Why do people keep going back to SMB3? It only outsold SMB1 in North America, and the North American record was broken by Final Fantasy VII (and Ocarena of Time for those who look only at Nintendo sales records).
In North America, SMB1 outsold SMB3 by far, 40 million vs 18 million. Zelda:OoT only sold 3.57 million in the US (ok, so only isn't the right word except in comparison to a handful of Mario titles). FFVII sold 2.45 million in the US.
Worldwide I'm fairly sure Pokemon beats the lot of them, but it depends on whether you split them into versions or not (which is a debate in and of itself, since there are people who own both the near identical red and blue versions).
Red and Blue combined in the US is 9.85 million, but the US charts have always split the Pokemon versions. In Japan the individual Pokemon games come close to outselling SMB3, and the combined versions come close to outselling SMB1, but then SMB3 only sold 3.84 million (still a huge number of sales for Japan) and SMB1 6.28 million. FFVII sold 3.28 million copies in Japan, and OoT sold 1.45 million.
I think you'll find that the games that come closest in the US to SMB3 are GTA3, GTA:VC, and Mario 64. Pokemon Yellow, Pokemon Blue, and Goldeneye are the only other titles on the list over 5 million.
Microsoft on the other hand has to contend with all these disperent companies who wouldn't be too keen to letting each other have a look at the insides of their hardware...
Fortunately for Microsoft, they're not dealing with as many companies as people seem to think they are. Sure, nVidia and Intel aren't going to swap specs so that one or the other can build an integrated CPU/GPU, but they don't really need to in order for Microsoft to save money, because Microsoft would still be paying Intel and nVidia the same amount. In fact, nVidia claimed that they were losing money on the XBox because of some problems where Microsoft wasn't buying parts from them as quickly as they had scheduled production.
Also, unless Microsoft has set up its own fab plant, Intel is running a line of celerons just for Xboxes. Likewise, Nvidia has to put manufacturing capacity aside to make video cards for Xboxes. I don't see either of those companies negoiating a lower contract to continue to build an antiquated product...
nVidia and Intel both have fixed price contracts as far as I know, but Microsoft doesn't pay for a part until it's delivered to them. nVidia's building the entire motherboard, GPU, and sound processor, too, not just the video card. nVidia then turned around and leveraged the technology for the GeForce 3 line and the nForce line, which is pretty much the only way they made any money from the deal. The Intel chip is a special line anyway, as it's been modified to the specs MS and nVidia came up with to optimize performance for games, so Intel can't just shovel whatever chips they didn't ship from that era over to MS, either.
In the end, though, MS has come up with ways to reduce the cost on the assembly end. They still have the problem of Intel and nVidia being at fairly fixed prices, but they may have learned their lesson on that one. Notice that the official releases regarding the deal with IBM on the next XBox don't mention IBM actually producing chips, but rather Microsoft licensing technology. MS is currently limited in how much they can cut their costs, and they still will be in the future because they are licensing technology, but not to the extent they are now as they are buying hardware (at fixed cost afaik).
Sony has none of those problems. In fact it could be argued that it goes the otherway for Sony. As Sony works to create a more integrated PS2, that know how gets used to integrate other products in the Sony line and visa versa.
This is true, but it still costs Sony money to change their production lines for the updated (cheaper) chips. They have to weigh the costs against the gains, and I'm sure they only change the chips when they stand to make significant amounts of money off of it. At the same time, this whole concept is what allowed them to do PS1 compatibility, and now that they've reduced the PS2 functions outside the PS1 chip to a single chip, they can possibly do it again on the PS3 (and are currently using the single-chip design in the PSX afaik). On the other hand, there have been rumours that the next XBox may have to emulate the XBox hardware in order to successfully play XBox games. While this would result in lower hardware costs, to some degree, it would also result in a significant investment on the front end to produce the emulation.
SMB3 was bundled with hardware! When I got my NES (circa 1991), it came with SMB3 and SMB All Stars.
SMB All Stars wasn't even on the NES. Even if SMB All Stars was bundled with the SNES, the SMB3 sales do not include sales of SMB All Stars (any more than the SMB1 or SMB2 sales do). Super Mario World was the game originally bundled with the SNES iirc.
The numbers come from http://www.ownt.com/qtakes/2003/gamestats/gamestat s.shtm
which may or may not be reliable, as they claim they're from gamestate, but I can't confirm that. Finding sources for game sales, especially to compare over these time periods, tends to be fairly hard. It's also quite possible that those sales are only North America. Overall, though, SMB3 only comes out as the top seller if you don't count games that were bundled, and a quick search brought up another site that references this: http://www.madison.com/captimes/business/st ories/6 0159.php which also confirms the numbers being fairly accurate, especially mentioning SMB1 and Tetris.
Actually, SMB3 is only the best-selling game never bundled with hardware, so, technically, Solitaire doesn't count unless you also count SMB1, which sold over twice as many copies (40 million) as SMB3 (18 million), and Tetris for GameBoy, which sold just under twice as many copies (33 million) as SMB3. Still, Nintendo has the top 6 and 5 of them are Super Mario titles, and #8 is SMB2 (The Sims snuck in there at #7).
Frankly, I think if I'm going to buy a PC-console hybrid, it'll be the ApeXtreme, since that at least will let me use the games I already have and not require me to be signed into the mothership.
Granted, the grandparent is barking up the wrong tree, but the point is still valid. Why general language mistakes are so funny are beyond my comprehension. Some are funny, but most are just plain, normal bad language.
I think the main reason the Japanese (and many other Asians) get hit with this is because their native language is missing entire concepts required for English, and it leads to particularly odd sentences from time to time. In the end, though, most intelligent people will at least give them credit for trying, and will either mildly correct them (as opposed to ridiculing them) or let it pass. Most of the people from Japan I've met that are learning English are happy to have a little help now and then with a language that makes absolutely no sense to them at times, but no one likes to be treated like an idiot.
The things which is forbidden is not to have a monopoly and do things to keep it, but to use it in an unfair way to gain over competitors in other markets.
I'm not sure what EU law is on the matter, but US law states that it is illegal to do certain things to maintain a monopoly, and, in fact, these were the easiest things to prove against Microsoft in it's antitrust case (and most of those which they were found guilty of have supposedly been remedied, or at least are remedied if Microsoft does what they were told to do by the court).
It's not just about pushing your way into other markets, but also about preventing people from entering your market. This is why Apple was ruled out as a competitor in the OS market, because the hardware platforms are themselves a barrier preventing consumers from switching from an MS OS to an Apple OS (of course, this completely ignores the fact that many (if not most) consumers simply buy a new computer instead of upgrading, but I'm not the one that made the ruling).
DeBeers has done quite a bit to prevent other people from entering the diamond market, including threatening to flood the market if someone else enters, thereby reducing the price of diamonds and (hopefully from DeBeers' standpoint) make the market unprofitable for others. Once the other company goes out of business, supplies get choked off again and the prices gradually return to previous levels.
What exactly qualifies as "making it" for these guys? By their measurements the only systems that ever "made it" were the GBA and gameboy. The latter being 10+ years old, which is a phenomenon in itself, and the former just happening to be the only handheld currently available in the US. (That Ngage thing is not real).;)
Maybe being successful enough for the company to be willing to expend more money in the market before discontinuing the product? I only knew one person with a GameGear, and one person (other than myself) with a Lynx. Bandai (WonderSwan) for one reason or another gave up when the GBA came out.
I was never particularly fond of the GameBoy, and the GBA-SP is the first handheld I really think Nintendo's done a good job on, but I've at least been able to admit that no one, for one reason or another, has been able to compete with them, yet.
The DS was announced to us a week ago, selected developers get early word and SDK's for NextGen devices like the DS,XBOX2,PS3 and the PSP (under NDA's of course) sometimes 2 years before its release (as soon as its greenlighted), how much time do you think it takes to design, manufacture and release a device like this? the DS prototype has been sitting in Nintendo labs for some years now.
And the PSP was announced to us how long ago? The PS3? Assuming that you're right (and I actually believe you are mostly right), the PSP has had that much more time in the view of developers, and, being a less unusual device, is much easier to make a decision on.
However the public response to the DS has been mostly negative specially compared to the PSP, and thats the reason why some companies (like EA) are backing off.
Nintendo, on the other hand, said a few weeks before the release of any information that they expected mixed reactions, which I would take to mean that they got mixed reactions from developers, as well. They believe that they will be able to demonstrate the usefulness of the setup and are going ahead with expectations of low-key reactions at least for the first wave of titles, and a later uptake as developers and users understand what they are trying to do with the system.
I'd have to say that they deserve at least enough of a break on this to let them show us something before we make a decision, but everyone makes their own decisions, regardless of how informed their decisions may be, so be it.
All of that being said, I actually think that Sony's been releasing information to the public quite a bit earlier than anyone else about their new products. PS3 information was available within weeks of the North American PS2 launch, and PSP information was released with as much info available about it as there is about the DS now, and even to this date we've only seen concept drawings of the PSP. I wonder if either company will have hardware to show at E3 this year.
I think the difference is from the fact that it was released much earlier in the UK (late autumn?) rather than just before Christmas in the US and so the sales built Joementum*. *Your American politicians are funny.
Funny, I hadn't even heard that until you mentioned it. I guess I don't watch CNN enough, or maybe it's simply because the primaries have been on TV 24/7 for 3 weeks and I stopped caring who the Democrats nominate.
In fact both Eye Toy:Play and EyeToy:groove and still in the top ten. http://www.elspa.co.uk/about/charts/charts.a sp?d=2 0040124&chartType=17
Just to clarify, it's the top 10 for PS2 (and that link doesn't work for me). Play is #9 overall (and I still find it funny that the UK charts can't filter out Norton Internet Security (and Office and Anti-virus if you check the PC list)), and Groove doesn't show up in the top 20.
I've always wondered why so many charts don't show the unit or sales numbers, but then at least the UK and Japanese charts are usually fairly easy to find up-to-date. The best I can find for North America is from last month.
It also helps to consider that the game press goes through the same cycle with every generation of consoles (at least since I started paying attention about 15 years ago). At a certain point in a console's lifetime, developers start putting out some really strong titles on the platform, really taking advantage of what it can offer, while on the PC side you continue to get games developed for the highest spec machine the developer thinks everyone has, which is usually something about 4 years old. Only a handful of developers bother to develop for what is top-of-the-line when they start the project (thereby assuring that the hardware is 2+ years old by the time the game is on the shelves), so most of the games that come out for PCs look worse than what is available on the consoles (note that the amount of RAM on current video cards has made a difference with this in the current console generation, but with most ports coming from the console to PC rather than from the PC to console, it isn't as obvious as it was in the past that the PC is capable of being a superior platform).
When the consoles start showing their age, the PC games pick back up, or the lesser known (or independent) developers on the PC side pick up the slack left by the major publishers running for the money on consoles. PC gaming picks back up for a year or two, the new consoles come out with games that are about the same level as the PC games, the console developers take advantage of the system again, and the cycle comes back around.
When the PC games start booming again, the publishers will simply buy up any developers that do well in the first wave. Then, when the consoles start picking up again, they'll start dismantling studios that don't want to work on console games.
we haven't been playing anything but Command and Conquer Generals for the past 2 or 3 months. And we haven't got the expansion pack yet. Its a hell of a lot of fun with 3-4 people on a LAN. (although the LAN lobby server code must have been written by a blind rabbit with its paws tied behind its back, its so flakey)
Get the expansion, seriously. Overall, C&C:Generals has the best skirmish mode (and probably multiplayer given the skirmish, but I haven't played it multiplayer) of any C&C game, and easily ranks among the top RTS games in this aspect. The single player campaigns? No clue, haven't played them, and I've had the game since about 2 months before the expansion.
I was pretty severely disappointed with the previous 2 C&C games (especially compared to the first 2), but I've put in nearly as much time with Generals as I did with the original, and Zero Hour seemed shallow at first, but added a great deal of depth to the game (though I do agree that it's quite obvious that Zero Hour is more or less what they intended the game to be in the first place, why call it Generals without the generals?).
That is, all the widely available ones. Cheaters who keep their hacks private are unlikely to ever be detected unless fingered with the PB screenshot facility.
If Half-Life set any example for the cheating community, the cheaters will start (or already have) releasing the source to the cheats, which essentially puts a lot of custom cheats out there. Hopefully PB's adjusted their detection (and screenshot) methods significantly in the last couple of years to make it a lot harder for cheaters to bypass it.
CAD work is all about distances and areas. It will help you adjust to the tools somewhat, but Level design is all about the feel and exact measurements don't matter too much. Nobody cares if your door is 6'8" or 7' really. You can stretch the texture to fit in a way that you just can't stretch a door.
You're right to a degree, but even CAD work can have elements of design to it that aren't just about measuring the space. Games tend to deal in units equivalent to the height of the standard player character (or half the height in the cases I've experienced), so instead of working in feet or inches you're working mostly in ~3' units. Still, if your door is only 3' tall, your players are going to have to duck to get through it, and you'd better hope that you planned for that in the dynamics of the level.
Yes, there are more considerations in level design, such as game balance, the level of detail and number of polygons in an area (you can use more detail and polygons in a single-player level than in multiplayer, for instance, because you can better control how much is on the screen at one time in single player), the pace that people go through an area, and so on.
In CAD your considerations are function first, implementing a design that satisfies your customer. These things can move over to level design perfectly well, and if you can use AutoCAD, for instance, you can probably find your way through almost any level design software. You won't necessarily be a good level designer just because you can design a warehouse or office space in a CAD program, but it doesn't hurt if you can design a level in AutoCAD and use the available converters to port it into most available games (I just double-checked because it's been quite a while before I messed with a level editor, but there are tools available for Quake, Half-Life, and Unreal (multiple versions of Quake and Unreal) to convert AutoCAD drawings into formats native to their respective map editing tools). Still, any developer looking for level designers is going to be looking for people with at least some familiarity with their tools, so the bulk of the work you show them should be in their tools. The rest just doesn't hurt if your designs are good.
Don't be fooled, there is a lot of overhead in these subscription based games that eat away your profit. In fact, as with all other genres, only the top selling MMORPGs make any money at all.
Of course, that's what they keep saying, but every developer out there that can do the math realizes that the subscription fees alone are the equivalent of selling 3-4 games per year to every subscriber, which is why the MMO games that make good money make most of their money from users that spend more than 6 months as subscribers.
With good management and a solid team, you make your initial costs back right away, and the more bandwidth you buy, the less it costs per user, so of course the more users you have, the more you make per user. The only time they lose money on an MMO game is when they have significant launch problems and/or low sales (don't recoup cost of initial development), and they have to maintain the servers for a certain amount of time regardless of whether or not they have enough people playing to justify it.
The cost of maintaining the servers, supporting the users, and developing new content is significantly less than the cost of developing 3 or 4 more games, yet they bring in that $10-15 per month per user, or $120-180 per year per user. If you can afford to secure the bandwidth for several thousand users at the start, you'll find that it costs significantly less than $5/user for that portion of the costs. Support costs go down over time, not only because bugs are fixed, but also because bugs are found, categorized, and added to the support scripts. To add content, you don't need a team the size of the original development team, you simply need artists and coders that understand whatever system your game has for adding that content and are familiar with the world you're trying to create.
Beyond all of that, if an MMO game were made with a smaller number of players in mind, and managed properly to meet the budget that would require, it could be quite profitable, as long as it didn't have an explosion in player numbers (at that point it might fall on it's face if the developers are unprepared to expand capacity, and it's much more expensive to expand capacity than to build for it from the start).
That's a myth. It worked for Everquest and a few other games, but the bottom line is that people don't want to buy a $50 game and then pay monthly fees to keep playing. And even if they do for one game, it's not something they'll do for every or even most games they buy.
Actually, the myth is that the software is loss-leading. The only way the software is loss-leading is if they don't get enough initial purchases to cover the costs, and the development and setup budgets are based on projected sales, not on making up development costs in subscriptions. The subscriptions go to maintenance and bandwidth, then profit, and the reason so many MMO games come out each year, now, is that the profit potential is huge, and with enough buzz the risk is equal to or less than development of standard games.
Most level design positions will accept portfolios from a variety of games/toolsets. They want to see what the applicant can do with what he has and what he can do that stands out from everyone else.
Additionally, even work done with standard architectural programs would most likely be applicable to level design. It helps to have a good base of material developed in tools specific to the developers you're applying to, but work in a variety of tools is usually just as applicable, because the tools don't tend to stay the same across different games (though variations may only be minor over a period of 2 years, eventually there's a major overhaul).
I don't let my kids have video games because (my son at least) would spend all his time playing it (or I'd spend all my time fighting with them over playing time).
I hope you don't let them have televisions, then, because at least their brains are active while they're playing a game, whereas brain activity while watching television is lower than while sleeping.
However, if the games made the kids get up and move, I might reconsider. First, because they'd get some exercise, Second, because they'd get tired and do something else, instead of spending hours in trance-land.
It could until they figured out how to cheat it, which would allow them to minimize their effort. Something else to consider would be DDR, as stated in an article sometime last week, though dance pads could get expensive. At the very least, there are features in many of the DDR games geared specifically towards exercise.
The other reason for the difference in sales is that it was out for quite some time in Europe before it was released in the US, and though it's been selling well in the US, it isn't selling as quickly as it did in Europe.
It doesn't appear to be on any of the Japanese charts, yet, so either it's not selling there yet or it's not selling well.
this is not something that Lieberman grabbed a hold of because he thought it sounded good. He's been on this theme for quite a while. You see, there are some people who actually stick to their guns regardless of who they upset. I think it's actually refreshing to see so many Democratic thinkers getting mad at this. It shows that he hasn't sold out again like he did in '00.
I agree that it's definitely not something he just decided would look good this year, he's been banging the drum for over a decade. What I was trying to point out, though, is that his statements on the issue have significantly less of an edge to them when he's trying to get elected. He shifts himself very much to a more moderate stance when he's looking for election, even if he's still willing to talk about how bad music, movies, TV, and games are for everyone's kids. He simply doesn't go into the world of calling it a "culture of carnage" and blaming Marilyn Manson for some kid's suicide in an election year.
Onimusha Tactics is very linear and is a bit easy at the start (it gets harder, though). It holds a lot in common with FFTA and Tactics Ogre, especially in the layout of the maps, but is fairly different in the story and the various abilities the characters have. Additionally, there's a system for upgrading weapons and armour in Onimusha Tactics that's fairly straight-forward and helps a great deal in advancing particular characters.
That's all assuming I'm not getting Onimusha Tactics and Tactics Ogre confused in my head, as I was playing them concurrently for quite a while. They're both definitely worth picking up for fans of the genre, though.
Must have good apprecation of Apple's design practices and be able to provide a half-an-hour lecture on why its market share is so low.
You forgot the next part:...including the products that the applicant has never worked with, or the products not yet released by Apple.;)
Another one, though probably only for a signing bonus: Must be able to extoll the virtues of Linux to any casual listener. ...and explain how Microsoft stole code from BSD.
Those types of things are fine, and probably can and should be done, but in the end require a lot of the more costly portions of a software business to be in place. It's not just about the time developing the software (which may be a big portion for this market), but also the funding and marketing.
With niche markets you can sometimes get companies that are willing to fund a project based on a pitch and a demo. Small companies are just as likely to do this sort of thing as larger companies, and more likely to take a chance on a small startup with no real history (though everyone will probably want resumes of the people that will actually be doing the work for the sake of making sure that you actually have the capability to do what you say you'll do). If a company wants some way to sort their email in a particular manner in Outlook or connect Outlook to Excel and doesn't really have an IT department that can write macros for them or any coders on staff to handle some simple VBScript (or anyone they can afford to pay to do something as simple), they may pay a small amount for a quick project that you can leverage to other companies or use in a larger project (just make sure anything you might sign still maintains your right to do so). They may need something bigger than that, like a database and front-end for their inventory and tracking system that just isn't big enough for the larger, more expensive companies to handle. A little project done well may be enough to lead to bigger projects down the line, either from the same company or from other companies they work with.
With broad markets you may not be able to get any funding (you'd need something more like venture capital, someone (or multiple people) willing to put in money on the idea for a share of the profits or control of the company), and even when you do you'll have to find a way to get your product to your market, as well as letting your market know your product is there.
Personally, over the last 5 years, despite working for a rather large company rather than working for myself, I've managed to expand our oppurtunities simply by building on the simple projects I started out with. Now we're getting to a point at which we're building software to do things that weren't possible before rather than simply to augment or replace existing software that we had no control over (and that the company that supplied the software had no stake in). The development cycles get longer as the scope of the projects get larger (and many small projects have turned into larger projects over time as more functionality was requested by the customers), but the funding increases as well to reflect the difference in size as well as the potential earnings. On the other hand, the software I'm writing isn't something that Microsoft would come in and write, simply because the market is very small, and the knowledge required tends to come most readily from within the industry (certainly not a software-driven industry, but rather one that is coming more and more to terms with how it can leverage software to improve it's products and services). Many of the people that really have the knowledge required aren't software people at all, so it takes people familiar with the industry to be brought together with people familiar with software to really get things moving. People in industries like biotech and other areas should be fairly familiar with the idea that people with little to no software development experience learn something like perl to get a job done more quickly. Now imagine what happens if you bring a software developer into that environment that's willing to learn enough about the industry, or at least the particular project (on a project-by-project basis) to move the more complex ideas those people (the guys hacking together perl scripts from vague ideas of how perl works) have into the realm of actual tools they can use comfortably. Those are the kinds of areas where many companies could use small development houses that can come in and help them out with small projects, and the people doing the software could stand to make some good money that way, if they are there when these industries look for them.
Could you people just put on your marketing hat for a few seconds?
That wasn't the point, though. Sure, someone that's been looking at flash-based players might see the Mini iPod as a good deal, or any of the other devices using 1" 4GB drives, for that matter. To the tech people, though, it looks like a rip-off when you can have a 15GB drive for $50 more. Of course, 6-12 months ago the same people were saying the iPod was a rip-off anyway, because you could get hard drive-based players from other companies for less.
It doesn't really matter what market they're going for, it's obviously not those people. It's not me, either, because I'm not going to spend $500 for a player that can't hold all of my music (40GB? Not nearly enough). I wouldn't even spend $500 for a player that *could* hold all of my music, yet at one time I was considering spending much more for a player that could hold all of my music and fit in my car, but now I could probably get a CD-based player for my car that reads MP3s from CD-Rs, which would be perfectly fine for my car if it had good enough skip protection.
Marketing hats are fine, but everyone (including the people commenting they don't want one, which also includes myself) needs to realize that Apple's aiming at 20% of the market they don't already have, and that still leaves ~40% of the market that Apple's not reaching for one reason or another. In another year or two Apple may look towards picking up another 20%, but for each chunk of the market they bring in, they have to spend more to bring in another chunk of the same size, so eventually they'll stop trying to bring in more of the market and continue to ignore some percentage of possible users.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do people keep going back to SMB3? It only outsold SMB1 in North America, and the North American record was broken by Final Fantasy VII (and Ocarena of Time for those who look only at Nintendo sales records).
In North America, SMB1 outsold SMB3 by far, 40 million vs 18 million. Zelda:OoT only sold 3.57 million in the US (ok, so only isn't the right word except in comparison to a handful of Mario titles). FFVII sold 2.45 million in the US.
Worldwide I'm fairly sure Pokemon beats the lot of them, but it depends on whether you split them into versions or not (which is a debate in and of itself, since there are people who own both the near identical red and blue versions).
Red and Blue combined in the US is 9.85 million, but the US charts have always split the Pokemon versions. In Japan the individual Pokemon games come close to outselling SMB3, and the combined versions come close to outselling SMB1, but then SMB3 only sold 3.84 million (still a huge number of sales for Japan) and SMB1 6.28 million. FFVII sold 3.28 million copies in Japan, and OoT sold 1.45 million.
Japanese Platinum Charts
US Platinum Charts (doesn't go back to NES games unfortunately).
I think you'll find that the games that come closest in the US to SMB3 are GTA3, GTA:VC, and Mario 64. Pokemon Yellow, Pokemon Blue, and Goldeneye are the only other titles on the list over 5 million.
Microsoft on the other hand has to contend with all these disperent companies who wouldn't be too keen to letting each other have a look at the insides of their hardware...
Fortunately for Microsoft, they're not dealing with as many companies as people seem to think they are. Sure, nVidia and Intel aren't going to swap specs so that one or the other can build an integrated CPU/GPU, but they don't really need to in order for Microsoft to save money, because Microsoft would still be paying Intel and nVidia the same amount. In fact, nVidia claimed that they were losing money on the XBox because of some problems where Microsoft wasn't buying parts from them as quickly as they had scheduled production.
Also, unless Microsoft has set up its own fab plant, Intel is running a line of celerons just for Xboxes. Likewise, Nvidia has to put manufacturing capacity aside to make video cards for Xboxes. I don't see either of those companies negoiating a lower contract to continue to build an antiquated product...
nVidia and Intel both have fixed price contracts as far as I know, but Microsoft doesn't pay for a part until it's delivered to them. nVidia's building the entire motherboard, GPU, and sound processor, too, not just the video card. nVidia then turned around and leveraged the technology for the GeForce 3 line and the nForce line, which is pretty much the only way they made any money from the deal. The Intel chip is a special line anyway, as it's been modified to the specs MS and nVidia came up with to optimize performance for games, so Intel can't just shovel whatever chips they didn't ship from that era over to MS, either.
In the end, though, MS has come up with ways to reduce the cost on the assembly end. They still have the problem of Intel and nVidia being at fairly fixed prices, but they may have learned their lesson on that one. Notice that the official releases regarding the deal with IBM on the next XBox don't mention IBM actually producing chips, but rather Microsoft licensing technology. MS is currently limited in how much they can cut their costs, and they still will be in the future because they are licensing technology, but not to the extent they are now as they are buying hardware (at fixed cost afaik).
Sony has none of those problems. In fact it could be argued that it goes the otherway for Sony. As Sony works to create a more integrated PS2, that know how gets used to integrate other products in the Sony line and visa versa.
This is true, but it still costs Sony money to change their production lines for the updated (cheaper) chips. They have to weigh the costs against the gains, and I'm sure they only change the chips when they stand to make significant amounts of money off of it. At the same time, this whole concept is what allowed them to do PS1 compatibility, and now that they've reduced the PS2 functions outside the PS1 chip to a single chip, they can possibly do it again on the PS3 (and are currently using the single-chip design in the PSX afaik). On the other hand, there have been rumours that the next XBox may have to emulate the XBox hardware in order to successfully play XBox games. While this would result in lower hardware costs, to some degree, it would also result in a significant investment on the front end to produce the emulation.
SMB3 was bundled with hardware! When I got my NES (circa 1991), it came with SMB3 and SMB All Stars.
SMB All Stars wasn't even on the NES. Even if SMB All Stars was bundled with the SNES, the SMB3 sales do not include sales of SMB All Stars (any more than the SMB1 or SMB2 sales do). Super Mario World was the game originally bundled with the SNES iirc.
The numbers come from http://www.ownt.com/qtakes/2003/gamestats/gamestat s.shtm
t ories/6 0159.php
which may or may not be reliable, as they claim they're from gamestate, but I can't confirm that. Finding sources for game sales, especially to compare over these time periods, tends to be fairly hard. It's also quite possible that those sales are only North America. Overall, though, SMB3 only comes out as the top seller if you don't count games that were bundled, and a quick search brought up another site that references this:
http://www.madison.com/captimes/business/s
which also confirms the numbers being fairly accurate, especially mentioning SMB1 and Tetris.
Actually, SMB3 is only the best-selling game never bundled with hardware, so, technically, Solitaire doesn't count unless you also count SMB1, which sold over twice as many copies (40 million) as SMB3 (18 million), and Tetris for GameBoy, which sold just under twice as many copies (33 million) as SMB3. Still, Nintendo has the top 6 and 5 of them are Super Mario titles, and #8 is SMB2 (The Sims snuck in there at #7).
Frankly, I think if I'm going to buy a PC-console hybrid, it'll be the ApeXtreme, since that at least will let me use the games I already have and not require me to be signed into the mothership.
Granted, the grandparent is barking up the wrong tree, but the point is still valid. Why general language mistakes are so funny are beyond my comprehension. Some are funny, but most are just plain, normal bad language.
I think the main reason the Japanese (and many other Asians) get hit with this is because their native language is missing entire concepts required for English, and it leads to particularly odd sentences from time to time. In the end, though, most intelligent people will at least give them credit for trying, and will either mildly correct them (as opposed to ridiculing them) or let it pass. Most of the people from Japan I've met that are learning English are happy to have a little help now and then with a language that makes absolutely no sense to them at times, but no one likes to be treated like an idiot.
The things which is forbidden is not to have a monopoly and do things to keep it, but to use it in an unfair way to gain over competitors in other markets.
I'm not sure what EU law is on the matter, but US law states that it is illegal to do certain things to maintain a monopoly, and, in fact, these were the easiest things to prove against Microsoft in it's antitrust case (and most of those which they were found guilty of have supposedly been remedied, or at least are remedied if Microsoft does what they were told to do by the court).
It's not just about pushing your way into other markets, but also about preventing people from entering your market. This is why Apple was ruled out as a competitor in the OS market, because the hardware platforms are themselves a barrier preventing consumers from switching from an MS OS to an Apple OS (of course, this completely ignores the fact that many (if not most) consumers simply buy a new computer instead of upgrading, but I'm not the one that made the ruling).
DeBeers has done quite a bit to prevent other people from entering the diamond market, including threatening to flood the market if someone else enters, thereby reducing the price of diamonds and (hopefully from DeBeers' standpoint) make the market unprofitable for others. Once the other company goes out of business, supplies get choked off again and the prices gradually return to previous levels.
What exactly qualifies as "making it" for these guys? By their measurements the only systems that ever "made it" were the GBA and gameboy. The latter being 10+ years old, which is a phenomenon in itself, and the former just happening to be the only handheld currently available in the US. (That Ngage thing is not real). ;)
Maybe being successful enough for the company to be willing to expend more money in the market before discontinuing the product? I only knew one person with a GameGear, and one person (other than myself) with a Lynx. Bandai (WonderSwan) for one reason or another gave up when the GBA came out.
I was never particularly fond of the GameBoy, and the GBA-SP is the first handheld I really think Nintendo's done a good job on, but I've at least been able to admit that no one, for one reason or another, has been able to compete with them, yet.
The DS was announced to us a week ago, selected developers get early word and SDK's for NextGen devices like the DS,XBOX2,PS3 and the PSP (under NDA's of course) sometimes 2 years before its release (as soon as its greenlighted), how much time do you think it takes to design, manufacture and release a device like this? the DS prototype has been sitting in Nintendo labs for some years now.
And the PSP was announced to us how long ago? The PS3? Assuming that you're right (and I actually believe you are mostly right), the PSP has had that much more time in the view of developers, and, being a less unusual device, is much easier to make a decision on.
However the public response to the DS has been mostly negative specially compared to the PSP, and thats the reason why some companies (like EA) are backing off.
Nintendo, on the other hand, said a few weeks before the release of any information that they expected mixed reactions, which I would take to mean that they got mixed reactions from developers, as well. They believe that they will be able to demonstrate the usefulness of the setup and are going ahead with expectations of low-key reactions at least for the first wave of titles, and a later uptake as developers and users understand what they are trying to do with the system.
I'd have to say that they deserve at least enough of a break on this to let them show us something before we make a decision, but everyone makes their own decisions, regardless of how informed their decisions may be, so be it.
All of that being said, I actually think that Sony's been releasing information to the public quite a bit earlier than anyone else about their new products. PS3 information was available within weeks of the North American PS2 launch, and PSP information was released with as much info available about it as there is about the DS now, and even to this date we've only seen concept drawings of the PSP. I wonder if either company will have hardware to show at E3 this year.
I think the difference is from the fact that it was released much earlier in the UK (late autumn?) rather than just before Christmas in the US and so the sales built Joementum*.
a sp?d=2 0040124&chartType=17
*Your American politicians are funny.
Funny, I hadn't even heard that until you mentioned it. I guess I don't watch CNN enough, or maybe it's simply because the primaries have been on TV 24/7 for 3 weeks and I stopped caring who the Democrats nominate.
In fact both Eye Toy:Play and EyeToy:groove and still in the top ten.
http://www.elspa.co.uk/about/charts/charts.
Just to clarify, it's the top 10 for PS2 (and that link doesn't work for me). Play is #9 overall (and I still find it funny that the UK charts can't filter out Norton Internet Security (and Office and Anti-virus if you check the PC list)), and Groove doesn't show up in the top 20.
I've always wondered why so many charts don't show the unit or sales numbers, but then at least the UK and Japanese charts are usually fairly easy to find up-to-date. The best I can find for North America is from last month.
It also helps to consider that the game press goes through the same cycle with every generation of consoles (at least since I started paying attention about 15 years ago). At a certain point in a console's lifetime, developers start putting out some really strong titles on the platform, really taking advantage of what it can offer, while on the PC side you continue to get games developed for the highest spec machine the developer thinks everyone has, which is usually something about 4 years old. Only a handful of developers bother to develop for what is top-of-the-line when they start the project (thereby assuring that the hardware is 2+ years old by the time the game is on the shelves), so most of the games that come out for PCs look worse than what is available on the consoles (note that the amount of RAM on current video cards has made a difference with this in the current console generation, but with most ports coming from the console to PC rather than from the PC to console, it isn't as obvious as it was in the past that the PC is capable of being a superior platform).
When the consoles start showing their age, the PC games pick back up, or the lesser known (or independent) developers on the PC side pick up the slack left by the major publishers running for the money on consoles. PC gaming picks back up for a year or two, the new consoles come out with games that are about the same level as the PC games, the console developers take advantage of the system again, and the cycle comes back around.
When the PC games start booming again, the publishers will simply buy up any developers that do well in the first wave. Then, when the consoles start picking up again, they'll start dismantling studios that don't want to work on console games.
we haven't been playing anything but Command and Conquer Generals for the past 2 or 3 months. And we haven't got the expansion pack yet. Its a hell of a lot of fun with 3-4 people on a LAN. (although the LAN lobby server code must have been written by a blind rabbit with its paws tied behind its back, its so flakey)
Get the expansion, seriously. Overall, C&C:Generals has the best skirmish mode (and probably multiplayer given the skirmish, but I haven't played it multiplayer) of any C&C game, and easily ranks among the top RTS games in this aspect. The single player campaigns? No clue, haven't played them, and I've had the game since about 2 months before the expansion.
I was pretty severely disappointed with the previous 2 C&C games (especially compared to the first 2), but I've put in nearly as much time with Generals as I did with the original, and Zero Hour seemed shallow at first, but added a great deal of depth to the game (though I do agree that it's quite obvious that Zero Hour is more or less what they intended the game to be in the first place, why call it Generals without the generals?).
That is, all the widely available ones. Cheaters who keep their hacks private are unlikely to ever be detected unless fingered with the PB screenshot facility.
If Half-Life set any example for the cheating community, the cheaters will start (or already have) releasing the source to the cheats, which essentially puts a lot of custom cheats out there. Hopefully PB's adjusted their detection (and screenshot) methods significantly in the last couple of years to make it a lot harder for cheaters to bypass it.
CAD work is all about distances and areas. It will help you adjust to the tools somewhat, but Level design is all about the feel and exact measurements don't matter too much. Nobody cares if your door is 6'8" or 7' really. You can stretch the texture to fit in a way that you just can't stretch a door.
You're right to a degree, but even CAD work can have elements of design to it that aren't just about measuring the space. Games tend to deal in units equivalent to the height of the standard player character (or half the height in the cases I've experienced), so instead of working in feet or inches you're working mostly in ~3' units. Still, if your door is only 3' tall, your players are going to have to duck to get through it, and you'd better hope that you planned for that in the dynamics of the level.
Yes, there are more considerations in level design, such as game balance, the level of detail and number of polygons in an area (you can use more detail and polygons in a single-player level than in multiplayer, for instance, because you can better control how much is on the screen at one time in single player), the pace that people go through an area, and so on.
In CAD your considerations are function first, implementing a design that satisfies your customer. These things can move over to level design perfectly well, and if you can use AutoCAD, for instance, you can probably find your way through almost any level design software. You won't necessarily be a good level designer just because you can design a warehouse or office space in a CAD program, but it doesn't hurt if you can design a level in AutoCAD and use the available converters to port it into most available games (I just double-checked because it's been quite a while before I messed with a level editor, but there are tools available for Quake, Half-Life, and Unreal (multiple versions of Quake and Unreal) to convert AutoCAD drawings into formats native to their respective map editing tools). Still, any developer looking for level designers is going to be looking for people with at least some familiarity with their tools, so the bulk of the work you show them should be in their tools. The rest just doesn't hurt if your designs are good.
Don't be fooled, there is a lot of overhead in these subscription based games that eat away your profit. In fact, as with all other genres, only the top selling MMORPGs make any money at all.
Of course, that's what they keep saying, but every developer out there that can do the math realizes that the subscription fees alone are the equivalent of selling 3-4 games per year to every subscriber, which is why the MMO games that make good money make most of their money from users that spend more than 6 months as subscribers.
With good management and a solid team, you make your initial costs back right away, and the more bandwidth you buy, the less it costs per user, so of course the more users you have, the more you make per user. The only time they lose money on an MMO game is when they have significant launch problems and/or low sales (don't recoup cost of initial development), and they have to maintain the servers for a certain amount of time regardless of whether or not they have enough people playing to justify it.
The cost of maintaining the servers, supporting the users, and developing new content is significantly less than the cost of developing 3 or 4 more games, yet they bring in that $10-15 per month per user, or $120-180 per year per user. If you can afford to secure the bandwidth for several thousand users at the start, you'll find that it costs significantly less than $5/user for that portion of the costs. Support costs go down over time, not only because bugs are fixed, but also because bugs are found, categorized, and added to the support scripts. To add content, you don't need a team the size of the original development team, you simply need artists and coders that understand whatever system your game has for adding that content and are familiar with the world you're trying to create.
Beyond all of that, if an MMO game were made with a smaller number of players in mind, and managed properly to meet the budget that would require, it could be quite profitable, as long as it didn't have an explosion in player numbers (at that point it might fall on it's face if the developers are unprepared to expand capacity, and it's much more expensive to expand capacity than to build for it from the start).
That's a myth. It worked for Everquest and a few other games, but the bottom line is that people don't want to buy a $50 game and then pay monthly fees to keep playing. And even if they do for one game, it's not something they'll do for every or even most games they buy.
Actually, the myth is that the software is loss-leading. The only way the software is loss-leading is if they don't get enough initial purchases to cover the costs, and the development and setup budgets are based on projected sales, not on making up development costs in subscriptions. The subscriptions go to maintenance and bandwidth, then profit, and the reason so many MMO games come out each year, now, is that the profit potential is huge, and with enough buzz the risk is equal to or less than development of standard games.
Most level design positions will accept portfolios from a variety of games/toolsets. They want to see what the applicant can do with what he has and what he can do that stands out from everyone else.
Additionally, even work done with standard architectural programs would most likely be applicable to level design. It helps to have a good base of material developed in tools specific to the developers you're applying to, but work in a variety of tools is usually just as applicable, because the tools don't tend to stay the same across different games (though variations may only be minor over a period of 2 years, eventually there's a major overhaul).
I don't let my kids have video games because (my son at least) would spend all his time playing it (or I'd spend all my time fighting with them over playing time).
I hope you don't let them have televisions, then, because at least their brains are active while they're playing a game, whereas brain activity while watching television is lower than while sleeping.
However, if the games made the kids get up and move, I might reconsider. First, because they'd get some exercise, Second, because they'd get tired and do something else, instead of spending hours in trance-land.
It could until they figured out how to cheat it, which would allow them to minimize their effort. Something else to consider would be DDR, as stated in an article sometime last week, though dance pads could get expensive. At the very least, there are features in many of the DDR games geared specifically towards exercise.
The other reason for the difference in sales is that it was out for quite some time in Europe before it was released in the US, and though it's been selling well in the US, it isn't selling as quickly as it did in Europe.
It doesn't appear to be on any of the Japanese charts, yet, so either it's not selling there yet or it's not selling well.
this is not something that Lieberman grabbed a hold of because he thought it sounded good. He's been on this theme for quite a while. You see, there are some people who actually stick to their guns regardless of who they upset. I think it's actually refreshing to see so many Democratic thinkers getting mad at this. It shows that he hasn't sold out again like he did in '00.
I agree that it's definitely not something he just decided would look good this year, he's been banging the drum for over a decade. What I was trying to point out, though, is that his statements on the issue have significantly less of an edge to them when he's trying to get elected. He shifts himself very much to a more moderate stance when he's looking for election, even if he's still willing to talk about how bad music, movies, TV, and games are for everyone's kids. He simply doesn't go into the world of calling it a "culture of carnage" and blaming Marilyn Manson for some kid's suicide in an election year.
Onimusha Tactics is very linear and is a bit easy at the start (it gets harder, though). It holds a lot in common with FFTA and Tactics Ogre, especially in the layout of the maps, but is fairly different in the story and the various abilities the characters have. Additionally, there's a system for upgrading weapons and armour in Onimusha Tactics that's fairly straight-forward and helps a great deal in advancing particular characters.
That's all assuming I'm not getting Onimusha Tactics and Tactics Ogre confused in my head, as I was playing them concurrently for quite a while. They're both definitely worth picking up for fans of the genre, though.
Must have good apprecation of Apple's design practices and be able to provide a half-an-hour lecture on why its market share is so low.
...including the products that the applicant has never worked with, or the products not yet released by Apple. ;)
...and explain how Microsoft stole code from BSD.
You forgot the next part:
Another one, though probably only for a signing bonus:
Must be able to extoll the virtues of Linux to any casual listener.
Those types of things are fine, and probably can and should be done, but in the end require a lot of the more costly portions of a software business to be in place. It's not just about the time developing the software (which may be a big portion for this market), but also the funding and marketing.
With niche markets you can sometimes get companies that are willing to fund a project based on a pitch and a demo. Small companies are just as likely to do this sort of thing as larger companies, and more likely to take a chance on a small startup with no real history (though everyone will probably want resumes of the people that will actually be doing the work for the sake of making sure that you actually have the capability to do what you say you'll do). If a company wants some way to sort their email in a particular manner in Outlook or connect Outlook to Excel and doesn't really have an IT department that can write macros for them or any coders on staff to handle some simple VBScript (or anyone they can afford to pay to do something as simple), they may pay a small amount for a quick project that you can leverage to other companies or use in a larger project (just make sure anything you might sign still maintains your right to do so). They may need something bigger than that, like a database and front-end for their inventory and tracking system that just isn't big enough for the larger, more expensive companies to handle. A little project done well may be enough to lead to bigger projects down the line, either from the same company or from other companies they work with.
With broad markets you may not be able to get any funding (you'd need something more like venture capital, someone (or multiple people) willing to put in money on the idea for a share of the profits or control of the company), and even when you do you'll have to find a way to get your product to your market, as well as letting your market know your product is there.
Personally, over the last 5 years, despite working for a rather large company rather than working for myself, I've managed to expand our oppurtunities simply by building on the simple projects I started out with. Now we're getting to a point at which we're building software to do things that weren't possible before rather than simply to augment or replace existing software that we had no control over (and that the company that supplied the software had no stake in). The development cycles get longer as the scope of the projects get larger (and many small projects have turned into larger projects over time as more functionality was requested by the customers), but the funding increases as well to reflect the difference in size as well as the potential earnings. On the other hand, the software I'm writing isn't something that Microsoft would come in and write, simply because the market is very small, and the knowledge required tends to come most readily from within the industry (certainly not a software-driven industry, but rather one that is coming more and more to terms with how it can leverage software to improve it's products and services). Many of the people that really have the knowledge required aren't software people at all, so it takes people familiar with the industry to be brought together with people familiar with software to really get things moving. People in industries like biotech and other areas should be fairly familiar with the idea that people with little to no software development experience learn something like perl to get a job done more quickly. Now imagine what happens if you bring a software developer into that environment that's willing to learn enough about the industry, or at least the particular project (on a project-by-project basis) to move the more complex ideas those people (the guys hacking together perl scripts from vague ideas of how perl works) have into the realm of actual tools they can use comfortably. Those are the kinds of areas where many companies could use small development houses that can come in and help them out with small projects, and the people doing the software could stand to make some good money that way, if they are there when these industries look for them.
Could you people just put on your marketing hat for a few seconds?
That wasn't the point, though. Sure, someone that's been looking at flash-based players might see the Mini iPod as a good deal, or any of the other devices using 1" 4GB drives, for that matter. To the tech people, though, it looks like a rip-off when you can have a 15GB drive for $50 more. Of course, 6-12 months ago the same people were saying the iPod was a rip-off anyway, because you could get hard drive-based players from other companies for less.
It doesn't really matter what market they're going for, it's obviously not those people. It's not me, either, because I'm not going to spend $500 for a player that can't hold all of my music (40GB? Not nearly enough). I wouldn't even spend $500 for a player that *could* hold all of my music, yet at one time I was considering spending much more for a player that could hold all of my music and fit in my car, but now I could probably get a CD-based player for my car that reads MP3s from CD-Rs, which would be perfectly fine for my car if it had good enough skip protection.
Marketing hats are fine, but everyone (including the people commenting they don't want one, which also includes myself) needs to realize that Apple's aiming at 20% of the market they don't already have, and that still leaves ~40% of the market that Apple's not reaching for one reason or another. In another year or two Apple may look towards picking up another 20%, but for each chunk of the market they bring in, they have to spend more to bring in another chunk of the same size, so eventually they'll stop trying to bring in more of the market and continue to ignore some percentage of possible users.