You don't put a grill over the engine, because all that would do with a large birdstrike is add bits of metal into the mass of bird going into the engine.
Airports can, and do, put a huge amount of effort into clearing birds from around their runways, due to the risks that birdstrike presents during takeoff and landing. To quote from one of Heathrow Airport's own documents:
Birds can present a safety risk if they become
caught in aircraft engines. Heathrowâ(TM)s bird
hazard management team aim to make the
airport as unappealing as possible for birds
through habitat management, disturbing
birds using distress noises, letting off flares
and, as a last resort, through culling.
The operational risk to the airport posed by birdstrike could increase the scale of compensatory habitat required as it would require it to be sited further away, ideally to a minimum of 20km away from the site, and certainly outside of the 13km bird
safeguarding circle, increasing the uncertainty as to its suitability as replacement for the habitat lost. It may also necessitate additional mitigation measures to be put in place. If any remaining bird habitats within the 13km safeguarding circle (that is those not already displaced by the airport's direct impact) were considered to pose an operational safety risk additional mitigation measures would be needed and it may ultimately be necessary to remove those habitats, increasing further the environmental impact and cost of compensation.
Yes, they still exist. I was having hardware problems last year on a Win10 PC and got to see plenty of BSODs.
The problem turned out to a wonky PSU, meaning it didn't always manifest in the same way and it took a long time and a lot of dump-trawling (via a third-party tool) to diagnose. But the BSODs and their dump-files were genuinely useful in tracing the problem.
I'm guessing not too many people on their judging panel actually play all that many games. I could have imagined Fallout 4 being Game of the Year material... if it had been released in 2010 or so. As it is, I found it distinctly underwhelming, and I don't seem to be even close to alone in that.
Leave aside for a moment the bugs and technical issues (serious though they are). The game itself just feels dated and not particularly interesting. After a reasonably effective opening sequence (possibly all the judges played?) the writing is generally quite stiff and sterile. There are few NPCs who display any signs of actual character. Ironically, one of the very rare exceptions is a robot.
The main plot is a by the numbers affair whose "big twist" is easily predicted within an hour or two of starting out. With one or two exceptions, the sidequests and environmental storytelling are flat. The combat is poor (immersion-breaking movements speeds and bullet-sponge enemies), the stats system is nothing to write home about and all of the best bits of the game were basically present in Fallout 3 and New Vegas.
By almost any measure, there have been better games released in the last 12 months. The Witcher 3, while not without occasional technical issues (albeit much less severe than Fallout 4's) was jaw-dropping. The writing, which I would expect BAFTA to have a particular focus on, was superb. Everybody talks (quite justifiably) about the Bloody Baron questline, which remains a superb example of moral nuance in games, but that was just one of many plot-threads written with both intelligence and humanity. The world they created also did a great job of looking and feeling like a low-tech fantasy world, right down to a prevailing moral compass that is a long way from the early 21st century.
I'm not sure what their eligibility window was (so its release may have been slightly too early), but Bloodborne would also have been a strong contender. It does the "environmental storytelling" techniques developed in the Souls series and takes them close to perfection, building an incredibly rich seem of lore with only the broadest of brush-strokes (and doing the most successful evocation of the spirit of H. P. Lovecraft in a game that I've ever seen). It's also much, much better than Fallout 4 in gameplay terms, being deeper, more fluid and more satisfying.
Hell, even Metal Gear Solid 5, glorious trainwreck that it was, must surely rank above Bethesda's clunking bug-fest. Sure, the ending is clearly unfinished and it occasionally dips into the depths of Kojima-stupidity, but it's a hell of journey along the way (and, unlike the other games I've mentioned, pretty much perfect from a quality assurance and technical performance point of view).
I hadn't realised that "killing a cow" was such a value-booster. I spy a business opportunity here.
Buy up items which could conceivably be used to kill a cow: shovels, pickaxes, trampolines (that one needs a bit of creativity) and so on. Use them to kill cows, then re-sell at a profit.
Skipped the last year of primary school here in the UK after my parents (rightly) decided it was a waste of time and as a result went to university at 17. I knew a few others who did the same, as well as one who went at 16 (but she was frankly weird).
Don't think it did me any harm, but having to worry about getting IDed pretty much anywhere except the college bar (which just assumed everybody was 18+) for the first few months kinda sucked.
This is a myth. I can - and sometimes do - walk into my local supermarket here in the UK and buy ingredients (meat and veg) which will allow me to cook for three nights for the price of a single pre-prepared meal. I can do so because I avoid the upmarket "branded" groceries, avoid scammy organic and free-range stuff and the more expensive and exotic items. I don't do this very often. Why not? Because cooking from fresh takes longer, generally doesn't taste as good (unless you are a really good cook) and, to be frank, I can afford not to have to eat like that these days.
Modern agriculture has made the raw ingredients for cooking cheaper relative to incomes than they have been at any point in history. Because farms and supermarkets are businesses, they have found ways to charge more for some of them - see above comments on premium, organic and free-range brands - but you can still buy the basics dirt-cheap if you want to.
Looking at the other comments on this, I see some pretty polarised views; either "corporations are evil, let me get a refund on anything I want whenever I want it" or "regulation is evil, let companies do what they want". I think both of those are missing the point somewhat.
The area of refunds for downloadable game purchases is one that a lot of effort has gone into over the last few years and nobody has yet quite found a solution that seems to work fairly for both the public and developers.
Actually, it needs to be acknowledged that things have moved on a long way from a couple of years ago. You can actually routinely get refunds now from the main online PC game stores, provided you meet specific conditions. What's not clear is whether this is down to the threat of governmental action (the EU had been making loud noises) or market forces. In particular, when EA startled everybody by announcing what was actually a fairly ambitious refund policy for Origin, it forced competitors like Steam to up their game and follow suit.
Steam's current policy is that, outside of exceptional circumstances, you can get a refund without question on a game which has been purchased within the last two weeks (or which has been released within the last two weeks if you pre-ordered) and which you have played for less than two hours. That falls short of the statutory provisions for refunds that apply in many jurisdictions, but it's nevertheless a useful protection if you purchase a game which doesn't work on your PC, is hopelessly bug-riddled or is fundamentally not-as-advertised.
But this system is causing problems of its own. In particular, a lot of small-scale indie developers, whose games only sell for a couple of dollars but whose play-time is less than two hours, are finding that people are playing their games to completion in less than two hours and then requesting refunds, despite having, in essenence, fully consumed the product. Guess what - customers can be greedy, exploitive morons too.
Now, you might argue - and indeed I would - that Steam would be a better place if it closed the door to a lot of these small-scale indie developers, or at least increased the barriers to entry. But encouraging them onto the platform and then shafting them through the refund policy benefits nobody.
I think part of the problem here is that for all of their many benefits, Valve remain resolutely awful at direct customer support and, indeed, seem to have no interest in resourcing it properly. Turn-around time for support requests, including non-standard refund reqursts, are abyssmal (and said requests often just drop into a black-hole). This means that when things go wrong either for a customer or a developer, unless you manage to get a twitter-storm on-side, it can be very hard to escalate a problem. Dealing with that and becoming better at processing those non-standard refunds (for instance, when a previously-working game is broken by a patch), might help with a lot of Valve's current problems. But that won't be cheap or easy for the company to implement.
There are a huge number of factors here that don't seem to have been filtered and which are therefore muddying the findings.
One simple example: the factor most strongly associated with Alzheimer's is age. To quote the Alzheimer's Society: "Age is the greatest risk factor for Alzheimer's. The disease mainly affects people over 65. Above this age, a person's risk of developing Alzheimer's disease doubles approximately every five years. One in six people over 80 have dementia." Other forms of dementia, such as vascular dementia and Lewy bodies dementia, are also strongly associated with increasing age.
So in other words - your chances of contracting Alzheimer's grow markedly at the point where most people will be retiring. For people for whom a computer is a tool, rather than a leisure activity (which describes quite a lot of the older generation), that is naturally going to be a point at which computer use declines.
Your post repeats so many industry myths it should be in some kind of museum.
You talk about Project CARS putting "realistic graphics over gameplay". However, the idea that realistic graphics and gameplay cannot go hand in hand is one of the longest lived pieces of complete bollocks in gaming history. Plenty of games have gone this path over the years and have had superb gameplay. Quake, Gran Turismo, Metal Gear Solid, god knows how many others. Most recently the Witcher 3 - arguably the best looking game of all time, and also one of the best to play.
The hipsterwankish idea that Nintendo games are somehow "purer" as games because of their graphics style is complete toss. Hell, look at the recent Zelda remasters (Wind Waker and Twilight Princess) - unresponsive controls, poor player feedback, repetitive combat, overly-slow navigation. They compare very badly in gameplay terms to other titles of similar genres from the same era.
Plus the fact is, Nintendo only makes games with a fairly narrow range of styles and genres. A healthy software ecosystem means appealing to people with other tastes.
On Nintendo avoiding the "loss leader" model. They used do. They could no longer do this from the 3DS onwards. When they tried to launch the 3DS with the hardware at a profit, it crashed. To save it, they moved to the sale-at-loss model with a very large post-launch price cut. The Wii-U launched at a loss and, like most consoles, remained there for the first 12 months or so before moving to a more or less break-even position, due to a combination of component cost reductions and further price-cuts.
The N64 was a reasonably successful console in the short term, but a long-term disaster because of its impacts on Nintendo's market-share and third-party relationships. The poor performance of the Cube was disguised at the time because of large profits from Nintendo's handhelds (the GBA and DS) and trading cards (this was the height of the Pokemon boom). Incidentally, the GBA and DS both had huge third party ecosystems.
Meanwhile, Sony's losses were not due to the PS2. They were due to the implosion of its home-electronics and PC lines. The PS2 earned an absolute fortune, mostly from third party licensing fees. These just couldn't offset the wider group's losses. And as for MS... well... they sank a lot of money into buying a toe-hold in the market. The jury is still out on whether it was worth it.
The big problem with their hardware is that it complicates multi-platform development; and that isn't just AAA. We're at the point now where there are mid-tier and even indie games that push the hardware; the likes of ARK: Survival Evolved and whatnot. If you don't maintain rough hardware parity with your rivals, you are just putting another obstacle in the way of smaller developers, who won't generally have the resources to redesign their game from the ground up for a lesser piece of hardware. Look at the Project CARS Wii-U debacle for an illustration of this.
It's true that they did well with the Wii on under-powered hardware, but the Wii increasingly looks, with the benefit of hindsight, like a bit of a one-off. It aligned nicely with the zeitgeist by releasing at a time when MS and Sony had both had a slew of bad news. It had an easily grasped new concept in the motion controls, which allowed it to sell a huge number of consoles to new audiences. Of course, the promise of those motion controls never actually delivered; they were never really up to much more than mapping a button to "waggle". Don't forget that the Wii flatlined from the mid-point of the cycle and that Nintendo fell to its first ever annual losses during the Wii's life-span.
Nintendo cannot, on their own, provide enough of a software ecosystem on a console to keep it successful. Their last truly successful home console was the SNES, which had wide third-party support, albeit in an industry that looked very different to today's. What Nintendo can't afford to be doing is putting artificial hurdles in the way of third party developers.
That means that if they want to have a cat in hell's chance with the NX, they need to both have hardware that is at least on a par with (and preferably slightly better than) the PS4 and XB1 and, just as important, they need controller-parity. The same number of buttons with the same functionality in the same rough configuration.
Way back in 2003-4, I had a housemate who was a developer at a multi-platform studio. They eventually dropped Gamecube support (despite the console being quite easy to develop for and despite the sales being no worse than on the Xbox), because they were spending too much time and cost redesigning games, sometimes quite fundamentally, for the Cube because of the reduced number and functionality of controller inputs.
So the Wii-U more or less failed. Not quite as horribly as it seemed that it might at some points. As of right now, it's sold 12.5 million units, which is a few million ahead of the Dreamcast and Saturn, but almost 10 million behind the Gamecube. The PS4 and Xbox One both blew it out of the water. I don't think there's any one reason for this, but there are a lot of factors that all contributed:
1) The name. This was a really bad choice, as it didn't clearly differentiate the console as a sequel to the Wii, rather than an add-on for it. This caused confusion in the market, particularly in the casual/family market that supported the Wii. What's bizarre is that Nintendo had already been stung by this once, with the 3DS.
2) The timing. This was about as badly wrong as could have been imagined. The Wii had been dead in the water since 2010 or so. A successor late-2010 with the Wii-U's capabilities, when the successors to the PS3 and 360 were still years away, might have had a chance. But to launch with dated hardware (more on this later) at a time when Sony and MS were already spinning up their hype-machines for much more powerful consoles was suicidal.
3) Terrible launch marketing. The Wii-U launched in the run up to Christmas, which is an obvious enough choice, but had a near-invisible marketing campaign. It ended up getting buried by games such as Call of Duty in the pre-Christmas rush.
4) The wrong hardware. We know now from reports from ex-Nintendo staff that the company's key priority for the console was low power usage and noise and a small form factor; to make the thing an unobtrusive part of the living room. That's not a bad goal in itself, but it shouldn't have been taken to the extremes it was. A horribly underpowered CPU meant that in some respects, the Wii-U was outgunned by the (already elderly) PS3 and 360. Porting to the platform was also complicated.
5) A poorly designed gamepad with no clear USP. I've owned a Wii-U since launch and I still don't really understand the point of the gamepad. Very few games have made good use of it. It's unergonomic (just google "Wii U gamepad hand pain"), imprecise, cheap-feeling and, most bizarrely of all, virtually irreplaceable without buying a new console. The Wii sold tens of millions of copies on the quick-draw appeal of the Wii-mote, even if the potential of motion controls proved horribly limited in the longer run. The Wii-U, by contrast.
6) Terrible third-party relationships. This has long been a problem for Nintendo. They have a reputation in the industry as being arrogant and high-handed towards third-party developers. They promised this would improve with the Wii-U. It didn't. In fact, they royally pissed off a lot of the big names by failing to support their own launch so badly. Some publishers, particularly Ubisoft, invested heavily in the Wii-U launch, only to have their titles crash and burn because Nintendo didn't seem willing to put the effort into growing the installed base.
7) Underwhelming first-party games. This is the controversial one. The Wii-U does have some good exclusives, developed on a first or second party basis, but by and large, it has an insipid lineup. New Super Mario Brothers U and 3D Mario World were second-rate titles at best. Popular Gamecube and Wii series like Metroid went AWOL. Nintendo has a reputation for being an innovative games developer, but this reputation is largely misplaced. Its Wii-U library was generally composed of inferior retreads of familiar ground. There were one or two more innovative late-cycle games, like the first-party Splatoon and the second-party Xenoblade Chronicles X, but those were too little, too late.
The question is whether Nintendo can really fix all of the above problems with the NX, particularly given that they are, once again, going with a tricky mid-cycle launch (and that third parties have essentially given up on them).
No, I'm not excited. Why? Because, based on past experience, their release will no doubt be accompanied by essentially mandatory firmware updates that will degrade performance on my current, perfectly usable, Apple devices (iPhone 5S and iPad Air 2).
I've had a similar issue. Actually got together with some of the neighbours a few years ago to co-ordinate wifi channels after this kept coming up at building-committee meetings, which helped a bit. Problem was, though, around 1/3rd of the apartments in my building are private-rentals, rather than owner-occupier. The rental apartments tended to change occupiers often enough that co-ordination turned into a huge pain. Plus their occupants weren't always as co-operative.
Moving to a router that supported 5ghz helped a lot for me. Unfortunately, not all of my devices support 5ghz (including the Playstation 4 unless I buy a third-party external adapter for it). So I'm still on wired connections for some of my devices (and likely always will be for my desktop).
I've mixed feelings over social media in general, but Twitter in the specific makes my blood boil.
It's a medium that seems designed to kill off nuance, civility and sophistication of thought. By forcing people into 140 characters and providing social incentives for them to use those 140 characters to say something that will be shared as widely as possible, it encourages them to make the crassest, most polarizing statements possible. I'd put Twitter as the number one reason that so many online debates these days devolve into bitter mud-slinging between the loudest fringes of two opposing echo-chambers.
The rapid-response culture of twitter just makes things worse. Combined with the anonymity of online interactions, it compels people to speak before they've had a chance to do a sense-check and think through the consequences. There's no shortage of examples of responsible individuals in major corporations who have thrown away careers because they got sucked into the vortex that Twitter creates. One example, former Microsoft director Adam Orth and the "deal with it" furore over the planned always-online functionality for the Xbox One. Now, you could argue that in this case, Twitter did us a service by providing him with a platform to air his (or the company's) "true feeling". I'm not necessarily sure that's the right response, though. I strongly suspect pretty much everybody has "true feelings" which are pretty appalling at times (I know I do) and a huge part of social interaction is toning those things down before they can fly from your mouth (or indeed, stopping them altogether). Twitter, by design, takes the brakes off.
Some people can be incredibly witty and lucid within a single sentence. You see those in the occasional +5 Funny or +5 Insightful post on slashdot. Those people are a minority (and most of them struggle to manage it consistently). Most one-line posts are badly written crap (and usually from ACs). Twitter just institutionalizes that, except with less anonymity.
First person shooters are not the only technologically demanding game (indeed, I would argue that the two most demanding games around right now are The Witcher 3 and Assassin's Creed: Syndicate, neither of which are FPSes).
GP is right, the poor graphics hardware in this machine fundamentally undermines its credibility as a gaming machine, unless you really are only interested in legacy titles (in which case, you can get something cheaper without paying for an i7 you really don't need).
Going by the pricing, this is clearly being pitched at competing with the Nvidia Titan range. The current entry in that range is currently a white elephant, with performance that is basically matched by the (much cheaper) 980ti. However, past Titans (and their *90 predecessors) have generally had a successful enough niche in the super-premium section of the market.
However, and this is where I can speak from personal experience, multi-GPU cards are not always a great use of money, even at the top end of the market. I've owned two of them before (both Nvidia): the 7950GX2 and the 590. Both of them had problems. In both cases, support in individual games was patchy. In some titles, you would get only limited benefit. In a fairly large number of titles, you would get no benefit. In some titles (including various iterations of World of Warcraft), you could get odd performance artefacts and stability problems that meant that the dual-GPU card was actually weaker than the top-end single-GPU card. That situation has not changed; the last twelve months have seen a number of major PC releases with poor, no, or seriously bugged multi-GPU support.
The other point is that these cards are not necessarily the easiest to live with on a day-to-day basis. While Nvidia have made great strides in reducing the heat and noise output, as well as the power consumption, of their high end cards recently (the 980 behaves like a low-to-mid end card from a few generations ago and even the 980ti is reasonably civilised), AMD cards remain louder, hotter and more power-hungry. God only knows what the profiles of this latest beast are going to look like.
For a lot of users, that may mean PSU and system-cooling upgrades. It might make this card a poor choice for living-room PCs (which are increasingly popular, thanks to Steam big-picture mode and the like). And it does raise lingering worries about longevity; some past dual-GPU cards, like the 7950GX2, have been notorious for burning out after 18 months or so.
Having done the maths quickly on the Wii-U vs PS Vita bars, it is very clear that what the chart is actually showing is unit sales divided by months on sale. That's an interesting chart, but I agree it should have been clearly labelled as such.
However, your own original post wasn't particularly clear, hence why I misinterpreted it. You might want to work on your own literacy before angrily berating others for mislabelling charts.
The 3DS has around 5 years on the market, while the PS4 has just under two and a half. If you look at the historic performance of the 3DS, it was more or less matching the PS4 at this point in its lifespan (actually, somewhat below the PS4's current 38 million).
Plus handheld consoles historically have higher sales than home consoles anyway (unless they crash and burn). That's down to lower unit-costs and the fact that families are more likely to buy a handheld for each member who plays games, whereas they'll only get a single home console. The fact that handhelds are more likely to get lost or broken is also a (small) factor.
In addition to all this, the 3DS had needed extremely aggressive price-cutting to get those sales figures over the first two and a half years, after a very slow launch. The price of the PS4 has held up much better.
So taking those factors into account, the PS4 looks far more successful than the 3DS. Historically, only the Wii has outpaced PS4 sales, though again that was a much cheaper console. In addition, Wii sales effectively flatlined after a few years and second half of the system's lifespan was marked by a miserably low software attach rate.
The historic comparator to beat is the PS2, which had a slower start than the PS4, but maintained very strong sales across its lifespan, with a marked acceleration in sales at around the two and a half year point. That went on to manage 155 million units shipped, which holds the record for a home console. It was also the most expensive (and least powerful) home console of its generation.
A particular information is that the "correction" often fails to travel as far as the original misinformation. There are plenty of examples of this, though a particularly effective case study is the aftermath of the Columbine shootings, where a number of early pieces of misinformation on both the perpetrators (outcasts, "trench coat mafia", third-shooter) and the victims (specific targeting of individuals, religious martyrdom) went viral gained traction and remain part of the popular perceptions of the event today, despite having been disproved and corrected shortly after they were issued. Simply put, the misinformation was a better and "more comfortable" story than the truth (which is often the case - reality has a nasty habit of being messy, while our brains seem to like tidy stories).
On that basis, this looks like a worthy study. That said, given the Chinese connection, I do have to wonder whether this study isn't just going to be a vehicle for proposing blanket media-censorship.
This was pure stupidity from start to finish. Putting considerable time and effort into developing a game which you know you do not have the rights to publish is generally not a bad idea. When the game you are developing is a remake of a game which still has considerable commercial value, and which is owned by a company which does not have a long history of encouraging third party modding and development, it is dafter still.
Konami own the rights to Metal Gear Solid. If you want a remake of it, tell them so (letters, e-mails, petitions, questions from the floor at trade-shows - whatever). Companies like making money and if they think there is an audience for a remake of an old game, then they will generally do the remake. If they don't, then... there's not really much you can do.
If you want to make a stealth-action game, then make one. Konami own the rights to Metal Gear Solid, but they do not own the rights to "everything that looks a bit like Metal Gear Solid". There are no shortage of games out there, both AAA and indie, which take a degree of inspiration from Metal Gear Solid. If you have a team with the skills to make a game as ambitious as a full remake of Metal Gear Solid would be, then go that route.
But trying to make a game which you know it is vanishingly unlikely you will be allowed to publish and then whinging when you are not allowed to publish it is just stupid.
I'm toying with another possible interpretation of this; that this is effectively MS's way of getting out of the console market, but without the "big bang" announcement that saw Sega ditch things what should have been half-way through the Dreamcast's life-cycle.
There's not much detail out there yet, but based on what there is, it sounds like MS are planning to release what are basically cheap, locked-down PCs on a rolling basis, similar to the Steam Machines. As with those Steam machines, anything which is playable on them will also be playable on a full-sized PC. This is a long-way removed from the traditional console model, where a machine is sent out to sit in the market for anywhere from 4 to 8 years with no hardware changes and where the console-manufacturer funds exclusive titles to grow the installed base (then creams revenue off the third-party titles via licensing fees). In essence, it is just a slightly different type of PC, which sits under your TV (and yes, I know the PS4 and XB1 already resemble that description to a degree, but they were both sold on the "static hardware" model).
It's pretty clear why MS might go in this direction. Their long-standing cash-cows are Windows and Office. Xbox has been a side-line and, in some respects, a slightly risky one, in that it has toyed with undermining one of the key sales-points of Windows (gaming). It was always a sideline which only a company which was very, very confident in its continued monopoly position in its main market (and the continued health of that market) could afford to pursue.
And right now, while that monopoly still looks fairly strong, there are signs of stress; tablets (mostly non-MS ones) have convinced a lot of people to give up their laptops. Ten years ago, Linux was, in essence, NeckbeardOS with no real chance of displacing Windows in the home environment. Now you have Valve and other reasonably serious players throwing a lot of weight behind Linux-powered devices. Win8 flopped and while Win10 is doing better, it isn't doing as well as you might expect given it's basically free. MS still dominate the PC OS market, but it's an increasingly vulnerable domination of an increasingly vulnerable market. Re-emphasizing the Windows PC (be it a laptop, desktop, tablet or box that sits under the TV) as a gaming platform may well be a sensible defensive strategy.
Phil Spencer is, unlike his immediate predecessor, no fool. If he thinks for a moment that what's needed to maintain the health of the Windows cash-cow is to sacrifice the Xbox console strategy on the altar of PC gaming, he will do so in a heart-beat and that, I think, is what we're starting to see happening. Previously-announced Xbox-exclusive series have been announced for PC (albeit Windows 10, and sometimes Windows Store-only) and in some cases are already available.
This shouldn't be a surprise. The Xbox One is a moderately successful console, despite the bad publicity, but MS has no real interest in having a moderately successful console. Don Mattrick's strategy was to use the Xbox One as a doorway for MS to get a presence in every living-room in the country through an all-singing-all-dancing multimedia box, that just happened to also be a games console. That strategy was inane and failed. Spencer has turned the disaster around by refocusing the console in the short term as a traditional console, but it is still only putting out reasonably good numbers and MS have bled market-share to Sony. I just don't see why they'd be excited about staying in that market.
It's complex. I've known two people who have seriously messed up their lives as a result of excessive gaming and one who came close (but pulled back at the last minute). I've known a lot more people who fouled up their lives for other reasons.
The two I knew who seriously messed up their lives were friends from my university days who managed to get so heavily into the QuakeWorld/Quake 3 online scene that they failed their exams at the end of their second year and were thrown out (my university didn't "do" second chances). One of them went into the workplace without a degree (and is doing more or less ok now, almost 15 years later, though probably not in the field he wanted to be in) while the other enrolled at another university and came damned close to flunking out a second time (but scraped graduation and is now a teacher, so draw your own conclusions).
The near-miss was more recent. A friend I've known for about a decade got so heavily into an MMO last year that it started to affect his attendance and performance at work. A few of us spotted what was happening and did a bit of an "intervention" (god, I hate that term, but I can't think of a better one). The immediate result was a week long sulk - but after that, he realised the danger he was in and pulled back from the edge.
Thing is, though, I'm not ultimately convinced that "gaming" was a unique factor in either of those cases. In both cases, I think the social obligations that existed around gaming were a bigger factor. The Quake-pair weren't just playing the game; they were heavily involved in the competitive scene and had weekly practice and event schedules imposed on them by their clans. They both knew (one more than the other, perhaps) that they should be playing less, but didn't have the experience or maturity to tell their clan-mates when enough was enough. The MMO-player was, as he later admitted, more or less hating the game, but was so bound into his guild's hierarchy and structure that he felt he couldn't stop playing (or even cut back) for fear of letting other people down. So it wasn't so much video-game addiction as it was a kind of social entrapment.
Thing is, I've also seen people mess up their lives even more spectacularly for non-gaming reasons. In my first "grown up" job, one of my colleagues was into mountaineering. Seriously so. He'd take months of unpaid leave each year to go on expeditions. He'd done a couple of Himalayan 8,000ers as well as a whole load of peaks in Alaska and the Andes. And over time, it destroyed his life. His marriage fell apart, he lost contact with his son and, when redundancies came around at the office, he was the first one out the door; his lengthy absences meant that people had gotten used to doing without him, so he wasn't able to pull the "look indispensable" trick.
Another guy I was at university with ended up not just flunking out of his course but also winding up tens of thousands of GBP in debt. How? Poker. He convinced himself that as an "elite" maths student, he would be able to clean up. Turns out he couldn't. He ended up hopelessly addicted and throwing good money after bad.
I've also seen people wreck their lives through mundane and even unpleasant stuff. One guy I worked with got so drawn into work for the building management committee for the apartment block he lived in that it took over his life to the point he was spending most of the working day on it - and again, he was out the door at the first whiff of redundancies. He always told people that he was only doing it because he felt people were depending on him...
People are remarkably adept at finding ways to wreck their own lives and will use any tool at hand to do so. Games can be one of those tools and there certainly seem to be some people with a high general propensity to addictive behaviour who will be especially prone to gaming addiction. But for those people, I can't escape the view that if it wasn't gaming that brought them down, it would just be something else.
Way back in the distant dawn of time (or at least, of competitive Counter-Strike play), I ran a major UK Counter-Strike league. Cheating was a pretty big issue back then (not least because software anit-cheat was much less developed) and we spent a lot of time on the watch for it. In the 18 months or so I was running the league, we had maybe 10 cheat detections during competitive play. The guys running the "open" public servers sponsored by the same company were getting a similar number of detections in the average week.
By and large, I think there were three reasons why people cheated. The first was simple curiosity; people who were bored of playing the game honestly and just wanted to see what the cheats were like. There probably weren't too many of these.
The largest group were the trolls; the people who cheated not because it was fun in itself, but because they got off on pissing off other people and screwing up their leisure time. Some of them would try to hide their cheating, but a lot of them were pretty damned open about it. After all, it's annoying to play a guy you think might be cheating. It's even worse to play a guy who is open and proud about the fact he's cheating, in a world where it can take time (up to an hour, on the public servers) to summon an admin.
The third kind were the properly competitive gamers who felt they were struggling to keep up with the pack and thought that by making subtle use of cheats, they could give themselves an edge. This was the only kind we tended to see in the competitive league. "Pro-gaming" was in its infancy back then, but was already becoming "a thing" and there was sponsorship and prize money floating around. There were lots of players who frankly weren't good enough who thought they could make a fist of pro-gaming. When it became clear that they weren't cut out for it (you need both a hell of a lot of practice time and god's own natural reflexes to cut it in that world), they'd often resort to cheats. They would always try to hide the fact they were cheating, so unless you got a rare software detection, discerning cheating from good or lucky play was hard (but not impossible) for an admin.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't put a grill over the engine, because all that would do with a large birdstrike is add bits of metal into the mass of bird going into the engine.
Airports can, and do, put a huge amount of effort into clearing birds from around their runways, due to the risks that birdstrike presents during takeoff and landing. To quote from one of Heathrow Airport's own documents:
Birds can present a safety risk if they become caught in aircraft engines. Heathrowâ(TM)s bird hazard management team aim to make the airport as unappealing as possible for birds through habitat management, disturbing birds using distress noises, letting off flares and, as a last resort, through culling.
Bird populations can even influence the siting of airports. When a major recent UK study ruled out the construction of a new airport in the Thames Estuary (to the east of the capital), the scale of the bird-management that would be necessary was one of several reasons cited:
The operational risk to the airport posed by birdstrike could increase the scale of compensatory habitat required as it would require it to be sited further away, ideally to a minimum of 20km away from the site, and certainly outside of the 13km bird safeguarding circle, increasing the uncertainty as to its suitability as replacement for the habitat lost. It may also necessitate additional mitigation measures to be put in place. If any remaining bird habitats within the 13km safeguarding circle (that is those not already displaced by the airport's direct impact) were considered to pose an operational safety risk additional mitigation measures would be needed and it may ultimately be necessary to remove those habitats, increasing further the environmental impact and cost of compensation.
Yes, they still exist. I was having hardware problems last year on a Win10 PC and got to see plenty of BSODs.
The problem turned out to a wonky PSU, meaning it didn't always manifest in the same way and it took a long time and a lot of dump-trawling (via a third-party tool) to diagnose. But the BSODs and their dump-files were genuinely useful in tracing the problem.
I'm guessing not too many people on their judging panel actually play all that many games. I could have imagined Fallout 4 being Game of the Year material... if it had been released in 2010 or so. As it is, I found it distinctly underwhelming, and I don't seem to be even close to alone in that.
Leave aside for a moment the bugs and technical issues (serious though they are). The game itself just feels dated and not particularly interesting. After a reasonably effective opening sequence (possibly all the judges played?) the writing is generally quite stiff and sterile. There are few NPCs who display any signs of actual character. Ironically, one of the very rare exceptions is a robot.
The main plot is a by the numbers affair whose "big twist" is easily predicted within an hour or two of starting out. With one or two exceptions, the sidequests and environmental storytelling are flat. The combat is poor (immersion-breaking movements speeds and bullet-sponge enemies), the stats system is nothing to write home about and all of the best bits of the game were basically present in Fallout 3 and New Vegas.
By almost any measure, there have been better games released in the last 12 months. The Witcher 3, while not without occasional technical issues (albeit much less severe than Fallout 4's) was jaw-dropping. The writing, which I would expect BAFTA to have a particular focus on, was superb. Everybody talks (quite justifiably) about the Bloody Baron questline, which remains a superb example of moral nuance in games, but that was just one of many plot-threads written with both intelligence and humanity. The world they created also did a great job of looking and feeling like a low-tech fantasy world, right down to a prevailing moral compass that is a long way from the early 21st century.
I'm not sure what their eligibility window was (so its release may have been slightly too early), but Bloodborne would also have been a strong contender. It does the "environmental storytelling" techniques developed in the Souls series and takes them close to perfection, building an incredibly rich seem of lore with only the broadest of brush-strokes (and doing the most successful evocation of the spirit of H. P. Lovecraft in a game that I've ever seen). It's also much, much better than Fallout 4 in gameplay terms, being deeper, more fluid and more satisfying.
Hell, even Metal Gear Solid 5, glorious trainwreck that it was, must surely rank above Bethesda's clunking bug-fest. Sure, the ending is clearly unfinished and it occasionally dips into the depths of Kojima-stupidity, but it's a hell of journey along the way (and, unlike the other games I've mentioned, pretty much perfect from a quality assurance and technical performance point of view).
God almighty... Fallout 4? Seriously?
The headline could just as easily have been "Reddit Launches New Block Tools To Help Reinforce Echo Chamber".
I hadn't realised that "killing a cow" was such a value-booster. I spy a business opportunity here.
Buy up items which could conceivably be used to kill a cow: shovels, pickaxes, trampolines (that one needs a bit of creativity) and so on. Use them to kill cows, then re-sell at a profit.
What could possibly go wrong?
Skipped the last year of primary school here in the UK after my parents (rightly) decided it was a waste of time and as a result went to university at 17. I knew a few others who did the same, as well as one who went at 16 (but she was frankly weird).
Don't think it did me any harm, but having to worry about getting IDed pretty much anywhere except the college bar (which just assumed everybody was 18+) for the first few months kinda sucked.
This is a myth. I can - and sometimes do - walk into my local supermarket here in the UK and buy ingredients (meat and veg) which will allow me to cook for three nights for the price of a single pre-prepared meal. I can do so because I avoid the upmarket "branded" groceries, avoid scammy organic and free-range stuff and the more expensive and exotic items. I don't do this very often. Why not? Because cooking from fresh takes longer, generally doesn't taste as good (unless you are a really good cook) and, to be frank, I can afford not to have to eat like that these days.
Modern agriculture has made the raw ingredients for cooking cheaper relative to incomes than they have been at any point in history. Because farms and supermarkets are businesses, they have found ways to charge more for some of them - see above comments on premium, organic and free-range brands - but you can still buy the basics dirt-cheap if you want to.
Looking at the other comments on this, I see some pretty polarised views; either "corporations are evil, let me get a refund on anything I want whenever I want it" or "regulation is evil, let companies do what they want". I think both of those are missing the point somewhat.
The area of refunds for downloadable game purchases is one that a lot of effort has gone into over the last few years and nobody has yet quite found a solution that seems to work fairly for both the public and developers.
Actually, it needs to be acknowledged that things have moved on a long way from a couple of years ago. You can actually routinely get refunds now from the main online PC game stores, provided you meet specific conditions. What's not clear is whether this is down to the threat of governmental action (the EU had been making loud noises) or market forces. In particular, when EA startled everybody by announcing what was actually a fairly ambitious refund policy for Origin, it forced competitors like Steam to up their game and follow suit.
Steam's current policy is that, outside of exceptional circumstances, you can get a refund without question on a game which has been purchased within the last two weeks (or which has been released within the last two weeks if you pre-ordered) and which you have played for less than two hours. That falls short of the statutory provisions for refunds that apply in many jurisdictions, but it's nevertheless a useful protection if you purchase a game which doesn't work on your PC, is hopelessly bug-riddled or is fundamentally not-as-advertised.
But this system is causing problems of its own. In particular, a lot of small-scale indie developers, whose games only sell for a couple of dollars but whose play-time is less than two hours, are finding that people are playing their games to completion in less than two hours and then requesting refunds, despite having, in essenence, fully consumed the product. Guess what - customers can be greedy, exploitive morons too.
Now, you might argue - and indeed I would - that Steam would be a better place if it closed the door to a lot of these small-scale indie developers, or at least increased the barriers to entry. But encouraging them onto the platform and then shafting them through the refund policy benefits nobody.
I think part of the problem here is that for all of their many benefits, Valve remain resolutely awful at direct customer support and, indeed, seem to have no interest in resourcing it properly. Turn-around time for support requests, including non-standard refund reqursts, are abyssmal (and said requests often just drop into a black-hole). This means that when things go wrong either for a customer or a developer, unless you manage to get a twitter-storm on-side, it can be very hard to escalate a problem. Dealing with that and becoming better at processing those non-standard refunds (for instance, when a previously-working game is broken by a patch), might help with a lot of Valve's current problems. But that won't be cheap or easy for the company to implement.
There are a huge number of factors here that don't seem to have been filtered and which are therefore muddying the findings.
One simple example: the factor most strongly associated with Alzheimer's is age. To quote the Alzheimer's Society: "Age is the greatest risk factor for Alzheimer's. The disease mainly affects people over 65. Above this age, a person's risk of developing Alzheimer's disease doubles approximately every five years. One in six people over 80 have dementia." Other forms of dementia, such as vascular dementia and Lewy bodies dementia, are also strongly associated with increasing age.
So in other words - your chances of contracting Alzheimer's grow markedly at the point where most people will be retiring. For people for whom a computer is a tool, rather than a leisure activity (which describes quite a lot of the older generation), that is naturally going to be a point at which computer use declines.
Your post repeats so many industry myths it should be in some kind of museum.
You talk about Project CARS putting "realistic graphics over gameplay". However, the idea that realistic graphics and gameplay cannot go hand in hand is one of the longest lived pieces of complete bollocks in gaming history. Plenty of games have gone this path over the years and have had superb gameplay. Quake, Gran Turismo, Metal Gear Solid, god knows how many others. Most recently the Witcher 3 - arguably the best looking game of all time, and also one of the best to play.
The hipsterwankish idea that Nintendo games are somehow "purer" as games because of their graphics style is complete toss. Hell, look at the recent Zelda remasters (Wind Waker and Twilight Princess) - unresponsive controls, poor player feedback, repetitive combat, overly-slow navigation. They compare very badly in gameplay terms to other titles of similar genres from the same era.
Plus the fact is, Nintendo only makes games with a fairly narrow range of styles and genres. A healthy software ecosystem means appealing to people with other tastes.
On Nintendo avoiding the "loss leader" model. They used do. They could no longer do this from the 3DS onwards. When they tried to launch the 3DS with the hardware at a profit, it crashed. To save it, they moved to the sale-at-loss model with a very large post-launch price cut. The Wii-U launched at a loss and, like most consoles, remained there for the first 12 months or so before moving to a more or less break-even position, due to a combination of component cost reductions and further price-cuts.
The N64 was a reasonably successful console in the short term, but a long-term disaster because of its impacts on Nintendo's market-share and third-party relationships. The poor performance of the Cube was disguised at the time because of large profits from Nintendo's handhelds (the GBA and DS) and trading cards (this was the height of the Pokemon boom). Incidentally, the GBA and DS both had huge third party ecosystems.
Meanwhile, Sony's losses were not due to the PS2. They were due to the implosion of its home-electronics and PC lines. The PS2 earned an absolute fortune, mostly from third party licensing fees. These just couldn't offset the wider group's losses. And as for MS... well... they sank a lot of money into buying a toe-hold in the market. The jury is still out on whether it was worth it.
The big problem with their hardware is that it complicates multi-platform development; and that isn't just AAA. We're at the point now where there are mid-tier and even indie games that push the hardware; the likes of ARK: Survival Evolved and whatnot. If you don't maintain rough hardware parity with your rivals, you are just putting another obstacle in the way of smaller developers, who won't generally have the resources to redesign their game from the ground up for a lesser piece of hardware. Look at the Project CARS Wii-U debacle for an illustration of this.
It's true that they did well with the Wii on under-powered hardware, but the Wii increasingly looks, with the benefit of hindsight, like a bit of a one-off. It aligned nicely with the zeitgeist by releasing at a time when MS and Sony had both had a slew of bad news. It had an easily grasped new concept in the motion controls, which allowed it to sell a huge number of consoles to new audiences. Of course, the promise of those motion controls never actually delivered; they were never really up to much more than mapping a button to "waggle". Don't forget that the Wii flatlined from the mid-point of the cycle and that Nintendo fell to its first ever annual losses during the Wii's life-span.
Nintendo cannot, on their own, provide enough of a software ecosystem on a console to keep it successful. Their last truly successful home console was the SNES, which had wide third-party support, albeit in an industry that looked very different to today's. What Nintendo can't afford to be doing is putting artificial hurdles in the way of third party developers.
That means that if they want to have a cat in hell's chance with the NX, they need to both have hardware that is at least on a par with (and preferably slightly better than) the PS4 and XB1 and, just as important, they need controller-parity. The same number of buttons with the same functionality in the same rough configuration.
Way back in 2003-4, I had a housemate who was a developer at a multi-platform studio. They eventually dropped Gamecube support (despite the console being quite easy to develop for and despite the sales being no worse than on the Xbox), because they were spending too much time and cost redesigning games, sometimes quite fundamentally, for the Cube because of the reduced number and functionality of controller inputs.
So the Wii-U more or less failed. Not quite as horribly as it seemed that it might at some points. As of right now, it's sold 12.5 million units, which is a few million ahead of the Dreamcast and Saturn, but almost 10 million behind the Gamecube. The PS4 and Xbox One both blew it out of the water. I don't think there's any one reason for this, but there are a lot of factors that all contributed:
1) The name. This was a really bad choice, as it didn't clearly differentiate the console as a sequel to the Wii, rather than an add-on for it. This caused confusion in the market, particularly in the casual/family market that supported the Wii. What's bizarre is that Nintendo had already been stung by this once, with the 3DS.
2) The timing. This was about as badly wrong as could have been imagined. The Wii had been dead in the water since 2010 or so. A successor late-2010 with the Wii-U's capabilities, when the successors to the PS3 and 360 were still years away, might have had a chance. But to launch with dated hardware (more on this later) at a time when Sony and MS were already spinning up their hype-machines for much more powerful consoles was suicidal.
3) Terrible launch marketing. The Wii-U launched in the run up to Christmas, which is an obvious enough choice, but had a near-invisible marketing campaign. It ended up getting buried by games such as Call of Duty in the pre-Christmas rush.
4) The wrong hardware. We know now from reports from ex-Nintendo staff that the company's key priority for the console was low power usage and noise and a small form factor; to make the thing an unobtrusive part of the living room. That's not a bad goal in itself, but it shouldn't have been taken to the extremes it was. A horribly underpowered CPU meant that in some respects, the Wii-U was outgunned by the (already elderly) PS3 and 360. Porting to the platform was also complicated.
5) A poorly designed gamepad with no clear USP. I've owned a Wii-U since launch and I still don't really understand the point of the gamepad. Very few games have made good use of it. It's unergonomic (just google "Wii U gamepad hand pain"), imprecise, cheap-feeling and, most bizarrely of all, virtually irreplaceable without buying a new console. The Wii sold tens of millions of copies on the quick-draw appeal of the Wii-mote, even if the potential of motion controls proved horribly limited in the longer run. The Wii-U, by contrast.
6) Terrible third-party relationships. This has long been a problem for Nintendo. They have a reputation in the industry as being arrogant and high-handed towards third-party developers. They promised this would improve with the Wii-U. It didn't. In fact, they royally pissed off a lot of the big names by failing to support their own launch so badly. Some publishers, particularly Ubisoft, invested heavily in the Wii-U launch, only to have their titles crash and burn because Nintendo didn't seem willing to put the effort into growing the installed base.
7) Underwhelming first-party games. This is the controversial one. The Wii-U does have some good exclusives, developed on a first or second party basis, but by and large, it has an insipid lineup. New Super Mario Brothers U and 3D Mario World were second-rate titles at best. Popular Gamecube and Wii series like Metroid went AWOL. Nintendo has a reputation for being an innovative games developer, but this reputation is largely misplaced. Its Wii-U library was generally composed of inferior retreads of familiar ground. There were one or two more innovative late-cycle games, like the first-party Splatoon and the second-party Xenoblade Chronicles X, but those were too little, too late.
The question is whether Nintendo can really fix all of the above problems with the NX, particularly given that they are, once again, going with a tricky mid-cycle launch (and that third parties have essentially given up on them).
No, I'm not excited. Why? Because, based on past experience, their release will no doubt be accompanied by essentially mandatory firmware updates that will degrade performance on my current, perfectly usable, Apple devices (iPhone 5S and iPad Air 2).
I've had a similar issue. Actually got together with some of the neighbours a few years ago to co-ordinate wifi channels after this kept coming up at building-committee meetings, which helped a bit. Problem was, though, around 1/3rd of the apartments in my building are private-rentals, rather than owner-occupier. The rental apartments tended to change occupiers often enough that co-ordination turned into a huge pain. Plus their occupants weren't always as co-operative.
Moving to a router that supported 5ghz helped a lot for me. Unfortunately, not all of my devices support 5ghz (including the Playstation 4 unless I buy a third-party external adapter for it). So I'm still on wired connections for some of my devices (and likely always will be for my desktop).
I've mixed feelings over social media in general, but Twitter in the specific makes my blood boil.
It's a medium that seems designed to kill off nuance, civility and sophistication of thought. By forcing people into 140 characters and providing social incentives for them to use those 140 characters to say something that will be shared as widely as possible, it encourages them to make the crassest, most polarizing statements possible. I'd put Twitter as the number one reason that so many online debates these days devolve into bitter mud-slinging between the loudest fringes of two opposing echo-chambers.
The rapid-response culture of twitter just makes things worse. Combined with the anonymity of online interactions, it compels people to speak before they've had a chance to do a sense-check and think through the consequences. There's no shortage of examples of responsible individuals in major corporations who have thrown away careers because they got sucked into the vortex that Twitter creates. One example, former Microsoft director Adam Orth and the "deal with it" furore over the planned always-online functionality for the Xbox One. Now, you could argue that in this case, Twitter did us a service by providing him with a platform to air his (or the company's) "true feeling". I'm not necessarily sure that's the right response, though. I strongly suspect pretty much everybody has "true feelings" which are pretty appalling at times (I know I do) and a huge part of social interaction is toning those things down before they can fly from your mouth (or indeed, stopping them altogether). Twitter, by design, takes the brakes off.
Some people can be incredibly witty and lucid within a single sentence. You see those in the occasional +5 Funny or +5 Insightful post on slashdot. Those people are a minority (and most of them struggle to manage it consistently). Most one-line posts are badly written crap (and usually from ACs). Twitter just institutionalizes that, except with less anonymity.
First person shooters are not the only technologically demanding game (indeed, I would argue that the two most demanding games around right now are The Witcher 3 and Assassin's Creed: Syndicate, neither of which are FPSes).
GP is right, the poor graphics hardware in this machine fundamentally undermines its credibility as a gaming machine, unless you really are only interested in legacy titles (in which case, you can get something cheaper without paying for an i7 you really don't need).
Going by the pricing, this is clearly being pitched at competing with the Nvidia Titan range. The current entry in that range is currently a white elephant, with performance that is basically matched by the (much cheaper) 980ti. However, past Titans (and their *90 predecessors) have generally had a successful enough niche in the super-premium section of the market.
However, and this is where I can speak from personal experience, multi-GPU cards are not always a great use of money, even at the top end of the market. I've owned two of them before (both Nvidia): the 7950GX2 and the 590. Both of them had problems. In both cases, support in individual games was patchy. In some titles, you would get only limited benefit. In a fairly large number of titles, you would get no benefit. In some titles (including various iterations of World of Warcraft), you could get odd performance artefacts and stability problems that meant that the dual-GPU card was actually weaker than the top-end single-GPU card. That situation has not changed; the last twelve months have seen a number of major PC releases with poor, no, or seriously bugged multi-GPU support.
The other point is that these cards are not necessarily the easiest to live with on a day-to-day basis. While Nvidia have made great strides in reducing the heat and noise output, as well as the power consumption, of their high end cards recently (the 980 behaves like a low-to-mid end card from a few generations ago and even the 980ti is reasonably civilised), AMD cards remain louder, hotter and more power-hungry. God only knows what the profiles of this latest beast are going to look like.
For a lot of users, that may mean PSU and system-cooling upgrades. It might make this card a poor choice for living-room PCs (which are increasingly popular, thanks to Steam big-picture mode and the like). And it does raise lingering worries about longevity; some past dual-GPU cards, like the 7950GX2, have been notorious for burning out after 18 months or so.
Having done the maths quickly on the Wii-U vs PS Vita bars, it is very clear that what the chart is actually showing is unit sales divided by months on sale. That's an interesting chart, but I agree it should have been clearly labelled as such.
However, your own original post wasn't particularly clear, hence why I misinterpreted it. You might want to work on your own literacy before angrily berating others for mislabelling charts.
The 3DS has around 5 years on the market, while the PS4 has just under two and a half. If you look at the historic performance of the 3DS, it was more or less matching the PS4 at this point in its lifespan (actually, somewhat below the PS4's current 38 million).
Plus handheld consoles historically have higher sales than home consoles anyway (unless they crash and burn). That's down to lower unit-costs and the fact that families are more likely to buy a handheld for each member who plays games, whereas they'll only get a single home console. The fact that handhelds are more likely to get lost or broken is also a (small) factor.
In addition to all this, the 3DS had needed extremely aggressive price-cutting to get those sales figures over the first two and a half years, after a very slow launch. The price of the PS4 has held up much better.
So taking those factors into account, the PS4 looks far more successful than the 3DS. Historically, only the Wii has outpaced PS4 sales, though again that was a much cheaper console. In addition, Wii sales effectively flatlined after a few years and second half of the system's lifespan was marked by a miserably low software attach rate.
The historic comparator to beat is the PS2, which had a slower start than the PS4, but maintained very strong sales across its lifespan, with a marked acceleration in sales at around the two and a half year point. That went on to manage 155 million units shipped, which holds the record for a home console. It was also the most expensive (and least powerful) home console of its generation.
A particular information is that the "correction" often fails to travel as far as the original misinformation. There are plenty of examples of this, though a particularly effective case study is the aftermath of the Columbine shootings, where a number of early pieces of misinformation on both the perpetrators (outcasts, "trench coat mafia", third-shooter) and the victims (specific targeting of individuals, religious martyrdom) went viral gained traction and remain part of the popular perceptions of the event today, despite having been disproved and corrected shortly after they were issued. Simply put, the misinformation was a better and "more comfortable" story than the truth (which is often the case - reality has a nasty habit of being messy, while our brains seem to like tidy stories).
On that basis, this looks like a worthy study. That said, given the Chinese connection, I do have to wonder whether this study isn't just going to be a vehicle for proposing blanket media-censorship.
This was pure stupidity from start to finish. Putting considerable time and effort into developing a game which you know you do not have the rights to publish is generally not a bad idea. When the game you are developing is a remake of a game which still has considerable commercial value, and which is owned by a company which does not have a long history of encouraging third party modding and development, it is dafter still.
Konami own the rights to Metal Gear Solid. If you want a remake of it, tell them so (letters, e-mails, petitions, questions from the floor at trade-shows - whatever). Companies like making money and if they think there is an audience for a remake of an old game, then they will generally do the remake. If they don't, then... there's not really much you can do.
If you want to make a stealth-action game, then make one. Konami own the rights to Metal Gear Solid, but they do not own the rights to "everything that looks a bit like Metal Gear Solid". There are no shortage of games out there, both AAA and indie, which take a degree of inspiration from Metal Gear Solid. If you have a team with the skills to make a game as ambitious as a full remake of Metal Gear Solid would be, then go that route.
But trying to make a game which you know it is vanishingly unlikely you will be allowed to publish and then whinging when you are not allowed to publish it is just stupid.
I'm toying with another possible interpretation of this; that this is effectively MS's way of getting out of the console market, but without the "big bang" announcement that saw Sega ditch things what should have been half-way through the Dreamcast's life-cycle.
There's not much detail out there yet, but based on what there is, it sounds like MS are planning to release what are basically cheap, locked-down PCs on a rolling basis, similar to the Steam Machines. As with those Steam machines, anything which is playable on them will also be playable on a full-sized PC. This is a long-way removed from the traditional console model, where a machine is sent out to sit in the market for anywhere from 4 to 8 years with no hardware changes and where the console-manufacturer funds exclusive titles to grow the installed base (then creams revenue off the third-party titles via licensing fees). In essence, it is just a slightly different type of PC, which sits under your TV (and yes, I know the PS4 and XB1 already resemble that description to a degree, but they were both sold on the "static hardware" model).
It's pretty clear why MS might go in this direction. Their long-standing cash-cows are Windows and Office. Xbox has been a side-line and, in some respects, a slightly risky one, in that it has toyed with undermining one of the key sales-points of Windows (gaming). It was always a sideline which only a company which was very, very confident in its continued monopoly position in its main market (and the continued health of that market) could afford to pursue.
And right now, while that monopoly still looks fairly strong, there are signs of stress; tablets (mostly non-MS ones) have convinced a lot of people to give up their laptops. Ten years ago, Linux was, in essence, NeckbeardOS with no real chance of displacing Windows in the home environment. Now you have Valve and other reasonably serious players throwing a lot of weight behind Linux-powered devices. Win8 flopped and while Win10 is doing better, it isn't doing as well as you might expect given it's basically free. MS still dominate the PC OS market, but it's an increasingly vulnerable domination of an increasingly vulnerable market. Re-emphasizing the Windows PC (be it a laptop, desktop, tablet or box that sits under the TV) as a gaming platform may well be a sensible defensive strategy.
Phil Spencer is, unlike his immediate predecessor, no fool. If he thinks for a moment that what's needed to maintain the health of the Windows cash-cow is to sacrifice the Xbox console strategy on the altar of PC gaming, he will do so in a heart-beat and that, I think, is what we're starting to see happening. Previously-announced Xbox-exclusive series have been announced for PC (albeit Windows 10, and sometimes Windows Store-only) and in some cases are already available.
This shouldn't be a surprise. The Xbox One is a moderately successful console, despite the bad publicity, but MS has no real interest in having a moderately successful console. Don Mattrick's strategy was to use the Xbox One as a doorway for MS to get a presence in every living-room in the country through an all-singing-all-dancing multimedia box, that just happened to also be a games console. That strategy was inane and failed. Spencer has turned the disaster around by refocusing the console in the short term as a traditional console, but it is still only putting out reasonably good numbers and MS have bled market-share to Sony. I just don't see why they'd be excited about staying in that market.
I have an inclusive and diverse response to this story. It includes the words "fuck", "off" and "die".
Yay me!
It's complex. I've known two people who have seriously messed up their lives as a result of excessive gaming and one who came close (but pulled back at the last minute). I've known a lot more people who fouled up their lives for other reasons.
The two I knew who seriously messed up their lives were friends from my university days who managed to get so heavily into the QuakeWorld/Quake 3 online scene that they failed their exams at the end of their second year and were thrown out (my university didn't "do" second chances). One of them went into the workplace without a degree (and is doing more or less ok now, almost 15 years later, though probably not in the field he wanted to be in) while the other enrolled at another university and came damned close to flunking out a second time (but scraped graduation and is now a teacher, so draw your own conclusions).
The near-miss was more recent. A friend I've known for about a decade got so heavily into an MMO last year that it started to affect his attendance and performance at work. A few of us spotted what was happening and did a bit of an "intervention" (god, I hate that term, but I can't think of a better one). The immediate result was a week long sulk - but after that, he realised the danger he was in and pulled back from the edge.
Thing is, though, I'm not ultimately convinced that "gaming" was a unique factor in either of those cases. In both cases, I think the social obligations that existed around gaming were a bigger factor. The Quake-pair weren't just playing the game; they were heavily involved in the competitive scene and had weekly practice and event schedules imposed on them by their clans. They both knew (one more than the other, perhaps) that they should be playing less, but didn't have the experience or maturity to tell their clan-mates when enough was enough. The MMO-player was, as he later admitted, more or less hating the game, but was so bound into his guild's hierarchy and structure that he felt he couldn't stop playing (or even cut back) for fear of letting other people down. So it wasn't so much video-game addiction as it was a kind of social entrapment.
Thing is, I've also seen people mess up their lives even more spectacularly for non-gaming reasons. In my first "grown up" job, one of my colleagues was into mountaineering. Seriously so. He'd take months of unpaid leave each year to go on expeditions. He'd done a couple of Himalayan 8,000ers as well as a whole load of peaks in Alaska and the Andes. And over time, it destroyed his life. His marriage fell apart, he lost contact with his son and, when redundancies came around at the office, he was the first one out the door; his lengthy absences meant that people had gotten used to doing without him, so he wasn't able to pull the "look indispensable" trick.
Another guy I was at university with ended up not just flunking out of his course but also winding up tens of thousands of GBP in debt. How? Poker. He convinced himself that as an "elite" maths student, he would be able to clean up. Turns out he couldn't. He ended up hopelessly addicted and throwing good money after bad.
I've also seen people wreck their lives through mundane and even unpleasant stuff. One guy I worked with got so drawn into work for the building management committee for the apartment block he lived in that it took over his life to the point he was spending most of the working day on it - and again, he was out the door at the first whiff of redundancies. He always told people that he was only doing it because he felt people were depending on him...
People are remarkably adept at finding ways to wreck their own lives and will use any tool at hand to do so. Games can be one of those tools and there certainly seem to be some people with a high general propensity to addictive behaviour who will be especially prone to gaming addiction. But for those people, I can't escape the view that if it wasn't gaming that brought them down, it would just be something else.
As for gaming and violence, whi
Way back in the distant dawn of time (or at least, of competitive Counter-Strike play), I ran a major UK Counter-Strike league. Cheating was a pretty big issue back then (not least because software anit-cheat was much less developed) and we spent a lot of time on the watch for it. In the 18 months or so I was running the league, we had maybe 10 cheat detections during competitive play. The guys running the "open" public servers sponsored by the same company were getting a similar number of detections in the average week.
By and large, I think there were three reasons why people cheated. The first was simple curiosity; people who were bored of playing the game honestly and just wanted to see what the cheats were like. There probably weren't too many of these.
The largest group were the trolls; the people who cheated not because it was fun in itself, but because they got off on pissing off other people and screwing up their leisure time. Some of them would try to hide their cheating, but a lot of them were pretty damned open about it. After all, it's annoying to play a guy you think might be cheating. It's even worse to play a guy who is open and proud about the fact he's cheating, in a world where it can take time (up to an hour, on the public servers) to summon an admin.
The third kind were the properly competitive gamers who felt they were struggling to keep up with the pack and thought that by making subtle use of cheats, they could give themselves an edge. This was the only kind we tended to see in the competitive league. "Pro-gaming" was in its infancy back then, but was already becoming "a thing" and there was sponsorship and prize money floating around. There were lots of players who frankly weren't good enough who thought they could make a fist of pro-gaming. When it became clear that they weren't cut out for it (you need both a hell of a lot of practice time and god's own natural reflexes to cut it in that world), they'd often resort to cheats. They would always try to hide the fact they were cheating, so unless you got a rare software detection, discerning cheating from good or lucky play was hard (but not impossible) for an admin.