Uhh, we should also remember that there are some people at these places that make legitimate edits to Wikipedia. Just because an IP changes one or two things controversial, doesn't mean that all of their edits are BS.
Not to mention that one IP can cover a LOT of people.
My work IP is currently banned from wikipedia for vandalism. I've investigated this, and it was apparently some idiot in another building that's not even in the same zip code but who happens to work at another subsidiary under the same parent company that shares my IP. There are probably more than 10,000 people that share this same IP spread across New York City. Some of us work at the same company he does, some of us don't.
You really cannot take any of the IP's on this list and directly connect it to anyone at any company or organization, any more than the RIAA can take an IP of an alleged music pirate and say they individually are the ones that did it.
My IP, for example, says I work at a completely different company than the one that signs my paychecks. That's the way it is in the age of conglomerates.
The same fine article which announces the end of the Google Video store announces that Google is getting into video advertising! As if these things are related... hmmm.... Just think. What would it mean if the real purpose of Google's video store was to get their internal video player working well enough that they could do AdSense on video?
Eh?
I think you've managed to confuse at least three different points in your last sentence.
First of all, adsense is for content creators. Google obviously gets a cut, but the whole point is that people attach adsense ads to their own content. So now you'd be against revenue sharing with video content creators? I've always thought it was pretty offensive that sites like YouTube get to keep all their ad revenue themselves while those who actually make the content that draws the traffic in get nothing. Talk about a racket! AdSense for video would be one of the best things to ever happen to YouTube. People would actually have a real incentive to create more videos, and better quality ones too (since there's no incentive in creating videos nobody would watch). And those who actually draw the traffic in would be able to make money, not just the YouTube guys sitting there watching it all happen.
Second, there's no big mystery to getting a Flash video player "working well enough", and anyway the Google Video and YouTube players are totally different. Google basically admitted defeat to YouTube when they purchased them; they're now de-emphasizing Google Video. Little or none of that technology is going to end up filtering back to YouTube - they already have a player that works perfectly fine.
Third, YouTube (post-Google purchase) has been talking about their plans for pre-roll video ads for at least six months. These will be at the option of the content owner, ie. Google won't be inserting them. The purpose of this is to attract more major commercial content owners, many of whom will not (or legally cannot) post video to YouTube without having a sponsor ad shown beforehand. My company, for example, is one of the few that does post video on YouTube, but we have certain videos that we have to hold back because we have sponsor deals that say pre-roll must be shown before any web exhibition. Once they get pre-roll going, we'll be able to add those videos. Some people may get pissed off about this, but the alternative is that we just don't post those videos. You either watch with an ad or you don't watch at all; that's the choice. (And the logical extension of that is that these clips wouldn't even exist without the sponsor; that's why they require the pre-roll.)
Re:Summary is Flamebait
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SCO Loses
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· Score: 4, Insightful
While this is true, I think it's also fair to say that a big reason that IBM got to show that SCO was wrong was because IBM has truckloads of money.
Except they didn't lose to IBM. They lost to Novell. The IBM case is still in court, although it will now be a lot easier for IBM to win. It's unclear how SCO can even keep that case going, as the entire premise of it is now blown away. When you don't own the copyright to something, it's pretty pointless to sue somebody for copyright infringement. (Or any of their other claims.)
I actually hope the IBM case does get settled one way or another, because it's a real test of the GPL. The Novell case was a simple question of who "owned" Unix. It looks like the IBM case might fade away now, though, which means still no major test of the GPL in US court.
But the point is they didn't lose because they didn't have financial parity. This was basically MS and Sun vs. Novell, by proxy. If anything, SCO had the financial advantage.
I looked quickly at the numbers. This impacts U.S. air surface temperatures, not global. It almost seems like the U.S. is experiencing a somewhat lesser global warming effect than the rest of the world.
Maybe (or maybe not) it's receiving less "global" warming (I put "global" in quotes because what you're talking about is regional or local warming, not global warming), but it certainly doesn't seem to be feeling any lesser effects of it...
We've had a major increase in storms and in the strength of those storms in the last decade. I'm not sure the sample size is yet large enough to definitively say it's due to warming, but at some point you stop calling things isolated cases and start calling them a trend.
I mean... dude, New York City had a frikkin' tornado the other day. That just doesn't happen. We've now also had three - count 'em, three - 100-year storms in the last 12 months. That shit just ain't right.
Warmer air can hold more moisture, and that means stronger storms.
If our warming is less than what the rest of the world is feeling, then I'd hate to be living anywhere else in the near future.
It's funny, because I've had the exact opposite impression of most ranking systems employed today. Everyone tends to either give the game a perfect 10/10, a 1/10 because it's not their cup of tea, or an average score like 8/10. After it's all tallied, it just becomes so much statistical noise.
That's why there are reviews to go with the scores...
I think if you really care about your $50 or $60, it makes sense to read more than just a single score on a single web site - even if it's supposedly an aggregate. Different people still have different tastes and even if Gears of War is the best shooter ever made, maybe I just don't like shooters. If I just trolled for the top-rated games, though, and I wasn't clued in to daily industry news, I'd never know that Gears of War even was a shooter before buying it if I just went by the scores. You've gotta read more than the score, and really more than one review.
I can often get as much from the supposedly negative points in a review as I can from the positive. One reviewer may take points off a game for the exact reason that might actually make me want to buy it. For example, in every review of Ridge Racer games these days, reviewers are constantly belaboring the point that the car physics aren't realistic enough. That's why people buy Ridge Racer, ya shmucks. You may as well complain that the characters in Hot Shots Golf don't look like professional golfers. But that's what I'm talking about - they'll take points off for that kind of thing, when maybe that's actually just what I'm looking for in a game.
But again, I won't know that unless I read the review, and really multiple reviews. If Ridge Racer 7 gets a 7.9, that doesn't sound very good... until I realize that most of those points were taken off because it plays just like the arcade game that I want it to be.
So I agree with the original poster that GameRankings serves a useful purpose because it puts a bunch of different reviews for the same game in one big list for you to click through. It just makes it a lot more convenient to do your research before making a purchase. He wasn't saying to rely on the aggregate score - just the opposite.
Yes, it is the definition of accident. However, most deaths that result from a firearm are suicides. Only a small percentage of firearm deaths are accidents. The vast majority of accidental firearm deaths could be prevented by a little common sense.
As could the vast majority of firearm homicides. Yet we still have about 9,000 of those per year.
I think you're focusing on the wrong part of the parent poster's post (in other words, you're missing the point). It sounds like you're trying to defend gun ownership, when the fact remains we have about 10,000 gun deaths per year, whatever the cause. If you still believe in gun ownership in the face of facts like that, then why do you care about the prospects of terrorists killing a couple thousand more every few years? Guns in the hands of Americans kill more people in this country every year than islamic terrorists ever have, but somehow, it's the terrorists that we're all afraid of.
(If you're going to then come back and say those 10,000 people would have just been killed some other way without guns, then realize that makes about as much sense as me saying the same about victims of terrorists. We're all gonna die somehow, sometime, right?)
Re:Have some patience, we'll run across them... ev
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The Fermi Paradox is Back
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I'm pretty much convinced that intelligent life is extremely improbable, and that we're alone in the galaxy.
What an extremely narrow and self-centered view of the universe.
First of all "extremely improbable" when talking about something the size of the universe means that even if life in a given star system had a 1 in 1 million chance of ever developing (I'd call that "extremely improbable"), that's still 5,000 systems in our galaxy alone that will develop life someday, or already have. For a 1 in 1 billion chance, that's still 500 star systems. And there are up to 500 billion galaxies in the universe. Even if only 1 out of every billion star systems will support life - or perhaps 1 out of every 5 billion planets - that would still mean there could be trillions of life-supporting star systems in the universe. Given that there are not one, but two planets in our system that are capable of supporting life (Earth and Mars), both of which may have actually supported life, it's certainly no stretch to think there are at least this many planets out there that could support life and that at least some of them are actually doing so.
It's all too easy to draw conclusions for the entire universe based on observations of your local area. People do it not just when thinking of extra terrestrials but even when thinking of other people and cultures on our own planet. There's a tendency to think that the way we do things is just the way that things should be done. But there are many ways life can develop, many ways life can be supported, and many, many planets that are much too far away for us to observe or for them to observe us. It's foolish to think that we are alone simply because we have not observed any other intelligent life in the few hundred years we've been looking.
Maybe other life forms have sent out self replicating probes. Why would we have necessarily noticed?
"to begin putting the broadcast entertainment onto cable, and stop actually advertising our existence" Wireless internet, cell phones, PA systems...
I believe that's all covered under "We won't even go into the many different and varied methods we ourselves use to communicate that never beak the atmosphere, thus making them exo-undetectable."
If everyone stopped submitting their games to the ESRB, and we pink slipped those censor's like they badly deserve, would anyone even notice?
Yes, because this is what would happen:
1. No major retailers would stock any of these games
followed by
2. The US government would intervene and create their own censoring board that would be far more strict and arbitrary and would answer to nobody.
All of you complainers need to realize a couple things. The first is that the ESRB is entirely funded by and consists entirely of game companies. This is not the PMRC. This is not the government. This is not some outside organization. This is the industry. Game companies have all banded together and agreed on certain rules, and they created this organization to enforce those rules. 3DR's position is, by definition, a rogue position within the industry. They are going against the wishes of all the other game companies out there, because that's what the ESRB is.
The second is that the reason the ESRB exists is because the industry realized that the alternative to self-regulation was government regulation. The government is not going to sit idly by while a free-for-all is going on. Their position is, why should video games be any different than any other entertainment medium? They all have various content ratings and warnings. The ESRB has in fact long been held up by the government as an example of self-regulation done right - their rating system is the gold standard. But if enforcement of that rating system ever breaks down, the government will have no problem stepping in and enforcing it themselves. Is that what you want?
I realize that some of you kids think everything should just be available all the time to anyone who wants it regardless of age or parental consent. But that's never going to happen, nor should it. Given that, the ESRB is the best possible system anyone could have come up with - it's an industry-created, industry-funded board enforcing rules set by the industry upon itself. It is exactly how this kind of thing should be done.
Contrast it with the way things work in the UK or other parts of Europe, where games can be outright banned by the government. The government does not ban games here, and neither does the ESRB. The worst the ESRB can do is give a game an AO rating, and you can blame Sony, MS and Nintendo for the fact that they won't allow those games on their systems - it's not the ESRB practicing any sort of "censorship", and plenty of AO games do come out on PC. If the ESRB was gone, these games would end up being banned outright by the government just like they are elsewhere. That's the alternative you're arguing in favor of.
While I understand that technically the ESRB was "created" by the industry, the recent shenannigans that they have been pulling makes me believe that they are "funded" by those with certain political motivations.
No, they are funded by the industry on an ongoing basis. 3DRealms provides some of this funding themselves in the form of the dues they pay.
The ESRB is a member-created and member-funded organization.
The inneptitude they have displayed as of late has been astounding.
They are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing. And pithy response or not, Patricia Vance is exactly right in her comments.
The ESRB actually has yearly meetings all over the country for their members where they remind everybody of the rules. I've attended several of these myself. There's no excuse for anybody not to know what those rules are.
This is true even of games that most people would think "sell themselves" like the Grand Theft Auto series. You watch how the hype ramps up as we get closer to October/November. All of that's already been either planned or actually in place for months now. Rockstar's advertising a particular date in all those ads and they will hit it. They're actually pretty good about that as a company.
Sorry to reply to myself, but all I can say is... uh... whoops!
I hadn't thought about all of the advertising that games do compared to thing like, say, winzip.
Yeah, and it all needs to be budgeted and coordinated. For a big game, there can be literally tens of millions of dollars at stake. Print ads get bought months in advance, meaning they need to be worked on starting months before that, meaning they need to be budgeted and planned even sooner. A company only has a certain number of designers and they work on a variety of projects. They can't just drop everything one day and make an ad up for a game that the company has just decided is ready. A company also has a certain marketing budget, so they can't just pull ad money out of a hat if a game is suddenly ready that they weren't expecting.
Print campaigns also need to be coordinated with TV ad campaigns and online ad campaigns, so that the same message is getting out there at the same time. (Or, you might advertise in certain mediums but not others at first, but again, this is based on a strategy that needs to be set in advance. It's not haphazard.)
This is true even of games that most people would think "sell themselves" like the Grand Theft Auto series. You watch how the hype ramps up as we get closer to October/November. All of that's already been either planned or actually in place for months now. Rockstar's advertising a particular date in all those ads and they will hit it. They're actually pretty good about that as a company.
Most games have around an 18 month development cycle on average. Some (like GTA) take longer. But in part because of the marketing, a company needs to know 8-10 months out whether a game is shaping up well enough to set a date. Those dates can sometimes change, but there needs to be a date in order to start the planning for everything that happens around the game.
Watch a football game lately? How about boxing? Those are actual really-real people beating each other to a bloody pulp, resulting occasionally in actually-actual death.
I can't remember any instance of a football player dying from physical contact on the field. It may have happened once or twice, but it would be a freak accident, not a result of regular contact. Oh, and btw, have YOU watched a football game lately? Because "beating each other to a bloody pulp" is kind of against the rules.
As for boxing, yeah, it's a barbaric "sport" that really has no place in a civilized society. It's the modern-day equivalent of the Roman gladiators. So probably not a good example to support your argument. Saying Manhunt's not so bad because all these other totally barbaric things are worse is not really convincing. Yeah, you know, I hear *real* rape and murder are pretty bad too, so because the real thing is so bad, a game about them is just peachy-keen? That doesn't make a lot of sense.
Elevating FICTIONAL violence as more harmful or indecent than ACTUAL violence is nonsensical. Unlike you, I can't speak for every single person who views or plays violent media. But I can speak for myself. I'm a well-educated, well-adjusted, non-violent adult, who often enjoys viewing or playing fictionalized media with dark and/or violent content. So far, my "neuroses" have gone hungry. My "violent proclivities" remain buried, and mostly likely fictional.
Well you've obviously got some overt aggressiveness in your post. Why do you think that is?
I get annoyed by people who claim that they're somehow completely unaffected by both the culture in which they live and the things they surround themselves with. It defies both common sense and every study that's ever been done. I'm not talking about cherry picking one game or one genre and studying it and looking for a direct causal link between the media and violence. I'm talking about linking general behavior and attitudes with the culture that's all around you. Are people in the United States the same as people in Japan? Vietnam? Tibet? No? Then you must agree that culture has an affect on people.
Games are part of culture. And culture has obviously affected you, because you're talking in such a way that nobody would dare do in certain other countries, not out of fear, but out of sheer politeness. Culture has affected me too; I won't deny that this reply is just as aggressive as yours.
Whether or not what happens in a game translates directly into a violent real-life act I think is missing the point completely. Games are entertainment and entertainment is culture, and we are all products of our culture. To deny that is both stupid and elitist, because you're saying you have some power to resist everything around you that none of the rest of us have. Culture is by definition shared.
At what point do you look at a piece of our culture and say "I do not accept this; this is bad for society and in turn bad for me." Is there nothing that would make you say that? What if the game involved real images of babies being raped? What if it was just simulated 3D images instead? And if you make a distinction between the two, what is that distinction? Aren't you tacitly accepting baby rape either way by not rejecting it?
You can argue that it all depends on context, and I wouldn't argue with that. Then what is it about Manhunt's context that makes its violence acceptable? And what is it about Manhunt 2, which you have never played? How can you argue that the context of its violence is a net positive for both you individually and society as a whole when you don't even know yet what that context is? The various ratings boards around the world have played the game; you haven't. They're in a better position than you to determine the quality of content and its context.
I don't buy any of your arguments or the arguments put forth by those who say generally that entertainment does not have
That may all be true, but you're not equating one overvalued company with a market-wide "bubble" are you? Or are you saying Google is typical of IT companies right now?
I'm not sure he quite knows what he's saying, but his point could easily morph into something that makes sense.
A lot of you guys apparently lived through the dot.com bubble from the IT side. Sorry, but that wasn't really the heart of it. It wasn't just all about bad investments or companies without products. It was mostly about companies that thought they could support themselves with banner ads. The idea was you make a web site, everything on it's free, and advertisers will support it because you have a lot of viewers. This is still the model used by many successful web sites today (including this one).
Of course there were also companies like Priceline and whatever the name of that same-day delivery service was that were trying new things with actual products that didn't work out. But the majority of the dot.com bust was due to online ad revenue not growing as fast as expected and then eventually drying up. Any companies that had built themselves up expecting a big ad windfall ended up going under.
I do see the same thing happening now. The internet is being treated as one big marketing opportunity. Advertisers have come back in droves and they're all believers now. The problem is, as with anything else, there comes a point at which supply outstrips demand. That's a bubble.
Google makes its money entirely based on ads it sells. Many other sites now rely on Google AdWords themselves. (You see these "ads by Google" everywhere, from personal blogs to sites like the New York Times and CNN.) Honestly, what would happen to the net if Google's - only Google's - ad revenue collapsed? It would affect not only Google, but literally countless sites across the net. The big sites would survive at first, because they've got cash reserves and are often profitable. But they'd have to repurpose people to go out selling ad units that were previously provided to them, and they'd be doing it in a down market with a glut of supply. Smaller sites would lose their primary revenue source. Google itself would lose its only real revenue source.
You can say the same for Yahoo, MySpace or any of the big sites. They're all ad supported. If the advertisers get skittish or they find something new that they think is more effective than web advertising, then we're in for a dot.com bust all over again. And that's not even counting oversupply, which is a problem even if demand continues to be there.
Could digital watermarking actually be used against the copyright holders in this case?
Say an encoder inserts a unique watermark that can't be seen by eye but is part of the data stream. Google isn't looking for it and doesn't recognize it when the video's uploaded, so it allows the video. Somebody would then have to complain, and Google would take down the video and add it to their "banned" database. The problem is, they would then have added basically a garbage entry into their database because it only applies to that particular encode of the video. The video could then just have a new watermark inserted and be uploaded again. Essentially they're back to square one; relying on people to report copyrighted videos, and for employees to then actually watch them and remove them by hand. The only difference is now there's the worthless extra step of adding a bunch of useless data into a large and growing database that's filled with nothing but garbage.
I have no idea if this would work, but it seems like it or something like it would.
Except for the fact that Rockstar was originally a PC focused developer and they've been developing games for consoles besides the PS1 and PS2 on and off for years. The Dreamcast got GTA2, the Xbox got GTA3 and VC, the PC got all of the mainstream GTAs, the 360 got Table Tennis and soon GTA4.
Rockstar was never a "PC focused developer". DMA Design created the first-ever GTA game for the PC first, but that was before Rockstar had anything to do with them. As soon as Rockstar took over, consoles came first. It's inaccurate to say that Rockstar was ever PC-focused - DMA Design was for exactly one game, but Rockstar never has been.
It's really no different than saying Microsoft was originally a Super Nintendo-oriented game publisher just because they purchased Rare, and therefore MS is unlikely to keep first-party games exclusive. Rare was Nintendo-focused, not Microsoft. It doesn't go both ways.
As for all those games on non-Sony systems, for one thing you have *only* listed non-exclusive titles. And in every case prior to GTA4, Sony got these games a year or even more before any other console. The only reason that's not happening with GTA4 if the money MS threw at them - and all that money was able to buy was a day and date release and some episodic content, not a 360 exclusive. It's still coming to PS3, because Rockstar wants it to.
Don't underestimate the power of relationships and loyalty in Rockstar's development plans. This is not a company that always thinks with its wallet.
Videogames are still a new and rapidly evolving artform.
So is film, so is recorded music... hell, in the grand scheme of things, so is literature. These things have been around only a fraction of even human history, let alone the history of the world, and all of them are still rapidly evolving.
If your argument is that there can be no "purists" unless the art form is no longer "new" or "evolving", then there really cannot be purists of any art form.
I don't think it's a stretch to think there could be video game purists at this point. There are people who were there at the beginning and who have grown up with video games, knowing them a certain way. If they have developed a set of expectations based on those experiences, that would make them a purist.
You may not be one, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. It further doesn't mean that your opinion is superior to theirs.
As a statistician, I can reassure you that the only thing that's worse than no data is flawed data. When you have no data, you know something is wrong and you start correcting that. When you have flawed data, you don't.
This is a huge assumption that I'd say is incorrect more often than not.
Your entire argument as it stands now presupposes that the advertiser doesn't know the data is flawed. But what if he does?
My company buys lots of web ads. We use Alexa as one of our data sources (not the only one) to determine ad buys, both because it's free and because in our experience, its data is no more or less accurate than that of paid vendors like Nielsen. Do we expect 100% accuracy? No. Do we think we can learn anything if, for example, it tells us that two directly competing sites have traffic that's different by about 200% in every metric? Probably.
Buying ads is not an exact science. It doesn't really matter if we get accurate traffic down to the individual click. All we're looking for is relativity - a site's size and reach compared to its competitors. We look at the sites themselves, we look at Alexa and we look at research that we commission and pay for. Usually these sources all agree and we go ahead and buy. In the event that they don't agree, we use our own critical thinking and our own judgment to determine what to believe - that is part of any marketer's job, after all.
It seems to me that this whole article here is missing the point. Alexa's a tool. A free tool. It is useful at what it does, but it is not, nor was it ever intended to be, some sort of accurate measure of site statistics for the entire internet. Nobody who uses it as part of their decision-making process is using it that way.
I think this is a case where somebody looked at Alexa, figured out that it wasn't perfect, and therefore determined that it's utter crap. That's basically what your argument boils down to also. But the point is we don't need perfection, and we don't expect perfection, and this lack of perfection is taken into account in our decision making process. We're not flying to the moon here; we're buying ad space. It's something of an organic process regardless of how good your data is.
If you're talking about somebody using Alexa for their own site, then that's just ridiculous. Even cheap hosting accounts (like I have for my personal site) come with their own log-based stats, and if not, there are plenty of free services like Statcounter out there. I don't think this is what many people use Alexa for, though; it's used more by small to mid-sized companies looking for sites on which to buy ads, or by curiosity seekers who just want to see how big their favorite sites are. I would think most sites would know what their own internal numbers are one way or another, without Alexa.
Anytime you're breaking into a new market, especially one that has as many lock-in features as the video game market, you're going to lose money.
As others have said, that excuse may have worked in 2002. It's no longer very convincing in 2007.
Video games were a new market for Sony in 1990. Didn't take them nearly that long to start turning a profit.
Additionally, reporting like this just promotes the same short sighted point of view of earnings and stock performance that we deride Enron execs for.
We deride Enron for breaking the law. Not for a "short sighted view of earnings."
I don't know how Gates and and Co. view the current performance of the 360, but I'm sure they are pleased that they've held their own against the PS3 so far, primarily because Nintendo is eating Sony's lunch.
At some point, the idea is to make money. It's not a popularity contest. If that were MS's goal, it certainly would be "short sighted" and worthy of derision. Presumably, they are in business to make money, not just so they can waggle their fingers and say "nyah nyah!" at Sony.
So far, their Xbox division has been run like a charity. And it's not getting any better. They've been saying they're on the verge of turning a profit for years now, and they still say it. Well, guess what? A $1.89 billion loss is not due to a $1.1 billion charge. Where's the extra $800 million coming from? Those are real and continuing losses outside of the reliability problems. Additionally, sales of the system are way down from a year ago, they've missed their shipping targets by 400,000 systems, and revenue at the division is down a commiserate amount.
Combine that with the reassignment of J Allard and the resignation of Peter Moore, and it's all starting to look a bit like a ship that, if it's not sinking, is at least taking on water and listing badly.
Where do you live that this happens? I've never lived anywhere where someone picked up for suspected DWI gets his car 'seized'.
New York City has been doing it since at least 1999, though they were authorized under state law to do it for repeat offenders even earlier. See here for an explanation of some of the legal justifications. This policy has been modified a bit over the years, but city cops can still seize your vehicle at the time of arrest.
Seizure and forfeiture are two different things, and a lot of people do get their cars back in court.
Mocking games = Mystery Science Theater 3000. Cult following = The Rocky Horror Picture Show....it was so bad but has a huge following BECAUSE it was bad.
Well this is actually a little more complex than that.
I would argue that there is plenty of "mocking" in the popularity of RHPS. That doesn't make it any less fun to watch it, or have any less of a cult following. In fact, you could reasonably argue that a show like Mystery Science Theater 3000 grew directly out of the audience participation in RHPS.
RHPS was also intended as a b-movie. It wasn't made with the thought that they were making a quality film. They wanted people to make fun of it, and hoped to generate a cult following through that. The producers were disappointed when it didn't happen originally - then the audience participation part kicked in a few years post-release, which reportedly took everybody involved by surprise.
There are other movies like that, intended to generate a cult following by purposely copying traits found in unintentional b-movies. The Evil Dead series is another example. The original Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie. Heathers. The list goes on. It's almost a genre unto itself, these purposeful b-movies. I think people end up enjoying these on several different levels (some people on more or fewer levels than others), whether they realize it or not.
As for games, I think there are several that fit into that same category - games that don't really adhere to modern standards for what we consider a "quality" game, and that ape conventions from the past or from campy sources with the intent of generating a cult following. Enjoyment comes as much from the camp value of these games as the gameplay mechanic. I'm thinking of a game like Viewtiful Joe in this category. Or Katamari Damacy. I'm not saying these aren't good games (they are), but they are definitely intended to be laughed "at" rather than "with" to a certain degree. I mean nobody who watches the first cut-scene with the "King of All Cosmos" would ever take the game seriously. It's not just about humor, either; it's about ridiculousness.
I also think there *are* some unintentional b-grade games that are popular and are taken at face value. The Resident Evil series is a perfect example of that. It's total camp horror, and a big gore-fest, but people love it.
So I guess what I'm saying is that I disagree with the original article. There are b-grade games that are fun to play, both of the intentional and unintentional variety.
According to Sony's press materials, the highly anticipated RPG sequel is now 13% complete. Yes, a low, unlucky completion percentage. But thankfully it's not as low as Final Fantasy Versus XIII, which is listed as 1.3%!
Let's see... FFXIII (as in 13) is 1.3% complete. FFXIII (as in 13) Vs. is 13% complete.
Hmmm... 13... 1.3%... 13%... see a pattern here?
It's a common Japanese piece of PR to release "completion" percentages that everybody there knows are always ludicrously arbitrary. Go to any game show in Japan or read any publication and you will see this number next to every game on display. A publisher can put whatever number they want there. Square Enix is obviously having a little fun with this convention.
Sony typically reports the number of units shipped to retailers, not actually sold through to consumers.
This is counting units sold, not shipped. Sony can report whatever number it wants, but there are third party organizations and companies devoted to counting units sold at retail, and Enterbrain (where this number is coming from) is one of them.
All manufacturers, not just Sony, count units shipped and announce those numbers. MS does the same (they just announced 11.6 million Xbox 360's shipped, not sold), as does Nintendo. It's all they know, after all - it's just an inventory. It takes a separate company to go out there and count units sold at retail, which Enterbrain, Media Create and at least one other company I'm forgetting right now do.
If you only look at money through console sales that might be true, but what about money from GAMES and assessories,merchandise also online sales, they have movies and all sorts of online content to download for money.
Yeah, and it all gets reported on the same quarterly balance sheets.
Sheesh, some of you guys act like MS is hiding a bunch of profits under their mattress or something. They have to report all their profit and loss; it's all public. Go read it yourself; Yahoo finance has it all for free if you don't have a brokerage account anywhere.
The fact is MS was $5.5 billion in the hole by last quarter, is losing around $220 million every single quarter on its entertainment division, and has now taken a $1.1 billion charge on top of that. These are facts that have been publicly reported by MS in their SEC filings. There's no hidden profit there. There's no "well yeah, if you only count this or that". That's counting everything.
Erm, MS is only about ~$300 million in losses for their gaming division, and turning a profit overall as a company.
Sony is suffering around ~$600million losses for their gaming division and is $11.3 billion in debt overall as a company.
MS is at $7 billion in losses and counting for their gaming division.
Sony posted a loss in one quarter with their gaming division, but overall are in the black by more than $9 billion.
In addition to that, "debt" has nothing to do with whether or not a company is profitable. Sony cleared a little more than $2 billion in net profit each of the last 3 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhh, we should also remember that there are some people at these places that make legitimate edits to Wikipedia. Just because an IP changes one or two things controversial, doesn't mean that all of their edits are BS.
Not to mention that one IP can cover a LOT of people.
My work IP is currently banned from wikipedia for vandalism. I've investigated this, and it was apparently some idiot in another building that's not even in the same zip code but who happens to work at another subsidiary under the same parent company that shares my IP. There are probably more than 10,000 people that share this same IP spread across New York City. Some of us work at the same company he does, some of us don't.
You really cannot take any of the IP's on this list and directly connect it to anyone at any company or organization, any more than the RIAA can take an IP of an alleged music pirate and say they individually are the ones that did it.
My IP, for example, says I work at a completely different company than the one that signs my paychecks. That's the way it is in the age of conglomerates.
The same fine article which announces the end of the Google Video store announces that Google is getting into video advertising! As if these things are related... hmmm....
Just think. What would it mean if the real purpose of Google's video store was to get their internal video player working well enough that they could do AdSense on video?
Eh?
I think you've managed to confuse at least three different points in your last sentence.
First of all, adsense is for content creators. Google obviously gets a cut, but the whole point is that people attach adsense ads to their own content. So now you'd be against revenue sharing with video content creators? I've always thought it was pretty offensive that sites like YouTube get to keep all their ad revenue themselves while those who actually make the content that draws the traffic in get nothing. Talk about a racket! AdSense for video would be one of the best things to ever happen to YouTube. People would actually have a real incentive to create more videos, and better quality ones too (since there's no incentive in creating videos nobody would watch). And those who actually draw the traffic in would be able to make money, not just the YouTube guys sitting there watching it all happen.
Second, there's no big mystery to getting a Flash video player "working well enough", and anyway the Google Video and YouTube players are totally different. Google basically admitted defeat to YouTube when they purchased them; they're now de-emphasizing Google Video. Little or none of that technology is going to end up filtering back to YouTube - they already have a player that works perfectly fine.
Third, YouTube (post-Google purchase) has been talking about their plans for pre-roll video ads for at least six months. These will be at the option of the content owner, ie. Google won't be inserting them. The purpose of this is to attract more major commercial content owners, many of whom will not (or legally cannot) post video to YouTube without having a sponsor ad shown beforehand. My company, for example, is one of the few that does post video on YouTube, but we have certain videos that we have to hold back because we have sponsor deals that say pre-roll must be shown before any web exhibition. Once they get pre-roll going, we'll be able to add those videos. Some people may get pissed off about this, but the alternative is that we just don't post those videos. You either watch with an ad or you don't watch at all; that's the choice. (And the logical extension of that is that these clips wouldn't even exist without the sponsor; that's why they require the pre-roll.)
While this is true, I think it's also fair to say that a big reason that IBM got to show that SCO was wrong was because IBM has truckloads of money.
Except they didn't lose to IBM. They lost to Novell. The IBM case is still in court, although it will now be a lot easier for IBM to win. It's unclear how SCO can even keep that case going, as the entire premise of it is now blown away. When you don't own the copyright to something, it's pretty pointless to sue somebody for copyright infringement. (Or any of their other claims.)
I actually hope the IBM case does get settled one way or another, because it's a real test of the GPL. The Novell case was a simple question of who "owned" Unix. It looks like the IBM case might fade away now, though, which means still no major test of the GPL in US court.
But the point is they didn't lose because they didn't have financial parity. This was basically MS and Sun vs. Novell, by proxy. If anything, SCO had the financial advantage.
I looked quickly at the numbers. This impacts U.S. air surface temperatures, not global. It almost seems like the U.S. is experiencing a somewhat lesser global warming effect than the rest of the world.
Maybe (or maybe not) it's receiving less "global" warming (I put "global" in quotes because what you're talking about is regional or local warming, not global warming), but it certainly doesn't seem to be feeling any lesser effects of it...
We've had a major increase in storms and in the strength of those storms in the last decade. I'm not sure the sample size is yet large enough to definitively say it's due to warming, but at some point you stop calling things isolated cases and start calling them a trend.
I mean... dude, New York City had a frikkin' tornado the other day. That just doesn't happen. We've now also had three - count 'em, three - 100-year storms in the last 12 months. That shit just ain't right.
Warmer air can hold more moisture, and that means stronger storms.
If our warming is less than what the rest of the world is feeling, then I'd hate to be living anywhere else in the near future.
It's funny, because I've had the exact opposite impression of most ranking systems employed today. Everyone tends to either give the game a perfect 10/10, a 1/10 because it's not their cup of tea, or an average score like 8/10. After it's all tallied, it just becomes so much statistical noise.
That's why there are reviews to go with the scores...
I think if you really care about your $50 or $60, it makes sense to read more than just a single score on a single web site - even if it's supposedly an aggregate. Different people still have different tastes and even if Gears of War is the best shooter ever made, maybe I just don't like shooters. If I just trolled for the top-rated games, though, and I wasn't clued in to daily industry news, I'd never know that Gears of War even was a shooter before buying it if I just went by the scores. You've gotta read more than the score, and really more than one review.
I can often get as much from the supposedly negative points in a review as I can from the positive. One reviewer may take points off a game for the exact reason that might actually make me want to buy it. For example, in every review of Ridge Racer games these days, reviewers are constantly belaboring the point that the car physics aren't realistic enough. That's why people buy Ridge Racer, ya shmucks. You may as well complain that the characters in Hot Shots Golf don't look like professional golfers. But that's what I'm talking about - they'll take points off for that kind of thing, when maybe that's actually just what I'm looking for in a game.
But again, I won't know that unless I read the review, and really multiple reviews. If Ridge Racer 7 gets a 7.9, that doesn't sound very good... until I realize that most of those points were taken off because it plays just like the arcade game that I want it to be.
So I agree with the original poster that GameRankings serves a useful purpose because it puts a bunch of different reviews for the same game in one big list for you to click through. It just makes it a lot more convenient to do your research before making a purchase. He wasn't saying to rely on the aggregate score - just the opposite.
Yes, it is the definition of accident. However, most deaths that result from a firearm are suicides. Only a small percentage of firearm deaths are accidents. The vast majority of accidental firearm deaths could be prevented by a little common sense.
As could the vast majority of firearm homicides. Yet we still have about 9,000 of those per year.
I think you're focusing on the wrong part of the parent poster's post (in other words, you're missing the point). It sounds like you're trying to defend gun ownership, when the fact remains we have about 10,000 gun deaths per year, whatever the cause. If you still believe in gun ownership in the face of facts like that, then why do you care about the prospects of terrorists killing a couple thousand more every few years? Guns in the hands of Americans kill more people in this country every year than islamic terrorists ever have, but somehow, it's the terrorists that we're all afraid of.
(If you're going to then come back and say those 10,000 people would have just been killed some other way without guns, then realize that makes about as much sense as me saying the same about victims of terrorists. We're all gonna die somehow, sometime, right?)
I'm pretty much convinced that intelligent life is extremely improbable, and that we're alone in the galaxy.
What an extremely narrow and self-centered view of the universe.
First of all "extremely improbable" when talking about something the size of the universe means that even if life in a given star system had a 1 in 1 million chance of ever developing (I'd call that "extremely improbable"), that's still 5,000 systems in our galaxy alone that will develop life someday, or already have. For a 1 in 1 billion chance, that's still 500 star systems. And there are up to 500 billion galaxies in the universe. Even if only 1 out of every billion star systems will support life - or perhaps 1 out of every 5 billion planets - that would still mean there could be trillions of life-supporting star systems in the universe. Given that there are not one, but two planets in our system that are capable of supporting life (Earth and Mars), both of which may have actually supported life, it's certainly no stretch to think there are at least this many planets out there that could support life and that at least some of them are actually doing so.
It's all too easy to draw conclusions for the entire universe based on observations of your local area. People do it not just when thinking of extra terrestrials but even when thinking of other people and cultures on our own planet. There's a tendency to think that the way we do things is just the way that things should be done. But there are many ways life can develop, many ways life can be supported, and many, many planets that are much too far away for us to observe or for them to observe us. It's foolish to think that we are alone simply because we have not observed any other intelligent life in the few hundred years we've been looking.
Maybe other life forms have sent out self replicating probes. Why would we have necessarily noticed?
"to begin putting the broadcast entertainment onto cable, and stop actually advertising our existence" Wireless internet, cell phones, PA systems...
I believe that's all covered under "We won't even go into the many different and varied methods we ourselves use to communicate that never beak the atmosphere, thus making them exo-undetectable."
If everyone stopped submitting their games to the ESRB, and we pink slipped those censor's like they badly deserve, would anyone even notice?
Yes, because this is what would happen:
1. No major retailers would stock any of these games
followed by
2. The US government would intervene and create their own censoring board that would be far more strict and arbitrary and would answer to nobody.
All of you complainers need to realize a couple things. The first is that the ESRB is entirely funded by and consists entirely of game companies. This is not the PMRC. This is not the government. This is not some outside organization. This is the industry. Game companies have all banded together and agreed on certain rules, and they created this organization to enforce those rules. 3DR's position is, by definition, a rogue position within the industry. They are going against the wishes of all the other game companies out there, because that's what the ESRB is.
The second is that the reason the ESRB exists is because the industry realized that the alternative to self-regulation was government regulation. The government is not going to sit idly by while a free-for-all is going on. Their position is, why should video games be any different than any other entertainment medium? They all have various content ratings and warnings. The ESRB has in fact long been held up by the government as an example of self-regulation done right - their rating system is the gold standard. But if enforcement of that rating system ever breaks down, the government will have no problem stepping in and enforcing it themselves. Is that what you want?
I realize that some of you kids think everything should just be available all the time to anyone who wants it regardless of age or parental consent. But that's never going to happen, nor should it. Given that, the ESRB is the best possible system anyone could have come up with - it's an industry-created, industry-funded board enforcing rules set by the industry upon itself. It is exactly how this kind of thing should be done.
Contrast it with the way things work in the UK or other parts of Europe, where games can be outright banned by the government. The government does not ban games here, and neither does the ESRB. The worst the ESRB can do is give a game an AO rating, and you can blame Sony, MS and Nintendo for the fact that they won't allow those games on their systems - it's not the ESRB practicing any sort of "censorship", and plenty of AO games do come out on PC. If the ESRB was gone, these games would end up being banned outright by the government just like they are elsewhere. That's the alternative you're arguing in favor of.
While I understand that technically the ESRB was "created" by the industry, the recent shenannigans that they have been pulling makes me believe that they are "funded" by those with certain political motivations.
No, they are funded by the industry on an ongoing basis. 3DRealms provides some of this funding themselves in the form of the dues they pay.
The ESRB is a member-created and member-funded organization.
The inneptitude they have displayed as of late has been astounding.
They are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing. And pithy response or not, Patricia Vance is exactly right in her comments.
The ESRB actually has yearly meetings all over the country for their members where they remind everybody of the rules. I've attended several of these myself. There's no excuse for anybody not to know what those rules are.
This is true even of games that most people would think "sell themselves" like the Grand Theft Auto series. You watch how the hype ramps up as we get closer to October/November. All of that's already been either planned or actually in place for months now. Rockstar's advertising a particular date in all those ads and they will hit it. They're actually pretty good about that as a company.
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Sorry to reply to myself, but all I can say is... uh... whoops!
http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idU
I hadn't thought about all of the advertising that games do compared to thing like, say, winzip.
Yeah, and it all needs to be budgeted and coordinated. For a big game, there can be literally tens of millions of dollars at stake. Print ads get bought months in advance, meaning they need to be worked on starting months before that, meaning they need to be budgeted and planned even sooner. A company only has a certain number of designers and they work on a variety of projects. They can't just drop everything one day and make an ad up for a game that the company has just decided is ready. A company also has a certain marketing budget, so they can't just pull ad money out of a hat if a game is suddenly ready that they weren't expecting.
Print campaigns also need to be coordinated with TV ad campaigns and online ad campaigns, so that the same message is getting out there at the same time. (Or, you might advertise in certain mediums but not others at first, but again, this is based on a strategy that needs to be set in advance. It's not haphazard.)
This is true even of games that most people would think "sell themselves" like the Grand Theft Auto series. You watch how the hype ramps up as we get closer to October/November. All of that's already been either planned or actually in place for months now. Rockstar's advertising a particular date in all those ads and they will hit it. They're actually pretty good about that as a company.
Most games have around an 18 month development cycle on average. Some (like GTA) take longer. But in part because of the marketing, a company needs to know 8-10 months out whether a game is shaping up well enough to set a date. Those dates can sometimes change, but there needs to be a date in order to start the planning for everything that happens around the game.
Watch a football game lately? How about boxing? Those are actual really-real people beating each other to a bloody pulp, resulting occasionally in actually-actual death.
I can't remember any instance of a football player dying from physical contact on the field. It may have happened once or twice, but it would be a freak accident, not a result of regular contact. Oh, and btw, have YOU watched a football game lately? Because "beating each other to a bloody pulp" is kind of against the rules.
As for boxing, yeah, it's a barbaric "sport" that really has no place in a civilized society. It's the modern-day equivalent of the Roman gladiators. So probably not a good example to support your argument. Saying Manhunt's not so bad because all these other totally barbaric things are worse is not really convincing. Yeah, you know, I hear *real* rape and murder are pretty bad too, so because the real thing is so bad, a game about them is just peachy-keen? That doesn't make a lot of sense.
Elevating FICTIONAL violence as more harmful or indecent than ACTUAL violence is nonsensical. Unlike you, I can't speak for every single person who views or plays violent media. But I can speak for myself. I'm a well-educated, well-adjusted, non-violent adult, who often enjoys viewing or playing fictionalized media with dark and/or violent content. So far, my "neuroses" have gone hungry. My "violent proclivities" remain buried, and mostly likely fictional.
Well you've obviously got some overt aggressiveness in your post. Why do you think that is?
I get annoyed by people who claim that they're somehow completely unaffected by both the culture in which they live and the things they surround themselves with. It defies both common sense and every study that's ever been done. I'm not talking about cherry picking one game or one genre and studying it and looking for a direct causal link between the media and violence. I'm talking about linking general behavior and attitudes with the culture that's all around you. Are people in the United States the same as people in Japan? Vietnam? Tibet? No? Then you must agree that culture has an affect on people.
Games are part of culture. And culture has obviously affected you, because you're talking in such a way that nobody would dare do in certain other countries, not out of fear, but out of sheer politeness. Culture has affected me too; I won't deny that this reply is just as aggressive as yours.
Whether or not what happens in a game translates directly into a violent real-life act I think is missing the point completely. Games are entertainment and entertainment is culture, and we are all products of our culture. To deny that is both stupid and elitist, because you're saying you have some power to resist everything around you that none of the rest of us have. Culture is by definition shared.
At what point do you look at a piece of our culture and say "I do not accept this; this is bad for society and in turn bad for me." Is there nothing that would make you say that? What if the game involved real images of babies being raped? What if it was just simulated 3D images instead? And if you make a distinction between the two, what is that distinction? Aren't you tacitly accepting baby rape either way by not rejecting it?
You can argue that it all depends on context, and I wouldn't argue with that. Then what is it about Manhunt's context that makes its violence acceptable? And what is it about Manhunt 2, which you have never played? How can you argue that the context of its violence is a net positive for both you individually and society as a whole when you don't even know yet what that context is? The various ratings boards around the world have played the game; you haven't. They're in a better position than you to determine the quality of content and its context.
I don't buy any of your arguments or the arguments put forth by those who say generally that entertainment does not have
That may all be true, but you're not equating one overvalued company with a market-wide "bubble" are you? Or are you saying Google is typical of IT companies right now?
I'm not sure he quite knows what he's saying, but his point could easily morph into something that makes sense.
A lot of you guys apparently lived through the dot.com bubble from the IT side. Sorry, but that wasn't really the heart of it. It wasn't just all about bad investments or companies without products. It was mostly about companies that thought they could support themselves with banner ads. The idea was you make a web site, everything on it's free, and advertisers will support it because you have a lot of viewers. This is still the model used by many successful web sites today (including this one).
Of course there were also companies like Priceline and whatever the name of that same-day delivery service was that were trying new things with actual products that didn't work out. But the majority of the dot.com bust was due to online ad revenue not growing as fast as expected and then eventually drying up. Any companies that had built themselves up expecting a big ad windfall ended up going under.
I do see the same thing happening now. The internet is being treated as one big marketing opportunity. Advertisers have come back in droves and they're all believers now. The problem is, as with anything else, there comes a point at which supply outstrips demand. That's a bubble.
Google makes its money entirely based on ads it sells. Many other sites now rely on Google AdWords themselves. (You see these "ads by Google" everywhere, from personal blogs to sites like the New York Times and CNN.) Honestly, what would happen to the net if Google's - only Google's - ad revenue collapsed? It would affect not only Google, but literally countless sites across the net. The big sites would survive at first, because they've got cash reserves and are often profitable. But they'd have to repurpose people to go out selling ad units that were previously provided to them, and they'd be doing it in a down market with a glut of supply. Smaller sites would lose their primary revenue source. Google itself would lose its only real revenue source.
You can say the same for Yahoo, MySpace or any of the big sites. They're all ad supported. If the advertisers get skittish or they find something new that they think is more effective than web advertising, then we're in for a dot.com bust all over again. And that's not even counting oversupply, which is a problem even if demand continues to be there.
Could digital watermarking actually be used against the copyright holders in this case?
Say an encoder inserts a unique watermark that can't be seen by eye but is part of the data stream. Google isn't looking for it and doesn't recognize it when the video's uploaded, so it allows the video. Somebody would then have to complain, and Google would take down the video and add it to their "banned" database. The problem is, they would then have added basically a garbage entry into their database because it only applies to that particular encode of the video. The video could then just have a new watermark inserted and be uploaded again. Essentially they're back to square one; relying on people to report copyrighted videos, and for employees to then actually watch them and remove them by hand. The only difference is now there's the worthless extra step of adding a bunch of useless data into a large and growing database that's filled with nothing but garbage.
I have no idea if this would work, but it seems like it or something like it would.
Except for the fact that Rockstar was originally a PC focused developer and they've been developing games for consoles besides the PS1 and PS2 on and off for years. The Dreamcast got GTA2, the Xbox got GTA3 and VC, the PC got all of the mainstream GTAs, the 360 got Table Tennis and soon GTA4.
Rockstar was never a "PC focused developer". DMA Design created the first-ever GTA game for the PC first, but that was before Rockstar had anything to do with them. As soon as Rockstar took over, consoles came first. It's inaccurate to say that Rockstar was ever PC-focused - DMA Design was for exactly one game, but Rockstar never has been.
It's really no different than saying Microsoft was originally a Super Nintendo-oriented game publisher just because they purchased Rare, and therefore MS is unlikely to keep first-party games exclusive. Rare was Nintendo-focused, not Microsoft. It doesn't go both ways.
As for all those games on non-Sony systems, for one thing you have *only* listed non-exclusive titles. And in every case prior to GTA4, Sony got these games a year or even more before any other console. The only reason that's not happening with GTA4 if the money MS threw at them - and all that money was able to buy was a day and date release and some episodic content, not a 360 exclusive. It's still coming to PS3, because Rockstar wants it to.
Don't underestimate the power of relationships and loyalty in Rockstar's development plans. This is not a company that always thinks with its wallet.
Videogames are still a new and rapidly evolving artform.
So is film, so is recorded music... hell, in the grand scheme of things, so is literature. These things have been around only a fraction of even human history, let alone the history of the world, and all of them are still rapidly evolving.
If your argument is that there can be no "purists" unless the art form is no longer "new" or "evolving", then there really cannot be purists of any art form.
I don't think it's a stretch to think there could be video game purists at this point. There are people who were there at the beginning and who have grown up with video games, knowing them a certain way. If they have developed a set of expectations based on those experiences, that would make them a purist.
You may not be one, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. It further doesn't mean that your opinion is superior to theirs.
As a statistician, I can reassure you that the only thing that's worse than no data is flawed data. When you have no data, you know something is wrong and you start correcting that. When you have flawed data, you don't.
This is a huge assumption that I'd say is incorrect more often than not.
Your entire argument as it stands now presupposes that the advertiser doesn't know the data is flawed. But what if he does?
My company buys lots of web ads. We use Alexa as one of our data sources (not the only one) to determine ad buys, both because it's free and because in our experience, its data is no more or less accurate than that of paid vendors like Nielsen. Do we expect 100% accuracy? No. Do we think we can learn anything if, for example, it tells us that two directly competing sites have traffic that's different by about 200% in every metric? Probably.
Buying ads is not an exact science. It doesn't really matter if we get accurate traffic down to the individual click. All we're looking for is relativity - a site's size and reach compared to its competitors. We look at the sites themselves, we look at Alexa and we look at research that we commission and pay for. Usually these sources all agree and we go ahead and buy. In the event that they don't agree, we use our own critical thinking and our own judgment to determine what to believe - that is part of any marketer's job, after all.
It seems to me that this whole article here is missing the point. Alexa's a tool. A free tool. It is useful at what it does, but it is not, nor was it ever intended to be, some sort of accurate measure of site statistics for the entire internet. Nobody who uses it as part of their decision-making process is using it that way.
I think this is a case where somebody looked at Alexa, figured out that it wasn't perfect, and therefore determined that it's utter crap. That's basically what your argument boils down to also. But the point is we don't need perfection, and we don't expect perfection, and this lack of perfection is taken into account in our decision making process. We're not flying to the moon here; we're buying ad space. It's something of an organic process regardless of how good your data is.
If you're talking about somebody using Alexa for their own site, then that's just ridiculous. Even cheap hosting accounts (like I have for my personal site) come with their own log-based stats, and if not, there are plenty of free services like Statcounter out there. I don't think this is what many people use Alexa for, though; it's used more by small to mid-sized companies looking for sites on which to buy ads, or by curiosity seekers who just want to see how big their favorite sites are. I would think most sites would know what their own internal numbers are one way or another, without Alexa.
Anytime you're breaking into a new market, especially one that has as many lock-in features as the video game market, you're going to lose money.
As others have said, that excuse may have worked in 2002. It's no longer very convincing in 2007.
Video games were a new market for Sony in 1990. Didn't take them nearly that long to start turning a profit.
Additionally, reporting like this just promotes the same short sighted point of view of earnings and stock performance that we deride Enron execs for.
We deride Enron for breaking the law. Not for a "short sighted view of earnings."
I don't know how Gates and and Co. view the current performance of the 360, but I'm sure they are pleased that they've held their own against the PS3 so far, primarily because Nintendo is eating Sony's lunch.
At some point, the idea is to make money. It's not a popularity contest. If that were MS's goal, it certainly would be "short sighted" and worthy of derision. Presumably, they are in business to make money, not just so they can waggle their fingers and say "nyah nyah!" at Sony.
So far, their Xbox division has been run like a charity. And it's not getting any better. They've been saying they're on the verge of turning a profit for years now, and they still say it. Well, guess what? A $1.89 billion loss is not due to a $1.1 billion charge. Where's the extra $800 million coming from? Those are real and continuing losses outside of the reliability problems. Additionally, sales of the system are way down from a year ago, they've missed their shipping targets by 400,000 systems, and revenue at the division is down a commiserate amount.
Combine that with the reassignment of J Allard and the resignation of Peter Moore, and it's all starting to look a bit like a ship that, if it's not sinking, is at least taking on water and listing badly.
Where do you live that this happens? I've never lived anywhere where someone picked up for suspected DWI gets his car 'seized'.
New York City has been doing it since at least 1999, though they were authorized under state law to do it for repeat offenders even earlier. See here for an explanation of some of the legal justifications. This policy has been modified a bit over the years, but city cops can still seize your vehicle at the time of arrest.
Seizure and forfeiture are two different things, and a lot of people do get their cars back in court.
Mocking games = Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Cult following = The Rocky Horror Picture Show....it was so bad but has a huge following BECAUSE it was bad.
Well this is actually a little more complex than that.
I would argue that there is plenty of "mocking" in the popularity of RHPS. That doesn't make it any less fun to watch it, or have any less of a cult following. In fact, you could reasonably argue that a show like Mystery Science Theater 3000 grew directly out of the audience participation in RHPS.
RHPS was also intended as a b-movie. It wasn't made with the thought that they were making a quality film. They wanted people to make fun of it, and hoped to generate a cult following through that. The producers were disappointed when it didn't happen originally - then the audience participation part kicked in a few years post-release, which reportedly took everybody involved by surprise.
There are other movies like that, intended to generate a cult following by purposely copying traits found in unintentional b-movies. The Evil Dead series is another example. The original Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie. Heathers. The list goes on. It's almost a genre unto itself, these purposeful b-movies. I think people end up enjoying these on several different levels (some people on more or fewer levels than others), whether they realize it or not.
As for games, I think there are several that fit into that same category - games that don't really adhere to modern standards for what we consider a "quality" game, and that ape conventions from the past or from campy sources with the intent of generating a cult following. Enjoyment comes as much from the camp value of these games as the gameplay mechanic. I'm thinking of a game like Viewtiful Joe in this category. Or Katamari Damacy. I'm not saying these aren't good games (they are), but they are definitely intended to be laughed "at" rather than "with" to a certain degree. I mean nobody who watches the first cut-scene with the "King of All Cosmos" would ever take the game seriously. It's not just about humor, either; it's about ridiculousness.
I also think there *are* some unintentional b-grade games that are popular and are taken at face value. The Resident Evil series is a perfect example of that. It's total camp horror, and a big gore-fest, but people love it.
So I guess what I'm saying is that I disagree with the original article. There are b-grade games that are fun to play, both of the intentional and unintentional variety.
According to Sony's press materials, the highly anticipated RPG sequel is now 13% complete. Yes, a low, unlucky completion percentage. But thankfully it's not as low as Final Fantasy Versus XIII, which is listed as 1.3%!
Let's see... FFXIII (as in 13) is 1.3% complete. FFXIII (as in 13) Vs. is 13% complete.
Hmmm... 13... 1.3%... 13%... see a pattern here?
It's a common Japanese piece of PR to release "completion" percentages that everybody there knows are always ludicrously arbitrary. Go to any game show in Japan or read any publication and you will see this number next to every game on display. A publisher can put whatever number they want there. Square Enix is obviously having a little fun with this convention.
Sony typically reports the number of units shipped to retailers, not actually sold through to consumers.
This is counting units sold, not shipped. Sony can report whatever number it wants, but there are third party organizations and companies devoted to counting units sold at retail, and Enterbrain (where this number is coming from) is one of them.
All manufacturers, not just Sony, count units shipped and announce those numbers. MS does the same (they just announced 11.6 million Xbox 360's shipped, not sold), as does Nintendo. It's all they know, after all - it's just an inventory. It takes a separate company to go out there and count units sold at retail, which Enterbrain, Media Create and at least one other company I'm forgetting right now do.
NPD does it in the United States.
If you only look at money through console sales that might be true, but what about money from GAMES and assessories,merchandise also online sales, they have movies and all sorts of online content to download for money.
Yeah, and it all gets reported on the same quarterly balance sheets.
Sheesh, some of you guys act like MS is hiding a bunch of profits under their mattress or something. They have to report all their profit and loss; it's all public. Go read it yourself; Yahoo finance has it all for free if you don't have a brokerage account anywhere.
The fact is MS was $5.5 billion in the hole by last quarter, is losing around $220 million every single quarter on its entertainment division, and has now taken a $1.1 billion charge on top of that. These are facts that have been publicly reported by MS in their SEC filings. There's no hidden profit there. There's no "well yeah, if you only count this or that". That's counting everything.
Erm, MS is only about ~$300 million in losses for their gaming division, and turning a profit overall as a company.
Sony is suffering around ~$600million losses for their gaming division and is $11.3 billion in debt overall as a company.
MS is at $7 billion in losses and counting for their gaming division.
Sony posted a loss in one quarter with their gaming division, but overall are in the black by more than $9 billion.
In addition to that, "debt" has nothing to do with whether or not a company is profitable. Sony cleared a little more than $2 billion in net profit each of the last 3 years.