And 1080p is the only real difference between this gen and the previous one? Consoles have developed without increasing resolutions for a long time, they don't need to increase them again. People don't care about graphics improvements beyond a certain point (and the Wii was Nintendo saying "that point was last gen").
That's Ken Kutaragi you're thinking of, Kaz Hirai is still in charge and still spouting nonsense. However, I don't believe that their "10 year lifecycle" actually refers to releasing the PS4 10 years later, it just means they'll keep producing PS3s and permit game licenses for the system for 10 years while it slowly fades away as the PS4 grows, they've done the same for the PS1 and 2. The difference this time is that they're last place (though Hirai insists they are the "official" industry leader by declaring the other two companies not competitors) and will probably see drastically reduced support once the next system comes out. I don't think the Xbox and Gamecube were abandoned so fast merely because their manufacturers didn't want a 10 year cycle, I think it was because they were so damn far behind that noone wanted to keep making games for them.
A problem is where do we go from here? While it may seem like the natural thing to upgrade the graphics again from what I've seen the current tech level already requires such huge investments to be used to its fullest extent that the game sales have trouble making that back and a game that isn't a multi-million seller can bankrupt its publisher. Doesn't look like the sales through technology are increasing so if we increase the dev costs again while sales don't increase much it'll be even harder to make a game that makes a profit. There's the suspicion that that's the real reason the Wii has such weak graphics tech (you could get a vastly more powerful system for just as cheap if you wanted but they didn't take that route). Of course the next Nintendo system will have HD output, increasing the resolution isn't exactly hard (PCs have been running at higher than HD resolutions before this console generation) and with the lacking upscalers in many TVs that'll be necessary.
The next gen step might also be timed differently depending on the strategies applied. While I'm sure MS and Sony would rather bury this gen fast and try to win the next one they've racked up massive losses to get their systems out of the door and it might be wiser for them to sit down a bit and try to work with what they have to cut their losses a bit while also trying to find a new direction to go into. Nintendo is very unpredictable. They'll probably try to ride on their wave of success for longer than usual and not go into the next iteration before they see a serious threat to their market (and with the way Sony and MS have behaved so far they might have trouble mounting a successful attack on the Wii's domination even when starting another generation). It's not sure how Nintendo's new market reacts to generation changes either, introducing a new generation may actually be counterproductive. Plus Nintendo's main strength are the controllers while improving the graphics and such isn't very useful for their market, they might be able to start another "generation" by making a new generation of peripherials instead of replacing the console box itself.
Their current problem is that they're pretty much ignoring the Wii (50% of the console market right there). After some promising but rushed launch games they've pretty much faded into the shovelware pile. In fact I think most of the shovelware on the system actually bears the Ubisoft logo. Shovelware doesn't really sell, there were some games on the system that sold while being critically panned but correlation does not imply causation and it seems many developers are forgetting that. The few games that did sell sold because they had value to the new people the Wii brought in, not because they are ignorant and will buy anything (otherwise the sames would be evenly spread over all the shovelware titles).
Don't waste your money, I did buy a 360 as a second system and still don't find much there. Really, all the interesting stuff is available for the PC anyway and the PC versions cost less money by far. Most of my recent spending was on Wiiware games.
The work needed depends in part on the style you choose. Abstract styles seem artistic but behind that facade they're really just a massive timesaver and that's why you see so many smaller games use "artistic" styles.
Code size restrictions seem to me like they're more likely to force coding styles than a focus on gameplay. Any small team focusses on the gameplay because there's nothing else they can implement to a high standard (well, okay, music but that doesn't tend to be the main focus of a game). Then again I guess it's wrong to talk about focus at all, every team tries to get everything done and they'll always try to make a game that's fun (at least to them) though not everybody succeeds every time. Even dev teams at big companies will always try to make their game fun and again it doesn't always succeed (though overall I'd say you can have fun with almost every game, just more with some than others and with that much competition people have high standards). Designing a fun game isn't just a matter of focus, it's also a matter of ability and experience. It's way more complex than just thinking "hey, this seems neat, let's do it!", unless of course your goal is simply to copy another design (but even then you can mess up if you don't notice where the design's strength comes from or why what seems like a suboptimal approach is in place). I think most people approach game making with the attitude "I liked game X, I want to make something like that except better!" and then produce something that feels fairly derivative to the end user. Hell, I've seen it in Spring, many people want to make their own mod but in the end they keep thinking in TA logic and produce something that is still pretty much TA at a basic level even though they may have made everything from scratch.
Game design is hard, guys! Just saying "we'll focus on gameplay over [insert component]" doesn't automatically get you a good game.
Definitely possible, you won't make the next Halo or anything like that but you can get a good game done alone, especially since these days you can get many components off the shelf (game engines, for example) and tools have advanced a lot since the 8 bit era plus you don't have to push the hardware to its very limit to get something that looks pleasing to the eye so you can afford less optimized code.
As for flash games, I can't imagine that being that much easier than just grabbing an off-the-shelf engine and coding your own game except that would run waaaaay faster (flash in fullscreen DOES tend to push my PC to the limit, for simple things like 2d platformers even). Hell, I got basic 2d platformer gameplay going in maybe 2 days using PyGame and most of that was figuring out the physics for colliding characters with the environment without glitches (there are many ways to mess that up and get glitches, I don't believe Flash includes that by default since I've seen glitchy jump and runs in Flash too) and I've never implemented something like that before. Obviously all this gets more complicated as your game gets more complex (a 3d engine is going to be way more complicated than a 2d engine) but it's still no biggie.
Of course one problem is that you won't find the full skillset needed to cover all aspects in one person or at least not to a degree where that person can produce high-quality output in every area. Getting 1-2 other people can help with that.
Maybe Gandalf just didn't know what The One Ring does when worn? Or maybe the effect differs depending on the wearer? AFAIK we've only seen it used on hobbits, maybe their tendency to lay low translates into invisibility with The One Ring...
That article was about a laser-based interferometer having noise that might have been the result of a holographic universe, I wonder if the noise this breakthrough removed was the same noise observed there or a ddifferent kind?
How does this relate to the earlier story about a laser-based system having noise that was considered evidence for the holographic principle? If the noise could be eliminated doesn't that mean the evidence is invalid?
I think Play-Asia is located in HK (at least Lik-Sang was) and I'm seeing 3$ shipping costs on videogames (roughly DVD sized) from them. That's to Europe but from what I've seen shipping to Europe from there actually costs more than shipping to the US.
Interesting example considering I got Bioshock for 10€ as a bargain bin edition (plenty of games go on the Pyramid where they cost a tenner each and come in unwieldy huge boxes). PC games drop in price really fast, console games tend to drop more slowly on average.
It will fail for anything that doesn't require online multiplayer (i.e. where the online server's functions are inseparably woven into the game). Any game where the main gameplay is offline would have online activation only as a DRM measure and that can be cut out. An online game is already protected against warez users playing online and the more of the game is online the less use there is for a warez version. When you propose any mechanic that works as a protection think to yourself what would happen if the crackers cut the whole thing out of the software. WoW without online play? Not really possible (yes I know there are cracked servers available). A singleplayer game that connects to a server merely to decrypt its content or download a few final pieces? Forget it, they'll just share the decrypted, completely downloaded version instead. As long as the server connection system has no benefits for the user it can just be cut out.
Of course most of them won't pay but if you throw hurdles into the way of your customers you may end up alienating some of them and having them download your product instead (or buy from a competitor). Telling a customer "hey, you can't buy this because you're in the wrong location even though there's no technical hurdle" is a terrible idea because you can be damn sure that warez sites are open to everyone. People have different resistances to copyright infringement, they aren't all buy-everything or download-everything, many are in the middle and if you push them away from buying you know where they'll end up. You cannot zero piracy, noone can sanely expect that but you can avoid pushing the numbers higher than necessary.
Of course "don't alienate potential customers" should have been basic knowledge for anyone in charge of making decisions.
Then you've done something seriously wrong, import stores operating out of Hong Kong charge about 3 dollars for a DVD (or videogame) shipping. Did you take an express service option?
Of course there's no meaningful way to appeal to someone who refuses new games on the grounds that they are new (you mention authenticity, that sounds like nostalgia to me) but that doesn't mean the design principles of the old games are lost forever. Some say the Wii is the revival of the arcade-era game design, at very least it did abandon the focus on better graphics. Kinda hard to say how it will pan out, even after 2-3 years this batch of consoles still seems to be in its infancy. Meh, if in doubt, get a DS. Best game system avaiable currently.
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And 1080p is the only real difference between this gen and the previous one? Consoles have developed without increasing resolutions for a long time, they don't need to increase them again. People don't care about graphics improvements beyond a certain point (and the Wii was Nintendo saying "that point was last gen").
That's Ken Kutaragi you're thinking of, Kaz Hirai is still in charge and still spouting nonsense. However, I don't believe that their "10 year lifecycle" actually refers to releasing the PS4 10 years later, it just means they'll keep producing PS3s and permit game licenses for the system for 10 years while it slowly fades away as the PS4 grows, they've done the same for the PS1 and 2. The difference this time is that they're last place (though Hirai insists they are the "official" industry leader by declaring the other two companies not competitors) and will probably see drastically reduced support once the next system comes out. I don't think the Xbox and Gamecube were abandoned so fast merely because their manufacturers didn't want a 10 year cycle, I think it was because they were so damn far behind that noone wanted to keep making games for them.
A problem is where do we go from here? While it may seem like the natural thing to upgrade the graphics again from what I've seen the current tech level already requires such huge investments to be used to its fullest extent that the game sales have trouble making that back and a game that isn't a multi-million seller can bankrupt its publisher. Doesn't look like the sales through technology are increasing so if we increase the dev costs again while sales don't increase much it'll be even harder to make a game that makes a profit. There's the suspicion that that's the real reason the Wii has such weak graphics tech (you could get a vastly more powerful system for just as cheap if you wanted but they didn't take that route). Of course the next Nintendo system will have HD output, increasing the resolution isn't exactly hard (PCs have been running at higher than HD resolutions before this console generation) and with the lacking upscalers in many TVs that'll be necessary.
The next gen step might also be timed differently depending on the strategies applied. While I'm sure MS and Sony would rather bury this gen fast and try to win the next one they've racked up massive losses to get their systems out of the door and it might be wiser for them to sit down a bit and try to work with what they have to cut their losses a bit while also trying to find a new direction to go into. Nintendo is very unpredictable. They'll probably try to ride on their wave of success for longer than usual and not go into the next iteration before they see a serious threat to their market (and with the way Sony and MS have behaved so far they might have trouble mounting a successful attack on the Wii's domination even when starting another generation). It's not sure how Nintendo's new market reacts to generation changes either, introducing a new generation may actually be counterproductive. Plus Nintendo's main strength are the controllers while improving the graphics and such isn't very useful for their market, they might be able to start another "generation" by making a new generation of peripherials instead of replacing the console box itself.
Their current problem is that they're pretty much ignoring the Wii (50% of the console market right there). After some promising but rushed launch games they've pretty much faded into the shovelware pile. In fact I think most of the shovelware on the system actually bears the Ubisoft logo. Shovelware doesn't really sell, there were some games on the system that sold while being critically panned but correlation does not imply causation and it seems many developers are forgetting that. The few games that did sell sold because they had value to the new people the Wii brought in, not because they are ignorant and will buy anything (otherwise the sames would be evenly spread over all the shovelware titles).
Don't waste your money, I did buy a 360 as a second system and still don't find much there. Really, all the interesting stuff is available for the PC anyway and the PC versions cost less money by far. Most of my recent spending was on Wiiware games.
The work needed depends in part on the style you choose. Abstract styles seem artistic but behind that facade they're really just a massive timesaver and that's why you see so many smaller games use "artistic" styles.
Code size restrictions seem to me like they're more likely to force coding styles than a focus on gameplay. Any small team focusses on the gameplay because there's nothing else they can implement to a high standard (well, okay, music but that doesn't tend to be the main focus of a game). Then again I guess it's wrong to talk about focus at all, every team tries to get everything done and they'll always try to make a game that's fun (at least to them) though not everybody succeeds every time. Even dev teams at big companies will always try to make their game fun and again it doesn't always succeed (though overall I'd say you can have fun with almost every game, just more with some than others and with that much competition people have high standards). Designing a fun game isn't just a matter of focus, it's also a matter of ability and experience. It's way more complex than just thinking "hey, this seems neat, let's do it!", unless of course your goal is simply to copy another design (but even then you can mess up if you don't notice where the design's strength comes from or why what seems like a suboptimal approach is in place). I think most people approach game making with the attitude "I liked game X, I want to make something like that except better!" and then produce something that feels fairly derivative to the end user. Hell, I've seen it in Spring, many people want to make their own mod but in the end they keep thinking in TA logic and produce something that is still pretty much TA at a basic level even though they may have made everything from scratch.
Game design is hard, guys! Just saying "we'll focus on gameplay over [insert component]" doesn't automatically get you a good game.
Definitely possible, you won't make the next Halo or anything like that but you can get a good game done alone, especially since these days you can get many components off the shelf (game engines, for example) and tools have advanced a lot since the 8 bit era plus you don't have to push the hardware to its very limit to get something that looks pleasing to the eye so you can afford less optimized code.
As for flash games, I can't imagine that being that much easier than just grabbing an off-the-shelf engine and coding your own game except that would run waaaaay faster (flash in fullscreen DOES tend to push my PC to the limit, for simple things like 2d platformers even). Hell, I got basic 2d platformer gameplay going in maybe 2 days using PyGame and most of that was figuring out the physics for colliding characters with the environment without glitches (there are many ways to mess that up and get glitches, I don't believe Flash includes that by default since I've seen glitchy jump and runs in Flash too) and I've never implemented something like that before. Obviously all this gets more complicated as your game gets more complex (a 3d engine is going to be way more complicated than a 2d engine) but it's still no biggie.
Of course one problem is that you won't find the full skillset needed to cover all aspects in one person or at least not to a degree where that person can produce high-quality output in every area. Getting 1-2 other people can help with that.
Should watching a timer really draw 20 watt?
OEMs preinstalling other browsers.
Er, better hope that's not getting traced back to you.
They do, unfortunately they only speak spanish, not latin.
By the law saying you're not allowed to share that music?
Let's hook them up to generators and call it a renewable source of power!
To me worth buying has to be divided into the different prices the game might drop to throughout its shelf life as well.
Maybe Gandalf just didn't know what The One Ring does when worn? Or maybe the effect differs depending on the wearer? AFAIK we've only seen it used on hobbits, maybe their tendency to lay low translates into invisibility with The One Ring...
That article was about a laser-based interferometer having noise that might have been the result of a holographic universe, I wonder if the noise this breakthrough removed was the same noise observed there or a ddifferent kind?
How does this relate to the earlier story about a laser-based system having noise that was considered evidence for the holographic principle? If the noise could be eliminated doesn't that mean the evidence is invalid?
I think Play-Asia is located in HK (at least Lik-Sang was) and I'm seeing 3$ shipping costs on videogames (roughly DVD sized) from them. That's to Europe but from what I've seen shipping to Europe from there actually costs more than shipping to the US.
Interesting example considering I got Bioshock for 10€ as a bargain bin edition (plenty of games go on the Pyramid where they cost a tenner each and come in unwieldy huge boxes). PC games drop in price really fast, console games tend to drop more slowly on average.
It will fail for anything that doesn't require online multiplayer (i.e. where the online server's functions are inseparably woven into the game). Any game where the main gameplay is offline would have online activation only as a DRM measure and that can be cut out. An online game is already protected against warez users playing online and the more of the game is online the less use there is for a warez version. When you propose any mechanic that works as a protection think to yourself what would happen if the crackers cut the whole thing out of the software. WoW without online play? Not really possible (yes I know there are cracked servers available). A singleplayer game that connects to a server merely to decrypt its content or download a few final pieces? Forget it, they'll just share the decrypted, completely downloaded version instead. As long as the server connection system has no benefits for the user it can just be cut out.
Of course most of them won't pay but if you throw hurdles into the way of your customers you may end up alienating some of them and having them download your product instead (or buy from a competitor). Telling a customer "hey, you can't buy this because you're in the wrong location even though there's no technical hurdle" is a terrible idea because you can be damn sure that warez sites are open to everyone. People have different resistances to copyright infringement, they aren't all buy-everything or download-everything, many are in the middle and if you push them away from buying you know where they'll end up. You cannot zero piracy, noone can sanely expect that but you can avoid pushing the numbers higher than necessary.
Of course "don't alienate potential customers" should have been basic knowledge for anyone in charge of making decisions.
Well, warez sites are massively undercutting you...
Then you've done something seriously wrong, import stores operating out of Hong Kong charge about 3 dollars for a DVD (or videogame) shipping. Did you take an express service option?
Of course there's no meaningful way to appeal to someone who refuses new games on the grounds that they are new (you mention authenticity, that sounds like nostalgia to me) but that doesn't mean the design principles of the old games are lost forever. Some say the Wii is the revival of the arcade-era game design, at very least it did abandon the focus on better graphics. Kinda hard to say how it will pan out, even after 2-3 years this batch of consoles still seems to be in its infancy. Meh, if in doubt, get a DS. Best game system avaiable currently.