agreed 100%. This is welcome, but irrelevant when so many americans (and increasingly us brits) drive armoured personnel carriers on the school-run. Still this could be a good trojan-horse. How can congress not vote for stricter car efficiency laws when they vote for this? surely a precedent of sorts?
if it happens every 5 years, and maybe a thousand people lose their lives, your billions will save a thousand lives. But how many thousands die every year in road traffic accidents? or through preventable diseases? I know the UK (pop 60 million) loses 3000 a year to road accidents. Im not saying you shouldnt do anything about terrorist attacks, but on a cost-benefit analysis basis, spending this much money on this system, rather than (for example) better healthcare, or road safety measures, is just inefficient.
I know WHY the govt would rather spend your money on a high profile l33t laser, but in logical terms, its an insane waste of money best used elsewhere.
why wait then? Nobody forces you to buy a game absed on its graphics engine. Companies like Matrix games or my own don't compete on graphics, but on gameplay. Nobody is forcing you to buy cutting edge visual games, there are plenty of indie titles, or small budget retail titles that are out there waiting to be discovered.
Who even assumes this is true. This is a big news story for a game most people would ignore. PR 101.
Is it just me that HATES devices talking?
on
Talking iPods
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I REALLY hate it in video games the most. I am capable of reading, yet every game tutorial on earth insists on having everything spoken to me at just the slowest speed so that the average joe can follow what is going on. One of my favorite games (Battlefield 2) is almost ruined by the constsant spamming in my ears of "Enemy unit spotted!" "ok" "roger sir" "well done team" etc.
Text is easy to skip, but voices arent, we seem naturally designed to respond to a voice, but we can ignore text. any device, application or game that talks to me just feels like someone nagging me. Besides, what accent will it have? pretty much everyone has at least one accent they hate, are people assuming a US accent is univerally appreciated?
Can you *imagine* how much MORE annoying the office paperclip would be if it spoke to you?
such things exist, you can put your art on turbosquid for free, or just on your blog. There are plenty of small indie gamers wanting cheap art (or free art).
The thing is, 99% of people who whine about the RIAA on slashdot and routinely pirate music, will make zero effort to purchase the music direct from the artist. When was the last time anyone who copys music actually trawled the web to check if they could buy the music direct from the artist? or did you just fire up bittorrent or p2p and keep your credit card in your wallet? If you don't try and buy it direct, or take the 10 seconds to email the artist and recommend they offer such a service, then you aint 'sticking it to the man', your just a cheapass.
"You'll have to ask people like Linux Torvalds about that. Last I checked, he wasn't starving to death."
yeah one guy. big deal. one operating system, with a tiny market share. The vast majority of the world still rpefer that 'outdated' biz model you look down your nose at where people are paid to amke software, and the best product wins in the free market.
Wheres the amateur hobbyist version of lord of the Rings? or Star Wars? or Schindlers List? or titanic? What about drug research? without the free market, where are the billions to research AIDS and Cancer drugs going to come from? if you dare mention the gates foundation, we should look at where he got his money methinks. I guess you think that drug research is just like music eh? once someone has cured aids, they dont deserve a penny in return on their investment. Explain to me why its ok for a drugs company to invest millions and then be protected from other companies knocking out cheap cloned pills, but the music market is different? Or do you extend your communist dreamworld to every area of life?
You are advocating that artists produce work and ask nothing for it in return, and where people are free to consume whatever they want without paying. Thats called communism, look it up sometime.
No suprise that your an academic, in other words, my taxes fund your life. Try living in the free market for 5 minutes with this "we all work for free" attitude.
You are trying to justify mass-theft to paper over your own conscience. Maybe you should track down all the artists whose music you pirate, and ask them if they are happy about it?
oh grow up. taking a photo of a tree is not planting and taking care of a tree for fifty years is it? copying a song isnt writing one. is this so hard to get your head around?
yet another freeloader who is lucky that there are people to plant those trees, write thsoe songs and code that software so that you can coast through life enjoying other peoples work and paying sod all towards anything.
oh for crying out loud, this is truly pathetic. You really believe this argument???? The musicians dont barge into your houde and play their CDs in your ears then ask for money for christ sake, you go to a website, download the music yourself and choose to listen to it. Then you insist you shouldnt have to pay for it.
Carpenters and bricklayers should be paid for their work by those who enjoy the fruits of their labour. Musicians and filmmakers have the same rights.
Anything else is just quite desperate intellectual willy-waving to justify stealing peoples work for nothing, and frankly its all a bit tedious. What you are advcocating is communism, so at least be honest and say so. Im presuming you dont create digital content for a living, because if you did, you'd look upon things a bit differently. How do you expect creators of digital content to pay the bills? How do you expect to get anything bigger or better than 'hobby' creation of content?
my morality is simple. If people work to create something, and you want it. you pay for it. Thats not what allofmp3 are doing. the artists dont get a dime. You can argue about law all you like. Thats not morally right.
"Artists have the right to not make art if they predict that the compensation will be insufficient"
Surely anyone who creates anything has the right to set the price for it? You as the customer have the right not to buy it, I cant understand where you assume the right to take it from the creator on your own terms and not theirs? Its not food, or shelter, its music, a luxury good.
Like i said, the artists have set the price, they did so when they signed a record contract. They are free to release their songs for free, yet chose not to. You can argue that the laws different in russia, fine. So block non-russian IP addresses and take payments in roubles (is that right?) This isnt what that website does. It sells music to americans, by american artists, using american currency, and ignoring american law. It's no different to hosting a warez site in another country, and what this website does is no more defensible. If you want to protest about copyright, set up a website outlining the arguments and campaign for reform. This website isnt 'fighting for the little guy', its screwing the little guy out of the money he deserves, whlst simulatenously taking money off consumers.
hold on, I was a musician once, I have seen a record contract. They arent written in 0 point type, or in a foreign language, its quite blatant the terms on which you sign (i chose not to), and many artists are more than happy to do so. And many artists DO make a considerable sum of money from the system. OF course, many are ripped off, and you can argue that the system is weighed too heavily in favour of the record companies (which is true), but that doesnt mean its fair for a website to sell something they dont own, and quite clearly not pay the artists ANYTHING. Even in a situation where the artist's royalties havent paid back their advance and not made a dime, they still got flown around the world, went to wild parties and got fed and put up in great hotels at the record companies expense. I dont see this russian website donating money towards recording studio fees, do you?
Criticising the record biz is fine with me, its when people sue the lack of perfect competition in that industry to justify wholesale copyright theft, as a thin excuse to get cheap or free music, that it bugs people.
There is no law preventing unsigned artists releasing their music for free on the web. The fact that most choose not to shows that they *do* actually want to be paid for their work.
in well organised companies maybe. But what if the new game design doesnt require the same number of animators and artists as the last game? suddenly its sim city instead of the Sims, and animations required are minimal? either you pay animators to do not very much for 3 years (bad) or you shoehorn some excuse for animation into the game (bad)
I sell online, and use Plimus (www.plimus.com) to take payments for my games. I have heard too many horror stories about paypal myself, and had trouble getting through to them when I needed help once. Ok so plimus is a complete software registration service, not just a payment provider, but there has been massive consolidation in this area, with RegNow buying up everyone except Plimus one by one. The last thing we need is for someone like Google to come swallow up the small companies in that area. I give it maybe a year before you cannot use adwords or adsense if your website sells through a different payment provider. Regnow already do this, they wont give you the good commission rate unless you use them exclusively. I kinda thought that was anti-competitive and maybe not even legal, but apparently not;( Anyway, I digress. I like a free and open market with good competition. Google are welcome as a competitor, not a monopoly.
The whole model of hiring remote contractors to do content work is already live and well in indie gaming. Im paying an artist and a writer for my next game -> http://www.kudosgame.com/ and I'll be paying an external PR guy and buying in stock sounds for it too. I've worked for companies that employ sound people and animators full time, which is lunacy. What the hell do these people (not to mention the QA dept) do in the first 6 months of a project? The movie industry learned years ago that this fixed-staff system was nonsense and moved to a contractor system. Big games need to do the same. Us little guys already have.
In these two cases. Both men seem to be genuinely charitable in a way that most people would approve of. But thats luck. What if one of these men had been a right wing anti-semite, or a highly fundamnetalist religious supporter of creationism? How many top-quality creationist schools could bill gates fund accross the USA? What if he had extreme views on abortion, extreme views on anything for that matter?
If you had a tax system that took more of this money and gave it to the state, then the state would be spending that money, not these guys. That means *in theory* that it will be spent on what the population considers (through the ballot box) to be important. It just so happens that we got lucky this time, and the two richest men seem to have sensible ideas of what to do with our money.(Im typing this on a copy of windows XP, and using a microsoft mouse) I'm not knocking either men, good on em, but I think its worth discussing the fact the we have an economic system that gives individuals more power to change the world than many small countries. That *can* be good, it can also be a total disaster. discuss:D
yup, you and me both. Im always amazed at just how clueless the big devs with their 5 gig games and their teams of 100 depressed workaholic college kids are. Stay away from the download market activision, you have absolutely no idea how it works. Keep churning out the 'triple a' crap.
They probably expect that after spending millions developing a well-received and popular video game, that people would dip into their pockets and buy it, rather than download a free copy and sticking two fingers up to the game developer.
If people buy this game, they are just encouraging devs to churn out long winded over hyped crap that gets put abck 100 times. Believe me, big devs are capable of doing that without our help.
Bullshit. The last 2 games I bought were 'Masters Of Defence' and 'Lux', both done by teams of under 6 people. They both have low system reqs, can be bought online, and are great fun. They both start in less time than battlefield 2 takes to show its first splash screen.
There ar loads of high quality games being done by lone develoeprs or small teams. Ive been doing it myself since 1998 (http://www.positech.co.uk) The 'hype' only occurs for the 100+ team games, because the jourbalists get flown to miami and given free drinks when they are shown the 'hands-off' demos of the big budget stuff to ensure glowing reviews. The little companies cant afford to shower journos with presents, and the website owbers with banner-ad revenue, so largely they get ignored, but we DO exist, and we DO sell games.
If someone wrote a book about the making of DNF, I'd probably buy it with real money. I like books like that, my fave is 'tales from development hell' about big name movies and how they can take 10+ years to get made. Link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1840236914/sr=8-1 /qid=1149948630/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-6139415-7876916?_ encoding=UTF8 Especially now I got the hell out of mainstream gamedev, its fun to look back on the car-crash that is gamedev management and have a good chuckle. Masters of doom was a good book, but the best bits are about Daikatana:D Maybe they should bundle a 'making of' book with the game. Thats the only way a lot of people would be tempted.
Slashdot Mirror
agreed 100%. This is welcome, but irrelevant when so many americans (and increasingly us brits) drive armoured personnel carriers on the school-run.
Still this could be a good trojan-horse. How can congress not vote for stricter car efficiency laws when they vote for this? surely a precedent of sorts?
if it happens every 5 years, and maybe a thousand people lose their lives, your billions will save a thousand lives. But how many thousands die every year in road traffic accidents? or through preventable diseases? I know the UK (pop 60 million) loses 3000 a year to road accidents.
Im not saying you shouldnt do anything about terrorist attacks, but on a cost-benefit analysis basis, spending this much money on this system, rather than (for example) better healthcare, or road safety measures, is just inefficient.
I know WHY the govt would rather spend your money on a high profile l33t laser, but in logical terms, its an insane waste of money best used elsewhere.
why wait then?
Nobody forces you to buy a game absed on its graphics engine. Companies like Matrix games or my own don't compete on graphics, but on gameplay. Nobody is forcing you to buy cutting edge visual games, there are plenty of indie titles, or small budget retail titles that are out there waiting to be discovered.
Who even assumes this is true. This is a big news story for a game most people would ignore.
PR 101.
I REALLY hate it in video games the most. I am capable of reading, yet every game tutorial on earth insists on having everything spoken to me at just the slowest speed so that the average joe can follow what is going on.
One of my favorite games (Battlefield 2) is almost ruined by the constsant spamming in my ears of "Enemy unit spotted!" "ok" "roger sir" "well done team" etc.
Text is easy to skip, but voices arent, we seem naturally designed to respond to a voice, but we can ignore text. any device, application or game that talks to me just feels like someone nagging me. Besides, what accent will it have? pretty much everyone has at least one accent they hate, are people assuming a US accent is univerally appreciated?
Can you *imagine* how much MORE annoying the office paperclip would be if it spoke to you?
such things exist, you can put your art on turbosquid for free, or just on your blog. There are plenty of small indie gamers wanting cheap art (or free art).
Everytime I hear talk of The PS3 it seems like another nail in its coffin. Does ANYONE know ANYONE who is going to buy this overpriced thing?
The thing is, 99% of people who whine about the RIAA on slashdot and routinely pirate music, will make zero effort to purchase the music direct from the artist.
When was the last time anyone who copys music actually trawled the web to check if they could buy the music direct from the artist? or did you just fire up bittorrent or p2p and keep your credit card in your wallet? If you don't try and buy it direct, or take the 10 seconds to email the artist and recommend they offer such a service, then you aint 'sticking it to the man', your just a cheapass.
"You'll have to ask people like Linux Torvalds about that. Last I checked, he wasn't starving to death."
yeah one guy. big deal. one operating system, with a tiny market share. The vast majority of the world still rpefer that 'outdated' biz model you look down your nose at where people are paid to amke software, and the best product wins in the free market.
Wheres the amateur hobbyist version of lord of the Rings? or Star Wars? or Schindlers List? or titanic? What about drug research? without the free market, where are the billions to research AIDS and Cancer drugs going to come from? if you dare mention the gates foundation, we should look at where he got his money methinks. I guess you think that drug research is just like music eh? once someone has cured aids, they dont deserve a penny in return on their investment. Explain to me why its ok for a drugs company to invest millions and then be protected from other companies knocking out cheap cloned pills, but the music market is different? Or do you extend your communist dreamworld to every area of life?
You are advocating that artists produce work and ask nothing for it in return, and where people are free to consume whatever they want without paying. Thats called communism, look it up sometime.
No suprise that your an academic, in other words, my taxes fund your life. Try living in the free market for 5 minutes with this "we all work for free" attitude.
You are trying to justify mass-theft to paper over your own conscience. Maybe you should track down all the artists whose music you pirate, and ask them if they are happy about it?
oh grow up. taking a photo of a tree is not planting and taking care of a tree for fifty years is it?
copying a song isnt writing one.
is this so hard to get your head around?
yet another freeloader who is lucky that there are people to plant those trees, write thsoe songs and code that software so that you can coast through life enjoying other peoples work and paying sod all towards anything.
oh for crying out loud, this is truly pathetic. You really believe this argument????
The musicians dont barge into your houde and play their CDs in your ears then ask for money for christ sake, you go to a website, download the music yourself and choose to listen to it. Then you insist you shouldnt have to pay for it.
Carpenters and bricklayers should be paid for their work by those who enjoy the fruits of their labour.
Musicians and filmmakers have the same rights.
Anything else is just quite desperate intellectual willy-waving to justify stealing peoples work for nothing, and frankly its all a bit tedious. What you are advcocating is communism, so at least be honest and say so.
Im presuming you dont create digital content for a living, because if you did, you'd look upon things a bit differently. How do you expect creators of digital content to pay the bills? How do you expect to get anything bigger or better than 'hobby' creation of content?
my morality is simple. If people work to create something, and you want it. you pay for it.
Thats not what allofmp3 are doing. the artists dont get a dime.
You can argue about law all you like. Thats not morally right.
"Artists have the right to not make art if they predict that the compensation will be insufficient"
Surely anyone who creates anything has the right to set the price for it? You as the customer have the right not to buy it, I cant understand where you assume the right to take it from the creator on your own terms and not theirs? Its not food, or shelter, its music, a luxury good.
Like i said, the artists have set the price, they did so when they signed a record contract. They are free to release their songs for free, yet chose not to.
You can argue that the laws different in russia, fine. So block non-russian IP addresses and take payments in roubles (is that right?)
This isnt what that website does. It sells music to americans, by american artists, using american currency, and ignoring american law. It's no different to hosting a warez site in another country, and what this website does is no more defensible. If you want to protest about copyright, set up a website outlining the arguments and campaign for reform. This website isnt 'fighting for the little guy', its screwing the little guy out of the money he deserves, whlst simulatenously taking money off consumers.
hold on, I was a musician once, I have seen a record contract. They arent written in 0 point type, or in a foreign language, its quite blatant the terms on which you sign (i chose not to), and many artists are more than happy to do so. And many artists DO make a considerable sum of money from the system. OF course, many are ripped off, and you can argue that the system is weighed too heavily in favour of the record companies (which is true), but that doesnt mean its fair for a website to sell something they dont own, and quite clearly not pay the artists ANYTHING.
Even in a situation where the artist's royalties havent paid back their advance and not made a dime, they still got flown around the world, went to wild parties and got fed and put up in great hotels at the record companies expense. I dont see this russian website donating money towards recording studio fees, do you?
Criticising the record biz is fine with me, its when people sue the lack of perfect competition in that industry to justify wholesale copyright theft, as a thin excuse to get cheap or free music, that it bugs people.
There is no law preventing unsigned artists releasing their music for free on the web. The fact that most choose not to shows that they *do* actually want to be paid for their work.
pity that the 'armadillo' was just a ball though...
in well organised companies maybe. But what if the new game design doesnt require the same number of animators and artists as the last game? suddenly its sim city instead of the Sims, and animations required are minimal?
either you pay animators to do not very much for 3 years (bad)
or you shoehorn some excuse for animation into the game (bad)
I sell online, and use Plimus (www.plimus.com) to take payments for my games. I have heard too many horror stories about paypal myself, and had trouble getting through to them when I needed help once. ;(
Ok so plimus is a complete software registration service, not just a payment provider, but there has been massive consolidation in this area, with RegNow buying up everyone except Plimus one by one. The last thing we need is for someone like Google to come swallow up the small companies in that area.
I give it maybe a year before you cannot use adwords or adsense if your website sells through a different payment provider. Regnow already do this, they wont give you the good commission rate unless you use them exclusively. I kinda thought that was anti-competitive and maybe not even legal, but apparently not
Anyway, I digress.
I like a free and open market with good competition. Google are welcome as a competitor, not a monopoly.
The whole model of hiring remote contractors to do content work is already live and well in indie gaming. Im paying an artist and a writer for my next game -> http://www.kudosgame.com/ and I'll be paying an external PR guy and buying in stock sounds for it too. I've worked for companies that employ sound people and animators full time, which is lunacy. What the hell do these people (not to mention the QA dept) do in the first 6 months of a project?
The movie industry learned years ago that this fixed-staff system was nonsense and moved to a contractor system. Big games need to do the same. Us little guys already have.
In these two cases. Both men seem to be genuinely charitable in a way that most people would approve of. But thats luck. What if one of these men had been a right wing anti-semite, or a highly fundamnetalist religious supporter of creationism? How many top-quality creationist schools could bill gates fund accross the USA? What if he had extreme views on abortion, extreme views on anything for that matter?
:D
If you had a tax system that took more of this money and gave it to the state, then the state would be spending that money, not these guys. That means *in theory* that it will be spent on what the population considers (through the ballot box) to be important. It just so happens that we got lucky this time, and the two richest men seem to have sensible ideas of what to do with our money.(Im typing this on a copy of windows XP, and using a microsoft mouse)
I'm not knocking either men, good on em, but I think its worth discussing the fact the we have an economic system that gives individuals more power to change the world than many small countries. That *can* be good, it can also be a total disaster.
discuss
yup, you and me both. Im always amazed at just how clueless the big devs with their 5 gig games and their teams of 100 depressed workaholic college kids are.
Stay away from the download market activision, you have absolutely no idea how it works. Keep churning out the 'triple a' crap.
They probably expect that after spending millions developing a well-received and popular video game, that people would dip into their pockets and buy it, rather than download a free copy and sticking two fingers up to the game developer.
*****SOUND OF DEAFENING APPLAUSE*****
If people buy this game, they are just encouraging devs to churn out long winded over hyped crap that gets put abck 100 times. Believe me, big devs are capable of doing that without our help.
never had layoffs maybe, but hasnt the whole Duke team quite and left several times over?
"Nowadays like 1,000 people work on every game."
Bullshit.
The last 2 games I bought were 'Masters Of Defence' and 'Lux', both done by teams of under 6 people. They both have low system reqs, can be bought online, and are great fun. They both start in less time than battlefield 2 takes to show its first splash screen.
There ar loads of high quality games being done by lone develoeprs or small teams. Ive been doing it myself since 1998
(http://www.positech.co.uk)
The 'hype' only occurs for the 100+ team games, because the jourbalists get flown to miami and given free drinks when they are shown the 'hands-off' demos of the big budget stuff to ensure glowing reviews. The little companies cant afford to shower journos with presents, and the website owbers with banner-ad revenue, so largely they get ignored, but we DO exist, and we DO sell games.
If someone wrote a book about the making of DNF, I'd probably buy it with real money. I like books like that, my fave is 'tales from development hell' about big name movies and how they can take 10+ years to get made.1 /qid=1149948630/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-6139415-7876916?_ encoding=UTF8 :D
Link:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1840236914/sr=8-
Especially now I got the hell out of mainstream gamedev, its fun to look back on the car-crash that is gamedev management and have a good chuckle. Masters of doom was a good book, but the best bits are about Daikatana
Maybe they should bundle a 'making of' book with the game. Thats the only way a lot of people would be tempted.