The only up-front cash they're actually putting up is for the accounts for the 'associates' that handle the transactions in the game, and from the looks of it they may not be paying those costs, either (though I can't be sure).
Otherwise, the only thing devaluation of currency does is effect that particular's game's currency's value on the market. They simply find one person that wants to sell say UO money and wants Sims money, another person that is selling money for another game and wants UO money, and someone that's selling Sims money and wants money for that other game, and arranging the transactions for a small percentage. The simplest example is when someone is selling UO money for cash, and someone else is buying UO money for cash, they simply handle the transaction (again, for a small percentage).
Essentially, the only money they should be keeping around is their cut, because they find a buyer for the money someone is selling before they take it off the seller's hands.
It's not much different from Ebay, except that it's specifically for handling game items, which have specific problems associated with them (like delivery), and they're adding some assurance much like PayPal is supposed to add, that you'll actually get the money in the currency you're looking for. Whether or not you will depends on whether or not someone's selling, and how much money you get depends on the value of that currency.
In the long term, the only way that devaluing currencies can hurt them is if they're stock-piling their cut and playing the market to turn their cut to cash at the best time rather than doing it whenever possible. At that point, they're playing a market just like people do with stocks or real currency markets, and it's their loss if they hold onto significant amounts of in-game currency (and someone finds a way to devalue that currency).
I actually just bought a second GameCube a couple days ago for the bedroom (primarily so my gf can play Animal Crossing in there, freeing up the TV in the living room so I can play other Cube games, or PS2, XBox, DC games, watch movies, etc; secondarily for the Zelda Classic bundle).
Unfortunately, the Cube can't keep up with the PS2 in terms of Japanese RPGs, at least for now, and the Cube isn't going to play all of the PS1 games that I still enjoy playing.
Actually, despite his appearance of attacking the source, he does make a good point, in that the article tries to take game development, which is a very specific field that has very specific requirements that hinder open source development, and then applies it to more general development.
In fact, government-funded development is done under whatever license the government chooses in it's terms for the funding. This can be a point of negotiation in many contracts, but since contracts are often open-bid, there aren't a lot of cases where a particular company can dictate another license over that specified in the contract and actually win the bid.
At the same time, the paper seems to side-step a point right when it's most ripe to be made: There is room in the market for a long continuum of types of intellectual property license. The English language is public domain, as are many common story lines and much creative imagerybut few good novels are
In this section it misses the point that many great novels are public domain purely because of their age. The only reason there aren't more great novels in the public domain is because novels really only came into their own as a respected type of literature relatively recently, and copyright protection has been extended a great deal.
It then goes on to address licensing of software and specifically the suggestion that government-funded software should be open source: The implication that open source "belongs" to the public is a peculiar one, since open source is not public domain. The open source license entails considerable obligations, the legal implications of which are sometimes unclear. For example, the GPL rather complicates the question of fair use and derivative works.
Open source may not be public domain, but software with public domain source is definitely open source. The GPL is only one example among many, and derivative works are not complicated much (if at all) with most BSD licenses. The government or the person(s) developing the software could determine the best license for their purpose, or the government could require the original source to be in the public domain. Once that source is available under the public domain it can be used for any purpose without restriction, which should be the intent of government-funded software research (unless, of course, there are specific reasons to keep the software itself out of the public eye, such as software with uses specifically tied to national security).
Yet marketers and spammers still believe they're getting something like a 4-7% return on spam, which is great when you consider that it's among the lowest-cost forms of advertising, and can be measured directly (in other words, whether or not there's an indirect market effect, you can still measure exactly how many people clicked on a link in your spam and how many of those people actually bought something).
Internet advertising in general has gone through several down-turns because of the simple fact that you can directly measure a certain percentage of your audience's reaction to the advertising, and because it has a higher cost than spam. If spam did not have a measurable effect that advertisers viewed as positive, it would simply not be used outside of the extreme fringe marketing and scams, at which point it would be the least effective for those particular groups.
With all of the stories of PS2s breaking, I've actually considered picking up a PSOne because I buy and play so many PS1 games. With that in mind, I hope that the PSOne remains in stores for a long time to come.
As for moving forward, not back, that's a pretty pointless argument since all of these titles were available for much older systems than what we have currently. If moving forward were the idea, these titles wouldn't even be available except in their original formats.
The nice thing about a tax is that there are agencies who are very good about knowing where the taxpayers live. So when spam starts coming from a whitelisted server, they know exactly where to go to collect the fine of one cojone per infringing email.
Except for one thing: if there's a spammer that's actually paying his taxes, it's very unlikely that they'd want to shut him down, because he's probably paying their salaries in the long run. If the cost per email is fairly low, it's still possible that the spammers could afford the cost, and the cost would actually be added to whatever 'service' or 'product' they offer (which people do buy, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it at all). If the cost were high enough to stop spammers, it may also be high enough to cause many people to stop using email, thereby eliminating the original reason for the tax in the first place.
On top of that, the company I work for would probably have to invent their own internal email system that used different protocols simply because the taxes would be so high with the large number of remote sites and the high volume of email going from one location to another that it'd be more cost-effective for them over almost any term to develop an alternative (not to mention that they could probably sell it eventually, though it's not core business).
3. USPS provides servers for (above) at a micro-payment fee
Which brings in another thought: Ever check to see why the cost of a postal stamp (at least in the US) went up? In many cases it's to reduce the cost of bulk email, which makes up the vast majority of the USPS' revenue. Every time you send something with a stamp, you subsidize all of that junk mail you get in your mailbox at home. Yes, it costs less to do things in bulk, even sending mail, but in the case of mail and email there are a great number of people that don't want the bulk mail, yet if you use a stamp you subsidize the bulk mail, and if there were an email tax, there'd probably be a lower rate for the people sending large numbers of messages, which would result in the same situation (the people that don't want bulk email subsidizing it), because any infrastructure to collect the tax would be dependent on the people paying the tax, not the people receiving the emails.
Given that, why the hell would anyone want the government or the USPS involved in taxing email?
why should you look like a spiky-headed huge-muscled freak when you're supposed to just be a normal kid?
I like the fact that they look like real, normal people. It makes them fit the role a lot better.
Generally, most of the games don't make any reference to the characters' ages. On the other hand, the only thing that prevents all of the characters from being fairly androgenous is the fact that they tend to make the female characters look like 12 year old girls with the breasts of a 16-18 year old. The males just look like 10-12 year old girls.
On the other hand, the games are Japanese, and the characters may more accurately reflect older (mid to late teen) Japanese people than Americans.
Of course, all of the ideas of them looking like normal people go out the window when you have characters like Cloud (FF7) carrying (and using) swords bigger than they are, in both width and height.
You are expecting it to be the best selling game ever, three times as as popular as the original Super Mario Bros. 3 for the NES.
Not quite. Yes, 10 million is pushing it, as that is roughly 1 copy for each owner of an XBox, and more than 4 times the number of copies of Halo sold for the XBox, but it's slightly more than half the number of copies of SMB3 for the NES sold, and 1/4th the number of copies of SMB1 for the NES sold. 10 Million would tie with The Sims and SMB2, taking it to anywhere from 7th to 9th on the best selling games of all time, beating down Vice City to #10 and dropping a PS1 Harry Potter game out of the top 10. Of course, this would knock Dragon Warrior VII off the top 20.
10 million would not beat FF7 and DW7 combined, or even FFX and DW7 combined, even though FFX sold slightly more than half as many copies as FF7. Halo sold roughly half as many copies as FFX.
Of course, the other things to remember are that: - The number of XBox owners is now significantly higher than it was when Halo was released, and since Halo is 2 years old and still remains at $50 (though it should come down soon), it hasn't been open to the full audience of XBox owners - Pre-order numbers are always larger than the actual sales to pre-order customers, and most game stores rely on this (by only buying enough copies to cover pre-orders, then putting the rest on the shelves) - Sales numbers are sometimes hard to track down properly, as different sources will give different numbers. For instance, Nintendo may have sold as many as 80 million copies of SMB1, but only(!) 40 million were sold to end-users.
This is actually why my girlfriend won't buy me hardware, as she knows just enough about computers to know I'll just want something else in a few months.
On the other hand, I don't know anyone that wanted a Voodoo 5, since nVidia had taken over the market before the thing finally came out.
Personally, the only hardware gifts I've ever given have been hand-me-downs, and those people tended to appreciate it more because my old hardware was a significant upgrade to their old hardware, and since they kept hardware much longer than I did, they got much more use from it (often more than I did before I gave it to them). My dad, for instance, still uses a video card and sound card that I gave him for father's day 3 years ago (I installed the hardware in his system while he was gone for the weekend and then gave him the sound card's box with his old hardware in it).
As for the other poster, I used to have a TV smaller than my monitor, and, at the time, simply waited until VGA adapters were available for the console(s). This is actually why I got a PS2 before I got an XBox (and why I waited so long for a PS2 that I had to choose between the two), and why I feel that the DreamCast is at least on par with, if not better than, any other console of the generation in terms of hardware (hell, the VGA adapter I got for the DreamCast was the best one I've ever used). Since I got a bigger TV, though, I've definitely spent far more time playing console games.
As an added bonus, with less than 25% of PC game titles actually being ported to the Mac, the savings by not being able to play 75% of the games released for the PC means you can actually afford a Mac (though I must admit that when it comes to laptops/notebooks, the Macs are competetive pricewise).
I just have to point out that, although I agree with you to a degree (I stopped upgrading video cards to buy consoles every 6 months instead), with the exception of the video card he listed, I had a better PC before I bought a PS1, and that exception is only because the GeForce 2 card is only a couple of years old. You'd be hard pressed, however, to find many games either out now or coming out soon that require more than a P3-1GHz, 256-512MB RAM, and a GeForce 2 (maybe even MX). My system hasn't had a single hardware upgrade in over a year and is running a GF4Ti, P4-2GHz, and 512MB of RAM. The last hardware upgrade was the video card, and the only reason I upgraded to the P4 was because my P3 self-destructed after moving across the country.
I used to be one of the guys that upgraded video cards every 6-12 months and many other portions of the system in the interim. At this point, though, the hardware has pushed well past the software, and the only reason I have all of the US-released consoles of this generation is simply because I didn't have any reason to buy new video cards, CPUs, etc. to play whatever games I feel like playing on the PC. I'd rather have the freedom to pick up any game and play it than be limited by system requirements, whether it's because I don't have a new graphics card or because I don't have an XBox (which is, in itself, a system requirement).
Besides, it may have sucked on PCs of the day, but on todays' machines, that game looks and sounds much better than the PSX version. NVidia card w/FSAA turned on & Yamaha audio w/XG MIDIs turned on make this game perfect on the PC, the better version by far.
hmm when did they release a patch so that FFVII would work with an nVidia card? (It was, after all, a Glide-based game).
FFVIII had a patch that made it work, but the movies played upside down (and when characters were in the scene they were often right-side up, making it even more odd to play).
I agree that the graphics on the PC version of FF7 were superior, but the game only handled a limited subset of PC hardware well, and was basically a better experience on the PSOne. That being said, I still have both versions of both FF7 and FF8.
And with those kinds of numbers, there's still plenty of room for movement in the market share of the three consoles. If Sony's sales drop by 2-3 million and the other 2 consoles pick up a portion of the 2 million left then there could be plenty of room for the Cube to take #2 in total sales, for instance. 4th quarter sales of PS2s are expected to be down 2 million anyway, and their shipments have been down ~40%, so it's very likely that PS2 sales could slip by as much as 8 million or more over the course of the next year, and that the Cube and XBox will pick up a lot of those sales (to people buying a 2nd or 3rd console).
Of course, they're not talking about word of mouth from the GameStop guy, they're talking about people you know, who's opinions you would generally trust. I spent about half an hour at GameStop yesterday listening to them (waiting for Mario Kart to come in since I had other places to go but had to buy things like milk that wouldn't do well in the car if I had to wait longer), and their full intent is to sell the games coming out that day (or week), get pre-orders, and sell used games, even if people obviously don't want any of the above. Oh, you're buying Final Fantasy XI, would you like to pre-order Final Fantasy X-2? Mario Kart comes with a bonus disc that contains extra material for Fire Emblem, which is a great game, would you like to buy it? (and yes, I did, and so far it is, and since I bought their last copy there were at least 2 other poor bastards in the store that could not buy it). Also, since you're buying Mario Kart, would you like to buy Mario & Luigi? Would you like the guide with that?
They forgot to ask me if I wanted a memory card, though, which means I might have to go back, since that's the one thing I wanted that I forgot to buy.
I think the only thing this will do for that particular title is make it easier to find, as I believe it was about $15 when I bought it used, and they only had the 1 copy.
I have both cards/subscriptions, but I've rarely used the Babbages/GameStop one, simply because I rarely buy games (used or otherwise) there.
I would have an EB card, if I ever looked up and saw that I was in an EB when I pulled out my GameStop card (I always have to check to see which one I'm in before I make the mistake of whipping out the GameStop card at an EBGames).
I think it's simply because there are a hell of a lot of GameStops around here, whereas to get to an EBGames you usually have to go to the mall.
I've used Best Buy's site many times, both for mail orders and for pickup orders, and I've only had 1 instance where I had problems. In that case, I had recently moved, and my bank rejected the charge due to the delivery address.
The only other time I've had anything cancelled was when I ordered something that clearly stated it was backordered, and they waited 30 days and then gave me the option to keep it on backorder before cancelling it (when I didn't respond).
Don't know how large this percentage is, but it's certainly large enough to make it economically feasible for Hori to make a GC-specific SCII arcade stick.
On a similar note, I finally found the SC2-branded arcade stick that was mentioned here on slashdot shortly before SC2 was released ( http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/14/ 040208&mode=thread&tid=127&tid=186&tid=211&tid=212 &tid=213 ). The particular GameStop I was in said that they had only received the one stick they had on the floor, so I bought it. To my dismay, the cable (which has a connector for each of the XBox, PS2, and GC) is the same length as the PS2 controllers' cables, so I have to go buy extension cables for my XBox and GC (XBox controllers' cables are long enough to reach my couch with some slack, I use WaveBirds on my GC, and I already have extensions for the 2 PS2 controllers) before I can use it on SC2 and Ikaruga. I've been using it in Amplitude, but find the stick a little too sensitive (it jumps 2 tracks almost every time I try to move to the next track).
this project wanted to move to closed source model and Xlink noticed that they either forgot to close up or couldn't close up their public source on sourceforge. so Xlink could use the code for their product. nothing wrong with this in an opensource model however someone screwed up by leaving the source available on sourceforge.
It should be noted that XLink wasn't involved at all, someone simply posted a link to the code in the sourceforge CVS on XLink's forums because the WarpPipe people were deleting the link from their own forums. XLink never used their code, as they simply used the code they had already had for their XBox software, with some minor modifications to work with the GameCube.
b) Video game development houses, from what I can tell (and I don't work in the industry), tend to get a bit shafted from a financial point of view. I'm not entirely sure why this is the case -- they take on a good deal of the risk, they require a good amount of resources, but generally the publisher is the one to really profit from games.
The primary reason for this is because the development houses don't fund their own development. They create a game idea and maybe a very basic mock-up to show off, and then shop for a publisher. The publisher puts up the development money and does everything else you would normally expect a publisher to do (handle marketing, does their own testing, and distribution). Patches, also, are generally publisher-funded. This isn't to say that development houses don't take on risk, simply that they are rarely self-funded.
There are a few well-to-do game development houses (id is everyone's favorite example), but I suspect most of those seem to publish their own games.
Actually, the only well-known development houses that publish their own games are the ones that are primarily publishers, such as EA, Sierra, and so on. id's games are published by Activision (and id made their name for themselves when they developed their last couple of shareware games under Apogee http://rinkworks.com/apogee/s/2.7.1.shtml ). id also self-poblished for a short time, and even published games for a handful of other developers (usually licensees of id's engines), but Quake2 and 3 have been published by Activision, under what are assumed to be terms favourable to id Software (otherwise, why would they bother, since Doom, at it's time, was one of the most successful PC games ever released). Valve is developing Steam as a method for self-publishing, but otherwise they publish through Sierra. On the other hand, Valve is self-owned and self-funded, meaning that Sierra didn't put any money into Half-Life other than marketing and publishing, so Valve most likely saw a better return than many development houses (and again, this is because Valve put up the money for development themselves, which most developers don't do).
I mean by the above, isn't it impossible to revoke an open source license once it was granted?
A handful of licenses approved by OSDI (which is what is required for free use of SourceForge unless you get approval for something else) allow you to change the license on derived code. This means that the alpha could have been under a BSD-like license, which would mean the code on SourceForge would remain free, but they could change the license for future releases (as they have done).
In other words, just by using SourceForge they've pretty much given away the code that was on SourceForge's CVS, but that doesn't mean they have to continue to release code, or even continue to make the previous code accessable (as long as they stop releasing binaries of the open-source version).
That being said, IANAL, and I don't work for SourceForge, so I'm certainly not an authority on their policies or the legality of this whole situation.
to add to that, although I don't watch NASCAR either, why are cars so different? We race horses in ovals, and dogs in ovals, and even people in ovals, so why not cars?
I like street courses, but frankly I prefer the cars to at least pretend like they're the same types of cars that we drive every day. Of course, a lot of that more or less stopped when they started using NASCAR to advertise front-wheel-drive sedans rather than muscle cars.
Slashdot Mirror
The only up-front cash they're actually putting up is for the accounts for the 'associates' that handle the transactions in the game, and from the looks of it they may not be paying those costs, either (though I can't be sure).
Otherwise, the only thing devaluation of currency does is effect that particular's game's currency's value on the market. They simply find one person that wants to sell say UO money and wants Sims money, another person that is selling money for another game and wants UO money, and someone that's selling Sims money and wants money for that other game, and arranging the transactions for a small percentage. The simplest example is when someone is selling UO money for cash, and someone else is buying UO money for cash, they simply handle the transaction (again, for a small percentage).
Essentially, the only money they should be keeping around is their cut, because they find a buyer for the money someone is selling before they take it off the seller's hands.
It's not much different from Ebay, except that it's specifically for handling game items, which have specific problems associated with them (like delivery), and they're adding some assurance much like PayPal is supposed to add, that you'll actually get the money in the currency you're looking for. Whether or not you will depends on whether or not someone's selling, and how much money you get depends on the value of that currency.
In the long term, the only way that devaluing currencies can hurt them is if they're stock-piling their cut and playing the market to turn their cut to cash at the best time rather than doing it whenever possible. At that point, they're playing a market just like people do with stocks or real currency markets, and it's their loss if they hold onto significant amounts of in-game currency (and someone finds a way to devalue that currency).
I actually just bought a second GameCube a couple days ago for the bedroom (primarily so my gf can play Animal Crossing in there, freeing up the TV in the living room so I can play other Cube games, or PS2, XBox, DC games, watch movies, etc; secondarily for the Zelda Classic bundle).
Unfortunately, the Cube can't keep up with the PS2 in terms of Japanese RPGs, at least for now, and the Cube isn't going to play all of the PS1 games that I still enjoy playing.
Actually, despite his appearance of attacking the source, he does make a good point, in that the article tries to take game development, which is a very specific field that has very specific requirements that hinder open source development, and then applies it to more general development.
In fact, government-funded development is done under whatever license the government chooses in it's terms for the funding. This can be a point of negotiation in many contracts, but since contracts are often open-bid, there aren't a lot of cases where a particular company can dictate another license over that specified in the contract and actually win the bid.
At the same time, the paper seems to side-step a point right when it's most ripe to be made:
There is room in the market for a long
continuum of types of intellectual property license. The English language
is public domain, as are many common story lines and much creative
imagerybut few good novels are
In this section it misses the point that many great novels are public domain purely because of their age. The only reason there aren't more great novels in the public domain is because novels really only came into their own as a respected type of literature relatively recently, and copyright protection has been extended a great deal.
It then goes on to address licensing of software and specifically the suggestion that government-funded software should be open source:
The implication that open source "belongs" to the public is a peculiar one,
since open source is not public domain. The open source license entails
considerable obligations, the legal implications of which are sometimes
unclear. For example, the GPL rather complicates the question of fair use
and derivative works.
Open source may not be public domain, but software with public domain source is definitely open source. The GPL is only one example among many, and derivative works are not complicated much (if at all) with most BSD licenses. The government or the person(s) developing the software could determine the best license for their purpose, or the government could require the original source to be in the public domain. Once that source is available under the public domain it can be used for any purpose without restriction, which should be the intent of government-funded software research (unless, of course, there are specific reasons to keep the software itself out of the public eye, such as software with uses specifically tied to national security).
Yet marketers and spammers still believe they're getting something like a 4-7% return on spam, which is great when you consider that it's among the lowest-cost forms of advertising, and can be measured directly (in other words, whether or not there's an indirect market effect, you can still measure exactly how many people clicked on a link in your spam and how many of those people actually bought something).
Internet advertising in general has gone through several down-turns because of the simple fact that you can directly measure a certain percentage of your audience's reaction to the advertising, and because it has a higher cost than spam. If spam did not have a measurable effect that advertisers viewed as positive, it would simply not be used outside of the extreme fringe marketing and scams, at which point it would be the least effective for those particular groups.
PS1 shouldn't even be in stores anymore.
With all of the stories of PS2s breaking, I've actually considered picking up a PSOne because I buy and play so many PS1 games. With that in mind, I hope that the PSOne remains in stores for a long time to come.
As for moving forward, not back, that's a pretty pointless argument since all of these titles were available for much older systems than what we have currently. If moving forward were the idea, these titles wouldn't even be available except in their original formats.
The nice thing about a tax is that there are agencies who are very good about knowing where the taxpayers live. So when spam starts coming from a whitelisted server, they know exactly where to go to collect the fine of one cojone per infringing email.
Except for one thing: if there's a spammer that's actually paying his taxes, it's very unlikely that they'd want to shut him down, because he's probably paying their salaries in the long run. If the cost per email is fairly low, it's still possible that the spammers could afford the cost, and the cost would actually be added to whatever 'service' or 'product' they offer (which people do buy, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it at all). If the cost were high enough to stop spammers, it may also be high enough to cause many people to stop using email, thereby eliminating the original reason for the tax in the first place.
On top of that, the company I work for would probably have to invent their own internal email system that used different protocols simply because the taxes would be so high with the large number of remote sites and the high volume of email going from one location to another that it'd be more cost-effective for them over almost any term to develop an alternative (not to mention that they could probably sell it eventually, though it's not core business).
3. USPS provides servers for (above) at a micro-payment fee
Which brings in another thought:
Ever check to see why the cost of a postal stamp (at least in the US) went up? In many cases it's to reduce the cost of bulk email, which makes up the vast majority of the USPS' revenue. Every time you send something with a stamp, you subsidize all of that junk mail you get in your mailbox at home. Yes, it costs less to do things in bulk, even sending mail, but in the case of mail and email there are a great number of people that don't want the bulk mail, yet if you use a stamp you subsidize the bulk mail, and if there were an email tax, there'd probably be a lower rate for the people sending large numbers of messages, which would result in the same situation (the people that don't want bulk email subsidizing it), because any infrastructure to collect the tax would be dependent on the people paying the tax, not the people receiving the emails.
Given that, why the hell would anyone want the government or the USPS involved in taxing email?
why should you look like a spiky-headed huge-muscled freak when you're supposed to just be a normal kid?
I like the fact that they look like real, normal people. It makes them fit the role a lot better.
Generally, most of the games don't make any reference to the characters' ages. On the other hand, the only thing that prevents all of the characters from being fairly androgenous is the fact that they tend to make the female characters look like 12 year old girls with the breasts of a 16-18 year old. The males just look like 10-12 year old girls.
On the other hand, the games are Japanese, and the characters may more accurately reflect older (mid to late teen) Japanese people than Americans.
Of course, all of the ideas of them looking like normal people go out the window when you have characters like Cloud (FF7) carrying (and using) swords bigger than they are, in both width and height.
You are expecting it to be the best selling game ever, three times as as popular as the original Super Mario Bros. 3 for the NES.
Not quite. Yes, 10 million is pushing it, as that is roughly 1 copy for each owner of an XBox, and more than 4 times the number of copies of Halo sold for the XBox, but it's slightly more than half the number of copies of SMB3 for the NES sold, and 1/4th the number of copies of SMB1 for the NES sold. 10 Million would tie with The Sims and SMB2, taking it to anywhere from 7th to 9th on the best selling games of all time, beating down Vice City to #10 and dropping a PS1 Harry Potter game out of the top 10. Of course, this would knock Dragon Warrior VII off the top 20.
10 million would not beat FF7 and DW7 combined, or even FFX and DW7 combined, even though FFX sold slightly more than half as many copies as FF7. Halo sold roughly half as many copies as FFX.
Of course, the other things to remember are that:
- The number of XBox owners is now significantly higher than it was when Halo was released, and since Halo is 2 years old and still remains at $50 (though it should come down soon), it hasn't been open to the full audience of XBox owners
- Pre-order numbers are always larger than the actual sales to pre-order customers, and most game stores rely on this (by only buying enough copies to cover pre-orders, then putting the rest on the shelves)
- Sales numbers are sometimes hard to track down properly, as different sources will give different numbers. For instance, Nintendo may have sold as many as 80 million copies of SMB1, but only(!) 40 million were sold to end-users.
This is actually why my girlfriend won't buy me hardware, as she knows just enough about computers to know I'll just want something else in a few months.
On the other hand, I don't know anyone that wanted a Voodoo 5, since nVidia had taken over the market before the thing finally came out.
Personally, the only hardware gifts I've ever given have been hand-me-downs, and those people tended to appreciate it more because my old hardware was a significant upgrade to their old hardware, and since they kept hardware much longer than I did, they got much more use from it (often more than I did before I gave it to them). My dad, for instance, still uses a video card and sound card that I gave him for father's day 3 years ago (I installed the hardware in his system while he was gone for the weekend and then gave him the sound card's box with his old hardware in it).
As for the other poster, I used to have a TV smaller than my monitor, and, at the time, simply waited until VGA adapters were available for the console(s). This is actually why I got a PS2 before I got an XBox (and why I waited so long for a PS2 that I had to choose between the two), and why I feel that the DreamCast is at least on par with, if not better than, any other console of the generation in terms of hardware (hell, the VGA adapter I got for the DreamCast was the best one I've ever used). Since I got a bigger TV, though, I've definitely spent far more time playing console games.
As an added bonus, with less than 25% of PC game titles actually being ported to the Mac, the savings by not being able to play 75% of the games released for the PC means you can actually afford a Mac (though I must admit that when it comes to laptops/notebooks, the Macs are competetive pricewise).
I just have to point out that, although I agree with you to a degree (I stopped upgrading video cards to buy consoles every 6 months instead), with the exception of the video card he listed, I had a better PC before I bought a PS1, and that exception is only because the GeForce 2 card is only a couple of years old. You'd be hard pressed, however, to find many games either out now or coming out soon that require more than a P3-1GHz, 256-512MB RAM, and a GeForce 2 (maybe even MX). My system hasn't had a single hardware upgrade in over a year and is running a GF4Ti, P4-2GHz, and 512MB of RAM. The last hardware upgrade was the video card, and the only reason I upgraded to the P4 was because my P3 self-destructed after moving across the country.
I used to be one of the guys that upgraded video cards every 6-12 months and many other portions of the system in the interim. At this point, though, the hardware has pushed well past the software, and the only reason I have all of the US-released consoles of this generation is simply because I didn't have any reason to buy new video cards, CPUs, etc. to play whatever games I feel like playing on the PC. I'd rather have the freedom to pick up any game and play it than be limited by system requirements, whether it's because I don't have a new graphics card or because I don't have an XBox (which is, in itself, a system requirement).
Besides, it may have sucked on PCs of the day, but on todays' machines, that game looks and sounds much better than the PSX version. NVidia card w/FSAA turned on & Yamaha audio w/XG MIDIs turned on make this game perfect on the PC, the better version by far.
hmm when did they release a patch so that FFVII would work with an nVidia card? (It was, after all, a Glide-based game).
FFVIII had a patch that made it work, but the movies played upside down (and when characters were in the scene they were often right-side up, making it even more odd to play).
I agree that the graphics on the PC version of FF7 were superior, but the game only handled a limited subset of PC hardware well, and was basically a better experience on the PSOne. That being said, I still have both versions of both FF7 and FF8.
I mean, from like 21 million to 20 million?
And with those kinds of numbers, there's still plenty of room for movement in the market share of the three consoles. If Sony's sales drop by 2-3 million and the other 2 consoles pick up a portion of the 2 million left then there could be plenty of room for the Cube to take #2 in total sales, for instance. 4th quarter sales of PS2s are expected to be down 2 million anyway, and their shipments have been down ~40%, so it's very likely that PS2 sales could slip by as much as 8 million or more over the course of the next year, and that the Cube and XBox will pick up a lot of those sales (to people buying a 2nd or 3rd console).
Of course, they're not talking about word of mouth from the GameStop guy, they're talking about people you know, who's opinions you would generally trust. I spent about half an hour at GameStop yesterday listening to them (waiting for Mario Kart to come in since I had other places to go but had to buy things like milk that wouldn't do well in the car if I had to wait longer), and their full intent is to sell the games coming out that day (or week), get pre-orders, and sell used games, even if people obviously don't want any of the above. Oh, you're buying Final Fantasy XI, would you like to pre-order Final Fantasy X-2? Mario Kart comes with a bonus disc that contains extra material for Fire Emblem, which is a great game, would you like to buy it? (and yes, I did, and so far it is, and since I bought their last copy there were at least 2 other poor bastards in the store that could not buy it). Also, since you're buying Mario Kart, would you like to buy Mario & Luigi? Would you like the guide with that?
They forgot to ask me if I wanted a memory card, though, which means I might have to go back, since that's the one thing I wanted that I forgot to buy.
Vagrant Story
I think the only thing this will do for that particular title is make it easier to find, as I believe it was about $15 when I bought it used, and they only had the 1 copy.
I have both cards/subscriptions, but I've rarely used the Babbages/GameStop one, simply because I rarely buy games (used or otherwise) there.
I would have an EB card, if I ever looked up and saw that I was in an EB when I pulled out my GameStop card (I always have to check to see which one I'm in before I make the mistake of whipping out the GameStop card at an EBGames).
I think it's simply because there are a hell of a lot of GameStops around here, whereas to get to an EBGames you usually have to go to the mall.
I've used Best Buy's site many times, both for mail orders and for pickup orders, and I've only had 1 instance where I had problems. In that case, I had recently moved, and my bank rejected the charge due to the delivery address.
The only other time I've had anything cancelled was when I ordered something that clearly stated it was backordered, and they waited 30 days and then gave me the option to keep it on backorder before cancelling it (when I didn't respond).
Not to mention that the PS2 version comes with a double bonus:
- bad graphics
- bad control scheme
Get it on the PC or XBox, and it should still cost less than $20.
You should be able to pick up the Sonic Mega-Collection for well under $40 if you're willing to buy used. I think it was $7 when I bought it.
Don't know how large this percentage is, but it's certainly large enough to make it economically feasible for Hori to make a GC-specific SCII arcade stick.
/ 040208&mode=thread&tid=127&tid=186&tid=211&tid=212 &tid=213 ). The particular GameStop I was in said that they had only received the one stick they had on the floor, so I bought it. To my dismay, the cable (which has a connector for each of the XBox, PS2, and GC) is the same length as the PS2 controllers' cables, so I have to go buy extension cables for my XBox and GC (XBox controllers' cables are long enough to reach my couch with some slack, I use WaveBirds on my GC, and I already have extensions for the 2 PS2 controllers) before I can use it on SC2 and Ikaruga. I've been using it in Amplitude, but find the stick a little too sensitive (it jumps 2 tracks almost every time I try to move to the next track).
On a similar note, I finally found the SC2-branded arcade stick that was mentioned here on slashdot shortly before SC2 was released ( http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/14
this project wanted to move to closed source model and Xlink noticed that they either forgot to close up or couldn't close up their public source on sourceforge. so Xlink could use the code for their product. nothing wrong with this in an opensource model however someone screwed up by leaving the source available on sourceforge.
It should be noted that XLink wasn't involved at all, someone simply posted a link to the code in the sourceforge CVS on XLink's forums because the WarpPipe people were deleting the link from their own forums. XLink never used their code, as they simply used the code they had already had for their XBox software, with some minor modifications to work with the GameCube.
b) Video game development houses, from what I can tell (and I don't work in the industry), tend to get a bit shafted from a financial point of view. I'm not entirely sure why this is the case -- they take on a good deal of the risk, they require a good amount of resources, but generally the publisher is the one to really profit from games.
The primary reason for this is because the development houses don't fund their own development. They create a game idea and maybe a very basic mock-up to show off, and then shop for a publisher. The publisher puts up the development money and does everything else you would normally expect a publisher to do (handle marketing, does their own testing, and distribution). Patches, also, are generally publisher-funded. This isn't to say that development houses don't take on risk, simply that they are rarely self-funded.
There are a few well-to-do game development houses (id is everyone's favorite example), but I suspect most of those seem to publish their own games.
Actually, the only well-known development houses that publish their own games are the ones that are primarily publishers, such as EA, Sierra, and so on. id's games are published by Activision (and id made their name for themselves when they developed their last couple of shareware games under Apogee http://rinkworks.com/apogee/s/2.7.1.shtml ). id also self-poblished for a short time, and even published games for a handful of other developers (usually licensees of id's engines), but Quake2 and 3 have been published by Activision, under what are assumed to be terms favourable to id Software (otherwise, why would they bother, since Doom, at it's time, was one of the most successful PC games ever released). Valve is developing Steam as a method for self-publishing, but otherwise they publish through Sierra. On the other hand, Valve is self-owned and self-funded, meaning that Sierra didn't put any money into Half-Life other than marketing and publishing, so Valve most likely saw a better return than many development houses (and again, this is because Valve put up the money for development themselves, which most developers don't do).
I mean by the above, isn't it impossible to revoke an open source license once it was granted?
A handful of licenses approved by OSDI (which is what is required for free use of SourceForge unless you get approval for something else) allow you to change the license on derived code. This means that the alpha could have been under a BSD-like license, which would mean the code on SourceForge would remain free, but they could change the license for future releases (as they have done).
In other words, just by using SourceForge they've pretty much given away the code that was on SourceForge's CVS, but that doesn't mean they have to continue to release code, or even continue to make the previous code accessable (as long as they stop releasing binaries of the open-source version).
That being said, IANAL, and I don't work for SourceForge, so I'm certainly not an authority on their policies or the legality of this whole situation.
to add to that, although I don't watch NASCAR either, why are cars so different? We race horses in ovals, and dogs in ovals, and even people in ovals, so why not cars?
I like street courses, but frankly I prefer the cars to at least pretend like they're the same types of cars that we drive every day. Of course, a lot of that more or less stopped when they started using NASCAR to advertise front-wheel-drive sedans rather than muscle cars.