Yes, we all know what happens. A bad movie gets made that does no justice whatsoever to the original comic and several hollywood execs snort another line of coke whilst discussing what cars they are buying from the profits of the movie they managed to get people to see in the hopes that it would do justice to the orignal comic (see second sentence).
I appreciate you giving the examples. I have to tell ya, its disturbing how fake things can be now, and how hard it is becoming to detect it. Photoshop has given us both immeasurable image manipulation power, and an ever increasing reason to not believe images we see are real.
"The ads in magazines and the like that are good are the ones I don't remember...because they haven't pissed me off.
Funny you should mention that. I forget the name of the theory, but the theory states that you tend to remember negative experiences more than you would positive ones, and also that you tend to verbalize more about the negative ones as opposed to the positive ones.
"But honestly, no matter how good your work is, there isn't any way you can offset things like that retarded Blockbuster ad."
As someone who used to rent/work at blockbuster, and as someone in advertising now, I agree 100% with you. Many times I've seen some of their ads that just completely missed their target audience and thought to myself "hmmm, I hope the Account Executive working on the blockbuster account used lube when BB marketing bent them over the table and told them how things were gonna work."
But you also have to recognize the importance of target audience. This is one of the hardest things for someone to understand about advertising. NOT EVERY AD IS TARGETED AT YOU. What you may consider lame and boring, might actually be quite effective with the target audience for that ad. It just so happens you happened to see it. If you want a good example of how that works, think of an ad you loved as a little kid, which you think is absolutely retarded now. You are now part of a different demographic, and thus things that appealed to you back then, won't appeal to you now, and thus you would not be the target of those old ads.
"IIRC, every single FPS to date has had strictly oriented players and monsters -- yes, you can go above someone if the map allows you, but you are still oriented in the same direction -- head toward sky, feet on ground."
You've never played any of the Aliens vs. Predator games have you? The whole point of the aliens is that they can crawl pretty much anywhere. You can run up a wall, and wait for someone by clinging to the underside of a bridge and then drop on them. This is fairly old in terms of gameplay features.
Can you give us examples of some of the drastic and not so drastic changes that had to be made? Perhaps if you can't give specifics, could you fabricate an example that would be illustrative of your point?
"Didn't the ad say that he was going to make you "his bitch"?
Well, those who bought the game certainly did become his bitch, among other things."
I'd love to see this be argued in court.
Judge: "So you're claiming Mr. Romero did not make your client his bitch upon purchasing the game?" Prosecutor: "Correct, the only thing my client got upon purchasing the game was a poor gaming experience." Judge: "So your client paid for a game which gave him a poor gaming experience?" Prosecutor: "That is correct your honor." Judge: "Judgement for the defendant is NOT GUILTY. Your client is indeed Romero's bitch now."
" There is no end to the stupidity of the average person in the Marketing Department of your average game company."
Another reason is that they can just fix the bugs in the next expansion, thus making the customer pay not only for new content, but to fix their old broken content, which should have either not been broken to begin with, or should have been patched for free.
" There is no end to the stupidity of the average person in the Marketing Department of your average game company."
You are dead on. But then there are the GOOD marketers. And keep in mind that marketers don't really do all the advertising. It is usually an ad agency that handles that. The marketers are the people on the client end who deal with the ad agency. Many times bad advertising and marketing for games is due to the fact that little money is spent, or they make a poor choice in ad agencies. I work for a very respected ad agency. Know why its respected? Because we think things through, we do EXTENSIVE research on our target audience, and don't just settle for the opinion of some 25 year old who didn't play games much when he was a kid, but has some general opinions on them.
I realize many slashdotters have a very strong resentment of marketing people and advertising people, but you have to realize that you are only highlighting the bad examples. There are plenty good ones to go along with it. Hell, M$ won a Gold Lion at Cannes for their Xbox ping pong ear paddle ad. So before people just bash marketing and advertising in general, remember that its all about how good the ad agency is, and how well they can work with the marketers. Because the average marketer doesn't have a clue about what they need to do, they just know what is best for the company in general, and make sure what the ad agency produces will be good for the company. The ad agency is the one who actually handles the creative aspect.
If you REALLY wanna see if these can "defend", I recommend putting them on Battlebots. Seriously, if the government wants to get serious about using robots as soldiers, they should sponsor that show. And make it so that you can have explosive/corrosive/incendiary/projectile weapons! Just put the audience and controllers back a bit with some more protective junk, and that show would be a WHOLE lot more interesting.
"What's scarier -- the prospect of a thousand pound robot armed with guns and grenades, or a sixteen thousand tiny ant robots weighing an ounce each hiding, ready to swarm over their victim at a prearranged signal?"
What's scarier? 16,000 1000 LB robots armed with guns and grenades, ready to swarm over their victim at a prearranged signal. And if you don't think that's likely? Three words for you:
So, is this just going to be the RIAA's latest hits? Or is Microsoft going to do something innovative for a change and sign on indies? And I'll bet there's watermarking in the files to catch people who circumvent the DRM. Microsoft will have the advantage that they can bundle it with computers and they have huge marketshare, but something tells me Apple will destroy them when it comes out with its music service. Wonder which one will come out first.
"I guess the whole "one price for all singles, including pre-release and exclusives" was a bit too complicated for them to try and replicate."
No, they just want to milk people for more money. They start with the price high and give it early, and only the trendsetters buy it, albeit at the inflated price, then they bring it down to the regular price, and the masses buy it. Thats what many companies do.
I'm sorry, but there's no way in hell I'm going to pay for a service like this, not to mention at a price that could get me standard dialup internet access. I hope someone makes a free version of this. WITH a moderation system. Then it'll start to get interesting. What would be even more interesting is if you could search for people based on their physical features in the image. Yeah yeah the obvious jokes aside...if I'm looking for brunettes, and don't like blondes (to each his own) I could filter based on that. Sort of like Autopr0n...only not pr0n.
" No, Friendster won't become "just another dating site". Friendster, at least in communities of 20 & 30-something hipsters, is changing the way people meet. Friendster is revolutionary, and it's not all about dating. I see it as a growing replacement for the bar scene. It's amazing the people you meet through friends for all kinds of activites. Sure, dating is part of it, but I'd guess a smaller part then ordinary people just looking meeting other ordinary people."
"Although I agree that this is sort of tenuous as far as/. news goes, my guess is that if the story really was submitted by an undercover marketer, they would have at least waited for the website to be online. At least, I'd wait until then."
BZZZT! Wrong. This way they get two shots at us. The first is now when we can all watch the trailer. This will generate hype. Then when the website is up (which will likely be very soon), they'll get another article posted stating its up. Welcome to Guerilla Marketing.
Re:What I would Actually like to see.
on
Aquarium Modcase
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· Score: 1
My 3D sculpture teacher and I talked about doing something like this for one of my projects. I wanted to suspend an LED in the oil to give an eerie glow to it. I forget the exact type of oil he wanted to use, but it wasn't vegetable oil, seems there's better stuff to use. Anyways, he'd done stuff like this in the past, showed me pictures from his portfolio, and it was simply mindblowing. If you made a computer like this, and put lighting in there as well, it would be insane.
In 10 years from now, I predict computing progress will grind to a complete halt as DRM has made its way into every computer through legislation, virii, or big nerdy goombas coming in and installing it forcefully. We will all be mandated by law to pay M$, the RIAA, the MPAA, and the MDAA (Materials Design Association of America, cuz believe me, 3D printers will be cheap and much more capable in 10 years) 30% of our income, after taxes, to make up for piracy. Except piracy will have been eradicated a long time prior thanks to DRM, but they still get the money anyways.
In short, the future will be Orwellian, and dark......VERY DARK!!!!!!!!!!
" In addition to the tablet, you will have a variety of other everyday objects that are also in contact with the box, each reporting your use, gestures, speech, or what have you to the main box."
And this will all be reported back to the government....err.....I mean Microsoft....err...Microsoft = Government?
Screw it, in 10 years my computer will be made out of tin-foil.
"Right now, SCO is a day-trader's dream - few outstanding shares, very volatile, and yet affordable."
And very predictable, cuz when you start to see the stock price dropping, you can wait for the press release to be made shortly after, and then sell for a huge profit.
As a side note, I wonder if anybody has made a graph correlating the date/time of the press releases to a stock chart. It'd be interesting to see if ALL of the press releases were made when their price dropped considerably.
So what would the standard be instead of Flash just out of curiosity. I don't know of any other software that lets you create complex animations in a reasonably small file size for the web except for Flash.
I beta'd AO. It was a blast...aside from never being able to do anything because of the lag. Hell, I was racing between buildings in my flying car on the last day of beta when they pimped everybody out. However, the launch was unacceptable. As is the current trend these days...you release a very buggy game, and then patch the hell out of it....or wait a while, and try to sell and "expansion" that fixes the bugs....getting people to pay more for your mistakes.
Back when EQ was first starting, it was acceptable. People would tolerate a few bugs on launch. Now though, with a new MMORPG coming out practically every week, the bar is getting higher and higher for how stable your launch is. There are too many MMORPGs out there for people to care about all the problems the game has. They'll just find a new one that IS going to have a good launch. And I haven't even addressed the issue of releasing without much content and planning to add it in with a later expansion *cough*Starwars:Galaxies*cough*.
Slashdot Mirror
I for one welcome our new Hulk over.....awww fuck it, you know how it goes.
Funny you should mention that. I forget the name of the theory, but the theory states that you tend to remember negative experiences more than you would positive ones, and also that you tend to verbalize more about the negative ones as opposed to the positive ones.
"But honestly, no matter how good your work is, there isn't any way you can offset things like that retarded Blockbuster ad."
As someone who used to rent/work at blockbuster, and as someone in advertising now, I agree 100% with you. Many times I've seen some of their ads that just completely missed their target audience and thought to myself "hmmm, I hope the Account Executive working on the blockbuster account used lube when BB marketing bent them over the table and told them how things were gonna work."
But you also have to recognize the importance of target audience. This is one of the hardest things for someone to understand about advertising. NOT EVERY AD IS TARGETED AT YOU. What you may consider lame and boring, might actually be quite effective with the target audience for that ad. It just so happens you happened to see it. If you want a good example of how that works, think of an ad you loved as a little kid, which you think is absolutely retarded now. You are now part of a different demographic, and thus things that appealed to you back then, won't appeal to you now, and thus you would not be the target of those old ads.
You've never played any of the Aliens vs. Predator games have you? The whole point of the aliens is that they can crawl pretty much anywhere. You can run up a wall, and wait for someone by clinging to the underside of a bridge and then drop on them. This is fairly old in terms of gameplay features.
I'd love to see this be argued in court.
Judge: "So you're claiming Mr. Romero did not make your client his bitch upon purchasing the game?"
Prosecutor: "Correct, the only thing my client got upon purchasing the game was a poor gaming experience."
Judge: "So your client paid for a game which gave him a poor gaming experience?"
Prosecutor: "That is correct your honor."
Judge: "Judgement for the defendant is NOT GUILTY. Your client is indeed Romero's bitch now."
Another reason is that they can just fix the bugs in the next expansion, thus making the customer pay not only for new content, but to fix their old broken content, which should have either not been broken to begin with, or should have been patched for free.
You are dead on. But then there are the GOOD marketers. And keep in mind that marketers don't really do all the advertising. It is usually an ad agency that handles that. The marketers are the people on the client end who deal with the ad agency. Many times bad advertising and marketing for games is due to the fact that little money is spent, or they make a poor choice in ad agencies. I work for a very respected ad agency. Know why its respected? Because we think things through, we do EXTENSIVE research on our target audience, and don't just settle for the opinion of some 25 year old who didn't play games much when he was a kid, but has some general opinions on them.
I realize many slashdotters have a very strong resentment of marketing people and advertising people, but you have to realize that you are only highlighting the bad examples. There are plenty good ones to go along with it. Hell, M$ won a Gold Lion at Cannes for their Xbox ping pong ear paddle ad. So before people just bash marketing and advertising in general, remember that its all about how good the ad agency is, and how well they can work with the marketers. Because the average marketer doesn't have a clue about what they need to do, they just know what is best for the company in general, and make sure what the ad agency produces will be good for the company. The ad agency is the one who actually handles the creative aspect.
What's scarier? 16,000 1000 LB robots armed with guns and grenades, ready to swarm over their victim at a prearranged signal. And if you don't think that's likely? Three words for you:
"Shock and Awe"
No, they just want to milk people for more money. They start with the price high and give it early, and only the trendsetters buy it, albeit at the inflated price, then they bring it down to the regular price, and the masses buy it. Thats what many companies do.
Thank you Mr. Guerilla Marketer.
BZZZT! Wrong. This way they get two shots at us. The first is now when we can all watch the trailer. This will generate hype. Then when the website is up (which will likely be very soon), they'll get another article posted stating its up. Welcome to Guerilla Marketing.
The only bitch would be upgrading the sucker.
In short, the future will be Orwellian, and dark......VERY DARK!!!!!!!!!!
And yes, this was a joke!
And this will all be reported back to the government....err.....I mean Microsoft....err...Microsoft = Government?
Screw it, in 10 years my computer will be made out of tin-foil.
Even spellcheck?
And very predictable, cuz when you start to see the stock price dropping, you can wait for the press release to be made shortly after, and then sell for a huge profit.
As a side note, I wonder if anybody has made a graph correlating the date/time of the press releases to a stock chart. It'd be interesting to see if ALL of the press releases were made when their price dropped considerably.
Back when EQ was first starting, it was acceptable. People would tolerate a few bugs on launch. Now though, with a new MMORPG coming out practically every week, the bar is getting higher and higher for how stable your launch is. There are too many MMORPGs out there for people to care about all the problems the game has. They'll just find a new one that IS going to have a good launch. And I haven't even addressed the issue of releasing without much content and planning to add it in with a later expansion *cough*Starwars:Galaxies*cough*.