While Microsoft has signed on several big name developers to do games, none will have games ready for launch.
To expand on your point a little, here's the thing:
It doesn't matter what names you have signed up to make games for you. What matters is the games they actually end up making. This was true of the original Xbox too. The Xbox (and the Xbox 360) has a real reputation in Japan as an American system, for Americans. (They don't really even think about Europe; they just think about where the system is made and its largest market.) So the games they make, when they make them, are tailored more for American tastes. There may be nods here and there to the Japanese, but you just never see real Japanese niche titles, the largest RPG's, or the AAA new franchises debuting on Xbox there. So far, from the "in-development" lists I've seen for the 360, that's as true of the new console as it was of the original.
Development costs for the Xbox, according to the CESA, were more than twice that of the PS2. Given that, Japanese developers were less likely to develop games at all and when they did, they were obviously going to develop them for a market where they thought they'd sell. That wasn't Japan.
Now, MS is in a sort of chicken-or-egg quandary. Developers there don't really seem to have confidence that the 360 is going to sell, based on current Xbox sales and on various surveys (Famitsu's last survey showed only 2% of their readers were interested in the Xbox 360, despite MS's hype machine). So, whether or not MS has "every Japanese game developer" on board, what makes anyone think they're going to develop unique or even popular cross-platform games for the system? They might throw it a bone every once in a while, and of course you'll see DOA4 and Ridge Racer and other stuff that appeals to westerners as much as Japanese, but you will probably not see very much in the way of games that actually sell systems in Japan. Those will still go to the PS3, which is more or less guaranteed success in Japan.
I say it's a chicken-or-egg thing because developers have confidence in the PS3 because they know consumers want it, and consumers want it because they know it will have the most games they like. The reverse is true of the Xbox. The problem for MS is it takes more to change perception than just reversing one of those trends - i.e. they could sign up every developer under the sun, they could announce a slew of huge games just for the Japanese, but the perception consumers have of the system will not change overnight, and developers might again bail. The same would be true on the other end - even if consumers started warming up to the system through MS's marketing campaign, it will take a lot to convince developers that a real, major investment in the system will pay off (especially in comparison to making the same investment in the PS3). And if developers don't warm up to the system fast enough, any consumer enthusiasm will die off.
It is going to be a tough cycle for MS to break there. I'm not betting that they'll be able to do it - I don't give the Xbox 360 much of a chance there.
I'm certainly no expert on photography, but it seems to me that the maximum resolution doesn't have much to do with the size of the lens.
Maximum resolution has quite a lot to do with the size of the lens.
Sure, you can make a sensor with 50 million pixels on it, but if the resolution of the image coming through the lens only carries an equivalent of 1,000 or so lines horizontally and vertically, you're just going to be getting a very large file, not a high-resolution one.
(This is the scam already happening with a lot of 7mp and up consumer-level digicams - they just do not have the optics required to pass that level of detail.)
The larger a lens is, the more light it can let through. And that's all an image is to a camera - light. On film, that light hits the crystals contained in the celluloid and chemically excites them, whereas on a digital sensor the light is converted to binary data representing the image. In both cases, though, light is all that matters.
Bigger lenses can obviously gather more light, which means they can be used in lower-light situations or at longer focal lengths (longer focal lengths involve more light fall-off inside the lens, so it helps for extreme telephoto lenses to have massive front elements). It also means the sensor does not need to have its gain cranked up so high to compensate for a smaller lens. And it means the sensor itself can be larger, which in itself will allow greater resolution.
Probably the most important thing, though, is that larger lenses can more easily achieve perfect focus. It is possible for a lens to be simply unable to achieve perfect focus - the light beams will just never converge properly. This is not an exact science - every lens is slightly different in this (even among the same model), but larger lenses can come closer because they're dealing with the same projected image size but have more incoming light with which to deal and larger elements that can be built to stricter relative tolerances. This has the greatest effect on real resolution, and it's why some lenses appear tack-sharp and others look a bit soft.
Relatedly, the larger the lens, the less effect manufacturing tolerances are going to have on quality. For example, say an element can be ground to within 0.001mm of spec and still be within that spec. If you shrink the lens down by 100 times and you can still only manage a 0.001mm tolerance, you will not have any real consistency in quality. You would have to similarly up your manufacturing tolerances by 100 times just to maintain the quality of the larger lens.
This is even ignoring all the image defects you get from smaller lenses. Photographic lenses usually have 6 or more elements inside them to correct for various distortions that the curved glass introduces; obviously this is going to be a lot more difficult to do the smaller you go, and I can't see how a lens with liquid inside is really going to be able to simulate this. It might be able to replicate one or two interior elements (even though liquid is infinitely maleable, it can still only be one shape at a time) but I would imagine there will always be distortions left over.
You may ask how our eyes work so well, then, given how small they are. Well, for one thing, our eyes are "prime" lenses - they don't have an optical zoom function. For another, we have a big, powerful brain sitting behind them to interpret what we're looking at and correct any oddities (the image your eyes are actually seeing and the image you interpret are not even close to being the same thing). The fact that we've got two of them doesn't hurt either - it's not just about depth perception, just close one eye and see how good your vision is for a while. Peripheral vision will be cut, it is harder to focus, etc. Your brain does a good job of taking these two images and combining them, making it easier to see. Having two eyes also means we have double the light gathering ability.
Sega Saturn. Alright, more than "several years", but meh.
Also 3DO, Philips CDi, and Neo Geo AES. No console has ever sold well at a launch price above $300.
Of course, if you factor inflation into the mix, different story. But $300 is a psychological barrier, not really a financial one (most people who can afford $300 can afford $400 just as well).
I'm not sure if MS is smart or not with this, though, because it's allowing them to stay below that psychological barrier with the cheap model while still offering a higher-end model that is presumably more profitable (or at least less unprofitable). But, at the same time, it has convinced me and at least a few other people to hold off, wait until the price drops, and wait until they give up on segmenting the market (which they will eventually). I'm no longer interested in picking up a system at launch - their original Xbox power supply problems had almost convinced me to wait anyway and this pushed me over the edge.
I don't see what's new about this, the decision has been known for quite some time and the LA Times is not an "official" soruce any more than the dozen of other artices we've seen about this.
You don't see what's new about an official announcement vs. uninformed speculation?
Complain about the AI as much as you want, but I'll take mediocre AI over stupid people any day.
Hell, I'll take mediocre AI over *smart* people too!
I have played RTS games online I believe twice. The last time was Rise of Nations, which was a brutal experience. There I was, working at what I thought was a pretty fast pace, only to get bum-rushed and knocked out of submission by an opponent who was a full two ages ahead of me already within seven minutes of starting the game. He knocked me out before I could even manage a defense.
Now, this may be "challenging", but I wouldn't call it "fun". In fact, from what I know of it, making AI "challenging" is no problem whatsoever - it's making it a good match to the skills that most average people have that's the issue. I would rather play a well-tuned AI than an expertly-honed real person who knows a game's weaknesses inside and out (which seems to be most of what you run into online) any day of the week. I'm not into games to develop and perfect my mad skillz; I'm into games to have fun.
If I can play against friends, then the experience is better, and in fact I used to play UT, Quake 3 and even Serious Sam against some of my co-workers after hours and I enjoyed it. I didn't even suck so bad compared to some of them.
But against random people, forget it. I'd rather not bother. And the problem is everybody has such different tastes that it's often tough to find friends who like the same games as I do - nobody I know likes RTS games, for example, or flight sims.
I think it probably is possible to design a game such that it's fun for everybody, whether you're a n00b, an experienced but relaxed player, a cheap bum-rusher or just a cheater. BF1942 came pretty close to this ideal, because there were just so many different ways to play - different objectives, different "jobs", etc. If you wanted to, you could just hang out inside a bomber and strafe the players below. You could run around on the ground on your own, you could sit and snipe (a perfectly valid activity given the setting), you could get together with others and plan a real attack, you could be a driver, you could be a fighter pilot. And the game world was large enough that if you really sucked, nobody would even really notice anyway.
But online games like that are rare. Most online games are just not very much fun if you ask me, because most random people are either jerks or they've just learned how to exploit a game's inherent flaws (and every game is flawed in some ways). They play cheap and dirty, which is fine if they want to play that way (it's not their fault a game has flaws to be exploited), but it sure doesn't make me want to play them.
As it is now it's just a benefit for those without jobs (so they could spend the day).
I don't know what job you work at, but here in the modern world we have a little thing called "personal days". It means you get to take a certain number of days off for any reason (you don't even have to tell your boss why!), and at most jobs you even still get paid for it.
Do you think it's fair that taxpayers - who already paid for these laptops with their taxes - should have to pay fair market value for them again? They'd be buying a laptop new and then buying it again used. That seems right to you? The $50 each sounds to me more like they're trying to just pay for their administrative costs in dealing with the sale - wiping and re-imaging the hard drives, testing, cleaning, transporting 1,000 of these things (including renting a truck and any movers), etc.
btw, even if "90%" of this county is on welfare (which I doubt), let's not forget that welfare recipients still pay taxes. They pay sales taxes, property taxes (directly or indirectly), they may even have to pay income taxes. They helped buy these laptops in the first place too, so I don't see any reason to exclude them from having a shot at getting a used one.
The county could have done something better than this, though. Put together a sign-up with a lottery in advance, for example, and then only told the 1,000 "winners" to show up, with some form of valid photo ID required for verification. It seems rather stupid to allow this sort of free-for-all in this day and age.
Oh, and in case you weren't aware, the US gaming market is much larger than that in either Japan or Europe.
CESA industry sales figures for Japanese publishers/manufacturers from last year:
Year - Software / Hardware : Total 2004 - $4.28 billion / $4.03 billion : $8.31 billion
And by region:
Year - Japan/Overseas : Total 2004 - $3.06 billion / $5.16 billion : $8.22 billion
The total North American video game market had $9.9 billion in sales over the same period.
Now, you can say that $9.9 billion in sales is more than three times $3.06 billion, but a couple things:
a) $3.06 billion is still no small chunk of change
b) That's in a country with half the population and about 1/20 the land mass (meaning distribution and marketing is much, much cheaper)
c) That's just one country, vs. Canada/US/Mexico for North American market numbers
d) $5 billion worth of Japanese software/hardware was sold overseas, meaning a large chunk of that North American market number is made up of Japanese games and systems
e) The total Japanese game industry is nearly the same size as the North American game industry in total dollar sales (in 2003, it was actually larger).
For example, the Saturn, a console made by a Japanese company, did pretty well in Japan yet tanked everywhere else. The end result of that was creating a situation where Sega ran out of money to compete.
And the same thing would have happened to Microsoft - with a successful console in the US and Europe but not Japan - if they did not have billions of dollars from their operating system business to rely on. They have lost billions on the Xbox. Part of the reason for that is approximately 33% of the sales they envisioned never materialized, because the system tanked so hard in Japan. They literally have only two of the three markets they thought they would.
I think you're underestimating the importance of Japan to the overall video game market. No system can be a financial success these days without being successful in Japan, in addition to the other markets. Japan is a huge cash cow - it is a much more profitable market than either the US or Europe, which are both nightmares of marketing and distribution for various reasons (different languages, long distances, political borders, cultures, etc.).
Of course, what I always wonder is - why hide them? Oh are you afraid your players might, y'know, have fun playing with the game?
The issue is most of these "extras" would *not* be fun for the average person, and would in fact lead to a lot of people questioning whether they got a finished game. (In fact, they'd be right to ask.)
There are 29 complete stages in SSBM, and apparently more than 60 with the developer menu. But that doesn't mean those 30-some odd extra stages are anywhere close to being finished or even very playable. They may be test stages with incomplete graphics, they may be buggy, unbalanced, or just not worthy of being in the game quality-wise.
Some of these customizations were obviously disabled to protect the brand. Dark Link? That's probably something Nintendo just didn't want people to be able to play as at this point in time, anymore than Disney would want you playing a game as "Evil Nemo" or something. Maybe you don't agree with their decision, but you should hopefully be able to understand it.
A lot of these options are also in there to help marketing departments. How do you think publishers get screenshots? It's a combination of actually playing the game (yes, they do actually play!) combined with a bit of manipulation through the developer controls. For example, in a certain actual game I won't name, the publisher might select a particular vehicle to drop in front of the character, then select a rocket launcher and blow it up. They will then put the game in slow-motion, turn the character so he's running away from the explosion, then pause. Then they will unlock and set the camera (with camera controls that mimic those of a real camera, including optical effects) and take a screenshot.
So, there are a combination of reasons why these various things are in the game. Some are just tests. Some are things that were intended to be in the game but either didn't work right or were never finished. Some were intended to help market the game.
But none of them are really worthy of being in anything you might call a "finished game". If Nintendo had released this game with all this stuff unlocked, you'd have been charitable calling it a beta. Closing this stuff off allows users to only see the final, polished product.
Look at it this way. Every filmmaker shoots about 50 hours of film for a feature, or thousands of hours for a documentary. Why not just include all of it in the final film, with no editing? Wouldn't be very interesting or exciting to watch, would it?
Knowing what to edit out is as important as knowing what to put in.
'll stick with my enjoyable PSP, and I'll be watching Carnivale, BSG Season 2, and the rest of Charlie Jade in the months to come!
Does anyone else find it interesting (if that's the right word) that the only things people seem to be using their PSP's for are illegal? (Either civil copyright infringement or DMCA violations.)
Given your earlier statements that you'd "never seen" these shows before, I'm guessing you did not record them yourself (or borrow them from a friend) and then rip them to your PSP. And none of these shows are yet available on DVD. Which leaves downloading as the only way you could have gotten them.
Same for those of you playing old NES ROMs. I'm sure you all took your own old carts and dumped the contents to memory stick yourself... right?
Now, you can debate whether or not it's good business for a console to rely so heavily on illicit activities for its success. But I'm seeing very few people defend the selection of official games for this system. Is this really what Sony wants to happen, that people buy a PSP specifically to pirate TV shows and old Nintendo games? (I suppose there's a certain poetic justice in that, but I doubt it's what Sony had in mind.)
Maybe more to the point, it seems to me that compared to the mainstream (i.e. kids and non-technical adults), the potential audience that's going to have the know-how to even do these things, much less the desire to, is going to be relatively small. So it's no surprise that sales of this system would be flat at this point.
Sony's learning some of the same things Atari, Sega, NEC and others learned in the handheld arena - it doesn't matter if you've got the baddest system in the planet, that's not what handheld gaming is about. It's about playing pick-up-and-play games in short bursts, without any muss or fuss, with near 100% reliability of the machine, a tough form factor, and good battery life. That is literally all that matters and Nintendo knows it.
Sony has spent a huge amount more money on the PSP than Nintendo has spent on the DS and the DS is still outselling the PSP, as are its games. This is the exact same pattern followed by almost every major Nintendo challenger in the handheld arena over the last 15 years.
Another thing to consider, which this article didn't specifically point out is... Aluminum cases keep your system cooler than standard steel cases.
I'm guessing the article didn't point it out because it's not true. It's an old urban legend among PC builders that's been thoroughly debunked repeatedly, to the point where most people actually don't believe it anymore. (This is a good thing - most urban myths just keep on going forever... witness the Bill Gates 640k quote myth.)
Aluminum is a superior thermal conductor to steel but that's meaningless when you're talking about open air. Your PC's components are not actually in contact with the aluminum so it doesn't do them any good to be in an aluminum case. The vast majority of a PC's heat (around 99.9%) is removed by the PC's fans, not by conduction through the case, and you can easily verify this yourself just by feeling the top of your PC when it's on. It's likely that it's barely even warm to the touch - if it is, then you've got bigger problems that aren't going to be solved just by an aluminum case.
It's far more important that a PC case be built for good airflow than what material it's made out of. A well-designed steel case will outperform a poorly-designed aluminum case in terms of heat removal any day of the week.
It's another myth that aluminum cases are lighter - that may be true by a half pound or so, but when you're talking about 40 lbs. vs. 39.5 lbs. in a fully loaded PC, I don't think that much matters either. Your PC's innards don't magically get lighter just because you bought an aluminum case.
Buy an aluminum case because you like the way it looks and you like the way it's designed, not for any other reason.
(btw, I have two PC's in aluminum cases - I just like the look.)
They also do not enforce any form of copy protection to prevent you from installing on multiple machines because the "trust" users.
Well, that and the fact that even if you do pirate their software, they know that you have already given them several thousand dollars for the hardware you're running it on. It seems to me it has very little to do with "trust" and everything to do with promoting their hardware.
That will not be the case once they switch to Intel. They're already learning about the wild west of the Intel world (cue conspiracy theories, but I don't think this was all intentional). Once they realize that hey, people can install their software on multiple machines and not give Apple a dime, you can expect restrictive DRM and copy protection to be introduced right quick.
Neither side is acting in particularly good faith on this issue.
BUT, before all of Slashdot flies off the handle on this "story", I think it's worth pointing out that this is an SEC filing, and it is every company's responsibility, in fact under the law, to state all possibilities that may negatively affect a business, however remote those possibilities may be. I don't think it's any secret to anybody that Apple could sue Real, and that there is at least a chance that Apple would win (because you just never know what can happen in the courts). Given that, Real must disclose this information to investors.
The news here seems to be that Real is "admitting" to something that seems to be common sense. But Real has to admit that they're at risk of a lawsuit, and that there's a chance that they would lose - to do otherwise would be fraud. It would be withholding information in order that people would continue buying their stock.
If you are not used to reading these SEC filings, even the healthiest of companies can seem to be in pretty dire straits once you get to the "risks" section. These are worst-case scenarios, presented basically to cover the company's ass from class action lawsuits and SEC investigations should the unthinkable happen. That doesn't mean anything listed as a risk will happen, or even has a good chance of happening. It's kind of the same as putting a warning label on a 9 volt battery that says "warning! eating this battery may cause injury!" I mean, duh. But they have to put that label on there or you just know that one idiot who eats that battery and gets sick is going to sue.
Gotta love all the fan boys coming out to defend and attack consoles that aren't out yet. I especially like the ones that pretend they are developers.
What makes you think they aren't?
I don't anymore, but I used to work for one of the largest publishers in the United States, in the marketing department. I'd be on here posting all the time from work. I never said where I worked (and I still won't publicly; no point), I rarely even said what field I was in unless it was absolutely necessary to make a point, but the bottom line is you never know who you are talking to online. You could be talking to the CEO of Namco and not even know it. (Even Bill Gates admitted reading the Engadget blog comments every day a while back!)
Just because you're unemployed and living in your parents' basement, don't assume everybody else is. Some people lie online, but that just makes it all the easier for us people who actually want to stay anonymous, because even if we come right out and say what we do, nobody believes us:)
(btw, I used to love it when people would write about games I was involved in and then tell me I "didn't know what I was talking about" when I replied... gave me a good laugh!)
Yeah, they might. But if they did, that wouldn't really be "defying Sony" now, would it.
And since when have headlines on Slashdot ever had to be accurate?
You think even the Businessweek article writer read the contracts in question? I doubt he or she would even have access to them.
My statement stands - none of us have any idea how the contracts in question are structured. And we are talking about an "exception" - so far exactly one artist out of Sony's entire stable. Nothing you've said refutes any of my points.
I think you'll find that recording contracts give the company the rights to your recordings. Indeed, that is basically the point.
Almost all recording contracts specify what mediums are covered by the contract. A lot of contracts do say things like "CD's, vinyl records, audio cassette tapes, video cassette tapes, mini-discs, DVD's, and other formats that may arise in the future" but a powerful artist with a good agent can always look at that and say "ok, strike this, and this, and this, and you've got a deal" so in the end only certain mediums are covered.
Other contracts only specify that a certain number of albums must be completed within a certain time, or that no other label may represent the artist. That doesn't necessarily mean they can't represent themselves, or that they can't do side-projects not covered by the contract. It depends on the structure of the contract.
There is also a difference between a contract for distribution and a contract for recording. Many of the richer artists in the world have their own recording studios and equipment and will record their own music on their own time. They then will shop it around and, if it's a particularly popular artist, they will be negotiating from a position of strength and they will be negotiating very specific distribution deals (i.e. "I retain the copyrights, you press the CD's and I'll give you 20% of the profits"). This is a little more common than you probably think, and it happens not just with rich and powerful artists but also with older catalog titles that are no longer covered by any other contract. The artist will grant exclusive distribution rights for a certain medium for a certain length of time.
And that's just here. In Japan, the system they've set up favors "artists" even more, because in most cases artists and managers/producers are basically interchangeable so these artists operate from a position of strength right from the get-go. The managers & producers are generally connected and powerful people so even new artists start out with leverage over the record labels that new artists here do not have (since it's much more of a DIY system of starting up a band and getting signed in the west).
So really, you have no idea what the deal is with the contracts these specific artists mentioned here have signed. It could be well within their rights to put some of their music on iTunes. We're not talking a stampede of Sony artists yet, just a few of the really powerful ones that may have very loose contracts. No doubt the rest of Sony's artists are pressuring the company in the background, but they haven't yet decided to strike out on their own in defiance.
(Note that I'm not saying recording artists generally hold the cards in the artist/label relationship, just that in specific cases they might, that the balance between artist/label is not the same in Japan as it is here, and not every contract is the same.)
I would DEFINITELY not say the Dreamcast is quieter than the Xbox... do you even have an xbox?
I have three Dreamcasts and one Xbox, and the Xbox is by far the loudest console of any that I own. The Dreamcast is quiet by today's standards.
There may be some variation between Xboxes because it's pretty clear that the hard drive and DVD drive are the two main culprits in my machine. They may have quieted those down in later production runs (I have a launch system).
But I actually have to have a separate fan on when playing my Xbox just to drown out the whine of the drives or I can't even concentrate enough to play.
We've already got a good handle on what we'll get with the $299 model, but what extras should we expect in a $350 or $399 model?
Including an HD-DVD drive would seem to jibe with some of their other recent comments. Having two separate versions of the console out there would ensure that no game would ever be produced on the HD-DVD format, but it would mean you'd be getting an HD-DVD player for basically $100. That's a deal I think some people might take. If they also included a larger hard drive and an extra accessory or two, I think it might even be too good to pass up.
They've already said they'll include an HD-DVD drive at some point, and have shown no aversion at all to having multiple SKUs out there. They haven't said they'll do it at launch, but it's at least no dumber to do it at launch than it is to do it any other time.
Unless Microsoft doesn't give users a choice, I'd bet most would go with the $299 model.
It would depend on what's in the higher-priced model. If it's just a bunch of extra stuff I can buy separately later, then no thanks. I'm sure most people would feel that way - people hate bundles.
But if there's an HD-DVD drive and a larger hard drive, for only $100 more, then even I - bundle-hater of all bundle-haters - would probably spring for the higher-end model. But I doubt that's the way it's going to go down. It's probably just going to be a "value pack" with a couple of over-priced accessories.
I do think the "80%" number is kind of out there, unless this analyst knows something we don't. My gut feeling is he's confusing the fact that these early adopters are usually forced to spend more money than they want to with the desire to spend more money than they need to. They are not the same thing. I think 99% of early adopters would love to pay less than they do for the products they buy, it's just that they never have that choice. If MS gives them that choice, most of them will opt for the cheaper model until it's sold out. (And it seems reasonable to expect them to sell out fast, leaving the appearance that there are two models on the market and that MS is trying to please everyone, but in fact there is only in practical terms one model out there and it's $400.)
If I buy a bunch of stuff on credit, and then can't pay for it, can I tell the judge to let me off because paying my bills will make me go bankrupt?
That's not really the question. The question would be "If I buy a bunch of stuff on credit and then can't pay for it, can I tell a judge to take away my debt for me?" And the answer is yes. That's what bankruptcy does, at least to a point. (Some debts are cancelled, others are subject to payoff terms decided by the court.)
The point is the law gives judges leeway to do various things in a lot of cases, including invalidating portions of contracts, setting up new terms favorable to one side or the other, or whatever. It depends on what laws we're talking about, and what exactly happened.
It is extremely rare for any judge to order a company to do something he/she knows will drive them out of business, even if such action is required for full compliance with the law. It would be more likely for a judge to do something like rule that they have to pull all copies of this software off the market (which I guess it already is), remove the offending code, and to word the ruling such that it opens the door for any possible future lawsuits. They would then be free to negotiate settlements with whoever they've wronged over whatever period of time the various sides wish.
The court system doesn't exist to put bad companies out of business, even if they have broken the law. Judges don't get paid to be vindictive, they get paid to enforce laws and make their own judgements about appropriate punishment (that's why they're called "judges"). Given the potential for damages in a case like this, it is actually better for the copyright holders for SCO to remain in business, so they will be in a position to dispense monetary damages later on.
Its one of the very few genres were maximum realism really is wanted, because everybody known how it look to drive and have expectations how it should look like when driving, well, faster...
You've obviously never played games like Burnout, Outrun, Daytona USA, Ridge Racer, Wipeout, F-Zero, or any of the other myriad of racing games where realism is most definitely not the goal...
And to the "style" of this "demo". Well, i cant call it style, and i cant call it a demo. Its more like a short looping flash movie, and the "style" is using only one colour and making everything so dark you cant see there isnt anything too see.
And from this, I can tell you've obviously never played any of the prior art listed on this page, such as Night Driver or Speed Freak.
Racing games are not a genre that requires any more realism than any other genre. The point of a racing game is to have fun. There is no need for them to be realistic - there is only a need to make you feel like you are driving something.
This guy does call this a "driving simulation", which implies realism, but even that's a misnomer. There's nothing about the word "simulation" that implies realistic visuals - the dictionary definition that applies in this case is "Representation of the operation or features of one process or system through the use of another: computer simulation of an in-flight emergency."
And to further that example, modern commercial flight sims (you know, the ones that cost $2 million each) have less realistic graphics than commercially-available flight simulators available at your local GameStop. Because simulating the inner workings of something is not really about texture-mapping every single crack on the asphalt.
How many people have to purchase a video game sequel to make it profitable? A few? Try a few hundred thousand.
Out of how many million gamers?
The PS2 has sold close to 100 million consoles worldwide. The Xbox is over 20 million, the GameCube at about 15 million.
The top selling games are lucky to sell 5 million copies - only a few have ever sold more than that (and yes, most that did have been sequels).
That means the vast majority of gamers do not buy any individual game. It's the same as anything else - Britney Spears gets a lot of press, but the most copies of a CD she's ever sold have gone to around 3% of the population. Clearly, 97% of the United States couldn't care less about her - and yet you'd never know that by the amount of coverage she gets or her sales numbers relative to other music.
If you assume that the same people buy a game like Madden every single year (and I think that's a pretty safe assumption), then you can pretty much deduce that at least 85%-90% of gamers in the world don't care about Madden. That doesn't mean these people don't buy other sequels, but I don't think it's out of bounds to suggest that a lot of them are simply waiting patiently for something new.
There will never be a game that unites all gamers and is truly universal. I mean a lot of people still don't own any copy of Pac-Man for any platform and that's about as close as you're going to get. But I think it's important to keep a sense of perspective - yes, sequels sell well enough to keep their publishers afloat. But, like every other individual game, most of the gaming public doesn't want to buy them. (Relatedly, I'd be interested to know what percentage of gamers eschew sequels altogether - it'd be difficult to measure, but it could actually be a majority of those gamers who do not buy any particular sequel.) They want to buy other things, and they may or may not be satisfied with what's available on the whole.
So every profession must maintain the exact equal representation that exists in the overall population according to the US Census?
Not by mandate, but theoretically that's the way it should be. Unless you're going to make some lame-brained argument about how some races are "predisposed" to certain professions - i.e. whites make good game developers, blacks make good basketball players. That's the only way you can counter-argue the point. (Next you'll start getting into issues of "natural bouyancy.") I don't think you're going there, are you?
Assuming an employer is an equal opportunity employer (as all large corporations are), then any reasonably large industry (with a large enough sample size) should have a fairly representative workforce.
If it doesn't, that doesn't necessarily mean it's the industry's fault. But if you start from an assumption that all races are equal, and you then realize that non-whites play games more than whites (in other words, there is an obvious interest in games), then the fact that whites seem to get a disproportionate share of game development jobs indicates a problem somewhere. Maybe it's the educational system. Maybe it's the latent class system. Maybe it's differing regional cultures (though plenty of blacks and hispanics live in southern California, where most game developers are). Maybe it's George Bush or Hillary Clinton or whoever else. But the fact of the matter is, if you start from that assumption - that all races are equal - then there must be something - some link in the chain somewhere - holding these ethnic groups back from getting these jobs.
It's a problem that's obviously not unique to the game industry, and it's not necessarily the industry's responsibility to fix it either. But in a perfect world, yes, the racial makeup of large industries would reflect the real world. We do not live in a perfect world, so it doesn't always happen. But that doesn't mean you don't set that as a goal and strive for it, as a society.
But then they realized that for timley delivery of movies, you really need hundreds of distribution centers, not several. Hundreds may be exaggerating a little bit, but Netflix definatley has more than several.
In fact, ideally you need enough distribution centers to cover the entire country with one-day service. Netflix doesn't have that - you get to a certain point and you're spending a huge amount of money for a few people in rural areas - but they have about 90% coverage at this point.
Then you have to consider that not only do you have to maintain all those distribution centers, but to make them useful you have to actually make sure you have inventory at all of them at all times. This is a huge logistical headache, because not every center is going to have the same amount of space, the same number of customers, and you have to be retiring old discs at the same time as you're adding new ones and trying to keep things balanced out. I've noticed Netflix doing something kinda neat, though, which is occasionally putting a different return address on my envelope than the center it shipped from. This is not really a speedy way of transferring merchandise around, but it is cheap (i.e. no extra shipping fees for them).
But those are the kinds of little things that a company just getting started in the business won't think of, and it's why Netflix has the clear advantage. A company with four million subscribers and what, six years in the business now definitely has an advantage over a company that's only ever dealt with traditional retail.
And anyway, I don't think Amazon has nearly enough distribution centers yet. The closest one to NYC, for example, is in PA. That's a two-day trip by the USPS, which means four days minimum round-trip. That's unacceptable for this type of service. You'd be lucky to send a movie back on Monday and have a new one by the weekend, which is really the benchmark, I think.
And don't forget - 5 million of them are in Korea!
That's no joke. Growth rates in the rest of the world have been pretty low. Of course, cup-half-fullers will say that just means there's more growth potential in other countries. Half-empties like me will say it shows that not everybody is really interested in online gaming, even in advanced, internet-saturated nations.
That way, there would be none of this bullshit confusion about 'what time is that here', or 'what is the time there'. It's GMT. The same damned time everywhere.
I think you're missing the basic purpose of telling time. Which is to say that no matter what it says on the clock, it's the "same damned time everywhere", so your solution accomplishes nothing. Time is linear - you don't actually go back in time if you take a flight that lands in one place "earlier" than when it left (I know you know this, but your premise suggests otherwise). The purpose of having a time standard that we can all read is as a frame of reference. Your solution is to eliminate that frame of reference. I don't see how this makes things simpler.
If it's morning where I am in NYC, it's still going to be night in Hawaii regardless of what the clock says. I still need to remember that if I want to call somebody there, or otherwise communicate. Just because my watch says it's 4 AM (GMT) doesn't mean all those Hawaiians are going to be awake.
You're looking at things backwards. Time zones make it easier to deal with this issue, because we can easily say "oh, it's six hours earlier in Hawaii - that means people must still be asleep." Take away the time zones and you're stuck doing calculations about distance and solar cycles for every single place on the planet you've got to deal with. Is it really easier to say "well, Hawaii is 5,500 miles east, and the earth rotates at X miles an hour; therefore, Hawaii will have sunlight in 6 hours" than it is to just know that Hawaii's 6 hours behind us?
Slashdot Mirror
While Microsoft has signed on several big name developers to do games, none will have games ready for launch.
To expand on your point a little, here's the thing:
It doesn't matter what names you have signed up to make games for you. What matters is the games they actually end up making. This was true of the original Xbox too. The Xbox (and the Xbox 360) has a real reputation in Japan as an American system, for Americans. (They don't really even think about Europe; they just think about where the system is made and its largest market.) So the games they make, when they make them, are tailored more for American tastes. There may be nods here and there to the Japanese, but you just never see real Japanese niche titles, the largest RPG's, or the AAA new franchises debuting on Xbox there. So far, from the "in-development" lists I've seen for the 360, that's as true of the new console as it was of the original.
Development costs for the Xbox, according to the CESA, were more than twice that of the PS2. Given that, Japanese developers were less likely to develop games at all and when they did, they were obviously going to develop them for a market where they thought they'd sell. That wasn't Japan.
Now, MS is in a sort of chicken-or-egg quandary. Developers there don't really seem to have confidence that the 360 is going to sell, based on current Xbox sales and on various surveys (Famitsu's last survey showed only 2% of their readers were interested in the Xbox 360, despite MS's hype machine). So, whether or not MS has "every Japanese game developer" on board, what makes anyone think they're going to develop unique or even popular cross-platform games for the system? They might throw it a bone every once in a while, and of course you'll see DOA4 and Ridge Racer and other stuff that appeals to westerners as much as Japanese, but you will probably not see very much in the way of games that actually sell systems in Japan. Those will still go to the PS3, which is more or less guaranteed success in Japan.
I say it's a chicken-or-egg thing because developers have confidence in the PS3 because they know consumers want it, and consumers want it because they know it will have the most games they like. The reverse is true of the Xbox. The problem for MS is it takes more to change perception than just reversing one of those trends - i.e. they could sign up every developer under the sun, they could announce a slew of huge games just for the Japanese, but the perception consumers have of the system will not change overnight, and developers might again bail. The same would be true on the other end - even if consumers started warming up to the system through MS's marketing campaign, it will take a lot to convince developers that a real, major investment in the system will pay off (especially in comparison to making the same investment in the PS3). And if developers don't warm up to the system fast enough, any consumer enthusiasm will die off.
It is going to be a tough cycle for MS to break there. I'm not betting that they'll be able to do it - I don't give the Xbox 360 much of a chance there.
I'm certainly no expert on photography, but it seems to me that the maximum resolution doesn't have much to do with the size of the lens.
Maximum resolution has quite a lot to do with the size of the lens.
Sure, you can make a sensor with 50 million pixels on it, but if the resolution of the image coming through the lens only carries an equivalent of 1,000 or so lines horizontally and vertically, you're just going to be getting a very large file, not a high-resolution one.
(This is the scam already happening with a lot of 7mp and up consumer-level digicams - they just do not have the optics required to pass that level of detail.)
The larger a lens is, the more light it can let through. And that's all an image is to a camera - light. On film, that light hits the crystals contained in the celluloid and chemically excites them, whereas on a digital sensor the light is converted to binary data representing the image. In both cases, though, light is all that matters.
Bigger lenses can obviously gather more light, which means they can be used in lower-light situations or at longer focal lengths (longer focal lengths involve more light fall-off inside the lens, so it helps for extreme telephoto lenses to have massive front elements). It also means the sensor does not need to have its gain cranked up so high to compensate for a smaller lens. And it means the sensor itself can be larger, which in itself will allow greater resolution.
Probably the most important thing, though, is that larger lenses can more easily achieve perfect focus. It is possible for a lens to be simply unable to achieve perfect focus - the light beams will just never converge properly. This is not an exact science - every lens is slightly different in this (even among the same model), but larger lenses can come closer because they're dealing with the same projected image size but have more incoming light with which to deal and larger elements that can be built to stricter relative tolerances. This has the greatest effect on real resolution, and it's why some lenses appear tack-sharp and others look a bit soft.
Relatedly, the larger the lens, the less effect manufacturing tolerances are going to have on quality. For example, say an element can be ground to within 0.001mm of spec and still be within that spec. If you shrink the lens down by 100 times and you can still only manage a 0.001mm tolerance, you will not have any real consistency in quality. You would have to similarly up your manufacturing tolerances by 100 times just to maintain the quality of the larger lens.
This is even ignoring all the image defects you get from smaller lenses. Photographic lenses usually have 6 or more elements inside them to correct for various distortions that the curved glass introduces; obviously this is going to be a lot more difficult to do the smaller you go, and I can't see how a lens with liquid inside is really going to be able to simulate this. It might be able to replicate one or two interior elements (even though liquid is infinitely maleable, it can still only be one shape at a time) but I would imagine there will always be distortions left over.
You may ask how our eyes work so well, then, given how small they are. Well, for one thing, our eyes are "prime" lenses - they don't have an optical zoom function. For another, we have a big, powerful brain sitting behind them to interpret what we're looking at and correct any oddities (the image your eyes are actually seeing and the image you interpret are not even close to being the same thing). The fact that we've got two of them doesn't hurt either - it's not just about depth perception, just close one eye and see how good your vision is for a while. Peripheral vision will be cut, it is harder to focus, etc. Your brain does a good job of taking these two images and combining them, making it easier to see. Having two eyes also means we have double the light gathering ability.
Also, many people's eyes *don't* work so well.
Sega Saturn. Alright, more than "several years", but meh.
Also 3DO, Philips CDi, and Neo Geo AES. No console has ever sold well at a launch price above $300.
Of course, if you factor inflation into the mix, different story. But $300 is a psychological barrier, not really a financial one (most people who can afford $300 can afford $400 just as well).
I'm not sure if MS is smart or not with this, though, because it's allowing them to stay below that psychological barrier with the cheap model while still offering a higher-end model that is presumably more profitable (or at least less unprofitable). But, at the same time, it has convinced me and at least a few other people to hold off, wait until the price drops, and wait until they give up on segmenting the market (which they will eventually). I'm no longer interested in picking up a system at launch - their original Xbox power supply problems had almost convinced me to wait anyway and this pushed me over the edge.
I don't see what's new about this, the decision has been known for quite some time and the LA Times is not an "official" soruce any more than the dozen of other artices we've seen about this.
You don't see what's new about an official announcement vs. uninformed speculation?
Complain about the AI as much as you want, but I'll take mediocre AI over stupid people any day.
Hell, I'll take mediocre AI over *smart* people too!
I have played RTS games online I believe twice. The last time was Rise of Nations, which was a brutal experience. There I was, working at what I thought was a pretty fast pace, only to get bum-rushed and knocked out of submission by an opponent who was a full two ages ahead of me already within seven minutes of starting the game. He knocked me out before I could even manage a defense.
Now, this may be "challenging", but I wouldn't call it "fun". In fact, from what I know of it, making AI "challenging" is no problem whatsoever - it's making it a good match to the skills that most average people have that's the issue. I would rather play a well-tuned AI than an expertly-honed real person who knows a game's weaknesses inside and out (which seems to be most of what you run into online) any day of the week. I'm not into games to develop and perfect my mad skillz; I'm into games to have fun.
If I can play against friends, then the experience is better, and in fact I used to play UT, Quake 3 and even Serious Sam against some of my co-workers after hours and I enjoyed it. I didn't even suck so bad compared to some of them.
But against random people, forget it. I'd rather not bother. And the problem is everybody has such different tastes that it's often tough to find friends who like the same games as I do - nobody I know likes RTS games, for example, or flight sims.
I think it probably is possible to design a game such that it's fun for everybody, whether you're a n00b, an experienced but relaxed player, a cheap bum-rusher or just a cheater. BF1942 came pretty close to this ideal, because there were just so many different ways to play - different objectives, different "jobs", etc. If you wanted to, you could just hang out inside a bomber and strafe the players below. You could run around on the ground on your own, you could sit and snipe (a perfectly valid activity given the setting), you could get together with others and plan a real attack, you could be a driver, you could be a fighter pilot. And the game world was large enough that if you really sucked, nobody would even really notice anyway.
But online games like that are rare. Most online games are just not very much fun if you ask me, because most random people are either jerks or they've just learned how to exploit a game's inherent flaws (and every game is flawed in some ways). They play cheap and dirty, which is fine if they want to play that way (it's not their fault a game has flaws to be exploited), but it sure doesn't make me want to play them.
As it is now it's just a benefit for those without jobs (so they could spend the day).
I don't know what job you work at, but here in the modern world we have a little thing called "personal days". It means you get to take a certain number of days off for any reason (you don't even have to tell your boss why!), and at most jobs you even still get paid for it.
Do you think it's fair that taxpayers - who already paid for these laptops with their taxes - should have to pay fair market value for them again? They'd be buying a laptop new and then buying it again used. That seems right to you? The $50 each sounds to me more like they're trying to just pay for their administrative costs in dealing with the sale - wiping and re-imaging the hard drives, testing, cleaning, transporting 1,000 of these things (including renting a truck and any movers), etc.
btw, even if "90%" of this county is on welfare (which I doubt), let's not forget that welfare recipients still pay taxes. They pay sales taxes, property taxes (directly or indirectly), they may even have to pay income taxes. They helped buy these laptops in the first place too, so I don't see any reason to exclude them from having a shot at getting a used one.
The county could have done something better than this, though. Put together a sign-up with a lottery in advance, for example, and then only told the 1,000 "winners" to show up, with some form of valid photo ID required for verification. It seems rather stupid to allow this sort of free-for-all in this day and age.
Oh, and in case you weren't aware, the US gaming market is much larger than that in either Japan or Europe.
CESA industry sales figures for Japanese publishers/manufacturers from last year:
Year - Software / Hardware : Total
2004 - $4.28 billion / $4.03 billion : $8.31 billion
And by region:
Year - Japan/Overseas : Total
2004 - $3.06 billion / $5.16 billion : $8.22 billion
The total North American video game market had $9.9 billion in sales over the same period.
Now, you can say that $9.9 billion in sales is more than three times $3.06 billion, but a couple things:
a) $3.06 billion is still no small chunk of change
b) That's in a country with half the population and about 1/20 the land mass (meaning distribution and marketing is much, much cheaper)
c) That's just one country, vs. Canada/US/Mexico for North American market numbers
d) $5 billion worth of Japanese software/hardware was sold overseas, meaning a large chunk of that North American market number is made up of Japanese games and systems
e) The total Japanese game industry is nearly the same size as the North American game industry in total dollar sales (in 2003, it was actually larger).
For example, the Saturn, a console made by a Japanese company, did pretty well in Japan yet tanked everywhere else. The end result of that was creating a situation where Sega ran out of money to compete.
And the same thing would have happened to Microsoft - with a successful console in the US and Europe but not Japan - if they did not have billions of dollars from their operating system business to rely on. They have lost billions on the Xbox. Part of the reason for that is approximately 33% of the sales they envisioned never materialized, because the system tanked so hard in Japan. They literally have only two of the three markets they thought they would.
I think you're underestimating the importance of Japan to the overall video game market. No system can be a financial success these days without being successful in Japan, in addition to the other markets. Japan is a huge cash cow - it is a much more profitable market than either the US or Europe, which are both nightmares of marketing and distribution for various reasons (different languages, long distances, political borders, cultures, etc.).
Of course, what I always wonder is - why hide them? Oh are you afraid your players might, y'know, have fun playing with the game?
The issue is most of these "extras" would *not* be fun for the average person, and would in fact lead to a lot of people questioning whether they got a finished game. (In fact, they'd be right to ask.)
There are 29 complete stages in SSBM, and apparently more than 60 with the developer menu. But that doesn't mean those 30-some odd extra stages are anywhere close to being finished or even very playable. They may be test stages with incomplete graphics, they may be buggy, unbalanced, or just not worthy of being in the game quality-wise.
Some of these customizations were obviously disabled to protect the brand. Dark Link? That's probably something Nintendo just didn't want people to be able to play as at this point in time, anymore than Disney would want you playing a game as "Evil Nemo" or something. Maybe you don't agree with their decision, but you should hopefully be able to understand it.
A lot of these options are also in there to help marketing departments. How do you think publishers get screenshots? It's a combination of actually playing the game (yes, they do actually play!) combined with a bit of manipulation through the developer controls. For example, in a certain actual game I won't name, the publisher might select a particular vehicle to drop in front of the character, then select a rocket launcher and blow it up. They will then put the game in slow-motion, turn the character so he's running away from the explosion, then pause. Then they will unlock and set the camera (with camera controls that mimic those of a real camera, including optical effects) and take a screenshot.
So, there are a combination of reasons why these various things are in the game. Some are just tests. Some are things that were intended to be in the game but either didn't work right or were never finished. Some were intended to help market the game.
But none of them are really worthy of being in anything you might call a "finished game". If Nintendo had released this game with all this stuff unlocked, you'd have been charitable calling it a beta. Closing this stuff off allows users to only see the final, polished product.
Look at it this way. Every filmmaker shoots about 50 hours of film for a feature, or thousands of hours for a documentary. Why not just include all of it in the final film, with no editing? Wouldn't be very interesting or exciting to watch, would it?
Knowing what to edit out is as important as knowing what to put in.
'll stick with my enjoyable PSP, and I'll be watching Carnivale, BSG Season 2, and the rest of Charlie Jade in the months to come!
Does anyone else find it interesting (if that's the right word) that the only things people seem to be using their PSP's for are illegal? (Either civil copyright infringement or DMCA violations.)
Given your earlier statements that you'd "never seen" these shows before, I'm guessing you did not record them yourself (or borrow them from a friend) and then rip them to your PSP. And none of these shows are yet available on DVD. Which leaves downloading as the only way you could have gotten them.
Same for those of you playing old NES ROMs. I'm sure you all took your own old carts and dumped the contents to memory stick yourself... right?
Now, you can debate whether or not it's good business for a console to rely so heavily on illicit activities for its success. But I'm seeing very few people defend the selection of official games for this system. Is this really what Sony wants to happen, that people buy a PSP specifically to pirate TV shows and old Nintendo games? (I suppose there's a certain poetic justice in that, but I doubt it's what Sony had in mind.)
Maybe more to the point, it seems to me that compared to the mainstream (i.e. kids and non-technical adults), the potential audience that's going to have the know-how to even do these things, much less the desire to, is going to be relatively small. So it's no surprise that sales of this system would be flat at this point.
Sony's learning some of the same things Atari, Sega, NEC and others learned in the handheld arena - it doesn't matter if you've got the baddest system in the planet, that's not what handheld gaming is about. It's about playing pick-up-and-play games in short bursts, without any muss or fuss, with near 100% reliability of the machine, a tough form factor, and good battery life. That is literally all that matters and Nintendo knows it.
Sony has spent a huge amount more money on the PSP than Nintendo has spent on the DS and the DS is still outselling the PSP, as are its games. This is the exact same pattern followed by almost every major Nintendo challenger in the handheld arena over the last 15 years.
Another thing to consider, which this article didn't specifically point out is... Aluminum cases keep your system cooler than standard steel cases.
I'm guessing the article didn't point it out because it's not true. It's an old urban legend among PC builders that's been thoroughly debunked repeatedly, to the point where most people actually don't believe it anymore. (This is a good thing - most urban myths just keep on going forever... witness the Bill Gates 640k quote myth.)
Aluminum is a superior thermal conductor to steel but that's meaningless when you're talking about open air. Your PC's components are not actually in contact with the aluminum so it doesn't do them any good to be in an aluminum case. The vast majority of a PC's heat (around 99.9%) is removed by the PC's fans, not by conduction through the case, and you can easily verify this yourself just by feeling the top of your PC when it's on. It's likely that it's barely even warm to the touch - if it is, then you've got bigger problems that aren't going to be solved just by an aluminum case.
It's far more important that a PC case be built for good airflow than what material it's made out of. A well-designed steel case will outperform a poorly-designed aluminum case in terms of heat removal any day of the week.
It's another myth that aluminum cases are lighter - that may be true by a half pound or so, but when you're talking about 40 lbs. vs. 39.5 lbs. in a fully loaded PC, I don't think that much matters either. Your PC's innards don't magically get lighter just because you bought an aluminum case.
Buy an aluminum case because you like the way it looks and you like the way it's designed, not for any other reason.
(btw, I have two PC's in aluminum cases - I just like the look.)
They also do not enforce any form of copy protection to prevent you from installing on multiple machines because the "trust" users.
Well, that and the fact that even if you do pirate their software, they know that you have already given them several thousand dollars for the hardware you're running it on. It seems to me it has very little to do with "trust" and everything to do with promoting their hardware.
That will not be the case once they switch to Intel. They're already learning about the wild west of the Intel world (cue conspiracy theories, but I don't think this was all intentional). Once they realize that hey, people can install their software on multiple machines and not give Apple a dime, you can expect restrictive DRM and copy protection to be introduced right quick.
is this the first time I'll be rooting FOR Real?
Neither side is acting in particularly good faith on this issue.
BUT, before all of Slashdot flies off the handle on this "story", I think it's worth pointing out that this is an SEC filing, and it is every company's responsibility, in fact under the law, to state all possibilities that may negatively affect a business, however remote those possibilities may be. I don't think it's any secret to anybody that Apple could sue Real, and that there is at least a chance that Apple would win (because you just never know what can happen in the courts). Given that, Real must disclose this information to investors.
The news here seems to be that Real is "admitting" to something that seems to be common sense. But Real has to admit that they're at risk of a lawsuit, and that there's a chance that they would lose - to do otherwise would be fraud. It would be withholding information in order that people would continue buying their stock.
If you are not used to reading these SEC filings, even the healthiest of companies can seem to be in pretty dire straits once you get to the "risks" section. These are worst-case scenarios, presented basically to cover the company's ass from class action lawsuits and SEC investigations should the unthinkable happen. That doesn't mean anything listed as a risk will happen, or even has a good chance of happening. It's kind of the same as putting a warning label on a 9 volt battery that says "warning! eating this battery may cause injury!" I mean, duh. But they have to put that label on there or you just know that one idiot who eats that battery and gets sick is going to sue.
Gotta love all the fan boys coming out to defend and attack consoles that aren't out yet. I especially like the ones that pretend they are developers.
:)
What makes you think they aren't?
I don't anymore, but I used to work for one of the largest publishers in the United States, in the marketing department. I'd be on here posting all the time from work. I never said where I worked (and I still won't publicly; no point), I rarely even said what field I was in unless it was absolutely necessary to make a point, but the bottom line is you never know who you are talking to online. You could be talking to the CEO of Namco and not even know it. (Even Bill Gates admitted reading the Engadget blog comments every day a while back!)
Just because you're unemployed and living in your parents' basement, don't assume everybody else is. Some people lie online, but that just makes it all the easier for us people who actually want to stay anonymous, because even if we come right out and say what we do, nobody believes us
(btw, I used to love it when people would write about games I was involved in and then tell me I "didn't know what I was talking about" when I replied... gave me a good laugh!)
Yeah, they might. But if they did, that wouldn't really be "defying Sony" now, would it.
And since when have headlines on Slashdot ever had to be accurate?
You think even the Businessweek article writer read the contracts in question? I doubt he or she would even have access to them.
My statement stands - none of us have any idea how the contracts in question are structured. And we are talking about an "exception" - so far exactly one artist out of Sony's entire stable. Nothing you've said refutes any of my points.
I think you'll find that recording contracts give the company the rights to your recordings. Indeed, that is basically the point.
Almost all recording contracts specify what mediums are covered by the contract. A lot of contracts do say things like "CD's, vinyl records, audio cassette tapes, video cassette tapes, mini-discs, DVD's, and other formats that may arise in the future" but a powerful artist with a good agent can always look at that and say "ok, strike this, and this, and this, and you've got a deal" so in the end only certain mediums are covered.
Other contracts only specify that a certain number of albums must be completed within a certain time, or that no other label may represent the artist. That doesn't necessarily mean they can't represent themselves, or that they can't do side-projects not covered by the contract. It depends on the structure of the contract.
There is also a difference between a contract for distribution and a contract for recording. Many of the richer artists in the world have their own recording studios and equipment and will record their own music on their own time. They then will shop it around and, if it's a particularly popular artist, they will be negotiating from a position of strength and they will be negotiating very specific distribution deals (i.e. "I retain the copyrights, you press the CD's and I'll give you 20% of the profits"). This is a little more common than you probably think, and it happens not just with rich and powerful artists but also with older catalog titles that are no longer covered by any other contract. The artist will grant exclusive distribution rights for a certain medium for a certain length of time.
And that's just here. In Japan, the system they've set up favors "artists" even more, because in most cases artists and managers/producers are basically interchangeable so these artists operate from a position of strength right from the get-go. The managers & producers are generally connected and powerful people so even new artists start out with leverage over the record labels that new artists here do not have (since it's much more of a DIY system of starting up a band and getting signed in the west).
So really, you have no idea what the deal is with the contracts these specific artists mentioned here have signed. It could be well within their rights to put some of their music on iTunes. We're not talking a stampede of Sony artists yet, just a few of the really powerful ones that may have very loose contracts. No doubt the rest of Sony's artists are pressuring the company in the background, but they haven't yet decided to strike out on their own in defiance.
(Note that I'm not saying recording artists generally hold the cards in the artist/label relationship, just that in specific cases they might, that the balance between artist/label is not the same in Japan as it is here, and not every contract is the same.)
I would DEFINITELY not say the Dreamcast is quieter than the Xbox... do you even have an xbox?
I have three Dreamcasts and one Xbox, and the Xbox is by far the loudest console of any that I own. The Dreamcast is quiet by today's standards.
There may be some variation between Xboxes because it's pretty clear that the hard drive and DVD drive are the two main culprits in my machine. They may have quieted those down in later production runs (I have a launch system).
But I actually have to have a separate fan on when playing my Xbox just to drown out the whine of the drives or I can't even concentrate enough to play.
We've already got a good handle on what we'll get with the $299 model, but what extras should we expect in a $350 or $399 model?
Including an HD-DVD drive would seem to jibe with some of their other recent comments. Having two separate versions of the console out there would ensure that no game would ever be produced on the HD-DVD format, but it would mean you'd be getting an HD-DVD player for basically $100. That's a deal I think some people might take. If they also included a larger hard drive and an extra accessory or two, I think it might even be too good to pass up.
They've already said they'll include an HD-DVD drive at some point, and have shown no aversion at all to having multiple SKUs out there. They haven't said they'll do it at launch, but it's at least no dumber to do it at launch than it is to do it any other time.
Unless Microsoft doesn't give users a choice, I'd bet most would go with the $299 model.
It would depend on what's in the higher-priced model. If it's just a bunch of extra stuff I can buy separately later, then no thanks. I'm sure most people would feel that way - people hate bundles.
But if there's an HD-DVD drive and a larger hard drive, for only $100 more, then even I - bundle-hater of all bundle-haters - would probably spring for the higher-end model. But I doubt that's the way it's going to go down. It's probably just going to be a "value pack" with a couple of over-priced accessories.
I do think the "80%" number is kind of out there, unless this analyst knows something we don't. My gut feeling is he's confusing the fact that these early adopters are usually forced to spend more money than they want to with the desire to spend more money than they need to. They are not the same thing. I think 99% of early adopters would love to pay less than they do for the products they buy, it's just that they never have that choice. If MS gives them that choice, most of them will opt for the cheaper model until it's sold out. (And it seems reasonable to expect them to sell out fast, leaving the appearance that there are two models on the market and that MS is trying to please everyone, but in fact there is only in practical terms one model out there and it's $400.)
If I buy a bunch of stuff on credit, and then can't pay for it, can I tell the judge to let me off because paying my bills will make me go bankrupt?
That's not really the question. The question would be "If I buy a bunch of stuff on credit and then can't pay for it, can I tell a judge to take away my debt for me?" And the answer is yes. That's what bankruptcy does, at least to a point. (Some debts are cancelled, others are subject to payoff terms decided by the court.)
The point is the law gives judges leeway to do various things in a lot of cases, including invalidating portions of contracts, setting up new terms favorable to one side or the other, or whatever. It depends on what laws we're talking about, and what exactly happened.
It is extremely rare for any judge to order a company to do something he/she knows will drive them out of business, even if such action is required for full compliance with the law. It would be more likely for a judge to do something like rule that they have to pull all copies of this software off the market (which I guess it already is), remove the offending code, and to word the ruling such that it opens the door for any possible future lawsuits. They would then be free to negotiate settlements with whoever they've wronged over whatever period of time the various sides wish.
The court system doesn't exist to put bad companies out of business, even if they have broken the law. Judges don't get paid to be vindictive, they get paid to enforce laws and make their own judgements about appropriate punishment (that's why they're called "judges"). Given the potential for damages in a case like this, it is actually better for the copyright holders for SCO to remain in business, so they will be in a position to dispense monetary damages later on.
Its a _RACING_ game.
Its one of the very few genres were maximum realism really is wanted, because everybody known how it look to drive and have expectations how it should look like when driving, well, faster...
You've obviously never played games like Burnout, Outrun, Daytona USA, Ridge Racer, Wipeout, F-Zero, or any of the other myriad of racing games where realism is most definitely not the goal...
And to the "style" of this "demo". Well, i cant call it style, and i cant call it a demo. Its more like a short looping flash movie, and the "style" is using only one colour and making everything so dark you cant see there isnt anything too see.
And from this, I can tell you've obviously never played any of the prior art listed on this page, such as Night Driver or Speed Freak.
Racing games are not a genre that requires any more realism than any other genre. The point of a racing game is to have fun. There is no need for them to be realistic - there is only a need to make you feel like you are driving something.
This guy does call this a "driving simulation", which implies realism, but even that's a misnomer. There's nothing about the word "simulation" that implies realistic visuals - the dictionary definition that applies in this case is "Representation of the operation or features of one process or system through the use of another: computer simulation of an in-flight emergency."
And to further that example, modern commercial flight sims (you know, the ones that cost $2 million each) have less realistic graphics than commercially-available flight simulators available at your local GameStop. Because simulating the inner workings of something is not really about texture-mapping every single crack on the asphalt.
How many people have to purchase a video game sequel to make it profitable? A few? Try a few hundred thousand.
Out of how many million gamers?
The PS2 has sold close to 100 million consoles worldwide. The Xbox is over 20 million, the GameCube at about 15 million.
The top selling games are lucky to sell 5 million copies - only a few have ever sold more than that (and yes, most that did have been sequels).
That means the vast majority of gamers do not buy any individual game. It's the same as anything else - Britney Spears gets a lot of press, but the most copies of a CD she's ever sold have gone to around 3% of the population. Clearly, 97% of the United States couldn't care less about her - and yet you'd never know that by the amount of coverage she gets or her sales numbers relative to other music.
If you assume that the same people buy a game like Madden every single year (and I think that's a pretty safe assumption), then you can pretty much deduce that at least 85%-90% of gamers in the world don't care about Madden. That doesn't mean these people don't buy other sequels, but I don't think it's out of bounds to suggest that a lot of them are simply waiting patiently for something new.
There will never be a game that unites all gamers and is truly universal. I mean a lot of people still don't own any copy of Pac-Man for any platform and that's about as close as you're going to get. But I think it's important to keep a sense of perspective - yes, sequels sell well enough to keep their publishers afloat. But, like every other individual game, most of the gaming public doesn't want to buy them. (Relatedly, I'd be interested to know what percentage of gamers eschew sequels altogether - it'd be difficult to measure, but it could actually be a majority of those gamers who do not buy any particular sequel.) They want to buy other things, and they may or may not be satisfied with what's available on the whole.
So every profession must maintain the exact equal representation that exists in the overall population according to the US Census?
Not by mandate, but theoretically that's the way it should be. Unless you're going to make some lame-brained argument about how some races are "predisposed" to certain professions - i.e. whites make good game developers, blacks make good basketball players. That's the only way you can counter-argue the point. (Next you'll start getting into issues of "natural bouyancy.") I don't think you're going there, are you?
Assuming an employer is an equal opportunity employer (as all large corporations are), then any reasonably large industry (with a large enough sample size) should have a fairly representative workforce.
If it doesn't, that doesn't necessarily mean it's the industry's fault. But if you start from an assumption that all races are equal, and you then realize that non-whites play games more than whites (in other words, there is an obvious interest in games), then the fact that whites seem to get a disproportionate share of game development jobs indicates a problem somewhere. Maybe it's the educational system. Maybe it's the latent class system. Maybe it's differing regional cultures (though plenty of blacks and hispanics live in southern California, where most game developers are). Maybe it's George Bush or Hillary Clinton or whoever else. But the fact of the matter is, if you start from that assumption - that all races are equal - then there must be something - some link in the chain somewhere - holding these ethnic groups back from getting these jobs.
It's a problem that's obviously not unique to the game industry, and it's not necessarily the industry's responsibility to fix it either. But in a perfect world, yes, the racial makeup of large industries would reflect the real world. We do not live in a perfect world, so it doesn't always happen. But that doesn't mean you don't set that as a goal and strive for it, as a society.
But then they realized that for timley delivery of movies, you really need hundreds of distribution centers, not several. Hundreds may be exaggerating a little bit, but Netflix definatley has more than several.
In fact, ideally you need enough distribution centers to cover the entire country with one-day service. Netflix doesn't have that - you get to a certain point and you're spending a huge amount of money for a few people in rural areas - but they have about 90% coverage at this point.
Then you have to consider that not only do you have to maintain all those distribution centers, but to make them useful you have to actually make sure you have inventory at all of them at all times. This is a huge logistical headache, because not every center is going to have the same amount of space, the same number of customers, and you have to be retiring old discs at the same time as you're adding new ones and trying to keep things balanced out. I've noticed Netflix doing something kinda neat, though, which is occasionally putting a different return address on my envelope than the center it shipped from. This is not really a speedy way of transferring merchandise around, but it is cheap (i.e. no extra shipping fees for them).
But those are the kinds of little things that a company just getting started in the business won't think of, and it's why Netflix has the clear advantage. A company with four million subscribers and what, six years in the business now definitely has an advantage over a company that's only ever dealt with traditional retail.
And anyway, I don't think Amazon has nearly enough distribution centers yet. The closest one to NYC, for example, is in PA. That's a two-day trip by the USPS, which means four days minimum round-trip. That's unacceptable for this type of service. You'd be lucky to send a movie back on Monday and have a new one by the weekend, which is really the benchmark, I think.
Exactly.
Users
And don't forget - 5 million of them are in Korea!
That's no joke. Growth rates in the rest of the world have been pretty low. Of course, cup-half-fullers will say that just means there's more growth potential in other countries. Half-empties like me will say it shows that not everybody is really interested in online gaming, even in advanced, internet-saturated nations.
That way, there would be none of this bullshit confusion about 'what time is that here', or 'what is the time there'. It's GMT. The same damned time everywhere.
I think you're missing the basic purpose of telling time. Which is to say that no matter what it says on the clock, it's the "same damned time everywhere", so your solution accomplishes nothing. Time is linear - you don't actually go back in time if you take a flight that lands in one place "earlier" than when it left (I know you know this, but your premise suggests otherwise). The purpose of having a time standard that we can all read is as a frame of reference. Your solution is to eliminate that frame of reference. I don't see how this makes things simpler.
If it's morning where I am in NYC, it's still going to be night in Hawaii regardless of what the clock says. I still need to remember that if I want to call somebody there, or otherwise communicate. Just because my watch says it's 4 AM (GMT) doesn't mean all those Hawaiians are going to be awake.
You're looking at things backwards. Time zones make it easier to deal with this issue, because we can easily say "oh, it's six hours earlier in Hawaii - that means people must still be asleep." Take away the time zones and you're stuck doing calculations about distance and solar cycles for every single place on the planet you've got to deal with. Is it really easier to say "well, Hawaii is 5,500 miles east, and the earth rotates at X miles an hour; therefore, Hawaii will have sunlight in 6 hours" than it is to just know that Hawaii's 6 hours behind us?
They mind as well do a xbox-updates website like windows-update.
The day a new game console requires a windows-update-like web site is the day I go back to playing my Atari 2600 exclusively.