Yes, if the industry really wanted to cut down on piracy for movies/TV shows and games, there are two very simple steps it could take, neither of which would involve paying for new laws and both of which would likely be more effective than legislation, particularly in terms of getting at that particular subcategory of piracy where a torrented version actually does equate into a lost sale.
1) For movies and TV shows, cut the gap between cinema release/TV air date and the media going on sale in a "to own" format. Yes, this would be bad news for the multiplexes (though these do tend to market themselves on the basis that they have better AV equipment than the average home anyway) and yes, it would mean lower TV revenues. But hey - if you really think that piracy is costing you THAT much, you'd do it, right?
2) Get rid of region encoding and gaps between international release dates. People don't like knowing that a product is being sold in other countries before their own. Get rid of that gap in the window of legal availability and you'll take a way a lot of resentment and temptation. Some leeway needed here in territories where translation is needed - but just make the English (or whatever the original language is) version available anyway and say "translated version to follow".
No, neither the US nor the UK has any provisions saying that "if a show isn't sold in this country, copyright doesn't apply to it". Even if it did, that wouldn't apply in this case, as you can buy DVD box-sets of all of those shows in the UK.
Of course, there are instances where copyright holders take a relaxed view of whether or not to pursue people from territories they don't operate in downloading their stuff. Anime's probably the biggest example here; the odds of being sued for torrenting fansubs of an anime show that isn't licensed in the West are next to zero (though the people who upload them in Japan can and do get prosecuted over there). Even if the show is licensed, you're still much less likely to get hit than you might be with Western shows. The main reason why? Overseas sales are so marginal to the business model for making these shows that it's not worth the cost of cross-border prosecutions. Plus watching the popularity of torrents is, as referenced with Netflix in the summary, sometimes an indicator of which shows are worth licensing for a Western distributor.
But that isn't to say that they couldn't go after people in the West downloading their shows, or even that it hasn't happened. We've seen a harder line on people torrenting Ghost in the Shell material (certainly to the extent of chasing fansub groups, if not individual downloaders) - possibly because GitS is a bit more "made for export" than the norm.
I have no idea. Stories like this have been a stock feature in local papers here in the UK ever since home video recorders came onto the market, usually centered on raids on car boot sales or dodgy market stalls. Maybe it's the "selling online" thing? Though dodgy DVDs being sold as genuine online is hardly a new thing either and has always been something you've known you have to look out for on Ebay and the like.
Maybe it's because it's in the Guardian? There's a certain type of person who takes everything that paper writes as the judgement of God. But I'm not even sure why the Guardian decided to pick up on this story. If it wants to convince the public at large that people being arrested for flogging dodgy DVDs is a new and globally significant assault on civil liberties, then it's going to face an uphill struggle.
Getting a telephone connected in the UK in the days of nationalisation took weeks. At best. When I moved into my new place last year, Virgin Media had somebody around to switch on the phone and broadband the day after I moved in. They could have been there on the day itself, but I pushed them back a day because I knew I'd be too busy with boxes and furniture.
Privatisation and the introduction of competition was the best thing to happen to telecommunications in the UK. BT - as in the privatised successor company to the old nationalised monopoly - took quite a long time to improve, mainly because it was stuck with most of the old staff and management from the nationalisation days. But even BT is much improved these days.
The postal service has a simple problem. An ideological (to use your word) commitment to a universal service with universal fees. Which means that to send a first-class letter to an urban address 2 minutes walk from the sorting center costs as much as sending that same letter to a remote hamlet an hour's drive from civilisation. That means that most users of the service end up paying way above what they otherwise would to subsidise a small minority who choose to live in the middle of nowhere. If privatisation ends that, then fantastic.
Oh, and they could also do with sorting out the "don't give a shit" attitude of most of the staff (with a few exceptions). That's another consistent feature of UK nationalised industries and if experiences elsewhere are anything to go by, it will be a good few years after privatisation that it finally dies out.
The first book (The Gunslinger) is terrible. By King's own admission, it's essentially an oversized student essay. When it was around a decade ago reprinted, it had some fairly major changes to make it fit better with the rest of the series. But by and large, it's awful.
Things improve markedly with the second book, which has actual... you know... characters and plot. The third and fourth are excellent, the fifth divides opinion but I like it, the sixth a very short and doesn't do much and the seventh is an epic in its own right.
The ending is infamous and many people hate it. Or rather, the second ending is infamous. There is a break point at which he cuts into the narrative and says "you can stop here". If you stop there, you get a perfectly fine open-ish ending. But nobody ever stops there.
I didn't mind Wolves. In fact, I more or less like The Dark Tower series as a whole. Yes, I've got some reservations (as I have about other long fantasy series - Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time, Song of Ice and Fire), but as a whole, I'd say that I found more to enjoy than to dislike.
If I had a complaint, it'd be around the way the last two books are cut up. Song of Susannah is a very, very short book (not much more than a pamphlet really) in which not much happens. Then the final books is a vast tome (not much shorter than all three books of LOTR combined) with god knows how many plot threads within it. Even the meta-narrative crap (my least favorite aspect of the series) from book 6 has all of its conclusions pushed into book 7.
It doesn't much matter, now that the whole series is available and if you want to read through it you can do so with no delays. But at the time SoS was released... my word, I was not a happy bunny.
I don't find 26k characters hard to believe, expecially not if you take the short stories into account. Yes, it probably takes minor characters into account, but King's books do feature an insane number of those (cf. IT or the extended version of The Stand) and quite a number of them have small plot-threads of their own, or show up in multiple books (lots of minor-character cameos in the Dark Tower series).
Don't worry, I think the free to play bubble is already bursting. A lot of the companies who made their name in that market, particularly Zynga, are in dire financial straits. At the same time, publishers who had made previous statements committing themselves heavily to that model (EA, Square Enix to name two) have started to hedge their bets over the last month or two. EA is talking about the importance of singleplayer and the traditional pay-to-own model again, while Square Enix (the masters of free-to-play scamware like All The Bravest) have gone with a very traditional purchase-and-subscription model for their newly relaunched flagship MMO, FF14: A Realm Reborn.
Free-to-play was a pretty blatant trick played upon users. Emphasise the "free" and obfuscate the "paywalls everywhere once you start playing". Then hope nobody notices that your game doesn't actually contain anything that looks like game mechanics; just a surface imitation of a game designed to extract microtransactions.
If, like me, you first started gaming during the 1980s, you might remember seeing Commodore 64 offerings which advertised things like "50 great games on one tape!" for the price of a single "normal" game. If, like me, you hadn't yet reached your teens at the time, that probably looked like a fantastic offer. Of course, the first time you spent the pocket money you'd been saving on these rather than on a normal game, you realised that all 50 were unutterably shit. Next time you had the money for a game, you didn't fall for that trick again.
Free to play's basically the same thing. It had a brief wave of success based on tricking a large number of people for a short span of time. In most of the world, revenues from it seem to be falling through the floor now that people (and not just people who would describe themselves as "gamers") have wised up to it.
Yes, I suppose it is "dying" in the sense that we are all "dying" from the moment we are born.
Sorry... it's late and I'm rather drunker than when I made my earlier posts.
Re:Good news for stockholders
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Ballmer To Retire
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Disagree very strongly here. PC gaming is in a much better place than it was a few years ago. Back then, it was a toss-up as to whether the PC got a port of major multi-platform console games and, if it did, it usually got the crappy port. For the last 12 months or so, the PC has been the primary platform for most releases. The piracy rates and DRM-avoidance thing is a rather tired straw-man. PC gamers accept Steam DRM. Developers mostly live with the fact that somebody really determined can break Steam DRM.
The next-gen console may shift the balance back to the consoles. That's what usually happens early in a console cycle. If so, it will be a temporary thing (just as the current console decline is probably a temporary thing).
The App Store looked potent a couple of years ago, but it's losing momentum as a gaming platform - largely because of diminishing returns on IAP laden pay-to-win games. The bubble on those has already burst - Zynga and the other companies which rode the crest of it are now going to the wall.
PC gaming has been "dying" ever since I first started playing PC games myself in 1990. It's no more dying now than it was then.
Yes, and the natural OS cycle probably just reinforces this fear. We've seen how difficult MS have found to prize a lot of users (including big corporate customers) off Win98/NT and WinXP. They're finding the same now with Win7.
I suspect MS looks at this and thinks "the problem is that our product was too good". In reality, of course, the problem was that people don't really feel the need for a major OS overhaul all that often and that MS needed to be looking for new markets in between OS cycles.
It's closing, but only very slowly. Check the number of Mac games on Steam and it's still tiny.
If one or two big publishers were to say "we no longer target Windows as a platform, instead we target Steam, which means PC, Mac (plus Linux?)" that might change things.
But publishers generally need a lot of convincing to do that kind of thing and Apple's attitude is such that they will never even put out the feelers.
Indeed. And it's more about accounts than it is about games (though of course most MMOs have issues with this).
If you have a Steam account these days and you aren't using the Steamguard added security, you're mad. The trade in compromised Steam accounts is quite terrifying (and unsurprising given the value of the games stored on many of them). The same is true for PSN accounts. It's even more true for XBox Live accounts where there are fewer additional layers of password security you can bolt on (unless they've added them since I last checked) and where there are FIFA Soccer DLC packs that are tradable and essentially allow "real money" to be laundered through the accounts.
Re:Good news for stockholders
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Ballmer To Retire
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The big thing? Games...
Apple's been culturally hostile to gaming for most of its history. And yet it remains a huge driver of home computer sales and platform choice - but it never so much as figures in MS's OS advertising.
Re:Good news for stockholders
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Ballmer To Retire
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I think the next CEO has a few big challenges on his hands. I'd highlight three in particular:
First, he needs to get the company out of the mindset that has it still behaving as though it commands monopoly power. It doesn't, or at least, it doesn't in many of the markets where it now needs to compete. It found that out with with the XBox One launch, where it thought that it had the power to force customers to accept things they didn't want to, then was forced into an embarrassing U-turn when Sony offered a viable alternative. It is finding that out in the mobile and tablet marketplaces, which it came to as a late entrant and failed to provide reasons for people to switch. And it's about to find that out on the desktop, where the message coming through on Windows 8 is that even die-hard Windows users will bide their time and see what else comes along rather than making the shift to an operating system that forces unwanted changes onto them.
Second, he needs to sort out communications. MS does have some good products. The Surface is by no means bad - but it was marketed via that whole incomrpehensible break dancing thing. The XBox One is turning into a decent product (thanks to the aforementioned U-Turns), but every time MS speaks about it, their message comes over as either an apology or a horribly mis-aimed pitch for TV services. MS needs to stop being afraid of selling its products on the basis of its features, rather than coming over like an embarrassing parent trying to be trendy at a teen disco. The obvious answer to the old "I'm a Mac, he's a PC" advertising slur was "yeah, Mac guy looks pretty, but he's actually useless. Look at what PC guy can do". They always seemed curiously afraid to go there.
Thirdly, judging by the stories that come out of the company, the new CEO needs to sort out some of the staffing and corporate culture issues. MS increasingly looks and sounds like a public sector bureaucracy. Its stack-ranking system in particular is a cack-handed system that's been demonstrated to destroy morale and drive down performance wherever it's used. If MS doesn't want to reduce the size of its workforce, then it needs to adapt its organisation structures in such a way that they actually enable an organisation of that size to respond to new challenges flexibly. That probably means a lot more internal devolution (including over staffing issues).
That sector benefited over the years between the start of European Monetary Union and the start of the Mediterranean death-spiral from being locked into a favourable exchange rate with a relatively cash-rich (albeit debt-fuelled) set of customer states. Most of those states are economically dead or dying at the moment.
If the German manufacturing sector has managed to diversify its markets enough over the last couple of years that it can weather the delayed shock of this when it finally hits, then Europe will probably muddle through. Once the worst of the crisis has past, the states that should never have been in EMU to begin with can be eased out of it without too much risk of contagion and most of Europe will be ok (though I suspect living standards in Greece etc will take decades to make up lost ground, if indeed they ever do).
If German manufacturing does start to suffer in a big way over the next year or two, then we've only seen the start of the problem, as if the economic engine of much of the continent splutters, then the death spiral will just widen. In that case, expect to see the UK and some of Eastern European states split away in self preservation and some really unpleasant social disorder sweep most of the rest of the continent.
All of which is absolutely nothing compared to what will happen when China's generation of largely-single angry-young-men-used-to-ever-rising-living-standards (the inevitable result of a one-child-policy that turns a blind eye to a bit of back-door gender selection) experiences its first serious recession.
It's shocking how little effort shareholders in the tech sector are willing to put into scrutinising the products of the companies they are investing in and asking the crucial question: "how many people are going to pay money for this?"
We saw it back in the first dotcom bubble - investors ploughing money into businesses which had no plausible path towards generating substantial revenues, let alone turning a profit.
We've seen it with social networks whose business plan boiled down to "erm... advertising?".
God knows we've seen it in the video gaming sector, where all investors seem to want to here is the appropriate catchphrase, which, depending on the year in question might be: "the next World of Warcraft", "the next Call of Duty" or "free to play with microtransactions". This usually results in a lemming-like dash towards bankrupcy unless the company in question is one of the industry giants.
And now we've seen it with a "next iPad" tablet.
Seriously, is it that hard to look at the product line of the company you're investing in and ask yourself "can I imagine any significant number of people parting with their cash for this?".
Oh, and look at their marketing strategy as well. If it involves breakdancing, that's probably a bad sign.
I'd also take issue with the phrase "make Shakespeare less boring". Most of Shakespeare's work (and I will make an exception for a couple of the romcoms, which I do feel are a bit crap) are anything but boring.
This proposal just makes my flesh crawl. Why are we so afraid of the idea that some classic works of literature (just like classics in the field of art or film) require a degree of diligence and attention to get the most out of them? Why do we object so strongly to the idea of teaching children the value of deferred please; that hard work and effort now can produce greater rewards down the line?
It's not just a problem in the arts. If we teach the next generation that all study should be easy, quick and fun, then how do we get over the fact that a learning lot of the science that underpins our current standard of living is none of those things.
"Sit down, shut up and read" might not be patentable as a teaching method due to prior art (though part of me wouldn't be surprised if somebody tried), but it strikes me as far more useful than the technology described in TFA.
Not trustworthy by default - absolutely. I think I failed to make that point clear.
But there are certainly projects and products that have become trustworthy over time - both open and closed source.
By contrast, the trend on the Apple/Android app store seems to be towards studios that pop up out of nowhere, based in obscure parts of the world, with no kind of track record and no means of recourse when things go wrong.
I do get the impression that the tide's starting to turn a bit of late and that people are starting to realise the drawbacks of the Apple/Android app-store model.
Yes, the applications might be cheap or free, but when they're coming from obscure and opaque closed-source developers with no public track record, there's generally a price to be paid somewhere along the line, either in the form of IAPs or privacy/security problems (or both).
About 2 years ago, I replaced my laptop with an iPad, as it seemed to be just as good for the tasks I need when "on the move" (and I do keep a proper desktop at home). I'm seriously considering moving back to a laptop PC now, because it's increasingly clear that the cheap and dirty "apps" model is no substitute for a proper combination of trusted open-source software and high quality (if more expensive) closed-source products from reputable developers.
Yes, this feels like a case of emergency damage limitation. After a period in the mid-point of the current console cycle where things seemed to be going their way, Microsoft have had a fairly poor late cycle (unpopular 3rd-gen dashboard, a drought of major exclusives, overtaken by the PS3 in global installed-base stakes). This all culminated in a very difficult lead-up to E3 and an absolute disaster at E3 itself.
The company went in the wrong direction with always-online DRM and, arguably worse, didn't have a convincing story to tell on why it was going that direction in the first place. Admittedly, they probably got dumped on by some of their industry partners. In particular, EA claiming that they never wanted always-online DRM and denying that they had anything to do with its inclusion in the XBone was reminiscent of a small child frantically wiping cake-crumbs off his mouth while emphatically denying that he raided the fridge to steal the cake. But ultimately, whatever pressure there was on MS from publishers to go the always-online route, Sony recognised that it was a better long term strategy to side with the customers instead. MS's about-turn since E3 is welcome, but it hasn't helped the company's reputation.
And reptuation is probably what this is about. Not so much reputation with the general public, but reputation with shareholders. From its early days as a long-shot cash-hungry investment, the Xbox line has become a big part of MS's business. With the Windows side of the business not doing very much and with the company's attempts to get into the phone and tablet market not going very far, annual reports have shown that Xbox and Office are basically the two big growth areas in Microsoft.
On the day of E3 it looked like MS was about to commit suicide in one of those two areas. Shareholders will not have liked that. And while the general gaming public has welcomed MS's u-turn since then, shareholders will have liked it even less. Why? Because it smacks of confusion and a lack of a strategy. If MS had stood firm, then at least shareholders might have clung to the belief that the board knew what it was doing here and would be proved right in the long run. With a u-turn, it seems that the executive team has been making decisions that it doesn't even believe in itself.
So now, Ballmer (who, rather oddly, still enjoys a lot of shareholder confidence) steps in personally to provide reassurance that the company recognises it has a problem and is getting a strategy in place to fix it.
If the games industry in particular (and the tech sector in particular) had smarter and more in-touch shareholders, then a lot of executive teams would be getting very uncomfortable. However, there seems to be little chance of that happening any time soon.
Having read TFA, I am forced to conclude that if I could, I would repeal the printing press.
See, the printing press gave rise to mass publishing. Mass publishing gave rise to newspapers. Which in turn led to the Washington Post. Which in turn led to the ability of somebody as atrociously stupid as Robert J. Samuelson to find a mass audience for his idiocy.
Or is that not going far enough. If we're going to be truly safe, do we need to repeal writing?
Thing is, while the driver situation back then may have been better for Linux than Win2k, the simple fact was that you couldn't actually play most games on Linux.
Thinking back to the games I was mostly playing back in my final days as a Win98 user, when I was weighing up a shift to Win2k, I can recall a good few (as a postgrad student at the time, I had a lot more time for gaming than I had now). I was heavily into the online scene for Counter-Strike (was the head admin of a major UK league) and also fairly heavily into online Warcraft 3. I was also a more casual online player of Battlefield 1942 and Tribes 2. Offline, I spent a lot of time with the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale series. Playing that lot on Linux? Very, very unlikely.
So it was a case of sticking with Win98, tolerating the requirement for reboots pretty much daily if you wanted to preserve performance and stability, and waiting for reports that 2k was actually usable.
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Yes, if the industry really wanted to cut down on piracy for movies/TV shows and games, there are two very simple steps it could take, neither of which would involve paying for new laws and both of which would likely be more effective than legislation, particularly in terms of getting at that particular subcategory of piracy where a torrented version actually does equate into a lost sale.
1) For movies and TV shows, cut the gap between cinema release/TV air date and the media going on sale in a "to own" format. Yes, this would be bad news for the multiplexes (though these do tend to market themselves on the basis that they have better AV equipment than the average home anyway) and yes, it would mean lower TV revenues. But hey - if you really think that piracy is costing you THAT much, you'd do it, right?
2) Get rid of region encoding and gaps between international release dates. People don't like knowing that a product is being sold in other countries before their own. Get rid of that gap in the window of legal availability and you'll take a way a lot of resentment and temptation. Some leeway needed here in territories where translation is needed - but just make the English (or whatever the original language is) version available anyway and say "translated version to follow".
No, neither the US nor the UK has any provisions saying that "if a show isn't sold in this country, copyright doesn't apply to it". Even if it did, that wouldn't apply in this case, as you can buy DVD box-sets of all of those shows in the UK.
Of course, there are instances where copyright holders take a relaxed view of whether or not to pursue people from territories they don't operate in downloading their stuff. Anime's probably the biggest example here; the odds of being sued for torrenting fansubs of an anime show that isn't licensed in the West are next to zero (though the people who upload them in Japan can and do get prosecuted over there). Even if the show is licensed, you're still much less likely to get hit than you might be with Western shows. The main reason why? Overseas sales are so marginal to the business model for making these shows that it's not worth the cost of cross-border prosecutions. Plus watching the popularity of torrents is, as referenced with Netflix in the summary, sometimes an indicator of which shows are worth licensing for a Western distributor.
But that isn't to say that they couldn't go after people in the West downloading their shows, or even that it hasn't happened. We've seen a harder line on people torrenting Ghost in the Shell material (certainly to the extent of chasing fansub groups, if not individual downloaders) - possibly because GitS is a bit more "made for export" than the norm.
I have no idea. Stories like this have been a stock feature in local papers here in the UK ever since home video recorders came onto the market, usually centered on raids on car boot sales or dodgy market stalls. Maybe it's the "selling online" thing? Though dodgy DVDs being sold as genuine online is hardly a new thing either and has always been something you've known you have to look out for on Ebay and the like.
Maybe it's because it's in the Guardian? There's a certain type of person who takes everything that paper writes as the judgement of God. But I'm not even sure why the Guardian decided to pick up on this story. If it wants to convince the public at large that people being arrested for flogging dodgy DVDs is a new and globally significant assault on civil liberties, then it's going to face an uphill struggle.
Getting a telephone connected in the UK in the days of nationalisation took weeks. At best. When I moved into my new place last year, Virgin Media had somebody around to switch on the phone and broadband the day after I moved in. They could have been there on the day itself, but I pushed them back a day because I knew I'd be too busy with boxes and furniture.
Privatisation and the introduction of competition was the best thing to happen to telecommunications in the UK. BT - as in the privatised successor company to the old nationalised monopoly - took quite a long time to improve, mainly because it was stuck with most of the old staff and management from the nationalisation days. But even BT is much improved these days.
The postal service has a simple problem. An ideological (to use your word) commitment to a universal service with universal fees. Which means that to send a first-class letter to an urban address 2 minutes walk from the sorting center costs as much as sending that same letter to a remote hamlet an hour's drive from civilisation. That means that most users of the service end up paying way above what they otherwise would to subsidise a small minority who choose to live in the middle of nowhere. If privatisation ends that, then fantastic.
Oh, and they could also do with sorting out the "don't give a shit" attitude of most of the staff (with a few exceptions). That's another consistent feature of UK nationalised industries and if experiences elsewhere are anything to go by, it will be a good few years after privatisation that it finally dies out.
The first book (The Gunslinger) is terrible. By King's own admission, it's essentially an oversized student essay. When it was around a decade ago reprinted, it had some fairly major changes to make it fit better with the rest of the series. But by and large, it's awful.
Things improve markedly with the second book, which has actual... you know... characters and plot. The third and fourth are excellent, the fifth divides opinion but I like it, the sixth a very short and doesn't do much and the seventh is an epic in its own right.
The ending is infamous and many people hate it. Or rather, the second ending is infamous. There is a break point at which he cuts into the narrative and says "you can stop here". If you stop there, you get a perfectly fine open-ish ending. But nobody ever stops there.
I didn't mind Wolves. In fact, I more or less like The Dark Tower series as a whole. Yes, I've got some reservations (as I have about other long fantasy series - Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time, Song of Ice and Fire), but as a whole, I'd say that I found more to enjoy than to dislike.
If I had a complaint, it'd be around the way the last two books are cut up. Song of Susannah is a very, very short book (not much more than a pamphlet really) in which not much happens. Then the final books is a vast tome (not much shorter than all three books of LOTR combined) with god knows how many plot threads within it. Even the meta-narrative crap (my least favorite aspect of the series) from book 6 has all of its conclusions pushed into book 7.
It doesn't much matter, now that the whole series is available and if you want to read through it you can do so with no delays. But at the time SoS was released... my word, I was not a happy bunny.
I don't find 26k characters hard to believe, expecially not if you take the short stories into account. Yes, it probably takes minor characters into account, but King's books do feature an insane number of those (cf. IT or the extended version of The Stand) and quite a number of them have small plot-threads of their own, or show up in multiple books (lots of minor-character cameos in the Dark Tower series).
Don't worry, I think the free to play bubble is already bursting. A lot of the companies who made their name in that market, particularly Zynga, are in dire financial straits. At the same time, publishers who had made previous statements committing themselves heavily to that model (EA, Square Enix to name two) have started to hedge their bets over the last month or two. EA is talking about the importance of singleplayer and the traditional pay-to-own model again, while Square Enix (the masters of free-to-play scamware like All The Bravest) have gone with a very traditional purchase-and-subscription model for their newly relaunched flagship MMO, FF14: A Realm Reborn.
Free-to-play was a pretty blatant trick played upon users. Emphasise the "free" and obfuscate the "paywalls everywhere once you start playing". Then hope nobody notices that your game doesn't actually contain anything that looks like game mechanics; just a surface imitation of a game designed to extract microtransactions.
If, like me, you first started gaming during the 1980s, you might remember seeing Commodore 64 offerings which advertised things like "50 great games on one tape!" for the price of a single "normal" game. If, like me, you hadn't yet reached your teens at the time, that probably looked like a fantastic offer. Of course, the first time you spent the pocket money you'd been saving on these rather than on a normal game, you realised that all 50 were unutterably shit. Next time you had the money for a game, you didn't fall for that trick again.
Free to play's basically the same thing. It had a brief wave of success based on tricking a large number of people for a short span of time. In most of the world, revenues from it seem to be falling through the floor now that people (and not just people who would describe themselves as "gamers") have wised up to it.
Yes, I suppose it is "dying" in the sense that we are all "dying" from the moment we are born.
Sorry... it's late and I'm rather drunker than when I made my earlier posts.
Disagree very strongly here. PC gaming is in a much better place than it was a few years ago. Back then, it was a toss-up as to whether the PC got a port of major multi-platform console games and, if it did, it usually got the crappy port. For the last 12 months or so, the PC has been the primary platform for most releases. The piracy rates and DRM-avoidance thing is a rather tired straw-man. PC gamers accept Steam DRM. Developers mostly live with the fact that somebody really determined can break Steam DRM.
The next-gen console may shift the balance back to the consoles. That's what usually happens early in a console cycle. If so, it will be a temporary thing (just as the current console decline is probably a temporary thing).
The App Store looked potent a couple of years ago, but it's losing momentum as a gaming platform - largely because of diminishing returns on IAP laden pay-to-win games. The bubble on those has already burst - Zynga and the other companies which rode the crest of it are now going to the wall.
PC gaming has been "dying" ever since I first started playing PC games myself in 1990. It's no more dying now than it was then.
Yes, and the natural OS cycle probably just reinforces this fear. We've seen how difficult MS have found to prize a lot of users (including big corporate customers) off Win98/NT and WinXP. They're finding the same now with Win7.
I suspect MS looks at this and thinks "the problem is that our product was too good". In reality, of course, the problem was that people don't really feel the need for a major OS overhaul all that often and that MS needed to be looking for new markets in between OS cycles.
It's closing, but only very slowly. Check the number of Mac games on Steam and it's still tiny.
If one or two big publishers were to say "we no longer target Windows as a platform, instead we target Steam, which means PC, Mac (plus Linux?)" that might change things.
But publishers generally need a lot of convincing to do that kind of thing and Apple's attitude is such that they will never even put out the feelers.
Indeed. And it's more about accounts than it is about games (though of course most MMOs have issues with this).
If you have a Steam account these days and you aren't using the Steamguard added security, you're mad. The trade in compromised Steam accounts is quite terrifying (and unsurprising given the value of the games stored on many of them). The same is true for PSN accounts. It's even more true for XBox Live accounts where there are fewer additional layers of password security you can bolt on (unless they've added them since I last checked) and where there are FIFA Soccer DLC packs that are tradable and essentially allow "real money" to be laundered through the accounts.
The big thing? Games...
Apple's been culturally hostile to gaming for most of its history. And yet it remains a huge driver of home computer sales and platform choice - but it never so much as figures in MS's OS advertising.
I think the next CEO has a few big challenges on his hands. I'd highlight three in particular:
First, he needs to get the company out of the mindset that has it still behaving as though it commands monopoly power. It doesn't, or at least, it doesn't in many of the markets where it now needs to compete. It found that out with with the XBox One launch, where it thought that it had the power to force customers to accept things they didn't want to, then was forced into an embarrassing U-turn when Sony offered a viable alternative. It is finding that out in the mobile and tablet marketplaces, which it came to as a late entrant and failed to provide reasons for people to switch. And it's about to find that out on the desktop, where the message coming through on Windows 8 is that even die-hard Windows users will bide their time and see what else comes along rather than making the shift to an operating system that forces unwanted changes onto them.
Second, he needs to sort out communications. MS does have some good products. The Surface is by no means bad - but it was marketed via that whole incomrpehensible break dancing thing. The XBox One is turning into a decent product (thanks to the aforementioned U-Turns), but every time MS speaks about it, their message comes over as either an apology or a horribly mis-aimed pitch for TV services. MS needs to stop being afraid of selling its products on the basis of its features, rather than coming over like an embarrassing parent trying to be trendy at a teen disco. The obvious answer to the old "I'm a Mac, he's a PC" advertising slur was "yeah, Mac guy looks pretty, but he's actually useless. Look at what PC guy can do". They always seemed curiously afraid to go there.
Thirdly, judging by the stories that come out of the company, the new CEO needs to sort out some of the staffing and corporate culture issues. MS increasingly looks and sounds like a public sector bureaucracy. Its stack-ranking system in particular is a cack-handed system that's been demonstrated to destroy morale and drive down performance wherever it's used. If MS doesn't want to reduce the size of its workforce, then it needs to adapt its organisation structures in such a way that they actually enable an organisation of that size to respond to new challenges flexibly. That probably means a lot more internal devolution (including over staffing issues).
Specifically, German manufacturing...
That sector benefited over the years between the start of European Monetary Union and the start of the Mediterranean death-spiral from being locked into a favourable exchange rate with a relatively cash-rich (albeit debt-fuelled) set of customer states. Most of those states are economically dead or dying at the moment.
If the German manufacturing sector has managed to diversify its markets enough over the last couple of years that it can weather the delayed shock of this when it finally hits, then Europe will probably muddle through. Once the worst of the crisis has past, the states that should never have been in EMU to begin with can be eased out of it without too much risk of contagion and most of Europe will be ok (though I suspect living standards in Greece etc will take decades to make up lost ground, if indeed they ever do).
If German manufacturing does start to suffer in a big way over the next year or two, then we've only seen the start of the problem, as if the economic engine of much of the continent splutters, then the death spiral will just widen. In that case, expect to see the UK and some of Eastern European states split away in self preservation and some really unpleasant social disorder sweep most of the rest of the continent.
All of which is absolutely nothing compared to what will happen when China's generation of largely-single angry-young-men-used-to-ever-rising-living-standards (the inevitable result of a one-child-policy that turns a blind eye to a bit of back-door gender selection) experiences its first serious recession.
You're probably right, but...
It's shocking how little effort shareholders in the tech sector are willing to put into scrutinising the products of the companies they are investing in and asking the crucial question: "how many people are going to pay money for this?"
We saw it back in the first dotcom bubble - investors ploughing money into businesses which had no plausible path towards generating substantial revenues, let alone turning a profit.
We've seen it with social networks whose business plan boiled down to "erm... advertising?".
God knows we've seen it in the video gaming sector, where all investors seem to want to here is the appropriate catchphrase, which, depending on the year in question might be: "the next World of Warcraft", "the next Call of Duty" or "free to play with microtransactions". This usually results in a lemming-like dash towards bankrupcy unless the company in question is one of the industry giants.
And now we've seen it with a "next iPad" tablet.
Seriously, is it that hard to look at the product line of the company you're investing in and ask yourself "can I imagine any significant number of people parting with their cash for this?".
Oh, and look at their marketing strategy as well. If it involves breakdancing, that's probably a bad sign.
Yes, point taken on the plays.
I'd also take issue with the phrase "make Shakespeare less boring". Most of Shakespeare's work (and I will make an exception for a couple of the romcoms, which I do feel are a bit crap) are anything but boring.
This proposal just makes my flesh crawl. Why are we so afraid of the idea that some classic works of literature (just like classics in the field of art or film) require a degree of diligence and attention to get the most out of them? Why do we object so strongly to the idea of teaching children the value of deferred please; that hard work and effort now can produce greater rewards down the line?
It's not just a problem in the arts. If we teach the next generation that all study should be easy, quick and fun, then how do we get over the fact that a learning lot of the science that underpins our current standard of living is none of those things.
"Sit down, shut up and read" might not be patentable as a teaching method due to prior art (though part of me wouldn't be surprised if somebody tried), but it strikes me as far more useful than the technology described in TFA.
Not trustworthy by default - absolutely. I think I failed to make that point clear.
But there are certainly projects and products that have become trustworthy over time - both open and closed source.
By contrast, the trend on the Apple/Android app store seems to be towards studios that pop up out of nowhere, based in obscure parts of the world, with no kind of track record and no means of recourse when things go wrong.
I do get the impression that the tide's starting to turn a bit of late and that people are starting to realise the drawbacks of the Apple/Android app-store model.
Yes, the applications might be cheap or free, but when they're coming from obscure and opaque closed-source developers with no public track record, there's generally a price to be paid somewhere along the line, either in the form of IAPs or privacy/security problems (or both).
About 2 years ago, I replaced my laptop with an iPad, as it seemed to be just as good for the tasks I need when "on the move" (and I do keep a proper desktop at home). I'm seriously considering moving back to a laptop PC now, because it's increasingly clear that the cheap and dirty "apps" model is no substitute for a proper combination of trusted open-source software and high quality (if more expensive) closed-source products from reputable developers.
Yes, this feels like a case of emergency damage limitation. After a period in the mid-point of the current console cycle where things seemed to be going their way, Microsoft have had a fairly poor late cycle (unpopular 3rd-gen dashboard, a drought of major exclusives, overtaken by the PS3 in global installed-base stakes). This all culminated in a very difficult lead-up to E3 and an absolute disaster at E3 itself.
The company went in the wrong direction with always-online DRM and, arguably worse, didn't have a convincing story to tell on why it was going that direction in the first place. Admittedly, they probably got dumped on by some of their industry partners. In particular, EA claiming that they never wanted always-online DRM and denying that they had anything to do with its inclusion in the XBone was reminiscent of a small child frantically wiping cake-crumbs off his mouth while emphatically denying that he raided the fridge to steal the cake. But ultimately, whatever pressure there was on MS from publishers to go the always-online route, Sony recognised that it was a better long term strategy to side with the customers instead. MS's about-turn since E3 is welcome, but it hasn't helped the company's reputation.
And reptuation is probably what this is about. Not so much reputation with the general public, but reputation with shareholders. From its early days as a long-shot cash-hungry investment, the Xbox line has become a big part of MS's business. With the Windows side of the business not doing very much and with the company's attempts to get into the phone and tablet market not going very far, annual reports have shown that Xbox and Office are basically the two big growth areas in Microsoft.
On the day of E3 it looked like MS was about to commit suicide in one of those two areas. Shareholders will not have liked that. And while the general gaming public has welcomed MS's u-turn since then, shareholders will have liked it even less. Why? Because it smacks of confusion and a lack of a strategy. If MS had stood firm, then at least shareholders might have clung to the belief that the board knew what it was doing here and would be proved right in the long run. With a u-turn, it seems that the executive team has been making decisions that it doesn't even believe in itself.
So now, Ballmer (who, rather oddly, still enjoys a lot of shareholder confidence) steps in personally to provide reassurance that the company recognises it has a problem and is getting a strategy in place to fix it.
If the games industry in particular (and the tech sector in particular) had smarter and more in-touch shareholders, then a lot of executive teams would be getting very uncomfortable. However, there seems to be little chance of that happening any time soon.
In fairness, London did have those bendy buses for a while, which had an unfortunate habit of catching fire.
Having read TFA, I am forced to conclude that if I could, I would repeal the printing press.
See, the printing press gave rise to mass publishing. Mass publishing gave rise to newspapers. Which in turn led to the Washington Post. Which in turn led to the ability of somebody as atrociously stupid as Robert J. Samuelson to find a mass audience for his idiocy.
Or is that not going far enough. If we're going to be truly safe, do we need to repeal writing?
Thing is, while the driver situation back then may have been better for Linux than Win2k, the simple fact was that you couldn't actually play most games on Linux.
Thinking back to the games I was mostly playing back in my final days as a Win98 user, when I was weighing up a shift to Win2k, I can recall a good few (as a postgrad student at the time, I had a lot more time for gaming than I had now). I was heavily into the online scene for Counter-Strike (was the head admin of a major UK league) and also fairly heavily into online Warcraft 3. I was also a more casual online player of Battlefield 1942 and Tribes 2. Offline, I spent a lot of time with the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale series. Playing that lot on Linux? Very, very unlikely.
So it was a case of sticking with Win98, tolerating the requirement for reboots pretty much daily if you wanted to preserve performance and stability, and waiting for reports that 2k was actually usable.