It is a common misconception that xbox has sold more than gamecube. In the US, it's true, but in Europe (especially UK, for some reason), the gamecube is stronger. As for japan, I don't think I need to go into details...
So yeah, Microsoft spent all that money, and it could be argued that they are tied in 2nd place (for worldwide install base) with Nintendo. However, they did establish themselves and a credible player, and I do think they have a bit more momentum than Nintendo going into this next round.
Good, so we've heard the success stories (which is all the author really mentions). What about the legions of shareware developers that just make a decent living (nothing wrong with that) without making a fortune? And what about the ones that soon have to find something else to do when they can't pay their bills?
It's just like rock bands. You only hear about the successful ones. You never hear about all the very decent bands that, 20 years later, are still playing in ordinary bars in front of an audience of 3.
(trivia: The Police once played in front of an audience of 2!)
The specialty stores totally sold out (EB, etc). It's the walmarts and targets that haven't. The initial wave of buyers are early adopters, and these guys usually don't buy at Walmart but rather go to specialty stores.
Apparently, the specialty stores went through 3 waves of shipments that sold out. That's very good.
As word of mouth spreads from the early adopters, the non-early adopters will start buying them from "just anyplace", and the walmarts and tagerts will sell way more units.
Sony probably made a mistake shipping too many units to the Walmarts, and not enough to the specialty stores.
PC games development as a high initial cost to get started with??!?!? Do you have any idea how much ps2 or xbox devkits cost? And that's only if you are approved by sony or microsoft to actually develop games for their platforms.
I'm sorry man, you're just thick. The xbox is huge, and that's all there is to it. You're probably one of those guys who thinks the original xbox controllers are normal size.
John Carmack, for one, mods his ferraris.:) That includes an F50! Seriously though, there are some ferrari only races in europe where owners bring their ferraris and race. And they are all heavily race tuned!:)
As for the 350Z, although it remains a question of choice, I think the engine sounds like crap. The 240SX however, I still love today! I hope you don't sell it! I still like it way more than the (ill-birthed, IMO) 350Z.
Your point does not stand however. The only reason you are not aware of ferraris being modded is because most people who spend 200k on a car do not want to tear it apart, understandly so! In comparision, there is no risk in opening apart a 30k japanese car. But ferraris and porsches can be modded just like any other car.
As a matter of fact, RUF, a german manufacturer, consists of nothing but modded porsches. We're talking about a 700 hp car out of the factory!! And keep in mind these are "safe" mods. You can certainly keep powering them up with aftermarket mods, just like you would with your japanese cars, except that there are no garantees on your engine lifetime anymore.
By the way, GT3 does feature RUF cars, and I hope GT4 does (haven't checked yet).
The element that I agree with you on is the question of image. Ferrari probably has no interest being thrown in a mix of 700 other cars. Not a question of being creamed, more a question of ferraris "having no business" hanging out with "mass market" cars.
Even though GT4 is a huge phenomenon in the gaming world, it is still tiny compared to the noise generated by Formula 1. And ferrari has won the last 5 driver championships and the last 6 constructor championships, so I don't think they are worried about their "performance" image.
The only games where I've seen ferraris are games that feature other exotic cars (porsches, lamborginis, etc), or games that are ferrari exclusive (Sega F355 Challenge game).
Dude, you don't buy a ferrari for the performance.
That super moded car you're talking about won't give you the status a ferrari will. While you may not care much about status (to which I could agree), a souped up STI (for example) won't give you the panache that a ferrari will, even though it might be on par for performance.
As Jay Leno once put it, a car like a ferrari is a penis helper.:)
It's not about halo3 changing someone's mind about buying a ps3.
Did you see the marketing campaign for halo2? It was almost like a new console was being released.
Now think about it. No matter when halo3 comes out, Microsoft will back it up with a huge marketing campaign. So why not make it coincide with the ps3's release? This way, halo3's marketing campaign will accomplish two things:
1) sell a ton of halo3 copies, which is the goal of any marketing campaign. 2) burry sony's marketing campaign under their own.
FF is bug, but (correct me if I'm wrong) doesn't Eidos only get to do the port & distribution for the PC version? That would be pretty small. Or do they also distribute in NA/Europe? Nevertheless, that's still tiny compared to how much this game sells in Japan/Asia.
There are very few franchises/studios that can afford being late. The ones I know of: gran turismo, any blizzard game, any id software game, that's pretty much it. These games could come out just about anytime and still sell like crazy. But those studios put out one game every 3-4 years.
But even franchises like grand theft auto stick to their release dates pretty well.
Otherwise, pretty much everyone else has to stick to their contract with their publisher. There are often penalties for not reaching milestones...
Although I don't know for a fact that MoH is not built on quake2, I would be surprised since this would imply that the quake2 engine has been ported to gamecube and playstation 2. While not impossible, what's the point in buying an engine for a PC and then have to port to to consoles (and porting it to ps2 would be way more painful then gc).
As for the sports games, they have been built from the ground up at some point, so the company would still diserve the credit.:) Also, if you look at FIFA 2002 (Which is the 1st or 2nd fifa title that came out for ps2), the graphics are not comparable to the current FIFA '05. With every title, more of the console's power is untapped, so you're not just buying a new roster. Now I don't expect FIFA '06 to look way better than '05 as '05 looked way better then '03 or '02. (btw, those games are updated with way more then just a new roster but that's a subject for another discussion).
As for the ESPN vs EA, you probably haven't played each sports game by saying what you did. Some of the ESPN titles are better (nhl?), some of the EA titles are better.
SSX Def Jam Need for Speed The sims Medal of Honor (for better or for worse) Command and Conquer LotR RPG LotR RTS LotR hack'n'slash (two towers + rotk) Goldeneye Harry Potter Nascaar racing
to name just a few, are all sports games and are all developped internally at EA.
As for 5 sports games a year, your count is quite inexact (btw the 'street' games are totally different from their 'serious' counterpart, both from gameplay and art perspectives - you should try them and stop talking out of your ass):
- Madden - FIFA - NBA - MVP - Fight Night - Tiger Woods Golf - NHL - FIFA Street - NBA Street (if you haven't tried vol'3 you are missing something) - NFL Street
a rewrite!??!? Yeah right!! That would introduce 1000 new bugs. More likely a few issues to hunt down, debug and fix. They are probably pretty hard to reproduce. Give them some slack, the developers working to fix this must be under tremendous pressure.
Dude, I think it's about time you get your head out of that hole. EA does "some" in-house development? They do a HUGE amount of in-house development. All their sports games (which sell in gigantic numbers on consoles), the sims (doesn't matter that this was once a seperate studio), SSX, LOtR, James Bond, Harry Potter...
Need I say more?
EA brings in MUCH more with their in-house products then with the games from third party developers that they publish.
Hey, maybe EA thinks Ubisoft is just fine as it is, and thinks the company will grow. As such, it is a good idea to own stocks of Ubisoft. Maybe that's it and that's all?!?
If you could afford Ubisoft stocks, wouldn't you want to buy them seeing as how they have created and revived some awesome IPs lately? (splinter cell, prince of persia, beyond G & E, etc).
I hope Ubisoft had been trying to reacquire some shares from that dutch bank before, otherwise this means that anyone could have acquired them without their consentment by just dealing with that bank. Not just EA. I'm actually surprised Microsoft didn't try to go for them.
It's the same with movies. Everyone wants their brand name out there, and honestly, I totally understand that.
While I agree that in a perfect world, it would be nice not to have any of those brand screens, it's totally normal for companies to what to put their brands out there.
If you really want to complain about something, then complain about level load times. Did you notice how long it takes to load a map on battlefield vietnam? Forget maxed spec computers. If you load a map on a normal to fast PC (when the game came out), you're _easily_ over a minute if not two.
Now let's see, one one side: 10 seconds of intro screens (during which the game resources can be initialized to save time later, so it shouldn't be "wasted time")
Running a deterministic model based on peer input, dead-reckoning locally if you haven't received the current input frame from the server, correcting the simulation later on once you've received the missing information from the server (with the server always being authorative).
And he mentions some typical (but not all) caveats:
- uninitialized variables that end up having a different value on the different hosts (since, if they're not initialized, their value is whatever was at their location in memory/on the stack)
- making sure that the simulation is perfectly deterministic (very hard!)
- calling repeatable random streams in deterministic code, but _not_ doing so in the non deterministic parts of the code otherwise this desyncs the streams
- and many more!!
Basically, all this stuff has been done in games for a while now. Of course, these guys had it figured out since marathon (not sure that they were doing dead-reckoning at the time since marathon was LAN only... was it?).
Slashdot Mirror
It is a common misconception that xbox has sold more than gamecube. In the US, it's true, but in Europe (especially UK, for some reason), the gamecube is stronger. As for japan, I don't think I need to go into details...
So yeah, Microsoft spent all that money, and it could be argued that they are tied in 2nd place (for worldwide install base) with Nintendo. However, they did establish themselves and a credible player, and I do think they have a bit more momentum than Nintendo going into this next round.
Good, so we've heard the success stories (which is all the author really mentions). What about the legions of shareware developers that just make a decent living (nothing wrong with that) without making a fortune? And what about the ones that soon have to find something else to do when they can't pay their bills?
It's just like rock bands. You only hear about the successful ones. You never hear about all the very decent bands that, 20 years later, are still playing in ordinary bars in front of an audience of 3.
(trivia: The Police once played in front of an audience of 2!)
The specialty stores totally sold out (EB, etc). It's the walmarts and targets that haven't. The initial wave of buyers are early adopters, and these guys usually don't buy at Walmart but rather go to specialty stores.
Apparently, the specialty stores went through 3 waves of shipments that sold out. That's very good.
As word of mouth spreads from the early adopters, the non-early adopters will start buying them from "just anyplace", and the walmarts and tagerts will sell way more units.
Sony probably made a mistake shipping too many units to the Walmarts, and not enough to the specialty stores.
Whoops, I put my foot in my mouth. You of course meant the cost for the gamer to actually own a decent PC system. Sorry!
PC games development as a high initial cost to get started with??!?!? Do you have any idea how much ps2 or xbox devkits cost? And that's only if you are approved by sony or microsoft to actually develop games for their platforms.
This guy sure likes to run around in circles before getting to the point, and then finally there's not much of a point.
Well you probably won't like any MMORPGs anyway, so your case doesn't prove him right.
I'm sorry man, you're just thick. The xbox is huge, and that's all there is to it. You're probably one of those guys who thinks the original xbox controllers are normal size.
John Carmack, for one, mods his ferraris. :) That includes an F50! Seriously though, there are some ferrari only races in europe where owners bring their ferraris and race. And they are all heavily race tuned! :)
_ 05 .asp
As for the 350Z, although it remains a question of choice, I think the engine sounds like crap. The 240SX however, I still love today! I hope you don't sell it! I still like it way more than the (ill-birthed, IMO) 350Z.
Your point does not stand however. The only reason you are not aware of ferraris being modded is because most people who spend 200k on a car do not want to tear it apart, understandly so! In comparision, there is no risk in opening apart a 30k japanese car. But ferraris and porsches can be modded just like any other car.
As a matter of fact, RUF, a german manufacturer, consists of nothing but modded porsches. We're talking about a 700 hp car out of the factory!! And keep in mind these are "safe" mods. You can certainly keep powering them up with aftermarket mods, just like you would with your japanese cars, except that there are no garantees on your engine lifetime anymore.
Check it out:
http://www.rufautocentre.com/newcars/RT12_Turbo
By the way, GT3 does feature RUF cars, and I hope GT4 does (haven't checked yet).
The element that I agree with you on is the question of image. Ferrari probably has no interest being thrown in a mix of 700 other cars. Not a question of being creamed, more a question of ferraris "having no business" hanging out with "mass market" cars.
Even though GT4 is a huge phenomenon in the gaming world, it is still tiny compared to the noise generated by Formula 1. And ferrari has won the last 5 driver championships and the last 6 constructor championships, so I don't think they are worried about their "performance" image.
The only games where I've seen ferraris are games that feature other exotic cars (porsches, lamborginis, etc), or games that are ferrari exclusive (Sega F355 Challenge game).
Dude, you don't buy a ferrari for the performance.
:)
:)
That super moded car you're talking about won't give you the status a ferrari will. While you may not care much about status (to which I could agree), a souped up STI (for example) won't give you the panache that a ferrari will, even though it might be on par for performance.
As Jay Leno once put it, a car like a ferrari is a penis helper.
Plus, ferraris are splendid.
And who says you can't also mod your ferrari?
Yeah, 200 lines of code using a few libraries compiled from 50000 lines of code.
this is a total bogus move on Ubi's part to increase its acquisition value?
It's not about halo3 changing someone's mind about buying a ps3.
Did you see the marketing campaign for halo2? It was almost like a new console was being released.
Now think about it. No matter when halo3 comes out, Microsoft will back it up with a huge marketing campaign. So why not make it coincide with the ps3's release? This way, halo3's marketing campaign will accomplish two things:
1) sell a ton of halo3 copies, which is the goal of any marketing campaign.
2) burry sony's marketing campaign under their own.
FF is bug, but (correct me if I'm wrong) doesn't Eidos only get to do the port & distribution for the PC version? That would be pretty small. Or do they also distribute in NA/Europe? Nevertheless, that's still tiny compared to how much this game sells in Japan/Asia.
Sega is not doing very well. They are putting out good games, but when's the last time you've seen one of their titles in a platform top 10?
It's really too bad because Sega was one of the few big companies that understood good gameplay & controls really, really well. And I love shenmue!
There are very few franchises/studios that can afford being late. The ones I know of: gran turismo, any blizzard game, any id software game, that's pretty much it. These games could come out just about anytime and still sell like crazy. But those studios put out one game every 3-4 years.
But even franchises like grand theft auto stick to their release dates pretty well.
Otherwise, pretty much everyone else has to stick to their contract with their publisher. There are often penalties for not reaching milestones...
Although I don't know for a fact that MoH is not built on quake2, I would be surprised since this would imply that the quake2 engine has been ported to gamecube and playstation 2. While not impossible, what's the point in buying an engine for a PC and then have to port to to consoles (and porting it to ps2 would be way more painful then gc).
:) Also, if you look at FIFA 2002 (Which is the 1st or 2nd fifa title that came out for ps2), the graphics are not comparable to the current FIFA '05. With every title, more of the console's power is untapped, so you're not just buying a new roster. Now I don't expect FIFA '06 to look way better than '05 as '05 looked way better then '03 or '02. (btw, those games are updated with way more then just a new roster but that's a subject for another discussion).
As for the sports games, they have been built from the ground up at some point, so the company would still diserve the credit.
As for the ESPN vs EA, you probably haven't played each sports game by saying what you did. Some of the ESPN titles are better (nhl?), some of the EA titles are better.
Cheers.
SSX
Def Jam
Need for Speed
The sims
Medal of Honor (for better or for worse)
Command and Conquer
LotR RPG
LotR RTS
LotR hack'n'slash (two towers + rotk)
Goldeneye
Harry Potter
Nascaar racing
to name just a few, are all sports games and are all developped internally at EA.
As for 5 sports games a year, your count is quite inexact (btw the 'street' games are totally different from their 'serious' counterpart, both from gameplay and art perspectives - you should try them and stop talking out of your ass):
- Madden
- FIFA
- NBA
- MVP
- Fight Night
- Tiger Woods Golf
- NHL
- FIFA Street
- NBA Street (if you haven't tried vol'3 you are missing something)
- NFL Street
a rewrite!??!? Yeah right!! That would introduce 1000 new bugs. More likely a few issues to hunt down, debug and fix. They are probably pretty hard to reproduce. Give them some slack, the developers working to fix this must be under tremendous pressure.
Dude, I think it's about time you get your head out of that hole. EA does "some" in-house development? They do a HUGE amount of in-house development. All their sports games (which sell in gigantic numbers on consoles), the sims (doesn't matter that this was once a seperate studio), SSX, LOtR, James Bond, Harry Potter...
Need I say more?
EA brings in MUCH more with their in-house products then with the games from third party developers that they publish.
Hey, maybe EA thinks Ubisoft is just fine as it is, and thinks the company will grow. As such, it is a good idea to own stocks of Ubisoft. Maybe that's it and that's all?!?
If you could afford Ubisoft stocks, wouldn't you want to buy them seeing as how they have created and revived some awesome IPs lately? (splinter cell, prince of persia, beyond G & E, etc).
I hope Ubisoft had been trying to reacquire some shares from that dutch bank before, otherwise this means that anyone could have acquired them without their consentment by just dealing with that bank. Not just EA. I'm actually surprised Microsoft didn't try to go for them.
Is this is basically a company not owning itself?
It's the same with movies. Everyone wants their brand name out there, and honestly, I totally understand that.
While I agree that in a perfect world, it would be nice not to have any of those brand screens, it's totally normal for companies to what to put their brands out there.
If you really want to complain about something, then complain about level load times. Did you notice how long it takes to load a map on battlefield vietnam? Forget maxed spec computers. If you load a map on a normal to fast PC (when the game came out), you're _easily_ over a minute if not two.
Now let's see, one one side: 10 seconds of intro screens (during which the game resources can be initialized to save time later, so it shouldn't be "wasted time")
On the other side: 2 minutes map loading times.
Which is the most annoying??? hmmm....
oh and of course, locally process anything that doesn't have feedback on the world.
Running a deterministic model based on peer input, dead-reckoning locally if you haven't received the current input frame from the server, correcting the simulation later on once you've received the missing information from the server (with the server always being authorative).
And he mentions some typical (but not all) caveats:
- uninitialized variables that end up having a different value on the different hosts (since, if they're not initialized, their value is whatever was at their location in memory/on the stack)
- making sure that the simulation is perfectly deterministic (very hard!)
- calling repeatable random streams in deterministic code, but _not_ doing so in the non deterministic parts of the code otherwise this desyncs the streams
- and many more!!
Basically, all this stuff has been done in games for a while now. Of course, these guys had it figured out since marathon (not sure that they were doing dead-reckoning at the time since marathon was LAN only... was it?).
For sure, their implementation is solid.