_Even_ _if_ you make the graphics only for the Wii, if you want your game to compete with more than minigames, you'll want the game to at least look competitive with what one can buy on other consoles in your chosen genre.
No. People buy games for more than just their graphics. What you have to make is a good game which many companies are currently failing spectacularly at. Would you really buy an inferior game in the same genre just because it looks better? The competition is on quality which is more than graphics.
BTW, the 3MB video memory seems to be just the part embedded into the GPU, the system also has 24MB of SRAM and 64MB of GDDR3 SDRAM which should be fast enough to be used for graphics as well (GDDR3 is used on some graphics cards and it's the slower of the two). Since games tended to have higher resolution textures on the GC than the PS2 I think the main memory can indeed be used for textures as well and the 3MB are just the framebuffer and cache. The 360's GPU has 10MB on-chip, for comparison. These are obviously not the same numbers that are advertised for PC graphics cards with their 512MB and whatnot. Of course if it mattered the marketshare wouldn't corelate negatively with the processing power.
And anyway, the Wii is pretty much 50% of the market so going exclusive (as opposed to everything-except-the-Wii) to it isn't exactly a big loss of marketshare but it saves you a massive amount of dev costs (which seems to be becoming important as more and more companies fold because of the dev costs of their HD games).
Meh, I got my 360 plugged into a crappy (and by that I mean blurry) old CRT, the games aren't much worse from it (except the tiny fonts many HD games use are hard to read, SD consoles tend to use much larger fonts). If people wanted to play PS3 games they could do so even on crappy old CRTs.
The lack of PS2 compatibility is probably not much of an issue now, I see BC mostly used before a console has built a decent library of native games and from what I heard the HD consoles have a decent library already (yeah, heard, most of that library seems to be designed for people that aren't me so I can't say much about it myself).
I'm not sure games on the PS3 are more expensive than on the 360 (they certainly cost way more than Wii or PC games which is kinda ridiculous when the same game goes for 70€ on the HD consoles and 45€ on the PC).
I don't think the price is that big of a factor. The 360 is cheaper than the Wii and still getting beaten by a large margin (Nov 08 had about 800k 360s sold and over 2M Wiis IIRC). Sure, it doesn't have PS2 BC either but its library seems to overlap strongly with the PS3's so if the interest was there it should at least sell the 360.
What is wrecking the PS3 and 360 is the focus of their library, it feels much narrower than the PS2's. You get grey-brown first person shooters and grey-brown third person shooters (or at least that's what it feels like when looking at the shelves). Oh and the Dynasty Warriors clones seem kinda prolific. I wouldn't be surprised if many people simply didn't switch because there weren't many compelling titles available (sure, there are a few in different genres like Little Big Planet but a single game isn't enough to make a good library).
Between the focus of the HD library on brown-grey shooters and the Wii library on party games (yes I know there are first party games but they're few and not everyone likes every single of them so the effective library of them is smaller) it seems to me like there are massive segments of the market with no compelling reason to buy any of the current generation consoles yet (didn't e.g. all jRPGs so far suck?). The download services are currently much more interesting than the retail shelves but it seems that XBLA got typecast as the service for dual analog shooters (which are all implemented badly, haven't seen any exceptions yet) which hurts it badly.
All current gen consoles are pathetic compared to the DS.
Dentist: "Oh, it's nothing, you just have extra sensitive teeth. Have some fluor! If it was an infection, it would hurt always and not just when drinking cold.".
Huh? When I had that the immediate response was "it's inflamed, we'll have to perform a root canal!". I was scared so there was some paste applied to the teeth, they still react to cold or sweet stuff (though not when eating healthy food, lowered my sweets consumption to some degree) but the dentist said only one (out of four) of the teeth needed a root canal due to the treatment. That was a few years ago and the situation has remained pretty much the same since then so I guess the paste did something.
I think I've read about that in more countries than just NZ. Maybe in part people imagine a dictator running stuff well to be a dictator who follows their own political persuation or something. Generally humans tend to prefer hierarchies (even in a group of equals you'll quickly see a de facto hierarchy forming with some taking initiative and others just following their orders) and as such will accept a ruler even if it limits freedoms (though people would probably assume they'd only lose freedoms they don't care for like the freedom to elect someone else which would be unnecessary if the ruler was really a competent guy).
Of course in practice dictators don't tend to run things well (though I heard jokes that the only politician to ever keep his election promises was Hitler).
And? Just because a part of the game has been done before doesn't mean it's not new. Brain training has been limited to boring work-like programs before, sports games consisted of hitting buttons (or adjusting dials if we go really far back) rather than the actual motions and exercise vids are again work-like and not interactive. You can always find a weak relationship to something existing for any new idea (someone jokingly said GTA is like Pac Man except the dots are people). I don't think there's any indie game that couldn't be claimed to be just a clone if you just looked at it with enough abstraction.
I disagree. The biggest game changers recently were games like Brain Training (DS), Wii Sports and Wii Fit which are far from indie efforts. Indie games have nice ideas sometimes but they rarely have a lasting impact on gaming. This "casualization" of console gaming is turning the whole market upside down.
A question is if that applies to every game or just small indie games. An indie game has no way to get known other than word of mouth but a commercial game will mostly get its publicity from advertising and such so the effect might be way lower.
And they're coming to consoles now with the download services. There's tons of smaller developers suddently jumping on these opportunities and probably getting way more exposure that way than by just making them for sites with tons of badly made flash games that seem to exist merely to prove Sturgeon's Law.
It's funny how they call running with the stampede the safe option when especially the copypasta-style publishers are running up massive losses. Treading the same path makes it hard to leave a mark and you need to do that in order to get sales for YOUR product instead of a competing one and harder marks means needing to spend tons more money on it. Look at the budgets they throw at games to get the graphics up! Some developers have gone broke over that if their game doesn't sell big (recent higher profile ones are Factor 5 (Rogue Squadron series, Lair) and Free Radical (Timesplitters series, Black, Haze), EA also had to do some massive cuts to stop the losses due to increasing develpment costs). Meanwhile controlled change can make a much bigger mark for little money. Of course you gotta know how to do the change so you don't end up with a quirky niche game noone wants but hey, knowing what customers want is the marketing department's purpose, right? Make them do their job rather than just laze around and say "same procedure as every year, James".
4th gen? How are you counting that? Are you counting eras instead of generations (pre-crash, post-crash 2D, 3D, motion controlled? Heh, that could probably be phrased as joystick, d-pad, analog stick and motion control...)?
There is a market for both the simple console and the media hub, the media hub's just seems to be smaller.
Dunno, I can't get myself to touch the PS2 anymore. The system's atmosphere (color output or something but there's always a certain something that makes a PS2 game feel like a PS2 game and the association for me is darkness) is just appalling and now that I have plenty of games that aren't on the system I'm playing those instead. Though honestly if someone asked me which PS2 games I'd recommend I'd have a hard time answering because I don't feel like any of the ones I played (which I'd have to count but I'd guess 30-40) were worth recommending. Even the ones that were considered great games everywhere tended to have some flaws that would keep me from recommending them. Well, okay, Earth Defense Force 2 definitely deserves recommending, Okami to a lesser degree as well. Maybe I just picked the wrong games but even ones like God of War, Ratchet & Clank 2, Devil May Cry 3, Final Fantasy X, Odin Sphere, etc felt uninteresting.
Of course but the difference isn't so big that people will refuse to buy your game if you make it to PS2 standards (or, in some cases, PSP standards...).
Only if someone else used Mickey Mouse as a trademark. I think having the character appear in a story (but not in a prominent role on the cover) would not fall under trademark law.
"and all related imagery"? Nope. Steamboat Willie goes out of copyright but anything that was added to the characters or setting after that (how much is the modern Mickey Mouse like the old one?) would still be protected.
Neither the EU nor the US will stand up against the companies here, they'll just find a new way to increase the durations together.
To be fair, most "artists" aren't going to make much more money off an old idea after a year or two, the vast majority of all "art" sells for a few months or years and then it becomes practically worthless and without additional creations the "artist" would starve. If you could really make money off an old idea forever companies like movie studios and such wouldn't keep making expensive new material and instead rely on the money they get from their old copyrights.
I'd rather see different treatment of active and abandoned works than a blanket duration. Something like if a work or a legally made derivative of it hasn't been available for (legal) purchase to the public (possibly with a restriction that it has to be at a sane price, exact threshold to be decided in court) for 10 years (or maybe less) the work enters the public domain. Anyone who cares can easily keep his copyright to the maximum duration but someone who doesn't will lose it. Might even make some copyright holders who want to hold onto their rights re-release old materials that would have been unavailable otherwise.
I'd make sure to include derivatives so in order to keep something like a character you wouldn't have to republish the first incarnation. Of couse the derivative chain only includes the elements that still appear in the sold works, a character that has been abandoned within a setting would be abandoned too.
IMO a restriction like that would make copyright only restrict access to things that are still being used and open up a lot of old material to the public that wouldn't be preserved otherwise (and really has no commercial interest attached so it just gets protected by accident when the durations get extended rather than with any intent on using the copyright). Probably easier to get implemented than a general shortening of durations because if it's abandoned by this system that would be because there is no commercial interest in keeping it alive and therefore no reason to oppose it.
I do think it's somewhat fair that Disney gets to keep Mickey Mouse and such still because it is a quite rare feat to make a work that has any relevance even 10 years later but their duration is pushing it.
Either way I think the derivative chain being enough to protect something would also make it easier for prospective users since currently when an old version goes out of copyright any derivatives (such as later stories, character changes, etc) remain copyrighted and someone trying to write a story with such a character would suddently find out that most of what makes up the current image of the character is actually much newer and still covered (and I expect most people to find that part out the hard way).
References are slightly different from taking verbatim. You could always make references, you just couldn't put the character straight into your work. Now you can.
Slashdot Mirror
_Even_ _if_ you make the graphics only for the Wii, if you want your game to compete with more than minigames, you'll want the game to at least look competitive with what one can buy on other consoles in your chosen genre.
No. People buy games for more than just their graphics. What you have to make is a good game which many companies are currently failing spectacularly at. Would you really buy an inferior game in the same genre just because it looks better? The competition is on quality which is more than graphics.
BTW, the 3MB video memory seems to be just the part embedded into the GPU, the system also has 24MB of SRAM and 64MB of GDDR3 SDRAM which should be fast enough to be used for graphics as well (GDDR3 is used on some graphics cards and it's the slower of the two). Since games tended to have higher resolution textures on the GC than the PS2 I think the main memory can indeed be used for textures as well and the 3MB are just the framebuffer and cache. The 360's GPU has 10MB on-chip, for comparison. These are obviously not the same numbers that are advertised for PC graphics cards with their 512MB and whatnot. Of course if it mattered the marketshare wouldn't corelate negatively with the processing power.
And anyway, the Wii is pretty much 50% of the market so going exclusive (as opposed to everything-except-the-Wii) to it isn't exactly a big loss of marketshare but it saves you a massive amount of dev costs (which seems to be becoming important as more and more companies fold because of the dev costs of their HD games).
Yeah but you're comparing it with MAC GAMING.
Meh, I got my 360 plugged into a crappy (and by that I mean blurry) old CRT, the games aren't much worse from it (except the tiny fonts many HD games use are hard to read, SD consoles tend to use much larger fonts). If people wanted to play PS3 games they could do so even on crappy old CRTs.
The lack of PS2 compatibility is probably not much of an issue now, I see BC mostly used before a console has built a decent library of native games and from what I heard the HD consoles have a decent library already (yeah, heard, most of that library seems to be designed for people that aren't me so I can't say much about it myself).
I'm not sure games on the PS3 are more expensive than on the 360 (they certainly cost way more than Wii or PC games which is kinda ridiculous when the same game goes for 70€ on the HD consoles and 45€ on the PC).
I don't think the price is that big of a factor. The 360 is cheaper than the Wii and still getting beaten by a large margin (Nov 08 had about 800k 360s sold and over 2M Wiis IIRC). Sure, it doesn't have PS2 BC either but its library seems to overlap strongly with the PS3's so if the interest was there it should at least sell the 360.
What is wrecking the PS3 and 360 is the focus of their library, it feels much narrower than the PS2's. You get grey-brown first person shooters and grey-brown third person shooters (or at least that's what it feels like when looking at the shelves). Oh and the Dynasty Warriors clones seem kinda prolific. I wouldn't be surprised if many people simply didn't switch because there weren't many compelling titles available (sure, there are a few in different genres like Little Big Planet but a single game isn't enough to make a good library).
Between the focus of the HD library on brown-grey shooters and the Wii library on party games (yes I know there are first party games but they're few and not everyone likes every single of them so the effective library of them is smaller) it seems to me like there are massive segments of the market with no compelling reason to buy any of the current generation consoles yet (didn't e.g. all jRPGs so far suck?). The download services are currently much more interesting than the retail shelves but it seems that XBLA got typecast as the service for dual analog shooters (which are all implemented badly, haven't seen any exceptions yet) which hurts it badly.
All current gen consoles are pathetic compared to the DS.
Er, you did notice that site was The Onion, right?
Dentist: "Oh, it's nothing, you just have extra sensitive teeth. Have some fluor! If it was an infection, it would hurt always and not just when drinking cold.".
Huh? When I had that the immediate response was "it's inflamed, we'll have to perform a root canal!". I was scared so there was some paste applied to the teeth, they still react to cold or sweet stuff (though not when eating healthy food, lowered my sweets consumption to some degree) but the dentist said only one (out of four) of the teeth needed a root canal due to the treatment. That was a few years ago and the situation has remained pretty much the same since then so I guess the paste did something.
Oh I love it when the dentist says "that tooth is dead, you won't feel anything", that's usually a prelude to lots of screaming.
Over here root canals are covered by the insurance and I don't think there was a waiting period at all when I got mine.
I think I've read about that in more countries than just NZ. Maybe in part people imagine a dictator running stuff well to be a dictator who follows their own political persuation or something. Generally humans tend to prefer hierarchies (even in a group of equals you'll quickly see a de facto hierarchy forming with some taking initiative and others just following their orders) and as such will accept a ruler even if it limits freedoms (though people would probably assume they'd only lose freedoms they don't care for like the freedom to elect someone else which would be unnecessary if the ruler was really a competent guy).
Of course in practice dictators don't tend to run things well (though I heard jokes that the only politician to ever keep his election promises was Hitler).
And? Just because a part of the game has been done before doesn't mean it's not new. Brain training has been limited to boring work-like programs before, sports games consisted of hitting buttons (or adjusting dials if we go really far back) rather than the actual motions and exercise vids are again work-like and not interactive. You can always find a weak relationship to something existing for any new idea (someone jokingly said GTA is like Pac Man except the dots are people). I don't think there's any indie game that couldn't be claimed to be just a clone if you just looked at it with enough abstraction.
But 4th counted from when? Did gaming begin with the Playstation for you or something?
I disagree. The biggest game changers recently were games like Brain Training (DS), Wii Sports and Wii Fit which are far from indie efforts. Indie games have nice ideas sometimes but they rarely have a lasting impact on gaming. This "casualization" of console gaming is turning the whole market upside down.
A question is if that applies to every game or just small indie games. An indie game has no way to get known other than word of mouth but a commercial game will mostly get its publicity from advertising and such so the effect might be way lower.
And they're coming to consoles now with the download services. There's tons of smaller developers suddently jumping on these opportunities and probably getting way more exposure that way than by just making them for sites with tons of badly made flash games that seem to exist merely to prove Sturgeon's Law.
It's funny how they call running with the stampede the safe option when especially the copypasta-style publishers are running up massive losses. Treading the same path makes it hard to leave a mark and you need to do that in order to get sales for YOUR product instead of a competing one and harder marks means needing to spend tons more money on it. Look at the budgets they throw at games to get the graphics up! Some developers have gone broke over that if their game doesn't sell big (recent higher profile ones are Factor 5 (Rogue Squadron series, Lair) and Free Radical (Timesplitters series, Black, Haze), EA also had to do some massive cuts to stop the losses due to increasing develpment costs). Meanwhile controlled change can make a much bigger mark for little money. Of course you gotta know how to do the change so you don't end up with a quirky niche game noone wants but hey, knowing what customers want is the marketing department's purpose, right? Make them do their job rather than just laze around and say "same procedure as every year, James".
4th gen? How are you counting that? Are you counting eras instead of generations (pre-crash, post-crash 2D, 3D, motion controlled? Heh, that could probably be phrased as joystick, d-pad, analog stick and motion control...)?
There is a market for both the simple console and the media hub, the media hub's just seems to be smaller.
Screw backwards compatibility, release one for 200€, then people might care more.
Then again I don't think it's the price that makes them lose to the Wii...
Dunno, I can't get myself to touch the PS2 anymore. The system's atmosphere (color output or something but there's always a certain something that makes a PS2 game feel like a PS2 game and the association for me is darkness) is just appalling and now that I have plenty of games that aren't on the system I'm playing those instead. Though honestly if someone asked me which PS2 games I'd recommend I'd have a hard time answering because I don't feel like any of the ones I played (which I'd have to count but I'd guess 30-40) were worth recommending. Even the ones that were considered great games everywhere tended to have some flaws that would keep me from recommending them. Well, okay, Earth Defense Force 2 definitely deserves recommending, Okami to a lesser degree as well. Maybe I just picked the wrong games but even ones like God of War, Ratchet & Clank 2, Devil May Cry 3, Final Fantasy X, Odin Sphere, etc felt uninteresting.
Of course but the difference isn't so big that people will refuse to buy your game if you make it to PS2 standards (or, in some cases, PSP standards...).
Better running? You mean lazy ports choked with nasty DRM and terrible framerates?
Only if someone else used Mickey Mouse as a trademark. I think having the character appear in a story (but not in a prominent role on the cover) would not fall under trademark law.
"and all related imagery"? Nope. Steamboat Willie goes out of copyright but anything that was added to the characters or setting after that (how much is the modern Mickey Mouse like the old one?) would still be protected.
Neither the EU nor the US will stand up against the companies here, they'll just find a new way to increase the durations together.
To be fair, most "artists" aren't going to make much more money off an old idea after a year or two, the vast majority of all "art" sells for a few months or years and then it becomes practically worthless and without additional creations the "artist" would starve. If you could really make money off an old idea forever companies like movie studios and such wouldn't keep making expensive new material and instead rely on the money they get from their old copyrights.
I'd rather see different treatment of active and abandoned works than a blanket duration. Something like if a work or a legally made derivative of it hasn't been available for (legal) purchase to the public (possibly with a restriction that it has to be at a sane price, exact threshold to be decided in court) for 10 years (or maybe less) the work enters the public domain. Anyone who cares can easily keep his copyright to the maximum duration but someone who doesn't will lose it. Might even make some copyright holders who want to hold onto their rights re-release old materials that would have been unavailable otherwise.
I'd make sure to include derivatives so in order to keep something like a character you wouldn't have to republish the first incarnation. Of couse the derivative chain only includes the elements that still appear in the sold works, a character that has been abandoned within a setting would be abandoned too.
IMO a restriction like that would make copyright only restrict access to things that are still being used and open up a lot of old material to the public that wouldn't be preserved otherwise (and really has no commercial interest attached so it just gets protected by accident when the durations get extended rather than with any intent on using the copyright). Probably easier to get implemented than a general shortening of durations because if it's abandoned by this system that would be because there is no commercial interest in keeping it alive and therefore no reason to oppose it.
I do think it's somewhat fair that Disney gets to keep Mickey Mouse and such still because it is a quite rare feat to make a work that has any relevance even 10 years later but their duration is pushing it.
Either way I think the derivative chain being enough to protect something would also make it easier for prospective users since currently when an old version goes out of copyright any derivatives (such as later stories, character changes, etc) remain copyrighted and someone trying to write a story with such a character would suddently find out that most of what makes up the current image of the character is actually much newer and still covered (and I expect most people to find that part out the hard way).
References are slightly different from taking verbatim. You could always make references, you just couldn't put the character straight into your work. Now you can.
Have they released a fixed version of it yet? From what I read the retail CD version sounded a lot worse than the Guitar Hero DLC version.