Wow, that's everything I'm always trying to say. I think most everyone else around here just spouts out dumb nonsense solutions to complicated problems because their models of reality that generate the easy solutions are just too simple-minded. Usually the model something that results in a solution like 'it's always worked out before, so let's not do anything different...'.
The reason we face energy shortages has nothing to do with the fact that we're running out. It has to do with the fact that we waste it. When the price gets high enough, provided of course that the government lets it get high, then you'll find out people get quite resourceful about conservation. You'll also find that there is plenty of energy to do the things we must.
This 'people do stuff to respond to shortages' argument doesn't really say anything. Of course people can handle shortages. Civilization goes on, sure. But is the sort of society that take extreme measures to conserves energy because it has to preferable to the one with cheap and plentiful power? No it isn't. The thing about people responding to shortages is that they respond a lot better when they see them coming, and take steps to prepare and do so much that there isn't a shortage at all because they got started early enough to solve the problem rather than just responding in the moment to increasing prices.
It's always funny to hear the greenies make fun of the all-too-Texan quirk of mispronouncing "new-cue-ler" while they make the actually meaningful error of not understanding the actual issues at hand. Too bad this guy's old buddies have so rabidly excommunicated him, but they're just as blind in their faith and their Nukes = Evil mantra as they would suggest that an oil-burning, SUV-driving Texan is in his own world view. Critical thinking, people! (both of you!)
I don't really see anything adding to the discussion in here at all, there's no new facts or data reference, and barely any opinion expressed: 'it's funny' and 'too bad'. An admonishment to think better... fantastic, that really helps. Why is this '+1 interesting'? Everybody be better than before! (all of you, especially those moderators!)
Except of course the military, their ability to manufacture plutonium for weapons purposes was never affected, something which strikes me as endlessly ironic, given that Carter's justification for banning reprocessing was ostensibly to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.
I don't think you know what 'spread' means, it doesn't mean that one country continues to make weapons, it means other countries and say terrorists don't acquire weapons they didn't already possess.
Not reprocessing our fuel does two things- it reduces the total amount of reprocessed fuel lying around, presumably the military gets as much as it needs anyway so making more just adds to the risk that someone else will get their hands on it. The second thing is that it sets a better example for countries that possess nuclear power plants or are interested in them but who don't have nuclear weapons- we wouldn't want them producing the weaponizable stuff, which again might fall into the wrong hands, or those countries might decide to make bombs after all after they abruptly change their minds and decide it's the only way to truly defend their country or whatever.
We don't know whether another three degrees of warming over the next century (which is what the most pessimistic of Global Warming predictors are saying will happen regardless of what changes we make) will, on balance, be a Good Thing or a Bad Thing.
Historically, periods of warm climates have been more prosperous for mankind than cool eras, because most of the land in the world lies outside the tropics.
All the Ice melting off Greenland might suck if you live in Venice, New Orleans, or some other port town that is mostly below sea level, but it's the best news ever if you've invested in any arctic real estate.
I don't really buy into the 'take the long view' type of reasonings. The problem remains that trillions of dollars worth of real estate and infrastructure are threatened. Change may not be inherently bad, but it's hard. And potentially very painful. We know how to get by the way things are right now (well, except if the way we're getting by is causing the whole problem to begin with...). It's going to cost a fucking lot of money to restructure society to take advantage of this potential pleasant change in the weather. Taking millions of people and having them move somewhere else is also pretty expensive- sure, maybe it happens over decades, but it's not going to be trivial.
The thing about change, is that we don't really understand what's going on and all the ramifications. It's easy to say, in my dumb-simple model, add three degrees results in a little melted ice here, more temperate climates here, and slightly raised sea level there. Doesn't look to bad to me. But the weather and climate and ecology and economy and everything else is that will be perturbed is very messy and chaotic- it's messy and chaotic enough when it's in a stable mode, but you add ramp up some of the inputs to the system and it could go anywhere.
This is what saddens me about the tech demos I'm seeing lately: "Look, the car falls apart realistically!" While that gets me to geek out for a few minutes I wonder if so much effort will be put into gameplay.
I think all 'graphics vs. gameplay' arguments are typically wrong in their assumptions about how games are made and sold.
The fallacy of the 'lets do less of x and more of y' is that x is typically very well defined and achievable with a limited budget and schedule with the proper people and tools, substance y is vague and intangible and unmanageable.
Everybody with eyes and a brain knows what good graphics are, there are lots of good artists and graphics programmers out there so it's only a matter of time and money to get good graphics. A huge part of our brain is devoted to processing visuals, so I think it's well and good that that part of the brain is targeted. Another good bit of mental processing is devoted to physics- recognizing where things are falling intuitively, how to move muscles to achieve desired effect and so on- and we understand physics. Visuals are a subset of physics in reality, and that's pretty well understood too.
I have no idea what 'good gameplay' is, or what 'fun' is. I'm sure there are a lot of people out there with theories that work sometimes when the stars are aligned and so forth. There may be some really brilliant people out there who really understand how to make some specific kind of 'good gameplay' and 'fun' and can consistently create games with those qualities, but for the most part since those people are few and far between the easiest way to make a fun game with good gameplay is to copy another game that just happened to hit upon those qualities. Another thing is that in the development process, the point at which a game becomes fun may come really late- you won't know you screwed up until its too late to make fundamental changes to how the game is played without breaking budget and schedule.
That just covers the developer end though- consumers, although they want to have fun and have good gameplay, have no real method of determining if a game embodies that by looking at the box, or watching the video. They know it when they experience it. And sometimes it takes a while to learn a new style of gameplay, so maybe a demo isn't enough- so again it's easier for consumers to stick with what they know, and have past experience with a genre of game they'll know much sooner when first playing a game whether it will be fun and so on. But the first thing the consumer sees is going to be the graphics, and the second thing they'll experience is the way entities in the game move and interact- the physics and animation. Those two things make the first impression even if gameplay is more important to making them enjoy the entire game- if those two things are done poorly then the gamer will most likely never get to the gameplay part of the game. I don't think there's any way around that.
If you walk into walmart, and say in a loud voice over and over again how you had sex with an underage child, you can bet your ass you will be investigated.
I would have agreed with you, but I think using sex crimes against children as in a justification for some law or police tactic that is going to be used for much more that those kinds of crimes is like bringing up Hitler in a debate (and with Godwin's law you automatically lose that debate etc.).
Seems that police is getting some kind of back-door to get "raw" data.
Facebook has a lot more controls on who can see the user data, building little barriers around individual schools and so on, it would be more of a candidate for special police back doors, but myspace is completely wide open except for when it comes to underage users. Once you register on myspace, you have access to everyone else. Now, the police my want a special database api back doors and so on so they can do wholesale monitoring of millions of people (which would be pretty disturbing and wrong), but if they are just looking for specific individuals they don't need any special access.
But there's no way to know what will be considered 'wrong' in the future, which was one of the main points of the parent post. Some future American cultural revolution may decide that some perfectly acceptable activity right now is actually everything that's wrong with the country, so let's go detain/summarily-execute everyone we have logs of doing it...
The part where he throws the thing into the window sort of looks like security footage, not homemade footage- or did the guy with the camera climb up onto the building they were trying to burn down, to get the shot?
It doesn't have to be effective. If they did it five times and killed one person each time the population would be effectively terrorized.
But the effect wears off once the public becomes used to the type of attack and understands it isn't that great of a threat. Guns and cars kill lots and lots of people and people are used to hearing about it, so they don't make very effective weapons for spectacular terrorist events aimed at the general public. If terrorists started using bioweapons repeatedly, and each time hardly anyone died, people would eventually realize there isn't much to worry about.
If I wanted realism... I'd just go outside. Instead of sprouting all this 'better graphics = great games' crap did they ever stop to consider that gameplay matters?
You would think by now that people talking about improved graphics would realize that throwing around a term like realism automatically triggers a dozen slashbot posts like the above.
This kind of sentiment is about as idiotic and useless as saying 'why don't they just make good games/music/movies', as if 'good' or 'gameplay' was a well understood and rigidly defined thing you could just apply x many person-hours to in order to create it.
I like having increasingly better graphics as time goes on, and to a certain extent increased realism- the technology that enables photorealistic graphics is also the technology that will enable non-photorealistic graphics that could be more amazing than anything we can imagine.
No one forces you to buy a 360, no one forces you to buy Oblivion, no one forces you to buy Horse armor, no one forces you to buy Xbox live.
You buy it because you choose to do so. You buy it because it works, because you enjoy it and because you don't mind paying for someones hard work.
Sure horse armor for 2.50 is a joke. I don't dispute that. However the 360, xbox live and the game are all worth every penny i paid and then some. I'll choose not to buy the horse armor because..
you may guess it
i don't freaking HAVE to.
Thanks for blowing this way out of proportion and making yourselves look like idiots. Move along.
If you think about this for a second, you would realize a few things. I'm guessing there's no way to return or resell this horse armor after it has been purchased. And that there was also very little way to 'test drive' the armor before making the purchase. Some people have to buy it and tell other people if it was worth it or not, the first people are out the money but they can be compensated sort of by trying to influence the rest of the market- if they succeed in discouraging others from buying the product then they punish the seller, and the seller might learn better for the next time and the original buyer will benefit.
Obviously if you make a bad decision and buy something, and you think there are a lot of people out there also like you who might make that bad decision, then it's very beneficial to everyone if you try to inform those people, blowing things out of proportion. If you were smart enough not to buy something in the first place, it is only partially effective to say 'if you are smart like me you won't buy it', but you lack the credibility of the person who has actually lost money and sound like an ass besides.
>More open sourced games can only be a good thing. How does Microsoft's >shared-source license affect me as a professional game developer, though? >I'm afraid of looking through a lot of other games' source code for fear of >taint.
I guess as a professional book writer I would have to stop reading other books, otherwsie my own books could be "tainted" or "contaminated" by what I read. What a shock!!!
I think there are a lot of authors who avoid reading other books, at least ones with very strong styles, while in the midst of writing their own work. Not for any legal reasons, it's just that when they read something and really get into it their own writing style is affected. Later on, the author might reread their writing and be annoyed by the change to a 'voice' that is not their own, so they just avoid the possibility altogether.
I'm sure there a even a few very anal about not looking like they took anybody else's ideas, so don't read anything by other authors in the same genre. Again, not for legal reasons, they just want to be as original seeming as possible. I've read books by authors who all know and read each other and it is pretty obvious that they are riffing and remixing each other's ideas. That's all well and good for them, but some authors don't go in for that.
There's got to be a Mr. Show fan out their with a joke about 'fear of taint'...
I'm glad there's gamers out there that are willing to pay top dollar for the latest & greatest, because it motivates nVidia and ATI to be competitive and in the long run drives the prices down for consumers like you and me.
Their numbers aren't all that great compared to gamers, but there are graphics professionals who can easily and gladly purchase cards for $500 or more each when they are spending $50K on a motion base or tens of thousands on multiple projectors and screens for scientific visualization or flight simulators etc. Companies like Silicon Graphics are getting out of the graphics business because nobody needs the super high-end anymore, but there still needs to be something high end, and nVidia and ATI do and should continue to fill that need.
Remember that government funded superbowl ad about how buying marijuana was helping put box-cutters into the hands of hijackers? Of course at the time it probably made you angry enough to want to fly an airplane into the DEA headquarters, but there probably was some grain of truth, where if you follow n-many levels of redirection then yes some percentage of that money ended up in the hands of people so designated as terrorists. But then, you think about it more, and any money you give to anyone for anything could end up in the hands of terrorists after it has changed hands a few times. It's like 7 steps to Kevin Bacon, but with money instead of movies, and Osama or whoever instead of Kevin Bacon.
I remember there was a guest on Letterman once who when asked what kind of movies they liked said "I like good movies". The audience and host laughed at him for saying something so idiotic, and the actor tried to recover by quickly naming a few favorites and articulating what in particular was good about them.
It would be great if the content and code could be open-sourced or shared somehow, just so all the artistry and time put into the game could be appreciated. Even a viewer program that would allow you to view all the game art would be nice. The longer the publisher just sits on the data that went into the game the more worthless it will become due to obsolescence and the more likely that the data will be lost or damaged or deleted on purpose.
I guess I'm asking for a lot, to take an example from another field few authors get their notes and partially completed works etc. published, and then usually only after they are dead (and therefore won't object).
History is written by the winners, and it's common knowledge that we were taken by surprise, and that FDR was (overall) a really swell guy.
But the thing to remember there is that they did actually win WWII and it only took a handful of years to do it. History can forgive you for those tactical and strategic blunders and lapses in respect for freedom and human rights and so on, but it's really important that you clearly and completely win in a short time frame (e.g. before your administration leaves office). If at the end of your term you hold up some heavily massaged statistics about a 2.4% increase of some debateable measure of success, then history books more mainstream than People's History of the United States are going to be critical.
every recent release comes out at $70 (Canadian) and then a week later it's down to $60, then a month later it's $50... then about 2 months after that it's in the bargain bin for $20.
It's the free market in action. The longer after the release date, the more used copies are going to enter the market, competing with the new copies for sales, so the publisher has to lower prices in order to keep selling more games. There also may be new games out competing with the old game, so although the new game has all the hype and maybe a few new features you can get a similar old game for a lot less money (although if the same publisher makes both of those similar games then it may be cannibalizing its own sales).
You'll notice games that are both unique and top-notch don't drop their prices much for many months, sometimes for more than a year or until the sequel comes out. I think BF1942 stayed full price until the Vietnam one came out, and also Half-Life continued to sell for around $50 for years and years (though in increasingly 'deluxe' packages) until the sequel came out.
It's also a form of market segmentation, which is a way of extracting the most money out of each customer, in this case the customer's desire to play the game close to its release date is the how the segmenting is done. This form of market segmentation is far more preferable to the sort where the vendor sizes you up and makes you individually a limited-time offer based on how much they think you want it and how much money they think you're good for. You'll hate the vendor as soon as you find out how much less someone else paid for the exact same thing.
If they started pricing games more reasonably, based on length, quality, and quantity of game play, then maybe they'd make money, and a much better return on investment... but instead, I just sit around waiting for a month before buying the game.
The pricing scheme you've outlined already does this, but it's the derivative of price vs. time that is (inversely) proportional to length and quality (and originality), not the starting price.
I consider this a relationship model, as opposed to current games' "one night stand" model. If you like something, why WOULDN'T you want it to go on for years? Why WOULDN'T you get a subscription to it and keep enjoying it for as long as possible?
Because it might be taking your time and money away from something fresh and different being made by a different company? Because eventually the people who worked on it from the start and made it good are going to get tired and move on, but the less creative ones will stay and run the whole thing into the ground by trying to make it their meal ticket for all time?
It's nice to sit down to play a game and know that you have some hours in of unexplored territory right in front of you- and there's a definite stopping point at the end of that. Just like it's nice to sit down and watch a two hour movie that draws you into a world and then ends decisively.
If you knew it was only going to be only a handful of hours and not really bring any closure, and then you have to wait for a month, that's going to make you approach the game differently. Starting to play HL2 for the first time you feel like you have something weighy in your hands: a game years in the making, this slow reveal as you glimpse the occupied Earth of the future and have to play for some time before the action starts, incredible graphics and physics and attention to detail like you've never seen before. Waiting a few months for a few new levels on a well established game engine is not going to feel terribly important, it's going to feel more cheap and disposable.
I don't deny that episodic content may become a source of revenue for some more types of games eventually than MMORPGs and the sports and racing games that release 'episodes' on a yearly basis, but for plot-based FPS type games they will have to find the right price and playing time per episode and time between releases to satisfy the consumer.
The other bit is games tend to be way to short these days.
There's a demographic split between people who have lots of free time and those that don't. I'm in the former camp, and I always prefer quality over quantity. I would always rather a game felt like it should have gone on longer than the opposite, though I suppose there is some dollar/hour-of-play threshold I wouldn't want to go above, say $5/hr.
The console game 'unlockables' approach is a pretty good way to cater to both demographics- a player can play straight through the game in say 10-20 hours and feel like they've experienced most of what they paid for, but if they really liked it or just have a lot of free time they can play through as different characters with different abilities and get different outfits and get high scores or get to secret locations or whatever.
I think the right approach for developers is to spend their effort on content that the majority of players will experience- if 90% of the players will only play the game without finding secret areas or something, spend 90% of the art budget and level developing time on the parts of the game most people will see (unfortunately for games with one or more shelf-level-events, that also means spending more time on the earlier levels than the later ones...).
I really resent the current trend to shorten games to generate a better revenue flow and try to price it for optimum wallet extraction.
Games are going up orders of magnitude in complexity on multiple fronts but budgets aren't going up nearly as fast. I think it's the right thing to do to make the games shorter. Think of it in a competitive sense too- if you have half the budget of the game you are trying to compete with, why not make your game half as big so at least you have chance of attracting the players who got used to a certain density of content and level quality and so on- if you do it well you'll have more money for the sequel or add-on pack and can then compete on playing time also.
Games that are long but reuse a lot of textures and character models and other content and seem as if very little thought has gone into making the levels interesting to play and don't give the player much to do as they move from point to point are usually the grade-B or C games.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, that's everything I'm always trying to say. I think most everyone else around here just spouts out dumb nonsense solutions to complicated problems because their models of reality that generate the easy solutions are just too simple-minded. Usually the model something that results in a solution like 'it's always worked out before, so let's not do anything different...'.
The reason we face energy shortages has nothing to do with the fact that we're running out. It has to do with the fact that we waste it. When the price gets high enough, provided of course that the government lets it get high, then you'll find out people get quite resourceful about conservation. You'll also find that there is plenty of energy to do the things we must.
This 'people do stuff to respond to shortages' argument doesn't really say anything. Of course people can handle shortages. Civilization goes on, sure. But is the sort of society that take extreme measures to conserves energy because it has to preferable to the one with cheap and plentiful power? No it isn't. The thing about people responding to shortages is that they respond a lot better when they see them coming, and take steps to prepare and do so much that there isn't a shortage at all because they got started early enough to solve the problem rather than just responding in the moment to increasing prices.
It's always funny to hear the greenies make fun of the all-too-Texan quirk of mispronouncing "new-cue-ler" while they make the actually meaningful error of not understanding the actual issues at hand. Too bad this guy's old buddies have so rabidly excommunicated him, but they're just as blind in their faith and their Nukes = Evil mantra as they would suggest that an oil-burning, SUV-driving Texan is in his own world view. Critical thinking, people! (both of you!)
I don't really see anything adding to the discussion in here at all, there's no new facts or data reference, and barely any opinion expressed: 'it's funny' and 'too bad'. An admonishment to think better... fantastic, that really helps. Why is this '+1 interesting'? Everybody be better than before! (all of you, especially those moderators!)
Except of course the military, their ability to manufacture plutonium for weapons purposes was never affected, something which strikes me as endlessly ironic, given that Carter's justification for banning reprocessing was ostensibly to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.
I don't think you know what 'spread' means, it doesn't mean that one country continues to make weapons, it means other countries and say terrorists don't acquire weapons they didn't already possess.
Not reprocessing our fuel does two things- it reduces the total amount of reprocessed fuel lying around, presumably the military gets as much as it needs anyway so making more just adds to the risk that someone else will get their hands on it. The second thing is that it sets a better example for countries that possess nuclear power plants or are interested in them but who don't have nuclear weapons- we wouldn't want them producing the weaponizable stuff, which again might fall into the wrong hands, or those countries might decide to make bombs after all after they abruptly change their minds and decide it's the only way to truly defend their country or whatever.
We don't know whether another three degrees of warming over the next century (which is what the most pessimistic of Global Warming predictors are saying will happen regardless of what changes we make) will, on balance, be a Good Thing or a Bad Thing.
Historically, periods of warm climates have been more prosperous for mankind than cool eras, because most of the land in the world lies outside the tropics.
All the Ice melting off Greenland might suck if you live in Venice, New Orleans, or some other port town that is mostly below sea level, but it's the best news ever if you've invested in any arctic real estate.
I don't really buy into the 'take the long view' type of reasonings. The problem remains that trillions of dollars worth of real estate and infrastructure are threatened. Change may not be inherently bad, but it's hard. And potentially very painful. We know how to get by the way things are right now (well, except if the way we're getting by is causing the whole problem to begin with...). It's going to cost a fucking lot of money to restructure society to take advantage of this potential pleasant change in the weather. Taking millions of people and having them move somewhere else is also pretty expensive- sure, maybe it happens over decades, but it's not going to be trivial.
The thing about change, is that we don't really understand what's going on and all the ramifications. It's easy to say, in my dumb-simple model, add three degrees results in a little melted ice here, more temperate climates here, and slightly raised sea level there. Doesn't look to bad to me. But the weather and climate and ecology and economy and everything else is that will be perturbed is very messy and chaotic- it's messy and chaotic enough when it's in a stable mode, but you add ramp up some of the inputs to the system and it could go anywhere.
This is what saddens me about the tech demos I'm seeing lately: "Look, the car falls apart realistically!" While that gets me to geek out for a few minutes I wonder if so much effort will be put into gameplay.
I think all 'graphics vs. gameplay' arguments are typically wrong in their assumptions about how games are made and sold.
The fallacy of the 'lets do less of x and more of y' is that x is typically very well defined and achievable with a limited budget and schedule with the proper people and tools, substance y is vague and intangible and unmanageable.
Everybody with eyes and a brain knows what good graphics are, there are lots of good artists and graphics programmers out there so it's only a matter of time and money to get good graphics. A huge part of our brain is devoted to processing visuals, so I think it's well and good that that part of the brain is targeted. Another good bit of mental processing is devoted to physics- recognizing where things are falling intuitively, how to move muscles to achieve desired effect and so on- and we understand physics. Visuals are a subset of physics in reality, and that's pretty well understood too.
I have no idea what 'good gameplay' is, or what 'fun' is. I'm sure there are a lot of people out there with theories that work sometimes when the stars are aligned and so forth. There may be some really brilliant people out there who really understand how to make some specific kind of 'good gameplay' and 'fun' and can consistently create games with those qualities, but for the most part since those people are few and far between the easiest way to make a fun game with good gameplay is to copy another game that just happened to hit upon those qualities. Another thing is that in the development process, the point at which a game becomes fun may come really late- you won't know you screwed up until its too late to make fundamental changes to how the game is played without breaking budget and schedule.
That just covers the developer end though- consumers, although they want to have fun and have good gameplay, have no real method of determining if a game embodies that by looking at the box, or watching the video. They know it when they experience it. And sometimes it takes a while to learn a new style of gameplay, so maybe a demo isn't enough- so again it's easier for consumers to stick with what they know, and have past experience with a genre of game they'll know much sooner when first playing a game whether it will be fun and so on. But the first thing the consumer sees is going to be the graphics, and the second thing they'll experience is the way entities in the game move and interact- the physics and animation. Those two things make the first impression even if gameplay is more important to making them enjoy the entire game- if those two things are done poorly then the gamer will most likely never get to the gameplay part of the game. I don't think there's any way around that.
If you walk into walmart, and say in a loud voice over and over again how you had sex with an underage child, you can bet your ass you will be investigated.
I would have agreed with you, but I think using sex crimes against children as in a justification for some law or police tactic that is going to be used for much more that those kinds of crimes is like bringing up Hitler in a debate (and with Godwin's law you automatically lose that debate etc.).
Seems that police is getting some kind of back-door to get "raw" data.
Facebook has a lot more controls on who can see the user data, building little barriers around individual schools and so on, it would be more of a candidate for special police back doors, but myspace is completely wide open except for when it comes to underage users. Once you register on myspace, you have access to everyone else. Now, the police my want a special database api back doors and so on so they can do wholesale monitoring of millions of people (which would be pretty disturbing and wrong), but if they are just looking for specific individuals they don't need any special access.
1)Don't do anything wrong
But there's no way to know what will be considered 'wrong' in the future, which was one of the main points of the parent post. Some future American cultural revolution may decide that some perfectly acceptable activity right now is actually everything that's wrong with the country, so let's go detain/summarily-execute everyone we have logs of doing it...
The part where he throws the thing into the window sort of looks like security footage, not homemade footage- or did the guy with the camera climb up onto the building they were trying to burn down, to get the shot?
What do you think could be causing this drop in interest from young people? Sequels? Mature themes? Sequels?
They'd rather be on myspace?
It doesn't have to be effective. If they did it five times and killed one person each time the population would be effectively terrorized.
But the effect wears off once the public becomes used to the type of attack and understands it isn't that great of a threat. Guns and cars kill lots and lots of people and people are used to hearing about it, so they don't make very effective weapons for spectacular terrorist events aimed at the general public. If terrorists started using bioweapons repeatedly, and each time hardly anyone died, people would eventually realize there isn't much to worry about.
If I wanted realism... I'd just go outside. Instead of sprouting all this 'better graphics = great games' crap did they ever stop to consider that gameplay matters?
You would think by now that people talking about improved graphics would realize that throwing around a term like realism automatically triggers a dozen slashbot posts like the above.
This kind of sentiment is about as idiotic and useless as saying 'why don't they just make good games/music/movies', as if 'good' or 'gameplay' was a well understood and rigidly defined thing you could just apply x many person-hours to in order to create it.
I like having increasingly better graphics as time goes on, and to a certain extent increased realism- the technology that enables photorealistic graphics is also the technology that will enable non-photorealistic graphics that could be more amazing than anything we can imagine.
No one forces you to buy a 360, no one forces you to buy Oblivion, no one forces you to buy Horse armor, no one forces you to buy Xbox live.
You buy it because you choose to do so. You buy it because it works, because you enjoy it and because you don't mind paying for someones hard work.
Sure horse armor for 2.50 is a joke. I don't dispute that. However the 360, xbox live and the game are all worth every penny i paid and then some. I'll choose not to buy the horse armor because..
you may guess it
i don't freaking HAVE to.
Thanks for blowing this way out of proportion and making yourselves look like idiots. Move along.
If you think about this for a second, you would realize a few things. I'm guessing there's no way to return or resell this horse armor after it has been purchased. And that there was also very little way to 'test drive' the armor before making the purchase. Some people have to buy it and tell other people if it was worth it or not, the first people are out the money but they can be compensated sort of by trying to influence the rest of the market- if they succeed in discouraging others from buying the product then they punish the seller, and the seller might learn better for the next time and the original buyer will benefit.
Obviously if you make a bad decision and buy something, and you think there are a lot of people out there also like you who might make that bad decision, then it's very beneficial to everyone if you try to inform those people, blowing things out of proportion. If you were smart enough not to buy something in the first place, it is only partially effective to say 'if you are smart like me you won't buy it', but you lack the credibility of the person who has actually lost money and sound like an ass besides.
That's called a free market
I think in a free market you would be able to resell the purchased item to anyone else for any price the buyer agrees to. Is this the case here?
It's what you'd normally do in the body of the story post...
I don't really care about the interview, but I wouldn't mind seeing what the project is about.
Yes, I am too lazy to google it.
>More open sourced games can only be a good thing. How does Microsoft's
>shared-source license affect me as a professional game developer, though?
>I'm afraid of looking through a lot of other games' source code for fear of
>taint.
I guess as a professional book writer I would have to stop reading other books, otherwsie my own books could be "tainted" or "contaminated" by what I read. What a shock!!!
I think there are a lot of authors who avoid reading other books, at least ones with very strong styles, while in the midst of writing their own work. Not for any legal reasons, it's just that when they read something and really get into it their own writing style is affected. Later on, the author might reread their writing and be annoyed by the change to a 'voice' that is not their own, so they just avoid the possibility altogether.
I'm sure there a even a few very anal about not looking like they took anybody else's ideas, so don't read anything by other authors in the same genre. Again, not for legal reasons, they just want to be as original seeming as possible. I've read books by authors who all know and read each other and it is pretty obvious that they are riffing and remixing each other's ideas. That's all well and good for them, but some authors don't go in for that.
There's got to be a Mr. Show fan out their with a joke about 'fear of taint'...
I'm glad there's gamers out there that are willing to pay top dollar for the latest & greatest, because it motivates nVidia and ATI to be competitive and in the long run drives the prices down for consumers like you and me.
Their numbers aren't all that great compared to gamers, but there are graphics professionals who can easily and gladly purchase cards for $500 or more each when they are spending $50K on a motion base or tens of thousands on multiple projectors and screens for scientific visualization or flight simulators etc. Companies like Silicon Graphics are getting out of the graphics business because nobody needs the super high-end anymore, but there still needs to be something high end, and nVidia and ATI do and should continue to fill that need.
Remember that government funded superbowl ad about how buying marijuana was helping put box-cutters into the hands of hijackers? Of course at the time it probably made you angry enough to want to fly an airplane into the DEA headquarters, but there probably was some grain of truth, where if you follow n-many levels of redirection then yes some percentage of that money ended up in the hands of people so designated as terrorists. But then, you think about it more, and any money you give to anyone for anything could end up in the hands of terrorists after it has changed hands a few times. It's like 7 steps to Kevin Bacon, but with money instead of movies, and Osama or whoever instead of Kevin Bacon.
Maybe they could go back to making good games.
I remember there was a guest on Letterman once who when asked what kind of movies they liked said "I like good movies". The audience and host laughed at him for saying something so idiotic, and the actor tried to recover by quickly naming a few favorites and articulating what in particular was good about them.
It would be great if the content and code could be open-sourced or shared somehow, just so all the artistry and time put into the game could be appreciated. Even a viewer program that would allow you to view all the game art would be nice. The longer the publisher just sits on the data that went into the game the more worthless it will become due to obsolescence and the more likely that the data will be lost or damaged or deleted on purpose.
I guess I'm asking for a lot, to take an example from another field few authors get their notes and partially completed works etc. published, and then usually only after they are dead (and therefore won't object).
History is written by the winners, and it's common knowledge that we were taken by surprise, and that FDR was (overall) a really swell guy.
But the thing to remember there is that they did actually win WWII and it only took a handful of years to do it. History can forgive you for those tactical and strategic blunders and lapses in respect for freedom and human rights and so on, but it's really important that you clearly and completely win in a short time frame (e.g. before your administration leaves office). If at the end of your term you hold up some heavily massaged statistics about a 2.4% increase of some debateable measure of success, then history books more mainstream than People's History of the United States are going to be critical.
every recent release comes out at $70 (Canadian) and then a week later it's down to $60, then a month later it's $50... then about 2 months after that it's in the bargain bin for $20.
It's the free market in action. The longer after the release date, the more used copies are going to enter the market, competing with the new copies for sales, so the publisher has to lower prices in order to keep selling more games. There also may be new games out competing with the old game, so although the new game has all the hype and maybe a few new features you can get a similar old game for a lot less money (although if the same publisher makes both of those similar games then it may be cannibalizing its own sales).
You'll notice games that are both unique and top-notch don't drop their prices much for many months, sometimes for more than a year or until the sequel comes out. I think BF1942 stayed full price until the Vietnam one came out, and also Half-Life continued to sell for around $50 for years and years (though in increasingly 'deluxe' packages) until the sequel came out.
It's also a form of market segmentation, which is a way of extracting the most money out of each customer, in this case the customer's desire to play the game close to its release date is the how the segmenting is done. This form of market segmentation is far more preferable to the sort where the vendor sizes you up and makes you individually a limited-time offer based on how much they think you want it and how much money they think you're good for. You'll hate the vendor as soon as you find out how much less someone else paid for the exact same thing.
If they started pricing games more reasonably, based on length, quality, and quantity of game play, then maybe they'd make money, and a much better return on investment... but instead, I just sit around waiting for a month before buying the game.
The pricing scheme you've outlined already does this, but it's the derivative of price vs. time that is (inversely) proportional to length and quality (and originality), not the starting price.
I consider this a relationship model, as opposed to current games' "one night stand" model. If you like something, why WOULDN'T you want it to go on for years? Why WOULDN'T you get a subscription to it and keep enjoying it for as long as possible?
Because it might be taking your time and money away from something fresh and different being made by a different company? Because eventually the people who worked on it from the start and made it good are going to get tired and move on, but the less creative ones will stay and run the whole thing into the ground by trying to make it their meal ticket for all time?
It's nice to sit down to play a game and know that you have some hours in of unexplored territory right in front of you- and there's a definite stopping point at the end of that. Just like it's nice to sit down and watch a two hour movie that draws you into a world and then ends decisively.
If you knew it was only going to be only a handful of hours and not really bring any closure, and then you have to wait for a month, that's going to make you approach the game differently. Starting to play HL2 for the first time you feel like you have something weighy in your hands: a game years in the making, this slow reveal as you glimpse the occupied Earth of the future and have to play for some time before the action starts, incredible graphics and physics and attention to detail like you've never seen before. Waiting a few months for a few new levels on a well established game engine is not going to feel terribly important, it's going to feel more cheap and disposable.
I don't deny that episodic content may become a source of revenue for some more types of games eventually than MMORPGs and the sports and racing games that release 'episodes' on a yearly basis, but for plot-based FPS type games they will have to find the right price and playing time per episode and time between releases to satisfy the consumer.
The other bit is games tend to be way to short these days.
There's a demographic split between people who have lots of free time and those that don't. I'm in the former camp, and I always prefer quality over quantity. I would always rather a game felt like it should have gone on longer than the opposite, though I suppose there is some dollar/hour-of-play threshold I wouldn't want to go above, say $5/hr.
The console game 'unlockables' approach is a pretty good way to cater to both demographics- a player can play straight through the game in say 10-20 hours and feel like they've experienced most of what they paid for, but if they really liked it or just have a lot of free time they can play through as different characters with different abilities and get different outfits and get high scores or get to secret locations or whatever.
I think the right approach for developers is to spend their effort on content that the majority of players will experience- if 90% of the players will only play the game without finding secret areas or something, spend 90% of the art budget and level developing time on the parts of the game most people will see (unfortunately for games with one or more shelf-level-events, that also means spending more time on the earlier levels than the later ones...).
I really resent the current trend to shorten games to generate a better revenue flow and try to price it for optimum wallet extraction.
Games are going up orders of magnitude in complexity on multiple fronts but budgets aren't going up nearly as fast. I think it's the right thing to do to make the games shorter. Think of it in a competitive sense too- if you have half the budget of the game you are trying to compete with, why not make your game half as big so at least you have chance of attracting the players who got used to a certain density of content and level quality and so on- if you do it well you'll have more money for the sequel or add-on pack and can then compete on playing time also.
Games that are long but reuse a lot of textures and character models and other content and seem as if very little thought has gone into making the levels interesting to play and don't give the player much to do as they move from point to point are usually the grade-B or C games.