...drivers in New York suddenly face a severe shortage of parking space, as they are unable to parallel-park more than one Honda within 300 feet of each other.
Yup, I know of inflation. That's a very common argument in favor of increasing the game prices, and I must say it is a very valid argument. Where I and those who support that argument differ is the definition of the price of the game. I view the price of a game as an amount paid for an hour of entertainment. After all, games are entertainment products, just like movies and books, and I view them as pretty good substitutes. Others view the price for a game only by what's on the label. Following the latter definition, the price of games is certainly lower than it used to be, due to inflation. However, consider my definition for a moment. I said that some games offered as little as $0.50 per game of entertainment, while many current games offer up to $5 per hour of entertainment. If I paid $50 for a game that I could play for 50 hours in 1990, or $1/hour, the fair price for such a game would be $1.40/hour today. Unfortunatelly, I pay up to $5/hour today, more than three times the current price. In fact, compared to a $50 old game from my example, this new game would cost $178 if they offered the same length of entertainment. That's way more than I am willing to pay.
Now this is strange. As long as I had Kazaa on my work computer (P2-600, 128MB RAM), I could not run anything else when I was using it. I never thought it would be possible to run it on a P-166. But you are absolutely right; it is a very nasty piece of software (cleaning it with AdAware has disabled it, for example), which is why I switched to Kazaa Lite. And considering that I'm using it at least partially to a legal purpose (I've got lots of friends with amateur bands who put their work out on Kazaa), I would be very upset if somebody tried to nuke my computer.
(I also completely understand why you would want to keep file sharers out of your network. I also understand that compared to you, I should not call myself a sysadmin;))
I'm a network admin, too. However, having 8 computers on a 512kbps DSL line, I can afford to run Kazaa with a bandwidth limit of 100 kbps (both ways, combined) without slowing down the network connection on other computers, which are used primarily for downloading e-mails and playing solitaire.
If governmental workers are like me, they are bored and use Kazaa at work. I'm wondering whether there will be enough computers left to control the ballisting missile defense by the time Hatch is through with destroying computers.
1980s and early 1990s games: box contained a game, a thick manual, and usually some extras, such as a cloth map, a booklet with background informations or cut-outs of spaceships (Wing Commander series). Price per game: $50
2001-03 games: Box, which is much smaller (in the case of Europeans a DVD box even for PC games) contains a game and a thin booklet with installation instructions. The manual is on the CD; no extras. Price: $50.
Prices of games have already gone up. What I described, however, is only the most visible indication. You also have games that start at $60 (Neverwinter Nights, Warcraft III), or "special editions" that can cost as much as $80 and have box contents roughly equal to those of games that cost $50 ten years ago. In addition, the dollar spent per hour of gameplay is increasing all the time. Where you spent anywhere between 25 and 50 cents per hour of gameplay ten to fifteen years ago, you now spend up to $5 per hour of gameplay on titles like Command & Conquer: Renegade and Unreal II. That means that where you spent maybe $50 per month on games, you spend the same amount per week these days, or even more. Games are already enormously expensive, compared to a decade ago, but people didn't notice. The publishers used the ages-old strategy to decrease the amount of sold, while keeping the price stable, and it worked. Unfortunately for them, there is very little left to cut away from games, and so they have to resort to increasing the prices.
I may be dead-wrong here, but this is how I would create an estimate for software demand if I were a BSA researcher:
1. I'd estimate the number of companies and the number of employees that require the work with computers. This is a tedious, but relatively straight-forward process, and Yahoo! business profiles would be everything I needed.
2. I'd take this number, and assign to it the same number of operating systems, word processors, e-mail programs, antivirus programs and maybe something else. I'd also arbitrarily determine the share of people why may need to use a spreadsheet and a presentation program, etc...
3. I would come up with a number for the aggregate usage of the appropriate software. Then, I would create a formula to calculate the average age of computers in companies (based on their accumulated depreciation and depreciable life), and calculate what share of computers needed to be replaced last year.
I'd do all this, and make a huge mistake. I would not consider that some of the users would opt for freely downloadable software, such as Open Office or the office suite from Software 602, and that some other users would migrate their old software onto new computers (the way I still do it with MS Office 97). As a result, my estimates for demand, and thus the estimates for software piracy would be vastly overblown.
I use my PDA mainly as an e-book reader. Unlike Palm, Clie has this cool scrolling wheel, which makes all the difference for me. A perfect example of a small innovation that can (and should) mean big bucks for the company.
Here in Europe we can listen too and pass around Public Domain copies pre 1953 works, where the author is dead, so Elvis etc
Actually, that is not entirely so. In Europe, copyright expires 50 years after the death of the author, not 50 years after the work is published and the author is dead. In the US, the current limit is AFAIK 75 years. As a consequence, Elvis' works are not yet in public domain in Europe.
Other than that, you are absolutely right; it raises some interesting questions. For example, the works of George Orwell passed into public domain in Europe two years ago, but when I featured them on my Web site, I was quickly presented with a cease-and-desist letter from a US publisher. Residing in the US and having all my files on a US-based server, I had to oblige.
MMORPGs face one serious economic problem - inflation. I don't think it's coincidence that all the successful MMORPGs keep their monetary policies under strict control, so that the money supply doesn't get out of hand.
What really intrigued me in this paper was the talk about currency exchange between real-world currency and the game currency (pp 49-51). Right now, it's not much of a concern. However, considering the growth in on-line gaming, I can well imagine a world a few years from now, where several "virtual economies" combined would have the economic strength of a G-8 country, such as France or perhaps even Germany. In that case, you'll have a currency exchange market between several currencies that are regulated by central banks, and several currencies that are regulated by private companies. If the amount of virtual currency becomes signifficant, the unregulated currency exchange could possibly destabilize world currency markets. I am wondering whether this would result into governments taking control over MMORPGs or whether by that time the MMORPG providers will be economically powerful enough to force the governments into some kind of a compromise.
Well, it all comes down to one of the barriers to entry I mentioned - a decent marketing budget. I'm not a game developer, so I can't tell for certain, but as an investment analyst I understand one thing: on aggregate, people are like sheep (my econ teacher who tried to teach me that on aggregte people are rational must turn in his grave now). People have a herd mentality, and flock to the shiniest, most promising, most overhyped thing. In the gaming industry, this is made possible by marketing (same applies to virtually all entertainment industry). Unfortunatelly, independents have a hard time to get their message across.
Over my gaming career, I found some highly original independent games, ranging from unique puzzles to games that deserve their own niche, such as a trainspotting game. None of them would have a chance when selling on the shelves, because of the lack of decent graphics or music (another barrier of entry - lack of sufficiently big staff and equipment), but their original concept and length of gameplay often surpassed the bestsellers. Once in a long while one of the independents makes a breakthrough, and a big publisher markets his game (Rollercoaster Tycoon, for example). Other times, a publisher decides to corner a niche, and in order to survive, must publish games that are out of the mainstream (Dreamcatcher in adventures, or HPS Simulations in wargaming). Interestingly enough, these games experience a higher relative success than games in the mainstream, where you can have a wildly successful (albeit mediocre) game (such as Warcraft III in RTS) and a whole bunch of games that sell as poorly as some truly independent titles (Hooligans or Aztec Wars). I think that this indicates that with proper information (marketing), the consumers will pick up what they are really interested in, and not only what they get served on a silver platter.
For anyone who laments "Why do companies continue to pump out this sludge?", the answer is pretty simple: because consumers continue to buy.
Sorry, but I can't fully agree with this statement. It's like asking why record companies still sold CDs for $15 and answering because people would buy the CDs. I can pull this analogy even further - just like the record companies are whining about declining profits, the profit expectations for the gaming industry have been consistently downgraded over the past year.
The current gaming industry is nothing short of a classical oligopoly. You have a few companies that pretty much have the pricing structure worked out, which sell products that are roughly the same and only differ in brand and a few details, and which operate in an industry that has relatively high barriers to entry. As a game developer, you very well know the level of expertise a development team needs to have, as well as equipment and a solid marketing budget. As a consequence, only select few people can produce games these days, and none of the independent games is actually successful enough to either become mainstream or force the big publishers from their limbo.
Let's be generous and say there are five songs per CD that you really like. You would need 1500 CDs to get those 7500 songs. That makes me think that 7500 songs is not too realistic. I personally listen to anywhere between 30 and 200 songs until I'm sick of them (that can take a month or two) before I load up a different songlist. Throuhout the year, I listen to maybe 500 different songs; probably less. So why would I need a service that allows me to download 7500 songs (or more) if all I need is 500 of them? Considering that I own more than half of them on original CDs and can rip them at any time (which I did), all I really need is to buy 200-250 songs. That's $200-250 on iTunes, or $10/month using Microsoft's new project. Within 2-3 years (adjusting for new songs I may want to own throughout this period), it will be heaper for me to use iTunes than Microsoft's service.
Officially, the main reason for including these tags is to prevent counterfeiting. Now let's be generous and say that a whole 1% of all Euros are fake (the real number would be much closer to 0.0001%). I doubt that these tags would increase the cost of producing a banknote by less than 1%; more likely, the marginal cost increase will be significant. As such, I don't think that including the RFID tags will be a viable option for the EU.
Some people already mentioned other sites with more games (and some with fewer), but with the exception of Word of Spectrum and Home of the Underdogs, those sites lack the best feature of MobyGames - the crosslinking capability. If you want to research a particular game, you not only get user reviews and screenshots, but also the trivia about the game, and most importantly, a direct link to everybody mentioned in the credits and the developer and producer page. Once there, you can alway dig deeper, seeing which games the particular person participated in, and how those games may have influenced the game you are researching. If there ever will be a computer gaming historian, MobyGames will be a better resource for him than sites that may offer twice the number of games, but little or nothing in addition to the game name.
That said, I have to admit that even MobyGames is far from perfect. All content is user-submitted, and there are numerous mistakes, especially when it comes to release dates and publishers.
The lead designer of Bard's Tale was Michael Cranford, not Brian Fargo. Fargo was credited only with level design. While still important, as a level designer, he didn't have to work on game rules, spells, the story, etc. In fact, he never designed games on his own, even though he helped with the design of Bard's Tale I and II and Wasteland, after which he became a game producer. I'd love to see him as a producer of the game again, while leaving the design to a seasoned designer.
On a side note, Bard's Tale was so great because of the whole team; something that will be difficult to reproduce. In addition, to the genius of Michael Cranford, the team also included Lawrence Holland who later moved on to create Totally Games (X-Wing games, Star Trek: Bridge Commander), Joe Ybarra, the veteran game producer, and Bing Gordon (currently the CEO of Electronic Arts).
It would be surely nice to see similar action being taken elsewhere, but I don't think it will happen.
TurboTax is an unique piece of software in the sense that it has a very specific goal. It is used only once, and then it needs to be replaced by a newer version. Combine this with the fact that it would appeal even to users who would never install anything else on their computers, and you get a large number of disenchanted customers. You will never get the same protest base with programs like Windows, which come largely preinstalled, or different office suites, which the user installs and forgets, until he replaces the computer.
As for entertainment products, there is a possibility of such a backlash only when the products don't work on common players. The people who want to play CDs on their computers may be vocal, but they are too small of a minority to hurt the companies' revenues signifficantly, in the case of a boycott.
1. Unlike the TV, which is virtually free, people pay for PC games. The advertisers' argument against TiVo or skipping commercials in general is that watching commercials is a way to pay for the free programing. With advertisments in games, will we get the games for free or at least cheaper?
2. What will prevent rogue advertisers to advertise in on-line games? For example, a spammer in The Sims Online can create a character and simply walk around, telling users about the product he advertises. Or, if you can create your own house in the game (don't know whether that's possible; never played it), what prevents you to build a non-sanctioned Burger King right next to a McDonald's, which paid for product placement?
1982. Atari produces several million gaming cartridges, based on a blockbuster movie that hit the big screen only days before the release of the game. 5 million cartridges ended up burried in the New Mexico desert. The game was E.T.
2003. Atari produces several million copies (4 million, to be exact) of a game, based on a blockbuster movie that hit the theaters at roughly the same time. The response is less than lukewarm. The movie is The Matrix Reloaded.
If I were Atari, I'd try to buy some cheap desert property now.
In the Internet heydays, I was covering Internet companies as an investment analyst (a much more fun job, considering the companies I need to cover now). Anyway, even then, some Internet advertisers, retailers and service companies were complaining about people using fake names and name spoofing. Ever since then, they were quietly pushing for regulations which would allow them to sue users that don't use their real names (I can only guess the reason, but I think it's got something to do with customer habits and data collection).
This may be partially the argument in Korea as well, even though it still dowsn't apply to outlawing nicknames on private message boards. However, considering the traditional need for a strong centralized government in Asian countries, at the cost of individual rights, it's just natural that Korea would be among the first to implement this. I'm wondering whether Singapore, the most authoritarian of these countries, didn't pass similar laws already...
Slashdot Mirror
- The Fountains of Paradise by Atrhur C. Clarke
- Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson
I'm sure there are more....drivers in New York suddenly face a severe shortage of parking space, as they are unable to parallel-park more than one Honda within 300 feet of each other.
Yup, I know of inflation. That's a very common argument in favor of increasing the game prices, and I must say it is a very valid argument. Where I and those who support that argument differ is the definition of the price of the game. I view the price of a game as an amount paid for an hour of entertainment. After all, games are entertainment products, just like movies and books, and I view them as pretty good substitutes. Others view the price for a game only by what's on the label. Following the latter definition, the price of games is certainly lower than it used to be, due to inflation. However, consider my definition for a moment. I said that some games offered as little as $0.50 per game of entertainment, while many current games offer up to $5 per hour of entertainment. If I paid $50 for a game that I could play for 50 hours in 1990, or $1/hour, the fair price for such a game would be $1.40/hour today. Unfortunatelly, I pay up to $5/hour today, more than three times the current price. In fact, compared to a $50 old game from my example, this new game would cost $178 if they offered the same length of entertainment. That's way more than I am willing to pay.
(I also completely understand why you would want to keep file sharers out of your network. I also understand that compared to you, I should not call myself a sysadmin ;))
I'm a network admin, too. However, having 8 computers on a 512kbps DSL line, I can afford to run Kazaa with a bandwidth limit of 100 kbps (both ways, combined) without slowing down the network connection on other computers, which are used primarily for downloading e-mails and playing solitaire.
If governmental workers are like me, they are bored and use Kazaa at work. I'm wondering whether there will be enough computers left to control the ballisting missile defense by the time Hatch is through with destroying computers.
1980s and early 1990s games: box contained a game, a thick manual, and usually some extras, such as a cloth map, a booklet with background informations or cut-outs of spaceships (Wing Commander series). Price per game: $50
2001-03 games: Box, which is much smaller (in the case of Europeans a DVD box even for PC games) contains a game and a thin booklet with installation instructions. The manual is on the CD; no extras. Price: $50.
Prices of games have already gone up. What I described, however, is only the most visible indication. You also have games that start at $60 (Neverwinter Nights, Warcraft III), or "special editions" that can cost as much as $80 and have box contents roughly equal to those of games that cost $50 ten years ago. In addition, the dollar spent per hour of gameplay is increasing all the time. Where you spent anywhere between 25 and 50 cents per hour of gameplay ten to fifteen years ago, you now spend up to $5 per hour of gameplay on titles like Command & Conquer: Renegade and Unreal II. That means that where you spent maybe $50 per month on games, you spend the same amount per week these days, or even more. Games are already enormously expensive, compared to a decade ago, but people didn't notice. The publishers used the ages-old strategy to decrease the amount of sold, while keeping the price stable, and it worked. Unfortunately for them, there is very little left to cut away from games, and so they have to resort to increasing the prices.
Americans are overly violent, while Europeans are oversexed. That's it; I'm moving to Europe!
Coffee, pizza, chips, popcorn, Coke, beer and lots of Maalox.
1. I'd estimate the number of companies and the number of employees that require the work with computers. This is a tedious, but relatively straight-forward process, and Yahoo! business profiles would be everything I needed.
2. I'd take this number, and assign to it the same number of operating systems, word processors, e-mail programs, antivirus programs and maybe something else. I'd also arbitrarily determine the share of people why may need to use a spreadsheet and a presentation program, etc...
3. I would come up with a number for the aggregate usage of the appropriate software. Then, I would create a formula to calculate the average age of computers in companies (based on their accumulated depreciation and depreciable life), and calculate what share of computers needed to be replaced last year.
I'd do all this, and make a huge mistake. I would not consider that some of the users would opt for freely downloadable software, such as Open Office or the office suite from Software 602, and that some other users would migrate their old software onto new computers (the way I still do it with MS Office 97). As a result, my estimates for demand, and thus the estimates for software piracy would be vastly overblown.
I was lucky to score an early version of TomeRaider. This allows me to take (or create) any .txt file and export it as a Palm database file.
I use my PDA mainly as an e-book reader. Unlike Palm, Clie has this cool scrolling wheel, which makes all the difference for me. A perfect example of a small innovation that can (and should) mean big bucks for the company.
Actually, that is not entirely so. In Europe, copyright expires 50 years after the death of the author, not 50 years after the work is published and the author is dead. In the US, the current limit is AFAIK 75 years. As a consequence, Elvis' works are not yet in public domain in Europe.
Other than that, you are absolutely right; it raises some interesting questions. For example, the works of George Orwell passed into public domain in Europe two years ago, but when I featured them on my Web site, I was quickly presented with a cease-and-desist letter from a US publisher. Residing in the US and having all my files on a US-based server, I had to oblige.
There is already such thing
What really intrigued me in this paper was the talk about currency exchange between real-world currency and the game currency (pp 49-51). Right now, it's not much of a concern. However, considering the growth in on-line gaming, I can well imagine a world a few years from now, where several "virtual economies" combined would have the economic strength of a G-8 country, such as France or perhaps even Germany. In that case, you'll have a currency exchange market between several currencies that are regulated by central banks, and several currencies that are regulated by private companies. If the amount of virtual currency becomes signifficant, the unregulated currency exchange could possibly destabilize world currency markets. I am wondering whether this would result into governments taking control over MMORPGs or whether by that time the MMORPG providers will be economically powerful enough to force the governments into some kind of a compromise.
Over my gaming career, I found some highly original independent games, ranging from unique puzzles to games that deserve their own niche, such as a trainspotting game. None of them would have a chance when selling on the shelves, because of the lack of decent graphics or music (another barrier of entry - lack of sufficiently big staff and equipment), but their original concept and length of gameplay often surpassed the bestsellers. Once in a long while one of the independents makes a breakthrough, and a big publisher markets his game (Rollercoaster Tycoon, for example). Other times, a publisher decides to corner a niche, and in order to survive, must publish games that are out of the mainstream (Dreamcatcher in adventures, or HPS Simulations in wargaming). Interestingly enough, these games experience a higher relative success than games in the mainstream, where you can have a wildly successful (albeit mediocre) game (such as Warcraft III in RTS) and a whole bunch of games that sell as poorly as some truly independent titles (Hooligans or Aztec Wars). I think that this indicates that with proper information (marketing), the consumers will pick up what they are really interested in, and not only what they get served on a silver platter.
Sorry, but I can't fully agree with this statement. It's like asking why record companies still sold CDs for $15 and answering because people would buy the CDs. I can pull this analogy even further - just like the record companies are whining about declining profits, the profit expectations for the gaming industry have been consistently downgraded over the past year.
The current gaming industry is nothing short of a classical oligopoly. You have a few companies that pretty much have the pricing structure worked out, which sell products that are roughly the same and only differ in brand and a few details, and which operate in an industry that has relatively high barriers to entry. As a game developer, you very well know the level of expertise a development team needs to have, as well as equipment and a solid marketing budget. As a consequence, only select few people can produce games these days, and none of the independent games is actually successful enough to either become mainstream or force the big publishers from their limbo.
Let's be generous and say there are five songs per CD that you really like. You would need 1500 CDs to get those 7500 songs. That makes me think that 7500 songs is not too realistic. I personally listen to anywhere between 30 and 200 songs until I'm sick of them (that can take a month or two) before I load up a different songlist. Throuhout the year, I listen to maybe 500 different songs; probably less. So why would I need a service that allows me to download 7500 songs (or more) if all I need is 500 of them? Considering that I own more than half of them on original CDs and can rip them at any time (which I did), all I really need is to buy 200-250 songs. That's $200-250 on iTunes, or $10/month using Microsoft's new project. Within 2-3 years (adjusting for new songs I may want to own throughout this period), it will be heaper for me to use iTunes than Microsoft's service.
Officially, the main reason for including these tags is to prevent counterfeiting. Now let's be generous and say that a whole 1% of all Euros are fake (the real number would be much closer to 0.0001%). I doubt that these tags would increase the cost of producing a banknote by less than 1%; more likely, the marginal cost increase will be significant. As such, I don't think that including the RFID tags will be a viable option for the EU.
That said, I have to admit that even MobyGames is far from perfect. All content is user-submitted, and there are numerous mistakes, especially when it comes to release dates and publishers.
On a side note, Bard's Tale was so great because of the whole team; something that will be difficult to reproduce. In addition, to the genius of Michael Cranford, the team also included Lawrence Holland who later moved on to create Totally Games (X-Wing games, Star Trek: Bridge Commander), Joe Ybarra, the veteran game producer, and Bing Gordon (currently the CEO of Electronic Arts).
TurboTax is an unique piece of software in the sense that it has a very specific goal. It is used only once, and then it needs to be replaced by a newer version. Combine this with the fact that it would appeal even to users who would never install anything else on their computers, and you get a large number of disenchanted customers. You will never get the same protest base with programs like Windows, which come largely preinstalled, or different office suites, which the user installs and forgets, until he replaces the computer.
As for entertainment products, there is a possibility of such a backlash only when the products don't work on common players. The people who want to play CDs on their computers may be vocal, but they are too small of a minority to hurt the companies' revenues signifficantly, in the case of a boycott.
2. What will prevent rogue advertisers to advertise in on-line games? For example, a spammer in The Sims Online can create a character and simply walk around, telling users about the product he advertises. Or, if you can create your own house in the game (don't know whether that's possible; never played it), what prevents you to build a non-sanctioned Burger King right next to a McDonald's, which paid for product placement?
2003. Atari produces several million copies (4 million, to be exact) of a game, based on a blockbuster movie that hit the theaters at roughly the same time. The response is less than lukewarm. The movie is The Matrix Reloaded.
If I were Atari, I'd try to buy some cheap desert property now.
This may be partially the argument in Korea as well, even though it still dowsn't apply to outlawing nicknames on private message boards. However, considering the traditional need for a strong centralized government in Asian countries, at the cost of individual rights, it's just natural that Korea would be among the first to implement this. I'm wondering whether Singapore, the most authoritarian of these countries, didn't pass similar laws already...