The problem is not the abundance in itself, it's the hoarding. Ive gone through the same phase when i was in college. Got an internet connection that was restricted by the local network and the beginning of p2p (scour, napster and some others). Also the beginning of mpeg4 video compression with the divx codec.
The result? I could find lots of movies easily and download them faster than i could watch them. Hell we could almost STREAM them! At first, you go crazy and hoard all you can get your little dirty hands on. Then, when storage space start to get limited, you realize you got gigs of movies, hundreds more that are barely an hour away and you watched a grand total of 4 movies in the past week. What was the point?
This is the same thing to me for people that are on netflix and COPY all the DVDs that come their ways. What is the point? If they want to watch it again, why not cycle it in the queue or buy it if it has that much redeeeming value?
The hoarding is a loss of time when the ressource itself is almost illimited (bandwidth on p2p or movies on netflix). Hoarding more than you can consumme for the remote case you would need it is a waste.
So, coming back to the story here, people have movies waiting on their coffee table. Where is the harm? Either they'll send them back unwatched or they will watch them. If it becomes too frequent, they are just wasting their money on their netflix subscription, but wasting is so usual here. It always takes time to reconsider what you have and what you need. Both dont necessarily match well all the time. If you reconsider too frequently, you are wasting time, a ressource that is getting scarcer by the minute.
This is the difference between "Free" USA and "Communist" Europe I guess... In europe, Internet access is already 5x faster for easily half the price. In most of western europe, you can get a 20Mbps pipe in your house to deliver internet, tv (over IP) and phone (VoIP, although they do not call it that there or even make any difference for it).
In Europe, they forced the local operators (usually state owned) to open the local loop, allowing anyone to install their equipement to connect your house to their network. The result? Healthy competition driving the services up and the cost down.
Sure, Europe has a much higher population density than the US, BUT, if that was the only problem, you would have that level of service in any metropolitan area capable to sustain it. This is far from the case here... What happenned is the telcos concentrated on low speed "broadband" and low price. Consummer answered on those terms. You can grab a 1.5Mb/128kb for less than $15 (if you already pay for phone service, get into a 1 year contract and promise your first born) while in Europe, they get 20Mb/1Mb, phone and TV for 30 euros (which is about $40).
"Communist" Europe regulated (forced the operator to open the loop) and got competition. "Capitalist" USA protected the interests of their lobbyists and got a price gouging.
I envy the fact you live out of your parent's basement and spend all your dispensable income on video games, but for those of us who pay rent or mortgage or save money to invest in, we don't care for a $600 console when the $200 one has more fun games to play.
He said the price would not be a big hurdle, he never said there would not be a better deal in town. And he is right. The targeted population is the one with HDTVs, the fringe that bought Home theater setups for $3k-5k. The $600 of the hardware wont scare them. However, they WILL demand their money's worth and that means both games and blu-ray movies delivered at launch (or an undying faith in SONY's success).
If history repeats, the price of the console will be well paid over its life time *IF* it gets as much succesful games as the preceding ones AND/OR blu-ray wins as a standard.
Price is NOT the biggest deciding factor. Sure, you shunt out kids and college kids (although some of them seem to prefer a home-theater setup and eating ramen to eating healthy), but it leaves enough market as early adapters to buy your product at full price and then you price drop it.
The deciding factor for this generation, as for the preceding, will be the games. Nintendo seems to have a head start on that part, with their first party productions. There is no must have title so far on x360 (for me at least) and none announced on PS3, whereas nintendo has several "intriguing" ones.
Land of the free, indeed. Whatever happened to doing whatever you wanted unless it hurt someone else?
But it does HURT someone: the Indian casinos and the legislature that is NOT getting its bonus under the table (ie: lobby money). Can't you think of the indian children?
The price of Intel's stock was already reflecting this. The stock has been beaten down with poor results and poor expectations.
Cutting down price was expected and is actually supposed to be a good move for intel: back in competition and on the war path to regain their market share.
AMD stock has been going down since the previews of Conroe and showing that intel will not only compete technically, but also on price lowers their results' expectations.
..can someone explain why Apple selling music that only works on their devices (unless of course you consider those crappy Motorola ROKR and SLVR phones) is bad, but Sony selling games that only play on the PlayStation or Microsoft selling software that only runs on Windows is OK. Seriously. Why is what Apple is doing any different in the eyes of the Norwegian government?
Because the government is not stupid and can still tell the difference between a natural problem caused by different architecture and requiring effort to solve (like porting said game or program to a different platform) and an artificial limitation placed here to create a monopoly on the access (like the iTunes music).
There is NO real reason the iTune music wont play on any other hardware than the iPod. They are not asking Apple to change their encoding (after all, if they just released un-DRMed MP4 files, that would be fine. It would STILL not play on every other player, but then it is their fault), just to remove the artificial barrier of DRM.
If YOU cannot tell the difference, i feel sorry for you.
I could have sworn that they had the PS2 down to a single chip quite a ways back (and the PS1 as a section on that chip.)
They did. They called the respin around that chip the PSTwo. Sony did this on the PS1->PSOne-> included in PS2 and is doing it again this generation (PS2->PSTwo->included in PS3).
Backward compatibility was a big factor in the PS2 success and they will not drop it easily (especially after the MS fiasco).
If console wars were won and lost on price alone, Nintendo would have been #1 with the GameCube.
Number #1 in what? It all depends how you rank your competitors. Market share? Sure, nintendo is #3, close behind MS and far from Sony. Now, if you count profitability, then the picture change. Nintendo jumps easily over MS, as they have ALWAYS been profitable and every sale brings them money. MS gaming division has lost 4 BILLIONS dollars since its creation. They have traded market share for monney. Sure, if you give your goods away, you can grab a good market share. Internet ".com" companies followed the same principle, but it did not make a sound business plan. (I'm not sure how profitable the SONY Computer Entertainment division is. I know it has been higly profitable, bringing in as much as 33%+ of sony's profits during some good years).
Nintendo may lose in number of system, but they win in profit. Personnaly, I know which is the strongest company in the long term...
In the slide, the "Local Memory" refers to the RSX local memory, not the SPU local memory. The article says that the next slide is Sony telling devs to use the RSX to do the transfer instead, which only makes sense if it is talking about the RSX memory.
Your conclusion is right though, as this also is memory that the Cell doesn't need to read from.
Actually, you can WRITE to the RSX memory, but read is slow. The slide shows 4GB/s write and 16MB/s read. This is somewhat reminiscent of AGP: you can PUSH texture fast, but you dont have reasons to go and recover them, ever.
Logical asymetrical architecture. No real flaw here. I support your conclusion;)
Eventually, 4 way GPU cards will be released, and eventually nVidia and/or ATI will start to dual core their GPUs, those spending money on their expensive dual or even quad based SLI configurations just wasted a bunch of money.
You are missing the point that GPU are highly parallel operation processors. What you call "dual core their GPU" has been done for the past 5+ years in the graphics industry. They call it a new product. Every new generation had more pixel pipelines. What do you think those are? You can see the latest nVidia chips as 6 core (1 core would be 1 "quad" or 4 pixel pipeline) for the GTX (24 pixels pipelines, 6 "quads"). Of course, they improve the pipeline everytime and now they added the shader operations, but in essence, the performance improvement from the GPU industry came through parallelism, ie: multi core.
So, is there a use for $600+ cards in SLI? Sure. Not for me, as i do not need the perfs. I do not need a $2k professional card either. Do they prevent you to sleep too? The fact that people are burning a lot of money on SLI should be no concern to you. Actually, even nVidia was surprised at how successful SLI was (both for their chipset and their graphic card sale). As long as there is a market, they will sale it. The original market was for developpers, to give them the performances of tomorrow's cards today. If "hard core gamers" have the money to buy it too, more power to them.
Wait till people are paying $8 for a head of lettuce, and the light just may go on. If ranchers and restaurants actually paid ALL of their employees a legal wage, complete with all the taxes, insurance, etc, prices have to go up. I'm all for the immigrants--the poor bastards have been exploited for too long. I hope, for their own sake, that the problem is "fixed" long enough for people to realize how much we depend on their existence. If the immigtants just stopped coming, the entire US economy would have to undergo some serious readjustment.
Actually, i would like to see that. The US politics and citizens close their eyes to illegal immigration as long as it benefits them (slave labor), but trash talk it. I would like to see the US respect its word and actually DO something against *COMPANIES* that employ illegal immigrants (not just against the poor exploited immigrants). Sure, the economy would need adjustement, but it would be *FAIR*.
Only when it is done in a manner the person giving the info did not agree to and not following the current laws on sharing and retention. In Europe, people value their personnal information and the people have a right to correction and decision on those infos. This is not the case in the US => there is conflict of the laws and data should not be shared this way.
Logging all internet traffic(EU data retention acts) GOOD.
I do not agree with the law, but the law defines exactly what should be logged, how and for how long. Also, it defines who can get access to this information. Nothing of the sort exists for US data bases, that belongs to their respective companies, even if the data inside is yours.
So, no real contradiction here. The court just said: "We disagree about the way you handle personnal data and hence we will not share our data with you until we can garantee it to our standards".
I love the idea of clandestine meetings around ISO and IEEE meetings, more people would go if that was true! Of course there are "clandestine meeting. Those are just meeting between the same people, but not reported to the ISO/IEEE, whether those people discussed IEEE business or not. They are called "private" meetings and happen in every group, professional or not.
When you have a group of friends, if you go out with only a subset of those, but talk about business concerning everyone and making decisions about those, do you necessarilly report it to the rest of the group? This is the kind of behavior that is fine with friends, but should not happen in a standard organization. That round of golf you play with a coworker cannot serve as decision making time, as the others could not voice their opinion. This is their complaint.
Let me be clear: I think micropayments definitely have a future (on consoles, as well as on the Net), but the way they are doing it now ; by making incomplete games at first, and then releasing items/gameplay-variations for money, is imho a complete rip off.
I would mostly agree with you, but i would put some restriction to your statement.
Not all add-ons to games are rip-offs that should have been in the game originally.
Sure, you *WILL* find the $2 skinn or the new uber model with those cool sunglasses (that are perfectly useless) for $1.5, but when, for example, the team offers you a new quest (that they coded after the release of the game) gor $2, then it becomes fair in my opinion. If some studio, after they release a great game with plenty of content, sale some additional content for a small fee, I call that a nice opportunity.
I'll take Oblivion as an example. Sure, their first mod, the horse armor, was ridiculous and overpriced ($2 for a useless skin), BUT you can hardly blame them to have witheld content from the game. They are shipping with a full world to explore and probably 30 to 50 hours of gameplay easily (depending on your reliance on the fast travel option). That they now sale additional content (small quests or new places) for a small fee ($2) is reasonnable to me. You may not buy it (who would force you?), but getting a few hours (1 to 3) of fun for that price is definitely better than going to the movie.
Moreover, they still allow you (at least on PC) to use similar FREE, community developped, modifications. Use whatever you feel suits you at the price you want. More options are always better.
Now, on the flip side, some games come with 8-12h of gameplay (still at $50+, mind you) and need the new add-ons to be enjoyable. This is nickel and diming us.
Micropaiments are just a way. Not evil in itself. I hope Sony makes it easy to use. Xbox has the capacity and the content is slowly coming. Same for Steam. More competition is good for us, the consumer.
Something much more detailed is currently possible; the screenshots look like they just touched up the background art and rendered the flat polygon foreground models in a higher resolution, and it looks like something that would have run on Windows 95. What they really ought to do is render the game world in 3D from the same perspective, and place even higher-res, shaded flat polygon models into the scene. They could still easily retain the abstract polygon look of the original (I've seen it done in 3D console games) while achieving a much more immersive and higher quality effect.
As you said, this won't happen. Eric explains on his website the reason for this update: someone thought about porting his game to cell phones (yes, cell phones!), their small LCD screens needed more contrasts. As he touched up the graphisms for the cell phones, he realized he could update the engine for the PC version and did so. The graphisms are just more contrasty and slightly more precise, taking advantage of higher resolutions (up to 16x, 4x in each direction).
This is not a full rewrite of the code, just a small update.
He has more projects coming up though it seems. Eric has a love affair with video games that comes and goes. He has been out of this business for a few years (since heart of darkness) and seems ready to come back.
As for flashback, this belongs to Delphine Software, so if they re-release it, it would be an effort independant from this one (although they could enjoy the advertisement).
If you're going to ask us to do things like follow the Kyoto treaty that just happens to be rigged to do disproportionate harm to America then you're going to have to come up with better proof that adding industrialization to the mix is artificially increasing those natural climate swings. The fact that the people most loudly advocating man-made global warming theories are our political adversaries and/or have a financial incentive to hype it (it would still be useful to know how the natural temperature changes work though, even if that's less alarming) doesn't instill confidence in we right-wingers. Yes, that most definitely includes government researchers.
The Kyoto treaty puts an heavy burden on the US, because the US is the country consumming the most oil per capita and rejecting the most pollutant in the atmosphere. So, as the biggest pollutant, you get the most drastic changes. It's not so much that the others dont pollute or wont get crippled, it is more that they have already started policies to curb pollution and as such dont have such a big step to take.
Take a look at this chart of oil consumption per capita. The US uses AT LEAST 33% more per capita than other western nations (outside of Canada). This is what the rest of the world complains about...
Great, the last qualification on driving tests to keep the completely brain-dead off the road will be eliminated. I hope examiners will demand that this feature be turned off for testing.
Actually, in California, parallel parking has already been eliminated from the official driving test. It may be just me, but it shows...;^)
Sony has one big advantage over MS on that side: they own the IPs to ALL the components in the PS2. They even own the designs. So, what they will do is refound the chips, grouping them all in a lower geometry as a single chip and incorporate the result in the PS3. This is how they did it on the PS2. This is also the reason they do a new lighter unit at the end of the console life: to prepare for that step (PSX -> PSOne, PS2 -> PSTwo).
It is quite easy to fit a whole PS2, 6 years old tech, into a single chip in a modern 90nm tech. Quite cheap too, especially if it brings you more market chare...
None. I was in Japan 3 weeks ago and it was already very hard to find a regular DS. The PSP was available everywhere, but the DS was sold out thoughout the Akihabara quarter. So I would guess the DS would sell even better...
my point is that a dvd player is cheaper and easier to produce (and is actually producable) vs the Blu Ray drive which is expensive and difficult to produce hence causing a big delay in the PS3.
You are missing the point that the BD-ROM drive will be a compelling selling point. Everyone already has a DVD player by now (as you can grab one from $35 or less at walmart). However, there will be a big media war for the next gen discs, between HD-DVD and BD-ROM. Sony has a definite interest in BluRay and they want it to win. Including a BDRom in the PS3, which is forecast to sell several millions units, even in a case of failure, will give it a HUGE lead over the HDDVD group.
Moreover, it helps people to swallow the high price if they think they are getting a good deal. They are replaying their win with the PS2 where it doubled as a DVD player. Paying $300 for game console + DVD player made it easier to sell it. The same will happen with the PS3.
The delay in the PS3 is only minimally affecting Sony, as they still sell more PS2 than MS sells 360s. If they can have a strong introduction with a few choice games on the PS3, it would catch up in no time (then, again, they may fell too).
The PS3 is supposed to kill 3 birds with 1 stone for Sony.
- they saturate the market with bluray drives, killing HDDVD
- they get a hitech, next gen appliance in the tv room. Foot hold to content delivery. It also plays game and may need the BD size for contents;)
- they develop a new chip to decode HD content (the cell proc) that they can manufacture for cheap and include in all HD appliances.
Re:What kind of marketing is this?
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The Great HDCP Fiasco
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Then I realized it was probably intentional. Hollywood wants their content as far from your computer as possible.
which is both stupid AND diametrically opposed to what the computer and electronic manufacturers want to do: bring the PC in the living room for added functionnalities.
HDCP was supposed to bridge that gap (provide enough protection to satisfy Hollywood and allow their content on this computer hardware), but it seems the implementation failed, because most taiwanese manufacturers balk at the thoughts of unnecessary half penny expanses (which is about as low as intel can go), although implementation costs are probably higher (different designs and added components).
It will be interesting to see how consummers will react. The HD transition, that was already slow to start with, may even take another step back if all of the current equipment (both older HDTVs and all computer equipment) cannot play the future content in full HD resolution.
Game publishers wont do any OS exclusives (especially for a new OS like Vista) except if MS throws lots of cash at them in compensation. MS can afford to do it for Halo2 as they are NOT a real PC game publisher, they dont really care if Halo2 succeed or not, they want to use it to push their new platform.
The problem with video games is that a "sequel" does not necessarily means the same thing as with a movie. A sequel to a movie usually (most of the time) tells a story that happens after the previous one, involving the same characters.
In video games, this is far from true. People tend to mix sequel (sonic 2, mario 64) with franchise (CIV4, Doom3, Elder scroll). In one case, the game usually keeps most mecanisms and in the other, the NAME is what is kept (and sometime some characters or game genre).
Why do people complain about sequels? Because they are incremental improvements and we feel ripped when we just shell out $50 to by a version 1.5 (mostly the same, with new maps and some improved graphics).
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is not the abundance in itself, it's the hoarding.
Ive gone through the same phase when i was in college. Got an internet connection that was restricted by the local network and the beginning of p2p (scour, napster and some others). Also the beginning of mpeg4 video compression with the divx codec.
The result? I could find lots of movies easily and download them faster than i could watch them. Hell we could almost STREAM them! At first, you go crazy and hoard all you can get your little dirty hands on. Then, when storage space start to get limited, you realize you got gigs of movies, hundreds more that are barely an hour away and you watched a grand total of 4 movies in the past week. What was the point?
This is the same thing to me for people that are on netflix and COPY all the DVDs that come their ways. What is the point? If they want to watch it again, why not cycle it in the queue or buy it if it has that much redeeeming value?
The hoarding is a loss of time when the ressource itself is almost illimited (bandwidth on p2p or movies on netflix). Hoarding more than you can consumme for the remote case you would need it is a waste.
So, coming back to the story here, people have movies waiting on their coffee table. Where is the harm? Either they'll send them back unwatched or they will watch them. If it becomes too frequent, they are just wasting their money on their netflix subscription, but wasting is so usual here. It always takes time to reconsider what you have and what you need. Both dont necessarily match well all the time. If you reconsider too frequently, you are wasting time, a ressource that is getting scarcer by the minute.
This is the difference between "Free" USA and "Communist" Europe I guess...
In europe, Internet access is already 5x faster for easily half the price. In most of western europe, you can get a 20Mbps pipe in your house to deliver internet, tv (over IP) and phone (VoIP, although they do not call it that there or even make any difference for it).
In Europe, they forced the local operators (usually state owned) to open the local loop, allowing anyone to install their equipement to connect your house to their network. The result? Healthy competition driving the services up and the cost down.
Sure, Europe has a much higher population density than the US, BUT, if that was the only problem, you would have that level of service in any metropolitan area capable to sustain it. This is far from the case here... What happenned is the telcos concentrated on low speed "broadband" and low price. Consummer answered on those terms. You can grab a 1.5Mb/128kb for less than $15 (if you already pay for phone service, get into a 1 year contract and promise your first born) while in Europe, they get 20Mb/1Mb, phone and TV for 30 euros (which is about $40).
"Communist" Europe regulated (forced the operator to open the loop) and got competition. "Capitalist" USA protected the interests of their lobbyists and got a price gouging.
He said the price would not be a big hurdle, he never said there would not be a better deal in town.
And he is right. The targeted population is the one with HDTVs, the fringe that bought Home theater setups for $3k-5k. The $600 of the hardware wont scare them. However, they WILL demand their money's worth and that means both games and blu-ray movies delivered at launch (or an undying faith in SONY's success).
If history repeats, the price of the console will be well paid over its life time *IF* it gets as much succesful games as the preceding ones AND/OR blu-ray wins as a standard.
Price is NOT the biggest deciding factor. Sure, you shunt out kids and college kids (although some of them seem to prefer a home-theater setup and eating ramen to eating healthy), but it leaves enough market as early adapters to buy your product at full price and then you price drop it.
The deciding factor for this generation, as for the preceding, will be the games. Nintendo seems to have a head start on that part, with their first party productions. There is no must have title so far on x360 (for me at least) and none announced on PS3, whereas nintendo has several "intriguing" ones.
But it does HURT someone: the Indian casinos and the legislature that is NOT getting its bonus under the table (ie: lobby money).
Can't you think of the indian children?
The price of Intel's stock was already reflecting this. The stock has been beaten down with poor results and poor expectations.
Cutting down price was expected and is actually supposed to be a good move for intel: back in competition and on the war path to regain their market share.
AMD stock has been going down since the previews of Conroe and showing that intel will not only compete technically, but also on price lowers their results' expectations.
Because the government is not stupid and can still tell the difference between a natural problem caused by different architecture and requiring effort to solve (like porting said game or program to a different platform) and an artificial limitation placed here to create a monopoly on the access (like the iTunes music).
There is NO real reason the iTune music wont play on any other hardware than the iPod. They are not asking Apple to change their encoding (after all, if they just released un-DRMed MP4 files, that would be fine. It would STILL not play on every other player, but then it is their fault), just to remove the artificial barrier of DRM.
If YOU cannot tell the difference, i feel sorry for you.
They did. They called the respin around that chip the PSTwo.
Sony did this on the PS1->PSOne-> included in PS2 and is doing it again this generation (PS2->PSTwo->included in PS3).
Backward compatibility was a big factor in the PS2 success and they will not drop it easily (especially after the MS fiasco).
Number #1 in what? It all depends how you rank your competitors. Market share? Sure, nintendo is #3, close behind MS and far from Sony.
Now, if you count profitability, then the picture change. Nintendo jumps easily over MS, as they have ALWAYS been profitable and every sale brings them money. MS gaming division has lost 4 BILLIONS dollars since its creation. They have traded market share for monney. Sure, if you give your goods away, you can grab a good market share. Internet ".com" companies followed the same principle, but it did not make a sound business plan. (I'm not sure how profitable the SONY Computer Entertainment division is. I know it has been higly profitable, bringing in as much as 33%+ of sony's profits during some good years).
Nintendo may lose in number of system, but they win in profit. Personnaly, I know which is the strongest company in the long term...
Actually, you can WRITE to the RSX memory, but read is slow. The slide shows 4GB/s write and 16MB/s read. This is somewhat reminiscent of AGP: you can PUSH texture fast, but you dont have reasons to go and recover them, ever.
Logical asymetrical architecture. No real flaw here. I support your conclusion
You are missing the point that GPU are highly parallel operation processors. What you call "dual core their GPU" has been done for the past 5+ years in the graphics industry. They call it a new product.
Every new generation had more pixel pipelines. What do you think those are? You can see the latest nVidia chips as 6 core (1 core would be 1 "quad" or 4 pixel pipeline) for the GTX (24 pixels pipelines, 6 "quads"). Of course, they improve the pipeline everytime and now they added the shader operations, but in essence, the performance improvement from the GPU industry came through parallelism, ie: multi core.
So, is there a use for $600+ cards in SLI? Sure. Not for me, as i do not need the perfs. I do not need a $2k professional card either. Do they prevent you to sleep too? The fact that people are burning a lot of money on SLI should be no concern to you. Actually, even nVidia was surprised at how successful SLI was (both for their chipset and their graphic card sale). As long as there is a market, they will sale it. The original market was for developpers, to give them the performances of tomorrow's cards today. If "hard core gamers" have the money to buy it too, more power to them.
Actually, i would like to see that. The US politics and citizens close their eyes to illegal immigration as long as it benefits them (slave labor), but trash talk it. I would like to see the US respect its word and actually DO something against *COMPANIES* that employ illegal immigrants (not just against the poor exploited immigrants).
Sure, the economy would need adjustement, but it would be *FAIR*.
Let the adjustement begin!
Let me see if I understand.
Let me help you.
Sharing info BAD.
Only when it is done in a manner the person giving the info did not agree to and not following the current laws on sharing and retention. In Europe, people value their personnal information and the people have a right to correction and decision on those infos. This is not the case in the US => there is conflict of the laws and data should not be shared this way.
Logging all internet traffic(EU data retention acts) GOOD.
I do not agree with the law, but the law defines exactly what should be logged, how and for how long. Also, it defines who can get access to this information. Nothing of the sort exists for US data bases, that belongs to their respective companies, even if the data inside is yours.
So, no real contradiction here. The court just said: "We disagree about the way you handle personnal data and hence we will not share our data with you until we can garantee it to our standards".
I love the idea of clandestine meetings around ISO and IEEE meetings, more people would go if that was true!
Of course there are "clandestine meeting. Those are just meeting between the same people, but not reported to the ISO/IEEE, whether those people discussed IEEE business or not. They are called "private" meetings and happen in every group, professional or not.
When you have a group of friends, if you go out with only a subset of those, but talk about business concerning everyone and making decisions about those, do you necessarilly report it to the rest of the group? This is the kind of behavior that is fine with friends, but should not happen in a standard organization. That round of golf you play with a coworker cannot serve as decision making time, as the others could not voice their opinion. This is their complaint.
Let me be clear: I think micropayments definitely have a future (on consoles, as well as on the Net), but the way they are doing it now ; by making incomplete games at first, and then releasing items/gameplay-variations for money, is imho a complete rip off.
I would mostly agree with you, but i would put some restriction to your statement.
Not all add-ons to games are rip-offs that should have been in the game originally.
Sure, you *WILL* find the $2 skinn or the new uber model with those cool sunglasses (that are perfectly useless) for $1.5, but when, for example, the team offers you a new quest (that they coded after the release of the game) gor $2, then it becomes fair in my opinion. If some studio, after they release a great game with plenty of content, sale some additional content for a small fee, I call that a nice opportunity.
I'll take Oblivion as an example. Sure, their first mod, the horse armor, was ridiculous and overpriced ($2 for a useless skin), BUT you can hardly blame them to have witheld content from the game. They are shipping with a full world to explore and probably 30 to 50 hours of gameplay easily (depending on your reliance on the fast travel option). That they now sale additional content (small quests or new places) for a small fee ($2) is reasonnable to me. You may not buy it (who would force you?), but getting a few hours (1 to 3) of fun for that price is definitely better than going to the movie.
Moreover, they still allow you (at least on PC) to use similar FREE, community developped, modifications. Use whatever you feel suits you at the price you want. More options are always better.
Now, on the flip side, some games come with 8-12h of gameplay (still at $50+, mind you) and need the new add-ons to be enjoyable. This is nickel and diming us.
Micropaiments are just a way. Not evil in itself. I hope Sony makes it easy to use. Xbox has the capacity and the content is slowly coming. Same for Steam. More competition is good for us, the consumer.
Something much more detailed is currently possible; the screenshots look like they just touched up the background art and rendered the flat polygon foreground models in a higher resolution, and it looks like something that would have run on Windows 95. What they really ought to do is render the game world in 3D from the same perspective, and place even higher-res, shaded flat polygon models into the scene. They could still easily retain the abstract polygon look of the original (I've seen it done in 3D console games) while achieving a much more immersive and higher quality effect.
As you said, this won't happen. Eric explains on his website the reason for this update: someone thought about porting his game to cell phones (yes, cell phones!), their small LCD screens needed more contrasts. As he touched up the graphisms for the cell phones, he realized he could update the engine for the PC version and did so. The graphisms are just more contrasty and slightly more precise, taking advantage of higher resolutions (up to 16x, 4x in each direction).
This is not a full rewrite of the code, just a small update.
He has more projects coming up though it seems. Eric has a love affair with video games that comes and goes. He has been out of this business for a few years (since heart of darkness) and seems ready to come back.
As for flashback, this belongs to Delphine Software, so if they re-release it, it would be an effort independant from this one (although they could enjoy the advertisement).
If you're going to ask us to do things like follow the Kyoto treaty that just happens to be rigged to do disproportionate harm to America then you're going to have to come up with better proof that adding industrialization to the mix is artificially increasing those natural climate swings. The fact that the people most loudly advocating man-made global warming theories are our political adversaries and/or have a financial incentive to hype it (it would still be useful to know how the natural temperature changes work though, even if that's less alarming) doesn't instill confidence in we right-wingers. Yes, that most definitely includes government researchers.
The Kyoto treaty puts an heavy burden on the US, because the US is the country consumming the most oil per capita and rejecting the most pollutant in the atmosphere. So, as the biggest pollutant, you get the most drastic changes. It's not so much that the others dont pollute or wont get crippled, it is more that they have already started policies to curb pollution and as such dont have such a big step to take.
Take a look at this chart of oil consumption per capita. The US uses AT LEAST 33% more per capita than other western nations (outside of Canada). This is what the rest of the world complains about...
Great, the last qualification on driving tests to keep the completely brain-dead off the road will be eliminated. I hope examiners will demand that this feature be turned off for testing.
;^)
Actually, in California, parallel parking has already been eliminated from the official driving test.
It may be just me, but it shows...
"Sony will probably try software emulation"
Sony has one big advantage over MS on that side: they own the IPs to ALL the components in the PS2. They even own the designs. So, what they will do is refound the chips, grouping them all in a lower geometry as a single chip and incorporate the result in the PS3. This is how they did it on the PS2. This is also the reason they do a new lighter unit at the end of the console life: to prepare for that step (PSX -> PSOne, PS2 -> PSTwo).
It is quite easy to fit a whole PS2, 6 years old tech, into a single chip in a modern 90nm tech. Quite cheap too, especially if it brings you more market chare...
None.
I was in Japan 3 weeks ago and it was already very hard to find a regular DS.
The PSP was available everywhere, but the DS was sold out thoughout the Akihabara quarter. So I would guess the DS would sell even better...
You are missing the point that the BD-ROM drive will be a compelling selling point. Everyone already has a DVD player by now (as you can grab one from $35 or less at walmart). However, there will be a big media war for the next gen discs, between HD-DVD and BD-ROM. Sony has a definite interest in BluRay and they want it to win. Including a BDRom in the PS3, which is forecast to sell several millions units, even in a case of failure, will give it a HUGE lead over the HDDVD group.
Moreover, it helps people to swallow the high price if they think they are getting a good deal. They are replaying their win with the PS2 where it doubled as a DVD player. Paying $300 for game console + DVD player made it easier to sell it. The same will happen with the PS3.
The delay in the PS3 is only minimally affecting Sony, as they still sell more PS2 than MS sells 360s. If they can have a strong introduction with a few choice games on the PS3, it would catch up in no time (then, again, they may fell too).
The PS3 is supposed to kill 3 birds with 1 stone for Sony.
- they saturate the market with bluray drives, killing HDDVD
- they get a hitech, next gen appliance in the tv room. Foot hold to content delivery. It also plays game and may need the BD size for contents
- they develop a new chip to decode HD content (the cell proc) that they can manufacture for cheap and include in all HD appliances.
Then I realized it was probably intentional.
Hollywood wants their content as far from your computer as possible.
which is both stupid AND diametrically opposed to what the computer and electronic manufacturers want to do: bring the PC in the living room for added functionnalities.
HDCP was supposed to bridge that gap (provide enough protection to satisfy Hollywood and allow their content on this computer hardware), but it seems the implementation failed, because most taiwanese manufacturers balk at the thoughts of unnecessary half penny expanses (which is about as low as intel can go), although implementation costs are probably higher (different designs and added components).
It will be interesting to see how consummers will react. The HD transition, that was already slow to start with, may even take another step back if all of the current equipment (both older HDTVs and all computer equipment) cannot play the future content in full HD resolution.
Game publishers wont do any OS exclusives (especially for a new OS like Vista) except if MS throws lots of cash at them in compensation. MS can afford to do it for Halo2 as they are NOT a real PC game publisher, they dont really care if Halo2 succeed or not, they want to use it to push their new platform.
With that usage pattern I believe you'll find the game rental services a cheaper alternative once you do the math.
I dont do math, I dont have time, i have games to play...
For those asking the difference, it's just so that you can correct people calling it a state
The problem with video games is that a "sequel" does not necessarily means the same thing as with a movie. A sequel to a movie usually (most of the time) tells a story that happens after the previous one, involving the same characters. In video games, this is far from true. People tend to mix sequel (sonic 2, mario 64) with franchise (CIV4, Doom3, Elder scroll). In one case, the game usually keeps most mecanisms and in the other, the NAME is what is kept (and sometime some characters or game genre). Why do people complain about sequels? Because they are incremental improvements and we feel ripped when we just shell out $50 to by a version 1.5 (mostly the same, with new maps and some improved graphics).