Common sense tells me that 99% of Xbox 360 buyers in the first year of release have an XBox or even (maybe) a PS2. So if you don't have any console I'm not imagining starting with the most expensive one. The people that buy these consoles when they came out are core fans with expendable cash and usually buy games when they release. A smart buyer on a budget buys everything, games and console, at least one year later.
20 million is a lot of money for a game, but it still is a small budget compared with others, namely the movie industry. Of the current top ten movies at the box office only 3 cost that or fewer, all others have higher production budget. To compare it to similar production methods, the last 2 Pixar movies had 90million production budget, I'm guessing that the licensed games had nothing of a kind in terms of budget, and in terms of quality either. Lets taker other popular IP used in games, what kind of NFL or NBA team can you have with a 20 million budget? Not a very good one that's for sure. So I also think that this budget are very high but if the game industry wants to play with the big boys they have to be. The problem is the market is considerably smaller,. I'm guessing that the number of people that saw Finding Nemo compared to the ones that play the game to be in the range of the 20 to 1 or higher. If you do the same calculation taking the superbowl game or a NBA finals the difference will be even higher. Also predictions show that's the growth of games won't be that great either. So gamers end up paying the bill for these higher budgets with games getting even more expensive.
That's right I thought the same thing, Microsoft is trying to emulate the cell-phone industry success, but with one catch, they apparently control the whole market and any third party goes trough then. That said I think the bit about selling arcade games and the bit of using point to level the different currency in the world are good ideas. But the avatars and themes seem to be rip offs and only work is it's impossible to create your own or import it from the PC
I sorry to say to those of you complaining about originality, or the lack of, but Microsoft is given the people what they want. What are consistently over the years the biggest titles for consoles? Sports Who is the biggest in that genre? EA. so the best selling tittles are assured, granted they are the same versions that came out to Xbox an PS2 on better graphics, but they do that every year so no difference here. The biggest success on XBox? Halo. Halo is missing and for a good cause, Halo 3 has to bee very good so no way it could be a launch title, but 3 FPS hit the market one exclusive. Driving is also popular so also makes the cut with 3 games. Now that leaves Kameo with the promise of some difference, and also Condemned: Criminal Origins which is from Monolith and looks pretty good. So I would say this is a good lineup and looking at the lineup of past consoles presented in earlier article it look to be one of the best. But only time will tell if that's true.
Disclaimer: Don't own an XBox, and I'm not buying a XBox360 for the foreseeable future.
If you compress the movies in H.264 or AV-1 you can fit 3 to 4 hours of 1080p movie into a HD-DVD, if you use MPEG2 probably not but i think the idea will be to use the newer codecs. So I don't think this will be a clear advantage of blue ray. What i like to know is what format is more reliable and what disc more resistant to scratches, based on what as been said I would say that is HD-DVD.
I agree Beyond Good and Evil was a fantastic game but the game press did give it attention 88% on Gamerankins it's a good score. But infortunally most buyers don't read the game press so most games sell on marketing or name recognition only some truly fenomenal games can escape the lack of good markting.
Besides the distribution cost advantage, and the not so consensus picture quality advantage. Digital projectors may have an impact on the way film are schedule. With low costs of distribution and storing a cinema could play different movies in the same week, or in the same day adjusting the movie preferences to their target audience. For example Saturday night would have more screens with blockbuster, Sunday afternoon more kid movies, and during the week more alternative adult movies. This could be a solution to the problem of some movies having very low screen counts and only being there fore one week or two. Also highly expected movies could have debuts with a high screen some everybody could see. In my opinion this is a great possible advantage that could change moviegoer's habits.
I agree character recognition is a strong sell point, but initial Pro evolution soccer games proved in Europe that if your game is better you can sell it.
Other way to go is allowing costume teams and have the fans develop the teams.
Also you can go the Nintendo way and use other characters like game, or even cinema, if you have the license.
Other solution could be to ask the people to join the put up a website and people would submit their photo and name, at least does that made the cut would buy the game:)
In the past two centuries we evolved very fast in terms of science knowledge, but I don't think mother nature works that fast, our bodies have evolved but not that much, we live longer and are taller but it's more a consequence of medical advances and better living conditions. Has our brain evolved that much in terms of understanding capacity and multitasking? Probably not so unless we keep pushing it, it would stall. So maybe we can't do all the things we supposed to do but if we keep trying eventuality future generations will be able to do that and much more.
But not quiet like a regular MMO an not a simple one-on-one and there are some issues to solve first. The first one is the technical problem as stated before there are many issues in real time sports play with many players but it could be possible in a near future. The other one is the gameplay it was stated that in all sports there are positions that no one wants to play so it would be a mixed game with controlled players by the computer a others by humans, so people would organize in teams, any one one could create is team and play alone if it wanted, them there would be a massive world wide league with many divisions and a possible annual world title.
while you are at it check the other movies made by Timothy Hines.
They are almost all low-budget sci-fi movies, so don't get to mutch hopes about this film. Altougth a low budget/home made could turn out to be some great cult movies (Peter Jackson) this film doesn't give much hope on that happening.
So I think that Spielberg can handle the competition, and by he way his film was already rumored for a name change so it's probable that is version his very different from the book.
This is common aspect that good reviewers focus, gameplay along side with replayability, but in the end depends on the player. I'm not a fan of replayability and don't remember playing a fame from start to finish twice even games that I like a lot, the same goes with books(excluding comics), this concept only applies in my case to music and movies, and I don't replay movies as much has did. So a short game annoys me a bit, I'm not saying that every game should have 150h because probably I won't play the game to get to 100%, I'm saying is a question of choice some people like to replay games often and don't have a lot a time so a short good game is what 's best for them, others tend to be obsessed with one game and have time to play it often, so RPG's and other's very long play games with multiple paths are there choice. I like the middle, 15h-30h for action, 50h-60h for RPG's so I can play the game once and enjoy it without getting bored. So in conclusion I like GTA model 30h for finishing the game with core missions and some side missions, and more hours for people o like to play it all. I don't like max Payne 2 model play the game 5 times with some different aspects, although I enjoyed the first play I feel a little cheated be cause it's to short.
No if there is a clear announcement by the studio that there will be two versions, like New Line did with LOTR, the second version is clearly too big for the theatre. But in this case there was no announcement of the extended version of reloaded giving people a choice to by one or the other, worse this version is included in pack with products that everyone interested in seeing that version already ones.
I hope New Line doesn't mess up the work it has been doing and that other studios follow the example of announcing extend version before realising the normal ones.
and invest in Europe, the Japanese market isn't growing any more, as stated in previous article, so we can safely say that Xbox lost and it would take insane amounts of money to win it, on the other hand European market is still growing, EU as 500+ million people and lots of them aren't playing yet, and if they treat the EU market as they do the US they could win a market share. This would be easy because Sony treats EU market badly, prices are higher and games arrive later than US, so with a small effort from Microsoft the market share could rise. I understand that the EU market could be a little more complicated because of the different languages, but let's face it how hard is it to translate a game? Not much just prepare it advance to support different languages and get good translators, (don't hire any Portuguese because I prefer the games in English:)).
I took a look at their website and in fact it's a lot more easy to instal now, not a double click but near, so maybe i'll give it a try now that i have a bigger HD.
How easy is it these days to install NVIDIA or ATI drivers in Linux?
I'm a Linux occasional user, and the last time I installed it in my home computer the instructions for the driver install were a little complicated and being a bit lazy never took the time to do it, since then I deleted linux partition( to make more room for games:)).
So before entering in the emulation department I think a few basic steps should be made in the user friendly department before gaming could be widely used in Linux.
I agree with you, In my country there are 3 women for every man enrolled in universities, but in computer courses they are less then 10%, in the other and there are less than 10% men in language courses.
So it seems that we have different interests, you a can easily find a young girl reading a book and young boy playing a game, the opposite is not common .
It would have save me a lot of work because I probably would follow some of the suggestions here presented before doing a windows XP reinstall this weekend.
So 5 minutes after I completed the installation and connect to the internet to do the critical updates, the computer shuts down, the sasser worm attacked. So an hour later and countless reboots I get ride of it a can complete the updates, only to find out that some spyware ad already infected the computer before I could even install firefox. Install a bunch of ad-awares and run then, and still one remains, surf the internet for removal instructions; find it in some forgotten forum, complete the clean-up.
So conclusion part of the weekend wasted, and the next time someone asks me to install XP I tell them that I out of town this weekend. Well at least Portugal beat Spain so the weekend wasn't a total lost.
All motherboards started including sound, it's dificult to find one whithout it, so the instaled base is of simple stereo speakears, so developers don't worry about improved sound systems for PC only games.
The prices of the games and saturation of the market, PS one was easier to mod and even so revenues continued climbing, but now they are reaching a point where the novelty is gone and people start to think of the amount of money they have to pay to play a game and they are running out of new people that are willing to spend so much money.
I bought PS2 about one year and a half after it came out and didn't put the mod chip, all the games I own are platinum or used, never bought a recent game, the platinum games are in my view sold ate at fair price the new game are sold at outrageous prices, and like me probably others are thinking this and are buying less new games, of course many people don't have the patience to wait a year for the platinum so they put the mod chip and copy the game.
The only way the game industry can grow to be similar to the video or music industries is with lower prices.
I don't think you can completely rule out the middleman, but you can surely given pay less. Considering that Music CD's, Movies DVD's and even books come out with a price tag between $10 to $25, I'm sure the middleman takes a lot less, and considering the service they provide is the same, games, without taking in to account the other costs, should be at least $10 cheaper.
Slashdot Mirror
Common sense tells me that 99% of Xbox 360 buyers in the first year of release have an XBox or even (maybe) a PS2. So if you don't have any console I'm not imagining starting with the most expensive one. The people that buy these consoles when they came out are core fans with expendable cash and usually buy games when they release. A smart buyer on a budget buys everything, games and console, at least one year later.
20 million is a lot of money for a game, but it still is a small budget compared with others, namely the movie industry. Of the current top ten movies at the box office only 3 cost that or fewer, all others have higher production budget. To compare it to similar production methods, the last 2 Pixar movies had 90million production budget, I'm guessing that the licensed games had nothing of a kind in terms of budget, and in terms of quality either. Lets taker other popular IP used in games, what kind of NFL or NBA team can you have with a 20 million budget? Not a very good one that's for sure. So I also think that this budget are very high but if the game industry wants to play with the big boys they have to be. The problem is the market is considerably smaller,. I'm guessing that the number of people that saw Finding Nemo compared to the ones that play the game to be in the range of the 20 to 1 or higher. If you do the same calculation taking the superbowl game or a NBA finals the difference will be even higher. Also predictions show that's the growth of games won't be that great either. So gamers end up paying the bill for these higher budgets with games getting even more expensive.
That's right I thought the same thing, Microsoft is trying to emulate the cell-phone industry success, but with one catch, they apparently control the whole market and any third party goes trough then. That said I think the bit about selling arcade games and the bit of using point to level the different currency in the world are good ideas. But the avatars and themes seem to be rip offs and only work is it's impossible to create your own or import it from the PC
I sorry to say to those of you complaining about originality, or the lack of, but Microsoft is given the people what they want. What are consistently over the years the biggest titles for consoles? Sports Who is the biggest in that genre? EA. so the best selling tittles are assured, granted they are the same versions that came out to Xbox an PS2 on better graphics, but they do that every year so no difference here. The biggest success on XBox? Halo. Halo is missing and for a good cause, Halo 3 has to bee very good so no way it could be a launch title, but 3 FPS hit the market one exclusive. Driving is also popular so also makes the cut with 3 games. Now that leaves Kameo with the promise of some difference, and also Condemned: Criminal Origins which is from Monolith and looks pretty good. So I would say this is a good lineup and looking at the lineup of past consoles presented in earlier article it look to be one of the best. But only time will tell if that's true.
Disclaimer: Don't own an XBox, and I'm not buying a XBox360 for the foreseeable future.
If you compress the movies in H.264 or AV-1 you can fit 3 to 4 hours of 1080p movie into a HD-DVD, if you use MPEG2 probably not but i think the idea will be to use the newer codecs. So I don't think this will be a clear advantage of blue ray. What i like to know is what format is more reliable and what disc more resistant to scratches, based on what as been said I would say that is HD-DVD.
I agree Beyond Good and Evil was a fantastic game but the game press did give it attention 88% on Gamerankins it's a good score. But infortunally most buyers don't read the game press so most games sell on marketing or name recognition only some truly fenomenal games can escape the lack of good markting.
Besides the distribution cost advantage, and the not so consensus picture quality advantage. Digital projectors may have an impact on the way film are schedule. With low costs of distribution and storing a cinema could play different movies in the same week, or in the same day adjusting the movie preferences to their target audience. For example Saturday night would have more screens with blockbuster, Sunday afternoon more kid movies, and during the week more alternative adult movies. This could be a solution to the problem of some movies having very low screen counts and only being there fore one week or two. Also highly expected movies could have debuts with a high screen some everybody could see. In my opinion this is a great possible advantage that could change moviegoer's habits.
I agree character recognition is a strong sell point, but initial Pro evolution soccer games proved in Europe that if your game is better you can sell it. :)
Other way to go is allowing costume teams and have the fans develop the teams.
Also you can go the Nintendo way and use other characters like game, or even cinema, if you have the license.
Other solution could be to ask the people to join the put up a website and people would submit their photo and name, at least does that made the cut would buy the game
In the past two centuries we evolved very fast in terms of science knowledge, but I don't think mother nature works that fast, our bodies have evolved but not that much, we live longer and are taller but it's more a consequence of medical advances and better living conditions. Has our brain evolved that much in terms of understanding capacity and multitasking? Probably not so unless we keep pushing it, it would stall. So maybe we can't do all the things we supposed to do but if we keep trying eventuality future generations will be able to do that and much more.
But not quiet like a regular MMO an not a simple one-on-one and there are some issues to solve first. The first one is the technical problem as stated before there are many issues in real time sports play with many players but it could be possible in a near future. The other one is the gameplay it was stated that in all sports there are positions that no one wants to play so it would be a mixed game with controlled players by the computer a others by humans, so people would organize in teams, any one one could create is team and play alone if it wanted, them there would be a massive world wide league with many divisions and a possible annual world title.
while you are at it check the other movies made by Timothy Hines.
They are almost all low-budget sci-fi movies, so don't get to mutch hopes about this film. Altougth a low budget/home made could turn out to be some great cult movies (Peter Jackson) this film doesn't give much hope on that happening.
So I think that Spielberg can handle the competition, and by he way his film was already rumored for a name change so it's probable that is version his very different from the book.
This is common aspect that good reviewers focus, gameplay along side with replayability, but in the end depends on the player. I'm not a fan of replayability and don't remember playing a fame from start to finish twice even games that I like a lot, the same goes with books(excluding comics), this concept only applies in my case to music and movies, and I don't replay movies as much has did. So a short game annoys me a bit, I'm not saying that every game should have 150h because probably I won't play the game to get to 100%, I'm saying is a question of choice some people like to replay games often and don't have a lot a time so a short good game is what 's best for them, others tend to be obsessed with one game and have time to play it often, so RPG's and other's very long play games with multiple paths are there choice. I like the middle, 15h-30h for action, 50h-60h for RPG's so I can play the game once and enjoy it without getting bored. So in conclusion I like GTA model 30h for finishing the game with core missions and some side missions, and more hours for people o like to play it all. I don't like max Payne 2 model play the game 5 times with some different aspects, although I enjoyed the first play I feel a little cheated be cause it's to short.
No if there is a clear announcement by the studio that there will be two versions, like New Line did with LOTR, the second version is clearly too big for the theatre. But in this case there was no announcement of the extended version of reloaded giving people a choice to by one or the other, worse this version is included in pack with products that everyone interested in seeing that version already ones.
I hope New Line doesn't mess up the work it has been doing and that other studios follow the example of announcing extend version before realising the normal ones.
and invest in Europe, the Japanese market isn't growing any more, as stated in previous article, so we can safely say that Xbox lost and it would take insane amounts of money to win it, on the other hand European market is still growing, EU as 500+ million people and lots of them aren't playing yet, and if they treat the EU market as they do the US they could win a market share. This would be easy because Sony treats EU market badly, prices are higher and games arrive later than US, so with a small effort from Microsoft the market share could rise. I understand that the EU market could be a little more complicated because of the different languages, but let's face it how hard is it to translate a game? Not much just prepare it advance to support different languages and get good translators, (don't hire any Portuguese because I prefer the games in English :)).
I took a look at their website and in fact it's a lot more easy to instal now, not a double click but near, so maybe i'll give it a try now that i have a bigger HD.
Don't need the code for that
http://googlebar.mozdev.org/
How easy is it these days to install NVIDIA or ATI drivers in Linux? I'm a Linux occasional user, and the last time I installed it in my home computer the instructions for the driver install were a little complicated and being a bit lazy never took the time to do it, since then I deleted linux partition( to make more room for games :)).
So before entering in the emulation department I think a few basic steps should be made in the user friendly department before gaming could be widely used in Linux.
I agree with you, In my country there are 3 women for every man enrolled in universities, but in computer courses they are less then 10%, in the other and there are less than 10% men in language courses. So it seems that we have different interests, you a can easily find a young girl reading a book and young boy playing a game, the opposite is not common .
It would have save me a lot of work because I probably would follow some of the suggestions here presented before doing a windows XP reinstall this weekend. So 5 minutes after I completed the installation and connect to the internet to do the critical updates, the computer shuts down, the sasser worm attacked. So an hour later and countless reboots I get ride of it a can complete the updates, only to find out that some spyware ad already infected the computer before I could even install firefox. Install a bunch of ad-awares and run then, and still one remains, surf the internet for removal instructions; find it in some forgotten forum, complete the clean-up. So conclusion part of the weekend wasted, and the next time someone asks me to install XP I tell them that I out of town this weekend. Well at least Portugal beat Spain so the weekend wasn't a total lost.
All motherboards started including sound, it's dificult to find one whithout it, so the instaled base is of simple stereo speakears, so developers don't worry about improved sound systems for PC only games.
The prices of the games and saturation of the market, PS one was easier to mod and even so revenues continued climbing, but now they are reaching a point where the novelty is gone and people start to think of the amount of money they have to pay to play a game and they are running out of new people that are willing to spend so much money. I bought PS2 about one year and a half after it came out and didn't put the mod chip, all the games I own are platinum or used, never bought a recent game, the platinum games are in my view sold ate at fair price the new game are sold at outrageous prices, and like me probably others are thinking this and are buying less new games, of course many people don't have the patience to wait a year for the platinum so they put the mod chip and copy the game. The only way the game industry can grow to be similar to the video or music industries is with lower prices.
I don't think you can completely rule out the middleman, but you can surely given pay less. Considering that Music CD's, Movies DVD's and even books come out with a price tag between $10 to $25, I'm sure the middleman takes a lot less, and considering the service they provide is the same, games, without taking in to account the other costs, should be at least $10 cheaper.