I don't just mean those killing themselves via internet, I mean the notoriously high general suicide rates of Japan. They are quite real,
No, they are not, and you're perpetuating the same stereotype as the article submitter. See here for actual suicide rates around the world. Japan's are higher than the US but lower than many other countries (Russia's suicide rate, for example, is about double that of Japan's) - overall, Japan is about average. Finland's suicide rate is comparable to Japan's, but you wouldn't know it based on media coverage - I don't recall seeing any news stories on Slashdot about those crazy, depressed Finns.
Into an online massive world, where you strive to be a gang leader / mafia leader / etc against other real players. Think GTA:SA Gang Wars, but with real people, real gangs, real gang members.
The problem is Rockstar North have basically no experience making MMO's, and very limited experience making online games at all (Wild Metal being one exception - even GTA:LCS was ported by Rockstar Leeds). They have steadfastly resisted adding any real online modes to the GTA series, claiming each time that they can't figure out a way to make it work. LCS showed they could do it in a very limited way, but designing an MMO game is a whole different animal... because you're not tacking on an online mode to an already existing game, you're trying to build an entire self-sustaining world around the online component. It's completely the reverse in terms of the way you traditionally design a game.
They're going to need to do something to shake up the formula, so I'm not suggesting this won't happen. What I am suggesting is that it's no guaranteed recipe for success. They'd have to create their own MMO template - copying other games just won't do for GTA, and in any case even if they did, there's not much about a game like Final Fantasy XI that I think you could translate into a GTA world. So they'd be going into uncharted territory with no experience, and given their past statements on the matter I don't think even they're convinced they could pull it off.
Salute to them for doing a good job, sure, but dont give them most of the credit.
Well, it depends on what you're giving them most of the credit for.
Arcade games were invented by Americans. Most people also say home consoles were as well, although they developed basically independently in Japan at around the same time (maybe slightly later). For the first decade or so of the console industry, Americans and Japanese gamers played their own systems basically unaware of what was going on on the other side of the Pacific. They had never heard of the Coleco Vision and we had never heard of the Sega Mark 1 or Famicom.
After the crash of 1983/1984 in the US, though, the Japanese completely took over. They resuscitated the industry in America pretty much singlehandedly. It wasn't European or American manufacturers and developers; it was the Japanese. We would not have a game industry these days without Nintendo, Sega and yes, Sony, along with the developers that went along with them (and they were mainly Japanese as well). It was the success of these companies that brought Microsoft back into the mix, and enticed American and European publishers as well. But it's important to remember that in 1985, third-party American and European console publishers basically did not exist. Activision managed to survive the crash but were a shell of their former selves and were focusing on the PC market. Most of the European developers we know now also either just weren't around at the time or were known as PC developers. It was the NES and later Japanese systems that rejuvinated the western industry.
Even today, Japan controls more than 50% of the worldwide video game market. That includes games and systems created in Japan and sold both domestically and abroad. It's not just about famous creators like Shigeru Miyamoto; Japan churns out thousands of games per year and without its contributions, there literally wouldn't be an industry at this point. (You can debate whether or not MS would have ever released the Xbox, but it's well-documented that they did so in response to the threat from Sony.)
So, don't necessarily give them credit for creating the industry in the first place... but do give them most of the credit for keeping it alive and making it thrive again.
Now that we have cameras of a decent MP maybe we could stop saving as jpeg and instead use a lossless format?
Er, it's called RAW, and all pro cameras and even a lot of pocket cams are capable of using it. This is unrasterized data, so it's about as lossless as it gets (even TIFF is destructive because it rasterizes the images before it's saved).
The problem with RAW formats right now is that they're all proprietary, but this isn't really that big of a deal in practice. Generally speaking, if an image editor supports RAW at all, it will support every major camera. And every camera that supports RAW also ships with its own conversion software (so you can save as whatever format you want).
Cinematics are very effective in the right situations. Would a cinematic be a selling point for me if I wanted a new hack n slash? Probably not. Would I be disappointed if the next installment of FF had no cinematics? Deffinitely.
Your argument obviously boiling down to the fact that it's genre that matters - you can't make a blanket statement that cinematics do/don't matter. And I agree. (For the record, I'm not ashamed to admit that I did cry like a baby when Aeris died in FF7 - and I knew it was coming!)
btw, from TFA:
The merits of if a cinematic and/or story detract from a game experience is rather mute,
Me fail English? That's unpossible!!
How do these guys get paid to write such obviously crap sentences like the one I partially quoted above? I have no desire to read the rest of that article after seeing that summary, which is practically incoherent.
The publishers will insist that graphics sell, that you need such high-res textures that you can see the models' individual pores, that you need to get Hollywood actors to do the voices. I don't buy that. If Geometry Wars and the success of the DS have taught us anything, it's that gameplay sells.
Agree 100%. I've been trying to save my money lately but just this past week I finally broke down and bought a DS (yeah, I know about the DS Lite...) along with Mario Kart, Sonic Rush and Nintendogs, all new, and I don't regret my purchase a bit. I think the system's awesome as are every one of the three games I got with it. And I say that knowing that the PSP is more powerful. I couldn't care less, because I can't play Mario Kart online on the PSP.
I'm obviously not the only person that feels that way, judging by the sales of the DS vs. the PSP. And I'm also someone who has rarely bought games new lately - but I make exceptions in the case of games that provide me with an experience I can't easily obtain on the used market, or on another system. That's the key. Who are the ones complaining about used game sales? It's invariably the developers and publishers who can't figure out why people aren't buying the fifth sequel to a tired franchise on the same console anymore; i.e. Madden 2006 on PS2. Why would I need Madden 2006 if I have Madden 2005? News flash: nobody wants to buy the same damn game every year for full price. Give people something new and they will buy the game new, and they won't be as likely to sell it later either. Mario Kart DS may be a sequel, but it's the first Mario Kart with online play and the first 3D version on a portable. (It also has more "stuff" - tracks, carts, characters - than any other version.) And it's only $35 new. That's the way you sell games based on established "franchises", not by doing a roster update and charging $50 for it every year.
Somehow, because they're games instead of books, it magically makes sense now?
In fact, it makes even less sense to me...
Aren't we buying used games in the first place because somebody who owned the game decided it no longer had value for him, and somebody else decided that the value of the game was lower than the cost of buying it new?
Now, assuming a company puts out an all-new game based on an innovative premise and with gameplay we hadn't seen before... wouldn't that a) force those who want that experience to buy it new, and b) provide enough value to otherwise second-hand buyers of valueless games that they would now buy a new one?
In other words, it seems to me that sequelitis is directly responsible for the surge in the used market, and the only way out of it is to produce new and innovative games. It's not the other way around. Developers need to give people a reason why they should buy a new game. Pumping out sequels is just going to do the opposite. (It also has the effect of just dumping a whole bunch of previous series editions into the used marketplace. Why keep Madden 05 when Madden 06 is now out?)
Just look at the Nintendo DS if you need an example of this. The only solution is to make games that are as fun and unique as possible, and that aren't "updated" on a yearly basis.
Umm, no. They compared the size of launch XBox games to current ones to get an idea of how much games grow over the lifetime of the machine. Then they measured the size of current 360 games (which already have those shiny textures you want)
And three of those four games are at or above 4GB. Two of them are 4.5GB, right at the edge of the capacity of a single layer DVD.
Developers by and large don't want to use a second layer if they can avoid it, both because streaming becomes a problem when you have to switch back and forth between layers and because it's more expensive to produce dual layer discs. So you're already seeing that these games are basically at the capacity limit. Eventually developers will have to push beyond 4.7GB - they will have no choice - but once that line is crossed, you will see a ramp-up to 9GB very, very quickly, because there's no point trying to fit a game under 4.7GB anymore. And then there's nowhere else to go.
Textures on the current generation of machines are already compressed using algorithms similar to jpg. Compression is not going to get much better, if any. The only answer when you're talking eight times the resolution is a corresponding increase in texture size.
My guess is once the first dual-layer Xbox 360 games hit the market, you will see a significant difference in texture quality and variety (with fewer repeating textures) compared to what's out there right now. But that's going to be as good as it gets, and it's going to happen pretty soon. There's no more headroom once you hit the texture storage limit of a DVD9.
It's a limitation the PS3 basically doesn't have. You can never have too much storage. It wasn't a big deal with the PS1 and Saturn because they were only displaying 320x240 images anyway, but it *is* a big reason why those games look so chunky to us now. It became a bigger deal in the PS2/Xbox/GameCube generation when higher resolutions and anti-aliasing let us see more clearly just how little detail there was in the textures of some games. In high-def, with resolutions of 1920x1080, you're going to need massive textures to make certain types of games look at all convincing or interesting. A fighting or sports game is one thing; come back and talk to me when you see GTA or the latest and greatest MMO on the Xbox 360, and can directly compare it to the same game on the PS3. The PS3, with its maximum 50GB for texture storage, is just not limited in this same way.
I think the answer lies in the fact that it is so portable and that in the urban japanese scenario, they can be used while travelling, waiting etc.
I think you kind of missed the point. There are two handhelds out right now - the PSP and DS. The PSP is more powerful, has a lot of games ported from the PS2, etc. But the DS at its peak (before it sold out) was selling 600,000 units per week in Japan about a month ago, whereas the PSP rarely breaks the 100,000 barrier. That's where the "why?" question comes from. It's not really a question of home consoles vs. handhelds.
It's not 100% confirmation of anything, but Nintendo took this photo themselves and they didn't do it for nothing. They're showing you something here - and what else would it be than that you can use your regular old GameCube controllers with the Revolution?
It really bothers me how meaningless marketing-speak has invaded video games. This is a complete misuse of the word "franchise" - it doesn't mean what these marketing guys think it does, or what most people who now subscribe to this marketing-speak outside of marketing think it does. Here's the definition from dictionary.com:
franchise Audio pronunciation of "franchise" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (frnchz) n.
1. A privilege or right officially granted a person or a group by a government, especially:
1. The constitutional or statutory right to vote.
2. The establishment of a corporation's existence.
3. The granting of certain rights and powers to a corporation.
4. Legal immunity from servitude, certain burdens, or other restrictions.
2.
1. Authorization granted to someone to sell or distribute a company's goods or services in a certain area.
2. A business or group of businesses established or operated under such authorization.
3. The territory or limits within which immunity, a privilege, or a right may be exercised.
4. A professional sports team.
Somewhere along the line, one of these marketdrones probably confused "the granting of certain rights and powers to a corporation" (i.e. the right to distribute games based on Star Trek, for example) with an actual line of games all bearing some relation to each other. That is not a franchise!
It just bothers me how games are now called "IP", series are now called "franchises", etc. and people just accept it. Speak English, people, not the language of marketing. Because more than half the time these people don't know what they're talking about to begin with, and they don't even know the meaning of the words they're using.
Just because it is "rare" doesn't mean it is worth finding, ESPECIALLY if you are a gamer. I guess that's my point. I'd rather track down a copy of PDS to play it, not own it.
In that case, PDS is, like all Saturn games, extremely easy to obtain, and for nothing. What are you worried about by buying an original copy, Sega getting their cut of the profits? They're not getting anything from a used sale on Ebay at this point. If all you want to do is *play* the game, just find some ISO's somewhere... right? There's no moral reason not to (unless Sega does issue a re-release for this decade-old Saturn game).
Presumably you go out and try to find an original copy used for some materialistic reason. You want to own an original PDS. You don't just want to play it, or you'd have just downloaded it from somewhere and called it done.
The point being, almost everybody is a collector to some extent. The only thing that differs is degree.
Anyway, what you are talking about and what real hardcore collectors of "rare" games do are two different things. That's why I said "collecting" for the PS2 is pretty pointless right now - if you are collecting for the sake of rarity, then you don't even know what you want at this point. If you are collecting because you want to play the game, then you're not really collecting, and you shouldn't care at all about these reprints "lowering the value" of your original run. And if you do care, then you shouldn't have bought the game based on its value to begin with... because it's not that rare! See what I'm saying? You can't win if you buy a game like Rez based on how rare and valuable it supposedly is while the system is still current.
I'm agreeing with you in one sense, but my original point was disputing the article's assertion that these reprints "lowered the value" of the original print run. There is no inherent value to lower, and if there was, a reprint wouldn't lower it. If the value of a game drops because of a reprint, then there wasn't any real value there to begin with and the prices being paid previously were simply inflated. Collectors don't buy reprints, and the only thing that can lower the price of an original print is the collector market drying up. Obviously, if people stop buying originals in favor of reprints, then there was no collector market to begin with.
People who collect games for the sake of value or rarity (and there's nothing about doing this that's any more wrong than collecting rare hat pins or rare refrigerator magnets or rare paintings or whatever else you're into - it's a hobby in itself) do so decades after the fact. We're still basically in the Atari 2600 era of collecting right now, and just starting to scratch the surface of the Famicom/NES and the 16 bit systems. That's about how long it takes for the collector community to really get organized and start doing things like creating rarity lists and keeping each other updated as far as how often various games come up. If you're collecting stuff for current systems thinking that value's gonna hold, you're in for a world of hurt in a few years no matter what happens.
My list is not up to date (it's current as of December 2003) but here are some *really* rare PS2 games, along with their cumulative sales numbers to date (don't ask me how or where I got this, but these are NPD numbers - not just weekly, but all time up to that point):
I-NINJA 4,850 XGRA:EXTREME G RACING 4,771 SPACE CHANNEL 5 SE 4,720 BATTLESTAR GALACTICA 4,691 LOONEY TUNES:BACK IN 4,638 BOMBASTIC 4,323 ROGUE OPS 3,627 VIRTUAL-ON MARZ 3,280 MONSTER 4X4: MASTERS 3,145 FUGITIVE HUNTER: WAR 3,135 SMASH CARS 3,006 METAL ARMS: GLITCH 2,899 GLADIATOR: SWORD 2,632 GOBLIN COMMANDER 2,452 WHIPLASH 2,427 KYA: DARK LINEAGE 1,765 BUTT UGLY MARTNS:ZOOM 1,267 MUPPETS PARTY CRUISE 867
Reprints could not be distinguished from the originals, which brought the value down of their collection.
BS. Reprints can always be distinguished from originals. It may not be easy, but there are always differences - different paper stocks for the manuals, different type, a different dot printing pattern on the picture on the disc, or whatever.
If you're a "collector", you have nothing to worry about from these reprints. It's pretty stupid to be "collecting" for the PS2 at this point anyway - in the grand scheme of things Rez is not all that rare, and people who do truly collect games based on rarity are not going to give it all that much notice in the future regardless of the reprint. It takes time for the real rarities to bubble up, because by nature they didn't make much of a ripple on first release... but what usually happens is somebody will find something at a garage sale or whatever, say "I've never seen THAT before..." and show it to their friends, and a reputation grows. There are games for the PS2 that have sold fewer than a thousand units - Rez is not one of them.
But even if it was, nobody who's been collecting anything for very long would say a reprint affects value in the least. That's no different than saying a JC Penney copy of a Tiffany lamp affects the value of the original, or that a reprint of Spiderman #1 affects the value of the first run... it doesn't. And sure, to a layperson they may look the same, but the real collectors can spot the difference instantaneously.
I say, good for them if they want to reprint games like Rez - and I say that as an owner of the first pressing. I may even buy a reprint just to have both (I do this with comics too). More people should be able to play this great game - the appeal of Rez is not so much that it's rare, but that it's just an amazing experience.
As to why they don't use open standards? Because there's no simple way to stream XviD/Ogg streams to the masses. Forcing people to download a CODEC isn't any more practical than forcing them to download another player, and I haven't seen any drop-in solutions for streaming either of those formats or any other.
Flash Video is as close as you're going to get to that, and it's what a lot of the more modern sites are starting to use (Flash Video itself is pretty new - I believe Flash 7 was the first version to support it). Google Video, for example, uses it for its embedded videos - click one and see, though be sure to set the video size to "original" as the stretching they do by default seriously degrades the real quality of the format. Adobe/Macromedia claims a 97% penetration rate for Flash itself across all platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux), and I don't disbelieve this - ignoring the Slashdot "I won't browse with anything but Lynx!" crowd, I haven't met anybody who didn't have Flash installed, and most major manufacturers now preinstall it.
So if you've got Flash installed, you can play Flash video. And it's really the best totally cross-platform solution, with quality equal to any of the other formats.
I agree totally that forcing people to download a codec or player to view video is not a good idea. But the vast majority of people already have Flash and it is basically OS-agnostic. (Yes, it is proprietary - some people here will just have to get over their hangups about that when it comes to video.)
Unfortunately, it is one of the more technically competent and compatible formats out there (being an extended version of MPEG-4), and it has a pro-level encoding app available for download from MS that also happens to be free. A lot of people would love to use it if not for boneheaded decisions like this. I'll explain...
It's what Microsoft wants. For everybody to use their platform becaue their platform will only support what they throw their weight behind (then drop to change to something else)
What Microsoft wants and what they're getting out of this are two different things.
MS initially wanted Windows Media to be a universal format. The strategy was to make it the web streaming format of choice. That's still supposedly their strategy.
Unfortunately for them, if 85% of the world uses Windows, to a web developer that means only 85% of the world has easy access to a real WMV player. (The Mac player is so bad now that it almost doesn't count, and flip4mac is payware.) Contrast that with something like Flash Video, which is almost completely cross-platform - it has Windows, Mac, even an official Linux player, and it streams as well or better than any other format.
All I can conclude from this is that they think Windows itself is so compelling with WMP built in that they no longer care about whether or not people use the wmv format on the web. Because as it stands, only idiots use wmv for web use (unless it's one of several options). And yes, I mean you, CNN.
I've never seen so many spelling and grammer mistakes; I can't believe they get printed.
Coming from someone who can't spell "grammar", I'm not sure you're the right one to judge that. (Yeah yeah, you probably don't get paid to write and these guys do.)
But it does depend on the car mag. Some of them are trash. Others pride themselves on quality journalism (i.e. Car and Driver), in addition to their standard product reviews/previews, and they have a real editorial department that oversees everything and takes on major stories in every issue.
There's no equivalent to this in gaming. EGM sort of tried to do it for a while (they had a lengthy expose on Ralph Baer in one issue, for example, along with his trials and tribulations in the early days of gaming), but they gave up when they realized it wasn't making them more money than just filling up pages with ads would. Next Generation tried it for a while too and promptly went out of business. Same with Gamers' Republic.
So part of it is the fault of the readers, who are not nearly demanding enough - probably in part because many of them are too young. But the current focus on the lack of standards is coming from the older readers who are demanding more - problem is, we're probably in the minority, and we're not adding as much to these publications' bottom line as their advertisers are. When faced with the choice of filling a 12 page feature on a guy like Ralph Baer in order to satiate subscribers or selling 12 pages worth of ads, publishers these days will always choose the latter. Even if it means guys like me don't re-up their subscriptions later on.
The same is probably true online, where budgets are such that online publishers consider doing anything but reviewing and previewing new games to be pretty much a waste of resources and time.
Assuming "publisher" refers to a game publisher... Since when were the subjects of journalism required to cooperate on a story?
Bingo. I was going to write the same thing but you beat me to it.
This strikes me as nothing but an excuse, and a whiny excuse at that. "Waaaaah, we can't write our stories because the publishers don't give us access!" Well, dammit, then get access. Wait around the elevators pretending to be a freakin' janitor until you see the guy you want to talk to, then corner him. Real journalists do this kind of thing all the time.
It's not the game publishers' job to help you. It is the publishers' job to look out for their own self interests, which in most cases are probably exactly the opposite of the interests of any decent journalist. It's the journalist's job to get the story regardless of what sort of cooperation is offered - and in some cases, maybe it's the lack of cooperation that is the story (though that's not the case here... in this case, this guy missed the real story, and is in fact a bad journalist himself for it). This is what being a journalist means. And the fact that so many in the gaming press seem oblivious to this fact is one of the reasons why nobody takes them seriously as "journalists".
Asking for the publishers to help you is tantamount to telling them you want to be their PR firm. That is not a journalist's job. If you have a story to tell, then tell it. Find whatever sources you need and get access to them however you can. And if you can't get the information you want, either tell a different story or shelve it until you can. But don't rely on the publishers to do your job for you and don't just take the little bits of info they "officially" dole out, print them, and then call yourself a journalist, because you're not. You're a PR man.
There are two major counts taken weekly of hardware and software sales. One is done by Media Create, the other by Famitsu. Famitsu's is done the same way NPD does it here, through a survey and statistical sampling. Media Create does it a different way and I'm not sure how, but usually their numbers are lower than Famitsu's and generally considered more accurate, so they may be tracking actual store scans and either not using statistical sampling or just using a larger and more accurate sample.
But in any case, "shipped to retailers" is not "sold". Sold to customers is sold.
I believe the numbers quoted just a bit earlier are Media Create numbers.
Some tiny portion, in the future, at the end of its commercial lifetime, which will then be sold cheap to someone prepared to sell them for a few bucks. At the moment the difference is irrelevant. If they're being made then they're being sold.
Nope. Stores can and do ship back unsold merchandise to manufacturers in exchange for credits that they can then use to purchase other merchandise from the same manufacturer. That merchandise then generally gets moved around to other retailers who actually want it, but not always. Sometimes it just sits in a warehouse for years. If it does get shipped to another retailer, it gets counted twice in the "shipped" number (because it was, in fact, shipped twice).
Whenever you see a "shipped" number (or "sold to retailers" which is the same thing), then you can be assured that the company is at the very least hedging against the next quarter's numbers. If there's a wide disparity between "shipped" and "sold", they will quote "shipped", which basically just puts off the bad news for a quarter or two when that low demand starts being reflected in shipments too.
You can see that happening with the PSP now. The PSP was outselling the DS initially - at least according to Sony's "shipment" reports. But now, it's the other way around, and the disparity is growing. Nintendo has sold 4 million DS's in the US, and while Sony has basically stopped putting out releases, NPD says they've sold 2.5 million PSP's. 600,000 of those - nearly 25% - were during the launch week (compared to 400,000 DS's - or 10% of that system's US total).
In Japan, which gets weekly sales numbers published publicly, the disparity is even larger, and the DS is currently outselling the PSP by four to one. (For the week of December 18, Nintendo sold 408,000 DS's, while Sony sold 95,000 PSP's.)
So "shipped" vs. "sold" definitely does mean something. It's a sign that at best, a manufacturer is not confident in its sell-through numbers and is trying (usually in vain) to prop up public interest and make the system sound more popular than it is. Eventually, though, you will see even "shipped" numbers start to drop, as retailers stop placing orders for new units and even return unsold merchandise. That's usually the point when the press releases start to dry up too.
Next time someone wants to tell me why I'm playing video games, tell it to my face.
Perhaps you should play games as escape, because you clearly need it.
But I suppose you expect every analyst and/or journalist to come to your house and personally clear all of their opinions with you before printing them?
Anyway, the article's points are completely valid. MS likes to tout how they have 2 million XBL subscribers and what a success that is. But that's out of 24 million Xboxes sold. Presumably included within those account numbers are people like me, who signed up for a year to see what it was like and then ended up never using the service... I finally cancelled when my year was up. I wonder how many of those 2 million are even active users. But in any case, the highest percentage of Xbox owners that use XBL would still be under 10%.
Now, you can say this is just a starting point, that they'll do better the next time around, etc. but there's no logic behind that. Online gaming is not new, and there was no big barrier to entry in the last generation. The Xbox came with a network adapter built in and all you needed to do was go to your local game store (same place you buy your games) and buy a kit that included a year of service. Some games even came with cards that gave you 3 free months.
Given that, you just have to keep coming back to that percentage - 10%. Do you really think the other 90% of Xbox users didn't know about Xbox Live and didn't know how to get it? What about PS2 users? The online rate was similar - the PS2 actually had more total online users than the Xbox but that's because it has a greater installed base. The cost of entry was about the same ($40 for the online adapter) and there was no ongoing monthly fee. Yet still that percentage of online users was about the same - 10%.
What if we throw the PC into the mix? Now, I would argue first that PC gamers are cut of a slightly different mold than console gamers - there's a lot of overlap, but PC gamers are definitely often either a bit more hardcore almost out of necessity or they're far more casual. PC gamers are older, they've been around longer, and they use their computers for other things too.
But let's look at a popular online PC game, such as World of Warcraft. WoW has what, around 5 million users worldwide? That's a lot - more than the total number of XBL subscribers - but then there are also literally billions of computers in use in the world. Even if you narrow down the number of computers to exclude users with more than one system, to exclude office computers, and to then only include users who actually play games on their systems, I'd guarantee you're still looking at more than 100 million "PC gamers" worldwide. (Remember, "games" can include everything from Half Life 2 to Baseball Mogul to Bejeweled.) So even if you put all of the top online PC games together, my guess is you'd still come out with about the same percentage of total online gamers - around 10%.
I don't see any reason why that percentage is going to suddenly spike upwards with the current generation of consoles. Some people want to play online - around 10% of us, apparently - but most don't. And by focusing so very heavily on online gaming, MS is appealing directly to the hardest of the hardcore - something they have said repeatedly that they don't want to do anymore. They're trying to expand the market, to broaden their base.
Well, this isn't the way to do it. Hardcore online gamers know they want to play online, and the rest of us have apparently made up our minds that we don't. We're just not looking for that kind of experience. Online gaming has its place, and there should be games to appeal to that audience, but it is just not the mainstream audience some people seem to think it is. It's almost a genre unto itself. And MS, by marketing this feature so heavily, I'm convinced is actually intimidating more casual users away from buying the Xbox 360 in the same way t
It's a billboard in slightly different kind of ink. Big deal. If you haven't previously noticed that advertising can be deceptive, cheapen the arts, and degrade the aesthetics of our living spaces, then you have been numbed.
So I guess your position is that we've lost the war and should just give up. Who's the one that's been numbed again?
Some of us would like to keep our streets clean, and keep the advertising in areas where it's, you know, allowed. The issue this article is talking about is putting advertising up without a permit. Sorry to tell some of the other people in here, but in every city I know of, it is illegal to sell advertising on your property without a permit. You can't just do anything you want; you still live in a city and you have to abide by city laws. These property owners - and Sony - did not do that.
You can sell your wall space to an artist for non-commercial art. You cannot sell your wall space for commercial use in most cases. That's the difference, and if you can't see it, then it's you that's been numbed to what's acceptable and what isn't.
6 out of 10 shows on the list are cable/satellite only and of those, 2 are on pay channels only. Can the big networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC compete anymore?
I would personally argue that LOST is the best show on any network, and it's not on this list. The more you watch it, the better it gets... and it's already good on first viewing.
A year ago, I'd have put Desperate Housewives up there too (though no longer).
Both of those are ABC shows, and I think they prove that the major nets can and do still produce both quality TV and pretty imaginative TV too, while at the same time doing well in the ratings. Whether they do this enough is a different question, but then, nobody ever said putting out quality TV was easy either.
The real question is why? The Mac already has both a more modern Apple-produced browser (Safari) that MS themselves recommend, along with a true open-source alternative (Firefox), not to mention all the usual suspects if you're not a fan of either of those (Opera, etc.).
While it may be a nice pseudo-political irony to have IE Mac go open-source, it is an old, outdated browser that was rendered unnecessary long ago in every sense of the word.
I've been a Netflix subscriber for nearly two years now, and I've never experienced this "throttling" you speak of.
The two posts that have actually mentioned this phenomenon so far have both been penned by Chris Bradshaw. Apparently he is the sole target of this dastardly plot.
When I first subscribed to Netflix I was renting on average one movie per day (3 at a time, returned 2-3 days later). This lasted several months, until I burned through my initial queue, and now I'm down to a more reasonable 10 or so movies per month. Overall I was nowhere close to being a profitable customer initially, and I'm probably borderline now. But I have never experienced anything I'd call "throttling". My movies are received the day after I ship them back and my next movies are shipped out the same day. This happens 100% of the time.
I live in NYC so that may have something to do with it. My closest service center is in Flushing, within the city limits. And no doubt it's a big one, because it's serving probably hundreds of thousands of customers. Only one time have I ever gotten a DVD from elsewhere in the Netflix system, and that was 2046 - a relatively small foreign film (especially at the time I rented it, when it was one of their region 0 Hong Kong DVD's).
It wouldn't surprise me if people living in areas that are not as well served have to wait a little longer. Maybe their service center doesn't have the films in stock that they want, and a request has to be relayed to another service center further away. So turnaround takes longer, and the mail takes longer. If a customer doesn't look at the labels on his envelopes, he may never know this. His envelopes may also be labeled for return to his local service center when they actually came from somewhere else.
But I doubt there's any sort of nefarious plot going on. A lot more people than just one would be complaining about it - there are a lot of long-time, heavy-use Netflix subscribers in here.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't just mean those killing themselves via internet, I mean the notoriously high general suicide rates of Japan. They are quite real,
No, they are not, and you're perpetuating the same stereotype as the article submitter. See here for actual suicide rates around the world. Japan's are higher than the US but lower than many other countries (Russia's suicide rate, for example, is about double that of Japan's) - overall, Japan is about average. Finland's suicide rate is comparable to Japan's, but you wouldn't know it based on media coverage - I don't recall seeing any news stories on Slashdot about those crazy, depressed Finns.
Into an online massive world, where you strive to be a gang leader / mafia leader / etc against other real players. Think GTA:SA Gang Wars, but with real people, real gangs, real gang members.
The problem is Rockstar North have basically no experience making MMO's, and very limited experience making online games at all (Wild Metal being one exception - even GTA:LCS was ported by Rockstar Leeds). They have steadfastly resisted adding any real online modes to the GTA series, claiming each time that they can't figure out a way to make it work. LCS showed they could do it in a very limited way, but designing an MMO game is a whole different animal... because you're not tacking on an online mode to an already existing game, you're trying to build an entire self-sustaining world around the online component. It's completely the reverse in terms of the way you traditionally design a game.
They're going to need to do something to shake up the formula, so I'm not suggesting this won't happen. What I am suggesting is that it's no guaranteed recipe for success. They'd have to create their own MMO template - copying other games just won't do for GTA, and in any case even if they did, there's not much about a game like Final Fantasy XI that I think you could translate into a GTA world. So they'd be going into uncharted territory with no experience, and given their past statements on the matter I don't think even they're convinced they could pull it off.
Salute to them for doing a good job, sure, but dont give them most of the credit.
Well, it depends on what you're giving them most of the credit for.
Arcade games were invented by Americans. Most people also say home consoles were as well, although they developed basically independently in Japan at around the same time (maybe slightly later). For the first decade or so of the console industry, Americans and Japanese gamers played their own systems basically unaware of what was going on on the other side of the Pacific. They had never heard of the Coleco Vision and we had never heard of the Sega Mark 1 or Famicom.
After the crash of 1983/1984 in the US, though, the Japanese completely took over. They resuscitated the industry in America pretty much singlehandedly. It wasn't European or American manufacturers and developers; it was the Japanese. We would not have a game industry these days without Nintendo, Sega and yes, Sony, along with the developers that went along with them (and they were mainly Japanese as well). It was the success of these companies that brought Microsoft back into the mix, and enticed American and European publishers as well. But it's important to remember that in 1985, third-party American and European console publishers basically did not exist. Activision managed to survive the crash but were a shell of their former selves and were focusing on the PC market. Most of the European developers we know now also either just weren't around at the time or were known as PC developers. It was the NES and later Japanese systems that rejuvinated the western industry.
Even today, Japan controls more than 50% of the worldwide video game market. That includes games and systems created in Japan and sold both domestically and abroad. It's not just about famous creators like Shigeru Miyamoto; Japan churns out thousands of games per year and without its contributions, there literally wouldn't be an industry at this point. (You can debate whether or not MS would have ever released the Xbox, but it's well-documented that they did so in response to the threat from Sony.)
So, don't necessarily give them credit for creating the industry in the first place... but do give them most of the credit for keeping it alive and making it thrive again.
Now that we have cameras of a decent MP maybe we could stop saving as jpeg and instead use a lossless format?
Er, it's called RAW, and all pro cameras and even a lot of pocket cams are capable of using it. This is unrasterized data, so it's about as lossless as it gets (even TIFF is destructive because it rasterizes the images before it's saved).
The problem with RAW formats right now is that they're all proprietary, but this isn't really that big of a deal in practice. Generally speaking, if an image editor supports RAW at all, it will support every major camera. And every camera that supports RAW also ships with its own conversion software (so you can save as whatever format you want).
Cinematics are very effective in the right situations. Would a cinematic be a selling point for me if I wanted a new hack n slash? Probably not. Would I be disappointed if the next installment of FF had no cinematics? Deffinitely.
Your argument obviously boiling down to the fact that it's genre that matters - you can't make a blanket statement that cinematics do/don't matter. And I agree. (For the record, I'm not ashamed to admit that I did cry like a baby when Aeris died in FF7 - and I knew it was coming!)
btw, from TFA:
The merits of if a cinematic and/or story detract from a game experience is rather mute,
Me fail English? That's unpossible!!
How do these guys get paid to write such obviously crap sentences like the one I partially quoted above? I have no desire to read the rest of that article after seeing that summary, which is practically incoherent.
The publishers will insist that graphics sell, that you need such high-res textures that you can see the models' individual pores, that you need to get Hollywood actors to do the voices. I don't buy that. If Geometry Wars and the success of the DS have taught us anything, it's that gameplay sells.
Agree 100%. I've been trying to save my money lately but just this past week I finally broke down and bought a DS (yeah, I know about the DS Lite...) along with Mario Kart, Sonic Rush and Nintendogs, all new, and I don't regret my purchase a bit. I think the system's awesome as are every one of the three games I got with it. And I say that knowing that the PSP is more powerful. I couldn't care less, because I can't play Mario Kart online on the PSP.
I'm obviously not the only person that feels that way, judging by the sales of the DS vs. the PSP. And I'm also someone who has rarely bought games new lately - but I make exceptions in the case of games that provide me with an experience I can't easily obtain on the used market, or on another system. That's the key. Who are the ones complaining about used game sales? It's invariably the developers and publishers who can't figure out why people aren't buying the fifth sequel to a tired franchise on the same console anymore; i.e. Madden 2006 on PS2. Why would I need Madden 2006 if I have Madden 2005? News flash: nobody wants to buy the same damn game every year for full price. Give people something new and they will buy the game new, and they won't be as likely to sell it later either. Mario Kart DS may be a sequel, but it's the first Mario Kart with online play and the first 3D version on a portable. (It also has more "stuff" - tracks, carts, characters - than any other version.) And it's only $35 new. That's the way you sell games based on established "franchises", not by doing a roster update and charging $50 for it every year.
Somehow, because they're games instead of books, it magically makes sense now?
In fact, it makes even less sense to me...
Aren't we buying used games in the first place because somebody who owned the game decided it no longer had value for him, and somebody else decided that the value of the game was lower than the cost of buying it new?
Now, assuming a company puts out an all-new game based on an innovative premise and with gameplay we hadn't seen before... wouldn't that a) force those who want that experience to buy it new, and b) provide enough value to otherwise second-hand buyers of valueless games that they would now buy a new one?
In other words, it seems to me that sequelitis is directly responsible for the surge in the used market, and the only way out of it is to produce new and innovative games. It's not the other way around. Developers need to give people a reason why they should buy a new game. Pumping out sequels is just going to do the opposite. (It also has the effect of just dumping a whole bunch of previous series editions into the used marketplace. Why keep Madden 05 when Madden 06 is now out?)
Just look at the Nintendo DS if you need an example of this. The only solution is to make games that are as fun and unique as possible, and that aren't "updated" on a yearly basis.
Umm, no. They compared the size of launch XBox games to current ones to get an idea of how much games grow over the lifetime of the machine. Then they measured the size of current 360 games (which already have those shiny textures you want)
And three of those four games are at or above 4GB. Two of them are 4.5GB, right at the edge of the capacity of a single layer DVD.
Developers by and large don't want to use a second layer if they can avoid it, both because streaming becomes a problem when you have to switch back and forth between layers and because it's more expensive to produce dual layer discs. So you're already seeing that these games are basically at the capacity limit. Eventually developers will have to push beyond 4.7GB - they will have no choice - but once that line is crossed, you will see a ramp-up to 9GB very, very quickly, because there's no point trying to fit a game under 4.7GB anymore. And then there's nowhere else to go.
Textures on the current generation of machines are already compressed using algorithms similar to jpg. Compression is not going to get much better, if any. The only answer when you're talking eight times the resolution is a corresponding increase in texture size.
My guess is once the first dual-layer Xbox 360 games hit the market, you will see a significant difference in texture quality and variety (with fewer repeating textures) compared to what's out there right now. But that's going to be as good as it gets, and it's going to happen pretty soon. There's no more headroom once you hit the texture storage limit of a DVD9.
It's a limitation the PS3 basically doesn't have. You can never have too much storage. It wasn't a big deal with the PS1 and Saturn because they were only displaying 320x240 images anyway, but it *is* a big reason why those games look so chunky to us now. It became a bigger deal in the PS2/Xbox/GameCube generation when higher resolutions and anti-aliasing let us see more clearly just how little detail there was in the textures of some games. In high-def, with resolutions of 1920x1080, you're going to need massive textures to make certain types of games look at all convincing or interesting. A fighting or sports game is one thing; come back and talk to me when you see GTA or the latest and greatest MMO on the Xbox 360, and can directly compare it to the same game on the PS3. The PS3, with its maximum 50GB for texture storage, is just not limited in this same way.
I think the answer lies in the fact that it is so portable and that in the urban japanese scenario, they can be used while travelling, waiting etc.
I think you kind of missed the point. There are two handhelds out right now - the PSP and DS. The PSP is more powerful, has a lot of games ported from the PS2, etc. But the DS at its peak (before it sold out) was selling 600,000 units per week in Japan about a month ago, whereas the PSP rarely breaks the 100,000 barrier. That's where the "why?" question comes from. It's not really a question of home consoles vs. handhelds.
However, I'd be surprised if Revolution games would be able to use the Gamecube controller connectors.
You apparently have not seen this photo.
It's not 100% confirmation of anything, but Nintendo took this photo themselves and they didn't do it for nothing. They're showing you something here - and what else would it be than that you can use your regular old GameCube controllers with the Revolution?
It really bothers me how meaningless marketing-speak has invaded video games. This is a complete misuse of the word "franchise" - it doesn't mean what these marketing guys think it does, or what most people who now subscribe to this marketing-speak outside of marketing think it does. Here's the definition from dictionary.com:
franchise Audio pronunciation of "franchise" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (frnchz)
n.
1. A privilege or right officially granted a person or a group by a government, especially:
1. The constitutional or statutory right to vote.
2. The establishment of a corporation's existence.
3. The granting of certain rights and powers to a corporation.
4. Legal immunity from servitude, certain burdens, or other restrictions.
2.
1. Authorization granted to someone to sell or distribute a company's goods or services in a certain area.
2. A business or group of businesses established or operated under such authorization.
3. The territory or limits within which immunity, a privilege, or a right may be exercised.
4. A professional sports team.
Somewhere along the line, one of these marketdrones probably confused "the granting of certain rights and powers to a corporation" (i.e. the right to distribute games based on Star Trek, for example) with an actual line of games all bearing some relation to each other. That is not a franchise!
It just bothers me how games are now called "IP", series are now called "franchises", etc. and people just accept it. Speak English, people, not the language of marketing. Because more than half the time these people don't know what they're talking about to begin with, and they don't even know the meaning of the words they're using.
Just because it is "rare" doesn't mean it is worth finding, ESPECIALLY if you are a gamer. I guess that's my point. I'd rather track down a copy of PDS to play it, not own it.
In that case, PDS is, like all Saturn games, extremely easy to obtain, and for nothing. What are you worried about by buying an original copy, Sega getting their cut of the profits? They're not getting anything from a used sale on Ebay at this point. If all you want to do is *play* the game, just find some ISO's somewhere... right? There's no moral reason not to (unless Sega does issue a re-release for this decade-old Saturn game).
Presumably you go out and try to find an original copy used for some materialistic reason. You want to own an original PDS. You don't just want to play it, or you'd have just downloaded it from somewhere and called it done.
The point being, almost everybody is a collector to some extent. The only thing that differs is degree.
Anyway, what you are talking about and what real hardcore collectors of "rare" games do are two different things. That's why I said "collecting" for the PS2 is pretty pointless right now - if you are collecting for the sake of rarity, then you don't even know what you want at this point. If you are collecting because you want to play the game, then you're not really collecting, and you shouldn't care at all about these reprints "lowering the value" of your original run. And if you do care, then you shouldn't have bought the game based on its value to begin with... because it's not that rare! See what I'm saying? You can't win if you buy a game like Rez based on how rare and valuable it supposedly is while the system is still current.
I'm agreeing with you in one sense, but my original point was disputing the article's assertion that these reprints "lowered the value" of the original print run. There is no inherent value to lower, and if there was, a reprint wouldn't lower it. If the value of a game drops because of a reprint, then there wasn't any real value there to begin with and the prices being paid previously were simply inflated. Collectors don't buy reprints, and the only thing that can lower the price of an original print is the collector market drying up. Obviously, if people stop buying originals in favor of reprints, then there was no collector market to begin with.
People who collect games for the sake of value or rarity (and there's nothing about doing this that's any more wrong than collecting rare hat pins or rare refrigerator magnets or rare paintings or whatever else you're into - it's a hobby in itself) do so decades after the fact. We're still basically in the Atari 2600 era of collecting right now, and just starting to scratch the surface of the Famicom/NES and the 16 bit systems. That's about how long it takes for the collector community to really get organized and start doing things like creating rarity lists and keeping each other updated as far as how often various games come up. If you're collecting stuff for current systems thinking that value's gonna hold, you're in for a world of hurt in a few years no matter what happens.
My list is not up to date (it's current as of December 2003) but here are some *really* rare PS2 games, along with their cumulative sales numbers to date (don't ask me how or where I got this, but these are NPD numbers - not just weekly, but all time up to that point):
I-NINJA 4,850
XGRA:EXTREME G RACING 4,771
SPACE CHANNEL 5 SE 4,720
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA 4,691
LOONEY TUNES:BACK IN 4,638
BOMBASTIC 4,323
ROGUE OPS 3,627
VIRTUAL-ON MARZ 3,280
MONSTER 4X4: MASTERS 3,145
FUGITIVE HUNTER: WAR 3,135
SMASH CARS 3,006
METAL ARMS: GLITCH 2,899
GLADIATOR: SWORD 2,632
GOBLIN COMMANDER 2,452
WHIPLASH 2,427
KYA: DARK LINEAGE 1,765
BUTT UGLY MARTNS:ZOOM 1,267
MUPPETS PARTY CRUISE 867
A couple of those games (like Space Channel 5 an
From TFA:
Reprints could not be distinguished from the originals, which brought the value down of their collection.
BS. Reprints can always be distinguished from originals. It may not be easy, but there are always differences - different paper stocks for the manuals, different type, a different dot printing pattern on the picture on the disc, or whatever.
If you're a "collector", you have nothing to worry about from these reprints. It's pretty stupid to be "collecting" for the PS2 at this point anyway - in the grand scheme of things Rez is not all that rare, and people who do truly collect games based on rarity are not going to give it all that much notice in the future regardless of the reprint. It takes time for the real rarities to bubble up, because by nature they didn't make much of a ripple on first release... but what usually happens is somebody will find something at a garage sale or whatever, say "I've never seen THAT before..." and show it to their friends, and a reputation grows. There are games for the PS2 that have sold fewer than a thousand units - Rez is not one of them.
But even if it was, nobody who's been collecting anything for very long would say a reprint affects value in the least. That's no different than saying a JC Penney copy of a Tiffany lamp affects the value of the original, or that a reprint of Spiderman #1 affects the value of the first run... it doesn't. And sure, to a layperson they may look the same, but the real collectors can spot the difference instantaneously.
I say, good for them if they want to reprint games like Rez - and I say that as an owner of the first pressing. I may even buy a reprint just to have both (I do this with comics too). More people should be able to play this great game - the appeal of Rez is not so much that it's rare, but that it's just an amazing experience.
As to why they don't use open standards? Because there's no simple way to stream XviD/Ogg streams to the masses. Forcing people to download a CODEC isn't any more practical than forcing them to download another player, and I haven't seen any drop-in solutions for streaming either of those formats or any other.
Flash Video is as close as you're going to get to that, and it's what a lot of the more modern sites are starting to use (Flash Video itself is pretty new - I believe Flash 7 was the first version to support it). Google Video, for example, uses it for its embedded videos - click one and see, though be sure to set the video size to "original" as the stretching they do by default seriously degrades the real quality of the format. Adobe/Macromedia claims a 97% penetration rate for Flash itself across all platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux), and I don't disbelieve this - ignoring the Slashdot "I won't browse with anything but Lynx!" crowd, I haven't met anybody who didn't have Flash installed, and most major manufacturers now preinstall it.
So if you've got Flash installed, you can play Flash video. And it's really the best totally cross-platform solution, with quality equal to any of the other formats.
I agree totally that forcing people to download a codec or player to view video is not a good idea. But the vast majority of people already have Flash and it is basically OS-agnostic. (Yes, it is proprietary - some people here will just have to get over their hangups about that when it comes to video.)
All the more reason to stop using the format.
Unfortunately, it is one of the more technically competent and compatible formats out there (being an extended version of MPEG-4), and it has a pro-level encoding app available for download from MS that also happens to be free. A lot of people would love to use it if not for boneheaded decisions like this. I'll explain...
It's what Microsoft wants. For everybody to use their platform becaue their platform will only support what they throw their weight behind (then drop to change to something else)
What Microsoft wants and what they're getting out of this are two different things.
MS initially wanted Windows Media to be a universal format. The strategy was to make it the web streaming format of choice. That's still supposedly their strategy.
Unfortunately for them, if 85% of the world uses Windows, to a web developer that means only 85% of the world has easy access to a real WMV player. (The Mac player is so bad now that it almost doesn't count, and flip4mac is payware.) Contrast that with something like Flash Video, which is almost completely cross-platform - it has Windows, Mac, even an official Linux player, and it streams as well or better than any other format.
All I can conclude from this is that they think Windows itself is so compelling with WMP built in that they no longer care about whether or not people use the wmv format on the web. Because as it stands, only idiots use wmv for web use (unless it's one of several options). And yes, I mean you, CNN.
Have you ever looked over the car magazines?
I've never seen so many spelling and grammer mistakes; I can't believe they get printed.
Coming from someone who can't spell "grammar", I'm not sure you're the right one to judge that. (Yeah yeah, you probably don't get paid to write and these guys do.)
But it does depend on the car mag. Some of them are trash. Others pride themselves on quality journalism (i.e. Car and Driver), in addition to their standard product reviews/previews, and they have a real editorial department that oversees everything and takes on major stories in every issue.
There's no equivalent to this in gaming. EGM sort of tried to do it for a while (they had a lengthy expose on Ralph Baer in one issue, for example, along with his trials and tribulations in the early days of gaming), but they gave up when they realized it wasn't making them more money than just filling up pages with ads would. Next Generation tried it for a while too and promptly went out of business. Same with Gamers' Republic.
So part of it is the fault of the readers, who are not nearly demanding enough - probably in part because many of them are too young. But the current focus on the lack of standards is coming from the older readers who are demanding more - problem is, we're probably in the minority, and we're not adding as much to these publications' bottom line as their advertisers are. When faced with the choice of filling a 12 page feature on a guy like Ralph Baer in order to satiate subscribers or selling 12 pages worth of ads, publishers these days will always choose the latter. Even if it means guys like me don't re-up their subscriptions later on.
The same is probably true online, where budgets are such that online publishers consider doing anything but reviewing and previewing new games to be pretty much a waste of resources and time.
Assuming "publisher" refers to a game publisher... Since when were the subjects of journalism required to cooperate on a story?
Bingo. I was going to write the same thing but you beat me to it.
This strikes me as nothing but an excuse, and a whiny excuse at that. "Waaaaah, we can't write our stories because the publishers don't give us access!" Well, dammit, then get access. Wait around the elevators pretending to be a freakin' janitor until you see the guy you want to talk to, then corner him. Real journalists do this kind of thing all the time.
It's not the game publishers' job to help you. It is the publishers' job to look out for their own self interests, which in most cases are probably exactly the opposite of the interests of any decent journalist. It's the journalist's job to get the story regardless of what sort of cooperation is offered - and in some cases, maybe it's the lack of cooperation that is the story (though that's not the case here... in this case, this guy missed the real story, and is in fact a bad journalist himself for it). This is what being a journalist means. And the fact that so many in the gaming press seem oblivious to this fact is one of the reasons why nobody takes them seriously as "journalists".
Asking for the publishers to help you is tantamount to telling them you want to be their PR firm. That is not a journalist's job. If you have a story to tell, then tell it. Find whatever sources you need and get access to them however you can. And if you can't get the information you want, either tell a different story or shelve it until you can. But don't rely on the publishers to do your job for you and don't just take the little bits of info they "officially" dole out, print them, and then call yourself a journalist, because you're not. You're a PR man.
In Japan, "Shipped to retailers" is "sold".
Bzzzt.
There are two major counts taken weekly of hardware and software sales. One is done by Media Create, the other by Famitsu. Famitsu's is done the same way NPD does it here, through a survey and statistical sampling. Media Create does it a different way and I'm not sure how, but usually their numbers are lower than Famitsu's and generally considered more accurate, so they may be tracking actual store scans and either not using statistical sampling or just using a larger and more accurate sample.
But in any case, "shipped to retailers" is not "sold". Sold to customers is sold.
I believe the numbers quoted just a bit earlier are Media Create numbers.
Some tiny portion, in the future, at the end of its commercial lifetime, which will then be sold cheap to someone prepared to sell them for a few bucks. At the moment the difference is irrelevant. If they're being made then they're being sold.
Nope. Stores can and do ship back unsold merchandise to manufacturers in exchange for credits that they can then use to purchase other merchandise from the same manufacturer. That merchandise then generally gets moved around to other retailers who actually want it, but not always. Sometimes it just sits in a warehouse for years. If it does get shipped to another retailer, it gets counted twice in the "shipped" number (because it was, in fact, shipped twice).
Whenever you see a "shipped" number (or "sold to retailers" which is the same thing), then you can be assured that the company is at the very least hedging against the next quarter's numbers. If there's a wide disparity between "shipped" and "sold", they will quote "shipped", which basically just puts off the bad news for a quarter or two when that low demand starts being reflected in shipments too.
You can see that happening with the PSP now. The PSP was outselling the DS initially - at least according to Sony's "shipment" reports. But now, it's the other way around, and the disparity is growing. Nintendo has sold 4 million DS's in the US, and while Sony has basically stopped putting out releases, NPD says they've sold 2.5 million PSP's. 600,000 of those - nearly 25% - were during the launch week (compared to 400,000 DS's - or 10% of that system's US total).
In Japan, which gets weekly sales numbers published publicly, the disparity is even larger, and the DS is currently outselling the PSP by four to one. (For the week of December 18, Nintendo sold 408,000 DS's, while Sony sold 95,000 PSP's.)
So "shipped" vs. "sold" definitely does mean something. It's a sign that at best, a manufacturer is not confident in its sell-through numbers and is trying (usually in vain) to prop up public interest and make the system sound more popular than it is. Eventually, though, you will see even "shipped" numbers start to drop, as retailers stop placing orders for new units and even return unsold merchandise. That's usually the point when the press releases start to dry up too.
Next time someone wants to tell me why I'm playing video games, tell it to my face.
Perhaps you should play games as escape, because you clearly need it.
But I suppose you expect every analyst and/or journalist to come to your house and personally clear all of their opinions with you before printing them?
Anyway, the article's points are completely valid. MS likes to tout how they have 2 million XBL subscribers and what a success that is. But that's out of 24 million Xboxes sold. Presumably included within those account numbers are people like me, who signed up for a year to see what it was like and then ended up never using the service... I finally cancelled when my year was up. I wonder how many of those 2 million are even active users. But in any case, the highest percentage of Xbox owners that use XBL would still be under 10%.
Now, you can say this is just a starting point, that they'll do better the next time around, etc. but there's no logic behind that. Online gaming is not new, and there was no big barrier to entry in the last generation. The Xbox came with a network adapter built in and all you needed to do was go to your local game store (same place you buy your games) and buy a kit that included a year of service. Some games even came with cards that gave you 3 free months.
Given that, you just have to keep coming back to that percentage - 10%. Do you really think the other 90% of Xbox users didn't know about Xbox Live and didn't know how to get it? What about PS2 users? The online rate was similar - the PS2 actually had more total online users than the Xbox but that's because it has a greater installed base. The cost of entry was about the same ($40 for the online adapter) and there was no ongoing monthly fee. Yet still that percentage of online users was about the same - 10%.
What if we throw the PC into the mix? Now, I would argue first that PC gamers are cut of a slightly different mold than console gamers - there's a lot of overlap, but PC gamers are definitely often either a bit more hardcore almost out of necessity or they're far more casual. PC gamers are older, they've been around longer, and they use their computers for other things too.
But let's look at a popular online PC game, such as World of Warcraft. WoW has what, around 5 million users worldwide? That's a lot - more than the total number of XBL subscribers - but then there are also literally billions of computers in use in the world. Even if you narrow down the number of computers to exclude users with more than one system, to exclude office computers, and to then only include users who actually play games on their systems, I'd guarantee you're still looking at more than 100 million "PC gamers" worldwide. (Remember, "games" can include everything from Half Life 2 to Baseball Mogul to Bejeweled.) So even if you put all of the top online PC games together, my guess is you'd still come out with about the same percentage of total online gamers - around 10%.
I don't see any reason why that percentage is going to suddenly spike upwards with the current generation of consoles. Some people want to play online - around 10% of us, apparently - but most don't. And by focusing so very heavily on online gaming, MS is appealing directly to the hardest of the hardcore - something they have said repeatedly that they don't want to do anymore. They're trying to expand the market, to broaden their base.
Well, this isn't the way to do it. Hardcore online gamers know they want to play online, and the rest of us have apparently made up our minds that we don't. We're just not looking for that kind of experience. Online gaming has its place, and there should be games to appeal to that audience, but it is just not the mainstream audience some people seem to think it is. It's almost a genre unto itself. And MS, by marketing this feature so heavily, I'm convinced is actually intimidating more casual users away from buying the Xbox 360 in the same way t
It's a billboard in slightly different kind of ink. Big deal. If you haven't previously noticed that advertising can be deceptive, cheapen the arts, and degrade the aesthetics of our living spaces, then you have been numbed.
So I guess your position is that we've lost the war and should just give up. Who's the one that's been numbed again?
Some of us would like to keep our streets clean, and keep the advertising in areas where it's, you know, allowed. The issue this article is talking about is putting advertising up without a permit. Sorry to tell some of the other people in here, but in every city I know of, it is illegal to sell advertising on your property without a permit. You can't just do anything you want; you still live in a city and you have to abide by city laws. These property owners - and Sony - did not do that.
You can sell your wall space to an artist for non-commercial art. You cannot sell your wall space for commercial use in most cases. That's the difference, and if you can't see it, then it's you that's been numbed to what's acceptable and what isn't.
6 out of 10 shows on the list are cable/satellite only and of those, 2 are on pay channels only. Can the big networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC compete anymore?
I would personally argue that LOST is the best show on any network, and it's not on this list. The more you watch it, the better it gets... and it's already good on first viewing.
A year ago, I'd have put Desperate Housewives up there too (though no longer).
Both of those are ABC shows, and I think they prove that the major nets can and do still produce both quality TV and pretty imaginative TV too, while at the same time doing well in the ratings. Whether they do this enough is a different question, but then, nobody ever said putting out quality TV was easy either.
"Mr. Negroponte has called it a $100 laptop -- I think a more realistic title should be 'the $100 gadget.'"
-- Intel chairman Craig Barrett
Who is getting the foot in the mouth here? Mr. Negroponte?
Not unless you think making fun of inexpensive computers for poor children in developing countries is insightful.
The real question is why? The Mac already has both a more modern Apple-produced browser (Safari) that MS themselves recommend, along with a true open-source alternative (Firefox), not to mention all the usual suspects if you're not a fan of either of those (Opera, etc.).
While it may be a nice pseudo-political irony to have IE Mac go open-source, it is an old, outdated browser that was rendered unnecessary long ago in every sense of the word.
I've been a Netflix subscriber for nearly two years now, and I've never experienced this "throttling" you speak of.
The two posts that have actually mentioned this phenomenon so far have both been penned by Chris Bradshaw. Apparently he is the sole target of this dastardly plot.
When I first subscribed to Netflix I was renting on average one movie per day (3 at a time, returned 2-3 days later). This lasted several months, until I burned through my initial queue, and now I'm down to a more reasonable 10 or so movies per month. Overall I was nowhere close to being a profitable customer initially, and I'm probably borderline now. But I have never experienced anything I'd call "throttling". My movies are received the day after I ship them back and my next movies are shipped out the same day. This happens 100% of the time.
I live in NYC so that may have something to do with it. My closest service center is in Flushing, within the city limits. And no doubt it's a big one, because it's serving probably hundreds of thousands of customers. Only one time have I ever gotten a DVD from elsewhere in the Netflix system, and that was 2046 - a relatively small foreign film (especially at the time I rented it, when it was one of their region 0 Hong Kong DVD's).
It wouldn't surprise me if people living in areas that are not as well served have to wait a little longer. Maybe their service center doesn't have the films in stock that they want, and a request has to be relayed to another service center further away. So turnaround takes longer, and the mail takes longer. If a customer doesn't look at the labels on his envelopes, he may never know this. His envelopes may also be labeled for return to his local service center when they actually came from somewhere else.
But I doubt there's any sort of nefarious plot going on. A lot more people than just one would be complaining about it - there are a lot of long-time, heavy-use Netflix subscribers in here.