Let's see... as of right now, the total contributed is $1,030,536, and the total number of contributions is 113,838, making the average contribution $9.05 for a bundle of four games (5 if the people who purchased the bundle before Penumbra was added still get it).
An executive at EA just blew his nose on $1,030,536. They are not interested.
it is generally not the responsibility of somebody else to make sure that material they are not responsible for does not wind up in places it doesn't belong.
Actually, this is a great idea. Let's make every YouTube user responsible for policing themselves. If they upload infringing material, they can issue themselves a takedown request, respond to themselves with a fair use claim, and then sue themselves for copyright infringement. Look how streamlined this makes the process: The publishers won't have to lift a finger! They should be paying me for coming up with such great ideas.
That's one reason digital distribution makes sense: it pushes the value of a copy close to zero (as opposed to now, where you have to pay for packaging, shipping and shelf space), and makes payment truly represent a *license*, not a *copy*. Are licenses meaningless too? If so, how do you suggest that the people who spent time making the software be compensated?
Well, of course it's stupid to pay if that's the case, but it's not really the case for Nintendo. I'm assuming that "better alternative" refers to free software, as opposed to piracy of software that is not free.
"Hardcore" gamers bitching about shovelware and casual games should realize that rampant piracy makes developing a multimillion dollar blockbuster look a lot less attractive. It's a much better financial proposition to create low-budget games that cater to people who are less likely to pirate them.
Yeah, but that image doesn't show the part where you have to figure out what BitTorrent is, what a client is, figure out how to get, install, configure and run a client, reliably find what you want, extract and decompress it, find software that can burn it to a disc and then get it to actually do that - and then find out if what you got was actually a copy of the movie you wanted to see.
To an average consumer, buying a physical disc is easy. It's at the store, just like everything else, and doesn't require you to do anything you don't know how to do. Same goes for iTunes: click here, get iTunes, and searching in the search bar returns big friendly splash screens with listings, not screens full of XxX- WarezDePoT Avatar XviD Scnr RIP multisub FULL -XxX.rar.
The "money paid" was paid to enter into an expiring contract for provision of a service - a service that Microsoft is free to terminate. Now that the service is being terminated, people using Xbox Live solely to play OXbox games like Halo 2 no longer need to pay for it.
Halo 2 still works just fine, and no one is taking away the ability to use it.
Except it *doesn't* resolve the issue, because lots and lots of other people buy into it every day. As more people do, it becomes more OK for companies to pull this kind of crap. It's a tyranny-of-the-majority problem - competitors will look at the walled garden model, see that its working (obviously the people want it, right? Look at iPhone sales!), and emulate it. Quality and integration on the platform goes up (as well as sales), and freedom goes down.
Look, I'm not RMS, parading for information to be free in every situation, nor can I say I wage war every day against the erosion of privacy. I don't want to make it sound like the apocalypse is coming. All I'm saying is that if people continue to buy into this model and make it successful, other major corporations that can throw their weight around will make their own walled gardens, with their own subjective moral rules and guidelines. Steve says go to Android if you want porn... what if Google sets up their own app store and review process? Yeah, I know they can do no wrong, but neither could Apple in the eyes of Apple developers just a few years ago, and now those developers are screaming about the fact that it's Apple's way or the highway - and Apple did it because it's so clearly what consumers wanted, otherwise they wouldn't be buying into it.
There may be an app for everything, but if we're not careful, there may not be any platform that lets many of those apps into their walled gardens, if we keep supporting this model.
"We do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone."
Apple's only moral responsibility is to let their users do whatever they feel like, and they have failed.
The "Apple cult" image tossed around as a joke and an insult is becoming more and more true every day. You can't simply buy a device from Apple - you have to buy their device, their software, their platform, and their tastes, desires and morals too, and once you do, you can't separate any of them. This isn't vendor lock-in, it's religion.
The biggest problem with *anything* is user education. The problem with user education is that users don't care and have other things to worry about, which is incidentally the same reason that long or complex passwords like "mydAught3rwAsbOrnInmArch" get written down on post-its stuck to monitors.
I wonder if this will have an effect on "Web 2.0". For a while we have been moving quickly towards the idea that it's just as easy to publish and share information as it is to consume it. If these types of devices that have no keyboards and no capabilities for uploading images or video start to become more favored than traditional devices, I wonder if that will start to change. Sure, you could still go to your PC and get that experience, but if everyone is content to simply use their iPad, I wonder if they'll just get lazy and say "forget it."
I don't think it's always resistance to change. I frequently experiment with new ways of keeping my life organized and I almost always end up coming back to a system that involves paper, stickies or notecards, at least in part. Outlook tasks and calendar entries definitely have their place, especially when your whole office is using them, but it often helps me to have notes take up physical space in my life. After a long period of trying to deny it and "go paperless," I finally admitted to myself that spatial organization was incredibly effective and I needed to take advantage of it.
I tried the Hipster PDA when I was in college and ended up ditching it because I didn't have enough actionable items to track to make it worth it, but my current job is full of little things to remember and act on, and I find it incredibly useful to have everything on cards - I can thumb through them, spread them out, sort them, organize them, etc. I can take the card for what I'm currently working on and put it next to me and help helps me focus a bit.
I love tools like Outlook and especially OneNote, but I find that when things get stressful or when I have lower-priority items, those tools become dumpsters for information that I drop things into and never sort or see again. My notecards are bite-sized pieces that I can organize how I like on a whim.
What it sounds like you want is to have it both ways - connectivity AND privacy.
I'd say that's what we all want, but I think we've come to the realization that it's not possible. If you want privacy, unplug. If you want connectivity, you pay in part by giving up your privacy, just like you do when you walk around in a public area.
It seems most people have found that the middle ground is acceptable, though. We don't need to be Shadowrunners, at least not yet.
In any case, your phrase, "If I'm a student paying to attend your class and hear your lecture", reveals a lot about your perspective. I don't see my job as a simple transaction between a willing buyer and a seller of information. I don't know any faculty feel that way either. If that is all the job was there would be no point in it, you can read more books and articles than I can ever cover.
I don't feel that way either; if I did I wouldn't be coming to a lecture, and I would be spending my time reading those books and articles instead. I go to lectures because I want to hear what the speaker has to say, in the way he has to say it, and to have a focused learning time where I can direct my attention to someone who really knows their stuff.
Don't get me wrong - inspiring students is an important part of teaching, and the world is better for all the teachers out there who are good at it. I prefer to attend lectures with speakers that know how to speak and teach, not just regurgitate slides. I know that teachers like this have helped me along my way and changed my perspective on things. I guess my point was that if I'm in a university, working my ass off, paying my own way, and I'm one of the students who is fully engaged and ready to get after it, it feels a little unfair to end up in a lecture with rules designed to cater to students that can't really decide whether or not they want to be there, at my expense.
By all means, teach and inspire. But don't force your motivated students to chisel their notes into stone tablets, regardless of whether or not they can succeed while doing it, and tell them it's for the sake of the kids that can't put their distractions away when it's go time.
many tend to type up whatever is on the board and then go back to surfing the web, playing games, etc.
those with low self control
If I'm a student paying to attend your class and hear your lecture, "those with low self control" are not my problem. I come into your class to learn and all I ask is that you let me use the tools that I have in order to do so as best as I can.
Can I take notes without a laptop? Yes, and I can be effective with them too. And I understand that it's hypocritical of me to say "students who have trouble using laptops in class should learn to resist distractions better" and ignore the fact that someone could just as easily say to me "you should learn to take better notes with pen and paper" and be just as justified. However, I'm part of the group that's there to listen and learn and I want to use a tool that's going to maximize my effectiveness. Other students in this group that are distracted by laptops will put them away or not bring them. The rest will be distracted, laptops or no, and they show up to copy off of the board. It may or may not be your job to teach them that that's not going to work, in your classroom or in life, but do you really want to cater to them at the expense of the others?
Not everyone learns and retains information the same way as you.
If you were to look at me attending a lecture, I can tell you that if I'm keeping my eyes on the prof's face for the whole lecture, I'm essentially asleep with my eyes open. If I'm taking notes, I'm processing what he's saying.
If I'm taking notes on a laptop, triply so, because I can type fast enough to essentially have a conversation with myself. If I'm doing 100 WPM on a laptop instead of being chained to a pen and paper, I'm restating ideas in different language and making analogies. I'm making the connection, having the 'aha' moment if you will, which is likely a state I am going to fall out of as I leave class. When I read the pages of notes I have later on, I can rebuild that scaffolding in my mind and find my way back there. When I do, I'll take notes on my notes or work example problems to strengthen my connection to that state for that specific topic and make it more permanent.
This is how I take notes and learn from lectures: lots and lots of words, stating and restating ideas, over and over, to "save state." Eventually, by working enough while in that state, I don't have to manually load it anymore.
Do I read the textbook too, and learn from it? Of course I do. That's another kind of studying altogether, not necessarily better or worse than lectures (although it may be for some people). Lecture, for me, is one type of learning/study, and I get the most out of it by taking copious notes.
Of course publishers understand that viewpoint. The fact that you feel that way is the reason they put DRM on the game! "Fine, it's yours", they say, "but we're going to take every technical measure possible to prevent you from doing what we don't want you to do with it."
DRM never works as intended, of course, but when big corporations hear their customers say things like what you just said, do you really think their reaction is going to be, "oh, we understand how you feel - here, have our software completely unprotected and do what you want with it. Our feelings won't be hurt if you 'forget' to pay after 'demoing' it, or 'loan' it to a friend."
Of course, if publishers would use a little *reason* there wouldn't be an issue, but it's never that simple. These companies exist to make money and they are run by people who want to sell product, and don't want it to be distributed for free. When your game is pirated all around the internet, do you want to be the product lead that says to the CEO "we topped the industry standards for DRM with the best technology available and they still beat it; we'll keep working on it", or the one that says "well, yeah, we didn't put any copy protection on it"?
I definitely understand the need for handwritten notes when drawings or mathematics input is required, but typing in an app like OneNote does offer many advantages:
-First and foremost, for standard text, typing. I type around 100 wpm, and even my slow handwriting is chickenscratch. Handwriting being "a little slow" is a massive understatement for anyone who can touch-type. -Model is based on a set of notebooks: easy to organize how you like. -Supports an invisible sharing/versioning system: put a notebook on a share and access it from anywhere, even simultaneously, and changes are all synced and nothing is lost, even if they are are made offline. -Physical bookmarks functionality is beaten by tagging, which not only allows you to mark specific paragraphs in specific pages, but classify them as well. One kind of bookmark is even a checkbox that can be checked/unchecked. Plus, the app offers a sorted/filtered list of all tags: want to see all unchecked boxes or all stars in every notebook? Takes two or three clicks. You can have to-dos scattered everywhere and bring them up all in the same pane. Comes out of the box with tons of tags defined and you can define your own. Highlighting counts as tagging as well. -Can be backed up digitally (saved in a number of formats), emailed and/or printed. -Storage is a snap: A OneNote notebook is a folder full of OneNote files. Obviously, since you're not working with paper, there's no real physical storage limitation.
If you've got a tablet, OneNote natively supports ink as well, and will do OCR on it so you can include the image in text search or extract the text from it, as well as on any other image you care to paste into it.
OneNote is an app that doesn't sound like it has a ton of groundbreaking features, but they all come together and are presented in such a way that makes OneNote much more powerful than something like Notepad++.
It's really pretty simple: people who play games are demanding more for their $60 - more playtime, more engrossing experiences, more replayability, more choices and more customization. Think of all the games on the market now... a hippity-hop 2D platformer can be a pretty hard sell for 50 or 60 bucks when there are games right next to it that promise expansive environments, customization, tons of playtime, etc. The easiest way to make a game more complex and cover all those traits in one fell swoop is to toss in a leveling system and some kind of skill tree or progression. It makes a game more multifaceted and provides a "meta-game" that sits underneath the pew-pew-pew on the screen. Technology has also made it easier to create no-loading open-world environments as opposed to static levels, which play very nicely with RPG elements because passing by areas you can't reach and enemies too strong for you to kill is interesting and makes you want to come back later.
And why are these games trending toward being first-person shooters? Well, if you want a three-dimensional, open world experience with a free-roaming character, there are really only two places you can put the camera: inside the player-character's head, or outside of it. I guess developers have simply found that third person cameras don't add a lot to the experience (who wants to look at their character's ass for 40 hours - then again, this may explain the rise of female player-characters), they are hard to program, and they don't feel as controllable or as precise as first-person viewpoints.
So if it all comes down to the price point, which I alluded to in my opening sentence, then where are the cheaper, less complex games? They're on XBox Live, PSN and the VC store, where they get little attention from casual gamers because they're not advertised and they're too hard to find, no attention from "hardcore" gamers because they're "casual games" that are too simplistic and not worth the money, and ignored by the media because they're not blockbusters and no one wants to read the reviews. Welcome to the games industry.
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He should sue the music industry for distributing the music in the first place. After all, if they hadn't sold it, it wouldn't be available to steal.
Then, the industry can turn around and sue the musician for the same thing.
Let's see... as of right now, the total contributed is $1,030,536, and the total number of contributions is 113,838, making the average contribution $9.05 for a bundle of four games (5 if the people who purchased the bundle before Penumbra was added still get it).
An executive at EA just blew his nose on $1,030,536. They are not interested.
it is generally not the responsibility of somebody else to make sure that material they are not responsible for does not wind up in places it doesn't belong.
Actually, this is a great idea. Let's make every YouTube user responsible for policing themselves. If they upload infringing material, they can issue themselves a takedown request, respond to themselves with a fair use claim, and then sue themselves for copyright infringement. Look how streamlined this makes the process: The publishers won't have to lift a finger! They should be paying me for coming up with such great ideas.
If the games are too expensive and don't offer enough replayability, rental is a good option. Try Gamefly.
As for a console that could download $10-$15 games: XBox Live Arcade is fantastic.
That's one reason digital distribution makes sense: it pushes the value of a copy close to zero (as opposed to now, where you have to pay for packaging, shipping and shelf space), and makes payment truly represent a *license*, not a *copy*. Are licenses meaningless too? If so, how do you suggest that the people who spent time making the software be compensated?
When better alternatives (IMHO, obviously) exist
Well, of course it's stupid to pay if that's the case, but it's not really the case for Nintendo. I'm assuming that "better alternative" refers to free software, as opposed to piracy of software that is not free.
Mod parent up.
"Hardcore" gamers bitching about shovelware and casual games should realize that rampant piracy makes developing a multimillion dollar blockbuster look a lot less attractive. It's a much better financial proposition to create low-budget games that cater to people who are less likely to pirate them.
Yeah, but that image doesn't show the part where you have to figure out what BitTorrent is, what a client is, figure out how to get, install, configure and run a client, reliably find what you want, extract and decompress it, find software that can burn it to a disc and then get it to actually do that - and then find out if what you got was actually a copy of the movie you wanted to see.
To an average consumer, buying a physical disc is easy. It's at the store, just like everything else, and doesn't require you to do anything you don't know how to do. Same goes for iTunes: click here, get iTunes, and searching in the search bar returns big friendly splash screens with listings, not screens full of XxX- WarezDePoT Avatar XviD Scnr RIP multisub FULL -XxX.rar.
The "money paid" was paid to enter into an expiring contract for provision of a service - a service that Microsoft is free to terminate. Now that the service is being terminated, people using Xbox Live solely to play OXbox games like Halo 2 no longer need to pay for it.
Halo 2 still works just fine, and no one is taking away the ability to use it.
Except it *doesn't* resolve the issue, because lots and lots of other people buy into it every day. As more people do, it becomes more OK for companies to pull this kind of crap. It's a tyranny-of-the-majority problem - competitors will look at the walled garden model, see that its working (obviously the people want it, right? Look at iPhone sales!), and emulate it. Quality and integration on the platform goes up (as well as sales), and freedom goes down.
Look, I'm not RMS, parading for information to be free in every situation, nor can I say I wage war every day against the erosion of privacy. I don't want to make it sound like the apocalypse is coming. All I'm saying is that if people continue to buy into this model and make it successful, other major corporations that can throw their weight around will make their own walled gardens, with their own subjective moral rules and guidelines. Steve says go to Android if you want porn... what if Google sets up their own app store and review process? Yeah, I know they can do no wrong, but neither could Apple in the eyes of Apple developers just a few years ago, and now those developers are screaming about the fact that it's Apple's way or the highway - and Apple did it because it's so clearly what consumers wanted, otherwise they wouldn't be buying into it.
There may be an app for everything, but if we're not careful, there may not be any platform that lets many of those apps into their walled gardens, if we keep supporting this model.
"We do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone."
Apple's only moral responsibility is to let their users do whatever they feel like, and they have failed.
The "Apple cult" image tossed around as a joke and an insult is becoming more and more true every day. You can't simply buy a device from Apple - you have to buy their device, their software, their platform, and their tastes, desires and morals too, and once you do, you can't separate any of them. This isn't vendor lock-in, it's religion.
Now my mom's basement will be perfect
How so? Don't carriers require you to pay through the nose for SMS, where IM would be part of the data connection you already pay for?
The biggest problem with *anything* is user education. The problem with user education is that users don't care and have other things to worry about, which is incidentally the same reason that long or complex passwords like "mydAught3rwAsbOrnInmArch" get written down on post-its stuck to monitors.
I wonder if this will have an effect on "Web 2.0". For a while we have been moving quickly towards the idea that it's just as easy to publish and share information as it is to consume it. If these types of devices that have no keyboards and no capabilities for uploading images or video start to become more favored than traditional devices, I wonder if that will start to change. Sure, you could still go to your PC and get that experience, but if everyone is content to simply use their iPad, I wonder if they'll just get lazy and say "forget it."
Yeah, same here. "Light world/dark world" with some stuff that can be manipulated in either.
I don't think it's always resistance to change. I frequently experiment with new ways of keeping my life organized and I almost always end up coming back to a system that involves paper, stickies or notecards, at least in part. Outlook tasks and calendar entries definitely have their place, especially when your whole office is using them, but it often helps me to have notes take up physical space in my life. After a long period of trying to deny it and "go paperless," I finally admitted to myself that spatial organization was incredibly effective and I needed to take advantage of it.
I tried the Hipster PDA when I was in college and ended up ditching it because I didn't have enough actionable items to track to make it worth it, but my current job is full of little things to remember and act on, and I find it incredibly useful to have everything on cards - I can thumb through them, spread them out, sort them, organize them, etc. I can take the card for what I'm currently working on and put it next to me and help helps me focus a bit.
I love tools like Outlook and especially OneNote, but I find that when things get stressful or when I have lower-priority items, those tools become dumpsters for information that I drop things into and never sort or see again. My notecards are bite-sized pieces that I can organize how I like on a whim.
What it sounds like you want is to have it both ways - connectivity AND privacy.
I'd say that's what we all want, but I think we've come to the realization that it's not possible. If you want privacy, unplug. If you want connectivity, you pay in part by giving up your privacy, just like you do when you walk around in a public area.
It seems most people have found that the middle ground is acceptable, though. We don't need to be Shadowrunners, at least not yet.
In any case, your phrase, "If I'm a student paying to attend your class and hear your lecture", reveals a lot about your perspective. I don't see my job as a simple transaction between a willing buyer and a seller of information. I don't know any faculty feel that way either. If that is all the job was there would be no point in it, you can read more books and articles than I can ever cover.
I don't feel that way either; if I did I wouldn't be coming to a lecture, and I would be spending my time reading those books and articles instead. I go to lectures because I want to hear what the speaker has to say, in the way he has to say it, and to have a focused learning time where I can direct my attention to someone who really knows their stuff.
Don't get me wrong - inspiring students is an important part of teaching, and the world is better for all the teachers out there who are good at it. I prefer to attend lectures with speakers that know how to speak and teach, not just regurgitate slides. I know that teachers like this have helped me along my way and changed my perspective on things. I guess my point was that if I'm in a university, working my ass off, paying my own way, and I'm one of the students who is fully engaged and ready to get after it, it feels a little unfair to end up in a lecture with rules designed to cater to students that can't really decide whether or not they want to be there, at my expense.
By all means, teach and inspire. But don't force your motivated students to chisel their notes into stone tablets, regardless of whether or not they can succeed while doing it, and tell them it's for the sake of the kids that can't put their distractions away when it's go time.
Amen. Cater to the students who are there to learn and let them use their tools as long as they're not distracting others. Ignore the rest.
many tend to type up whatever is on the board and then go back to surfing the web, playing games, etc.
those with low self control
If I'm a student paying to attend your class and hear your lecture, "those with low self control" are not my problem. I come into your class to learn and all I ask is that you let me use the tools that I have in order to do so as best as I can.
Can I take notes without a laptop? Yes, and I can be effective with them too. And I understand that it's hypocritical of me to say "students who have trouble using laptops in class should learn to resist distractions better" and ignore the fact that someone could just as easily say to me "you should learn to take better notes with pen and paper" and be just as justified. However, I'm part of the group that's there to listen and learn and I want to use a tool that's going to maximize my effectiveness. Other students in this group that are distracted by laptops will put them away or not bring them. The rest will be distracted, laptops or no, and they show up to copy off of the board. It may or may not be your job to teach them that that's not going to work, in your classroom or in life, but do you really want to cater to them at the expense of the others?
Not everyone learns and retains information the same way as you.
If you were to look at me attending a lecture, I can tell you that if I'm keeping my eyes on the prof's face for the whole lecture, I'm essentially asleep with my eyes open. If I'm taking notes, I'm processing what he's saying.
If I'm taking notes on a laptop, triply so, because I can type fast enough to essentially have a conversation with myself. If I'm doing 100 WPM on a laptop instead of being chained to a pen and paper, I'm restating ideas in different language and making analogies. I'm making the connection, having the 'aha' moment if you will, which is likely a state I am going to fall out of as I leave class. When I read the pages of notes I have later on, I can rebuild that scaffolding in my mind and find my way back there. When I do, I'll take notes on my notes or work example problems to strengthen my connection to that state for that specific topic and make it more permanent.
This is how I take notes and learn from lectures: lots and lots of words, stating and restating ideas, over and over, to "save state." Eventually, by working enough while in that state, I don't have to manually load it anymore.
Do I read the textbook too, and learn from it? Of course I do. That's another kind of studying altogether, not necessarily better or worse than lectures (although it may be for some people). Lecture, for me, is one type of learning/study, and I get the most out of it by taking copious notes.
Of course publishers understand that viewpoint. The fact that you feel that way is the reason they put DRM on the game! "Fine, it's yours", they say, "but we're going to take every technical measure possible to prevent you from doing what we don't want you to do with it."
DRM never works as intended, of course, but when big corporations hear their customers say things like what you just said, do you really think their reaction is going to be, "oh, we understand how you feel - here, have our software completely unprotected and do what you want with it. Our feelings won't be hurt if you 'forget' to pay after 'demoing' it, or 'loan' it to a friend."
Of course, if publishers would use a little *reason* there wouldn't be an issue, but it's never that simple. These companies exist to make money and they are run by people who want to sell product, and don't want it to be distributed for free. When your game is pirated all around the internet, do you want to be the product lead that says to the CEO "we topped the industry standards for DRM with the best technology available and they still beat it; we'll keep working on it", or the one that says "well, yeah, we didn't put any copy protection on it"?
I definitely understand the need for handwritten notes when drawings or mathematics input is required, but typing in an app like OneNote does offer many advantages:
-First and foremost, for standard text, typing. I type around 100 wpm, and even my slow handwriting is chickenscratch. Handwriting being "a little slow" is a massive understatement for anyone who can touch-type.
-Model is based on a set of notebooks: easy to organize how you like.
-Supports an invisible sharing/versioning system: put a notebook on a share and access it from anywhere, even simultaneously, and changes are all synced and nothing is lost, even if they are are made offline.
-Physical bookmarks functionality is beaten by tagging, which not only allows you to mark specific paragraphs in specific pages, but classify them as well. One kind of bookmark is even a checkbox that can be checked/unchecked. Plus, the app offers a sorted/filtered list of all tags: want to see all unchecked boxes or all stars in every notebook? Takes two or three clicks. You can have to-dos scattered everywhere and bring them up all in the same pane. Comes out of the box with tons of tags defined and you can define your own. Highlighting counts as tagging as well.
-Can be backed up digitally (saved in a number of formats), emailed and/or printed.
-Storage is a snap: A OneNote notebook is a folder full of OneNote files. Obviously, since you're not working with paper, there's no real physical storage limitation.
If you've got a tablet, OneNote natively supports ink as well, and will do OCR on it so you can include the image in text search or extract the text from it, as well as on any other image you care to paste into it.
OneNote is an app that doesn't sound like it has a ton of groundbreaking features, but they all come together and are presented in such a way that makes OneNote much more powerful than something like Notepad++.
It's really pretty simple: people who play games are demanding more for their $60 - more playtime, more engrossing experiences, more replayability, more choices and more customization. Think of all the games on the market now... a hippity-hop 2D platformer can be a pretty hard sell for 50 or 60 bucks when there are games right next to it that promise expansive environments, customization, tons of playtime, etc. The easiest way to make a game more complex and cover all those traits in one fell swoop is to toss in a leveling system and some kind of skill tree or progression. It makes a game more multifaceted and provides a "meta-game" that sits underneath the pew-pew-pew on the screen. Technology has also made it easier to create no-loading open-world environments as opposed to static levels, which play very nicely with RPG elements because passing by areas you can't reach and enemies too strong for you to kill is interesting and makes you want to come back later.
And why are these games trending toward being first-person shooters? Well, if you want a three-dimensional, open world experience with a free-roaming character, there are really only two places you can put the camera: inside the player-character's head, or outside of it. I guess developers have simply found that third person cameras don't add a lot to the experience (who wants to look at their character's ass for 40 hours - then again, this may explain the rise of female player-characters), they are hard to program, and they don't feel as controllable or as precise as first-person viewpoints.
So if it all comes down to the price point, which I alluded to in my opening sentence, then where are the cheaper, less complex games? They're on XBox Live, PSN and the VC store, where they get little attention from casual gamers because they're not advertised and they're too hard to find, no attention from "hardcore" gamers because they're "casual games" that are too simplistic and not worth the money, and ignored by the media because they're not blockbusters and no one wants to read the reviews. Welcome to the games industry.