I imagine those are NPD numbers, so it only says a lot about North America. Other parts of the world do exist, and the numbers very well could be a lot different. Also, keep in mind that NPD numbers rarely, if ever, include digital sales. They only include retail sales.
Instead of blaming piracy, they could blame a few other things (and I'll do this for Gears instead of their tech demos of games).
Wasn't advertised enough. (i.e. almost no advertising)
Was buggy.
Average game.
I'm not going to argue that piracy can't hurt sales. But when you already have one foot in the grave, it's obvious to anyone with half a brain to see that it's clearly not the only problem. Take a loot at Spore. Despite it being a pretty boring game overall, it still managed to sell a lot due to the hype machine, despite that it's being heavily pirated.
Now, I'm not saying that the guys at Epic need to make a game that appeals to the lowest common denominator like Spore did. Besides the massive marketing campaign the game went through, it did manage to appeal to it's target audience. I can't say the same for any game Epic has made. I have played them all and said, "so what?", and I continue to do so. They can be a lot of mindless fun once in a while, but they're generally over glorified tech demos.
I guess I can call your opinion an uneducated one too, at this point, as it's clear, like Cliff, you fail to recognize the mitigating factors and would rather just accept the convenient scapegoat.
One final note: I built my PC a year ago and it's doing just fine. I don't care how many games I have available to me on the PC. It's about quality, not quantity (and the ability to play mods).
Name me one tech demo in history that hasn't lacked depth. I must have missed the memo that said tech demos needed to have depth to be classified as a mindlessly entertaining game, yet Gears had more depth than anything Epic had released to date and they did a damn good job of it.
Well, therein lies the problem. While Gears wasn't actually meant to be a tech demo, I'd say their Unreal games are. You can't expect huge sales on tech demos. And of course, everyone loves to blame piracy when sales don't meet expectations. It's the convenient scapegoat for many a developer and publisher.
I don't understand why games which are completely unrealistic in just about every fashion try to go the "realism" route with some gameplay mechanics. It's very easy to ignore that they obviously won't work in real life if the mechanic is fun and adds value to the game. If we've suspended our ability for disbelief that far, why not go a little further when it was already done a thousand times before? Ultimately, realism != gameplay
I'd tell him that his opinion is not a very educated one. That the decisions his companies make don't foster a lot of sales in the PC market anyway.
Consider that each iteration of any game they have released has usually needed a bleeding edge PC, or very close to it. Scalability for systems that are say... 3 of 4 years old is poor. Their games are just a tech demo of the new engine they've created. Tech demos usually stop being fun after you realize that's all they are. You see how the games generally lack depth.
Besides, piracy exists on the consoles too. If they can easily ignore that, they should be able to easily ignore piracy on the PC.
Wheras if I buy a game for the Wii/PS3/360 I can be 100% guaranteed that it will work on my system.
Not entirely true. Fable II, a very current release is having freezing issues. Bully: Scholarship Edition also had some technical issues which needed to be patched. This is just on the 360. The PS3, GTA IV had some technical issues too. I call this "not working". Crappy firmware updates for the PS3? Yup, those are there too!
Get over yourself. Kids lack control and finesse to be able to throw and or kick a ball where they want it to go 100% of the time. Ever try to catch a bad throw or a kick, and have it bounce off of you? That is, unless you never went outdoors as a kid. Then I can understand how you'd forget these things. They're kids. It's what they do. Stealing their toys only creates unnecessary tension in the neighbor. Just because you're old doesn't mean you have to be a cranky cunt either.
The loss leader comment was bit of hyperbole, so relax. Even at your suggested price, it just probably ends up as an endeavor that wasn't worth it. There is the initial development and testing to consider. At $3, sure, that might be covered, but in what time frame? And from there does it look like a wasted effort? Just because it's profitable doesn't mean that it was a wise decision to make.
Your complaint about the price is ultimately irrelevant. You have failed to take into consideration some mitigating factors for the price. You can either download it for free and do the work yourself to get it to work on a newer OS, or pay the convenience fee.
The fact is, 99% of the people using GOG aren't going to care about DOSBOX. The only thing they care about is that they have a hassle free way of getting their favorite classics to run on their newer PC. That little thanks that you expect on every single page will just clutter the layout
Besides, their thanks page isn't hidden. Using hyperbole to drive home your bitchiness doesn't make it your point any more valid.
Yes, $5 on eBay, and now what about the shipping costs? Oh, wait, it comes out to about the same. So why wait for it when you have it slightly later than now?
So? What's your point? How long will those torrents or FTP servers stay up? GOG has a longer chance of being active than either of those two options. So essentially GOG is still easier to use than the alternatives. Everything is done for you. You pay a small fee.
The time you spent trolling on here, you could've spent that time earning $6.
I never stated they would get a fixed fee, just that other people have to be paid besides the people at GOG for this service to even be available.
I'm not entirely sure loss leaders would work in this type of environment for an extended period of time.
And you still don't address how GOG would make money from that $3 price tag. What? Because you mention a little about volume and percentages? Why would a developer even choose to sell their IP on this service if they're not going to be making a decent amount of money?
A game titled "Battle Chess" is only an impulse buy to a set audience of people. A game like Fallout on the other hand, would be more of an impulse buy at that price. Why? Because everyone has heard the name, and if you hadn't tried it before, $3 is pretty damn cheap to try a classic that people speak so fondly of.
And how would they make a profit from that price? I imagine the publisher / developer needs to get a slice of the pie too. And then there's the cost of the servers, etc... That $3 would be eaten up fast with likely little to not profit being made.
Yes, but how well will the pirated versions play on XP or Vista? They might do ok on XP, but it seems with each newer iteration of Windows, compatibility mode works less and less. With GOG, you don't have to worry about downloading a few programs just to get them to work. You can pay a small fee and just have the game work. That's the intent. A cheap classic without DRM that will be guaranteed to work on Vista? Yes please!
And what will you do when you move from place A to Place B, where Place A was using scope brand X, Place B is using scope brand Y? If you have your own lab, it's a moot point. If you work for a company/university, they won't waste the money on buying an expensive piece of equipment no one is comfortable using unless it has an assortment of features that will help you down the road (which I assume you don't already have).
There is nothing more frustrating than having a department full of Tektronix scopes and people who have used those for the last 3 years only to have to battle with an Agilent simply because the buttons are in a different place.
I've ran across similar experiences before too. It's mind boggling how these people, many of which have a degree, can't figure out how to use a different oscilloscope. Not all of them are intuitive to use, but the options and features are generally lain out in a way that you can figure out what to do.
Must haves? What? Besides being able to show a sine, square, and sawtooth waveform, what more are you looking for? Even the legacy oscilloscopes from HP that I've used has had a lot of the modern features that you see on the newer ones today. Sure, the newer ones do certain things more nicely, but there honestly isn't a huge difference, unless you're looking for things like color, USB support for capturing waveforms, super accurate frequency readings, etc... What you need to do is figure out what specifically is going to be needed with whatever projects you're doing.
This is what I use at work. (Specifically the TDS2000B.) I have no complaints with it. I've found this to be intuitive to use. It's simple and robust for what it is. Other people around me have to use the TDS1000B, and really the only difference is the lack of a multicolor display, USB support, and only 2 channels. I haven't had any issues showing our "trained monkeys" (pre-testers who have zero training or education in electronics) on how to use these oscilloscopes.
I mean, really, Hidden? That mod is a joke. It's not fun, period. I'd rather play Source Forts, which isn't very fun once you get past the whole "oh I can build forts" aspect of it. Hell, I'd rather play the campfest that's Insurgency, which is loathesome to say the least. Eternal Silence would have been a better pick. And all I've done so far is list other mods I can't stand to play anymore for various different reasons.
Seriously, people who write these types of articles don't play a lot of mods, and that's why they're always a failure. They pick a few with a few concepts that sound neat, play them for a total of ten minutes, and then try to write some half-hearted attempt as something that resembles an "article". I'm not saying all of these mods are terrible, I haven't played most of them, but by picking Hidden: Source, it only shows that the author has probably skipped a large portion of the mods that are better, far far better. Either better int he innovation department, or better in the gameplay department, or both.
You guys need to think outside of the box a little bit. What they probably mean by "DRM sooner", are just safeguards to stop people from stealing a disc off of the press and selling it or cracking it.
That's why we usually see games being leaked on the internets a week or two before they come out. If you can manage to stop the piracy by a little bit, you potentially may see bigger returns.
If dial-up is truly your only option, download the updates while you're sleeping, then wake up, do your morning activities, head to work. By the time you get home, you should have every single update and then some. It's what people have always done with dial-up in the past. So why can't you do that?
Besides, once that's done, you can set STEAM to run in offline mode and despite popular belief, it will work. I have yet to have an issue with any of Valve's games running in offline mode.
It's fairly accurate. A lot of console games are designed so that you only get to use two weapons or so, and switch back and forth between them, dump them for something better, or whatever you choose to do with them. So on the console side, that solves the "few buttons" thing, but it also makes the game far less versatile.
It's also a shame no developer wants to program for the mouse and keyboard too on a console. They certain support it. However, the problem arises in the fact that not everyone will buy a mouse and keyboard for their console, so there will be a huge disparity in the skill gap. It's not any fun for a lot of players. The skill gap is already naturally there with everyone being limited to the same control mechanism, and that's how they want it to stay.
It sounds like the developers don't know what they're doing then. Hey, it would be nice if the game took advantage of pixel shader 7.5, but if your development cycle is constantly being held back by trying to adapt for technologies that just came out, you're doing something wrong. Use those technologies in your next game. I doubt your game would somehow be worse off if you didn't take advantage of those technologies.
Or a patch could be created after the release of the game to take advantage of those technologies. If you arbitrarily make it harder for yourself to develop on an open platform, yeah, it's obvious which is easier to develop for, but it's also obvious you're doing it wrong.
Did you read TFA? Randy Stude stated that there were over 100 million PC's sold where their capabilities exceeded what a current generation console could do. It's on the second page, third question down.
Here's what he was asked:
VideoGamer.com: We ran an interview with Cameron Suey, the producer of the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of Force Unleashed, and he said they weren't doing a PC version because of scalability issues, that the game would require a high end PC and not enough people own one to justify the release. What do you think about his explanation?
The question is answered with:
That's not an educated answer. In the last several years there have been at least 100 million PCs sold that have the capabilities or better of an Xbox 360. It's ridiculous to say that there's not enough audience for that game potentially and that it falls into this enthusiast extreme category when ported over to the PC. That's an uneducated response. And the PCGA has research available to members to show that if you're making a decision on a game and you have that belief that there's just not a large enough audience, let us show you that there's a huge audience that has the capabilities that are being described there. You can make a run at that audience without having to sacrifice anything on your game at all.
(I bolded the relevant part for emphasis.)
I don't think it would be too big of a stretch to ask developers to look at what is currently the top end, and figure out what they want for a bottom spec. They don't have to maximize on the hardware that's at the top end. Instead of a game needing a 4870X2 or a 280GTX, the game could require an 8800GT for the top end, just for the graphics alone. Maybe slightly better. Look at the current console for the "mid point" and decide if you want to be slightly above that, or slightly below that, then figure out a reasonable low end where the game won't run like ass. Problem solved.
Obviously my example is a little bit simplified, but it shouldn't ring too far from the truth. So the idea that the audience is "too diverse" is bullshit.
Slashdot Mirror
I imagine those are NPD numbers, so it only says a lot about North America. Other parts of the world do exist, and the numbers very well could be a lot different. Also, keep in mind that NPD numbers rarely, if ever, include digital sales. They only include retail sales.
Despite your unfounded trolling, I'll bite.
Let's see...
Sales on PC sucks. Let's blame piracy!
Instead of blaming piracy, they could blame a few other things (and I'll do this for Gears instead of their tech demos of games).
I'm not going to argue that piracy can't hurt sales. But when you already have one foot in the grave, it's obvious to anyone with half a brain to see that it's clearly not the only problem. Take a loot at Spore. Despite it being a pretty boring game overall, it still managed to sell a lot due to the hype machine, despite that it's being heavily pirated.
Now, I'm not saying that the guys at Epic need to make a game that appeals to the lowest common denominator like Spore did. Besides the massive marketing campaign the game went through, it did manage to appeal to it's target audience. I can't say the same for any game Epic has made. I have played them all and said, "so what?", and I continue to do so. They can be a lot of mindless fun once in a while, but they're generally over glorified tech demos.
I guess I can call your opinion an uneducated one too, at this point, as it's clear, like Cliff, you fail to recognize the mitigating factors and would rather just accept the convenient scapegoat.
One final note: I built my PC a year ago and it's doing just fine. I don't care how many games I have available to me on the PC. It's about quality, not quantity (and the ability to play mods).
Name me one tech demo in history that hasn't lacked depth. I must have missed the memo that said tech demos needed to have depth to be classified as a mindlessly entertaining game, yet Gears had more depth than anything Epic had released to date and they did a damn good job of it.
Well, therein lies the problem. While Gears wasn't actually meant to be a tech demo, I'd say their Unreal games are. You can't expect huge sales on tech demos. And of course, everyone loves to blame piracy when sales don't meet expectations. It's the convenient scapegoat for many a developer and publisher.
I don't understand why games which are completely unrealistic in just about every fashion try to go the "realism" route with some gameplay mechanics. It's very easy to ignore that they obviously won't work in real life if the mechanic is fun and adds value to the game. If we've suspended our ability for disbelief that far, why not go a little further when it was already done a thousand times before? Ultimately, realism != gameplay
I'd tell him that his opinion is not a very educated one. That the decisions his companies make don't foster a lot of sales in the PC market anyway.
Consider that each iteration of any game they have released has usually needed a bleeding edge PC, or very close to it. Scalability for systems that are say... 3 of 4 years old is poor. Their games are just a tech demo of the new engine they've created. Tech demos usually stop being fun after you realize that's all they are. You see how the games generally lack depth.
Besides, piracy exists on the consoles too. If they can easily ignore that, they should be able to easily ignore piracy on the PC.
Wheras if I buy a game for the Wii/PS3/360 I can be 100% guaranteed that it will work on my system.
Not entirely true. Fable II, a very current release is having freezing issues. Bully: Scholarship Edition also had some technical issues which needed to be patched. This is just on the 360. The PS3, GTA IV had some technical issues too. I call this "not working". Crappy firmware updates for the PS3? Yup, those are there too!
Get over yourself. Kids lack control and finesse to be able to throw and or kick a ball where they want it to go 100% of the time. Ever try to catch a bad throw or a kick, and have it bounce off of you? That is, unless you never went outdoors as a kid. Then I can understand how you'd forget these things. They're kids. It's what they do. Stealing their toys only creates unnecessary tension in the neighbor. Just because you're old doesn't mean you have to be a cranky cunt either.
You can download the games as many times as you like once you've purchased it.
The loss leader comment was bit of hyperbole, so relax. Even at your suggested price, it just probably ends up as an endeavor that wasn't worth it. There is the initial development and testing to consider. At $3, sure, that might be covered, but in what time frame? And from there does it look like a wasted effort? Just because it's profitable doesn't mean that it was a wise decision to make.
Your complaint about the price is ultimately irrelevant. You have failed to take into consideration some mitigating factors for the price. You can either download it for free and do the work yourself to get it to work on a newer OS, or pay the convenience fee.
Yup, you just like to bitch.
The fact is, 99% of the people using GOG aren't going to care about DOSBOX. The only thing they care about is that they have a hassle free way of getting their favorite classics to run on their newer PC. That little thanks that you expect on every single page will just clutter the layout
Besides, their thanks page isn't hidden. Using hyperbole to drive home your bitchiness doesn't make it your point any more valid.
Yes, $5 on eBay, and now what about the shipping costs? Oh, wait, it comes out to about the same. So why wait for it when you have it slightly later than now?
So? What's your point? How long will those torrents or FTP servers stay up? GOG has a longer chance of being active than either of those two options. So essentially GOG is still easier to use than the alternatives. Everything is done for you. You pay a small fee.
The time you spent trolling on here, you could've spent that time earning $6.
I never stated they would get a fixed fee, just that other people have to be paid besides the people at GOG for this service to even be available.
I'm not entirely sure loss leaders would work in this type of environment for an extended period of time.
And you still don't address how GOG would make money from that $3 price tag. What? Because you mention a little about volume and percentages? Why would a developer even choose to sell their IP on this service if they're not going to be making a decent amount of money?
A game titled "Battle Chess" is only an impulse buy to a set audience of people. A game like Fallout on the other hand, would be more of an impulse buy at that price. Why? Because everyone has heard the name, and if you hadn't tried it before, $3 is pretty damn cheap to try a classic that people speak so fondly of.
And how would they make a profit from that price? I imagine the publisher / developer needs to get a slice of the pie too. And then there's the cost of the servers, etc... That $3 would be eaten up fast with likely little to not profit being made.
Yes, but how well will the pirated versions play on XP or Vista? They might do ok on XP, but it seems with each newer iteration of Windows, compatibility mode works less and less. With GOG, you don't have to worry about downloading a few programs just to get them to work. You can pay a small fee and just have the game work. That's the intent. A cheap classic without DRM that will be guaranteed to work on Vista? Yes please!
And what will you do when you move from place A to Place B, where Place A was using scope brand X, Place B is using scope brand Y? If you have your own lab, it's a moot point. If you work for a company/university, they won't waste the money on buying an expensive piece of equipment no one is comfortable using unless it has an assortment of features that will help you down the road (which I assume you don't already have).
There is nothing more frustrating than having a department full of Tektronix scopes and people who have used those for the last 3 years only to have to battle with an Agilent simply because the buttons are in a different place.
I've ran across similar experiences before too. It's mind boggling how these people, many of which have a degree, can't figure out how to use a different oscilloscope. Not all of them are intuitive to use, but the options and features are generally lain out in a way that you can figure out what to do.
Must haves? What? Besides being able to show a sine, square, and sawtooth waveform, what more are you looking for? Even the legacy oscilloscopes from HP that I've used has had a lot of the modern features that you see on the newer ones today. Sure, the newer ones do certain things more nicely, but there honestly isn't a huge difference, unless you're looking for things like color, USB support for capturing waveforms, super accurate frequency readings, etc... What you need to do is figure out what specifically is going to be needed with whatever projects you're doing.
This is what I use at work. (Specifically the TDS2000B.) I have no complaints with it. I've found this to be intuitive to use. It's simple and robust for what it is. Other people around me have to use the TDS1000B, and really the only difference is the lack of a multicolor display, USB support, and only 2 channels. I haven't had any issues showing our "trained monkeys" (pre-testers who have zero training or education in electronics) on how to use these oscilloscopes.
So what would one do with a magic lactating train?
I mean, really, Hidden? That mod is a joke. It's not fun, period. I'd rather play Source Forts, which isn't very fun once you get past the whole "oh I can build forts" aspect of it. Hell, I'd rather play the campfest that's Insurgency, which is loathesome to say the least. Eternal Silence would have been a better pick. And all I've done so far is list other mods I can't stand to play anymore for various different reasons.
Seriously, people who write these types of articles don't play a lot of mods, and that's why they're always a failure. They pick a few with a few concepts that sound neat, play them for a total of ten minutes, and then try to write some half-hearted attempt as something that resembles an "article". I'm not saying all of these mods are terrible, I haven't played most of them, but by picking Hidden: Source, it only shows that the author has probably skipped a large portion of the mods that are better, far far better. Either better int he innovation department, or better in the gameplay department, or both.
You guys need to think outside of the box a little bit. What they probably mean by "DRM sooner", are just safeguards to stop people from stealing a disc off of the press and selling it or cracking it.
That's why we usually see games being leaked on the internets a week or two before they come out. If you can manage to stop the piracy by a little bit, you potentially may see bigger returns.
If dial-up is truly your only option, download the updates while you're sleeping, then wake up, do your morning activities, head to work. By the time you get home, you should have every single update and then some. It's what people have always done with dial-up in the past. So why can't you do that?
Besides, once that's done, you can set STEAM to run in offline mode and despite popular belief, it will work. I have yet to have an issue with any of Valve's games running in offline mode.
It's fairly accurate. A lot of console games are designed so that you only get to use two weapons or so, and switch back and forth between them, dump them for something better, or whatever you choose to do with them. So on the console side, that solves the "few buttons" thing, but it also makes the game far less versatile.
It's also a shame no developer wants to program for the mouse and keyboard too on a console. They certain support it. However, the problem arises in the fact that not everyone will buy a mouse and keyboard for their console, so there will be a huge disparity in the skill gap. It's not any fun for a lot of players. The skill gap is already naturally there with everyone being limited to the same control mechanism, and that's how they want it to stay.
It sounds like the developers don't know what they're doing then. Hey, it would be nice if the game took advantage of pixel shader 7.5, but if your development cycle is constantly being held back by trying to adapt for technologies that just came out, you're doing something wrong. Use those technologies in your next game. I doubt your game would somehow be worse off if you didn't take advantage of those technologies.
Or a patch could be created after the release of the game to take advantage of those technologies. If you arbitrarily make it harder for yourself to develop on an open platform, yeah, it's obvious which is easier to develop for, but it's also obvious you're doing it wrong.
Did you read TFA? Randy Stude stated that there were over 100 million PC's sold where their capabilities exceeded what a current generation console could do. It's on the second page, third question down.
Here's what he was asked:
VideoGamer.com: We ran an interview with Cameron Suey, the producer of the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of Force Unleashed, and he said they weren't doing a PC version because of scalability issues, that the game would require a high end PC and not enough people own one to justify the release. What do you think about his explanation?
The question is answered with:
That's not an educated answer. In the last several years there have been at least 100 million PCs sold that have the capabilities or better of an Xbox 360. It's ridiculous to say that there's not enough audience for that game potentially and that it falls into this enthusiast extreme category when ported over to the PC. That's an uneducated response. And the PCGA has research available to members to show that if you're making a decision on a game and you have that belief that there's just not a large enough audience, let us show you that there's a huge audience that has the capabilities that are being described there. You can make a run at that audience without having to sacrifice anything on your game at all.
(I bolded the relevant part for emphasis.)
I don't think it would be too big of a stretch to ask developers to look at what is currently the top end, and figure out what they want for a bottom spec. They don't have to maximize on the hardware that's at the top end. Instead of a game needing a 4870X2 or a 280GTX, the game could require an 8800GT for the top end, just for the graphics alone. Maybe slightly better. Look at the current console for the "mid point" and decide if you want to be slightly above that, or slightly below that, then figure out a reasonable low end where the game won't run like ass. Problem solved.
Obviously my example is a little bit simplified, but it shouldn't ring too far from the truth. So the idea that the audience is "too diverse" is bullshit.