One difference is that Microsoft has a daily fine ticking, if they drag it out for five years and then lose they have to pay for those five years, too. They won't be able to drag it out to any point where their standing is better, their competition is either dead already or not losing any ground, in five years they'll still face the same competition they do now.
Cheat codes still means accessible during normal operation. I would only ignore things that cannot be reached without arbitrary memory access. Whether the developer got cold feet over the content doesn't matter, they effectively removed it for anyone playing the game normally. Releasing "inofficial" patches to enable hidden stuff could just be replaced with releasing "inofficial" patches that add such content, the effect is identical.
Pity about Anachronox, aside from being REALLY buggy (there's an inofficial patch that fixes a lot of it and with that it can be played just fine) it's a great game with some things the developers of japanese RPGs could learn from, e.g. understanding that battles are an RPG's weakness so Anachronox had large parts without any battles at all, autolevelling the unused parts of your party at plot events or allowing the player to skip minigames that are necessary for plot progression. It also manages to be pretty funny most of the time (Being abducted by a comic supervillain? The Democratus political system? Collectible items called "Totally Arbitrary Collectible Objects"?).
Why not? As long as there's no way the game can ever reach the code during normal operation it doesn't need to be rated up. As long as the user has to deliberately enable it with a program downloaded from the internet he knows what he's getting himself into (and he could probably download worse things when he's on the internet anyway).
I don't know about US sales (those are hard to come by) but in Japan the DS keeps claiming more than 50% of the top 30 game sales every week. Other consoles get maybe one or two games into the list while the DS dominates everything.
Additionally Wii Sports is selling Wiis. It is a good demonstration of what the system is capable of (even though it doesn't use all features) and it's a way to make sure people don't blame the system when they buy a crappy license tie-in that controls like ass for their first game.
Well, if Nintendo hadn't dumped Sony they'd essentially have lost control of their platform as well (since Sony demanded that they get all of the license fees devs pay for the SNES CD). Also at the time it didn't seem like a bad decision. Look at how badly the Turbo CD, Sega CD, CDi and Saturn failed (of course not all of these predated Nintendo's decision to abandon the CD). CDs were used as a way to add crappy movies to games and had horrible load times at the time. Nintendo only lost control when someone managed to use the movies to actually enhance the game (namely Final Fantasy 7) rather than just provide a pseudointeractive amalgamation of worse-than-B-movie scenes.
Just because development is only paid for once, you can't assume that it's actually free.
That doesn't matter. Free, 14 billion dollars, the costs stay constant. You still try to maximize the profit at a per-unit cost of 1$ or so. If your game makes 4 million $ at 40$, 5 million $ at 50$ and 4 million $ at 60$ you sell it at 50$, no matter what the dev costs were (because you subtract them from the total). If you don't understand why higher prices don't immediately equal more profit you should look into economic theory again.
Sure, the costs amortize but that doesn't make them a per-unit cost. At 50k units made your dev costs may be 50$ per unit, at 500k units it's 5$ per unit but in the end you still paid 2.5 million $.
The PS3 hardware revision this website is talking about hasn't been released yet. Your PS3 is an older revision that doesn't have these problems. The issues were introduced by cost-saving measures.
That does not matter. The optimum price is the one that gives you the most profit per copy multiplied by the number of sales. The profit per copy is NOT affected by dev costs. Dev costs are sunk in advance and will not increase or decrease if you make more or less copies of the game.
The maximum for x * f(x) (where f is a monotonously falling function) and x * f(x) - y (for any fixed value of y) have the same value for x.
And how much does it cost to hire script translators and voice actors for the twenty-three languages of the European Union?
Apparetly not enough to cause a similar price increase for PC games. Usually the translation staff is between one and three people per language and often only a handfull of languages are actually covered (often only three, one of which is English and they never bother to translate American English to British English).
And voice actors? Don't make me laugh, VERY few console games translate the voice acting at all, most just throw subtitles on there and call it a day. Meanwhile PC games get fully translated voice acting yet have nowhere near the price increase console games do.
The article is trying to explain why games cost 60$. Since most costs aren't per unit they aren't really a justification for increasing the price and I don't think the per-unit costs increased at all. The only reason the price was increased was because someone thought it's more profitable that way. But of course "We increased the price to make more money" isn't something the public likes to hear.
They don't get a percentage of the sales, they get a fixed salary and that's it, for better or for worse. Usually the publisher pays for the development and reaps all the profits, the devs get only the money the publisher paid them to make the game (I'm ignoring the developing company here). The advantage is that the employees don't need to be running around looking for the next "gig" (unless they're contractors) all the time, they do their regularly scheduled work and if the company goes bust they go elsewhere.
However many of these costs don't scale with the number of units produced so we have to ask how many copies of the game were made and what kind of budget was used for development, marketing, etc. A game that was made on a 200k$ budget and sold a million copies certainly isn't going to spend 45% on development, neither is a game that cost millions to develop but failed to sell.
European sales taxes are significantly lower than the 50% overcharge we're getting. They could produce the discs locally, it's not like there aren't any disc factories in or near Europe.
Dev costs are independent of the sales. No matter how high they are, the cost to make one copy is always a few dollars. You are supposed to price your goods so you see the most profit, as the dev costs don't influence your per-unit profit at all you'd have the same optimal price for both a cheap and an expensive project (assuming identical demand). If raising the price of the game at retail would result in more profit you should have raised it LOOONG ago. Since game prices remained stable for so long it's reasonable to expect that they've already found the optimal price. As such any increase or decrease in price will lead to lower profits.
Games like Katamari are cheaper (in some territories) because the publisher didn't expect there to be much demand for them at the usual price and decided that a lower price will probably yield higher profits.
Similarly "next-gen" games are more expensive because publishers feel that the next-geniness of the game will make customers willing to pay a higher price and as such increase the optimal pricepoint.
Development is a fixed cost (this while "45% goes to development" claim is BS for that very reason, dev costs are sunk and don't increase with the number of units sold). It has no bearing on the price that will generate the optimal profit. Games are 60$ because publishers felt they could get away with it on the "powerful" consoles.
Of course inflation is not a good measure for consumer electronics. The cheapest home computers in 1980 cost more than today's top-of-the-line gaming rigs when you adjust for inflation. Prices are always compared to the "normal" price of their market and inflation is just an index of that "normal" price for some markets (especially food).
Slashdot Mirror
One difference is that Microsoft has a daily fine ticking, if they drag it out for five years and then lose they have to pay for those five years, too. They won't be able to drag it out to any point where their standing is better, their competition is either dead already or not losing any ground, in five years they'll still face the same competition they do now.
Do what you want but never subject a child to furry porn.
Great way to spread a viral video even more. Post it to /.
Do you think any Slashdotter gives two hoots about preventing the spread of this video?
Cheat codes still means accessible during normal operation. I would only ignore things that cannot be reached without arbitrary memory access. Whether the developer got cold feet over the content doesn't matter, they effectively removed it for anyone playing the game normally. Releasing "inofficial" patches to enable hidden stuff could just be replaced with releasing "inofficial" patches that add such content, the effect is identical.
Pity about Anachronox, aside from being REALLY buggy (there's an inofficial patch that fixes a lot of it and with that it can be played just fine) it's a great game with some things the developers of japanese RPGs could learn from, e.g. understanding that battles are an RPG's weakness so Anachronox had large parts without any battles at all, autolevelling the unused parts of your party at plot events or allowing the player to skip minigames that are necessary for plot progression. It also manages to be pretty funny most of the time (Being abducted by a comic supervillain? The Democratus political system? Collectible items called "Totally Arbitrary Collectible Objects"?).
And then we have Communism.
That's nothing, we've got a church here that has the inverted pentagram built into its bell tower (and it's not a joke church either).
picture
Why not? As long as there's no way the game can ever reach the code during normal operation it doesn't need to be rated up. As long as the user has to deliberately enable it with a program downloaded from the internet he knows what he's getting himself into (and he could probably download worse things when he's on the internet anyway).
I don't know about US sales (those are hard to come by) but in Japan the DS keeps claiming more than 50% of the top 30 game sales every week. Other consoles get maybe one or two games into the list while the DS dominates everything.
He's talking about the crippled backwards compatibility for the PAL PS3.
Additionally Wii Sports is selling Wiis. It is a good demonstration of what the system is capable of (even though it doesn't use all features) and it's a way to make sure people don't blame the system when they buy a crappy license tie-in that controls like ass for their first game.
Well, if Nintendo hadn't dumped Sony they'd essentially have lost control of their platform as well (since Sony demanded that they get all of the license fees devs pay for the SNES CD). Also at the time it didn't seem like a bad decision. Look at how badly the Turbo CD, Sega CD, CDi and Saturn failed (of course not all of these predated Nintendo's decision to abandon the CD). CDs were used as a way to add crappy movies to games and had horrible load times at the time. Nintendo only lost control when someone managed to use the movies to actually enhance the game (namely Final Fantasy 7) rather than just provide a pseudointeractive amalgamation of worse-than-B-movie scenes.
Just because development is only paid for once, you can't assume that it's actually free.
That doesn't matter. Free, 14 billion dollars, the costs stay constant. You still try to maximize the profit at a per-unit cost of 1$ or so. If your game makes 4 million $ at 40$, 5 million $ at 50$ and 4 million $ at 60$ you sell it at 50$, no matter what the dev costs were (because you subtract them from the total). If you don't understand why higher prices don't immediately equal more profit you should look into economic theory again.
Sure, the costs amortize but that doesn't make them a per-unit cost. At 50k units made your dev costs may be 50$ per unit, at 500k units it's 5$ per unit but in the end you still paid 2.5 million $.
The PS3 hardware revision this website is talking about hasn't been released yet. Your PS3 is an older revision that doesn't have these problems. The issues were introduced by cost-saving measures.
I'm not sure that's a non-discriminatory term.
That does not matter. The optimum price is the one that gives you the most profit per copy multiplied by the number of sales. The profit per copy is NOT affected by dev costs. Dev costs are sunk in advance and will not increase or decrease if you make more or less copies of the game.
The maximum for x * f(x) (where f is a monotonously falling function) and x * f(x) - y (for any fixed value of y) have the same value for x.
And how much does it cost to hire script translators and voice actors for the twenty-three languages of the European Union?
Apparetly not enough to cause a similar price increase for PC games. Usually the translation staff is between one and three people per language and often only a handfull of languages are actually covered (often only three, one of which is English and they never bother to translate American English to British English).
And voice actors? Don't make me laugh, VERY few console games translate the voice acting at all, most just throw subtitles on there and call it a day. Meanwhile PC games get fully translated voice acting yet have nowhere near the price increase console games do.
The article is trying to explain why games cost 60$. Since most costs aren't per unit they aren't really a justification for increasing the price and I don't think the per-unit costs increased at all. The only reason the price was increased was because someone thought it's more profitable that way. But of course "We increased the price to make more money" isn't something the public likes to hear.
They don't get a percentage of the sales, they get a fixed salary and that's it, for better or for worse. Usually the publisher pays for the development and reaps all the profits, the devs get only the money the publisher paid them to make the game (I'm ignoring the developing company here). The advantage is that the employees don't need to be running around looking for the next "gig" (unless they're contractors) all the time, they do their regularly scheduled work and if the company goes bust they go elsewhere.
However many of these costs don't scale with the number of units produced so we have to ask how many copies of the game were made and what kind of budget was used for development, marketing, etc. A game that was made on a 200k$ budget and sold a million copies certainly isn't going to spend 45% on development, neither is a game that cost millions to develop but failed to sell.
European sales taxes are significantly lower than the 50% overcharge we're getting. They could produce the discs locally, it's not like there aren't any disc factories in or near Europe.
Dev costs are independent of the sales. No matter how high they are, the cost to make one copy is always a few dollars. You are supposed to price your goods so you see the most profit, as the dev costs don't influence your per-unit profit at all you'd have the same optimal price for both a cheap and an expensive project (assuming identical demand). If raising the price of the game at retail would result in more profit you should have raised it LOOONG ago. Since game prices remained stable for so long it's reasonable to expect that they've already found the optimal price. As such any increase or decrease in price will lead to lower profits.
Games like Katamari are cheaper (in some territories) because the publisher didn't expect there to be much demand for them at the usual price and decided that a lower price will probably yield higher profits.
Similarly "next-gen" games are more expensive because publishers feel that the next-geniness of the game will make customers willing to pay a higher price and as such increase the optimal pricepoint.
Development is a fixed cost (this while "45% goes to development" claim is BS for that very reason, dev costs are sunk and don't increase with the number of units sold). It has no bearing on the price that will generate the optimal profit. Games are 60$ because publishers felt they could get away with it on the "powerful" consoles.
Of course inflation is not a good measure for consumer electronics. The cheapest home computers in 1980 cost more than today's top-of-the-line gaming rigs when you adjust for inflation. Prices are always compared to the "normal" price of their market and inflation is just an index of that "normal" price for some markets (especially food).
No, they added HDMI shortly before launch.