That was certainly true for the Wii and Wii-U, but I'm not sure it holds up for Nintendo's other consoles. The Gamecube hardware was, by all accounts, good. Better than the PS2's and not far short of the Xbox's. It's still slightly amazing that the PS2 did as well as it did, given it was both underpowered and a complete dog to develop for.
The N64 was more complicated; most of its hardware was pretty decent, but the decision to stick with cartridges rather than move to a CD format for games doomed it in the race with the Playstation. That was probably the most significant point in console-history (I'd rank it above even the Atari-crash, which was strictly a US phenomenon) - the moment Nintendo decided, on the basis of piracy fears, to part way with almost all of its significant third party developers (and also to massively annoy Sony, who had done a load of development work in partnership with Nintendo on CD-based console technology). If the N64 had used CDs, chances are the industry would look completely different today.
In the early days of the 360, MS spent a lot of time and money love-bombing Japanese developers to get them to make games primarily for the Japanese market (though many of them got exported to the West). Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey - the two best Japanese RPGs of the first few years of the last generation - were funded by MS, developed in Japan with Japanese as the primary language and English translations provided later. So language was no issue for those. Similarly, MS pumped a lot of money into Cave, making sure that the 360 got ports of a lot of their most notable arcade machines.
All of which did next to nothing. I'm tempted to say MS did absolutely everything it reasonably could to break into Japan. It still didn't work. I wasn't surprised therefore that they've barely even bothered to try this time around with the Xbox One. The Japanese home console market is in a bad way anyway, so it probably doesn't matter anything like as much as it did a decade ago.
They were talking about Kinect - not the Xbox. And "fastest selling entertainment device" is a flexible term - as you can define whatever period you want to base your judgement on.
Going off this it seems to have managed 8 million sales in 2 months. That's certainly got to be a contender for "fastest selling over 2 months". The PS2, Wii and PS4 all might have been able to manage faster, as might some of Apple's portable devices, if they hadn't been constrained by supply shortages.
Of course, Kinect sales flatlined after the first few months, nobody's disputing that. But there is certainly a defined period over which it seems to be "fastest selling".
Kinda guessing you're not a fan of the Xbox. Possibly even that you're a bit of a fan of one of its rivals? Remember that blind brand loyalty (or blind hatred of a brand) is self-defeating on the part of the consumer.
Microsoft does not love you and does not have your best interests at heart.
Sony does not love you and does not have your best interests at heart.
Nintendo does not love you and does not have your best interests at heart.
Valve does not love you and does not have your best interests at heart.
The fanboy-arguments between the various sides in the console war are more bitter this time around than I've ever seen them before. Which is ironic, really, given that the actual practical differences between the PS4 and Xbox One are vanishingly small and only really apparent to hardcore enthusiasts.
What you say is technically correct for a very narrow span of time, but also one of the most pernicious myths about the finances of the gaming industry.
The article you link is from when the 360 first went on sale in 2005. The 360 remained MS's "main" console until late 2013. Production costs fall wildly over that time. Indeed, in the traditional MS/Sony model of selling consoles, you sell at a loss for about the first 12-18 months, then as unit cost reductions and economies of scale start to work in your favour, you keep the console selling at a more or less neutral level for the rest of its life-span, reducing the retail price as costs fall further.
Where do they make the money from? Xbox Live subscriptions, first party games etc are a small part of it, but only a small part. Most of the money - and it is a lot of money - comes from third party game fees.
See, when you buy a console game as "new" (rather than pre-owned), a large chunk of the sale price goes directly to Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo. On a full-priced game, this tends to be in the $10-15 range. Historically, this has explained the price differential between console and PC games - though with Valve now taking a similar cut of most PC game sales, who knows how long that will last.
The platform owner has spent next to nothing on those third party games; in most cases, it only gets involved at the certification stage. So it is, for the most part, "free money". And with series like Call of Duty, FIFA, Madden etc racking up the sales they do, it is a lot of free money.
So the trick is attracting third parties to the console. To do this, you need to have either a large current installed base, or the promise of a large installed base to come. This is why console manufacturers are happy to sell at a loss for the first year and often to take a loss (or at least a risk) on funding first party or platform-exclusive third party games - the Halos, Gears of War, Killzones and Gran Turismos of the world. Those are the bait to lure in the early adopters to get the installed base growing to get the third party developers on board.
The other business model is the one that was previously (but not currently) used by Nintendo. In the SNES, N64, Gamecube and Wii generations, as well as with its handhelds up to and including the DS, Nintendo sold platforms at a profit from day 1 and focussed much more on first party games development. This actually worked pretty well for a long time; they made megabucks on the SNES (which also had a lot of third party support, so win-win there) and even when the Gamecube ended up with poor sales, they were still able to turn a profit on it.
But around 5 years ago, this model started to break. The Wii was essentially dead by 2010; console sales were slowing to a trickle (after a few phenomenal years) and despite the huge installed base, most Wii owners (a different demographic to that on other platforms) did not buy many games, so third party developers abandoned it. Then came the 3DS launch.
The 3DS is doing ok now. Well in Japan, so-so in the US and Europe. It's on course to be a kind of PSP-level success, which is ok (the PSP actually did much better than is generally realised, largely on the strength of Japan). But the 3DS's launch was actually a bit of a disaster. For months after launch, the damned thing just wouldn't sell - and price was a big part of it. So Nintendo reversed historic policy and slashed the price; for the first time in its history, selling console hardware at a loss. It didn't remain at a loss for long; only 6 months or so until it got onto a neutral footing - but it was enough to bury Nintendo's historic strategy. Console sales improved, third parties moved in (particularly Japanese developers, many of who shy away from the high cost of developing for home consoles) and Nintendo's losses (the first in the company's history) were reduced. When the Wii-U was launched, it was launched with a traditional Sony/MS style pricing strategy; sold at a loss at first, before moving to
Not bullshit at all. Kinect's first couple of months on sale were extremely successful. In fact, MS made a very nice slug of money from it; unusually for the console business, there was a hefty chunk of profit margin on each unit sold. And it sold a lot of units very fast, because it was never supply constrained; unlike many new console launches, if you wanted one, you could walk into a shop and buy one (supply shortages have limited early sales of the PS2, Wii and PS4 to a large extent, early sales of other consoles to a lesser extent).
Of course, the Kinect basically went on to traverse (on a slightly smaller scale) the same kind of curve of the Wii. Lots and lots of early sales, but faltering when people started to realise that the only games you could practically play on it were short-lived party-games. So after the first few months on sale, sales fell of a brick and games releases dried up. But MS had a lot of sales and made a lot of money in the window before that.
And in what the hell sense is the Xbox brand a dismal failure? Ok, it's never taken off in Japan (basically because Japanese consumers are highly protectionist), but it's generally been a surprising success. The original Xbox managed just over 24 million sales. That's a long way behind the PS2's 150+ million, but ahead of Nintendo's 22 million, despite Nintendo being an established brand at the time and essentially being able to sell in 3 major markets (US, EU, JP) rather than Microsoft's 2 (US, EU).
The Xbox 360 managed 83 million sales until the point where MS stopped reporting sales (the unit is actually still selling). By comparison, the PS3 managed 80 million and the Wii just over 100 million (though the Wii got most of those early in the cycle - both console and game sales dried up in the second half).
And this time around - despite the "disaster for MS" narrative, the Xbox One isn't doing too badly. Sales data is a little hard to compare at the moment, but it looks like the PS4 managed 20 million in a year on sale, the Xbox One 10 million in the same time and the Wii-U around 8 million over two years. The Xbox One is in second place, but set against previous generations, it has sold fast in its first year (remember that console sales tend to accelerate in their second and third years, as prices come down and more games become available).
So MS has a successful console brand on its hands. What it doesn't have is the kind of "single device living room dominator" that Ballmer hoped the Xbox One would be. The new management seems content to settle for "successful games console", though there's a real question as to whether MS will want to be in that space in the long term.
Most 3d games use most of the controls on a standard controller, though L3/R3 (which as you say are awkward) are generally avoided where possible. The Cube controller was missing enough buttons that games needed serious redesign. The Classic Controller was closer to being fully-featured, but was an optional peripheral anyway.
In the early part of the last decade, I was housemates for a while with a guy who worked at a middle-budget developer whose niche was putting out reasonably good (but not exceptional) games based on other people's licenses across the major platforms - at the time, PS2, Xbox, Gamecube and sometimes PC. His commentary on the state of cross-platform development at the time was interesting.
The Xbox was a delight to develop for; nice simple architecture and reasonable power. The PS2 was horribly tricky and all kinds of compromises had to be made, but its installed base was so huge that you couldn't commercially afford not to release for it. What was inside the Cube was perfectly nice to design for, but the controller limitations meant that entire sections of their game had to be redesigned for the Cube version, and features sometimes cut. So some movement abilities would have to be automated, or combat simplified, which meant difficulty had to be retuned and significant additional QA testing was needed. Towards the end of the cycle, when the Xbox notably overtook the Cube on installed base (having more or less level-pegged until then), they dropped Cube development; redesigning games to fit the controller was costing more than the money was justifying.
The "share" button also needs to be changed into something a bit more genera -purpose. I know that the whole game-streaming thing is big right now, but the simple fact is that the majority of gamers - self very much included - will never actually record gameplay footage interesting enough to be worth sharing with others. By all means, have some kind of option in the OS to enable recording and uploading of footage, but you do not need a controller button set aside for it. That's just pandering to narcissists.
The range of functions available on console controllers is actually massively significant. It's every bit as important as the hardware inside the box in determining how difficult it is for a developer to produce a game that works across a range of platforms. If you change the functions available on the controller, you will require changes to gameplay for a large number of games. This is one of the reasons why third party support for the Gamecube was so poor, despite it having a similar installed base to the original Xbox and fairly easy hardware to develop for; its little controller had fewer buttons than the Dualshock 2 or the various iterations of the Xbox controller, so games would have had to be redesigned to fit on it.
The PS4 controller isn't a total disaster; as the touchpad also doubles as a button (which is all most games use it as) you can still have functional equivalents to the "start" and "select" buttons. But it's still an unhelpful step back in a world that had been moving towards controller standardisation.
And just for fairness's sake - the Xbox One controller's layout is fine, but its build and materials feel cheap and nasty compared to the old 360 controller. And the Wii-U gamepad does at least have the right number of buttons and sticks (unprecedented for a modern Nintendo controller), but is even larger, heavier and more uncomfortable than the first-gen Xbox controller and has an awful battery life.
It should be a priority - because if it isn't, it will start hitting revenue. I'd gone years without using adblocking software, on the grounds that I knew a lot of sites I liked depended on advertising income.
When Yahoo! ads starting redirecting to ransomware-pushers a couple of months ago, I reversed my policy fast.
Agreed it's moronic. But this is Nintendo we're talking about. Region locking isn't about the money; it's about a combination of their messed-up corporate structure (the various international companies are only loosely integrated) and nasty control-freakery. They have a long history of liking to say "title X does not fit with our irrationally conceived stereotype of region Y, so we won't release it there, or will cut it to hell first". Region locking is one of the tools they use for that.
The whole "region locking for differential pricing" thing at least had a simple motive behind it ("more money"), but it doesn't work all that well (markets where you need to sell cheap tend to have too much piracy to be worth it anyway). Most people who region lock for that reason are moving away from it now (Sony and MS have ditched it entirely).
There's currently no way to play pirated games on a Wii-U. The original Wii's copy protection was circumvented (very quickly), as was the 360's (if you didn't mind losing online functionality). PS3 piracy was possible for certain titles on consoles with certain firmware revisions, but was generally a huge pain in the ass, so it never really took off. The copy protection mechanisms on the PS4 and Xbox One are currently intact.
However, those in Brazil who have bought consoles already do apparently have the option of importing titles from neighboring countries or the US. Nintendo is the last of the console manufacturers to support region locking (and even Nintendo is now publicly acknowledging that it has an internal debate on ditching it), but a few minutes with google seems to indicate that they treat the whole of the Americas as a single region for locking purposes.
It's curious how many relatively recent high-end PCs from prestige-brands don't have PCIe 3.0 slots. Alienware are a particular offender here - they were very slow adopters, quite possibly because a lot of their customers don't actually think to check for this when speccing up a machine.
That said, it's questionable how much it really matters in the real world at the moment. Performance tests on the latest video cards (which can take advantage of PCIe 3.0) have found very little performance gap between 3.0 and 2.0 (and even 1.0) with the likes of the Nvidia 980. The gap is most apparent at extremely high (150+) framerates - which is unlikely to constrain the average gamer, who probably just turns up the graphical settings until his PC can't sustain his target framerate (probably somewhere in the 40-60fps rate) any more.
I won't disagree on Betamax or MGM, but describing the Playstation series as "also ran" is one of the dumbest statements I've ever heard on slashdot - which is really saying something.
The Playstation series revolutionised the video games industry and opened up whole new demographics to gaming. Sony may have stumbled a bit around the time they released the PS3 (the wrong hardware at the wrong price), but with the announcement today that the PS4 has achieved 18.5 million units sold to consumers in just over a year on sale, they're clearly back on form. By contrast, the Xbox One is sitting at just over 10 million units shipped to stores in the same time period (which is itself "not bad" going off historical comparators), while the Wii-U hasn't even managed 8 million shipped to stores in around twice the time (which is sub-Dreamcast pacing).
Many of Sony's other brands may be struggling, but the Playstation series is a startling success story.
It means "patient zero for this outbreak". Unlike some diseases, Ebola doesn't have a constant presence in the human species. Most of the time, there are no humans on the planet infected with Ebola (compare and contrast with the common cold, which exists in an endemic steady state among humans).
Ebola outbreaks begin when a human is exposed to the disease from a non-human source (bats have been suspected for decades, but it was tricky to pin down). So "patient zero" for an Ebola outbreak is the human who is the first to be infected (and who then goes on to infect others).
One of the big questions about Ebola outbreaks is why there aren't more of them. If bats are the carriers, then given how widespread bats are across Africa, why do outbreaks so isolated? Tracking down the patient zero for each outbreak is crucial if we're going to understand that (and understanding it could be the key to preventing future outbreaks).
It's not finger pointing. Knowing who your patient zero was is absolutely vital if you want to be able to reduce the likelihood of future outbreaks.
Ebola doesn't have a natural reservoir in the human population; it's too fast-acting and (with the exception of the Reston strain) deadly for that. It tends to have a similar effect on other primates as well. So identifying where the disease does live between outbreaks in the human population (likely in a species which experiences no or limited symptoms from infection) is critical, both for research purposes (the ability to keep an eye on the virus before its latest strain jumps into humans) or for educating people as to which particular pools of the animal population to stay away from.
If you go back through medical history - right back to bubonic plague having a natural reservoir in rats' fleas - identifying how a virus has been making the jump into humans has been the first stage in controlling it.
Certainly, as I've recently noted in more detail than I will repeat here in a journal entry, the big question that the new consoles have yet to answer is what, precisely, they are for.
If they're replaced, I don't think it will be tablets that replace them - touchscreen controls are just unsuitable for many types of game. It will be PCs; though they may not look anything like the traditional "beige box under a desk".
The economics of the games industry are rapidly killing platform exclusivity (games cost too much to develop and increasingly developers can't afford to artificially limit sales and platform owners can't afford to compensate them for doing so). Without platform-exclusive games and with cheap, small and easy to use gaming PCs that can sit under a TV running Steam's big picture mode or something similar, the traditional games console starts to look like an oddity.
And they really are guesses, because the nature of the industry is that one major hit can save a failing company overnight, while just a couple of expensive disasters can sink a successful company within a year.
EA probably have the potentia to be the highest-profile casualty. Despite their size and notoriety, they've not been doing brilliantly in financial terms for quite a few years now. They've a couple of nasty habits (from the point of view of both the gamer and the shareholder) which contribute to this.
The first is the continual chase after the "last big thing" - EA rarely comes up with new mega-hit formulas itself; rather, it belatedly notices when somebody else produces one, tries to mimic it and usually fails. Hence the expensive and largely unsuccessful attempts to copy the Call of Duty formula with Medal of Honor and Battlefield (the former in particular having been a costly disaster for the company) and the late arrival, whole-hearted embrace of and often embarrassing fiascos in the pay-to-win mobile space.
The second bad habit is that of making expensive acquisitions and then ruining their unique selling points. Bioware is the biggest example here; Dragon Age: Inquisition may do a bit of reputational-repair, but the Bioware brand is much tarnished from when EA acquired it.
EA isn't going to die overnight; if it does die in the next 10 years, it's more likely to be a "death by a thousand cuts" kind of affair, probably with some smaller rump of the company surviving. But despite the fact it has some really talented developers (it makes some amazingly good games, despite its reputation), I just don't think it's smart or agile enough to keep up with Activision, Ubisoft or Square-Enix in the longer term.
The funny thing about EA is that when it's gone, we'll probably miss it. It's used its (now slightly diminishing-returns) cash-cow sports franchises to fund some interesting games like Dead Space that would probably never have been made otherwise.
The next guess is, ironically, a company whose gaming division is doing very well and will likely continue to do very well right up to the point the company (possibly) collapses; Sony. Sony's currently building up the kind of console-wars installed-base lead it hasn't had since the PS2-era and is doing it with much healthier margins than it had during that generation. The problem is that the wider company is a shambles, selling electronic goods that nobody wants. There's still plenty of time for Sony to turn itself around, but it's not absolutely certain that it will.
Nintendo has perhaps the opposite problem; the part of the company that makes and sells consoles is doing pretty badly, while other bits of the business are doing quite well. The Wii-U has failed now. Aafter Mario Kart 8 and Smash Bros failed to have a significant impact on sales, it has run out of last chances and even Nintendo themselves seem increasingly reluctant to support it at the expense of the 3DS. It appears almost certain that the Xbox One overtook it on installed base somewhere around October/November, despite the Wii-U's 12 month head start. While the 3DS isn't doing too badly, it's more a "PSP-level" success than a "DS-level" success (though the PSP was indeed a successful machine) and is particularly dependant upon the Japanese market. I don't think Nintendo's going bust, but I suspect that the threat of a shareholder revolt may mean that the Wii-U ends up being the company's last home console (or they may try a panicked and quick-to-fail emergency successor, which will only slightly delay the inevitable). They have some strong brands though and if they can shed the home-console hardware business, they'll probably still be here and still be healthy in 10 years time.
And MS... will be discussed to death elsewhere in this thread. I don't think they're going out of business. I do think it's more uncertain that they will stay in the home console market, however. They've rescued the Xbox One fairly neatly after a disaster of a launch (it's had a
My home PC setup has a 500GB SSD for the operating system, frequently used software and a few games that are significantly affected by hard drive speed, then a 3TB media storage HDD and a 4TB HDD for the rest of my Steam/Origin library. Nobody has yet convinced me that this isn't a sensible way to order things.
What is interesting, though, is how many PC games released over the last 12-18 months have been significantly affected by the speed of the drive they're installed on. I'm not just talking about loading-screens here - while it's always nice to reduce the time you spend staring at a loading screen, it's not generally essential to your experience of the game. Rather, what I've noticed is that a lot of recent games (particularly those with an open-world structure) which stream content from the drive during play (often to eliminate or reduce load-screens) can be prone to significant in-game stuttering when running off anything but an SSD.
Watch_Dogs was perhaps the most egregious example of this; running off a platter-drive can render the PC version almost unplayable (certainly during driving sequences), while when played from SSD, it's just a badly optimised and boring game (but playable). Far Cry 4 is also significantly affected and, while I don't own it, I gather Assassin's Creed Unity is the same. All of those are Ubisoft games (so the problems potentially have the same underlying cause), but it's not just their titles that derive benefits; Dragon Age Inquisition is prone to loading-stutter in some of its areas when run off a platter drive.
Other games, particularly those with smaller areas and more linear structures, seem largely unaffected. Putting Wolfenstein: New Order on an SSD will marginally reduce your loading times, but not do much else. The same holds true for Dark Souls 2, Lords of the Fallen and Alien: Isolation.
The odd thing is that relatively few benchmarking articles for games actually examine the impacts of drive-speed. Eurogamer's (otherwise excellent) Digital Foundry series will test variants on CPU and GPU, but often doesn't even tell us what kind of drive they were running the game off.
Before anybody points it out - all of the post below is anecdote - usual caveats apply.
A friend of mine is a teacher - he generally works with the 10-11 age-range (which in the UK at least, is unusual for a male teacher). This is, as is documented in any number of official and unofficial studies, a particularly critical year in the education of boys; it's when many of them start to fall behind the girls in their year group in academic terms (not catching up until the 18-21 age range). The individuals who start falling behind at this point generally never catch up.
Now, just a few weeks ago, and spurred by the impending release of this movie, I had a long conversation with said friend about childhood literacy, academic achievement and the Hobbit.
See, his view is that the big problem with the UK education system and boys is that they lose all interest in reading for pleasure right around that 10-11 age range. This is, in part, because the generally approved reading materials in schools have a heavy female tilt (lots of teddy bears and thinking about feelings, not so much on the swords, dragons and robots), but there's not actually a mandatory reading list at this age and teachers (if they're willing to stand up to the senior management in their school if needed) have quite a lot of leeway.
And his big antidote to "losing" boys at this age has, for close to a decade now, been "The Hobbit". Indeed, he's of the view that it's one of the finest children's books ever written; short enough not to be off-putting, gripping pretty much from the first page and written with an authorial voice that strikes a good balance between not being condescending and not being too advanced for the age-range in question. It is also a damned exciting story, with wizards, dragons, goblins and magic rings. The girls don't hate it and the boys absolutely lap it up.
So from his point of view, the movies have been a bit of a disaster. He'd been hoping for something he could take classes along to. Instead, the movies, are dark, brooding, serious, dark and extremely violent in places. They're absolutely not suitable for the age range the book is pitched at and, in any case, they miss the fundamental quality of what makes the book so great.
It's not a disaster for him - the book is still there and always will be there. But his view was that it was a missed opportunity to give the "best children's book ever written" a proper adaptation.
I've not read The Hobbit for many years myself, but this does chime with my own memory of it.
There is no GamerGate. Not really. There are several amorphous bunches of people who hang around on some forums. There's a similarly amorphous bunch of people who use a twitter tag, often for wildly differing reasons. There are a handful of internet petitions. There's a fictitious mass-movement that some juvenile "supporters" have imagined up because it makes them feel good. And there's a fictitious shadowy, sinister organisation that a bunch of equally juvenile opponents have imagined up because it gives them a convenient straw man to attack. Really, nobody comes out of this well.
During my postgrad years (so going back to the start of the last decade now), I had two online roles back to back which gave me a fair amount of visibility to a lot of angry people online. First, I was the head admin of a major European Counter-Strike league. Then I was an oper (and one of the public-facing ones rather than the backroom code-tweakers) on a very large European-based IRC network. Both of those roles involved telling angry people things they didn't want to hear. Things like "somebody in your clan was caught cheating, you are now banned" or "no, I will not gline somebody just so you can have your usual nick back".
And so, on a pretty much daily basis, people threatened to kill me. They were going to find out where I lived and kill me, or maybe track down my parents and kill them or maybe rape my grandmother or my sister (I don't have a sister, but hey), or whatever, or something, or they just hoped I got CANCER or AIDS and would go away and DIE. To be honest, I suspect anybody who's done a similar role (or worked in customer service in certain types of company) also gets similar on a daily basis.
Were the people making those threats good people? Hell no. Even the fact that they were angry doesn't excuse behaviour like that. But what did I do about it? In the Counter-Strike role, if they clan wasn't already banned from the league, then it sure was the moment they made death threats. In the IRC role, it takes only a few seconds to apply a gline and suspend accounts with network services, but the warm fuzzy feeling that follows can last an hour or more. Did I ever actually feel in danger? Did I ever feel I needed to call the police? Hell no. Talking shit online is, unfortunately, pretty much as old as the internet itself and I had no particular political axe to grind.
So yeah, immature idiots on one side and professional grievance-mongers trying to inflate trash talk out of all proportion on the other. Nobody comes well out of this, for the most part.
Actually, the one thing that did strike me about this was how much the whole thing was a product of the indie gaming community. Almost every AAA publisher or developer out there either stayed silent or distanced from it as quickly as possible (which was the only sensible course of action). 2014 is really feeling like the year AAA gaming got smart and indie gaming got dumb.
Region locks are vile practice. It's infuriating to see them creeping into PC gaming (historically a region-free platform) at a time when two of the three console developers have ditched them and the third (Nintendo) is considering dropping them. That said, it's worth reflecting on why they exist. There are, historically, two reason behind this.
The first is plain old-fashioned cultural stereotyping (which somebody being less diplomatic might call "racism"). This is the classic Nintendo reason. Big paternalist companies like Nintendo (they're not alone in this, but are the worst offenders) have this weird outlook that says that they should function as some kind of moral arbiter of what should and should not be available in each territory. Hence certain games are "not a good cultural fit for some regions" (usually a view based on offensive broad-brush stereotypes... or racism, if you prefer the more honest term) or "require alterations to be culturally appropriate" (meaning "we're going to cut the game to hell on release in some territories, because REASONS"). Happily, this particular driver behind region locking is on the decline. Sony used to buy into it every bit as much as Nintendo, but have completely washed their hands of it. Even Nintendo are considering getting out of this game. I should add that a few territories (a handful of religious-wacko countries, plus Germany and Australia - what good company they find themselves in) set up their own barriers that require these kind of locks on occasion. In those cases, the blame rests with the Governments of those countries, not the platform owners/publishers.
The second reason is more complex and is down to differential pricing. Not every currency is of the same strength or stability. The last few days have made that pretty clear, if it wasn't already. And by and large, a lot of those countries which have weak and/or unstable currencies also tend to have very high piracy rates. A lot of companies (Microsoft used to be particularly bad in this respect, but have been stepping back lately) operate under the delusion that if they sell their products really really cheap in those territories, they can get people to buy legitimately, rather than pirating their products (all the evidence to date shows this doesn't work). Problem is, when you do that, you create a huge reverse-import problem; why would a US or European consumer pay the going rate in their territory for a locally-bought copy, when they could import a Brazillian or Russian or Vietnamese copy for a fraction of the price (which probably has English-language support anyway)?
Now, in a pure free market, one of two things would happen. Either the company selling the product would have to drop its price globally, or else it would have to accept that customers in those marginal economies just couldn't, for the most part, afford its products. But we live in a world where they're allowed to circumvent the free-market at will - via region locks. So first-world consumers get to subsidise producers (usually fruitless) speculation in developing-world markets.
There's a curious mirror image of this around one particular market; Japan. See, Japanese consumers are willing to pay massively over the odds for media (movies, games, TV series both live action and animated), particularly when said media is domestically produced. Seriously, you think UK or Australian consumers pay over the odds? It's nothing to what they'll pay in Japan. And because Japan has a large media industry which has grown accustomed to being able to milk this unquestioningly loyal (and seemingly happy to be exploited) domestic market, a good chunk of it is desperate to keep said market behind a walled garden, with reverse importing from the rest of the world locked off.
So yeah... region locking... a few reasons for it, none of them good for the consumer. Truly sad to see it come to Steam (though it's been creeping in at the margins for a while now). The only alternative? Fix all regions' price to the dollar (allowing for differences in local sales taxes, which is the major difference, for instance, between US and UK prices). But then a good chunk of the world wouldn't be able to afford to buy anything like as many games.
Shouldn't be the customer's problem. A big part of the root cause of the Kickstarter backlash is that it makes it into the customer's problem.
I know people who have taken entry-level development positions with large games developers. That's certainly one way to get experience. Yes, the pay, working hours and culture will probably suck, but that's the price you pay for wanting to work in an over-subscribed field. Any large developer will always be carrying a lot of people with little to no experience of games development - the things that suck which I just mentioned mean that this is a field with high turn-over. What matters is that there are experienced people in the right places.
In fact, given that the main skill that seems to be lacking in failed Kickstarter campaigns is project management, you could argue that relevant experience doesn't have to come from games development. Delivering (or at least making a major contribution to) any complex technical project within fixed time and budget constraints is good experience, regardless of field.
Launching a Kickstarter or Early Access for an implausible game design and taking people's money for a project that you then mismanage horribly and fail to deliver any product is not a viable business model. Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to think it is.
You're right that "backers" need to realise that Kickstarter is not a pre-order mechanism. But developers also need to realise that turning to crowdfunding means, by necessity, a different kind of development model to a "traditional" game.
If this game was - as is more usual - being funded by a big publisher and Frontier decided that the offline mode wasn't working out, then that would be the cue for them to begin a negotiation with the publisher. The publisher might be fine with the change. It might not be. The publisher might want to change its funding committment. It might even want to walk away and leave the project looking for a new publisher. But at the end of the day, it's a commercial negotiation.
Now generally, when a game Kickstarter goes horribly wrong, the root cause is that the developer was a "two men and a dog" team with little to no experience of games development. That's not the case here; Frontier are an established studio with a long track record of delivering games (even if most of those games for the last decade-and-a-bit have been low-profile franchise tie-ins). But they're attempting to behave here as though the absence of a traditional publisher means that they have licence to do what they want without the usual accountability to backers. There's no possible world in which that is reasonable.
Slashdot Mirror
That was certainly true for the Wii and Wii-U, but I'm not sure it holds up for Nintendo's other consoles. The Gamecube hardware was, by all accounts, good. Better than the PS2's and not far short of the Xbox's. It's still slightly amazing that the PS2 did as well as it did, given it was both underpowered and a complete dog to develop for.
The N64 was more complicated; most of its hardware was pretty decent, but the decision to stick with cartridges rather than move to a CD format for games doomed it in the race with the Playstation. That was probably the most significant point in console-history (I'd rank it above even the Atari-crash, which was strictly a US phenomenon) - the moment Nintendo decided, on the basis of piracy fears, to part way with almost all of its significant third party developers (and also to massively annoy Sony, who had done a load of development work in partnership with Nintendo on CD-based console technology). If the N64 had used CDs, chances are the industry would look completely different today.
In the early days of the 360, MS spent a lot of time and money love-bombing Japanese developers to get them to make games primarily for the Japanese market (though many of them got exported to the West). Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey - the two best Japanese RPGs of the first few years of the last generation - were funded by MS, developed in Japan with Japanese as the primary language and English translations provided later. So language was no issue for those. Similarly, MS pumped a lot of money into Cave, making sure that the 360 got ports of a lot of their most notable arcade machines.
All of which did next to nothing. I'm tempted to say MS did absolutely everything it reasonably could to break into Japan. It still didn't work. I wasn't surprised therefore that they've barely even bothered to try this time around with the Xbox One. The Japanese home console market is in a bad way anyway, so it probably doesn't matter anything like as much as it did a decade ago.
They were talking about Kinect - not the Xbox. And "fastest selling entertainment device" is a flexible term - as you can define whatever period you want to base your judgement on.
Going off this it seems to have managed 8 million sales in 2 months. That's certainly got to be a contender for "fastest selling over 2 months". The PS2, Wii and PS4 all might have been able to manage faster, as might some of Apple's portable devices, if they hadn't been constrained by supply shortages.
Of course, Kinect sales flatlined after the first few months, nobody's disputing that. But there is certainly a defined period over which it seems to be "fastest selling".
That whooshing sound you hear is the irony rushing right over your head...
Wow, bitter much...
Kinda guessing you're not a fan of the Xbox. Possibly even that you're a bit of a fan of one of its rivals? Remember that blind brand loyalty (or blind hatred of a brand) is self-defeating on the part of the consumer.
Microsoft does not love you and does not have your best interests at heart.
Sony does not love you and does not have your best interests at heart.
Nintendo does not love you and does not have your best interests at heart.
Valve does not love you and does not have your best interests at heart.
The fanboy-arguments between the various sides in the console war are more bitter this time around than I've ever seen them before. Which is ironic, really, given that the actual practical differences between the PS4 and Xbox One are vanishingly small and only really apparent to hardcore enthusiasts.
What you say is technically correct for a very narrow span of time, but also one of the most pernicious myths about the finances of the gaming industry.
The article you link is from when the 360 first went on sale in 2005. The 360 remained MS's "main" console until late 2013. Production costs fall wildly over that time. Indeed, in the traditional MS/Sony model of selling consoles, you sell at a loss for about the first 12-18 months, then as unit cost reductions and economies of scale start to work in your favour, you keep the console selling at a more or less neutral level for the rest of its life-span, reducing the retail price as costs fall further.
Where do they make the money from? Xbox Live subscriptions, first party games etc are a small part of it, but only a small part. Most of the money - and it is a lot of money - comes from third party game fees.
See, when you buy a console game as "new" (rather than pre-owned), a large chunk of the sale price goes directly to Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo. On a full-priced game, this tends to be in the $10-15 range. Historically, this has explained the price differential between console and PC games - though with Valve now taking a similar cut of most PC game sales, who knows how long that will last.
The platform owner has spent next to nothing on those third party games; in most cases, it only gets involved at the certification stage. So it is, for the most part, "free money". And with series like Call of Duty, FIFA, Madden etc racking up the sales they do, it is a lot of free money.
So the trick is attracting third parties to the console. To do this, you need to have either a large current installed base, or the promise of a large installed base to come. This is why console manufacturers are happy to sell at a loss for the first year and often to take a loss (or at least a risk) on funding first party or platform-exclusive third party games - the Halos, Gears of War, Killzones and Gran Turismos of the world. Those are the bait to lure in the early adopters to get the installed base growing to get the third party developers on board.
The other business model is the one that was previously (but not currently) used by Nintendo. In the SNES, N64, Gamecube and Wii generations, as well as with its handhelds up to and including the DS, Nintendo sold platforms at a profit from day 1 and focussed much more on first party games development. This actually worked pretty well for a long time; they made megabucks on the SNES (which also had a lot of third party support, so win-win there) and even when the Gamecube ended up with poor sales, they were still able to turn a profit on it.
But around 5 years ago, this model started to break. The Wii was essentially dead by 2010; console sales were slowing to a trickle (after a few phenomenal years) and despite the huge installed base, most Wii owners (a different demographic to that on other platforms) did not buy many games, so third party developers abandoned it. Then came the 3DS launch.
The 3DS is doing ok now. Well in Japan, so-so in the US and Europe. It's on course to be a kind of PSP-level success, which is ok (the PSP actually did much better than is generally realised, largely on the strength of Japan). But the 3DS's launch was actually a bit of a disaster. For months after launch, the damned thing just wouldn't sell - and price was a big part of it. So Nintendo reversed historic policy and slashed the price; for the first time in its history, selling console hardware at a loss. It didn't remain at a loss for long; only 6 months or so until it got onto a neutral footing - but it was enough to bury Nintendo's historic strategy. Console sales improved, third parties moved in (particularly Japanese developers, many of who shy away from the high cost of developing for home consoles) and Nintendo's losses (the first in the company's history) were reduced. When the Wii-U was launched, it was launched with a traditional Sony/MS style pricing strategy; sold at a loss at first, before moving to
Not bullshit at all. Kinect's first couple of months on sale were extremely successful. In fact, MS made a very nice slug of money from it; unusually for the console business, there was a hefty chunk of profit margin on each unit sold. And it sold a lot of units very fast, because it was never supply constrained; unlike many new console launches, if you wanted one, you could walk into a shop and buy one (supply shortages have limited early sales of the PS2, Wii and PS4 to a large extent, early sales of other consoles to a lesser extent).
Of course, the Kinect basically went on to traverse (on a slightly smaller scale) the same kind of curve of the Wii. Lots and lots of early sales, but faltering when people started to realise that the only games you could practically play on it were short-lived party-games. So after the first few months on sale, sales fell of a brick and games releases dried up. But MS had a lot of sales and made a lot of money in the window before that.
And in what the hell sense is the Xbox brand a dismal failure? Ok, it's never taken off in Japan (basically because Japanese consumers are highly protectionist), but it's generally been a surprising success. The original Xbox managed just over 24 million sales. That's a long way behind the PS2's 150+ million, but ahead of Nintendo's 22 million, despite Nintendo being an established brand at the time and essentially being able to sell in 3 major markets (US, EU, JP) rather than Microsoft's 2 (US, EU).
The Xbox 360 managed 83 million sales until the point where MS stopped reporting sales (the unit is actually still selling). By comparison, the PS3 managed 80 million and the Wii just over 100 million (though the Wii got most of those early in the cycle - both console and game sales dried up in the second half).
And this time around - despite the "disaster for MS" narrative, the Xbox One isn't doing too badly. Sales data is a little hard to compare at the moment, but it looks like the PS4 managed 20 million in a year on sale, the Xbox One 10 million in the same time and the Wii-U around 8 million over two years. The Xbox One is in second place, but set against previous generations, it has sold fast in its first year (remember that console sales tend to accelerate in their second and third years, as prices come down and more games become available).
So MS has a successful console brand on its hands. What it doesn't have is the kind of "single device living room dominator" that Ballmer hoped the Xbox One would be. The new management seems content to settle for "successful games console", though there's a real question as to whether MS will want to be in that space in the long term.
Most 3d games use most of the controls on a standard controller, though L3/R3 (which as you say are awkward) are generally avoided where possible. The Cube controller was missing enough buttons that games needed serious redesign. The Classic Controller was closer to being fully-featured, but was an optional peripheral anyway.
In the early part of the last decade, I was housemates for a while with a guy who worked at a middle-budget developer whose niche was putting out reasonably good (but not exceptional) games based on other people's licenses across the major platforms - at the time, PS2, Xbox, Gamecube and sometimes PC. His commentary on the state of cross-platform development at the time was interesting.
The Xbox was a delight to develop for; nice simple architecture and reasonable power. The PS2 was horribly tricky and all kinds of compromises had to be made, but its installed base was so huge that you couldn't commercially afford not to release for it. What was inside the Cube was perfectly nice to design for, but the controller limitations meant that entire sections of their game had to be redesigned for the Cube version, and features sometimes cut. So some movement abilities would have to be automated, or combat simplified, which meant difficulty had to be retuned and significant additional QA testing was needed. Towards the end of the cycle, when the Xbox notably overtook the Cube on installed base (having more or less level-pegged until then), they dropped Cube development; redesigning games to fit the controller was costing more than the money was justifying.
The "share" button also needs to be changed into something a bit more genera -purpose. I know that the whole game-streaming thing is big right now, but the simple fact is that the majority of gamers - self very much included - will never actually record gameplay footage interesting enough to be worth sharing with others. By all means, have some kind of option in the OS to enable recording and uploading of footage, but you do not need a controller button set aside for it. That's just pandering to narcissists.
The range of functions available on console controllers is actually massively significant. It's every bit as important as the hardware inside the box in determining how difficult it is for a developer to produce a game that works across a range of platforms. If you change the functions available on the controller, you will require changes to gameplay for a large number of games. This is one of the reasons why third party support for the Gamecube was so poor, despite it having a similar installed base to the original Xbox and fairly easy hardware to develop for; its little controller had fewer buttons than the Dualshock 2 or the various iterations of the Xbox controller, so games would have had to be redesigned to fit on it.
The PS4 controller isn't a total disaster; as the touchpad also doubles as a button (which is all most games use it as) you can still have functional equivalents to the "start" and "select" buttons. But it's still an unhelpful step back in a world that had been moving towards controller standardisation.
And just for fairness's sake - the Xbox One controller's layout is fine, but its build and materials feel cheap and nasty compared to the old 360 controller. And the Wii-U gamepad does at least have the right number of buttons and sticks (unprecedented for a modern Nintendo controller), but is even larger, heavier and more uncomfortable than the first-gen Xbox controller and has an awful battery life.
It should be a priority - because if it isn't, it will start hitting revenue. I'd gone years without using adblocking software, on the grounds that I knew a lot of sites I liked depended on advertising income.
When Yahoo! ads starting redirecting to ransomware-pushers a couple of months ago, I reversed my policy fast.
Can't you just nuke the recovery partition with dban or something similar? I've removed Dell recovery partitions that way in the past.
Agreed it's moronic. But this is Nintendo we're talking about. Region locking isn't about the money; it's about a combination of their messed-up corporate structure (the various international companies are only loosely integrated) and nasty control-freakery. They have a long history of liking to say "title X does not fit with our irrationally conceived stereotype of region Y, so we won't release it there, or will cut it to hell first". Region locking is one of the tools they use for that.
The whole "region locking for differential pricing" thing at least had a simple motive behind it ("more money"), but it doesn't work all that well (markets where you need to sell cheap tend to have too much piracy to be worth it anyway). Most people who region lock for that reason are moving away from it now (Sony and MS have ditched it entirely).
There's currently no way to play pirated games on a Wii-U. The original Wii's copy protection was circumvented (very quickly), as was the 360's (if you didn't mind losing online functionality). PS3 piracy was possible for certain titles on consoles with certain firmware revisions, but was generally a huge pain in the ass, so it never really took off. The copy protection mechanisms on the PS4 and Xbox One are currently intact.
However, those in Brazil who have bought consoles already do apparently have the option of importing titles from neighboring countries or the US. Nintendo is the last of the console manufacturers to support region locking (and even Nintendo is now publicly acknowledging that it has an internal debate on ditching it), but a few minutes with google seems to indicate that they treat the whole of the Americas as a single region for locking purposes.
It's curious how many relatively recent high-end PCs from prestige-brands don't have PCIe 3.0 slots. Alienware are a particular offender here - they were very slow adopters, quite possibly because a lot of their customers don't actually think to check for this when speccing up a machine.
That said, it's questionable how much it really matters in the real world at the moment. Performance tests on the latest video cards (which can take advantage of PCIe 3.0) have found very little performance gap between 3.0 and 2.0 (and even 1.0) with the likes of the Nvidia 980. The gap is most apparent at extremely high (150+) framerates - which is unlikely to constrain the average gamer, who probably just turns up the graphical settings until his PC can't sustain his target framerate (probably somewhere in the 40-60fps rate) any more.
I won't disagree on Betamax or MGM, but describing the Playstation series as "also ran" is one of the dumbest statements I've ever heard on slashdot - which is really saying something.
The Playstation series revolutionised the video games industry and opened up whole new demographics to gaming. Sony may have stumbled a bit around the time they released the PS3 (the wrong hardware at the wrong price), but with the announcement today that the PS4 has achieved 18.5 million units sold to consumers in just over a year on sale, they're clearly back on form. By contrast, the Xbox One is sitting at just over 10 million units shipped to stores in the same time period (which is itself "not bad" going off historical comparators), while the Wii-U hasn't even managed 8 million shipped to stores in around twice the time (which is sub-Dreamcast pacing).
Many of Sony's other brands may be struggling, but the Playstation series is a startling success story.
It means "patient zero for this outbreak". Unlike some diseases, Ebola doesn't have a constant presence in the human species. Most of the time, there are no humans on the planet infected with Ebola (compare and contrast with the common cold, which exists in an endemic steady state among humans).
Ebola outbreaks begin when a human is exposed to the disease from a non-human source (bats have been suspected for decades, but it was tricky to pin down). So "patient zero" for an Ebola outbreak is the human who is the first to be infected (and who then goes on to infect others).
One of the big questions about Ebola outbreaks is why there aren't more of them. If bats are the carriers, then given how widespread bats are across Africa, why do outbreaks so isolated? Tracking down the patient zero for each outbreak is crucial if we're going to understand that (and understanding it could be the key to preventing future outbreaks).
It's not finger pointing. Knowing who your patient zero was is absolutely vital if you want to be able to reduce the likelihood of future outbreaks.
Ebola doesn't have a natural reservoir in the human population; it's too fast-acting and (with the exception of the Reston strain) deadly for that. It tends to have a similar effect on other primates as well. So identifying where the disease does live between outbreaks in the human population (likely in a species which experiences no or limited symptoms from infection) is critical, both for research purposes (the ability to keep an eye on the virus before its latest strain jumps into humans) or for educating people as to which particular pools of the animal population to stay away from.
If you go back through medical history - right back to bubonic plague having a natural reservoir in rats' fleas - identifying how a virus has been making the jump into humans has been the first stage in controlling it.
Certainly, as I've recently noted in more detail than I will repeat here in a journal entry, the big question that the new consoles have yet to answer is what, precisely, they are for.
If they're replaced, I don't think it will be tablets that replace them - touchscreen controls are just unsuitable for many types of game. It will be PCs; though they may not look anything like the traditional "beige box under a desk".
The economics of the games industry are rapidly killing platform exclusivity (games cost too much to develop and increasingly developers can't afford to artificially limit sales and platform owners can't afford to compensate them for doing so). Without platform-exclusive games and with cheap, small and easy to use gaming PCs that can sit under a TV running Steam's big picture mode or something similar, the traditional games console starts to look like an oddity.
And they really are guesses, because the nature of the industry is that one major hit can save a failing company overnight, while just a couple of expensive disasters can sink a successful company within a year.
EA probably have the potentia to be the highest-profile casualty. Despite their size and notoriety, they've not been doing brilliantly in financial terms for quite a few years now. They've a couple of nasty habits (from the point of view of both the gamer and the shareholder) which contribute to this.
The first is the continual chase after the "last big thing" - EA rarely comes up with new mega-hit formulas itself; rather, it belatedly notices when somebody else produces one, tries to mimic it and usually fails. Hence the expensive and largely unsuccessful attempts to copy the Call of Duty formula with Medal of Honor and Battlefield (the former in particular having been a costly disaster for the company) and the late arrival, whole-hearted embrace of and often embarrassing fiascos in the pay-to-win mobile space.
The second bad habit is that of making expensive acquisitions and then ruining their unique selling points. Bioware is the biggest example here; Dragon Age: Inquisition may do a bit of reputational-repair, but the Bioware brand is much tarnished from when EA acquired it.
EA isn't going to die overnight; if it does die in the next 10 years, it's more likely to be a "death by a thousand cuts" kind of affair, probably with some smaller rump of the company surviving. But despite the fact it has some really talented developers (it makes some amazingly good games, despite its reputation), I just don't think it's smart or agile enough to keep up with Activision, Ubisoft or Square-Enix in the longer term.
The funny thing about EA is that when it's gone, we'll probably miss it. It's used its (now slightly diminishing-returns) cash-cow sports franchises to fund some interesting games like Dead Space that would probably never have been made otherwise.
The next guess is, ironically, a company whose gaming division is doing very well and will likely continue to do very well right up to the point the company (possibly) collapses; Sony. Sony's currently building up the kind of console-wars installed-base lead it hasn't had since the PS2-era and is doing it with much healthier margins than it had during that generation. The problem is that the wider company is a shambles, selling electronic goods that nobody wants. There's still plenty of time for Sony to turn itself around, but it's not absolutely certain that it will.
Nintendo has perhaps the opposite problem; the part of the company that makes and sells consoles is doing pretty badly, while other bits of the business are doing quite well. The Wii-U has failed now. Aafter Mario Kart 8 and Smash Bros failed to have a significant impact on sales, it has run out of last chances and even Nintendo themselves seem increasingly reluctant to support it at the expense of the 3DS. It appears almost certain that the Xbox One overtook it on installed base somewhere around October/November, despite the Wii-U's 12 month head start. While the 3DS isn't doing too badly, it's more a "PSP-level" success than a "DS-level" success (though the PSP was indeed a successful machine) and is particularly dependant upon the Japanese market. I don't think Nintendo's going bust, but I suspect that the threat of a shareholder revolt may mean that the Wii-U ends up being the company's last home console (or they may try a panicked and quick-to-fail emergency successor, which will only slightly delay the inevitable). They have some strong brands though and if they can shed the home-console hardware business, they'll probably still be here and still be healthy in 10 years time.
And MS... will be discussed to death elsewhere in this thread. I don't think they're going out of business. I do think it's more uncertain that they will stay in the home console market, however. They've rescued the Xbox One fairly neatly after a disaster of a launch (it's had a
My home PC setup has a 500GB SSD for the operating system, frequently used software and a few games that are significantly affected by hard drive speed, then a 3TB media storage HDD and a 4TB HDD for the rest of my Steam/Origin library. Nobody has yet convinced me that this isn't a sensible way to order things.
What is interesting, though, is how many PC games released over the last 12-18 months have been significantly affected by the speed of the drive they're installed on. I'm not just talking about loading-screens here - while it's always nice to reduce the time you spend staring at a loading screen, it's not generally essential to your experience of the game. Rather, what I've noticed is that a lot of recent games (particularly those with an open-world structure) which stream content from the drive during play (often to eliminate or reduce load-screens) can be prone to significant in-game stuttering when running off anything but an SSD.
Watch_Dogs was perhaps the most egregious example of this; running off a platter-drive can render the PC version almost unplayable (certainly during driving sequences), while when played from SSD, it's just a badly optimised and boring game (but playable). Far Cry 4 is also significantly affected and, while I don't own it, I gather Assassin's Creed Unity is the same. All of those are Ubisoft games (so the problems potentially have the same underlying cause), but it's not just their titles that derive benefits; Dragon Age Inquisition is prone to loading-stutter in some of its areas when run off a platter drive.
Other games, particularly those with smaller areas and more linear structures, seem largely unaffected. Putting Wolfenstein: New Order on an SSD will marginally reduce your loading times, but not do much else. The same holds true for Dark Souls 2, Lords of the Fallen and Alien: Isolation.
The odd thing is that relatively few benchmarking articles for games actually examine the impacts of drive-speed. Eurogamer's (otherwise excellent) Digital Foundry series will test variants on CPU and GPU, but often doesn't even tell us what kind of drive they were running the game off.
Before anybody points it out - all of the post below is anecdote - usual caveats apply.
A friend of mine is a teacher - he generally works with the 10-11 age-range (which in the UK at least, is unusual for a male teacher). This is, as is documented in any number of official and unofficial studies, a particularly critical year in the education of boys; it's when many of them start to fall behind the girls in their year group in academic terms (not catching up until the 18-21 age range). The individuals who start falling behind at this point generally never catch up.
Now, just a few weeks ago, and spurred by the impending release of this movie, I had a long conversation with said friend about childhood literacy, academic achievement and the Hobbit.
See, his view is that the big problem with the UK education system and boys is that they lose all interest in reading for pleasure right around that 10-11 age range. This is, in part, because the generally approved reading materials in schools have a heavy female tilt (lots of teddy bears and thinking about feelings, not so much on the swords, dragons and robots), but there's not actually a mandatory reading list at this age and teachers (if they're willing to stand up to the senior management in their school if needed) have quite a lot of leeway.
And his big antidote to "losing" boys at this age has, for close to a decade now, been "The Hobbit". Indeed, he's of the view that it's one of the finest children's books ever written; short enough not to be off-putting, gripping pretty much from the first page and written with an authorial voice that strikes a good balance between not being condescending and not being too advanced for the age-range in question. It is also a damned exciting story, with wizards, dragons, goblins and magic rings. The girls don't hate it and the boys absolutely lap it up.
So from his point of view, the movies have been a bit of a disaster. He'd been hoping for something he could take classes along to. Instead, the movies, are dark, brooding, serious, dark and extremely violent in places. They're absolutely not suitable for the age range the book is pitched at and, in any case, they miss the fundamental quality of what makes the book so great.
It's not a disaster for him - the book is still there and always will be there. But his view was that it was a missed opportunity to give the "best children's book ever written" a proper adaptation.
I've not read The Hobbit for many years myself, but this does chime with my own memory of it.
There is no GamerGate. Not really. There are several amorphous bunches of people who hang around on some forums. There's a similarly amorphous bunch of people who use a twitter tag, often for wildly differing reasons. There are a handful of internet petitions. There's a fictitious mass-movement that some juvenile "supporters" have imagined up because it makes them feel good. And there's a fictitious shadowy, sinister organisation that a bunch of equally juvenile opponents have imagined up because it gives them a convenient straw man to attack. Really, nobody comes out of this well.
During my postgrad years (so going back to the start of the last decade now), I had two online roles back to back which gave me a fair amount of visibility to a lot of angry people online. First, I was the head admin of a major European Counter-Strike league. Then I was an oper (and one of the public-facing ones rather than the backroom code-tweakers) on a very large European-based IRC network. Both of those roles involved telling angry people things they didn't want to hear. Things like "somebody in your clan was caught cheating, you are now banned" or "no, I will not gline somebody just so you can have your usual nick back".
And so, on a pretty much daily basis, people threatened to kill me. They were going to find out where I lived and kill me, or maybe track down my parents and kill them or maybe rape my grandmother or my sister (I don't have a sister, but hey), or whatever, or something, or they just hoped I got CANCER or AIDS and would go away and DIE. To be honest, I suspect anybody who's done a similar role (or worked in customer service in certain types of company) also gets similar on a daily basis.
Were the people making those threats good people? Hell no. Even the fact that they were angry doesn't excuse behaviour like that. But what did I do about it? In the Counter-Strike role, if they clan wasn't already banned from the league, then it sure was the moment they made death threats. In the IRC role, it takes only a few seconds to apply a gline and suspend accounts with network services, but the warm fuzzy feeling that follows can last an hour or more. Did I ever actually feel in danger? Did I ever feel I needed to call the police? Hell no. Talking shit online is, unfortunately, pretty much as old as the internet itself and I had no particular political axe to grind.
So yeah, immature idiots on one side and professional grievance-mongers trying to inflate trash talk out of all proportion on the other. Nobody comes well out of this, for the most part.
Actually, the one thing that did strike me about this was how much the whole thing was a product of the indie gaming community. Almost every AAA publisher or developer out there either stayed silent or distanced from it as quickly as possible (which was the only sensible course of action). 2014 is really feeling like the year AAA gaming got smart and indie gaming got dumb.
Ugh...
Region locks are vile practice. It's infuriating to see them creeping into PC gaming (historically a region-free platform) at a time when two of the three console developers have ditched them and the third (Nintendo) is considering dropping them. That said, it's worth reflecting on why they exist. There are, historically, two reason behind this.
The first is plain old-fashioned cultural stereotyping (which somebody being less diplomatic might call "racism"). This is the classic Nintendo reason. Big paternalist companies like Nintendo (they're not alone in this, but are the worst offenders) have this weird outlook that says that they should function as some kind of moral arbiter of what should and should not be available in each territory. Hence certain games are "not a good cultural fit for some regions" (usually a view based on offensive broad-brush stereotypes... or racism, if you prefer the more honest term) or "require alterations to be culturally appropriate" (meaning "we're going to cut the game to hell on release in some territories, because REASONS"). Happily, this particular driver behind region locking is on the decline. Sony used to buy into it every bit as much as Nintendo, but have completely washed their hands of it. Even Nintendo are considering getting out of this game. I should add that a few territories (a handful of religious-wacko countries, plus Germany and Australia - what good company they find themselves in) set up their own barriers that require these kind of locks on occasion. In those cases, the blame rests with the Governments of those countries, not the platform owners/publishers.
The second reason is more complex and is down to differential pricing. Not every currency is of the same strength or stability. The last few days have made that pretty clear, if it wasn't already. And by and large, a lot of those countries which have weak and/or unstable currencies also tend to have very high piracy rates. A lot of companies (Microsoft used to be particularly bad in this respect, but have been stepping back lately) operate under the delusion that if they sell their products really really cheap in those territories, they can get people to buy legitimately, rather than pirating their products (all the evidence to date shows this doesn't work). Problem is, when you do that, you create a huge reverse-import problem; why would a US or European consumer pay the going rate in their territory for a locally-bought copy, when they could import a Brazillian or Russian or Vietnamese copy for a fraction of the price (which probably has English-language support anyway)?
Now, in a pure free market, one of two things would happen. Either the company selling the product would have to drop its price globally, or else it would have to accept that customers in those marginal economies just couldn't, for the most part, afford its products. But we live in a world where they're allowed to circumvent the free-market at will - via region locks. So first-world consumers get to subsidise producers (usually fruitless) speculation in developing-world markets.
There's a curious mirror image of this around one particular market; Japan. See, Japanese consumers are willing to pay massively over the odds for media (movies, games, TV series both live action and animated), particularly when said media is domestically produced. Seriously, you think UK or Australian consumers pay over the odds? It's nothing to what they'll pay in Japan. And because Japan has a large media industry which has grown accustomed to being able to milk this unquestioningly loyal (and seemingly happy to be exploited) domestic market, a good chunk of it is desperate to keep said market behind a walled garden, with reverse importing from the rest of the world locked off.
So yeah... region locking... a few reasons for it, none of them good for the consumer. Truly sad to see it come to Steam (though it's been creeping in at the margins for a while now). The only alternative? Fix all regions' price to the dollar (allowing for differences in local sales taxes, which is the major difference, for instance, between US and UK prices). But then a good chunk of the world wouldn't be able to afford to buy anything like as many games.
Shouldn't be the customer's problem. A big part of the root cause of the Kickstarter backlash is that it makes it into the customer's problem.
I know people who have taken entry-level development positions with large games developers. That's certainly one way to get experience. Yes, the pay, working hours and culture will probably suck, but that's the price you pay for wanting to work in an over-subscribed field. Any large developer will always be carrying a lot of people with little to no experience of games development - the things that suck which I just mentioned mean that this is a field with high turn-over. What matters is that there are experienced people in the right places.
In fact, given that the main skill that seems to be lacking in failed Kickstarter campaigns is project management, you could argue that relevant experience doesn't have to come from games development. Delivering (or at least making a major contribution to) any complex technical project within fixed time and budget constraints is good experience, regardless of field.
Launching a Kickstarter or Early Access for an implausible game design and taking people's money for a project that you then mismanage horribly and fail to deliver any product is not a viable business model. Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to think it is.
You're right that "backers" need to realise that Kickstarter is not a pre-order mechanism. But developers also need to realise that turning to crowdfunding means, by necessity, a different kind of development model to a "traditional" game.
If this game was - as is more usual - being funded by a big publisher and Frontier decided that the offline mode wasn't working out, then that would be the cue for them to begin a negotiation with the publisher. The publisher might be fine with the change. It might not be. The publisher might want to change its funding committment. It might even want to walk away and leave the project looking for a new publisher. But at the end of the day, it's a commercial negotiation.
Now generally, when a game Kickstarter goes horribly wrong, the root cause is that the developer was a "two men and a dog" team with little to no experience of games development. That's not the case here; Frontier are an established studio with a long track record of delivering games (even if most of those games for the last decade-and-a-bit have been low-profile franchise tie-ins). But they're attempting to behave here as though the absence of a traditional publisher means that they have licence to do what they want without the usual accountability to backers. There's no possible world in which that is reasonable.
So it's no wonder backers are upset.