One huge variable will be the number of their friends who are excited about the release.
Are you in marketing? Because claims like that just sound really weird to me. If anyone had asked me I'd have said 99% of the decision would come down to the prospective purchaser's views on first person shooters. Like 'em? Then clearly you want Halo 3. Don't like 'em? Then clearly you don't want Halo 3 (even if it has a great story).
This particular campaign seems even more questionable to me. Not only is it targeting the online hardcore who will already doubtless know about the product, it also seems to me that amongst the small subset of players worth targeting interest in ARGs wouldn't correlate all that well with interest in Halo 3.
Even worse, they probably have to sell an entire XBox 360 to any would-be customer as well, since it seems even less likely that someone would already own a 360, be playing the ARG, yet not know about Halo 3 (and already have a clear idea of whether or not it's for them).
That sounds to me like the approximate number of people who self-identify as Anglican via the census. How many of those do you think actually go near a church more than twice a year? (Hint: in the same census, 390000 people self-identified as Jedi!)
Actually likely impact of Anglican wrath on Sony sales: approximately zero.
Whilst I completely agree with your points here it's worth noting that depending on exactly what the poster's colleagues are going to be working on, decent support for any of this stuff may not be needed. How often to projects really require Pantone accuracy in their colour reproduction?
A good print service should be able to take input in any non-stupid format and use that as the starting point for a Photoshop workflow. Indeed, most print services I've worked with wouldn't expect customers - even customers in creative fields - to screw around with the technical details themselves.
The main pitfall for non-experts producing artwork for print is resolution. Again and again I run into people not understanding that things which look great on their big screens are still going to look pixelly when printed out on A1 board.
But, when that happens get used to skyrocketing prices
Which is puzzling to me. Why does one "cheap supplier" experiencing local trouble cause such dramatic problems? Shouldn't market forces cause another supplier to step in to the opportunity created and sell at a price that is almost as low?
Re:"consumer products" only
on
GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
Doh - too slow!
Re:"consumer products" only
on
GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
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· Score: 0, Redundant
From the article:
The ban on tivoization applies to any product whose use by consumers, even occasionally, is to be expected. GPLv3 tolerates tivoization only for products that are almost exclusively meant for businesses and organizations. (The latest draft of GPLv3 states this criterion explicitly.)
I live in London and that's certainly not been my experience of things.
On the other hand, the example is a bit contrived. Armed burglary accounts for a tiny fraction of all burglaries (most of which are over long before the police get there anyway and, based on anecdotal evidence, usually happen when the residents of the property are out).
Most of the gun crime here involves gangs and drugs. And in fact the police aren't too happy over their capacity to deal with all this and regularly complain that they want more armed officers. (See this BBC report from 2004 for more details.)
Re:How about some actual commentary on the game?
on
LittleBigInterview
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· Score: 1
If Slashdot and Digg both go the way of MySpace, where am I going to get REAL news discussion?
If you're worried about a tide of braindead new users turning up here just write a GreaseMonkey script to strip out all comments from users with seven digit SlashDot user numbers!
Of course, the resulting threads might not make a lot of sense... but that won't be anything new.
Who said anything about free content? And who's disputing their IP ownership? All I was pointing out was that there is no free market for these add-on tracks.
What they are doing is not illegal or anything like that, but it is a monopoly. If you don't think so, perhaps you'd be kind enough to link me to the dictionary you're using?
No, it's not a free market. Only Red Octane can create these packs. That's a monopoly.
It's true that nobody's forced to buy them, but the annoyance is caused by the fact that people knew these packs would exist and were expecting a lower price point.
I'm not quite sure if you're joking or not, but just for clarity: no - in the grand scheme of things only technical people reinstall Windows. I realise standards are differnet round here, but Windows is also used by plenty of people who call tech support if their USB mouse comes unplugged.
Windows gets installed mostly by OEMs (and overwhelmingly so outside industry).
Given that Dell now ship machines with a variety of Linux distros preinstalled (http://www.dell.com/linux) I don't think installation from scratch is a major factor in ease of use anymore.
You'd better give us some more about how much better Ubuntu is comparing to SuSe
That's an interesting thing about Microsoft and Google, though, isn't it? After years of Microsoft-vs-Linux and occasional Microsoft-vs-Apple a lot of the geek tribal mindshare now seems to have shifted across to cheering for Google.
I consider myself a Linux fanboi in general, but the more time passes the more I find myself losing interest in OS wars and caring more about applications. Quite frequently I boot my desktop machine into Windows XP and spend the day mostly running Firefox, emacs and Cygwin because it's easier that way than trying to run the occasional Windows-only app on Debian (via Wine or whatever).
So if it's all about applications now it becomes clearer why Google are so popular. Search, mail, maps, documents... a lot of their stuff seems well designed and easy to use. Oh, plus it's cleverly funded so I don't pay anything. Compare with MS Office which is expensive, bloated and often hard to use.
Whether Microsoft can compete (yes, almost certainly) with that feature list depends a lot on the quality of the co-op play.
It seems to me there is great demand for co-op in many genres, but it's difficult to do well. The trouble being that you need to support singleplayer and it's too expensive to do another entire game for co-op, so you end up tweaking the singleplayer and hoping that's good enough.
If God of War 3 does this well and really is an exclusive for PS3, the main thing that will do is irritate people who don't want to buy PS3s. Microsoft, I imagine, will be relatively indifferent.
Slashdot Mirror
Nintendo also require the developer to foot the bill for ESRB testing.
The ESRB's website doesn't publish costs for that, but it's a fair bet that will also be well over the cost of the dev kit.
This particular campaign seems even more questionable to me. Not only is it targeting the online hardcore who will already doubtless know about the product, it also seems to me that amongst the small subset of players worth targeting interest in ARGs wouldn't correlate all that well with interest in Halo 3.
Even worse, they probably have to sell an entire XBox 360 to any would-be customer as well, since it seems even less likely that someone would already own a 360, be playing the ARG, yet not know about Halo 3 (and already have a clear idea of whether or not it's for them).
Interesting. So what you're saying is that you find it's not actually slower if the machine has sufficient memory? What apps do you use regularly?
Still, I suppose it could be argued that using 4x as much memory is also a disadvantage.
Seconded. Not only that, it's viral marketing for a pretty evil product.
That's Christian, not C of E. Even the C of E's own figures don't claim anything like that many.
Three million?!
That sounds to me like the approximate number of people who self-identify as Anglican via the census. How many of those do you think actually go near a church more than twice a year? (Hint: in the same census, 390000 people self-identified as Jedi!)
Actually likely impact of Anglican wrath on Sony sales: approximately zero.
Whilst I completely agree with your points here it's worth noting that depending on exactly what the poster's colleagues are going to be working on, decent support for any of this stuff may not be needed. How often to projects really require Pantone accuracy in their colour reproduction?
A good print service should be able to take input in any non-stupid format and use that as the starting point for a Photoshop workflow. Indeed, most print services I've worked with wouldn't expect customers - even customers in creative fields - to screw around with the technical details themselves.
The main pitfall for non-experts producing artwork for print is resolution. Again and again I run into people not understanding that things which look great on their big screens are still going to look pixelly when printed out on A1 board.
Doh - too slow!
I live in London and that's certainly not been my experience of things.
On the other hand, the example is a bit contrived. Armed burglary accounts for a tiny fraction of all burglaries (most of which are over long before the police get there anyway and, based on anecdotal evidence, usually happen when the residents of the property are out).
Most of the gun crime here involves gangs and drugs. And in fact the police aren't too happy over their capacity to deal with all this and regularly complain that they want more armed officers. (See this BBC report from 2004 for more details.)
...and also people with smaller hands.
I find even the small XBox 360 controllers quite nasty, but the Dual Shock is just right for me, I could use it for hours (and frequently do).
If the analogue sticks were a bit better it might come close to being my perfect controller. As it is I find it's merely the best so far.
Wow, that Japan regional result is pretty striking.
Also of some interest is what happens when you replace PS3 with PS2.
If Slashdot and Digg both go the way of MySpace, where am I going to get REAL news discussion?
If you're worried about a tide of braindead new users turning up here just write a GreaseMonkey script to strip out all comments from users with seven digit SlashDot user numbers!
Of course, the resulting threads might not make a lot of sense... but that won't be anything new.
What?! Mod +4 Insightful... surely, surely that should be "Funny". Please tell me nobody took that seriously?!
Of course, once they make a video game console you can have sex with, the human race is doomed to extinction.
So are you saying you fancy your XBox 360?
There are plenty of inanimate objects you could theoretically have sex with. Personally, I prefer the real thing. I don't think we're all doomed yet.
Who said anything about free content? And who's disputing their IP ownership? All I was pointing out was that there is no free market for these add-on tracks.
What they are doing is not illegal or anything like that, but it is a monopoly. If you don't think so, perhaps you'd be kind enough to link me to the dictionary you're using?
No, it's not a free market. Only Red Octane can create these packs. That's a monopoly.
It's true that nobody's forced to buy them, but the annoyance is caused by the fact that people knew these packs would exist and were expecting a lower price point.
I'm not quite sure if you're joking or not, but just for clarity: no - in the grand scheme of things only technical people reinstall Windows. I realise standards are differnet round here, but Windows is also used by plenty of people who call tech support if their USB mouse comes unplugged.
Windows gets installed mostly by OEMs (and overwhelmingly so outside industry).
Given that Dell now ship machines with a variety of Linux distros preinstalled (http://www.dell.com/linux) I don't think installation from scratch is a major factor in ease of use anymore.
You'd better give us some more about how much better Ubuntu is comparing to SuSe
That's an interesting thing about Microsoft and Google, though, isn't it? After years of Microsoft-vs-Linux and occasional Microsoft-vs-Apple a lot of the geek tribal mindshare now seems to have shifted across to cheering for Google.
I consider myself a Linux fanboi in general, but the more time passes the more I find myself losing interest in OS wars and caring more about applications. Quite frequently I boot my desktop machine into Windows XP and spend the day mostly running Firefox, emacs and Cygwin because it's easier that way than trying to run the occasional Windows-only app on Debian (via Wine or whatever).
So if it's all about applications now it becomes clearer why Google are so popular. Search, mail, maps, documents... a lot of their stuff seems well designed and easy to use. Oh, plus it's cleverly funded so I don't pay anything. Compare with MS Office which is expensive, bloated and often hard to use.
Whether Microsoft can compete (yes, almost certainly) with that feature list depends a lot on the quality of the co-op play.
It seems to me there is great demand for co-op in many genres, but it's difficult to do well. The trouble being that you need to support singleplayer and it's too expensive to do another entire game for co-op, so you end up tweaking the singleplayer and hoping that's good enough.
If God of War 3 does this well and really is an exclusive for PS3, the main thing that will do is irritate people who don't want to buy PS3s. Microsoft, I imagine, will be relatively indifferent.
adults on the internet will make a lot of sex shops
:-O
Uh oh, I can see where this is going. The kids are going to build hundreds of... sweet shops!
They'll rot their virtual teeth!
Good grief. Please at least mod comments like that "Funny".
:-/
If that remark is worth a "Score:5, Insightful" I'm inclined to conclude Slashdot has become a self-parody.