Everything about this screams "rob Vega of its momentum". Judging by the price and specs, this is probably only slightly above "loss leader" territory.
Another example of competition being good for the end-users. The first round of high-end Pascal cards (1070/1080/Titan) frankly looked a bit over-priced relative to their performance increase over the previous generation, but then AMD just didn't have a viable high-end offering at the time. I'd struggle to persuade myself to buy an AMD card after previous driver woes with them, but I'm relieved to see them looking like they're about to get back into the game.
But then I'm a well-paid professional whose main hobby is gaming and who can afford to splash out on something like this once in a while, while still paying the mortgage, racking up savings etc. I like having all the latest bells and whistles. If I'm going to spend a good chunk of my leisure time doing something, I'd like to do it well.
Gaming can be an expensive hobby, sure. But so can lots of other hobbies. Guy I've known since my late teens is seriously into mountaineering. He got pretty rich during his 20s (combination of being smart, hardworking and in the right place at the right time) then downshifted into a job with an employer who was fine with him taking big chunks of time off. In previous years, he's vanished for 2-3 month chunks of time to Alaska and the Andes. Later this year, he'll be doing his first Himalayan trip. All-inclusive cost for that trip alone is close to $100k (which, given he's British like me, is rather more money than it used to be since Brexit). All of which is to spend a few months cold and miserable in a tent, with no guarantee of a successful summit and a non-trivial chance of dying. Not my cup of tea at all. But that's what he likes to do and he has the money to do it, so frankly it's his business (and his stories are fun, in a hair-raising way).
Even leaving the more extreme hobbies aside, lots of people still sink sums into fairly normal activities that are not out of line with what I spend on gaming. My dad's a golfer and, between membership fees, trips, new clubs, training sessions and all of the assorted gadgets that seem to go with the sport, he likely racks up more on that than I do on gaming. But that's fine; he can afford it without making stupid compromises elsewhere in his life
Cars? I'm friends with a petrolhead at work who spends a fortune on them (his own estimate to me was £10,000 per annum on average, albeit with peaks and troughs), despite the fact that other than a track day every couple of months, his latest road-going rally-monster spends most of its time on supermarket runs. Good god, I know cyclists (the pedal kind, not the motorised kind) who spend more on their bikes than I spend on my PC.
Short version; what adults do with their own disposable income is their own business, provided they aren't inconveniencing anybody else with it. Different things will appeal to different people.
Denuvo have become a popular company to hate recently. There are long-standing complaints that their DRM "harms performance" in the games that use it. The time-to-crack on some of the more recent Denuvo-protected releases has been down to around a week or so, which is a big reduction from the "several months" they could boast a year ago. They can also come over as a bit cocky in their public messaging at times.
And yet... are they really that bad? The war against DRM in PC gaming at the conceptual level was lost years ago, the moment consumers (self included) decided that the convenience of Steam and its equivalents (and the general reduction in game prices that came with them) outweighed concerns about ownership and digital rights. There have been battles since then, to be sure, but those have generally been over the extent to which DRM inconveniences legitimate consumers.
So we had (fairly successful) protests against Spore, which limited the number of installs possible from a single key (a practice which is more or less dead now). There is continuing pushback over the inclusion of always-on DRM in games which don't require it, which looks like it still has some way to run. We've had outcries, again generally successful, against DRM schemes which compromise the security of PCs they are run on (see the recent additional of such DRM to Street Fighter V and its subsequent removal).
But Denuvo doesn't really do any of these things. From the end-users point of view, provided they have a legitimate copy of the game, it is pretty much invisible. The rumours of it having a performance impact persist, but when credible sources like Eurogamer's Digital Foundry have investigated, they've never been able to substantiate them. In many cases, Denuvo appear to have become the scapegoat for poorly optimised PC ports.
PC gaming is actually in quite a good place right now. Most major releases find their way to PC; considerably more than did so 5 or even 10 years ago. Previously console-only developers have realised that they can expand their market for relatively little effort by producing a PC port. This has gone hand-in-hand with a general improvement in the quality of DRM, which appears (though I'll admit the link is not validated) to have deterred at least casual pirates (accepting that the hardcore will likely never be deterred). If DRM is here to stay, I would much prefer Denuvo to some of the alternatives.
I don't think that's likely to be the case with the PS4. You can already remove the hard drive from the machine pretty easily (and replacing the hard drive is an officially authorised modification that doesn't void your warranty). PS4 hard drives, like PS3 hard drives before them, use an encrypted structure that locks content to the console in question. I'm guessing there will be a requirement to format any external hard drives used in the same way.
This, incidentally, means it is really important to keep backups (cloud or USB stick) of your PS3/PS4 saves. If your console fails, you will not just be able to stick the drive from it into a replacement console or a PC and get the data off it. Happened to me with my old PS3. Lost five years worth of savegame data.
Same here, to be honest. AVG became unusable due to bloat a couple of years ago. Avast can have some serious issues when presented with a combination of Windows 10 with Anniversary Update and a Skylake CPU. The remainder all seem to be as bad as much of the malware they ostensibly protect you from.
I confess I spent a while feeling paranoid after I finally gave in and uninstalled Avast, but a few months on, I've had no problems with a combination of Windows Defender and a weekly Malwarebytes scan.
The big challenge for "alternative" ways of playing video games has always been "can you play a proper game that way". We've seen supposedly revolutionary new technologies come along before and then falter when it turns out that all they are good for is playing casual or party-games.
The Wii's motion control sold a hell of a lot of consoles on the basis of Wii Sports. However, before too long, it dawned on people that Wii Sports was pretty much the limit of the device's capabilities. Similarly the Kinect had a lot of early success on the basis of some party games, but every attempt to integrate it into a proper game was either irrelevant or disastrous (Steel Battalion says hi). It's becoming increasingly clear that if any of these new technologies are going to "stick", then they need to be something you could realistically use to play a major AAA title; a Dragon Age or a Call of Duty (not that I'm a big fan of either of those).
VR had looked like it was headed in the same direction as the Wii/Kinect; an initial burst of hype, then growing disillusionment. It generated a load of pretty but thin tech demos, a handful of novelty party games and, until recently, not much else. RE7 is interesting because it's an attempt to do a major release, from a well-known franchise, via VR, without diluting the thing beyond recognition. I've held off from buying a VR set myself so far; even if it takes off, the number of mutually-incompatible offerings on the market at the moment makes it a bit too likely I'd end up on the Betamax side of the divide. But I'd like to see it succeed and it's good that serious efforts are being made to adopt it in major games.
I also find it interesting that it seems to be Sony that is spearheading this effort via PSVR (RE7 isn't even their first attempt; there were some "proper" games, even if not of the same profile, among the PSVR launch titles). While technically superior, the Oculus and Vive still seem to be mostly pushing minigames and tech demos so far.
I'm in an outer London suburb - and a fairly wealthy one at that ("leafy Tory suburbia" pretty much nails this place). Back at the start of December, a huge number of Deliveroo drivers started congregating on the market street every evening, and then drifting off to a nearby park as the night goes on. It's not quite become a permanent encampment yet, but it's well on its way. From what I've observed, very few of these guys have more than a few words of English. It doesn't really feel like a healthy situation for anybody.
There's only one local takeaway that I use and it's an old-fashioned one that still employs its own driver. For all I know, he's horribly downtrodden and oppressed, but at least he's not part of that slightly creepy pale-green army.
Almost every word of your post is factually incorrect.
The Wii-U did not out-sell the XB1. Not even close. The most recent "units shipped" numbers for the Wii-U are at 13.36 million, as of September 2016. The most recent equivalent number on the XB1 is 19 million, from January 2016 (so the gap has likely widened significantly since then, boosted in particular by the XB1-S release over the summer). Both numbers are "shipped" rather than "sold".
And don't mistake the fact that Nintendo sell hardware at a profit (which they don't always these days anyway and haven't consistently since the first 3DS price-cut) with them being profitable. Nintendo hasn't been consistently profitable since FY2010-11, which was the last year in which it reaped Wii-led mega-profits. Since then, it has flipped between loss and (small) profits, but with the main deciding factor being currency fluctuations. When Nintendo has reported an operating profit over this period, it has generally been on the basis of the 3DS. The Wii-U may not even have recouped its development costs, particularly after its abandonment by third parties led to licensing fees all but drying up and a number of first party titles such as Starfox Zero crashed and burned.
Moreover, the gaming section of Sony has been very profitable indeed since the launch of the PS4 (and, indeed, since the company got its house in gear in the latter part of the PS3 cycle). In fact, while Sony was a bit of a basket case until a couple of years ago, the company has bounced back strongly in recent years, almost entirely on the basis of its gaming division. Remember, whether a console is sold at a profit or a loss is not actually all that relevant - licensing fees are where the real money is. How MS's Xbox division is doing is a bit harder to judge, but they seem to have turned things around a bit over the last 18 months and are likely at least no worse than Nintendo now. As of late last year, Nintendo was posting some pretty awful financial losses.
It's hard to see this being a major success, outside of the (aging, shrinking) Nintendo hardcore. The consensus on gaming sites (and their forums) seems to reinforce this. So do the markets; Nintendo's stocks have fallen around 5.75% since the reveal.
The stock price shift will almost certainly have been driven by the price. It's higher than expected by at least $50 (and realistically closer to $100). Sony and MS got away with even higher prices when they were launching the PS4 and XB1, for sure. However, those consoles were significantly more powerful than their predecessors. They also launched at the same time as each other. So in essence, there were two expensive consoles without many games in direct competition with each other, which actually negated those disadvantages a bit. Nintendo are launching a less powerful console against two cheaper and well-entrenched mid-cycle consoles with extensive games libraries. That's going to be tough.
The launch games line-up is also poor. Zelda looks pretty good, but there is a cheaper Wii-U version also available that doesn't look appreciably worse. The rest of the launch window looks pretty pants. The XB1 and the PS4 had the same problem, of course, but again, their near-simultaneous launch actually offset that as a problem.
Beyond the launch-window, the games lineup is nothing special. The same first party range that didn't do much to help the Wii-U. A couple of more interesting (but still niche) second party titles like Xenoblade 2. Third party support from a few companies with a long-standing relationship with the Nintendo DS line (like Atlus), whose games aren't yet even confirmed for release outside of Japan. And a tentative dip of a toe in the water from EA. The poor specs, eccentric hardware and unusual control configurations are going to put a lot of other third party developers off.
I think the console itself is also going to be very hard to market. It's not quite clear what the USP here is. The thing looks large and clunky by handheld standards; more awkward than a tablet or even a PS Vita. As a home console, it's badly underpowered compared to the competition. Nobody has quite explained yet why the hybrid configuration is such a good thing, and the attempts to date to do so have been toe-curling.
On the plus side, it's region-free. That's actually pretty huge news and is a sign that even the most authoritarian of the platform owners is now being forced to open up a little. I might actually buy one just to reward that, because the fear is that if the Switch fails horribly (as I fear it might), then Nintendo will swing back to region locking in future. But it is really hard right now to see a pathway to this thing being a success.
The current CryEngine is not the one that powered Crysis back in 2007. Like "idTech", "CryEngine" is sometimes used as a generic term for a family of engines that has evolved over time. Crytek's "core" business model has involved quite a lot of licensing of its CryEngine technologies to third parties for them to build games on; much like the id model. There's a handy list of which games have run on which generations of CryEngine technology over at Wikipedia.
Crytek's challenge has, to some extent, been that while their engine (across successive generation) can be used to produce visually stunning results, it can be notoriously difficult to optimise for performance, particularly on console hardware. This year's Homefront: The Revolution (partly developed by Crytek before the IP was sold to Deep Silver) was an absolute dog in performance terms on consoles (and only moderately better on a high-end PC) and received a critical slating at least partly as a result. Everybody's Gone To The Rapture also had some eye-wateringly poor performance on PS4, though for genre-reasons, this mattered less than it would with an action game.
The Dunia engine used by Ubisoft (who acquired a lot of Crytek assets after they published the original Far Cry) to power the Far Cry sequels is a distant fork of the first-generation Crytek engine, though it has diverged so far over time that the two have only a very loose relationship indeed these days.
StarFox Zero was, by all accounts, a pretty bad game and was a horrible commercial flop. But it wasn't actually "news" that it flopped. Investors had already basically written off the Wii-U by the time StarFox Zero released, so all it did was continue the current narrative.
If that entry turns into a belly-flop, then said investors will take fright. If it turns out that putting Nintendo franchises on a phone isn't an instant profit factory, then they will be distinctly unhappy. Don't forget that other major developers and publishers have struggled to turn established gaming franchises into successful mobile titles. Indeed, many of the biggest mobile hits to date have come from left-field from developers nobody had previously heard of.
I suspect that in the eyes of investors, mobile is seen as more important to Nintendo's future even than the Switch (which some, at least, seem to have written off before it even launches). It's too early to know for sure whether they'll pull off the mobile thing or not; early signals are mixed.
When I started my first "proper" job fresh out of university, my first boss told me:
"Your reputation can recover from even spectacular incompetence if you look apologetic and keep your head down for a year or two at most. The moment you lose your integrity, it's gone for life."
Would be a better story if he hadn't been fired and referred to the police a few years later for fiddling money from consultancy contracts.
Ah goddamit, and my "humorous" inserts got eaten in the parsing. Bah... talk about spoiling a perfectly good joke. That will teach me not to use "preview".
Yes, one of the big stories of the US 2016 election does seem to be that states and counties which were not considered to be in play suddenly switched camps. What I'm less sure about is how much pollsters could have done to predict this.
Based on what little data I've seen so far, I think one of the tactical errors Clinton's campaign made was to focus too heavy on "attacking" (hitting not only swing-states, but also states traditionally in the Republican column) and not enough on defending states that looked like they were in the bank.
The UK's 2015 General Election again offers a direct parallel here. Labour's "ground game" focused on 100 Conservative and Lib-Dem held "target seats". The Conservatives, on the other hand, went for a "40/40" strategy. They attacked 40 of the seats they thought they were most likely to take and threw resources at defending their own 40 most vulnerable seats.
The 40/40 strategy proved far superior to the 100-targets one.
Beware simple explanations for polling failures, particularly explanations which align comfortably with your existing beliefs.
It hasn't been a fantastic couple of years for the polling industry. After a period around the turn of the decade where people thought that polling had become a pretty precise art, we've had some major polling controversies in recent years. I actually get horribly nerdy about some of this stuff; I'm not a pollster, but I find polling fascinating.
Before I go any further; I'm in the UK and most of my knowledge is based on the UK polling scene. That said, the US and UK scenes have aligned quite a lot over the last two decades and, while polling a relatively small country like the UK will always be different to polling a very large one like the US, there are a lot of commonalities as well.
It's worth noting that most political polling is not a big earner for the companies that carry it out. It's a competitive market and margins for pollsters are not huge. Most polling companies are primarily market research firms who do most of their work for commercial clients. Political polling is often a loss-leader for them. It gets their name in the press and, if they can claim "we were the most accurate pollster for the election", that's a good way of winning more lucrative commercial business. The commercial incentive on most pollsters, therefore, is to be accurate. Contrary to popular belief/conspiracy theory, very few deliberately set out to mislead and those who do are easy to identify (generally by the wording of the questions they ask, or a refusal to disclose data) and mostly ignored by the mainstream media.
But back to some of our problems with polling in the UK in the last couple of years...
Our own 2015 General Election had a fairly major polling failure. The polling pointed to Labour and the Conservatives (our two main parties) being more or less neck or neck, to the extent that it looked almost impossible that either of them would be able to form a majority government. The final weeks of the campaign were dominated by speculation over the likely distribution of seats and the possible combinations of parties that might be able to form governing coalitions (which probably influenced how people voted).
When election day came, it became clear almost as soon as the polls closed that the pre-election polls had been very badly wrong. The Conservatives had performed somewhat above expectations and Labour had performed somewhat below them. Moreover, the pollsters had also failed to map vote totals into Parliamentary seats correctly (in the UK, each of our 650 constituencies elects a Member of Parliament and, as with US States/Districts, those constituencies do not all behave alike). The result was that, contrary to all expectations, the Conservative Party formed a majority government.
This triggered a bit of a crisis for our polling industry, not least since, following a highly accurate polling record from the 2010 election as well as various local, European and London Mayoral elections, a lot of weight and credibility had been attached the polling. The British Polling Council, which is a self-regulatory body for our polling industry, commissioned a post-mortem on what had happened.
The initial public narrative on what had happened was pretty stark. The newspapers (and various online forums) were filled with cries of "shy Tories" or "lazy Labour". These are two politically-comfortable labels that have been used to explain polling failures in the past. The first is the idea that Conservative voters might be embarrassed to admit their real voting intention to a pollster. Labour supporters like this one. The latter is that Labour supporters are too lazy to turn out and vote on election day. Conservative supporters like this one.
The actual post-mortem comprehensively rubbished both theories. The problem was one of sampling. Pollsters use a range of sampling and weighting techniques to turn a sample size of less than 2,000 people (a sample of around 5,000
Most of the consoles on that list reached end-of-life some time ago. The PS4 is still in the middle of its lifespan and, with the PS4 Pro just launched, is likely to remain live for quite some time.
In terms of sales trajectory, which makes for better comparisons, the PS4 was tracking broadly equal with the Wii (the previous record holder at the 3-year point, though it also flatlined not long after that) until Sony announced the PS4 Pro earlier in the year. That dropped their trajectory a bit, as people who had been planning to buy a PS4 over the summer deferred their purchase until the Pro was available.
There's still every chance that the PS4 will eventually hold the number 1 spot. Cheaper hardware and a larger (and cheaper) games library means that console sales traditionally hold strong through the mid and late parts of the cycle. At the 3 year point, the PS2 was still at 70 million sales and, as recorded by your own link, it would eventually go on to sell around 155 million.
The quotation in the CNBC report here is just a little bit disingenuous. "The Xbox and PS2 were two of the most popular consoles ever" is 50% true; with an estimated 155m units sold, the PS2 does indeed sit at the top of the pile for home-consoles (though the Nintendo DS handheld roughly level-pegs it). The Xbox, however, with sales in around the 24 million range, is very much in "also ran" territory.
It wasn't a failure by any means. It was a toe in the door for Microsoft and it did eventually beat out the Gamecube in the battle for second-place on units sold among the 6th generation consoles. But attempting to lend credibility to an argument by claiming that views are from one of the creators of "one of the most successful consoles ever" when said console was the original Xbox is simply misleading.
And as for the content of TFA... the case for VR in gaming is not yet proven. Sales of consumer VR units are ok but not spectacular and are showing some signs of diminishing now the launch-hype is over. Perhaps more importantly, there has yet to be a game that really makes the case for VR as anything other than a tech demo. A range of factors, including problems with using the headsets for an extended period and, most importantly, control problems mean that nobody has yet produced a really great VR game (Elite: Dangerous is almost certainly the most successful, but that's a fairly niche product). For the most part, VR experiences to date have fallen into one of three categories:
a) the pretty but shallow glorified tech-demo b) the cut-down version of an existing game (e.g. Driveclub VR) c) The existing pre-VR game which has had VR support added
Last generation's fad, motion controls, eventually faltered after people realised that they just weren't as good as regular controls for actually playing games. Nobody was ever going to be chosing to play through a Dragon Age or a Call of Duty using motion controls and, after the novelty wore off, people went back to their controllers or mouse/keyboard combos. If VR is to avoid the same trap, its best hope comes from my category c) above; but so far, that's only been made to even remotely work in the driving and space-combat genres, both of which are niche.
Twitter itself is a huge part of the problem in the coarsening of political debate. The emphasis on short, snappy "soundbite" statements and the e-peen benefits of being retweeted serve as powerful incentives for people to forgo civility and mean that the most extreme voices, whatever their persuasion, get the most prominence.
When you are trying to fit your thoughts into a character limit, what kind of clauses are you going to cut? How about:
"I see your point, but have you considered..." "I understand why some people are attracted to that argument, but..." "I know there are exceptions to this rule..." "I might be oversimplifying here..." "This is purely anecdotal, but..."
Twitter is a remarkably effective tool for stripping conversations of all of the little niceties, qualifications and acknowledgements that keep things civil. It's a platform for thumping certainties, hysterical over-reactions and wanton attention-seeking. I've known rational, well-spoken people, often well-regarded in their professional fields, who turn into flaming morons on Twitter.
It's not a problem of Twitter's moderation policies or editorial stances, but rather a fundamental problem with the medium. Being mischievous, maybe 140 characters should be the minimum rather than the limit.
For those not familiar with the UK context, I'd point out that an Employment Tribunal is a first-line body. I would eat my hat if this decision isn't appealed and the higher courts do have a long track record of overturning Employment Tribunal decisions.
The Wii was an odd beast and I suspect the wider industry is right not to emulate it. At the time of its launch, the Wii was supported by a particular press and publicity zeitgeist that gave it a big advantage over two rivals who appeared desperate to shoot themselves in their feet (MS with the RROD fiasco, Sony with the PS3's price-tag). It also had a quickly-grasped concept that appealed to a lot of people who didn't usually play games.
The problem is, while the Wii made some super-profits in the first 2-3 years, its success turned out not to be sustainable. The second half of its active lifespan was pretty miserable for Nintendo, as hardware sales fell and game sales plummeted. The company fell to its first ever annual losses in the second half of the Wii's lifespan. The Wii's successor, the Wii-U, was a dead-duck pretty much from the moment it left the door and has only managed around 13 million units sold, making it Nintendo's lowest selling home console ever by quite some way. Poor hardware played a big role in that; people didn't want to jump to a new console that only really offered comparable performance with the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 at a time when those consoles were almost ready to be replaced.
Besides, Sony did ok out of the "we have bigger numbers" game with the PS4. Up to the point where the PS4 Pro was announced, which obviously impacted sales of the current hardware, they'd shipped more than 40 million consoles in just three and a half years on sale. That's decent going and those sales seem to have resumed again with the PS4 Pro available.
That said, I still don't disagree that the emphasis on specs is a bit of an own-goal in the longer term. Oddly, they've actually played somewhat into the revival of PC gaming; if you make the marketing battle all about specs, resolutions and framerates, then a console is only ever going to be able to take second place behind PC, and PC game-sales have revived sharply over the last few years, eating into the console manufacturer's revenue bases (the license fees from game sales, not hardware sales, are where the real profit is). I suspect the PS4 Pro and Xbox Scorpio are at least in part a reaction to that.
Or alternatively, Ecuador simply decided that Assange's political beliefs and ambitions no longer align with their own. Whatever you may think about Trump, he is not exactly preaching love and peace towards that particular part of the world.
If a regime offers you sanctuary because you are politically convenient for them, you really should ask yourself what happens the moment you become politically inconvenient.
Sorry, I might not have been clear enough about what this scheme was and who was on it. To be clear, this was not "a few hours temporary work" for "experienced and qualified professionals". This was full time work, on a 6 month contract, for young people from "disadvantaged" backgrounds. What "disadvantaged" meant was "school drop-outs with chaotic lives and, in most cases, some incidences of minor criminal activity (though no theft or fraud)". The work paid reasonably well for entry-level work (as much as some of my graduate friends had in their first jobs).
It was, if I recall, 75% funded by the taxpayer; so effectively, 75% of the direct and indirect employment costs were not picked up by my employer. We met the remaining costs and, as part of the deal, agreed to offer permanent appointments to a reasonable number of people who had a satisfactory record at the end of their 6 months. We were participating in this in good faith and in the year I was acting as a mentor, we had a target to get a 50% retention rate.
In reality, across all three years, the retention rate was 0%. Not one person successfully completed 6 months and almost half didn't finish the first week. When they deigned to come into the office, they would generally describe their career aspirations as "professional footballer" or "rapper". A couple of the more honest ones would say "benefits", as this was in the days when you could more or less permanently stay on quite generous unemployment benefits in the UK (it's much harder these days). In so far as this was a distraction for looking for a "real job", the "real job" they were after was unemployment.
The Government funding for this particular scheme largely dried up before the 2010 election (as finding firms to participate got harder and harder).
This is purely anecdotal, but my experience is that there isn't so much a generational correlation to work ethic as there is an age-based one. Which is to say, a person's work ethic can vary significantly over the course of their adult life.
What I've seen in my own workplace is new entrants (whether at graduate or non-graduate level) entering the organisation but generally (and of course there are outliers) without making a full commitment to it and, particularly in the case of graduate entrants, trying to keep their student lifestyle running for a few more years. Over time, usually by the late 20s, this transitions into a much stronger work ethic; more time spent in the office and more "commitment" to the organisation. Eventually, somewhere usually in the 50s, this lapses into a degree of burnout. Now, all of the above is a huge generalisation and based on personal experiences only, but I've seen a couple of generations go through that cycle now.
Of course, there's a far bigger correlation between work ethic and social class. Behaviours liked to worth ethic, such as the ability to focus on deferred reward have a strong hereditary component, whether based on biology, culture or both. Again, there are exceptions, but this is where I've seen the strongest correlation. In the mid-2000s (at the height of the UK's New Labour touchy-feely period) I worked for an employer which took part in a Government-subsidised scheme to give placements to "disadvantaged" young people. This was actually a pretty cushy detail; the pay for those brought in through the scheme wasn't huge, but it was significantly above the minimum wage (almost £10/hour) and the work was white-collar administrative. Moreover, there was an expectation in place that if you did well, you would be able to turn it into a full-time job (this was in the land of silly-money before the big crash, when the UK economy appeared to be in full boom). Hell, there wasn't even much of a dress code beyond "use your common sense and don't wear anything that would actively harm our reputation".
I was involved with this scheme for three consecutive years, once as a mentor and twice as one of the "lucky" managers "given" one of the apprentices (yes, there was a degree of corporate arm-twisting). Across all three years, with an intake of 8-10 people per year, not a single one stuck with it for more than 2 months. The simple basics of being expected to get into the office at a sane time (we had a flexitime-within-reason system), to come into the office every working day and to follow the instructions of a manager once in the office were too much for the participants.
Slashdot Mirror
Everything about this screams "rob Vega of its momentum". Judging by the price and specs, this is probably only slightly above "loss leader" territory.
Another example of competition being good for the end-users. The first round of high-end Pascal cards (1070/1080/Titan) frankly looked a bit over-priced relative to their performance increase over the previous generation, but then AMD just didn't have a viable high-end offering at the time. I'd struggle to persuade myself to buy an AMD card after previous driver woes with them, but I'm relieved to see them looking like they're about to get back into the game.
I'll be buying one. First in the queue.
But then I'm a well-paid professional whose main hobby is gaming and who can afford to splash out on something like this once in a while, while still paying the mortgage, racking up savings etc. I like having all the latest bells and whistles. If I'm going to spend a good chunk of my leisure time doing something, I'd like to do it well.
Gaming can be an expensive hobby, sure. But so can lots of other hobbies. Guy I've known since my late teens is seriously into mountaineering. He got pretty rich during his 20s (combination of being smart, hardworking and in the right place at the right time) then downshifted into a job with an employer who was fine with him taking big chunks of time off. In previous years, he's vanished for 2-3 month chunks of time to Alaska and the Andes. Later this year, he'll be doing his first Himalayan trip. All-inclusive cost for that trip alone is close to $100k (which, given he's British like me, is rather more money than it used to be since Brexit). All of which is to spend a few months cold and miserable in a tent, with no guarantee of a successful summit and a non-trivial chance of dying. Not my cup of tea at all. But that's what he likes to do and he has the money to do it, so frankly it's his business (and his stories are fun, in a hair-raising way).
Even leaving the more extreme hobbies aside, lots of people still sink sums into fairly normal activities that are not out of line with what I spend on gaming. My dad's a golfer and, between membership fees, trips, new clubs, training sessions and all of the assorted gadgets that seem to go with the sport, he likely racks up more on that than I do on gaming. But that's fine; he can afford it without making stupid compromises elsewhere in his life
Cars? I'm friends with a petrolhead at work who spends a fortune on them (his own estimate to me was £10,000 per annum on average, albeit with peaks and troughs), despite the fact that other than a track day every couple of months, his latest road-going rally-monster spends most of its time on supermarket runs. Good god, I know cyclists (the pedal kind, not the motorised kind) who spend more on their bikes than I spend on my PC.
Short version; what adults do with their own disposable income is their own business, provided they aren't inconveniencing anybody else with it. Different things will appeal to different people.
Denuvo have become a popular company to hate recently. There are long-standing complaints that their DRM "harms performance" in the games that use it. The time-to-crack on some of the more recent Denuvo-protected releases has been down to around a week or so, which is a big reduction from the "several months" they could boast a year ago. They can also come over as a bit cocky in their public messaging at times.
And yet... are they really that bad? The war against DRM in PC gaming at the conceptual level was lost years ago, the moment consumers (self included) decided that the convenience of Steam and its equivalents (and the general reduction in game prices that came with them) outweighed concerns about ownership and digital rights. There have been battles since then, to be sure, but those have generally been over the extent to which DRM inconveniences legitimate consumers.
So we had (fairly successful) protests against Spore, which limited the number of installs possible from a single key (a practice which is more or less dead now). There is continuing pushback over the inclusion of always-on DRM in games which don't require it, which looks like it still has some way to run. We've had outcries, again generally successful, against DRM schemes which compromise the security of PCs they are run on (see the recent additional of such DRM to Street Fighter V and its subsequent removal).
But Denuvo doesn't really do any of these things. From the end-users point of view, provided they have a legitimate copy of the game, it is pretty much invisible. The rumours of it having a performance impact persist, but when credible sources like Eurogamer's Digital Foundry have investigated, they've never been able to substantiate them. In many cases, Denuvo appear to have become the scapegoat for poorly optimised PC ports.
PC gaming is actually in quite a good place right now. Most major releases find their way to PC; considerably more than did so 5 or even 10 years ago. Previously console-only developers have realised that they can expand their market for relatively little effort by producing a PC port. This has gone hand-in-hand with a general improvement in the quality of DRM, which appears (though I'll admit the link is not validated) to have deterred at least casual pirates (accepting that the hardcore will likely never be deterred). If DRM is here to stay, I would much prefer Denuvo to some of the alternatives.
I don't think that's likely to be the case with the PS4. You can already remove the hard drive from the machine pretty easily (and replacing the hard drive is an officially authorised modification that doesn't void your warranty). PS4 hard drives, like PS3 hard drives before them, use an encrypted structure that locks content to the console in question. I'm guessing there will be a requirement to format any external hard drives used in the same way.
This, incidentally, means it is really important to keep backups (cloud or USB stick) of your PS3/PS4 saves. If your console fails, you will not just be able to stick the drive from it into a replacement console or a PC and get the data off it. Happened to me with my old PS3. Lost five years worth of savegame data.
Same here, to be honest. AVG became unusable due to bloat a couple of years ago. Avast can have some serious issues when presented with a combination of Windows 10 with Anniversary Update and a Skylake CPU. The remainder all seem to be as bad as much of the malware they ostensibly protect you from.
I confess I spent a while feeling paranoid after I finally gave in and uninstalled Avast, but a few months on, I've had no problems with a combination of Windows Defender and a weekly Malwarebytes scan.
The big challenge for "alternative" ways of playing video games has always been "can you play a proper game that way". We've seen supposedly revolutionary new technologies come along before and then falter when it turns out that all they are good for is playing casual or party-games.
The Wii's motion control sold a hell of a lot of consoles on the basis of Wii Sports. However, before too long, it dawned on people that Wii Sports was pretty much the limit of the device's capabilities. Similarly the Kinect had a lot of early success on the basis of some party games, but every attempt to integrate it into a proper game was either irrelevant or disastrous (Steel Battalion says hi). It's becoming increasingly clear that if any of these new technologies are going to "stick", then they need to be something you could realistically use to play a major AAA title; a Dragon Age or a Call of Duty (not that I'm a big fan of either of those).
VR had looked like it was headed in the same direction as the Wii/Kinect; an initial burst of hype, then growing disillusionment. It generated a load of pretty but thin tech demos, a handful of novelty party games and, until recently, not much else. RE7 is interesting because it's an attempt to do a major release, from a well-known franchise, via VR, without diluting the thing beyond recognition. I've held off from buying a VR set myself so far; even if it takes off, the number of mutually-incompatible offerings on the market at the moment makes it a bit too likely I'd end up on the Betamax side of the divide. But I'd like to see it succeed and it's good that serious efforts are being made to adopt it in major games.
I also find it interesting that it seems to be Sony that is spearheading this effort via PSVR (RE7 isn't even their first attempt; there were some "proper" games, even if not of the same profile, among the PSVR launch titles). While technically superior, the Oculus and Vive still seem to be mostly pushing minigames and tech demos so far.
I'm in an outer London suburb - and a fairly wealthy one at that ("leafy Tory suburbia" pretty much nails this place). Back at the start of December, a huge number of Deliveroo drivers started congregating on the market street every evening, and then drifting off to a nearby park as the night goes on. It's not quite become a permanent encampment yet, but it's well on its way. From what I've observed, very few of these guys have more than a few words of English. It doesn't really feel like a healthy situation for anybody.
There's only one local takeaway that I use and it's an old-fashioned one that still employs its own driver. For all I know, he's horribly downtrodden and oppressed, but at least he's not part of that slightly creepy pale-green army.
Almost every word of your post is factually incorrect.
The Wii-U did not out-sell the XB1. Not even close. The most recent "units shipped" numbers for the Wii-U are at 13.36 million, as of September 2016. The most recent equivalent number on the XB1 is 19 million, from January 2016 (so the gap has likely widened significantly since then, boosted in particular by the XB1-S release over the summer). Both numbers are "shipped" rather than "sold".
And don't mistake the fact that Nintendo sell hardware at a profit (which they don't always these days anyway and haven't consistently since the first 3DS price-cut) with them being profitable. Nintendo hasn't been consistently profitable since FY2010-11, which was the last year in which it reaped Wii-led mega-profits. Since then, it has flipped between loss and (small) profits, but with the main deciding factor being currency fluctuations. When Nintendo has reported an operating profit over this period, it has generally been on the basis of the 3DS. The Wii-U may not even have recouped its development costs, particularly after its abandonment by third parties led to licensing fees all but drying up and a number of first party titles such as Starfox Zero crashed and burned.
Moreover, the gaming section of Sony has been very profitable indeed since the launch of the PS4 (and, indeed, since the company got its house in gear in the latter part of the PS3 cycle). In fact, while Sony was a bit of a basket case until a couple of years ago, the company has bounced back strongly in recent years, almost entirely on the basis of its gaming division. Remember, whether a console is sold at a profit or a loss is not actually all that relevant - licensing fees are where the real money is. How MS's Xbox division is doing is a bit harder to judge, but they seem to have turned things around a bit over the last 18 months and are likely at least no worse than Nintendo now. As of late last year, Nintendo was posting some pretty awful financial losses.
It would be good if we could start to ditch some of the 2007-era narrative now. Nintendo's position today is a lot weaker than it was then, but we still hear the same old clichés trotted out.
It's hard to see this being a major success, outside of the (aging, shrinking) Nintendo hardcore. The consensus on gaming sites (and their forums) seems to reinforce this. So do the markets; Nintendo's stocks have fallen around 5.75% since the reveal.
The stock price shift will almost certainly have been driven by the price. It's higher than expected by at least $50 (and realistically closer to $100). Sony and MS got away with even higher prices when they were launching the PS4 and XB1, for sure. However, those consoles were significantly more powerful than their predecessors. They also launched at the same time as each other. So in essence, there were two expensive consoles without many games in direct competition with each other, which actually negated those disadvantages a bit. Nintendo are launching a less powerful console against two cheaper and well-entrenched mid-cycle consoles with extensive games libraries. That's going to be tough.
The launch games line-up is also poor. Zelda looks pretty good, but there is a cheaper Wii-U version also available that doesn't look appreciably worse. The rest of the launch window looks pretty pants. The XB1 and the PS4 had the same problem, of course, but again, their near-simultaneous launch actually offset that as a problem.
Beyond the launch-window, the games lineup is nothing special. The same first party range that didn't do much to help the Wii-U. A couple of more interesting (but still niche) second party titles like Xenoblade 2. Third party support from a few companies with a long-standing relationship with the Nintendo DS line (like Atlus), whose games aren't yet even confirmed for release outside of Japan. And a tentative dip of a toe in the water from EA. The poor specs, eccentric hardware and unusual control configurations are going to put a lot of other third party developers off.
I think the console itself is also going to be very hard to market. It's not quite clear what the USP here is. The thing looks large and clunky by handheld standards; more awkward than a tablet or even a PS Vita. As a home console, it's badly underpowered compared to the competition. Nobody has quite explained yet why the hybrid configuration is such a good thing, and the attempts to date to do so have been toe-curling.
On the plus side, it's region-free. That's actually pretty huge news and is a sign that even the most authoritarian of the platform owners is now being forced to open up a little. I might actually buy one just to reward that, because the fear is that if the Switch fails horribly (as I fear it might), then Nintendo will swing back to region locking in future. But it is really hard right now to see a pathway to this thing being a success.
The current CryEngine is not the one that powered Crysis back in 2007. Like "idTech", "CryEngine" is sometimes used as a generic term for a family of engines that has evolved over time. Crytek's "core" business model has involved quite a lot of licensing of its CryEngine technologies to third parties for them to build games on; much like the id model. There's a handy list of which games have run on which generations of CryEngine technology over at Wikipedia.
Crytek's challenge has, to some extent, been that while their engine (across successive generation) can be used to produce visually stunning results, it can be notoriously difficult to optimise for performance, particularly on console hardware. This year's Homefront: The Revolution (partly developed by Crytek before the IP was sold to Deep Silver) was an absolute dog in performance terms on consoles (and only moderately better on a high-end PC) and received a critical slating at least partly as a result. Everybody's Gone To The Rapture also had some eye-wateringly poor performance on PS4, though for genre-reasons, this mattered less than it would with an action game.
The Dunia engine used by Ubisoft (who acquired a lot of Crytek assets after they published the original Far Cry) to power the Far Cry sequels is a distant fork of the first-generation Crytek engine, though it has diverged so far over time that the two have only a very loose relationship indeed these days.
StarFox Zero was, by all accounts, a pretty bad game and was a horrible commercial flop. But it wasn't actually "news" that it flopped. Investors had already basically written off the Wii-U by the time StarFox Zero released, so all it did was continue the current narrative.
If Super Mario Run doesn't pan out properly, then that is "news". Nintendo's stocks have been buoyed a bit in recent months by their planned entry into the mobile market. Their home-console sales have been moribund since around 2011. The handheld market has been a lot healthier for them - and Pokémon remains the jewel in their crown (Mario lost that accolade years ago) - but nobody seriously thinks there's a long-term future for dedicated gaming handhelds. Investors who were hoping for a serious return from Nintendo on a par with the early days of the Wii have been putting a lot of weight on their entry into the mobile market.
If that entry turns into a belly-flop, then said investors will take fright. If it turns out that putting Nintendo franchises on a phone isn't an instant profit factory, then they will be distinctly unhappy. Don't forget that other major developers and publishers have struggled to turn established gaming franchises into successful mobile titles. Indeed, many of the biggest mobile hits to date have come from left-field from developers nobody had previously heard of.
I suspect that in the eyes of investors, mobile is seen as more important to Nintendo's future even than the Switch (which some, at least, seem to have written off before it even launches). It's too early to know for sure whether they'll pull off the mobile thing or not; early signals are mixed.
When I started my first "proper" job fresh out of university, my first boss told me:
"Your reputation can recover from even spectacular incompetence if you look apologetic and keep your head down for a year or two at most. The moment you lose your integrity, it's gone for life."
Would be a better story if he hadn't been fired and referred to the police a few years later for fiddling money from consultancy contracts.
Ah goddamit, and my "humorous" inserts got eaten in the parsing. Bah... talk about spoiling a perfectly good joke. That will teach me not to use "preview".
This kind of thing doesn't happen on slashdot isn't it?
Yes, one of the big stories of the US 2016 election does seem to be that states and counties which were not considered to be in play suddenly switched camps. What I'm less sure about is how much pollsters could have done to predict this.
Based on what little data I've seen so far, I think one of the tactical errors Clinton's campaign made was to focus too heavy on "attacking" (hitting not only swing-states, but also states traditionally in the Republican column) and not enough on defending states that looked like they were in the bank.
The UK's 2015 General Election again offers a direct parallel here. Labour's "ground game" focused on 100 Conservative and Lib-Dem held "target seats". The Conservatives, on the other hand, went for a "40/40" strategy. They attacked 40 of the seats they thought they were most likely to take and threw resources at defending their own 40 most vulnerable seats.
The 40/40 strategy proved far superior to the 100-targets one.
Beware simple explanations for polling failures, particularly explanations which align comfortably with your existing beliefs.
It hasn't been a fantastic couple of years for the polling industry. After a period around the turn of the decade where people thought that polling had become a pretty precise art, we've had some major polling controversies in recent years. I actually get horribly nerdy about some of this stuff; I'm not a pollster, but I find polling fascinating.
Before I go any further; I'm in the UK and most of my knowledge is based on the UK polling scene. That said, the US and UK scenes have aligned quite a lot over the last two decades and, while polling a relatively small country like the UK will always be different to polling a very large one like the US, there are a lot of commonalities as well.
It's worth noting that most political polling is not a big earner for the companies that carry it out. It's a competitive market and margins for pollsters are not huge. Most polling companies are primarily market research firms who do most of their work for commercial clients. Political polling is often a loss-leader for them. It gets their name in the press and, if they can claim "we were the most accurate pollster for the election", that's a good way of winning more lucrative commercial business. The commercial incentive on most pollsters, therefore, is to be accurate. Contrary to popular belief/conspiracy theory, very few deliberately set out to mislead and those who do are easy to identify (generally by the wording of the questions they ask, or a refusal to disclose data) and mostly ignored by the mainstream media.
But back to some of our problems with polling in the UK in the last couple of years...
Our own 2015 General Election had a fairly major polling failure. The polling pointed to Labour and the Conservatives (our two main parties) being more or less neck or neck, to the extent that it looked almost impossible that either of them would be able to form a majority government. The final weeks of the campaign were dominated by speculation over the likely distribution of seats and the possible combinations of parties that might be able to form governing coalitions (which probably influenced how people voted).
When election day came, it became clear almost as soon as the polls closed that the pre-election polls had been very badly wrong. The Conservatives had performed somewhat above expectations and Labour had performed somewhat below them. Moreover, the pollsters had also failed to map vote totals into Parliamentary seats correctly (in the UK, each of our 650 constituencies elects a Member of Parliament and, as with US States/Districts, those constituencies do not all behave alike). The result was that, contrary to all expectations, the Conservative Party formed a majority government.
This triggered a bit of a crisis for our polling industry, not least since, following a highly accurate polling record from the 2010 election as well as various local, European and London Mayoral elections, a lot of weight and credibility had been attached the polling. The British Polling Council, which is a self-regulatory body for our polling industry, commissioned a post-mortem on what had happened.
The initial public narrative on what had happened was pretty stark. The newspapers (and various online forums) were filled with cries of "shy Tories" or "lazy Labour". These are two politically-comfortable labels that have been used to explain polling failures in the past. The first is the idea that Conservative voters might be embarrassed to admit their real voting intention to a pollster. Labour supporters like this one. The latter is that Labour supporters are too lazy to turn out and vote on election day. Conservative supporters like this one.
The actual post-mortem comprehensively rubbished both theories. The problem was one of sampling. Pollsters use a range of sampling and weighting techniques to turn a sample size of less than 2,000 people (a sample of around 5,000
Most of the consoles on that list reached end-of-life some time ago. The PS4 is still in the middle of its lifespan and, with the PS4 Pro just launched, is likely to remain live for quite some time.
In terms of sales trajectory, which makes for better comparisons, the PS4 was tracking broadly equal with the Wii (the previous record holder at the 3-year point, though it also flatlined not long after that) until Sony announced the PS4 Pro earlier in the year. That dropped their trajectory a bit, as people who had been planning to buy a PS4 over the summer deferred their purchase until the Pro was available.
There's still every chance that the PS4 will eventually hold the number 1 spot. Cheaper hardware and a larger (and cheaper) games library means that console sales traditionally hold strong through the mid and late parts of the cycle. At the 3 year point, the PS2 was still at 70 million sales and, as recorded by your own link, it would eventually go on to sell around 155 million.
The quotation in the CNBC report here is just a little bit disingenuous. "The Xbox and PS2 were two of the most popular consoles ever" is 50% true; with an estimated 155m units sold, the PS2 does indeed sit at the top of the pile for home-consoles (though the Nintendo DS handheld roughly level-pegs it). The Xbox, however, with sales in around the 24 million range, is very much in "also ran" territory.
It wasn't a failure by any means. It was a toe in the door for Microsoft and it did eventually beat out the Gamecube in the battle for second-place on units sold among the 6th generation consoles. But attempting to lend credibility to an argument by claiming that views are from one of the creators of "one of the most successful consoles ever" when said console was the original Xbox is simply misleading.
And as for the content of TFA... the case for VR in gaming is not yet proven. Sales of consumer VR units are ok but not spectacular and are showing some signs of diminishing now the launch-hype is over. Perhaps more importantly, there has yet to be a game that really makes the case for VR as anything other than a tech demo. A range of factors, including problems with using the headsets for an extended period and, most importantly, control problems mean that nobody has yet produced a really great VR game (Elite: Dangerous is almost certainly the most successful, but that's a fairly niche product). For the most part, VR experiences to date have fallen into one of three categories:
a) the pretty but shallow glorified tech-demo
b) the cut-down version of an existing game (e.g. Driveclub VR)
c) The existing pre-VR game which has had VR support added
Last generation's fad, motion controls, eventually faltered after people realised that they just weren't as good as regular controls for actually playing games. Nobody was ever going to be chosing to play through a Dragon Age or a Call of Duty using motion controls and, after the novelty wore off, people went back to their controllers or mouse/keyboard combos. If VR is to avoid the same trap, its best hope comes from my category c) above; but so far, that's only been made to even remotely work in the driving and space-combat genres, both of which are niche.
Twitter itself is a huge part of the problem in the coarsening of political debate. The emphasis on short, snappy "soundbite" statements and the e-peen benefits of being retweeted serve as powerful incentives for people to forgo civility and mean that the most extreme voices, whatever their persuasion, get the most prominence.
When you are trying to fit your thoughts into a character limit, what kind of clauses are you going to cut? How about:
"I see your point, but have you considered..."
"I understand why some people are attracted to that argument, but..."
"I know there are exceptions to this rule..."
"I might be oversimplifying here..."
"This is purely anecdotal, but..."
Twitter is a remarkably effective tool for stripping conversations of all of the little niceties, qualifications and acknowledgements that keep things civil. It's a platform for thumping certainties, hysterical over-reactions and wanton attention-seeking. I've known rational, well-spoken people, often well-regarded in their professional fields, who turn into flaming morons on Twitter.
It's not a problem of Twitter's moderation policies or editorial stances, but rather a fundamental problem with the medium. Being mischievous, maybe 140 characters should be the minimum rather than the limit.
For those not familiar with the UK context, I'd point out that an Employment Tribunal is a first-line body. I would eat my hat if this decision isn't appealed and the higher courts do have a long track record of overturning Employment Tribunal decisions.
Don't assume this one is settled.
Sorry, sorry, the PS4 had, of course, been on sale two and a half years, not three and a half, at the point it broke the 40 million sales barrier.
The Wii was an odd beast and I suspect the wider industry is right not to emulate it. At the time of its launch, the Wii was supported by a particular press and publicity zeitgeist that gave it a big advantage over two rivals who appeared desperate to shoot themselves in their feet (MS with the RROD fiasco, Sony with the PS3's price-tag). It also had a quickly-grasped concept that appealed to a lot of people who didn't usually play games.
The problem is, while the Wii made some super-profits in the first 2-3 years, its success turned out not to be sustainable. The second half of its active lifespan was pretty miserable for Nintendo, as hardware sales fell and game sales plummeted. The company fell to its first ever annual losses in the second half of the Wii's lifespan. The Wii's successor, the Wii-U, was a dead-duck pretty much from the moment it left the door and has only managed around 13 million units sold, making it Nintendo's lowest selling home console ever by quite some way. Poor hardware played a big role in that; people didn't want to jump to a new console that only really offered comparable performance with the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 at a time when those consoles were almost ready to be replaced.
Besides, Sony did ok out of the "we have bigger numbers" game with the PS4. Up to the point where the PS4 Pro was announced, which obviously impacted sales of the current hardware, they'd shipped more than 40 million consoles in just three and a half years on sale. That's decent going and those sales seem to have resumed again with the PS4 Pro available.
That said, I still don't disagree that the emphasis on specs is a bit of an own-goal in the longer term. Oddly, they've actually played somewhat into the revival of PC gaming; if you make the marketing battle all about specs, resolutions and framerates, then a console is only ever going to be able to take second place behind PC, and PC game-sales have revived sharply over the last few years, eating into the console manufacturer's revenue bases (the license fees from game sales, not hardware sales, are where the real profit is). I suspect the PS4 Pro and Xbox Scorpio are at least in part a reaction to that.
Or alternatively, Ecuador simply decided that Assange's political beliefs and ambitions no longer align with their own. Whatever you may think about Trump, he is not exactly preaching love and peace towards that particular part of the world.
If a regime offers you sanctuary because you are politically convenient for them, you really should ask yourself what happens the moment you become politically inconvenient.
Sorry, I might not have been clear enough about what this scheme was and who was on it. To be clear, this was not "a few hours temporary work" for "experienced and qualified professionals". This was full time work, on a 6 month contract, for young people from "disadvantaged" backgrounds. What "disadvantaged" meant was "school drop-outs with chaotic lives and, in most cases, some incidences of minor criminal activity (though no theft or fraud)". The work paid reasonably well for entry-level work (as much as some of my graduate friends had in their first jobs).
It was, if I recall, 75% funded by the taxpayer; so effectively, 75% of the direct and indirect employment costs were not picked up by my employer. We met the remaining costs and, as part of the deal, agreed to offer permanent appointments to a reasonable number of people who had a satisfactory record at the end of their 6 months. We were participating in this in good faith and in the year I was acting as a mentor, we had a target to get a 50% retention rate.
In reality, across all three years, the retention rate was 0%. Not one person successfully completed 6 months and almost half didn't finish the first week. When they deigned to come into the office, they would generally describe their career aspirations as "professional footballer" or "rapper". A couple of the more honest ones would say "benefits", as this was in the days when you could more or less permanently stay on quite generous unemployment benefits in the UK (it's much harder these days). In so far as this was a distraction for looking for a "real job", the "real job" they were after was unemployment.
The Government funding for this particular scheme largely dried up before the 2010 election (as finding firms to participate got harder and harder).
This is purely anecdotal, but my experience is that there isn't so much a generational correlation to work ethic as there is an age-based one. Which is to say, a person's work ethic can vary significantly over the course of their adult life.
What I've seen in my own workplace is new entrants (whether at graduate or non-graduate level) entering the organisation but generally (and of course there are outliers) without making a full commitment to it and, particularly in the case of graduate entrants, trying to keep their student lifestyle running for a few more years. Over time, usually by the late 20s, this transitions into a much stronger work ethic; more time spent in the office and more "commitment" to the organisation. Eventually, somewhere usually in the 50s, this lapses into a degree of burnout. Now, all of the above is a huge generalisation and based on personal experiences only, but I've seen a couple of generations go through that cycle now.
Of course, there's a far bigger correlation between work ethic and social class. Behaviours liked to worth ethic, such as the ability to focus on deferred reward have a strong hereditary component, whether based on biology, culture or both. Again, there are exceptions, but this is where I've seen the strongest correlation. In the mid-2000s (at the height of the UK's New Labour touchy-feely period) I worked for an employer which took part in a Government-subsidised scheme to give placements to "disadvantaged" young people. This was actually a pretty cushy detail; the pay for those brought in through the scheme wasn't huge, but it was significantly above the minimum wage (almost £10/hour) and the work was white-collar administrative. Moreover, there was an expectation in place that if you did well, you would be able to turn it into a full-time job (this was in the land of silly-money before the big crash, when the UK economy appeared to be in full boom). Hell, there wasn't even much of a dress code beyond "use your common sense and don't wear anything that would actively harm our reputation".
I was involved with this scheme for three consecutive years, once as a mentor and twice as one of the "lucky" managers "given" one of the apprentices (yes, there was a degree of corporate arm-twisting). Across all three years, with an intake of 8-10 people per year, not a single one stuck with it for more than 2 months. The simple basics of being expected to get into the office at a sane time (we had a flexitime-within-reason system), to come into the office every working day and to follow the instructions of a manager once in the office were too much for the participants.