12 months to get 10 levels? Holy shit man, with that kind of time being put towards xping/questing/grinding, you might as well hire some Chinese company to level for you. Throw in the fact that NO ONE does the older "end-game" content (Molten Core most notably) and an expansion every year is the WORST thing for casuals.
Um, the whole point of these robots IS to have the enemy shoot at the robots. If an insurgent sees a robot armed with a machine gun turning around the corner and starts to aim at him, hes gonna spend a few seconds not shooting at U.S. soldiers. In the eyes of the media and the government, thats multi-billion dollar project just earned every cent. The fact that it can shoot back simply sweetens the deal.
Except for the fact that there are EXTREMELY few methods in WoW to adjust your character's appearance (after creating a character). And gold don't count since gold directly impacts buying power which affects gameplay. And goods can be as minor as some alchemy ingredients for skilling up or as major as having your character run through an instance for an uber-item, which in both cases still affects gameplay.
Except for the fact that medieval MMO's treat banks as a catch-all, store anything, retrieve half way around the globe, impossible to be broken into and have its contents stolen, free public service with little to no cost to the customers, for an indefinite period of time system. To add insult to injury against would-be thieves, Blizzard doesn't even offer a half-assed explanation to why a bank in WoW is an empty building without a vault or how the Auction House can store thousands of items at any given time yet have its auctioneers stand around town nowhere near a storage facility. Hell even the Pokemon games use the explanation of a digital delivery and storage system to explain how a player can own so many Pokemon at once.
When MMOs allows you to break into a bank (or better yet, the Auction House) and rob it (of course assuming you can fight off all the guards and players that come to its rescue) THEN we'll talk.
The reason why people in the U.S. frown upon paying more for in-game content is simply the fact that they recognize the fact that the content is either, A) for appearances only and therefore have no valve towards gameplay or B) gives an unfair advantage towards players who spend more money than other gamers.
Take a look at games like Gunbound and Maple Story. Both sell in-game content but they only alter your character's appearance. Neat, but nothing the mass market (of MMO players) are willing to pay for.
First off, GTA2, GTA:London 1961 and Max Payne 1 and 2 all came out for PC before their console ports. Second, GTA2 came out for the Dreamcast 6 months after the PS1 version, not the 1+ year(s) you claim. Third, State of Emergency was a Xbox exclusive and Smuggler's Run Warzones was a Gamecube exclusive.
Quit putting shit out of your ass like a PS3 fanboy. You're embarrassing Rockstar.
Except for the fact that back then unless you game was a runaway success like Doom or Simcity 2000, marketing was more or less word of month. Shareware and demos were pretty much the ONLY means of advertising for some of these companies. Throw in the fact that producing and distributing those floppy disks/CDs was expensive and you can see why companies wanted to charge people for such demos.
Except for the fact that Rockstar was originally a PC focused developer and they've been developing games for consoles besides the PS1 and PS2 on and off for years. The Dreamcast got GTA2, the Xbox got GTA3 and VC, the PC got all of the mainstream GTAs, the 360 got Table Tennis and soon GTA4. Rockstar may "seem" loyal to Sony, but thats only because of how the video game market played out last generation. This generation, Rockstar is a wild card. The Wii (might) get Manhunt 2, GTA4 for the 360 is guaranteed and the PSP GTA games did sell but didn't blow people away in sales.
You play "casually" but manage to hit level 70? Have you looked at the playtime stats when you log in? The people have recorded speed leveling to level 70 in roughly one week of PLAYTIME, thats 168 hours of gaming. Tack on another 50~100 hours for crafting, chatting, doing PvP, instances, etc and you'd been pushing towards the 300 hour mark.
Grinding in MMOs is terrible. I've played MMOs since UO and recently quit WoW; most of them all have one thing in common, spending 100+ hours just to reach the "maximum" level (assuming there aren't multiple "jobs" like FFXI or cranking out a new character every month in WoW).
Obviously, to SOME extent grinding is necessary (not counting PvP which Guild Wars has down damned near perfectly) but when you start talking about hundreds of hours just to REACH the end game (let alone take part in end game activities), you've got massive barrier against casual gamers.
Back in the days of Napster the battle cry was sue the users (if you can find them) but don't go after a mere facilitator. Well now they're doing just that, they're not necessarily doing it right, what are the other, better options?
Keep going after the users, but don't launch massive carpet-bombing style lawsuits and then bitch about the backlash. You can't say that "they're doing the right thing just not the right way" and expect people to accept that. By that logic, Bush's decision to go into Iraq was the right decision, just not the right way.
Art is only considered to be art if its static. And The Thinker is considered to be art, yet no one can come to an inevitable conclusion that everyone is satisfied with.
I know schools that didn't require login/reimage on reboot until the past 5 years. I know at some universities, lab computers are automatically logged in with anonymous accounts upon booting so they routinely get "hacked" (officially, they're "broken", unofficially, 'don't know, don't care' in the words of a friend who works at the technical help desk) with the sysops never bothering to fix them so long as they remain few and far between. (On average out of every 10 computers, by the end of the semester, 3 will either be "hacked" or so overloaded with spyware/malware/adware that most students will avoid using them like the plague.)
Change sugar to several pounds of sand and banana to wet cement and you'd be closer to reality.
Once you go from minor annoyance to minor damage, "harmless fun" goes out the window. Spray painted graffiti on mailboxes is annoying, but smashing mailboxes with a baseball bat is damaging (there was actually a news report in my local newspaper about it a few years ago.) A virus that causes your startup screen to look like a BSOD but lets you into Windows/Linux/Mac OS X is annoying, a virus that prevents you from getting past the startup screen is damaging.
Except for the fact that publishers (and developers) and distributors weren't brought together at all. If you didn't have an appointment with anyone, tough luck. All the big wigs were back in their hotel rooms and booth managers could've been replaced by an intern handing out mission statements.
All the real "goodies" to come out this year are a couple videos which could've been released a number of different ways (Halo 3, Super Mario Galaxy and MGS4 look amazing), some expected developments (another Wii-want-you-to-exercise game and Killzone 2 reappears albeit far from the 2006 video, what a surprise *yawn*) and some "coming soon" lists (just in case we forgot, just two months prior to the September-December video game glut).
I think European politicians are simply jumping on the bandwagon and blaming video games for cheap political points. Seriously Europe already has less gun-friendly policies (compared to the U.S.) already in place, regulating video games is going to be even more of a waste in their political system compared to the U.S.'s.
The problem is that outside the US the 360 may as well not even exist.
Except for the fact that the 360 is doing fairly well in Europe (not sure about Australia). Japan is really the only market that hasn't gotten over the anti-Microsoft/Xbox/they're-not-making-game-genre- X sentiment and adopted the system.
Its not flamebait because one developer, even one as big as SquareEnix, cannot single-handedly hold up a console.
A number of developers have either jumped ship (Capcom is pretty happy with Dead Rising sales), went cross-platform (Devil May Cry 4) or aren't putting all their eggs in one basket (SquareEnix announced Dragon Quest/Warrior 9 for the DS and several Final Fantasy spin-offs for the DS and the Wii.) Unless Sony suddenly creates (first-party) the next Mario; the PS3's outlook is bleak.
The PS2 has shitty graphics once you got away from the FMVs. Slowdowns, lack of anti-aliasing and pixelation were all rampant in PS2 games if you had a good TV or had plenty of experience gaming on the PC.
And the PS3 was advertised as the second coming of video game graphics. Instead, we got sub-Xbox360 graphics and a series of cross-platform ports. The Cell processor (if you know how to program for it) is literally next-gen, yet we get current-gen level graphics. Sony fucked up plain and simply.
Easily. Catch-all signatures that basically say "sign here once and you agree to the past 200 pages of legal agreement" have been more or less considered to be illegal when brought to court. Legally, they're simply unrealistic for the courts to enforce.
If Ford SUVs started exploding due to a manufacturing defect, the public cannot be realistically be told they can't sue Ford because of a single line in a 200 page contract.
This is just a PR move. Anyone with any MMO experience will tell you this "oversight group" will simply end up being dominated by a clique of the most powerful players in the game. The most popular players, the leaders of the most powerful guilds/clans/corps and the richest players will all take the top seats and nothing will ever get done. Corruption will run rampant and eventually the users are going to get fed up and ANOTHER scandal will eventually be revealed.
PA wanted to control all publicity? Well, no shit. Last thing ANY marketer wants is for two marketing campaigns that contradict each other. Jack Thompson would probably put out ads saying "Come see the horrors of video gaming!", while PA put out ads saying "Come see the friendly community video gaming!"
On their terms? "Their terms" basically were, 1) Keep this secret until 1 hour before the debate and 2) let us handling marketing. Not exactly a gag order there.
Flexibility? This is not an 20-year binding contract, its a contract asking Jack Thompson not to blab about the debate beforehand.
The guy has been demonizing video games for almost a DECADE. The guy has been featured on nearly every major U.S. news network from CNN to Fox News. This is not some "fairly anonymous guy". Anyone who watches/reads about the news has at least heard of this guy at least once. You have to be pretty ignorant to have not heard of him by this point, especially if you're posting in the video games section of a news site.
Yeah because X-Com: Terror of the Deep and Bookworm are such high end system games.
Steam is not a system only for the Half-Life series and mods. It also includes low, low, low end games like Bookworm which would be ported to cell phones if text entry wasn't so difficult and X-Com: TOTD was practically considered to be abandonware for almost half a decade (if you search around abandonware websites enough its still possible to find old DOS copies, it was originally released in 1996). The fact that the average level of system standards among Steam users has decreased since the first survey is nothing of interest. This is on par with Ford releasing a new line of low priced/budget cars and then announcing that the average price on all their cars being sold decreased since the 90's.
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12 months to get 10 levels? Holy shit man, with that kind of time being put towards xping/questing/grinding, you might as well hire some Chinese company to level for you. Throw in the fact that NO ONE does the older "end-game" content (Molten Core most notably) and an expansion every year is the WORST thing for casuals.
Um, the whole point of these robots IS to have the enemy shoot at the robots. If an insurgent sees a robot armed with a machine gun turning around the corner and starts to aim at him, hes gonna spend a few seconds not shooting at U.S. soldiers. In the eyes of the media and the government, thats multi-billion dollar project just earned every cent. The fact that it can shoot back simply sweetens the deal.
Except for the fact that there are EXTREMELY few methods in WoW to adjust your character's appearance (after creating a character). And gold don't count since gold directly impacts buying power which affects gameplay. And goods can be as minor as some alchemy ingredients for skilling up or as major as having your character run through an instance for an uber-item, which in both cases still affects gameplay.
When MMOs allows you to break into a bank (or better yet, the Auction House) and rob it (of course assuming you can fight off all the guards and players that come to its rescue) THEN we'll talk.
Take a look at games like Gunbound and Maple Story. Both sell in-game content but they only alter your character's appearance. Neat, but nothing the mass market (of MMO players) are willing to pay for.
Quit putting shit out of your ass like a PS3 fanboy. You're embarrassing Rockstar.
Except for the fact that back then unless you game was a runaway success like Doom or Simcity 2000, marketing was more or less word of month. Shareware and demos were pretty much the ONLY means of advertising for some of these companies. Throw in the fact that producing and distributing those floppy disks/CDs was expensive and you can see why companies wanted to charge people for such demos.
Except for the fact that Rockstar was originally a PC focused developer and they've been developing games for consoles besides the PS1 and PS2 on and off for years. The Dreamcast got GTA2, the Xbox got GTA3 and VC, the PC got all of the mainstream GTAs, the 360 got Table Tennis and soon GTA4. Rockstar may "seem" loyal to Sony, but thats only because of how the video game market played out last generation. This generation, Rockstar is a wild card. The Wii (might) get Manhunt 2, GTA4 for the 360 is guaranteed and the PSP GTA games did sell but didn't blow people away in sales.
You play "casually" but manage to hit level 70? Have you looked at the playtime stats when you log in? The people have recorded speed leveling to level 70 in roughly one week of PLAYTIME, thats 168 hours of gaming. Tack on another 50~100 hours for crafting, chatting, doing PvP, instances, etc and you'd been pushing towards the 300 hour mark.
Obviously, to SOME extent grinding is necessary (not counting PvP which Guild Wars has down damned near perfectly) but when you start talking about hundreds of hours just to REACH the end game (let alone take part in end game activities), you've got massive barrier against casual gamers.
Sure, as soon as the Middle East stops having "death to America" protests in countries the U.S. isn't even in.
Keep going after the users, but don't launch massive carpet-bombing style lawsuits and then bitch about the backlash. You can't say that "they're doing the right thing just not the right way" and expect people to accept that. By that logic, Bush's decision to go into Iraq was the right decision, just not the right way.
Art is only considered to be art if its static. And The Thinker is considered to be art, yet no one can come to an inevitable conclusion that everyone is satisfied with.
I know schools that didn't require login/reimage on reboot until the past 5 years. I know at some universities, lab computers are automatically logged in with anonymous accounts upon booting so they routinely get "hacked" (officially, they're "broken", unofficially, 'don't know, don't care' in the words of a friend who works at the technical help desk) with the sysops never bothering to fix them so long as they remain few and far between. (On average out of every 10 computers, by the end of the semester, 3 will either be "hacked" or so overloaded with spyware/malware/adware that most students will avoid using them like the plague.)
Once you go from minor annoyance to minor damage, "harmless fun" goes out the window. Spray painted graffiti on mailboxes is annoying, but smashing mailboxes with a baseball bat is damaging (there was actually a news report in my local newspaper about it a few years ago.) A virus that causes your startup screen to look like a BSOD but lets you into Windows/Linux/Mac OS X is annoying, a virus that prevents you from getting past the startup screen is damaging.
All the real "goodies" to come out this year are a couple videos which could've been released a number of different ways (Halo 3, Super Mario Galaxy and MGS4 look amazing), some expected developments (another Wii-want-you-to-exercise game and Killzone 2 reappears albeit far from the 2006 video, what a surprise *yawn*) and some "coming soon" lists (just in case we forgot, just two months prior to the September-December video game glut).
I think European politicians are simply jumping on the bandwagon and blaming video games for cheap political points. Seriously Europe already has less gun-friendly policies (compared to the U.S.) already in place, regulating video games is going to be even more of a waste in their political system compared to the U.S.'s.
Except for the fact that the 360 is doing fairly well in Europe (not sure about Australia). Japan is really the only market that hasn't gotten over the anti-Microsoft/Xbox/they're-not-making-game-genre- X sentiment and adopted the system.
A number of developers have either jumped ship (Capcom is pretty happy with Dead Rising sales), went cross-platform (Devil May Cry 4) or aren't putting all their eggs in one basket (SquareEnix announced Dragon Quest/Warrior 9 for the DS and several Final Fantasy spin-offs for the DS and the Wii.) Unless Sony suddenly creates (first-party) the next Mario; the PS3's outlook is bleak.
And the PS3 was advertised as the second coming of video game graphics. Instead, we got sub-Xbox360 graphics and a series of cross-platform ports. The Cell processor (if you know how to program for it) is literally next-gen, yet we get current-gen level graphics. Sony fucked up plain and simply.
If Ford SUVs started exploding due to a manufacturing defect, the public cannot be realistically be told they can't sue Ford because of a single line in a 200 page contract.
This is just a PR move. Anyone with any MMO experience will tell you this "oversight group" will simply end up being dominated by a clique of the most powerful players in the game. The most popular players, the leaders of the most powerful guilds/clans/corps and the richest players will all take the top seats and nothing will ever get done. Corruption will run rampant and eventually the users are going to get fed up and ANOTHER scandal will eventually be revealed.
On their terms? "Their terms" basically were, 1) Keep this secret until 1 hour before the debate and 2) let us handling marketing. Not exactly a gag order there.
Flexibility? This is not an 20-year binding contract, its a contract asking Jack Thompson not to blab about the debate beforehand.
The guy has been demonizing video games for almost a DECADE. The guy has been featured on nearly every major U.S. news network from CNN to Fox News. This is not some "fairly anonymous guy". Anyone who watches/reads about the news has at least heard of this guy at least once. You have to be pretty ignorant to have not heard of him by this point, especially if you're posting in the video games section of a news site.
Steam is not a system only for the Half-Life series and mods. It also includes low, low, low end games like Bookworm which would be ported to cell phones if text entry wasn't so difficult and X-Com: TOTD was practically considered to be abandonware for almost half a decade (if you search around abandonware websites enough its still possible to find old DOS copies, it was originally released in 1996). The fact that the average level of system standards among Steam users has decreased since the first survey is nothing of interest. This is on par with Ford releasing a new line of low priced/budget cars and then announcing that the average price on all their cars being sold decreased since the 90's.
Seriously, anyone in any age group doesn't want a 'game' thats 'not fun'. The lower the age group, the lower the tolerance.