Some stores have broken the release date, and many of the online vendors were apparantly permitted to ship pre-orders in a fashion to have them arrive on release day. This means that people who chose overnight shipping do already have their boxes, for all the good it does them before the servers go live.
The analogy to suing Bic because you can draw a copyrighted character with their pens doesn't hold because Bic has zero control over what you do with their product once you purchase it. If I draw Spiderman in my sketchbook and keep it in my home, I may or may not have broken copyright (not clear on how the fair use falls out there) but Marvel has suffered no damages so they probably aren't going to sue me. If I try to sell that sketch on EBay, I'm now a good target for copyright infringement, but the Bic corporation has no control over my decision to make my infringement available to the broader public. (If they were to market their pens for that specific purpose then they WOULD be open to lawsuits.) By contrast, City of Heroes characters can look only the ways NCSoft has designed into the character builder (which I've heard is pretty robust) and they are actively making money off of letting you play with said characters, derivative or otherwise.
I don't think Marvel will win this one though - as others have pointed out, most superhero designs have gotten pretty derivative over time. (Don't confuse cause and effect though - the big green/grey beast person with tattered shorts is a staple look BECAUSE of the Hulk.) If anything, DC may have a better case - I saw a lot of VERY Superman-looking costumes during the Christopher Reeve tributes.
Sadly, in copyright law sometimes you're WORSE off trying and failing than not trying at all, because if you're trying to stop a practice then you can't claim you were unaware of the infringement.
I'm a member of Science in the News (http://www.sitnboston.com), a grad student organization in Boston that gives talks on current events biology to the general public. In my three years with the group I can say that it's a small, but highly interested audience. What seems to concern them most is learning something relevant to them while having it explained in terms they can understand even if they don't have any biology background beyond high school.
Will our program, or this new network, become multi-million viewer blockbuster events? Probably not. But they can give people the background to understand some of what they hear on the nightly news, or at least to know what kind of questions to ask. And that's never a bad thing in my book.
I've heard that companies have staggered entry into open betas in the past. This will probably be a short open beta (2-3 weeks) with the game's impending release (no official date confirmed, but holding the beta now all but confirms that it will make the holidays, meaning around 6-8 weeks from now to RELEASE tops). Getting into the first wave may make a big difference in how much free trial you get before having to decide if it's worth buying a $50 game that shuts off if you don't subscribe.
Quote: Food was grown by humankind for an awfully long time and rather successfully before the advent of pesticides and herbicides. We don't need that poison on our foods, on our soil or in our water supplies. And we don't need Frankenfood either.
There were also awfully fewer PEOPLE to feed for an awfully long time. Regardless of the need for public health education to slow global population growth, that fact is that more people means a greater need for food. Now you've got several ways to approach this problem. 1) Do nothing to increase food production, allowing people (hint: we're talking poor folks, not the Dick Cheney's of the world) to starve. 2) Farm more land, requiring destruction of the environments currently occupying that land. This option can obviously only be used for a certain amount of time before we've clear-cut all arable land in the world. 3) Increase the productivity of the land we already have. Since we have been farming for an "awfully long time", I think it's fair to say that we've done pretty much all we can on this one if we forego the use of modern science. Which leaves options 1 and 2, and eventually just option 1.
(Side note: I don't know if it's because production costs are higher or because organic farmers are in a fair wage program, but I can observe at my local grocery store that organic foods are more expensive than the alternatives. Raising the cost of food ought to have obvious consequences for the world's poor, see option 1 above.)
In all seriousness, should I actually install this thing? It's one thing if the worst it does is make me manually unblock all my programs to get them through the firewall, but I don't want it to break other programs that are currently working. Is it problematic to firewall my machine if I'm already behind a firewall (home, work networks)?
SCO's got a bunch of lawsuits going against people with a lot more money than they've got. (Not counting the smackdown they got from I think it was Autozone.) He's probably telling the truth that they won't be suing anyone else right now - I doubt they can afford the expenses. A few wins as precedents and that cost/benefit equation may change but for now....
An example I can think of is the special edition Lunar games Working Designs put out for the PS1. All kinds of great, fun, nifty extras.... and a whopping $70 price tag new. I like cloth maps, sountracks, etc, as well as the next guy, but the bottom line is that companies charge more when they include these things and/or include these things to cover over the fact that they're charging more anyways. Offer OPTIONAL extras by all means. But if you make the game ONLY available at $30 over the going rate to cover the random stuff some of your customers don't WANT, you're shooting your sales in the foot cause I'm just going to wait until the price drops or buy it used (with $0 of that sale going to the publisher).
I posted this to my own journal last night, where a friend who happens to be more discerning than I dug up the same information that's in these comments. The parent article should be amended to point out that commenters have found that the guy is probably at least GUILTY of copyright infringement (which his own account of events carefully leaves out) before soliciting donations for his legal defense.
I'm not going to spend $30 on a game that a new player can beat in 5 hours (the Metroid GBA games) or $50 for a game I can beat in a week. Not when I can rent the game from Blockbuster for that week for $5, see most of the content in the game (let's face it - playing the same game again on a harder difficulty level is still the same game), and return it for another one. Say I'm really liking the game and only halfway through it at the end of the week, I just renew it and still wind up with $40 more to spend on games I HAVEN'T finished yet. The only games actually worth full-priced retail purchase ARE the ones that will provide a month's worth of entertainment. (Note: ACTUAL play time, the advertised number is always a significant overstatement.)
For the first time in recent memory I'm at a point where I might reasonably consider having the time to play an MMORPG. And here they are announcing that fundamental issues with the game are a lower priority than the next paid expansion pack. Problem is that, as a new potential customer, I'd MUCH rather buy one product that works well than buy TWO products that both have flaws (as I'm to understand new releases usually do). (Complete ignorance talking here - does one at least get extra "free" play time with the expansion packs, or do you only get that for the base game?) Looks like a good way to get me to look at FFXI/CoH/WoW instead....
""faculty-provided course content, including language lessons, music, recorded lectures and audio books." Faculty will be assisted in creating new content for these devices by Duke's Center for Instructional Technology"
Unlike the Field of Dreams, having the system in place does nothing to actually see the faculty trained in the use of the devices. From my experience as a recent college grad reading the alumni bulletins, this sounds suspiciously like one of those improvements a school makes solely to CLAIM it's made them, with relatively little regard to whether the money is well-spent in terms of its students' education.
"See, we're hip, we're constantly updating to the times, and we can only keep doing this if you give us all your money! Information on how to leave us your estate is enclosed (I'm not kidding about that part)."
Though I suppose at least in this case the students get a free iPod out of the deal.
If there's one feature MMORPG's could add to make me more likely to play them, it's an account hibernation feature where I could quit if I knew I wasn't going to have time to play this month and resubscribe later. This would clearly not be a prohibitive cost, since DAoC has just done exactly this without even having been asked in advance as a "win back players who've left" tactic.
Of course, this feature is the opposite of the MMORPG business model. Those of us who play sufficiently infrequently to consider hibernating an account any given month? We're the customers they want to keep MOST because we're the ones they're making the most profit off of. Fact is, this industry uses the casual players and ones who try and dislike the game to subsidize the ones who make the game their second job. And that, as a member of the former group, I don't like.
Don't they realize their job is to produce easily counterable products that keep AV software writers in business? You might think they actually wanted their viruses to suceed or something....
If the EFF is to be believed, the pending super-DMCA, intended to overturn the current Supreme Court ruling saying that technology which has "substantial noninfringing uses" can't be withdrawn from the marketplace (Sony was one of the parties RE: the VCR), will allow just such lawsuits. It was posted here a week or two ago.
Personally, backwards compatibility on the PS2 meant buying it months earlier, as I otherwise would have been unwilling to drop FF IX midway. But the question is what portion of the X-Box 1 owners market who WOULD buy the new Box if it had compatibility WON'T if it doesn't. The fact is that early adoptors of consoles are willing to put up with high prices and forced bundling by retailers in the days when demand outpaces supply. (See the unopened extra PS2 controller and the copy of Star Wars: Starfighter I haven't touched since the week I got and finished it.) I don't think having to switch consoles to play the old games will be a big road block to selling the new console. And remember that, in a game company's eyes, selling a new game is making money, while encouraging me to play games I've already paid for (or worse bought used, with all the money going to the reseller) is squandering the limited gaming hours I might otherwise buy new games occupy. Maybe not the most consumer friendly decision, but then they ARE trying to make money....
Back when I subscribed to EGM (in the days when IGN was free) I found that 75% of the content was stuff that I'd known about for months (take E3 screenshots for instance, which would usually show up 2-3 issues after the show happened). The only times something would be new is if the magazine extracted an exclusivity clause in exchange for a cover story or whatnot (essentially publicity for the game). This news article didn't specify what the lead time for the digital magazine was, but I'll venture a guess that if they need to make a layout and get everything in final, ready to send to the printers format there's going to be a decent lag. If they don't want the electronic form coming out a full month before the print version gets to their loyal, directly paying, print subscribers, the publishers might be enforcing a longer delay. Somehow I think that I'd rather spend my gaming info buck on a website with a better lead time....
I said "AFAIK" and now stand corrected - a quick search and I see that Star Wars Galaxies also charges $15 a month, meaning the MMORPG industry has undergone significant inflation since I decided it was overpriced at $9.99 a month and stopped paying attention. (A Slashdot games post on CoH's release gave me the mistaken impression that the $15 price point was high.)
And we're both agreed that it's more than possible to play games casually, in a relationship or otherwise. I just maintain that a game that gives infinitely better gaming value per dollar spent to the crowd that spends, say, 4 hours every day in one month, 120 hours for $15, than someone who plays that same 120 hours over the course of SIX months for $90, is inherently unfriendly to the casual gamer. The fact that other games are EVEN WORSE to casual players isn't really a good defense to that point.:-/
Pay $15 a month, AFAIK 50% more than any other major MMORPG on the market, for a month of use-it-or-lose-it gaming time. If you're playing it for only an hour every other day, you're paying a lot more per gaming hour than you are when you buy a game like Baldur's Gate that doesn't go away after a month. Don't get me wrong, I realize it's a flaw of the whole genre (though those crazy kids at Guild Wars seem to think otherwise), but then I (as a casual gamer) won't touch the rest of the genre for the same reason.
Chances that you can offer her a substitute when she actually wants attention from you are not good. Chances that there will be times when she's checking email/websurfing on another machince, reading books, on the phone, watching TV, doing things with her friends (not sure what the modern, not-old-people equivalent of the bridge club is) are usually pretty high. I've had moderate luck playing games that can be picked up and put down easily while the girlfriend stops to smell the proverbial flowers (hm... providing actual flowers might work too).
The downside is that this method is better suited for single player games than cooperative play for obvious reasons. Coordinating schedules makes things more difficult. Of course, these things are all relative. Most reasonable girls would understand one games night a week and most would feel neglected if you wanted to play several hours a night, but YMMV. (Unfortunately, CoH's $15 monthly use it or lose it access makes infrequent gaming a terrible value - this is the reason I won't touch the game.)
All that said, your question sort of misses the point. Time is the only limited resource that you can't get more of. If you want to spend your time one way and your girlfriend wants to spend it another, ultimately one of you is going to get what you want and one is going to have to settle for something else. In a good, healthy relationship the two of you are going to do your best to try and accomodate each other's wants equally, but at the end of the day you DO need to choose one or the other. (Unsolicited relationship advice: In the absence of any other information, my opinion is that if you have to think about it too hard, you're not with the right girl.)
Take a game like Metroid Fusion, which retails for $30 and can be finished by a novice in around 5 hours. Sure, they've designed the thing for you to try speed runs and whatnot, but most gamers, myself included, A) don't care about shaving a few minutes off the completion speed and B) expect more value for the gaming buck than that. Why shouldn't I pay half price on EBay for a used game that I literally won't buy retail because I don't think it's worth what they're charging? If anything, I'm snatching up a deal that leaves one less used game out there that someone who actually WILL buy it new might otherwise have gotten.
Here's a link to the abstract of their actual paper on the topic. Technically, this is news from last Sept, though I suppose it's good to get mainstream press where possible so everyone knows where their taxpayer funded $200K is going.:)
I find most games these days too EASY, not too hard. Maybe that's because I play RPG's and don't mind taking time out to kill a few extra monsters if it gets me the next ability or whatever. But I've become all too accustomed to ploughing through $50 games without the HINT of challenge, with characters who don't take significant amounts of damage and kill anything in a few hits. Or look at the new Metroid games, where you can expect to finish a $30 GBA game in 5 hours of play and the designers have had to DESIGN the thing for speed runs in order to squeeze any semblance of replay value out of it. And then we have platformers (or even RPG's) where the "challenge" is simply nigh unavoidable threats that you are most likely to "beat" by memorizing level layouts and reacting to them in advance. Guess that might be why people want to play PVP stuff most of the time these days....
Slashdot Mirror
Some stores have broken the release date, and many of the online vendors were apparantly permitted to ship pre-orders in a fashion to have them arrive on release day. This means that people who chose overnight shipping do already have their boxes, for all the good it does them before the servers go live.
The analogy to suing Bic because you can draw a copyrighted character with their pens doesn't hold because Bic has zero control over what you do with their product once you purchase it. If I draw Spiderman in my sketchbook and keep it in my home, I may or may not have broken copyright (not clear on how the fair use falls out there) but Marvel has suffered no damages so they probably aren't going to sue me. If I try to sell that sketch on EBay, I'm now a good target for copyright infringement, but the Bic corporation has no control over my decision to make my infringement available to the broader public. (If they were to market their pens for that specific purpose then they WOULD be open to lawsuits.) By contrast, City of Heroes characters can look only the ways NCSoft has designed into the character builder (which I've heard is pretty robust) and they are actively making money off of letting you play with said characters, derivative or otherwise.
I don't think Marvel will win this one though - as others have pointed out, most superhero designs have gotten pretty derivative over time. (Don't confuse cause and effect though - the big green/grey beast person with tattered shorts is a staple look BECAUSE of the Hulk.) If anything, DC may have a better case - I saw a lot of VERY Superman-looking costumes during the Christopher Reeve tributes.
Sadly, in copyright law sometimes you're WORSE off trying and failing than not trying at all, because if you're trying to stop a practice then you can't claim you were unaware of the infringement.
Will our program, or this new network, become multi-million viewer blockbuster events? Probably not. But they can give people the background to understand some of what they hear on the nightly news, or at least to know what kind of questions to ask. And that's never a bad thing in my book.
I've heard that companies have staggered entry into open betas in the past. This will probably be a short open beta (2-3 weeks) with the game's impending release (no official date confirmed, but holding the beta now all but confirms that it will make the holidays, meaning around 6-8 weeks from now to RELEASE tops). Getting into the first wave may make a big difference in how much free trial you get before having to decide if it's worth buying a $50 game that shuts off if you don't subscribe.
There were also awfully fewer PEOPLE to feed for an awfully long time. Regardless of the need for public health education to slow global population growth, that fact is that more people means a greater need for food. Now you've got several ways to approach this problem. 1) Do nothing to increase food production, allowing people (hint: we're talking poor folks, not the Dick Cheney's of the world) to starve. 2) Farm more land, requiring destruction of the environments currently occupying that land. This option can obviously only be used for a certain amount of time before we've clear-cut all arable land in the world. 3) Increase the productivity of the land we already have. Since we have been farming for an "awfully long time", I think it's fair to say that we've done pretty much all we can on this one if we forego the use of modern science. Which leaves options 1 and 2, and eventually just option 1.
(Side note: I don't know if it's because production costs are higher or because organic farmers are in a fair wage program, but I can observe at my local grocery store that organic foods are more expensive than the alternatives. Raising the cost of food ought to have obvious consequences for the world's poor, see option 1 above.)
In all seriousness, should I actually install this thing? It's one thing if the worst it does is make me manually unblock all my programs to get them through the firewall, but I don't want it to break other programs that are currently working. Is it problematic to firewall my machine if I'm already behind a firewall (home, work networks)?
SCO's got a bunch of lawsuits going against people with a lot more money than they've got. (Not counting the smackdown they got from I think it was Autozone.) He's probably telling the truth that they won't be suing anyone else right now - I doubt they can afford the expenses. A few wins as precedents and that cost/benefit equation may change but for now....
An example I can think of is the special edition Lunar games Working Designs put out for the PS1. All kinds of great, fun, nifty extras.... and a whopping $70 price tag new. I like cloth maps, sountracks, etc, as well as the next guy, but the bottom line is that companies charge more when they include these things and/or include these things to cover over the fact that they're charging more anyways. Offer OPTIONAL extras by all means. But if you make the game ONLY available at $30 over the going rate to cover the random stuff some of your customers don't WANT, you're shooting your sales in the foot cause I'm just going to wait until the price drops or buy it used (with $0 of that sale going to the publisher).
I posted this to my own journal last night, where a friend who happens to be more discerning than I dug up the same information that's in these comments. The parent article should be amended to point out that commenters have found that the guy is probably at least GUILTY of copyright infringement (which his own account of events carefully leaves out) before soliciting donations for his legal defense.
I'm not going to spend $30 on a game that a new player can beat in 5 hours (the Metroid GBA games) or $50 for a game I can beat in a week. Not when I can rent the game from Blockbuster for that week for $5, see most of the content in the game (let's face it - playing the same game again on a harder difficulty level is still the same game), and return it for another one. Say I'm really liking the game and only halfway through it at the end of the week, I just renew it and still wind up with $40 more to spend on games I HAVEN'T finished yet. The only games actually worth full-priced retail purchase ARE the ones that will provide a month's worth of entertainment. (Note: ACTUAL play time, the advertised number is always a significant overstatement.)
For the first time in recent memory I'm at a point where I might reasonably consider having the time to play an MMORPG. And here they are announcing that fundamental issues with the game are a lower priority than the next paid expansion pack. Problem is that, as a new potential customer, I'd MUCH rather buy one product that works well than buy TWO products that both have flaws (as I'm to understand new releases usually do). (Complete ignorance talking here - does one at least get extra "free" play time with the expansion packs, or do you only get that for the base game?) Looks like a good way to get me to look at FFXI/CoH/WoW instead....
Unlike the Field of Dreams, having the system in place does nothing to actually see the faculty trained in the use of the devices. From my experience as a recent college grad reading the alumni bulletins, this sounds suspiciously like one of those improvements a school makes solely to CLAIM it's made them, with relatively little regard to whether the money is well-spent in terms of its students' education.
"See, we're hip, we're constantly updating to the times, and we can only keep doing this if you give us all your money! Information on how to leave us your estate is enclosed (I'm not kidding about that part)."
Though I suppose at least in this case the students get a free iPod out of the deal.
If there's one feature MMORPG's could add to make me more likely to play them, it's an account hibernation feature where I could quit if I knew I wasn't going to have time to play this month and resubscribe later. This would clearly not be a prohibitive cost, since DAoC has just done exactly this without even having been asked in advance as a "win back players who've left" tactic.
Of course, this feature is the opposite of the MMORPG business model. Those of us who play sufficiently infrequently to consider hibernating an account any given month? We're the customers they want to keep MOST because we're the ones they're making the most profit off of. Fact is, this industry uses the casual players and ones who try and dislike the game to subsidize the ones who make the game their second job. And that, as a member of the former group, I don't like.
Don't they realize their job is to produce easily counterable products that keep AV software writers in business? You might think they actually wanted their viruses to suceed or something....
If the EFF is to be believed, the pending super-DMCA, intended to overturn the current Supreme Court ruling saying that technology which has "substantial noninfringing uses" can't be withdrawn from the marketplace (Sony was one of the parties RE: the VCR), will allow just such lawsuits. It was posted here a week or two ago.
Personally, backwards compatibility on the PS2 meant buying it months earlier, as I otherwise would have been unwilling to drop FF IX midway. But the question is what portion of the X-Box 1 owners market who WOULD buy the new Box if it had compatibility WON'T if it doesn't. The fact is that early adoptors of consoles are willing to put up with high prices and forced bundling by retailers in the days when demand outpaces supply. (See the unopened extra PS2 controller and the copy of Star Wars: Starfighter I haven't touched since the week I got and finished it.) I don't think having to switch consoles to play the old games will be a big road block to selling the new console. And remember that, in a game company's eyes, selling a new game is making money, while encouraging me to play games I've already paid for (or worse bought used, with all the money going to the reseller) is squandering the limited gaming hours I might otherwise buy new games occupy. Maybe not the most consumer friendly decision, but then they ARE trying to make money....
Back when I subscribed to EGM (in the days when IGN was free) I found that 75% of the content was stuff that I'd known about for months (take E3 screenshots for instance, which would usually show up 2-3 issues after the show happened). The only times something would be new is if the magazine extracted an exclusivity clause in exchange for a cover story or whatnot (essentially publicity for the game). This news article didn't specify what the lead time for the digital magazine was, but I'll venture a guess that if they need to make a layout and get everything in final, ready to send to the printers format there's going to be a decent lag. If they don't want the electronic form coming out a full month before the print version gets to their loyal, directly paying, print subscribers, the publishers might be enforcing a longer delay. Somehow I think that I'd rather spend my gaming info buck on a website with a better lead time....
(And here's an amusing summary/parody of the thing for those who are up for a little MST3K style ribbing at it.)
I said "AFAIK" and now stand corrected - a quick search and I see that Star Wars Galaxies also charges $15 a month, meaning the MMORPG industry has undergone significant inflation since I decided it was overpriced at $9.99 a month and stopped paying attention. (A Slashdot games post on CoH's release gave me the mistaken impression that the $15 price point was high.)
:-/
And we're both agreed that it's more than possible to play games casually, in a relationship or otherwise. I just maintain that a game that gives infinitely better gaming value per dollar spent to the crowd that spends, say, 4 hours every day in one month, 120 hours for $15, than someone who plays that same 120 hours over the course of SIX months for $90, is inherently unfriendly to the casual gamer. The fact that other games are EVEN WORSE to casual players isn't really a good defense to that point.
Pay $15 a month, AFAIK 50% more than any other major MMORPG on the market, for a month of use-it-or-lose-it gaming time. If you're playing it for only an hour every other day, you're paying a lot more per gaming hour than you are when you buy a game like Baldur's Gate that doesn't go away after a month. Don't get me wrong, I realize it's a flaw of the whole genre (though those crazy kids at Guild Wars seem to think otherwise), but then I (as a casual gamer) won't touch the rest of the genre for the same reason.
Chances that you can offer her a substitute when she actually wants attention from you are not good. Chances that there will be times when she's checking email/websurfing on another machince, reading books, on the phone, watching TV, doing things with her friends (not sure what the modern, not-old-people equivalent of the bridge club is) are usually pretty high. I've had moderate luck playing games that can be picked up and put down easily while the girlfriend stops to smell the proverbial flowers (hm... providing actual flowers might work too).
The downside is that this method is better suited for single player games than cooperative play for obvious reasons. Coordinating schedules makes things more difficult. Of course, these things are all relative. Most reasonable girls would understand one games night a week and most would feel neglected if you wanted to play several hours a night, but YMMV. (Unfortunately, CoH's $15 monthly use it or lose it access makes infrequent gaming a terrible value - this is the reason I won't touch the game.)
All that said, your question sort of misses the point. Time is the only limited resource that you can't get more of. If you want to spend your time one way and your girlfriend wants to spend it another, ultimately one of you is going to get what you want and one is going to have to settle for something else. In a good, healthy relationship the two of you are going to do your best to try and accomodate each other's wants equally, but at the end of the day you DO need to choose one or the other. (Unsolicited relationship advice: In the absence of any other information, my opinion is that if you have to think about it too hard, you're not with the right girl.)
Take a game like Metroid Fusion, which retails for $30 and can be finished by a novice in around 5 hours. Sure, they've designed the thing for you to try speed runs and whatnot, but most gamers, myself included, A) don't care about shaving a few minutes off the completion speed and B) expect more value for the gaming buck than that. Why shouldn't I pay half price on EBay for a used game that I literally won't buy retail because I don't think it's worth what they're charging? If anything, I'm snatching up a deal that leaves one less used game out there that someone who actually WILL buy it new might otherwise have gotten.
Here's a link to the abstract of their actual paper on the topic. Technically, this is news from last Sept, though I suppose it's good to get mainstream press where possible so everyone knows where their taxpayer funded $200K is going. :)
I find most games these days too EASY, not too hard. Maybe that's because I play RPG's and don't mind taking time out to kill a few extra monsters if it gets me the next ability or whatever. But I've become all too accustomed to ploughing through $50 games without the HINT of challenge, with characters who don't take significant amounts of damage and kill anything in a few hits. Or look at the new Metroid games, where you can expect to finish a $30 GBA game in 5 hours of play and the designers have had to DESIGN the thing for speed runs in order to squeeze any semblance of replay value out of it. And then we have platformers (or even RPG's) where the "challenge" is simply nigh unavoidable threats that you are most likely to "beat" by memorizing level layouts and reacting to them in advance. Guess that might be why people want to play PVP stuff most of the time these days....