I have heard direct from the UO team that the Japanese shard is one of their most popular, so apparently they are trying to cater to that audience with more targetet content
I think that's what they mean by getting rid of capitalism as we know it.
If labor forces are unnaturally mandated or prevented (e.g. through regulation), then it is no longer capitalism -- or maybe I should say it is no longer free market capitalism.
I think the endemic overwork in the game industry is a symptom of free-market economics: lots of supply of potential game developers, with little demand for quality or longevity of the games. Hopefully this is starting to change as the game industry gets a little more mature, and as MMO games (which do require higher quality code, because they have to last longer and get pounded on more) get more market acceptance.
My wife was in a sewing class the other day, and two of the other four women there were online gamers -- one (19 yrs old) played DAOC and the other (mid 50's) played Ultima Online. They said they play for many hours per week.
I'm not sure if it's statistically significant, but a 50% gamer ratio at a sewing class has gotta mean something!
Actual speech recognition is still best when there's a limited vocabulary -- the more limited the better, especially if the vocabulary can be constrained so that the words are very different.
I am surprised you got such lousy recognition on things like "fire photons", etc. The recognizer in Starfleet Academy sounds pretty bad.
Dragon's program was called Naturally Speaking (IIRC). There's also ViaVoice (from IBM) and a few others. My wife works in this field, so I know far too much about it for my own good.;-)
Stress *does* affect the recognition, and so does inflection and accents. Using "dictation" mode in games has a long way to go, and probably limited-vocabulary for commands, and player-to-player (hopefully with voice fonts!) is what we're likely to see for the next few years.
This works for retail boxed games, but not for MMO games. Retail sales (which is all you can preorder) account for maybe 10% of a MMO games final revenues. So you'll get a spike in expected revenue when people order the box, but then they might not pay after the first free month.
The only real way to measure an MMOs success is a year or so after launch, by looking at subscriber retention rates. Any other measurement is flawed.
Remember: The Sims Online was also projected as being a huge blockbuster with over 400,000 subscribers before it launched. Did it ever reach even 25% of that number?
Given the interconnected networks and advanced electronics not used by donkey-cart users, would we be able to prevent such attacks as happened this morning in Baghdad?
Or should do a intense forced upgrade of donkey-cart users world-wide?
Re:Nothing new - Better languages than Java for th
on
Jess in Action
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· Score: 1
My point was addressing this sentence:
despite the "cross-platform" compatibility of Java, few corporations use it to their financial benefit.
My reply showed how a large corporation is using the cross-platform compatibility of Java for financial benefit. This is not an example of an individual (me) porting a Java app. This is an example of an app requiring no porting, because it is already cross-platform compatible. The institution in question will save thousands of dollars: 44 servers * ~$3000/server/year = $132000 per year (approx), purely by taking advantage of Java's cross-platform compatibility.
And, yes, I do consider myself a typical Java developer, one of a mere 3-5 million or so.
Re:Nothing new - Better languages than Java for th
on
Jess in Action
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· Score: 1
I am currently working for a large financial institution that is replacing an NT server farm with a Linux server farm. This was quite easily done because they are using WebLogic (i.e. Java) as an application server.
And when I say server farm I mean several dozens of servers. And several hundred thousand lines of code.
Oh yeah - they also found a massive performance improvement switching from NT to Linux.
Almost forgot! They are using Blaze, which is a Java-based rules engine.
Re:Rule Engine Frameworks
on
Jess in Action
·
· Score: 1
I created a rules-based system for a financial institution back in 1996 using CLIPS (the C-based precursor to JESS). It is still being used on the trading floor today, as far as I know.
I am also planning on using JESS for the AI for a large Java-based online game I'm currently working on. I am really looking forward to using the backward-chaining capabilities of JESS for this.
I think JESS (and CLIPS) is best suited for fairly complex systems where you want to break out the rules separately and let non-programmers work on them. One of the big advantages is that you can load the rules without having to recompile everything. Another is that it is much easier to debug rules than to debug raw code, just like for any scripting language.
As for the rules JSR, I haven't looked at it recently. But from what I remember it seemed to fit in pretty well with JESS.
What do you mean by "Exclusivity"? There's two meanings that I can think of:
1) Excludes others from the market.
Microsoft has been found legally culpable by a real, live judge of excluding others from the browser market, using its monopoly powers.
2) Owns 100% of the market.
Monopolies hardly ever have 100% of the market, because it's almost impossible. They just have to have a supermajority so that they can keep others from joining. I'd say it's hard to argue that Microsoft doesn't have a supermajority of the browser market right now.
There's a basic flaw with his HBO example: The content developers (TV studios) are not selling directly to the end-viewer (TV audience). They are really selling to the distributer, who in turn sells you access to the content.
So when a new season of The Sopranos comes out it is sold to the cable channels, who *do* have to pay for it again. But they absorb the cost because they are already making hefty margins on all the $30/month subscribers.
So his HBO example is more like if you have a little brother who pays you $3/month to watch you play EQ. If you buy an expansion pack you don't necessarily charge your little bro' an upgrade fee for watching, because his $3/month is gravy over and above your fixed $12/month cost that you pay whether or not he's watching.
But, given all that, I agree that the price for a "box" should be minimal at worst (just enough to cover distribution, retail shelf space, and enough profit to make it worth it for retailers), and zero at best (e.g. for a downloadable version). I think the market will inevitably drive the MMOG companies to this point. Alternatively, they will have to start packaging "goodies" with the box to give you something concrete and/or essential for your $.
They don't get those glossy spreads and reams of publicity for free, you know.
There's a huge advertising cost that's associated with each expansion pack, which of course is (hopefully) a lot less than the sales that get generated.
But you are right about the gaming press -- they wan't new cover art, new titles, new new new new new. This is because they haven't been trained to cover "stories" like regular journalists have been -- they've been trained to generate buzz (and sometimes useful reviews) which is what the people buy their magazines for. If we wanted more "story", like what ATITD has, then the market has to see a need for that, and somebody has to create a magazine or web site that can survive based on covering evolving content, instead of the newest splashy cover art.
It is always more expensive to make changes and/or fix bugs once a system has gone "live". This has been shown so many times that it isn't funny. But for some reason, time-to-market is always raised as the counter-argument, even when being early to market actually causes the whole thing to fail. Or in the case of MMO games, to suffer irreparable damage to the company's reputation.
I hope as the game industry matures more that there will more examples of well-designed systems and games.
Personally, my company has been working on a MMO game for a few years, with the goal of getting a robust, reliable engine and network framework in place in parallel to getting the first game in place. We started with prototypes and then refactored and redesigned to get the final design, which is now pretty solid. If we had to get to market more quickly we probably would have crashed and burned and disappeared already, instead of having a better architecture that should handle a lot better in the long haul.
Of course, we'll see what happens come launch time, which is really when the rubber hits the road!:-)
But Tetris is not an online multiplayer game.
The point was that it's the crappy interactions with other people that ruins the game, not the game itself, e.g. sore losers and poor-sport winners.
I found it interesting that the author's calculations were based solely on the U.S. and European market, without taking into account the Asian market.
So far, all MMO games that have been released have failed to achieve cross-over between the Western and Eastern markets. This includes MMOGs that started in the U.S and Europe, like Everquest, and MMOGs that started in Asia, like Lineage.
The true global market is probably at about 10-12% saturation with today's games, meaning we are still in the Early Adopter phase, and not yet into the Early Majority. Thus, we have 90% growth potential ahead, for any game(s) that can actually become popular in the global market.
And, of course, China is getting more wired every day. And the only profitable games in China will be online games, because console and single-player games have a 99% piracy rate there.
So, IMHO, the MMO market is still very much in it's infancy, and the best days are still far ahead of us.
One key is in creating games that appeal to both hard-core and more casual gamers (or at least casual gamers that are willing to pay for their games)
Another key is in coming up with new types of pricing models, like mini-subscriptions, group discounts, and shared subscriptions, and charging subscriptions to your phone bill.
And, of course, the games need to get better. It's time to get off the leveling treadmill!
My prediction is that to really gain mainstream acceptance MMOs will need ubiquituous access, including from cell phones, browsers, consoles, webTV, etc.
Not always to actually *play* the game, but to give a touchpoint for seeing what's going on, chat, etc.
MMOs are *very* expensive to run. It's not just the network pipe. It's:
1) *peak* bandwidth (not average bandwidth)
Typically any ISP will charge for peak, not average bandwidth. That means if a MMOG has a very low bandwidth usage for 23.99 hours a day, and then they get just one big usage spike (like when a patch is released) then the peak usage is charged for the whole month.
Bandwidth costs are often calculated as 20 to 30% of gross monthly operating costs -- maybe $10,000 - $20,000 per month as a SWAG?
2) Customer Service Reps (CSRs)
Gotta pay the support folks. That's a 24x7x365 = responsibility, so you typically figure 4-6 actual people to fill one CSR slot. If you have only 10 CSR slots, that's 40-60 salaried people.
Probably another $50,000 per month gone.
3) Office rent, AC, legal staff
I dunno -- call it $10,000-$15,000 per month? maybe more if there's a lawsuit going on? I've heard that UO always has at least 2 lawsuits (usually frivolous) in the pipeline, but they still gotta defend against them.
What was it - about $40 million in total costs to create TSO? So that's all gotta be recouped.
5) Taxes -- corporate tax rate was 35% last I checked...
6) Collection losses -- credit card purchases don't always go through, cards expire, etc. Assume 5% per month - or $5,000.
When all is said and done, TSO is probably barely breaking even, if they are lucky! They are probably going deeper into the red every month, unless they fire all their CSRs (which will definitely kill them).
I suggest you take a look at book by "Developing Online Games" -- it does a pretty good job of breaking down the actual costs of running a MMO, which is far more costly than you might realize.
So SWG, DAoC, and EQ are probably making some decent monthly profit, but not as much as you might think.
That's also why no publishers are willing to risk any money on backing an MMO that doesn't expect to get at least 80,000 paying subscribers with a break-even within 3-6 months. It's also why there's a huge number of EQ-clones or UO-clones and not much else, because no publisher wants to take a risk on an "unproven" genre.
Of course, the non-commercial MMOs don't have any of these issues, so that's where we'll see the most innovation. But none of them will become cash cows without running into the same difficulties.
Slashdot Mirror
I have heard direct from the UO team that the Japanese shard is one of their most popular, so apparently they are trying to cater to that audience with more targetet content
If labor forces are unnaturally mandated or prevented (e.g. through regulation), then it is no longer capitalism -- or maybe I should say it is no longer free market capitalism.
I think the endemic overwork in the game industry is a symptom of free-market economics: lots of supply of potential game developers, with little demand for quality or longevity of the games. Hopefully this is starting to change as the game industry gets a little more mature, and as MMO games (which do require higher quality code, because they have to last longer and get pounded on more) get more market acceptance.
There is a discussion about this very topic over at the Java Gaming forums
I'm not sure if it's statistically significant, but a 50% gamer ratio at a sewing class has gotta mean something!
Dragon's program was called Naturally Speaking (IIRC). There's also ViaVoice (from IBM) and a few others. My wife works in this field, so I know far too much about it for my own good. ;-)
Stress *does* affect the recognition, and so does inflection and accents. Using "dictation" mode in games has a long way to go, and probably limited-vocabulary for commands, and player-to-player (hopefully with voice fonts!) is what we're likely to see for the next few years.
The only real way to measure an MMOs success is a year or so after launch, by looking at subscriber retention rates. Any other measurement is flawed.
Remember: The Sims Online was also projected as being a huge blockbuster with over 400,000 subscribers before it launched. Did it ever reach even 25% of that number?
BTW, the title "Gimp" is not derogatory -- it stands for Gnu Image Manipulation Program.
It's the new math, I'm telling you!
Given the interconnected networks and advanced electronics not used by donkey-cart users, would we be able to prevent such attacks as happened this morning in Baghdad?
Or should do a intense forced upgrade of donkey-cart users world-wide?
despite the "cross-platform" compatibility of Java, few corporations use it to their financial benefit.
My reply showed how a large corporation is using the cross-platform compatibility of Java for financial benefit. This is not an example of an individual (me) porting a Java app. This is an example of an app requiring no porting, because it is already cross-platform compatible. The institution in question will save thousands of dollars: 44 servers * ~$3000/server/year = $132000 per year (approx), purely by taking advantage of Java's cross-platform compatibility.
And, yes, I do consider myself a typical Java developer, one of a mere 3-5 million or so.
And when I say server farm I mean several dozens of servers. And several hundred thousand lines of code.
Oh yeah - they also found a massive performance improvement switching from NT to Linux.
Almost forgot! They are using Blaze, which is a Java-based rules engine.
I am also planning on using JESS for the AI for a large Java-based online game I'm currently working on. I am really looking forward to using the backward-chaining capabilities of JESS for this.
I think JESS (and CLIPS) is best suited for fairly complex systems where you want to break out the rules separately and let non-programmers work on them. One of the big advantages is that you can load the rules without having to recompile everything. Another is that it is much easier to debug rules than to debug raw code, just like for any scripting language.
As for the rules JSR, I haven't looked at it recently. But from what I remember it seemed to fit in pretty well with JESS.
1) Excludes others from the market.
Microsoft has been found legally culpable by a real, live judge of excluding others from the browser market, using its monopoly powers.
2) Owns 100% of the market.
Monopolies hardly ever have 100% of the market, because it's almost impossible. They just have to have a supermajority so that they can keep others from joining. I'd say it's hard to argue that Microsoft doesn't have a supermajority of the browser market right now.
So when a new season of The Sopranos comes out it is sold to the cable channels, who *do* have to pay for it again. But they absorb the cost because they are already making hefty margins on all the $30/month subscribers.
So his HBO example is more like if you have a little brother who pays you $3/month to watch you play EQ. If you buy an expansion pack you don't necessarily charge your little bro' an upgrade fee for watching, because his $3/month is gravy over and above your fixed $12/month cost that you pay whether or not he's watching.
But, given all that, I agree that the price for a "box" should be minimal at worst (just enough to cover distribution, retail shelf space, and enough profit to make it worth it for retailers), and zero at best (e.g. for a downloadable version). I think the market will inevitably drive the MMOG companies to this point. Alternatively, they will have to start packaging "goodies" with the box to give you something concrete and/or essential for your $.
There's a huge advertising cost that's associated with each expansion pack, which of course is (hopefully) a lot less than the sales that get generated.
But you are right about the gaming press -- they wan't new cover art, new titles, new new new new new. This is because they haven't been trained to cover "stories" like regular journalists have been -- they've been trained to generate buzz (and sometimes useful reviews) which is what the people buy their magazines for. If we wanted more "story", like what ATITD has, then the market has to see a need for that, and somebody has to create a magazine or web site that can survive based on covering evolving content, instead of the newest splashy cover art.
I hope as the game industry matures more that there will more examples of well-designed systems and games.
Personally, my company has been working on a MMO game for a few years, with the goal of getting a robust, reliable engine and network framework in place in parallel to getting the first game in place. We started with prototypes and then refactored and redesigned to get the final design, which is now pretty solid. If we had to get to market more quickly we probably would have crashed and burned and disappeared already, instead of having a better architecture that should handle a lot better in the long haul.
Of course, we'll see what happens come launch time, which is really when the rubber hits the road! :-)
Also, there is a big difference between publishing someone's name and publishing the fact that they work for the CIA. Duh.
But Tetris is not an online multiplayer game.
The point was that it's the crappy interactions with other people that ruins the game, not the game itself, e.g. sore losers and poor-sport winners.
It was FUNNY! Not a Troll! geez, some people have no sense of humor, I guess...
My dad doesn't play any computer games.
Both of my parents are defined as "old" (around 60).
Note: My statistical universe is complete and verifiable!
So far, all MMO games that have been released have failed to achieve cross-over between the Western and Eastern markets. This includes MMOGs that started in the U.S and Europe, like Everquest, and MMOGs that started in Asia, like Lineage.
The true global market is probably at about 10-12% saturation with today's games, meaning we are still in the Early Adopter phase, and not yet into the Early Majority. Thus, we have 90% growth potential ahead, for any game(s) that can actually become popular in the global market.
And, of course, China is getting more wired every day. And the only profitable games in China will be online games, because console and single-player games have a 99% piracy rate there.
So, IMHO, the MMO market is still very much in it's infancy, and the best days are still far ahead of us.
One key is in creating games that appeal to both hard-core and more casual gamers (or at least casual gamers that are willing to pay for their games)
Another key is in coming up with new types of pricing models, like mini-subscriptions, group discounts, and shared subscriptions, and charging subscriptions to your phone bill.
And, of course, the games need to get better. It's time to get off the leveling treadmill!
Not always to actually *play* the game, but to give a touchpoint for seeing what's going on, chat, etc.
1) *peak* bandwidth (not average bandwidth)
Typically any ISP will charge for peak, not average bandwidth. That means if a MMOG has a very low bandwidth usage for 23.99 hours a day, and then they get just one big usage spike (like when a patch is released) then the peak usage is charged for the whole month.
Bandwidth costs are often calculated as 20 to 30% of gross monthly operating costs -- maybe $10,000 - $20,000 per month as a SWAG?
2) Customer Service Reps (CSRs)
Gotta pay the support folks. That's a 24x7x365 = responsibility, so you typically figure 4-6 actual people to fill one CSR slot. If you have only 10 CSR slots, that's 40-60 salaried people.
Probably another $50,000 per month gone.
3) Office rent, AC, legal staff
I dunno -- call it $10,000-$15,000 per month? maybe more if there's a lawsuit going on? I've heard that UO always has at least 2 lawsuits (usually frivolous) in the pipeline, but they still gotta defend against them.
4) "sunk" costs -- development, advertising, marketing
What was it - about $40 million in total costs to create TSO? So that's all gotta be recouped.
5) Taxes -- corporate tax rate was 35% last I checked...
6) Collection losses -- credit card purchases don't always go through, cards expire, etc. Assume 5% per month - or $5,000.
When all is said and done, TSO is probably barely breaking even, if they are lucky! They are probably going deeper into the red every month, unless they fire all their CSRs (which will definitely kill them).
I suggest you take a look at book by "Developing Online Games" -- it does a pretty good job of breaking down the actual costs of running a MMO, which is far more costly than you might realize.
So SWG, DAoC, and EQ are probably making some decent monthly profit, but not as much as you might think.
That's also why no publishers are willing to risk any money on backing an MMO that doesn't expect to get at least 80,000 paying subscribers with a break-even within 3-6 months. It's also why there's a huge number of EQ-clones or UO-clones and not much else, because no publisher wants to take a risk on an "unproven" genre.
Of course, the non-commercial MMOs don't have any of these issues, so that's where we'll see the most innovation. But none of them will become cash cows without running into the same difficulties.
According to those results, 30% of players are "explorers", 25% are "socializers", 23% are "achievers", and 22% are "killers".
So, assuming PvP means "killers", this *does* put PvP players squarely in the minority.
The book goes on to explain why "killers" are the biggest cause of other people leaving MMO games, and things you can do to remedy that situation.