It's true that the cost of game development is significant, and growing all the time. The answer isn't to flail desperately at the latest fad or wow potential customers with marketspeak, though. Here are a few suggestions:
1) Focus on quality instead of marketing hype. If a project isn't coming together, it's better to cut your losses than to shove a piece of garbage out the door and lose the confidence of your customers.
2) Develop your code with reuseability and extensibility in mind. Never accept quick hacks or shoddy workmanship. It never pays off in the long run. Also: quick hacks for funding milestones = long-term disaster.
3) Don't work your employees insane hours at crunch-time. You'll just lose the best ones after the project is over. Treat them with respect, pay them decently, and give them a stake in the financial success of the company.
4) Invest in internal tool and systems development. It's a longer-term payoff, but high-quality internal tools allow a small team to do what otherwise requires a small army to accomplish.
5) Betting on safe and sure things is a surefire road to stagnation and failure. You can't be afraid to shake up the status-quo and innovate. There's nothing wrong with sequels per se, as fans of your first are likely expecting a second (I'm working on one now), but you can't just remake the same game and expect everyone to buy it a second time.
Pretty boring list, huh? But I'd bet 9 out of 10 companies probably don't really follow this advice. It's sort of like advice on how to lose weight: eat healthy and exercise regularly. Stupid and simple, but it's just to tempting to take the easy road.
The game development company I work for seems to be adhering to these principles pretty well, and is hiring developers while other companies in the area are laying employees off. We'll see if it pays off in the long run.
...forgive me if I'm missing something, but... it was announced at GDC? I haven't been to GDC for a number of years, but it used to be a developer's conference with lectures, round-tables, etc - not something like E3 where you announced release titles, and nothing much the general public was interested in. When did publishers start pushing wares to the press there?
The fact that there's a fairly complete, informative article about Encarta aptly demonstrates one of Wikipedia's strengths.
Following the first multimedia Academic American Encyclopedia, Microsoft initiated Encarta by purchasing non-exclusive rights to the Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia, incorporating it into its first edition in 1993. (Funk & Wagnalls continued to publish revised editions for several years independently of Encarta, but then ceased printing in the late 1990s.) Funk & Wagnalls had been a third-tier encyclopedia available at cut rates in grocery stores, where volumes were sold individually as well as in one collected set. The name Encarta was created for Microsoft by an advertising agency, successfully guessing that it sounded better than Funk & Wagnalls.[4]
The article's summary illustrates one of its weaknesses...
It's not hard to think of games that offer wildly differing perspectives (Spore, anyone?). And yet, nothing a book's reader does will affect the outcome on the last page (unless it's a "choose your own adventure" book). The book achieves it's depth through lack of interactivity, focusing exclusively on narrative. Games typically have to make a choice between narrative and player freedom and interactivity.
I'm not saying videogames are anywhere near the level of sophistication of literature (although I think they're catching up to movies pretty quickly). After all, the medium of videogames is still very young - we're already starting to see videogames that stretch the traditional bounds of storytelling and gameplay, and do new and innovative things. Yeah, 90% of them are crap, but you have to remember that 90% of *everything* is crap, including books.
I still find it oddly amusing that people 'sell' or expect to be 'paid' for stuff made up of ones and zeros and try to treat it like a diamond ring on display at Zale's or Tiffany & Co.
I'm going to take wild guess that you keep your money in a bank, not stuffed under a mattress. You might even have your paycheck electronically transferred to your account. The fact is, it's almost ALL "ones and zeros" now. Saying something has no value because it is made up of ones and zeros means you are declaring worthless nearly all information and currency in the modern age.
...but good for EA, so long as they follow through with this. I think a simple serial code authorization system has worked just fine for much of the software I own. It's never felt overly onerous to me. I keep the serial code safe right along with the install disk, and I've often (years later) re-installed and replayed those games. Simple, and strikes a reasonable balance between some protection for the publisher / developer and reasonable use for the customer.
And of course, I see a tag on the article "serialdrm". Seriously, no one is going to get much traction whining about "serial code DRM". At that point, I'm gonna call bullshit and figure you just enjoy complaining.
I'm also some someone who likes it quiet when I work. Personally, I can just concentrate better on difficult problems I'm trying to solve when it's relatively quiet. I'll occasionally don headphones and listen to either symphonic music or movie/game soundtracks (both seem more suitable for background music than other types to me) if the background ambiance gets a bit too loud for my tastes.
And no offense, but one who offhandedly dismisses others' preferences as a psychological disorder isn't exactly in a position to cast stones...
There's a not well-known game called Two Worlds, which I actually liked better than Oblivion, truth be told. They have an online activation thing, like Vista, but it's a one-time deal, and they have promised to release a patch killing the activation if for whatever reason they stop support for the game.
Every company that uses Dumb Restrictions on Media should do this, and stick to it.
Valve's Gabe Newell has apparently indicated that's what would happen if Steam were to go belly up. I trust the man's intention, but I don't necessarily believe if the company were in that position that it would even be able to legally pull the trigger.
We've seen example's of DRM servers going away, but we've never seen an example of a company unlocking content of said servers. Can you trust a company to do this when it may be fighting for it's life? If it came down to a choice of shutting down servers to save money or going out of business, which do you think it would choose?
That being said, I don't think DRM is inherently evil or anything, as the methods presented here seem relatively unobtrusive (I do object to rootkits and other crap being installed on your system - I refuse to install that stuff). I just think you need to have a very clear understanding when purchasing that you're now paying for a service rather than a buying product.
You're envisioning the process incorrectly. You don't subtract the *encoded* bits from the waveform, you subtract the *decoded* bits. In other words, to restore the data to it's lossless state, you first decode the mp3, then fill in whatever missing data is needed to get the data back to the original, exact waveform instead of the close approximation. This subtraction essentially gives you the audio data that the mp3 encoder has "thrown away", and I'm presuming this data would be a smaller set (and easier to compress) than the full waveform.
Naturally, I have no idea if this is what they're doing. It's not an optimal way to encode lossless audio (as evidenced by the fact that it's not as small as FLAC or Apple lossless files), but it also has the obvious benefit of preserving a backward-compatible mp3 file that existing players can play.
also given the filesize stats in the article it appears they aren't just bundling together a lossy and lossless format but actually making the lossless format build on the lossy format (either that or they have a lossless format that is considerablly better than flac).
That makes sense. The decoded waveform from the MP3 file matches up pretty close, but not exactly to the original. It probably wouldn't take all that many bits per sample to nudge the waveform back to the original value. Essentially, they only have to compress the different between the two signals, and that's got to be simpler than encoding the original waveform.
I wonder how FLAC would do if you encoded the difference between a Vorbis encoding and the original waveform?
Also in a normal online game the time you press the button at your end means nothing... what matters is when the button press event gets to the server. So as long as the rendering server is in the same line of hops (ie co-located with ISP) to the actual game server then you won't have any more than a couple ms extra lag.
Not exactly. You might not see much extra lag at the server side, but you'd definitely feel the pain of this. Unless they're streaming some amount of local graphics and SFX to your client, you'd have to wait for a complete round-trip on the network to see the response of your input. The apparent lag would *feel* horrible, although technically it might be no worse than with any other system. Modern networked games do a lot of client-side prediction to minimize the appearance of lag on your own client, so the game still feels nice and snappy, even if there's fairly high latency between the client and server. Unless network latencies improve dramatically in the next few years (unlikely), then this thing is dead in the water for all but turn-based games in which latency plays no factor.
Hopefully this will keep publishers from shipping broken/empty games with plans of patching them up later (*cough* UT3 *cough*); and we could go back to actually getting a working game on the disk, not a game in need of a patch and more content.
Think about the math a bit. It's not exactly a deal-breaker to patch a game at $.16 per GB. That's only 16 cents out of their bottom line per game if they had to send a massive 1GB patch down to each user. Still, it's hard to say if this means we'll be less likely to see large, free demos to download on the PS3 in the future. It's probably more likely that publishers will still do this, but just factor this cost into their advertising budgets.
Still, it just doesn't strike me as the wisest of decisions to alienate publishers when your console isn't exactly leading the pack. Publishers might be just slightly less inclined to publish on their platform in the first place, and Sony can't really afford to lose too much ground at the moment.
Slight difference: He uploaded the songs to his website. That's not something you can do accidentally. He knew exactly what the hell he was doing. These were also pre-release tracks, which makes it harder to argue it won't have an impact on sales.
Finally, his "too cool for school" pose in front of the courtroom isn't doing much to generate sympathy from me. Excessive punishment? Yeah, it is. But I still don't feel sorry for him.
I think I'll save my concern for some housewife, grandmother, or student who gets financially ruined by the RIAA just for downloading a few songs.
Don't forget Cyan. They are a Washington company and have been around quite a while.
I knew that I would probably forget at least one major WA company, which is why I said "and more". You're right, of course. They do belong in the "notable names" category.
Don't be ridiculously short-sighted. In an open-source scenario as you've explained, it would be difficult to make money on the development of the game, sure. But consider that there is money to be made in the support of the product.
"Support of the product" has long been the mantra of selling open-source business software. It has not generally, to my knowledge, been seriously proposed as a viable solution for a consumer product - an entertainment product at that - one which people tend to (for single-player games) play once and once only. The only support gamers need is when their game doesn't work. And at that point, they're probably not exactly in a mood to start handing over money to the developer.
Just because the first guys to develop a product see no immediate profit, it doesn't mean that there can't be an entire ecosystem of support developers who make a good living helping users with the game.
You're not doing a very good job of convincing anyone to develop the original game, which is, you know, the hard and expensive part...
People have talked about open-source gaming for years and years, and nothing significant has come of it. On the other hand, we have a thriving computer game industry with no less than half-a-dozen major platforms to choose from, and entire store-fulls of high-quality games. A developer may spend upwards of $50 million to develop a AAA game title, and I get to enjoy it (typically anywhere from 10 to 40 hours of gameplay) for $60. I just don't see how that's such a horrible system. If you look at it in terms of dollars-per-hour, it's one of the best entertainment values out there, which I think partially explains why the industry does well even during recessions.
Developers will need to rewrite core libraries or purchase them. Want soft shadows? Buy it or re-develop in house because it isn't a default ray tracing feature and requires casting more (expensive) rays.
Don't make the assumption that Larrabee is only a ray-tracing engine. It should be able to do traditional polygonal-based rasterization as well. That being said, the entire point is that developers are not locked into using a pre-packaged graphics package. Creating the system out of programmable components is to allow developers to write their own pipelines and graphics engines. This is the direction GPUs are moving toward anyways, with shader languages that run on, in essence, many small, specialized CPUs.
That said, most consoles don't need true CPUs.
I'm not sure what you mean here, but CPUs are required for everything that's NOT graphical rendering. You know, AI, game logic, audio, physics, stuff like that.
Am I the only one who is wary of purchasing this game because Ensemble is being shut down? There are two reasons for this:
1) It feels like I'm rewarding Microsoft for shutting down one of my favorite studios. 2) It pretty much guarantees no substantial post-game support.
I'm normally not counted among the "I hate M$" crowd, but I simply don't want to reward this behavior. I suppose management would look at poor sales as an indication that they did the right thing anyhow, but at least they wouldn't have my money...
You should do a bit of research into breeder reactors. They're extremely fuel efficient, are powered by a much more common thorium, and my understanding is the waste material they would produce has a half-life of half a century instead of twenty-five millennium. And, they can use the leftover fuel from conventional reactors. When people talk about "going nuclear", it's with this type of technology that they're referring to, not building inefficient 1950's style reactors.
It's funny you mention Miles. It's the one audio library you can use that comes with a blanket MP3 license (I think they made a very early deal with Fraunhofer before a general per-game license fee was decided on). Pretty much any other audio library, such as FMOD or wwise you'll have to pay an additional licensing fee.
The biggest reason to use Vorbis is actually technical, not the licensing agreement. It's not that expensive to license mp3 use for a game title - just a few grand per title, which is pretty insignificant compared to total development expenses for AAA title nowadays (more critical for indy developers, of course). Vorbis has support for 6-channel audio, and it has sample-accurate containers, meaning you can easily chop it up, splice it, loop it, etc... MP3 is really only good for simple playback scenarios.
Hell yes. 33% is an unacceptably high failure rate. Anything over 10 should be a mandatory recall by law.
What for? It's an entertainment console. It's not going to kill anybody when it goes belly-up. MS has done the appropriate thing (if belatedly) by replacing these consoles for free. If they hadn't done this, they would have been crucified by gamers and the press, and rightly so. That's how a free market works in conjunction with a free press.
Everyone (including large companies) makes mistakes. It's how you deal with those mistakes that affects your reputation. In the case of the Xbox 360, yes, MS knew they had a high failure rate, but I believe they underestimated the problem and overestimated how easy it would be to fix. No one had a crystal ball telling 1 in 3 would fail - these failures happened over time.
So, no need for another law. Microsoft's reputation over this mess has taken a beating AND hurt their bottom line, and this will encourage both them and other console makers to pay more attention to reliability for fear of losing market share in a fiercely competitive industry.
Slashdot Mirror
It's true that the cost of game development is significant, and growing all the time. The answer isn't to flail desperately at the latest fad or wow potential customers with marketspeak, though. Here are a few suggestions:
1) Focus on quality instead of marketing hype. If a project isn't coming together, it's better to cut your losses than to shove a piece of garbage out the door and lose the confidence of your customers.
2) Develop your code with reuseability and extensibility in mind. Never accept quick hacks or shoddy workmanship. It never pays off in the long run. Also: quick hacks for funding milestones = long-term disaster.
3) Don't work your employees insane hours at crunch-time. You'll just lose the best ones after the project is over. Treat them with respect, pay them decently, and give them a stake in the financial success of the company.
4) Invest in internal tool and systems development. It's a longer-term payoff, but high-quality internal tools allow a small team to do what otherwise requires a small army to accomplish.
5) Betting on safe and sure things is a surefire road to stagnation and failure. You can't be afraid to shake up the status-quo and innovate. There's nothing wrong with sequels per se, as fans of your first are likely expecting a second (I'm working on one now), but you can't just remake the same game and expect everyone to buy it a second time.
Pretty boring list, huh? But I'd bet 9 out of 10 companies probably don't really follow this advice. It's sort of like advice on how to lose weight: eat healthy and exercise regularly. Stupid and simple, but it's just to tempting to take the easy road.
The game development company I work for seems to be adhering to these principles pretty well, and is hiring developers while other companies in the area are laying employees off. We'll see if it pays off in the long run.
...forgive me if I'm missing something, but... it was announced at GDC? I haven't been to GDC for a number of years, but it used to be a developer's conference with lectures, round-tables, etc - not something like E3 where you announced release titles, and nothing much the general public was interested in. When did publishers start pushing wares to the press there?
The staff are not bothered whether they have the radio on or not, in fact they don't particularly like my music and turn if off when I'm not around.
The staff isn't bothered by the music, but they don't like it and turn it off when she's not around?
Still, stupid as can be. Enjoy your nanny state. Ours is coming soon enough.
The fact that there's a fairly complete, informative article about Encarta aptly demonstrates one of Wikipedia's strengths.
Following the first multimedia Academic American Encyclopedia, Microsoft initiated Encarta by purchasing non-exclusive rights to the Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia, incorporating it into its first edition in 1993. (Funk & Wagnalls continued to publish revised editions for several years independently of Encarta, but then ceased printing in the late 1990s.) Funk & Wagnalls had been a third-tier encyclopedia available at cut rates in grocery stores, where volumes were sold individually as well as in one collected set. The name Encarta was created for Microsoft by an advertising agency, successfully guessing that it sounded better than Funk & Wagnalls.[4]
The article's summary illustrates one of its weaknesses...
It's not hard to think of games that offer wildly differing perspectives (Spore, anyone?). And yet, nothing a book's reader does will affect the outcome on the last page (unless it's a "choose your own adventure" book). The book achieves it's depth through lack of interactivity, focusing exclusively on narrative. Games typically have to make a choice between narrative and player freedom and interactivity.
I'm not saying videogames are anywhere near the level of sophistication of literature (although I think they're catching up to movies pretty quickly). After all, the medium of videogames is still very young - we're already starting to see videogames that stretch the traditional bounds of storytelling and gameplay, and do new and innovative things. Yeah, 90% of them are crap, but you have to remember that 90% of *everything* is crap, including books.
Actually, no, I'm am perfectly well positioned to cast stones, and with deadly accuracy.
What are you, a hobbit? ;-)
I still find it oddly amusing that people 'sell' or expect to be 'paid' for stuff made up of ones and zeros and try to treat it like a diamond ring on display at Zale's or Tiffany & Co.
I'm going to take wild guess that you keep your money in a bank, not stuffed under a mattress. You might even have your paycheck electronically transferred to your account. The fact is, it's almost ALL "ones and zeros" now. Saying something has no value because it is made up of ones and zeros means you are declaring worthless nearly all information and currency in the modern age.
...but good for EA, so long as they follow through with this. I think a simple serial code authorization system has worked just fine for much of the software I own. It's never felt overly onerous to me. I keep the serial code safe right along with the install disk, and I've often (years later) re-installed and replayed those games. Simple, and strikes a reasonable balance between some protection for the publisher / developer and reasonable use for the customer.
And of course, I see a tag on the article "serialdrm". Seriously, no one is going to get much traction whining about "serial code DRM". At that point, I'm gonna call bullshit and figure you just enjoy complaining.
What exactly is preventing the startup of community-based news websites? I already rely on one of those for the area I live in.
I'm also some someone who likes it quiet when I work. Personally, I can just concentrate better on difficult problems I'm trying to solve when it's relatively quiet. I'll occasionally don headphones and listen to either symphonic music or movie/game soundtracks (both seem more suitable for background music than other types to me) if the background ambiance gets a bit too loud for my tastes.
And no offense, but one who offhandedly dismisses others' preferences as a psychological disorder isn't exactly in a position to cast stones...
There's a not well-known game called Two Worlds, which I actually liked better than Oblivion, truth be told. They have an online activation thing, like Vista, but it's a one-time deal, and they have promised to release a patch killing the activation if for whatever reason they stop support for the game.
Every company that uses Dumb Restrictions on Media should do this, and stick to it.
Valve's Gabe Newell has apparently indicated that's what would happen if Steam were to go belly up. I trust the man's intention, but I don't necessarily believe if the company were in that position that it would even be able to legally pull the trigger.
We've seen example's of DRM servers going away, but we've never seen an example of a company unlocking content of said servers. Can you trust a company to do this when it may be fighting for it's life? If it came down to a choice of shutting down servers to save money or going out of business, which do you think it would choose?
That being said, I don't think DRM is inherently evil or anything, as the methods presented here seem relatively unobtrusive (I do object to rootkits and other crap being installed on your system - I refuse to install that stuff). I just think you need to have a very clear understanding when purchasing that you're now paying for a service rather than a buying product.
Joseph Smith wins a Space Race victory!
-1 Troll? Mod never played Civilization, I presume? Well, *I* thought it was funny.
You're envisioning the process incorrectly. You don't subtract the *encoded* bits from the waveform, you subtract the *decoded* bits. In other words, to restore the data to it's lossless state, you first decode the mp3, then fill in whatever missing data is needed to get the data back to the original, exact waveform instead of the close approximation. This subtraction essentially gives you the audio data that the mp3 encoder has "thrown away", and I'm presuming this data would be a smaller set (and easier to compress) than the full waveform.
Naturally, I have no idea if this is what they're doing. It's not an optimal way to encode lossless audio (as evidenced by the fact that it's not as small as FLAC or Apple lossless files), but it also has the obvious benefit of preserving a backward-compatible mp3 file that existing players can play.
also given the filesize stats in the article it appears they aren't just bundling together a lossy and lossless format but actually making the lossless format build on the lossy format (either that or they have a lossless format that is considerablly better than flac).
That makes sense. The decoded waveform from the MP3 file matches up pretty close, but not exactly to the original. It probably wouldn't take all that many bits per sample to nudge the waveform back to the original value. Essentially, they only have to compress the different between the two signals, and that's got to be simpler than encoding the original waveform.
I wonder how FLAC would do if you encoded the difference between a Vorbis encoding and the original waveform?
Also in a normal online game the time you press the button at your end means nothing... what matters is when the button press event gets to the server. So as long as the rendering server is in the same line of hops (ie co-located with ISP) to the actual game server then you won't have any more than a couple ms extra lag.
Not exactly. You might not see much extra lag at the server side, but you'd definitely feel the pain of this. Unless they're streaming some amount of local graphics and SFX to your client, you'd have to wait for a complete round-trip on the network to see the response of your input. The apparent lag would *feel* horrible, although technically it might be no worse than with any other system. Modern networked games do a lot of client-side prediction to minimize the appearance of lag on your own client, so the game still feels nice and snappy, even if there's fairly high latency between the client and server. Unless network latencies improve dramatically in the next few years (unlikely), then this thing is dead in the water for all but turn-based games in which latency plays no factor.
Hopefully this will keep publishers from shipping broken/empty games with plans of patching them up later (*cough* UT3 *cough*); and we could go back to actually getting a working game on the disk, not a game in need of a patch and more content.
Think about the math a bit. It's not exactly a deal-breaker to patch a game at $.16 per GB. That's only 16 cents out of their bottom line per game if they had to send a massive 1GB patch down to each user. Still, it's hard to say if this means we'll be less likely to see large, free demos to download on the PS3 in the future. It's probably more likely that publishers will still do this, but just factor this cost into their advertising budgets.
Still, it just doesn't strike me as the wisest of decisions to alienate publishers when your console isn't exactly leading the pack. Publishers might be just slightly less inclined to publish on their platform in the first place, and Sony can't really afford to lose too much ground at the moment.
Slight difference: He uploaded the songs to his website. That's not something you can do accidentally. He knew exactly what the hell he was doing. These were also pre-release tracks, which makes it harder to argue it won't have an impact on sales.
Finally, his "too cool for school" pose in front of the courtroom isn't doing much to generate sympathy from me. Excessive punishment? Yeah, it is. But I still don't feel sorry for him.
I think I'll save my concern for some housewife, grandmother, or student who gets financially ruined by the RIAA just for downloading a few songs.
Don't forget Cyan. They are a Washington company and have been around quite a while.
I knew that I would probably forget at least one major WA company, which is why I said "and more". You're right, of course. They do belong in the "notable names" category.
Don't be ridiculously short-sighted. In an open-source scenario as you've explained, it would be difficult to make money on the development of the game, sure. But consider that there is money to be made in the support of the product.
"Support of the product" has long been the mantra of selling open-source business software. It has not generally, to my knowledge, been seriously proposed as a viable solution for a consumer product - an entertainment product at that - one which people tend to (for single-player games) play once and once only. The only support gamers need is when their game doesn't work. And at that point, they're probably not exactly in a mood to start handing over money to the developer.
Just because the first guys to develop a product see no immediate profit, it doesn't mean that there can't be an entire ecosystem of support developers who make a good living helping users with the game.
You're not doing a very good job of convincing anyone to develop the original game, which is, you know, the hard and expensive part...
People have talked about open-source gaming for years and years, and nothing significant has come of it. On the other hand, we have a thriving computer game industry with no less than half-a-dozen major platforms to choose from, and entire store-fulls of high-quality games. A developer may spend upwards of $50 million to develop a AAA game title, and I get to enjoy it (typically anywhere from 10 to 40 hours of gameplay) for $60. I just don't see how that's such a horrible system. If you look at it in terms of dollars-per-hour, it's one of the best entertainment values out there, which I think partially explains why the industry does well even during recessions.
Developers will need to rewrite core libraries or purchase them. Want soft shadows? Buy it or re-develop in house because it isn't a default ray tracing feature and requires casting more (expensive) rays.
Don't make the assumption that Larrabee is only a ray-tracing engine. It should be able to do traditional polygonal-based rasterization as well. That being said, the entire point is that developers are not locked into using a pre-packaged graphics package. Creating the system out of programmable components is to allow developers to write their own pipelines and graphics engines. This is the direction GPUs are moving toward anyways, with shader languages that run on, in essence, many small, specialized CPUs.
That said, most consoles don't need true CPUs.
I'm not sure what you mean here, but CPUs are required for everything that's NOT graphical rendering. You know, AI, game logic, audio, physics, stuff like that.
Year of the Linux-based Distribution Desktop just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Am I the only one who is wary of purchasing this game because Ensemble is being shut down? There are two reasons for this:
1) It feels like I'm rewarding Microsoft for shutting down one of my favorite studios.
2) It pretty much guarantees no substantial post-game support.
I'm normally not counted among the "I hate M$" crowd, but I simply don't want to reward this behavior. I suppose management would look at poor sales as an indication that they did the right thing anyhow, but at least they wouldn't have my money...
You should do a bit of research into breeder reactors. They're extremely fuel efficient, are powered by a much more common thorium, and my understanding is the waste material they would produce has a half-life of half a century instead of twenty-five millennium. And, they can use the leftover fuel from conventional reactors. When people talk about "going nuclear", it's with this type of technology that they're referring to, not building inefficient 1950's style reactors.
It's funny you mention Miles. It's the one audio library you can use that comes with a blanket MP3 license (I think they made a very early deal with Fraunhofer before a general per-game license fee was decided on). Pretty much any other audio library, such as FMOD or wwise you'll have to pay an additional licensing fee.
The biggest reason to use Vorbis is actually technical, not the licensing agreement. It's not that expensive to license mp3 use for a game title - just a few grand per title, which is pretty insignificant compared to total development expenses for AAA title nowadays (more critical for indy developers, of course). Vorbis has support for 6-channel audio, and it has sample-accurate containers, meaning you can easily chop it up, splice it, loop it, etc... MP3 is really only good for simple playback scenarios.
Hell yes. 33% is an unacceptably high failure rate. Anything over 10 should be a mandatory recall by law.
What for? It's an entertainment console. It's not going to kill anybody when it goes belly-up. MS has done the appropriate thing (if belatedly) by replacing these consoles for free. If they hadn't done this, they would have been crucified by gamers and the press, and rightly so. That's how a free market works in conjunction with a free press.
Everyone (including large companies) makes mistakes. It's how you deal with those mistakes that affects your reputation. In the case of the Xbox 360, yes, MS knew they had a high failure rate, but I believe they underestimated the problem and overestimated how easy it would be to fix. No one had a crystal ball telling 1 in 3 would fail - these failures happened over time.
So, no need for another law. Microsoft's reputation over this mess has taken a beating AND hurt their bottom line, and this will encourage both them and other console makers to pay more attention to reliability for fear of losing market share in a fiercely competitive industry.