Since people will sue you for infringement on the flimsiest of pretenses, you aren't really protecting yourself from the possibility of a lawsuit. On the off chance you see something similar to your idea which you dismiss as unrelated and you later get sued by the party who controls that idea, they can go after you for treble damages on the grounds of willful infringement. "But it isn't the same?" Doesn't matter: they're in a much stronger bargaining position when it comes to coercing you into a settlement.
There's a reason the legal departments of corporations order their engineers not to so much as Google for prior art. Hold yourself to the same standard; get yourself a patent attorney and let them take on the liability on your behalf.
Five hundred years, people! Years! I mean, it's incomprehensible that something s frivolous as a game would remain a cultural staple that long! Name one game that people were playing 500 years ago that they still play today.
No, no, no! It's the USA PATRIOT Act! It stands for "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism." It's just fantastic luck that such a descriptive name would happen to also have an easy-to-remember acronym.
I mean, if they changed it to the GOOD AMERICAN Act, I'd never remember it. The "GA Act"? That's not even a word!
Unless you're suggesting our smart, handsome politicians have nothing better to do than to sit around all day thinking up names for bills that fit politically expedient acronyms...
I find it highly humorous that the first article posted on/. I read when I boot up Solaris 10 on VMware is an article about VMware and virtual appliances.
Especially since you read it on the LCD of your Solaris-powered electric toothbrush!
It's a big, bold plan, but Microsoft tends to excel at the biggest, boldest plans--see Windows, Internet Explorer, and the optical mouse.
Early 2000, deep inside Bill Gates' Secret Lab under Lake Washington.
Bill Gates: Steve, what I'm about to show you may shock you to your very core. It's going to change the face of computing, nay, technology, as we know it. You may want to sit down.
Steve Ballmer: I would, but you've removed all the chairs from the room.
Bill Gates:...yes. Well, just stand then. Stand, and behold, for like Prometheus giving fire to mankind, we are about to unleash upon the world... The Optical Mouse!!!
Steve Ballmer: Like those old Apple II mice, with the little camera inside?
Bill Gates: (Rolls eyes) Mice have two buttons Steve.
Steve Ballmer: Right, sure. Look, Bill. I'm just not sure the world is ready for-
Rockstar (specifically, Sam Houser) has stated that San Andreas "marks the end of the GTA 3 Trilogy," that GTA 4 has yet to be released, and that it will represent more of a dramatic change in the game than the one between 3, Vice City, and San Andreas. This is in line with their previous philosophy: the original GTA was followed up with The London Missions (London 1969 and, later, London 1961, expansions on the PC and a whole new release on the PSX), which preceded the "true" GTA2.
not to mention Rockstar Games would never sell out to M$.
...When it's so much more profitable to sell out to the market leader?:-D
You know, it's interesting: Microsoft has done this with the Xbox 360's Live Arcade, but I haven't heard anyone complaining about it.
Live Arcade games are "locked" to your profile. As long as the system can see your profile (e.g., it's on the hard drive or memory card in the system), everyone on the system has full use of any games that profile has purchased. But once the profile goes away, all the Arcade games "automagically" turn into game-demos.
It's a pretty convenient system in a lot of ways: If you're at someone else's house (or lose your hard drive, delete games for more space, or need to replace your system), you can save your profile on a memory card or restore it from Live and all your Arcade games can be redownloaded at no cost. But it also means those Arcade games can never be sold used, given to a friend or relative, or "transferred" in any way short of selling off your entire profile. Those are the things people are rightly upset about with Sony's rumored system: I wonder why that ire doesn't extend to MS?
I just played a few hours (no, I'm serious) of the Fight Night Round 3 demo on a friend's 360, which is the first fighting game I've ever played that went completely HUDless. It was really impressive. Everything is conveyed through the sounds of the punches, the damage to the characters (on an HDTV you can actually make out their eyes swelling shut, which is just brutal looking), and the background announcers talking about how the match is going.
The problem I have with it is that, even when you can see you're getting demolished, you're still just guessing how close you are to hitting the mat. It was definitely immersive, but as a gamer, I like having concrete information to play by. Especially in close matches against tough AI: losing a dozen rounds of a story mode match without seeing whether you're making any headway might be "Real," but it doesn't sound "Fun."
Is their really any difference between lending a CD to friend and sharing music via online?
Pragmatically, there's a difference in scale. If you're typical, you probably have under a hundred "friends," only a handful of which are even interested in the same music as you. Through filesharing, you could be supplying copies of the CD to thousands or even tens of thousands of individuals, nearly none of whom you've ever met.
Legally, it's a matter of duplication. You're well within your rights to lend a CD to a friend, because you can't technically play the CD while your friend is borrowing it.
RIAAly, you can't lend CDs to friends. Our rootkits have transmitted your contacts lists to our servers, and they'll be hearing from our lawyers shortly.
This law was to go into effect on January 1st, and the Judge ordered it blocked, according to the article, on December 23rd.
The law requires that all games fitting its definitions of "violent" be emblazoned with a 2-inch by 2-inch sticker with the number "18" on it. Since it doesn't establish any ratings review board and doesn't punish publishers or developers directly (the $1000 fine only applies to the person who sells the game), it would have been up to the retailers themselves to decide which games were violent under the law, and to affix a label to them. There was a good chance this was going to get blocked, but with only a week to go, I can't believe major retailers didn't have a contingency plan.
Did anyone working at a game store in California get a box of "18" stickers from the corporate office and a list of games that needed to be labelled? Can you tell us what was on the list?
You can use my old standby, "Psychonauts." TFA uses "The Warriors" which seems fair: you can't really be criticized for riding the coattails of a license nobody's heard of (or, apparently, cares about).
Microsoft's inability to produce reasonable quantities of the 360 has clearly had a ripple effect across the industry because most consumers, naturally, aren't going to buy 360 software, even great games like Call of Duty 2, until they can buy the actual console.
It seems a little disingenuous to blame a new console for a lack of new hit games. Even in the best-supplied launches, there's never enough consoles on shelves to push through a million units of any game before Christmas (the PS2 sold a little over a million in its first month in Japan, but it was mostly coupled with DVD purchases, not games).
With a combination of bundling in stores and an unusually high concentration of hardcore purchasers (because, really, who else would stand outside all night for one?), I would bet that the attach rate on these things is extremely high. But the PS2 has 100 million units out there: even if the 360 sold through 2 million in the first month (or an unheard-of 3) it's still a months away from being a significant percentage of sales in the industry.
The reason they can't watch DVDs when the player is hooked through the VCR is likely because the DVD player has Macrovision protection standard and the VCR, reading the protection signal, scrambles the input. Changing to AUX/Line In won't circumvent the issue unless their VCR is more than a decade old or has been modded, in which case they almost certainly don't need to go back to the store for technical advice.
Now the real question is, are there enough guys like me out there to justify charging half as much for the game to make the profit on volume?
Yes. And they do: when console games hit a certain rate of penetration, the Big Three turn them over to "Platinum" status, slash the System Licensing cost to a few bucks, and let the publisher re-release the game at that magic price-point of 20-25 bucks.
Is it worth it for them to do this with new games? Hell no. Market research demonstrates that casual gamers such as yourself almost never know when a new game is coming out anyway, don't read the magazines where those dates are advertised, and don't frequent the websites that hype them (although, since you're reading Slashdot Games, you might be less "casual" than you'd like to believe). So releasing a new title at a lower price point doesn't gain the publisher anything: they can release it at full price, wait while your hardcore friends play it and tell you how great it is, and by the time you decide to see what the fuss is about, the price is already in the sweet spot.
And if your gaming friends aren't playing it and telling you how great it is? Then you probably wouldn't buy it even if it was $20 on launch day.
This second-stage of a console game's life is extremely profitable for the publisher: sales volume typically goes way up. But it doesn't work with new games. I was at Atari when they considered releasing a title at a $25 price point for launch: the problem is that hardcore gamers see this as a sign that the game isn't good (not because we released it cheap, but because they hadn't heard much about it and, seeing it at that price point, presume it's been on shelves for months and wasn't selling), and casual gamers don't hear about it from hardcore gamers, so they don't give it a second glance. It's not impossible, mind. But it doesn't usually pay off.
The "Real-Time Toy Story on the PS2" bit is a little myth that no one ever seems to be able to find documented evidence of Sony stating.
That said: yeah, your PS3 won't be a "wireless hub," almost certainly isn't going to include "2 HDMI outputs" and probably won't have flash memory ports for every one of the five promised formats (Hmm... Sony voluntarily giving up the lucrative memory card market... Can you say "Memory Stick DUO compatible?")
And if the PSP is any indication, Euro-Timmy's got quite a wait ahead of him.
Sony's doing a brilliant job of "managed fanboism": as long as they remain mum on new information (like final console specs, worldwide release schedule, and some in-game footage of a launch title), they can continue to compete in people's minds with the "here and now(ish)" 360. But since, in practice, people won't be able to pick up a 360 until Spring 2006 anyway (by which time Sony's going to HAVE to tip their hand), I wonder why they're bothering.
Actually, this is uniquely not true on the 360. A LOT of the Live functionality (voice, gamercards, friends, etc.), your audio controls (so you do some of that much-lauded "listening to your iPod through the tee-vee"), system preferences, multi-controller setups, and powering down the console are all handled through the system-HUD, which pops up whenever you press the little X in the middle of the controller. So the System GUI comes up a LOT; if it's good, that means you always know how to get to the settings you want, and if it sucks, it sucks everywhere.
It's worse than just the quotas (which are, although not AFAIK explicit, still de facto). The patent office is entirely funded by patent fees, and despite this apparent disincentive to research (or, perhaps, because of it) has been flush with cash for so long that Congress has started using it as a loan/revenue source, a la Social Security.
Which means (you guessed it) if the U.S. legislature ever did reform the system to be more agressive at stopping submarine/infringing/abusive patents, it would be another hit to the national debt.
So... you're saying Microsoft is illegally leveraging their marketshare by making their bundled apps difficult to delete, thus closing off the valuable "I deleted my media player and don't know how to reinstall it" market from outside competition?
I don't buy it. "Difficult to delete bundled apps" is a design critique, not an antitrust violation. The question is whether including the apps in the first place unfairly blocks effective competition, and if so, Apple is just as guilty of it as Microsoft.
Incidentally, you CAN remove apps such as Media Player, IE, and even Paint by going to Add or Remove Programs | Add/Remove Windows Components. Mind, I've never met anyone who's bothered, but I've never met anyone who's ditched Quicktime on their Mac either...
Rockstar has to be held responsible for anything that can be done with their game, even if they've made significant efforts to make any changes to their code impossible, such as not creating any community mod tools, using largely proprietary data formats, and never creating a "Sex-Based minigame" to begin with. Heads will roll!
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to the courthouse to sue the government for that penis someone spraypainted under the 405 overpass. Didn't they realize when they built the highway that CHILDREN might see that wall?
It says that the DS tracked more total units sold "over the same period," that is to say, excluding those sold before the PSP launched.
I haven't double-checked the numbers elsewhere to see if that is indeed true, but presuming Forbes did its homework, that's a perfectly reasonable measure of how Nintendo is kicking Sony's ass 'round the playground. More touchscreen road-drawing games for everyone!
I suspect this isn't just marketing promises: Microsoft has a fair deal of control over how many 360's are sold in the first year. If they've decided that a 10 million unit head-start on Sony's US launch is what they need to compete this generation, they can cut prices and advertise sufficiently to get 10 million consoles into homes.
Remember, this isn't a question of a market demanding a good at a certain price point: MS, just like Sony, is going to lose millions of dollars in their first year of giving away razors, one way or the other.
From the Article: "The team that produced Super Mario 3 consisted of over TEN PEOPLE..."
My God. I mean, can you imagine ordering take out for TEN PEOPLE? Must have been a management nightmare.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a reason the legal departments of corporations order their engineers not to so much as Google for prior art. Hold yourself to the same standard; get yourself a patent attorney and let them take on the liability on your behalf.
(IANAL, but I deal with a lot of them. ;-)
I mean, except chess, which was also a product of the rennaisance.
And checkers which by some accounts predates the Epic of Gilgamesh by about a thousand years.
And go, mancala, tic-tac-toe, golf, of course...
I mean, if they changed it to the GOOD AMERICAN Act, I'd never remember it. The "GA Act"? That's not even a word!
Unless you're suggesting our smart, handsome politicians have nothing better to do than to sit around all day thinking up names for bills that fit politically expedient acronyms...
Especially since you read it on the LCD of your Solaris-powered electric toothbrush!
(Ducks)
Early 2000, deep inside Bill Gates' Secret Lab under Lake Washington.
Bill Gates: Steve, what I'm about to show you may shock you to your very core. It's going to change the face of computing, nay, technology, as we know it. You may want to sit down.
Steve Ballmer: I would, but you've removed all the chairs from the room.
Bill Gates: ...yes. Well, just stand then. Stand, and behold, for like Prometheus giving fire to mankind, we are about to unleash upon the world... The Optical Mouse!!!
Steve Ballmer: Like those old Apple II mice, with the little camera inside?
Bill Gates: (Rolls eyes) Mice have two buttons Steve.
Steve Ballmer: Right, sure. Look, Bill. I'm just not sure the world is ready for-
Bill Gates: I SAY WHEN THE WORLD IS READY!
etc.
Rockstar (specifically, Sam Houser) has stated that San Andreas "marks the end of the GTA 3 Trilogy," that GTA 4 has yet to be released, and that it will represent more of a dramatic change in the game than the one between 3, Vice City, and San Andreas. This is in line with their previous philosophy: the original GTA was followed up with The London Missions (London 1969 and, later, London 1961, expansions on the PC and a whole new release on the PSX), which preceded the "true" GTA2.
...When it's so much more profitable to sell out to the market leader? :-D
Live Arcade games are "locked" to your profile. As long as the system can see your profile (e.g., it's on the hard drive or memory card in the system), everyone on the system has full use of any games that profile has purchased. But once the profile goes away, all the Arcade games "automagically" turn into game-demos.
It's a pretty convenient system in a lot of ways: If you're at someone else's house (or lose your hard drive, delete games for more space, or need to replace your system), you can save your profile on a memory card or restore it from Live and all your Arcade games can be redownloaded at no cost. But it also means those Arcade games can never be sold used, given to a friend or relative, or "transferred" in any way short of selling off your entire profile. Those are the things people are rightly upset about with Sony's rumored system: I wonder why that ire doesn't extend to MS?
The problem I have with it is that, even when you can see you're getting demolished, you're still just guessing how close you are to hitting the mat. It was definitely immersive, but as a gamer, I like having concrete information to play by. Especially in close matches against tough AI: losing a dozen rounds of a story mode match without seeing whether you're making any headway might be "Real," but it doesn't sound "Fun."
Pragmatically, there's a difference in scale. If you're typical, you probably have under a hundred "friends," only a handful of which are even interested in the same music as you. Through filesharing, you could be supplying copies of the CD to thousands or even tens of thousands of individuals, nearly none of whom you've ever met.
Legally, it's a matter of duplication. You're well within your rights to lend a CD to a friend, because you can't technically play the CD while your friend is borrowing it.
RIAAly, you can't lend CDs to friends. Our rootkits have transmitted your contacts lists to our servers, and they'll be hearing from our lawyers shortly.
The law requires that all games fitting its definitions of "violent" be emblazoned with a 2-inch by 2-inch sticker with the number "18" on it. Since it doesn't establish any ratings review board and doesn't punish publishers or developers directly (the $1000 fine only applies to the person who sells the game), it would have been up to the retailers themselves to decide which games were violent under the law, and to affix a label to them. There was a good chance this was going to get blocked, but with only a week to go, I can't believe major retailers didn't have a contingency plan.
Did anyone working at a game store in California get a box of "18" stickers from the corporate office and a list of games that needed to be labelled? Can you tell us what was on the list?
You can use my old standby, "Psychonauts." TFA uses "The Warriors" which seems fair: you can't really be criticized for riding the coattails of a license nobody's heard of (or, apparently, cares about).
It seems a little disingenuous to blame a new console for a lack of new hit games. Even in the best-supplied launches, there's never enough consoles on shelves to push through a million units of any game before Christmas (the PS2 sold a little over a million in its first month in Japan, but it was mostly coupled with DVD purchases, not games).
With a combination of bundling in stores and an unusually high concentration of hardcore purchasers (because, really, who else would stand outside all night for one?), I would bet that the attach rate on these things is extremely high. But the PS2 has 100 million units out there: even if the 360 sold through 2 million in the first month (or an unheard-of 3) it's still a months away from being a significant percentage of sales in the industry.
Just sayin'.
Yes. And they do: when console games hit a certain rate of penetration, the Big Three turn them over to "Platinum" status, slash the System Licensing cost to a few bucks, and let the publisher re-release the game at that magic price-point of 20-25 bucks.
Is it worth it for them to do this with new games? Hell no. Market research demonstrates that casual gamers such as yourself almost never know when a new game is coming out anyway, don't read the magazines where those dates are advertised, and don't frequent the websites that hype them (although, since you're reading Slashdot Games, you might be less "casual" than you'd like to believe). So releasing a new title at a lower price point doesn't gain the publisher anything: they can release it at full price, wait while your hardcore friends play it and tell you how great it is, and by the time you decide to see what the fuss is about, the price is already in the sweet spot.
And if your gaming friends aren't playing it and telling you how great it is? Then you probably wouldn't buy it even if it was $20 on launch day.
This second-stage of a console game's life is extremely profitable for the publisher: sales volume typically goes way up. But it doesn't work with new games. I was at Atari when they considered releasing a title at a $25 price point for launch: the problem is that hardcore gamers see this as a sign that the game isn't good (not because we released it cheap, but because they hadn't heard much about it and, seeing it at that price point, presume it's been on shelves for months and wasn't selling), and casual gamers don't hear about it from hardcore gamers, so they don't give it a second glance. It's not impossible, mind. But it doesn't usually pay off.
The "Real-Time Toy Story on the PS2" bit is a little myth that no one ever seems to be able to find documented evidence of Sony stating.
That said: yeah, your PS3 won't be a "wireless hub," almost certainly isn't going to include "2 HDMI outputs" and probably won't have flash memory ports for every one of the five promised formats (Hmm... Sony voluntarily giving up the lucrative memory card market... Can you say "Memory Stick DUO compatible?")
And if the PSP is any indication, Euro-Timmy's got quite a wait ahead of him.
Sony's doing a brilliant job of "managed fanboism": as long as they remain mum on new information (like final console specs, worldwide release schedule, and some in-game footage of a launch title), they can continue to compete in people's minds with the "here and now(ish)" 360. But since, in practice, people won't be able to pick up a 360 until Spring 2006 anyway (by which time Sony's going to HAVE to tip their hand), I wonder why they're bothering.
Sounds like it's good, though. Cool.
Which means (you guessed it) if the U.S. legislature ever did reform the system to be more agressive at stopping submarine/infringing/abusive patents, it would be another hit to the national debt.
Intelligent Qube WAS great. Wish its publisher, Sony, had brought the sequel stateside...
Challenge: Count the ironies in that statement.
So... you're saying Microsoft is illegally leveraging their marketshare by making their bundled apps difficult to delete, thus closing off the valuable "I deleted my media player and don't know how to reinstall it" market from outside competition?
I don't buy it. "Difficult to delete bundled apps" is a design critique, not an antitrust violation. The question is whether including the apps in the first place unfairly blocks effective competition, and if so, Apple is just as guilty of it as Microsoft.
Incidentally, you CAN remove apps such as Media Player, IE, and even Paint by going to Add or Remove Programs | Add/Remove Windows Components. Mind, I've never met anyone who's bothered, but I've never met anyone who's ditched Quicktime on their Mac either...
Rockstar has to be held responsible for anything that can be done with their game, even if they've made significant efforts to make any changes to their code impossible, such as not creating any community mod tools, using largely proprietary data formats, and never creating a "Sex-Based minigame" to begin with. Heads will roll!
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to the courthouse to sue the government for that penis someone spraypainted under the 405 overpass. Didn't they realize when they built the highway that CHILDREN might see that wall?
Mind, I could be wrong... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/28/ds_psp_sal es/
I haven't double-checked the numbers elsewhere to see if that is indeed true, but presuming Forbes did its homework, that's a perfectly reasonable measure of how Nintendo is kicking Sony's ass 'round the playground. More touchscreen road-drawing games for everyone!
Remember, this isn't a question of a market demanding a good at a certain price point: MS, just like Sony, is going to lose millions of dollars in their first year of giving away razors, one way or the other.
Hm...
At about 12 Million, you're going to have to broaden your definition of "hot."
Around 30 Million, you're going to have to rethink "university."
At about 3.6 Billion, you may have to tinker with your standards for "girl."
It's downhill from there...
From the Article: "The team that produced Super Mario 3 consisted of over TEN PEOPLE..." My God. I mean, can you imagine ordering take out for TEN PEOPLE? Must have been a management nightmare.