Steam pricing is the weak point
on
The Age of Steam
·
· Score: 5, Informative
They might do some great offers if you manage to catch them, however any long term users of Steam know that if you want to get the best deal for a game then sometimes you have to look elsewhere. This is starting to build up a lack of trust for customers, games on Steam are often more expensive even though it costs less to sell than a physical box - customers will end up doing Google searches for the cheapest deal elsewhere. It reminds me of people going into stores to find the product they like, then ordering off the Internet to get the best deal.
After playing various browser based games it's fairly obvious that these sort of games need to try and get some sort of revenue from players who aren't willing to spend anything on upgrading their account. Whilst I'm sure the developers might not want to put adverts in their game, they might have to. Less than $5 a month could be considered insanely cheap, but I'm sure people in their minds already have the opinion that the game isn't worth spending money on. Look at the entire web, most of it is free and funded by advertising, people expect sites to be free.
It's hard for people to relate to something being valuable in a web based game, just think twice about what users are paying for - they're paying for a few extra strings of text (rows in a table/database, etc) to get some extra stats, faster experience, new items, etc. All too often these bonuses disappear after a certain amount of time, making it hard to get any attachment to the value of it. I'm sure the developer and anyone knows about developing software realises that it's something else people for (funding the developer so he/she can continue working on it), but players will see that their wonderful web game is now trying to charge them money instead of being something great and free!
Just don't have high expectations for web based games. Some might get lucky enough to pay their developers wages, some might be good enough to expand and get profit. But certainly don't spend hundreds of hours on something and expect users will instantly rush to you with their wallets wide open.
One useful site I tend to look at on a regular basis is Lars Eggert's IPv6 Deployment Trends, it uses the Alexa rankings to find the top 100 sites for various countries. You could always argue that these aren't the most visited sites - but it does give you an idea.
The top 100 sites for all these countries comes to a big fat total of 0%. I'm not expecting fast adoption, but it would've been nice to see some progress being made with these sites. Even the two sites which I regularly visit that report about IPv6 stories (Slashdot and Ars Technica) don't even have IPv6 records!
I suppose I'm just as bad as none of my personal sites don't have IPv6 records either, but then again my server host doesn't provide any native addresses yet.
... the last thing you want to do is listen to someone who you can barely understand and is totally unwilling to genuinely help you.
Customer retention is a huge part of business and many companies are failing it. By retention I don't mean special offers which are offered because the service is cheaper elsewhere and the company can offer a discount, but by keeping the customers who are having problems happy you'll retain them for longer. I've been having problems with some other company who shall remain nameless, am I likely to stay with their service? No chance.
Perhaps if more companies considered their reputation and their ability to retain customers, they'd consider things a bit more carefully before outsourcing their support.
I use several DNSBLs at SMTP level, however instead of blocking any blacklisted IP they get greylisted. The majority of zombie machines never bother trying to resend the mail, so it cuts out a large amount of spam. Any blacklisted IP address which does successfully resend gets added to the whitelist so they don't have to bother with the greylist.
For our users it works perfectly. Users from non-blacklisted IPs get their mail sent immediately, those who are blacklisted get a short delay.
Reddog01, are you by chance accidentally comparing this one to Sony's other older Glasstron model, the PLM-A55? They list that one for 799 msrp, which could easily be bundled with a DVD player for the price you mention. See http://www.sel.sony.com/SEL/consumer/ss5/home/camc order/camcorderaccessories/plm-a55_specs.shtml for a pic. They look incredibly similar.
However, if you are right, that's an awful lot just to pay for RGB input. zoiks.
The NSA definitely knows what it's doing. That's why they were (along with their British equiv) so disturbed when Australia came clean about tracking its own citizens and those of other countries. Seriously, please see: http://www.dsd.gov.au/
This monitoring is done automatically. All faxes, email, and phone converstations are scanned 24x7 for what the NSA and others consider to be pertinent info. Info that passes the filters is automagically passed via their computers to the various NSAish orgs around the world. No human intervention is allows.
Think about that. You NEED strong encryption. Don't let the gov't or anyone else tell you otherwise. The US gov't wants to monitor its OWN citizens more than the purported criminals it continues to mention. The int'l terrorist line is just a smokescreen. This should have you upset! As others here have pointed out, criminals will get ahold of encryption either illegally in the USA or legally in some other country.
Maybe I'm just upset b/c the NSA didn't offer me a job.
Slashdot Mirror
They might do some great offers if you manage to catch them, however any long term users of Steam know that if you want to get the best deal for a game then sometimes you have to look elsewhere. This is starting to build up a lack of trust for customers, games on Steam are often more expensive even though it costs less to sell than a physical box - customers will end up doing Google searches for the cheapest deal elsewhere. It reminds me of people going into stores to find the product they like, then ordering off the Internet to get the best deal.
Apart from pricing it's a nice platform.
After playing various browser based games it's fairly obvious that these sort of games need to try and get some sort of revenue from players who aren't willing to spend anything on upgrading their account. Whilst I'm sure the developers might not want to put adverts in their game, they might have to. Less than $5 a month could be considered insanely cheap, but I'm sure people in their minds already have the opinion that the game isn't worth spending money on. Look at the entire web, most of it is free and funded by advertising, people expect sites to be free.
It's hard for people to relate to something being valuable in a web based game, just think twice about what users are paying for - they're paying for a few extra strings of text (rows in a table/database, etc) to get some extra stats, faster experience, new items, etc. All too often these bonuses disappear after a certain amount of time, making it hard to get any attachment to the value of it. I'm sure the developer and anyone knows about developing software realises that it's something else people for (funding the developer so he/she can continue working on it), but players will see that their wonderful web game is now trying to charge them money instead of being something great and free!
Just don't have high expectations for web based games. Some might get lucky enough to pay their developers wages, some might be good enough to expand and get profit. But certainly don't spend hundreds of hours on something and expect users will instantly rush to you with their wallets wide open.
One useful site I tend to look at on a regular basis is Lars Eggert's IPv6 Deployment Trends, it uses the Alexa rankings to find the top 100 sites for various countries. You could always argue that these aren't the most visited sites - but it does give you an idea.
The top 100 sites for all these countries comes to a big fat total of 0%. I'm not expecting fast adoption, but it would've been nice to see some progress being made with these sites. Even the two sites which I regularly visit that report about IPv6 stories (Slashdot and Ars Technica) don't even have IPv6 records!
I suppose I'm just as bad as none of my personal sites don't have IPv6 records either, but then again my server host doesn't provide any native addresses yet.
... the last thing you want to do is listen to someone who you can barely understand and is totally unwilling to genuinely help you.
Customer retention is a huge part of business and many companies are failing it. By retention I don't mean special offers which are offered because the service is cheaper elsewhere and the company can offer a discount, but by keeping the customers who are having problems happy you'll retain them for longer. I've been having problems with some other company who shall remain nameless, am I likely to stay with their service? No chance.
Perhaps if more companies considered their reputation and their ability to retain customers, they'd consider things a bit more carefully before outsourcing their support.
Couldn't agree more with this.
I use several DNSBLs at SMTP level, however instead of blocking any blacklisted IP they get greylisted. The majority of zombie machines never bother trying to resend the mail, so it cuts out a large amount of spam. Any blacklisted IP address which does successfully resend gets added to the whitelist so they don't have to bother with the greylist.
For our users it works perfectly. Users from non-blacklisted IPs get their mail sent immediately, those who are blacklisted get a short delay.
From TechTV, Overclockers and Tweak3D may provide you with some information.
Reddog01, are you by chance accidentally comparing this one to Sony's other older Glasstron model, the PLM-A55? They list that one for 799 msrp, which could easily be bundled with a DVD player for the price you mention. See http://www.sel.sony.com/SEL/consumer/ss5/home/camc order/camcorderaccessories/plm-a55_specs .shtml for a pic. They look incredibly similar.
However, if you are right, that's an awful lot just to pay for RGB input. zoiks.
-Paul
Greetings all.
The NSA definitely knows what it's doing. That's why they were (along with their British equiv) so disturbed when Australia came clean about tracking its own citizens and those of other countries. Seriously, please see: http://www.dsd.gov.au/
This monitoring is done automatically. All faxes, email, and phone converstations are scanned 24x7 for what the NSA and others consider to be pertinent info. Info that passes the filters is automagically passed via their computers to the various NSAish orgs around the world. No human intervention is allows.
Think about that. You NEED strong encryption. Don't let the gov't or anyone else tell you otherwise. The US gov't wants to monitor its OWN citizens more than the purported criminals it continues to mention. The int'l terrorist line is just a smokescreen. This should have you upset! As others here have pointed out, criminals will get ahold of encryption either illegally in the USA or legally in some other country.
Maybe I'm just upset b/c the NSA didn't offer me a job.
-Paul Lantinga
--
NSA grabber: president, target, end, vice, hit, erase, kill, US, Bill, Al, Senator, $, agent, service, secret, package, bomb, encrypt, key, number, target, crypto, government, China, nuclear.