Tech companies that are trying to sell their technology will have a friendler stance about copyright and the consumer than the record companies would.
Yeah, like Sony! They're a tech company. They should buy a record label, maybe some movie studios.... I bet they'd release all their stuff under CC licenses! It would be great!
Even if you think our government sucks, would ANY of you prefer any of the alternatives currently on offer
You're right. We may be detained without trial indefinitely, abducted and tortured, or forced to sell ourselves into slavery to pay the RIAA, but at least we're not in Canada!
Seriously, since when were the alternatives the U.S. or China? There are countries out there better than ours, and a lot that are worse.
I'll dispense with the customary "don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out" phraseology
And since when are the alternatives to love it or to leave? Can't we point out the flaws and make improvements? Or is our only alternative to live under a dictatorship?
False dichotomies are all too present in US politics.
I don't think lawsuits are what Nintendo is afraid of - they're afraid of a bad user experience for the new gamers they're trying to usher in.
If you've played online on Live or PS2, you'll understand. The language, while offensive, is nothing compared to the childishness, the racism, the homophobia, the sexual harrasment... Imagine being in High School, except everyone is anonymous and thus can't be held accountable for anything they say. (cf. John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory) I'm a hardcore gamer, not easily offended, and *I* certainly don't want to play with voice chat in SOCOM or BattleField. It's like swimming in the raw sewage of humanity.
If your last gaming experience was Super Mario Bros. 3, and you're enticed back in to gaming when you have kids, a wife, and a mortgage, you don't want to be called a mexican jew lizard in Mario Kart by some 14-year-old in Alabama. You might not sue over it, but you're sure not going to play online any more, regardless of whether you were warned or not.
I don't think free is the focus. From everything MS has been talking about, the Live Marketplace is the interesting part to them and to developers - Small payments for new skins, levels, wallpapers and stuff. Some of it might be free, but so far MS has been mostly pushing it as a place to sell things (hence the name).
Whether or not his business plans hinged on ease of infringement to gain popularity -- if he didn't promote it, and if he didn't distribute eDonkey with the expressed intent of promoting illegal filesharing, then he would not lose the case.
His point was that it didn't matter if he won the case - he didn't have the money to fight the accusations. This is something I pointed out on Slashdot when everyone was saying "Oh, the Grokster decision isn't THAT bad." - it opens companies up for the possibility of lawsuits that they can't afford, win or lose. This puts a chilling effect on P2P development, and means that it'll be that much longer before someone comes out with a legitimate business plan using P2P, and kills off the music industry for good.
The startup costs for new P2P media businesses just went up by a lot.
It used to be a great thing for the US that our companies were successful overseas. More sales means more pay for the workers back home, and more taxes for the government. Everyone benefits!
Now, however, very little production is done in the US. only a small proportion of a multinational corporation's jobs are in this country. And with tax cuts and corporate welfare, they might be getting more from the government than they're getting.
Currently, the biggest ties we have to the corporations are as customers. The US still buys a lot of stuff, and so they have to keep us happy. What will happen, though, when China has as much disposable income? Will those corporations stick around out of loyalty, or will we see all of our investment as a country moving elsewhere?
There will come a point where corporations start transcending national power. Governments are ceding more and more control and power away, and it will come back to bite them in the future. We're already seeing companies like Yahoo! disregarding US values and laws in their dealings. What if it were Lockheed Martin dealing with North Korea?
Granted, this might not happen for a while. But before we sell our laws and resources to companies, we should think about the long-term. Will they still care about us once they can't make money from us?
This is definitely Nintendo's biggest problem (both currently, and with the new controller): third party support.
However, look at the DS. Very few developers are saying "Oh, I can't make my touchscreen/dual screen game for the PSP also! Woe is me!" The DS gets a lot of great games.
Now, partially this is due to the fact that the DS has a large marketshare, and to the fact that handhelds are a lot cheaper to develop for, but still the fact remains: platform-exclusivity is not an automatic killer. In fact, for most of the console world's history, titles have been exclusives (was there anything that was on both SNES and Genesis? Or PS1 and Dreamcast?)
So if Nintendo can make enough hardware sales, and can make the platform cheap enough to develop for (signs point to yes on the second one, at least), then they have a shot even without cross-platform games.
Anyway, 3rd parties might be more willing to step up to the plate than you think - EA has already said they're looking forward to using the new controller features in their sports games, and a number of other large publishers have stated support as well. That's not to say they won't back out if things start going downhill, but of course that will be a lot harder once you've started to develop a game around the controller.
Of course it's possible - I play emulated games all the time with a gamepad (actually I recently just got a DualShock to USB converter, which I recommend), but I'm obviously not the target market for these games (since I can set up an emulator).
The casual "The last video game I played was Super Mario Bros." crowd, however, isn't going to want to have to buy a separate piece of hardware and deal with calibrating it in order to play their games. They'd much rather buy a $20 dollar "15 classic games!" joystick and plug it into their TV.
I can see there being a market for this - less-computer-savvy people who are nostalgic about past games and want to play them again. However, I doubt that those people would be willing to pay $15 a month for the privilege - especially given the somewhat-smallish list of games available. There's also the fact that when you're playing with a keyboard, you lose a lot of the feel of the original game. I think the cheap retro joystick sets are probably competitive with this service in every way.
Anyone who is knowledgable about computers, though, will probably just set up some type of emulator - you still have to play with a keyboard, and deal with intermediate software and loading the ROMs, but you have access to many many more games.
I think the only way a download service like this can work is when it's paired with the classic controllers, and there's a minimal setup/interface to deal with. If Nintendo pulls it off, the Revolution download service could be all these things (of course, only classic Nintendo games would be available, but there are a lot of those).
Actually, the fact that _all_ NES games are missing from the GameTap list makes me think that perhaps the Revolution service will have games from all NES publishers, not just Nintendo... That makes their offering much stronger.
Yeah, I really like We Love Katamari. It takes the concepts from the original and builds on them in a unique and interesting way.
That said, I hope they don't make a Katamari 3. Part of the appeal of the game is in the uniqueness of it, and making sequel after sequel would kill the magic. Of course, since it was so successful I have no doubt there will be more. We'll get sequels and spin-offs until Dead or Alive: Beach Katamari 6 comes along, and then it will die a quiet death in the bargain bin, mourned by none.
Game companies are good at attempting to squeeze blood from stones.
Hmm. I think this is slightly offtopic (since the Broadcast Flag doesn't really _actually_ have anything to do with funding), but I can think of a possible reason things work that way: If the budget increase doesn't keep up with inflation, then in real terms the budget actually has decreased.
This may not be the case, depending on the actual percentages, but that's one justification I can think of.
Regardless of the financial stuff, I think it's pretty awful that something totally unrelated to budgetting like the broadcast flag can be cloaked in that sort of bill, not to mention the fact that corporations can even *attempt* to write laws for us. There's obviously a lot of rotten stuff going on in the US government.
The Broadcast flag isn't for people to block content they don't want to see. It's for companies to mark content they don't want you to be able to record.
Which, when you look at their public attitudes, has to be "everything". The only thing I can see them allowing is sports events and news. I'm sure they don't want to miss out on possible revenue from DVD versions of TV shows.
Masahiro Sakurai is also the guy behind Super Smash Brothers Melee on the GameCube, the deepest fighting game I have ever played.
Rumor has it that he left HAL Labs because he didn't want to keep working on sequels, but I hope that he keeps working with Nintendo to make DS and Revolution games. Meteos is a very addictive puzzler, and obviously Kirby has had some great games over the years.
As someone who works in the game industry, I think this is great. If digital distribution can become legitimized, it will allow independents and other small developers to make unique and fun games.
Currently the games market works like the pre-online book market - you need to be famous or spend a lot on shelf space in retail in order to make money. You also have to appeal to the widest possible audience of people who walk in from the mall. This leads to creative stagnation in the industry, and games that might be niche hits not getting made or not selling well.
Digital distribution allows games to benefit from the Long Tail market. There's probably enough fans of hardcore hex-based wargames or 4X games out there to make a profit on those types of games, but there aren't enough of them visiting EB. If you put that type of game on the internet, though, you can succeed (especially since you don't have to pay for shelf space, CD/DVD duplication, or distribution).
My only worry is that the middlemen will sneak in and publishing online will be just like publishing offline, except your publisher saves money. (Sort of what the music industry is like...) But the game industry is still very flexible at this point, so I have some hope.
The biggest coup for digital distrubution would be if one of the console makers opened their licensing for cheap digital distribution. It would be really difficult with the current business models, but the Xbox Live marketplace and the Revolution download service seem like they might be possible steps in that direction.
like all things in life, if you cut corners [price wise] you'll get burnt...
Well, to an extent that's true, but it's also the case that you often end up paying inflated prices for brand or advertising, not quality. In some cases, the more-expensive product can actually be inferior.
For instance, several companies just rebadge computer components, and sell them for a higher price. You're not getting anything different, but you're paying more.
So how do you decide when the extra money is worth it, and when it isn't? Let's say you're willing to spend for top of the line - how do you decide what's top quality and what's just top price?
You do what these guys did, and test them. Or you go on the internet and find someone who tested them.
Man, I loved that movie. It was one of the best awful movies produced in recent history. Usually for that brand of so-terrible-it's-funny sci-fi, you have to go back to the 50s and 60s.
But Deep Blue Sea did it for me. Especially the part with Samuel Jackson. I have to watch that again.
Yeah, I don't think MS could get away with making a Revolution look-alike. You really have to plan your whole strategy around the controller - not just the hardware and software, but the target audience and marketing, as well.
However, there's no guarantee that if it does really well, the other companies wouldn't sneak in the aspects that work, like the gyroscopic controls.
Or Sony could see the appeal of nonstandard control schemes and focus more heavily on the EyeToy - a fantastic peripheral with only one really great game for it (AntiGrav).
He has a problem with secondhand games, and I see his point - support and infrastructure costs going to customers who haven't paid the developer.
On the other hand, though, he's not going to have any luck convincing me or anyone else that we can't resell something we've bought - games, books, music, teddy bears - no one will accept limits on the First Sale doctrine.
But, there is a way out. An article recently on Gamasutra here talked about how the pricing strategy for games and the entire sales model is based on an old, old way of doing things that's far more suited to cabbages and sealing wax than digital information. If game companies got over the retail model, and instead did interesting things like web-based delivery, episodic content, subscription-based models, and so forth, they would solve the secondhand-games problem and make more money to boot. This becomes more possible as game consoles and even handheld systems gain Internet connectivity.
Steam (as badly implemented as it is) is a glipse of the future.
I think this is exactly the wrong approach to take to DRM - and perhaps it's why DRM has done as well as it has. The savvy user says "Oh, DRM isn't so bad, I can get around it..." and the CEO says, "Well, we put in DRM and people are still paying for our service!" and there aren't any serious repercussions.
If, instead, everyone were to drop a service like a rock when DRM hit, no company would implement it, regardless of the pressure. Even legislation would have a hard time succeeding in the face of that sort of failure.
iTunes is the worst example of this, IMO. Sure, it's easy to bypass it, but it's getting everyone used to the idea that their music is not their own - it's "licensed" rather than "owned". When something worse comes along, it will look like closing a loophole, rather than stripping away a right.
I see this sort of happening in the world of news, especially online. I read a certain type of news, and sometimes the only exposure I have to "the other side" of the debate is the indignant responses to points I didn't even know were made. This is most pronounced in blogs, but I think it's happening more and more with mainstream news, too - you can only find out about certain things if you read the Bay Guardian, or watch Fox News.
I wonder if this polarization has anything to do with the "Equal time" rule being done away with, or if it's just a reflection of the overall polarization of our society.
Slashdot Mirror
Tech companies that are trying to sell their technology will have a friendler stance about copyright and the consumer than the record companies would.
Yeah, like Sony! They're a tech company. They should buy a record label, maybe some movie studios.... I bet they'd release all their stuff under CC licenses! It would be great!
Even if you think our government sucks, would ANY of you prefer any of the alternatives currently on offer
You're right. We may be detained without trial indefinitely, abducted and tortured, or forced to sell ourselves into slavery to pay the RIAA, but at least we're not in Canada!
Seriously, since when were the alternatives the U.S. or China? There are countries out there better than ours, and a lot that are worse.
I'll dispense with the customary "don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out" phraseology
And since when are the alternatives to love it or to leave? Can't we point out the flaws and make improvements? Or is our only alternative to live under a dictatorship?
False dichotomies are all too present in US politics.
I don't think lawsuits are what Nintendo is afraid of - they're afraid of a bad user experience for the new gamers they're trying to usher in.
If you've played online on Live or PS2, you'll understand. The language, while offensive, is nothing compared to the childishness, the racism, the homophobia, the sexual harrasment... Imagine being in High School, except everyone is anonymous and thus can't be held accountable for anything they say. (cf. John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory) I'm a hardcore gamer, not easily offended, and *I* certainly don't want to play with voice chat in SOCOM or BattleField. It's like swimming in the raw sewage of humanity.
If your last gaming experience was Super Mario Bros. 3, and you're enticed back in to gaming when you have kids, a wife, and a mortgage, you don't want to be called a mexican jew lizard in Mario Kart by some 14-year-old in Alabama. You might not sue over it, but you're sure not going to play online any more, regardless of whether you were warned or not.
I don't think free is the focus. From everything MS has been talking about, the Live Marketplace is the interesting part to them and to developers - Small payments for new skins, levels, wallpapers and stuff. Some of it might be free, but so far MS has been mostly pushing it as a place to sell things (hence the name).
If you don't like it, go back to using Windows, because that's Good Software.
Wow, Slashdot is different these days...
Whether or not his business plans hinged on ease of infringement to gain popularity -- if he didn't promote it, and if he didn't distribute eDonkey with the expressed intent of promoting illegal filesharing, then he would not lose the case.
His point was that it didn't matter if he won the case - he didn't have the money to fight the accusations. This is something I pointed out on Slashdot when everyone was saying "Oh, the Grokster decision isn't THAT bad." - it opens companies up for the possibility of lawsuits that they can't afford, win or lose. This puts a chilling effect on P2P development, and means that it'll be that much longer before someone comes out with a legitimate business plan using P2P, and kills off the music industry for good.
The startup costs for new P2P media businesses just went up by a lot.
How long is this going to be the case, though?
It used to be a great thing for the US that our companies were successful overseas. More sales means more pay for the workers back home, and more taxes for the government. Everyone benefits!
Now, however, very little production is done in the US. only a small proportion of a multinational corporation's jobs are in this country. And with tax cuts and corporate welfare, they might be getting more from the government than they're getting.
Currently, the biggest ties we have to the corporations are as customers. The US still buys a lot of stuff, and so they have to keep us happy. What will happen, though, when China has as much disposable income? Will those corporations stick around out of loyalty, or will we see all of our investment as a country moving elsewhere?
There will come a point where corporations start transcending national power. Governments are ceding more and more control and power away, and it will come back to bite them in the future. We're already seeing companies like Yahoo! disregarding US values and laws in their dealings. What if it were Lockheed Martin dealing with North Korea?
Granted, this might not happen for a while. But before we sell our laws and resources to companies, we should think about the long-term. Will they still care about us once they can't make money from us?
This is definitely Nintendo's biggest problem (both currently, and with the new controller): third party support.
However, look at the DS. Very few developers are saying "Oh, I can't make my touchscreen/dual screen game for the PSP also! Woe is me!" The DS gets a lot of great games.
Now, partially this is due to the fact that the DS has a large marketshare, and to the fact that handhelds are a lot cheaper to develop for, but still the fact remains: platform-exclusivity is not an automatic killer. In fact, for most of the console world's history, titles have been exclusives (was there anything that was on both SNES and Genesis? Or PS1 and Dreamcast?)
So if Nintendo can make enough hardware sales, and can make the platform cheap enough to develop for (signs point to yes on the second one, at least), then they have a shot even without cross-platform games.
Anyway, 3rd parties might be more willing to step up to the plate than you think - EA has already said they're looking forward to using the new controller features in their sports games, and a number of other large publishers have stated support as well. That's not to say they won't back out if things start going downhill, but of course that will be a lot harder once you've started to develop a game around the controller.
Actually, it happens quite often.
Of course it's possible - I play emulated games all the time with a gamepad (actually I recently just got a DualShock to USB converter, which I recommend), but I'm obviously not the target market for these games (since I can set up an emulator).
The casual "The last video game I played was Super Mario Bros." crowd, however, isn't going to want to have to buy a separate piece of hardware and deal with calibrating it in order to play their games. They'd much rather buy a $20 dollar "15 classic games!" joystick and plug it into their TV.
I can see there being a market for this - less-computer-savvy people who are nostalgic about past games and want to play them again. However, I doubt that those people would be willing to pay $15 a month for the privilege - especially given the somewhat-smallish list of games available. There's also the fact that when you're playing with a keyboard, you lose a lot of the feel of the original game. I think the cheap retro joystick sets are probably competitive with this service in every way.
Anyone who is knowledgable about computers, though, will probably just set up some type of emulator - you still have to play with a keyboard, and deal with intermediate software and loading the ROMs, but you have access to many many more games.
I think the only way a download service like this can work is when it's paired with the classic controllers, and there's a minimal setup/interface to deal with. If Nintendo pulls it off, the Revolution download service could be all these things (of course, only classic Nintendo games would be available, but there are a lot of those).
Actually, the fact that _all_ NES games are missing from the GameTap list makes me think that perhaps the Revolution service will have games from all NES publishers, not just Nintendo... That makes their offering much stronger.
Yeah, I really like We Love Katamari. It takes the concepts from the original and builds on them in a unique and interesting way.
That said, I hope they don't make a Katamari 3. Part of the appeal of the game is in the uniqueness of it, and making sequel after sequel would kill the magic. Of course, since it was so successful I have no doubt there will be more. We'll get sequels and spin-offs until Dead or Alive: Beach Katamari 6 comes along, and then it will die a quiet death in the bargain bin, mourned by none.
Game companies are good at attempting to squeeze blood from stones.
Hmm. I think this is slightly offtopic (since the Broadcast Flag doesn't really _actually_ have anything to do with funding), but I can think of a possible reason things work that way: If the budget increase doesn't keep up with inflation, then in real terms the budget actually has decreased.
This may not be the case, depending on the actual percentages, but that's one justification I can think of.
Regardless of the financial stuff, I think it's pretty awful that something totally unrelated to budgetting like the broadcast flag can be cloaked in that sort of bill, not to mention the fact that corporations can even *attempt* to write laws for us. There's obviously a lot of rotten stuff going on in the US government.
The Broadcast flag isn't for people to block content they don't want to see. It's for companies to mark content they don't want you to be able to record.
Which, when you look at their public attitudes, has to be "everything". The only thing I can see them allowing is sports events and news. I'm sure they don't want to miss out on possible revenue from DVD versions of TV shows.
Masahiro Sakurai is also the guy behind Super Smash Brothers Melee on the GameCube, the deepest fighting game I have ever played.
Rumor has it that he left HAL Labs because he didn't want to keep working on sequels, but I hope that he keeps working with Nintendo to make DS and Revolution games. Meteos is a very addictive puzzler, and obviously Kirby has had some great games over the years.
As someone who works in the game industry, I think this is great. If digital distribution can become legitimized, it will allow independents and other small developers to make unique and fun games.
Currently the games market works like the pre-online book market - you need to be famous or spend a lot on shelf space in retail in order to make money. You also have to appeal to the widest possible audience of people who walk in from the mall. This leads to creative stagnation in the industry, and games that might be niche hits not getting made or not selling well.
Digital distribution allows games to benefit from the Long Tail market. There's probably enough fans of hardcore hex-based wargames or 4X games out there to make a profit on those types of games, but there aren't enough of them visiting EB. If you put that type of game on the internet, though, you can succeed (especially since you don't have to pay for shelf space, CD/DVD duplication, or distribution).
My only worry is that the middlemen will sneak in and publishing online will be just like publishing offline, except your publisher saves money. (Sort of what the music industry is like...) But the game industry is still very flexible at this point, so I have some hope.
The biggest coup for digital distrubution would be if one of the console makers opened their licensing for cheap digital distribution. It would be really difficult with the current business models, but the Xbox Live marketplace and the Revolution download service seem like they might be possible steps in that direction.
like all things in life, if you cut corners [price wise] you'll get burnt...
Well, to an extent that's true, but it's also the case that you often end up paying inflated prices for brand or advertising, not quality. In some cases, the more-expensive product can actually be inferior.
For instance, several companies just rebadge computer components, and sell them for a higher price. You're not getting anything different, but you're paying more.
So how do you decide when the extra money is worth it, and when it isn't? Let's say you're willing to spend for top of the line - how do you decide what's top quality and what's just top price?
You do what these guys did, and test them. Or you go on the internet and find someone who tested them.
So these articles ARE valuable!
Man, I loved that movie. It was one of the best awful movies produced in recent history. Usually for that brand of so-terrible-it's-funny sci-fi, you have to go back to the 50s and 60s.
But Deep Blue Sea did it for me. Especially the part with Samuel Jackson. I have to watch that again.
Yeah, I don't think MS could get away with making a Revolution look-alike. You really have to plan your whole strategy around the controller - not just the hardware and software, but the target audience and marketing, as well.
However, there's no guarantee that if it does really well, the other companies wouldn't sneak in the aspects that work, like the gyroscopic controls.
Or Sony could see the appeal of nonstandard control schemes and focus more heavily on the EyeToy - a fantastic peripheral with only one really great game for it (AntiGrav).
It's been longer than that. The last PS1 game to be released was Madden '05.
But you're right, the PS1 had a very long lifespan, and most of its sales were made AFTER the PS2 was released.
He has a problem with secondhand games, and I see his point - support and infrastructure costs going to customers who haven't paid the developer.
On the other hand, though, he's not going to have any luck convincing me or anyone else that we can't resell something we've bought - games, books, music, teddy bears - no one will accept limits on the First Sale doctrine.
But, there is a way out. An article recently on Gamasutra here talked about how the pricing strategy for games and the entire sales model is based on an old, old way of doing things that's far more suited to cabbages and sealing wax than digital information. If game companies got over the retail model, and instead did interesting things like web-based delivery, episodic content, subscription-based models, and so forth, they would solve the secondhand-games problem and make more money to boot. This becomes more possible as game consoles and even handheld systems gain Internet connectivity.
Steam (as badly implemented as it is) is a glipse of the future.
I think this is exactly the wrong approach to take to DRM - and perhaps it's why DRM has done as well as it has. The savvy user says "Oh, DRM isn't so bad, I can get around it..." and the CEO says, "Well, we put in DRM and people are still paying for our service!" and there aren't any serious repercussions.
If, instead, everyone were to drop a service like a rock when DRM hit, no company would implement it, regardless of the pressure. Even legislation would have a hard time succeeding in the face of that sort of failure.
iTunes is the worst example of this, IMO. Sure, it's easy to bypass it, but it's getting everyone used to the idea that their music is not their own - it's "licensed" rather than "owned". When something worse comes along, it will look like closing a loophole, rather than stripping away a right.
Apparently this is brighter than the DS.
I see this sort of happening in the world of news, especially online. I read a certain type of news, and sometimes the only exposure I have to "the other side" of the debate is the indignant responses to points I didn't even know were made. This is most pronounced in blogs, but I think it's happening more and more with mainstream news, too - you can only find out about certain things if you read the Bay Guardian, or watch Fox News.
I wonder if this polarization has anything to do with the "Equal time" rule being done away with, or if it's just a reflection of the overall polarization of our society.
Its nicer to repel than base-jump.
Hey! Imagine the base-jumping opportunities a space elevator would provide! That would be CRAZY!
I can't wait.