Aren't those diametrically opposed? Not that they can't coexist, but they each seem to support opposite sides. With zero trade-in value, a digital purchase is a vote for higher net prices. World of Warcraft and Madden are both proof that you can charge people hundreds of dollars for a game, as long as you are clever.
Well, for the sake of simplicity let's exclude recurring cost games like WoW and Madden, and limit our discussion to one-time purchases.
Though trade-in's is different than digital distribution, I think from the consumer's perspective they are trying to achieve a lower price. The vast majority of trade-in money goes towards the purchase of another title, thus offsetting the cost; and digitally distributed games come in (typically) at a lower price in the first place. Either way, it's a lower price (perhaps not a better value per se, but mentally it's a lower number in the consumer's head).
You bring up good points, but I still think that game prices are due for a "market adjustment". The market has a good way of establishing "true value". When the wii first came out, the "official" price was $250 but you could easily sell it for $350-400 on ebay. Similarly I think that you have a segment of consumers who will only buy a game once it comes into the neighborhood of $20-$40 USD.
To be honest, the fact that all console games start out at the same is not so much of an issue for me (after all, we don't pay less for bad movies, and good and bad CD's generally open at the same price point). The price will drop over time (especially for unpopular content). I simply think that the initial price point is too high and ends up hurting the industry as a whole.
Let's see how much "Darkest of Days" costs in two months.
You suckers keep paying $50 and $60 for games and the prices will only go higher.
While I'm in the same boat as you (I just bought Bioshock for $5 through D2D), I wouldn't necessarily label people who pay full price as suckers. They're paying a premium to play right away and that's their prerogative.
The real answer to games cost $60 is "because people will pay that much". That said, I think there are signs that the price point is more than the market will bear. Look at the meteoric rise of the trade-in market and digital distribution. I'd argue that the lower pricepoint are a big factor.
Furthermore, look at Left 4 Dead. When they lowered the price to $30 Valve sold more copies that weekend than they did at launch!
I disagree. I've listened to the StackOverflow podcast and read several of Joel's articles, and I've come to the conclusion that while unapologetic and outspoken at times, he is also right-on-the-money.
After you've read too many mealy-mouthed, passive aggressive essays that dance around the point they're trying to make, you really start to appreciate Joel's plain, straight-forward manner of speaking.
That's not entirely true. You're limited to 6 SPE's (out of seven I think). Also keep in mind that it's not just the RSX that you can't access, but the RSX memory as well -- giving you only 256MB to work with. I've heard that some hackers figured out how to access the rsx ram as swap space, but that later firmware revs closed that loophole.
I'm sure that you can still do some pretty impressive stuff, but the GP's point is still valid: Linux on PS3 is pretty gimped vs. what it could be.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, but most of the people I know have resigned themselves to treat the hardware as more of a service with a recurring cost. They know that they will be purchasing another in another 10-18 months and they enjoy the games/community/experience enough that they are willing to tolerate the crappy hardware (and by "crappy hardware" I'm referring to workmanship... from a gaming/development perspective most people love the hardware). Or at least it seems that way.
What I'd like know, however, is whether the failure rate gets figured into market penetration numbers. When Microsoft says 30 million units have been sold, does this mean that only around 14 million are actually in use?
And to be honest, I disagree with the assertion that the trailer doesn't give away any hint of the story. We have no idea if the story will be *good* but from the trailer we learn that a wounded soldier is able to fight again, albeit by proxy, controlling an indigenous creature of an alien planet.
Yeah, that ain't much, but it's an intriguing idea, and a helluva lot more plot that we got with GI-Joe.
I'm impressed that all of these Reddit users had the attention span to stay long enough to get mod points. But nobody likes a guest who overstays their welcome. Besides, I think somebody posted an animated gif of an old man falling down or something. GO CHECK IT OUT!!!1!1one
And that's a fair point, but why not post benchmarks on *that*? I imagine that they are harder to test, but it's not totally intangible. The article makes no attempt to quantify any of these supposed improvements.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Win7 UI is more responsive than Vista, but I doubt it would be snappier than, say, WinXP. Of course, I don't know either way and this article is no help.
Is this article a joke? I clearly see that vista beats Win7 in 3 out of 5 benchmarks, and XP beats Windows 7 in all but one (how can we forget the all-important "shutdown time" benchmark.
Yet CNet is telling me that *this* is the version of Windows I've been waiting for?
FWIW, I was not trying to cast dispersions on the poor fellow who took his own life (or was even potentially murdered). What I meant was that, if he was in fact murdered, it would serve as a chilling warning to all other employees of the company.
Couldn't agree more. This is just like hint guides and walkthoughs. Originally the game publishers tried to put a stop to it, but realized it was largely futile, so they decided to get in on the action. That was a very good move -- game guides are a goldmine.
Game publishers need to stop whining and instead
Sell their own used games
Institute a trade-in rebate program
Recognize that the market can't bear a $60-80 pricepoint and lower prices on new releases
After reading the article, it sounds more like this is a game of chicken that NASA intends to play in order to secure more funding, either from congress or elsewhere.
I've been out of the loop re: windows development, so I apologize in advance. But I had thought that Silverlight was a browser-based implementation of WPF (XAML+.NET), WPF being the new way to develop windows desktop apps. So the fact that Silverlight can run outside of the browser makes me wonder
While I am annoyed by Blizzard's decision, I suspect it may not be as bad as all that. I'd be surprised if ALL traffic is going to be routed through battle.net. What seems more likely is that Battle.net would handle authentication and matchmaking, but have the actual gameplay be a traditional peer-to-peer situation. If that turns out to be true, then a LAN-based SC2 game would still take advantage of your 100mbs local network. Of course, I'm just guessing here.
But I suspect I'm right, simply based on how greedy Blizzard is. I can see them wanting to make sure you paid for your copy and serve you ads, but they *don't* want to pay for all that gameplay bandwidth.
It seems that two are two types of consumer who will see this add
People who have experience with firefox/chrome/opera and know that the IE8 claims are bullshit
People like my mother-in-law who who've "never heard of a firefox" woke up one day to find IE8 auto-installed on their computer and were none the wiser
Either way it seems pointless to have this sort of marketing campaign. In fact, it only serves to infuriate the people who know better when Microsoft should be doing their best to placate them after over a decade of flouting web standards.
If you honestly think that you can take an income statement from the whole of AT&T and extrapolate the iPhone profit margins you are out of your mind. For all we know they are losing money hand-over-fist in one area and are compensating with obscene markups on iPhones.
Instead, let's go with what we know. We know the unsubsidized price of the phone is $200 more than the new contract price. So we can safely assume that $8.33 a month of your bill is going towards paying off your "loan".
I really wish that the market was just fundamentally changed. No other industry can get away with this shit. Would you be willing to "buy" a new Prius for $15,000 so long as you were forced to gas up and Toyota dealerships at $10.00/gallon for the life of the car? Hell no. Yet that's what were doing with phones. And people seem to love it.
Any iphone devs have any idea how the new graphics chipset might affect things? Are there going to be GS-specific graphics API calls?
Also I wonder if we'll see 3gs-only games? Obviously it would unwise to do so from a sales perspective, but I wonder if apple will even allow such a thing.
I agree that the 3rd party situation is abysmal, but I'm scratching my head when you say that they are stagnating. If anything, I'd say they are the only console manufacturer that has truly managed to innovate and break out of traditional "gamer" demographic.
And then there's this:
Mario, Mario, and Metriod. And another gimmick, Wii fit. How depressing for us Wii owners.
As an aside, when is Nintendo going to come out with a faithful quality sequel to Star Fox 64?
Translation:
<sequel/>, <sequel/>, and <sequel/>. And another gimmick, Wii fit. How depressing for us Wii owners.
As an aside, when is Nintendo going to come out with a faithful quality sequel to <sequel/>?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, for the sake of simplicity let's exclude recurring cost games like WoW and Madden, and limit our discussion to one-time purchases.
Though trade-in's is different than digital distribution, I think from the consumer's perspective they are trying to achieve a lower price. The vast majority of trade-in money goes towards the purchase of another title, thus offsetting the cost; and digitally distributed games come in (typically) at a lower price in the first place. Either way, it's a lower price (perhaps not a better value per se, but mentally it's a lower number in the consumer's head).
You bring up good points, but I still think that game prices are due for a "market adjustment". The market has a good way of establishing "true value". When the wii first came out, the "official" price was $250 but you could easily sell it for $350-400 on ebay. Similarly I think that you have a segment of consumers who will only buy a game once it comes into the neighborhood of $20-$40 USD.
To be honest, the fact that all console games start out at the same is not so much of an issue for me (after all, we don't pay less for bad movies, and good and bad CD's generally open at the same price point). The price will drop over time (especially for unpopular content). I simply think that the initial price point is too high and ends up hurting the industry as a whole.
Let's see how much "Darkest of Days" costs in two months.
While I'm in the same boat as you (I just bought Bioshock for $5 through D2D), I wouldn't necessarily label people who pay full price as suckers. They're paying a premium to play right away and that's their prerogative.
The real answer to games cost $60 is "because people will pay that much". That said, I think there are signs that the price point is more than the market will bear. Look at the meteoric rise of the trade-in market and digital distribution. I'd argue that the lower pricepoint are a big factor.
Furthermore, look at Left 4 Dead. When they lowered the price to $30 Valve sold more copies that weekend than they did at launch!
I disagree. I've listened to the StackOverflow podcast and read several of Joel's articles, and I've come to the conclusion that while unapologetic and outspoken at times, he is also right-on-the-money.
After you've read too many mealy-mouthed, passive aggressive essays that dance around the point they're trying to make, you really start to appreciate Joel's plain, straight-forward manner of speaking.
True, but I suppose the GP should have been more clear: $200 will buy you a CUDA card. Then you'll need power, cpu, networking, input, and RAM.
That's not entirely true. You're limited to 6 SPE's (out of seven I think). Also keep in mind that it's not just the RSX that you can't access, but the RSX memory as well -- giving you only 256MB to work with. I've heard that some hackers figured out how to access the rsx ram as swap space, but that later firmware revs closed that loophole.
I'm sure that you can still do some pretty impressive stuff, but the GP's point is still valid: Linux on PS3 is pretty gimped vs. what it could be.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, but most of the people I know have resigned themselves to treat the hardware as more of a service with a recurring cost. They know that they will be purchasing another in another 10-18 months and they enjoy the games/community/experience enough that they are willing to tolerate the crappy hardware (and by "crappy hardware" I'm referring to workmanship... from a gaming/development perspective most people love the hardware). Or at least it seems that way.
What I'd like know, however, is whether the failure rate gets figured into market penetration numbers. When Microsoft says 30 million units have been sold, does this mean that only around 14 million are actually in use?
And to be honest, I disagree with the assertion that the trailer doesn't give away any hint of the story. We have no idea if the story will be *good* but from the trailer we learn that a wounded soldier is able to fight again, albeit by proxy, controlling an indigenous creature of an alien planet.
Yeah, that ain't much, but it's an intriguing idea, and a helluva lot more plot that we got with GI-Joe.
I'm impressed that all of these Reddit users had the attention span to stay long enough to get mod points. But nobody likes a guest who overstays their welcome. Besides, I think somebody posted an animated gif of an old man falling down or something. GO CHECK IT OUT!!!1!1one
And that's a fair point, but why not post benchmarks on *that*? I imagine that they are harder to test, but it's not totally intangible. The article makes no attempt to quantify any of these supposed improvements.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Win7 UI is more responsive than Vista, but I doubt it would be snappier than, say, WinXP. Of course, I don't know either way and this article is no help.
Is this article a joke? I clearly see that vista beats Win7 in 3 out of 5 benchmarks, and XP beats Windows 7 in all but one (how can we forget the all-important "shutdown time" benchmark.
Yet CNet is telling me that *this* is the version of Windows I've been waiting for?
Which, to be fair, is pretty fucking sweet. Obviously you don't live in Phoenix.
FWIW, I was not trying to cast dispersions on the poor fellow who took his own life (or was even potentially murdered). What I meant was that, if he was in fact murdered, it would serve as a chilling warning to all other employees of the company.
It would certainly send a message to all other employees to not be careless.
Couldn't agree more. This is just like hint guides and walkthoughs. Originally the game publishers tried to put a stop to it, but realized it was largely futile, so they decided to get in on the action. That was a very good move -- game guides are a goldmine.
Game publishers need to stop whining and instead
After reading the article, it sounds more like this is a game of chicken that NASA intends to play in order to secure more funding, either from congress or elsewhere.
I've been out of the loop re: windows development, so I apologize in advance. But I had thought that Silverlight was a browser-based implementation of WPF (XAML+.NET), WPF being the new way to develop windows desktop apps. So the fact that Silverlight can run outside of the browser makes me wonder
If ever there is a lull in the action, that goddamn mini-UFO will be all over the protagonist!
While I am annoyed by Blizzard's decision, I suspect it may not be as bad as all that. I'd be surprised if ALL traffic is going to be routed through battle.net. What seems more likely is that Battle.net would handle authentication and matchmaking, but have the actual gameplay be a traditional peer-to-peer situation. If that turns out to be true, then a LAN-based SC2 game would still take advantage of your 100mbs local network. Of course, I'm just guessing here.
But I suspect I'm right, simply based on how greedy Blizzard is. I can see them wanting to make sure you paid for your copy and serve you ads, but they *don't* want to pay for all that gameplay bandwidth.
It seems that two are two types of consumer who will see this add
Either way it seems pointless to have this sort of marketing campaign. In fact, it only serves to infuriate the people who know better when Microsoft should be doing their best to placate them after over a decade of flouting web standards.
That said, the Dean Cain ads are pretty funny.
If you honestly think that you can take an income statement from the whole of AT&T and extrapolate the iPhone profit margins you are out of your mind. For all we know they are losing money hand-over-fist in one area and are compensating with obscene markups on iPhones.
Instead, let's go with what we know. We know the unsubsidized price of the phone is $200 more than the new contract price. So we can safely assume that $8.33 a month of your bill is going towards paying off your "loan".
I really wish that the market was just fundamentally changed. No other industry can get away with this shit. Would you be willing to "buy" a new Prius for $15,000 so long as you were forced to gas up and Toyota dealerships at $10.00/gallon for the life of the car? Hell no. Yet that's what were doing with phones. And people seem to love it.
Any iphone devs have any idea how the new graphics chipset might affect things? Are there going to be GS-specific graphics API calls?
Also I wonder if we'll see 3gs-only games? Obviously it would unwise to do so from a sales perspective, but I wonder if apple will even allow such a thing.
I agree that the 3rd party situation is abysmal, but I'm scratching my head when you say that they are stagnating. If anything, I'd say they are the only console manufacturer that has truly managed to innovate and break out of traditional "gamer" demographic.
And then there's this:
Translation:
So you want innovation... except when you don't?