I don't know if you're living under a rock but almost all major games have been moving towards online multiplayer instead of local multiplayer. Plenty of console games require one system per player too.
Go play them then but don't assume every one wants the same thing as you and don't live in the illusion that simplistic game play can cut it for the mass market today.
I think the only illusion here is that the more demanding customers form the mass market. They're the minority, it turns out that the mass market doesn't really need great stories and whatnot and is perfectly happy to play a game of tennis where you don't even control your character's leg movement.
The thing with the PC market is that it's fairly small and relying only on it when you've sunk a hundred million into your game is suicide. The number of people who have a PC that's gaming ready and care about having it is fairly low though there is a HUGE market of people who have a PC, don't care about its game readiness and want something simple to play. PopCap is serving that market.
Yeah, that analyst seems to forget the old adage about correlation and causation. China uses online and China has growth therefore online means growth? No, China grows by itself and it uses online because they can't get people to pay in any other way. Makes you wonder what kind of sucker hands this guy a paycheck for faulty reasoning like that.
They already do that to some degree but it's not enough and apparently you can't get very good talent over there currently (maybe because it all emigrates to western countries to get more money), usually the outsourcing to those countries is done for crappy ports to secondary systems and original games from the area tend not to do very well. I guess the best you can hope for in terms of cheap labor is eastern Europe.
I haven't paid the full 70€ for any "next" generation game so far, the most I paid for a game on the 360 was 45€ for Prototype, imported from the UK (and apparently they imported it from Korea if I recognize that font correctly). Other almost full-price games were Red Faction Guerilla which would have been 70€ had it not been for a deal of the week on Amazon and HAWX which was only 30€ because the store was going out of business. Yeah, I will stay away from the 70€ price even more when I know a game isn't great but so far I don't think I'd pay that even for the greatest games there are.
I certainly won't buy used at Gamestop, 5€ off is nowhere near enough of a discount for a used game. I'd rather wait for the new copies to fall to 30€ or less. If Gamestop wants my business on used games they should offer much bigger discounts.
For comparison the Wii's full game price of 50€ is much more acceptable.
Because punishment no longer deters when you've reached the maximum penalty. If you've done something that would warrant one year at most you aren't just casually going to do something that'll be five years.
Since the people who hate him most are organized crime, you have no point.
We only know that the organized criminals are willing to use force to make their hatred known, we don't know if the law abiding citizens hate him any less or just have much higher restraint when it comes to assassinations.
Best example is World of Warcraft which rakes in over 100 million revenue per month but still the developer think they can get away with a retarder story a 3rd grader would make up.
They don't just think so, they can. Most customers don't really care about the quality of the story and will often games with no story at all (e.g. sports games).
Judging by the comments that followed a story on Games on Demand on Eurogamer it sounds like the entire UK has low caps (like 30GB). Of course the entirety of Australia has very low caps as well but AFAIK that market is only a few hundred thousand people.
Opera just freezes the page the way it was when you navigate away, that said I'm still using the old Slashdot interface so comments go on a separate page anyway.
The point of stealth until separation is that once the warheads separate they overwhelm any anti-missile defense and stealth no longer matters so you don't have to worry about the stealth coating not surviving reentry.
One glaring exception would be Wii Fit, depending on whether you want to count that as a pure game or not.
I think it's an important one. Wii Fit isn't just a game that manages to sell stupidly well without pricedrops a long time after its release and even sells consoles too, it's also a game that would be impossible to make online-only because of the balance board. As much as game publishers seem to love the idea of something like OnLive where you basically subscribe to a gaming broadcast Wii Fit would be a killer app against it. Peripherials can't be downloaded and Wii Fit cannot be done without the balance board (there are other fitness games but AFAIK they all come with at least one peripherial to get more data about your body movements). OnLive's promise of playing all games without upgrades is made impossible by games like Wii Fit.
You are not alone in that sentiment, in fact it looks like the vast majority wants a physical copy. In an interview even Shigeru Miyamoto (I think he holds a lot of sway on Nintendo's business decisions, not just game designs) said he wants a physical copy of things he downloads.
Going online-only isn't going to fix the financial woes of the gaming industry anyway, the problem is with the content (which is costing more and more to make while bringing in too little money), not the delivery method. Even if online reduces the overhead costs that's only a fixed growth, a one time spike that may delay the end for a few years but not going to prevent it. The only way to prevent it is to make costs go down (or at least stay level if you've got them down to a good level already) and sales go up. Sales don't go up by making the delivery cheaper, they go up by making the product more interesting to more people, i.e. expand the market. Companies that keep pushing unnecessary expenses like even better graphics while keeping their product's appeal more or less the same will implode from rising costs.
It's really not news though, apparently the percentage of households with a gaming system has remained unchanged over the last few generations and all growth was driven by population growth. If the population declines so will the core market for gaming. Doesn't help that core games are currently being made for a very narrow demographic and the demographic change in the upcoming years (i.e. the number of people in the age brackets below the target demographic) looks like that demographic is going to shrink massively.
Their main commodities don't get easier to reproduce but they are demanded less by customers. Most if not all core values of gaming have overshot the majority of customers, i.e. reached the point where they offer more than the customer demands. The big publishers may be better at driving these values but since they've overshot a smaller company can come along, make a game with lower core market values than the big guys do and still not be too low for the customer's demands so the big guy just spent a whole lot of money on something that failed to give him a competitive advantage. Meanwhile some companies find values that were traditionally ignored but are undershooting the customer (i.e. not up to the standard the customer would like and improvements are much appreciated) and improve them, resulting in a MASSIVE advantage. This is a disruption (actual business term) and it usually ends with the incumbents being driven out of the market while the newcomer becomes the new master.
Many people are apparently buying wii games at random, the effect being that most of the games for the wii are barely playable.
The data actually shows that sales are MORE concentrated on the Wii, most sales go to an even smaller number of games than usual (80% sales on 14% games, the usual values are 80-20). The few shovelware titles that managed breakthroughs did so because they did something people really wanted. AFAIK the sales of the shovelware are mostly really low and the market for it is so oversaturated (the developer of Carnival Games, a million-selling minigame collection said they wouldn't stand a chance in today's Wii market... yet they kept throwing money at more shovelware) that I wouldn't be surprised if they failed to sell enough to break even despite their low dev costs.
The whole situation has made third parties run around like headless chickens, only able to clone what others succeeded with and not realizing that they could at least clone games from other consoles instead of only what was released on the Wii. As it is they keep cloning a very small pool of games with no understanding of why the original game worked in first place and then act surprised as the result bombs. EA's Peter Moore seemed to have a recent realization of how to sell Wii games, namely thinking about what the customer demands from a game of that type and then dealing with those demands instead of just taking an existing formula (that was probably developed with those customer demands even if it was by accident and so long ago that noone remembers what exactly happened). Maybe it was triggered by Wii Fit where everybody could immediately understand why a customer would buy Wii Fit: Because they wanted to lose weight! By knowing the customer demands they were able to make their own fitness games that worked. If you don't understand WHY something was done you probably won't be successful at copying it.
Weren't anti-nuke measures cancelled during the cold war due to an international treaty banning them?
Also wouldn't one country having anti-nuke systems and noone else make a global thermonuclear war much more likely as it no longer becomes "everybody loses"?
What about going the really expensive route and making a stealth missile that the laser operator doesn't even know about until it separates from its payload?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if you're living under a rock but almost all major games have been moving towards online multiplayer instead of local multiplayer. Plenty of console games require one system per player too.
Go play them then but don't assume every one wants the same thing as you and don't live in the illusion that simplistic game play can cut it for the mass market today.
I think the only illusion here is that the more demanding customers form the mass market. They're the minority, it turns out that the mass market doesn't really need great stories and whatnot and is perfectly happy to play a game of tennis where you don't even control your character's leg movement.
The thing with the PC market is that it's fairly small and relying only on it when you've sunk a hundred million into your game is suicide. The number of people who have a PC that's gaming ready and care about having it is fairly low though there is a HUGE market of people who have a PC, don't care about its game readiness and want something simple to play. PopCap is serving that market.
Yeah, that analyst seems to forget the old adage about correlation and causation. China uses online and China has growth therefore online means growth? No, China grows by itself and it uses online because they can't get people to pay in any other way. Makes you wonder what kind of sucker hands this guy a paycheck for faulty reasoning like that.
They already do that to some degree but it's not enough and apparently you can't get very good talent over there currently (maybe because it all emigrates to western countries to get more money), usually the outsourcing to those countries is done for crappy ports to secondary systems and original games from the area tend not to do very well. I guess the best you can hope for in terms of cheap labor is eastern Europe.
That's pretty small for a game that appeared on every retail shelf in large amounts like the next big blockbuster.
I haven't paid the full 70€ for any "next" generation game so far, the most I paid for a game on the 360 was 45€ for Prototype, imported from the UK (and apparently they imported it from Korea if I recognize that font correctly). Other almost full-price games were Red Faction Guerilla which would have been 70€ had it not been for a deal of the week on Amazon and HAWX which was only 30€ because the store was going out of business. Yeah, I will stay away from the 70€ price even more when I know a game isn't great but so far I don't think I'd pay that even for the greatest games there are.
I certainly won't buy used at Gamestop, 5€ off is nowhere near enough of a discount for a used game. I'd rather wait for the new copies to fall to 30€ or less. If Gamestop wants my business on used games they should offer much bigger discounts.
For comparison the Wii's full game price of 50€ is much more acceptable.
I mean it takes the site as it is instead of reloading it.
Because punishment no longer deters when you've reached the maximum penalty. If you've done something that would warrant one year at most you aren't just casually going to do something that'll be five years.
The label that came to my mind was "SA" and I'm not talking about internet forums.
Since the people who hate him most are organized crime, you have no point.
We only know that the organized criminals are willing to use force to make their hatred known, we don't know if the law abiding citizens hate him any less or just have much higher restraint when it comes to assassinations.
Best example is World of Warcraft which rakes in over 100 million revenue per month but still the developer think they can get away with a retarder story a 3rd grader would make up.
They don't just think so, they can. Most customers don't really care about the quality of the story and will often games with no story at all (e.g. sports games).
As long as you make a profit that's good but most of the gaming industry is actually making losses.
Judging by the comments that followed a story on Games on Demand on Eurogamer it sounds like the entire UK has low caps (like 30GB). Of course the entirety of Australia has very low caps as well but AFAIK that market is only a few hundred thousand people.
Opera just freezes the page the way it was when you navigate away, that said I'm still using the old Slashdot interface so comments go on a separate page anyway.
The point of stealth until separation is that once the warheads separate they overwhelm any anti-missile defense and stealth no longer matters so you don't have to worry about the stealth coating not surviving reentry.
One glaring exception would be Wii Fit, depending on whether you want to count that as a pure game or not.
I think it's an important one. Wii Fit isn't just a game that manages to sell stupidly well without pricedrops a long time after its release and even sells consoles too, it's also a game that would be impossible to make online-only because of the balance board. As much as game publishers seem to love the idea of something like OnLive where you basically subscribe to a gaming broadcast Wii Fit would be a killer app against it. Peripherials can't be downloaded and Wii Fit cannot be done without the balance board (there are other fitness games but AFAIK they all come with at least one peripherial to get more data about your body movements). OnLive's promise of playing all games without upgrades is made impossible by games like Wii Fit.
You are not alone in that sentiment, in fact it looks like the vast majority wants a physical copy. In an interview even Shigeru Miyamoto (I think he holds a lot of sway on Nintendo's business decisions, not just game designs) said he wants a physical copy of things he downloads.
Going online-only isn't going to fix the financial woes of the gaming industry anyway, the problem is with the content (which is costing more and more to make while bringing in too little money), not the delivery method. Even if online reduces the overhead costs that's only a fixed growth, a one time spike that may delay the end for a few years but not going to prevent it. The only way to prevent it is to make costs go down (or at least stay level if you've got them down to a good level already) and sales go up. Sales don't go up by making the delivery cheaper, they go up by making the product more interesting to more people, i.e. expand the market. Companies that keep pushing unnecessary expenses like even better graphics while keeping their product's appeal more or less the same will implode from rising costs.
It's really not news though, apparently the percentage of households with a gaming system has remained unchanged over the last few generations and all growth was driven by population growth. If the population declines so will the core market for gaming. Doesn't help that core games are currently being made for a very narrow demographic and the demographic change in the upcoming years (i.e. the number of people in the age brackets below the target demographic) looks like that demographic is going to shrink massively.
Their main commodities don't get easier to reproduce but they are demanded less by customers. Most if not all core values of gaming have overshot the majority of customers, i.e. reached the point where they offer more than the customer demands. The big publishers may be better at driving these values but since they've overshot a smaller company can come along, make a game with lower core market values than the big guys do and still not be too low for the customer's demands so the big guy just spent a whole lot of money on something that failed to give him a competitive advantage. Meanwhile some companies find values that were traditionally ignored but are undershooting the customer (i.e. not up to the standard the customer would like and improvements are much appreciated) and improve them, resulting in a MASSIVE advantage. This is a disruption (actual business term) and it usually ends with the incumbents being driven out of the market while the newcomer becomes the new master.
Many people are apparently buying wii games at random, the effect being that most of the games for the wii are barely playable.
The data actually shows that sales are MORE concentrated on the Wii, most sales go to an even smaller number of games than usual (80% sales on 14% games, the usual values are 80-20). The few shovelware titles that managed breakthroughs did so because they did something people really wanted. AFAIK the sales of the shovelware are mostly really low and the market for it is so oversaturated (the developer of Carnival Games, a million-selling minigame collection said they wouldn't stand a chance in today's Wii market... yet they kept throwing money at more shovelware) that I wouldn't be surprised if they failed to sell enough to break even despite their low dev costs.
The whole situation has made third parties run around like headless chickens, only able to clone what others succeeded with and not realizing that they could at least clone games from other consoles instead of only what was released on the Wii. As it is they keep cloning a very small pool of games with no understanding of why the original game worked in first place and then act surprised as the result bombs. EA's Peter Moore seemed to have a recent realization of how to sell Wii games, namely thinking about what the customer demands from a game of that type and then dealing with those demands instead of just taking an existing formula (that was probably developed with those customer demands even if it was by accident and so long ago that noone remembers what exactly happened). Maybe it was triggered by Wii Fit where everybody could immediately understand why a customer would buy Wii Fit: Because they wanted to lose weight! By knowing the customer demands they were able to make their own fitness games that worked. If you don't understand WHY something was done you probably won't be successful at copying it.
Oh and maybe I shouldn't amend my posts that often but here is a good description of the attack process in a disruption.
If you like a source with less unconventional writing there's this one though it doesn't go into the basics of what disruption means.
there has been 'significant disruption' to the games industry's business model.
Yes and it's called the Wii.
Weren't anti-nuke measures cancelled during the cold war due to an international treaty banning them?
Also wouldn't one country having anti-nuke systems and noone else make a global thermonuclear war much more likely as it no longer becomes "everybody loses"?
What about going the really expensive route and making a stealth missile that the laser operator doesn't even know about until it separates from its payload?