More like blow your foot off from a land mine. Sony limited the PS2 when it first launched (it was initially supposed to be 1 million before the shortage knocked it down to 500,000) and people ended up selling them on eBay for up to $1,000 for months! Sure they shipped on time and met their supply goals, but everyone who didn't get a PS2 or bought one at an inflated price was bitter, angry and upset. The fact that first generation PS2 games weren't even showcases for the hardware didn't help either. (Silent Scope? Another line of sports games? Wth?)
It'd be easier if Blizzard would release some, but its not too hard to estimate when you look at whats on the market and whats been done in the past.
They upgraded to 80 servers recently right? Considering we're talking about high-end, 1000+ users minimum servers a price tag of $10,000 is nothing. 80 * $10,000 is $800,000. Thats more than 1/2 of their first month of income if they pull in $1.5 million a month. Assume 2 system operators for all the servers and they each get paid a simple salary of $60,000 a year. Divided by 12, they get paid $5,000 a month so $10,000 a month for sysops. Thats $810,000 gone in the first month.
Lets say Blizzard starts getting stingy here. 50 game masters/administrators/moderators for ALL the players. They guys are getting 'paid to do what they love' so a mere $1,000 a month, a little over $8/hr, 40 hours a week. Thats $50,000 a month. (I've seenen MMO games go a LOWER than 10 people so 50 is not impossible). Advertisement is probably going to continue for another 3 months, not including expansions/add-ons, and that can range anywhere from $100,000 to $1,000,000 depending on how much they do a marketing blitz but for our purposes we'll say $100,000. (This is pennies, a full page advertisement in a small newspaper costs about $1,000 try doing that nationally.)
Without taking in taxes, expenses such as electricity and cooling, and the costs of making the game engine BEFORE all this, you come to about $960,000 in the first month. BUT don't forget Blizzard offered a free first month for all users, SO they don't actually get any money until the second month. And when that happens, Blizzard is $960,000 in the red at LEAST. Pulling numbers out of my ass? More like pulling numbers out of the shallow end of a corporate budget. Bill Gates is worth nearly 100 million privately, how much do you think Blizzard is worth as a corporation?
that's a cool $1,500,000 a month on subscription fees. Not a bad chunk of change, and you have to love the recurring monthly revenue
Too bad thats BEFORE expenses. Say 1/3 of that goes to server maintanence, another 1/3 goes to salaries and working on upgrades and add-ons, and finally another 1/6 for everything else (break downs, advertising, paying the GMs, etc). After all that, its $250,000 ASSUMING nothing goes wrong, not counting taxes, and no one attempts to sue Blizzard because 'their game made their son/daughter/husband/spousee commit suicide/run away/divorce.'
Fans of violent video games will need to show photo identification to prove they are old enough to buy or rent their favourite titles because of a new Ontario law.
Is this based on the ESRB (or the Canadian counterpart) or what? I wouldn't mind being checked for a M(ature)-rated game but I'll be pissed if I have to get checked for every non-E(veryone) rated game.
Forget football, what about rugby or hockey? Rugby is basicly football without the protective gear and in hockey... well chances are we've all seen or heard stories of players getting into fights or losing teeth from flying pucks. Baseball is dangerous too, some baseball players can throw up to a hundred miles per hour! I pity those who played professional baseball before helmets became required gear and were hit by a fastball.
Just about every sport can be considered violent (ever get hit by a tennis ball?). I'll take my chances with carpel tunnel syndrome and vision impairing video games over bone breaking, muscle tearing sports.
All the things I mentioned are commonplace in FPS games lately. HL1 let you shoot through boxes (sorta), Red Faction had destroyable environments (crappy ones though), rag-doll physics were in UT2k3, and neatly shaped gibs have been around since... Soldier of Fortune? HL1? Quake? Doom 1?
What I'm suggesting is hardly new. Hell, Thief 3 let you pick things up and throw them at people but I don't hear people saying it was 'innovative' or 'ground breaking' for doing so.
Saying the game is terrible because it lacked resolution at the end is done by those who would have complained between installments of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It's not a complete series, it's part of a longer story.
I don't know about you, but Half-Life 1 never felt like it was supposed to be part of a series of any kind. There was almost NO hinting of what was to happen between HL1 and HL2 even if you played all the expansions.
Gordon Freeman becoming a 'hero'? The Earth is conquered? Aliens working with humans, teleportation devices and giant robots being built to protect and serve humans? Oh yeah, I saw that coming *sarcasm*. How about also telling me how Dr. Eli escaped Black Mesa from the very core of the accident(just a few walls away), without a hazard suit(regular scientist), with no human assistance(Freeman ditches him and everyone else is killed) and becomes such a genius in physics so far as to create a hand-held gravity manipulation device. There is a LOT HL1 never answered and HL2 simply made some of those old questions even more complex without giving any answers. I mean for crying out loud, we still don't even know anything about the 'G-man' either.
The only problem I see with your experiment is the fact that you unplugged your network cable AFTER you let Windows started up. Without checking your network data transfers, theres still a chance that Steam exchanged data to and from the Steam servers to authenticate the game.
A better experiment would've been to shut down down your computer at step 2, unplug your network cable, and THEN start up Windows.
I think physics simulation could go even further than that when you consider what types of video games are made and played. What about how a bullet would affect and/or pierce a wall? TRUELY destroyable environments? Rag-doll physics where a dead human doesn't twist his back into a 90 degree angle with his feet bent backwards so far the dead guy could kiss his feet if he wanted to? Or how about gibs where a 300 pound human being doesn't turn into neat meat chunks the size of cinder blocks?
Theres a lot of gameplay advantages to have physics simulation over graphics IMO. Some people are going to say its really memory limitations, but considering a lot of games have glass that can be shot through or can have grenades tossed through and not completely be destroyed, a few texture changes and some tweaking you got yourself a destroyable 'wall', albeit not a very thick one (yet).
A CEO is the general of his organization. At a large company, his decisions can have billion dollar consequences and directly affect the livelihood tens of thousands of employees. At that scale, $10million to ensure that it will happen is a small price to pay.
If this was the military then a CEO is the (Five Star) General of his organization (lets say Army). If the General suddenly started getting paid millions of dollars, while benefits and equipment were being cutback on soldiers, there's hell to pay for. In comparison with a corporation like EA Games, the CEO and his 'Chiefs of Staff' are making millions of dollars while their programmers or 'soldiers' are getting paid like Russians.
A corporation by law is required to make money for the benefit of their shareholders. In a case like this, the CEO of EA Games and their highly paid staff could be viewed as a violation of this law.
Install a game off five CDs... Download Steam... Install Steam... Have Steam 'authenticate' your game which, based on Half-Life 2's launch, anywhere from 5 minutes to a hour... THEN you can start playing Half-Life 2 in single-player.
As opposed to... Install a game off X CDs... Play game in single-player.
On Legendary I've seen the AI do some crazy things they never do on Normal or Heroic. So far out of the ordinary, I've seen marines press their backs against cover and peek around it before attempting to fire. I think grunts attempt to use grenades to blow away your cover, but that might just be flushing out techniques. I've had elites try to 'bait me' by letting one come out in the open and having the others stay hidden until I tried to take the bait. And of course, they flank you. A lot.
I haven't tried any missions where there are jackals, hunters, flood, forerunner drones, or *spoiler* brutes yet but I'm guessing they have their own tricks. Oh and before you question what I saw, on legendary there are LOTS of situations where you're against 6+ elites at once so you see their tactics quite often.
Not to nitpick but the three games you use as an example are not exactly 'free' either. American taxpayers paid for America's Army, Nethack is in a special case supported by donations and people with tons of free time and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory was supposed to be an add-on to the original Return to Castle Wolfenstein so people who bought the original basicly paid for it for everyone else.
Halo 2 simply carries some 'extra' software which checks your Xbox if its modded/hacked. If it finds some it sends the data through Xbox Live. They only did it to Halo 2 because it was such a big game. Watch, the next Xbox Live update will probably send the 'extra' software to all Xbox Live users then we'll hear about this AGAIN.
Had he been selling a legitimate product, his prison sentence would have been much shorter if he even received one at all.
Define 'legitimate product' when you're talking about the internet and the only creditability a website has is a fancy looking layout and a few lines of text. I could say, 'this home has an excellent view of the coast, nearby a major city, and is a stone's throw from the Atlantic Ocean' and have it turn out to be an old, leaky, abandoned deep-sea fishing ship anchored just outside of New York Harbor. Call the feds on me and I close my e-mail account maybe change ISPs if I'm paranoid and just become another nobody the police won't bother with.
or take the damn game back for a refund. Couldn't be more simple.
It would be simply if retailers didn't refuse to take refunds on opened software. Thanks to CD keys needed to play online and the easily ability to copy CD, retailers are taking the cautious way out and refusing to take back software.
True but you have to consider the video game market at the time. In the 80's when Nintendo was THE company, video games were still fledging little things in comparison to today's standards (this was still when PC developers were 1-man developing teams working in basements). If Nintendo tried doing what Sony is doing with the PS2, do you think they would've succeeded? (Sony's 'flood the market with tons of crappy games and let the market decide' method takes up a lot of shelf spaces...) This is pre-internet (for the most part) as well so...
You're right, he keeps say, "this is my last MGS, I swear!" Except for the fact that no one has the balls the try and take his position as director/developer/lead designer (whatever the hell he is when it comes to the Metal Gear games). That said, it was either let the series end on paper or finish what he started.
As the parent said, the creation of mods/add-ons/total conversions are a great way to get into the industry.
But remember that you're entering a multi-billion dollar industry run mostly be big name corporations. 90% of the time you're not gonna get paid to make 'the next C&C/Total Annihilation/Starcraft' or 'a Halo/Doom/Half-Life killer FPS'. Just look what happened to the developers of Day of Defeat, Counter-Strike, the people who worked on Vietnam mods for Battlefield 1942. They were all bought out by companies and then told to do something totally different or had their ideas completely copied, repackaged and sold as 'original concepts.' (Rainbow Six did the whole realistic FPS gameplay first, Vietnam is a setting is not new if you paid attention to the storylines of some obscure games, the use of vehicles in FPS is HARDLY new and large numbers of players playing together online with graphics was done with Quake 1 server mods.)
Or at least hide them. Game stats causes more problems and less fun. Any online gamer knows the annoying problem of stats-whores. We've all heard of 'bragging rights' but goddamn, why do servers run specialized programs that regularly inform me of other players' stats? I don't give a shit if DarthLeftHandedSniper got over 2000 kills so stop reminding me every minute.
Just one comment about the end boss. Given the fact that he kills you in one hit, is a fast mofo and can take more damage than a tank on Normal (once my AI buddies pinned him against the wall with swords... then he threw them off the platform), I'd say you should turn up the difficulty if it was anticlimatic. Oh and did you know that if you wait/fight long enough, AI buddies AND enemies will join the fight turning it into an unescapable deathmatch pit. Very cool if you hide on the side and take pot shots. Annoying if you get killed by a fresh opponent who jumped in right behind you.
Counter-Strike is just another uncreative and uninnovative game that shouldn't have succeeded.
Weapons? Oh wow real world copies, real creative there. Vehicles? None. Enemies? Human players, not fair or fun considering theres no gauge or measurement of skill between them. (Not to mention cheaters) Co-op gameplay? The only thing forcing people to even be near each other is the tight, few chokepoints. Graphics? Modern day budgetware. (8 skins?) Outdoor sequences? Boxed in areas with the horizon being a paper wall. In door sequences? Quake 1 had more interesting layouts.
Obviously we all know CS is considered to be the 'god' of PC FPSs and it still reigns king, but we all know gameplay is what really counts. Its the same thing with Halo 1 (or 2), its all about gameplay. If CS was single-player ONLY with the AI from Half-Life, you'd say CS is as boring as Halo. Throw in human players and CS/Halo is a totally different game.
So you're saying I should get to play Halo 2 or Half-Life 2 up to a week (or more) eariler than you simply because Fedex decided to send the boxes to my store first? By that logic I should've been playing Halo 2 last Saturday when the game arrived at my local EBGames.
If some employee just told you, 'ok we just got the shipment of the greatest game ever in your lifetime, but by the time you even take off the shrink wrap some kid in another town has already beaten it' I'd say you'd have a right to be pissed.
Slashdot Mirror
More like blow your foot off from a land mine. Sony limited the PS2 when it first launched (it was initially supposed to be 1 million before the shortage knocked it down to 500,000) and people ended up selling them on eBay for up to $1,000 for months! Sure they shipped on time and met their supply goals, but everyone who didn't get a PS2 or bought one at an inflated price was bitter, angry and upset. The fact that first generation PS2 games weren't even showcases for the hardware didn't help either. (Silent Scope? Another line of sports games? Wth?)
They upgraded to 80 servers recently right? Considering we're talking about high-end, 1000+ users minimum servers a price tag of $10,000 is nothing. 80 * $10,000 is $800,000. Thats more than 1/2 of their first month of income if they pull in $1.5 million a month. Assume 2 system operators for all the servers and they each get paid a simple salary of $60,000 a year. Divided by 12, they get paid $5,000 a month so $10,000 a month for sysops. Thats $810,000 gone in the first month.
Lets say Blizzard starts getting stingy here. 50 game masters/administrators/moderators for ALL the players. They guys are getting 'paid to do what they love' so a mere $1,000 a month, a little over $8/hr, 40 hours a week. Thats $50,000 a month. (I've seenen MMO games go a LOWER than 10 people so 50 is not impossible). Advertisement is probably going to continue for another 3 months, not including expansions/add-ons, and that can range anywhere from $100,000 to $1,000,000 depending on how much they do a marketing blitz but for our purposes we'll say $100,000. (This is pennies, a full page advertisement in a small newspaper costs about $1,000 try doing that nationally.)
Without taking in taxes, expenses such as electricity and cooling, and the costs of making the game engine BEFORE all this, you come to about $960,000 in the first month. BUT don't forget Blizzard offered a free first month for all users, SO they don't actually get any money until the second month. And when that happens, Blizzard is $960,000 in the red at LEAST. Pulling numbers out of my ass? More like pulling numbers out of the shallow end of a corporate budget. Bill Gates is worth nearly 100 million privately, how much do you think Blizzard is worth as a corporation?
Na they should be designated 'international historical parks' since any colonization on Mars would probably be by a multinational group.
Too bad thats BEFORE expenses. Say 1/3 of that goes to server maintanence, another 1/3 goes to salaries and working on upgrades and add-ons, and finally another 1/6 for everything else (break downs, advertising, paying the GMs, etc). After all that, its $250,000 ASSUMING nothing goes wrong, not counting taxes, and no one attempts to sue Blizzard because 'their game made their son/daughter/husband/spousee commit suicide/run away/divorce.'
Is this based on the ESRB (or the Canadian counterpart) or what? I wouldn't mind being checked for a M(ature)-rated game but I'll be pissed if I have to get checked for every non-E(veryone) rated game.
Just about every sport can be considered violent (ever get hit by a tennis ball?). I'll take my chances with carpel tunnel syndrome and vision impairing video games over bone breaking, muscle tearing sports.
What I'm suggesting is hardly new. Hell, Thief 3 let you pick things up and throw them at people but I don't hear people saying it was 'innovative' or 'ground breaking' for doing so.
I don't know about you, but Half-Life 1 never felt like it was supposed to be part of a series of any kind. There was almost NO hinting of what was to happen between HL1 and HL2 even if you played all the expansions.
Gordon Freeman becoming a 'hero'? The Earth is conquered? Aliens working with humans, teleportation devices and giant robots being built to protect and serve humans? Oh yeah, I saw that coming *sarcasm*. How about also telling me how Dr. Eli escaped Black Mesa from the very core of the accident(just a few walls away), without a hazard suit(regular scientist), with no human assistance(Freeman ditches him and everyone else is killed) and becomes such a genius in physics so far as to create a hand-held gravity manipulation device. There is a LOT HL1 never answered and HL2 simply made some of those old questions even more complex without giving any answers. I mean for crying out loud, we still don't even know anything about the 'G-man' either.
A better experiment would've been to shut down down your computer at step 2, unplug your network cable, and THEN start up Windows.
Theres a lot of gameplay advantages to have physics simulation over graphics IMO. Some people are going to say its really memory limitations, but considering a lot of games have glass that can be shot through or can have grenades tossed through and not completely be destroyed, a few texture changes and some tweaking you got yourself a destroyable 'wall', albeit not a very thick one (yet).
If this was the military then a CEO is the (Five Star) General of his organization (lets say Army). If the General suddenly started getting paid millions of dollars, while benefits and equipment were being cutback on soldiers, there's hell to pay for. In comparison with a corporation like EA Games, the CEO and his 'Chiefs of Staff' are making millions of dollars while their programmers or 'soldiers' are getting paid like Russians.
A corporation by law is required to make money for the benefit of their shareholders. In a case like this, the CEO of EA Games and their highly paid staff could be viewed as a violation of this law.
Download Steam...
Install Steam...
Have Steam 'authenticate' your game which, based on Half-Life 2's launch, anywhere from 5 minutes to a hour...
THEN you can start playing Half-Life 2 in single-player.
As opposed to...
Install a game off X CDs...
Play game in single-player.
Did I miss anything?
I haven't tried any missions where there are jackals, hunters, flood, forerunner drones, or *spoiler* brutes yet but I'm guessing they have their own tricks. Oh and before you question what I saw, on legendary there are LOTS of situations where you're against 6+ elites at once so you see their tactics quite often.
Not to nitpick but the three games you use as an example are not exactly 'free' either. American taxpayers paid for America's Army, Nethack is in a special case supported by donations and people with tons of free time and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory was supposed to be an add-on to the original Return to Castle Wolfenstein so people who bought the original basicly paid for it for everyone else.
Halo 2 simply carries some 'extra' software which checks your Xbox if its modded/hacked. If it finds some it sends the data through Xbox Live. They only did it to Halo 2 because it was such a big game. Watch, the next Xbox Live update will probably send the 'extra' software to all Xbox Live users then we'll hear about this AGAIN.
Define 'legitimate product' when you're talking about the internet and the only creditability a website has is a fancy looking layout and a few lines of text. I could say, 'this home has an excellent view of the coast, nearby a major city, and is a stone's throw from the Atlantic Ocean' and have it turn out to be an old, leaky, abandoned deep-sea fishing ship anchored just outside of New York Harbor. Call the feds on me and I close my e-mail account maybe change ISPs if I'm paranoid and just become another nobody the police won't bother with.
It would be simply if retailers didn't refuse to take refunds on opened software. Thanks to CD keys needed to play online and the easily ability to copy CD, retailers are taking the cautious way out and refusing to take back software.
True but you have to consider the video game market at the time. In the 80's when Nintendo was THE company, video games were still fledging little things in comparison to today's standards (this was still when PC developers were 1-man developing teams working in basements). If Nintendo tried doing what Sony is doing with the PS2, do you think they would've succeeded? (Sony's 'flood the market with tons of crappy games and let the market decide' method takes up a lot of shelf spaces...) This is pre-internet (for the most part) as well so...
You're right, he keeps say, "this is my last MGS, I swear!" Except for the fact that no one has the balls the try and take his position as director/developer/lead designer (whatever the hell he is when it comes to the Metal Gear games). That said, it was either let the series end on paper or finish what he started.
But remember that you're entering a multi-billion dollar industry run mostly be big name corporations. 90% of the time you're not gonna get paid to make 'the next C&C/Total Annihilation/Starcraft' or 'a Halo/Doom/Half-Life killer FPS'. Just look what happened to the developers of Day of Defeat, Counter-Strike, the people who worked on Vietnam mods for Battlefield 1942. They were all bought out by companies and then told to do something totally different or had their ideas completely copied, repackaged and sold as 'original concepts.' (Rainbow Six did the whole realistic FPS gameplay first, Vietnam is a setting is not new if you paid attention to the storylines of some obscure games, the use of vehicles in FPS is HARDLY new and large numbers of players playing together online with graphics was done with Quake 1 server mods.)
Or at least hide them. Game stats causes more problems and less fun. Any online gamer knows the annoying problem of stats-whores. We've all heard of 'bragging rights' but goddamn, why do servers run specialized programs that regularly inform me of other players' stats? I don't give a shit if DarthLeftHandedSniper got over 2000 kills so stop reminding me every minute.
Just one comment about the end boss. Given the fact that he kills you in one hit, is a fast mofo and can take more damage than a tank on Normal (once my AI buddies pinned him against the wall with swords... then he threw them off the platform), I'd say you should turn up the difficulty if it was anticlimatic. Oh and did you know that if you wait/fight long enough, AI buddies AND enemies will join the fight turning it into an unescapable deathmatch pit. Very cool if you hide on the side and take pot shots. Annoying if you get killed by a fresh opponent who jumped in right behind you.
Weapons? Oh wow real world copies, real creative there.
Vehicles? None.
Enemies? Human players, not fair or fun considering theres no gauge or measurement of skill between them. (Not to mention cheaters)
Co-op gameplay? The only thing forcing people to even be near each other is the tight, few chokepoints.
Graphics? Modern day budgetware. (8 skins?)
Outdoor sequences? Boxed in areas with the horizon being a paper wall.
In door sequences? Quake 1 had more interesting layouts.
Obviously we all know CS is considered to be the 'god' of PC FPSs and it still reigns king, but we all know gameplay is what really counts. Its the same thing with Halo 1 (or 2), its all about gameplay. If CS was single-player ONLY with the AI from Half-Life, you'd say CS is as boring as Halo. Throw in human players and CS/Halo is a totally different game.
If some employee just told you, 'ok we just got the shipment of the greatest game ever in your lifetime, but by the time you even take off the shrink wrap some kid in another town has already beaten it' I'd say you'd have a right to be pissed.
See : PS2 launch week.