I think you need to seperate subscription and non-subscription games to get a clear picture.
For subscription games, the number of people paying for a subscription is a good number. Even if someone hasn't played in months, if they still have an active subscription, that says something. Example: I quit City of Heroes and cancelled my subscription immediately. It's not that it was a bad game, it's just that I knew that I was done with it when I stopped.
On the other hand, when I quit Everquest, I let my account stay active for about 6 months just because I thought I might want to go back. I was attached enough to the game that I was willing to keep paying for it even though I wasn't actively playing. Quite a lot of people do this, and I think those numbers are important. Important enough to not throw them out, anyway. And the fact that those accounts are still generating money for the company is no small thing either.
Non-subscription games are a totally different ballgame. "Registered accounts" isn't a useful number, unless you're trying to track how many people have tried the game. For non-subscription games, I think you need to look at how many people have played in the last 30 days, or maybe how many have logged in multiple times in the last 30 days. That gets you a fairly good number of how many people are playing the game, even if it's just to try it, and it also avoids ridiculous statements like Internet Pong has 400 million users!
> Does anyone think that MS is going to bite the cost and sell it on the red? Do they really think they are going to make money this way?
Well, they sold the XBox itself in the red. They've shown that they have no problem whatsoever losing money if it lets them extend their dominance in the market.
So yeah, if that was the case, I have no problem believing that they would willingly lose money on it. I'm not saying they will, because I don't know the numbers-- just that if they had to, they would.
I have to disagree. Setting a date and missing it makes people lose faith in your company.
Of course they gave Sony a time table. This is big business. They're just not giving us a time table, and I think it's a wise move.
We make fun of the companies that miss their deadlines. We get pissed off, and flame them. It's annoying to look forward to something on a certain date and have it not arrive. We get more cautious about following their next project.
Not to use a Bradism, but managing expectations is a good thing. In any case, it makes the company look more respectable than missing deadlines does.
> it's just the sort of place you'd need to run a few Pentium Extreme Edition systems.
Microsoft has already launched a probe to harness the power of Pluto to cool the Xbox 360.
The White House, misreading the term "global warming", immediately denied that Pluto exists. After reading the article they retracted the statement and issued another, stating that they will investigate Pluto's "anti-warmification properties".
An investigation has been opened into just who Kelvin is, and why he's allowed to practice science without a degree.
> what INNOVATIVE features would it bring to the market?
Maybe it's innovation will be less features. Windows Vista, by all the reports I've read, is an OS that seriously strains the hardware. You're not going to be able to run it on the system you bought a couple years ago. It will consume honkin hunks of memory and processor time.
Maybe GoogleOS could cater to the people who don't really want an OS that big.
I, for one, can't really see the point in it, and I don't understand why MS needs to get so beefy with it. I'm happy with my simple menus and directories. That's all an OS needs to be. Just let me navigate around, find my files, whatever. An OS that consumes the resources of a middle-of-the-line game irks me. I'm irked.
But games are also how MS has smartly solidified their position in the marketplace. Most geeks I know don't use Windows because of it's amazing features or security... they use it because so many good games are Windows only. So MS has that going for them, and that's how they've almost guaranteed (again: smart! very smart!) that they have little to fear from other home-user OSs.
If that's the route GoogleOS goes... smaller and sleeker... and I suspect it is, because Google is all about being simple and effective... then they aren't competing with MS at all. They're competing with Linux.
It is just gossip, but it's some of the best tech gossip I've ever heard. Made me all tingly, it did.
There are so few companies out there that could even dream of competing with Microsoft in the OS area... but, in my mind, Google is one of them. Note how I have absolutely no evidence to back up this opinion... Google doesn't sell gadgets, and they don't really even sell software... but the one thing they do seem to do is succeed. I have a sort of blind faith in Google at this point.
Of course, trying their own OS might be Google's Russia... Napolean and Hitler both were doing pretty well until they went for Moscow... and going head to head with MS might just be the one thing Google can't do.
All rumors, agreed. But it makes me feel all funny, like when we used to climb the rope in gym class.
The whole thing hints at some serious panic at Sony Online Entertainment. It didn't start with SWG, but SWG is going to suffer the most for it. There was the decline of Everquest, the underperformance of EQII (which some people believed would do better than WoW at one point), the total indifference to Planetside, and the flopping of SWG. Is there any SoE game that is doing well, in the eyes of gamers?
Smed is taking heat for all of them, so I guess it's understandable that he's taking serious amounts of Valium (or gin) to get him through interviews.
I have a list of things I hate about DAoC (literally... I made it earlier this week), but those things you mention are actually very low on it. That sounded worse than I meant it: I meant, those areas have been improved a lot, I think-- improved to the point where they don't bug me as much anymore.
They've done a lot of things in the past couple years that have made it easier to start playing DAoC.
Classic Servers: In the Trials of Atlantis expansion, they introduced items that had to be levelled themselves to gain power. It increased the grind a lot, and turned a lot of people off of DAoC (including me). I am just not going to spend that much time to be able to compete. So, they introduced classic servers: servers where the Trials of Atlantis expansion doesn't exist.
The result? The single most popular server is now a classic server. I play on it. I wouldn't have been able to come back to DAoC if classic servers didn't exist. That was one hugely smart move by Mythic. As a note, I wished for classic servers in Everquest for years, but SoE never did it. If they had, I'd probably still be playing EQ.
Free Expansions: I wasn't about to buy 4 expansions just so I could try DAoC again, so I was happy when I found out that the majority of the expansions are now free (ok, one was free in the first place, but I digress). That's another thing where, if Mythic hadn't done it, I wouldn't have come back to the game.
Easier Levelling: Catacombs made levelling 10 times faster, which is nice. It came at a price, though, because people don't level in the frontiers like they used to, so that aspect of the game has mostly vanished (Darkness Falls could be considered frontier levelling, but it isn't really, for a bunch of reasons). I always hated the "easier levelling" expansions in EQ, because I didn't think they were appropriate for the world, but in DAoC, it was appropriate.
All in all, there are still many things about the game that I can't stand. Many. A whole article worth. My point here, though, was that I think the areas of gaining new players and keeping them is where DAoC has improved the most.
Are you telling me that IGN's 9.0 review of Carrot Top's Mad Kareoke Jams was somehow tainted? Cause I was about to send the author hate mail for being such an idiot... but if he was just being a capitalist, that's different.
Smedley: We spent quite a bit of time and money doing product research. We did a number of focus groups and talked specifically about changes that we could make to the interface, to the combat, and to the overall gameplay experience--to make it a lot more fun. We also did surveys asking the current user base what was missing, what were things we could do to make the game better.
And in all of these user surveys, apparently no one ever said they wanted content, and that's why there was none, right?
Let me spell this out for you future game developers. Randomly generated content is not content, it's crap. The brain of even the slowest human can smell the difference between hand crafted and computer generated content. It's why the Turing test hasn't been passed, it's why automated customer service menus piss people off, and it's one of the reasons SWG failed.
Creating a massive world that was 99% empty might have seemed like a good idea on the surface, I know. You'd save all that time on programming, writing, implementing... you'd create beautiful cities (and you did), players would go to them and be merry... but all the rest of the world would be random. It didn't seem like a bad idea, I know. I can follow the thought process that led to SWG's design, and on paper, I can see how it might have sounded good.
But what you've got to understand, devs, is that there is no substitute for the human hand. Technology is great when used right, but it is not a good babysitter. Random levels worked for Nethack because it was a single player game, an ASCII game, and the design was genius for its time. But random will not work in a modern MMOG.
People need to fall in love with the world they're playing in, and a computer-generated design just can't inspire that love. Only the human hand can do that. Maybe in the next 20 years a genius programmer will come along who will write the algorithm that will be able to trick the human brain into loving it that way they love something painstakingly crafted by a human... but for now, you have to do it by hand.
I'm serious, game devs. I'm trying to save you millions of dollars. Don't do it. Hire a bunch of high school aged D&D DMs if your budget is that tight. Just hire a human, k?
(oh yeah, and crippling bugs wrapped in unstable code that never get fixed are bad too)
It's a ceremonial black mark, just like the AO video game rating. Normal people understand that watching it/playing it won't cause their souls to turn black as sin, but it's enough to scare theaters away from showing it/Walmart from selling it.
I remember how the South Park movie originally got an NC-17. Didn't they make fun of the MPAA too? How odd.
(and yeah, it may not be new news, but lighten up. At this point, anything besides another 360, PSP or Hot Coffee lawsuit story is a breath of fresh air).
I found this out on accident when, after calling Verizon for the 5th time to find out why my DSL service was still not activated 3 weeks after I ordered it, I finally got frustrated with the computer opeator and yelled, "I want to talk to a fucking human being." 3 seconds later, I'm talking to a real human. Amazing.
I think you're right in general, but what's happening with SWG really is different than anything that's happened in MMOGs before (that I know of). I don't think you can chalk this up to "gamers will be unhappy no matter what". It's not a new feature or a balance-- it's a transformation into a totally different game.
The only thing that kept The 5th Element from being the perfect movie for me was Chris Tucker. Up until his entrance, the movie was flawless. He threw off the whole rhythm with that pointless, annoying character.
Willis was really good in it, I thought. He can turn out great lines if you put him in the right tough-guy role: Pulp Fiction, Sin City (even though his opening speech in the movie was horrible, the rest was dead on).
So yeah. Despite Tucker, I still would have put 5th Element on the list, maybe at #7.
Yup. One of the biggest excuses parents have for their children watching R-rated movies, and doing other things kids aren't supposed to do, is that they can't watch their kids 24 hours a day. Well, that password will watch their Revolution 24 hours a day. I like it. It gives people one less reason to complain about the game industry.
You can piss off the consumers, the college kids, the geeks, the nerds, the haxx0rs, the artists, and even other people in the industry itself... but when you put that crap on a country CD, you just know some politician is going to buy it, and then you're screwed.
Well, gaming journalists are uninteresting vultures. But so are most other journalists.
Maybe he's just noticing now because gaming is finally big enough to have real press now.
Whoa, step back a bit.
on
MMORPG Evolution
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· Score: 3, Interesting
EQ was the king for years with 400k subscribers, now WoW is with 4 million. Even though I only played WoW in beta and didn't find it interesting, I respect the numbers.
But you have to ask yourself: how big do we need MMOGs to get? The movie Titanic broke box office records, but it was a steaming pile of shit.
Wow has set the bar, and as far as I'm concerned, it's a good bar. It's a healthy bar. 4 million is a damn healthy bar. If you want to go more mass-market than that, you have to go into areas that don't appeal to me as a MMOG player.
At some point, you have to say, "We're making enough money to satisfy our art", and leave it at that.
I don't think I want to see the MMOG that attracts 1 billion subscribers.
I stopped reading the f13 article after the second time I read that the game will involve "skill" now. Hand-eye coordination is not skill-- it's hand-eye coordination. Being able to twitch the mouse faster than the other guy is not skill-- it's being able to twitch the mouse faster than the other guy.
Skill is relative to the game you're playing. In chess, it's being able to think 50 moves ahead. In other games, it's always knowing the right thing to do at the right time. I'm a "skilled" monopoly player. Know why? The orange properties, mother, the orange ones.
On SWG... SOE is obviously hurting, and feels the need to do something drastic, and I don't disagree-- though none of the changes make me want to go out and try it again, either.
Slashdot Mirror
For subscription games, the number of people paying for a subscription is a good number. Even if someone hasn't played in months, if they still have an active subscription, that says something. Example: I quit City of Heroes and cancelled my subscription immediately. It's not that it was a bad game, it's just that I knew that I was done with it when I stopped.
On the other hand, when I quit Everquest, I let my account stay active for about 6 months just because I thought I might want to go back. I was attached enough to the game that I was willing to keep paying for it even though I wasn't actively playing. Quite a lot of people do this, and I think those numbers are important. Important enough to not throw them out, anyway. And the fact that those accounts are still generating money for the company is no small thing either.
Non-subscription games are a totally different ballgame. "Registered accounts" isn't a useful number, unless you're trying to track how many people have tried the game. For non-subscription games, I think you need to look at how many people have played in the last 30 days, or maybe how many have logged in multiple times in the last 30 days. That gets you a fairly good number of how many people are playing the game, even if it's just to try it, and it also avoids ridiculous statements like Internet Pong has 400 million users!
Future headline probability: 20%
ironicalness: 99.44%.
Well, they sold the XBox itself in the red. They've shown that they have no problem whatsoever losing money if it lets them extend their dominance in the market.
So yeah, if that was the case, I have no problem believing that they would willingly lose money on it. I'm not saying they will, because I don't know the numbers-- just that if they had to, they would.
Of course they gave Sony a time table. This is big business. They're just not giving us a time table, and I think it's a wise move.
We make fun of the companies that miss their deadlines. We get pissed off, and flame them. It's annoying to look forward to something on a certain date and have it not arrive. We get more cautious about following their next project.
Not to use a Bradism, but managing expectations is a good thing. In any case, it makes the company look more respectable than missing deadlines does.
Microsoft has already launched a probe to harness the power of Pluto to cool the Xbox 360.
The White House, misreading the term "global warming", immediately denied that Pluto exists. After reading the article they retracted the statement and issued another, stating that they will investigate Pluto's "anti-warmification properties".
An investigation has been opened into just who Kelvin is, and why he's allowed to practice science without a degree.
Maybe it's innovation will be less features. Windows Vista, by all the reports I've read, is an OS that seriously strains the hardware. You're not going to be able to run it on the system you bought a couple years ago. It will consume honkin hunks of memory and processor time.
Maybe GoogleOS could cater to the people who don't really want an OS that big.
I, for one, can't really see the point in it, and I don't understand why MS needs to get so beefy with it. I'm happy with my simple menus and directories. That's all an OS needs to be. Just let me navigate around, find my files, whatever. An OS that consumes the resources of a middle-of-the-line game irks me. I'm irked.
But games are also how MS has smartly solidified their position in the marketplace. Most geeks I know don't use Windows because of it's amazing features or security... they use it because so many good games are Windows only. So MS has that going for them, and that's how they've almost guaranteed (again: smart! very smart!) that they have little to fear from other home-user OSs.
If that's the route GoogleOS goes... smaller and sleeker... and I suspect it is, because Google is all about being simple and effective... then they aren't competing with MS at all. They're competing with Linux.
There are so few companies out there that could even dream of competing with Microsoft in the OS area... but, in my mind, Google is one of them. Note how I have absolutely no evidence to back up this opinion... Google doesn't sell gadgets, and they don't really even sell software... but the one thing they do seem to do is succeed. I have a sort of blind faith in Google at this point.
Of course, trying their own OS might be Google's Russia... Napolean and Hitler both were doing pretty well until they went for Moscow... and going head to head with MS might just be the one thing Google can't do.
All rumors, agreed. But it makes me feel all funny, like when we used to climb the rope in gym class.
Watercooler jokes: they're not just about Seinfeld anymore.
And I'm sure Baywatch had 5 million viewers at some point. It's easy, just cater to the lowest common denominator.
Smed is taking heat for all of them, so I guess it's understandable that he's taking serious amounts of Valium (or gin) to get him through interviews.
The result? The single most popular server is now a classic server. I play on it. I wouldn't have been able to come back to DAoC if classic servers didn't exist. That was one hugely smart move by Mythic. As a note, I wished for classic servers in Everquest for years, but SoE never did it. If they had, I'd probably still be playing EQ.
All in all, there are still many things about the game that I can't stand. Many. A whole article worth. My point here, though, was that I think the areas of gaining new players and keeping them is where DAoC has improved the most.
Are you telling me that IGN's 9.0 review of Carrot Top's Mad Kareoke Jams was somehow tainted? Cause I was about to send the author hate mail for being such an idiot... but if he was just being a capitalist, that's different.
Let me spell this out for you future game developers. Randomly generated content is not content, it's crap. The brain of even the slowest human can smell the difference between hand crafted and computer generated content. It's why the Turing test hasn't been passed, it's why automated customer service menus piss people off, and it's one of the reasons SWG failed.
Creating a massive world that was 99% empty might have seemed like a good idea on the surface, I know. You'd save all that time on programming, writing, implementing... you'd create beautiful cities (and you did), players would go to them and be merry... but all the rest of the world would be random. It didn't seem like a bad idea, I know. I can follow the thought process that led to SWG's design, and on paper, I can see how it might have sounded good.
But what you've got to understand, devs, is that there is no substitute for the human hand. Technology is great when used right, but it is not a good babysitter. Random levels worked for Nethack because it was a single player game, an ASCII game, and the design was genius for its time. But random will not work in a modern MMOG.
People need to fall in love with the world they're playing in, and a computer-generated design just can't inspire that love. Only the human hand can do that. Maybe in the next 20 years a genius programmer will come along who will write the algorithm that will be able to trick the human brain into loving it that way they love something painstakingly crafted by a human... but for now, you have to do it by hand.
I'm serious, game devs. I'm trying to save you millions of dollars. Don't do it. Hire a bunch of high school aged D&D DMs if your budget is that tight. Just hire a human, k?
(oh yeah, and crippling bugs wrapped in unstable code that never get fixed are bad too)
I remember how the South Park movie originally got an NC-17. Didn't they make fun of the MPAA too? How odd.
(and yeah, it may not be new news, but lighten up. At this point, anything besides another 360, PSP or Hot Coffee lawsuit story is a breath of fresh air).
Four words: Chief Knock-a-Homer.
I found this out on accident when, after calling Verizon for the 5th time to find out why my DSL service was still not activated 3 weeks after I ordered it, I finally got frustrated with the computer opeator and yelled, "I want to talk to a fucking human being." 3 seconds later, I'm talking to a real human. Amazing.
I think you're right in general, but what's happening with SWG really is different than anything that's happened in MMOGs before (that I know of). I don't think you can chalk this up to "gamers will be unhappy no matter what". It's not a new feature or a balance-- it's a transformation into a totally different game.
Willis was really good in it, I thought. He can turn out great lines if you put him in the right tough-guy role: Pulp Fiction, Sin City (even though his opening speech in the movie was horrible, the rest was dead on).
So yeah. Despite Tucker, I still would have put 5th Element on the list, maybe at #7.
Yup. One of the biggest excuses parents have for their children watching R-rated movies, and doing other things kids aren't supposed to do, is that they can't watch their kids 24 hours a day. Well, that password will watch their Revolution 24 hours a day. I like it. It gives people one less reason to complain about the game industry.
SOE giving back money? This truly is the seventh sign of the apocolypse... repent, sinners, for the end is near.
You can piss off the consumers, the college kids, the geeks, the nerds, the haxx0rs, the artists, and even other people in the industry itself... but when you put that crap on a country CD, you just know some politician is going to buy it, and then you're screwed.
Maybe he's just noticing now because gaming is finally big enough to have real press now.
But you have to ask yourself: how big do we need MMOGs to get? The movie Titanic broke box office records, but it was a steaming pile of shit.
Wow has set the bar, and as far as I'm concerned, it's a good bar. It's a healthy bar. 4 million is a damn healthy bar. If you want to go more mass-market than that, you have to go into areas that don't appeal to me as a MMOG player.
At some point, you have to say, "We're making enough money to satisfy our art", and leave it at that.
I don't think I want to see the MMOG that attracts 1 billion subscribers.
Skill is relative to the game you're playing. In chess, it's being able to think 50 moves ahead. In other games, it's always knowing the right thing to do at the right time. I'm a "skilled" monopoly player. Know why? The orange properties, mother, the orange ones.
On SWG... SOE is obviously hurting, and feels the need to do something drastic, and I don't disagree-- though none of the changes make me want to go out and try it again, either.