this is the first thing I thought - how can they come up with something this complicated to solve a problem that apparently isn't a problem. the number i read (different article about the same topic) was 2500/year across america.
it also mentioned that consumers wouldn't be informed if their food was sprayed with this virus - so the entire population is going to be subjected to a virus that MIGHT help a few thousand people. The odds of something going wrong is ridiculous. If there are a few thousand people that need special food with this virus, then create special food for them. don't subject the entire population to an experimental genetically engineered virus for something so relatively minor.
it's pretty much any of creative's devices, except with microsoft's name on it.
bOOOring.
my g/f has a creative zen 30Gb, it's alot slicker than this - has pretty much exactly the same interface - including the whole 'scroll & get the letter of the alphabet', except it's not nearly as obnoxious as that screenshot.
I used it for a long busride recently and found that I liked it alot - i find the whole 'scrolling' ipod interface annoying - going up and down menus by scrolling a wheel around makes no sense.
the zen however has an up-down scroll pad, which i found to be very slick.
dunno, guess it's a matter of taste, but anything microsoft is pretty much a no-go for alot of people.
the wifi is a non-seller, unless it lets you do anything you would normally do with a wifi - if i run into a person with another zune (however unlikely), can i send them an mp3? or just a windows-media DRM protected file? if it's the second (DRM only) then it's a non-feature.
this whole 'giving the consumer more choice' marketing slogan is so much bullshit it's unbelievable. how about, create a device that does what consumers want and otherwise just GETS OUT OF OUR WAY?
syncing wifi to an xbox360? isn't the xbox supposed to be the 'center of the living room'? shouldn't it be the other way around? Oh right, no harddrive by default...so much for that concept.
non-sell, non-feature...dead in the water.
illiad, as usual, has the best commentary on this:
of course you can - all a so-called 'podcast' is, is an rss feed that links to audio files instead of text files.
there are numerous clients that can listen / download podcasts on the net.
personally i would LIKE podcasts to be renamed, the whole 'pod' part of the name confuses people to the point that they think that they can ONLY listen / watch (in the case of video podcasting) to these feeds in iTunes.
which of course, is a fallacy that apple would like to continue propogating i'm sure.
we have podcasts on a number of sites that we run and the client of choice for most people to listen / watch them is NOT iTunes.
you have a good point - it is so easy to write about the potential downside of any new product, particularly when you have no 'real' experience in what it takes to create a successful product.
i think 'armchair' journalists are doing more harm than good, whether for or against any particular product.
with the amount of testing that is required to meet a console specs just to pass certification, it is very unlikely that nintendo is going to let any launch titles, let alone their BIG first party launch title be anything but killer.
no, unfortunately - just removed from a case where he was trying to but his nose in where it wasn't wanted.
can't remember the legal term, but he was trying to pretend to be a lawyer in an out of town case, and the judge basically said 'um, no - you are a retard' and kicked him out.
nah, you'll still be expected to pay $50 and get nosebleed seats...wonder if they'll sell virtual binoculars so you can actually see the 5 pixel animations too?
Using your reasoning we should ban pencils and paper because they force us to endure this 'gigantic, suffocating mass of mediocrity' that we call the book publishing medium?
Tools like this are what brings a medium into the position of being able to mature. Like the printing press in it's day, being able to lower the barrier of entry to zero is the fundamental key to allowing interactive content to truly become what it 'should' be in most people eyes.
Sure having inexpensive video camera technology has spawned a LOT of garbage (just spend 2 minutes on youtube to prove this), but it has also allowed people like Kevin Smith to create Clerks. There are many other examples of Indie filmmaking that ONLY became possible with the barrier of entry being lowered to the point where literally anyone could create content for the industry - in this case the film industry.
Look at it this way - we have the 'current regime' of interactive content, which requires a multi-million dollar investment by a publisher, plus thousands of man-months of time put in by people that are the equivalent of rocket scientists (programmers & 3d artists / animators). Every 2 or 3 years IF THEY ARE EXTREMELY LUCKY, they manage to spit a game onto the market, whic may or may not be good, and may or may not even be an interactive story in the context of what we're talking about here.
The new regime (and it will come, whether the industry wants it or not) will consist of something more along the lines of this: instead of 100 triple A teams working on 50 million dollar games, we'll have 100000 teams of artists & programmers working on projects that they truly believe in (as opposed to projects that they endure to get a salary from EA working on 'sequel x')
Will this result in alot of crap? Sure, but the business models will evolve as well, and in turn the publishing systems will allow people to filter the content, much like the book & movie industries today.
Amazon claims to have 'x' millions of titles on their 'shelves' - is there not alot of crap in there too? Sure, but it doesn't mean that we should all flee for the hills because of the overload in content. Ratings systems, user reviews, recommendations systems and more will all provide both users & content creators ways to find & promote new content.
Yes there will be the Triple A titles still - the almightly marketing budget will never go away - but these will simply be the lure to get people in the door - after which point you will be able to discover that there is a LOT of interesting content being produced by people that you've never heard of.
Ie the same business models as the Music, Film & Book industries today.
Yeah this is the most 'vapourware' article i've read in a long time...asking a bunch of people that really have no idea what will be possible isn't news...we could get as good of an answer by chatting with random people in the street
>>When somebody comes up with a way to generate good dialog, story and gameplay via procedural algorithms, then maybe, >>but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Chris Crawford has a patent on generating stories on the fly...or something similar anyways.
agreed - i have hit several profiles on myspace recently that 'claim' to be one thing (a band site, whatever) and end up doing who-knows-what and end up sending you off to some other site, for whatever reason...disabling javascript when visiting the site is almost required and definitely recommended...
unfortunately the site is WAAAY to popular for it's own good now, and the maintainers are way over their heads as far as being able to handle these 'outbreaks' - if they even care in the first place.
because they have an open API does not mean that they are any less of a monopoly - if you use their API, you are willing putting your business at the whims of Ebay's business practices and decisions. This decision in particular (banning google) is a perfect example of the kind of decision that Ebay is taking away from businesses that use their API - instead of letting the market decide legitimately.
Not to mention the fact that Teacher & University administration is notorious for complaining about how they don't have enough time to give these same students a quality education. Now they are supposed to spend HOW long trying to monitoring every website that might allow the students to have a personal profile, online 'persona' etc?
we do alot of contracts where the majority of QA is handled outside of our own company - ie by the publisher or someone they assign to the project to handle QA.
There are a lot of companies that do contracts & work for big games that are simply too small to even have an HR department, let alone full time QA people.
Seems like you are assuming that everyone in the industry is a 100 person (or more) development house. If you are trying to get a job at one of these large studios, you are cutting off yourself from, i'd say about 90% of the actual game industry, company-wise and job-potential wise.
Sure working for a smaller company may not pay as much as the big studios, but it is a hell of a lot more rewarding than being employee number #300 at a large studio.
In Vancouver, there are 3 or 4 of these 'big' studios that are 300+ people - but there are literally hundreds of smaller studios.
I go to the job fairs here in town and there are thousands of people trying to get hired by the 3 or 4 companies, but no one bothers to look up the smaller studios.
the original poster listed 3 examples, but if you hadn't noticed, there are thousands and thousands of mods that have been either made or are being made.
as the owner of game company, i would hire a modder that has actually 'created' content or worked on a game engine over a qa tester that 'thinks' they know how to make games any day of the week.
big difference: - modders typically have an actual marketable skill - whether it be 3d modeling / mapping / programming / scripting whereas qa testers don't for the most part.
While Sony seems to be pretty much 'all over the place' with regards to their descriptions of the new console, what they are really trying to do with this 'its a computer' type marketing schpeal, is try to emphasize that they are focusing on making a 'computer' that is designed to be component-based, not 'fixed' with it's hardware.
For example, look at a typical home stereo. It's built of several individual components, a tuner, an amplifier, a cd player / dvd player, etc.
What if the gaming console went the direction of just becoming 'another' component in the overall home entertainment unit? don't want a normal dvd drive? want to upgrade to a blue-ray drive? just swap the components. Want a larger storage device? Just plug in a larger USB drive and voila.
That type of thing.
Instead of being a 'computer' like the rest of the industry is used to thinking about them, turn it into just another component in the rest of the Sony 'Home Entertainment' platform, and these statements & Sony's actions as of late begin to make sense.
The funniest part about this is all of the whining about the price point for the PS3. Look at the rest of the components for a mid to high-end entertainment system. Most of those ocmponents are all going to likely be upwards of 500$ or more.
Most people that have hardcore entertainment systems have thousands of dollars in amplifiers, speakers & TV setups - what's $500 for the centerpiece of the entertainment system? Which is really what the so-called 'next-gen' of consoles is really all about - replacing the DVD player / CD player with a single unit that can play CD's, play DVD's, play killer next-gen games, serve as your HD-based storage media device, provide net access etc.
I'd like to know how many people that are complaining about the PS3 price point have an iPod? The new high-end iPod's are almost as much as the PS3 is going to cost, and they JUST play music (ok, so some of them play shit-ass video on a tiny screen that might possibly output low-res video to an external screen).
The PSP was almost the same price when it was released - the DS is almost the same price...
Spending $500 (ish) dollars on something that will 'supposedly' do everything the PS3 can do is hardly excessive, and Sony is more than likely correct in their thinking about the price point.
With all of this said, they really need to get their 'sh*t' together on their marketing though. They have shoot themselves in the foot so many times with confused, contradictory marketing speak that by the time it actually gets released, I'm curious whether anyone will care...
Re:Games with no unlockables suck
on
Just Let Me Play!
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
How about providing your customers with BOTH options? This isn't exactly rocket science.
You buy a DVD for a movie, you can skip chapters all you want - or you can watch the behind the scenes spoilers, etc all you want.
Games, for all of their supposed 'non-linear' capabilities, force us to go from level 1 through level 5000 one, by one, by one...
This might be the way that YOU want to play the game, but designers should provide consumers with the option to choose.
Just because a game lets you unlock everything if you should so choose, does this make it less valuable or a 'rip off'? We, the game playing public, who, I might add pay publishers & developer salaries, should have the option to choose what content we have access to, what we see etc.
Note that this doesn't necessarily preclude having easter eggs or secret content that only a hard-core junkie that plays the game & searches every single corner & clicks on every pixel of the screen would find, but at least lets me get my $60 bux worth of entertainment out of a game...
Slashdot Mirror
this is the first thing I thought - how can they come up with something this complicated to solve a problem that apparently isn't a problem. the number i read (different article about the same topic) was 2500/year across america.
it also mentioned that consumers wouldn't be informed if their food was sprayed with this virus - so the entire population is going to be subjected to a virus that MIGHT help a few thousand people. The odds of something going wrong is ridiculous. If there are a few thousand people that need special food with this virus, then create special food for them. don't subject the entire population to an experimental genetically engineered virus for something so relatively minor.
it's pretty much any of creative's devices, except with microsoft's name on it.
bOOOring.
my g/f has a creative zen 30Gb, it's alot slicker than this - has pretty much exactly the same interface - including the whole 'scroll & get the letter of the alphabet', except it's not nearly as obnoxious as that screenshot.
I used it for a long busride recently and found that I liked it alot - i find the whole 'scrolling' ipod interface annoying - going up and down menus by scrolling a wheel around makes no sense.
the zen however has an up-down scroll pad, which i found to be very slick.
dunno, guess it's a matter of taste, but anything microsoft is pretty much a no-go for alot of people.
the wifi is a non-seller, unless it lets you do anything you would normally do with a wifi - if i run into a person with another zune (however unlikely), can i send them an mp3? or just a windows-media DRM protected file? if it's the second (DRM only) then it's a non-feature.
this whole 'giving the consumer more choice' marketing slogan is so much bullshit it's unbelievable. how about, create a device that does what consumers want and otherwise just GETS OUT OF OUR WAY?
syncing wifi to an xbox360? isn't the xbox supposed to be the 'center of the living room'? shouldn't it be the other way around? Oh right, no harddrive by default...so much for that concept.
non-sell, non-feature...dead in the water.
illiad, as usual, has the best commentary on this:
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20060725
of course you can - all a so-called 'podcast' is, is an rss feed that links to audio files instead of text files.
there are numerous clients that can listen / download podcasts on the net.
personally i would LIKE podcasts to be renamed, the whole 'pod' part of the name confuses people to the point that they think that they can ONLY listen / watch (in the case of video podcasting) to these feeds in iTunes.
which of course, is a fallacy that apple would like to continue propogating i'm sure.
we have podcasts on a number of sites that we run and the client of choice for most people to listen / watch them is NOT iTunes.
you have a good point - it is so easy to write about the potential downside of any new product, particularly when you have no 'real' experience in what it takes to create a successful product.
i think 'armchair' journalists are doing more harm than good, whether for or against any particular product.
with the amount of testing that is required to meet a console specs just to pass certification, it is very unlikely that nintendo is going to let any launch titles, let alone their BIG first party launch title be anything but killer.
no, unfortunately - just removed from a case where he was trying to but his nose in where it wasn't wanted.
can't remember the legal term, but he was trying to pretend to be a lawyer in an out of town case, and the judge basically said 'um, no - you are a retard' and kicked him out.
>>When did they turn evil?
when their board of directors became a bunch of 60+ CEO's from other companies that have NO game experience whatsoever
i've heard similar things - the lighting is supposedly extremely picky.
this is pretty much consistent with their previous engines though - their art pipeline has always been a pain.
well, considering that youtube is currently down, there isn't a whole lot to compete with ;}
http://www.actiontrip.com/files/movies/ps2/bully.p html
I'd think that the NASA Moontapes are important to HUMAN history, not just American "We're the center of the universe" histrry only ;}
nah, you'll still be expected to pay $50 and get nosebleed seats...wonder if they'll sell virtual binoculars so you can actually see the 5 pixel animations too?
lol
you should write an article on this theory...
;}
"Going to Church killing the game industry!"
LOL. not that i disagree mind you
damn religious nuts, always knew they were up to no good.
nitpicking doesn't make the argument any less valid.
Using your reasoning we should ban pencils and paper because they force us to endure this 'gigantic, suffocating mass of mediocrity' that we call the book publishing medium?
Tools like this are what brings a medium into the position of being able to mature. Like the printing press in it's day, being able to lower the barrier of entry to zero is the fundamental key to allowing interactive content to truly become what it 'should' be in most people eyes.
Sure having inexpensive video camera technology has spawned a LOT of garbage (just spend 2 minutes on youtube to prove this), but it has also allowed people like Kevin Smith to create Clerks. There are many other examples of Indie filmmaking that ONLY became possible with the barrier of entry being lowered to the point where literally anyone could create content for the industry - in this case the film industry.
Look at it this way - we have the 'current regime' of interactive content, which requires a multi-million dollar investment by a publisher, plus thousands of man-months of time put in by people that are the equivalent of rocket scientists (programmers & 3d artists / animators). Every 2 or 3 years IF THEY ARE EXTREMELY LUCKY, they manage to spit a game onto the market, whic may or may not be good, and may or may not even be an interactive story in the context of what we're talking about here.
The new regime (and it will come, whether the industry wants it or not) will consist of something more along the lines of this: instead of 100 triple A teams working on 50 million dollar games, we'll have 100000 teams of artists & programmers working on projects that they truly believe in (as opposed to projects that they endure to get a salary from EA working on 'sequel x')
Will this result in alot of crap? Sure, but the business models will evolve as well, and in turn the publishing systems will allow people to filter the content, much like the book & movie industries today.
Amazon claims to have 'x' millions of titles on their 'shelves' - is there not alot of crap in there too? Sure, but it doesn't mean that we should all flee for the hills because of the overload in content. Ratings systems, user reviews, recommendations systems and more will all provide both users & content creators ways to find & promote new content.
Yes there will be the Triple A titles still - the almightly marketing budget will never go away - but these will simply be the lure to get people in the door - after which point you will be able to discover that there is a LOT of interesting content being produced by people that you've never heard of.
Ie the same business models as the Music, Film & Book industries today.
Yeah this is the most 'vapourware' article i've read in a long time...asking a bunch of people that really have no idea what will be possible isn't news...we could get as good of an answer by chatting with random people in the street
Indeed - let's hear it for last year's winners!
>>When somebody comes up with a way to generate good dialog, story and gameplay via procedural algorithms, then maybe,
>>but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Chris Crawford has a patent on generating stories on the fly...or something similar anyways.
http://www.erasmatazz.com/patent.html
agreed - i have hit several profiles on myspace recently that 'claim' to be one thing (a band site, whatever) and end up doing who-knows-what and end up sending you off to some other site, for whatever reason...disabling javascript when visiting the site is almost required and definitely recommended...
unfortunately the site is WAAAY to popular for it's own good now, and the maintainers are way over their heads as far as being able to handle these 'outbreaks' - if they even care in the first place.
because they have an open API does not mean that they are any less of a monopoly - if you use their API, you are willing putting your business at the whims of Ebay's business practices and decisions. This decision in particular (banning google) is a perfect example of the kind of decision that Ebay is taking away from businesses that use their API - instead of letting the market decide legitimately.
don't think they show the hdr lighting as well either?
Not to mention the fact that Teacher & University administration is notorious for complaining about how they don't have enough time to give these same students a quality education. Now they are supposed to spend HOW long trying to monitoring every website that might allow the students to have a personal profile, online 'persona' etc?
Beyond ridiculous
but at what size of a company?
we do alot of contracts where the majority of QA is handled outside of our own company - ie by the publisher or someone they assign to the project to handle QA.
There are a lot of companies that do contracts & work for big games that are simply too small to even have an HR department, let alone full time QA people.
Seems like you are assuming that everyone in the industry is a 100 person (or more) development house. If you are trying to get a job at one of these large studios, you are cutting off yourself from, i'd say about 90% of the actual game industry, company-wise and job-potential wise.
Sure working for a smaller company may not pay as much as the big studios, but it is a hell of a lot more rewarding than being employee number #300 at a large studio.
In Vancouver, there are 3 or 4 of these 'big' studios that are 300+ people - but there are literally hundreds of smaller studios.
I go to the job fairs here in town and there are thousands of people trying to get hired by the 3 or 4 companies, but no one bothers to look up the smaller studios.
It's quite amusing.
the original poster listed 3 examples, but if you hadn't noticed, there are thousands and thousands of mods that have been either made or are being made.
as the owner of game company, i would hire a modder that has actually 'created' content or worked on a game engine over a qa tester that 'thinks' they know how to make games any day of the week.
big difference:
- modders typically have an actual marketable skill - whether it be 3d modeling / mapping / programming / scripting whereas qa testers don't for the most part.
While Sony seems to be pretty much 'all over the place' with regards to their descriptions of the new console, what they are really trying to do with this 'its a computer' type marketing schpeal, is try to emphasize that they are focusing on making a 'computer' that is designed to be component-based, not 'fixed' with it's hardware.
For example, look at a typical home stereo. It's built of several individual components, a tuner, an amplifier, a cd player / dvd player, etc.
What if the gaming console went the direction of just becoming 'another' component in the overall home entertainment unit? don't want a normal dvd drive? want to upgrade to a blue-ray drive? just swap the components. Want a larger storage device? Just plug in a larger USB drive and voila.
That type of thing.
Instead of being a 'computer' like the rest of the industry is used to thinking about them, turn it into just another component in the rest of the Sony 'Home Entertainment' platform, and these statements & Sony's actions as of late begin to make sense.
The funniest part about this is all of the whining about the price point for the PS3. Look at the rest of the components for a mid to high-end entertainment system. Most of those ocmponents are all going to likely be upwards of 500$ or more.
Most people that have hardcore entertainment systems have thousands of dollars in amplifiers, speakers & TV setups - what's $500 for the centerpiece of the entertainment system? Which is really what the so-called 'next-gen' of consoles is really all about - replacing the DVD player / CD player with a single unit that can play CD's, play DVD's, play killer next-gen games, serve as your HD-based storage media device, provide net access etc.
I'd like to know how many people that are complaining about the PS3 price point have an iPod? The new high-end iPod's are almost as much as the PS3 is going to cost, and they JUST play music (ok, so some of them play shit-ass video on a tiny screen that might possibly output low-res video to an external screen).
The PSP was almost the same price when it was released - the DS is almost the same price...
Spending $500 (ish) dollars on something that will 'supposedly' do everything the PS3 can do is hardly excessive, and Sony is more than likely correct in their thinking about the price point.
With all of this said, they really need to get their 'sh*t' together on their marketing though. They have shoot themselves in the foot so many times with confused, contradictory marketing speak that by the time it actually gets released, I'm curious whether anyone will care...
How about providing your customers with BOTH options? This isn't exactly rocket science.
You buy a DVD for a movie, you can skip chapters all you want - or you can watch the behind the scenes spoilers, etc all you want.
Games, for all of their supposed 'non-linear' capabilities, force us to go from level 1 through level 5000 one, by one, by one...
This might be the way that YOU want to play the game, but designers should provide consumers with the option to choose.
Just because a game lets you unlock everything if you should so choose, does this make it less valuable or a 'rip off'? We, the game playing public, who, I might add pay publishers & developer salaries, should have the option to choose what content we have access to, what we see etc.
Note that this doesn't necessarily preclude having easter eggs or secret content that only a hard-core junkie that plays the game & searches every single corner & clicks on every pixel of the screen would find, but at least lets me get my $60 bux worth of entertainment out of a game...