Regardless of your interpretation of the urban genre, the question remains, what exactly would you call it if not urban? It's certainly not a "black" game. Gangbanging in the inner city isn't a favored past time of black people as a whole. Nor is everyone in the scene by definition black. Black people and urban gangstas are two different sets of people that have some intersection.
Just because race is involved doesn't mean you're always a marketdroid dodging the issue if you don't bring it up specifically. And it would be inaccurate in this case.
I loved games like GTA III and Vice City... I can shoot bad guys and crooked cops in a game. I don't have fun stomping on the heads of old ladies as my character yells "You're just a b*tch!" (San Andreas).
Just curious, how is C.J. worse than Tommy Vercetti?:P
Exactly. GTA's cool was not about the "Urban theme" (does Italian Mafia even qualify as "Urban"?? Maybe literaly, but thats not what that they mean when they say that.) It was about introducing a new style of game play - a level of interactivity and freedom that was not widely available before. It is widely available now, so if you want to catch interest of people you need to introduce something new. Be that "new" in "urban theme" or "redneck theme" or for that matter "ping-pong theme" window dressing is mostly irrelevant.
I wouldn't say that, actually. A lot of the allure of the GTA series is the fireworks of getting the cops on your tail, doing 100 mph+ down the pseudo-Vegas strip in a sports car mockup, flying a plane under the faux Golden Gate Bridge... not just that you have the freedom to do it, but because of the familiarity of the landmarks. One of the best parts about GTA3 was the Italian mafia connection. The idea of starting off as a double-crossed shmuck with a bat taking orders from some low-level guy with a strip club and moving up to eventually knock off the head hitman. How every time you jump into a mafia car the station is already set to the Double Clef classic station. And Vice City's main allure was really the 80s theme, the awful fashions, the classic music, the neon blur of lights.
If you put the games side-to-side on just gameplay, Vice City barely has anything over GTA3. San Andreas does make a couple of big jumps in terms of sheer expansiveness, but it's still mostly a thematic change.
It's not really an MMO thing, it's most games. Unreal Tournie, Halo, Quake, most of the early RTS (less now), Half-Life DM, etc, etc... most multiplayer games have mirror matches. Even traditional RPGs when you can pick between races, the race is just graphics and starting stats. Especially in MMOs, though, if you had widely diverse classes interacting with diverse races, you've just multiplied your problems with balance by the number of races. And you see how much trouble most MMOs have balancing just ten or sixteen classes, I can only imagine what happens when that number bumps up to 100 with the different combinations.
The first game I played where I really felt like the races were completely dissimilar was Natural-Selection, a truly excellent half-life mod that is similar in some respects to AvP. But that takes a whooooole crapload of balance work, and it's easier to pair down the number of variables.
This is a bit of a pet peeve, but "urban"? Are they talking about SimCity, or GTA?
It's a BS marketing term that dances around race.
What would you prefer? Are they making a black game? A hispanic game? A minority game?
GTA is a collection of extreme parodies of pretty much every racial stereotype, including the white trailer trash and fibbies. "Urban/gangsta" is pretty much the best tag you can put on it.
When the game "media" stops advertising the products it's reviewing, writing previews that are basically verbatim press releases with a couple screenshots, editorializing like emo versions of Maddox, and actually... I dunno, doing some interesting journalism and fact-finding instead of filling pages up with the above drivel handed to them on a platter by game companies, we can talk. Not that I'd agree with you still, but we could talk. Until then I'll regard them as the glorified P.R. firms that they are.
Square is asking the media to act as though they don't know the rest of the world exists.
And no, if you go down the list they were asking them not to talk about certain areas of the game in specificity. Import reviewers who wanted to stay on Square's good side could've spoken about pretty much everything that you talk about in a normal review. How often in a review is the public interested in knowing the specific names and details about locations as opposed to whether the game sucks? I want to hear if the music is going to kill my ears or the story is terrible, not if the Happy Funtime Trainstation on Day 3 is a pyramid or a jungle.
Why would it hurt profits? It would just delay them.
Why don't we delay your next paycheck for six months?
Additionally, I'd imagine this gives them time to run the PR hype machine and a little leeway if it turns out the game is an awful performer to cut back on its promotion on the other side of the world.
The "draconian" edict they passed down was a politely-worded suggestion that the news media doesn't post directly-ripped music, directly-ripped CG samples, and gross plot spoilers. There is one part of the letter where it "embargos" certain areas of the game for discussion until certain dates, I'm guessing to try to drum up interest for the game so that they don't blow everything immediately and have attention die down.
Is this a marketing ploy? Ya, I'm sure it is. But it's tit-for-tat. Square lets out information and demos to game media, Square asks for a little something back. The media can choose whether they want it or not. If not, fine, then their relationship with Square sours a little. Whoopdeeshit. If yes, then a couple salivating fans have to wait a month or turn to fansites to get their information.
Luke did a good job of drawing his line in the sand to rally the ill-informed reactionaries and the 15-year-old fanatics to the aid of his page impressions, but he needs a reality check.
And there was someone else (maybe the same guy?) who made the exact same crack on another story about the donation. The best thing about it is, it never gets old. Ever.:P
I think the more interesting study is in seeing which internet currents this site followed, hehe. They should drop a bunch of seeds of information out there sometime that... somehow... report back?... like those little probes in Twister, and maybe we can get some sort of topological map of the connectedness of internet communities hehe.
Beaurocratic rules say that if you don't use your entire budget, your budget gets cut. Therefore everyone wastes all left overs before the budget times out. Yes I know that's stupid and inefficient but noone bothers to fix it.
Not just in national bureaucracies either, hehe. My undergrad school's student senate used to pull the same shit. You'd start off with tiddlywinks in the way of budget, not enough to do much of anything, and you'd blow it on refreshments or some crap for a couple years before they started giving you more money.
The other fun part was that student-run academic clubs were considered to be ipso facto extensions of the academic major they were closest affiliated with, and those were required to have one-to-one support from the department itself. So if our club wanted to bring a speaker for $500, we needed $250 of that money to come from our already budget-starved, very small academic department.
On top of that, the finance committee made a policy of shaving a couple hundred off your budget just for shits and giggles so they felt like they were doing something. I found that out after a carefully planned budget that involved bringing in just one speaker for a modest expense got axed, leaving me with a "speaker budget" that could barely fund getting a member of our own faculty to speak. So the policy became overestimating by a couple hundred dollars. And the year you actually get that extra money, guess what, if you have no use for it you still need to spend it all (see above), so yay more pizza parties at the end of the year, hehe.
I don't know why I just posted all that. I guess it's cathartic even after I'm gone:P
What he's measuring is very real, questions of accuracy aside. As a business, my first data point is money. Forum comments, "what everyone says", etc, are pretty meaningless in comparison.
That's nice, but he's measuring number of subscriptions worldwide, not money. People in different countries pay different amounts of money for their subscriptions, which are weighted equally on Sir Bruce's site. Different MMOs charge different amounts of money -- again, weighted equally on Sir Bruce's site. As a business, you should probably read the fine print:P
Hehe, I actually liked that game for some mysterious reason. Now, to find a 100% legal venue to recover the game and bask in nostalgia... *shifty eyes*
MMOGChart is inaccurate, incomplete and a waste of anyones time. If you think its figures are accurate, or frankly show the whole picture, you're wrong. Ignore it.
Despite the nature of the troll, there actually is a point here. Giving SirBruce the benefit of the doubt about the numbers, there's the question of, well, what exactly does the subscription metric tell you? It tells you something, but certainly not turnover rate, average satisfaction, profits, the number of "deadbeat" accounts, etc. Everytime I see this site pop up I spend a couple minutes wondering how exactly to interpret it -- and then I usually forget about it until next time because it's just not something that catches my interest in the right way:P
Of course, this isn't news to anyone, least of all SirBruce, who actually discusses better metrics and the limited utility of subscribership numbers. It's just that there isn't an easy way to access the information needed for all those other metrics. And to claim that the subscriber numbers are useless is pretty narrow minded.
I'd be interested in seeing a comparison of how additional content and frequency of updates scales with subscriber numbers. The monthly fee outpaces individual subscriber upkeep costs by a pretty high amount, so you'd figure the games with high subscriber numbers would have at least a little more attention thrown at the updates -- but I'm not sure that is the case.
Although one of the problems with making such a comparison is that subscribers in different countries add up to vastly different subscribership plans and fees. Speaking of, though I've heard it's hard to get a hold of the numbers, I'd be very interested in seeing the average money per capita made off players broken down by pricing region. I'd also imagine there's a significant amount of overhead involved in expanding your business internationally. Hrrm.
So say you've got WoW, EverQuest, and whatever else is being played these days with a fee, and say, WoW gets double the playership of the other games that month. Well, WoW would get 50% of the profits, and the remainder gets split up accordingly. I think that could actually work. Good idea, man.
Inc mechanics that encourage even more idling and timesinks for great profit:P
They only accept e-mail addys from schools, and only schools that they've pre-approved at that. So unless your hotmail account comes with an @accepted_university.edu, you're SoL:P
Are you talking about Longest Journey 2? If so, how is it? Does it compare to the first one? I was waiting for it forever and now I'm a bit strapped for cash when it's finally out.
But, I see in your response exactly what I was talking about. It appears you judge a man by the degree of his material wealth. Mr. Buffet is a better man in your eyes because he achieved greater financial wealth than the average Joe. Okay, if that's how you judge people, fine. The rich are America's royalty. But, Mr. Buffet's wealth did not come from a vacuum -- it was made on the backs of millions of hard working people -- mediocre people (mediocre being defined as "not-rich"), in your way of thinking, I suppose.
No, by mediocre I mean not outstanding in their efforts or results. Buffet labors his entire life essentially to make billions of dollars for charity plus a guarantee of prosperity (but not gross prosperity) for his family. Your theoretical breadwinner got married, got laid, and has kids, and is just making enough money to support them all. He is merely subsisting and throwing a bone to charity when possible. If we're going to ask who deserves more praise as you did, I'd have to say unquestionably Buffet. The family man brought a couple new mouths into the world and just barely helped alleviate a little of its problems via donations.
However, I usually don't couch charity in competitive terms. People donate what they can as they see fit. If it's a big number it'll get some press attention. If Americans as a whole got off their asses and started donating even on the small scale like you suggested, you'd see stories on that movement.
The bigger question, I guess, for me, is why you care which donation ranks where on the hosanna-meter.
Slashdot Mirror
Regardless of your interpretation of the urban genre, the question remains, what exactly would you call it if not urban? It's certainly not a "black" game. Gangbanging in the inner city isn't a favored past time of black people as a whole. Nor is everyone in the scene by definition black. Black people and urban gangstas are two different sets of people that have some intersection.
Just because race is involved doesn't mean you're always a marketdroid dodging the issue if you don't bring it up specifically. And it would be inaccurate in this case.
You're right! Look at all the movies set in the real world. Abject failures, all of them.
I loved games like GTA III and Vice City... I can shoot bad guys and crooked cops in a game. I don't have fun stomping on the heads of old ladies as my character yells "You're just a b*tch!" (San Andreas).
:P
Just curious, how is C.J. worse than Tommy Vercetti?
Exactly. GTA's cool was not about the "Urban theme" (does Italian Mafia even qualify as "Urban"?? Maybe literaly, but thats not what that they mean when they say that.) It was about introducing a new style of game play - a level of interactivity and freedom that was not widely available before. It is widely available now, so if you want to catch interest of people you need to introduce something new. Be that "new" in "urban theme" or "redneck theme" or for that matter "ping-pong theme" window dressing is mostly irrelevant.
I wouldn't say that, actually. A lot of the allure of the GTA series is the fireworks of getting the cops on your tail, doing 100 mph+ down the pseudo-Vegas strip in a sports car mockup, flying a plane under the faux Golden Gate Bridge... not just that you have the freedom to do it, but because of the familiarity of the landmarks. One of the best parts about GTA3 was the Italian mafia connection. The idea of starting off as a double-crossed shmuck with a bat taking orders from some low-level guy with a strip club and moving up to eventually knock off the head hitman. How every time you jump into a mafia car the station is already set to the Double Clef classic station. And Vice City's main allure was really the 80s theme, the awful fashions, the classic music, the neon blur of lights.
If you put the games side-to-side on just gameplay, Vice City barely has anything over GTA3. San Andreas does make a couple of big jumps in terms of sheer expansiveness, but it's still mostly a thematic change.
It's not really an MMO thing, it's most games. Unreal Tournie, Halo, Quake, most of the early RTS (less now), Half-Life DM, etc, etc... most multiplayer games have mirror matches. Even traditional RPGs when you can pick between races, the race is just graphics and starting stats. Especially in MMOs, though, if you had widely diverse classes interacting with diverse races, you've just multiplied your problems with balance by the number of races. And you see how much trouble most MMOs have balancing just ten or sixteen classes, I can only imagine what happens when that number bumps up to 100 with the different combinations.
The first game I played where I really felt like the races were completely dissimilar was Natural-Selection, a truly excellent half-life mod that is similar in some respects to AvP. But that takes a whooooole crapload of balance work, and it's easier to pair down the number of variables.
This is a bit of a pet peeve, but "urban"? Are they talking about SimCity, or GTA?
It's a BS marketing term that dances around race.
What would you prefer? Are they making a black game? A hispanic game? A minority game?
GTA is a collection of extreme parodies of pretty much every racial stereotype, including the white trailer trash and fibbies. "Urban/gangsta" is pretty much the best tag you can put on it.
Tit-for-tat means corruption.
When the game "media" stops advertising the products it's reviewing, writing previews that are basically verbatim press releases with a couple screenshots, editorializing like emo versions of Maddox, and actually... I dunno, doing some interesting journalism and fact-finding instead of filling pages up with the above drivel handed to them on a platter by game companies, we can talk. Not that I'd agree with you still, but we could talk. Until then I'll regard them as the glorified P.R. firms that they are.
Square is asking the media to act as though they don't know the rest of the world exists.
And no, if you go down the list they were asking them not to talk about certain areas of the game in specificity. Import reviewers who wanted to stay on Square's good side could've spoken about pretty much everything that you talk about in a normal review. How often in a review is the public interested in knowing the specific names and details about locations as opposed to whether the game sucks? I want to hear if the music is going to kill my ears or the story is terrible, not if the Happy Funtime Trainstation on Day 3 is a pyramid or a jungle.
I'm not an HTML expert or anything, but roughly how much does myspace.com weigh?
Hold on... lemme just... pop it out of its tube here...
Why would it hurt profits? It would just delay them.
Why don't we delay your next paycheck for six months?
Additionally, I'd imagine this gives them time to run the PR hype machine and a little leeway if it turns out the game is an awful performer to cut back on its promotion on the other side of the world.
The "draconian" edict they passed down was a politely-worded suggestion that the news media doesn't post directly-ripped music, directly-ripped CG samples, and gross plot spoilers. There is one part of the letter where it "embargos" certain areas of the game for discussion until certain dates, I'm guessing to try to drum up interest for the game so that they don't blow everything immediately and have attention die down.
Is this a marketing ploy? Ya, I'm sure it is. But it's tit-for-tat. Square lets out information and demos to game media, Square asks for a little something back. The media can choose whether they want it or not. If not, fine, then their relationship with Square sours a little. Whoopdeeshit. If yes, then a couple salivating fans have to wait a month or turn to fansites to get their information.
Luke did a good job of drawing his line in the sand to rally the ill-informed reactionaries and the 15-year-old fanatics to the aid of his page impressions, but he needs a reality check.
No sweat. I'll just have my secretary send me over the internet and I'll forward it on.
And there was someone else (maybe the same guy?) who made the exact same crack on another story about the donation. The best thing about it is, it never gets old. Ever. :P
I think the more interesting study is in seeing which internet currents this site followed, hehe. They should drop a bunch of seeds of information out there sometime that... somehow... report back?... like those little probes in Twister, and maybe we can get some sort of topological map of the connectedness of internet communities hehe.
Beaurocratic rules say that if you don't use your entire budget, your budget gets cut. Therefore everyone wastes all left overs before the budget times out. Yes I know that's stupid and inefficient but noone bothers to fix it.
:P
Not just in national bureaucracies either, hehe. My undergrad school's student senate used to pull the same shit. You'd start off with tiddlywinks in the way of budget, not enough to do much of anything, and you'd blow it on refreshments or some crap for a couple years before they started giving you more money.
The other fun part was that student-run academic clubs were considered to be ipso facto extensions of the academic major they were closest affiliated with, and those were required to have one-to-one support from the department itself. So if our club wanted to bring a speaker for $500, we needed $250 of that money to come from our already budget-starved, very small academic department.
On top of that, the finance committee made a policy of shaving a couple hundred off your budget just for shits and giggles so they felt like they were doing something. I found that out after a carefully planned budget that involved bringing in just one speaker for a modest expense got axed, leaving me with a "speaker budget" that could barely fund getting a member of our own faculty to speak. So the policy became overestimating by a couple hundred dollars. And the year you actually get that extra money, guess what, if you have no use for it you still need to spend it all (see above), so yay more pizza parties at the end of the year, hehe.
I don't know why I just posted all that. I guess it's cathartic even after I'm gone
Yeah, where was this hyped? It actually sounds sort of interesting to me, but I never heard about it before hehe.
Whoever he wants to be. Gosh!
What he's measuring is very real, questions of accuracy aside. As a business, my first data point is money. Forum comments, "what everyone says", etc, are pretty meaningless in comparison.
:P
That's nice, but he's measuring number of subscriptions worldwide, not money. People in different countries pay different amounts of money for their subscriptions, which are weighted equally on Sir Bruce's site. Different MMOs charge different amounts of money -- again, weighted equally on Sir Bruce's site. As a business, you should probably read the fine print
Hehe, I actually liked that game for some mysterious reason. Now, to find a 100% legal venue to recover the game and bask in nostalgia... *shifty eyes*
MMOGChart is inaccurate, incomplete and a waste of anyones time. If you think its figures are accurate, or frankly show the whole picture, you're wrong. Ignore it.
:P
Despite the nature of the troll, there actually is a point here. Giving SirBruce the benefit of the doubt about the numbers, there's the question of, well, what exactly does the subscription metric tell you? It tells you something, but certainly not turnover rate, average satisfaction, profits, the number of "deadbeat" accounts, etc. Everytime I see this site pop up I spend a couple minutes wondering how exactly to interpret it -- and then I usually forget about it until next time because it's just not something that catches my interest in the right way
Of course, this isn't news to anyone, least of all SirBruce, who actually discusses better metrics and the limited utility of subscribership numbers. It's just that there isn't an easy way to access the information needed for all those other metrics. And to claim that the subscriber numbers are useless is pretty narrow minded.
I'd be interested in seeing a comparison of how additional content and frequency of updates scales with subscriber numbers. The monthly fee outpaces individual subscriber upkeep costs by a pretty high amount, so you'd figure the games with high subscriber numbers would have at least a little more attention thrown at the updates -- but I'm not sure that is the case.
Although one of the problems with making such a comparison is that subscribers in different countries add up to vastly different subscribership plans and fees. Speaking of, though I've heard it's hard to get a hold of the numbers, I'd be very interested in seeing the average money per capita made off players broken down by pricing region. I'd also imagine there's a significant amount of overhead involved in expanding your business internationally. Hrrm.
So say you've got WoW, EverQuest, and whatever else is being played these days with a fee, and say, WoW gets double the playership of the other games that month. Well, WoW would get 50% of the profits, and the remainder gets split up accordingly. I think that could actually work. Good idea, man.
:P
Inc mechanics that encourage even more idling and timesinks for great profit
Man, that sounds like an awesome way to get fired, hehe. I half-wonder if they're getting encouraged to do it as honeypots for idiot workers.
Either way, the point still stands that it's 100% traceable back to you or your company/school.
They only accept e-mail addys from schools, and only schools that they've pre-approved at that. So unless your hotmail account comes with an @accepted_university.edu, you're SoL :P
Are you talking about Longest Journey 2? If so, how is it? Does it compare to the first one? I was waiting for it forever and now I'm a bit strapped for cash when it's finally out.
But, I see in your response exactly what I was talking about. It appears you judge a man by the degree of his material wealth. Mr. Buffet is a better man in your eyes because he achieved greater financial wealth than the average Joe. Okay, if that's how you judge people, fine. The rich are America's royalty. But, Mr. Buffet's wealth did not come from a vacuum -- it was made on the backs of millions of hard working people -- mediocre people (mediocre being defined as "not-rich"), in your way of thinking, I suppose.
No, by mediocre I mean not outstanding in their efforts or results. Buffet labors his entire life essentially to make billions of dollars for charity plus a guarantee of prosperity (but not gross prosperity) for his family. Your theoretical breadwinner got married, got laid, and has kids, and is just making enough money to support them all. He is merely subsisting and throwing a bone to charity when possible. If we're going to ask who deserves more praise as you did, I'd have to say unquestionably Buffet. The family man brought a couple new mouths into the world and just barely helped alleviate a little of its problems via donations.
However, I usually don't couch charity in competitive terms. People donate what they can as they see fit. If it's a big number it'll get some press attention. If Americans as a whole got off their asses and started donating even on the small scale like you suggested, you'd see stories on that movement.
The bigger question, I guess, for me, is why you care which donation ranks where on the hosanna-meter.