This is precicely the point Nintendo is trying to make about system design. No, the DS isn't as graphically impressive as the PSP, and no, it hasn't got as nice a screen. But then again, PSP costs 100 bucks more, has much shorter battery life, and uses a mechanical drive, which IMHO, sucks (as a free extra you get glorious load times). The PSP is trying to bring the PS2 experience to your pocket. Not that it can't be fun, but I don't play home consoles like I play handhelds.
Why do you think there are so few developers interested in making games for PSP? The answer is simple: it makes more sense for them to make them on PS2. The DS however, is a wholly different platform, both in terms of possibilities and expectations.
The DS has a more natural approach to handheld gaming, mainly because of it's touchscreen, and demonstrates how handheld games can and should be, without needing super-expensive components and horsepower to be more fun.
Nintendo is persuing the same goal with the revolution.
Not that the success of the DS isn't because of it's games, but saying that's the only reason why the DS is more appealing is wrong.
When there was a shortage of GBA SPs when it released in Japan, Nintendo pulled back all advertising. After a few weeks though, as one could expect, enough systems could be shipped to deal with the initial surge, and the international releases a few weeks after had no problems.
If Nintendo had have shipped 300 000 Systems for the whole of Europe at the release of the DS, they would have had serious shortages too.
Justified to who? The price is obviously justified to the millions of people who play the game.
I don't think you understand the correct meaning of this term.
What I said is that Blizzard has no just reasons to charge that much for their game. You don't have to make reference to the consumer.
If you want to believe otherwise, that's up to you.
So in other words, you don't know? Brilliant. Any more baseless assertions you'd like to make?
It's strange how you come to such conclusions. These "assertions" are not baseless, as I have explained earlier.
I might not be able to give exact Data, but comparing it with other companies, who offer similar services for free, and employ many more people to do work and research on products that they won't be able to necessarily sell as new, I think I have reasons to believe that it does not cost them 13 Euros a month for what I would get.
If you want to think otherwise, or believe that the price is actualy justified, that is entirely up to you.
What's wrong with that? People are happy to pay it, and they make money from it. Your post sounds like baseless whining.
Ther's nothing wrong with wanting to make money at all. My point is that the costs you pay don't reflect the costs for maintainence, as one could expect. The price is inflated and unjustified. The sorts of people who do that cost a lot of money. You're looking at a wage bill in the millions. Not to mention the costs of running the servers. Equipment, electricity, bandwidth (costs a lot more than you think).
In the millions? I'm talking about people who actually are still working exclusively on WoW.
I'm not saying they don't cost anything. But for a copmpany of Blizzards size, maitaining a few personel keepeng an eye on their online game will hardly be anything significant.
The same with bandwidth/electricity. Sure it might cost a little, but is easily covered by a company like Blizzard, and in no way justifies 13 Euros/month subscrition fee.
The cost of the game covers the costs of making it in the first place, the subscription costs cover the cost of keeping it going.
This makes it quite clear that you don't have the slightest concept of how any business works.
As I explained before, the costs for maintaining are quite negligable. Next to nothing.
You are suggesting that the cost of creating and developing the game, which was in development for years, are as high as what it costs them in server bills for 3 months.
That is ludicrous. You are insane!
Aside from all that, you should know that price structuring isn't fixed to simplistic aspects such as development cost or maintainence.
It's $45 for the game, because that's how much games always cost, and you need to look attractive amongst the competition, and $13/month because that's the price where they think they can get the most money.
Hey maybe that would increase pressure on the developers to make the game mor dynamic. WoW might be fun sometimes but often it's just sssoooooooooooo ssssssooooooooo sssssslllllllooooooooowwwwwwwww
It's all about making money. Monthly costs in no way reflect the costs in development or maintainance.
They want to make revenue. They want to make as much as they can. And sadly publisher are just happier when their customers are paying an overly inflated price every month.
I played WoW for 4 months. Minus the free month, I payed for 3, so that makes 40 Euros. Did I cost them 40 Euros when I was playing? Shit no!
The bandwidth costs next to nothing.
Support? I wrote them an Email once, they didn't answer.
Content updates? Bugfixes and stat corrections, done by maybe a few dozen people. Based on the amount you pay, the game should be getting signifigantly better every few months.
Character storage? Complete bull! Are they seriously suggesting this is an Issue? Even with quite a few characters the Data from one account could hardly exceed a few Megabytes. Gmail gives me 2.5 Gigs for free. The price I payed for the game, Blizzard should give my characters guarantee of existance for the rest of all eternity. Instead Blizzard deletes them if you go 6 Months without subscribing. Mine will be deleted next month. Why? They hope to scare me and get me to take up the subscription again so that I can keep my precious characters.
There is no reason why MMORPGs couldn't be completely free after paying full price for the game.
But the way it is, the publishers are making a fuckload of money, and they damn well want to keep it that way.
I don't want to start too much of a discussion about value, but there is no real reason anyone should have to pay 15 Dollars a month so they can play a game they already bought.
The price is totally unjustified. They say they've got 4 Million subscribers. What kind of black hole have they got that needs $50 000 000 plus every month?
This doesn't make sense. To pay for 4 periods, you would have to play 96 hours. To fulfill your "unlimited" calculation, they would have to play more than that in a week.
Are you saying the vast majority of players were freaks who spent 60% of their time playing a game? Not counting sleeping, eating, and for some, actually working.
There is no way I could even make up for two periods a month in this model. And it only seems logical to give free time for the rest of the month, but that would invalidate your calculations.
For a player to really make an impact on ipod market shares, and many people forget this, a product has to actually be better than the ipod.
Sure, some support OGG, you can transfer this and that, and might have an FM tuner, but the main purpose is as a portable music player. That's what the mass market is interested in, and that's what they want, nothing more.
I suppose you might get sick of them if you see them everywhere, but where I live, in Germany, most people do own non-ipod music players.
Even when looking at it from a neutral view, the ipod does pretty well compared with the players I saw. Support for practicaly every used format, easy to use, a superb management software.
And the online music store rocks, despite the bit of DRM.
It's not like people are buying an awful product, or as if there were clearly better options.
Just because they called themselves neutral in the cold war, and didn't come hugging the US and their nukes, and dared criticise the US in Vietnam, doesn't mean they're communist.
A typical example of America's "Either you're with us, or against us"
Do we actually get any numbers? How many Units will the stores get, how many have been preorderd, what is to be expected? As long as I don't have any real numbers, I'll just take it as artificial hype.
Most poeple don't own HDTVs, so why waste performance on HD that only a minority will appreciate, if you can use the power on more performance that everyone can enjoy? If somebody buys a Blu-Ray player, they're going to be buying it because they want to watch movies in HD. Most people who will buy a 360 won't be too intersted in HDTV, they want to play the newest games.
No, you don't own the license for the music.
You own a game, which you can play and listen to as much as you like. And I think in most countries you also have the right to make a direct recording of the Music if you do want to listen to it, and it is solely for your personal use.
But a game is not a music license. If a company wants to profit from their IP by releasing a soundtrack (which mostly contains extra music not featured in the game) they can do that with all copyrights.
It's the same reason why owning an old VHS doesn't give you the right to pirate it's DVD rerelease, and why subscribing to Pay-tv doesn't give you the right to pirate the DVDs of all movies featured in their program.
You bought a game. Not a soundtrack. Two differant things. Owning a game which features that soundtrack doesn't give you the right to pirate the soundtrack.
Plus, if there is eventually a market for game music from which game companies can profit, it will only benefit the consumer with better quality, as they would have more initiative to invest money in creating new music, instead of pouring more and more into visuals.
Holding up an Xbox 360 pad, to whoops and cheers from the audience, he proclaimed: "This is the Xbox 360 controller, and there's nothing wrong with it.
He then held up a first-gen XBOX and said: "This is an XBOX, and there's nothing wrong with it, it works the same as a 360. To hell with all this next gen crap, I'm sticking with this generation!"
His point is fundamentally flawed. If he believes the gaming experience can be improved by better graphics, then the same is true with an improved interface.
I'll be damned if two hundred years from now, noone has found a more natural way to play games than pressing buttons and rotating sticks on a small block of plastic.
History has shown that, more often than not, first to market=first to games=first to sales.
History has also "shown" the opposite.
I don't think you can apply simplistic rules like so many poeple like to do with sales expectations.
Too many poeple are thinking from a hardcore point of view, stating how many games are coming for the system, what the performance is etc.
The casual consumer isn't interested in any of that, and even the best marketing about superiority can't overpower basic market prferences.
A system needs something to catch the attention of the casual consumer. They won't buy XBOXs months before PS3s come out if there isn't anything that interests them in the first place, or the price is too high.
For example, an adventure or rpg game could have hundreds of pages of text that needs to be translated, new voice actors and recording sessions, and potentially swapping out assets that may be offensive or not relevant the target cultures. Sure, you could do it simultaneously (and some games do), but it's much, much more work.
Actually, localisation is pretty routine work. The only problem is for smaller companies, who do not have the needed structures to localise a game, so many games are simply ignored. If they are lucky, a European/American software publisher might want to localise their game.
Most big publishers should have sufficient resources to translate a game. Think of how much work it is to develop a game from scratch, with all the graphics, music and program code. Then think of the work to translate a bit of text.
I am always surprised by the quality of the localisation Nintendo does, at least in Europe.
Minish Cap for GBA was released even before Japan and didn't have any major differences.
I don't know how good coordination is at development stage, but I see no reason why a game couldn't be translated while it is being developed.
The main thing though is sales expectations and marketing that determines whether or not a game is released. That is the reason why it took Pokemon 3 years to finally catch on, why Nintendo waited to release Minish Cap in America because they thought it could damage DS sales at christmas and many games sadly don't see any kind of release outside of Japan.
If you really want to criticise the the UN, you might have been more convincing if you didn't link to a clearly biased Site which presents ludicrously false information.
Why suche an agressive reply? I think it is more of a case of you being insane for merely thinking that would matter to me. It is in no way an argument for anything, and to reinforce that, I did clearly distance myself from his view.
It is just that according to many sources, noone was killed on the square, as the students decided to move off before they reached the square.
Of course, as with any sources about historical events, they are not always accurate. I can't guarantee that it was that way, but many do consider this true.
It is merely an interesting fact, especially when considering the terrible irony involved, as the name literally means "gate of heavenly peace".
No other reason, no denial of the fact that there was a massacre.
Not that I want to support this propaganda stuffed moron in any way, it is an interesting fact to point out anyway.
As far as I know, nobody actually died on the Tiananmen Square. Sure there were bloodbaths trailing all the way to the square, marking the path the army took, but when they reached the square everybody packed up.
Although I haven't got any experience with ipods, I can say that my coated glasses (I don't think they've done uncoated ones for years, at leats where I am from) have nothing noticable on the lenses at all. I was so surprised by their resistance that I even put them unprotected in my pants pocket if I need to.
If the reports that you can scratch it with a cloth or fingernail are true, then comparing my spectecles with it iss like comparing steel with butter.
It is often very difficult to get information about biodiesel support from car manufacturers, even if they are suited for biodiesel.
The thing is, experience from commercial vehicles (which have been used alot ) has shown that biodiesel increases the corrosion on fuel pumps, so that many fuel pump manufacturers (from which the car manufacturers buy the fuel pumps, because they often don't make them themselves) have said they won't approve the use of biodiesel.
Of course this isn't so good for the car manufacturers, because if they approve the use of biodiesel in their car, they hold the responsibilty for the pumps. So they might not want too many poeple to run on biodiesel even though it has been approved for the car.
On the other hand, biodiesel has proved much more beneficial for engines, with some tests seeing as much as 60% less wear on the motors.
And this is where private cusomers should benefit.
Basically, it is probably better for your car to run on biodiesel (as long as it's been approved. They need to use different sealing and fuel pipes aswell).
And many have been approved, but the car manufacturers would probably prefer not to shout about it. And I believe most Volkswagen cars are approved.
You best just insistantly bug them until they say it's been approved.
Slashdot Mirror
How is the availibility in other areas? Particularly the Core System.
Where I live (Germany) there doesnt seem to be that much of a shortage.
I saw a few Core systems today in my local electronics store.
This is precicely the point Nintendo is trying to make about system design. No, the DS isn't as graphically impressive as the PSP, and no, it hasn't got as nice a screen.
But then again, PSP costs 100 bucks more, has much shorter battery life, and uses a mechanical drive, which IMHO, sucks (as a free extra you get glorious load times).
The PSP is trying to bring the PS2 experience to your pocket. Not that it can't be fun, but I don't play home consoles like I play handhelds.
Why do you think there are so few developers interested in making games for PSP? The answer is simple: it makes more sense for them to make them on PS2. The DS however, is a wholly different platform, both in terms of possibilities and expectations.
The DS has a more natural approach to handheld gaming, mainly because of it's touchscreen, and demonstrates how handheld games can and should be, without needing super-expensive components and horsepower to be more fun.
Nintendo is persuing the same goal with the revolution.
Not that the success of the DS isn't because of it's games, but saying that's the only reason why the DS is more appealing is wrong.
When there was a shortage of GBA SPs when it released in Japan, Nintendo pulled back all advertising. After a few weeks though, as one could expect, enough systems could be shipped to deal with the initial surge, and the international releases a few weeks after had no problems.
If Nintendo had have shipped 300 000 Systems for the whole of Europe at the release of the DS, they would have had serious shortages too.
Justified to who? The price is obviously justified to the millions of people who play the game.
I don't think you understand the correct meaning of this term.
What I said is that Blizzard has no just reasons to charge that much for their game. You don't have to make reference to the consumer. If you want to believe otherwise, that's up to you.
So in other words, you don't know? Brilliant. Any more baseless assertions you'd like to make?
It's strange how you come to such conclusions. These "assertions" are not baseless, as I have explained earlier.
I might not be able to give exact Data, but comparing it with other companies, who offer similar services for free, and employ many more people to do work and research on products that they won't be able to necessarily sell as new, I think I have reasons to believe that it does not cost them 13 Euros a month for what I would get.
If you want to think otherwise, or believe that the price is actualy justified, that is entirely up to you.
What's wrong with that? People are happy to pay it, and they make money from it. Your post sounds like baseless whining.
Ther's nothing wrong with wanting to make money at all. My point is that the costs you pay don't reflect the costs for maintainence, as one could expect. The price is inflated and unjustified.
The sorts of people who do that cost a lot of money. You're looking at a wage bill in the millions. Not to mention the costs of running the servers. Equipment, electricity, bandwidth (costs a lot more than you think).
In the millions? I'm talking about people who actually are still working exclusively on WoW.
I'm not saying they don't cost anything. But for a copmpany of Blizzards size, maitaining a few personel keepeng an eye on their online game will hardly be anything significant.
The same with bandwidth/electricity. Sure it might cost a little, but is easily covered by a company like Blizzard, and in no way justifies 13 Euros/month subscrition fee.
The cost of the game covers the costs of making it in the first place, the subscription costs cover the cost of keeping it going.
This makes it quite clear that you don't have the slightest concept of how any business works.
As I explained before, the costs for maintaining are quite negligable. Next to nothing.
You are suggesting that the cost of creating and developing the game, which was in development for years, are as high as what it costs them in server bills for 3 months.
That is ludicrous. You are insane!
Aside from all that, you should know that price structuring isn't fixed to simplistic aspects such as development cost or maintainence.
It's $45 for the game, because that's how much games always cost, and you need to look attractive amongst the competition, and $13/month because that's the price where they think they can get the most money.
Almost 30000
This is just rediculous.
Hey maybe that would increase pressure on the developers to make the game mor dynamic.
WoW might be fun sometimes but often it's just sssoooooooooooo ssssssooooooooo sssssslllllllooooooooowwwwwwwww
It's all about making money. Monthly costs in no way reflect the costs in development or maintainance.
They want to make revenue. They want to make as much as they can. And sadly publisher are just happier when their customers are paying an overly inflated price every month.
I played WoW for 4 months.
Minus the free month, I payed for 3, so that makes 40 Euros. Did I cost them 40 Euros when I was playing? Shit no!
The bandwidth costs next to nothing.
Support? I wrote them an Email once, they didn't answer.
Content updates? Bugfixes and stat corrections, done by maybe a few dozen people. Based on the amount you pay, the game should be getting signifigantly better every few months.
Character storage? Complete bull! Are they seriously suggesting this is an Issue? Even with quite a few characters the Data from one account could hardly exceed a few Megabytes. Gmail gives me 2.5 Gigs for free. The price I payed for the game, Blizzard should give my characters guarantee of existance for the rest of all eternity. Instead Blizzard deletes them if you go 6 Months without subscribing. Mine will be deleted next month. Why? They hope to scare me and get me to take up the subscription again so that I can keep my precious characters.
There is no reason why MMORPGs couldn't be completely free after paying full price for the game.
But the way it is, the publishers are making a fuckload of money, and they damn well want to keep it that way.
I don't want to start too much of a discussion about value, but there is no real reason anyone should have to pay 15 Dollars a month so they can play a game they already bought.
The price is totally unjustified. They say they've got 4 Million subscribers.
What kind of black hole have they got that needs $50 000 000 plus every month?
This doesn't make sense. To pay for 4 periods, you would have to play 96 hours. To fulfill your "unlimited" calculation, they would have to play more than that in a week.
Are you saying the vast majority of players were freaks who spent 60% of their time playing a game? Not counting sleeping, eating, and for some, actually working.
There is no way I could even make up for two periods a month in this model. And it only seems logical to give free time for the rest of the month, but that would invalidate your calculations.
For a player to really make an impact on ipod market shares, and many people forget this, a product has to actually be better than the ipod.
Sure, some support OGG, you can transfer this and that, and might have an FM tuner, but the main purpose is as a portable music player. That's what the mass market is interested in, and that's what they want, nothing more.
I suppose you might get sick of them if you see them everywhere, but where I live, in Germany, most people do own non-ipod music players.
Even when looking at it from a neutral view, the ipod does pretty well compared with the players I saw. Support for practicaly every used format, easy to use, a superb management software.
And the online music store rocks, despite the bit of DRM.
It's not like people are buying an awful product, or as if there were clearly better options.
Just because they called themselves neutral in the cold war, and didn't come hugging the US and their nukes, and dared criticise the US in Vietnam, doesn't mean they're communist.
A typical example of America's "Either you're with us, or against us"
Do we actually get any numbers? How many Units will the stores get, how many have been preorderd, what is to be expected?
As long as I don't have any real numbers, I'll just take it as artificial hype.
Most poeple don't own HDTVs, so why waste performance on HD that only a minority will appreciate, if you can use the power on more performance that everyone can enjoy?
If somebody buys a Blu-Ray player, they're going to be buying it because they want to watch movies in HD.
Most people who will buy a 360 won't be too intersted in HDTV, they want to play the newest games.
No, you don't own the license for the music. You own a game, which you can play and listen to as much as you like. And I think in most countries you also have the right to make a direct recording of the Music if you do want to listen to it, and it is solely for your personal use. But a game is not a music license. If a company wants to profit from their IP by releasing a soundtrack (which mostly contains extra music not featured in the game) they can do that with all copyrights. It's the same reason why owning an old VHS doesn't give you the right to pirate it's DVD rerelease, and why subscribing to Pay-tv doesn't give you the right to pirate the DVDs of all movies featured in their program. You bought a game. Not a soundtrack. Two differant things. Owning a game which features that soundtrack doesn't give you the right to pirate the soundtrack. Plus, if there is eventually a market for game music from which game companies can profit, it will only benefit the consumer with better quality, as they would have more initiative to invest money in creating new music, instead of pouring more and more into visuals.
How is the EU supposed impose regulations on autonomous countries?
Get your facts/common sense right.
Pressure does come from Europe, as well as the USA, and a ban is declared by the international Stockholm convention.
I don't see why so many people try to push everything on the EU.
Holding up an Xbox 360 pad, to whoops and cheers from the audience, he proclaimed: "This is the Xbox 360 controller, and there's nothing wrong with it.
He then held up a first-gen XBOX and said: "This is an XBOX, and there's nothing wrong with it, it works the same as a 360. To hell with all this next gen crap, I'm sticking with this generation!"
His point is fundamentally flawed. If he believes the gaming experience can be improved by better graphics, then the same is true with an improved interface.
I'll be damned if two hundred years from now, noone has found a more natural way to play games than pressing buttons and rotating sticks on a small block of plastic.
History has shown that, more often than not, first to market=first to games=first to sales.
History has also "shown" the opposite. I don't think you can apply simplistic rules like so many poeple like to do with sales expectations.
Too many poeple are thinking from a hardcore point of view, stating how many games are coming for the system, what the performance is etc.
The casual consumer isn't interested in any of that, and even the best marketing about superiority can't overpower basic market prferences.
A system needs something to catch the attention of the casual consumer. They won't buy XBOXs months before PS3s come out if there isn't anything that interests them in the first place, or the price is too high.
For example, an adventure or rpg game could have hundreds of pages of text that needs to be translated, new voice actors and recording sessions, and potentially swapping out assets that may be offensive or not relevant the target cultures. Sure, you could do it simultaneously (and some games do), but it's much, much more work.
Actually, localisation is pretty routine work. The only problem is for smaller companies, who do not have the needed structures to localise a game, so many games are simply ignored. If they are lucky, a European/American software publisher might want to localise their game.
Most big publishers should have sufficient resources to translate a game. Think of how much work it is to develop a game from scratch, with all the graphics, music and program code. Then think of the work to translate a bit of text.
I am always surprised by the quality of the localisation Nintendo does, at least in Europe. Minish Cap for GBA was released even before Japan and didn't have any major differences.
I don't know how good coordination is at development stage, but I see no reason why a game couldn't be translated while it is being developed.
The main thing though is sales expectations and marketing that determines whether or not a game is released. That is the reason why it took Pokemon 3 years to finally catch on, why Nintendo waited to release Minish Cap in America because they thought it could damage DS sales at christmas and many games sadly don't see any kind of release outside of Japan.
I was just thinking that but then I read the comment by the guy from Australia.
This format is still a long way away, and will probably have quite a high production cost.
But really, as long as we can get HDTV-Movies on one or two discs, what more does the customer need?
If you really want to criticise the the UN, you might have been more convincing if you didn't link to a clearly biased Site which presents ludicrously false information.
Why suche an agressive reply? I think it is more of a case of you being insane for merely thinking that would matter to me. It is in no way an argument for anything, and to reinforce that, I did clearly distance myself from his view.
It is just that according to many sources, noone was killed on the square, as the students decided to move off before they reached the square.
Of course, as with any sources about historical events, they are not always accurate. I can't guarantee that it was that way, but many do consider this true.
It is merely an interesting fact, especially when considering the terrible irony involved, as the name literally means "gate of heavenly peace".
No other reason, no denial of the fact that there was a massacre.
Not that I want to support this propaganda stuffed moron in any way, it is an interesting fact to point out anyway.
As far as I know, nobody actually died on the Tiananmen Square. Sure there were bloodbaths trailing all the way to the square, marking the path the army took, but when they reached the square everybody packed up.
Although I haven't got any experience with ipods, I can say that my coated glasses (I don't think they've done uncoated ones for years, at leats where I am from) have nothing noticable on the lenses at all. I was so surprised by their resistance that I even put them unprotected in my pants pocket if I need to.
If the reports that you can scratch it with a cloth or fingernail are true, then comparing my spectecles with it iss like comparing steel with butter.
It is often very difficult to get information about biodiesel support from car manufacturers, even if they are suited for biodiesel.
The thing is, experience from commercial vehicles (which have been used alot ) has shown that biodiesel increases the corrosion on fuel pumps, so that many fuel pump manufacturers (from which the car manufacturers buy the fuel pumps, because they often don't make them themselves) have said they won't approve the use of biodiesel.
Of course this isn't so good for the car manufacturers, because if they approve the use of biodiesel in their car, they hold the responsibilty for the pumps. So they might not want too many poeple to run on biodiesel even though it has been approved for the car.
On the other hand, biodiesel has proved much more beneficial for engines, with some tests seeing as much as 60% less wear on the motors. And this is where private cusomers should benefit.
Basically, it is probably better for your car to run on biodiesel (as long as it's been approved. They need to use different sealing and fuel pipes aswell).
And many have been approved, but the car manufacturers would probably prefer not to shout about it. And I believe most Volkswagen cars are approved.
You best just insistantly bug them until they say it's been approved.