Film projectors and TVs were thought to be the "magic bullet" that would be so educational but really just allow the teacher and student to turn off their brains. Another problem with TV is that a lot of schools got them in exchange for running the advertising to the students.
And what tool works better to educate people than TV? I notice most students know what their hiphop hero Eminem is doing and can recite the lyrics. They remember every plot in the matrix. Yet that same student cannot remember (insert boring required school reading) or (insert boring required math assignment)
The reason is because, people do not learn well from reading books. Reading a book takes more effort than watching tv or listening to a lecture. Why is it that somehow college teaches in a realworld way, suddenly it all just clicks and everyone knows people learn from TV and so TV is used, lectures are used, etc but in highschool they just hand out text books.
This just means the student who likes to read will learn to read, the student who likes math will learn math, the rest wont learn shit because its not taught in a way which is universal.
If all music were encoded into notation and lyrics were posted onto a website, only musicians would appreciate music. Only musicians would like music. Because music is packaged in a way that someone can with no effort at all listen to and memorize the lyrics and hear the melodies, almost everyone likes music, almost everyone likes tv and almost everyone likes the internet.
All of us like to read slashdot articles but how many of you would like to read a book on how to improve grammar, or a book on some esoteric new math?
Well, computer science is not what most students are being taught with computers. Many teachers, like most people in our society, do not entirely realize that computer programs are mathematical functions, nor that they are something that ordinary human beings can learn to write.
Yet ordinary students are supposed to be able to learn algebra and calculus both which are alot more complicated and harder to grasp by the average mind than C, C++, or basic computer use.
I still can't figure calculus out and I suck at algebra, yet I can code in C, Java, Visual Basic, C++, Python, Qbasic, HTML etc you get the picture.
And its funny how we dont complain at all when it comes to using these things in college. No its only when its used in gradeschool that somehow its a problem.
Look, wiseup! This is 2003 not 1903. We do not need to teach kids using old technology. Class sizes are getting bigger, how are we going to teach 100 students? With a chalk board and books? There will never be enough books for every student and it would be a waste of money. Whats the solution? Use computers! DUH! Suddenly you can teach 100-500 students easily and its proven. Look at college campuses where professors routinely teach 400-500 students in a big room using computers, projectors, and the internet such as blackboard.
Maybe if we applied the tools to teach big classes to highschol we'd educate better, but of course our grade school education is subpar because we refuse to use the new technology.
The replacement should be to use computers.
No we should not ship standard computers running windowsXP and just throw them in a classroom, but I'm in college and our teachers have projectors and smartboards which are internet ready, we have computers which are used properly. We have wi-fi networks. The problem is not that computers are bad, its that most school systems suck and we just toss computers at them when they dont truely know how to use them.
Maybe they can learn something from colleges on how to teach hundreds of students in a classroom using computers to assist.
ok with Mario you may be right, but most sequels are never completely redone.
All of the sonic the hedgehog games use the same engine. All of the madden games use the same engine. The engine is developed once for the system and all sequels use that engine.
With starwars however new actors which cost millions of dollars, are added and each movie costs hundreds of millions to make.
What I'm trying to prove is, Sonic makes Sega so much money because its always the same engine, same play mechanics, with only an additional character and perhaps new level designs.
Sonic 1 was just sonic. Sonic 2 added tails. Sonic 3 added knuckles. Sonic + Knuckles added knuckles to the original sonic games, Sonic CD was sonic 1 with tons of levels, The first truely new sonic game? Sonic 3d blast, and that was not developed b y Sega. Sonic Adventure the first new Sonic game by Sonic Team. Sonic Adventure 2 was an improved Sonic Adventure, Sonic Heroes and the current Sonic Games cost very little to make but sell millions of copies each.
So lets say Sega spent 5 million developing Sonic Adventure and they earn 50 million in revenue. Then Sonic Adventure 2 earns 40-50 million and lets say Sega only spent 1 million dollars to upgrade the original Sonic Adventure to Sonic Adventure 2? So twice as much money while investment in development is going down, Sonic Heroes prolly required less than a million dollars to develop and with most money going into marketing etc perhaps 3-4 million overall cost, how much will it sell? Maybe a million copies.
A million copies sold even if it were for 40 bucks would make Sega a good 40 million, and because its a Sonic game it can easily sell 3-4 million copies and at 40 bucks a copy make Sega well over 100 million. So Sega can profit 100 million from each sequel to Sonic the hedgehog, same game, same team, just upgrades to the same game making all this money.
Movies on the other hand, even sequels, they usually cost alot to make. The Matrix and lord of the ring are exceptions as they were designed to rake in profits but most movies arent like those.
Mario, Madden and other series have sold hundreds of millions of copies.
Madden is essentially a re-release of the same game with a few updates to players, and it consistantly sells millions with each release. Mario sold over 20 million copies on the NES.
" Likewise, artistic labor capable of producing original works is scarce. "
Wrong. A lot of people have artistic talent, far more than the market can support. You can only afford to buy so many CDs, or watch so many movies. Its the competition between that talent and the monopoly on that talent which creates the illusion of scarce artistic labor market.
This same illusion existed in the tech industry, of the scarce tech labor market and this was used to support outsourcing. Well guess what? Now we are losing our jobs because of oursourcing and companies are increasing profits.
There is no shortage of artistic or technical labor, there is no shortage of music. There is enough music for each of us to listen to a new song every day for the rest of our entire lives. There is no shortage of movies, none of us have seen every single good movie. There are enough good and even great movies for us all to watch a new movie every day for the rest of our lives and be entertained.
These movies may not have been made last year or even in this decade but the more movies we create the less new movies we need to create. Maybe if we made old movies free we would not need to pay millions of dollars to create new movies.
In japan they do not spend millions of dollars on movies, the anime industry was created to save money while creating high quality movies. We could do that in the USA, we do not need 100 versions of the matrix, or 200 star wars clones.
Show me proof that spider man took in a billion dollars revenue. I'm sorry but theres no way ill believe that spider man took in a billion worldwide. Maybe starwars over the course of 10-20 years but not spiderman.
How could piracy make the price rise when the price is going to rise anyway?
The goal of a company is to raise the price of products, the goal of the consumer is to lower the price.
Piracy is our tool to fight monopolies.
But I'd like to point out here that most gaming companies don't make money. Large publishers, who are in the best position to be raking it in, are merely scraping by. Nintendo and Microsoft lost money last quarter. Gaming companies are not greedy monopolists keeping prices high because they want to milk their position. Game companies keep prices high because they are afraid of losing money.
First the retailer can be completely taken out of the picture. Blizzard and other companies sell directly to customers via the net.
We're in a small pool, in other words. To stay afloat, game companies need to keep prices high. I would like to believe that lower prices would increase demand, but I have seen companies attempt to go down that route with little success. The fact of the matter is that most people don't play games: they feel they are a "waste of time," and "for kids." One could argue the hipocracy of clinging to the puritanical belief in a lack of wasted effort in a society where the average person watches 4 hours of television per day, but it is (I fear) the latter perception is the more insidious and will only be overcome in a herse.
There are hundreds of millions of gamers. I'd say in the USA most people do play games. I'd also say that in the world people are starting to spend more money on games than on movies. Korea spends a fortune on games. So does Japan.
The problem is not that the gaming industry is not profitable. Sega went around spending a fortune on game development and lost money, when they finally started selling their games for reasonable prices and finally decided to make sequels and reuse game engines it was too late. Dreamcast died because Sega used a flawed business model. Their model was to spend as much money to make the best game possible without even thinking about the profitability of the game. Sega would have had a successful system and would have made a fortune if every game they released were a Sonic based game or a Sega sports game. In the gaming industry innovation often hurts profitability so you want to make the same game over and over again.
Warcraft 1, Warcraft 2, Diablo, Starcraft, Diablo 2, Warcraft 3, Starcraft Ghost, World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, etc.
You make sequel after sequel, the first game you break even, the sequel you aim to profit.
What movie has ever sold 100 million tickets? Name one movie?
So 100 million people go to see movies and 100 million people buy games, looks comparable on paper.
Movies on the otherhand have hundres of thousands of screens to show on, and that's _before_ you take it to DVD to squeeze every last dollar out. (Not to mention off to HBO, Pay-per-view, airplanes, then the networks, then on to syndication on TBS.) Most movies will eventually break even through video, DVD sales, merchendizing and TV rights. Most games fail because once you sell it, that's it. So you have to take the $50 up front from the much smaller market.
Only hardcore fans buy DVDs now. Theres a revenue stream for internet gaming and MMORPGs for games thats comparable to the HBO/PPV revenue stream of movies.
Game prices have come down due to piracy of the CD format.
What is your point? You havent stated anything that everyone doesnt already know.
The model has nothing to do with it. People usually go see movies once or twice so a movie even if you see it twice makes less than a game. If you rent a movie it makes less than a game. Only rich people or hardcore fans actually buy movies.
Game companies have multiple profit streams as well. Blizzard made money from battlenet, they also will make money charging $10 a month for world of warcraft, Blizzard makes money selling their engine for world of warcraft to other companies. Blizzard makes money via patents on the Diablo skill system which was used in Asheronscall and other games.
Seems to me Blizzards games continue to get more complicated. Go to a store and see Starcraft sell for 10 bucks.
Starcraft made Blizzard a fortune, I'm talking hundreds of millions of dollars. 5 million copies of starcraft sold, and maybe a million copies of Broodwar.
Warcraft 2 sold over a million copies and people purchased the addon.
Diablo 2 sold millions,
Warcraft 3 sold millions, and the addon sold more millions.
Blizzard is spending a fortune on WOW, but all of the games before World of Warcraft did not cost alot of money to make, did not have fancy 3d graphics, and made Blizzard a fortune.
The formula is simple, make good games and you'll make a fortune, make bad games and you go bankrupt.
Sega spent a fortune on games like Shenmue, but guess which game made Sega the most money? Sonic Adventure!
Not Shenmue!
Blizzard games routinely sell over 5 million copies. Blizzard routinely makes 100 million or so from just about every game they sell. This is revenue, the direct profits may be more like 30 million, but that 30 million does add up.
Ask EA.
You'd hire your own programmers, write your own 3d engine, spend millions of dollars writing it, and release a piece of crap game which has good graphics.
Look, people can license a good 3d engine, and theres many to choose from. There is no reason to write your own realtime 3d engine when theres a million companies trying to license them to you. Turbine licenses 3d engines, pay them and you can use their state of the art engine.
Basically, you need the eye candy to sell the game, but the eye candy support in the API layer is shitty and nonstandard. It's tough, so you try to make tradeoffs that will let you sell well to the high end gamer market without losing too much of the casual gamer market, and deal with undiscovered hardware dependencies though patches.
Eye candy alone does not sell games. Quake does not sell because of eye candy, the game looks ugly, its in a closed in area, its dark, it sells because its a shooting game that people like.
Look I could find an open source 3d engine, and hire programmers to make a game out of that. I admit the engine wouldnt be as good as an expensive licensed engine but i'm proving to you there are ways to save money.
If you are doing a big budget 3D game you can afford a horde of testers with a sufficiently broad variety of test hardware to detect _most_ of the major issues up front, but this requires a substantial budget.
You pay one or two testers, then you offer a demo or announce on your website you are looking for beta testers and let the world test it for free.
You do not have to pay alot of beta testers.
That's absurd. The market for movies is huge, compared to the market for PC games.
Actually the game and movie market are compareable. Do your research or shut the hell up.
Game development shops, for the most part, run small, low margin businesses. Your calculation is absurd, because the game that sells a million copies returns about 2 million to the developer, 3-4 million to the publisher, 3 million to retailers, and the rest to assorted other folks.
I said a game which costs 3 million dollars to make. This includes publishing and everything else. Games usually cost between 3-5 million dollars total, which means this is how much money the game company needs to make to break even. That includes paying for everything including marketing and publishing.
As for whether publishers and distributers take a bigger cut in the gaming business than the movie business, that's a toughie - I don't know enough to say for sure. But a successful movie might take in 50-100 million dollars so there is more to go around.
A successful game such as Final Fantasy, or an EA sports game like Madden can easily take in 50-100 million dollars. PC games like Starcraft which were very cheap to make, take in hundreds of millions of dollars. Starcraft is one of the best selling PC games of all time, sold well over 5 million copies, and at the time under 5 million to make. When each copy sells for $20, thats 100 million dollars from 5 million sold.
Try writing a 3D game, which has to run on EVERYBODY'S PC and compare to doing some animations in Maya, which just have to look good from one angle and get rendered once. Not dissing on the Matrix or other heavy-FX movies, but it's really a hell of a lot of work to support and distribute a modern 3D PC game.
What if I told you I have? Listen you do not know shit about the game industry. Game companies do not write 3d engines they license them from other companies, or use open source engines and add onto them. Sega was one of the few companies which did not do this and they went bankrupt after making games like Shenmue. Most smart and profitable game companies however use the same engine over and over again for all their games.
This, of course, is why nobody really wants to develop for the flooded PC market and why the console market exists, if you are well capitalized and can afford to hire the right people, get all the SDKs and negotiate good terms.
The problem with the PC market is the hardware keeps changing, and its the most competitive market. People do develop for the PC market, where do you think new companies start? The PC market is where you make your first couple of hits and then you move on to the console market, its rare for a company to start in the console market because you have to pay Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo a fee just to make games for their system. The fee is not small.
Please do some research before you comment again.
1 Games cost around 3 - 5 million to make, except for the rare Sega game like Shenmue which costs 50-80 million to make and 50 million more to market.
2 Game companies license 3d engines from other companies and rarely develop their own. This is done to save money, you cannot do this in the movie industry.
3 Game companies make sequels which require almost no new code, with added levels, a new musical score, and some new marketing, its basically repackaging the same game over and over and profiting off of it. Check out Tomb Raider and Madden.
4 The PC market is the only market you can start in because the console market is for big compaines only. You will pay so much in license fees that you'd be better off making your game for the PC.
When console games were cartidges the cost was much higher than CDs. Now you can buy console games for 10 bucks. Piracy is a good price control/ceiling. Go above the ceiling and people pirate, price it just right and people pay.
Same applies with music and movies.
Creators? You mean publishers and digital rights owners.
The owners jack up the price to make more money regardless of piracy. Piracy is not as popular in the USA and our copies of Windows and our movies and music was selling at almost $25 and headed toward 30.
P2P came along and changed the dynamics and now the price for music is going down. Seems to me the only way to fight a monopoly is with piracy because as long as they have complete power over you it makes perfect business sense to set your product at as high of a price as you think we will pay.
Guess what, its the piracy which brings prices down, if everyone stopped pirating and suddenly Microsoft earned more money, Microsoft would just raise the price and try to earn even more money, raising the price each year by a dollar or so.
I went to see the matrix revolutions which had all those special effects and then some for under $10.
Games ARE over priced for sure, because movies cost more to make than games.
Music is ridiculously over priced at $20 a CD when they cost less than $1 to make.
A good game costs a few million to make and easily makes millions of dollars back if it sells a million copies at $10 a copy.
10x1 million = 10 million dollars, if the game took 3 million to make, thats a nice profit margin.
Piracy is whats lowering the price of music CDs accross the country. Piracy is what keeps Microsoft from selling Windows for over $500 a copy to college students. Its piracy that controls a monopoly and prevents the company from setting the price.
Please support P2P and piracy so that we can force these monopolys to work via supply and demand.
I'll never buy another RIAA CD, but I know alot of people would if they were $5 each
Look, now we do this? Now we use money in the open source world? If the Gnome people were smart they'd host a UI design contest and use money to get a better interface because I'm sorry, the Gnome designers just do not have a clue when it comes to useability. They are geeks and programmers! They would be better of letting us normal people decide what features we want.
Currently Gnome is unusable because they keep removing features THEY (The geeks) dont like. KDE is for me because KDE listens to its users.
Slashdot Mirror
Film projectors and TVs were thought to be the "magic bullet" that would be so educational but really just allow the teacher and student to turn off their brains. Another problem with TV is that a lot of schools got them in exchange for running the advertising to the students. And what tool works better to educate people than TV? I notice most students know what their hiphop hero Eminem is doing and can recite the lyrics. They remember every plot in the matrix. Yet that same student cannot remember (insert boring required school reading) or (insert boring required math assignment) The reason is because, people do not learn well from reading books. Reading a book takes more effort than watching tv or listening to a lecture. Why is it that somehow college teaches in a realworld way, suddenly it all just clicks and everyone knows people learn from TV and so TV is used, lectures are used, etc but in highschool they just hand out text books. This just means the student who likes to read will learn to read, the student who likes math will learn math, the rest wont learn shit because its not taught in a way which is universal. If all music were encoded into notation and lyrics were posted onto a website, only musicians would appreciate music. Only musicians would like music. Because music is packaged in a way that someone can with no effort at all listen to and memorize the lyrics and hear the melodies, almost everyone likes music, almost everyone likes tv and almost everyone likes the internet. All of us like to read slashdot articles but how many of you would like to read a book on how to improve grammar, or a book on some esoteric new math?
Well, computer science is not what most students are being taught with computers. Many teachers, like most people in our society, do not entirely realize that computer programs are mathematical functions, nor that they are something that ordinary human beings can learn to write. Yet ordinary students are supposed to be able to learn algebra and calculus both which are alot more complicated and harder to grasp by the average mind than C, C++, or basic computer use. I still can't figure calculus out and I suck at algebra, yet I can code in C, Java, Visual Basic, C++, Python, Qbasic, HTML etc you get the picture.
And its funny how we dont complain at all when it comes to using these things in college. No its only when its used in gradeschool that somehow its a problem.
Look, wiseup! This is 2003 not 1903. We do not need to teach kids using old technology. Class sizes are getting bigger, how are we going to teach 100 students? With a chalk board and books? There will never be enough books for every student and it would be a waste of money. Whats the solution? Use computers! DUH! Suddenly you can teach 100-500 students easily and its proven. Look at college campuses where professors routinely teach 400-500 students in a big room using computers, projectors, and the internet such as blackboard.
Maybe if we applied the tools to teach big classes to highschol we'd educate better, but of course our grade school education is subpar because we refuse to use the new technology.
The replacement should be to use computers. No we should not ship standard computers running windowsXP and just throw them in a classroom, but I'm in college and our teachers have projectors and smartboards which are internet ready, we have computers which are used properly. We have wi-fi networks. The problem is not that computers are bad, its that most school systems suck and we just toss computers at them when they dont truely know how to use them. Maybe they can learn something from colleges on how to teach hundreds of students in a classroom using computers to assist.
ok with Mario you may be right, but most sequels are never completely redone. All of the sonic the hedgehog games use the same engine. All of the madden games use the same engine. The engine is developed once for the system and all sequels use that engine. With starwars however new actors which cost millions of dollars, are added and each movie costs hundreds of millions to make. What I'm trying to prove is, Sonic makes Sega so much money because its always the same engine, same play mechanics, with only an additional character and perhaps new level designs. Sonic 1 was just sonic. Sonic 2 added tails. Sonic 3 added knuckles. Sonic + Knuckles added knuckles to the original sonic games, Sonic CD was sonic 1 with tons of levels, The first truely new sonic game? Sonic 3d blast, and that was not developed b y Sega. Sonic Adventure the first new Sonic game by Sonic Team. Sonic Adventure 2 was an improved Sonic Adventure, Sonic Heroes and the current Sonic Games cost very little to make but sell millions of copies each. So lets say Sega spent 5 million developing Sonic Adventure and they earn 50 million in revenue. Then Sonic Adventure 2 earns 40-50 million and lets say Sega only spent 1 million dollars to upgrade the original Sonic Adventure to Sonic Adventure 2? So twice as much money while investment in development is going down, Sonic Heroes prolly required less than a million dollars to develop and with most money going into marketing etc perhaps 3-4 million overall cost, how much will it sell? Maybe a million copies. A million copies sold even if it were for 40 bucks would make Sega a good 40 million, and because its a Sonic game it can easily sell 3-4 million copies and at 40 bucks a copy make Sega well over 100 million. So Sega can profit 100 million from each sequel to Sonic the hedgehog, same game, same team, just upgrades to the same game making all this money. Movies on the other hand, even sequels, they usually cost alot to make. The Matrix and lord of the ring are exceptions as they were designed to rake in profits but most movies arent like those.
Mario, Madden and other series have sold hundreds of millions of copies. Madden is essentially a re-release of the same game with a few updates to players, and it consistantly sells millions with each release. Mario sold over 20 million copies on the NES.
" Likewise, artistic labor capable of producing original works is scarce. " Wrong. A lot of people have artistic talent, far more than the market can support. You can only afford to buy so many CDs, or watch so many movies. Its the competition between that talent and the monopoly on that talent which creates the illusion of scarce artistic labor market. This same illusion existed in the tech industry, of the scarce tech labor market and this was used to support outsourcing. Well guess what? Now we are losing our jobs because of oursourcing and companies are increasing profits. There is no shortage of artistic or technical labor, there is no shortage of music. There is enough music for each of us to listen to a new song every day for the rest of our entire lives. There is no shortage of movies, none of us have seen every single good movie. There are enough good and even great movies for us all to watch a new movie every day for the rest of our lives and be entertained. These movies may not have been made last year or even in this decade but the more movies we create the less new movies we need to create. Maybe if we made old movies free we would not need to pay millions of dollars to create new movies. In japan they do not spend millions of dollars on movies, the anime industry was created to save money while creating high quality movies. We could do that in the USA, we do not need 100 versions of the matrix, or 200 star wars clones.
wow you picked the perfect time to study in the USA, how the hell did you mananage to make $13 an hour when I'm making 8?
Show me proof that spider man took in a billion dollars revenue. I'm sorry but theres no way ill believe that spider man took in a billion worldwide. Maybe starwars over the course of 10-20 years but not spiderman.
How could piracy make the price rise when the price is going to rise anyway? The goal of a company is to raise the price of products, the goal of the consumer is to lower the price. Piracy is our tool to fight monopolies.
But I'd like to point out here that most gaming companies don't make money. Large publishers, who are in the best position to be raking it in, are merely scraping by. Nintendo and Microsoft lost money last quarter. Gaming companies are not greedy monopolists keeping prices high because they want to milk their position. Game companies keep prices high because they are afraid of losing money. First the retailer can be completely taken out of the picture. Blizzard and other companies sell directly to customers via the net. We're in a small pool, in other words. To stay afloat, game companies need to keep prices high. I would like to believe that lower prices would increase demand, but I have seen companies attempt to go down that route with little success. The fact of the matter is that most people don't play games: they feel they are a "waste of time," and "for kids." One could argue the hipocracy of clinging to the puritanical belief in a lack of wasted effort in a society where the average person watches 4 hours of television per day, but it is (I fear) the latter perception is the more insidious and will only be overcome in a herse. There are hundreds of millions of gamers. I'd say in the USA most people do play games. I'd also say that in the world people are starting to spend more money on games than on movies. Korea spends a fortune on games. So does Japan. The problem is not that the gaming industry is not profitable. Sega went around spending a fortune on game development and lost money, when they finally started selling their games for reasonable prices and finally decided to make sequels and reuse game engines it was too late. Dreamcast died because Sega used a flawed business model. Their model was to spend as much money to make the best game possible without even thinking about the profitability of the game. Sega would have had a successful system and would have made a fortune if every game they released were a Sonic based game or a Sega sports game. In the gaming industry innovation often hurts profitability so you want to make the same game over and over again. Warcraft 1, Warcraft 2, Diablo, Starcraft, Diablo 2, Warcraft 3, Starcraft Ghost, World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, etc. You make sequel after sequel, the first game you break even, the sequel you aim to profit.
What movie has ever sold 100 million tickets? Name one movie? So 100 million people go to see movies and 100 million people buy games, looks comparable on paper. Movies on the otherhand have hundres of thousands of screens to show on, and that's _before_ you take it to DVD to squeeze every last dollar out. (Not to mention off to HBO, Pay-per-view, airplanes, then the networks, then on to syndication on TBS.) Most movies will eventually break even through video, DVD sales, merchendizing and TV rights. Most games fail because once you sell it, that's it. So you have to take the $50 up front from the much smaller market. Only hardcore fans buy DVDs now. Theres a revenue stream for internet gaming and MMORPGs for games thats comparable to the HBO/PPV revenue stream of movies. Game prices have come down due to piracy of the CD format. What is your point? You havent stated anything that everyone doesnt already know.
The model has nothing to do with it. People usually go see movies once or twice so a movie even if you see it twice makes less than a game. If you rent a movie it makes less than a game. Only rich people or hardcore fans actually buy movies. Game companies have multiple profit streams as well. Blizzard made money from battlenet, they also will make money charging $10 a month for world of warcraft, Blizzard makes money selling their engine for world of warcraft to other companies. Blizzard makes money via patents on the Diablo skill system which was used in Asheronscall and other games.
Seems to me Blizzards games continue to get more complicated. Go to a store and see Starcraft sell for 10 bucks. Starcraft made Blizzard a fortune, I'm talking hundreds of millions of dollars. 5 million copies of starcraft sold, and maybe a million copies of Broodwar. Warcraft 2 sold over a million copies and people purchased the addon. Diablo 2 sold millions, Warcraft 3 sold millions, and the addon sold more millions. Blizzard is spending a fortune on WOW, but all of the games before World of Warcraft did not cost alot of money to make, did not have fancy 3d graphics, and made Blizzard a fortune. The formula is simple, make good games and you'll make a fortune, make bad games and you go bankrupt. Sega spent a fortune on games like Shenmue, but guess which game made Sega the most money? Sonic Adventure! Not Shenmue!
Blizzard games routinely sell over 5 million copies. Blizzard routinely makes 100 million or so from just about every game they sell. This is revenue, the direct profits may be more like 30 million, but that 30 million does add up. Ask EA.
You'd hire your own programmers, write your own 3d engine, spend millions of dollars writing it, and release a piece of crap game which has good graphics. Look, people can license a good 3d engine, and theres many to choose from. There is no reason to write your own realtime 3d engine when theres a million companies trying to license them to you. Turbine licenses 3d engines, pay them and you can use their state of the art engine. Basically, you need the eye candy to sell the game, but the eye candy support in the API layer is shitty and nonstandard. It's tough, so you try to make tradeoffs that will let you sell well to the high end gamer market without losing too much of the casual gamer market, and deal with undiscovered hardware dependencies though patches. Eye candy alone does not sell games. Quake does not sell because of eye candy, the game looks ugly, its in a closed in area, its dark, it sells because its a shooting game that people like. Look I could find an open source 3d engine, and hire programmers to make a game out of that. I admit the engine wouldnt be as good as an expensive licensed engine but i'm proving to you there are ways to save money. If you are doing a big budget 3D game you can afford a horde of testers with a sufficiently broad variety of test hardware to detect _most_ of the major issues up front, but this requires a substantial budget. You pay one or two testers, then you offer a demo or announce on your website you are looking for beta testers and let the world test it for free. You do not have to pay alot of beta testers.
That's absurd. The market for movies is huge, compared to the market for PC games. Actually the game and movie market are compareable. Do your research or shut the hell up. Game development shops, for the most part, run small, low margin businesses. Your calculation is absurd, because the game that sells a million copies returns about 2 million to the developer, 3-4 million to the publisher, 3 million to retailers, and the rest to assorted other folks. I said a game which costs 3 million dollars to make. This includes publishing and everything else. Games usually cost between 3-5 million dollars total, which means this is how much money the game company needs to make to break even. That includes paying for everything including marketing and publishing. As for whether publishers and distributers take a bigger cut in the gaming business than the movie business, that's a toughie - I don't know enough to say for sure. But a successful movie might take in 50-100 million dollars so there is more to go around. A successful game such as Final Fantasy, or an EA sports game like Madden can easily take in 50-100 million dollars. PC games like Starcraft which were very cheap to make, take in hundreds of millions of dollars. Starcraft is one of the best selling PC games of all time, sold well over 5 million copies, and at the time under 5 million to make. When each copy sells for $20, thats 100 million dollars from 5 million sold. Try writing a 3D game, which has to run on EVERYBODY'S PC and compare to doing some animations in Maya, which just have to look good from one angle and get rendered once. Not dissing on the Matrix or other heavy-FX movies, but it's really a hell of a lot of work to support and distribute a modern 3D PC game. What if I told you I have? Listen you do not know shit about the game industry. Game companies do not write 3d engines they license them from other companies, or use open source engines and add onto them. Sega was one of the few companies which did not do this and they went bankrupt after making games like Shenmue. Most smart and profitable game companies however use the same engine over and over again for all their games. This, of course, is why nobody really wants to develop for the flooded PC market and why the console market exists, if you are well capitalized and can afford to hire the right people, get all the SDKs and negotiate good terms. The problem with the PC market is the hardware keeps changing, and its the most competitive market. People do develop for the PC market, where do you think new companies start? The PC market is where you make your first couple of hits and then you move on to the console market, its rare for a company to start in the console market because you have to pay Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo a fee just to make games for their system. The fee is not small. Please do some research before you comment again. 1 Games cost around 3 - 5 million to make, except for the rare Sega game like Shenmue which costs 50-80 million to make and 50 million more to market. 2 Game companies license 3d engines from other companies and rarely develop their own. This is done to save money, you cannot do this in the movie industry. 3 Game companies make sequels which require almost no new code, with added levels, a new musical score, and some new marketing, its basically repackaging the same game over and over and profiting off of it. Check out Tomb Raider and Madden. 4 The PC market is the only market you can start in because the console market is for big compaines only. You will pay so much in license fees that you'd be better off making your game for the PC.
When console games were cartidges the cost was much higher than CDs. Now you can buy console games for 10 bucks. Piracy is a good price control/ceiling. Go above the ceiling and people pirate, price it just right and people pay. Same applies with music and movies.
Creators? You mean publishers and digital rights owners. The owners jack up the price to make more money regardless of piracy. Piracy is not as popular in the USA and our copies of Windows and our movies and music was selling at almost $25 and headed toward 30. P2P came along and changed the dynamics and now the price for music is going down. Seems to me the only way to fight a monopoly is with piracy because as long as they have complete power over you it makes perfect business sense to set your product at as high of a price as you think we will pay. Guess what, its the piracy which brings prices down, if everyone stopped pirating and suddenly Microsoft earned more money, Microsoft would just raise the price and try to earn even more money, raising the price each year by a dollar or so.
I went to see the matrix revolutions which had all those special effects and then some for under $10. Games ARE over priced for sure, because movies cost more to make than games. Music is ridiculously over priced at $20 a CD when they cost less than $1 to make. A good game costs a few million to make and easily makes millions of dollars back if it sells a million copies at $10 a copy. 10x1 million = 10 million dollars, if the game took 3 million to make, thats a nice profit margin.
Piracy is whats lowering the price of music CDs accross the country. Piracy is what keeps Microsoft from selling Windows for over $500 a copy to college students. Its piracy that controls a monopoly and prevents the company from setting the price. Please support P2P and piracy so that we can force these monopolys to work via supply and demand. I'll never buy another RIAA CD, but I know alot of people would if they were $5 each
"Apple's Expose was a totally original concept that's now been copied by OSS developers." Install the Enlightenment 16 Window manager.
OSX stole this feature from Enlightenment
Just because you have this does not mean these robotic singers have rhythm. Theres more to singing than just melody.
Look, now we do this? Now we use money in the open source world? If the Gnome people were smart they'd host a UI design contest and use money to get a better interface because I'm sorry, the Gnome designers just do not have a clue when it comes to useability. They are geeks and programmers! They would be better of letting us normal people decide what features we want. Currently Gnome is unusable because they keep removing features THEY (The geeks) dont like. KDE is for me because KDE listens to its users.