Its a good thing you're apologizing for the thuggish behavior of the aggressors. I'll make sure that you compensate me for any injuries I receive when I'm robbing your house.
I'm an early adopter because of my employer. We do mobile development and have been pushing to be a leader in Glass development. I've had a lot of hands on time with the device and its is a really cool piece of tech but there's a bunch of gotchas for it.
1. Its limited. There's little it can do right now that isn't handled better on your smartphone. 2. Battery usage is pretty abysmal. If you're looking to get a solid 8-10 hours of casual usage, you won't make it. 3. Its expensive. $1500 is a lot for what it can do.
Those things are severe downsides as a non-developer. However, if you're interested in learning how to develop on the device and juicing up your resume with wearable design / implementation experience, then for someone like me (a mobile developer), the $1500 is an investment that you get to play around with on your off hours.
So if you want to be a leading edge developer and you can back up your interest with cash, go for it. If you're looking for a good investment on a solid end user experience you will be disappointed, just wait for the consumer version to hit the market.
Except that those numbers are incredibly weak when compared with the "mainstream" game channels.
When I checked, there were $488k in 82k sales. That's for 4 titles and a charity. Assuming a 100% revenue push from customer to developer (an impossibility), that means their average of $5.95 per sale gets split into 4 companies equating to almost $1.50 per sale, per company.
So we've got $122,000 total possible revenue without any removal of revenue hitting the developer. If you're a one or a two man independent development team, Congrats, you get to (possibly) pay your bills. If you're a 3 or a 4 man team, you're still working a second job. If you're at all bigger, you'll be shutting down unless you have another source of revenue for your game.
Out of those 82,000 sales, less than 25% are linux sales, but even going with 25%, that means 20,500 people specifically bought the Linux version. Now, not all of the users on Steam have paid $5.95, but I'm willing to be a vast majority have. As I type this there are 4.1 million users on Steam and the vast majority of them are going to be Windows.
So honestly it really isn't hard to argue that there's no market. 20,500 people is great for an interest group, not for a global market.
* "The only reason the Queen deserves to live is that I've got a bowl of hot grits waiting for the two of us back at my space condo. You, you amphibious turd, should never have been conceived."
My grandfather is still using a machine that I built for him 8 years ago off the same Windows XP install that I put on the machine. Yes he uses the internet, yes he uses email. He's not really a computer person, he's been retired from repairing clocks for over 20 years now. I've been over to his house once to fix the computer, and that was to install a new hard drive to replace a failing IDE drive.
My brother works in landscaping, he's not a computer person. I've had to go to his house a couple times to replace hardware.
My mother is an HR manager, my father a retired factory worker. I've had to go to their house a couple times to replace hardware.
My family is not comprised of geniuses, yet they still manage to operate Windows computers for years at a time without requiring an "OS reinstall" or massive software surgery. I know there's counter-rage against the PEBKAC group but there has to be something done about user knowledge. Ignorance really isn't an excuse if you've been doing the same thing wrong for 10 years or more. We have the capacity to learn and change. We should exercise that frequently.
Yeah, it'll be great to play StarCraft 2 on a bunch of home built computers on your private home network! Ohhhh, yeah, that's right they took that you so you still have to connect to Battle.Net in order to play a LAN multiplayer game.
It's also really awesome that they're launching it for not one but two open source platforms! Oh, right, forgot... Windows and OS X aren't actually open source.
But yeah! Right there with ya man! I'm so sick of this proprietary crap too! I just can't wait for Blizzard to finish making their product which includes pretty much a custom built set of code that is not available to anyone but Blizzard employees... making it not really an open product.
Hmm... well, guess its not as open souce as I thought but woo, man that spin was great for about 15 seconds!
I'll see your anecdotal evidence and raise you mine. I've owned my 2003 Focus (manufacture date 2002) since Sept 2004. Ignoring normal consumables that need to be replaced I've spent an entire $100 and 2 hours on repairs for the vehicle.
My father owns an F150 that is 2 years older than my Focus and has needed a total of $250.
My brother owns an F250 that is relatively new and has never needed to repair it.
My brother's previous F150 had to be wrapped around a telephone pole before he stopped driving it and that's only because the frame's not legal to drive on anymore.
*shrug* I guess they're like everyone else in every other industry. Some good, some bad.
I think you've just written the best new CSI, Criminal Minds, NCIS, Law & Order, and JAG episode script simultaneously. In fact, I know I've seen an episode or 12 that went exactly like that so I know the public will be excited to see your fresh take on things.
You should get a producer to sell your idea to every network so that they can all make a version of your tremendously soul-reaching plot. You'll probably want to put in some techno-babble just to give it that extra punch the media execs are looking for these days.
Does it also cause "this disk can not be read" errors? I had thought that my system's CD writer (which worked fine for years) had finally just bit it because it wouldn't recognize any media being in the drive.
I have at least SecuROM on my system (despite buying a game from Steam, thanks EA!) and I know Alcohol 120% just added their ACID software that attempts to block DRM software from detecting and disabling A120.
I'm SO glad there's now an arms race between software developers on my system. Who do I sue to stop this? Obviously that's the only way this is going to end. If I put my drive into a new computer and it works fine, can I sue EA, or SecuROM, for the cost of labor and the cost of the new drive that I've yet to install into my machine? Can I make it a case as well to destroy the part of their EULA where it says they're allowed to knowingly damage my computer and cost me money in order to fix it?
The server was subjected to intentional unusual activities that caused a loss of business services. Is it actual physical damage? I'm not sure. I don't know what the legal definition the law is using.
Either way, they caused business loss using non-legal practices. "Physical" damage or not, they should have know this would've been the recourse.
One of my old co-workers decided to delete all the accounts on our Lotus server in China before he left (no, he wasn't trying to do us any favors either) the company. Sure, the "repair" was to reload the database from backup but that constituted damage under national and international law. He got nailed to the wall for it.
Because you're not seeing 3D on a screen. (Well, not any screen 99% of the public has access to.) You may be seeing an optical illusion of a 3D object, but you're looking at a 2D source.
In the end, you're still going to be limited to your output device. If you look at a 2D screen to figure out the capcha, then the script only needs to do the same as well.
I'd love to actually continue the discussion, but like someone else said, obviously we're of differing opinions.
I looked at the site for your game, I need to check it out at some point. Do I have anything else to show? Not really. I had a pair of games that I made in qBasic about 15 years ago. They were terrible. Truly horrid pieces of software. I'm working on a web game project now but all I have to show for it is some persistent socket serving code, some xml transforming object management code, and other back end widgets that need to be functional before I can even think about a UI.
I just want to make the point that not once did I say that the games weren't fun. I didn't ever say that Blizzard makes bad games. My actual point is centered around the reaction that people have whenever someone criticizes Blizzard with valid concerns. For some reason, they have a near cult like following that feels like they need to justify and defend anything that they do. That is what I don't like.
Blizzard has already turned into the Disney of the game industry. They have a ton of resources that they can sit on and their name is so big and they can throw so much money at something that so long as its at least mediocre with a lot of shiny, people will be supporting them forever. Its great that they're successful, but do something with that success instead of just making more money for the shareholders. Get back to making it about making games and not about business models.
Why do they make so much money? They created a product that was about 15% better than the other MMOs at the time, slapped 15 years worth of respectable IPO on it and then rammed $120 million worth of budget into it. I never said other people couldn't enjoy it. I never said that they needed to make the games I want to play. But I'll be damned if I let this "Blizzard can do no wrong" attitude continue on unchecked.
Actually wait to release things? The release of WoW? Paladins didn't have talents at launch. Server disconnects were rampant. Server crashes were rampant.
Best job of balancing of any game company? Let me know when they make a balanced FPS. Let me know when they actually finish balancing out WoW instead of just kicking weight back and forth on the see-saw they've got going there. (Ignoring the whole grind/time in vs skill debate) What happened to Ghost? They're a mortal, fallible company just like every other one on the company.
Everyone wants to be innovative? Hardly. Who do you think sits at the head of the major publishers? Game designers? No, people who have been CEOs of other companies and who are sitting in their chairs because they know how to do one thing well, make money. That's why they're in that role and honestly, putting an idealist game designer in that role is a disaster. So no, not everyone wants to be innovative. Innovative is hard and innovative is a huge risk undertaking.
Gaming has NOT gotten too mature for innovation. One word, Portal. 8 students with help from Valve for polish. Check out the rest of the Independent Games entries next march when it rolls around again. Go back and look at the entries they had last year.
And so finally, who am I to tell them that they're wrong? I'm a person, just like you and the people that work at Blizzard.
Also, don't resort to character attacks to try and prove your points. They don't work as well as you think they do.
Condescending? No. It is what it is. Why you're victimizing millions of people confuses me because I'm really not how I'm saying that people who play video games are weak. Ceramics have a kinetic shock weakness. Does that mean I'm trying to say that ceramics are crap and they suck? Less word games, more actual discussion please.
And yes, it is Blizzard who I should be pointing my finger at. Blizzard has a ton of money. A lot of it. More money than I can count on all the fingers of the people in some continents. What are they doing with this money? Setting up programs to incubate projects? Creating an arena where people can start up indie projects and get funding for their new and risky ideas? Is Blizzard working on a slew of new properties to harness the wealth they have in order to breath life into a Genre-King marketing landscape?
Nope. Quite the opposite actually. They're sitting on a total of 3 franchises that are now each 10 years or older and with the exception of game play differences between Franchises, have remained essentially stagnant for that amount of time. They're falling back on the "old formula" to pump out another iteration of what "worked before" but with a new shinier coating. If more companies were like Blizzard, the industry would be filled with giant companies trying to "out King" each other in the Genre wars and push innovation to the back end because its easier to put the "10,000 Items!" bullet point on the back of your box.
***Note: I do not mean any ill-will towards any Blizzard employees. I'm sure you're all very nice people. These statements are made towards the corporate, share-holder-value-enhancing Blizzard. And really, there's not much you can do about it sorry to say.
Eventually, you'll run out of Chapters in D3 and you'll level a character and then you'll start a new character or you'll restart on a different difficulty, and the world will reset. It is not persistent beyond your play session.
The only event(singular) that I recall from WoW that changed the game world was the opening of the Gates of (Insert faux Middle East name here). And as far as events go, that was pretty weak. You get to run around and grind resources and whoever grinds the most resources first... gets nothing. The gates will open for everyone when they grind enough resources (and then eventually for everyone else who doesn't want the carrot).
But I really can't blame Blizzard for what they're doing. I would propose that writing an interesting world that actually has 10,000,000 people running around in it and making some kind of difference is pretty much impossible at this point.
They're good software. As far as a good "game", I don't know that I can go that far on it anymore.
And skill trees were already covered in the "lots of options" that all drip back down to managing hit points.
Its 2008, we can make better games. Can we make better money printing factories? Probably not, these two products are already harnessing the weaknesses of the human psyche.
Slashdot Mirror
Its a good thing you're apologizing for the thuggish behavior of the aggressors. I'll make sure that you compensate me for any injuries I receive when I'm robbing your house.
I'm an early adopter because of my employer. We do mobile development and have been pushing to be a leader in Glass development. I've had a lot of hands on time with the device and its is a really cool piece of tech but there's a bunch of gotchas for it.
1. Its limited. There's little it can do right now that isn't handled better on your smartphone.
2. Battery usage is pretty abysmal. If you're looking to get a solid 8-10 hours of casual usage, you won't make it.
3. Its expensive. $1500 is a lot for what it can do.
Those things are severe downsides as a non-developer. However, if you're interested in learning how to develop on the device and juicing up your resume with wearable design / implementation experience, then for someone like me (a mobile developer), the $1500 is an investment that you get to play around with on your off hours.
So if you want to be a leading edge developer and you can back up your interest with cash, go for it. If you're looking for a good investment on a solid end user experience you will be disappointed, just wait for the consumer version to hit the market.
Excellent! Now we can build Copters, Thinkers, Drop Pods and start work on the The Cyborg Factory.
Except that those numbers are incredibly weak when compared with the "mainstream" game channels.
When I checked, there were $488k in 82k sales. That's for 4 titles and a charity. Assuming a 100% revenue push from customer to developer (an impossibility), that means their average of $5.95 per sale gets split into 4 companies equating to almost $1.50 per sale, per company.
So we've got $122,000 total possible revenue without any removal of revenue hitting the developer. If you're a one or a two man independent development team, Congrats, you get to (possibly) pay your bills. If you're a 3 or a 4 man team, you're still working a second job. If you're at all bigger, you'll be shutting down unless you have another source of revenue for your game.
Out of those 82,000 sales, less than 25% are linux sales, but even going with 25%, that means 20,500 people specifically bought the Linux version.
Now, not all of the users on Steam have paid $5.95, but I'm willing to be a vast majority have. As I type this there are 4.1 million users on Steam and the vast majority of them are going to be Windows.
So honestly it really isn't hard to argue that there's no market. 20,500 people is great for an interest group, not for a global market.
"Bwwweoooo boop beee wheeeeeeerrooooo boop bweeep oooop wee*"
-R2D2
* "The only reason the Queen deserves to live is that I've got a bowl of hot grits waiting for the two of us back at my space condo. You, you amphibious turd, should never have been conceived."
My grandfather is still using a machine that I built for him 8 years ago off the same Windows XP install that I put on the machine. Yes he uses the internet, yes he uses email. He's not really a computer person, he's been retired from repairing clocks for over 20 years now. I've been over to his house once to fix the computer, and that was to install a new hard drive to replace a failing IDE drive.
My brother works in landscaping, he's not a computer person. I've had to go to his house a couple times to replace hardware.
My mother is an HR manager, my father a retired factory worker. I've had to go to their house a couple times to replace hardware.
My family is not comprised of geniuses, yet they still manage to operate Windows computers for years at a time without requiring an "OS reinstall" or massive software surgery. I know there's counter-rage against the PEBKAC group but there has to be something done about user knowledge. Ignorance really isn't an excuse if you've been doing the same thing wrong for 10 years or more. We have the capacity to learn and change. We should exercise that frequently.
Same thing with the Hunter-Seeker Algorithm. Deny it to Zakarov and you don't even have to bother researching your own tech for the rest of the game.
I believe the phrase you were looking for is...
GREAT SCOTT!
Perhaps you could call my condo association and have them reverse their decision to disallow Verizon's deployment of FIOS.
You're right though, I suppose I should just be asking myself "Have you thought about changing residences?"
That makes a lot of sense just to play a video game, way more sense than going to NewEgg and buying a new video card for my computer.
Yeah, it'll be great to play StarCraft 2 on a bunch of home built computers on your private home network! Ohhhh, yeah, that's right they took that you so you still have to connect to Battle.Net in order to play a LAN multiplayer game.
It's also really awesome that they're launching it for not one but two open source platforms! Oh, right, forgot... Windows and OS X aren't actually open source.
But yeah! Right there with ya man! I'm so sick of this proprietary crap too! I just can't wait for Blizzard to finish making their product which includes pretty much a custom built set of code that is not available to anyone but Blizzard employees... making it not really an open product.
Hmm... well, guess its not as open souce as I thought but woo, man that spin was great for about 15 seconds!
Linux!!!! Wooo! *kegstand*
Where ever you go, there you are.
I'll see your anecdotal evidence and raise you mine. I've owned my 2003 Focus (manufacture date 2002) since Sept 2004. Ignoring normal consumables that need to be replaced I've spent an entire $100 and 2 hours on repairs for the vehicle.
My father owns an F150 that is 2 years older than my Focus and has needed a total of $250.
My brother owns an F250 that is relatively new and has never needed to repair it.
My brother's previous F150 had to be wrapped around a telephone pole before he stopped driving it and that's only because the frame's not legal to drive on anymore.
*shrug* I guess they're like everyone else in every other industry. Some good, some bad.
I think you've just written the best new CSI, Criminal Minds, NCIS, Law & Order, and JAG episode script simultaneously. In fact, I know I've seen an episode or 12 that went exactly like that so I know the public will be excited to see your fresh take on things.
You should get a producer to sell your idea to every network so that they can all make a version of your tremendously soul-reaching plot. You'll probably want to put in some techno-babble just to give it that extra punch the media execs are looking for these days.
"Evil will always win because Good is dumb." -Dark Helmet
Damn it! Where's Wesley Crusher when you need him?!
You can still reverse their polarity and align them to the deflector dish though... right?
Does it also cause "this disk can not be read" errors? I had thought that my system's CD writer (which worked fine for years) had finally just bit it because it wouldn't recognize any media being in the drive.
I have at least SecuROM on my system (despite buying a game from Steam, thanks EA!) and I know Alcohol 120% just added their ACID software that attempts to block DRM software from detecting and disabling A120.
I'm SO glad there's now an arms race between software developers on my system. Who do I sue to stop this? Obviously that's the only way this is going to end. If I put my drive into a new computer and it works fine, can I sue EA, or SecuROM, for the cost of labor and the cost of the new drive that I've yet to install into my machine? Can I make it a case as well to destroy the part of their EULA where it says they're allowed to knowingly damage my computer and cost me money in order to fix it?
Suddenly the conversation I had in the car last week about neo-platonic duality doesn't make feel like a total outcast. Thank you.
The server was subjected to intentional unusual activities that caused a loss of business services. Is it actual physical damage? I'm not sure. I don't know what the legal definition the law is using.
Either way, they caused business loss using non-legal practices. "Physical" damage or not, they should have know this would've been the recourse.
One of my old co-workers decided to delete all the accounts on our Lotus server in China before he left (no, he wasn't trying to do us any favors either) the company. Sure, the "repair" was to reload the database from backup but that constituted damage under national and international law. He got nailed to the wall for it.
Because you're not seeing 3D on a screen. (Well, not any screen 99% of the public has access to.) You may be seeing an optical illusion of a 3D object, but you're looking at a 2D source.
In the end, you're still going to be limited to your output device. If you look at a 2D screen to figure out the capcha, then the script only needs to do the same as well.
I'd love to actually continue the discussion, but like someone else said, obviously we're of differing opinions.
I looked at the site for your game, I need to check it out at some point. Do I have anything else to show? Not really. I had a pair of games that I made in qBasic about 15 years ago. They were terrible. Truly horrid pieces of software. I'm working on a web game project now but all I have to show for it is some persistent socket serving code, some xml transforming object management code, and other back end widgets that need to be functional before I can even think about a UI.
I just want to make the point that not once did I say that the games weren't fun. I didn't ever say that Blizzard makes bad games. My actual point is centered around the reaction that people have whenever someone criticizes Blizzard with valid concerns. For some reason, they have a near cult like following that feels like they need to justify and defend anything that they do. That is what I don't like.
Blizzard has already turned into the Disney of the game industry. They have a ton of resources that they can sit on and their name is so big and they can throw so much money at something that so long as its at least mediocre with a lot of shiny, people will be supporting them forever. Its great that they're successful, but do something with that success instead of just making more money for the shareholders. Get back to making it about making games and not about business models.
Why do they make so much money? They created a product that was about 15% better than the other MMOs at the time, slapped 15 years worth of respectable IPO on it and then rammed $120 million worth of budget into it. I never said other people couldn't enjoy it. I never said that they needed to make the games I want to play. But I'll be damned if I let this "Blizzard can do no wrong" attitude continue on unchecked.
Actually wait to release things? The release of WoW? Paladins didn't have talents at launch. Server disconnects were rampant. Server crashes were rampant.
Best job of balancing of any game company? Let me know when they make a balanced FPS. Let me know when they actually finish balancing out WoW instead of just kicking weight back and forth on the see-saw they've got going there. (Ignoring the whole grind/time in vs skill debate) What happened to Ghost? They're a mortal, fallible company just like every other one on the company.
Everyone wants to be innovative? Hardly. Who do you think sits at the head of the major publishers? Game designers? No, people who have been CEOs of other companies and who are sitting in their chairs because they know how to do one thing well, make money. That's why they're in that role and honestly, putting an idealist game designer in that role is a disaster. So no, not everyone wants to be innovative. Innovative is hard and innovative is a huge risk undertaking.
Gaming has NOT gotten too mature for innovation. One word, Portal. 8 students with help from Valve for polish. Check out the rest of the Independent Games entries next march when it rolls around again. Go back and look at the entries they had last year.
And so finally, who am I to tell them that they're wrong? I'm a person, just like you and the people that work at Blizzard.
Also, don't resort to character attacks to try and prove your points. They don't work as well as you think they do.
Condescending? No. It is what it is. Why you're victimizing millions of people confuses me because I'm really not how I'm saying that people who play video games are weak. Ceramics have a kinetic shock weakness. Does that mean I'm trying to say that ceramics are crap and they suck? Less word games, more actual discussion please.
And yes, it is Blizzard who I should be pointing my finger at. Blizzard has a ton of money. A lot of it. More money than I can count on all the fingers of the people in some continents. What are they doing with this money? Setting up programs to incubate projects? Creating an arena where people can start up indie projects and get funding for their new and risky ideas? Is Blizzard working on a slew of new properties to harness the wealth they have in order to breath life into a Genre-King marketing landscape?
Nope. Quite the opposite actually. They're sitting on a total of 3 franchises that are now each 10 years or older and with the exception of game play differences between Franchises, have remained essentially stagnant for that amount of time. They're falling back on the "old formula" to pump out another iteration of what "worked before" but with a new shinier coating. If more companies were like Blizzard, the industry would be filled with giant companies trying to "out King" each other in the Genre wars and push innovation to the back end because its easier to put the "10,000 Items!" bullet point on the back of your box.
***Note: I do not mean any ill-will towards any Blizzard employees. I'm sure you're all very nice people. These statements are made towards the corporate, share-holder-value-enhancing Blizzard. And really, there's not much you can do about it sorry to say.
Eventually, you'll run out of Chapters in D3 and you'll level a character and then you'll start a new character or you'll restart on a different difficulty, and the world will reset. It is not persistent beyond your play session.
The only event(singular) that I recall from WoW that changed the game world was the opening of the Gates of (Insert faux Middle East name here). And as far as events go, that was pretty weak. You get to run around and grind resources and whoever grinds the most resources first... gets nothing. The gates will open for everyone when they grind enough resources (and then eventually for everyone else who doesn't want the carrot).
But I really can't blame Blizzard for what they're doing. I would propose that writing an interesting world that actually has 10,000,000 people running around in it and making some kind of difference is pretty much impossible at this point.
They're good software. As far as a good "game", I don't know that I can go that far on it anymore.
And skill trees were already covered in the "lots of options" that all drip back down to managing hit points.
Its 2008, we can make better games. Can we make better money printing factories? Probably not, these two products are already harnessing the weaknesses of the human psyche.