Seriously. I think the slump in sales is something akin to the one that appeared in Xbox 360 sales prior to the release of Halo 3, or more accurately it's similar to the low sales experienced by the 360 this time last year, before its big Xmas uptick in sales. It's the usual doldrum between when the console hits the ground and when the games catch up. Because most 3rd party developers took a "wait and see" approach to the system, most were pretty late in starting their projects for the Wii. We're not going to see a lot of the more interesting 3rd-party Wii titles until 2008 as a result. Given that most games take one to three years to complete, and most developers and publishers didn't start their Wii projects until after a few months of sales data was available, we're just starting to see the leading edge of the 3rd party wave now, and most of the top-tier 3rd party titles won't show up until next year. That's hardly going to kill the platform, there are nearly 13 million Wii systems sold and they can't be unsold. At most it will slow down the growth of the install base, which is still the most common console among this generation, at least for now.
As for people saying that the Japanese market is "saturated" with Wii systems, hardly. The PS2 sold over 20 million units in Japan, so clearly there's more potential sales in the Japanese market than the 3.66 million units currently sold. The analysts are obsessing over weekly numbers and not looking at the bigger picture. The Wii has sold in one year what it took Microsoft two years to do with the 360. It's almost managed to sell in a single year the total number of GameCube's sold in that system's entire lifespan. Its sales rate is comparable to the PS2 in the first year of its lifespan. And as I already said, for now it's the most common current-gen console. The delay in 3rd party support, and its focus on a wider audience, will likely prevent it from achieving a PS2 level of dominance, but the platform itself is here to stay.
No, EA gives *Will Wright* a lot of free reign, because he's Will fscking Wright, and you can bet he'd be able to jump ship and land on his feet somewhere else if EA ever held him back. As for the rest of Maxis, they've been swallowed up by the EA hive collective, and are now drones in charge of cranking ever more irrelevant sequels, ports and expansion packs to The Sims.
Sorry man, but you're experiencing the old good-fast-cheap problem. You can have upscaled quality (good), and you can have it now (fast), but you'll have to pay through the nose for it (!cheap). Or, you can have the old PS2 quality (!good), you can have it now (fast), and it won't cost too much (cheap). Or, you can have what you want, high quality (good) and low price (cheap), but not for a couple years (!fast). Good, fast, cheap. Pick two.
I just got back from a week-long trip to Tokyo, and I can say first-hand that the DS is everywhere there. In the time I spent riding subways and trains in the city, I must have seen 50 DS's in use by Tokyo residents. It was rare to get on a train and not see someone using a DS. The variety of titles available for the platform is also staggeringly wide compared to what we have in North America. Some of the more interesting titles I saw:
- an interactive wine appreciation guide called "Sommelier DS", as well as an equivalent title for sake
- numerous training titles for kanji
- numerous training titles for english
It's no wonder the DS is selling well in Japan, with the breadth of available Japanese titles it's a viable purchase for anyone who speaks Japanese, young or old, gamer or non-gamer.
While I agree with your argument for the DS, I'd hardly call the PS2 "current." Comparing a 7-year-old console to a one-year-old console is pretty apples to oranges. Despite the mistake made in the article, lumping handhelds in with consoles, what they're saying is still pretty much true: of the next-gen consoles, the Wii is the current market leader, and it's gaining market share at a much faster rate than the 360 or PS3.
The fact that most publishers completely ignored the GameCube while Nintendo released some very good games, means that obviously most of the games that are being bought are going to be from Nintendo. One notable exception is Resident Evil. Same thing seems to be happening on the Wii. I disagree completely. The GameCube had little 3rd-party support because it was the runner-up in the last generation of the console wars, selling far less units than the PS2 and original Xbox did over their lifespans. Most 3rd-party developers decided to take a "wait and see" approach with the Wii, because no one was quite sure how it would do. The only major exception was Ubisoft, and they're laughing all the way to the bank now. The Wii has 10.57 million units sold so far, the largest slice of the next-gen pie, and that number is growing faster than the 360 and PS3 combined. At this point all we have seen for the Wii is the tail end of the first round of games, especially considering most publishers and developers were late to start projects for the Wii. With over 10 million units sold, I fully expect to see the first major round of 3rd-party Wii titles appear next year. I mean, seriously, what publisher isn't going to want to take a stab at the gaming dollars behind over 40% of the marketplace? That incentive of being able to tap into a large chunk of the market virtually guarantees that the Wii will enjoy far better 3rd-party support than the GC did.
If you look at why the PS2 was successful, it got to market earlier than its competitors with a good product at a good price. That lead to strong initial sales, which in turn led to a lot of titles being developed for this new system. More titles turned into additional hardware sales, which led to even more developer attention on that platform, and the whole thing snowballed and ultimately 120 million PS2s were sold. The Wii may have been later to market, but at the rate it's outselling PS3 and 360 it will be the most common next-gen console by a significant margin for the Christmas '08 season. That is confirmed to be attracting increased developer attention (see the comments made by the CEO of EA for example), which means we're going to be seeing more 3rd-party titles for the Wii in the future. That in turn will likely lead to increased hardware sales, and so on.
I don't think the Wii will have anywhere near the dominance that the PS2 enjoyed, however. This generation marks the first time that I can think of where the capabilities of the various competitors were split so starkly, while at the same time being somewhat equal in terms of their desirability. The 360 and PS3 are natural extensions of the bigger better faster more mentality, but the Wii is going in a completely different direction, last-gen graphics with a new control scheme. No one's measured it yet to my knowledge, but I suspect there will be a significant amount of overlap between owners of the Wii and "true" next-gen consoles (i.e. 360/PS3). That may have an impact on how gaming dollars get spent down the road. My money's on a rough split between the Wii and the 360, though I'm not sure which will be on top. I'm convinced at this point that the PS3 will be this generation's distant third.
I'm sorry, but games drive console sales, not brand names. The number of consoles currently in the marketplace drive the platforms that developers target. You only need to look at what the CEO of EA said to realize that. When you have the top dog of the single largest game publisher coming straight out and saying that your console was the "wrong horse," you are in some serious trouble.
The PS2 was a huge hit because they got to market early and were able to get a snowball effect going. Developers targeted the PS2 because it was the most widely-sold console, and that in turn drove additional console sales. The PS3 will not come anywhere close to experiencing that level of success. It appeared too late, it cost too much, and they've been bleeding third-party exclusive titles at a phenomenal rate as a result. They're experiencing a slight uptick in sales thanks to the (maybe temporary) price cut, but the only numbers developers and publishers are looking at are total number of consoles sold, and the weekly numbers are only a drop in the bucket compared to those totals.
Thanks to http://vgchartz.com/, we know that there are 10.5 million 360s, 10.5 willion Wiis, and only 4.3 million PS3s sold worldwide. What 3rd-party developer in their right mind is going to drop serious money on developing a AAA title if they can only sell it to 17% of the next-gen market? Without exclusive AAA third-party titles, there's pretty much no chance of a major increase in the rate of PS3 console sales. You only have to look at Nintendo's experience with the GameCube to realize that all the first-party titles in the world just aren't enough to get the job done.
As for Microsoft "flunking" in Europe, the weekly numbers may look a little rosy (or at least not dismal) for the PS3, but the 360 is still the most widely sold console in the "other" (i.e. not North America or Japan) category by a fair margin at 3.3 million, which is mostly Europe. The Wii is second with 2.8 million, and the PS3 hardly even rates with 1.3 million. The PS3 outsold the 360 by a whole 6000 units in Europe for the week ending August 19th. That's simply nowhere close to enough to erase the 2 million lead the 360 has. At a rate of 6000 more consoles sold per week, it would take the PS3 seven years to catch the 360 in Europe. For the same week though, the Wii stomped them both, selling almost twice as much as the 360 and PS3 combined.
As for Japan, MS completely botched the 360 marketing plan there, without question. You can Google for Japanese reactions to the 360's "Do Do Do" campaign, if you'd like a laugh. However, while the 360's failure to crack the Japanese market is bad news for MS, it isn't automatically good news for Sony. Japan was supposed to be Sony's stronghold, and look at the Japanese sales numbers: 3.4 million units for the Wii, and only 1.1 million for the PS3. Even in their own backyard, Sony is getting their asses handed to them.
"It should be obvious where all of those former PS2 users are going to end up over the next five years."
Yes, it is obvious to me, though apparently not to you: wherever the games are. Where are the games going to appear? This is also obvious: on whatever consoles are most common. Whether that's more frequently the 360 or the Wii depends on how things shake out this Xmas, but at this point the PS3 is simply too far behind to have much hope of making a comeback.
As far as I'm concerned, this guy has burned all of his credibility. Years from now, I suspect someone somewhere will write a retrospective of his career arc, and we'll find out how one of his former colleagues at Bullfrog was responsible for keeping his wilder impulses in check, keeping his visions grounded in reality, and keeping his mouth shut when the gaming press was around. Whoever or whatever it was that kept him from doing the same thing back at Bullfrog, it's clear that that influence is sorely needed now at Lionhead. His inability to reproduce at Lionhead the level of success and critical acclaim he received at Bullfrog makes me think that a) at the very least he wasn't solely responsible for those fantastic game designs and b) he's not the visionary designer he's sometimes made out to be. I've completely stopped paying attention to his hyperbole, as his track record at Lionhead has shown that he's not able to cash the checks his mouth keeps writing. Will Wright is a top game designer. Shigeru Miyamoto is a top game designer. Molyneux is a superb pitch-man, but maybe not so much a top-tier game designer. Perhaps he should give advertising or PR a try.
It's a shame in some ways because each of his games have actually been amazing Have you and I been playing the same games? Are we talking about the same Peter Molyneux? I found Black & White to be a tedious and frustrating take on the RTS genre. The giant animal pets were a nifty concept, but they just weren't backed up by good gameplay, there was far too much micromanagement and not nearly enough fun. I found Fable to be a boring, linear, uninspired take on the RPG genre. The thought of having your character's appearance change over time was a nifty concept, but it just wasn't backed up by good gameplay, the game offers less freedom than most classic RPGs and features a story that could not be more standard. To top it all off, the evolving character mechanic is pretty much the same "nifty idea" he had from B&W, just repackaged, and to be frank, both packages sucked. Black & White I actually made the mistake of purchasing, but Fable I was smart enough to borrow from a friend. Neither game comes anywhere close to deserving the title of "amazing" in my book.
As far as I'm concerned, Molyneux is good at coming up with interesting concepts, ways to build on existing game mechanics to produce new and potentially compelling gameplay variants. What Molyneux is bad at, however, is retaining the core mechanics on which his nifty ideas would be founded. In order for the evolving pet mechanic of Black & White to be any good, it had to be built on a solid RTS gameplay foundation, and it had to not detract from or interfere with that foundation. For the original Black & White, neither was true. For the evolving character mechanic of Fable, again, it needed to rest on RPG gameplay that was at least decent in its own right, and I just felt it didn't have that. When it comes to game design Molyneux seems to throw the baby out with the bath water, and his games suffer for it. I don't bother reading preview articles for his titles for this reason, there's no point in getting hyped up about something that in all likelihood will be a travesty of game design. Game journalists will always ask him about the new ideas, but for once I'd like a game journalist to ask him what steps he's taking to ensure he doesn't screw up the basic RTS/RPG/whatever elements of his new RTS/RPG/whatever.
To be honest, I think CAPTCHAs are living on borrowed time, both as a method of distinguishing humans from bots, and as a method of obfuscating spam. Once CAPTCHA-busting software has gone through a few iterations and been integrated into a few spam filters, websites are going to have to find a new way to differentiate real people from automation, because the same code can be used to bypass bot detection. The solution already exists, it's called KittenAuth (http://www.thepcspy.com/kittenauth). Spammers were simply lucky in that all the robot-detection CAPTCHA schemes out there worked on text. As soon as websites switch to non-text equivalents, such as KittenAuth, spammers lose the ability to borrow that technique to obfuscate their message. There's no way to turn stock pump 'n dump schemes or penis enlargement snake oil adds into kitten pictures. At least, I sure as hell hope not.
What about captcha-busting software?
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How Image Spam Works
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Lots of websites use the same techniques to obfuscate the little images used to differentiate real users from bot software. There have been lots of proof of concept examples of software that automatically "solve" these CAPTCHA images (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha#Computer_cha racter_recognition). If spammers move to increasingly complex image spam, I could see spam filters growing to include some of these algorithms, converting the images into a best-guess text representation, then subjecting that text to standard spam filtering. Even if the image to text conversion was only 50% accurate, I bet that would be enough to train up a modern spam filter like SpamBayes to recognize and reject the message.
Of course, I just read all my mail as plain text, so this is a non-issue as far as I'm concerned.
First, it amazes me that someone could continue to give credence to the movie industry's, when provided with a clear and concise debunking of those arguments such as Michael Geist's.
Second, you're completely wrong. The movie studios tried to do marking of the type that you describe. In order to do it in a way that would allow it to work even after the movie had been camcorded and compressed, it was a pattern of big colored blobs visible to moviegoers. It failed, completely and utterly. If the studios put the identifying marks in unimportant scenese, the pirates cut it out of the video they released. If they put it in important scenes, fans complained. As far as I'm aware, those colored blobs aren't used anymore, for those two reasons. A video watermark that survives camcording and compression, such as what you describe, is as fictional as the the rest of the industry's arguments.
Did you even read the article? Trick question! You couldn't have, since there was no link at this time! How can you post a contrary opinion without having RTFA? Shame on you, sir.
Making this RPG for the 360 will limit the amount of content that it can provide
Seriously now, this whole argument falls apart under the slightest amount of inspection. Where to begin...
- console developers can easily code for a "please insert disc 2" prompt, same as they do with PC games, same as they did with numerous previous console titles
- content is measured in terms of hours of enjoyable gameplay, it's not measured in terms of how many megabytes the textures take up
- a title that takes up 10 GB installed on a PC could easily take up less space on the Xbox 360 disc by using somewhat more compressed textures/audio/movies
ALL AAA titles are written specifically for one title, and maybe ported to another, requiring substantial rewrites
First, I'm assuming you meant to say that all AAA titles are written specifically for one platform, etc. Assuming that is what you meant, I also think this is a pretty faulty statement. Have you looked at console gaming lately? The majority of titles out there appear on at least two consoles, if not all three. The latest iteration of the Call of Duty franchise would be a good example. It can be found on the Xbox and Xbox 360 and PS2 and PS3 and Wii. Clearly it's not that onerous to port from one system to another, if the makers of A and AA titles are willing to spend the money to do so. They're clearly getting back more money than it costs them to do the port, probably many times over, otherwise they wouldn't keep doing it.
The reason AAA titles don't get ported has very little to do with technical details, and a whole lot to do with marketing and business strategy. In the console world, developers making a AAA title shop their project to the various console manufacturers, and hope to make it an exclusive for one of those systems. In return, the console make cuts them a nice fat check. That check buys them the time they need to spend on polishing the game in order to make it a AAA title. In the case of Valve, there is no real competition in the PC gaming space, so there's no manufacturers to play off each other in order to get a check for making your game exclusive. But Valve doesn't really need the money anyway, they've got quite a nice little warchest as it is. They could easily spend the money to either hire talent or outsource production to allow ports of their games. However, they don't want to give up creative control, or have some semiautonomous internal division produce a half-assed port. Basically, they don't want to risk "diluting their brand" through ports. Either way you slice it, though, it's a marketing/business thing, not a technology thing.
Blizzard is constantly building a better WoW themselves.
Unfortunately, there are some problems that they will never be able to fix. For example, PvP balance is broken at the higher levels because the population balance is skewed. Across the entire game, there's 3 high-level Alliance players for every 2 high-level Horde (see here). On older servers, it's even worse, 3 Alliance for every 1 Horde (for example my old server, here). Even with the cross-realm battleground queues, Alliance players have to wait longer for games than Horde players. Once the Alliance players get a game though, they tend to win more games than the Horde because a larger population has more opportunities to run endgame content and acquire endgame epics, which in turn leads to a more powerful character.
The only way to truly eradicate that problem would be to do away with one of the core elements of the design, namely the whole concept of Alliance vs. Horde. Obviously that's something that just wouldn't make sense to do, it runs completely contrary to the flavor of the entire Warcraft series. I mean, the first game was called "Orcs and Humans," and not because they were drinking buddies. The only truly permanent way to get rid of this problem is to do away with the idea of player factions on a single server. That's what Fury, an upcoming PvP-centric MMO is doing. From their FAQ:
Are there going to be queues like WoW Battlegrounds?
No. Our realm architecture is very different to WoW and avoids queues or long waits.
In some games (like WoW) you fight within a realm where the total number of opponents is quite limited leading to long wait times. In other games (like Guild Wars) you fight in a single universe where the fights are random and social opportunities are scarce because you can't tell your friends from your enemies.
In Fury you live in a realm of friends and fight against other realms. This increases the number of your opponents and increases the social opportunities. Our matchmaking limits your maximum wait to a few minutes.
To think that WoW has a lock on the one true best design for an MMO is simply foolish. WoW has a pretty good model for 1-59 PvE leveling, but there are many ways to put these games together. I would argue that WoW's endgame is pretty boring, and the PvP model is clearly a half-assed afterthought. As such, I see plenty of potential for a well-designed PvP-centric MMO in the near future. It might be Fury, it might be Warhammer Online, or it might be something I haven't even heard of. But eventually someone's going to come along with a vastly superior PvP design compared to WoW, and combine it with equivalent production values. Whoever that developer is, I think they stand a good chance to take 10-20% of WoW's player base, which would put them well into profitability.
"I pity the poor defenseless Canadians."
Oh, don't worry about us. We'll be hiring local photographers. Rest assured, those are fellow Americans you'll be shooting, as per usual.
"Also, while I would imagine that nVidia has a large staff of developers writing device drivers for their various bits and blogs of silicon, I would imagine the size of that staff is finite and that nVidia has to prioritize their work based on hard business decisions, such as the number of customers using a particular product with a particular operating system. Was it wrong of nVidia to focus their driver development efforts on satisfying the needs of the largest percentage of their installed base? Or should they have focused their efforts on their newest customers and satisfy the needs of thousands or tens of thousands instead of tens of millions?"
IANAL, but I think this is entirely irrelevant to the current discussion. Nvidia advertised the Geforce 8 series as "the first to support DirectX 10". Vista is the only DirectX 10 capable operating system. If a user purchased a Geforce 8 product, expecting full support under Windows Vista, the first DirectX 10 OS, then that user conceivably has a false advertising claim. Their argument would be that Nvidia made claims about their new part, then failed to back up those claims with a fully functional product. If the level of DirectX 10 support Nvidia claimed was not reasonably attainable given their software engineering capabilities, then they really should not have made the claims in the first place.
"Given that Microsoft Windows Vista is a brand new operating system in many respects, such as introducing a completely new video device driver model, and that, likewise, the 8800 series represents nVidia's own most complex product to date and so far has only a small market penetration, why is anyone alarmed (or even surprised) that WHQL-certified device drivers are not available yet which take advantage of all its features?"
Because Nvidia claimed that they do support those features, and not that they will support those features. If you're a customer who bought an 8800 specifically for its advertised level of Vista support, then it would be both surprising and alarming indeed.
Yes, yes, we all know what happened. The mouths of Nvidia's marketers wrote a check that the collective asses of Nvidia's engineers could not hope to cash. While on a personal level you or I may sumpathize with the company, particularily with its beleaguered engineering team, on a legal level all of these excuses mean exactly nothing. At the same time, you and I may feel that the folks who were actually foolish enough to buy the first of anything, let alone two firsts (first DX10 card and first DX10 OS), deserve the full measure of the early adopter's curse they're suffering through now. But again, from a legal standpoint I don't think that has any bearing.
Exactly. Just because the majority of traffic shaping implementations are crap, doesn't mean traffic shaping is necessarily evil. It's not hard to set quality of service rules such that BitTorrent traffic is allowed to use as much bandwidth as it likes, but it has a lower priority compared to other, more latency-sensitive protocols (web, text messaging, VOIP, etc.). It's a win-win for all customers using the same pipe. Non-torrent users get priority for their traffic, torrent users get the full measure of whatever bandwidth is left over.
That being said, there are a lot of really, really bad traffic shaping setups out there, whereby torrent traffic gets shaped right out of existence no matter what other traffic is running on the same pipe. It's painfully obvious that ISPs doing so are using shaping not to ensure good service for non-torrent users, but rather to ensure lower bandwidth bills for themselves. That kind of activity doesn't require a legislative solution, though. Bad ISPs, who degrade their own service at their customers' expense, will naturally be at a disadvantage in the marketplace, and will suffer the consequences. I selected my current ISP in part because they don't appear on that list, and their primary local competitor does.
The only thing they can do is run the game in a higher resolution. It's essentially the same as an upscaling DVD player, which takes the standard NTSC image from a DVD and converts it to an HD signal (720p, 1080i, or what have you). Just like with upscaled DVDs, there's no way to add more detail than was there originally, however. You can't add more polygons to models or more detail to textures after the fact. In the case of a lot of the later PS2 and Xbox games, where developers were creatively finding ways to cram extra detail into the models and textures, I understand they look great when played by their next-gen counterparts because there was enough detail in there to start with. For original PS1 or older PS2 and Xbox titles, they're still going to look like ass compared to the current generation of games. Models will still be just as blocy as before, textures will be just as muddy and pixellated, the image will just be sharper around the edges.
Popularity is relative. Sales numbers are not. If you measured gaming popularity amongst Slashdot readers, you'd find a high percentage of gamers, i.e. gaming is very popular in this site's core audience. If you measured popularity of games outside the traditional hardcore game audience, it's a relatively small number, but there are a *lot* more "non-gamers" out there. Electronic gaming still isn't all that popular a past-time compared to traditional forms of media, it's just that games like The Sims are starting to tap a much, much larger potential audience.
Re:Multi-Touch Innovation
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iPhone Roundup
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· Score: 1
Jeff Han's invention is a plexiglass screen with LEDs at the edge, and an infrared camera positioned well behind the screen. As commendable as it is, it's not at all suitable for use in a mobile device. If you were to scale down the multitouch display shown at TED, you'd end up with a phone that looked like a pyramid. At least one part of the "innovation" Jobs is referring to is their pocket-sized implementation of multitouch. Several of the "more than 200" patents probably cover the specific implementation of multitouch used in the iPhone, as well as any alternate designs that Apple can think of. Yes, the idea has been around for a while, but no one else has made it *flat* before now that I'm aware of, and that's an innovation worthy of a patent.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously. I think the slump in sales is something akin to the one that appeared in Xbox 360 sales prior to the release of Halo 3, or more accurately it's similar to the low sales experienced by the 360 this time last year, before its big Xmas uptick in sales. It's the usual doldrum between when the console hits the ground and when the games catch up. Because most 3rd party developers took a "wait and see" approach to the system, most were pretty late in starting their projects for the Wii. We're not going to see a lot of the more interesting 3rd-party Wii titles until 2008 as a result. Given that most games take one to three years to complete, and most developers and publishers didn't start their Wii projects until after a few months of sales data was available, we're just starting to see the leading edge of the 3rd party wave now, and most of the top-tier 3rd party titles won't show up until next year. That's hardly going to kill the platform, there are nearly 13 million Wii systems sold and they can't be unsold. At most it will slow down the growth of the install base, which is still the most common console among this generation, at least for now.
As for people saying that the Japanese market is "saturated" with Wii systems, hardly. The PS2 sold over 20 million units in Japan, so clearly there's more potential sales in the Japanese market than the 3.66 million units currently sold. The analysts are obsessing over weekly numbers and not looking at the bigger picture. The Wii has sold in one year what it took Microsoft two years to do with the 360. It's almost managed to sell in a single year the total number of GameCube's sold in that system's entire lifespan. Its sales rate is comparable to the PS2 in the first year of its lifespan. And as I already said, for now it's the most common current-gen console. The delay in 3rd party support, and its focus on a wider audience, will likely prevent it from achieving a PS2 level of dominance, but the platform itself is here to stay.
No, EA gives *Will Wright* a lot of free reign, because he's Will fscking Wright, and you can bet he'd be able to jump ship and land on his feet somewhere else if EA ever held him back. As for the rest of Maxis, they've been swallowed up by the EA hive collective, and are now drones in charge of cranking ever more irrelevant sequels, ports and expansion packs to The Sims.
Sorry man, but you're experiencing the old good-fast-cheap problem. You can have upscaled quality (good), and you can have it now (fast), but you'll have to pay through the nose for it (!cheap). Or, you can have the old PS2 quality (!good), you can have it now (fast), and it won't cost too much (cheap). Or, you can have what you want, high quality (good) and low price (cheap), but not for a couple years (!fast). Good, fast, cheap. Pick two.
I just got back from a week-long trip to Tokyo, and I can say first-hand that the DS is everywhere there. In the time I spent riding subways and trains in the city, I must have seen 50 DS's in use by Tokyo residents. It was rare to get on a train and not see someone using a DS. The variety of titles available for the platform is also staggeringly wide compared to what we have in North America. Some of the more interesting titles I saw: - an interactive wine appreciation guide called "Sommelier DS", as well as an equivalent title for sake - numerous training titles for kanji - numerous training titles for english It's no wonder the DS is selling well in Japan, with the breadth of available Japanese titles it's a viable purchase for anyone who speaks Japanese, young or old, gamer or non-gamer.
While I agree with your argument for the DS, I'd hardly call the PS2 "current." Comparing a 7-year-old console to a one-year-old console is pretty apples to oranges. Despite the mistake made in the article, lumping handhelds in with consoles, what they're saying is still pretty much true: of the next-gen consoles, the Wii is the current market leader, and it's gaining market share at a much faster rate than the 360 or PS3.
If you look at why the PS2 was successful, it got to market earlier than its competitors with a good product at a good price. That lead to strong initial sales, which in turn led to a lot of titles being developed for this new system. More titles turned into additional hardware sales, which led to even more developer attention on that platform, and the whole thing snowballed and ultimately 120 million PS2s were sold. The Wii may have been later to market, but at the rate it's outselling PS3 and 360 it will be the most common next-gen console by a significant margin for the Christmas '08 season. That is confirmed to be attracting increased developer attention (see the comments made by the CEO of EA for example), which means we're going to be seeing more 3rd-party titles for the Wii in the future. That in turn will likely lead to increased hardware sales, and so on.
I don't think the Wii will have anywhere near the dominance that the PS2 enjoyed, however. This generation marks the first time that I can think of where the capabilities of the various competitors were split so starkly, while at the same time being somewhat equal in terms of their desirability. The 360 and PS3 are natural extensions of the bigger better faster more mentality, but the Wii is going in a completely different direction, last-gen graphics with a new control scheme. No one's measured it yet to my knowledge, but I suspect there will be a significant amount of overlap between owners of the Wii and "true" next-gen consoles (i.e. 360/PS3). That may have an impact on how gaming dollars get spent down the road. My money's on a rough split between the Wii and the 360, though I'm not sure which will be on top. I'm convinced at this point that the PS3 will be this generation's distant third.
I'm sorry, but games drive console sales, not brand names. The number of consoles currently in the marketplace drive the platforms that developers target. You only need to look at what the CEO of EA said to realize that. When you have the top dog of the single largest game publisher coming straight out and saying that your console was the "wrong horse," you are in some serious trouble.
The PS2 was a huge hit because they got to market early and were able to get a snowball effect going. Developers targeted the PS2 because it was the most widely-sold console, and that in turn drove additional console sales. The PS3 will not come anywhere close to experiencing that level of success. It appeared too late, it cost too much, and they've been bleeding third-party exclusive titles at a phenomenal rate as a result. They're experiencing a slight uptick in sales thanks to the (maybe temporary) price cut, but the only numbers developers and publishers are looking at are total number of consoles sold, and the weekly numbers are only a drop in the bucket compared to those totals.
Thanks to http://vgchartz.com/, we know that there are 10.5 million 360s, 10.5 willion Wiis, and only 4.3 million PS3s sold worldwide. What 3rd-party developer in their right mind is going to drop serious money on developing a AAA title if they can only sell it to 17% of the next-gen market? Without exclusive AAA third-party titles, there's pretty much no chance of a major increase in the rate of PS3 console sales. You only have to look at Nintendo's experience with the GameCube to realize that all the first-party titles in the world just aren't enough to get the job done.
As for Microsoft "flunking" in Europe, the weekly numbers may look a little rosy (or at least not dismal) for the PS3, but the 360 is still the most widely sold console in the "other" (i.e. not North America or Japan) category by a fair margin at 3.3 million, which is mostly Europe. The Wii is second with 2.8 million, and the PS3 hardly even rates with 1.3 million. The PS3 outsold the 360 by a whole 6000 units in Europe for the week ending August 19th. That's simply nowhere close to enough to erase the 2 million lead the 360 has. At a rate of 6000 more consoles sold per week, it would take the PS3 seven years to catch the 360 in Europe. For the same week though, the Wii stomped them both, selling almost twice as much as the 360 and PS3 combined.
As for Japan, MS completely botched the 360 marketing plan there, without question. You can Google for Japanese reactions to the 360's "Do Do Do" campaign, if you'd like a laugh. However, while the 360's failure to crack the Japanese market is bad news for MS, it isn't automatically good news for Sony. Japan was supposed to be Sony's stronghold, and look at the Japanese sales numbers: 3.4 million units for the Wii, and only 1.1 million for the PS3. Even in their own backyard, Sony is getting their asses handed to them.
"It should be obvious where all of those former PS2 users are going to end up over the next five years."
Yes, it is obvious to me, though apparently not to you: wherever the games are. Where are the games going to appear? This is also obvious: on whatever consoles are most common. Whether that's more frequently the 360 or the Wii depends on how things shake out this Xmas, but at this point the PS3 is simply too far behind to have much hope of making a comeback.
As far as I'm concerned, this guy has burned all of his credibility. Years from now, I suspect someone somewhere will write a retrospective of his career arc, and we'll find out how one of his former colleagues at Bullfrog was responsible for keeping his wilder impulses in check, keeping his visions grounded in reality, and keeping his mouth shut when the gaming press was around. Whoever or whatever it was that kept him from doing the same thing back at Bullfrog, it's clear that that influence is sorely needed now at Lionhead. His inability to reproduce at Lionhead the level of success and critical acclaim he received at Bullfrog makes me think that a) at the very least he wasn't solely responsible for those fantastic game designs and b) he's not the visionary designer he's sometimes made out to be. I've completely stopped paying attention to his hyperbole, as his track record at Lionhead has shown that he's not able to cash the checks his mouth keeps writing. Will Wright is a top game designer. Shigeru Miyamoto is a top game designer. Molyneux is a superb pitch-man, but maybe not so much a top-tier game designer. Perhaps he should give advertising or PR a try.
As far as I'm concerned, Molyneux is good at coming up with interesting concepts, ways to build on existing game mechanics to produce new and potentially compelling gameplay variants. What Molyneux is bad at, however, is retaining the core mechanics on which his nifty ideas would be founded. In order for the evolving pet mechanic of Black & White to be any good, it had to be built on a solid RTS gameplay foundation, and it had to not detract from or interfere with that foundation. For the original Black & White, neither was true. For the evolving character mechanic of Fable, again, it needed to rest on RPG gameplay that was at least decent in its own right, and I just felt it didn't have that. When it comes to game design Molyneux seems to throw the baby out with the bath water, and his games suffer for it. I don't bother reading preview articles for his titles for this reason, there's no point in getting hyped up about something that in all likelihood will be a travesty of game design. Game journalists will always ask him about the new ideas, but for once I'd like a game journalist to ask him what steps he's taking to ensure he doesn't screw up the basic RTS/RPG/whatever elements of his new RTS/RPG/whatever.
To be honest, I think CAPTCHAs are living on borrowed time, both as a method of distinguishing humans from bots, and as a method of obfuscating spam. Once CAPTCHA-busting software has gone through a few iterations and been integrated into a few spam filters, websites are going to have to find a new way to differentiate real people from automation, because the same code can be used to bypass bot detection. The solution already exists, it's called KittenAuth (http://www.thepcspy.com/kittenauth). Spammers were simply lucky in that all the robot-detection CAPTCHA schemes out there worked on text. As soon as websites switch to non-text equivalents, such as KittenAuth, spammers lose the ability to borrow that technique to obfuscate their message. There's no way to turn stock pump 'n dump schemes or penis enlargement snake oil adds into kitten pictures. At least, I sure as hell hope not.
Lots of websites use the same techniques to obfuscate the little images used to differentiate real users from bot software. There have been lots of proof of concept examples of software that automatically "solve" these CAPTCHA images (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha#Computer_cha racter_recognition). If spammers move to increasingly complex image spam, I could see spam filters growing to include some of these algorithms, converting the images into a best-guess text representation, then subjecting that text to standard spam filtering. Even if the image to text conversion was only 50% accurate, I bet that would be enough to train up a modern spam filter like SpamBayes to recognize and reject the message.
Of course, I just read all my mail as plain text, so this is a non-issue as far as I'm concerned.
First, it amazes me that someone could continue to give credence to the movie industry's, when provided with a clear and concise debunking of those arguments such as Michael Geist's. Second, you're completely wrong. The movie studios tried to do marking of the type that you describe. In order to do it in a way that would allow it to work even after the movie had been camcorded and compressed, it was a pattern of big colored blobs visible to moviegoers. It failed, completely and utterly. If the studios put the identifying marks in unimportant scenese, the pirates cut it out of the video they released. If they put it in important scenes, fans complained. As far as I'm aware, those colored blobs aren't used anymore, for those two reasons. A video watermark that survives camcording and compression, such as what you describe, is as fictional as the the rest of the industry's arguments.
Did you even read the article? Trick question! You couldn't have, since there was no link at this time! How can you post a contrary opinion without having RTFA? Shame on you, sir.
I'm sure it's a fascinating story, but I can't read it if you don't provide a link.
Making this RPG for the 360 will limit the amount of content that it can provide
Seriously now, this whole argument falls apart under the slightest amount of inspection. Where to begin...
- console developers can easily code for a "please insert disc 2" prompt, same as they do with PC games, same as they did with numerous previous console titles
- content is measured in terms of hours of enjoyable gameplay, it's not measured in terms of how many megabytes the textures take up
- a title that takes up 10 GB installed on a PC could easily take up less space on the Xbox 360 disc by using somewhat more compressed textures/audio/movies
I could go on, but I think that's sufficient.
...I needed a new sig anyway.
ALL AAA titles are written specifically for one title, and maybe ported to another, requiring substantial rewrites
First, I'm assuming you meant to say that all AAA titles are written specifically for one platform, etc. Assuming that is what you meant, I also think this is a pretty faulty statement. Have you looked at console gaming lately? The majority of titles out there appear on at least two consoles, if not all three. The latest iteration of the Call of Duty franchise would be a good example. It can be found on the Xbox and Xbox 360 and PS2 and PS3 and Wii. Clearly it's not that onerous to port from one system to another, if the makers of A and AA titles are willing to spend the money to do so. They're clearly getting back more money than it costs them to do the port, probably many times over, otherwise they wouldn't keep doing it.
The reason AAA titles don't get ported has very little to do with technical details, and a whole lot to do with marketing and business strategy. In the console world, developers making a AAA title shop their project to the various console manufacturers, and hope to make it an exclusive for one of those systems. In return, the console make cuts them a nice fat check. That check buys them the time they need to spend on polishing the game in order to make it a AAA title. In the case of Valve, there is no real competition in the PC gaming space, so there's no manufacturers to play off each other in order to get a check for making your game exclusive. But Valve doesn't really need the money anyway, they've got quite a nice little warchest as it is. They could easily spend the money to either hire talent or outsource production to allow ports of their games. However, they don't want to give up creative control, or have some semiautonomous internal division produce a half-assed port. Basically, they don't want to risk "diluting their brand" through ports. Either way you slice it, though, it's a marketing/business thing, not a technology thing.
Blizzard is constantly building a better WoW themselves.
Unfortunately, there are some problems that they will never be able to fix. For example, PvP balance is broken at the higher levels because the population balance is skewed. Across the entire game, there's 3 high-level Alliance players for every 2 high-level Horde (see here). On older servers, it's even worse, 3 Alliance for every 1 Horde (for example my old server, here). Even with the cross-realm battleground queues, Alliance players have to wait longer for games than Horde players. Once the Alliance players get a game though, they tend to win more games than the Horde because a larger population has more opportunities to run endgame content and acquire endgame epics, which in turn leads to a more powerful character.
The only way to truly eradicate that problem would be to do away with one of the core elements of the design, namely the whole concept of Alliance vs. Horde. Obviously that's something that just wouldn't make sense to do, it runs completely contrary to the flavor of the entire Warcraft series. I mean, the first game was called "Orcs and Humans," and not because they were drinking buddies. The only truly permanent way to get rid of this problem is to do away with the idea of player factions on a single server. That's what Fury, an upcoming PvP-centric MMO is doing. From their FAQ:
Are there going to be queues like WoW Battlegrounds?
No. Our realm architecture is very different to WoW and avoids queues or long waits.
In some games (like WoW) you fight within a realm where the total number of opponents is quite limited leading to long wait times. In other games (like Guild Wars) you fight in a single universe where the fights are random and social opportunities are scarce because you can't tell your friends from your enemies.
In Fury you live in a realm of friends and fight against other realms. This increases the number of your opponents and increases the social opportunities. Our matchmaking limits your maximum wait to a few minutes.
To think that WoW has a lock on the one true best design for an MMO is simply foolish. WoW has a pretty good model for 1-59 PvE leveling, but there are many ways to put these games together. I would argue that WoW's endgame is pretty boring, and the PvP model is clearly a half-assed afterthought. As such, I see plenty of potential for a well-designed PvP-centric MMO in the near future. It might be Fury, it might be Warhammer Online, or it might be something I haven't even heard of. But eventually someone's going to come along with a vastly superior PvP design compared to WoW, and combine it with equivalent production values. Whoever that developer is, I think they stand a good chance to take 10-20% of WoW's player base, which would put them well into profitability.
"I pity the poor defenseless Canadians." Oh, don't worry about us. We'll be hiring local photographers. Rest assured, those are fellow Americans you'll be shooting, as per usual.
"Also, while I would imagine that nVidia has a large staff of developers writing device drivers for their various bits and blogs of silicon, I would imagine the size of that staff is finite and that nVidia has to prioritize their work based on hard business decisions, such as the number of customers using a particular product with a particular operating system. Was it wrong of nVidia to focus their driver development efforts on satisfying the needs of the largest percentage of their installed base? Or should they have focused their efforts on their newest customers and satisfy the needs of thousands or tens of thousands instead of tens of millions?"
IANAL, but I think this is entirely irrelevant to the current discussion. Nvidia advertised the Geforce 8 series as "the first to support DirectX 10". Vista is the only DirectX 10 capable operating system. If a user purchased a Geforce 8 product, expecting full support under Windows Vista, the first DirectX 10 OS, then that user conceivably has a false advertising claim. Their argument would be that Nvidia made claims about their new part, then failed to back up those claims with a fully functional product. If the level of DirectX 10 support Nvidia claimed was not reasonably attainable given their software engineering capabilities, then they really should not have made the claims in the first place.
"Given that Microsoft Windows Vista is a brand new operating system in many respects, such as introducing a completely new video device driver model, and that, likewise, the 8800 series represents nVidia's own most complex product to date and so far has only a small market penetration, why is anyone alarmed (or even surprised) that WHQL-certified device drivers are not available yet which take advantage of all its features?"
Because Nvidia claimed that they do support those features, and not that they will support those features. If you're a customer who bought an 8800 specifically for its advertised level of Vista support, then it would be both surprising and alarming indeed.
Yes, yes, we all know what happened. The mouths of Nvidia's marketers wrote a check that the collective asses of Nvidia's engineers could not hope to cash. While on a personal level you or I may sumpathize with the company, particularily with its beleaguered engineering team, on a legal level all of these excuses mean exactly nothing. At the same time, you and I may feel that the folks who were actually foolish enough to buy the first of anything, let alone two firsts (first DX10 card and first DX10 OS), deserve the full measure of the early adopter's curse they're suffering through now. But again, from a legal standpoint I don't think that has any bearing.
Exactly. Just because the majority of traffic shaping implementations are crap, doesn't mean traffic shaping is necessarily evil. It's not hard to set quality of service rules such that BitTorrent traffic is allowed to use as much bandwidth as it likes, but it has a lower priority compared to other, more latency-sensitive protocols (web, text messaging, VOIP, etc.). It's a win-win for all customers using the same pipe. Non-torrent users get priority for their traffic, torrent users get the full measure of whatever bandwidth is left over.
That being said, there are a lot of really, really bad traffic shaping setups out there, whereby torrent traffic gets shaped right out of existence no matter what other traffic is running on the same pipe. It's painfully obvious that ISPs doing so are using shaping not to ensure good service for non-torrent users, but rather to ensure lower bandwidth bills for themselves. That kind of activity doesn't require a legislative solution, though. Bad ISPs, who degrade their own service at their customers' expense, will naturally be at a disadvantage in the marketplace, and will suffer the consequences. I selected my current ISP in part because they don't appear on that list, and their primary local competitor does.
The Colossus depicted may be original, but the sadly the game mechanic is not.
The only thing they can do is run the game in a higher resolution. It's essentially the same as an upscaling DVD player, which takes the standard NTSC image from a DVD and converts it to an HD signal (720p, 1080i, or what have you). Just like with upscaled DVDs, there's no way to add more detail than was there originally, however. You can't add more polygons to models or more detail to textures after the fact. In the case of a lot of the later PS2 and Xbox games, where developers were creatively finding ways to cram extra detail into the models and textures, I understand they look great when played by their next-gen counterparts because there was enough detail in there to start with. For original PS1 or older PS2 and Xbox titles, they're still going to look like ass compared to the current generation of games. Models will still be just as blocy as before, textures will be just as muddy and pixellated, the image will just be sharper around the edges.
Popularity is relative. Sales numbers are not. If you measured gaming popularity amongst Slashdot readers, you'd find a high percentage of gamers, i.e. gaming is very popular in this site's core audience. If you measured popularity of games outside the traditional hardcore game audience, it's a relatively small number, but there are a *lot* more "non-gamers" out there. Electronic gaming still isn't all that popular a past-time compared to traditional forms of media, it's just that games like The Sims are starting to tap a much, much larger potential audience.
Jeff Han's invention is a plexiglass screen with LEDs at the edge, and an infrared camera positioned well behind the screen. As commendable as it is, it's not at all suitable for use in a mobile device. If you were to scale down the multitouch display shown at TED, you'd end up with a phone that looked like a pyramid. At least one part of the "innovation" Jobs is referring to is their pocket-sized implementation of multitouch. Several of the "more than 200" patents probably cover the specific implementation of multitouch used in the iPhone, as well as any alternate designs that Apple can think of. Yes, the idea has been around for a while, but no one else has made it *flat* before now that I'm aware of, and that's an innovation worthy of a patent.