I agree that a free game w/ pay subscription seems to make alot more sense than pay for the game and no subscription, but good luck to GW for trying;)
As for in store costs, most retailers make between $5-10 off each title, so you could easily sell a $10 boxed copy in addition to the free download version.
Another idea they could use is to offer free servers and "premium" servers. The free ones would be just like they are now, but the pay ones would offer more GMs and support along with free expansions. And since they offer free servers, they shouldn't see any harm in allowing players to easily setup their own and let the community take care of it (like FPS servers).
Guild Wars' multiplayer aspects are almost exactly the same as Phantasy Star Online, but PSO still charged you a monthly fee... and with Diablo were your players perpetual? (never played it)
Con-spir-a-cy n.
1. An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.
2. A group of conspirators.
3. Law. An agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime or accomplish a legal purpose through illegal action.
4. A joining or acting together, as if by sinister design: a conspiracy of wind and tide that devastated coastal areas.
...at first I thought conspiracy was a bad choice of words, but upon further inspection it seems perfect;)
It's basically the Quake movie...not the Doom movie. Doom=Demons, Quake=Aliens....pretty simple. Although it sounds like they've gone back to Mars, which is good...
It's funny that he still sees it as a "necessary evil"... How many other problems will he need to face before he realizes just how unnecessary it is? DRM makes suits feel better, but rarely stops people from getting around it.
Guess I missed that one, but now that I look it seems to be true. I still don't know what to think about this "scratch resistant coating" stuff though...
Hopefully Nintendo will announce the GBA's successor at next years E3 or maybe even at Spaceworld this fall? If the GBA has SNES quality graphics, and the DS has N64 quality, and the PSP has PS2 level, then the new gameboy should feature Gamecube quality graphics, if not better:P
Just barely. A blu-ray disc can hold roughly 50GB of data using dual layers, but an HD-DVD can hold up to 45GB using its new triple layer technology. The other very important fact is that current DVDs and HD-DVDs' plastic coating are both.8 milimeters thick while blu-ray discs will only be.1, and thus much much easier to scratch. You combine that with the fact that manufactures will have to buy all new equipment for Blu-ray, as opposed to only slight upgrades to current tech with HD-DVD, and Blu-ray will cost us, the consumers, much more as well... For an extra 5 gigs of space? no thanks...
As if IGN wasn't a crappy enough site already, now we've got the shareholders to put their worthless voices in on it too... Public corporations are a waste of time if you want to do anything more than make money...
The technology behind it is pretty similar to their 3D screen technology. The front of the panel is ribbed so that certain pixels are directed in different angles...I saw an article about this a few months ago. The one problem many forget to think about is it cuts your verticle resolution in half;)
I really don't think it's a practical solution to anything...
Well the problem is people keep making games they think 12 year old girls will want to play and that's not what most women want..lol. Women tend to enjoy a lot of the same games as men, they just tend to shy away from the overly violent/action oriented games, just like with movies. They're more interested in compelling characters and good stories more than things like that. Games where you get to be creative also tend to apeal more to women too... It's really not as hard as most people make it out to be.
Unfortunately, not every household has someone "with a clue" to be that administator. I'm not disagreeing that you should keep standard user and root accounts seperate, but to pretend that everyone will be able to just figure it out is ridiculous.
I don't think Gnome or KDE are any more confusing than the Windows interface. What is confusing though is program installation. People like Autopackage and Klik are working to make it easier..but the distro guys aren't willing to give up their archaic repostitory system. Having a repository for the OS and popular libraries is fine...but keeping a repository of every single program available is impossible. The only other thing that really confuses people is the cryptic posix file structure...but some distros like Gobo and RubyX are making strides to change that already.
I think Linux is at the point the old Mozilla browser was at a year or two ago...it's great if you take the time to get used to it, but it's too complicated and at times ugly to deal with for the average person. When the Firefox equivalent of a linux distro finally happens it really will explode.
Well, asking what Linux is doing is kind of confusing because Linux isn't an operating system...it's a kernel. GNU's not an operating system either...it's a userland. But these things are all platforms on which you can build your operating system. Linux systems tend to be similar, but they dont' have to be. The two biggest direvatives of Linux are Red Hat (and other RPM based distros) and Debian (and deb based distros). Each Linux distro has different goals, otherwise they'd all be working together. Some focus on server type systems, while others focus on a friendly easy to use desktop that competes directly with Windows and MacOS. I know some Linux guys that desperately want it to stay underground and not get "bloated with Windows like crap", while some us (like me) really do want it to become the number one Desktop OS. To use one of Linus' metaphors for Linux...it's like asking What do car deals want? Are they trying to dominate the horse and buggy market?
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I agree that a free game w/ pay subscription seems to make alot more sense than pay for the game and no subscription, but good luck to GW for trying ;)
As for in store costs, most retailers make between $5-10 off each title, so you could easily sell a $10 boxed copy in addition to the free download version.
Another idea they could use is to offer free servers and "premium" servers. The free ones would be just like they are now, but the pay ones would offer more GMs and support along with free expansions. And since they offer free servers, they shouldn't see any harm in allowing players to easily setup their own and let the community take care of it (like FPS servers).
Guild Wars' multiplayer aspects are almost exactly the same as Phantasy Star Online, but PSO still charged you a monthly fee... and with Diablo were your players perpetual? (never played it)
Con-spir-a-cy n.
...at first I thought conspiracy was a bad choice of words, but upon further inspection it seems perfect ;)
1. An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.
2. A group of conspirators.
3. Law. An agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime or accomplish a legal purpose through illegal action.
4. A joining or acting together, as if by sinister design: a conspiracy of wind and tide that devastated coastal areas.
How does this affect their Steam sales though? As long as I can buy my games directly from Valve, I don't have to contribute to the EA juggernaut ;)
If Zazzle offers black and/or dark color shirts they could easily put Cafe Press out of business...it's the only reason I don't use them.
Problem is they'll probably just have a Quicktime+DRM video format which will take up way more space than it needs too ;)
Why not bump up the processor a little so we can watch Xvid and Ogg movies? Oh wait...no DRM to piss off your customers? We can't have that...
Except they'll use the genetic mutations for the Wolfenstien movie ;)
It's basically the Quake movie...not the Doom movie. Doom=Demons, Quake=Aliens....pretty simple. Although it sounds like they've gone back to Mars, which is good...
If it's in the public domain it should't matter where you got it from...
Man...they're always playing that on Slashdot. It's not a good movie, I don't why they keep showing it.
It's funny that he still sees it as a "necessary evil"... How many other problems will he need to face before he realizes just how unnecessary it is? DRM makes suits feel better, but rarely stops people from getting around it.
Guess I missed that one, but now that I look it seems to be true. I still don't know what to think about this "scratch resistant coating" stuff though...
Hopefully Nintendo will announce the GBA's successor at next years E3 or maybe even at Spaceworld this fall? If the GBA has SNES quality graphics, and the DS has N64 quality, and the PSP has PS2 level, then the new gameboy should feature Gamecube quality graphics, if not better :P
Nice to see someone who actually knows something about the technologies chiming in ;)
Yes, but HD-DVDs also use a blue laser... "blu-ray" is just a marketing gimmick. Then again, so is HD-DVD ;)
45GB for HD-DVD vs. 50GB for Blu-ray isn't that big a difference...
Just barely. A blu-ray disc can hold roughly 50GB of data using dual layers, but an HD-DVD can hold up to 45GB using its new triple layer technology. The other very important fact is that current DVDs and HD-DVDs' plastic coating are both .8 milimeters thick while blu-ray discs will only be .1, and thus much much easier to scratch. You combine that with the fact that manufactures will have to buy all new equipment for Blu-ray, as opposed to only slight upgrades to current tech with HD-DVD, and Blu-ray will cost us, the consumers, much more as well... For an extra 5 gigs of space? no thanks...
oops...
As if IGN wasn't a crappy enough site already, now we've got the shareholders to put their worthless voices in on it too... Public corporations are a waste of time if you want to do anything more than make money...
The technology behind it is pretty similar to their 3D screen technology. The front of the panel is ribbed so that certain pixels are directed in different angles...I saw an article about this a few months ago. The one problem many forget to think about is it cuts your verticle resolution in half ;)
I really don't think it's a practical solution to anything...
Well the problem is people keep making games they think 12 year old girls will want to play and that's not what most women want..lol. Women tend to enjoy a lot of the same games as men, they just tend to shy away from the overly violent/action oriented games, just like with movies. They're more interested in compelling characters and good stories more than things like that. Games where you get to be creative also tend to apeal more to women too... It's really not as hard as most people make it out to be.
I believe it's very possible to make something easy to use while not having to give up any functionality. It's not easy, but it can be done...
Unfortunately, not every household has someone "with a clue" to be that administator. I'm not disagreeing that you should keep standard user and root accounts seperate, but to pretend that everyone will be able to just figure it out is ridiculous.
I don't think Gnome or KDE are any more confusing than the Windows interface. What is confusing though is program installation. People like Autopackage and Klik are working to make it easier..but the distro guys aren't willing to give up their archaic repostitory system. Having a repository for the OS and popular libraries is fine...but keeping a repository of every single program available is impossible. The only other thing that really confuses people is the cryptic posix file structure...but some distros like Gobo and RubyX are making strides to change that already.
I think Linux is at the point the old Mozilla browser was at a year or two ago...it's great if you take the time to get used to it, but it's too complicated and at times ugly to deal with for the average person. When the Firefox equivalent of a linux distro finally happens it really will explode.
Well, asking what Linux is doing is kind of confusing because Linux isn't an operating system...it's a kernel. GNU's not an operating system either...it's a userland. But these things are all platforms on which you can build your operating system. Linux systems tend to be similar, but they dont' have to be. The two biggest direvatives of Linux are Red Hat (and other RPM based distros) and Debian (and deb based distros). Each Linux distro has different goals, otherwise they'd all be working together. Some focus on server type systems, while others focus on a friendly easy to use desktop that competes directly with Windows and MacOS. I know some Linux guys that desperately want it to stay underground and not get "bloated with Windows like crap", while some us (like me) really do want it to become the number one Desktop OS. To use one of Linus' metaphors for Linux...it's like asking What do car deals want? Are they trying to dominate the horse and buggy market?
;)
PS. I'd suggest Ubuntu for anyone new to Linux
I guess more importantly to ask is, will SDL be available so I can release my games on it ;)