Expect to hear a lot of "but I just bought an HDTV" hand wringing but if you think about it, 1080P was barely if at all pushing the envelope when it went mainstream. I have CRTs that I bought second hand 10 years ago with 1600x1200 pixels and that is nothing special. This actually pushes display tech and pixel density forward and gets us close to the Hollywood OS ideal of photorealistic no-discernable pixel displays many of us have lusted after since seeing the main viewscreen on ST:TOS.
And that is because of MMO's, without MMO's PC gaming would be the niche it's always been.
DOOM helped revive PC gaming a little in 1993, it was something the consoles of that time didn't have, first person perspective in a blud soaked slugathon.
EQ and WoW did the same thing EQ was something you coudln't do on a console...well until 2003 anyway. If MMO's on consoles ever take off...say bye bye to hose numbers.
Even the DOTA stuff can be done on consoles so don't count on that alone to keep PC gaming vital.
You make some insightful points. It looks like innovative gameplay is what keeps moving PC gaming forward and keeping it vital. That being the case, I actually look forward to MMOs on consoles taking off; if the pattern holds, they'll be replaced by something even better and the cycle repeats.
Under normal circumstances it might not be but if the price is right there are people that will give you money before paperwork is completed. Nothing is impossible when it comes to money.
Sadly, "most of your money" for many people is whatever amount happens to be left over from your last paycheck that you hope you can stretch to the next one.
I happen to agree. I use Google because I like it and nothing I've seen so far can get me the answers for so many different things at a moments notice. That said, it's funny seeing people rail against Google when all they have to do is use something else. Hell, get a fat enough Internet pipe and index the entire web yourself if you're that paranoid.
You do know you can just not use Google, right? No, seriously. You can run your own mail server even. As a matter of fact if you're really worried, you can use tor or Freenet and be completely anonymous. Just make sure you have https everywhere, and noscript running and you're golden. As far as street view goes, secure your wi-fi and plant some trees in front of the house.
If you've got a car it's no problem to carry food/water for a week.
That's true but we're talking about somebody on the run. You're bound to get pulled over eventually in a car and when that happens it's all over.
If you're hiking, you can easily carry a week's worth of commercial dehydrated food, and water filters are common (will make most water drinkable). Use chlorine if you don't want to pump the filter, or a gravity-feed filter bag.
Supplement with fresh-caught fish, or even snared gopher/rabbit/hare if necessary.
All great ideas. I just wonder how sustainable that is in the long term.
Depends on how much 1 percent of your total wealth actually amounts to. If you have 10 million dollars in the bank then you have 100,000 dollars in the clear. I could go a long ways on that much.
Well, don't look now but PC gaming is an 11 billion dollar a year industry. Consoles? Eight. And that's all consoles combined against the single PC platform. The concept of PC gaming "dying" is little more than a well-worn meme to generate flame wars these days.
Of course no one knows the exact numbers but it's pretty obvious by practically every industry report I've seen that PC gaming isn't only alive and well but it's growing very fast.
The people that developed the game in the first place did it on a PC so the "mod tools" already exist. It's just a matter of making whatever changes they want and releasing.
Yeah because Valve hasn't made a dime off of Counter-Strike, right? I mean they've only shifted 27 million units in the franchise since buying the rights to the mod. I'm sure they really regret opening that can of worms now.
They started checking for the browser useragent that Chrome for Android uses on my Nexus 7
The Nexus 7 must have been more wildly popular than I thought for them to target it so specifically. It's a pyrrhic victory though as there is no way they can account for browsers like Dolphin that let you literally type in any user agent string you want. I guess they'll net a few of the more naive customers so not a total loss. I guess.
The only problem then is you get the crappy mobile site at a lot of places. Since many sites just look for some substring like "Mobile", you might try adding in some kind of subtle misspelling like "M obile" or whatever.
their piracy rates are by 5-7% from 100% piracy to 93-95%
That's a meaningless and highly inflated statistic without proper context though. To say the piracy rate of PC games is "93-95" percent ignores the fact that many of those copyright infringers would have just went without if piracy had been in some way impossible. The real number is what percent of the people that torrented the game would have bought and figure out what percentage of the whole that is. So if 100,000 people have your game and 7,000 of those people actually paid, that doesn't mean the other 93,000 people are lost sales. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say less than a third of pirates would actually buy the less than spectacular games given no other choice. So if 7,000 people bought your game and 30,000 people would have bought that's a piracy rate of "only" 81 percent which while not great is a far cry from the quoted figure from the article. I realize this is a well-worn argument but as long as people like this Ubisoft guy are ignoring reality to push the agenda, it bears telling.
That being said, the real question is what are the absolute number of sales in the respective percentages above? The way I see it, any conclusions drawn from a direct comparison are pretty worthless other than to be spun as a talking point as there are so many variables involved.
Slashdot Mirror
Expect to hear a lot of "but I just bought an HDTV" hand wringing but if you think about it, 1080P was barely if at all pushing the envelope when it went mainstream. I have CRTs that I bought second hand 10 years ago with 1600x1200 pixels and that is nothing special. This actually pushes display tech and pixel density forward and gets us close to the Hollywood OS ideal of photorealistic no-discernable pixel displays many of us have lusted after since seeing the main viewscreen on ST:TOS.
And that is because of MMO's, without MMO's PC gaming would be the niche it's always been.
DOOM helped revive PC gaming a little in 1993, it was something the consoles of that time didn't have, first person perspective in a blud soaked slugathon.
EQ and WoW did the same thing EQ was something you coudln't do on a console...well until 2003 anyway. If MMO's on consoles ever take off...say bye bye to hose numbers.
Even the DOTA stuff can be done on consoles so don't count on that alone to keep PC gaming vital.
You make some insightful points. It looks like innovative gameplay is what keeps moving PC gaming forward and keeping it vital. That being the case, I actually look forward to MMOs on consoles taking off; if the pattern holds, they'll be replaced by something even better and the cycle repeats.
Give those guys several more good programmers and the story might be different...
Or a lifetime supply of methamphetamine.
But I am an unstable rock you insensitive clod!
I'm okay with 5 years. Besides, the upgrade is free.
Um, or get a Mac. Or use one of the Free operating systems. There's also the option of just not using Metro on Wndows 8.
Do you have anything at all to back up even one of the assertions in your post?
I can attest to this. Office runs excellently in Wine and even starts faster on the same hardware.
Under normal circumstances it might not be but if the price is right there are people that will give you money before paperwork is completed. Nothing is impossible when it comes to money.
Sadly, "most of your money" for many people is whatever amount happens to be left over from your last paycheck that you hope you can stretch to the next one.
FWIW at least they had the common courtesy to hit the Submit button before dragging you off!
I happen to agree. I use Google because I like it and nothing I've seen so far can get me the answers for so many different things at a moments notice. That said, it's funny seeing people rail against Google when all they have to do is use something else. Hell, get a fat enough Internet pipe and index the entire web yourself if you're that paranoid.
Sure. If the price is right.
You do know you can just not use Google, right? No, seriously. You can run your own mail server even. As a matter of fact if you're really worried, you can use tor or Freenet and be completely anonymous. Just make sure you have https everywhere, and noscript running and you're golden. As far as street view goes, secure your wi-fi and plant some trees in front of the house.
If you've got a car it's no problem to carry food/water for a week.
That's true but we're talking about somebody on the run. You're bound to get pulled over eventually in a car and when that happens it's all over.
If you're hiking, you can easily carry a week's worth of commercial dehydrated food, and water filters are common (will make most water drinkable). Use chlorine if you don't want to pump the filter, or a gravity-feed filter bag.
Supplement with fresh-caught fish, or even snared gopher/rabbit/hare if necessary.
All great ideas. I just wonder how sustainable that is in the long term.
- Bus into town, taxi to real bus station, bus anywhere.
I would imagine they would expect you to take public transportation.
Withdraw enough cash to feed yourself for a week, then leave. Go camping. Get out into nature.
How would you feed yourself and keep a steady supply of clean water? It's not as easy as it sounds.
Depends on how much 1 percent of your total wealth actually amounts to. If you have 10 million dollars in the bank then you have 100,000 dollars in the clear. I could go a long ways on that much.
Of course no one knows the exact numbers but it's pretty obvious by practically every industry report I've seen that PC gaming isn't only alive and well but it's growing very fast.
230 million consoles sold. That doesn't mean there are that many currently in use.
The people that developed the game in the first place did it on a PC so the "mod tools" already exist. It's just a matter of making whatever changes they want and releasing.
How much do I make off mods?
Nothing
Yeah because Valve hasn't made a dime off of Counter-Strike, right? I mean they've only shifted 27 million units in the franchise since buying the rights to the mod. I'm sure they really regret opening that can of worms now.
They started checking for the browser useragent that Chrome for Android uses on my Nexus 7
The Nexus 7 must have been more wildly popular than I thought for them to target it so specifically. It's a pyrrhic victory though as there is no way they can account for browsers like Dolphin that let you literally type in any user agent string you want. I guess they'll net a few of the more naive customers so not a total loss. I guess.
The only problem then is you get the crappy mobile site at a lot of places. Since many sites just look for some substring like "Mobile", you might try adding in some kind of subtle misspelling like "M obile" or whatever.
their piracy rates are by 5-7% from 100% piracy to 93-95%
That's a meaningless and highly inflated statistic without proper context though. To say the piracy rate of PC games is "93-95" percent ignores the fact that many of those copyright infringers would have just went without if piracy had been in some way impossible. The real number is what percent of the people that torrented the game would have bought and figure out what percentage of the whole that is. So if 100,000 people have your game and 7,000 of those people actually paid, that doesn't mean the other 93,000 people are lost sales. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say less than a third of pirates would actually buy the less than spectacular games given no other choice. So if 7,000 people bought your game and 30,000 people would have bought that's a piracy rate of "only" 81 percent which while not great is a far cry from the quoted figure from the article. I realize this is a well-worn argument but as long as people like this Ubisoft guy are ignoring reality to push the agenda, it bears telling.
That being said, the real question is what are the absolute number of sales in the respective percentages above? The way I see it, any conclusions drawn from a direct comparison are pretty worthless other than to be spun as a talking point as there are so many variables involved.