"Your argument might make some sense if we were referring to a wild species that was dying off from a cause unrelated to human activity. As it stands, what you're saying makes about as much sense as saying we shouldn't treat bird flu in the chicken population."
Truth be told his argument doesn't make sense since interference is NATURAL. Many species have complementary or symbiotic relationships where they support one another, the idea that everything in nature is 'every man for himself' (survival of the fittest mentality) is quite contradicted by nature.
I really think the whole 'survival of the fittest' phrase has been twisted so badly and lost any real meaning (at least in the cultural way it is used) now that we know a lot more.
I rememeber back in the day I used to play a lot of games, truth be told being a 'hardcore' just meant being INTO certain games, or certain genre's that were considered 'real' games vs. one's made for casuals gamers that no one ever rented.
Games like Chrono trigger, final fantsay, etc, all the popular titles were 'hardcore'. I really dislike this whole idea that games are now 'casual', the way old gamers use hardcore is to talk about certain games and genre's and the types of gamers that play them.
Truth be told the casual vs hardcore distinction has become so bastardized with umpteen hundred definitions it has become almost meaningless.
A casual player is not someone who plays popular or hardcore genre (First person shooters).
A casual gamer has always been someone who plays cheap flash games and not much in the way of console or PC games, that is the 'true' definition of casual. Anyone who plays the big games on PC or consoles is by definition a 'hardcore' gamer, since they are playing big budget titles.
"Who wants to be always led about by the nose through every adventure? We did that before."
Many of the best games do just this (lead you around by the nose) and are great *because* of that fact despite gamers complaints. Some gamers don't understand that if you make a game more open you also can reduce the enjoyment of the game because the pacing now is unstructured. In a more freeform environment many gamers get really bored.
For instance - travel in WoW is mind numbing to me after playing a game like Diablo 1 and 2 with town portal. Early game having to get places feels like I'm wasting my time, while other people might 'enjoy' exploring the world. For me exploring the world is a one time thing - once you see the landscape/monsters it gets old fast and you want to get in and out as fast as possible.
As for 'being lead around by then nose', God of war for instance is a masterpiece because it does just this, but it masks the 'leading' in the way the levels are structured. The developers constructed the levels in such a way that that eventually it becomes obvious that there are only one ultimate real way to go with a few small crossroads in between that usually circle back on themselves making it feel a bit more open then it is.
Truth be told most game developers should set aside at least some of their ideas and game development visions as personal fulfillment and work on making games fun. This whole talk of "game design" is strikes me as being developers being "too close to their game", if I was designing games my whole approach is - is it entertaining, do players think its fun, or is it skipped? Because if 90% of players are skipping all that hardwork you put into the game, why bother with the effort if no one is getting enjoyment out of it? This is a major problem IMHO for some developers - they can't let go of what obviously isn't fun or doesn't work.
The best times I've had in gaming are when games are meant to be forms of play, not just some developers vision. Doom 2 IMHO was one of the most memorable games because all the enemies had some kind of interesting death, and in multiplayer the interesting death animations were hilarious.
I wish game devleopers would focus more on that kind of thing - where purposely exagerate or animate things in such a way to be funny.
... the next killer app that requires more power will move "just good enough" up a notch, IMHO we already have a lot of pressure. As soon as computers can do more complex tasks you can bet the "just good enough" computer will no longer make the cut.
I always find these articles redundant, the same thing is said every decade for some given technology.
The real reason is that the game industry is over produced, and past games compete with new products. How many games are released each year? Who can keep up with them all? We can't buy every game that is released. Then there's the fact that most of them aren't worth the $60 pricetag let alone the fact you can rent them for a fraction of the price or buy them used and get the same enjoyment out of them.
Truth be told the game market is suffering from over production.
"There is also the issue of the morality of it all. Should something that such a large section of the population do be illegal? Who is the law serving then?
Is this a road we really want to continue down? Seams pretty dark.... "
As if capitalism was a bed of roses, this is about the psychology of property rights and ownership, and the economics of non scarcity. People just have to get used to the fact of non scarcity, neo classical capitalsit economics no longer applies and this maddens certain types of people. Property and copyrights things mankind invented to deal with his own primitive territorial psychology and desire for gain and power over others. Many people would like to put an end to and reduce property rights and coporations as a person, and take back the commons because clearly the public good has taken a beating from the massive extortion that has been going on for a long time now. The real problem is corporations, leaders of the USA warned americans for decades that banks and corporations would rob them blind if they did not reel in their power. Problem is too many americans are so brainwashed they can't think straight, or too apathetic to do anything about it.
We could argue that people getting rich should be illegal because because they're taking too much from an artifact of large population sizes -- only in a large population size could we see very rich people like billionaires, it's really hard to get rich without economies of scale (large populations) from which you can extract surplus value.
A billionaire isn't a billionaire if he lives on an island of 30 people which he can't control nor enforce the system of wealth and wage work.
" I still have not seen one single artist that actually made a career this way."
That's because artists can't use the NET to start, why would you ever think the internet is not anything but a SUPPLEMENT to traditional advertising? Most people still get most of their advertising via their friends/facebook, television and huge billboards. You have to GET NOTICED and BE SEEN, try to strike deals and get your name up on a big billboard in the city, whenever I'm driving between cities these huge massive billboards on the side of major trafic ways or on the side's of buildings which everyone passes everyday will be there. People need to be constantly reminded you exist or you will fade into obscurity, how many actors fade into obscurity? A hell of a lot, why should you expect any different if you're in one of the most over produced industries imaginable on the face of planet earth, there are 6.5 billion plus people and probably hundreds of millions of musicians.
To profit you have to have at least some economy of scale, and the only way you're going to get that is to ask your customers (fan's/non fans) what they think of you and your music and simply not "make what you want", if you're going to be a business and want to make a profit you do at least to some extent HAVE to think like a person running a business serving the needs and tastes of your customers, not your own personal fulfillment.
Find fulfillment in music as a hobby, music is one of the hardest industries to break into. People I know in my family are extremely talented musicians and tried to break into the industry many times and some even ran their own studies, but it is REALLY hard to compete with amount of music that already exists and the those who have a monopoly on the media.
What indies need to do is to band together and fund their own advertising agency/company and pool their resources, without co-operation on your own NO ONE is going to know you exist.
The biggest problem is lack of advertising and finding "it" factor that makes you or your music catch on.
Most people in the world are non-technical, they still enjoy concerts and seeing bands and listening to music in real life(tm) where they dance, drink and have conversations.
If you're trying to make a career out of music you have to do your market research and not just "make the music you want", not to mention you are up against stiff competition, music and entertainment is one of the most over produced of all industries. A little crash course in economics and supply and demand should set you straight abou how much music is worth.
You have to stand out from the crowd and figure out what that "it" factor is, if you don't don't blame anyone but yourself.
"The whole try before you buy thing is a load of shit."
Bullshit. Empire total war on release was full of bugs, I'm glad I 'tried before I bought', the AI was broken (sending out 1-3 units at a time to get killed by a full stack of 12+), the game had severe pauses late game and the movement of ships was severely bugged on tradeports where ships would get trapped and could not be moved around the map. I'm holding off purchasing until the patches are released that fix all that BS, as well as fixing the AI to make it a challenge, right now the faction AI is so broken it's was shameful to release it in it's current state. Not to mention the insanely long AI turns which are for the most part too lengthly given how poor the AI really is.
I could go on but game developers give us PLENTY of reason to try before we buy.
Also lets not forget on consoles when most of us were younger we RENTED 100% of the games, teh publishers didn't see jack unless we got our FAVORITE GAMES we RENTED (no direct revenue) for our birthday / Christmas, etc.
Adults are not the only one's who play games, I think most people here FORGET THAT and just look at piracy numbers and go "omg pirates!".
"Yet all the reviews I saw were negative. "Yet another Diablo II rehash", "plagued with crash problems - can't even get past the cave in the starting area". Well, it's a rehash in the way WoW is a rehash of EQ or UO, I suppose."
Titan's quest picked the wrong theme and was released WAY AFTER diablo, not to mention the 3D hardware requirements let's not forget - TQ has a system hog, diablo 1 and 2 were 2D games!!! People keep forgetting this!
Whenever you limit your market to high hardware requirements you're going to narrow your market considerably.
If you're going to do a clone you have to get in when the market is "HOT" and also don't radically change the THEME (like th TQ team did). I played TQ and to be honest I got bored quickly, it wasn't diablo, everything seemed so forced in titan's quest. They basically built a game that COPIED diablo without being able to generate interest in the player.
It was a well crafted game, but it wasn't fun, nor very interesting. And come on we've Seen GREAT GAMES tank before just because there is lack of interest
Just because a game is "ok" compared to diablo doesn't mean it is as GOOD as diablo. Clones really need to raise the bar and be BETTER then what they are cloning and know why it was successful. Most importantly if you're going to do a clone you better pick the right theme thematically or you will screw yourself over for the average buyer without a clue.
See: Planescape torment, Freespace 2 and Descent 3 for evidence of good to ok games (d3, wasn't quite as good as d2 and had hq requirements most of descents audience didn't have).
For some it is about ethics, many people don't buy into the cult of property and copyright that has been stifling the their civil rights and fair use for decades. Companies today are downright abusive in all forms, looked at your credit card rates lately? You have to consider people's sentiment towards business's and corporations in GENERAL when they are being nickled and dimed by the bad kinds of companies. Maximizing profit is not a virtue if you are screwing your workers and customers.
We could view the whole economics from other perspectives beyond the excessive american kind of capitalist perspective.
So please don't paint all pirates as thieves or unethical - because that's just your perspective.
Just because you think copying stuff that isn't scarce for free is stealing and unethical, doesn't mean it is. You're confusing a physical product which is scarce (costs much for everyone to produce) like a car, with one that is not scarce.
According to supply and demand software shouldn't be profitable at all, since it's supply exceeds demand driving the cost of software towards zero. So why exactly is it that companies still make games or software for instance?
Lastly.. pirates buy games! There is no "Stereotypical pirate". I really hate this kind of crap. I was not interested in the playstation 2 nor many of its games. So I waited 4-5 years or so until it was nearing the end of its life cycle and got a PS2 slim. Then I got games on the cheap and I also modded it and used swap discs to burn a bunch of games... let me tell you that 90% of the games for the PS2 were crap and most were rentals at best. After I got my PS2, I went out and bought God of War, God of War 2, Gradius V... since those were the only games I really felt deserved my $, the rest I would have just rented or burned checked out briefly and threw away.
Let's also not forget what it was like for us to be kids - we didn't buy games, we rented 100% of the games and got our parents to buy us games for our birthdays/christmas. Piracy is the new kind of try before you buy, like rentals of console games during the semi pre-internet days.
This is how it is for 90+% of young kid and teens, and they are going to be the largest pirates by definition but also counter intuitively some of the largest buyers through parents gifts/holidays, etc, and when they finally get jobs and grow up.
Every person has their own reasons or lack of them. Do you think the average person in the 80's and 90's pirating windows 3.1 and windows 95
Finally the last issue is scarcity, game's are not scarce, if I were a game developer I would be glad that people found my game enjoyable enough to play pirated or not. I want to know that my games are so good people buy lots AND pirate them. It's got to feel good when you make a well selling game and EVERYONE pirates included is enjoying it.
Most everyone has pirated at some point in their life, or "played something for free, or neligable cost"
The people who are most vocal against piracy I bet pirate just as much or more so then other people, has some other unethical flaws in real life I bet.
So it really is just a bunch of hypocritical moral posturing.
"Your claim that corporate loan rates are at fault doesn't stack up; low interest rate loans from the Bank of England kept the cost of corporate lending low, and market forces kept price for corporate lending low. Effectively the BoE applied a price ceiling to the wholesale money markets."
Man this is a gross distortion of my argument, No one FORCED the banks to give credit to people who couldn't afford it. To clue you in, I know people on disability who are offered 10,000-20,000 line of credit, who have 5+ credit cards all with 5-10,000 dollar limits.
When you apply for these things at banks they have to be ok'd and green lighted by the banks themselves. It's obvious that people who run these institutions are just passing the buck (being irresponsible)
Blaming government for private sector incompetence because "if it's there they will use it" is nonsense, it's like blaming guns for killing people.
The banks are responsible, you act like just because cheap credit is there the banks HAVE to use it. Get real! The private sector deserve's all the blame here.
"Its something I dont understand. Blaming companies when you should be blaming the central bank and the government, for creating artifical credit bubbles and the resulting mania thereafter."
I don't know what planet you anti-government/free market extremist types live on but if you've been paying attention for the last 20 years and looked in your mailbox and see all the offers for lines of credit and credit cards that damn near every company's been spamming and wants to give you (grocers, wal-mart, etc) not to mention the banks and you'd have only one thing to blame: greed.
Amex and visa are not government owned yet they charge between 1.5 and 5% for merchants just to debit a credit card. When you use your debit card for your bank it's only a few cents (roughly ~5-8 cents where I live), where as these parasites (credit card companies) are basically an economically inefficient leach on the whole god damn economy, if I were in charge I'd shut these people down, they add NOTHING to the economy except charging people exorbitant rates of a the clueless portion of greedy public the illusion of buying things they can't afford and then paying it off later/w interest.
It's strange how the most vocal anti-government people lack any kind of insight into human nature at all because they have not read any serious history of corporate america. I have to wonder how old you are and just how well read, because you comments come off as painfully clueless.
You've missed what I was getting at. I was talking about how japanese games focus TOO much on cinematics and not ENOUGH on the gameplay.
MGS3 for me was one of the best made games in the series, the cut scenes and the story was BUILT INTO the game. My major qualms are with the disruption of gameplay flow that japanese games have with they try to put way too much movie into a game where you end up being annoyed as a player wanting to get back to the game. They didn't stop and take the player out of the game and have overly long sequences.
Japanese games have been notorious for this lately and I'm not the only one who finds it jarring and annoying, the point is to integrate the story into the game like Call of Duty 4 or God of war and not break the flow.
"Ugh, so you're suggesting taking out the cutscenes (story) from a JRPG? This is why current JRPGs like FFXII and Last Remnant are total garbage."
Uhm no... FF 12 was garbage because the lead designer was from FF tactics, he tried to bring his mundane crappy story + crappy MMO battle mechanics into FF world.
"Hate to break it to you (and Square for that matter), but JRPGs are supposed to be story-driven games. That means you must, from time to time, take a break from smashing the controller against your forehead for dialog and events to take place."
I'm sorry you're incorrect, early JRPG's had awesome gameplay AND awesome story, lately they've put way too much emphasis on PASSIVE cutscenes and not enough meat on gameplay. I really don't want to sit there for 10-30 minutes to watch some big ass long scene that takes me out of the game, if they are going to tell a story, they should let the player EXPERIENCE it and not take him out of the game "and now is the time to watch a movie for 15-30 mins" while you get bored out of your skull.
Games like God of war or Call of Duty 4 implement the story/movie aspect without essentially pausing the gameplay and "cutting to cutscene mode". Most cutscenes in FFX were grating, I couldn't stand the horrible voice acting of Yuna and the jarring incongruency of the lack of lip synching because it was originally modelled for japanese dialogue.
If you've played Final fantasy since the very first game, you've noticed that the later final fantasies (roughly after FF7/FF8) started getting progressively worse with time due to focus on graphics and cinematics over gameplay.
One does not preclude the other, go back and play classics like FF4 / FF6. Newer FF's have dumbed down the gameplay so badly they are barely games, why not just render it out and sell an anime on DVD? The whole point of GAMING is to have an actual game, the story heavy pansies who don't like the battle system or fighting monsters should really pick up movies or anime instead because they're more interested in movies then games. They are what is holding RPG's back from greatness, diablo and diablo 2 were great in both gameplay and story. The problem with some JRPG's lately is they are sacrificing and dumbing down gameplay for their "vision" when they really should be doing anime/movie's instead of games, because they are more focused on basically creating a movie that's rendered on a game console then creating a videogame.
It's obvious you've totally can't grasp what I'm getting at.
While gaming is more popular then it was a decade or so, it's not as mainstream as the press portrays it. 90 million consoles and the ~12-30 million PC gamers (as in non casual games) is a far cry from 6 billion+ people that inhabit the earth.
PS3/Xbox 360 have sold roughly between 20 and 30 million, while wii has sold ~ 60 million worldwide. DS with 100 million, still a far cry away from being mainstream worldwide.
I'm speaking from a less north american centric or developed country centric perspective.
And even in North america, Europe, asia and japan, gaming as a sport is not even a blip on many people's radar with the exception of korea and starcraft.
This is why I mean it will be a generation or so, we're still living with obama/bush generation (senior population) that thinks video games are a waste of time, not everyone is 'curmudgeonly' but remember you have a sample bias of not being able to poll all 40-50 year olds your age and ask them what they think of video games or eSports in general.
The difference is BANDWIDTH unused over time is gone forever, you're confusing "hardware costs money" with "bandwidth is scarce like goods", bandwidth is NOT scarce like goods, any bandwidth unused is gone forever, there is natural upkeep costs to hardware but that should already be priced in the business model, if it isn't then who-ever is running the company is clueless.
Oh and let me say - my ISP had unlimited download until two years ago... So I enjoyed UNLIMITED bandwidth for close to 10 years. Also many DSL providers where I live provided unlimited bandwdith/month. So if you're telling me that suddenly something changed overnight then certianly all the ISP's that are offering unlimited bandwidth shouldn't be capable of doing so.
Most importantly it's just smoke and mirrors trying to squeeze the customer. Now... especially where I live right now, anyone who would say my local ISP is oversold and needs the $$ I'm not going to believe them since I know the people that work at the ISP personally.
... the author makes some good points but when he started lauding MGS 4 as the pinnacle of what good game design is I had to take a step back.
The amount of cutscenes in Japanese games is offputting while the gameplay is often lacking (or the companies don't have a clue of what was fun about it).
You can especially see how stale the JRPG genre has become by going "simple" (read: cutting corners, cutting the best parts out they had in previous games going way back to the early 1990's). I would love to run a JRPG company and kick a lot of crappy developers and so-called visionaries out, some JRPG dev's are seriously stagnating and backtracking in RPG's in recent years.
Also I couldn't stand FFX and MGS 4 for same reasons, too much cutscenes too little gameplay options. In FFX they simplified the weapon and armor system so radically I felt cheated. They also reduced the number, variety and quality of NPC monsters and did a worse job in terms of art for them, etc.
When "simplicity" means cutting corners it's bad game design.
While I enjoyed Shadow of the colossus, it too had major problems with the land being so barren and having to waste a lot of time travelling back and forth from boss to boss without much happening in between could be a real drag after the novelty of the big world wore off.
Truth be told many game developers don't really have much insight into what works and what doesn't in their games. I can't be the only gamer that feels like game developers of late are flailing around blindly in many regards in terms of what made their games fun.
This has nothing to do with central planning, this is clearly a case of abusing the law for gain.
The two are NOT the same.
Nor does is it evidence of your implied counterpoint that in a decentralized economy stupid economic or environmental decisions would not get made, they certainly would.
There's a reason why we have laws in the first place, some days I wonder if anyone certain people on slashdot has read the history of corporate America and the things they used to get away with in a more decentralized economy because there was no authority whatsoever.
You're embarassing yourself by not having any clue of economic history, booms and busts are as old as finance itself. Government or no government there are bad people that will create institution you don't like to rule you regardless of what your ideology is. This is what I hate about ideologues like yourself like Murry, Mises, Et al, a bunch of clueless people in regards to history.
Money is not a neutral store of value, and it has systemic effects on everyone else, the market is an abstraction and can't do anything - it's the people that make dumb decisions that effect the rest of us and we need authorities in ANY system to deal with that. My problem with people who are hardcore anti-government pro free market, is that they don't realize by getting rid of government other institions will have to exist in their place and they will do EXACTLY everything the government does.
You'll have PMC (private military corporations) to protect x citizens in are Y from citizens in area Z. You'll never get rid of the fundamental problem in the equation: The stupid ass bad people that indirectly effect our lives due to their dumb shit because the monetary systems of the world connect us all.
Getting rid of government and 'letting it be' is just relabelling of institutions, instead of government and taxes, it will be corporations and PRIVATE TAXATION of corporates on the rest of us. Every act of profit or trade is an act of private taxation.
You hardcore free marketeers just don't get it, money by it's nature is aggregate, someone somewhere else in the trade system when they go bust can topple the economy because in the real world, money, market theory is NOT the economy...
The real economy is stuff (food, machines, goods, etc), the technologies and means to make, produce transport and service things is constantly in upheaval and will leave large swaths of the population out in the cold because don't own the means of production.
What happens is the richest group of people end up ruling those who don't own societies most valuable assets and you're not changing anything going to a free market, since corporations will become governments in and of themselves in the place of government and your back to square one.
Lastly money and it's effects, effect everybody indirectly. So the whole indivdualisitic "the economy can not be measured in teh aggregate" bla bla bla of the austrians wishy washnyess of those free market fuckups are seriously clueless.
... pro gaming. While you have places like Korea and starcraft, it's not the norm anywhere else.
I remember many startups like "Online athletes" years ago (defunct now) trying to create a "pro gaming" site and pay gamers for winning games, the y failed horribly.
Also there is a problem with pro gaming - the games keep changing and you can't do real "pro gaming" online because of cheaters and hackers, so you can't be sure the people you're playing against are "clean".
Gaming is also not like other sports where you stick to one game and then build an audience around that game around those rules. In the video game world everything is constantly changing.
One of my best friends plays at the WCG every year and would always be in the top 10 players but he never made any real money on it, he won prizes like computer hardware, etc. But I think it will take a leap forward in culture and technology before eSports takes off (a generation or so) when gaming is seen as something normal that most everybody does, and technology has advanced to allow more activity... in which Nintendo's Wii will be seen as just one of the first attempts.
Many competitive sports games can be really fun to watch but only if the camera work is done intelligently. Things like Orange Smoothie/other mods for Quake 3, etc, allowed people to stream live matches to the web so people could watch the match, truth be told... not all video games are exciting to watch, and this has to do with the lack designing the game and the games systems to do what traditional camera's do for televised sports.
"There you have it folks: your government acting as the racketeer that they are (again?? lol)"
Yeah a racketeer that pays for things like roads, telecommunications and lets not forget government bailouts (Citi, AIG) when the free market fails because of stupid people like yourself who don't have any clue about human nature. The fact that it's NOT about ideology, it's that bad people will always exist to fuck up any system, the free market fuckups that almost trashed the global economy were hardly not ardent supporters of deregulation with all their "free market" lobbyists in Washington. It was their own greed that lead to all this mess that now have implications for everyone else. Government isn't perfect but at the end of the day a world without government is a world of economic totalitarianism, quite those "Racketeers" can take on the other free market crimelords (no offense to honest free market supporters).
Lets face it, ideology is not a solution. It's a scapegoat. In any system the it's the people that make the decisions and fuck up. No ideology is going to force people to make good decisions, no matter what you believe.
Humans have been fucking up for centuries and anyone who thinks we just need more ideology along "more free market, a little less government" is completely naive and unread in history.
Take any system and people will find a way to fuck it up. The real world is a lot more complex and messy then hardcore ideologues make it out to be.
Quake always had horrible art direction, bland palletized textures, etc. Doom 2 had more artistic merit then Quake 1 and 2 ever had in terms of range of art and style.
I love quake 3 in terms of gameplay but even the art in quake 3 feels weird, random, and artificial . IMHO iD software has always had a problem finding good artists for quake. Quake 4 (single player) was a total joke, it was basically doom 3 redux except not anywhere near as good.
... the major cost and time sink in game development is content generation.
The question is, is the engine good enough to be used by commercial industry and would they want to given the fact that companies are a bunch of copyright nazi's?
It's cool to have an open source engine but it's highly unlikely any open source developer will be able to develop a compelling game on it given the enormous time and resources it now takes to create a modern game and live up to today's expectations.
I'd really like to see open source art asset generation tools, IMHO the future is automating the creation of things like art, etc, which at the present is woefully tedious and time consuming.
Slashdot Mirror
"Your argument might make some sense if we were referring to a wild species that was dying off from a cause unrelated to human activity. As it stands, what you're saying makes about as much sense as saying we shouldn't treat bird flu in the chicken population."
Truth be told his argument doesn't make sense since interference is NATURAL. Many species have complementary or symbiotic relationships where they support one another, the idea that everything in nature is 'every man for himself' (survival of the fittest mentality) is quite contradicted by nature.
I really think the whole 'survival of the fittest' phrase has been twisted so badly and lost any real meaning (at least in the cultural way it is used) now that we know a lot more.
... has become totally meaningless.
I rememeber back in the day I used to play a lot of games, truth be told being a 'hardcore' just meant being INTO certain games, or certain genre's that were considered 'real' games vs. one's made for casuals gamers that no one ever rented.
Games like Chrono trigger, final fantsay, etc, all the popular titles were 'hardcore'. I really dislike this whole idea that games are now 'casual', the way old gamers use hardcore is to talk about certain games and genre's and the types of gamers that play them.
Truth be told the casual vs hardcore distinction has become so bastardized with umpteen hundred definitions it has become almost meaningless.
A casual player is not someone who plays popular or hardcore genre (First person shooters).
A casual gamer has always been someone who plays cheap flash games and not much in the way of console or PC games, that is the 'true' definition of casual. Anyone who plays the big games on PC or consoles is by definition a 'hardcore' gamer, since they are playing big budget titles.
"Who wants to be always led about by the nose through every adventure? We did that before."
Many of the best games do just this (lead you around by the nose) and are great *because* of that fact despite gamers complaints. Some gamers don't understand that if you make a game more open you also can reduce the enjoyment of the game because the pacing now is unstructured. In a more freeform environment many gamers get really bored.
For instance - travel in WoW is mind numbing to me after playing a game like Diablo 1 and 2 with town portal. Early game having to get places feels like I'm wasting my time, while other people might 'enjoy' exploring the world. For me exploring the world is a one time thing - once you see the landscape/monsters it gets old fast and you want to get in and out as fast as possible.
As for 'being lead around by then nose', God of war for instance is a masterpiece because it does just this, but it masks the 'leading' in the way the levels are structured. The developers constructed the levels in such a way that that eventually it becomes obvious that there are only one ultimate real way to go with a few small crossroads in between that usually circle back on themselves making it feel a bit more open then it is.
Truth be told most game developers should set aside at least some of their ideas and game development visions as personal fulfillment and work on making games fun. This whole talk of "game design" is strikes me as being developers being "too close to their game", if I was designing games my whole approach is - is it entertaining, do players think its fun, or is it skipped? Because if 90% of players are skipping all that hardwork you put into the game, why bother with the effort if no one is getting enjoyment out of it? This is a major problem IMHO for some developers - they can't let go of what obviously isn't fun or doesn't work.
The best times I've had in gaming are when games are meant to be forms of play, not just some developers vision. Doom 2 IMHO was one of the most memorable games because all the enemies had some kind of interesting death, and in multiplayer the interesting death animations were hilarious.
I wish game devleopers would focus more on that kind of thing - where purposely exagerate or animate things in such a way to be funny.
Judges are people too. History is filled with corruption in the legal system, this is nothing new.
You're not alone, I modchipped my Wii and I bought Mario Galaxy and as well as other games.
Truth be told once you have "open access" to a console you can't really go back to having it locked down.
... the next killer app that requires more power will move "just good enough" up a notch, IMHO we already have a lot of pressure. As soon as computers can do more complex tasks you can bet the "just good enough" computer will no longer make the cut.
I always find these articles redundant, the same thing is said every decade for some given technology.
The real reason is that the game industry is over produced, and past games compete with new products. How many games are released each year? Who can keep up with them all? We can't buy every game that is released. Then there's the fact that most of them aren't worth the $60 pricetag let alone the fact you can rent them for a fraction of the price or buy them used and get the same enjoyment out of them.
Truth be told the game market is suffering from over production.
"There is also the issue of the morality of it all. Should something that such a large section of the population do be illegal? Who is the law serving then?
Is this a road we really want to continue down? Seams pretty dark.... "
As if capitalism was a bed of roses, this is about the psychology of property rights and ownership, and the economics of non scarcity. People just have to get used to the fact of non scarcity, neo classical capitalsit economics no longer applies and this maddens certain types of people. Property and copyrights things mankind invented to deal with his own primitive territorial psychology and desire for gain and power over others. Many people would like to put an end to and reduce property rights and coporations as a person, and take back the commons because clearly the public good has taken a beating from the massive extortion that has been going on for a long time now. The real problem is corporations, leaders of the USA warned americans for decades that banks and corporations would rob them blind if they did not reel in their power. Problem is too many americans are so brainwashed they can't think straight, or too apathetic to do anything about it.
We could argue that people getting rich should be illegal because because they're taking too much from an artifact of large population sizes -- only in a large population size could we see very rich people like billionaires, it's really hard to get rich without economies of scale (large populations) from which you can extract surplus value.
A billionaire isn't a billionaire if he lives on an island of 30 people which he can't control nor enforce the system of wealth and wage work.
" I still have not seen one single artist that actually made a career this way."
That's because artists can't use the NET to start, why would you ever think the internet is not anything but a SUPPLEMENT to traditional advertising? Most people still get most of their advertising via their friends/facebook, television and huge billboards. You have to GET NOTICED and BE SEEN, try to strike deals and get your name up on a big billboard in the city, whenever I'm driving between cities these huge massive billboards on the side of major trafic ways or on the side's of buildings which everyone passes everyday will be there. People need to be constantly reminded you exist or you will fade into obscurity, how many actors fade into obscurity? A hell of a lot, why should you expect any different if you're in one of the most over produced industries imaginable on the face of planet earth, there are 6.5 billion plus people and probably hundreds of millions of musicians.
To profit you have to have at least some economy of scale, and the only way you're going to get that is to ask your customers (fan's/non fans) what they think of you and your music and simply not "make what you want", if you're going to be a business and want to make a profit you do at least to some extent HAVE to think like a person running a business serving the needs and tastes of your customers, not your own personal fulfillment.
Find fulfillment in music as a hobby, music is one of the hardest industries to break into. People I know in my family are extremely talented musicians and tried to break into the industry many times and some even ran their own studies, but it is REALLY hard to compete with amount of music that already exists and the those who have a monopoly on the media.
What indies need to do is to band together and fund their own advertising agency/company and pool their resources, without co-operation on your own NO ONE is going to know you exist.
The biggest problem is lack of advertising and finding "it" factor that makes you or your music catch on.
Most people in the world are non-technical, they still enjoy concerts and seeing bands and listening to music in real life(tm) where they dance, drink and have conversations.
If you're trying to make a career out of music you have to do your market research and not just "make the music you want", not to mention you are up against stiff competition, music and entertainment is one of the most over produced of all industries. A little crash course in economics and supply and demand should set you straight abou how much music is worth.
You have to stand out from the crowd and figure out what that "it" factor is, if you don't don't blame anyone but yourself.
"The whole try before you buy thing is a load of shit."
Bullshit. Empire total war on release was full of bugs, I'm glad I 'tried before I bought', the AI was broken (sending out 1-3 units at a time to get killed by a full stack of 12+), the game had severe pauses late game and the movement of ships was severely bugged on tradeports where ships would get trapped and could not be moved around the map. I'm holding off purchasing until the patches are released that fix all that BS, as well as fixing the AI to make it a challenge, right now the faction AI is so broken it's was shameful to release it in it's current state. Not to mention the insanely long AI turns which are for the most part too lengthly given how poor the AI really is.
I could go on but game developers give us PLENTY of reason to try before we buy.
Also lets not forget on consoles when most of us were younger we RENTED 100% of the games, teh publishers didn't see jack unless we got our FAVORITE GAMES we RENTED (no direct revenue) for our birthday / Christmas, etc.
Adults are not the only one's who play games, I think most people here FORGET THAT and just look at piracy numbers and go "omg pirates!".
"Yet all the reviews I saw were negative. "Yet another Diablo II rehash", "plagued with crash problems - can't even get past the cave in the starting area". Well, it's a rehash in the way WoW is a rehash of EQ or UO, I suppose."
Titan's quest picked the wrong theme and was released WAY AFTER diablo, not to mention the 3D hardware requirements let's not forget - TQ has a system hog, diablo 1 and 2 were 2D games!!! People keep forgetting this!
Whenever you limit your market to high hardware requirements you're going to narrow your market considerably.
If you're going to do a clone you have to get in when the market is "HOT" and also don't radically change the THEME (like th TQ team did). I played TQ and to be honest I got bored quickly, it wasn't diablo, everything seemed so forced in titan's quest. They basically built a game that COPIED diablo without being able to generate interest in the player.
It was a well crafted game, but it wasn't fun, nor very interesting. And come on we've Seen GREAT GAMES tank before just because there is lack of interest
Just because a game is "ok" compared to diablo doesn't mean it is as GOOD as diablo. Clones really need to raise the bar and be BETTER then what they are cloning and know why it was successful. Most importantly if you're going to do a clone you better pick the right theme thematically or you will screw yourself over for the average buyer without a clue.
See: Planescape torment, Freespace 2 and Descent 3 for evidence of good to ok games (d3, wasn't quite as good as d2 and had hq requirements most of descents audience didn't have).
For some it is about ethics, many people don't buy into the cult of property and copyright that has been stifling the their civil rights and fair use for decades. Companies today are downright abusive in all forms, looked at your credit card rates lately? You have to consider people's sentiment towards business's and corporations in GENERAL when they are being nickled and dimed by the bad kinds of companies. Maximizing profit is not a virtue if you are screwing your workers and customers.
We could view the whole economics from other perspectives beyond the excessive american kind of capitalist perspective.
So please don't paint all pirates as thieves or unethical - because that's just your perspective.
Just because you think copying stuff that isn't scarce for free is stealing and unethical, doesn't mean it is. You're confusing a physical product which is scarce (costs much for everyone to produce) like a car, with one that is not scarce.
According to supply and demand software shouldn't be profitable at all, since it's supply exceeds demand driving the cost of software towards zero. So why exactly is it that companies still make games or software for instance?
Lastly.. pirates buy games! There is no "Stereotypical pirate". I really hate this kind of crap. I was not interested in the playstation 2 nor many of its games. So I waited 4-5 years or so until it was nearing the end of its life cycle and got a PS2 slim. Then I got games on the cheap and I also modded it and used swap discs to burn a bunch of games... let me tell you that 90% of the games for the PS2 were crap and most were rentals at best. After I got my PS2, I went out and bought God of War, God of War 2, Gradius V... since those were the only games I really felt deserved my $, the rest I would have just rented or burned checked out briefly and threw away.
Let's also not forget what it was like for us to be kids - we didn't buy games, we rented 100% of the games and got our parents to buy us games for our birthdays/christmas. Piracy is the new kind of try before you buy, like rentals of console games during the semi pre-internet days.
This is how it is for 90+% of young kid and teens, and they are going to be the largest pirates by definition but also counter intuitively some of the largest buyers through parents gifts/holidays, etc, and when they finally get jobs and grow up.
Every person has their own reasons or lack of them. Do you think the average person in the 80's and 90's pirating windows 3.1 and windows 95
Finally the last issue is scarcity, game's are not scarce, if I were a game developer I would be glad that people found my game enjoyable enough to play pirated or not. I want to know that my games are so good people buy lots AND pirate them. It's got to feel good when you make a well selling game and EVERYONE pirates included is enjoying it.
Most everyone has pirated at some point in their life, or "played something for free, or neligable cost"
The people who are most vocal against piracy I bet pirate just as much or more so then other people, has some other unethical flaws in real life I bet.
So it really is just a bunch of hypocritical moral posturing.
"Your claim that corporate loan rates are at fault doesn't stack up; low interest rate loans from the Bank of England kept the cost of corporate lending low, and market forces kept price for corporate lending low. Effectively the BoE applied a price ceiling to the wholesale money markets."
Man this is a gross distortion of my argument, No one FORCED the banks to give credit to people who couldn't afford it. To clue you in, I know people on disability who are offered 10,000-20,000 line of credit, who have 5+ credit cards all with 5-10,000 dollar limits.
When you apply for these things at banks they have to be ok'd and green lighted by the banks themselves. It's obvious that people who run these institutions are just passing the buck (being irresponsible)
Blaming government for private sector incompetence because "if it's there they will use it" is nonsense, it's like blaming guns for killing people.
The banks are responsible, you act like just because cheap credit is there the banks HAVE to use it. Get real! The private sector deserve's all the blame here.
"Its something I dont understand. Blaming companies when you should be blaming the central bank and the government, for creating artifical credit bubbles and the resulting mania thereafter."
I don't know what planet you anti-government/free market extremist types live on but if you've been paying attention for the last 20 years and looked in your mailbox and see all the offers for lines of credit and credit cards that damn near every company's been spamming and wants to give you (grocers, wal-mart, etc) not to mention the banks and you'd have only one thing to blame: greed.
Amex and visa are not government owned yet they charge between 1.5 and 5% for merchants just to debit a credit card. When you use your debit card for your bank it's only a few cents (roughly ~5-8 cents where I live), where as these parasites (credit card companies) are basically an economically inefficient leach on the whole god damn economy, if I were in charge I'd shut these people down, they add NOTHING to the economy except charging people exorbitant rates of a the clueless portion of greedy public the illusion of buying things they can't afford and then paying it off later /w interest.
It's strange how the most vocal anti-government people lack any kind of insight into human nature at all because they have not read any serious history of corporate america. I have to wonder how old you are and just how well read, because you comments come off as painfully clueless.
"MGS4 had plenty of gameplay"
You've missed what I was getting at. I was talking about how japanese games focus TOO much on cinematics and not ENOUGH on the gameplay.
MGS3 for me was one of the best made games in the series, the cut scenes and the story was BUILT INTO the game. My major qualms are with the disruption of gameplay flow that japanese games have with they try to put way too much movie into a game where you end up being annoyed as a player wanting to get back to the game. They didn't stop and take the player out of the game and have overly long sequences.
Japanese games have been notorious for this lately and I'm not the only one who finds it jarring and annoying, the point is to integrate the story into the game like Call of Duty 4 or God of war and not break the flow.
"Ugh, so you're suggesting taking out the cutscenes (story) from a JRPG? This is why current JRPGs like FFXII and Last Remnant are total garbage."
Uhm no... FF 12 was garbage because the lead designer was from FF tactics, he tried to bring his mundane crappy story + crappy MMO battle mechanics into FF world.
"Hate to break it to you (and Square for that matter), but JRPGs are supposed to be story-driven games. That means you must, from time to time, take a break from smashing the controller against your forehead for dialog and events to take place."
I'm sorry you're incorrect, early JRPG's had awesome gameplay AND awesome story, lately they've put way too much emphasis on PASSIVE cutscenes and not enough meat on gameplay. I really don't want to sit there for 10-30 minutes to watch some big ass long scene that takes me out of the game, if they are going to tell a story, they should let the player EXPERIENCE it and not take him out of the game "and now is the time to watch a movie for 15-30 mins" while you get bored out of your skull.
Games like God of war or Call of Duty 4 implement the story/movie aspect without essentially pausing the gameplay and "cutting to cutscene mode". Most cutscenes in FFX were grating, I couldn't stand the horrible voice acting of Yuna and the jarring incongruency of the lack of lip synching because it was originally modelled for japanese dialogue.
If you've played Final fantasy since the very first game, you've noticed that the later final fantasies (roughly after FF7/FF8) started getting progressively worse with time due to focus on graphics and cinematics over gameplay.
One does not preclude the other, go back and play classics like FF4 / FF6. Newer FF's have dumbed down the gameplay so badly they are barely games, why not just render it out and sell an anime on DVD? The whole point of GAMING is to have an actual game, the story heavy pansies who don't like the battle system or fighting monsters should really pick up movies or anime instead because they're more interested in movies then games. They are what is holding RPG's back from greatness, diablo and diablo 2 were great in both gameplay and story. The problem with some JRPG's lately is they are sacrificing and dumbing down gameplay for their "vision" when they really should be doing anime/movie's instead of games, because they are more focused on basically creating a movie that's rendered on a game console then creating a videogame.
It's obvious you've totally can't grasp what I'm getting at.
While gaming is more popular then it was a decade or so, it's not as mainstream as the press portrays it. 90 million consoles and the ~12-30 million PC gamers (as in non casual games) is a far cry from 6 billion+ people that inhabit the earth.
PS3/Xbox 360 have sold roughly between 20 and 30 million, while wii has sold ~ 60 million worldwide. DS with 100 million, still a far cry away from being mainstream worldwide.
I'm speaking from a less north american centric or developed country centric perspective.
And even in North america, Europe, asia and japan, gaming as a sport is not even a blip on many people's radar with the exception of korea and starcraft.
This is why I mean it will be a generation or so, we're still living with obama/bush generation (senior population) that thinks video games are a waste of time, not everyone is 'curmudgeonly' but remember you have a sample bias of not being able to poll all 40-50 year olds your age and ask them what they think of video games or eSports in general.
"Bandwidth and infrastructure cost real money."
The difference is BANDWIDTH unused over time is gone forever, you're confusing "hardware costs money" with "bandwidth is scarce like goods", bandwidth is NOT scarce like goods, any bandwidth unused is gone forever, there is natural upkeep costs to hardware but that should already be priced in the business model, if it isn't then who-ever is running the company is clueless.
Oh and let me say - my ISP had unlimited download until two years ago... So I enjoyed UNLIMITED bandwidth for close to 10 years. Also many DSL providers where I live provided unlimited bandwdith/month. So if you're telling me that suddenly something changed overnight then certianly all the ISP's that are offering unlimited bandwidth shouldn't be capable of doing so.
Most importantly it's just smoke and mirrors trying to squeeze the customer. Now... especially where I live right now, anyone who would say my local ISP is oversold and needs the $$ I'm not going to believe them since I know the people that work at the ISP personally.
... the author makes some good points but when he started lauding MGS 4 as the pinnacle of what good game design is I had to take a step back.
The amount of cutscenes in Japanese games is offputting while the gameplay is often lacking (or the companies don't have a clue of what was fun about it).
You can especially see how stale the JRPG genre has become by going "simple" (read: cutting corners, cutting the best parts out they had in previous games going way back to the early 1990's). I would love to run a JRPG company and kick a lot of crappy developers and so-called visionaries out, some JRPG dev's are seriously stagnating and backtracking in RPG's in recent years.
Also I couldn't stand FFX and MGS 4 for same reasons, too much cutscenes too little gameplay options. In FFX they simplified the weapon and armor system so radically I felt cheated. They also reduced the number, variety and quality of NPC monsters and did a worse job in terms of art for them, etc.
When "simplicity" means cutting corners it's bad game design.
While I enjoyed Shadow of the colossus, it too had major problems with the land being so barren and having to waste a lot of time travelling back and forth from boss to boss without much happening in between could be a real drag after the novelty of the big world wore off.
Truth be told many game developers don't really have much insight into what works and what doesn't in their games. I can't be the only gamer that feels like game developers of late are flailing around blindly in many regards in terms of what made their games fun.
This has nothing to do with central planning, this is clearly a case of abusing the law for gain.
The two are NOT the same.
Nor does is it evidence of your implied counterpoint that in a decentralized economy stupid economic or environmental decisions would not get made, they certainly would.
There's a reason why we have laws in the first place, some days I wonder if anyone certain people on slashdot has read the history of corporate America and the things they used to get away with in a more decentralized economy because there was no authority whatsoever.
You're embarassing yourself by not having any clue of economic history, booms and busts are as old as finance itself. Government or no government there are bad people that will create institution you don't like to rule you regardless of what your ideology is. This is what I hate about ideologues like yourself like Murry, Mises, Et al, a bunch of clueless people in regards to history.
Money is not a neutral store of value, and it has systemic effects on everyone else, the market is an abstraction and can't do anything - it's the people that make dumb decisions that effect the rest of us and we need authorities in ANY system to deal with that. My problem with people who are hardcore anti-government pro free market, is that they don't realize by getting rid of government other institions will have to exist in their place and they will do EXACTLY everything the government does.
You'll have PMC (private military corporations) to protect x citizens in are Y from citizens in area Z. You'll never get rid of the fundamental problem in the equation: The stupid ass bad people that indirectly effect our lives due to their dumb shit because the monetary systems of the world connect us all.
Getting rid of government and 'letting it be' is just relabelling of institutions, instead of government and taxes, it will be corporations and PRIVATE TAXATION of corporates on the rest of us. Every act of profit or trade is an act of private taxation.
You hardcore free marketeers just don't get it, money by it's nature is aggregate, someone somewhere else in the trade system when they go bust can topple the economy because in the real world, money, market theory is NOT the economy...
The real economy is stuff (food, machines, goods, etc), the technologies and means to make, produce transport and service things is constantly in upheaval and will leave large swaths of the population out in the cold because don't own the means of production.
What happens is the richest group of people end up ruling those who don't own societies most valuable assets and you're not changing anything going to a free market, since corporations will become governments in and of themselves in the place of government and your back to square one.
Lastly money and it's effects, effect everybody indirectly. So the whole indivdualisitic "the economy can not be measured in teh aggregate" bla bla bla of the austrians wishy washnyess of those free market fuckups are seriously clueless.
... pro gaming. While you have places like Korea and starcraft, it's not the norm anywhere else.
I remember many startups like "Online athletes" years ago (defunct now) trying to create a "pro gaming" site and pay gamers for winning games, the y failed horribly.
Also there is a problem with pro gaming - the games keep changing and you can't do real "pro gaming" online because of cheaters and hackers, so you can't be sure the people you're playing against are "clean".
Gaming is also not like other sports where you stick to one game and then build an audience around that game around those rules. In the video game world everything is constantly changing.
One of my best friends plays at the WCG every year and would always be in the top 10 players but he never made any real money on it, he won prizes like computer hardware, etc. But I think it will take a leap forward in culture and technology before eSports takes off (a generation or so) when gaming is seen as something normal that most everybody does, and technology has advanced to allow more activity... in which Nintendo's Wii will be seen as just one of the first attempts.
Many competitive sports games can be really fun to watch but only if the camera work is done intelligently. Things like Orange Smoothie/other mods for Quake 3, etc, allowed people to stream live matches to the web so people could watch the match, truth be told... not all video games are exciting to watch, and this has to do with the lack designing the game and the games systems to do what traditional camera's do for televised sports.
"There you have it folks: your government acting as the racketeer that they are (again?? lol)"
Yeah a racketeer that pays for things like roads, telecommunications and lets not forget government bailouts (Citi, AIG) when the free market fails because of stupid people like yourself who don't have any clue about human nature. The fact that it's NOT about ideology, it's that bad people will always exist to fuck up any system, the free market fuckups that almost trashed the global economy were hardly not ardent supporters of deregulation with all their "free market" lobbyists in Washington. It was their own greed that lead to all this mess that now have implications for everyone else. Government isn't perfect but at the end of the day a world without government is a world of economic totalitarianism, quite those "Racketeers" can take on the other free market crimelords (no offense to honest free market supporters).
Lets face it, ideology is not a solution. It's a scapegoat. In any system the it's the people that make the decisions and fuck up. No ideology is going to force people to make good decisions, no matter what you believe.
Humans have been fucking up for centuries and anyone who thinks we just need more ideology along "more free market, a little less government" is completely naive and unread in history.
Take any system and people will find a way to fuck it up. The real world is a lot more complex and messy then hardcore ideologues make it out to be.
Quake always had horrible art direction, bland palletized textures, etc. Doom 2 had more artistic merit then Quake 1 and 2 ever had in terms of range of art and style.
I love quake 3 in terms of gameplay but even the art in quake 3 feels weird, random, and artificial . IMHO iD software has always had a problem finding good artists for quake. Quake 4 (single player) was a total joke, it was basically doom 3 redux except not anywhere near as good.
... the major cost and time sink in game development is content generation.
The question is, is the engine good enough to be used by commercial industry and would they want to given the fact that companies are a bunch of copyright nazi's?
It's cool to have an open source engine but it's highly unlikely any open source developer will be able to develop a compelling game on it given the enormous time and resources it now takes to create a modern game and live up to today's expectations.
I'd really like to see open source art asset generation tools, IMHO the future is automating the creation of things like art, etc, which at the present is woefully tedious and time consuming.