It's worked so far with MSN, set-top internet (now branded with the MSN name, probably a future addition to the XBox line), and a handful of other MS products.
We can all name dozens of cancelled MS products if we've been around Slashdot long enough, but take a really hard look at how many products are grouped into the same division of Microsoft as the XBox, where the whole division basically loses money constantly, and how long some of those products have been around. If MS thinks someone else has a market they want, they're willing to spend a lot of money to stay in that market, even if it means they don't make any of it back for several years.
There are still specific advantages in the Xbox over the Gamecube. Networked games, higher quality output (audio and video), DVD player, hard drive.
As the other poster mentioned, the DVD player is a $30 addition. Internet games is $50/year (GC network adapter is an additional cost and more games are coming that support network play, though not internet play atm). Higher quality output is another additional cost (I don't know what the A/V pack costs since I have a fairly old TV). The hard drive is it, and without any of the other additions functions as an extremely large memory card and storage for music files (which I use quite a bit on certain games).
The directories in that image are fairly similar to what you get in the original HL SDK, with a few extra folders (though I don't have the SDK here at work, so I can't check). Other than that, a bunch of batch files don't amount to much, and I only see 1, possibly 2 or 3 header files in there. I also don't remember there being any batch files in the HL SDK (primarily because most of the code was VC++6 stuff, so you had the usual project files and such, along with a make file or two). That being said, if it is the code for the game itself, it's quite possible that there would be a large number of batch files for different builds of the engine, if they're working on multiple games simultaneously using the same engine (ie the image shows hl1, hl2, cs, tf2, but notably missing is cs2).
You're overestimating the stores' profits on console sales, for one. The stores count on people buying games just as much as the manufacturers do, and, furthermore, the stores want you to buy *used* games, for which they make a great deal more profit than the new games. There have even been a handful of reports that stores have occasionally had to sell consoles at a loss.
Second is that they're only selling the console and a controller at $99, so there's not a great deal coming in that box. (frankly, since the previous bundles involved the retailer taking an item from their shelves normally sold seperately and giving it to you with the box, I really don't see much difference here, except that your 'bundle' price and items are much more flexible, and no bundle is required).
As far as price point is concerned, it is likely that this is the first time that Nintendo is losing money on per-console sales.
OK, so let's look at this for a minute:
Nintendo was making a good profit selling a console bundled with a game or a GameBoy Player for $150. With the games I can see that, it really doesn't cost much to bundle a game, except any sales you might have gotten of that game and whatever profit difference exists. Microsoft cuts this cost by bundling low-selling games in cheap packages, as one example of how this can be done (something that wasn't done with the Nintendo bundles). With the GameBoy Player, you have a piece of hardware that sells for $50 seperately.
Now, granted bundle deals are usually going to cut some profit in favour of better sales and perceived value, but the perceived value of the Cube itself was around $100 anyway with these bundles, and the way the bundles were done usually meant that the retailer was taking a $50 item out of their stock and selling it with the Cube at $150. As the cost of the games went down, the game bundle obviously decreased in perceived value (increasing the perceived cost of the system), but overall you're still getting the Cube today at the same price you got it 2 weeks ago if you bought the GBPlayer bundle/bought the Cube and a Player today (unless you can find the Player cheaper than $50, which could be done in some areas).
In other words, unless they were drastically marking down the items they were bundling with the Cube, there's really not much difference on their end between the current deal and the previous deal, except that they may not push as many Players or copies of certain games (though most of the previously bundled games are now at a lower price, too).
The end effect, Nintendo was making money on each console sold before, and there's little evidence that this is not still true. The exception, of course, would be if they make a lot of money selling GBPlayers at $50 a pop like they presumably do with top-selling games at $50 a piece, and were using the perceived value to cover the GC's price. The beautiful thing about bundles, though, is that the profit on a bundle increases over time at a faster rate than it normally would selling the console alone (assuming that the console's rate of cost decrease is slower than what is being bundled; software costs, for instance, decrease drastically once the development cost is recouped).
106.1 and 4 other stations in Raliegh, NC, are Clear Channel stations. (you can search for Clear Channel stations in your area at http://www.clearchannel.com/rad_search.php though it's not a very good search function, the city name is about the most you can hope to get anything from).
They own 3 stations in my area listed as 'urban' format, and a 'smooth jazz' station. Considering that most of the stations out here are Country or Gospel, they seem to have missed the audience (they also own the 2 news radio stations out here). Of course, I don't think Raliegh is all that far from Hampton Roads, so you might pick up some of the stations, but I could be wrong (I haven't lived here very long after all).
Again, to the average user this is a nice deal because you get something extra in addition to the music. I saw a Marilyn Manson cd being sold that included a DVD along with it. This type of value-adding is what the music companies need to do in order to get people back to the store to buy their CDs - if that's the business model they want to hold onto.
Unfortunately, they've marked up the price on this one quite a bit, with the recommended price at $20. I have a handful of CDs that came with DVDs (off-hand, the Marilyn Manson CD you mentioned (and watching that DVD I wondered how many people would actually get through the whole thing), a Tori Amos CD, and a Korn CD, there may be a couple others), and none of them cost me anywhere near $20 (except for a Tool boxed set that was basically a CD and a DVD with all of their videos up to that point in an oversized box for $30). Sure, this DVD has one level of Amplitude on it (with a song that isn't in Amplitude, or on the CD), but how many people pay for a one-level game demo? (well, I guess the answer to that will depend on how many people buy this CD).
Also of note, I paid about $30 for Amplitude new, and though the store I bought it in had Frequency on the wall with a $20 price tag, they couldn't find the game itself when I asked for it (even after going back to the wall and bringing them the box).
I'd probably pick it up just for the extra Amplitude level. As it stands, though, the one track w/ P.O.D. in Amplitude drives me nuts, and it's at least a Crystal Method remix of one of their songs.
As for the claim that this won't be copyable / shareable, ummm yeah right. Maybe for people that don't have modded PS2s, but for those that do, it'll be easy enough.
Good project managers know that QA is planned for from the beginning, and that you know, from experience and extrapolation, how longs things will take to do.
First, Valve's had quite a lot of experience with QA both on their own side and on the publisher's (Sierra) side. They probably can make pretty good estimates about how long the QA process will take if it works out good. They can probably even estimate pretty well how long the QA process will take if they have to go through 4 iterations of it (including the fixes that go with those iterations).
On the other hand, if they found that X, Y, and Z needed to be completely redone, especially where any one of X, Y, and Z is an artistic element, such as a model or map, then they'll probably have a few snags on their schedule. More than likely a change like that would require more playtesting before it goes back to QA.
As for basing planning on experience, this is the company that delayed their last game by over a year to rewrite the engine. They're also a company that has released only 1 game (and a dozen expansions/mods/etc). There's a lot of experience there in terms of QA and such only because they've been through 4 years of QA on patches and such (yes, their is a QA process for the patches, both in-house and at the publisher), but there's very little experience in terms of building and shipping a game as a team.
"It's not uncommon for there to be only two or three Japanese games among the top 20 sellers each month; this would have been unheard of less than ten years ago."
I'm not even sure if this is completely true. Maybe we're questioning the fact that more western games are in the charts than before, but the last charts I saw showed more like 9 Japanese games in the top 20 (though 3 were the different versions of Soul Calibur 2, 3 US titles were the different versions of Madden NFL 2004).
As for questioning matters like originality in the titles, there are problems on this front on both sides. After all, 4 of the top 11 games are football games (Madden for GC was #11, NCAA Football was #5), and who would you get to develop an American football game outside of the US? 5 of the top 20 are US-centric sports games (the above 4 and NBA Street), with Mario Golf making 6 sports games in the list (though obviously not in the same realm of sports games as the others). The best selling soccer (football for the non-US people) game in Japan is a game made by a Japanese company, while the best selling soccer game in Europe is an EA title. Would anyone in the US be likely to play a Japanese-developed baseball game today? Well the Japanese certainly are, and it's right up there in the Japanese top 10, too.
Something else to note would be the longevity of titles on the US charts. Games rise and fall on the Japanese charts in a matter of weeks. In the US, we still have Vice City and Halo in the top 20. Pokemon Ruby & Saphire's combined sales keep it in the top 20 in Japan, while in the US they're listed individually and both still on the top 20.
The article's author even takes the time to say that Nintendo's part of the problem, even though Nintendo has 4 games in the US top 20, surpassed only by EA's 5. The only other company with more than 1 is Namco, and that's the 3 listings for SC2 (as EA's listing is for 2 games + 3 listings for Madden).
Why do people keep using the "register to vote" excuse to be against driver licenses for illegal immigrants? On this forum, people should be smarter and suggest to fix the real problem, the document requirements for voter registration.
For full disclosure, I'm not a US citizen but I have had a CA driver's license for 10 years but I know it's illegal for me to register to vote. Are you suggesting I should give up my CA license and drive whithout a license or insurance because of the posibility somebody in my position registers to vote illegally?
The legal immigrant part makes all the difference in the world in terms of the whole licensing issue. As far as registering to vote, I agree, there should be better requirements, or the license should indicate immigration/citizenship status to help the voter registration process. When I lived in California, I registered to vote as part of my application for a California ID (I didn't have a driver's license until I was 20, because of the whole insurance requirement and the fact that I did not have a car).
In reality, I could not possibly understand the reason that anyone would allow illegal immigrants to have a driver's license until I realized that this problem with voter registration existed. Because I needed a birth certificate and proof of residence to get my license, it didn't really occur to me at that time that the license was all I needed to register to vote. The simple fact is that if an illegal immigrant shows up to register for a driver's license, they should be exported, not given a license.
More approiately, we can decide that we shouldn't have differant tariffs because of the blurring that has been discussed here in absurd depth.
Exactly. And, in most cases, this is becoming the case. When it comes down to it, Sony made a big deal about export restrictions on the PS2 from Japan's side of things, and now has made a big deal about import tariffs on Europe's side. Overall, it's really about getting some press and trying to reduce the fees they have to pay to ship the thing around the world.
Of course, even if they didn't have to pay the tariffs, it's unlikely they'd pass much of the savings onto the consumer, unless/until they had to do it to meet a certain price point (assuming they actually have some competition some day).
Someone who's not afraid to *protect* business? Good god man, have you any idea what you're saying?! The DMCA was passed to protect business! Every copyright term extension has been to protect business! I say business has enough protection - what about protecting people for once?
It's not so much about protecting business as protecting jobs. 18 months ago I had the choice of leaving California or changing jobs (though within the same company). I took the $7K raise and relocation rather than the travel-heavy job that would have kept me in California, and kept my tax money in California (and I pay much less in taxes now). While my tax money may not be important to California, it becomes important when you consider that I wasn't alone, that there have been hundreds of people leaving the state in the last couple of years, either because their company pulled out of the state or because they needed to get away from that tax overhead. The company I work for also closed the office I worked in, reducing their overhead in the area (having most of the people work out of their homes or in another local office when they needed an office space).
My parents' vehicle taxes (registration) also tripled this year, in part due to the expiration of an earlier bill that cut them in half, and in part due to Davis & co. approving an increase in them during the same year. This may not sound like a big deal, but the registration on just one of the vehicles (the most expensive and newest vehicle) was just shy of $1,000.
I suppose when California collects more money in taxes from a pack of cigarettes than the company that actually put that pack on the shelves it's protecting people from the evils of smoking. Perhaps the increases in vehicle registration and gas taxes are protecting people from smog (just like lifting the requirement to smog-check vehicles that are less than 4 years old and increasing the cost of smog checks by enacting new rules which require new equipment). Making it illegal to smoke in enclosed public spaces is certainly protecting the public, as every bar owner that's losing business to some bar that has a patio can attest to. Oh, yeah, and there's that new one where Davis wants to require new exhaust restrictions on landscaping equipment, raising the cost of the equipment by ~$45 per item (even for something as simple as a chainsaw or lawnmower which you might be able to get for $50-100 today), even though federal guidelines forbid those regulations.
Don't worry, though, California's got extra bonuses for welfare recipients and illegal aliens, and now that the illegal residents of California can get driver's licenses, they have everything they need to register to vote for the people that gave them those licenses. After all, it may be illegal for them to live in California, and it may be illegal for an illegal immigrant to vote, but all you need to vote in California is a driver's license.
Unlikely, since they could modify the ISO to launch whatever hacks they want running at the same time as the game, or write up a hacked boot-loader that does it that way. In any case, the existence of the software on a CD rather than the hard drive doesn't change the fact that the game is interacting with the system, and that other programs can gain access to the same resources.
What would be neat is for someone to do the same thing to boot straight into Open Office, ideal for a diskless network workstation for an office, wouldn't you think? A kernel totally optimized for word processing in the system's CD-ROM. No concerns about your staff playing Q3A when you're not looking.
Until they pop out your OO CD and stick in their GentooQ3 CD. The more this sort of thing spreads, the more likely it is that you'll see corporate PCs with the boot from CD option locked out, rather than seeing this in wider use, even if they are just booting Open Office from an ISO image on a small hard drive or flash disk.
It's probably a tiny fraction of the cost that the Army spends on maintaing and opening recruiting offices, and sending flyers to high school seniors.
It is a rather small portion of their recruiting budget. One of the early press releases for the game mentioned the actual percentage, but I don't recall what it was. Several articles reference that it cost over $6.3 Million to develop and a few more recent articles mention that it has paid for itself (which earlier articles referenced as 300-400 recruits, meaning that the average cost of recruiting is ~$15,750 per person or more).
hmm when I played TFC excessively, I generally ran Roger Wilco (for voice comms), at least one IRC client, the game itself, sometimes an MP3 player, and whichever external server browser I was using at the time (gamespy early on, ASE later). That was on a day where I didn't have a half dozen other things going on, or wasn't running a league.
Sure, I stripped the OS down quite a bit when I initially set it up, to the point where I sometimes have to enable rather mundane functions to do other things, but overall the game is not the only thing running that matters to me, as the player of the game.
The place I could really see something like this going over pretty well, though, would be a LAN party, where you could have a few of these around for people that don't have the game, so they don't have to mess with installation and everything else. Of course, that would limit it pretty much to games that you don't have to pay a license for each copy on, such as America's Army.
I see the future and it looks like this: a bootable Linux CD with my choice of applications, and a USB dongle with my/home. Need new software? Download a new ISO, burn it. Take any PC (office, home, cybercafe), insert CD, boot, insert dongle, work/play.
If more people start doing things like this, you're more likely to find that more PCs are locked down rather than allowing you to do it. Then again, the basic idea is no different than what we did when we were using Apple IIs and so on, using a floppy to store our data and a floppy for our applications, many of which had to boot from the floppy. Sure, with CDs and USB keyrings you can store a lot more data and applications than you could on single floppies, but it's really not a new way of doing things.
I predict 12 months before bootable Linux CDs become a completely standard model for games and application distribution, and 24 months before Microsoft attempt an imitation.
Microsoft already does it, right here, with a stripped down version of WindowsXP on the hard drive, minimal data storage on the drive, and the primary applications distributed on DVD. Boot from the DVD and you don't even see the OS' GUI. Moving to an OS that boots from a CD would just be moving back to their previous attempt
Is there a specific significant improvement in the game over running it under regular Linux or Windows they can tell us about or are they just throwing around buzzwords and stuff like "super gaming console power". I'd like to see some hard evidence and benchmarks and such explaining why you would want to do this and why it makes the game play better.
The assumption is that they stripped down Linux to only what they need for the game. Of course, whether or not this is true remains to be seen. The real question, imo, is whether or not the hardware detection and configuration and so on that needs to be done during boot for this to work on multiple configurations is worth the extra speed you might get from running a handful of excess processes. Additionally, you'd have to modify the disc every time a new driver came out if you wanted any improved performance from that driver.
Of course, you could strip and rebuild the disc for your specific configuration, to reduce the detection and configuration requirements and possibly speed up the boot process.
heh, the last game I used a boot disk on was Doom, do I really need to do this all over again?
I also think the 'boots in under a minute' claim is rather pathetic, as in an arcade machine the operator is going to boot the machine long before anyone's in the place, and computer operating systems can already occomplish this to some degree (otherwise, it really couldn't have been done this way anyway). Besides that, I leave my home PC on all the time anyway, so the only boot time is from login to the start of the game (after it puts all of it's logo splash screens and other bs up). The home consoles all have various boot times as well, but then they're not that long, either (usually only a little longer than it takes to start the thing and switch the video and bring the controller with me over to the couch).
As you said, the option may be nice if people have problems getting the game to run, but how often does that really happen to a degree where a boot disk would actually help anything?
OTOH, there are some cases where I would appreciate having a login for my Windows XP machine that stripped out absolutely everything I didn't need for gaming, but then I usually strip out most of that stuff on my primary login (sure, manually starting the printer spool can be a PITA sometimes, when I forget to do it before hitting print, but it's not a big deal).
Consumers need an incentive to upgrade to HDTV. Sony, I use as an example because of its wide spectrum of products. However, Microsoft, or Nintendo could also feel a push from other display manufacturers to update the hardware.
Microsoft's and Nintendo's consoles already support HDTV, though Nintendo might (unlikely) feel a push to support the higher resolution that Microsoft supports. Sony has fairly minimal support for HDTV (at the same resolution as Nintendo), on a much smaller percentage of it's titles.
I am not a game designer, but I know that PS2 and X-Box really pushed the limits on capabilities this time around, and may have sacrificed some ease-of-programming as a result. The Gamecube, however, was developed in a way so as to ease development, so its almost premature retirement seems somewhat surprising. Perhaps Gamecube is gently beginning to broaden their audience and dumping their current design scheme?
The XBox should be easy to program for, at least for anyone that's developed a PC game before. I don't see a lot of PC game developers complaining about Windows being a hard platform to develop for, except in terms of the number of possible configurations (which consoles generally eliminate). The PS2 is a bit behind in terms of graphics performance. All of the systems could use more memory, and even the XBox' graphics processor is a bit behind the current high-end technology on the PC. This is all nothing new, though, as it's the middle of the consoles' life-spans. There are a lot of extra functions that can be put into graphics chips to help make games look better, and more speed can't hurt, especially as HDTV adoption spreads (and really the XBox supports the highest resolution of the 3). The PS2 didn't even have FSAA support in the US launch titles, because developers hadn't figured out how to do it and Sony hadn't supplied any middleware or sample code to handle it.
So, from here we get better graphics hardware to support higher resolutions and better FSAA, as well as a few new features that we're only just starting to see being used in PC games (because games that were in the beginning of the dev cycle when such technology was introduced are just starting to come out the doors, such as HL2 and Doom 3 in the next 3-6 months). Then there are the benefits of faster processors with things like better physics and AI. More RAM can help image quality by allowing bigger textures, and can allow more information (and textures) to be cached, increasing the amount of time between loads (or allowing background caching with the extra CPU cycles and extra RAM). Faster DVD drives to reduce load times. Faster bus speeds help almost all aspects of gaming. Better dedicated sound hardware.
Then there are the 'extras' that can become commonplace: wireless everything (controllers, networking, etc), though ports would still be nice (both controller ports and ethernet ports), especially since we're still not at the point of widespread adoption (especially for networking). Hard drives for the consoles that don't currently have them (and larger/faster hard drives for the ones that do). Larger and/or more universal memory cards (ie being able to use the same memory card in my PS3, camera, printer, PC, etc.; display pictures on my TV with my PS3 that were captured on my digital camera with the same memory card, transfer songs from my PC to my PS3, etc). Using the hard drive for Tivo-like purposes. I'm sure someone at Sony, MS, or Nintendo can think of something I haven't put here.
Still, an upgrade to a new console will most likely not have anything to do with polygon count or frames-per-second; a new console will be successful, just as every successful console was successful, from the creation of good, entertaining games/media. We can only hope that happens with the next generation consoles.
Amen to that, so to speak, but I still think they have plenty of room for polygon count and frames per second, though it may not be in the way people normally think of these things. To do higher resolutions and FSAA you usually have to increase your baseline polygon count and fps by large amounts, and these are the things that make console games look better (FSAA because your TV's resolution is limited, higher resolution because HDTV uses higher resolutions).
The real question is, if there are fewer legitimate items in the Diablo 2 economy, will Blizzard be more likely to stop the dupes?
Fixing the economy is not really a matter of adding more legitimate items into the economy, it's a matter of reducing the items in the economy to their 'natural' state. By using a bot to 'counter the flood', you're also reducing the rarity of certain legitimate items, thereby hurting the economy in much the same way duped items do. The simple fact is that it's probably a lot easier to distinguish between someone using a bot and someone not using a bot than it is to distinguish between someone duping items and someone not doing so.
I know I'd be pissed if I had legitimately collected a large number of extremely rare items and they decided that it was impossible to do so, therefore I must be duping.
That being said, they should have come up with a way of tracking legitimate items at the start, and then a simple script could've run through and deleted duped items, and possibly tracked the people found with duped items. Unfortunately, as the game goes on, there's more to lose by purging the system of duped items or whiping all of the characters to start with a clean slate (if they introduce a tracking system). Many people gained duped items through legitimate trades, and there's not much that can be done to rectify a situation like that.
I guess the lesson you want me to learn is that since other people ruined the game by massively circumventing the system I should have just quit instead of trying to enjoy the game and stay as close to legit as I could? That's a pretty terrible lesson, and Blizzard is setting a pretty terrible precedent.
Funny, instead of trying to cheat, but not cheating as bad as the others, I quit for a while, then came back and played legitimately. I play the game to play and enjoy it. If I don't enjoy the game, I stop playing it. If I have a bot playing the game for me, well, then I'm still not playing the game.
Somehow, I have yet to worry about not having some 1337 item in Diablo 2, though I've had my fair share of good items. I also lost a good number of characters with good items when I stopped playing (because, obviously, they really do purge the system of old characters that aren't being played, especially on accounts that aren't being played), and I dropped a couple of characters rather than trying to work through the changes they made to the game when they released the expansion. Still, the game is fine without cheating, and if it gets old at any point I just play something else for a while.
Maybe I'll start playing again now that they've cleaned things up, not that I noticed the cheaters before (except when I was trying to do some trading, of course, when the SOJ is a standard unit of barter there's something wrong, but then pskulls are easy enough to come by legitimately and they were worth quite a bit for a while).
Slashdot Mirror
It's worked so far with MSN, set-top internet (now branded with the MSN name, probably a future addition to the XBox line), and a handful of other MS products.
We can all name dozens of cancelled MS products if we've been around Slashdot long enough, but take a really hard look at how many products are grouped into the same division of Microsoft as the XBox, where the whole division basically loses money constantly, and how long some of those products have been around. If MS thinks someone else has a market they want, they're willing to spend a lot of money to stay in that market, even if it means they don't make any of it back for several years.
There are still specific advantages in the Xbox over the Gamecube. Networked games, higher quality output (audio and video), DVD player, hard drive.
As the other poster mentioned, the DVD player is a $30 addition. Internet games is $50/year (GC network adapter is an additional cost and more games are coming that support network play, though not internet play atm). Higher quality output is another additional cost (I don't know what the A/V pack costs since I have a fairly old TV). The hard drive is it, and without any of the other additions functions as an extremely large memory card and storage for music files (which I use quite a bit on certain games).
(haven't downloaded the source yet)
The directories in that image are fairly similar to what you get in the original HL SDK, with a few extra folders (though I don't have the SDK here at work, so I can't check). Other than that, a bunch of batch files don't amount to much, and I only see 1, possibly 2 or 3 header files in there. I also don't remember there being any batch files in the HL SDK (primarily because most of the code was VC++6 stuff, so you had the usual project files and such, along with a make file or two). That being said, if it is the code for the game itself, it's quite possible that there would be a large number of batch files for different builds of the engine, if they're working on multiple games simultaneously using the same engine (ie the image shows hl1, hl2, cs, tf2, but notably missing is cs2).
You're overestimating the stores' profits on console sales, for one. The stores count on people buying games just as much as the manufacturers do, and, furthermore, the stores want you to buy *used* games, for which they make a great deal more profit than the new games. There have even been a handful of reports that stores have occasionally had to sell consoles at a loss.
Second is that they're only selling the console and a controller at $99, so there's not a great deal coming in that box. (frankly, since the previous bundles involved the retailer taking an item from their shelves normally sold seperately and giving it to you with the box, I really don't see much difference here, except that your 'bundle' price and items are much more flexible, and no bundle is required).
As far as price point is concerned, it is likely that this is the first time that Nintendo is losing money on per-console sales.
OK, so let's look at this for a minute:
Nintendo was making a good profit selling a console bundled with a game or a GameBoy Player for $150. With the games I can see that, it really doesn't cost much to bundle a game, except any sales you might have gotten of that game and whatever profit difference exists. Microsoft cuts this cost by bundling low-selling games in cheap packages, as one example of how this can be done (something that wasn't done with the Nintendo bundles). With the GameBoy Player, you have a piece of hardware that sells for $50 seperately.
Now, granted bundle deals are usually going to cut some profit in favour of better sales and perceived value, but the perceived value of the Cube itself was around $100 anyway with these bundles, and the way the bundles were done usually meant that the retailer was taking a $50 item out of their stock and selling it with the Cube at $150. As the cost of the games went down, the game bundle obviously decreased in perceived value (increasing the perceived cost of the system), but overall you're still getting the Cube today at the same price you got it 2 weeks ago if you bought the GBPlayer bundle/bought the Cube and a Player today (unless you can find the Player cheaper than $50, which could be done in some areas).
In other words, unless they were drastically marking down the items they were bundling with the Cube, there's really not much difference on their end between the current deal and the previous deal, except that they may not push as many Players or copies of certain games (though most of the previously bundled games are now at a lower price, too).
The end effect, Nintendo was making money on each console sold before, and there's little evidence that this is not still true. The exception, of course, would be if they make a lot of money selling GBPlayers at $50 a pop like they presumably do with top-selling games at $50 a piece, and were using the perceived value to cover the GC's price. The beautiful thing about bundles, though, is that the profit on a bundle increases over time at a faster rate than it normally would selling the console alone (assuming that the console's rate of cost decrease is slower than what is being bundled; software costs, for instance, decrease drastically once the development cost is recouped).
106.1 and 4 other stations in Raliegh, NC, are Clear Channel stations. (you can search for Clear Channel stations in your area at http://www.clearchannel.com/rad_search.php though it's not a very good search function, the city name is about the most you can hope to get anything from).
They own 3 stations in my area listed as 'urban' format, and a 'smooth jazz' station. Considering that most of the stations out here are Country or Gospel, they seem to have missed the audience (they also own the 2 news radio stations out here). Of course, I don't think Raliegh is all that far from Hampton Roads, so you might pick up some of the stations, but I could be wrong (I haven't lived here very long after all).
Again, to the average user this is a nice deal because you get something extra in addition to the music. I saw a Marilyn Manson cd being sold that included a DVD along with it. This type of value-adding is what the music companies need to do in order to get people back to the store to buy their CDs - if that's the business model they want to hold onto.
Unfortunately, they've marked up the price on this one quite a bit, with the recommended price at $20. I have a handful of CDs that came with DVDs (off-hand, the Marilyn Manson CD you mentioned (and watching that DVD I wondered how many people would actually get through the whole thing), a Tori Amos CD, and a Korn CD, there may be a couple others), and none of them cost me anywhere near $20 (except for a Tool boxed set that was basically a CD and a DVD with all of their videos up to that point in an oversized box for $30). Sure, this DVD has one level of Amplitude on it (with a song that isn't in Amplitude, or on the CD), but how many people pay for a one-level game demo? (well, I guess the answer to that will depend on how many people buy this CD).
Also of note, I paid about $30 for Amplitude new, and though the store I bought it in had Frequency on the wall with a $20 price tag, they couldn't find the game itself when I asked for it (even after going back to the wall and bringing them the box).
I'd probably pick it up just for the extra Amplitude level. As it stands, though, the one track w/ P.O.D. in Amplitude drives me nuts, and it's at least a Crystal Method remix of one of their songs.
As for the claim that this won't be copyable / shareable, ummm yeah right. Maybe for people that don't have modded PS2s, but for those that do, it'll be easy enough.
Good project managers know that QA is planned for from the beginning, and that you know, from experience and extrapolation, how longs things will take to do.
First, Valve's had quite a lot of experience with QA both on their own side and on the publisher's (Sierra) side. They probably can make pretty good estimates about how long the QA process will take if it works out good. They can probably even estimate pretty well how long the QA process will take if they have to go through 4 iterations of it (including the fixes that go with those iterations).
On the other hand, if they found that X, Y, and Z needed to be completely redone, especially where any one of X, Y, and Z is an artistic element, such as a model or map, then they'll probably have a few snags on their schedule. More than likely a change like that would require more playtesting before it goes back to QA.
As for basing planning on experience, this is the company that delayed their last game by over a year to rewrite the engine. They're also a company that has released only 1 game (and a dozen expansions/mods/etc). There's a lot of experience there in terms of QA and such only because they've been through 4 years of QA on patches and such (yes, their is a QA process for the patches, both in-house and at the publisher), but there's very little experience in terms of building and shipping a game as a team.
"It's not uncommon for there to be only two or three Japanese games among the top 20 sellers each month; this would have been unheard of less than ten years ago."
I'm not even sure if this is completely true. Maybe we're questioning the fact that more western games are in the charts than before, but the last charts I saw showed more like 9 Japanese games in the top 20 (though 3 were the different versions of Soul Calibur 2, 3 US titles were the different versions of Madden NFL 2004).
As for questioning matters like originality in the titles, there are problems on this front on both sides. After all, 4 of the top 11 games are football games (Madden for GC was #11, NCAA Football was #5), and who would you get to develop an American football game outside of the US? 5 of the top 20 are US-centric sports games (the above 4 and NBA Street), with Mario Golf making 6 sports games in the list (though obviously not in the same realm of sports games as the others). The best selling soccer (football for the non-US people) game in Japan is a game made by a Japanese company, while the best selling soccer game in Europe is an EA title. Would anyone in the US be likely to play a Japanese-developed baseball game today? Well the Japanese certainly are, and it's right up there in the Japanese top 10, too.
Something else to note would be the longevity of titles on the US charts. Games rise and fall on the Japanese charts in a matter of weeks. In the US, we still have Vice City and Halo in the top 20. Pokemon Ruby & Saphire's combined sales keep it in the top 20 in Japan, while in the US they're listed individually and both still on the top 20.
The article's author even takes the time to say that Nintendo's part of the problem, even though Nintendo has 4 games in the US top 20, surpassed only by EA's 5. The only other company with more than 1 is Namco, and that's the 3 listings for SC2 (as EA's listing is for 2 games + 3 listings for Madden).
Why do people keep using the "register to vote" excuse to be against driver licenses for illegal immigrants? On this forum, people should be smarter and suggest to fix the real problem, the document requirements for voter registration.
For full disclosure, I'm not a US citizen but I have had a CA driver's license for 10 years but I know it's illegal for me to register to vote. Are you suggesting I should give up my CA license and drive whithout a license or insurance because of the posibility somebody in my position registers to vote illegally?
The legal immigrant part makes all the difference in the world in terms of the whole licensing issue. As far as registering to vote, I agree, there should be better requirements, or the license should indicate immigration/citizenship status to help the voter registration process. When I lived in California, I registered to vote as part of my application for a California ID (I didn't have a driver's license until I was 20, because of the whole insurance requirement and the fact that I did not have a car).
In reality, I could not possibly understand the reason that anyone would allow illegal immigrants to have a driver's license until I realized that this problem with voter registration existed. Because I needed a birth certificate and proof of residence to get my license, it didn't really occur to me at that time that the license was all I needed to register to vote. The simple fact is that if an illegal immigrant shows up to register for a driver's license, they should be exported, not given a license.
More approiately, we can decide that we shouldn't have differant tariffs because of the blurring that has been discussed here in absurd depth.
Exactly. And, in most cases, this is becoming the case. When it comes down to it, Sony made a big deal about export restrictions on the PS2 from Japan's side of things, and now has made a big deal about import tariffs on Europe's side. Overall, it's really about getting some press and trying to reduce the fees they have to pay to ship the thing around the world.
Of course, even if they didn't have to pay the tariffs, it's unlikely they'd pass much of the savings onto the consumer, unless/until they had to do it to meet a certain price point (assuming they actually have some competition some day).
Someone who's not afraid to *protect* business? Good god man, have you any idea what you're saying?! The DMCA was passed to protect business! Every copyright term extension has been to protect business! I say business has enough protection - what about protecting people for once?
It's not so much about protecting business as protecting jobs. 18 months ago I had the choice of leaving California or changing jobs (though within the same company). I took the $7K raise and relocation rather than the travel-heavy job that would have kept me in California, and kept my tax money in California (and I pay much less in taxes now). While my tax money may not be important to California, it becomes important when you consider that I wasn't alone, that there have been hundreds of people leaving the state in the last couple of years, either because their company pulled out of the state or because they needed to get away from that tax overhead. The company I work for also closed the office I worked in, reducing their overhead in the area (having most of the people work out of their homes or in another local office when they needed an office space).
My parents' vehicle taxes (registration) also tripled this year, in part due to the expiration of an earlier bill that cut them in half, and in part due to Davis & co. approving an increase in them during the same year. This may not sound like a big deal, but the registration on just one of the vehicles (the most expensive and newest vehicle) was just shy of $1,000.
I suppose when California collects more money in taxes from a pack of cigarettes than the company that actually put that pack on the shelves it's protecting people from the evils of smoking. Perhaps the increases in vehicle registration and gas taxes are protecting people from smog (just like lifting the requirement to smog-check vehicles that are less than 4 years old and increasing the cost of smog checks by enacting new rules which require new equipment). Making it illegal to smoke in enclosed public spaces is certainly protecting the public, as every bar owner that's losing business to some bar that has a patio can attest to. Oh, yeah, and there's that new one where Davis wants to require new exhaust restrictions on landscaping equipment, raising the cost of the equipment by ~$45 per item (even for something as simple as a chainsaw or lawnmower which you might be able to get for $50-100 today), even though federal guidelines forbid those regulations.
Don't worry, though, California's got extra bonuses for welfare recipients and illegal aliens, and now that the illegal residents of California can get driver's licenses, they have everything they need to register to vote for the people that gave them those licenses. After all, it may be illegal for them to live in California, and it may be illegal for an illegal immigrant to vote, but all you need to vote in California is a driver's license.
Unlikely, since they could modify the ISO to launch whatever hacks they want running at the same time as the game, or write up a hacked boot-loader that does it that way. In any case, the existence of the software on a CD rather than the hard drive doesn't change the fact that the game is interacting with the system, and that other programs can gain access to the same resources.
What would be neat is for someone to do the same thing to boot straight into Open Office, ideal for a diskless network workstation for an office, wouldn't you think? A kernel totally optimized for word processing in the system's CD-ROM. No concerns about your staff playing Q3A when you're not looking.
Until they pop out your OO CD and stick in their GentooQ3 CD. The more this sort of thing spreads, the more likely it is that you'll see corporate PCs with the boot from CD option locked out, rather than seeing this in wider use, even if they are just booting Open Office from an ISO image on a small hard drive or flash disk.
It's probably a tiny fraction of the cost that the Army spends on maintaing and opening recruiting offices, and sending flyers to high school seniors.
It is a rather small portion of their recruiting budget. One of the early press releases for the game mentioned the actual percentage, but I don't recall what it was. Several articles reference that it cost over $6.3 Million to develop and a few more recent articles mention that it has paid for itself (which earlier articles referenced as 300-400 recruits, meaning that the average cost of recruiting is ~$15,750 per person or more).
hmm when I played TFC excessively, I generally ran Roger Wilco (for voice comms), at least one IRC client, the game itself, sometimes an MP3 player, and whichever external server browser I was using at the time (gamespy early on, ASE later). That was on a day where I didn't have a half dozen other things going on, or wasn't running a league.
Sure, I stripped the OS down quite a bit when I initially set it up, to the point where I sometimes have to enable rather mundane functions to do other things, but overall the game is not the only thing running that matters to me, as the player of the game.
The place I could really see something like this going over pretty well, though, would be a LAN party, where you could have a few of these around for people that don't have the game, so they don't have to mess with installation and everything else. Of course, that would limit it pretty much to games that you don't have to pay a license for each copy on, such as America's Army.
I see the future and it looks like this: a bootable Linux CD with my choice of applications, and a USB dongle with my /home. Need new software? Download a new ISO, burn it. Take any PC (office, home, cybercafe), insert CD, boot, insert dongle, work/play.
If more people start doing things like this, you're more likely to find that more PCs are locked down rather than allowing you to do it. Then again, the basic idea is no different than what we did when we were using Apple IIs and so on, using a floppy to store our data and a floppy for our applications, many of which had to boot from the floppy. Sure, with CDs and USB keyrings you can store a lot more data and applications than you could on single floppies, but it's really not a new way of doing things.
I predict 12 months before bootable Linux CDs become a completely standard model for games and application distribution, and 24 months before Microsoft attempt an imitation.
Microsoft already does it, right here, with a stripped down version of WindowsXP on the hard drive, minimal data storage on the drive, and the primary applications distributed on DVD. Boot from the DVD and you don't even see the OS' GUI. Moving to an OS that boots from a CD would just be moving back to their previous attempt
Is there a specific significant improvement in the game over running it under regular Linux or Windows they can tell us about or are they just throwing around buzzwords and stuff like "super gaming console power". I'd like to see some hard evidence and benchmarks and such explaining why you would want to do this and why it makes the game play better.
The assumption is that they stripped down Linux to only what they need for the game. Of course, whether or not this is true remains to be seen. The real question, imo, is whether or not the hardware detection and configuration and so on that needs to be done during boot for this to work on multiple configurations is worth the extra speed you might get from running a handful of excess processes. Additionally, you'd have to modify the disc every time a new driver came out if you wanted any improved performance from that driver.
Of course, you could strip and rebuild the disc for your specific configuration, to reduce the detection and configuration requirements and possibly speed up the boot process.
heh, the last game I used a boot disk on was Doom, do I really need to do this all over again?
I also think the 'boots in under a minute' claim is rather pathetic, as in an arcade machine the operator is going to boot the machine long before anyone's in the place, and computer operating systems can already occomplish this to some degree (otherwise, it really couldn't have been done this way anyway). Besides that, I leave my home PC on all the time anyway, so the only boot time is from login to the start of the game (after it puts all of it's logo splash screens and other bs up). The home consoles all have various boot times as well, but then they're not that long, either (usually only a little longer than it takes to start the thing and switch the video and bring the controller with me over to the couch).
As you said, the option may be nice if people have problems getting the game to run, but how often does that really happen to a degree where a boot disk would actually help anything?
OTOH, there are some cases where I would appreciate having a login for my Windows XP machine that stripped out absolutely everything I didn't need for gaming, but then I usually strip out most of that stuff on my primary login (sure, manually starting the printer spool can be a PITA sometimes, when I forget to do it before hitting print, but it's not a big deal).
Consumers need an incentive to upgrade to HDTV. Sony, I use as an example because of its wide spectrum of products. However, Microsoft, or Nintendo could also feel a push from other display manufacturers to update the hardware.
Microsoft's and Nintendo's consoles already support HDTV, though Nintendo might (unlikely) feel a push to support the higher resolution that Microsoft supports. Sony has fairly minimal support for HDTV (at the same resolution as Nintendo), on a much smaller percentage of it's titles.
I am not a game designer, but I know that PS2 and X-Box really pushed the limits on capabilities this time around, and may have sacrificed some ease-of-programming as a result. The Gamecube, however, was developed in a way so as to ease development, so its almost premature retirement seems somewhat surprising. Perhaps Gamecube is gently beginning to broaden their audience and dumping their current design scheme?
The XBox should be easy to program for, at least for anyone that's developed a PC game before. I don't see a lot of PC game developers complaining about Windows being a hard platform to develop for, except in terms of the number of possible configurations (which consoles generally eliminate). The PS2 is a bit behind in terms of graphics performance. All of the systems could use more memory, and even the XBox' graphics processor is a bit behind the current high-end technology on the PC. This is all nothing new, though, as it's the middle of the consoles' life-spans. There are a lot of extra functions that can be put into graphics chips to help make games look better, and more speed can't hurt, especially as HDTV adoption spreads (and really the XBox supports the highest resolution of the 3). The PS2 didn't even have FSAA support in the US launch titles, because developers hadn't figured out how to do it and Sony hadn't supplied any middleware or sample code to handle it.
So, from here we get better graphics hardware to support higher resolutions and better FSAA, as well as a few new features that we're only just starting to see being used in PC games (because games that were in the beginning of the dev cycle when such technology was introduced are just starting to come out the doors, such as HL2 and Doom 3 in the next 3-6 months). Then there are the benefits of faster processors with things like better physics and AI. More RAM can help image quality by allowing bigger textures, and can allow more information (and textures) to be cached, increasing the amount of time between loads (or allowing background caching with the extra CPU cycles and extra RAM). Faster DVD drives to reduce load times. Faster bus speeds help almost all aspects of gaming. Better dedicated sound hardware.
Then there are the 'extras' that can become commonplace: wireless everything (controllers, networking, etc), though ports would still be nice (both controller ports and ethernet ports), especially since we're still not at the point of widespread adoption (especially for networking). Hard drives for the consoles that don't currently have them (and larger/faster hard drives for the ones that do). Larger and/or more universal memory cards (ie being able to use the same memory card in my PS3, camera, printer, PC, etc.; display pictures on my TV with my PS3 that were captured on my digital camera with the same memory card, transfer songs from my PC to my PS3, etc). Using the hard drive for Tivo-like purposes. I'm sure someone at Sony, MS, or Nintendo can think of something I haven't put here.
Still, an upgrade to a new console will most likely not have anything to do with polygon count or frames-per-second; a new console will be successful, just as every successful console was successful, from the creation of good, entertaining games/media. We can only hope that happens with the next generation consoles.
Amen to that, so to speak, but I still think they have plenty of room for polygon count and frames per second, though it may not be in the way people normally think of these things. To do higher resolutions and FSAA you usually have to increase your baseline polygon count and fps by large amounts, and these are the things that make console games look better (FSAA because your TV's resolution is limited, higher resolution because HDTV uses higher resolutions).
The real question is, if there are fewer legitimate items in the Diablo 2 economy, will Blizzard be more likely to stop the dupes?
Fixing the economy is not really a matter of adding more legitimate items into the economy, it's a matter of reducing the items in the economy to their 'natural' state. By using a bot to 'counter the flood', you're also reducing the rarity of certain legitimate items, thereby hurting the economy in much the same way duped items do. The simple fact is that it's probably a lot easier to distinguish between someone using a bot and someone not using a bot than it is to distinguish between someone duping items and someone not doing so.
I know I'd be pissed if I had legitimately collected a large number of extremely rare items and they decided that it was impossible to do so, therefore I must be duping.
That being said, they should have come up with a way of tracking legitimate items at the start, and then a simple script could've run through and deleted duped items, and possibly tracked the people found with duped items. Unfortunately, as the game goes on, there's more to lose by purging the system of duped items or whiping all of the characters to start with a clean slate (if they introduce a tracking system). Many people gained duped items through legitimate trades, and there's not much that can be done to rectify a situation like that.
I guess the lesson you want me to learn is that since other people ruined the game by massively circumventing the system I should have just quit instead of trying to enjoy the game and stay as close to legit as I could? That's a pretty terrible lesson, and Blizzard is setting a pretty terrible precedent.
Funny, instead of trying to cheat, but not cheating as bad as the others, I quit for a while, then came back and played legitimately. I play the game to play and enjoy it. If I don't enjoy the game, I stop playing it. If I have a bot playing the game for me, well, then I'm still not playing the game.
Somehow, I have yet to worry about not having some 1337 item in Diablo 2, though I've had my fair share of good items. I also lost a good number of characters with good items when I stopped playing (because, obviously, they really do purge the system of old characters that aren't being played, especially on accounts that aren't being played), and I dropped a couple of characters rather than trying to work through the changes they made to the game when they released the expansion. Still, the game is fine without cheating, and if it gets old at any point I just play something else for a while.
Maybe I'll start playing again now that they've cleaned things up, not that I noticed the cheaters before (except when I was trying to do some trading, of course, when the SOJ is a standard unit of barter there's something wrong, but then pskulls are easy enough to come by legitimately and they were worth quite a bit for a while).
blah, never mind, my first sentence is incorrect, I misread...
Now I get to wait for the posting requirements to finish up.
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