can be found at Slate, in a "Hollywood Economist" column written by Edward Jay Epstein. The column is very good in general for untangling the frequently recondite and illogical ways in which Hollywood makes money.
-- Excerpt: The Hollywood studio starts by arranging on paper to sell the film's copyright to a German company. Then, they immediately lease the movie back--with an option to repurchase it later. At this point, a German company appears to own the movie. The Germans then sign a "production service agreement" and a "distribution service agreement" with the studio that limits their responsibility to token--and temporary--ownership.
For the privilege of fake ownership, the Germans pay the studio about 10 percent more than they'll eventually get back in lease and option payments. For the studio, that extra 10 percent is instant profit. It is truly, as one Paramount executive told me, "money for nothing." --
So it's conceivable to me that German investors could come out ahead even if a film flops (even if the article at cinemabend does a very bad job illustrating how this happens).
CRPGs are in an interesting position, because as a game genre they tend to be very literate/sophisticated - CRPGS typically include more written text than other game genres - but at the same time genre convention demands a level of violence and slaying that's equivalent to (if not exceeding) the amount of violence in FPS's. I think a lot of modern computer RPG games are at least subconsciously expressing a dissatisfaction with the tired kill/level/loot progression that is genre convention.
KoToR 2, for example, explicitly recognizes that over the course of the game the player character engages in an obscene and absurd amount of violence and killing, and writes this absurdity into the plot line. (This involves some typically recondite Star Wars pseudo-Zen mumbo-jumbo about the player being a "void in the force" or some such that feeds on the death of others. The point it it's not very heroic stuff, and it's an arresting moment in the game when the player is forced to confront the weight and sheer magnitude of his/her actions.)
The entire BG series can be read as an artful dodge/acknowledgement of the problematic neverending-stream-of-foes paradigm of CRPGs. The player character is the direct progeny of the game world's god of _murder_.
In the NWN campaign an evil character who venerates death expresses a desire to follow the PC around as the PC invariably leaves a trial of blood and corpses in his/her wake. That this very distasteful character appreciates the player's actions could be interpreted as an indictment of the player.
Now that I think about it, a lot of RPG's I've played lately have at least acknowledged that the amount of combat in these game is sort of silly.
Because now parents wont have to pay for more adult-targetted channels like FX and Spike when they just want to give little Timmy access to Discovery and Animal Planet.
The current cable paradigm is a pretty good example of market failure - of market forces failing to produce optimal consumer outcomes or even providing coherent and significant choices for the consumer. Somehow I doubt the conservatives will be framing it that way when they announce government intervention.
His analysis actually probably makes sense to someone who is in business. A business is usually more comfortable paying for a service than getting one for free: when they pay for something, they explicitly can expect for it to work and know who to sue when it stops working (the people cashing the checks). Being ruthless capitalists themselves, MBA types just can't conceieve of a paradigm where a service is offered gratis. The idea of getting something for free just boggles the mind and they get all uncomfortable. (Wait... if we're not PAYING anyone... how do we know it will work? No free lunch! Everything I learned to get my MBA would be proven wrong!) Someone who sets up a for-pay Linux troubleshooting service could make a killing if Linux ever takes off in the enterprise market.
If you were alive a few decades ago (And you very well might have been), you probably would have felt the same way about Andy Warhol and the great jazz improvisationalists.
So yea, you are getting old. Sorry, old man.
(Read the above in the warmest, most sympathetic tones. But you're still wrong.)
Slashdot Mirror
can be found at Slate, in a "Hollywood Economist" column written by Edward Jay Epstein. The column is very good in general for untangling the frequently recondite and illogical ways in which Hollywood makes money.
http://www.slate.com/id/2117309/
--
Excerpt: The Hollywood studio starts by arranging on paper to sell the film's copyright to a German company. Then, they immediately lease the movie back--with an option to repurchase it later. At this point, a German company appears to own the movie. The Germans then sign a "production service agreement" and a "distribution service agreement" with the studio that limits their responsibility to token--and temporary--ownership.
For the privilege of fake ownership, the Germans pay the studio about 10 percent more than they'll eventually get back in lease and option payments. For the studio, that extra 10 percent is instant profit. It is truly, as one Paramount executive told me, "money for nothing."
--
So it's conceivable to me that German investors could come out ahead even if a film flops (even if the article at cinemabend does a very bad job illustrating how this happens).
CRPGs are in an interesting position, because as a game genre they tend to be very literate/sophisticated - CRPGS typically include more written text than other game genres - but at the same time genre convention demands a level of violence and slaying that's equivalent to (if not exceeding) the amount of violence in FPS's. I think a lot of modern computer RPG games are at least subconsciously expressing a dissatisfaction with the tired kill/level/loot progression that is genre convention. KoToR 2, for example, explicitly recognizes that over the course of the game the player character engages in an obscene and absurd amount of violence and killing, and writes this absurdity into the plot line. (This involves some typically recondite Star Wars pseudo-Zen mumbo-jumbo about the player being a "void in the force" or some such that feeds on the death of others. The point it it's not very heroic stuff, and it's an arresting moment in the game when the player is forced to confront the weight and sheer magnitude of his/her actions.) The entire BG series can be read as an artful dodge/acknowledgement of the problematic neverending-stream-of-foes paradigm of CRPGs. The player character is the direct progeny of the game world's god of _murder_. In the NWN campaign an evil character who venerates death expresses a desire to follow the PC around as the PC invariably leaves a trial of blood and corpses in his/her wake. That this very distasteful character appreciates the player's actions could be interpreted as an indictment of the player. Now that I think about it, a lot of RPG's I've played lately have at least acknowledged that the amount of combat in these game is sort of silly.
Because now parents wont have to pay for more adult-targetted channels like FX and Spike when they just want to give little Timmy access to Discovery and Animal Planet. The current cable paradigm is a pretty good example of market failure - of market forces failing to produce optimal consumer outcomes or even providing coherent and significant choices for the consumer. Somehow I doubt the conservatives will be framing it that way when they announce government intervention.
His analysis actually probably makes sense to someone who is in business. A business is usually more comfortable paying for a service than getting one for free: when they pay for something, they explicitly can expect for it to work and know who to sue when it stops working (the people cashing the checks). Being ruthless capitalists themselves, MBA types just can't conceieve of a paradigm where a service is offered gratis. The idea of getting something for free just boggles the mind and they get all uncomfortable. (Wait... if we're not PAYING anyone... how do we know it will work? No free lunch! Everything I learned to get my MBA would be proven wrong!) Someone who sets up a for-pay Linux troubleshooting service could make a killing if Linux ever takes off in the enterprise market.
... between desktop and mobile? Sure. It's because Intel hasn't found a way to improve their high end desktop products for about a year.
If you were alive a few decades ago (And you very well might have been), you probably would have felt the same way about Andy Warhol and the great jazz improvisationalists.
So yea, you are getting old. Sorry, old man.
(Read the above in the warmest, most sympathetic tones. But you're still wrong.)