The solution to a lack of marketing on the company's part isn't to cut back on marketing. Both Sony and Microsoft are behemoths in marketing largely because they're successful as a result of marketing. Sony in particular with their more diverse range of consumer products.
Showing off the Revolution at E3 would be cheap; presumeably they're going anyway, so I'd venture it's cheaper to add the Revolution to their kiosks than what they should be doing on a larger scale with respect to marketing. Your suggestion that they might host an event later would work... if Nintendo invested more in their international marketing to begin with.
The beauty of E3 is that the companies themselves aren't pushing to a generic audience coast to coast. They're pushing to the press that're already there. The press that have a lot more credibility with consumers than these companies themselves (or at least should). The press that makes its money devoting resources to covering this stuff, and getting the message out.
There's nothing "smart" about shirking a major media event. Particularly when you're a company with Nintendo's history and recent exposure to heavy competition.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but how does one person's exaggerated anecdotal experience get modded up so high as insightful? If I am missing something, I pre-emptively thank anyone that fills me in on this.
I've been using Firefox for over a year now, but before that IE was my primary browser. I never had any trouble; no malware, no viruses, no malicious helper objects. I, as a member of IE's userbase, never had any problem. My only third-party support apps were AVG Antivirus and Ad Aware, and the same system has since been checked Norton and Spybot. The most malicious findings were cookies found through Ad Aware. Probably the a result of my choice in site browsing?
I don't deny that Firefox is generally more secure, but I do seriously question which sites you're browsing such that "[going] to a site using IE" has you "immediately [getting] inudated [sic] with BHO's [sic]"?
I'm kind old school I guess, I think of the web as being primarily a form of information and knowledge distribution, and flash isn't necessary to present most types of information or knowledge.
"I'm kind old school I guess, I think of the web as being primarily a form of information and knowledge distribution, and PDFs aren't necessary to present most types of information or knowledge."
For sake of taking an alternate stance on format preference. For sake of doing more than echoing I can't count the number of times that co-workers, classmates, and myself have lost Firefox sessions thanks to Adobe's PDF plugin.
Both formats have their time and place. Both formats are abused. Both formats are condemned by any number of individuals who've had a bad run-in with them in the past. The benefits of both can be condemned by arguing what can already be done with existing open technology and debating what the web should and shouldn't be (i.e. No required rich content support). The fact that such formats are abused doesn't deny the potential benefits of each, and there aren't many viable alternatives to either when one breaks them down to their more powerful features.
Personally I think your problem is more with the content providers than those that would develop the tools. I definitely see where you're coming from, but idiots will be idiots regardless of the tools as their disposal; most of the near-alternatives typically involve more stringent browser restrictions.
However, you can only get movies on UMD if you buy them directly on UMD (and then you can't play them on anything but the PSP) and $150 per gig of storage for music is obnoxious.
But again, there's no non-proprietary format that solves these problems. DVD movies aren't released on any compact format suitable for a portable console; you wouldn't expect a PDA to play a DVD without an addon that significantly increases its size, and decreases its portability. The standard formats aren't suitable for a portable console.
The same is true where music is concerned. The standard is still CDs, which are infeasible for the same reason. There aren't any standard, cheap, available micro-hard-drives to download on to, and all flash memory is relatively expensive compared to, say, an iPod. Again, the standard formats are infeasible for a portable console.
300 megs less capacity, and 2 centimeters wider in diameter). The latter in particular significant considering that mini DVDs, at 8 centimeters, are already 6 millimeters wider than the PSP itself.
Come on Sony. Didn't you learn your lesson about propriatary formats yet?
Just out of curiosity, what non-proprietary format would you recommend in this case for its games? There don't seem to be many options in terms of standard small form-factor media discs.
Meanwhile, Nintendo seems to have done well enough in the portable market with their own long-proprietary formats. Not to mention their own proprietary disc format for the Gamecube.
The only thing that can get MS to change their browser is website developers. If they design CSS2 compliant websites that break IE, MS will fix it.
Websites "breaking" in IE is more of an attack on the users than on Microsoft itself. Unless you're designing a site specifically for other designers, your users will blame you, not Microsoft, when your page "breaks." You'll be the one taking heat for Microsoft's faults.
Perhaps a better approach would be providing an improved experience to users of other browsers that take advantage of the standards? It's a practice that seems to have motivated major change in the big alternative browsers recently (e.g. XMLHTTP).
"Standards." "You use this word a lot. I do not think it means what you think it means."
There are de facto standards, and there are de jure standards. Both are valid types of standards, just with different endorsement.
In the perfect world, all standards would be de jure standards. But in this imperfect world, de jure standards take forever to standardize, are often non-trivial to implement, and as a result often breed their own de facto offshoots, particularly if early adopters are 800lb gorillas.
One might pick at whether IE's standards are "de facto" based on rate of adoption, but with other browsers imitating much of its proprietary functionality (i.e. XMLHTTP and various non-standard JavaScript properties/methods), I think the label is reasonable.
It was fine 5-6 years ago to say "Ooops -- you're using that Netscape piece of shit, please come back using a real browser"
I say it's time we start doing this again, but for IE and for the exact same reasons.
It was never "fine." Simply because it became a common practice, doesn't make it right. It wasn't even a matter of time or cost; it was a matter of developers with lousy skill sets and a tendency to trend-hop to the latest browser technology. It's tu quoque fallacy to suggest that such practices in the past justify their revival, and ultimately it hurt the actual users.
Which brings us back back to the matter of your scheme for highlighting IE development cost. It makes more sense for the company to hire a developer with the required skill set to support the majority target browser from the beginning at a fraction of your transition cost. If you're already under contract for such work, and pull such a stunt, you seem to be pushing your employer toward hurting their users in the immediate future. It's incredibly unprofessional, and not your place.
The minority of designers actually work from standards, and fewer have the required comprehension level to understand them in a meaningful way. They develop for target browsers, and if their browser of choice happens to claim full standard support, they sing it from the hilltops. Some will validate their code, though even the W3C's validators don't adequately pick out IE's potholes. If you start pulling out big bills for IE support, your potential employers will start pulling in cheaper IE-centric developers, and risk aggrivating the situation.
I don't like what Microsoft is doing. I don't like Internet Explorer. I really wish people would switch, but I'm not going to target the user, either directly or indirectly. The user shouldn't be the one to suffer simply because some people hold a religious view regarding web standards. What you're suggesting is negative re-enforcement, rather than positive re-enforcement. Like running a political campaign on the dark private life of your opponent. The user should decide what their computer runs, not me, and hopefully not you.
I frequently use Wikipedia. I also frequently use Britannica.
Wikipedia is the only encyclopedia where a "bug" has resulted in me being told to "eat shit and die" by a current event listing.
I love Wikipedia, but it's in an entirely different league. As wonderful a resource as it is, it embodies the very principles that have my professors telling me that all Internet citations are unacceptable.
Imagine if Britannica devoted the resources to extensively tracking Wikipedia errors, then claiming corrections against them.;)
My experiences are the same, and I attribute it to the same problem of my email address being publically accessible for so long.
That said, even if spam levels were to decrease by 20% over a given period of time, it'd be difficult to identify, let alone diagnose. One day I may receive 10 spam emails. The next, 200. A lot of my spam for one account seems to come from a small handful of sources, so one of them taking a day off from hammering my address would probably have a more noticable impact than spammers being scared away entirely.
Doesn't help that, as a Canadian, fewer than 10% of my email addresses end in.ca.
Now, Wi-Fi? Serously, why on Earth would a Nintendo home console need Wi-Fi?
Everyone knows that Wi-Fi's the ideal connection type for accessing XML/SOAP/REST/RSS/ATOM powering all the latest innovative XHTML/JS/AJAX/PHP/ASP/JSP Web Application Frameworks (WAFs)! If you haven't already upgraded your home network, you're just part of the problem.
Your human logic doesn't stand a chance against my trendy acronyms and Nintendo's still-unrevealed, in-development-for-half-a-decade-so-it-must-be-ama zing Online Gaming Instrastructure (OGI)!
If "Don't be evil" means anything, it also means "Don't be a fucking hypocrite"!
Perhaps I'm using the wrong dictionary, but I fail to see how "evil" equates to "fucking hypocrite."
Parents are frequently hypocritical. That doesn't make them evil. It just makes them hypocritical. Hypocrisy is generally a bad thing, but realize that it's often committed with the best of intentions, so it seems unfair to assume the worst.
that is just going to force the average browser user to start using a custom Hosts file of some kind to block nearly all ads
The "average browser user" has no clue what a hosts file is. Heck, the "average browser user" is still using Internet Explorer and thinks the Internet is only accessible through their ISP's portal or MSN.
You and every other relatively elite computer user aren't the target of these advertisements. The ones I've encountered in my own experience have been the sort that inform me of a dangerously slow connection, or a severely unoptimized system, or vulnerabilities to various viruses. We all know that this is bollocks.
Advertisers almost certainly know that we know it's bollocks. They probably think that an OS-themed popup telling the user that they have a virus will fool a few random folks into clicking, and maybe even buying. They're probably right.
Heck, the "You have a virus!" advertisements look less out of place than the arbitrarily themed popups for most major antivirus suites.
And by the way, "boring" testimonials are highly effective marketing tools.
There's some humor in your condemnation of the term "free" in contrast to your promotion of testimonials. Both have negative connotation to the educated reader. Who are these people? Are the indicative of the whole? What do they do for a living? Why should I trust in their entirely personal, qualitative analysis?
At least your average shyster infomercial tends to give us a bit of background into the testimonial subject with something quantifiable to cling to. They attach a face, profession, and some numbers to work with. The latter may not be feasible given the nature of the advertisement, but even switch2firefox provides the first two. As it stands, the testimonials in the Firefox ad hold no more weight with me than, say, some random CNet reader review... within the bulk of which I could probably find counter-testimonials of equal credibility with little difficulty. I could manufacture the same testimonials ad hoc for virtually any product.
The company seeks to distinguish itself from Google, Yahoo Inc. and growing list of other search engine players by using artificial intelligence to make the results more relevant, said Pfeiffer.
There's some humor in this statement in that Accoona seems to be using Overture for at least its sponsored results. Oneexample.
But then, most modern "competitors" of Google and Yahoo seem to fall back on the technology of one or the other to some degree.
When was this? Do you have DNS/network/firewall issues which could be causing this?
I actually had the same problem myself, the day 1.0 was released. I cannot see it being a DNS or network issue in my case; I've never had such issues before, and none of my other applications or systems on the network experienced any hiccups.
The machine itself was a WinXP box with Zonealarm installed. Zonealarm itself didn't blink during the entire event. The crash was the type that has Windows screaming to have me provide feedback... something I'd hoped to never see, running a barebones Firefox installation.
My Firefox installation was broken after the crash. I downloaded the latest installer with Internet Explorer (shudder) and installed it overtop. Thankfully all my bookmarks and settings were preserved.
For quite some time now, searching for extremely common words (i.e. "the" by itself) would turn up a page count in the area of ~5,400,000,000. The number on Google's front page seems to update less frequently than the actual number indexed.
Still, I suppose it isn't unreasonable for most people to go by the number on the front page.
Re:Other record: Best reviewed game ever?
on
Halo 2 Released
·
· Score: 1
Based on past observations, for whatever reason, review scores seem to decrease over time, based on how their scores shift on sites such as Game Rankings. Possible factors? I could venture a few guesses, but it'd be little more than speculation on my part.
One notable example is GTA:VC, which was up at the top for quite a length of time. The same is true for GTA:SA, as far as I can tell, and some friends complained of the same with Mario Kart: Double Dash!!
So, please, enlighten me as to where you got your info to back up the aforementioned claim. I still don't believe because adults buy most games, that they'll jump in on this handheld wave.
My argument is no weaker than the original AC's: The majority of console gamers are adults, and there's no good reason to suggest that there's something about portable consoles that's somehow repellent to this demographic. Your personal insecurity and the insecurity you perceive in other adults is, in fact, a weak argument, and one balanced against my own experiences to the contrary. Even giving your own argument the benefit of the doubt, there's nothing to stop an adult from using a portable console in private, or in a context they're comfortable with. I never see people whipping out laptops on public transit, but that's no evidence that people don't buy laptops.
Adults are already on the "wave." IDC's study rolls portable consoles into its figures for console gaming, and makes no distinction between adult and child owners of specific consoles. If you feel that the distribution isn't even, then again, the burden is on you to demonstrate as much.
What do you have up your sleeve to support your claim?
Which claim, in particular?
The IDSA's report for 2003 suggests that roughly 2/3 of the game playing market were over the age of 18, if that's the claim you're talking about. Source.
If it's the claim of adults wanting handheld devices, you're the one flaming Sony (assuming you're the same AC), so I'd venture the burden of proof rests with you. Obviously they're targeting a different market for a reason; Their actions speak louder than your words and anecdote. After all, being a big bad corporation, they wouldn't be doing it if they didn't think they'd be successful by some measure of success. Meanwhile, you represent less than 0.0001% of the market.
attempting to reach out to a market that's not there (not many older people aside from the hardcore gamers play handheld systems)
Adults represent 2/3 of the video game market. If adults truly aren't playing handheld games, then presumable there's a good reason. One reason may be the present offerings, in which case Sony's appeal to this demographic makes sense.
The reason probably isn't that they don't want to play handheld games.
My cache is stored in: C:\Documents and Settings\[Current Account]\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Desktop Search
I wasn't aware this was a publically accessible folder. I'm not allowed to access said folder under other users' accounts, on this machine, unless I run as Admin. That said, I haven't tried searching for files that would be found only under their accounts.
Slashdot Mirror
The solution to a lack of marketing on the company's part isn't to cut back on marketing. Both Sony and Microsoft are behemoths in marketing largely because they're successful as a result of marketing. Sony in particular with their more diverse range of consumer products.
Showing off the Revolution at E3 would be cheap; presumeably they're going anyway, so I'd venture it's cheaper to add the Revolution to their kiosks than what they should be doing on a larger scale with respect to marketing. Your suggestion that they might host an event later would work... if Nintendo invested more in their international marketing to begin with.
The beauty of E3 is that the companies themselves aren't pushing to a generic audience coast to coast. They're pushing to the press that're already there. The press that have a lot more credibility with consumers than these companies themselves (or at least should). The press that makes its money devoting resources to covering this stuff, and getting the message out.
There's nothing "smart" about shirking a major media event. Particularly when you're a company with Nintendo's history and recent exposure to heavy competition.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but how does one person's exaggerated anecdotal experience get modded up so high as insightful? If I am missing something, I pre-emptively thank anyone that fills me in on this.
I've been using Firefox for over a year now, but before that IE was my primary browser. I never had any trouble; no malware, no viruses, no malicious helper objects. I, as a member of IE's userbase, never had any problem. My only third-party support apps were AVG Antivirus and Ad Aware, and the same system has since been checked Norton and Spybot. The most malicious findings were cookies found through Ad Aware. Probably the a result of my choice in site browsing?
I don't deny that Firefox is generally more secure, but I do seriously question which sites you're browsing such that "[going] to a site using IE" has you "immediately [getting] inudated [sic] with BHO's [sic]"?
I'm kind old school I guess, I think of the web as being primarily a form of information and knowledge distribution, and flash isn't necessary to present most types of information or knowledge.
"I'm kind old school I guess, I think of the web as being primarily a form of information and knowledge distribution, and PDFs aren't necessary to present most types of information or knowledge."
For sake of taking an alternate stance on format preference. For sake of doing more than echoing I can't count the number of times that co-workers, classmates, and myself have lost Firefox sessions thanks to Adobe's PDF plugin.
Both formats have their time and place. Both formats are abused. Both formats are condemned by any number of individuals who've had a bad run-in with them in the past. The benefits of both can be condemned by arguing what can already be done with existing open technology and debating what the web should and shouldn't be (i.e. No required rich content support). The fact that such formats are abused doesn't deny the potential benefits of each, and there aren't many viable alternatives to either when one breaks them down to their more powerful features.
Personally I think your problem is more with the content providers than those that would develop the tools. I definitely see where you're coming from, but idiots will be idiots regardless of the tools as their disposal; most of the near-alternatives typically involve more stringent browser restrictions.
Been there, done that
All the most amusing viruses emerge on the first day of April...
However, you can only get movies on UMD if you buy them directly on UMD (and then you can't play them on anything but the PSP) and $150 per gig of storage for music is obnoxious.
But again, there's no non-proprietary format that solves these problems. DVD movies aren't released on any compact format suitable for a portable console; you wouldn't expect a PDA to play a DVD without an addon that significantly increases its size, and decreases its portability. The standard formats aren't suitable for a portable console.
The same is true where music is concerned. The standard is still CDs, which are infeasible for the same reason. There aren't any standard, cheap, available micro-hard-drives to download on to, and all flash memory is relatively expensive compared to, say, an iPod. Again, the standard formats are infeasible for a portable console.
300 megs less capacity, and 2 centimeters wider in diameter). The latter in particular significant considering that mini DVDs, at 8 centimeters, are already 6 millimeters wider than the PSP itself.
Come on Sony. Didn't you learn your lesson about propriatary formats yet?
Just out of curiosity, what non-proprietary format would you recommend in this case for its games? There don't seem to be many options in terms of standard small form-factor media discs.
Meanwhile, Nintendo seems to have done well enough in the portable market with their own long-proprietary formats. Not to mention their own proprietary disc format for the Gamecube.
The only thing that can get MS to change their browser is website developers. If they design CSS2 compliant websites that break IE, MS will fix it.
Websites "breaking" in IE is more of an attack on the users than on Microsoft itself. Unless you're designing a site specifically for other designers, your users will blame you, not Microsoft, when your page "breaks." You'll be the one taking heat for Microsoft's faults.
Perhaps a better approach would be providing an improved experience to users of other browsers that take advantage of the standards? It's a practice that seems to have motivated major change in the big alternative browsers recently (e.g. XMLHTTP).
"Standards." "You use this word a lot. I do not think it means what you think it means."
There are de facto standards, and there are de jure standards. Both are valid types of standards, just with different endorsement.
In the perfect world, all standards would be de jure standards. But in this imperfect world, de jure standards take forever to standardize, are often non-trivial to implement, and as a result often breed their own de facto offshoots, particularly if early adopters are 800lb gorillas.
One might pick at whether IE's standards are "de facto" based on rate of adoption, but with other browsers imitating much of its proprietary functionality (i.e. XMLHTTP and various non-standard JavaScript properties/methods), I think the label is reasonable.
It was fine 5-6 years ago to say "Ooops -- you're using that Netscape piece of shit, please come back using a real browser" I say it's time we start doing this again, but for IE and for the exact same reasons.
It was never "fine." Simply because it became a common practice, doesn't make it right. It wasn't even a matter of time or cost; it was a matter of developers with lousy skill sets and a tendency to trend-hop to the latest browser technology. It's tu quoque fallacy to suggest that such practices in the past justify their revival, and ultimately it hurt the actual users.
Which brings us back back to the matter of your scheme for highlighting IE development cost. It makes more sense for the company to hire a developer with the required skill set to support the majority target browser from the beginning at a fraction of your transition cost. If you're already under contract for such work, and pull such a stunt, you seem to be pushing your employer toward hurting their users in the immediate future. It's incredibly unprofessional, and not your place.
The minority of designers actually work from standards, and fewer have the required comprehension level to understand them in a meaningful way. They develop for target browsers, and if their browser of choice happens to claim full standard support, they sing it from the hilltops. Some will validate their code, though even the W3C's validators don't adequately pick out IE's potholes. If you start pulling out big bills for IE support, your potential employers will start pulling in cheaper IE-centric developers, and risk aggrivating the situation.
I don't like what Microsoft is doing. I don't like Internet Explorer. I really wish people would switch, but I'm not going to target the user, either directly or indirectly. The user shouldn't be the one to suffer simply because some people hold a religious view regarding web standards. What you're suggesting is negative re-enforcement, rather than positive re-enforcement. Like running a political campaign on the dark private life of your opponent. The user should decide what their computer runs, not me, and hopefully not you.
I frequently use Wikipedia. I also frequently use Britannica.
Wikipedia is the only encyclopedia where a "bug" has resulted in me being told to "eat shit and die" by a current event listing.
I love Wikipedia, but it's in an entirely different league. As wonderful a resource as it is, it embodies the very principles that have my professors telling me that all Internet citations are unacceptable.
Imagine if Britannica devoted the resources to extensively tracking Wikipedia errors, then claiming corrections against them. ;)
Another Canadian chiming in.
My experiences are the same, and I attribute it to the same problem of my email address being publically accessible for so long.
That said, even if spam levels were to decrease by 20% over a given period of time, it'd be difficult to identify, let alone diagnose. One day I may receive 10 spam emails. The next, 200. A lot of my spam for one account seems to come from a small handful of sources, so one of them taking a day off from hammering my address would probably have a more noticable impact than spammers being scared away entirely.
Doesn't help that, as a Canadian, fewer than 10% of my email addresses end in .ca.
Now, Wi-Fi? Serously, why on Earth would a Nintendo home console need Wi-Fi?
Everyone knows that Wi-Fi's the ideal connection type for accessing XML/SOAP/REST/RSS/ATOM powering all the latest innovative XHTML/JS/AJAX/PHP/ASP/JSP Web Application Frameworks (WAFs)! If you haven't already upgraded your home network, you're just part of the problem.
Your human logic doesn't stand a chance against my trendy acronyms and Nintendo's still-unrevealed, in-development-for-half-a-decade-so-it-must-be-ama zing Online Gaming Instrastructure (OGI)!
If "Don't be evil" means anything, it also means "Don't be a fucking hypocrite"!
Perhaps I'm using the wrong dictionary, but I fail to see how "evil" equates to "fucking hypocrite."
Parents are frequently hypocritical. That doesn't make them evil. It just makes them hypocritical. Hypocrisy is generally a bad thing, but realize that it's often committed with the best of intentions, so it seems unfair to assume the worst.
that is just going to force the average browser user to start using a custom Hosts file of some kind to block nearly all ads
The "average browser user" has no clue what a hosts file is. Heck, the "average browser user" is still using Internet Explorer and thinks the Internet is only accessible through their ISP's portal or MSN.
You and every other relatively elite computer user aren't the target of these advertisements. The ones I've encountered in my own experience have been the sort that inform me of a dangerously slow connection, or a severely unoptimized system, or vulnerabilities to various viruses. We all know that this is bollocks.
Advertisers almost certainly know that we know it's bollocks. They probably think that an OS-themed popup telling the user that they have a virus will fool a few random folks into clicking, and maybe even buying. They're probably right.
Heck, the "You have a virus!" advertisements look less out of place than the arbitrarily themed popups for most major antivirus suites.
And by the way, "boring" testimonials are highly effective marketing tools.
There's some humor in your condemnation of the term "free" in contrast to your promotion of testimonials. Both have negative connotation to the educated reader. Who are these people? Are the indicative of the whole? What do they do for a living? Why should I trust in their entirely personal, qualitative analysis?
At least your average shyster infomercial tends to give us a bit of background into the testimonial subject with something quantifiable to cling to. They attach a face, profession, and some numbers to work with. The latter may not be feasible given the nature of the advertisement, but even switch2firefox provides the first two. As it stands, the testimonials in the Firefox ad hold no more weight with me than, say, some random CNet reader review... within the bulk of which I could probably find counter-testimonials of equal credibility with little difficulty. I could manufacture the same testimonials ad hoc for virtually any product.
The company seeks to distinguish itself from Google, Yahoo Inc. and growing list of other search engine players by using artificial intelligence to make the results more relevant, said Pfeiffer.
There's some humor in this statement in that Accoona seems to be using Overture for at least its sponsored results. One example. But then, most modern "competitors" of Google and Yahoo seem to fall back on the technology of one or the other to some degree.
When was this? Do you have DNS/network/firewall issues which could be causing this?
I actually had the same problem myself, the day 1.0 was released. I cannot see it being a DNS or network issue in my case; I've never had such issues before, and none of my other applications or systems on the network experienced any hiccups.
The machine itself was a WinXP box with Zonealarm installed. Zonealarm itself didn't blink during the entire event. The crash was the type that has Windows screaming to have me provide feedback... something I'd hoped to never see, running a barebones Firefox installation.
My Firefox installation was broken after the crash. I downloaded the latest installer with Internet Explorer (shudder) and installed it overtop. Thankfully all my bookmarks and settings were preserved.
For quite some time now, searching for extremely common words (i.e. "the" by itself) would turn up a page count in the area of ~5,400,000,000. The number on Google's front page seems to update less frequently than the actual number indexed.
Still, I suppose it isn't unreasonable for most people to go by the number on the front page.
Based on past observations, for whatever reason, review scores seem to decrease over time, based on how their scores shift on sites such as Game Rankings. Possible factors? I could venture a few guesses, but it'd be little more than speculation on my part.
One notable example is GTA:VC, which was up at the top for quite a length of time. The same is true for GTA:SA, as far as I can tell, and some friends complained of the same with Mario Kart: Double Dash!!
So, please, enlighten me as to where you got your info to back up the aforementioned claim. I still don't believe because adults buy most games, that they'll jump in on this handheld wave.
My argument is no weaker than the original AC's: The majority of console gamers are adults, and there's no good reason to suggest that there's something about portable consoles that's somehow repellent to this demographic. Your personal insecurity and the insecurity you perceive in other adults is, in fact, a weak argument, and one balanced against my own experiences to the contrary. Even giving your own argument the benefit of the doubt, there's nothing to stop an adult from using a portable console in private, or in a context they're comfortable with. I never see people whipping out laptops on public transit, but that's no evidence that people don't buy laptops.
Adults are already on the "wave." IDC's study rolls portable consoles into its figures for console gaming, and makes no distinction between adult and child owners of specific consoles. If you feel that the distribution isn't even, then again, the burden is on you to demonstrate as much.
What do you have up your sleeve to support your claim?
Which claim, in particular?
The IDSA's report for 2003 suggests that roughly 2/3 of the game playing market were over the age of 18, if that's the claim you're talking about. Source.
If it's the claim of adults wanting handheld devices, you're the one flaming Sony (assuming you're the same AC), so I'd venture the burden of proof rests with you. Obviously they're targeting a different market for a reason; Their actions speak louder than your words and anecdote. After all, being a big bad corporation, they wouldn't be doing it if they didn't think they'd be successful by some measure of success. Meanwhile, you represent less than 0.0001% of the market.
attempting to reach out to a market that's not there (not many older people aside from the hardcore gamers play handheld systems)
Adults represent 2/3 of the video game market. If adults truly aren't playing handheld games, then presumable there's a good reason. One reason may be the present offerings, in which case Sony's appeal to this demographic makes sense.
The reason probably isn't that they don't want to play handheld games.
The BD-ROM version 1 format is expected to include MPEG-4 AVC and VC-1 support.. Also stated on blu-ray.com. It's also on Wikipedia's entry.
The news is over a month old, and reasonably well circulated. Not sure why it keeps being overlooked...
My cache is stored in: C:\Documents and Settings\[Current Account]\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Desktop Search
I wasn't aware this was a publically accessible folder. I'm not allowed to access said folder under other users' accounts, on this machine, unless I run as Admin. That said, I haven't tried searching for files that would be found only under their accounts.