It's better described as the mental process in the player. The factors involved in that vary from game to game but a successor should provide a similar mental process (e.g. if a game has the player thinking about the large scale environment and how to navigate and explore it a game that instead focuses on a story and combat is not a sequel even if it uses the same setting, characters, etc). An important factor of that is also newness, if a part of the game was surprising the player with new ideas you can't make a successor by just recycling these ideas because they are no longer surprising and thus the mental process changes even if the physical content does not. Identify what the player is thinking about while playing the game, make sure you provide him with something that produces those same thoughts. Only looking at physical content creates the feeling that changing things is a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't dilemma, often fans will complain that a sequel changed things while also complaining that a sequel kept things the same, in both cases the mental process was changed (once because the mechanics differ, once because the newness was lost).
There's a difference between writing/movies/music/etc and games in that games are largely mechanical and those mechanics can be improved. Stories are fixed works, writing the same one again with small improvements makes no sense but a game is dynamic, changing the mechanics even minimally can have a gigantic effect on the outcome and people replay games to experience all the different variations the mechanics can provide so those changes can be a huge improvement. What may be compared to stories, movies etc is the level design, reusing old levels doesn't provide much new fun.
Also I believe the point here is not to honor the original devs but to produce something that is more fun to play than the original.
Then let's go for more straight rip-offs and compare Spring's Balanced Annihilation with the original Total Annihilation or the Supreme Commander games. TA was an unbalanced mess of units and Balanced Annihilation somehow managed to make it work better while Supreme Commander is a pretty shallow shadow of its spiritual predecessor Total Annihilation, while it may be more balanced the set of options went down radically.
It's pretty hard to get enough people to cooperate in a way that could be described as proper opensource development (i.e. not just one guy doing all the work and releasing it under GPL but actually multiple contributors working together) when the goal is not "let's make X but better!". When the goal is to go original you get a katamari of ideas as every contributor will want to add his own "improvements". The best games look like they were designed by a single person or a hive mind even though there were many individuals involved because it all stays coherent.
It's likely that while remaking the game you'll deviate in more than one way from the original because you find various ways in which you could make it better from your point of view and in the end the result will have so many of your own touches that it's more original than 90% of the big retail games today.
Arkham Asylum is not a platformer, the game's focus is not on having you climb/jump/etc across the environment with great care, that's just how Batman happens to move around while doing the important stuff like fighting, stealthing and exploring. Compare Assassin's Creed with Prince of Persia 2008, in PoP you have to press many different buttons for the different moves to keep going across obstacles, in AC you just hold down run and your dude does all that automatically because you're supposed to worry about other things.
It can't be that popular, by the looks of it every store has a huge surplus of FEAR2 copies and stores doing extreme discounts on all games as they are going out of business still can't get rid of FEAR2.
Not really my type of game, I'm too bad at spotting enemies before they shoot me and it often takes a LOOOOONG time to get back to where you died in ArmA2. I play Section 8 instead, when you die you just drop near where you're needed now and keep fighting.
Doing what everyone else is doing isn't exactly low on risk because you're going up against very strong competition and for most companies that competition will beat them (e.g. releasing your FPS alongside a Modern Warfare game). Very few companies are capable of beating that competition and even then there's the risk that you did something in the process wrong and your big expensive (because you cannot go against that competition on a limited budget) game flops. Doing what nobody else is doing is actually less risky because there is no competition so you can afford to scale back on many expenses you needed to compete and a flop is much easier to absorb. You also don't need to get as close to perfect as you do in a competitive market because your product stands without competition, there are many more things it has that the competition doesn't and if those turn out successful you will get a gigantic sales boost, possibly eclipsing most of the competitive markets in revenue and since you did it at a much lower budget your profits will be significantly bigger.
This is called the Blue Ocean Strategy, there are some business books on it. For a successful example you can look at the Nintendo DS, when that went up against the PSP it had weaker graphics (less expense on R&D) but it turned out to be the winner because it had a touchscreen that the PSP didn't and because that allowed it to gain system sellers that the PSP could not support (Nintendogs, Brain Training, both of which are also examples of Blue Ocean games as they went into a fairly uncontested market and dominated it despite being fairly cheaply developed). Going neck to neck with the PSP by making a Game Boy with better graphics may have turned out differently but the DS won by offering so much more than the PSP did.
I'm always of the opinion that making copyright "use it or lose it" would work best for encouraging the creation of creative works (if making a sequel or such counts as using the IP, the original work will sooner or later run out of sales potential and if they want to keep the IP they've gotta make another work with it) as well as preservation of older works.
Then again the concept of space marines vs primitive clawed aliens vs high tech aliens isn't really that unique to AvP and with a little creativity you could make a game that's AvP in everything but brand. All I see copyright doing when it comes to things like that is force people to make up their own damn characters and build their own brand.
Chip-based storage uses binary prefixes because the wiring makes binary space sizes more useful (e.g. you'll organize your storage cells in words matching the interface size, then use an address that uses a certain number of bits and all addresses are valid so there's no logic needed to limit the address size).
I'm pretty sure I've seen Linux use kiB and MiB labels already. There's no value in knowing the base 10 k/M B values because the file system organizes the data in blocks that have a power-of-two size and a kB would probably not contain an integral number of blocks.
Most places don't allow used PC game sales anyway because even without online activation the CD key is usually used up so online multiplayer isn't an option.
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It's better described as the mental process in the player. The factors involved in that vary from game to game but a successor should provide a similar mental process (e.g. if a game has the player thinking about the large scale environment and how to navigate and explore it a game that instead focuses on a story and combat is not a sequel even if it uses the same setting, characters, etc). An important factor of that is also newness, if a part of the game was surprising the player with new ideas you can't make a successor by just recycling these ideas because they are no longer surprising and thus the mental process changes even if the physical content does not. Identify what the player is thinking about while playing the game, make sure you provide him with something that produces those same thoughts. Only looking at physical content creates the feeling that changing things is a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't dilemma, often fans will complain that a sequel changed things while also complaining that a sequel kept things the same, in both cases the mental process was changed (once because the mechanics differ, once because the newness was lost).
There's a difference between writing/movies/music/etc and games in that games are largely mechanical and those mechanics can be improved. Stories are fixed works, writing the same one again with small improvements makes no sense but a game is dynamic, changing the mechanics even minimally can have a gigantic effect on the outcome and people replay games to experience all the different variations the mechanics can provide so those changes can be a huge improvement. What may be compared to stories, movies etc is the level design, reusing old levels doesn't provide much new fun.
Also I believe the point here is not to honor the original devs but to produce something that is more fun to play than the original.
Then let's go for more straight rip-offs and compare Spring's Balanced Annihilation with the original Total Annihilation or the Supreme Commander games. TA was an unbalanced mess of units and Balanced Annihilation somehow managed to make it work better while Supreme Commander is a pretty shallow shadow of its spiritual predecessor Total Annihilation, while it may be more balanced the set of options went down radically.
It's pretty hard to get enough people to cooperate in a way that could be described as proper opensource development (i.e. not just one guy doing all the work and releasing it under GPL but actually multiple contributors working together) when the goal is not "let's make X but better!". When the goal is to go original you get a katamari of ideas as every contributor will want to add his own "improvements". The best games look like they were designed by a single person or a hive mind even though there were many individuals involved because it all stays coherent.
Easier:
1) make your game
It's likely that while remaking the game you'll deviate in more than one way from the original because you find various ways in which you could make it better from your point of view and in the end the result will have so many of your own touches that it's more original than 90% of the big retail games today.
Then again I'd rather have Monolith work on something that needs their creativity instead of yet another boring and bland FEAR sequel.
Arkham Asylum is not a platformer, the game's focus is not on having you climb/jump/etc across the environment with great care, that's just how Batman happens to move around while doing the important stuff like fighting, stealthing and exploring. Compare Assassin's Creed with Prince of Persia 2008, in PoP you have to press many different buttons for the different moves to keep going across obstacles, in AC you just hold down run and your dude does all that automatically because you're supposed to worry about other things.
Fracture isn't exactly a standout title either, it's passable but the price fell over 50% within weeks of release so the game must have bombed badly.
It can't be that popular, by the looks of it every store has a huge surplus of FEAR2 copies and stores doing extreme discounts on all games as they are going out of business still can't get rid of FEAR2.
And you'd be content with a Mac Mini instead of something more powerful?
The C&C4 system is probably different in implementation, it's only designed to track your XP gains, not to prevent piracy.
Yep. The story was a copypasted mess of classic dystopia novels but the fight scenes were fun.
Not really my type of game, I'm too bad at spotting enemies before they shoot me and it often takes a LOOOOONG time to get back to where you died in ArmA2. I play Section 8 instead, when you die you just drop near where you're needed now and keep fighting.
You don't need to invest that much into a game to make it sell. Brain Age was developed with a barebones team in a few weeks and became a huge seller.
Doing what everyone else is doing isn't exactly low on risk because you're going up against very strong competition and for most companies that competition will beat them (e.g. releasing your FPS alongside a Modern Warfare game). Very few companies are capable of beating that competition and even then there's the risk that you did something in the process wrong and your big expensive (because you cannot go against that competition on a limited budget) game flops. Doing what nobody else is doing is actually less risky because there is no competition so you can afford to scale back on many expenses you needed to compete and a flop is much easier to absorb. You also don't need to get as close to perfect as you do in a competitive market because your product stands without competition, there are many more things it has that the competition doesn't and if those turn out successful you will get a gigantic sales boost, possibly eclipsing most of the competitive markets in revenue and since you did it at a much lower budget your profits will be significantly bigger.
This is called the Blue Ocean Strategy, there are some business books on it. For a successful example you can look at the Nintendo DS, when that went up against the PSP it had weaker graphics (less expense on R&D) but it turned out to be the winner because it had a touchscreen that the PSP didn't and because that allowed it to gain system sellers that the PSP could not support (Nintendogs, Brain Training, both of which are also examples of Blue Ocean games as they went into a fairly uncontested market and dominated it despite being fairly cheaply developed). Going neck to neck with the PSP by making a Game Boy with better graphics may have turned out differently but the DS won by offering so much more than the PSP did.
The word "aliens" is a trademark in this case, limiting copyrights has no bearing on that.
Anyway, I'm just pointing out that the benefits of PDing a lot of commercial stuff aren't as big as some people assume.
I'm always of the opinion that making copyright "use it or lose it" would work best for encouraging the creation of creative works (if making a sequel or such counts as using the IP, the original work will sooner or later run out of sales potential and if they want to keep the IP they've gotta make another work with it) as well as preservation of older works.
Then again the concept of space marines vs primitive clawed aliens vs high tech aliens isn't really that unique to AvP and with a little creativity you could make a game that's AvP in everything but brand. All I see copyright doing when it comes to things like that is force people to make up their own damn characters and build their own brand.
This is a discussion about games, not serious business.
The demoscene put all their effort into optimization, the rest of the world prefers games designed to be fun instead.
Panem et circenses, the question is just which half he was referring to.
Chip-based storage uses binary prefixes because the wiring makes binary space sizes more useful (e.g. you'll organize your storage cells in words matching the interface size, then use an address that uses a certain number of bits and all addresses are valid so there's no logic needed to limit the address size).
I'm pretty sure I've seen Linux use kiB and MiB labels already. There's no value in knowing the base 10 k/M B values because the file system organizes the data in blocks that have a power-of-two size and a kB would probably not contain an integral number of blocks.
Gamespot makes $15-$30 on the initial sale
Isn't it more like $0-$5?
Most places don't allow used PC game sales anyway because even without online activation the CD key is usually used up so online multiplayer isn't an option.