... for you have just wounded part of your economy. It may be a small part of the French economy but it's all Euros lost to neighbouring countries that will be quite happy to take that business.
No. You or I would want the big colour display, DVD drive and long battery but as I understand it this project isnt about that. It's about a basic portable computer that does the job without being too flash because it's cheap enough to be affordable by the target user. At that point the portable DVD analogy isnt so far out.
I'm curious as to why there seem to be so many manufacturing hurdles before this project. After all(Maybe on a slightly simplistic level), what is it? An LCD screen, input devices, a processor, some flash memory, a power supply and a plastic case to put them all in. Take away the flash memory and input devices and replace them with a DVD drive and what you have starts to look a lot like a portable DVD player, something that's manufactured for prices in the same ballpark as the quoted $100. Would the economies of scale on this product not similarly pull down the hardware price?
I missed out one title on the list, the unforgettably crap Tank Racer, a sort of Mario kart in a tank that they tried to sell as a full-on tank sim, believe it or not.
Yes. A lot. I spent several months of my life dealing with that product. And no, I wasnt one of the games testers:)
How you rate a game is down to who you are. I quite liked V2000, but then I liked the original on the Archimedes. You obviously didnt, but then that reinforces my point above that the marketeers conned you.
Compared to the other games from the same publisher it was, at least in my view, pretty good. Such drinks coasters as Perfect Assassin, Banzai Bug, Asgahn, Xenocracy and the Dragonriders of Pern title that came out when Ubisoft picked up the pieces were by comparison IMHO pretty poor. And to think I spent several years of my life on those products...
Game testers are not, by far, anyway relevant to the shaping of the product EXCEPT for: All they do is say "yea here is the bug" or "yea this is cool" but by the time the game gets into playtesters hands the game is already made. Too late to change concept.
Not true. All the games I've ever been involved with have received feedback from the testers at all levels. They arent just there to find bugs, they're a set of tame target audience on whome the game is continually tried out. The sad thing is they arent always listened to.
Pre-development is the most important. I was hanging out in a comic book store as a kid and some marketers came in. We all got in a group and they showed us concept art, storylines, etc. They asked for our opinion on what we would like to see in the game. We told them. That is where the consumer is most important.
You're all flattered because some marketeers asked you your opinion. What you dont realise is that when they do that they dont have to listen.
Yes marketers are VERY important. Do not belittle them because you are fedup with spam. These guys are trained to find out what the majority of the public want...it may not be what you want, but guess what they are not making their product for a minority....or do you play games like WoW, EQ, 1/2-Life, Doom3, etc? Then you fell for some marketers ploy.
That's the idea behind marketing, sure, but it's not necessarily how it gets done in the real world. My experience is of a group of people whose method is "We're going to tell you how we want it to be" rather than "Tell us how you want it to be".
Of course, all the games companies I worked for went titsup. (Wasnt me guv, honest!) So you might expect that the marketeers might be bad ones in a company that goes titsup, it's quite possible that I'm being harsh on the good ones. I just never met any.
Huh? So the people that actually come up with the ideas, design the characters, the levels, the worlds, design the gameplay elements; then the people that program all that in, create the artwork, create the physical look and feel of the game, these people are less important than the testers? WTF? Without all those other people that handle the creative and production tasks before the testers, there would be no game!
A valid position, it is true. As I've said in other comments, my assertion was based on experience in one publisher. And I wasnt belittling the contribution of the game creators.
Game testers when properly run should form the all-important feedback part of the equation, relating the creative fantasies of the developers to the real world inhabited by the customers. If they are not listened to you can have the best creatives in the world and still produce awful games.
This is so wrong its not even funny. If the game isnt fun and good by the time it gets to testers you have failed, and need to shuffle some people in your development team or get new ones
It would be wrong, except in the company that gave me the experience that led me to make the statement. When I said "Marketing led" I wasnt joking, the development teams were not under their own control but those of the marketeers. Believe me they could tell when what they were being told to do was rubbish too!
Fair enough. My comment was based on the experience of working for a marketing led game publisher in the UK for several years and watching them push woeful titles on unsuspecting punters by pumping them up through buying magazine reviews, in effect telling big lies about the products. Their testers were telling them the products were woeful but instead of getting some gameplay improvements in they just pushed more marketing at them.
Eventually they had such a string of titles which bombed that when the finally got a good title(Virus 2000, David Braben's brilliant follow-up to the classic Virus) the damage was done and no amount of marketing could shake the shoddy image they'd aquired. Standard going titsup ensued, most of the workforce out of the door, remnants sold to a competitor.
I'm afraid when you let the marketeers out of their playpens and run an industry this is the inevitable result.
The most important people in a game publisher or development house are the games testers because their input is most relevant to shaping the product as it will apear to the users - people like them. Sadly the "important" people are the marketeers.
I'm not just saying this from misty-eyed nostalgia, the Sinclair ZX81 was a computer that an enthusiast like me could understand at the lowest level because of its ingenious use of the simplest of hardware. Simple hardware meant not so many features but to this day with a electronic engineering degree under my belt that's the only desktop computer I've fully understood every part of how it works at every level. Sure I know how this PC works at a more than superficial technical level but I dont really know what goes on at gate level.
Thank you Sir Clive and your team, you gave me a career!
I once had to give up all caffiene as part of an exclusion diet to figure out which foods were giving me problems. It wasnt pleasant.
One of the surprises was that decaffienated coffee is not "No caffiene coffee", it's merely "Reduced caffiene coffee", in other words they cant remove all of it so you arent giving up caffiene by drinking it.
There may be a coffee industry Slashdotter along in a minute to give chapter and verse but the other thing I learned was that the method of caffiene extraction differs between brands. For example in the UK market Nescafe uses organic solvents to remove the caffiene while the more expensive Cafe Hag (no website, sadly) uses water. Thus the Nescafe decaf gave me headaches, the Cafe Hag didnt. Tasted pretty dire though.
My experience of corporate culture is that emotive arguments dont work but financial ones do. So dont sell them the free speech, sell them the free beer side of the argument.
I appreciate this goes against the whole spirit of something like the GPL but if you have to tell a few white lies to get something to happen then the important thing is that it gets to happen.
I'd sell it on the "Any holes will be fixed and new features will be created completely free of cost to you by a vibrant community that will spontaneously spring up around this wonderful product. And you the bosses at megacorp gets loads of wonderful PR that money simply cant buy from your public spirited action".
Its giant 66 ft. diameter dish is supposed to be able to receive even weak cell phones signals.
Unfortunately the article has no picture of the satellite so we cant see the antenna in question. But surely a the purpose of a dish antenna of that sort of size is to increase the gain by narrowing the beam width, isnt it? Presumably there's a small field near Osaka with an AWESOME signal!
If this is to cover the whole of Japan then I'm guessing they'll have multiple footprints overlapping each other from multiple feeds to this dish. Any readers who know their antenna theory care to elaborate?
I have found that being able to pull a laptop out of my bag and demonstrate a relevant piece of free software at a job interview puts me ahead of the crowd and often gets me the contract. I wont say that my software is the best there is or that it has got me every job I've applied for but it has certainly made a BIG diference. If nothing else it gives me something to fill the time they could be spending thinking of more difficult to answer questions.
No doubt like many Slashdotters, I have a copy of Opera installed on my computer.
It's their freely downloadable version so it has a 468x60 banner advert on the right at the top. This doesnt bother me, does it bother any of you?
Course it doesnt! Cos they're the plucky little software company taking on the big boys so they're the Good Guys.
So if we're all happy to have Operas banners when we use that browser, why the fuss about this outfit? You get to connect without paying cash, they get to show you adverts. Simple transaction.
The London Underground is doing this as well, though they are doing it with the ground water they pump out of the tunnels. If it relieves the sweaty hell of a crowded Tube train it gets my vote!
In my experience the problem has not been interesting managers in using open source software but persuading them to take seriously their responsibility under licences like the GPL to release modified code.
In short, they love free stuff but think anything their company has put any resources into (i.e. paying me to code bits into) belongs to them even if it's GPL'd. Perhaps not major GPL violations but stuff that really should be released. This is the boss-education issue for me.
That said they're not all like that. My current employer is an honorable exception, I'm doing some Drupal work for them that involves hefty hacks to other people's Drupal modules and when it's all done they are only to happy to stick it up there for all to pick over.
The usual course of action in that situation is to just ditch the project and cut one's losses.
In my career I have encountered more than one colleague who has several years in the games industry behind them without a single published game to their name, so sadly this situation is as the article says, all too common. Developers and publishers get cold feet for the most spurious of reasons and seem to abandon projects on a whim. Which is a shame, because some of the dross that got published by former employers of mine would have been better canned in favour of the projects they did let fall by the wayside.
Power to this developer for letting the game live!
For most of the 1990s I and my employers made the yearly pilgrimage to ECTS, the UK's main games industry trade show.
I've never been to E3 etc so I can only speak for ECTS, but in this case it is strictly a trade show. I'm sure some enthusiasts manage to get tickets, in fact one year I got myself a press pass by claiming to report for a games news web site(Mmm, free coffee and biscuits..:), but this is the exception not the rule. This could be affected by the kind of companies I worked for but in my view ECTS was more about narcisistic industry management showing off than doing business itself.
Slashdot Mirror
... for you have just wounded part of your economy. It may be a small part of the French economy but it's all Euros lost to neighbouring countries that will be quite happy to take that business.
No. You or I would want the big colour display, DVD drive and long battery but as I understand it this project isnt about that. It's about a basic portable computer that does the job without being too flash because it's cheap enough to be affordable by the target user. At that point the portable DVD analogy isnt so far out.
I'm curious as to why there seem to be so many manufacturing hurdles before this project. After all(Maybe on a slightly simplistic level), what is it? An LCD screen, input devices, a processor, some flash memory, a power supply and a plastic case to put them all in. Take away the flash memory and input devices and replace them with a DVD drive and what you have starts to look a lot like a portable DVD player, something that's manufactured for prices in the same ballpark as the quoted $100. Would the economies of scale on this product not similarly pull down the hardware price?
They think it's all over... (Blue screen causes entire stadium to crash) ... It is now!
- over for those of you who dont follow World Cup football)
(http://www.answers.com/topic/they-think-it-s-all
Never let an easily viewable web link on an in-context post get in the way of the herd instinct of Slashdot moderators.
Shame you're on the other side of the world or I'd send a CV in myself.
http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~zippy
"I work at Applied Minds with Danny Hillis, Kurt Bollacker, and a bunch of other cool people."
I missed out one title on the list, the unforgettably crap Tank Racer, a sort of Mario kart in a tank that they tried to sell as a full-on tank sim, believe it or not.
Yes. A lot. I spent several months of my life dealing with that product. And no, I wasnt one of the games testers:)
How you rate a game is down to who you are. I quite liked V2000, but then I liked the original on the Archimedes. You obviously didnt, but then that reinforces my point above that the marketeers conned you.
Compared to the other games from the same publisher it was, at least in my view, pretty good. Such drinks coasters as Perfect Assassin, Banzai Bug, Asgahn, Xenocracy and the Dragonriders of Pern title that came out when Ubisoft picked up the pieces were by comparison IMHO pretty poor. And to think I spent several years of my life on those products...
Not true. All the games I've ever been involved with have received feedback from the testers at all levels. They arent just there to find bugs, they're a set of tame target audience on whome the game is continually tried out. The sad thing is they arent always listened to.
Pre-development is the most important. I was hanging out in a comic book store as a kid and some marketers came in. We all got in a group and they showed us concept art, storylines, etc. They asked for our opinion on what we would like to see in the game. We told them. That is where the consumer is most important.
You're all flattered because some marketeers asked you your opinion. What you dont realise is that when they do that they dont have to listen.
Yes marketers are VERY important. Do not belittle them because you are fedup with spam. These guys are trained to find out what the majority of the public want...it may not be what you want, but guess what they are not making their product for a minority....or do you play games like WoW, EQ, 1/2-Life, Doom3, etc? Then you fell for some marketers ploy.That's the idea behind marketing, sure, but it's not necessarily how it gets done in the real world. My experience is of a group of people whose method is "We're going to tell you how we want it to be" rather than "Tell us how you want it to be".
Of course, all the games companies I worked for went titsup. (Wasnt me guv, honest!) So you might expect that the marketeers might be bad ones in a company that goes titsup, it's quite possible that I'm being harsh on the good ones. I just never met any.
A valid position, it is true. As I've said in other comments, my assertion was based on experience in one publisher. And I wasnt belittling the contribution of the game creators.
Game testers when properly run should form the all-important feedback part of the equation, relating the creative fantasies of the developers to the real world inhabited by the customers. If they are not listened to you can have the best creatives in the world and still produce awful games.
It would be wrong, except in the company that gave me the experience that led me to make the statement. When I said "Marketing led" I wasnt joking, the development teams were not under their own control but those of the marketeers. Believe me they could tell when what they were being told to do was rubbish too!
Eventually they had such a string of titles which bombed that when the finally got a good title(Virus 2000, David Braben's brilliant follow-up to the classic Virus) the damage was done and no amount of marketing could shake the shoddy image they'd aquired. Standard going titsup ensued, most of the workforce out of the door, remnants sold to a competitor.
The most important people in a game publisher or development house are the games testers because their input is most relevant to shaping the product as it will apear to the users - people like them. Sadly the "important" people are the marketeers.
I'm not just saying this from misty-eyed nostalgia, the Sinclair ZX81 was a computer that an enthusiast like me could understand at the lowest level because of its ingenious use of the simplest of hardware. Simple hardware meant not so many features but to this day with a electronic engineering degree under my belt that's the only desktop computer I've fully understood every part of how it works at every level. Sure I know how this PC works at a more than superficial technical level but I dont really know what goes on at gate level.
Thank you Sir Clive and your team, you gave me a career!
Uh... I wish my name was Linux? No y'dont. You'd have Aussie lawyers after you for licencing fees!
One of the surprises was that decaffienated coffee is not "No caffiene coffee", it's merely "Reduced caffiene coffee", in other words they cant remove all of it so you arent giving up caffiene by drinking it.
There may be a coffee industry Slashdotter along in a minute to give chapter and verse but the other thing I learned was that the method of caffiene extraction differs between brands. For example in the UK market Nescafe uses organic solvents to remove the caffiene while the more expensive Cafe Hag (no website, sadly) uses water. Thus the Nescafe decaf gave me headaches, the Cafe Hag didnt. Tasted pretty dire though.
The MPAA can now touch you for motion picture royalties.
I appreciate this goes against the whole spirit of something like the GPL but if you have to tell a few white lies to get something to happen then the important thing is that it gets to happen.
I'd sell it on the "Any holes will be fixed and new features will be created completely free of cost to you by a vibrant community that will spontaneously spring up around this wonderful product. And you the bosses at megacorp gets loads of wonderful PR that money simply cant buy from your public spirited action".
Yes. I know it's BS. But BS in a good cause.
Unfortunately the article has no picture of the satellite so we cant see the antenna in question. But surely a the purpose of a dish antenna of that sort of size is to increase the gain by narrowing the beam width, isnt it? Presumably there's a small field near Osaka with an AWESOME signal!
If this is to cover the whole of Japan then I'm guessing they'll have multiple footprints overlapping each other from multiple feeds to this dish. Any readers who know their antenna theory care to elaborate?
I have found that being able to pull a laptop out of my bag and demonstrate a relevant piece of free software at a job interview puts me ahead of the crowd and often gets me the contract. I wont say that my software is the best there is or that it has got me every job I've applied for but it has certainly made a BIG diference. If nothing else it gives me something to fill the time they could be spending thinking of more difficult to answer questions.
Course it doesnt! Cos they're the plucky little software company taking on the big boys so they're the Good Guys.
So if we're all happy to have Operas banners when we use that browser, why the fuss about this outfit? You get to connect without paying cash, they get to show you adverts. Simple transaction.
Here's the BBC's story about it.
In short, they love free stuff but think anything their company has put any resources into (i.e. paying me to code bits into) belongs to them even if it's GPL'd. Perhaps not major GPL violations but stuff that really should be released. This is the boss-education issue for me.
That said they're not all like that. My current employer is an honorable exception, I'm doing some Drupal work for them that involves hefty hacks to other people's Drupal modules and when it's all done they are only to happy to stick it up there for all to pick over.
The usual course of action in that situation is to just ditch the project and cut one's losses.
In my career I have encountered more than one colleague who has several years in the games industry behind them without a single published game to their name, so sadly this situation is as the article says, all too common. Developers and publishers get cold feet for the most spurious of reasons and seem to abandon projects on a whim. Which is a shame, because some of the dross that got published by former employers of mine would have been better canned in favour of the projects they did let fall by the wayside.
Power to this developer for letting the game live!
I've never been to E3 etc so I can only speak for ECTS, but in this case it is strictly a trade show. I'm sure some enthusiasts manage to get tickets, in fact one year I got myself a press pass by claiming to report for a games news web site(Mmm, free coffee and biscuits..:), but this is the exception not the rule. This could be affected by the kind of companies I worked for but in my view ECTS was more about narcisistic industry management showing off than doing business itself.