$100 million for 34 million users is a marketing department's wet dream. Screw relaunching the service, someone is going to snatch this up, harvest the user data and close everything down before spaming the living crap out of everyone.
The PC Games Industry Alliance was crowing about wanting to have a PC presence at E3 this year. Possibly including a keynote or something. If there's a near complete build of Episode 3 / Source 2 waiting in the wings that seems like a fine time to demonstrate it.
Last time I checked, Valve hasn't rushed a game out the door and had to do the walk of shame once everyone realized the sad shape the game was in.
Valve is one of those few developers who are in a position to say "When it's done" and take the time to polish/complete the game to the quality standards they set for themselves... and gamers expect. If there's a reason for Ep3/HL3's delay it's because they've been busy with improving the Source engine (or building a new one?), L4D, L4D2 (Brad conveniently disregards L4D2 was 100% Valve), Portal 2, and oh yes, continuing support for TF2.
He also conveniently left out the fact that while they did acquire Turtle Rock (and later let them leave) and a couple of student teams from Digipen, there was still level of involvement from people already at Valve. In particular, Chet and Erik were writing for the Half-Life episodes and were moved onto the L4D and Portal projects.
Firefox home has the same age rating notice as well. I guess that's Apple's get out of jail free card if you decide to start watching pr0n outside of Safari?
"What I have noticed is that the employees at Chik-fil-a's are better dressed and more polite/helpful than at most fast food restaurants"
Holy crap yes. I tried Chik-fil-a for the first time back during Xmas while mall shopping. I was actually stunned when they seemed more than helpful to make sure I was satisfied with my order.
I started to use Netflix to watch movies because I decided that it was much more convenient to rent a movie I wanted to watch instead of dealing with the hassle of BitTorrent and running the risks that includes. So now they want to clamp down on that, presumably because it's cutting into their profits. How many more times are we going to see this song and dance from these spoiled brats? First Hulu, now this.
If they were smart they would realize that 1) we're in a recession, 2) people are effectively telling them movies cost too much to own. If people are jumping on board rental services (which have existed for years, and rental stores predate them since the 70's or earlier) after they scared everyone from pirating, wouldn't that be a very clear indication that the price of a DVD is too high?
Next thing you know they're going to get rentals classified as illegal.
Haven't read TFA but this stood out at me from the summary:
"'I'm not sure that we'll see a standard $70 price point at all. To my mind, emerging technologies, subscriptions and episodic and downloadable content should all enable price drops -- increasing accessibility to a much wider audience.'"
Well if it worked for AT&T and Apple, I'm sure it'll work for the games industry. Decrease the initial investment cost, charge a regular subscription fee (DLC can serve this purpose too) and profit. No ???? needed.
Of course, it should be pointed out that PC and Wii games have stayed at $50. Just sayin'.
Slashdot Mirror
...someone did something remotely interesting/useful with Second Life. Congrats to them.
Merit badges weren't enough incentive?
Right. Got the two mixed up. Thanks for correcting me.
$100 million for 34 million users is a marketing department's wet dream. Screw relaunching the service, someone is going to snatch this up, harvest the user data and close everything down before spaming the living crap out of everyone.
Good work Mr. Murdoch.
We'll probably see him selling the NYT next after the great paywall failure.
Yup. We're officially in another bubble. Yee haw.
The PC Games Industry Alliance was crowing about wanting to have a PC presence at E3 this year. Possibly including a keynote or something. If there's a near complete build of Episode 3 / Source 2 waiting in the wings that seems like a fine time to demonstrate it.
Don't forget they were producing Arkane's The Crossing which ended up being cancelled back in 2009.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crossing_(video_game)
Someone reeks of sour grapes and lame duck.
Last time I checked, Valve hasn't rushed a game out the door and had to do the walk of shame once everyone realized the sad shape the game was in.
Valve is one of those few developers who are in a position to say "When it's done" and take the time to polish/complete the game to the quality standards they set for themselves... and gamers expect. If there's a reason for Ep3/HL3's delay it's because they've been busy with improving the Source engine (or building a new one?), L4D, L4D2 (Brad conveniently disregards L4D2 was 100% Valve), Portal 2, and oh yes, continuing support for TF2.
He also conveniently left out the fact that while they did acquire Turtle Rock (and later let them leave) and a couple of student teams from Digipen, there was still level of involvement from people already at Valve. In particular, Chet and Erik were writing for the Half-Life episodes and were moved onto the L4D and Portal projects.
So.... Facebook?
Welcome back Tech Bubble. How ya been?
Certainly not off the shelf components, but IBM and ATI made a boat load of money off this generation of hardware that's for sure.
Firefox home has the same age rating notice as well. I guess that's Apple's get out of jail free card if you decide to start watching pr0n outside of Safari?
Jeff Atwood hit on this issue in a blog post last year: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/06/url-shorteners-destroying-the-web-since-2002.html
Agreed. Very impressive.
They'll still be interested. Demographic information is worth money. If they don't use it on Facebook (or the web) they'll use it in other places.
About time my alma mater got some recognition on here for something other than an MP3 playing Xmas Tree ;)
"What I have noticed is that the employees at Chik-fil-a's are better dressed and more polite/helpful than at most fast food restaurants"
Holy crap yes. I tried Chik-fil-a for the first time back during Xmas while mall shopping. I was actually stunned when they seemed more than helpful to make sure I was satisfied with my order.
They've supposedly fixed this very recently. If you launch Steam without an Internet connection available it'll kick into offline mode correctly now.
I started to use Netflix to watch movies because I decided that it was much more convenient to rent a movie I wanted to watch instead of dealing with the hassle of BitTorrent and running the risks that includes. So now they want to clamp down on that, presumably because it's cutting into their profits. How many more times are we going to see this song and dance from these spoiled brats? First Hulu, now this.
If they were smart they would realize that 1) we're in a recession, 2) people are effectively telling them movies cost too much to own. If people are jumping on board rental services (which have existed for years, and rental stores predate them since the 70's or earlier) after they scared everyone from pirating, wouldn't that be a very clear indication that the price of a DVD is too high?
Next thing you know they're going to get rentals classified as illegal.
Haven't read TFA but this stood out at me from the summary:
"'I'm not sure that we'll see a standard $70 price point at all. To my mind, emerging technologies, subscriptions and episodic and downloadable content should all enable price drops -- increasing accessibility to a much wider audience.'"
Well if it worked for AT&T and Apple, I'm sure it'll work for the games industry. Decrease the initial investment cost, charge a regular subscription fee (DLC can serve this purpose too) and profit. No ???? needed.
Of course, it should be pointed out that PC and Wii games have stayed at $50. Just sayin'.
I think you need a "DaVinci" virus involved too
You do realize that ICBMs actually do into orbit or near-orbit for a short period of time right?
Karma wasn't a big enough goal already?
It's not like Blu-Ray is going to be a good alternative either.