One of the biggest problems game companies encounter is the pipeline. You need to create a bunch of plugins and tools and utils to get the assets from 3ds/maya/whatever to your game. (Plus gui, plus captions, plus textures, plus blah blah blah.)
Then you're building an isometric 2d render and a 3d renderer, which would employ totally different camera systems. And since you can take those 2d snaps without making sure the assets will look good in 3d, you'll render the 2d on the 2nd or 3rd pass, and drop it while you attempt to maintain your 2d client. Suddenly the deadline for the 3d client is coming up. Oh crap, look what fell through the cracks!
You know why games get delayed so often? Why MMORPGs get cancelled too often? Cause it's a huge assload of work to create games, and because software development is always slower that expectations. Under promise, over deliver. This 2d to 3d thing sounds like a make work project. If the product is sound and good, then make it. Giving yourself extra work to let people experience a game before you even define the final graphical experience sounds like the best of both terrible worlds - more work, for a less sincere first impression.
Saying Starcraft is a counter example is silly. People *still* play it in droves, and it still looks good. With the DS still trucking on with tons of essentially 2d games and even consoles having some (Metal Slug 7, Megaman), the game may not get better looking with newer hardware, but if it looks good to start with, who cares?
And Crysis didn't scale that poorly. Introversion games may never look better but still looks awesome.. now that is a great example of art direction working with limited work resources to create something truly awesome looking.
To make up for those disagreements, I can't agree more with you on Valve's Source engine - it does scale very very nicely, and while its never accused of being the best looking engine, it can look really nice and they do manage to update older games with newer asset-independent rendering features.
As for cross platform, Linux is still going to be last on the list for reasonable reasons. One major problem is that as much as people (and even developers like myself) love to bitch about Microsoft, DirectX stomps OpenGL in current day form, and that buys you 90% of the cross-platform that is PC and XBox, keeping in mind that they are two different platforms unless you wanna get religious about it. Developing games for the PS3 (or PSP) and the Wii, you are pretty much forced into CodeWarrior.. its the kind of IDE that makes you want to stick forks in your eyes.
I think its telling that developers realize doing a game thats cross platform for the 360 (and lets say PC as well) and the PS3 is hard enough, the Wii would be your next target, and then OSX and then Linux. Maybe you think its unfair to bring in consoles to what appears to be a PC gaming discussion, but saving PC gaming involves saving PC gaming - it does not imply that you don't release on consoles as well because the business decision is why release on Linux if you've already got a DirectX-friendly abstraction layer that can get you on the 360 as well?
Lastly, I was a former FreeBSD programmer myself, so please don't assume I don't realize how kickass Linux and *BSDs are. Linux kicks serious ass, but in so far as gaming developer support, MS holds all the cards - Visual Studio and DirectX arn't quite the utter pieces of shit that the OS is, and if you wanna program a generation into the future, OpenGL is trailing developer expectations while MS has been much more consistent with regards to their announcements of whats coming up. If you wanna game on a PC, as much as I am loathe to say it, I don't see Windows being threatened anytime soon in the gaming market. And I don't think that's a function of the buyers, I think it's more of a function of the creators.
Man, what is the point of going through all that trouble? This reeks of wasted effort spent on getting the 2d side up and running, assets they can't re-use, and the trouble of bridging the 2d client over to the 3d client. Seems like a huge timesuck to me.
While in general I agree with your sentiment, that's kind of the idea of any electoral process. I can't enforce the law by seizing your drugs or stolen property, but authority can.
I can't own a nuke but the government can, and it seems rather reasonable to me, as long as you believe that your electoral process is putting the right people in power. Democracy is just a way of mitigating privileges to a select group of people. All societies will have an unbalance of power and priviledges, the question is, how do you pick who gets them? Democracy, in its ideal, avoids the might is right problem with past feudal or fascist societies.
Does it work all the time? Of course not. You have a choice with respect to where you live, or work, and thats more than many people on earth can say but I'd hardly classify some people having more legal privileges as I do, even if they set the rules, as corruption. By that logic, any boss that makes a rule that I can't spend more than 30 bucks a day on food but grants himself a per diem of 40 is corrupt.
See the forest for the trees - you can't have a government that can govern if they arn't expempt from certain restrictions placed on citizens. It might not apply in this case, but thats kind of the point, isn't it? Our hallowed western world judicial system absolutely requires that some people have certain exemptions from laws that apply to citizens, otherwise it couldn't actually function. Who wants to require that the government license copy written material everytime it is valid evidence in a legal trial?
that doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of people use them for piracy
Is that a question? Not to you apparently. My post was pretty clearly in reply to this assertion. Of course Nintendo goes after stuff like this due to piracy fears. The question you apparently feel isn't a question is whether or not products like these hurt society more than they benefit it. Because as I alluded to in my post, Nintendo's use for a few extra bucks may not outweigh the benefits society and the industry receives from its availability.
It's disingenuous to say that one company's right to earn should be placed above the the benefit of society, because capitalism itself is designed to raise all our standards of living. As soon as you place one company above what I concede is a nebulous, and therefore worth discussing, plus for everyone else, you're negating an axiom that is used to justify the existence of capitalism in the first place. One which I believe in, for what it's worth.
If your point was just to say, "Nintendo is going after this because it can be used for piracy," well great, welcome to the moot point club. It is you who claims that products like this are used more for piracy than legitimate (lets define this as not harmful to Nintendo and game developers and publishers) purposes, but you don't provide any kind of metric for what 'more' means, and why it's relevant in this discussion.
Funny, the only people that I know that are sufficiently advanced game pirates are professionally employed game developers.
I sincerely doubt that the majority of the DS/WII demographic are all that interested in carting around everything on an SD card.
I've had the ability to carry around tons of backed up albums on different mediums for years now. Let's face it - piracy is a problem for the industry to solve when it comes to distributors, not end users nor content creators. As soon as you're illegally distributing a work of art, fine, go after it. But man, we have this exact same argument every 5 minutes - the VCR did not kill movies. The ability to back up and distribute roms will not kill games, as long as the industry remains focused on those who distribute ROMs rather than those who provide a mechanism to utilize them conveniently.
How difficult is this? It's easy as shit to pirate anything, and the method of distribution isn't SD cards. It's just a technology that overcomes an artificial limitation in the hardware that makes life more convenient for legitimate owners and interested programmers - many, by the way, who cut their chops before they end up working in the trenches of 'the establishment'. iPODs didn't kill music, DVDs didn't kill movies, etc etc etc.
So what's all the hubub about? Shitty games get pirated, but wouldn't have sold anyhow, and great games make tons of cash and are pirated by a small amount. Never mind the fact that if you want to carry around a bunch of games at one time on a cartridge on a DS, you already can. It should say lots that I love Nintendo to death and have more than 40 gamecube/wii titles on my shelf, but man, cooperate juggernauts like Nintendo are the last things on earth who actually need anybody to stand up for them. They're doing just fine on their own, and what you see as a means to enable piracy, I see as the usual technological one upmanship that is good old-fashioned capitalist innovation. The barrier to entry, for the vast majority of end users, to engage in piracy is always high enough to not really impact whatever the mass market form of publishing is. Publishers know that - theres no technical reason that DS games don't involve gigs of data. They just know that nobody is going to plug in a DVD reader at the back of the DS for the same reasons. They know their market, which is what makes this kind of legal issue so disingenuous. It very very slightly raises the bar of convenience, and therefore, there's no way it'll make a significant dent in game sales.
Eve-Online is deep as hell. Nothing approaches it. But customizable? I think that CCP is promising to introduce in station characters and socialization elements as the 'next big thing' says it all. I've played quite a few MMOs, and really enjoyed Eve, but I never ever felt like an individual in that game.
Fans should have their arses whipped for lionizing the franchise.
Read that again: franchise.
The first three movies were (relatively) great. Then a franchise was born. And some of the things in that franchise have been good. Much of it has been bad. That's a franchise.
There's one sure thing you can say about franchises - the more people buy into them, the less pressure there is to feel you need to make something of quality for it to sell. That's why franchises exist.. its a built-in consumer base.
Sounds good to me. You clearly have a much greater grasp on what the intended purpose of patents are than most folks. Although I think point 4 is basically "prior art".
I don't really agree with patent 3 - not because I don't think its a good idea, just because I think its a political non-starter. Limits starts to imply a cap on revenue growth, which is just too radical for anybody to accept. (Myself, I always thought it was stupid that somebody who could make 100 million would not be motivated to do so because he was denied making 200 million, but thats just me.)
Shortening patent terms is of course the thing that just will never happen. The only people with money to influence the rules of the patent system are the people who wish to extend the term. As long as lobbying exists, the terms on patents, copyrights, etc can only lengthen, not shorten.
Actually, and this isn't an insult, but it occurs to me that you're a guy looking for a good story and good acting in a medium which is very much secondary to another medium which is fully founded on it. Why play games if what you're looking for is good acting/good story? At the end of the day, most of the money on a game HAS to be spent on programming, modelers and texture artists because if there's no game play, what you're sitting in front of at your computer is a movie? The different between you and I is that good acting and writing is a bonus to me - to you, its required. I wonder why you just don't read books or be a film buff. I love movies and books, and whatever you seem to be looking for from games, you can get them there.
Hey, I liked Myst not because of the game play, but because of the atmosphere, the voice acting, and the story. You didn't like it, but thats more a matter of taste. I liked it for the same reasons you like some of your games: the experience. Between gameplay/story, neither can be king because different games need or use different amounts of them.
My main point is that games, as being able to provide a solid foundation for a movie, rank below both books and comic books in my world. (And I love comics.)
I just think that the strongest games, books, and movies are usually not created because some game, book, and movie got really popular and a bunch of money guys and marketers got together to go all horizontal over the media. Wing Commander wasn't a movie before it was a game. Neither was Myst. Neither was a whole host of other awesome games. I just feel like most videogame movies miss the mark, and it seems patently obvious to me why: the game was great, and hundreds of people are going to work on a movie based on it who never played it. It's just a very risky proposition, and while sometimes it all comes together, its really freakin rare.
To me, games are for playing, not for stories and acting. When games have great stories and great acting, I love it - Eternal Darkness is right up there for me.. but again.. I think its kind of like asking a heavy metal band to write a song about how awesome their lyrics are. Rap is rap, thats what makes it rap. Heavy metal is heavy metal. Games are games, movies are movies, books are books, and when you've experienced any of them and loved it, asking somebody else to re-do it in another media or genre is just a recipe for fandom. I honestly think most of these movies make money because comic book fans, game fans, whatever feel indebted to go see them just so they can have an opinion on how 'faithful' they are to the source material. Transformers the movie wasn't made because the story was compelling. It was because everybody knows that there are hundreds of thousands of people out there who won't pass it up, no matter how bad they hear it is - they have to see it, because its a franchise that they feel connected too. Its that kind of built in audience that doesn't require an incentive to create something good... more like something shiny and well marketed.
And that, is why by in large, when I see a semi-cool looking trailer for a decent game like Max Payne, I go "meh". It could be good. I don't preclude the possibility. But its funny you loved Wing Commander 4, only because - how good was the movie?
The patent system is a privilege to encourage publication of invention while granting a limited-term monopoly on licensing that invention.
Like the copyright system, it has been twisted by special interested groups into some kind of right whereby creators of art and technology and knowledge deserve some kind of lifetime monopoly. Throw in companies, works for hires, NDAs, etc and suddenly you have the very thing both systems were founded on to combat: a semi-feudal permenant monopoly on inventions and works of art.
I like to think of it this way - most people think it'd be unfair of somebody to be able to create their own Mickey Mouse merchandise. But certainly, Disney has reaped enough benefit from the original artistic creation, and certainly, if the character is so ingrained into our cultural fabric, it seems asinine to say only one company should be legally granted the permission to re-tell/re-interpret the stories? If the laws many companies sought came into effect, they would have been sued out of existence by their own original creations. That's what limited term means. After awhile, its not your story to tell. With respect to patents, it's the same thing - longer term, wider and more vague claims.
Everyone agrees that inventors/authors should be able to protect their work. It's just that when the terms of that protection get too strong, shrewd capitalists just can't resist, and always work on tipping the legal tables in their favor.
And screw the founding fathers - the acknowledgment that patents and copyright can encourage intellectual and cultural progress pre-date the US by centuries. What has been lost is the concept of balance and compromise. It's a political minefield politically within the context of the American Dream. Somewhere along the line, people started confusing right to private property with right to earn.
I forgot, 'ridiculously high standards' is one of the dumbest things you can say to somebody. We're talking about standards - if there is an absolute scale in the universe, well why bother? Standards vary from person to person and the reason I'm entering into this discussion is to adjust yours. Not make them better or worse - that transcends what standards mean.
You sound like you're under the stockholm sydrome. I played Quake1 for 7 years, every night unless I wasn't sleeping at my place. I played q3 ra for 6 years. I own a 360 and a wii, and every single day I play games on them. I think Myst is one of the best games ever made. Blizzard can do no wrong, in general. I like RTSes, FPSes, action games, and Ico was more than worth the 20 hours spent completing. It was a work of art. RTCW, awesome. I actively play Street Fighter and Virtua Fighter. Soul Calibur 4, I'm dying for. How could I not be a gamer? I've spent more money and more time playing games than any other interest in my life? And if you've never met a developer that has the time to play games, well, work at a gaming company. The ones that *make* time are the gamers. You're right that some really have no interest and leave it up to the designers to make it fun, but I'm a gamer and I get into arguments with designers because from time to time, I work on projects where I play more games than they do.
Don't tell me I'm not a gamer.
I'm really tired of movie producers and uwe boll crapping on source material for original games.
And thanks for making my point. You'll just keep going back to the trough of shitty game-sourced movies, hoping it'll be the exception to the rule. Source material? Games don't have source material. Games are fun to play. Writers and voice actors in games will never be payed enough to provide super compelling source material for the very reason that they just arn't that key to a game's success. Gameplay is. Artists are. Programmers are. Designers are. Man, compare it to comic books. More source material than you can shake a stick at, but at the end of the day, a good comic book hero movie is more an anomaly than a given. So why be so passionate about faithful translations of in game experiences? It can happen, but you're gunna have to absorb a lot of crap until the perfect storm that creates a good videogame movie.
I guess playing videogames a minimum of 3 hours a day and being a game developer makes me not a gamer.:D
Its almost impossible to make a bad trailer. Most gamers just have woefully low standards. I don't really get the desire to see a game turned into a movie. I like good games, I like good movies. I don't need one industry to reference the other - that's just window dressing.
You mean the screen shots look good. How does that tell you about whether it will be fun to play? (ie, watch)
I really don't get these game-to-movie things. Make a good movie. Why would I care whether its based on a video game or not? Its either good or its not.
Look at the batman movies/games. Sure, the license is cool but the movies and games suck when they arn't fun to watch or play respectively, not based on how good they look.
Seconded, they are great books for kids and adults alike - also, Hitch Hikers Guide, of course, but its always neat when somebody knows the Stainless Steel Rat books. I remember them very fondly from my youth.
"Is Apple successful because of the harmonious nature of their hardware and OS, or because people yearn for the OS experience, and thus pay a (disputed, but I'll say slight) premium on the hardware?"
I fall on the side of saying OSX could be where Windows is were it not for matters pretty unrelated to technical considerations. Apple makes its money from hardware because it has to. I believe 99bottles was alluding to the fact that since its such a critically acclaimed OS, why tie it to the hardware? The answer would be that that would be market suicide due to the monopoly that Windows has.
As an example, I run windows because I like games. I'm a game programmer. I'd really prefer the market be able to offer me OS choices that are separate from my taste in games. The reality is that my choice in OS has a lot to do with a very entrenched product of dubious quality. I'm not dumping terribly on Windows - it does the job and I feel fortunate to be a developer so that when problems arise, I can solve them. I still wonder why OSX, despite being a pretty darn slick piece of software has to be bundled with the hardware, doubly so now that its almost 100% the same hardware Windows runs on. Apple would give its first born to be Microsoft, but I don't think they have much choice. It's telling the giant is a software company; why wouldn't Apple want to become that?
Theoretically, you can't sell a product that operates natively on their data formats. But if free tools are available to translate from MS format to format X, that seems to free up commercial software to provide free translators to translate to native or other open formats.
That's a pretty rash assumption that nobody can substantiate; we're already talking about a monster franchise already. I don't know too many people who bought it because of the controversy, I just know plenty of people who became aware of the hidden content because of the controversy.
ManHunt 2 kicked up some crazy controversy (nothing that got it pulled from store shelves mind you, but it was on cnn all the same) and it didn't sell well. Hell, you can *buy* games that are sexually explicit; the fact that there was some tiny polygonal nudity broadcast to the world probably didn't result in massively increased sales. The violent content of the game had already run its course in the mainstream media - anyone who went from "GTA-what" to "oh, I gotta get me that" was probably already sold long before the hidden content was discovered.
While I agree with the bad publicity is better than no publicity, its extremely unlikely that the hot coffee incident made them more money than they ended up paying because they had to pull everything, reburn everything, and redistribute everything. That's a significant chunk of cash there. If its profitable to do something like that for every game, I'm pretty sure you'd see other game makers following suit. If it makes money, people will do it, but the overall industry reaction was and still is of extreme caution and asset control. If it was profitable, I doubt you'd have had that reaction. The world is full of "thats the cost of doing business 'mistakes'" things like this, but I'm very confident that it was a losing proposition in the long run for Rockstar.
It's called a political opportunity. It's not about reality, its about aligning yourself to an issue and making news. "The choir, let me preach to it."
Besides, in laymans terms, the game contained material not suitable for the rating it received. The amount of work you have to do to "unlock" it via the patch (and I did out of curiosity - it took 5 minutes) is trivial, but the joke is, the only reason I became aware of it is because of the news.
Lets face it - it was sloppy of Take Two. They didn't deserve the attention and the suit, but it would have been easily preventable. Having shipped more than a few console games myself in my day, I can assure you that whatever didn't enable the game mechanic of bangin your gf in the build was 'removed' on a pretty high level - just a boolean or the removal of a game event or trigger.
I agree with everyone saying the lawsuit was meritless, but its a valuable lesson for all game developers. (Case in point: my friend wrote something obscene on a texture in a game that would never be readable by a customer with the in game camera. Clients get a 'free camera' mode where they can run through everything, up to any level of detail. Guess who falls on the 'right' side here? The people paying the money. My employers and the client were rightly not amused. Whats to be gained?) Ship a violent movie, and a super ultra softcore porn scene that isn't accessible via the movie on one DVD... there is political weight to taking issue with that, if only because its possible to access it and because if its not meant to be accessed, what is it doing there?
So to summarize, it was a meritless lawsuit, for obvious reasons, but I don't have much sympathy for Take-Two unless it was one developer who kept the assets in there technically unbeknownst to everyone else. I doubt that was the case, and while they didn't deserve the lawsuit, they certainly opened themselves to misguided criticism. There are more stable platforms to assert one's distain for overly heavy handed sexual censorship.
I don't have to agree with somebody to necessarily not want to provide the opportunity for them to feel provoked, especially when money or political power is involved, no matter how fucking stupid they might be.
Imagine how insulting it would be for somebody who beat it to tell somebody who hasn't yet that they aren't doing the right thing.
Different people, different experiences. If there is one constant in this life, it is that people who have overcome their difficulties and problems will naturally believe (have to believe, even) that anybody could do it. While this may or may not be true, telling somebody they can do it because you already did it is insulting. They *might* be able to do it, sure. But you're not them, and nor do you have all the knowledge in the universe, so stating in the absolute that they're "doing it wrong" is myopic and insulting.
The first point I know - I find it strange that MS can turn a profit on Windows, but Apple can't.
The second point, I concede. I had forgotten about the Apple clusterfuck but let me phrase it this way. If beOS had made it stable, and they had better business acumen, do you think they would have managed to find themselves able to really offer consumers a choice in the desktop world? Because at the end of the day, it seems that if MS isn't going to let an x86 distributor with any reasonable clout sell another commercial OS on x86, the point is moot. It just seems strange to be, the dynamic between MS and Apple - ok, fine, Apple isn't going to let you ship Apple hardware with your OS on it. Seems reasonable to me. MS can say "Pray I don't alter the deal anymore," to every distributor of x86 on the planet.
What other products in the world have this kind of competitive disparity in the marketplace? Why is a country that is so about the entrepreneur and competition so quick to denounce the demise of new commercial oses as simply pure incompetence. And hell, despite the fact that Apple may have wrongly squashed beOS (or beOS deserved it for doing the wrong thing, take your pick).. what other product has such a market vacuum that tons of people would come together and build an alternative for free and make it an actual player in that market?
The whole situation just smells to me. Frankly, I don't have much sympathy for MS (or Apple, should they ever come under the gun) if they employed monopolistic practices.
Don't you wonder why if Apple decided to sell OSX in retail to run on beige x86 boxes, they'd go out of business? Is it because OSX sucks? Or is it because the consumer chooses windows?
Or maybe a company abused its market dominance.
In some alternate reality, where MS competed rather than monopolized, a lot of folks are running beOS...
Slashdot Mirror
In an age where joysticks didn't cost 90 bucks, X-Wing sold like crazy.
It's a little weird. Genres often live or die based on what the dominant interface is.
One of the biggest problems game companies encounter is the pipeline. You need to create a bunch of plugins and tools and utils to get the assets from 3ds/maya/whatever to your game. (Plus gui, plus captions, plus textures, plus blah blah blah.)
Then you're building an isometric 2d render and a 3d renderer, which would employ totally different camera systems. And since you can take those 2d snaps without making sure the assets will look good in 3d, you'll render the 2d on the 2nd or 3rd pass, and drop it while you attempt to maintain your 2d client. Suddenly the deadline for the 3d client is coming up. Oh crap, look what fell through the cracks!
You know why games get delayed so often? Why MMORPGs get cancelled too often? Cause it's a huge assload of work to create games, and because software development is always slower that expectations. Under promise, over deliver. This 2d to 3d thing sounds like a make work project. If the product is sound and good, then make it. Giving yourself extra work to let people experience a game before you even define the final graphical experience sounds like the best of both terrible worlds - more work, for a less sincere first impression.
Saying Starcraft is a counter example is silly. People *still* play it in droves, and it still looks good. With the DS still trucking on with tons of essentially 2d games and even consoles having some (Metal Slug 7, Megaman), the game may not get better looking with newer hardware, but if it looks good to start with, who cares?
And Crysis didn't scale that poorly. Introversion games may never look better but still looks awesome .. now that is a great example of art direction working with limited work resources to create something truly awesome looking.
To make up for those disagreements, I can't agree more with you on Valve's Source engine - it does scale very very nicely, and while its never accused of being the best looking engine, it can look really nice and they do manage to update older games with newer asset-independent rendering features.
As for cross platform, Linux is still going to be last on the list for reasonable reasons. One major problem is that as much as people (and even developers like myself) love to bitch about Microsoft, DirectX stomps OpenGL in current day form, and that buys you 90% of the cross-platform that is PC and XBox, keeping in mind that they are two different platforms unless you wanna get religious about it. Developing games for the PS3 (or PSP) and the Wii, you are pretty much forced into CodeWarrior .. its the kind of IDE that makes you want to stick forks in your eyes.
I think its telling that developers realize doing a game thats cross platform for the 360 (and lets say PC as well) and the PS3 is hard enough, the Wii would be your next target, and then OSX and then Linux. Maybe you think its unfair to bring in consoles to what appears to be a PC gaming discussion, but saving PC gaming involves saving PC gaming - it does not imply that you don't release on consoles as well because the business decision is why release on Linux if you've already got a DirectX-friendly abstraction layer that can get you on the 360 as well?
Lastly, I was a former FreeBSD programmer myself, so please don't assume I don't realize how kickass Linux and *BSDs are. Linux kicks serious ass, but in so far as gaming developer support, MS holds all the cards - Visual Studio and DirectX arn't quite the utter pieces of shit that the OS is, and if you wanna program a generation into the future, OpenGL is trailing developer expectations while MS has been much more consistent with regards to their announcements of whats coming up. If you wanna game on a PC, as much as I am loathe to say it, I don't see Windows being threatened anytime soon in the gaming market. And I don't think that's a function of the buyers, I think it's more of a function of the creators.
Man, what is the point of going through all that trouble? This reeks of wasted effort spent on getting the 2d side up and running, assets they can't re-use, and the trouble of bridging the 2d client over to the 3d client. Seems like a huge timesuck to me.
While in general I agree with your sentiment, that's kind of the idea of any electoral process. I can't enforce the law by seizing your drugs or stolen property, but authority can.
I can't own a nuke but the government can, and it seems rather reasonable to me, as long as you believe that your electoral process is putting the right people in power. Democracy is just a way of mitigating privileges to a select group of people. All societies will have an unbalance of power and priviledges, the question is, how do you pick who gets them? Democracy, in its ideal, avoids the might is right problem with past feudal or fascist societies.
Does it work all the time? Of course not. You have a choice with respect to where you live, or work, and thats more than many people on earth can say but I'd hardly classify some people having more legal privileges as I do, even if they set the rules, as corruption. By that logic, any boss that makes a rule that I can't spend more than 30 bucks a day on food but grants himself a per diem of 40 is corrupt.
See the forest for the trees - you can't have a government that can govern if they arn't expempt from certain restrictions placed on citizens. It might not apply in this case, but thats kind of the point, isn't it? Our hallowed western world judicial system absolutely requires that some people have certain exemptions from laws that apply to citizens, otherwise it couldn't actually function. Who wants to require that the government license copy written material everytime it is valid evidence in a legal trial?
that doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of people use them for piracy
Is that a question? Not to you apparently. My post was pretty clearly in reply to this assertion. Of course Nintendo goes after stuff like this due to piracy fears. The question you apparently feel isn't a question is whether or not products like these hurt society more than they benefit it. Because as I alluded to in my post, Nintendo's use for a few extra bucks may not outweigh the benefits society and the industry receives from its availability.
It's disingenuous to say that one company's right to earn should be placed above the the benefit of society, because capitalism itself is designed to raise all our standards of living. As soon as you place one company above what I concede is a nebulous, and therefore worth discussing, plus for everyone else, you're negating an axiom that is used to justify the existence of capitalism in the first place. One which I believe in, for what it's worth.
If your point was just to say, "Nintendo is going after this because it can be used for piracy," well great, welcome to the moot point club. It is you who claims that products like this are used more for piracy than legitimate (lets define this as not harmful to Nintendo and game developers and publishers) purposes, but you don't provide any kind of metric for what 'more' means, and why it's relevant in this discussion.
Funny, the only people that I know that are sufficiently advanced game pirates are professionally employed game developers.
I sincerely doubt that the majority of the DS/WII demographic are all that interested in carting around everything on an SD card.
I've had the ability to carry around tons of backed up albums on different mediums for years now. Let's face it - piracy is a problem for the industry to solve when it comes to distributors, not end users nor content creators. As soon as you're illegally distributing a work of art, fine, go after it. But man, we have this exact same argument every 5 minutes - the VCR did not kill movies. The ability to back up and distribute roms will not kill games, as long as the industry remains focused on those who distribute ROMs rather than those who provide a mechanism to utilize them conveniently.
How difficult is this? It's easy as shit to pirate anything, and the method of distribution isn't SD cards. It's just a technology that overcomes an artificial limitation in the hardware that makes life more convenient for legitimate owners and interested programmers - many, by the way, who cut their chops before they end up working in the trenches of 'the establishment'. iPODs didn't kill music, DVDs didn't kill movies, etc etc etc.
So what's all the hubub about? Shitty games get pirated, but wouldn't have sold anyhow, and great games make tons of cash and are pirated by a small amount. Never mind the fact that if you want to carry around a bunch of games at one time on a cartridge on a DS, you already can. It should say lots that I love Nintendo to death and have more than 40 gamecube/wii titles on my shelf, but man, cooperate juggernauts like Nintendo are the last things on earth who actually need anybody to stand up for them. They're doing just fine on their own, and what you see as a means to enable piracy, I see as the usual technological one upmanship that is good old-fashioned capitalist innovation. The barrier to entry, for the vast majority of end users, to engage in piracy is always high enough to not really impact whatever the mass market form of publishing is. Publishers know that - theres no technical reason that DS games don't involve gigs of data. They just know that nobody is going to plug in a DVD reader at the back of the DS for the same reasons. They know their market, which is what makes this kind of legal issue so disingenuous. It very very slightly raises the bar of convenience, and therefore, there's no way it'll make a significant dent in game sales.
Eve-Online is deep as hell. Nothing approaches it. But customizable? I think that CCP is promising to introduce in station characters and socialization elements as the 'next big thing' says it all. I've played quite a few MMOs, and really enjoyed Eve, but I never ever felt like an individual in that game.
Fans should have their arses whipped for lionizing the franchise.
Read that again: franchise.
The first three movies were (relatively) great. Then a franchise was born. And some of the things in that franchise have been good. Much of it has been bad. That's a franchise.
There's one sure thing you can say about franchises - the more people buy into them, the less pressure there is to feel you need to make something of quality for it to sell. That's why franchises exist .. its a built-in consumer base.
Sounds good to me. You clearly have a much greater grasp on what the intended purpose of patents are than most folks. Although I think point 4 is basically "prior art".
I don't really agree with patent 3 - not because I don't think its a good idea, just because I think its a political non-starter. Limits starts to imply a cap on revenue growth, which is just too radical for anybody to accept. (Myself, I always thought it was stupid that somebody who could make 100 million would not be motivated to do so because he was denied making 200 million, but thats just me.)
Shortening patent terms is of course the thing that just will never happen. The only people with money to influence the rules of the patent system are the people who wish to extend the term. As long as lobbying exists, the terms on patents, copyrights, etc can only lengthen, not shorten.
Actually, and this isn't an insult, but it occurs to me that you're a guy looking for a good story and good acting in a medium which is very much secondary to another medium which is fully founded on it. Why play games if what you're looking for is good acting/good story? At the end of the day, most of the money on a game HAS to be spent on programming, modelers and texture artists because if there's no game play, what you're sitting in front of at your computer is a movie? The different between you and I is that good acting and writing is a bonus to me - to you, its required. I wonder why you just don't read books or be a film buff. I love movies and books, and whatever you seem to be looking for from games, you can get them there.
Hey, I liked Myst not because of the game play, but because of the atmosphere, the voice acting, and the story. You didn't like it, but thats more a matter of taste. I liked it for the same reasons you like some of your games: the experience. Between gameplay/story, neither can be king because different games need or use different amounts of them.
My main point is that games, as being able to provide a solid foundation for a movie, rank below both books and comic books in my world. (And I love comics.)
I just think that the strongest games, books, and movies are usually not created because some game, book, and movie got really popular and a bunch of money guys and marketers got together to go all horizontal over the media. Wing Commander wasn't a movie before it was a game. Neither was Myst. Neither was a whole host of other awesome games. I just feel like most videogame movies miss the mark, and it seems patently obvious to me why: the game was great, and hundreds of people are going to work on a movie based on it who never played it. It's just a very risky proposition, and while sometimes it all comes together, its really freakin rare.
To me, games are for playing, not for stories and acting. When games have great stories and great acting, I love it - Eternal Darkness is right up there for me .. but again .. I think its kind of like asking a heavy metal band to write a song about how awesome their lyrics are. Rap is rap, thats what makes it rap. Heavy metal is heavy metal. Games are games, movies are movies, books are books, and when you've experienced any of them and loved it, asking somebody else to re-do it in another media or genre is just a recipe for fandom. I honestly think most of these movies make money because comic book fans, game fans, whatever feel indebted to go see them just so they can have an opinion on how 'faithful' they are to the source material. Transformers the movie wasn't made because the story was compelling. It was because everybody knows that there are hundreds of thousands of people out there who won't pass it up, no matter how bad they hear it is - they have to see it, because its a franchise that they feel connected too. Its that kind of built in audience that doesn't require an incentive to create something good ... more like something shiny and well marketed.
And that, is why by in large, when I see a semi-cool looking trailer for a decent game like Max Payne, I go "meh". It could be good. I don't preclude the possibility. But its funny you loved Wing Commander 4, only because - how good was the movie?
The patent system is a privilege to encourage publication of invention while granting a limited-term monopoly on licensing that invention.
Like the copyright system, it has been twisted by special interested groups into some kind of right whereby creators of art and technology and knowledge deserve some kind of lifetime monopoly. Throw in companies, works for hires, NDAs, etc and suddenly you have the very thing both systems were founded on to combat: a semi-feudal permenant monopoly on inventions and works of art.
I like to think of it this way - most people think it'd be unfair of somebody to be able to create their own Mickey Mouse merchandise. But certainly, Disney has reaped enough benefit from the original artistic creation, and certainly, if the character is so ingrained into our cultural fabric, it seems asinine to say only one company should be legally granted the permission to re-tell/re-interpret the stories? If the laws many companies sought came into effect, they would have been sued out of existence by their own original creations. That's what limited term means. After awhile, its not your story to tell. With respect to patents, it's the same thing - longer term, wider and more vague claims.
Everyone agrees that inventors/authors should be able to protect their work. It's just that when the terms of that protection get too strong, shrewd capitalists just can't resist, and always work on tipping the legal tables in their favor.
And screw the founding fathers - the acknowledgment that patents and copyright can encourage intellectual and cultural progress pre-date the US by centuries. What has been lost is the concept of balance and compromise. It's a political minefield politically within the context of the American Dream. Somewhere along the line, people started confusing right to private property with right to earn.
I forgot, 'ridiculously high standards' is one of the dumbest things you can say to somebody. We're talking about standards - if there is an absolute scale in the universe, well why bother? Standards vary from person to person and the reason I'm entering into this discussion is to adjust yours. Not make them better or worse - that transcends what standards mean.
You sound like you're under the stockholm sydrome. I played Quake1 for 7 years, every night unless I wasn't sleeping at my place. I played q3 ra for 6 years. I own a 360 and a wii, and every single day I play games on them. I think Myst is one of the best games ever made. Blizzard can do no wrong, in general. I like RTSes, FPSes, action games, and Ico was more than worth the 20 hours spent completing. It was a work of art. RTCW, awesome. I actively play Street Fighter and Virtua Fighter. Soul Calibur 4, I'm dying for. How could I not be a gamer? I've spent more money and more time playing games than any other interest in my life? And if you've never met a developer that has the time to play games, well, work at a gaming company. The ones that *make* time are the gamers. You're right that some really have no interest and leave it up to the designers to make it fun, but I'm a gamer and I get into arguments with designers because from time to time, I work on projects where I play more games than they do.
Don't tell me I'm not a gamer.
I'm really tired of movie producers and uwe boll crapping on source material for original games.
And thanks for making my point. You'll just keep going back to the trough of shitty game-sourced movies, hoping it'll be the exception to the rule. Source material? Games don't have source material. Games are fun to play. Writers and voice actors in games will never be payed enough to provide super compelling source material for the very reason that they just arn't that key to a game's success. Gameplay is. Artists are. Programmers are. Designers are. Man, compare it to comic books. More source material than you can shake a stick at, but at the end of the day, a good comic book hero movie is more an anomaly than a given. So why be so passionate about faithful translations of in game experiences? It can happen, but you're gunna have to absorb a lot of crap until the perfect storm that creates a good videogame movie.
I guess playing videogames a minimum of 3 hours a day and being a game developer makes me not a gamer. :D
Its almost impossible to make a bad trailer. Most gamers just have woefully low standards. I don't really get the desire to see a game turned into a movie. I like good games, I like good movies. I don't need one industry to reference the other - that's just window dressing.
You mean the screen shots look good. How does that tell you about whether it will be fun to play? (ie, watch)
I really don't get these game-to-movie things. Make a good movie. Why would I care whether its based on a video game or not? Its either good or its not.
Look at the batman movies/games. Sure, the license is cool but the movies and games suck when they arn't fun to watch or play respectively, not based on how good they look.
Seconded, they are great books for kids and adults alike - also, Hitch Hikers Guide, of course, but its always neat when somebody knows the Stainless Steel Rat books. I remember them very fondly from my youth.
The elephant in the corner is the question:
"Is Apple successful because of the harmonious nature of their hardware and OS, or because people yearn for the OS experience, and thus pay a (disputed, but I'll say slight) premium on the hardware?"
I fall on the side of saying OSX could be where Windows is were it not for matters pretty unrelated to technical considerations. Apple makes its money from hardware because it has to. I believe 99bottles was alluding to the fact that since its such a critically acclaimed OS, why tie it to the hardware? The answer would be that that would be market suicide due to the monopoly that Windows has.
As an example, I run windows because I like games. I'm a game programmer. I'd really prefer the market be able to offer me OS choices that are separate from my taste in games. The reality is that my choice in OS has a lot to do with a very entrenched product of dubious quality. I'm not dumping terribly on Windows - it does the job and I feel fortunate to be a developer so that when problems arise, I can solve them. I still wonder why OSX, despite being a pretty darn slick piece of software has to be bundled with the hardware, doubly so now that its almost 100% the same hardware Windows runs on. Apple would give its first born to be Microsoft, but I don't think they have much choice. It's telling the giant is a software company; why wouldn't Apple want to become that?
Theoretically, you can't sell a product that operates natively on their data formats. But if free tools are available to translate from MS format to format X, that seems to free up commercial software to provide free translators to translate to native or other open formats.
That's a pretty rash assumption that nobody can substantiate; we're already talking about a monster franchise already. I don't know too many people who bought it because of the controversy, I just know plenty of people who became aware of the hidden content because of the controversy.
ManHunt 2 kicked up some crazy controversy (nothing that got it pulled from store shelves mind you, but it was on cnn all the same) and it didn't sell well. Hell, you can *buy* games that are sexually explicit; the fact that there was some tiny polygonal nudity broadcast to the world probably didn't result in massively increased sales. The violent content of the game had already run its course in the mainstream media - anyone who went from "GTA-what" to "oh, I gotta get me that" was probably already sold long before the hidden content was discovered.
While I agree with the bad publicity is better than no publicity, its extremely unlikely that the hot coffee incident made them more money than they ended up paying because they had to pull everything, reburn everything, and redistribute everything. That's a significant chunk of cash there. If its profitable to do something like that for every game, I'm pretty sure you'd see other game makers following suit. If it makes money, people will do it, but the overall industry reaction was and still is of extreme caution and asset control. If it was profitable, I doubt you'd have had that reaction. The world is full of "thats the cost of doing business 'mistakes'" things like this, but I'm very confident that it was a losing proposition in the long run for Rockstar.
It's called a political opportunity. It's not about reality, its about aligning yourself to an issue and making news. "The choir, let me preach to it."
Besides, in laymans terms, the game contained material not suitable for the rating it received. The amount of work you have to do to "unlock" it via the patch (and I did out of curiosity - it took 5 minutes) is trivial, but the joke is, the only reason I became aware of it is because of the news.
Lets face it - it was sloppy of Take Two. They didn't deserve the attention and the suit, but it would have been easily preventable. Having shipped more than a few console games myself in my day, I can assure you that whatever didn't enable the game mechanic of bangin your gf in the build was 'removed' on a pretty high level - just a boolean or the removal of a game event or trigger.
I agree with everyone saying the lawsuit was meritless, but its a valuable lesson for all game developers. (Case in point: my friend wrote something obscene on a texture in a game that would never be readable by a customer with the in game camera. Clients get a 'free camera' mode where they can run through everything, up to any level of detail. Guess who falls on the 'right' side here? The people paying the money. My employers and the client were rightly not amused. Whats to be gained?) Ship a violent movie, and a super ultra softcore porn scene that isn't accessible via the movie on one DVD ... there is political weight to taking issue with that, if only because its possible to access it and because if its not meant to be accessed, what is it doing there?
So to summarize, it was a meritless lawsuit, for obvious reasons, but I don't have much sympathy for Take-Two unless it was one developer who kept the assets in there technically unbeknownst to everyone else. I doubt that was the case, and while they didn't deserve the lawsuit, they certainly opened themselves to misguided criticism. There are more stable platforms to assert one's distain for overly heavy handed sexual censorship.
I don't have to agree with somebody to necessarily not want to provide the opportunity for them to feel provoked, especially when money or political power is involved, no matter how fucking stupid they might be.
Some people beat cancer. Some people don't.
Imagine how insulting it would be for somebody who beat it to tell somebody who hasn't yet that they aren't doing the right thing.
Different people, different experiences. If there is one constant in this life, it is that people who have overcome their difficulties and problems will naturally believe (have to believe, even) that anybody could do it. While this may or may not be true, telling somebody they can do it because you already did it is insulting. They *might* be able to do it, sure. But you're not them, and nor do you have all the knowledge in the universe, so stating in the absolute that they're "doing it wrong" is myopic and insulting.
The first point I know - I find it strange that MS can turn a profit on Windows, but Apple can't.
The second point, I concede. I had forgotten about the Apple clusterfuck but let me phrase it this way. If beOS had made it stable, and they had better business acumen, do you think they would have managed to find themselves able to really offer consumers a choice in the desktop world? Because at the end of the day, it seems that if MS isn't going to let an x86 distributor with any reasonable clout sell another commercial OS on x86, the point is moot. It just seems strange to be, the dynamic between MS and Apple - ok, fine, Apple isn't going to let you ship Apple hardware with your OS on it. Seems reasonable to me. MS can say "Pray I don't alter the deal anymore," to every distributor of x86 on the planet.
What other products in the world have this kind of competitive disparity in the marketplace? Why is a country that is so about the entrepreneur and competition so quick to denounce the demise of new commercial oses as simply pure incompetence. And hell, despite the fact that Apple may have wrongly squashed beOS (or beOS deserved it for doing the wrong thing, take your pick) .. what other product has such a market vacuum that tons of people would come together and build an alternative for free and make it an actual player in that market?
The whole situation just smells to me. Frankly, I don't have much sympathy for MS (or Apple, should they ever come under the gun) if they employed monopolistic practices.
Don't you wonder why if Apple decided to sell OSX in retail to run on beige x86 boxes, they'd go out of business? Is it because OSX sucks? Or is it because the consumer chooses windows?
Or maybe a company abused its market dominance.
In some alternate reality, where MS competed rather than monopolized, a lot of folks are running beOS ...