A lot of people are doing the math and coming up with figures between $130-$200 as a price consistent with Apple's pricing philosophy. For those unfamiliar with said philosophy, it goes something like this:
Final price = manufacturing costs + marketing costs + healthy margin + some more healthy margin + annual GDP of Canada (which isn't much, I'll give you that)
I know I'm not buying an mp3 player that costs over a hundred bucks. Most people won't either.
Now if the rumors are true and apple is indeed planning to release a 2Gb mini-Ipod, They should cut on margins and go for a $99 markup. Sales would be huge and would certainly increase the Itunes userbase exponentially. This would allow them to be in a great position to renegociate their contracts with the Big five of the recording industry and profit from it. In/. speak, it goes like this:
1-sell miniIpod for $99 2-Increase Itunes userbase and song sales 3-renegociate contract with record labels 4-profit!
Not to mention that a significant amount of Ipod users switch to Macs. More long-term durable profit right there.
Unfortunately, corporations tend to favor next quarter profits to the detriment of the long-term. So I'm not holding my breath on this one.
If you happen to live in Spain, you can see milk, juice and other brand products embedded in tv shows. The most prevalent one being the "Puleva 3 milk". It's only a matter of time before this catches on in the U.S..
I've been wanting to buy 45min lowres videos to play on my GBA for ages. In fact, I can confidently say it's my lifelong dream. I'll now go pray and thank G..$5#&***_____ERROR.4174: Sarcasm Overload
Morocco exports a lot of goods to Europe. Some of them completely native like fruits and vegetables, phosphate, (hashich:p), etc. Others are produced by foreign companies outsourcing to Morocco (though not nearly as much as one would hope for) France, Spain, Germany, Italy and the U.K are some of Morocco's main economic partners.
It goes without saying That Morocco also imports from those countries quite a bit. Some more traffic right there.
Morocco is also a touristic destination. (And I am shamelessly plugging it when I say: Go visit! I swear you'll like it. Really:) I believe it gets around 2-3 million tourists a year (many of them people of Moroccan extraction residing in europe) which, while by no means comparable to Spain's 50 millions or France's 70 millions are still important to its economy and are a vital source of hard currency. That's some more traffic right there.
And last but not least, It is also a hub between Europe and Africa so part of many african countries' exports and imports also go through Morocco.
Anyways, My point is that there is PLENTY of traffic taking place between Spain and Morocco and that a tunnel or a bridge linking the two countries DOES make plenty of economic sense. As the article pointed out, talks about this have been going on for decades now and it is actually surprising this has not happened sooner (taking into account that The distance between Tangiers and Algeciras is a measly 10 miles).
And for those unfamiliar with the territorial "spats" between Morocco and Spain, it goes something like this:
A few hundred years ago, Spain conquered a couple of northern moroccan cities (sebta and imlilia a.k.a ceuta and melilla). They have been spanish ever since but Morocco still officially wants them returned (The truth is no moroccan I've ever known cares about that.) They are tax-free zones and a LOT of cheap contraband stuff (from eletronics to candy) comes from them. My first playstation most probably came from there:)
The Western Sahara is a different issue. Spain was ocuppying it during the days of european colonization and it was taken back about 3 decades ago at the end of a "million men" peaceful march. Since then, Spain has been trying to make it an independant country so that they could fish within it's territorial waters for cheap. Now THAT is a very touchy subject for your average moroccan. You know..pride, territorial integrity, yadda yadda. The government has been stalling a referendum supposed to take place there and giving incentives to Moroccans to relocate there in hopes of skewing a future vote.
Back to the topic. I'm a bit disappointed that the tunnel is going to be trains only. I was actually hoping for something that allows cars and trucks to travel through. I guess the ferry businesses lobbied against it to avoid certain bankruptcy.
You have a guy who: 1- downloads an iso 2- burns it our mounts it using d-tools 3- installs it then copies the included crack over 4- plays 5- downloads cracked patches every few months
So I guess my open letter to ubisoft is:
If I'm not mistaken, crackers have routinely defeated dozens of major protection schemes and thousands of obscure ones for decades now so How exactly is a crappy snoopware feature going to help you?
Oh, and keep the good games coming, you're on a roll!
Wait, what? So your PSP is about as good as a PS2?
No, Sony boasted that the PS2 was capable of spitting 75 Million Polygons / second. Now they boast that the PSP is capable of 33 MPS. Considering that the max resolution of the PSP is 480*272, I'd say the PS2 is roughly 3 times more powerful than the upcoming PSP.
It's kind of funny that Sony says the PSP "favorably compares" to the PS2. It seems to me that they want to spin it that way so that people won't associate it with the PSX the same way people associate the GBA with the SNES.
It's also interesting to note that they compare the cost of this UMD format to ROMs instead of mini-dvds (which would be considerably cheaper to manufacture).
I'm downloading the.iso now. I don't have a usb thumbdrive. Can i boot this without fear of it affecting my current winXP installation? Ya know, just to toy around with it a little.
I'm guessing yes. And I'm guessing even if somehow it can't use the free space in my NTFS5 formatted HD, it won't do anything without asking me first. Which is why i'm going ahead with it in the probable case I don't get an answer within...1 hour and 18 seconds:p
The same guy who leaked HL2's source, HL2 alpha (mislabeled BETA) and custom versions of Counter-strike and Half-Life 1 running on the source engin had just leaked Condition Zero.
Indeed, The sound quality is top notch.
Of course, I only made one call so far (I did harass about 50 females from all over the world before some nice middle aged lady actually answered:P)
SKYPER END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT IMPORTANT - PLEASE READ CAREFULLY:
This End User License Agreement ("Agreement") constitutes a valid and binding agreement between Skyper Limited (together with its affiliates, successors and assigns "Skyper") and you ("you," or "your") for the use of the Skype Software, Network and Services, as those terms are defined below. You must enter into this agreement in order to install and use such Skype Software.
BY INSTALLING AND USING THE SKYPE SOFTWARE, YOU AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT, DO NOT INSTALL OR USE THE SKYPE SOFTWARE.
The Skype Software and the Services are not intended for use by or availability to persons under the age limit of any jurisdiction which restricts the use of Internet-based applications and services according to age. IF YOU RESIDE IN SUCH A JURISDICTION AND ARE UNDER THAT JURISDICTION'S AGE LIMIT FOR USING INTERNET-BASED APPLICATIONS OR SERVICES, YOU MAY NOT DOWNLOAD, INSTALL OR USE THE SKYPE SOFTWARE AND YOU MAY NOT ACCESS THE SERVICES.
1. License Grant.
Subject to the terms of this Agreement, Skyper hereby grants you a limited, non-exclusive, personal, non-sublicensable, non-assignable license to download, install and use the Skype Software, including any online or enclosed documentation, data distributed to your computer for processing and any future programming fixes, updates and upgrades provided to you (collectively, the "Skype Software") onto a computer for your sole use to install, interact with and utilize the Skype Software, including the content and features contained therein and the services and the Network related thereto ("Services"). The Skype Software may only be used in connection with the Services. As used herein, the term "Network" means the universe of computers connected to the Internet that are operating the Skype Software.
2. License Restrictions.
(a) Notwithstanding anything to the contrary, you may not: (i) remove any proprietary notices from the Services, Skype Software or any copy thereof; (ii) cause, permit or authorize the modification, creation of derivative works, translation, reverse engineering, decompiling or disassembling or hacking of the Skype Software, the Services or the Network; (iii) sell, assign, rent, lease, act as a service bureau, or grant rights in the Skype Software or Services, including, without limitation, through sublicense, to any other entity without the prior written consent of Skyper; (iv) export or re-export the Skype Software in violation of United Kingdom export laws; (v) use the Skype Software or Services for any commercial purpose or the benefit of any third party or charge any person for the use of the Skype Software; or (vi) use the Skype Software or Services to, or in any way that would violate any applicable law, regulation or ordinance; (vii) collect any information or communication about the Network or users of the Skype Software or Services by monitoring, interdicting or intercepting any process of the Skype Software or the Network; and (viii) use any type of bot, spider virus, clock, timer, counter, worm, software lock, drop dead device, packet-sniffer, Trojan-horse routing, trap door, time bomb or any other codes or instructions that are designed to be used to provide a means of surreptitious or unauthorized access or that are designed to distort, delete, damage or disassemble the Skype Software, the Services or the Network. Furthermore, you may not use the Skype Software or Services to develop, generate, transmit or store information that: (A) infringes any third party's intellectual property or other proprietary right; (B) is defamatory, harmful, abusive, obscene or hateful; (C) in any way obstructs or otherwise interferes with the normal performance of another person's use of the Skype Software or Services, (D) performs any unsolicited commercial communication not permitted by applicable law; (E) is harassment or a violation of privacy or threatens other people or
I just don't understand what the selling point of Skype is. Can't we use MSN messenger, Aim, ICQ, Netmeeting, Roger Wylco, Counter-Strike and 200 billion other programs that do the exact same thing? What does the "p2p" bring into the mix?
Maybe I was too harsh, you DID include the UPI but your url was incorrect. Here is the correct link:
http://tinyurl.com/na9o
(couldn't figure out how to make the link clickable)
Not to be a troll, but I'm not wading through 400 comments to find a particular post. Next time, use the unique post identifier when you're referring to a specific comment.
When I first learned about Steam a month ago, I was impressed by what Valve had done. Free Counter-Strike, Half-Life and a few other mods. Wow. What a smart move! nobody's buying those old games anymore. Making them free not only is a nice thing to do for fans but also bolstered people's sympathy towards Valve and increased the number of people who are going to buy their new products (namely Half-Life 2). But that was just the tip of the iceberg as I saw it.
Steam had the potential to be the next revolution in pc game distribution. Here was my recipe for success:
Attract people with free games and increase Steam userbase. Make anyone who uses Steam agree to occasionally contribute some upload bandwidth as a compensation. Say you have to contribute 1Gb/month worth of upload, with the choice of when to enable it and full throttle abilities. A user in control is a happy user.
This will of course, be used by steam (which would a p2p system a la bittorrent for content distribution.)
Now comes the really cool part:
Say Half-Life 2 is ready. Valve can offer the game through Steam. Since all the costs involved in distributing a physical item have beel cut, they can afford to sell it for maybe $20 a piece. No monthtly subscriptions or anything like that. It's not like you are paying for servers! Other people are hosting them. One time fees. Always. (How much money does valve get off the sale of one HL2 box? I'm assuming it's $20 or less)Use a 100Mbit line to get things rolling (and maybe get some videogame sites (the same ones that host demos, servers and such) to share some of the "seeding" burden with you in exchange for some advertising.
Soon enough, People will be contributing most of the bandwidth needed by their fellow leechers). And these are freaking happy people. These are people who got the game for 40% of it's retail price.
Now that users have got the game (and the corresponding cd-keys that have been emailed to them). Keep being nice to them. Those who want to play online will have to pay for the cd-key. Those who want offline game and are not willing to pay can leech a pirate version anyways. So make the game protection free for your beloved customers. Hell, include a button for them that convert the game to format so they can burn it if they wish to (not like isoz of the cracked game aren't going to surface a week before it's released in stores anyways...).
A little later, you and others are going to start releasing mods. Team Fortress 2, DoD 2 and eventually, the much expected counter-strike 2.
Sell those mods! Charge very little for them. Say $5 to $10 bucks depending on the mod. If the mod is not yours, charge $5 or $10 on each mod sale. You'll have millions of people willing to spend $10 for CS2 right? many of the people who pirated HL2 buy it and spend $10 for CS2 because they want to play online. The number of quality mods will increase exponentially because of the money incentive. You get money, happy customers AND more users as time goes by. THe more users, the more appealing it is for other modders to jump on the bandwagon. and the cycle continues.
The constantly increasing userbase will start to full fledged game developpers (small and big alike) who will start releasing their games on Steam. And you're getting a small slice of the pie for every single copy sold! More profit for you at very little expense. Remember the bandwidth is provided by the users (who will be more than happy to do so in exchange for those low prices I mentionned).
So there we have it, Everybody is happy. Valve is making tons of money, gamers are getting awesome price/value, modders and small time game developpers have an easy entry to the industry.
Am I crazy? Is all this stuff I mentionned so hard to implement? Isn't this a valid business plan?
But nope. Steam is not going to do this.
1-After the beta ended, free HL and counter-strike was over. Say bye to to 50-75% of steam users.
Let's take a closer look at what they have done here:
1-They settled at an incredible speed, thus turning the story into an over and done with non-story and closing a very ackward chapter in their litigious history.
2-They imposed a fine big enough to financially harm the [poor] family and act as an efficient deterrent for the girl and her mother but small enough not to outrage the public.
3-They showed consistency in their current policy. If they hadn't fined the mother, other people could have claimed unfair treatment. Not that it would have changed anything for them legally but it always sits well with the media.
4-RIAA is evil. I know it's irrelevant to my post but this *is*/. afterall.
The graphics suck...a lot. Sure they are better than the pc version of the game. A game that uses an engine roughly equivalent to the Quake2 engine.
(For those who don't already know, Counter-Strike is a Half-Life mod. HL uses a heavily modified Quake1 engine peppered with some bits of Quake2 engine code). QUAKE1 people!!!
Therefore, comparing a nearly 5 year old game designed to run smoothly on a 300 Mhz PII with a TNT videocard to it's brand new Xbox counterpart is not really a smart move.
This port had the potential to look a lot better than it does right now. Maybe the developpers are just prioritizing the much expected CS2 for pc (which will run on the stunning HL2 engine).
Continuity? Transitions? What are you talking about?
Kazaa-lite/K++ are simply hacked versions of kazaa that remove "bad" features (spyware, ads,..) and add "good" features (more extensive searches and whatnot). This is done by a few p2p enthusiasts and is available for free. Nothing to do with corporations or whatever.
Oh my GOD! They pirate Anime? Those filthy animals! Why did you even bother mentionning civil rights problems? I vote to go to war with Taiwan over this anime piracy problem.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of people are doing the math and coming up with figures between $130-$200 as a price consistent with Apple's pricing philosophy. For those unfamiliar with said philosophy, it goes something like this:
/. speak, it goes like this:
Final price = manufacturing costs + marketing costs + healthy margin + some more healthy margin + annual GDP of Canada (which isn't much, I'll give you that)
I know I'm not buying an mp3 player that costs over a hundred bucks. Most people won't either.
Now if the rumors are true and apple is indeed planning to release a 2Gb mini-Ipod, They should cut on margins and go for a $99 markup. Sales would be huge and would certainly increase the Itunes userbase exponentially. This would allow them to be in a great position to renegociate their contracts with the Big five of the recording industry and profit from it. In
1-sell miniIpod for $99
2-Increase Itunes userbase and song sales
3-renegociate contract with record labels
4-profit!
Not to mention that a significant amount of Ipod users switch to Macs. More long-term durable profit right there.
Unfortunately, corporations tend to favor next quarter profits to the detriment of the long-term. So I'm not holding my breath on this one.
If you happen to live in Spain, you can see milk, juice and other brand products embedded in tv shows. The most prevalent one being the "Puleva 3 milk". It's only a matter of time before this catches on in the U.S..
I've been wanting to buy 45min lowres videos to play on my GBA for ages. In fact, I can confidently say it's my lifelong dream. I'll now go pray and thank G..$5#&***_____ERROR.4174: Sarcasm Overload
Morocco exports a lot of goods to Europe. Some of them completely native like fruits and vegetables, phosphate, (hashich :p), etc. Others are produced by foreign companies outsourcing to Morocco (though not nearly as much as one would hope for) France, Spain, Germany, Italy and the U.K are some of Morocco's main economic partners.
:) I believe it gets around 2-3 million tourists a year (many of them people of Moroccan extraction residing in europe) which, while by no means comparable to Spain's 50 millions or France's 70 millions are still important to its economy and are a vital source of hard currency. That's some more traffic right there.
:)
It goes without saying That Morocco also imports from those countries quite a bit. Some more traffic right there.
Morocco is also a touristic destination. (And I am shamelessly plugging it when I say: Go visit! I swear you'll like it. Really
And last but not least, It is also a hub between Europe and Africa so part of many african countries' exports and imports also go through Morocco.
Anyways, My point is that there is PLENTY of traffic taking place between Spain and Morocco and that a tunnel or a bridge linking the two countries DOES make plenty of economic sense. As the article pointed out, talks about this have been going on for decades now and it is actually surprising this has not happened sooner (taking into account that The distance between Tangiers and Algeciras is a measly 10 miles).
And for those unfamiliar with the territorial "spats" between Morocco and Spain, it goes something like this:
A few hundred years ago, Spain conquered a couple of northern moroccan cities (sebta and imlilia a.k.a ceuta and melilla). They have been spanish ever since but Morocco still officially wants them returned (The truth is no moroccan I've ever known cares about that.) They are tax-free zones and a LOT of cheap contraband stuff (from eletronics to candy) comes from them. My first playstation most probably came from there
The Western Sahara is a different issue. Spain was ocuppying it during the days of european colonization and it was taken back about 3 decades ago at the end of a "million men" peaceful march. Since then, Spain has been trying to make it an independant country so that they could fish within it's territorial waters for cheap. Now THAT is a very touchy subject for your average moroccan. You know..pride, territorial integrity, yadda yadda. The government has been stalling a referendum supposed to take place there and giving incentives to Moroccans to relocate there in hopes of skewing a future vote.
Back to the topic. I'm a bit disappointed that the tunnel is going to be trains only. I was actually hoping for something that allows cars and trucks to travel through. I guess the ferry businesses lobbied against it to avoid certain bankruptcy.
It took a whooping 24 hours but "finally":
1 .5 0.CRACKED-DEViANCE
TOM.CLANCYS.RAINBOW.SIX.3.RAVEN.SHIELD.UPDATE.V
I fail to see how this affects pirates.
You have a guy who:
1- downloads an iso
2- burns it our mounts it using d-tools
3- installs it then copies the included crack over
4- plays
5- downloads cracked patches every few months
So I guess my open letter to ubisoft is:
If I'm not mistaken, crackers have routinely defeated dozens of major protection schemes and thousands of obscure ones for decades now so How exactly is a crappy snoopware feature going to help you?
Oh, and keep the good games coming, you're on a roll!
Wait, what? So your PSP is about as good as a PS2?
No, Sony boasted that the PS2 was capable of spitting 75 Million Polygons / second. Now they boast that the PSP is capable of 33 MPS. Considering that the max resolution of the PSP is 480*272, I'd say the PS2 is roughly 3 times more powerful than the upcoming PSP.
It's kind of funny that Sony says the PSP "favorably compares" to the PS2. It seems to me that they want to spin it that way so that people won't associate it with the PSX the same way people associate the GBA with the SNES.
It's also interesting to note that they compare the cost of this UMD format to ROMs instead of mini-dvds (which would be considerably cheaper to manufacture).
I'm downloading the .iso now. I don't have a usb thumbdrive. Can i boot this without fear of it affecting my current winXP installation? Ya know, just to toy around with it a little.
:p
I'm guessing yes. And I'm guessing even if somehow it can't use the free space in my NTFS5 formatted HD, it won't do anything without asking me first. Which is why i'm going ahead with it in the probable case I don't get an answer within...1 hour and 18 seconds
Family Guy is, hands down, my favorite tv show of all times.
- http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/e/0/6e
0 c5f5b-bb37-42bb-a189-bb66038fce2e/setup.exe
You're welcome.The same guy who leaked HL2's source, HL2 alpha (mislabeled BETA) and custom versions of Counter-strike and Half-Life 1 running on the source engin had just leaked Condition Zero.
It is spreading wildly as I'm typing this...
I read the article and it's 36 DAYS, not hours. Big difference.
...Is that it actually *deserves* to crash and burn. And it will!
Mod parent up!
Indeed, The sound quality is top notch. Of course, I only made one call so far (I did harass about 50 females from all over the world before some nice middle aged lady actually answered :P)
SKYPER END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
IMPORTANT - PLEASE READ CAREFULLY:
This End User License Agreement ("Agreement") constitutes a valid and binding agreement between Skyper Limited (together with its affiliates, successors and assigns "Skyper") and you ("you," or "your") for the use of the Skype Software, Network and Services, as those terms are defined below. You must enter into this agreement in order to install and use such Skype Software.
BY INSTALLING AND USING THE SKYPE SOFTWARE, YOU AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT, DO NOT INSTALL OR USE THE SKYPE SOFTWARE.
The Skype Software and the Services are not intended for use by or availability to persons under the age limit of any jurisdiction which restricts the use of Internet-based applications and services according to age. IF YOU RESIDE IN SUCH A JURISDICTION AND ARE UNDER THAT JURISDICTION'S AGE LIMIT FOR USING INTERNET-BASED APPLICATIONS OR SERVICES, YOU MAY NOT DOWNLOAD, INSTALL OR USE THE SKYPE SOFTWARE AND YOU MAY NOT ACCESS THE SERVICES.
1. License Grant.
Subject to the terms of this Agreement, Skyper hereby grants you a limited, non-exclusive, personal, non-sublicensable, non-assignable license to download, install and use the Skype Software, including any online or enclosed documentation, data distributed to your computer for processing and any future programming fixes, updates and upgrades provided to you (collectively, the "Skype Software") onto a computer for your sole use to install, interact with and utilize the Skype Software, including the content and features contained therein and the services and the Network related thereto ("Services"). The Skype Software may only be used in connection with the Services. As used herein, the term "Network" means the universe of computers connected to the Internet that are operating the Skype Software.
2. License Restrictions.
(a) Notwithstanding anything to the contrary, you may not: (i) remove any proprietary notices from the Services, Skype Software or any copy thereof; (ii) cause, permit or authorize the modification, creation of derivative works, translation, reverse engineering, decompiling or disassembling or hacking of the Skype Software, the Services or the Network; (iii) sell, assign, rent, lease, act as a service bureau, or grant rights in the Skype Software or Services, including, without limitation, through sublicense, to any other entity without the prior written consent of Skyper; (iv) export or re-export the Skype Software in violation of United Kingdom export laws; (v) use the Skype Software or Services for any commercial purpose or the benefit of any third party or charge any person for the use of the Skype Software; or (vi) use the Skype Software or Services to, or in any way that would violate any applicable law, regulation or ordinance; (vii) collect any information or communication about the Network or users of the Skype Software or Services by monitoring, interdicting or intercepting any process of the Skype Software or the Network; and (viii) use any type of bot, spider virus, clock, timer, counter, worm, software lock, drop dead device, packet-sniffer, Trojan-horse routing, trap door, time bomb or any other codes or instructions that are designed to be used to provide a means of surreptitious or unauthorized access or that are designed to distort, delete, damage or disassemble the Skype Software, the Services or the Network. Furthermore, you may not use the Skype Software or Services to develop, generate, transmit or store information that: (A) infringes any third party's intellectual property or other proprietary right; (B) is defamatory, harmful, abusive, obscene or hateful; (C) in any way obstructs or otherwise interferes with the normal performance of another person's use of the Skype Software or Services, (D) performs any unsolicited commercial communication not permitted by applicable law; (E) is harassment or a violation of privacy or threatens other people or
I just don't understand what the selling point of Skype is. Can't we use MSN messenger, Aim, ICQ, Netmeeting, Roger Wylco, Counter-Strike and 200 billion other programs that do the exact same thing? What does the "p2p" bring into the mix?
The videogame industry ALREADY generates more revenue than the movie industry (at least in the u.s).
I really don't know why, but your post had me laughing repeatedly. Humor through repetition I guess. Weird...
Maybe I was too harsh, you DID include the UPI but your url was incorrect. Here is the correct link: http://tinyurl.com/na9o (couldn't figure out how to make the link clickable)
Not to be a troll, but I'm not wading through 400 comments to find a particular post. Next time, use the unique post identifier when you're referring to a specific comment.
When I first learned about Steam a month ago, I was impressed by what Valve had done. Free Counter-Strike, Half-Life and a few other mods. Wow. What a smart move! nobody's buying those old games anymore. Making them free not only is a nice thing to do for fans but also bolstered people's sympathy towards Valve and increased the number of people who are going to buy their new products (namely Half-Life 2). But that was just the tip of the iceberg as I saw it.
Steam had the potential to be the next revolution in pc game distribution. Here was my recipe for success:
Attract people with free games and increase Steam userbase. Make anyone who uses Steam agree to occasionally contribute some upload bandwidth as a compensation. Say you have to contribute 1Gb/month worth of upload, with the choice of when to enable it and full throttle abilities. A user in control is a happy user.
This will of course, be used by steam (which would a p2p system a la bittorrent for content distribution.)
Now comes the really cool part:
Say Half-Life 2 is ready. Valve can offer the game through Steam. Since all the costs involved in distributing a physical item have beel cut, they can afford to sell it for maybe $20 a piece. No monthtly subscriptions or anything like that. It's not like you are paying for servers! Other people are hosting them. One time fees. Always. (How much money does valve get off the sale of one HL2 box? I'm assuming it's $20 or less)Use a 100Mbit line to get things rolling (and maybe get some videogame sites (the same ones that host demos, servers and such) to share some of the "seeding" burden with you in exchange for some advertising.
Soon enough, People will be contributing most of the bandwidth needed by their fellow leechers). And these are freaking happy people. These are people who got the game for 40% of it's retail price.
Now that users have got the game (and the corresponding cd-keys that have been emailed to them). Keep being nice to them. Those who want to play online will have to pay for the cd-key. Those who want offline game and are not willing to pay can leech a pirate version anyways. So make the game protection free for your beloved customers. Hell, include a button for them that convert the game to format so they can burn it if they wish to (not like isoz of the cracked game aren't going to surface a week before it's released in stores anyways...).
A little later, you and others are going to start releasing mods. Team Fortress 2, DoD 2 and eventually, the much expected counter-strike 2.
Sell those mods! Charge very little for them. Say $5 to $10 bucks depending on the mod. If the mod is not yours, charge $5 or $10 on each mod sale. You'll have millions of people willing to spend $10 for CS2 right? many of the people who pirated HL2 buy it and spend $10 for CS2 because they want to play online. The number of quality mods will increase exponentially because of the money incentive. You get money, happy customers AND more users as time goes by. THe more users, the more appealing it is for other modders to jump on the bandwagon. and the cycle continues.
The constantly increasing userbase will start to full fledged game developpers (small and big alike) who will start releasing their games on Steam. And you're getting a small slice of the pie for every single copy sold! More profit for you at very little expense. Remember the bandwidth is provided by the users (who will be more than happy to do so in exchange for those low prices I mentionned).
So there we have it, Everybody is happy. Valve is making tons of money, gamers are getting awesome price/value, modders and small time game developpers have an easy entry to the industry.
Am I crazy? Is all this stuff I mentionned so hard to implement? Isn't this a valid business plan?
But nope. Steam is not going to do this.
1-After the beta ended, free HL and counter-strike was over. Say bye to to 50-75% of steam users.
2-Valve is going the monthly subs
Let's take a closer look at what they have done here:
/. afterall.
1-They settled at an incredible speed, thus turning the story into an over and done with non-story and closing a very ackward chapter in their litigious history.
2-They imposed a fine big enough to financially harm the [poor] family and act as an efficient deterrent for the girl and her mother but small enough not to outrage the public.
3-They showed consistency in their current policy. If they hadn't fined the mother, other people could have claimed unfair treatment. Not that it would have changed anything for them legally but it always sits well with the media.
4-RIAA is evil. I know it's irrelevant to my post but this *is*
The graphics suck...a lot. Sure they are better than the pc version of the game. A game that uses an engine roughly equivalent to the Quake2 engine.
(For those who don't already know, Counter-Strike is a Half-Life mod. HL uses a heavily modified Quake1 engine peppered with some bits of Quake2 engine code). QUAKE1 people!!!
Therefore, comparing a nearly 5 year old game designed to run smoothly on a 300 Mhz PII with a TNT videocard to it's brand new Xbox counterpart is not really a smart move.
This port had the potential to look a lot better than it does right now. Maybe the developpers are just prioritizing the much expected CS2 for pc (which will run on the stunning HL2 engine).
Continuity? Transitions? What are you talking about?
Kazaa-lite/K++ are simply hacked versions of kazaa that remove "bad" features (spyware, ads,..) and add "good" features (more extensive searches and whatnot). This is done by a few p2p enthusiasts and is available for free. Nothing to do with corporations or whatever.
Oh my GOD! They pirate Anime? Those filthy animals! Why did you even bother mentionning civil rights problems? I vote to go to war with Taiwan over this anime piracy problem.