But second place is not the point where you start making a profit, the profit is independent of the placing and only depends on raw sales and costs. Last gen Nintendo made the most money despite being in last place while MS blew billions because that was their strategy. Sony's situation doesn't look like they're magically going to make big profits when they surpass the 360.
The difference between places doesn't matter as much as the business proposal that is each of these platforms. The Wii's proposal is "you make a game for us, you get half the market but you'll have a hard time porting it", the 360's and PS3's proposal is "you make a game for us, you get our part of the market and can port it to the other console to get roughly the other half of the market". The Wii is significantly cheaper to develop for though.
There is not much money to be saved by omitting the PS3 or 360 when making a game for one of them. Porting is fairly cheap and nets roughly a doubling of the potential userbase. Which one of them is leading by a few million and which one is trailing does not matter, only the cost of releasing a port vs the likely revenue from it. For a game publisher the 360 and PS3 userbases can basically be seen as one market with similar tastes. There's some pointless fighting between them about which console is better why but in the end they'll still buy the same games and run hardware at roughly the same specs. Outside of moneyhats for exclusives there is no reason not to see it as one console called the PS360 with a userbase that is somewhere between a third to a half of the market, depending on the overlap between the userbases of the two systems.
However even in their combination they are still subject to the core implosion, core games cost too much to make and companies run up deficits even while having big sellers. So while the market shares of the Wii and PS360 are roughly equal, the business opportunity is not. On the PS360 you have to spend a lot more money for the same amount of revenue and there's a good chance that that revenue will not cover the costs.
It will be first place vs the combined second and third place but the first place has more advantages than just raw user numbers. In fact it's likely that those who keep working for the PS360 alliance will end up imploding under their own costs. They will die with little warning. Well, what am I doing using the future tense there? It already started happening. Or do you really think all these downsizings, buyouts and bankrupcies are just the result of the recession with the companies completely healthy otherwise? EA's problem was not low revenues, quite the contrary, the revenues were healthy, the costs were through the roof.
This is a videogame crash again. Or maybe not a crash, maybe a shakedown. A shakedown to see who can swallow their pride for long enough to make a game that's not meant for people like themselves and have the understanding of other people to make it good for them. Let us see how many will be left standing at the end of it.
A problem with better graphics is that graphics are more than just a better engine. You have to give that engine data to display and the more complex and intricate that data has to be the more time (and thus money) it takes to make.
Also his game has the number 4 in the title. 2D graphics are obsolete by default so you can reuse them without being called out for it, 3d tends to feel more obsolete as time passes so keeping most assets from earlier games would result in the game being perceived as more and more dated.
Hell, if he had the means to make prettier art he could start with prettier tiles, there's a lot of room for prettier 2D graphics before you even have to bring 3D into it.
The biggest step in making your graphics not look like ass is having someone with the skill to make stuff that does not look like ass. The technology is rarely the limit for indies, it's usually the amount of available time and skill.
And? So they're doing slightly better than the 360 (not that the time adjusted sales really matter, what matters is the userbase you can sell stuff to). What does that get them? A medal in the special olympics? The 360 isn't the goal, the Wii is! Currently the Wii's userbase is about equal to the COMBINED userbase of the 360 and PS3. I know people love to fling around stupid claims like "it's a fad" (yeah, one that's already gone through half a console generation without ending) or "casual gamers don't buy many games" (the tie in ratio does not support that claim). What is true to some extend is "third party software tends to sell much worse than Nintendo software" but that's mostly because third party software for the system tends to be garbage thrown together by, as Iwata put it, 4th and 5th string teams while the 1st and 2nd string teams keep working on extremely expensive yet less profitable games on the HD consoles. Of course dev teams that can barely make their games not crash aren't going to compete with the highest quality game publisher in the whole damn industry on even footing.
Anyway, taking second place from the 360 is a worthless goal since it's pretty easy to make a game cross platform between the two (and the PC) so the leadership in that special race isn't going to change much. What they have to beat is the Wii which is just far off in the distance with currently no apparent chance for Sony or MS to catch up with it.
This is why despite a lower userbase, proportionally the games sell better.
The tie in ratio is the same as it is for the Wii and it looks like it's equivalent to the 360 when adjusted for time. Do you have any data that says PS3 games sell better across the board (not just the top tier exclusives, those sell on their own merits but the entire library combined tends to sell on the userbase's preferences)?
I actually agree that PS3 would outsell Xbox360 in 10 years.
I doubt that. I don't think the system will stay alive that long, even if Sony doesn't give up on it the moment the PS4 releases they'll have a hard time gettimg more games for a system that is no longer a new system but not a huge market in the old generation either (and no more games support = no more sales). The PS2 received support for so long because it sold so much, it just made sense to put games there even with the new consoles taking off because the PS2 market is huge but the PS3 won't have that advantage, if anyone will then the Wii. Sony could artificially force a 10 year lifespan by making games for it themselves but the dev teams working on that are dev teams who won't be working on PS4 games in that time. Of course Sony can say "there's no point in a PS4, let's keep the PS3 going instead" and they might actually be right but if they're thinking like that their competition can do the same and the PS3 will remain away from the top while the competition keeps accumulating sales. I think by now Sony is like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, asking "when could we have said 'stop' and walked away?" Their situation is FUBAR by now and all they can do is hope they do better next time.
Then again their leadership is the kind that gets described as "a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the Wii came."
Nintendo is already re-releasing N64 games on the Wii and could theoretically add online multiplayer. However the dev studio that made it and owns at least some of the rights got sold to Microsoft and the James Bond license is in someone else's hands too.
UT2004 might have been so good because they had the chance to collect experience with 2003 what works and what doesn't, after all people complained to no end about 2003. They could also reuse a ton of material from 2003, freeing up more dev time for polish and additions rather than groundwork.
Well but many publishers seem to believe their 50$ games are worth 50$ to enough people. They'll use advertising just to make sure. Meanwhile cheaper games get developed for their final price (e.g. Serious Sam was released at half the regular PC game price initially) and badly selling games get pricedrops (on the PC it happens to well-selling games too as evidenced by the pile of old GOTY contenders on the 10€ pile, console games don't drop in price nearly as fast despite having used game sales to deal with). Sometimes games get lower prices in other regions after failing to perform in one (Castlevania Judgment, for example, is getting released at half price in the PAL regions after getting panned by critics who hated the game for its art style and occassionally even made up complaints just to give it a 1/10 score). However, the situation on the consoles is generally pretty bad when you're hunting for cheaper games, especially on the 360. Games start out at 70€ (PC and Wii use 45€ as the base price) and pricedrops are rare. I spent less on the games for my 360 than the system itself so far and I got the system when it was pricedropped to 200€ for the Pro simply because the number of really interesting games is very low and the lesser interesting games (pretty much anything that's gray-brown and gritty so about 99% of the non-sports games) never reach the acceptable price region for lesser interesting games.
Me, I think I'll pick UT3 up at the 12€ price now, I spent a LOT of time on UT200X and it's really not much money so I guess I can take the risk of ending up with a terrible framerate (then again minimum settings in most games seem to run fine on my system even though I upgraded to it back when Doom 3 was still the pinnacle of gaming tech).
So you missed the Wii and DS, huh? The idea behind those was that more graphics don't matter as much as new inputs and genres. A plain horsepower race won't be able to happen from here on, the current "HD" market is already ruining companies with its costs, a race would mean death for everyone.
BTW, we do get bigger worlds, bigger battles but it turned out that you can only interact with so much land area and so many enemies at a time (especially in games with melee combat as the only way to fight) so the payoff is kinda low. Plus there's only so much content you can get into a game anyway so more land area mostly means more filler rather than more to see.
I think if Nintendo's control method isn't taken to the hardcore it runs the risk of eventually being just another fad, rather than an integral part of gaming.
I think the hardcore is just a loud whiny bunch with delusions of grandeur. Their lack of approval doesn't destroy something. Hell, the hardcore was gaming on computers when the NES came out and thought it was a stupidly simple system. In fact hardcore gamers tend to be luddites who deride new controls as simplified and stupid while those new controls then go on to work better for most other people and thus taking a majority of the market until the hardcore are turned into a grumpy niche and ignored, then a new hardcore arises in the new market.
Yeah but if we're far enough to simulate humans to a believable degree we could probably also use robots to automate all work and need to find something to do for the humans anyway. Of course if we act like the Indiots* we won't need a holodeck to deal with mankind...
*=I'm not sure about the English name, the alien race from Lem's The Star Diaries who invents automatic factories while having what I think qualifies as Objectivism as their dogma.
It's probably something more specific than just a port, some specific attributes. Also the first game ports were pretty much just wires directly to the buttons and such, digital codes only came later.
The difference to track records is that a record only improves if you actually perform better while an MMO character improves as long as you perform good enough. Records are an indicator of skill while character levels are usually an indicator of time spent playing.
Yes but if that added time does not translate into more game success then you have plateaued with all your means of winning, be they reflexes, strategy, etc. That there are other things besides reaction time doesn't matter because they're only tracking the results and those results plateau. They see it as a problem and want to artificially inflate a player's skill rating so he feels like he is progressing without actually playing better.
If we consider stuff like church roofs sensitive then what reason do we have to consider residential buildings not sensitive? People live there after all! What about infrastructure like roads and rails? Those are of vital importance in any war, better make sure google maps does not contain them.
The Maw was released in January on the XBox 360 and last week or so on Steam so I guess it depends on which system you have which month you'll count it for.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe not retail games but there are already plenty of games announced for DSiWare.
But second place is not the point where you start making a profit, the profit is independent of the placing and only depends on raw sales and costs. Last gen Nintendo made the most money despite being in last place while MS blew billions because that was their strategy. Sony's situation doesn't look like they're magically going to make big profits when they surpass the 360.
The difference between places doesn't matter as much as the business proposal that is each of these platforms. The Wii's proposal is "you make a game for us, you get half the market but you'll have a hard time porting it", the 360's and PS3's proposal is "you make a game for us, you get our part of the market and can port it to the other console to get roughly the other half of the market". The Wii is significantly cheaper to develop for though.
There is not much money to be saved by omitting the PS3 or 360 when making a game for one of them. Porting is fairly cheap and nets roughly a doubling of the potential userbase. Which one of them is leading by a few million and which one is trailing does not matter, only the cost of releasing a port vs the likely revenue from it. For a game publisher the 360 and PS3 userbases can basically be seen as one market with similar tastes. There's some pointless fighting between them about which console is better why but in the end they'll still buy the same games and run hardware at roughly the same specs. Outside of moneyhats for exclusives there is no reason not to see it as one console called the PS360 with a userbase that is somewhere between a third to a half of the market, depending on the overlap between the userbases of the two systems.
However even in their combination they are still subject to the core implosion, core games cost too much to make and companies run up deficits even while having big sellers. So while the market shares of the Wii and PS360 are roughly equal, the business opportunity is not. On the PS360 you have to spend a lot more money for the same amount of revenue and there's a good chance that that revenue will not cover the costs.
It will be first place vs the combined second and third place but the first place has more advantages than just raw user numbers. In fact it's likely that those who keep working for the PS360 alliance will end up imploding under their own costs. They will die with little warning. Well, what am I doing using the future tense there? It already started happening. Or do you really think all these downsizings, buyouts and bankrupcies are just the result of the recession with the companies completely healthy otherwise? EA's problem was not low revenues, quite the contrary, the revenues were healthy, the costs were through the roof.
This is a videogame crash again. Or maybe not a crash, maybe a shakedown. A shakedown to see who can swallow their pride for long enough to make a game that's not meant for people like themselves and have the understanding of other people to make it good for them. Let us see how many will be left standing at the end of it.
When you make money with it you can spend more time on it rather than squeezing it in the gaps left by your day job.
A problem with better graphics is that graphics are more than just a better engine. You have to give that engine data to display and the more complex and intricate that data has to be the more time (and thus money) it takes to make.
Also his game has the number 4 in the title. 2D graphics are obsolete by default so you can reuse them without being called out for it, 3d tends to feel more obsolete as time passes so keeping most assets from earlier games would result in the game being perceived as more and more dated.
Hell, if he had the means to make prettier art he could start with prettier tiles, there's a lot of room for prettier 2D graphics before you even have to bring 3D into it.
The biggest step in making your graphics not look like ass is having someone with the skill to make stuff that does not look like ass. The technology is rarely the limit for indies, it's usually the amount of available time and skill.
They are competing because their machines get paid for with the same wallets and their games made by the same developers.
And? So they're doing slightly better than the 360 (not that the time adjusted sales really matter, what matters is the userbase you can sell stuff to). What does that get them? A medal in the special olympics? The 360 isn't the goal, the Wii is! Currently the Wii's userbase is about equal to the COMBINED userbase of the 360 and PS3. I know people love to fling around stupid claims like "it's a fad" (yeah, one that's already gone through half a console generation without ending) or "casual gamers don't buy many games" (the tie in ratio does not support that claim). What is true to some extend is "third party software tends to sell much worse than Nintendo software" but that's mostly because third party software for the system tends to be garbage thrown together by, as Iwata put it, 4th and 5th string teams while the 1st and 2nd string teams keep working on extremely expensive yet less profitable games on the HD consoles. Of course dev teams that can barely make their games not crash aren't going to compete with the highest quality game publisher in the whole damn industry on even footing.
Anyway, taking second place from the 360 is a worthless goal since it's pretty easy to make a game cross platform between the two (and the PC) so the leadership in that special race isn't going to change much. What they have to beat is the Wii which is just far off in the distance with currently no apparent chance for Sony or MS to catch up with it.
This is why despite a lower userbase, proportionally the games sell better.
The tie in ratio is the same as it is for the Wii and it looks like it's equivalent to the 360 when adjusted for time. Do you have any data that says PS3 games sell better across the board (not just the top tier exclusives, those sell on their own merits but the entire library combined tends to sell on the userbase's preferences)?
I actually agree that PS3 would outsell Xbox360 in 10 years.
I doubt that. I don't think the system will stay alive that long, even if Sony doesn't give up on it the moment the PS4 releases they'll have a hard time gettimg more games for a system that is no longer a new system but not a huge market in the old generation either (and no more games support = no more sales). The PS2 received support for so long because it sold so much, it just made sense to put games there even with the new consoles taking off because the PS2 market is huge but the PS3 won't have that advantage, if anyone will then the Wii. Sony could artificially force a 10 year lifespan by making games for it themselves but the dev teams working on that are dev teams who won't be working on PS4 games in that time. Of course Sony can say "there's no point in a PS4, let's keep the PS3 going instead" and they might actually be right but if they're thinking like that their competition can do the same and the PS3 will remain away from the top while the competition keeps accumulating sales. I think by now Sony is like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, asking "when could we have said 'stop' and walked away?" Their situation is FUBAR by now and all they can do is hope they do better next time.
Then again their leadership is the kind that gets described as "a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the Wii came."
Nintendo is already re-releasing N64 games on the Wii and could theoretically add online multiplayer. However the dev studio that made it and owns at least some of the rights got sold to Microsoft and the James Bond license is in someone else's hands too.
UT2004 might have been so good because they had the chance to collect experience with 2003 what works and what doesn't, after all people complained to no end about 2003. They could also reuse a ton of material from 2003, freeing up more dev time for polish and additions rather than groundwork.
Well but many publishers seem to believe their 50$ games are worth 50$ to enough people. They'll use advertising just to make sure. Meanwhile cheaper games get developed for their final price (e.g. Serious Sam was released at half the regular PC game price initially) and badly selling games get pricedrops (on the PC it happens to well-selling games too as evidenced by the pile of old GOTY contenders on the 10€ pile, console games don't drop in price nearly as fast despite having used game sales to deal with). Sometimes games get lower prices in other regions after failing to perform in one (Castlevania Judgment, for example, is getting released at half price in the PAL regions after getting panned by critics who hated the game for its art style and occassionally even made up complaints just to give it a 1/10 score). However, the situation on the consoles is generally pretty bad when you're hunting for cheaper games, especially on the 360. Games start out at 70€ (PC and Wii use 45€ as the base price) and pricedrops are rare. I spent less on the games for my 360 than the system itself so far and I got the system when it was pricedropped to 200€ for the Pro simply because the number of really interesting games is very low and the lesser interesting games (pretty much anything that's gray-brown and gritty so about 99% of the non-sports games) never reach the acceptable price region for lesser interesting games.
Me, I think I'll pick UT3 up at the 12€ price now, I spent a LOT of time on UT200X and it's really not much money so I guess I can take the risk of ending up with a terrible framerate (then again minimum settings in most games seem to run fine on my system even though I upgraded to it back when Doom 3 was still the pinnacle of gaming tech).
So you missed the Wii and DS, huh? The idea behind those was that more graphics don't matter as much as new inputs and genres. A plain horsepower race won't be able to happen from here on, the current "HD" market is already ruining companies with its costs, a race would mean death for everyone.
BTW, we do get bigger worlds, bigger battles but it turned out that you can only interact with so much land area and so many enemies at a time (especially in games with melee combat as the only way to fight) so the payoff is kinda low. Plus there's only so much content you can get into a game anyway so more land area mostly means more filler rather than more to see.
I think if Nintendo's control method isn't taken to the hardcore it runs the risk of eventually being just another fad, rather than an integral part of gaming.
I think the hardcore is just a loud whiny bunch with delusions of grandeur. Their lack of approval doesn't destroy something. Hell, the hardcore was gaming on computers when the NES came out and thought it was a stupidly simple system. In fact hardcore gamers tend to be luddites who deride new controls as simplified and stupid while those new controls then go on to work better for most other people and thus taking a majority of the market until the hardcore are turned into a grumpy niche and ignored, then a new hardcore arises in the new market.
I doubt that, most countries on Earth are too poor to afford anything like that.
Yeah but if we're far enough to simulate humans to a believable degree we could probably also use robots to automate all work and need to find something to do for the humans anyway. Of course if we act like the Indiots* we won't need a holodeck to deal with mankind...
*=I'm not sure about the English name, the alien race from Lem's The Star Diaries who invents automatic factories while having what I think qualifies as Objectivism as their dogma.
It's probably something more specific than just a port, some specific attributes. Also the first game ports were pretty much just wires directly to the buttons and such, digital codes only came later.
The difference to track records is that a record only improves if you actually perform better while an MMO character improves as long as you perform good enough. Records are an indicator of skill while character levels are usually an indicator of time spent playing.
A problem is that when you get real money from stuff that drops randomly you essentially randomly win money. That's gambling.
Yes but if that added time does not translate into more game success then you have plateaued with all your means of winning, be they reflexes, strategy, etc. That there are other things besides reaction time doesn't matter because they're only tracking the results and those results plateau. They see it as a problem and want to artificially inflate a player's skill rating so he feels like he is progressing without actually playing better.
Republic means the head of state is not a monarch. A country can be a republic while having direct democracy or even despotism.
If we consider stuff like church roofs sensitive then what reason do we have to consider residential buildings not sensitive? People live there after all! What about infrastructure like roads and rails? Those are of vital importance in any war, better make sure google maps does not contain them.
And real data security is when you simply shoot anyone in a position to hear or sniff your data.
Yeah, a "keesh" is a kind of food they sell in France.
Yeah but Berliner is short for Berliner Pfannkuchen so when you ask for a pancake in Berlin that's what you get.
The Maw was released in January on the XBox 360 and last week or so on Steam so I guess it depends on which system you have which month you'll count it for.
Time Pilot was top down.