I don't understand how the issue of free speech enters into the equation.
1) Rockstar makes incredibly violent video game
2) ESRB does its job and rates the game AO
3) Sony and Nintendo reaffirm their licensing agreement, saying no AO game will be on their consoles
4) Rockstar halts production of incredibly violent game
Could you show me the step where somebody's rights were violated?
Same here, bought it Octoberish of last year. Standing it up on its end inside an enclosed TV stand caused me some issues, but once I ditched the VCR and got the 360 horizontal and out in the open where air could circulate it's not given me a problem since.
I often wonder if those who go through 7-8 X360s are doing something wrong, like having bad ventilation or balanced on top of something.
I own an R4 (clone of the M3 Lite) and have been using it about a month now. I can't say enough about it. Clean interface, readily available Micro SD cards, and haven't had a lockup yet (that wasn't my fault). It can also act like a boot loader for a GBA Flash cart which it sounds like you're thinking of doing. It's really great, and now I don't have to make tough choices about which games to take along on a long business trip with me - they're all right there on my 1 GB Micro SD card.
So let me get this straight. The game is buggy and you're unable to play it, but you're excited about it and believe it will be great once you do get to play it.
Anybody who investigated the game online knew that the game was rushed (or they did a poor job investigating). I was among those on internet forums talking about major game-wide changes being made in the final month of production. They changed how XP was awarded, they implemented item durability, and they put in flying mounts within the last 4 weeks of Beta.
Of course there were still the die-hards who dismissed these with their standard "Go back to WoW" line, but everybody knew it was true. The die-hards often commented that they knew they were going to be funding a retail Beta, but didn't care because they "believed in the vision"
So I don't think it's setting a bad precedent - the precedent was there long before Vanguard. Asheron's Call 2, Dungeons and Dragons Online, The Matrix Online, Star Wars Galaxies... all beta'd by me, and all forced out the door too soon. It's no coincidence that they're all doing poorly, with one (AC2) dead.
World of Warcraft was not forced out the door, and in fact slipped over 2 years from its initial announced release date of Winter 2002. I beta'd WoW, and while there were still a few small bugs (and their servers were underprepared for the launch) it was polished and it shows in its subscriber numbers.
The only way we can change the precedent is by being informed customers and not buying crap when we know it's crap. The only way a company like SOE will stop rushing release dates is when they see long-term dissatisfaction outweighing short-term development costs. If they threw another $2 million into development and pushed Vanguard back a few months it would have made a world of difference, giving them subscribers for years to come. Blizzard understood this.
The PS3, despite shipping a paltry 400,000 units to the US before Christmas and maybe another 400,000 since (and that's being generous) has already intersected the Supply and Demand curves. They are freely available to anybody who wants one yet they remain in stock for long periods of time, sitting in warehouses and on store shelves.
After I quit WoW I started looking around for "The Next Big Thing" and while Vanguard seemed nice, Warhammer Online really got me interested because it looked like WoW+PvP. I devoured everything I could online, from fansites to videos to E3 demos downloaded through some shady sites. I loved it.
Unfortunately, I then discovered that they were being published by EA. I am on a self-imposed EA boycott because of several reasons including their Battlefield 2142 Spyware fiasco, their policing of EA torrent sites including contacting ISPs in an effort to get individual users' DSL accounts removed, and their continual abuse of Xbox Live microtransactions. Charging for cheat codes and tutorial videos = no EA games for me.
I will go back when they stop their horrible micro-transaction raping of Xbox Live, provided they do not include anymore adware and I do not hear about any more torrent policing. Hopefully, by the time Warhammer Online hits they will do that. If not, I'll just have to make do without it.
First, he's hiding his played games. That's a very very rare thing to do, because it's just not necessary. Who cared what games you've played, unless you've modded something?
Second, he's got a Gamerscore of 77103. For those who don't have a 360, each game is given a budget of 1000 Gamerpoints which can be unlocked however the game publisher wants - usually it's points-per-level, or for unlocking things in the game. Xbox Live Arcade games get a budget of 200. Gamerankings.com gives me a total of 66 games released for the Xbox 360. That's 66,000 possible points if he finished anything and everything - and most of the games are nigh impossible for any mortal to get all 1000 points on.
Lastly, he's currently playing Cars online as I type. That game is not scheduled to be shipped until tomorrow the 31st, in-stores probably November 1st. If this were the only thing odd I'd just attribute it to a broken street date, but considering all the factors it sounds like he is using a not-quite-ethical way to play games in a way Microsoft didn't intend.
It's from the DICE developer username CKMC and in a forum thread. Here's the two relevant quotes:
The information that is gathered is specifically related to the ingame ads themselves and not anything personally related to you.
There is no additional spy ware software installed secretly to your machine.
Data will only be gathered from in game. Web browsing and other profiling data is not being gathered.
Squib has essentially nailed it. The purpose of the gathering is to determine if an ad is viewed by players.
In the game there will be billboards, and the content of those billboards will be ads for a new movie, video game, shoe, whatever. The spyware will record how long that ad is in your view and what the average size of the ad is. Presumably, that will affect how much the spyware will bill the advertisers of the new movie/game/shoe.
Also, it's likely that the spyware will attempt to find patterns of how long you look at an ad, then serve to you similar ads of that type. So if you spend 20 seconds looking close-up at an ad for a new shoe, you'll likely get a lot of shoe ads the next time you load up the game.
I love me some Gmail too - but the key detail is that Gmail is 100% free to me, and is supported by advertising. So is Slashdot, Gamespot, Kotaku, and just about every other website out there. I have no problem with advertising. I have problems with paying the same price for a video game supported by advertising as a game not supported by advertising.
As for the rising costs to develop and publish games, that's not my problem. That's EA's problem. Multi-million dollar budgets and FMVs do not a good game make. Look at Geometry Wars on the Xbox 360, or look at any of the plethora of AAA-quality Nintendo DS games. You do not need huge budgets and FMVs to make a good game which sells well in the market. Thus I have no compassion for EA when they tell me that their prices are skyrocketing.
Make a good game and I'll buy it. That's the only revenue you should need if you're running your business well. And if you're running it poorly, the Free Market will make short work of you.
From the Gamespot review of Battlefield 2142 (emphasis mine)
On a peculiar note, even though the world is ending in 2142, it appears that advertising will still be around. Battlefield 2142 features in-game ads, though we didn't get to see them firsthand during our testing. Still, there is a printed disclaimer that comes with the game telling you that Battlefield 2142 will analyze certain "advertising data" on your machine to determine what ads to display to you. Ironically, EA says that if you don't want your data shared with its advertising partner then "do not install or play the software on any platform that is used to connect to the Internet." But that would pretty much defeat the purpose of playing Battlefield 2142, wouldn't it? Of course, you could always play single-player against the artificial intelligence, though the AI won't be mistaken for human opponents any time soon, and the single-player is still limited to 16-player maps. Still, this is an example of things to come, as we begin to see dynamic in-game ads appear in more and more games.
The representatives of DICE (the developers, EA is the publisher) have now clarified on the forums that it only records what ads you look at and for how long you look at them - it does not monitor your browsing habits, your cookies, or your hard drive.
Or so they say...
But even if it's not spying on my pr0n, I still have problems with paying full price for a game and having it be supported by ads. If they want to knock off $10 and give me in-game ads, that's fine by me. I consider it a fair trade. But the recent ad craze in the video game industry is not lowering prices, it's just creating more revenue for the game publisher.
Point well taken. I remember back in the BBS days I had used Stacker (disk compression software) to turn my 250 MB drive into a 520 MB drive, and people asked me "What could you possibly need 500 MB for?".
The problem I see is filling the space with quality. Somebody else in this article imagined GTA:San Andreas on a Blu-Ray disk, talking about how huge the area to explore could be, how detailed they could make it, etc. As I see it, it's not the space that's the problem, it's the time to fill that space.
Doubling the area of GTA:SA would mean a lot of work for artists, level designers, quest designers, and especially QA testers. You have to ask yourself, "Where's the break-even point?" Somewhere in the process of expanding game area or making higher resolution textures, you reach the point of "too much effort for minimal fun". I'm sure a Blu-Ray disk could hold data for the entire USA with decent modelling, so you could race Cannonball Run style across the nation. But would that be fun? Hours and hours of interstate?
Sony is repeating their past efforts. The PS2 won wide acceptance in part because it was a very cheap (at the time) DVD player. I believe that in Japan, a PS2 was actually priced lower at launch than any other DVD player available in Japan, so thousands of people picked it up simply for DVDs, and the games were an afterthought.
Sony is taking the same strategy this time around. Blu-Ray is Sony's technology and they NEED it to succeed. History is not on their side though - Betamax, MiniDisc, UMD... Sony just can't get their formats off the ground. Their solution? Package it in with their most popular product, the PS3. That ensures that there will be more Blu-Ray capable DVD players than HD-DVD players in households, thus ensuring that Blu-Ray will earn top billing and finally make Sony some money.
Will it work? Time will tell, but I doubt it - the $600 price tag is simply too high for most people to justify.
So, to answer the question, Blu-Ray came first, and Sony is trying to justify their huge price by claiming that it was needed by game designers. It's not.
How do you still make money as a corporation while still allowing for micro-payments? Easy - you charge up front and change from "money" to "points". The Xbox Live Marketplace has done this already.
Basically, instead of charging money for each small transaction (and incurring large credit card fees) you charge $20 for 2000 "points" which can then be spent, at a penny-per-point. $5.00 game, 500 points. That way, you make only one transaction (charging $20) but the consumer can use it however they want and in whatever small denominations they want.
Nintendo is going to be doing the same thing with their Virtual Console, last I heard. The points will be equal to 1 Yen or 0.01 Dollar/Euro.
It's being called "kiddy" because the majority of their titles look completely ridiculous.
You say Wind Waker looks ridiculous, I say Dead Or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball and BMX:XXX look ridiculous. Oh, but those are "mature" titles. Riiiight.
Tell anyone you know, hardcore or casual gamer, about the Wii and they'll say "But Nintendo just makes kids games."...but hardly any of my friends will touch them because they look like they're for little kids.
Hang in there buddy - Middle School will be over before you know it.
I agree 100%. Recently I've found it hard to get excited about games which amount to little more than "same gameplay as last year, but shinier graphics". I want new experiences in games, not just the same thing with a shinier coat of paint.
The Wii is in a great position to deliver exactly that. "Good enough" graphics and real, true innovation in controls for the first time in years. And since it's not an after-market product which only a small percentage of the owners will have (like the Power Glove or eReader) then developers will be able to confidently use the controller in new ways.
I have a feeling that we'll find out very very different released in Japan and the other territories. The Seattle PI article seemed very reliable and sourced Reggie himself in a phone interview. I have a feeling that they're both right.
Japan gets a $200 console with one controller, North America gets a $250 with 2 controllers and Wii Sports to help "sell" the common people on the system.
Either way, I'm going to bed. This will all be sorted out by 11am tomorrow morning.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand how the issue of free speech enters into the equation.
1) Rockstar makes incredibly violent video game
2) ESRB does its job and rates the game AO
3) Sony and Nintendo reaffirm their licensing agreement, saying no AO game will be on their consoles
4) Rockstar halts production of incredibly violent game
Could you show me the step where somebody's rights were violated?
Same here, bought it Octoberish of last year. Standing it up on its end inside an enclosed TV stand caused me some issues, but once I ditched the VCR and got the 360 horizontal and out in the open where air could circulate it's not given me a problem since.
I often wonder if those who go through 7-8 X360s are doing something wrong, like having bad ventilation or balanced on top of something.
I own an R4 (clone of the M3 Lite) and have been using it about a month now. I can't say enough about it. Clean interface, readily available Micro SD cards, and haven't had a lockup yet (that wasn't my fault). It can also act like a boot loader for a GBA Flash cart which it sounds like you're thinking of doing. It's really great, and now I don't have to make tough choices about which games to take along on a long business trip with me - they're all right there on my 1 GB Micro SD card.
Next time you're going through airport security and being forced to show your Photo ID and boarding pass, remember this:
All 19 of the 9/11 hijackers had valid photo ID and a valid boarding pass.
So let me get this straight. The game is buggy and you're unable to play it, but you're excited about it and believe it will be great once you do get to play it.
Anybody who investigated the game online knew that the game was rushed (or they did a poor job investigating). I was among those on internet forums talking about major game-wide changes being made in the final month of production. They changed how XP was awarded, they implemented item durability, and they put in flying mounts within the last 4 weeks of Beta.
Of course there were still the die-hards who dismissed these with their standard "Go back to WoW" line, but everybody knew it was true. The die-hards often commented that they knew they were going to be funding a retail Beta, but didn't care because they "believed in the vision"
So I don't think it's setting a bad precedent - the precedent was there long before Vanguard. Asheron's Call 2, Dungeons and Dragons Online, The Matrix Online, Star Wars Galaxies... all beta'd by me, and all forced out the door too soon. It's no coincidence that they're all doing poorly, with one (AC2) dead.
World of Warcraft was not forced out the door, and in fact slipped over 2 years from its initial announced release date of Winter 2002. I beta'd WoW, and while there were still a few small bugs (and their servers were underprepared for the launch) it was polished and it shows in its subscriber numbers.
The only way we can change the precedent is by being informed customers and not buying crap when we know it's crap. The only way a company like SOE will stop rushing release dates is when they see long-term dissatisfaction outweighing short-term development costs. If they threw another $2 million into development and pushed Vanguard back a few months it would have made a world of difference, giving them subscribers for years to come. Blizzard understood this.
Buy a 60 GB unit from CircuitCity.com. If you don't like Circuit City, how about Fry's? Or maybe you prefer a Gamestop Bundle?
The PS3, despite shipping a paltry 400,000 units to the US before Christmas and maybe another 400,000 since (and that's being generous) has already intersected the Supply and Demand curves. They are freely available to anybody who wants one yet they remain in stock for long periods of time, sitting in warehouses and on store shelves.
How's that for data?
After I quit WoW I started looking around for "The Next Big Thing" and while Vanguard seemed nice, Warhammer Online really got me interested because it looked like WoW+PvP. I devoured everything I could online, from fansites to videos to E3 demos downloaded through some shady sites. I loved it. Unfortunately, I then discovered that they were being published by EA. I am on a self-imposed EA boycott because of several reasons including their Battlefield 2142 Spyware fiasco, their policing of EA torrent sites including contacting ISPs in an effort to get individual users' DSL accounts removed, and their continual abuse of Xbox Live microtransactions. Charging for cheat codes and tutorial videos = no EA games for me. I will go back when they stop their horrible micro-transaction raping of Xbox Live, provided they do not include anymore adware and I do not hear about any more torrent policing. Hopefully, by the time Warhammer Online hits they will do that. If not, I'll just have to make do without it.
Give the guy a break. Zonk is definately 15, at least.
Here's the Original Xbox.com post about it. It seems very fishy for a few reasons:
First, he's hiding his played games. That's a very very rare thing to do, because it's just not necessary. Who cared what games you've played, unless you've modded something?
Second, he's got a Gamerscore of 77103. For those who don't have a 360, each game is given a budget of 1000 Gamerpoints which can be unlocked however the game publisher wants - usually it's points-per-level, or for unlocking things in the game. Xbox Live Arcade games get a budget of 200. Gamerankings.com gives me a total of 66 games released for the Xbox 360. That's 66,000 possible points if he finished anything and everything - and most of the games are nigh impossible for any mortal to get all 1000 points on.
Lastly, he's currently playing Cars online as I type. That game is not scheduled to be shipped until tomorrow the 31st, in-stores probably November 1st. If this were the only thing odd I'd just attribute it to a broken street date, but considering all the factors it sounds like he is using a not-quite-ethical way to play games in a way Microsoft didn't intend.
No, you're misunderstanding this.
In the game there will be billboards, and the content of those billboards will be ads for a new movie, video game, shoe, whatever. The spyware will record how long that ad is in your view and what the average size of the ad is. Presumably, that will affect how much the spyware will bill the advertisers of the new movie/game/shoe.
Also, it's likely that the spyware will attempt to find patterns of how long you look at an ad, then serve to you similar ads of that type. So if you spend 20 seconds looking close-up at an ad for a new shoe, you'll likely get a lot of shoe ads the next time you load up the game.
I love me some Gmail too - but the key detail is that Gmail is 100% free to me, and is supported by advertising. So is Slashdot, Gamespot, Kotaku, and just about every other website out there. I have no problem with advertising. I have problems with paying the same price for a video game supported by advertising as a game not supported by advertising.
As for the rising costs to develop and publish games, that's not my problem. That's EA's problem. Multi-million dollar budgets and FMVs do not a good game make. Look at Geometry Wars on the Xbox 360, or look at any of the plethora of AAA-quality Nintendo DS games. You do not need huge budgets and FMVs to make a good game which sells well in the market. Thus I have no compassion for EA when they tell me that their prices are skyrocketing.
Make a good game and I'll buy it. That's the only revenue you should need if you're running your business well. And if you're running it poorly, the Free Market will make short work of you.
The representatives of DICE (the developers, EA is the publisher) have now clarified on the forums that it only records what ads you look at and for how long you look at them - it does not monitor your browsing habits, your cookies, or your hard drive.
Or so they say...
But even if it's not spying on my pr0n, I still have problems with paying full price for a game and having it be supported by ads. If they want to knock off $10 and give me in-game ads, that's fine by me. I consider it a fair trade. But the recent ad craze in the video game industry is not lowering prices, it's just creating more revenue for the game publisher.
And since EA is not only charging for cheat codes and adopting **AA tactics on torrents I've decided to stop buying EA products - even Spore.
Point well taken. I remember back in the BBS days I had used Stacker (disk compression software) to turn my 250 MB drive into a 520 MB drive, and people asked me "What could you possibly need 500 MB for?".
The problem I see is filling the space with quality. Somebody else in this article imagined GTA:San Andreas on a Blu-Ray disk, talking about how huge the area to explore could be, how detailed they could make it, etc. As I see it, it's not the space that's the problem, it's the time to fill that space.
Doubling the area of GTA:SA would mean a lot of work for artists, level designers, quest designers, and especially QA testers. You have to ask yourself, "Where's the break-even point?" Somewhere in the process of expanding game area or making higher resolution textures, you reach the point of "too much effort for minimal fun". I'm sure a Blu-Ray disk could hold data for the entire USA with decent modelling, so you could race Cannonball Run style across the nation. But would that be fun? Hours and hours of interstate?
Sony is repeating their past efforts. The PS2 won wide acceptance in part because it was a very cheap (at the time) DVD player. I believe that in Japan, a PS2 was actually priced lower at launch than any other DVD player available in Japan, so thousands of people picked it up simply for DVDs, and the games were an afterthought.
Sony is taking the same strategy this time around. Blu-Ray is Sony's technology and they NEED it to succeed. History is not on their side though - Betamax, MiniDisc, UMD... Sony just can't get their formats off the ground. Their solution? Package it in with their most popular product, the PS3. That ensures that there will be more Blu-Ray capable DVD players than HD-DVD players in households, thus ensuring that Blu-Ray will earn top billing and finally make Sony some money.
Will it work? Time will tell, but I doubt it - the $600 price tag is simply too high for most people to justify.
So, to answer the question, Blu-Ray came first, and Sony is trying to justify their huge price by claiming that it was needed by game designers. It's not.
Where'd you pre-order from? Last I heard nobody was accepting pre-orders.
How do you still make money as a corporation while still allowing for micro-payments? Easy - you charge up front and change from "money" to "points". The Xbox Live Marketplace has done this already.
Basically, instead of charging money for each small transaction (and incurring large credit card fees) you charge $20 for 2000 "points" which can then be spent, at a penny-per-point. $5.00 game, 500 points. That way, you make only one transaction (charging $20) but the consumer can use it however they want and in whatever small denominations they want.
Nintendo is going to be doing the same thing with their Virtual Console, last I heard. The points will be equal to 1 Yen or 0.01 Dollar/Euro.
I must say, you are the King of Not Getting It.
I agree 100%. Recently I've found it hard to get excited about games which amount to little more than "same gameplay as last year, but shinier graphics". I want new experiences in games, not just the same thing with a shinier coat of paint.
The Wii is in a great position to deliver exactly that. "Good enough" graphics and real, true innovation in controls for the first time in years. And since it's not an after-market product which only a small percentage of the owners will have (like the Power Glove or eReader) then developers will be able to confidently use the controller in new ways.
Great videos on that site, even if they're all in Japanese right now
Wii Menu
Wii Web Browser/News Channel
Wii Weather
I have a feeling that we'll find out very very different released in Japan and the other territories. The Seattle PI article seemed very reliable and sourced Reggie himself in a phone interview. I have a feeling that they're both right.
Japan gets a $200 console with one controller, North America gets a $250 with 2 controllers and Wii Sports to help "sell" the common people on the system.
Either way, I'm going to bed. This will all be sorted out by 11am tomorrow morning.