I dug up some numbers years back - I should get more up to date ones, but at the time, computer & videogames were around a 10 billion dollar a year industry. Movies were too if you just counted box office, and didn't add in video rentals and sales, licensed toys and merchandise, etc. Radio, magazines, and books each weighed in at around 20 billion a year. Television was 40 billion a year. At the same time, telephone service was a $172 billion a year industry. Is all of that for entertainment purposes? Of course not. Many calls are for business purposes, medical emergencies, etc. etc. But estimate what percentage of phone calls you think are leisure related & multiply it by that 172 billion - unless you guess pretty low, it's still the world's number one entertainment medium.
Games like WOW may not be the most ideal place for it to "fit in" in some ways. That just says to me that games where voice chat fits in perfectly with what people are wanting to do will, someday, possibly be much bigger than WOW. With seven million players, about 1 in 1000 humans on the earth plays WOW. How many of the earth's humans like "talking to other people" as one of their very most favorite things to do?
Regarding the 11 year old group leader, by the way - this is part of the "future shock" inherent in moving from the physical labor era, where small kids couldn't do work with economic value as effectively as full-grown adults, to the intellectual labor era, where sometimes they can. This suggests that some of them would/should/could be taken more seriously, given more freedom or authority, etc. But of course we're not used to that, and social change takes a while to catch up with new underlying realities. America is still gradually adjusting its culture about sex decades after we invented birth control pills and blood tests for all known STDs.
You don't have to go all the way down into the 1000s. Furcadia has 60,000 regular players (who log on at least once per month), and it's still growing. (Or if you count every account ever created, like Second Life seems to, we're over a million. Woot.) It launched in 1996. It's the earliest user created content focused game to reach the "massive" size category as far as I'm aware.
Dr. Cat
Well, P. T. Barnum said "There's no such thing as bad publicity". Which suggests that leaks about upcoming cards probably do them more good than harm. On the other paw, the lawsuit generates a bunch MORE publicity, so by that metric maybe it's good for them too.
Since it's about someone in-house leaking info about stuff coming out a year hence, I suspect they'll offer to drop the lawsuit in exchange for being told who the source was. Of course any news about them dropping the lawsuit will get them some further inexpensive publicity too!
I wasn't trying to claim you or anyone else was prejudiced, I'm sorry if I gave that impression. I was just trying to set the record straight about who our game is aimed at. Regardless of my personal hobbies and interests, my work is intended for a general audience. Though I suppose more people would realize it if we took all those talking animals out of there.:)
Our website DOES have screenshots of the game! If you didn't spot them though, maybe we need to make them more prominent.
And for the record - Furcadia is no more "made for furry fandom" than Disney's movie The Lion King, or Bugs Bunny cartoons. Things that are enjoyed by a thousands furry fans, and millions of non furry fans. Furcadia's the same way. While we have some furry fans there, and they're most welcome, the majority of our players aren't involved or interested in that. Furcadia is primarily for people who want to socialize, roleplay, build, script, host, explore, check out games, puzzles, quests, etc. Some people have made maps that are patched to have human avatars for anime themed areas, vampire roleplaying, etc.
I should note that if you're uncomfortable around furries, you might want to watch where you go in Second Life too - they have a sizeable furry fandom subculture there as well. (Nothing wrong with that in my opinion, but hey.)
For Furcadia, I've been trying to keep a continuously updated estimate of our total playerbase since we opened in 1996, but I've always been aware that we'll never have a totally accurate number. We can count computers connecting (not by IP address, which is often dynamic, but by keys we put in the registry on install, hardware profiles we compare to tell machines apart, etc.) but that's inaccurate because some people use multiple computers, while in other cases multiple family members or roommates log on from one computer. Characters is near useless, since we allow free alts and many people create a lot. Email addresses are worth a bit more, but have the same miscount issues that computers do. We try to use a combination of all those factors to make the best estimate we can.
Currently our max concurrent users is around 4300, and our estimate is that about 60,000 unique players log in 30 days time. So that's very much in the same ballpark as Second Life, with 4500 peak and 50,000 in the last 30 days as their estimates. I'd tend to believe those numbers. We don't have analysis on how many have been on in the last 90 days for comparison to that figure - might be worth us looking into.
I agree with the person that commented that subscription based games & free games need to be counted differently. We've actually had nearly half a million email addresses registered and millions of characters created in the last 9 years - it's easy for people to try out a free game for 5 minutes and then never come back, something you don't see in the subscription based games.
I also agree with the comment that having "shards" is, in many ways, not as desirable as having a single massive world the way that Second Life does (and Furcadia also). Both being user-created content worlds, I think they follow Bob Metcalf's law of networks - the "value" increases as the square of the number of nodes (or in this case, users). It is interesting too that in Korea, the subscription model has already largely given way to games that are free to play, but have optional things to pay for. Might become the dominant model in the US in a few years?
Note to Zonk - when's there going to be a Slashdot article about Furcadia? There's been a bajillion about Second Life already. Not that they don't deserve a lot of news coverage, but I'd like to get a smidgen too someday! Furcadia's been a user created content world where people own the copyright to their own creations since 1996, it was made by 2 people on a $50,000 budget, the programmer (me) met his fiancee' in the game (she's now our producer too), our 10th anniversary is coming up, our scripting language is cool... Do I have to hire a PR guy to send out press releases? We could use a good slashdotting someday, followed by lots of people posting here why they didn't like the game.:)
The biggest problem with an endgame is that the one aspect of online RPGs that has the most value for players is the groups of friends they develop there. Whether it's a guild or just a handful of buddies you go adventuring with. People want stories to end, they want game goals to end. But they don't want their friendships or social groups to end. Shutting all those down on them makes for a bunch of very unhappy people. In a game where you just don't make friends with people, a big ending might be ok. In games where you do, it'd be disastrous.
That's the kind of reaction I guess you'll get in the genres that're still mostly played by male players - especially the combat oriented testosterone fueled games like first person shooters (or to a lesser extent, most MMORPGS). But half the users of the Internet are female, and in fact they're the best customers for a lot of the "casual game" genres. I doubt she'd get that kind of reaction in Spades and Hearts gamerooms, or in places like Puzzle Pirates or A Tale in the Desert. I know on my own Furcadia, 57% of the players are female, and half our company's staff are women. Of course if her favorite types of games are the male dominated ones, she's going to run into those kinds of players & reactions. It is a shame, but they're not universal all over the net and in all games.
I met Ted Nelson once, around 15 years ago. It was at the first or second BBSCON, in Colorado. I felt privileged to not only get to see his speech, but to get to talk to him in person, one-on-one, afterwards.
I couldn't shake the feeling though, as he spoke to me of his mad schemes and visions from the 1960s that the computer world still hadn't caught up with (and hasn't yet today, either) and that most people couldn't even understand, that I was gazing into the eyes of Babbage. A man cursed to envision things long, long before it's in any way possible to actually build them.
He coins a lot of new words to describe the concepts he's come up with, so he can build bigger ideas out of 'em. My favorite one is "transclusion", which he explained in his speech there.
I've managed a number of game development projects over the last 23 years. It's not compared to herding cats for nothing.
Now somebody wants to organize thousands upon thousands of game developers, some of the most independent thinking, strong willed, stubborn, quirky individualists out there into a single organzation? I'm not sure if that's even doable.
I was at Origin's office in New Hampshire when John Romero got hired to work on porting some of the Ultima games to the IBM PC. He kindly gave me copies of all the Apple II games he'd made in the past - he got his start the same way I did, making entire games from scratch, doing all the programming, art, levels, design, and sound effects. Most of his earliest works were done for budget software publishers that sold $5 or $10 game disks in inexpensive packaging.
After Origin he went to Softdisk, where the other 3 future members of Id Software were also working. Since they put out a monthly "magazine on disk" for the Apple II, he was again doing a lot of small games that could be developed quickly. I suspect everybody did a little bit of everything there too, though there was at least one artist on staff who could do game art for the designer-programmers like Romero and Carmack.
I think a lot of his difficulties at Ion Storm stemmed from the challenge of moving from low level production jobs like level building and coding into management type work without having prior experience at it. I've had to make that same transition in my career, and believe me it's not easy. He still stayed involved in game design as well. I hope he can make things work out better in his new venture than he did with Ion Storm - hopefully applying some of what he's learned from past mistakes. He genuinely does have a passion for making games, I could see that even back in 1987 when I first met him.
Two words - Tex Arcana. More words: This was a graphic novel, originally serialized in Heavy Metal magazine in the 1980s, and then collected in one volume. Worth looking for a used copy somewhere, the artwork was incredibly lush and beautiful, and the writing was good and very original, with nice touches of humor thrown in as well.
For me, any vampires & cowboys story in any medium has Tex Arcana as the yardstick it should be measured against.
Probably one of the most respected directors in anime had to actually fly in and demand not to mess with his stuff.
He didn't have to fly in at all. His contract with Disney famously denies them the right to make any cuts whatsoever. He was flying in to discuss the project anyway, so Weinstein asked him to make exceptions and give permission for cuts to be made. All he had to do was say no, and had he stayed in Japan during that time, all he would have to do was fax, email, or telephone a "no". Or just not answer the requests at all - they have no legal right to make any cuts unless he were to grant them such a right.
Super Mario Brothers are the biggest selling videogames, but they're not computer games. They don't run on home computers normally (emulators notwithstanding). Myst was the biggest selling game for home computers for a long time before it lost the record.
That is why nothing can beat a book. No matter what story is told, the book is printed, and it will NOT change.
This makes me think of what I've heard about the Mormons in Utah. Apparently if you're living there, going to public libraries and bookstores, even studying at the Brigham Young University and using the university library... You won't find any books that say that the Mormon religion used to support bigamy, but changed its mind in the 1800s and now opposes it. As I understand it, when they changed that (largely as part of an agreement with the USA in order to be granted statehood for Utah), they went back and rewrote ALL the books that said otherwise, including their religion's own holy books, AND got every copy of the old versions they could lay their hands on and destroyed it. Talk about 1984 - they were a century ahead of their time, I guess!
I read the account of a former mormon who had gone to BYU, then later went to other schools outside Utah. He was surprised his fellow students didn't agree with the Mormon religion, and their reasons for it didn't fit with what he'd learned of the history of his own church. When he went and researched the subject from non-Mormon sources that hadn't been available at the BYU library, he was shocked.
In 1999 & 2000 I worked for Multimedia Games, which makes slots (and video bingo, poker, keno, etc.) mostly for Indian casinos. I helped develop their client/server based system that basically did the same things described in this article. The news is more that this kind of thing is being deployed in places like Vegas and Atlantic City now, not just in the smaller markets.
I think most of these market research firms tend to project overly optimistic revenue numbers. I recall seeing numbers from the top forecasters in 1997, when I was working at an online games startup. They were talking about the online gaming industry reaching $1 billion in revenues in a few years, or the other one said no no no, 2 or 3 billion!
Basically I think they're selling these reports, which cost hundreds or sometimes thousands of dollars, to management at game companies who have to come up with some way to grow the company's revenues. Or at least convince higher management that they're going to do so. Are they going to want to invest in a report that says "industry expected to grow 3-6% annualy", or are they going to look for the advice they want from reports that say "Holy Crap, Batman, next year there'll be an extra billion dollars for you and your competing companies to grab up! Listen to us and maybe you'll find good clues how to grab your share!"
I think that reports that have rosy revenue forecasts probably sell more copies to corporations than those that don't. So there's a constant pressure on market research firms to be "over-optimistic".
attracted a non-traditional (ie female) audience in a way no other game has
Actually, around 57% of Furcadia players are female. And our development team is about 50% female (imagine that). I need a PR agent to get us mentioned more when people do articles about this stuff.
We have found that having those 57% there that are female has been fairly effective at getting those 43% that are male to want to come and to stay around!
I suspect the majority of Neopets' revenue has probably come from the very successful licensing deals they've done. Along with stuffed animals and little electronic virtual pet toys, they've also got a very successful collectible trading card game from Wizards of the Coast, right alongside Magic the Gathering & Pokemon. The animal characters and the art style of them are what made it such a hot, fast growing property. A lot of the initial games were kinda slow, all HTML affairs, followed up by a bunch of simple flash & shockwave games, mostly single player. Their game economy loosely ties together all the activities & gives players some minimal interaction with each other. It's not as fast paced an interaction as World of Warcraft - but perhaps it's more mainstream in appeal, and it is an architecture that scales to support 25 million users a lot easier than games like WoW or Everquest.
I know on Furcadia, the most frequent thing players trade with each other for our virtual items is Neopoints (the "money" of Neopets). Maybe someday we'll be "hip" enough that a big corporation will try to buy us, and we can say no. I have to confess though, I've often considered contacting them about making a more interactive Neopets game based on our engine technology, which they could add to their site. We run a free game too, and average $10-$20 per regular user per year in sales of optional addon items, which is mostly profit (cost of goods on virtual items being what it is).
If Viacom can find a way to bring in that much revenue per user, through advertising sales or any other way, then the $160 million price tag to acquire 25 million customers starts to look pretty cheap. Certainly less dollars per customer acquired ($6.40) than AOL was burning through at it's fast-spending peak of its growth some years back.
It only truly works, when ala 1984 everyone is convinced that it isn't happening.
Actually I'd say it works *best* if everyone is convinced. But it works "well enough to be of benefit to the censoring scumbags" if some significant percentage of people don't know it's happening. (Or even if they know but don't care.) Blockbuster Video's editing and censoring of many, many VHS videos was known to many people, unknown to millions of others. It scored a non-zero on the effectiveness meter if you ask me.
Having developed games for a living since 1982, the whole premise here seems ludicrous. The home gaming market started with consoles from Atari (and Mattell, Coleco, Fairchild, Bally, etc.) and quickly crossed the billion dollar mark. Computer gaming started out TINY on machines like the Apple ][, TRS-80, etc. and was only in the millions or low tens of millions of dollars in annual sales when I got into it. The one bright side to being so small and geeky is that when Atari and the industry crashed, cratering the console industry for a couple years till Nintendo rebuilt it, those of us in the fledgling computer game industry saw it stay the same size or grow a bit in those lean years for console developers.
Then I remember the computer game industry growing to over $300 million a year, when the console industry was around $3 billion a year, and I thought "Hey a tenth the size, not too bad". Then computer games got to a BILLION dollars a year, when videogames were around $5 to $6 billion a year, and I thought "Wow, bigger than a tenth, and over the billion mark, not shabby at all!" I was getting paid a lot better than in the early 80s, too.
Now computer games are a multi-billion dollar business if I remember right, and videogames are around $10 billion - or is that oft-touted $10 billion number for both combined? I haven't been paying attention. And some guy says "Oh, those multiple billions of dollars in sales might vaporize because consoles are a more cost effective way to play hot 3D games". What planet is he on?
Nobody is going to stop playing card games, backgammon, monopoly, or word games on their PCs - and these are the biggest categories of online games by number of players, though hardcore gamers (and developers) prefer not to realize that. These games don't require advanced 3D hardware either. Nobody's going to stop playing things like The Sims either - best selling PC game of all time, even though it wasn't as demanding of graphics hardware as some.
This guy's argument seems to be more about whether gamers will buy new PCs, or more about buying 3D cards, then whether the over 100 MILLION PC owners (is it over 200 million now? Remember I'm not paying attention) will suddenly stop playing their old favorite games or stop buying $10 and $20 bargain games or stop going to popcap.com or pogo.com (I love Popcap games myself). Of course apart from the monstrously huge installed base of existing PCs, people will continue to buy new PCs to do work, browse the web, write, work on videos or music, etc. etc. And then as long as they have the machines, they'll play some games too. Duh, no brainer.
If he'd said "Will the new consoles lower the amount of money spent on PC gaming significantly" he might have more of a leg to stand on... But suggesting something could "kill" it or even drop it back down to the tens of millions of dollars a year like it was in the 1980s... Just too ludicrous to even consider. But it's a more attention grabbing headline to exaggerate ridiculously like that.
The only reason the PC game industry was so small in the late 70s and early 80s is because only a few million hardcore computer nuts had computers in their home at ALL until the Commodore 64 and Atari 800 came along and changed that. (Tip of the hat to Sinclair Spectrum and BBC Acorn and a few others in the UK.) The home PC audience is no longer that small, and never will be that small again.
I think there's a bit more flexibility in game worlds than in real life about what can or cannot be "WRONG WRONG WRONG". In real life, there's no way to implement genuine thievery or murder without someone losing their property or their life. Someone who probably didn't want to. In games, we have all sorts of games where you can't steal or kill (tic tac toe, for one), and other games where you can do plenty of it (Grand Theft Auto, anyone?) In neither case does playing the game cause some real person to be dead or lose their real property. I don't think we have to say choose between which of those two, or a hundred other types of games is the "acceptable" way for a game to be, and call other games that don't match those rules "unacceptable". (Though if we did, World of Warcraft would fall into the category of "games where you kill and rob (from NPCs)", which some folks would like to ban or discourage. (Certainly a lot of people reacted that way to Grand Theft Auto).
If we can handle that kind of distinction (and I think most gamers are ok with games where you pretend to kill and steal - many gamers praised the Thief series for instance)... I think we ought to be sophisticated enough to handle the division between games where it's considered unacceptable to buy and sell game reources for real life money, and those where the game company explicitly says it's ok, encourages it, and/or even sells such resources themselves. Second Life, Project Entropia, or Achaea to name a few. Or my own Furcadia, to a small extent. I don't think we have to say "Warcraft is ok and Second life is WRONG" or "Second Life is ok and Warcraft is WRONG", any more than we have to say "hamburgers are right and hot dogs are wrong". They're just two different kinds of games (or two kinds of meat-encased-in-bread food products), let the players that prefer each type go to the one they like best.
Some people will even play both types at different times, depending on the mood they're in. Go figure!
The first multiplayer online game I can remember that had a replay mode was Modem Wars by Dan Bunten. It was strictly 2D of course. This was in the mid 1980s, and it was aimed at Commodore 64 owners with a 300 baud modem. Since the data stream to cover everything that was happening in the game had to be so small, it was trivial to put in an option to record it to a file and play it back. So he did.
The first game I recall Warren being Producer on at Origin was Ultima VI, which I was head writer on. I believe Jeff Johannigman was producer on Worlds of Ultima: Savage Empire and Warren was producer on Worlds of Ultima: Martian Dreams but I'm not totally sure I'm remembering that right. I'm pretty sure Warren was producer on Ultima VII as well as its spinoff. I think he produced some of the earlier Wing Commander titles too, not as sure on those (I never worked on any of them myself). He was definitely the producer on both of the Ultima Underworld games, 1 and 2. Before coming to Origin and getting into computer games, he worked at Steve Jackson Games, where he was heavily involved in the development of the pen & paper RPG Toon, and he worked at TSR, where he was involved in editing/managing on at least one edition of Advance Dungeons & Dragons. I think he was involved in some RPG project involving Rocky & Bullwinkle too. Before that he got his Masters degree at University of Texas in the Radio/Television/Film department with a thesis on something Warner Brothers cartoons, and he used to write movie reviews for the Austin Chronicle (the cool free weekly newspaper). He used to have a board-gaming marathon at his house every Labor Day, for as long as the Jerry Lewis telethon was on.
This concludes this installment of "more than you wanted to know about Warren Spector". I hope Uncle Warren will do great at his new job.:X) (Does anyone besides me find it an ironic coincidence that Romero and Hall were at Ion Storm, then Warren joined it, and now Romero and Hall are at Midway, and Warren joined that too? Or is there a conspiracy theory to be hatched here? More likely Romero just told his bosses "Warren does great work" or something.)
Slashdot Mirror
I dug up some numbers years back - I should get more up to date ones, but at the time, computer & videogames were around a 10 billion dollar a year industry. Movies were too if you just counted box office, and didn't add in video rentals and sales, licensed toys and merchandise, etc. Radio, magazines, and books each weighed in at around 20 billion a year. Television was 40 billion a year. At the same time, telephone service was a $172 billion a year industry. Is all of that for entertainment purposes? Of course not. Many calls are for business purposes, medical emergencies, etc. etc. But estimate what percentage of phone calls you think are leisure related & multiply it by that 172 billion - unless you guess pretty low, it's still the world's number one entertainment medium. Games like WOW may not be the most ideal place for it to "fit in" in some ways. That just says to me that games where voice chat fits in perfectly with what people are wanting to do will, someday, possibly be much bigger than WOW. With seven million players, about 1 in 1000 humans on the earth plays WOW. How many of the earth's humans like "talking to other people" as one of their very most favorite things to do? Regarding the 11 year old group leader, by the way - this is part of the "future shock" inherent in moving from the physical labor era, where small kids couldn't do work with economic value as effectively as full-grown adults, to the intellectual labor era, where sometimes they can. This suggests that some of them would/should/could be taken more seriously, given more freedom or authority, etc. But of course we're not used to that, and social change takes a while to catch up with new underlying realities. America is still gradually adjusting its culture about sex decades after we invented birth control pills and blood tests for all known STDs.
You don't have to go all the way down into the 1000s. Furcadia has 60,000 regular players (who log on at least once per month), and it's still growing. (Or if you count every account ever created, like Second Life seems to, we're over a million. Woot.) It launched in 1996. It's the earliest user created content focused game to reach the "massive" size category as far as I'm aware. Dr. Cat
Since it's about someone in-house leaking info about stuff coming out a year hence, I suspect they'll offer to drop the lawsuit in exchange for being told who the source was. Of course any news about them dropping the lawsuit will get them some further inexpensive publicity too!
Will do.
Our website DOES have screenshots of the game! If you didn't spot them though, maybe we need to make them more prominent. And for the record - Furcadia is no more "made for furry fandom" than Disney's movie The Lion King, or Bugs Bunny cartoons. Things that are enjoyed by a thousands furry fans, and millions of non furry fans. Furcadia's the same way. While we have some furry fans there, and they're most welcome, the majority of our players aren't involved or interested in that. Furcadia is primarily for people who want to socialize, roleplay, build, script, host, explore, check out games, puzzles, quests, etc. Some people have made maps that are patched to have human avatars for anime themed areas, vampire roleplaying, etc. I should note that if you're uncomfortable around furries, you might want to watch where you go in Second Life too - they have a sizeable furry fandom subculture there as well. (Nothing wrong with that in my opinion, but hey.)
Currently our max concurrent users is around 4300, and our estimate is that about 60,000 unique players log in 30 days time. So that's very much in the same ballpark as Second Life, with 4500 peak and 50,000 in the last 30 days as their estimates. I'd tend to believe those numbers. We don't have analysis on how many have been on in the last 90 days for comparison to that figure - might be worth us looking into.
I agree with the person that commented that subscription based games & free games need to be counted differently. We've actually had nearly half a million email addresses registered and millions of characters created in the last 9 years - it's easy for people to try out a free game for 5 minutes and then never come back, something you don't see in the subscription based games.
I also agree with the comment that having "shards" is, in many ways, not as desirable as having a single massive world the way that Second Life does (and Furcadia also). Both being user-created content worlds, I think they follow Bob Metcalf's law of networks - the "value" increases as the square of the number of nodes (or in this case, users). It is interesting too that in Korea, the subscription model has already largely given way to games that are free to play, but have optional things to pay for. Might become the dominant model in the US in a few years?
Note to Zonk - when's there going to be a Slashdot article about Furcadia? There's been a bajillion about Second Life already. Not that they don't deserve a lot of news coverage, but I'd like to get a smidgen too someday! Furcadia's been a user created content world where people own the copyright to their own creations since 1996, it was made by 2 people on a $50,000 budget, the programmer (me) met his fiancee' in the game (she's now our producer too), our 10th anniversary is coming up, our scripting language is cool... Do I have to hire a PR guy to send out press releases? We could use a good slashdotting someday, followed by lots of people posting here why they didn't like the game. :)
The biggest problem with an endgame is that the one aspect of online RPGs that has the most value for players is the groups of friends they develop there. Whether it's a guild or just a handful of buddies you go adventuring with. People want stories to end, they want game goals to end. But they don't want their friendships or social groups to end. Shutting all those down on them makes for a bunch of very unhappy people. In a game where you just don't make friends with people, a big ending might be ok. In games where you do, it'd be disastrous.
That's the kind of reaction I guess you'll get in the genres that're still mostly played by male players - especially the combat oriented testosterone fueled games like first person shooters (or to a lesser extent, most MMORPGS). But half the users of the Internet are female, and in fact they're the best customers for a lot of the "casual game" genres. I doubt she'd get that kind of reaction in Spades and Hearts gamerooms, or in places like Puzzle Pirates or A Tale in the Desert. I know on my own Furcadia, 57% of the players are female, and half our company's staff are women. Of course if her favorite types of games are the male dominated ones, she's going to run into those kinds of players & reactions. It is a shame, but they're not universal all over the net and in all games.
I couldn't shake the feeling though, as he spoke to me of his mad schemes and visions from the 1960s that the computer world still hadn't caught up with (and hasn't yet today, either) and that most people couldn't even understand, that I was gazing into the eyes of Babbage. A man cursed to envision things long, long before it's in any way possible to actually build them.
He coins a lot of new words to describe the concepts he's come up with, so he can build bigger ideas out of 'em. My favorite one is "transclusion", which he explained in his speech there.
Now somebody wants to organize thousands upon thousands of game developers, some of the most independent thinking, strong willed, stubborn, quirky individualists out there into a single organzation? I'm not sure if that's even doable.
After Origin he went to Softdisk, where the other 3 future members of Id Software were also working. Since they put out a monthly "magazine on disk" for the Apple II, he was again doing a lot of small games that could be developed quickly. I suspect everybody did a little bit of everything there too, though there was at least one artist on staff who could do game art for the designer-programmers like Romero and Carmack.
I think a lot of his difficulties at Ion Storm stemmed from the challenge of moving from low level production jobs like level building and coding into management type work without having prior experience at it. I've had to make that same transition in my career, and believe me it's not easy. He still stayed involved in game design as well. I hope he can make things work out better in his new venture than he did with Ion Storm - hopefully applying some of what he's learned from past mistakes. He genuinely does have a passion for making games, I could see that even back in 1987 when I first met him.
For me, any vampires & cowboys story in any medium has Tex Arcana as the yardstick it should be measured against.
He didn't have to fly in at all. His contract with Disney famously denies them the right to make any cuts whatsoever. He was flying in to discuss the project anyway, so Weinstein asked him to make exceptions and give permission for cuts to be made. All he had to do was say no, and had he stayed in Japan during that time, all he would have to do was fax, email, or telephone a "no". Or just not answer the requests at all - they have no legal right to make any cuts unless he were to grant them such a right.
Super Mario Brothers are the biggest selling videogames, but they're not computer games. They don't run on home computers normally (emulators notwithstanding). Myst was the biggest selling game for home computers for a long time before it lost the record.
This makes me think of what I've heard about the Mormons in Utah. Apparently if you're living there, going to public libraries and bookstores, even studying at the Brigham Young University and using the university library... You won't find any books that say that the Mormon religion used to support bigamy, but changed its mind in the 1800s and now opposes it. As I understand it, when they changed that (largely as part of an agreement with the USA in order to be granted statehood for Utah), they went back and rewrote ALL the books that said otherwise, including their religion's own holy books, AND got every copy of the old versions they could lay their hands on and destroyed it. Talk about 1984 - they were a century ahead of their time, I guess!
I read the account of a former mormon who had gone to BYU, then later went to other schools outside Utah. He was surprised his fellow students didn't agree with the Mormon religion, and their reasons for it didn't fit with what he'd learned of the history of his own church. When he went and researched the subject from non-Mormon sources that hadn't been available at the BYU library, he was shocked.
In 1999 & 2000 I worked for Multimedia Games, which makes slots (and video bingo, poker, keno, etc.) mostly for Indian casinos. I helped develop their client/server based system that basically did the same things described in this article. The news is more that this kind of thing is being deployed in places like Vegas and Atlantic City now, not just in the smaller markets.
Basically I think they're selling these reports, which cost hundreds or sometimes thousands of dollars, to management at game companies who have to come up with some way to grow the company's revenues. Or at least convince higher management that they're going to do so. Are they going to want to invest in a report that says "industry expected to grow 3-6% annualy", or are they going to look for the advice they want from reports that say "Holy Crap, Batman, next year there'll be an extra billion dollars for you and your competing companies to grab up! Listen to us and maybe you'll find good clues how to grab your share!"
I think that reports that have rosy revenue forecasts probably sell more copies to corporations than those that don't. So there's a constant pressure on market research firms to be "over-optimistic".
We have found that having those 57% there that are female has been fairly effective at getting those 43% that are male to want to come and to stay around!
I know on Furcadia, the most frequent thing players trade with each other for our virtual items is Neopoints (the "money" of Neopets). Maybe someday we'll be "hip" enough that a big corporation will try to buy us, and we can say no. I have to confess though, I've often considered contacting them about making a more interactive Neopets game based on our engine technology, which they could add to their site. We run a free game too, and average $10-$20 per regular user per year in sales of optional addon items, which is mostly profit (cost of goods on virtual items being what it is).
If Viacom can find a way to bring in that much revenue per user, through advertising sales or any other way, then the $160 million price tag to acquire 25 million customers starts to look pretty cheap. Certainly less dollars per customer acquired ($6.40) than AOL was burning through at it's fast-spending peak of its growth some years back.
Actually I'd say it works *best* if everyone is convinced. But it works "well enough to be of benefit to the censoring scumbags" if some significant percentage of people don't know it's happening. (Or even if they know but don't care.) Blockbuster Video's editing and censoring of many, many VHS videos was known to many people, unknown to millions of others. It scored a non-zero on the effectiveness meter if you ask me.
Then I remember the computer game industry growing to over $300 million a year, when the console industry was around $3 billion a year, and I thought "Hey a tenth the size, not too bad". Then computer games got to a BILLION dollars a year, when videogames were around $5 to $6 billion a year, and I thought "Wow, bigger than a tenth, and over the billion mark, not shabby at all!" I was getting paid a lot better than in the early 80s, too.
Now computer games are a multi-billion dollar business if I remember right, and videogames are around $10 billion - or is that oft-touted $10 billion number for both combined? I haven't been paying attention. And some guy says "Oh, those multiple billions of dollars in sales might vaporize because consoles are a more cost effective way to play hot 3D games". What planet is he on?
Nobody is going to stop playing card games, backgammon, monopoly, or word games on their PCs - and these are the biggest categories of online games by number of players, though hardcore gamers (and developers) prefer not to realize that. These games don't require advanced 3D hardware either. Nobody's going to stop playing things like The Sims either - best selling PC game of all time, even though it wasn't as demanding of graphics hardware as some.
This guy's argument seems to be more about whether gamers will buy new PCs, or more about buying 3D cards, then whether the over 100 MILLION PC owners (is it over 200 million now? Remember I'm not paying attention) will suddenly stop playing their old favorite games or stop buying $10 and $20 bargain games or stop going to popcap.com or pogo.com (I love Popcap games myself). Of course apart from the monstrously huge installed base of existing PCs, people will continue to buy new PCs to do work, browse the web, write, work on videos or music, etc. etc. And then as long as they have the machines, they'll play some games too. Duh, no brainer.
If he'd said "Will the new consoles lower the amount of money spent on PC gaming significantly" he might have more of a leg to stand on... But suggesting something could "kill" it or even drop it back down to the tens of millions of dollars a year like it was in the 1980s... Just too ludicrous to even consider. But it's a more attention grabbing headline to exaggerate ridiculously like that.
The only reason the PC game industry was so small in the late 70s and early 80s is because only a few million hardcore computer nuts had computers in their home at ALL until the Commodore 64 and Atari 800 came along and changed that. (Tip of the hat to Sinclair Spectrum and BBC Acorn and a few others in the UK.) The home PC audience is no longer that small, and never will be that small again.
I think there's a bit more flexibility in game worlds than in real life about what can or cannot be "WRONG WRONG WRONG". In real life, there's no way to implement genuine thievery or murder without someone losing their property or their life. Someone who probably didn't want to. In games, we have all sorts of games where you can't steal or kill (tic tac toe, for one), and other games where you can do plenty of it (Grand Theft Auto, anyone?) In neither case does playing the game cause some real person to be dead or lose their real property. I don't think we have to say choose between which of those two, or a hundred other types of games is the "acceptable" way for a game to be, and call other games that don't match those rules "unacceptable". (Though if we did, World of Warcraft would fall into the category of "games where you kill and rob (from NPCs)", which some folks would like to ban or discourage. (Certainly a lot of people reacted that way to Grand Theft Auto).
If we can handle that kind of distinction (and I think most gamers are ok with games where you pretend to kill and steal - many gamers praised the Thief series for instance)... I think we ought to be sophisticated enough to handle the division between games where it's considered unacceptable to buy and sell game reources for real life money, and those where the game company explicitly says it's ok, encourages it, and/or even sells such resources themselves. Second Life, Project Entropia, or Achaea to name a few. Or my own Furcadia, to a small extent. I don't think we have to say "Warcraft is ok and Second life is WRONG" or "Second Life is ok and Warcraft is WRONG", any more than we have to say "hamburgers are right and hot dogs are wrong". They're just two different kinds of games (or two kinds of meat-encased-in-bread food products), let the players that prefer each type go to the one they like best.
Some people will even play both types at different times, depending on the mood they're in. Go figure!
The first multiplayer online game I can remember that had a replay mode was Modem Wars by Dan Bunten. It was strictly 2D of course. This was in the mid 1980s, and it was aimed at Commodore 64 owners with a 300 baud modem. Since the data stream to cover everything that was happening in the game had to be so small, it was trivial to put in an option to record it to a file and play it back. So he did.
This concludes this installment of "more than you wanted to know about Warren Spector". I hope Uncle Warren will do great at his new job. :X) (Does anyone besides me find it an ironic coincidence that Romero and Hall were at Ion Storm, then Warren joined it, and now Romero and Hall are at Midway, and Warren joined that too? Or is there a conspiracy theory to be hatched here? More likely Romero just told his bosses "Warren does great work" or something.)