He's no joke when it comes to EQ. He even wrote a review of one of the expansion packs last year for PC Gamer (I forget which issue, I think it was one of the summer ones). That was a hoot.
Itunes, Napster, MusicMatch are now effectively record labels.
Similar in terms of distribution and business contracts, but the label also has the time and resources for multi-million dollar advertising blitzes per artist, and the money to fund actual album production up-front. Studio time is brutally expensive, and services like iTunes don't have that kind of cashflow, even when backed by a company as relatively large as Apple. Here, the big labels are less distinguished by their technical charateristics and more by their sheer ability to spend avalanches of money promoting artists and recording music.
Legit online music is just a drop in the profit bucket. This is more a clumsy way to wedge a new percieved value into people's minds as they did with CDs, before we can decide for ourselves how much an MP3 should actually cost. Most of us at/. have made this decision already, of course, but we don't exactly represent Joe Downloader who's still trying to wean himself from AOL. That's the market the labels are trying to deal with, not us.
And then they go on to quote some price and team size that might get them Prince of Persia 1, not the 275 people who worked on Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, or the 230 people who worked on Halo
I think counting this way is a little misleading, because you're combining both the platform teams and the people who ported to the PC. PoP also came out on all three consoles. The original team that created Halo is over 100 people, still quite large, but it also had an enormous development cycle, starting out on the Mac, then the PC, then the Xbox, then the PC again.
I'd wager that the number of people who actually worked on the Xbox version is significantly smaller than 100, probably no more than your average AAA title these days (which hovers around 50-75 people).
It's my understanding that foreign car makers have factories here because it's much cheaper and faster to build and distribute automobiles locally than to ship from overseas. And I suspect your shoes are inexpensive because there isn't a lot of demand for them. A small supply would, in theory, drive up the price, but that's contingent upon popularity. I wouldn't hang this argument on an esoteric anecdote.
But I whole-heartededly agree with you on the self-destructive epidemic of short-term fiscal paranoia and trendy offshoring.
Never mind the nuked presidents, I'm still trying to figure out what the guy was doing with 50 brand-new twenties, in his back pocket at a truck stop, plus more (as they were described as "the lion's share" of its cash contents). He must have gotten them directly from a bank teller, since you won't get 50 new ones straight off, or he selected them, which just makes him odd. I'm going with odd.
You know what else can do it, besides Evil Gov't RFID? A magnetized, steel-toed boot. Happens all the time, strangely enough. At least it did when I worked at Home Depot--about once a day, maybe more. Every so often, a blue-collar type would set off the alarm, walk to the counter, put each foot on the counter to de-mag, and walk out. And you know they were de-magging because the counter device did its signature thump to indicate it had done its job. I'm really not kidding.
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He's no joke when it comes to EQ. He even wrote a review of one of the expansion packs last year for PC Gamer (I forget which issue, I think it was one of the summer ones). That was a hoot.
Legit online music is just a drop in the profit bucket. This is more a clumsy way to wedge a new percieved value into people's minds as they did with CDs, before we can decide for ourselves how much an MP3 should actually cost. Most of us at /. have made this decision already, of course, but we don't exactly represent Joe Downloader who's still trying to wean himself from AOL. That's the market the labels are trying to deal with, not us.
I think counting this way is a little misleading, because you're combining both the platform teams and the people who ported to the PC. PoP also came out on all three consoles. The original team that created Halo is over 100 people, still quite large, but it also had an enormous development cycle, starting out on the Mac, then the PC, then the Xbox, then the PC again.
I'd wager that the number of people who actually worked on the Xbox version is significantly smaller than 100, probably no more than your average AAA title these days (which hovers around 50-75 people).
It's my understanding that foreign car makers have factories here because it's much cheaper and faster to build and distribute automobiles locally than to ship from overseas. And I suspect your shoes are inexpensive because there isn't a lot of demand for them. A small supply would, in theory, drive up the price, but that's contingent upon popularity. I wouldn't hang this argument on an esoteric anecdote.
But I whole-heartededly agree with you on the self-destructive epidemic of short-term fiscal paranoia and trendy offshoring.
You know what else can do it, besides Evil Gov't RFID? A magnetized, steel-toed boot. Happens all the time, strangely enough. At least it did when I worked at Home Depot--about once a day, maybe more. Every so often, a blue-collar type would set off the alarm, walk to the counter, put each foot on the counter to de-mag, and walk out. And you know they were de-magging because the counter device did its signature thump to indicate it had done its job. I'm really not kidding.