So you are saying that Blu-Ray should be compared to ever so more successful UMD and it's established base of PSP owners?
If HD-DVD does take off the fraction of the 3 million odd PS3 owners who want films and don't own an HD-DVD player will be such a small market it won't be worth considering them.
You're misjudging the business model here, to quote The West Wing on cheap AIDS drugs "The second pill off the production line cost 50 cents, the first cost $5 billion"
The costs of the game are all in development not producing the CDs the game comes on. Once the however many millions production costs is over there is a period of selling to cover the costs and anything extra is profit.
Valve's aim is to get as much money as they can out of something they have already paid for, why charge $10 when you can get $20 or more for it. Obviously there is a limit, if the price goes too high then sales drop, for every region there will be an optimum price to make the most profit. In say china where casual piracy is high the price will be lower. In a place like the UK where we're stupid enough to pay double what everyone else does it will be higher.
Finally all the cash is gathered in a big room, the developers take their share out and Vale's owners are then free to have a big money fight with whatever is left.
The same people who pay for their cable/satelite TV subscription and watch adverts during the commercial breaks? Or buy a magazines with adverts in? The model is not entirely new even if I don't believe for a moment that the adverts in games are there "to reduce the sale price" as is claimed by the publishers.
I did not entirely mean that no one wants an HDTV, over in Europe the only thing you are likely to buy is an HDTV too.
What we watch on it though is SD broadcasts or upscaled DVDs and the vast majority of us aren't staring close enough at the screen to care about the pixelation, we just want a nice big (future proofed) screen.
If you use a Wii on a big screen in 480p you'll know it looks just fine (I'm using a 40" LCD), the games are designed with the console's limitations in mind so the big bold colours of for example Wario Ware or Paper Mario don't need those extra pixels.
The Wii is all about the gameplay not the graphics which is as I and the rest of it's target market like it (if I want the kind of gritty high rez graphics the Wii can't do then I'll get them at 1900x1200 on my PC).
The thing is gaming PCs are not cheap, compare the cost of an Xbox 360 to a PC that is up to running the likes of Oblivion and Bioshock.
It's better to buy the console and a cheaper PC/Laptop that is up to running everything excluding games. Not only does it save money but Mum and Dad can use the PC while the kids play games (or vice versa). Also once you have the console you know it will run everything released for it, my experience of PCs is that the time after which you need to drop in a new console priced graphics card (if not more) to run the latest games is far shorter than between console generations.
The difference between the PS3's position now and the 360's position a year ago is that most of the 360's potential owners didn't already own a next gen console.
Regarding which system's future games are going to sell the hardware I see Mario Galaxy, SSB, the next Mario Cart, Metroid 3 (due out soon in the UK), Rayman Rabbids 2 and a bundle of others and now I made the right choice in buying a Wii.
Very few people care about HD, the Wii looks fine on my 40" HDTV and most people won't be upgrading to something like that for years, this is particularly true for the Wii's core market of casual game players.
The price looks good but one thing alone is stopping me for picking up a 360 and that's the huge overpricing MS puts on the hard drive add ons.
I don't believe I'm the only one who will pick up a 360 the day we can plug in a USB hard drive rather than being forced to pay the same price for 1/10th the storage.
Re:The Environment?
on
Blog Action Day
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· Score: 2, Informative
There are plenty of studies showing that the global warming issue is caused by the sun getting hotter (look it up...I'll wait), and a recent study showing that the ozone holes at the north pole are getting smaller (did we do that? doubtful. Can a blogger get that kind of reaction, unlikely)
I always thought the point of episodes of games was to release shorter, regular episodes for lower prices?
It seems like Valve's new sales model sadly is to release shorter episodes less frequently for the same price as a full game. I wonder if Episode 3 will still be great value when is sells for $80 and forces you to buy HL1, Ep1, Ep2, Portal and TF2 again...
A fair point, the compression artefacts are fairly noticable on most divx stuff.
However what is more important is if the quality improves at all. If HD compressed onto a DVD gives better quality than a normal DVD I'll take it regardless of wether the quality is worse than on some Blu Ray player I have no intention of buying.
But I am sort of baffled by people who spend hundreds upon hundreds of dollars for something that they will not use the bandwidth for until next year or later and then the thing will be down in price anyway.
At the extreme end of the scale it is bad value. However if you do need a new graphics card it often works out better to go towards the high end. I'd rather spend $300 on one card that keeps up with the latest games for two years than $180 get a mid range card that will need to be updated with another $180 card in a year's time.
Check your own link, that is for the bundle. Sure Valve made up unreasonable prices for each part but where can you get those parts because it's not on steam.
Also note how they quote the price of HL2 as $29.99 (when it's actually $19.99 on steam) and Ep1 as $19.99 ($9.99 on Steam). The two together can be had for $24.99 on Steam.
In other words, swim at your own risk, but don't bitch to us if you get eaten by an alligator; you were told to stay out of the water.
This isn't warning you there are alligators in the water though, this is the manufaturer of your swimming trunks dropping depth charges into the water because you want to swim in someone else's pool.
What I'm saying is that there ought to be a way that games using the same engine can be modularized where practical and adjust the pricing in such a way that game developers and publishers aren't losing out but consumers benefit from lower cost and a more efficient business model.
The publishers don't want to give you any savings. The moment Valve can't charge me the price of a full game for a small extra episode (Episode 2), a tech demo (Portal) and a new version of a previously free mod (TF2) becuase they force me to buy the full game that I already own again they are loosing money. (I bet they'll falsly count their millions of HL2 repeat sales to report a massive increase in the userbase too).
Sadly Valve's new "episodic" salse model seems to consist of selling shorter games at full price.
which is about 49 bucks at the current rates (steam sells it for 45). great deal there, sparky.
Steam adds sales tax automatically to all purchases in Europe (unlike most other pay & download services).
Here in the UK it adds the full 17.5% VAT on top. You can get the Orange box cheaper through Amazon but beta access and Peggle make the Steam version better value in my eyes.
This is going to turn out to be a pretty dull MMORPG.
I hear you have to spend years farming Iraqi's in the hope of getting access to the Osama Bin Laden raid.
For many people, the attraction to Apple ends when they find out that they can't easily do something that's important to them.
Hard? Since when is a Mac hard to use?
Right now I enjoy playing Team Fortress 2 and Bioshock. I also enjoy listening to any one of 2 million+ tracks of music I like under my Napster unlimited music subscription on my Creative Zen.
Please explain how I can do this easily on on apple products.
The Samsung Blu-Ray (BD-P1200) player has been $449.99 since before the PS3 price cut. Even now the Sony BDP-S300 is $439.57 (on Amazon).
So you can save $60 wow!
The parent has a good point, at $499 the PS3 is still far too expensive. But if you are going to buy a Blu-Ray player then at that point you can get a PS3 thrown in extra for $50. I'm no PS3 fan but if it was going to cost me $50 I'd already own one.
"homebrew community"
aka
videogame pirating community
The parent may have been flamebait but has a point.
Nintendo is pulling in a lot of money by selling emulated games for the Wii.
Some of the most common homebrew put on to consoles is of course emulators. The ability for example to put a SNES emulator and every SNES ROM ever on a 1Gb SD card could cost Nintendo a lot in lost sales.
Well compare to any other game you like then. Madden on the X360 outsells all the Wii titles in the top ten combined. Bioshock outsells the top 2 Wii games combined.
I agree that you would expect a game like Madden to sell better on the 360 but given there are supposed to be about the same number of each system out there it looks like in total a lot more 360 owners buying games than Wii owners.
To me it's the biggest challenge Nintendo faces, lots of people are picking up a Wii but how many are simply sticking with Wii Sports and Wii Play. I fit into this camp, I only have a Wii and I love it but I'm happy with the 4 wiimotes and small collection of party games I own and don't see the need to get any more soon.
To really make the big money and get more titles onto the system developers need to know that all those owners out there actually want another game.
Although you seemingly allege impossibility, concerts still occur, even though most of the people attending those concerts have already heard the songs, already own copies the songs, and can play the songs whenever they feel like on their digital devices.
All your examples (artists making painings, performers at concerts) assume there is something physical to present or for people to go see.
How does the classical composer make a living when the orchestra won't pay him for playing the music he just wrote?
How does the Author do the same when I can download his text and print the books myself (do many people go to public author led book readings?)
How does the tv producer/actor/other make money from the tv series they worked on when the originals get released onto the internet and no one watches the adverts that pay for it or buys the DVDs? Do you honestly think that something like Battlestar Galactica will be produced to give it away for free? Are you aware of how many people put how many hours into something like that? Of course if you want Coca Cola written down the side of the ships and half the episodes being Starbuck telling Apollo about the prouducts she uses to get her uniform clean it might still get paid for.
The article seems to miss that EVE being space based allows a huge environment to be created easily, a few random number generators and a bit of tweaking and you have a whole universe of stars and asteroids and it's easily extendable after that.
The landscape in the likes of WoW is a lot more design intensive, you have features and locations with NPCs and dungeons and so on put in place. To double the population on the server you would need to either double the design/quest writing hours, add in a bunch of fractally generated landscape that would be relatively boring and largely pointless or go with the EQ2 route of opening up instances of zones which always seemed artifcial to me ("Hey are you in Common Lands 1,2,3,4 or 5?").
Slashdot Mirror
So you are saying that Blu-Ray should be compared to ever so more successful UMD and it's established base of PSP owners?
If HD-DVD does take off the fraction of the 3 million odd PS3 owners who want films and don't own an HD-DVD player will be such a small market it won't be worth considering them.
You're misjudging the business model here, to quote The West Wing on cheap AIDS drugs "The second pill off the production line cost 50 cents, the first cost $5 billion"
The costs of the game are all in development not producing the CDs the game comes on. Once the however many millions production costs is over there is a period of selling to cover the costs and anything extra is profit.
Valve's aim is to get as much money as they can out of something they have already paid for, why charge $10 when you can get $20 or more for it. Obviously there is a limit, if the price goes too high then sales drop, for every region there will be an optimum price to make the most profit. In say china where casual piracy is high the price will be lower. In a place like the UK where we're stupid enough to pay double what everyone else does it will be higher.
Finally all the cash is gathered in a big room, the developers take their share out and Vale's owners are then free to have a big money fight with whatever is left.
So the real winner was Cowboy Neal?
Personally if I received an e-mail from Nigeria offering me a cheap helicopter I doubt I'd trust it.
I think I'll keep saving for my skycar
The same people who pay for their cable/satelite TV subscription and watch adverts during the commercial breaks? Or buy a magazines with adverts in? The model is not entirely new even if I don't believe for a moment that the adverts in games are there "to reduce the sale price" as is claimed by the publishers.
I did not entirely mean that no one wants an HDTV, over in Europe the only thing you are likely to buy is an HDTV too.
What we watch on it though is SD broadcasts or upscaled DVDs and the vast majority of us aren't staring close enough at the screen to care about the pixelation, we just want a nice big (future proofed) screen.
If you use a Wii on a big screen in 480p you'll know it looks just fine (I'm using a 40" LCD), the games are designed with the console's limitations in mind so the big bold colours of for example Wario Ware or Paper Mario don't need those extra pixels.
The Wii is all about the gameplay not the graphics which is as I and the rest of it's target market like it (if I want the kind of gritty high rez graphics the Wii can't do then I'll get them at 1900x1200 on my PC).
The thing is gaming PCs are not cheap, compare the cost of an Xbox 360 to a PC that is up to running the likes of Oblivion and Bioshock.
It's better to buy the console and a cheaper PC/Laptop that is up to running everything excluding games. Not only does it save money but Mum and Dad can use the PC while the kids play games (or vice versa). Also once you have the console you know it will run everything released for it, my experience of PCs is that the time after which you need to drop in a new console priced graphics card (if not more) to run the latest games is far shorter than between console generations.
The difference between the PS3's position now and the 360's position a year ago is that most of the 360's potential owners didn't already own a next gen console.
Regarding which system's future games are going to sell the hardware I see Mario Galaxy, SSB, the next Mario Cart, Metroid 3 (due out soon in the UK), Rayman Rabbids 2 and a bundle of others and now I made the right choice in buying a Wii.
Very few people care about HD, the Wii looks fine on my 40" HDTV and most people won't be upgrading to something like that for years, this is particularly true for the Wii's core market of casual game players.
The price looks good but one thing alone is stopping me for picking up a 360 and that's the huge overpricing MS puts on the hard drive add ons.
I don't believe I'm the only one who will pick up a 360 the day we can plug in a USB hard drive rather than being forced to pay the same price for 1/10th the storage.
The difference between Microsoft and EA is that Microsoft wants to destroy the competition. EA seem out to destroy the industry.
I always thought the point of episodes of games was to release shorter, regular episodes for lower prices?
It seems like Valve's new sales model sadly is to release shorter episodes less frequently for the same price as a full game. I wonder if Episode 3 will still be great value when is sells for $80 and forces you to buy HL1, Ep1, Ep2, Portal and TF2 again...
A fair point, the compression artefacts are fairly noticable on most divx stuff.
However what is more important is if the quality improves at all. If HD compressed onto a DVD gives better quality than a normal DVD I'll take it regardless of wether the quality is worse than on some Blu Ray player I have no intention of buying.
Check your own link, that is for the bundle. Sure Valve made up unreasonable prices for each part but where can you get those parts because it's not on steam.
Also note how they quote the price of HL2 as $29.99 (when it's actually $19.99 on steam) and Ep1 as $19.99 ($9.99 on Steam). The two together can be had for $24.99 on Steam.
Sadly Valve's new "episodic" salse model seems to consist of selling shorter games at full price.
Here in the UK it adds the full 17.5% VAT on top. You can get the Orange box cheaper through Amazon but beta access and Peggle make the Steam version better value in my eyes.
This is going to turn out to be a pretty dull MMORPG.
I hear you have to spend years farming Iraqi's in the hope of getting access to the Osama Bin Laden raid.
Please explain how I can do this easily on on apple products.
The parent has a good point, at $499 the PS3 is still far too expensive. But if you are going to buy a Blu-Ray player then at that point you can get a PS3 thrown in extra for $50. I'm no PS3 fan but if it was going to cost me $50 I'd already own one.
Nintendo is pulling in a lot of money by selling emulated games for the Wii.
Some of the most common homebrew put on to consoles is of course emulators. The ability for example to put a SNES emulator and every SNES ROM ever on a 1Gb SD card could cost Nintendo a lot in lost sales.
Well compare to any other game you like then. Madden on the X360 outsells all the Wii titles in the top ten combined. Bioshock outsells the top 2 Wii games combined.
I agree that you would expect a game like Madden to sell better on the 360 but given there are supposed to be about the same number of each system out there it looks like in total a lot more 360 owners buying games than Wii owners.
To me it's the biggest challenge Nintendo faces, lots of people are picking up a Wii but how many are simply sticking with Wii Sports and Wii Play. I fit into this camp, I only have a Wii and I love it but I'm happy with the 4 wiimotes and small collection of party games I own and don't see the need to get any more soon.
To really make the big money and get more titles onto the system developers need to know that all those owners out there actually want another game.
How does the classical composer make a living when the orchestra won't pay him for playing the music he just wrote?
How does the Author do the same when I can download his text and print the books myself (do many people go to public author led book readings?)
How does the tv producer/actor/other make money from the tv series they worked on when the originals get released onto the internet and no one watches the adverts that pay for it or buys the DVDs?
Do you honestly think that something like Battlestar Galactica will be produced to give it away for free? Are you aware of how many people put how many hours into something like that? Of course if you want Coca Cola written down the side of the ships and half the episodes being Starbuck telling Apollo about the prouducts she uses to get her uniform clean it might still get paid for.
The article seems to miss that EVE being space based allows a huge environment to be created easily, a few random number generators and a bit of tweaking and you have a whole universe of stars and asteroids and it's easily extendable after that.
The landscape in the likes of WoW is a lot more design intensive, you have features and locations with NPCs and dungeons and so on put in place. To double the population on the server you would need to either double the design/quest writing hours, add in a bunch of fractally generated landscape that would be relatively boring and largely pointless or go with the EQ2 route of opening up instances of zones which always seemed artifcial to me ("Hey are you in Common Lands 1,2,3,4 or 5?").