There's one thing needed for widespread mainstream acceptance: standardization. Well, maybe two; you might need a low price point as well.
Standardization is difficult when you've got a five-year cycle and three competing major platforms with no interoperability. A low price point is impossible when the hardware and software are both created entirely for technophiles who demand more features and better performance. If you can get games and game hardware cheaply, on a standardized format that is not monopolized by a single manufacturer, then you'll get mainstream acceptance.
There's a problem with this - most game hardware is sold at a loss. It's possible, however, to make a profit selling Gamecubes at a hundred dollars. If you take an equivalent platform, throw in some permanent storage, some DVD functionality, and intuitive Internet features including an online store for games, sell it at a profit, and market it toward non-traditional gamers and non-gamers with software that appeals to them, you can start to penetrate the market.
Sounds a lot like the Nintendo Revolution, doesn't it?
Once you build up your momentum and media awareness, license access to the online service to any manufacturer that wants it, but keep some exclusive features for yourself. You don't want to drive yourself out of business, after all. The online service would serve as a gateway drug, providing accessible games to get people interested in gaming. They might turn to your hardware after that - you've got the exclusive features, after all - or might turn to another hardware manufacturer. Market share won't matter as much any more, after all, since nobody will have to sell at a loss. Higher-end software can still go for a very high price - certainly not sixty bucks, but not five, either - and, like current game software, it will provide a deep and engaging experience for anyone who's not impressed by the more casual software on the market.
It's the restructuring and standardization that the game industry really needs in order to move outside of its (large) niche market and into the mainstream. It's a bit more complicated than home movies, but it's hardly impossible. Quite the opposite; I'd say it's inevitable.
They're not "disappearing" and "reappearing" so much as they are being converted from energy and spontaneously annihilating each other. Stray radiation enters the space inside of one very small area (I want to say within one Planck unit but I'd probably be wrong), resulting in enough energy in one place that the energy turns into an electron-positron pair. The electron and the positron then proceed to crash into one another due to electromagnetic attraction, and in so doing they mutually annihilate each other, releasing the same amount of energy that went into making them.
It may well be taken as a parallel for the Revolution, because there's really only two differences between the two platforms. Both of them have a much lower price point than the competition, both of them will be sold at a profit (so that hardware sales can be used to subsidize first-party development), both of them are attractive to developers, and both of them feature an intuitive, non-technical, and most importantly unique input system to appeal to non-traditional gamers and non-gamers.
The only differences are that the DS is a follow-up to the most wildly successful game hardware of all time (the Game Boy) whereas the Revolution succeeds the poor-selling Gamecube, and the Revolution is a home console rather than a portable platform.
The only real question is whether these differences are important enough to make or break a console.
If I recall correctly, isn't chat built in though?
The chat doesn't support any sort of Internet connection, merely ad-hoc wireless. I can understand why Nintendo would be reluctant to include that level of Wi-Fi support for Pictochat, however; there's good money to be made from selling messaging software.
And sequels can't include something new? Once you create a franchise, you should be done with it, rather than expand upon the possibilities it creates?
I agree that two Madden or Mario party games is one too many. But keep in mind: some of the best games ever made were refinements and expansions of existing concepts in gameplay, design, or setting.
A sequel is created to create either new mechanics or new scenarios. The new mechanics expand upon the gameplay. The new scenarios expand upon the world of the game.
A sequel that adds both new mechanics and new scenarios is a good sequel.
A sequel that adds either new mechanics or new scenarios, but not both, is only a good sequel if it's marketed as an expansion or an add-on.
A sequel that revamps the mechanics or the scenarios with no reference to the original is not, in fact, a sequel at all, but a new game derived from the original.
The whole world has been addicted to technology as soon as agriculture was invented and the human population exceeded the number that could be sustained by hunting and gathering alone.
You dislike it for the same reasons that lots of people enjoy it immensely. See, games with really complex storylines and dynamic characters are a dime a dozen these days. It's refreshing to go back to a game where the only reason you're saving the world is because some guy with a crown told you to, and the only reason you go through all those caves along the way is because every village has been endangered by some bad guy or other.
Dragon Quest succeeds because it is far better balanced and more entertaining just to play than any of its contemporaries. If you're looking for a story, go read a book. DQVIII is just one step closer to the perfection of the console RPG gameplay style.
And Europeans (nearly all of the ones I've conversed with, but this was over the Internet; be advised that my evidence is anecdotal) have the gall to criticize the Patriot Act, under which only some correspondence is archived.
There's quite a lot of such people, in fact. The moment a power vacuum exists in the Republican - Democrat dichotomy (if history and the modern political structure are any indication, it'll be because the Democrats splinter), the fiscal conservatives you named will form a coalition, taking away some of the Republicans, and the Republican party will snatch up environmentalists and social conservatives. We'll be left in a position where how much the government does is more important, politically, than in which direction it does it.
If you lack privacy, tyrants can go unchecked in power.
There's a missing ingredient. You have to lack privacy, but you also have to have a tyrant.
I'm not saying anybody in particular does or doesn't, and I'm certainly not saying that more privacy isn't a good thing. But there's more to an invasion of free expression than the ability to invade it.
TFA uses primarily correlational studies, yes, but that's acceptable since all it's trying to do is demonstrate that the opposing arguments, which do rely on causal arguments, are false.
He's presenting a rebuttal. The opposing viewpoint states that the presence of Foo causes Bar to increase; TFA disproves it by demonstrating that Foo is up and Bar is down. It's not asserting that the presence of Foo causes Bar to decrease. It's asserting that the presence of Foo does not case Bar to increase. There's a subtle difference.
Whether the subjects showed signs of aggression within an hour after playing the game is trivial in comparison to whether they showed these signs, say, a week (or more) after playing it.
If there are a lot of gamers in your town but not a lot of social places for them to go, then I must reiterate what most everybody else has been saying, and insist that the best thing you can do is provide a place for people to hang around and bask in gamer culture for a few hours, and buy something while they're there. Make your money catering to the social aspects of gaming rather than the games themselves. Become the place that people who are really serious about video games can go to and find other people who are also serious about video games. Launch parties, LAN parties, tournaments, a couple arcade cabinets with MAME machines in them - hooked up to each other in a way that allows for competitive play, of course - game-related merchandise, vending machines, whatever you can think of; just make sure that you emphasize these enough that they'll stand out in the face of the game's sales.
Preventing people who steal from buying seems, to me, like it would be counterintuitive. People who pirate games do so because they like games, and people who like games - even the pirates - can often be persuaded to pay for them. Not to mention that such harsh treatment might have other negative consequences. The kid you blacklisted certainly won't leak any of your games onto the Internet any more, yes, but do you think his friends will come back after he tells them how he was kicked out like that?
As a retailer, you will continue to run the risk of bankruptcy if you can't give your customer base what they want. And that is a hard fact, as hard a fact as 2+2=4. Get in touch with them. Who is the clientele of your store, and can you boost sales by expanding into a different market? A family-oriented video game store is going to be in a tighter position as the gamer demographic ages.
A business that can't adapt is going to fail. Blaming a segment of your cutomer base - people who have paid you for games in the past, but won't any more - is your right, but it is more important to find a solution. Adapt to market trends.
I feel for your family, truly. But you can't keep a roof over their heads by sticking up for "the industry." You have to stick up for your business, in whatever field. The industry battles will be fought by the ESRB, the ESA, and publishers.
I have just started taking a bachelor's program in Game and Simulation Programming, and where I am taking classes I have been fortunate enough to be instructed by an industry veteran who has been with the industry from the beginning and teaching skills related to it from the beginning.
I haven't been at it long enough to determine whether the skills I'm learning are different enough from a less specific degree, but it is clear that the school isn't fooling around.
The same cannot be said of most of my classmates, roughly half of whom signed up thinking that it would be a cakewalk and they'd get to play video games all day. I'm counting the weeks until they drop out and the rest of us can learn something. I can't imagine how much worse it must be in, say, a community college.
Game design does require a degree of creativity that many people simply do not have. The professor knows this, and so instead of trying to teach creativity, he has focused on teaching students how to turn that creativity into a full design document, and then how to turn that design document into a finished product.
You can't overlook the importance of modelers and animators - which is where the real demand is - and, noticing this, a number of institutions have begun "Game Art" programs, focusing on creating practical computer models. The game industry is becoming a highly-employing field for talented artists.
Ultimately, yes, I believe there are more people than normal who started taking programs like these because they thought they'd be easy and cool. But you can't overlook the people who joined them expecting to work - and found their expectations fulfilled.
Slashdot Mirror
There's one thing needed for widespread mainstream acceptance: standardization. Well, maybe two; you might need a low price point as well.
Standardization is difficult when you've got a five-year cycle and three competing major platforms with no interoperability. A low price point is impossible when the hardware and software are both created entirely for technophiles who demand more features and better performance. If you can get games and game hardware cheaply, on a standardized format that is not monopolized by a single manufacturer, then you'll get mainstream acceptance.
There's a problem with this - most game hardware is sold at a loss. It's possible, however, to make a profit selling Gamecubes at a hundred dollars. If you take an equivalent platform, throw in some permanent storage, some DVD functionality, and intuitive Internet features including an online store for games, sell it at a profit, and market it toward non-traditional gamers and non-gamers with software that appeals to them, you can start to penetrate the market.
Sounds a lot like the Nintendo Revolution, doesn't it?
Once you build up your momentum and media awareness, license access to the online service to any manufacturer that wants it, but keep some exclusive features for yourself. You don't want to drive yourself out of business, after all. The online service would serve as a gateway drug, providing accessible games to get people interested in gaming. They might turn to your hardware after that - you've got the exclusive features, after all - or might turn to another hardware manufacturer. Market share won't matter as much any more, after all, since nobody will have to sell at a loss. Higher-end software can still go for a very high price - certainly not sixty bucks, but not five, either - and, like current game software, it will provide a deep and engaging experience for anyone who's not impressed by the more casual software on the market.
It's the restructuring and standardization that the game industry really needs in order to move outside of its (large) niche market and into the mainstream. It's a bit more complicated than home movies, but it's hardly impossible. Quite the opposite; I'd say it's inevitable.
Jupiter's magnetic field is much larger and more intense than the sun's.
The sun's mass is much larger and more intense than Jupiter's.
Correlation does not imply causation, but a lack of correlation does imply a lack of causation.
They're not "disappearing" and "reappearing" so much as they are being converted from energy and spontaneously annihilating each other. Stray radiation enters the space inside of one very small area (I want to say within one Planck unit but I'd probably be wrong), resulting in enough energy in one place that the energy turns into an electron-positron pair. The electron and the positron then proceed to crash into one another due to electromagnetic attraction, and in so doing they mutually annihilate each other, releasing the same amount of energy that went into making them.
Why not do it yourself? Show some entrepreneurial initiative.
The only differences are that the DS is a follow-up to the most wildly successful game hardware of all time (the Game Boy) whereas the Revolution succeeds the poor-selling Gamecube, and the Revolution is a home console rather than a portable platform.
The only real question is whether these differences are important enough to make or break a console.
The chat doesn't support any sort of Internet connection, merely ad-hoc wireless. I can understand why Nintendo would be reluctant to include that level of Wi-Fi support for Pictochat, however; there's good money to be made from selling messaging software.
I agree that two Madden or Mario party games is one too many. But keep in mind: some of the best games ever made were refinements and expansions of existing concepts in gameplay, design, or setting.
A sequel is created to create either new mechanics or new scenarios. The new mechanics expand upon the gameplay. The new scenarios expand upon the world of the game.
A sequel that adds both new mechanics and new scenarios is a good sequel.
A sequel that adds either new mechanics or new scenarios, but not both, is only a good sequel if it's marketed as an expansion or an add-on.
A sequel that revamps the mechanics or the scenarios with no reference to the original is not, in fact, a sequel at all, but a new game derived from the original.
The whole world has been addicted to technology as soon as agriculture was invented and the human population exceeded the number that could be sustained by hunting and gathering alone.
The grandparent post's idea was that Quake isn't accessible to disabled users either.
For a body who throw around so many 1984 references, Slashdot users certainly demonstrate a whole lot of groupthink.
You dislike it for the same reasons that lots of people enjoy it immensely. See, games with really complex storylines and dynamic characters are a dime a dozen these days. It's refreshing to go back to a game where the only reason you're saving the world is because some guy with a crown told you to, and the only reason you go through all those caves along the way is because every village has been endangered by some bad guy or other.
Dragon Quest succeeds because it is far better balanced and more entertaining just to play than any of its contemporaries. If you're looking for a story, go read a book. DQVIII is just one step closer to the perfection of the console RPG gameplay style.
And at this stage in the debate, TFA was attempting to demonstrate why the common arguments are not truth.
And Europeans (nearly all of the ones I've conversed with, but this was over the Internet; be advised that my evidence is anecdotal) have the gall to criticize the Patriot Act, under which only some correspondence is archived.
There's quite a lot of such people, in fact. The moment a power vacuum exists in the Republican - Democrat dichotomy (if history and the modern political structure are any indication, it'll be because the Democrats splinter), the fiscal conservatives you named will form a coalition, taking away some of the Republicans, and the Republican party will snatch up environmentalists and social conservatives. We'll be left in a position where how much the government does is more important, politically, than in which direction it does it.
There's a missing ingredient. You have to lack privacy, but you also have to have a tyrant.
I'm not saying anybody in particular does or doesn't, and I'm certainly not saying that more privacy isn't a good thing. But there's more to an invasion of free expression than the ability to invade it.
He's presenting a rebuttal. The opposing viewpoint states that the presence of Foo causes Bar to increase; TFA disproves it by demonstrating that Foo is up and Bar is down. It's not asserting that the presence of Foo causes Bar to decrease. It's asserting that the presence of Foo does not case Bar to increase. There's a subtle difference.
Whether the subjects showed signs of aggression within an hour after playing the game is trivial in comparison to whether they showed these signs, say, a week (or more) after playing it.
In debate, the person who presents the truth is the person who's right.
There is no other console. At least, no other console that would serve as an adequate replacement.
Rentals are also an excellent idea.
The ICANN could theoretically stop it, but the ICANN is not the US.
As a retailer, you will continue to run the risk of bankruptcy if you can't give your customer base what they want. And that is a hard fact, as hard a fact as 2+2=4. Get in touch with them. Who is the clientele of your store, and can you boost sales by expanding into a different market? A family-oriented video game store is going to be in a tighter position as the gamer demographic ages.
A business that can't adapt is going to fail. Blaming a segment of your cutomer base - people who have paid you for games in the past, but won't any more - is your right, but it is more important to find a solution. Adapt to market trends.
I feel for your family, truly. But you can't keep a roof over their heads by sticking up for "the industry." You have to stick up for your business, in whatever field. The industry battles will be fought by the ESRB, the ESA, and publishers.
I have just started taking a bachelor's program in Game and Simulation Programming, and where I am taking classes I have been fortunate enough to be instructed by an industry veteran who has been with the industry from the beginning and teaching skills related to it from the beginning.
I haven't been at it long enough to determine whether the skills I'm learning are different enough from a less specific degree, but it is clear that the school isn't fooling around.
The same cannot be said of most of my classmates, roughly half of whom signed up thinking that it would be a cakewalk and they'd get to play video games all day. I'm counting the weeks until they drop out and the rest of us can learn something. I can't imagine how much worse it must be in, say, a community college.
Game design does require a degree of creativity that many people simply do not have. The professor knows this, and so instead of trying to teach creativity, he has focused on teaching students how to turn that creativity into a full design document, and then how to turn that design document into a finished product.
You can't overlook the importance of modelers and animators - which is where the real demand is - and, noticing this, a number of institutions have begun "Game Art" programs, focusing on creating practical computer models. The game industry is becoming a highly-employing field for talented artists.
Ultimately, yes, I believe there are more people than normal who started taking programs like these because they thought they'd be easy and cool. But you can't overlook the people who joined them expecting to work - and found their expectations fulfilled.
I mean trust in the specific developer who's making a game, not developers in general.
If you trust the developer who is making a specific upcoming game then you will probably be justified in buying it on the launch date.