Last time I checked, the actual tools used were GUNS. Unless the grainy video of the shootings that I've seen somehow managed to blur out them hurling CDs at hapless classmates Tron-style.
At the risk of sounding like a luddite, you guys should get rid of the voting machines entirely.
In Canada we hand-count our ballots and the last time there was a major election in our country (2000), we voted after your election day and knew our results before you knew yours.
Bioware does the CD key thing for its boards. How it works is that there are some forums that are open only to people with the appropriate CD key and other forums that are open to anyone at all. In addition, overly abusive people can have their CD Keys banned from posting for various periods of time.
As someone with a registered CD key, it's been my experience that the signal to noise ratio is much, much higher in the forums where people are required to have at least purchased the game before they can go off. As a result, a larger portion of the Dev team tends to hang out on those boards and chat with people and help them out and engage in banter and everything else.
Well, more to the point, assuming that Valve releases somftware that you want to buy every six months, it's a deal. That's a funny kind of gamble that I'm not yet willing to take.
Mind you it doesn't matter whether or not I take that gamble. Tech advances and changes in distribution structure require a bunch of early adopters to test things out and so on. Then if it works well enough and seems stable, the mass market well jump on the bandwagon.
So I won' be signing up for Steam right away, but I'll be watching it, and if in a year or two, it becomes clear that the Steam system is pipings tons of great content, then I'd switch over. At the moment, Valve's track record doesn't really point to a release schedule that justifies that kind of subscriptions but these guys have deep pockets and pretty good business sense, it seems to me, so they can aford to take a few business risks and try things out.
Which is the most verbose way of saying "wait and see" I've ever seen.
Actually, I think that the fact that big budget companies think that 100,000 copies (or whatever the number is) is a flop is encouraging. It means that the medium as a whole has become more mass market which means that there is a lot more room for niche developers - much like there is a whole lot of room in the movies now for art films, independent films and so on.
Does everyone involved in making these lower budget, lower market films/games become crazy rich? No, of course not. But a big budget studio's flop is a small potatoes designer's monthly rent and food.
There are a lot of developers that you've never heard of making games you don't know about. But it doesn't matter because *enough* people are buying their games that they are making a living.
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Good point. I mean this article certainly wasn't up to the crack journalistic snuff of the "There's going to be a BSD conference in the future!" article.
If OS geeks can get excited about upcoming OS releases, then gaming geeks can get excited about upcoming game releases.
Last time I checked, the actual tools used were GUNS. Unless the grainy video of the shootings that I've seen somehow managed to blur out them hurling CDs at hapless classmates Tron-style.
At the risk of sounding like a luddite, you guys should get rid of the voting machines entirely.
In Canada we hand-count our ballots and the last time there was a major election in our country (2000), we voted after your election day and knew our results before you knew yours.
Bioware does the CD key thing for its boards. How it works is that there are some forums that are open only to people with the appropriate CD key and other forums that are open to anyone at all. In addition, overly abusive people can have their CD Keys banned from posting for various periods of time.
As someone with a registered CD key, it's been my experience that the signal to noise ratio is much, much higher in the forums where people are required to have at least purchased the game before they can go off. As a result, a larger portion of the Dev team tends to hang out on those boards and chat with people and help them out and engage in banter and everything else.
Everyone wins but the trolls.
Well, more to the point, assuming that Valve releases somftware that you want to buy every six months, it's a deal. That's a funny kind of gamble that I'm not yet willing to take.
Mind you it doesn't matter whether or not I take that gamble. Tech advances and changes in distribution structure require a bunch of early adopters to test things out and so on. Then if it works well enough and seems stable, the mass market well jump on the bandwagon.
So I won' be signing up for Steam right away, but I'll be watching it, and if in a year or two, it becomes clear that the Steam system is pipings tons of great content, then I'd switch over. At the moment, Valve's track record doesn't really point to a release schedule that justifies that kind of subscriptions but these guys have deep pockets and pretty good business sense, it seems to me, so they can aford to take a few business risks and try things out.
Which is the most verbose way of saying "wait and see" I've ever seen.
Actually, I think that the fact that big budget companies think that 100,000 copies (or whatever the number is) is a flop is encouraging. It means that the medium as a whole has become more mass market which means that there is a lot more room for niche developers - much like there is a whole lot of room in the movies now for art films, independent films and so on.
Does everyone involved in making these lower budget, lower market films/games become crazy rich? No, of course not. But a big budget studio's flop is a small potatoes designer's monthly rent and food.
There are a lot of developers that you've never heard of making games you don't know about. But it doesn't matter because *enough* people are buying their games that they are making a living.