take over the world and needs to be relevant to 100% of the population, but it isn't and it doesn't. Have you tested it with screen readers? Have you made available a high-contrast, large font CSS file? Is it available in English, Spanish, Hebrew, and Mandarin? How does it look in low-rez on WebTV? On Cell Phones? You're already blocked off from large portions of the population anyway... all you can do is design to standards, check with the major points of compatibility, and release. If 3% of people can't get to your site, and they're not the particular 3% that you are trying to target, then it isn't that big of a deal.
If you can get that last few percent easily, then go for it. If not, delaying releasing the site just makes it unavailable to the other 97% of your users.
Disney is a much different company from Apple in early 1997. It has plenty of money in the bank (Apple had closer to $2 billion in cash vs. the $7 billion you describe), has strong free cash flow (wheras things were quite shakey at Apple), and is on a rebound vs. heading downward. Remember it was only at MacWorld in the summer of 1997, that things started to turnaround with the famous investment of Microsoft in Apple and the promise to keep Office on the Mac for 5 years.
If Disney can be said to be "on the rebound," that's only because it sunk terribly, terribly low. California Adventure was a miserable failure, standing unused next to a park that is perpetually overcrowded and run down. The few "enhancements" to the old Disneyland had to be closed because they weren't made properly. Disney Animation has had a string of duds like Chicken Little, Atlantis, Treasure Planet, etc etc. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Pirates of the Carrabean have helped Disney's movie arm to not be a miserable failure these past few years, but that's not saying much. And for every one of those there are dozens of Haunted Mansions and Herbie: Fully Loadeds. The stockholders have been constantly threatening to behead Michael Eisner for poor performance.
Now, Disney is a big company and owns things which aren't going down... like ABC and ESPN. But to go from a company that not only dominated family friendly entertainment but drew loyalty unparalleled by any company besides Apple, down to a company that's churning out second-rate direct-to-videos and whose flagships are falling apart is downright sad. Disney is looking at games, is looking at the internet, and is realizing that it doesn't have a part in either. While this happens, it is watching its movie business flounder and its flagship theme park business fall apart.
The margins Disney products demand are based upon their cultural relevance, and the shareholders are sitting there watching the strongest brand in history disappear.
You can't blame them for feeling that they're being dragged into irrelevance. And they'd be right. I don't know if this is the right step for Steve Jobs, but the board at Disney would be fools to not give him the reigns.
I've bumped into the DVD size limit on two of my projects.
If you look, everything is basically at the maximum for a single layer disk. Publishers simply won't let you go above that, because the manufacturing costs and defect rates both sky rocket.
DVD size is, to game developers, 4.5 GB. Most developers are already pushing up against that limit. Remove the RAM and CPU barriers of current systems, and disk size becomes the major bottleneck.
I am having a hard time believing the idea that the media is going to make all that much difference between the PS3 and the 360. Both systems only have 512 meg of RAM to fill.
That's funny, I have the opposite reaction. 512 megs means that you can fit 8 - 16 "ramfuls" before you run out of space. Levels in most current games load in 2 - 3 sections, so you have space for 6 - 8 levels on disk. That means that the kick-ass boss with the super-detailed intricate spline patterns and the programmatically generated tentacle animation physics will have a full 512 MB of ram to look like a dystopian nightmare, but wouldn't fit on disk on the X360.
Current games fit in 2 - 3 GB because that's what we've got: publishers are surprisingly loathe to use double-sided disks. We'll use all of that available space, don't you worry. If we had 30GB disks today we could fill them.
Oh, and the PS2 / Xbox 1 has good texture compression.... The "Emotion Engine" is a bit beyond GIFs. You might be able to eke out a few more percent, but don't expect a 50% file size reduction. We've been through that part of the curve already.
I hate to be so gruff about it, but bullshit. If you can get Madden 2006 for 60 dollars right next to a bin with Madden 2005 for 10, you're going to buy Madden 2005. EA isn't going to get any money and the developers aren't going to get any money. And neither of them, honestly, will deserve the money, because they didn't release anything compellingly better.
Now, if you're looking at a copy of God of War for 50 or Shadow of the Colossus for 40 or Madden 2004 for 10, you're far more likely to go with the awesome original title. The developers will have provided an amazing, original experience, will deserve the cash and will get it.
Franchises are good within reason, but milking them is bad for business. The publishers that don't realize that rehash mania is bad for everyone will die off, like Williams. The ones that are more disciplined in their approach and continually release new experiences will thrive, as they should.
Even James Bond movies only come out once every two years.
They could also, you know, ASK Google. That way the government would have the figures they ostensibly need, and additional abuses that the Bush administration is now famous for would be avoided.
Legacy, being developed by Mad Doc Software, is set for a September 2006 release, and will span the eras of all Star Trek television shows--Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, and Star Trek: Enterprise.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting calculation: If you live 80 years, that's 435.5 KB per second -- enough for a TV-quality video of your entire life.
If you live for 80 years, that's 75 years longer than an average hard drive will last. That's 6.9 Megs of data breaking every second.
That would deter crime.
Our justice system isn't just about deterrence. There is a theoretical sense of balance to it, in that the punishment should fit the crime. If you break a minor law, you recieve a minor punishment. Break a major law, and receive a major punishment. That's why people don't recieve life inprisonment for running stop signs. Sure it would deter the crime, but at what cost?
The fact of the matter is that downloading a copy of a crime that somebody else committed is not the same as committing that crime yourself. They are two distinct actions, and by lumping them together the moral high ground occupied by the system gets extremely muddy.
Indeed, one of the facts of life is that everyone gets topped by somebody who is better, or by somebody who will take it to the next level.
Or the next somebody who is roughly as good as you are, once your legend starts getting torn down.
Remember, Jobs was huge before he was torn down as being a has-been, before being built up again to who he is now. His legend will fade... We like to tear down our heroes.
It's an incredible new invention by children - all part of their plot to take over the world!
Someday they're going to be successful.
Video game developers manage to do something which Hollywood has never been able to do - The sequels that we make are consistantly BETTER than the previous entry in the series. How many movies can say that?
People love to talk about how so many new games coming out are sequels, and they are - But so what? If the games are high quality and you have fun playing them, then just enjoy!
What we're selling is a visceral experience. When you first get a game like, say, Dance Dance Revolution USA, you have an amazing experience that is like none you've ever had before. You're blown away by the experience.
But players acclimate. If you find an arcade with DDR 5th mix, the increase in framerate and the addition of hold arrows is a nice touch that helps keep you interested. And maybe DDR Max 2 has a ton of new songs, many of which are in genres that you're interested in. Even though they're both technically superior, neither of these creates the same sense of awe that you had the first time you found this amazing new game. By DDR Extreme 2, the 9th or 13th in the series, you're burned out on it all and want to recapture that original rush.
Sure, in many ways it is the player's fault for buying something they're familiar with instead of taking a chance on something new. But it is also our fault for not providing them with new experiences, but rather more content.
Gamers in some ways are drug addicts. They get that amazing high of the new game. But their systems get acclimated and they take larger and larger doses for less and less payoff. In reality what they need is a new drug, one their system hasn't adapted to.
Why do I think that last paragraph is going to be taken out of context someday?
We screw up, too, in thinking that just because we devote our lives to an experience that the player should too. Game designs don't last forever... not even close. Yet we keep pushing ones we've felt were successful because, while everyone else has moved on, we still think the original game was pretty awesome.
And it was. That's great. Get over it and make something else.
(remember that we're not counting movies and other forms of entertainment as "real life", this argument could be made for movies, etc. as well, but applies more to games for me personally)
There is more depth that comes through in movies than in most videogames. There is a scene in Pulp Fiction where they blow a kid's head off in a car. Gore, blood, grizzle everywhere. Most videogames would stop there, with the gnarly exploding brain effect. These guys paniced, pulled their car off the road, and had to scrape the brains off the windows for hours. They nearly lost a friend over it. They suffered, they slaved, they argued over the mistake.
In movies, violence *can* have nasty and deep effects. Videogame violence rarely elevates to that level, because if it did it wouldn't be much of a game. Videogames rely upon predictability to allow people to learn to control a system. Movies rely upon the inherently unpredictable nature of humanity to put viewers in ambiguous and uncertain situations.
Sometimes in videogames you get caught putting a hampster in a microwave by the owner, but rarely do you face the consequences yourself.
At some point videogames will get to a depth where behaviors modeled on moral situations will have predictable but emotionally complex results. But we're nowhere near that level of artistic sophistication right now.
What exactly is implicit nudity? Isn't being implicitly nude like being a little bit pregnant?
Thank you.
It is the difference between Sociology and Psychology, and a lot of people seem to take it personally.
If food stores in a given country drop below a certain level, you can make a reasonable prediction of the chances of open rebellion breaking out. That's Sociology. If socioeconomic indicators drop X%, you can predict with relative accuracy an increase in suicide rates of Y%. That's Sociology. If you put a million people in a trust game, you know roughly how many of them are going to stab eachother in the back for a given payout level. That's Sociology.
If you tried to make the same predictions about an individual person, you'd find that you had no fucking clue what that one person was going to do. That's Psychology.
Sociologists aren't making predictions about you, they make predictions about the average behaviors of average groups of people.
But you're not average. You're special. Everyone is special. That's fine, and not far from the truth. But people have weights pulling them towards one decision or another, and maybe you will say no and two of your friends will say yes. And you're all special. And throw a thousand people into that decision, and 60% will say no and 40% will say yes. And throw a million people in there and 64% will say no and 36% will say yes. And throw a billion people in there and 63.3% will say no and 36.7% will say yes.
Every individual person is special and unique, but take lots and lots and lots of people and patterns emerge. No one can predict what one person is going to do anymore than anyone can predict where a molecule in a cloud of gas is going to go. But you can still make accurate predictions about which way the wind is blowing.
My grandmother is going through this exact same process, and it is interesting to watch. She has gone from thinking that she just got to her new home, to "I think I've been here a few weeks." (years, actually) She's stopped recognizing a lot of people, but she's learned to pretend to know everyone. She learned to walk over to the calendar to see if people were there yesterday, even though she doesn't recognize the calendar or know why she's going to that part of the room.
She even learned how to sneak out and buy beer, and did so repeatedly. We were all impressed by that one. Of course, she pled innocent, and as far as she knows she was.
The commentator has an advantage that the players don't have in the match: he can see everything.
"MacKenzie is dropping back from the blue team pack, twisting in behind an oil drum. Jason from the Red team is sneaking up on them from behind, but he has no idea who lies in wait for him."
"Mayatama is trying a box style defense on the Zerg, but it doesn't seem to be holding. Will Jerrelly's Protos style seems unbeatable at this point. You know, Bill, Will played with Mayatama's Okinawa team for his last two years in college, but this is the first time these two men have ever met in person."
Most sports banter is just that, banter. Background on the players, the event, putting things into perspective. It's also a lot of obvious filler. "Unitas goes back to pass. Ohhh! And they've sacked him at the 15 yard line. That's got to hurt. They're going to need to make up some yardage to get a first down... Ok, I've got nothing. Over to you, Bill."
Sports commentator on videogames could be good, but they've got to improve significantly before they're up to the entertaining-but-empty level of professional sports commentators. Even tennis has commentators, and look at how much explainable strategy is in that game.
Unfortunately the Wiki article doesn't include stability, which seems to be the major problem with bittorrent clients these days.
Azurus is a great client, but it had the annoying tendency to take down the entire system. I still use ABC for its simplicity, but it will occasionally lock your network.
Can anyone recommend a robust, simple bittorrent client (for windows, natch)... preferably one that can automatically grep RSS feeds.
Steve's genius is finding amazing people and putting them in positions of power, then keeping them happy.
That's why John Lasseter is responsible for Pixar. That's why Woz designed the Apple II. That's why Jonathan Ive has free reign over Apple's hardware.
The CEO of a company doesn't need to be a genius himself, if he can recognize talent when he sees it and can drive that talent in the direction he wants to go. Jobs has a history of finding amazing people and driving them to do amazing things.
And that's exactly what Disney needs right now.
And Jobs did it with one thing: Quality. And Marketing. Ok, two things.
They invested a ton of effort to get an easy human computer interface, which got them the MAC. Jobs re-did that success to a degree with NeXT, which didn't pay off right away but got him even more money when NeXT becamse OSX. He bought Pixar while it was struggling, and helped drive it into one of the most creative, quality-focused entertainment companies in the world. The iPod was designed and re-designed and recieved constant feedback from Jobs himself... when was the last time you heard about Ballmer getting dirty in the trenches? Same with iTunes.
Years ago Jobs and Apple realized that quality and clarity commanded a premium, and have been working dilligently to create and milk that. MS's strategy has been to crush the competition from a business legal standpoint. The former has made Jobs and Apple welcome in new areas and businesses, while the latter leaves Microsoft having an uphill battle every time it enters a new market.
MSNBC was an interesting idea, but it didn't do anything better or more original than the competition.
I'm glad to see that sometimes quality is rewarded.
Or does the screwed-up-illogicalness still propagate at the speed of light for some absurd reason?
Well, Bush broadcasts on a 3 second delay...
A related point is that we probably needn't worry about inventing a device that annihilates the entire Universe, either. If such a device could exist, it probably would have already been invented elsewhere, and we wouldn't be here thinking about it.
Yeah, or a device that makes the entire universe completely screwed up and illogical.
Oh. Nevermind.
You need a portable drive that works with USB and firewire, has about 40GB of space, and lives comfortably in OSX and XP land. And money isn't a big deal.
Dude. You need to get your boss to buy you iPod.
If you're supporting I.E. 5, Firefox, Opera, and Safari, you're miles ahead of the pack. Really, how much extra effort do you need to put in to support those 10,000 full-time Lynx users, considering that maybe one will surf into your site?
You may think your (website / application / organization) is going to take over the world and needs to be relevant to 100% of the population, but it isn't and it doesn't. Have you tested it with screen readers? Have you made available a high-contrast, large font CSS file? Is it available in English, Spanish, Hebrew, and Mandarin? How does it look in low-rez on WebTV? On Cell Phones? You're already blocked off from large portions of the population anyway... all you can do is design to standards, check with the major points of compatibility, and release. If 3% of people can't get to your site, and they're not the particular 3% that you are trying to target, then it isn't that big of a deal.
If you can get that last few percent easily, then go for it. If not, delaying releasing the site just makes it unavailable to the other 97% of your users.
One of my old jobs had a fingerprint scanner that was so terrible you could foil it with a warm hot dog.
I'm still not quite sure what, if anything, it was scanning for. It wasn't even a beef frank.
Disney is a much different company from Apple in early 1997. It has plenty of money in the bank (Apple had closer to $2 billion in cash vs. the $7 billion you describe), has strong free cash flow (wheras things were quite shakey at Apple), and is on a rebound vs. heading downward. Remember it was only at MacWorld in the summer of 1997, that things started to turnaround with the famous investment of Microsoft in Apple and the promise to keep Office on the Mac for 5 years.
If Disney can be said to be "on the rebound," that's only because it sunk terribly, terribly low. California Adventure was a miserable failure, standing unused next to a park that is perpetually overcrowded and run down. The few "enhancements" to the old Disneyland had to be closed because they weren't made properly. Disney Animation has had a string of duds like Chicken Little, Atlantis, Treasure Planet, etc etc. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Pirates of the Carrabean have helped Disney's movie arm to not be a miserable failure these past few years, but that's not saying much. And for every one of those there are dozens of Haunted Mansions and Herbie: Fully Loadeds. The stockholders have been constantly threatening to behead Michael Eisner for poor performance.
Now, Disney is a big company and owns things which aren't going down... like ABC and ESPN. But to go from a company that not only dominated family friendly entertainment but drew loyalty unparalleled by any company besides Apple, down to a company that's churning out second-rate direct-to-videos and whose flagships are falling apart is downright sad. Disney is looking at games, is looking at the internet, and is realizing that it doesn't have a part in either. While this happens, it is watching its movie business flounder and its flagship theme park business fall apart.
The margins Disney products demand are based upon their cultural relevance, and the shareholders are sitting there watching the strongest brand in history disappear.
You can't blame them for feeling that they're being dragged into irrelevance. And they'd be right. I don't know if this is the right step for Steve Jobs, but the board at Disney would be fools to not give him the reigns.
I've bumped into the DVD size limit on two of my projects.
If you look, everything is basically at the maximum for a single layer disk. Publishers simply won't let you go above that, because the manufacturing costs and defect rates both sky rocket.
DVD size is, to game developers, 4.5 GB. Most developers are already pushing up against that limit. Remove the RAM and CPU barriers of current systems, and disk size becomes the major bottleneck.
I am having a hard time believing the idea that the media is going to make all that much difference between the PS3 and the 360. Both systems only have 512 meg of RAM to fill.
That's funny, I have the opposite reaction. 512 megs means that you can fit 8 - 16 "ramfuls" before you run out of space. Levels in most current games load in 2 - 3 sections, so you have space for 6 - 8 levels on disk. That means that the kick-ass boss with the super-detailed intricate spline patterns and the programmatically generated tentacle animation physics will have a full 512 MB of ram to look like a dystopian nightmare, but wouldn't fit on disk on the X360.
Current games fit in 2 - 3 GB because that's what we've got: publishers are surprisingly loathe to use double-sided disks. We'll use all of that available space, don't you worry. If we had 30GB disks today we could fill them.
Oh, and the PS2 / Xbox 1 has good texture compression.... The "Emotion Engine" is a bit beyond GIFs. You might be able to eke out a few more percent, but don't expect a 50% file size reduction. We've been through that part of the curve already.
I hate to be so gruff about it, but bullshit. If you can get Madden 2006 for 60 dollars right next to a bin with Madden 2005 for 10, you're going to buy Madden 2005. EA isn't going to get any money and the developers aren't going to get any money. And neither of them, honestly, will deserve the money, because they didn't release anything compellingly better.
Now, if you're looking at a copy of God of War for 50 or Shadow of the Colossus for 40 or Madden 2004 for 10, you're far more likely to go with the awesome original title. The developers will have provided an amazing, original experience, will deserve the cash and will get it.
Franchises are good within reason, but milking them is bad for business. The publishers that don't realize that rehash mania is bad for everyone will die off, like Williams. The ones that are more disciplined in their approach and continually release new experiences will thrive, as they should.
Even James Bond movies only come out once every two years.
They could also, you know, ASK Google. That way the government would have the figures they ostensibly need, and additional abuses that the Bush administration is now famous for would be avoided.
I wish someone could make a damn universal format
MPEG 2?
I mean, that's what VCD, DVD, and now HD-DVD are based on. I can't think of any consumer standard more universal.
Legacy, being developed by Mad Doc Software, is set for a September 2006 release, and will span the eras of all Star Trek television shows--Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, and Star Trek: Enterprise.