It won't be easy to slim hardcore epic games down to short pieces but there are many gqame designs that can be used to make short games. Also when the game is short the difficulty can be higher since spending more time on each part to master it doesn't result in an insanely long total playtime (who could beat a 40 hour content game if you'd need five hours of play to beat one hour of content?). Seems the cheap, short, hard route isn't very popular with retail purchasers though so it gets pushed into the download services instead and I don't know how sales are on those...
That and the Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People series. Seems only Telltale can handle episodic content though, everyone else manages to make one episode and then take forever to release the next and I don't think anyone except TT has gotten past episode 2 yet.
here. Looks like I was wrong with the 40%, that looks more like 60%. There's a quarterly loss of 300 million USD, that would be a billion over a year if it stayed constant. Not sure how much they really lost, the billions figure was just something I read in comments on a forum.
Late Thursday, the company reported that its net losses grew in the second fiscal quarter thanks to a sharp rise in expenses. Revenue also climbed, thanks to strong sales of video-game titles such as "Madden NFL," "Spore" and "Rock Band 2."
So revenue is up, sales are up but the company is bleeding money like mad. Seems this whole talk about next generation games costing too much to be profitable has something to it.
The game doesn't have to be worth keeping FOREVER, just long enough that most of the sales have gone by and preferrably until a price drop happens. I think multiplayer is a pretty piopular method of ensuring that.
The Wii just got the game Space Invaders: Get Even in Europe that has such a model, there's no disc to purchase but the base game (500 points, 5EUR/5USD) only includes one mission. The remaining 6 missions have to be bought in packs of two for 500 points each so for all missions you pay 2000 points (would be the most expensive downloadable Wii game at that price, they went with downloads instead of a retail release though). As far as I can see people are already complaining about being nickel-and-dimed.
Doesn't make sense, all money made from the game is the same, whether you already paid for dev costs or not. The price drops are just to sell the game to people who aren't willing to pay full price (which get more as the game gets older and less "relevant"). Nintendo has been preaching that games shouldn't get pricedrops because that reduces their sales at full price so Nintendo games almost never get any price reductions these days. No idea how that's working out for them but I'm buying fewer of their games as a result.
Never bought a used game with defects I see? Discs scratch, battery saves fail, manuals and boxes disappear,...
The third parties only make money from resale because the initial sale doesn't make them any. Do you see stores sell used tools? Used furniture? AFAIK no stores sell both new and used clothes either. Only game stores sell both used and new games while also complaining about the tiny profit margins on new games that are too low to even cover all expenses. Meanwhile clothes seem to have incredible markups judging from the price drops they regularly get.
Well, this approach would mean you'd pay the 70AUD anyway. They're not talking about making the game cheaper, they just put an unlock code in there that can only be used once and costs a lot of money to get otherwise. The buyer of the new game is unaffected except the resale value is much lower (so someone who wants to buy, play, sell sees the game as more expensive), someone who buys it used has to shell out big money to get the game complete in addition to what they paid for the game itself. Demos already exist and they are usually free to download.
It's a rip-off but people fall for it. That's noone's fault except the people who trade it in for pathetic returns or buy used for a measly 5€ discount. There are some good reasons to buy a used game (mostly when the game is so old it's no longer sold new) and of course there's something like ebay where the buyer and seller meet at more reasonable prices. There's also always the risk of getting a faulty game that is too scratched to work or fails to save (for cart games), dirty or missing parts of the package like the manual or the box. IMO the 5€ discount is too low for that risk but I guess other people are willing to take it.
As long as people are willing to be ripped off they will be ripped off. Using technical means to circumvent explicitely granted rights is not acceptable and should be illegal.
Wait, so you think any bit of socialism means taxing companies so much they all disappear from your country while pointing at Europe as socialist? Last I checked there are still plenty of companies in Europe, shouldn't they all have left by now?
The Us vs Them mentality instilled by the two party system seems to make many people brand anyone who doesn't 100% agree with everything they say as a supporter of the opposite party.
Maybe the American Dream has to do with it, i.e. everyone considering himself a potential millionaire and wanting to keep that future free of obstacles?
Isn't cutting taxes without matching cuts in spending a favourite of the whole Republican party? Seems to me when Democrats increase spending they raise taxes, when Republicans increase spending they go for debt instead so the citizens don't see it on their tax bill until a later administration decides to fix the money leaks.
What's that got to do with PS3 vs XBox? Modern AAA games are all alike in how stupid their puzzles are, an experienced gamer usually sees a room once and solves the puzzle instantly, no complicated thought required (and even then many games insist on giving you some obnoxious "buddy" that will ram you face first into the solution if you seem to be stuck for more than three seconds). I'm of the oppinion that such puzzles are stupid, if you're going to throw a puzzle in at least use one that requires REAL thought (try Toki Tori on WiiWare or, to some degree, Braid on XBLA). Stupid puzzles are pointless and should just be cut from the game.
The point of balance is to allow a variety of strategies and actions instead of forcing everyone onto a narrow path of choices where every deviation means a loss. The LAN situation is mostly untrained players that don't know the game well, once you get at least one experienced player into the game anyone trying to be creative is toast in five minutes, crushed by an onslaught of more cost effective units. There is an "over-balanced" version of TA in the mod Balanced Annihilation for Spring and everyone who played that agrees it's better.
A lack of balancing also makes a game very hard to learn without having someone tell you the secrets. You pretty much have to play the game in a way that wasn't intended and you can be sure the manual won't tell you about that. A balanced game plays closer to what the manual describes.
The worst example of imbalance would be imbalanced factions, it means a player is practically guaranteed to lose if he picks the wrong option in a drop-down box before the game even starts. Some people have the misconception that balance is boring and means everything is the same, it really just means out of the options you have there's not one that's best and the rest that make you lose. The factions can very well be different as night and day but balance means you actually have an equal chance, no matter which faction you pick.
Balance allows MORE creativity because you can be pretty damn sure creativity takes you off the prescribed path for exploiting an imbalance and makes you fight that imbalance head-on, putting you at a disadvantage. With balance you at least don't wreck your chances automatically but only by doing something that just doesn't work.
Don't ask me why third parties don't try to make FPS games on the Wii, there have been FPSes that sold well, there are good controls and a userbase yearning for more. Execs just don't seem to have a fucking clue when it comes to Wii development, treating its userbase like a black box and only trying the inputs others have tried and reached a positive response on (often ignoring one or two key parts that didn't seem important at first glance). Overall The Orange Box does fall into the epic, story driven and long category though (Portal is short but can't really be sold as a standalone).
TA was the best for GUI (back then) but the gameplay wasn't designed with much thought about balancing and units ended up being useless or OP and overall the games played out in ways that probably weren't intended.
Play Earth Defense Force 2 (PS2) or 2017 (360) and say that again.
Megaman 9 suffered from instadeath-overload like recent MMX games. There's hardly anything to shoot at but there's loads of things that will instantly kill you. Death from HP depletion is rare outside of miniboss and boss fights and just to be sure you can buy a crapload of E tanks which might be the reason why there's so many spikes. The old MM games weren't like that.
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It won't be easy to slim hardcore epic games down to short pieces but there are many gqame designs that can be used to make short games. Also when the game is short the difficulty can be higher since spending more time on each part to master it doesn't result in an insanely long total playtime (who could beat a 40 hour content game if you'd need five hours of play to beat one hour of content?). Seems the cheap, short, hard route isn't very popular with retail purchasers though so it gets pushed into the download services instead and I don't know how sales are on those...
That and the Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People series. Seems only Telltale can handle episodic content though, everyone else manages to make one episode and then take forever to release the next and I don't think anyone except TT has gotten past episode 2 yet.
here. Looks like I was wrong with the 40%, that looks more like 60%. There's a quarterly loss of 300 million USD, that would be a billion over a year if it stayed constant. Not sure how much they really lost, the billions figure was just something I read in comments on a forum.
So revenue is up, sales are up but the company is bleeding money like mad. Seems this whole talk about next generation games costing too much to be profitable has something to it.
The game doesn't have to be worth keeping FOREVER, just long enough that most of the sales have gone by and preferrably until a price drop happens. I think multiplayer is a pretty piopular method of ensuring that.
EA lost 40% of their value this year. They're posting losses in the billions. They must have done something seriously wrong in that time...
The Wii just got the game Space Invaders: Get Even in Europe that has such a model, there's no disc to purchase but the base game (500 points, 5EUR/5USD) only includes one mission. The remaining 6 missions have to be bought in packs of two for 500 points each so for all missions you pay 2000 points (would be the most expensive downloadable Wii game at that price, they went with downloads instead of a retail release though). As far as I can see people are already complaining about being nickel-and-dimed.
Doesn't make sense, all money made from the game is the same, whether you already paid for dev costs or not. The price drops are just to sell the game to people who aren't willing to pay full price (which get more as the game gets older and less "relevant"). Nintendo has been preaching that games shouldn't get pricedrops because that reduces their sales at full price so Nintendo games almost never get any price reductions these days. No idea how that's working out for them but I'm buying fewer of their games as a result.
Never bought a used game with defects I see? Discs scratch, battery saves fail, manuals and boxes disappear, ...
The third parties only make money from resale because the initial sale doesn't make them any. Do you see stores sell used tools? Used furniture? AFAIK no stores sell both new and used clothes either. Only game stores sell both used and new games while also complaining about the tiny profit margins on new games that are too low to even cover all expenses. Meanwhile clothes seem to have incredible markups judging from the price drops they regularly get.
Well, this approach would mean you'd pay the 70AUD anyway. They're not talking about making the game cheaper, they just put an unlock code in there that can only be used once and costs a lot of money to get otherwise. The buyer of the new game is unaffected except the resale value is much lower (so someone who wants to buy, play, sell sees the game as more expensive), someone who buys it used has to shell out big money to get the game complete in addition to what they paid for the game itself. Demos already exist and they are usually free to download.
No but the people who trade used games in or stock the rental stores are.
It's a rip-off but people fall for it. That's noone's fault except the people who trade it in for pathetic returns or buy used for a measly 5€ discount. There are some good reasons to buy a used game (mostly when the game is so old it's no longer sold new) and of course there's something like ebay where the buyer and seller meet at more reasonable prices. There's also always the risk of getting a faulty game that is too scratched to work or fails to save (for cart games), dirty or missing parts of the package like the manual or the box. IMO the 5€ discount is too low for that risk but I guess other people are willing to take it.
As long as people are willing to be ripped off they will be ripped off. Using technical means to circumvent explicitely granted rights is not acceptable and should be illegal.
You've got a winner-takes-all system, how do you expect to get everyone represented by someone they want?
Wait, so you think any bit of socialism means taxing companies so much they all disappear from your country while pointing at Europe as socialist? Last I checked there are still plenty of companies in Europe, shouldn't they all have left by now?
The Us vs Them mentality instilled by the two party system seems to make many people brand anyone who doesn't 100% agree with everything they say as a supporter of the opposite party.
Maybe it's just because the populations of other countries prefer Obama?
Maybe the American Dream has to do with it, i.e. everyone considering himself a potential millionaire and wanting to keep that future free of obstacles?
Isn't cutting taxes without matching cuts in spending a favourite of the whole Republican party? Seems to me when Democrats increase spending they raise taxes, when Republicans increase spending they go for debt instead so the citizens don't see it on their tax bill until a later administration decides to fix the money leaks.
In the US topics like abortion are contested, in most of Europe it's just considered normal.
Those three things ARE bad design, a well designed game would teach you that by itself.
What's that got to do with PS3 vs XBox? Modern AAA games are all alike in how stupid their puzzles are, an experienced gamer usually sees a room once and solves the puzzle instantly, no complicated thought required (and even then many games insist on giving you some obnoxious "buddy" that will ram you face first into the solution if you seem to be stuck for more than three seconds). I'm of the oppinion that such puzzles are stupid, if you're going to throw a puzzle in at least use one that requires REAL thought (try Toki Tori on WiiWare or, to some degree, Braid on XBLA). Stupid puzzles are pointless and should just be cut from the game.
Um, a book being horribly written is a reason not to read it and get a summary from somewhere else instead.
The point of balance is to allow a variety of strategies and actions instead of forcing everyone onto a narrow path of choices where every deviation means a loss. The LAN situation is mostly untrained players that don't know the game well, once you get at least one experienced player into the game anyone trying to be creative is toast in five minutes, crushed by an onslaught of more cost effective units. There is an "over-balanced" version of TA in the mod Balanced Annihilation for Spring and everyone who played that agrees it's better.
A lack of balancing also makes a game very hard to learn without having someone tell you the secrets. You pretty much have to play the game in a way that wasn't intended and you can be sure the manual won't tell you about that. A balanced game plays closer to what the manual describes.
The worst example of imbalance would be imbalanced factions, it means a player is practically guaranteed to lose if he picks the wrong option in a drop-down box before the game even starts. Some people have the misconception that balance is boring and means everything is the same, it really just means out of the options you have there's not one that's best and the rest that make you lose. The factions can very well be different as night and day but balance means you actually have an equal chance, no matter which faction you pick.
Balance allows MORE creativity because you can be pretty damn sure creativity takes you off the prescribed path for exploiting an imbalance and makes you fight that imbalance head-on, putting you at a disadvantage. With balance you at least don't wreck your chances automatically but only by doing something that just doesn't work.
Don't ask me why third parties don't try to make FPS games on the Wii, there have been FPSes that sold well, there are good controls and a userbase yearning for more. Execs just don't seem to have a fucking clue when it comes to Wii development, treating its userbase like a black box and only trying the inputs others have tried and reached a positive response on (often ignoring one or two key parts that didn't seem important at first glance). Overall The Orange Box does fall into the epic, story driven and long category though (Portal is short but can't really be sold as a standalone).
TA was the best for GUI (back then) but the gameplay wasn't designed with much thought about balancing and units ended up being useless or OP and overall the games played out in ways that probably weren't intended.
(CDs were the death of the old-time games)
Play Earth Defense Force 2 (PS2) or 2017 (360) and say that again.
Megaman 9 suffered from instadeath-overload like recent MMX games. There's hardly anything to shoot at but there's loads of things that will instantly kill you. Death from HP depletion is rare outside of miniboss and boss fights and just to be sure you can buy a crapload of E tanks which might be the reason why there's so many spikes. The old MM games weren't like that.