Neilson (of TV ratings fame) do stats on video games too. The enormous bulk of the market is in the 20-30 range, mostly male, although they noted that female players between 20-30 was the biggest "growth" area.
Video games aren't just for kids anymore.
I don't know why Blockbuster, EB, Best Buy, etc, cant segregate the games into kids section and regular. I mean, the movies are segregated by type/genre. Lord knows there's enough of them to group them like Action/Adventure, Roleplaying, Horror, Adult, Children.
I think a lot of the noise would go away if "Monsters, Inc" wasn't on the shelf right next to "Manhunt", but there will always be kooks.
It's about the developers right to produce whatever kind of game/story he wants, and my right to play whatever kind of game I want.
There are fun games that don't involve shooting. There are fun games that do.
If these guys had their way and got GTA et all banned, they'd come after the rest later.
I remember EA being slammed way back in the early 90s because there was fighting in their legendary NHL games for the Genesis/SNES. It promoted bad sportsmanship and taught kids the wrong things about hockey, blah blah.. The next year it was gone, the game sucked, the next year it was back.
So, yeah, the sports games are definately on their list. Especially something like NFL Blitz, NHL Hitz, or NBA Jam, because they all "glorify violence".
People complained about Donkey Kong back in the day. A game where you try to hurt an ape? How cruel!
They'll come for your precious Zelda, just as soon as the next time some kid loses an eye to a homemade slingshot or bow and arrow and they find a copy of Wind Waker in his gamecube.
And you've obviously never seen the sexually explicit cutscenes in Ms. Pac-Man.
These people are kooks, they hate everything electronic. There's no rationalizing with them.
It's now illegal to sell an M rated game to a minor in California, thanks to the Governator.
I mean, it's not like he'd actively try to hamper the sale of video games so that youngsters disposable income would be spent on his latest action flick.
To summarize: Arnold pretending to kill terrorists on the big screen, is A-OK. Nothing more american than Arnold Shwartzenegger. But me pretending to kill terrorists on the small screen, not OK.
Yes, this has hampered the industry. Dozens, hundreds, hell who knows how many projects have been cancelled or shelved for fear of some frivolous lawsuit. Thrill Kill being a "famous" example of a promising game being scrapped because of PC concerns.
See the douchebags vs Doom and douchebags vs Rockstar cases for more background.
When I was a kid it was Dungeons and Dragons and Judas Priest albums that were responsible for all the troubles of youth. I guess they fixed D&D and Priest.
Some article claims some guy asked some iPod owners if they might want a Mac.. Whoopty fucking do
Seriously, this isn't "news for nerds", this isn't "stuff that matters". This is "yay for Apple hoooray for iPods".
I'm impressed any of you have an iPod that works, considering you masturbate furiously every time its near you, I'd think it would be gummed up with dried zealot spooge.
I don't hate Apple, I just dont particularly see any reason to raise Apple above any other computer vendor. Whoopty do, they have their own incompatible architecture.
Apple is just Dell or Gateway that sell a different architecture. BFD. Where are all the Dell, Gateway and eMachines press releases?
THIS JUST IN!! PEOPLE WHO BUY A DELL TEND TO BUY ANOTHER DELL BECAUSE OF THE AWARD WINNING 24 HOUR TECH SUPPORT!
Re:TiVo's the killer
on
The VHS is Dead
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Tivo is 200 bucks + subscription, a VCR can be had for under 20. (Blah blah mail in rebates and other book-cooking scams not taken into account)
TiVo's not even in the same market.
VCRs stopped selling about the same time you saw DVD players for less than 40 bucks.
Hardly anyone ever used a VCR to tape shows, they used them to watch movies. It was always primarily a playback device to most people.
I now have a DVD player to replace the movie-watching functions, and never needed the "record Who's the Boss tonight at 8" feature.
The UKs largest retailer
on
The VHS is Dead
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
You mean Harrod's right? Harrod's is a piss ant compared to even some of the mid-sized box stores here in the states.
Best Buy, Circuit City, Walmart, K-Mart, etc, etc, all still stock VCRs.
They aren't completely dead, but of course they're slowly going the way of the LP or 8 Track.
There are still plenty of people with VHS-C based camcorders, and when said camcorder is only 50 bucks compared to a few hundred for the cheapest digital recorder, this will probably continue.
Are you saying that unless you can devote a whole lot of time to playing them, they aren't fun?
I can't be "whisked away" to the "enchanted world of warcraft" in a mere hour a week? You can't pop in, kill a couple of elves, have a couple of laughs, and leave?
Bear in mind that I would never give a fuck what level I am in relation to anyone else. I'd be in it just for the fun.
So, is the game simply not fun? Is it only about showing off your level (which equates time spent logged in) to others, or is there any actual gameplay?
I guess the thing to do "across the pond" is to back up all your harebrained political ideas with "the US can't do this!"
"Let's privatize radio because the US can't because the FCC doesn't have the authority! yuk yuk yuk!"
It's their version of "we're doing this to fight terrorists".
Simple minded people are so easily led around by hype.
I'm sure your privatized radio system will be a beacon of truth, democracy, and "raping citizenry up the ass while reaching into their pocket and take money straight out of their wallets".
Me, I like not having to pay for radio, and I like having access to the various stations and I sure as hell hope the FCC doesn't decide to sell it off and start a clusterfuck like with DTV.
More than half of all slashdot articles are thinly veiled advertisements.
Either it's a link to one of Apple's press releases, or to Roland Piquepilles blog, etc..
This is not really any different.
Why write a book on "easy to use linux"?
on
Point and Click Linux
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Every bit of information in it will be obsolete by the time the next build is out.
Why document linux/oss at all? There are so many inconsistencies between versions of all the major oss projects you may as well just keep starting from scratch.
No, IIRC, it's client-server . Everyone connects to XBL, and XBL basically hosts all the games.
That's why I can play a 16-player battle, with voice communication, in Halo 2 on XBox Live, when there's no way any of us could host such a thing on our normal connections.
It's also the reason I can play that 16 player game with people from Quebec, Texas, Alaska, etc, and not any lag problems.
Plus, XBL works through NAT and firewalls, I'm not sure how that would work P2P (previous slashdot articles notwithstanding)?
If it were P2P, there's no way Halo 2 would play as well as it does, because it's a friggin pig on XBConnect no matter who hosts.
Go look how many people are downloading stuff at supernova et al right now, this very instant.
Compare that to how many people are in the checkout line at the Best Buys and EB's right now.
People are mostly honest, and given the option of paying or stealing, most will pay.
I was in a little shop yesterday, the owner was in the back room when I showed up. He called out that he'd be with me in a minute. I had the place to myself, I easily could have taken what I wanted and left without paying. Yet I didn't, and it wasn't for fear of being caught (I wouldn't have been).
Best Buy is also where people go to pop open a box of $AWESOME_GAME, jot down the CD key, and go home and use it on their warezeded copy/post it on the intarweb.
Besides, I doubt your numbers. There really aren't that many pirates out there.
20,000 accounts? How many copies did they sell release day? How many million? And only 20,000 cracked ones turn up?
Hell, lets say they only sold a million copies, by their math, that's only 2% copies that are cracked. Of those, how many were warezed? Not that many, considering most of the half life 2 "releases" out there are non-working or hoaxes. Of the ones that were downloaded, how many are illegitemate? If the game CD I got in my box won't read properly, I might download a copy.
I watch the torrent sites and have seen the warez "scene", and it's not that big, not nearly as big as Da Man would have you believe.
The boxes at Best Buy that I saw had very little text on the outside.
In fact, they didn't even make mention of the fact that you're buying a disc full of useless random bits, and that you have to create a steam account decrypt it online to play at all.
Until you have both options available in your area you are stuck with high prices.
No they wont, ever. Two options is not any real competition in the market. Verizon and Comcast will slice the pie in half, and will collude to keep prices artificially high.
It works for nVidia/ATi, Intel/AMD, Coke/Pepsi, the handful of companies that make up the RIAA/MPAA, and even Republicans/Democrats. They maintain the illusion that it's a fair playing field full of competition when it's really just two guys teamed up to screw you.
It will never change, broadband will never get cheaper in America. Comcast and Verizon will meet and agree that "high speed" will never be offered for less than 40 bucks a month.
It happens all the time, and noone gets too bothered about it. And it's only marginally illegal, and nearly impossible to prove.
Slashdot Mirror
Neilson (of TV ratings fame) do stats on video games too. The enormous bulk of the market is in the 20-30 range, mostly male, although they noted that female players between 20-30 was the biggest "growth" area.
Video games aren't just for kids anymore.
I don't know why Blockbuster, EB, Best Buy, etc, cant segregate the games into kids section and regular. I mean, the movies are segregated by type/genre. Lord knows there's enough of them to group them like Action/Adventure, Roleplaying, Horror, Adult, Children.
I think a lot of the noise would go away if "Monsters, Inc" wasn't on the shelf right next to "Manhunt", but there will always be kooks.
So what?
It's about the developers right to produce whatever kind of game/story he wants, and my right to play whatever kind of game I want.
There are fun games that don't involve shooting. There are fun games that do.
If these guys had their way and got GTA et all banned, they'd come after the rest later.
I remember EA being slammed way back in the early 90s because there was fighting in their legendary NHL games for the Genesis/SNES. It promoted bad sportsmanship and taught kids the wrong things about hockey, blah blah.. The next year it was gone, the game sucked, the next year it was back.
So, yeah, the sports games are definately on their list. Especially something like NFL Blitz, NHL Hitz, or NBA Jam, because they all "glorify violence".
People complained about Donkey Kong back in the day. A game where you try to hurt an ape? How cruel!
They'll come for your precious Zelda, just as soon as the next time some kid loses an eye to a homemade slingshot or bow and arrow and they find a copy of Wind Waker in his gamecube.
And you've obviously never seen the sexually explicit cutscenes in Ms. Pac-Man.
These people are kooks, they hate everything electronic. There's no rationalizing with them.
It's now illegal to sell an M rated game to a minor in California, thanks to the Governator.
I mean, it's not like he'd actively try to hamper the sale of video games so that youngsters disposable income would be spent on his latest action flick.
To summarize: Arnold pretending to kill terrorists on the big screen, is A-OK. Nothing more american than Arnold Shwartzenegger. But me pretending to kill terrorists on the small screen, not OK.
Yes, this has hampered the industry. Dozens, hundreds, hell who knows how many projects have been cancelled or shelved for fear of some frivolous lawsuit. Thrill Kill being a "famous" example of a promising game being scrapped because of PC concerns.
See the douchebags vs Doom and douchebags vs Rockstar cases for more background.
When I was a kid it was Dungeons and Dragons and Judas Priest albums that were responsible for all the troubles of youth. I guess they fixed D&D and Priest.
seriously.
Some article claims some guy asked some iPod owners if they might want a Mac.. Whoopty fucking do
Seriously, this isn't "news for nerds", this isn't "stuff that matters". This is "yay for Apple hoooray for iPods".
I'm impressed any of you have an iPod that works, considering you masturbate furiously every time its near you, I'd think it would be gummed up with dried zealot spooge.
I don't hate Apple, I just dont particularly see any reason to raise Apple above any other computer vendor. Whoopty do, they have their own incompatible architecture.
Apple is just Dell or Gateway that sell a different architecture. BFD. Where are all the Dell, Gateway and eMachines press releases?
THIS JUST IN!! PEOPLE WHO BUY A DELL TEND TO BUY ANOTHER DELL BECAUSE OF THE AWARD WINNING 24 HOUR TECH SUPPORT!
Tivo is 200 bucks + subscription, a VCR can be had for under 20. (Blah blah mail in rebates and other book-cooking scams not taken into account)
TiVo's not even in the same market.
VCRs stopped selling about the same time you saw DVD players for less than 40 bucks.
Hardly anyone ever used a VCR to tape shows, they used them to watch movies. It was always primarily a playback device to most people.
I now have a DVD player to replace the movie-watching functions, and never needed the "record Who's the Boss tonight at 8" feature.
You mean Harrod's right? Harrod's is a piss ant compared to even some of the mid-sized box stores here in the states.
Best Buy, Circuit City, Walmart, K-Mart, etc, etc, all still stock VCRs.
They aren't completely dead, but of course they're slowly going the way of the LP or 8 Track.
There are still plenty of people with VHS-C based camcorders, and when said camcorder is only 50 bucks compared to a few hundred for the cheapest digital recorder, this will probably continue.
Why not?
Are you saying that unless you can devote a whole lot of time to playing them, they aren't fun?
I can't be "whisked away" to the "enchanted world of warcraft" in a mere hour a week? You can't pop in, kill a couple of elves, have a couple of laughs, and leave?
Bear in mind that I would never give a fuck what level I am in relation to anyone else. I'd be in it just for the fun.
So, is the game simply not fun? Is it only about showing off your level (which equates time spent logged in) to others, or is there any actual gameplay?
I guess the thing to do "across the pond" is to back up all your harebrained political ideas with "the US can't do this!"
"Let's privatize radio because the US can't because the FCC doesn't have the authority! yuk yuk yuk!"
It's their version of "we're doing this to fight terrorists".
Simple minded people are so easily led around by hype.
I'm sure your privatized radio system will be a beacon of truth, democracy, and "raping citizenry up the ass while reaching into their pocket and take money straight out of their wallets".
Me, I like not having to pay for radio, and I like having access to the various stations and I sure as hell hope the FCC doesn't decide to sell it off and start a clusterfuck like with DTV.
More than half of all slashdot articles are thinly veiled advertisements.
Either it's a link to one of Apple's press releases, or to Roland Piquepilles blog, etc..
This is not really any different.
Every bit of information in it will be obsolete by the time the next build is out.
Why document linux/oss at all? There are so many inconsistencies between versions of all the major oss projects you may as well just keep starting from scratch.
No, it doesn't work that way.
Each card renders half of the same image. So each card needs access to the full texture set.
So 2x256 cards still only gives you 256 megs for your textures.
Scan Line Interleaving.
Two video cards, one draws all the even scan lines for the final display, and one draws all the odd ones.
Yes, I know exactly what kind of infrastructure is involved.
I also know how fat game publishers like their profit margins to be.
It's expensive, sure, but not ($60 + ($15 x months)) x (1 million subscribers) expensive.
Maybe I'm wrong, and if I am, I really want to see this mammoth supercomputer that costs 15 million a month to operate.
No, IIRC, it's client-server . Everyone connects to XBL, and XBL basically hosts all the games.
That's why I can play a 16-player battle, with voice communication, in Halo 2 on XBox Live, when there's no way any of us could host such a thing on our normal connections.
It's also the reason I can play that 16 player game with people from Quebec, Texas, Alaska, etc, and not any lag problems.
Plus, XBL works through NAT and firewalls, I'm not sure how that would work P2P (previous slashdot articles notwithstanding)?
If it were P2P, there's no way Halo 2 would play as well as it does, because it's a friggin pig on XBConnect no matter who hosts.
Countless hours?
/3 hours of playing = 5 dollars an hour, which is the going rate your mom charges.
I can count them easily. In a given 30 day month, I'll probably get about 3 hours to sit and play games.
15 bucks a month
So, you're right. WoW is really cheap, as cheap as your mom.
Can one not consider them all overly expensive?
Especially when you fork out 60 bucks for the game in the first place.
Why can MSFT pull off XBox Live for 50 bucks a year, but the MMOG guys can't do it for much less than 20 bucks a month?
XBL no doubt sucks more bandwidth and does a shitload of backend work.
Too bad gentoo doesn't work, and typing "emerge -uD world" is often a death sentence for your box.
Go look how many people are downloading stuff at supernova et al right now, this very instant.
Compare that to how many people are in the checkout line at the Best Buys and EB's right now.
People are mostly honest, and given the option of paying or stealing, most will pay.
I was in a little shop yesterday, the owner was in the back room when I showed up. He called out that he'd be with me in a minute. I had the place to myself, I easily could have taken what I wanted and left without paying. Yet I didn't, and it wasn't for fear of being caught (I wouldn't have been).
Most people just aren't douchebags.
UDP transfers are about being anonymous, and hiding the senders IP, so we can be free to trade warez again without getting caught.
Best Buy is also where people go to pop open a box of $AWESOME_GAME, jot down the CD key, and go home and use it on their warezeded copy/post it on the intarweb.
Those CD checks are law and circumventing them violates the DMCA.
End of story. Doesn't matter if you like it or not.
Anyone who supports Valve and Steam is an idiot, IMO.
The game isn't even all that great.
Completely irrelevant.
Besides, I doubt your numbers. There really aren't that many pirates out there.
20,000 accounts? How many copies did they sell release day? How many million? And only 20,000 cracked ones turn up?
Hell, lets say they only sold a million copies, by their math, that's only 2% copies that are cracked. Of those, how many were warezed? Not that many, considering most of the half life 2 "releases" out there are non-working or hoaxes. Of the ones that were downloaded, how many are illegitemate? If the game CD I got in my box won't read properly, I might download a copy.
I watch the torrent sites and have seen the warez "scene", and it's not that big, not nearly as big as Da Man would have you believe.
But what about people who buy it in retail?
The boxes at Best Buy that I saw had very little text on the outside.
In fact, they didn't even make mention of the fact that you're buying a disc full of useless random bits, and that you have to create a steam account decrypt it online to play at all.
It wasn't about the children, it was about protecting their own asses when they advertised the wrong URL.
BigPond and the paper in question are both owned and operated by Telstra, IIRC.
Until you have both options available in your area you are stuck with high prices.
No they wont, ever. Two options is not any real competition in the market. Verizon and Comcast will slice the pie in half, and will collude to keep prices artificially high.
It works for nVidia/ATi, Intel/AMD, Coke/Pepsi, the handful of companies that make up the RIAA/MPAA, and even Republicans/Democrats. They maintain the illusion that it's a fair playing field full of competition when it's really just two guys teamed up to screw you.
It will never change, broadband will never get cheaper in America. Comcast and Verizon will meet and agree that "high speed" will never be offered for less than 40 bucks a month.
It happens all the time, and noone gets too bothered about it. And it's only marginally illegal, and nearly impossible to prove.