I got Rock Band and all the instruments that come with it. Harmonix was gracious enough to let you use the GH guitar in Rock Band. I don't see why the hell Activision can't let us plug in Rock Band instruments into their game. Particularly lame to change the drumkit in one tiny little way (add one extra pad) to "improve" it. It is stupid to buy new hardware with every music game out there. It wastes money and living room space.
They aren't really trying anything new so much as going back to the old ways of advertising. Ever heard the Jack Benny Program (also called "the Lucky Strike Program", "the Chevrolet Show", and other sponsor-reflecting names)? The show would seamlessly include little bits where the entertainers themselves sell you on the benefits of their sponsor's products. And the sponsors were definitely "at the table" affecting content in the shows.
I can't blame the networks. They have to get the money from somewhere.
I love Rhapsody. It has its problems, like forcing you to too frequently upgrade the software, but the basic subscription idea is great, and Rhapsody has a very good selection. You can pretty much just put in any artist, obscure or famous, and 19 times out of 20, their music pops up ready to listen to.
The reason that the pay subscription model is not insanely popular is probably because it is competing against the "free subscription" model, where you get all the same music, but for free. Who is offering that? Millions of torrent clients, spread across the internet. For myself, I guess I'll just be a chump and pay twelve bucks a month for all the music I could ever want and then some.
Whatever that particular guy says is going to be prefaced with five decades of mediocre broadcast television, and then before that a bunch of radio shows about cowboys and indians. We should worry more about what kind of impression Jack Benny will make on the aliens. I.e. is he going to convince them all to take up smoking? Mmmm mmm, Lucky Strikes, nothing breathes smoother.
I propose turning their company name into a verb, "roger", which means to manipulate internet data without the receiver's permission. Everytime you exclaim, "I've been rogered!" or "They rogered my data!" the Rogers company name will hold on to its well-earned place in history. And yes, "roger" already means something else quite similar. With either definition, something is being inserted where it probably shouldn't go.
It's nice to get a little break in the stream of injustices and pending threats reported on Slashdot. In addition to alleviating my sense of panic, it also rounds out my world view. I.e. not every stupid lawsuit wins. At least occasionally, the system works.
And congratulations to Philip Smith. To stick through this ordeal must have required some principles (or at least an unhealthy stubbornness).
Could you give some indication in the teaser that the content is actually inside of a video? Ideally, I could filter out the video content. Can't watch it at work due to IT constraints and videos usually take much longer than text to consume.
Reread the quote this whole article is based on again. The Adobe guy said, "...we have not yet announced any intentions to move into the office-productivity software market." Everything else in the article is the Wired writer fantasizing with one hand down his pants about how it might happen. Let's all pull up our chairs in a circle and join him.
I make software and sell it from my website for twenty bucks. Every once in a while somebody with a different website approaches me and offers to sell the same software on their website and give me a cut of every sale. Since getting people's attention on the internet is a hard thing to do, I often have an interest in letting these people put my product in front of their site visitors that wouldn't normally find their way to me.
Now, what pains me terribly is when this distributor discounts my product beneath the twenty bucks. Then people who would normally buy my software from my site will instead go to the outside distributor's site and buy the exact same software I wrote for less. I have *NO* incentive to allow these distributors to sell my software for less than me. If I knew in advance that they were going to undercut my price, I wouldn't make an agreement to let them sell my software. That would be like cutting myself and watching the blood run out.
A strict interpretation of anti-trust law says that I shouldn't set prices in contracts or even bring up the concern informally. So at the moment, I'm at risk to even hint to the distributor about the price problem. The only safe thing to do is to specify a MSRP ("s" stands for "suggested") and if somebody drops below it, quietly avoid them in the future without saying why. I can't complain about being undercut.
Note that in my situation, the people undercutting me aren't running a tighter ship or being cleverly competitive. They are just dumping my product cheap without incurring any extra costs to themselves. I have no problem with discounters as long as I, as the manufacturer, can choose whether or not I wish to deal with them upfront. I have a great relationship with a discounter that sells a Russian-localized version of my product for ten cents on the dollar. By having the freedom to simply discuss and legally agree upon how my product will be distributed, it is possible to find good solutions where everyone wins and nobody gets exploited.
If you think all software should be free and the people that write it shouldn't be paid, then I'm sure this will fall on deaf ears. But some of us are trying to earn a living, and it feels terrible to have your business eroded by exploitive discounters. I want to set price floors, dammit!
The independant game developers are actually releasing a lot of smaller games for the Mac and being rewarded for it. Some shops like Spiderweb Software release on Mac first and port to Windows. For the last 2 years or so, it's been almost a truism in the indie community that releasing on the Mac platform is well worth the effort in sales. Indies that have released on Windows and Mac routinely report 30-50% of their sales come from Mac users. The audience is smaller, but there are less games available, so more attention gets paid to Mac game releases. Not only is it easier to get sales--it's easier to get reviews and press attention.
As far as Apple not advertising and educating about the Mac as gaming machine.. oh, come on! Maybe that would be better for Mac gamers in the short-term, but is that really good for the Mac as a whole? It's easy to spend too much money on advertising or to spend it ineffectively. Somebody else would say that Apple should promote their machines for education or graphic design use, but why dilute a message that is apparently working well for them? As long as Apple is attracting new Mac users, that will improve the market for games and increase the money spent elsewhere to develop titles for that market. So if Apple says "Get a Mac because it's easy to use and will hook up to all your devices painlessly" and that brings in a bunch of new Mac owners, then eventually more money will get spent developing games and the Mac gamers win. Just let Apple go get their customers in the most effective way they can.
The problem is probably a technical one, because smaller game developers making games that don't need to push the technical envelope will go after the Mac market and get paid for it. Like was said above, the reason you don't see AAA titles released simultaneously on the Mac along with PC and consoles could just be because the cross-platform tools and resulting performance when using them are inferior.
"The quality of open source games can be very high. And, I'd like to remind you, there is nothing about GPL-compatible open source licenses that prohibits selling the software. It's a discredit to your reputation to ignore Free / open source games"
Would you give the guy a break? There are more games out there than his site can report on. It's reasonable to choose a niche and stick with it. That isn't a judgment on open source/freeware--it's a practical decision. Besides, GameTunnel isn't anti-open source. One open source game (DROD: Journey to Rooted Hold) was featured in their top ten games of 2006 recently, for example. Whether a game gets noticed by them or not probably has more to do with if the developer has enough motivation to send a press release. A lot of freeware/open source projects never get around to playing the marketing game, so yeah, they get missed.
"Check out the following games for starters. There are more if you look around and ask questions."
That's so rude. Again, it's not GT's job to cover every good game out there. And to imply that they need to do more "looking around" to find titles when they are already deluged with more than they can review is ridiculous. Note that aside from Wesnoth, your list includes games released a long time ago. Not news, so it doesn't belong in a round-up article.
It doesn't make sense for GT to revise it's coverage goals to satisfy everybody. It might make sense for Slashdot to reference similar round-up articles from sites that cover the freeware/open source world. But people are always going to bitch about the left-me-outs no matter what shows up here.
Hey, more people have played Freecell than World of Warcraft. So we better think of all the terrible lessons that are being permanently burned into people's brains from repeated play of this game:
1. Luck > skill.
2. I'll say it again, because it's so damned important: luck > skill.
3. You can always hide workplace sloth from your boss with alt-tab.
4. I'll say it again, because I think I'm so damned clever: You can always hide workplace sloth from your boss with alt-tab.
5. O/S preinstalled games > get-off-ass-and-buy games
6. Life is a series of repetitive tasks, unrewarding and meaningless.
7. Freecell Terms of Service are buried in Windows EULA. Scary!
8. I'll say it again: luck > skill.
9. Skill < luck.
10. Okay, I'm just repeating points because I don't actually have 10 things to say, yet top ten lists are all the rage with Slashdot editors these days.
Oh my god, how long will it be before complete societal collapse?
They should get sued, but not by their own shareholders. They should get sued by the ESRB and retail game developers in general. A short while back, the American game industry was going to get government regulation. A self-regulating system was created quickly and it worked. It got the Joseph Liebermans of the world off our backs for a while.
And then Rockstar comes along. They want to have their cake and eat it too. For attention-whoring reasons, they want to include the controversial "Hot coffee" scene, but they don't have the guts to slap an "AO" rating on their title and take a battle to distribution channels. No, they want to be the bad boys but still suck on Wal*mart's moneyteet. So they pulled their cute little trick. Slashdotters tend to gravitate towards the obvious, high-visibility assholes like Jack Thompson. You'd rather not consider that there is a real mess here that could have been avoided if one company hadn't been such a greedy attention whore.
A self-regulated rating system is a fine thing to have around. As a side effect of their antics, Rock Star/Take Two have assembled the proof that it doesn't work, playing right into the hands of uptight legislators and holy rollers. The most telling sign of trouble is that the ESRB can't seem to do anything substantial to Take Two, i.e. fining or sueing them for breaking their agreement. Is it because the original rules for content review were lax? I don't think so. It's more likely that ESRB doesn't have the will to get into a serious dispute with an industry-dominant publisher.
Yeah, fair enough. It would be cool if some people put the effort into top 10 freeware or top 10 open source lists. One game on the list, DROD: Journey to Rooted Hold, is open source, by the way, although the media included with the game is not openly distributable.
"I wonder if this means that more titles overall are being released for these platforms."
Yeah, if you look around a bit, you'll see a lot more cross-platform releases, and that's great. A number of indie developers started reporting large Mac sales in 2005, like 30-50% compared to their Windows sales. As a result, a lot of devs started writing cross-platform code so they could hit Mac OS X. It wasn't hard to port to Linux if you were already developing for Mac, so Linux players got some trickle down.
"The big question is how many of these games run on Linux ?"
Four. You just have to read the system requirements that are next to each game on the original page (or copied into this thread). Barring any errors in the listings, the 4 Linux-running games are:
So 40% of the games in the top 10 run on Linux. And cross-platform indie developers report about 10% of their sales come from Linux games. So don't bitch too much.
Cave Story was released last year, actually. It just got more attention in 2005.
And dude, have you even played the other games? I hear a lot of whining in this thread about "no way my favorite game isn't there". Tunnel vision. Play some of those other games--they are pretty much all outstanding.
Yes! I would mod you up, but my stash is empty. I made profits on my indie game this year. I contract for a small company that has developed several profitable budget retail titles. I know half a dozen indie developers that have small profits from their games. Look past the big dumb corporations and there are still games being sold and generating profits.
There's less money in a computer science degree now, so I imagine the people getting into the field are doing it more often for the right reason--i.e. the inherent fun and satisfaction of making a machine do your bidding. I got plenty tired of all the entry-level programmers in the 90's that created problems for the real coders to clean up after. Now there are less programming jobs to be filled here, because some of it has been outsourced, and the stupid money dried up. You would expect for there to be less programmers around too, right? I'd rather the US had its old software industry with a little more sanity, but the bright side of the current situation is that I'm working alongside less meatheads that just came in for the money.
Would somebody from Escapist or Businessweek please write an article about all the miserable failures in indie game development? Holy crap, they make it sound like it's so easy to jump in and make money. It's incredibly difficult to make a quality game worth paying attention to, and that's not even the real trouble. Can you market the game and get those sales? Average indie devs can't, and there's a lot of Peter Pans out there that haven't grown up and gotten anyplace with selling their games. Average indie developer age 23. Average indie developer retirement age 25. In other words, you release a game, it gets a few hundred sales, you go back to your job at Starbucks. Unless you're a masochist--then you put out a series of small games over the years and sign up for real punishment. If you learn a lot and are lucky, then maybe you get to support yourself from your games, like a few dozen indie companies are doing. But you could take that same amount of effort and apply it to some other business that is not as immediately appealing but much more lucrative. Other forms of shareware besides games are considered to be much better for finding markets and making sales.
Making casual games is not anything new. Small game developers have been busting their asses at making them for several years now. The fact that a mainstream magazine is picking up on the potential success of casual games just means that competition with large game companies is about to heat up. Don't get into this business for the money. Get into it because you have a burning passion to make your game!
"Maybe some sort of third party site would be good."
This isn't a bad idea, but it's already come up a lot amongst indie developers. The main problem is it takes a lot of work to make the site, maintain the site, and promote it. An indie review site like GameTunnel for example has had thousands of dollars poured into it in order to make it a moderately successful destination for game players. The head guy there, Russell Carroll, will set up a table at shows to promote the site, put out press releases like crazy, and basically work his butt off. To make a review/portal site get traffic, (not just exist and look pretty) you need to put a huge amount of sweat into it. The people sweating want something for their work, so money has got to flow or certain games need to get promoted over others as payoff.
That said, I'm all for more indie game sites and fan reviews are cool too. The closest existing thing I see to that is Home of the Underdogs, which you might want to check out. I just don't think anyone should undertake such a site with the wrong expectations. Like if the person or group's main aim was to make a cool site about games, then they might get someplace. But if they had a business-minded goal to make a place where indie games get a lot of exposure, then that is a long, hard road people have been toiling at in obscurity for years.
Yeah, I'm getting tired of listening to what gamers think is a good dramatic story. These are the ones that fall in love with some anime chick that is, wow... intelligent (because she wears glasses), has big boobs, and knows how to wield a laser rifle. When a gamer tells me that some game has a moving story to it, I just don't believe them anymore. How do you feel emotionally connected to characters whose means of expression are punching, kicking, and shooting, interrupted occasionally by cut scenes where there is "acting"?
The game industry has all but abandoned the adventure genre where we were just beginning to grow up and see some good storytelling. Now we have crap! Gamers need to watch better movies, read better books, and learn to appreciate themes outside of their adolescent power and sex fantasies.
I'm tempted to get the first Bone episode, but twenty bucks for 4-6 hours of gameplay? It just makes me want to look around on eBay instead for the remaining adventure games I haven't played yet.
Slashdot Mirror
I got Rock Band and all the instruments that come with it. Harmonix was gracious enough to let you use the GH guitar in Rock Band. I don't see why the hell Activision can't let us plug in Rock Band instruments into their game. Particularly lame to change the drumkit in one tiny little way (add one extra pad) to "improve" it. It is stupid to buy new hardware with every music game out there. It wastes money and living room space.
They aren't really trying anything new so much as going back to the old ways of advertising. Ever heard the Jack Benny Program (also called "the Lucky Strike Program", "the Chevrolet Show", and other sponsor-reflecting names)? The show would seamlessly include little bits where the entertainers themselves sell you on the benefits of their sponsor's products. And the sponsors were definitely "at the table" affecting content in the shows.
I can't blame the networks. They have to get the money from somewhere.
I love Rhapsody. It has its problems, like forcing you to too frequently upgrade the software, but the basic subscription idea is great, and Rhapsody has a very good selection. You can pretty much just put in any artist, obscure or famous, and 19 times out of 20, their music pops up ready to listen to.
The reason that the pay subscription model is not insanely popular is probably because it is competing against the "free subscription" model, where you get all the same music, but for free. Who is offering that? Millions of torrent clients, spread across the internet. For myself, I guess I'll just be a chump and pay twelve bucks a month for all the music I could ever want and then some.
Whatever that particular guy says is going to be prefaced with five decades of mediocre broadcast television, and then before that a bunch of radio shows about cowboys and indians. We should worry more about what kind of impression Jack Benny will make on the aliens. I.e. is he going to convince them all to take up smoking? Mmmm mmm, Lucky Strikes, nothing breathes smoother.
I propose turning their company name into a verb, "roger", which means to manipulate internet data without the receiver's permission. Everytime you exclaim, "I've been rogered!" or "They rogered my data!" the Rogers company name will hold on to its well-earned place in history. And yes, "roger" already means something else quite similar. With either definition, something is being inserted where it probably shouldn't go.
And congratulations to Philip Smith. To stick through this ordeal must have required some principles (or at least an unhealthy stubbornness).
Could you give some indication in the teaser that the content is actually inside of a video? Ideally, I could filter out the video content. Can't watch it at work due to IT constraints and videos usually take much longer than text to consume.
Reread the quote this whole article is based on again. The Adobe guy said, "...we have not yet announced any intentions to move into the office-productivity software market." Everything else in the article is the Wired writer fantasizing with one hand down his pants about how it might happen. Let's all pull up our chairs in a circle and join him.
I make software and sell it from my website for twenty bucks. Every once in a while somebody with a different website approaches me and offers to sell the same software on their website and give me a cut of every sale. Since getting people's attention on the internet is a hard thing to do, I often have an interest in letting these people put my product in front of their site visitors that wouldn't normally find their way to me.
Now, what pains me terribly is when this distributor discounts my product beneath the twenty bucks. Then people who would normally buy my software from my site will instead go to the outside distributor's site and buy the exact same software I wrote for less. I have *NO* incentive to allow these distributors to sell my software for less than me. If I knew in advance that they were going to undercut my price, I wouldn't make an agreement to let them sell my software. That would be like cutting myself and watching the blood run out.
A strict interpretation of anti-trust law says that I shouldn't set prices in contracts or even bring up the concern informally. So at the moment, I'm at risk to even hint to the distributor about the price problem. The only safe thing to do is to specify a MSRP ("s" stands for "suggested") and if somebody drops below it, quietly avoid them in the future without saying why. I can't complain about being undercut.
Note that in my situation, the people undercutting me aren't running a tighter ship or being cleverly competitive. They are just dumping my product cheap without incurring any extra costs to themselves. I have no problem with discounters as long as I, as the manufacturer, can choose whether or not I wish to deal with them upfront. I have a great relationship with a discounter that sells a Russian-localized version of my product for ten cents on the dollar. By having the freedom to simply discuss and legally agree upon how my product will be distributed, it is possible to find good solutions where everyone wins and nobody gets exploited.
If you think all software should be free and the people that write it shouldn't be paid, then I'm sure this will fall on deaf ears. But some of us are trying to earn a living, and it feels terrible to have your business eroded by exploitive discounters. I want to set price floors, dammit!
As far as Apple not advertising and educating about the Mac as gaming machine.. oh, come on! Maybe that would be better for Mac gamers in the short-term, but is that really good for the Mac as a whole? It's easy to spend too much money on advertising or to spend it ineffectively. Somebody else would say that Apple should promote their machines for education or graphic design use, but why dilute a message that is apparently working well for them? As long as Apple is attracting new Mac users, that will improve the market for games and increase the money spent elsewhere to develop titles for that market. So if Apple says "Get a Mac because it's easy to use and will hook up to all your devices painlessly" and that brings in a bunch of new Mac owners, then eventually more money will get spent developing games and the Mac gamers win. Just let Apple go get their customers in the most effective way they can.
The problem is probably a technical one, because smaller game developers making games that don't need to push the technical envelope will go after the Mac market and get paid for it. Like was said above, the reason you don't see AAA titles released simultaneously on the Mac along with PC and consoles could just be because the cross-platform tools and resulting performance when using them are inferior.
Would you give the guy a break? There are more games out there than his site can report on. It's reasonable to choose a niche and stick with it. That isn't a judgment on open source/freeware--it's a practical decision. Besides, GameTunnel isn't anti-open source. One open source game (DROD: Journey to Rooted Hold) was featured in their top ten games of 2006 recently, for example. Whether a game gets noticed by them or not probably has more to do with if the developer has enough motivation to send a press release. A lot of freeware/open source projects never get around to playing the marketing game, so yeah, they get missed.
"Check out the following games for starters. There are more if you look around and ask questions."
That's so rude. Again, it's not GT's job to cover every good game out there. And to imply that they need to do more "looking around" to find titles when they are already deluged with more than they can review is ridiculous. Note that aside from Wesnoth, your list includes games released a long time ago. Not news, so it doesn't belong in a round-up article.
It doesn't make sense for GT to revise it's coverage goals to satisfy everybody. It might make sense for Slashdot to reference similar round-up articles from sites that cover the freeware/open source world. But people are always going to bitch about the left-me-outs no matter what shows up here.
Oh my god, how long will it be before complete societal collapse?
And then Rockstar comes along. They want to have their cake and eat it too. For attention-whoring reasons, they want to include the controversial "Hot coffee" scene, but they don't have the guts to slap an "AO" rating on their title and take a battle to distribution channels. No, they want to be the bad boys but still suck on Wal*mart's moneyteet. So they pulled their cute little trick. Slashdotters tend to gravitate towards the obvious, high-visibility assholes like Jack Thompson. You'd rather not consider that there is a real mess here that could have been avoided if one company hadn't been such a greedy attention whore.
A self-regulated rating system is a fine thing to have around. As a side effect of their antics, Rock Star/Take Two have assembled the proof that it doesn't work, playing right into the hands of uptight legislators and holy rollers. The most telling sign of trouble is that the ESRB can't seem to do anything substantial to Take Two, i.e. fining or sueing them for breaking their agreement. Is it because the original rules for content review were lax? I don't think so. It's more likely that ESRB doesn't have the will to get into a serious dispute with an industry-dominant publisher.
Better yet... buy some Linux games. Nothing works better than that for getting attention.
Yeah, fair enough. It would be cool if some people put the effort into top 10 freeware or top 10 open source lists. One game on the list, DROD: Journey to Rooted Hold, is open source, by the way, although the media included with the game is not openly distributable.
Yeah, if you look around a bit, you'll see a lot more cross-platform releases, and that's great. A number of indie developers started reporting large Mac sales in 2005, like 30-50% compared to their Windows sales. As a result, a lot of devs started writing cross-platform code so they could hit Mac OS X. It wasn't hard to port to Linux if you were already developing for Mac, so Linux players got some trickle down.
Four. You just have to read the system requirements that are next to each game on the original page (or copied into this thread). Barring any errors in the listings, the 4 Linux-running games are:
So 40% of the games in the top 10 run on Linux. And cross-platform indie developers report about 10% of their sales come from Linux games. So don't bitch too much.
And dude, have you even played the other games? I hear a lot of whining in this thread about "no way my favorite game isn't there". Tunnel vision. Play some of those other games--they are pretty much all outstanding.
Yes! I would mod you up, but my stash is empty. I made profits on my indie game this year. I contract for a small company that has developed several profitable budget retail titles. I know half a dozen indie developers that have small profits from their games. Look past the big dumb corporations and there are still games being sold and generating profits.
There's less money in a computer science degree now, so I imagine the people getting into the field are doing it more often for the right reason--i.e. the inherent fun and satisfaction of making a machine do your bidding. I got plenty tired of all the entry-level programmers in the 90's that created problems for the real coders to clean up after. Now there are less programming jobs to be filled here, because some of it has been outsourced, and the stupid money dried up. You would expect for there to be less programmers around too, right? I'd rather the US had its old software industry with a little more sanity, but the bright side of the current situation is that I'm working alongside less meatheads that just came in for the money.
Making casual games is not anything new. Small game developers have been busting their asses at making them for several years now. The fact that a mainstream magazine is picking up on the potential success of casual games just means that competition with large game companies is about to heat up. Don't get into this business for the money. Get into it because you have a burning passion to make your game!
This isn't a bad idea, but it's already come up a lot amongst indie developers. The main problem is it takes a lot of work to make the site, maintain the site, and promote it. An indie review site like GameTunnel for example has had thousands of dollars poured into it in order to make it a moderately successful destination for game players. The head guy there, Russell Carroll, will set up a table at shows to promote the site, put out press releases like crazy, and basically work his butt off. To make a review/portal site get traffic, (not just exist and look pretty) you need to put a huge amount of sweat into it. The people sweating want something for their work, so money has got to flow or certain games need to get promoted over others as payoff.
That said, I'm all for more indie game sites and fan reviews are cool too. The closest existing thing I see to that is Home of the Underdogs, which you might want to check out. I just don't think anyone should undertake such a site with the wrong expectations. Like if the person or group's main aim was to make a cool site about games, then they might get someplace. But if they had a business-minded goal to make a place where indie games get a lot of exposure, then that is a long, hard road people have been toiling at in obscurity for years.
The game industry has all but abandoned the adventure genre where we were just beginning to grow up and see some good storytelling. Now we have crap! Gamers need to watch better movies, read better books, and learn to appreciate themes outside of their adolescent power and sex fantasies.
I'm with you, buddy. Curse of Monkey Island had beautiful 2D graphics that Escape never matched. It was the apex of point-and-click adventures.
I'm tempted to get the first Bone episode, but twenty bucks for 4-6 hours of gameplay? It just makes me want to look around on eBay instead for the remaining adventure games I haven't played yet.