Would most of the people who choose to buy and play new games continue to spend the same amount on new games if they couldn't resell them when finished? Probably not.
What you're arguing here doesn't necessarily imply that developers would get more sales, because if a person is reselling their games, there's also a good chance they may actually be buying a used game. A used game sale may mean either a trade-in for a new one, an old one, or nothing at all. Logically, then there's fewer new games purchased after a trade-in than there are trade-ins, so trade-ins are not 100% helpful. Really, it's a case where you'd have to do a study to see whether used game sales actually increase sales enough for developers to be profiting from them. I don't think you can make an anecdotal conclusion on that issue.
In any case, I think we'll see this issue go away with digital sales and online only games. There's just not much incentive for a game developer to allow used game sales if they can prevent it.
No surprise there. Since you need an iTunes account to do anything but mail and web on the iPad, they have your identity anyways. Let's not forget there's far more iPhones out there. Chances are, if you bought an iPad, Apple already knew who you were.
That's an excellent reason why the phrase should be clarified. If you had a problem understanding it, then chances are that a large portion of the audience is also not getting it.
"Game Experience May Change During Online Play"
While I've always understood what they mean, I've always felt it was written in such a way as to intentionally confuse. It's as if they're trying to be a bit coy about it. "Yep, this game is perfectly fine for kids. Except....well, I don't want to startle you or anything, but...something really bad could happen online. Oops, look at the time, gotta go!"
Okay, let's assume that for a moment. Will anyone actually give a shit? Well, there was one guy who cared, but he'd be gone by then. There's another guy who looks just like him, though, and he's totally cool with it.
... when you build your entire source engine in DirectX. Of course valve's console takeup has been slow.
It only works on two platforms Windows and 360.
Instead of trolling, could you read what he said? He said nothing about DirectX. Porting a game that uses DirectX to another API is straightforward these days. How to make use of all the cores in the PS3 is not.
Sorry to disappoint you, but DirectX is not the reason people don't port to other platforms.
They'll take the 12 month replacement plan off right after you've been billed. I bought the 360 bundle, which included a replacement plan. It disappeared off my invoice after I was billed. Neat.
Oh, and if you have placed a preorder for a non-bundled Wii, you'll be getting it after they sell the bundles. A friend of mine had preordered a 360 a few monthes before it was released. I ordered a bundle 3-4 weeks after the 360 was released and got it a couple monthes before my friend got his. You want it first, you've got to shell out the dough.
A key to making an enjoyable game is to watch other people playing your game. You and your development team should already be playing constantly, obviously, but you need unbiased feedback to see the real effect of the changes you're trying.
When you have a playtester, watch them play, but don't teach them, answer questions, or comment on what they do. Let them struggle their way through the game like a player would if they bought the game. While they play, take notes on what they do. Do they appear confused? Do they miss important feedback from the game? Are they using all the weapons they currently have? If there are puzzles in the game, how long did it take them to figure them out? If they failed, how many times did they try before giving up?
Of course, if they get really stuck, or encounter a bug or an unfinished section of the game, step in to help. If it's not a bug, don't tell the player they screwed up, however. Just tell them you're still working on that and move on. The fact that the player got stuck is not their fault--it's probably a design error. You can usually tell if you get a few more testers. If it happens more than once, it's probably worth changing, possibly even removing that part of the game.
After they're done, walkthrough their experience with them. Ask them non-leading questions. Ask them what they were thinking at different parts of the game. Again, don't tell them they did something they weren't supposed to--get information FROM them. You need to know whether they were understanding what they were doing while they were playing. Also, ask what were the high points and low points of the game (note: asking if they had fun is usually pointless as most playtesters will feel gratitude for being able to play and won't want to hurt your feelings). Did they ever feel lost, or not know what they were doing? Ask them to describe how the HUD works, and what the guns did. To find out if they noticed how the HUD works, ask them questions that reveal their thinking--"Did you ever feel like you were low on ammo?" could reveal that they never knew how much they had.
The important thing during these playtests is to not taint them by giving the player any information that could alter their honest reaction. You want to see how a player who just bought the game would experience it.
Don't be afraid of showing the game while it's ugly. The most important thing is to get feedback early so that you can make changes easily. It's best to know early on if your game is boring.
Remember not to take things too personally when people just don't like some part of your game. You may have a "vision" that you want to create, but ultimately you want an audience. Watching others play your game should be a humbling experience. When things don't work out, it's not a disaster, and it's no one's fault. Take the lesson learned and use it to make things better. The nice thing about a playtest is that there can't be much arguing about the results. If the players keep hitting their head on some problem, it has to be fixed, no matter who's favorite feature it is.
What's funny to me about this is that this is a Role-Playing game, so people should expect that some people playing the game may be playing a role of someone actively trying to rip you off. A big part of these games is about imagining yourself in this alternate world. People expect others might try to kill them and generally deal with it when it happens. When someone rips you off in the game, why would you take that any more seriously than if they killed your game character?
I remember when Ultima Online came out, a friend of mine was totally excited about the possibilities of role playing an evil character online. It was essentially just an offshoot of his playing a thief in D&D when we were growning up. In fact, I believe one of his goals was to actually create a Ponzi scheme in the game. I remember he eventually gave up on the game because no one really wanted to roleplay like he did. He and I both were disappointed as MMORPGs became more like online theme parks, where safety of the customer was paramount, than a kind of wild lawless game world.
I think a lot of the problem with this kind of thing is that many people see it as just a form of cheating. And honestly, it was the cheating that was going on in UO and others that caused the people running them to turn the game into something that was more safe for neophyte players.
It would be interesting to see a game that emphasized to the player that other players may do bad things to you from time to time, and any form of redress has to take place through action in the game world and not by banning the person from the game.
I hear they have a game coming out on the 360, didn't sound like it was giving them much problems using the Unreal engine 3 for it either.
Of course Epic can make a game with their own engine--they wrote it. Duh. Besides, it's not like they'd talk about it publicly if they DID have problems.
I'm not insinuating there's any problems with Epic's engine, just that there's a huge difference between using code you wrote and licensing it. You have to get used to what may be a completely different paradigm for developing that might not be compatible with the way you work.
Transgaming brags about all these great results on their website but the sheer number of workarounds and hacks to get a game to play are unbearable. And what's worse is that the games, once installed, randomly crash, screw up graphics, display incorrect fonts, lose mouse control, can't position correctly on the screen, takes an inordinate amount of Microsoft software to even function... BLAH.
Sounds like they've got the Windows emulation working perfectly.
If he's strictly talking about getting 10 of your personal friends together, why not just go to Target, pick up a cheap football, go to a park, and...play football? Compared to the price of getting 10 gaming systems, 10 copies of the game, 10 online subscriptions, and coordinating the same time to get all 10 of your friends together it's far too much effort.
Are you dense? He's a friggen football player. He plays the real thing all the time. You're acting like this is some fat kid sitting on a couch complaining about football games not being real enough.
Besides, there's other reasons to want to play a game on a gaming system: if you live in different areas and can't get together, if you're injured, if you're a 280lb football player and you want to play your 80lb nephew, if it's currently raining/snowing/too dark, or when you've already been playing professional football all day and you want to play something a little less tiring.
Remember Novalogic? They haven't had an honest-to-goodness hit since that voxel helicopter game back in the early 90's. And they're still around because they understand this basic principle: Ship the game when you know that it's good enough to generate enough sales to cover your costs, and not one day later. As long as your staff is marginally competent and decently paid, you can always meet that goal.
The only real tragedy in this list is Looking Glass, who was killed off because Eidos would rather divert funds to help Daikatana limp along -- Eidos failing to recognize the common sense of NovaLogic. (In the end, John Romero really did make us his bitch, by denying us more great Thief games.)
Now wait a minute. You were just saying that game companies should keep sinking money into a project until it's good and now you're complaining about a company that followed that logic. You aren't making sense. Really what it boils down to is you liked Looking Glass, but you hate John Romero and Eidos because they didn't support Looking Glass when their games weren't selling.
Maybe it was Looking Glass that needed to learn a lesson from Novalogic. Maybe Looking Glass spent too much money on games that only appealed to a niche audience.
Um, no it's not. I believe Berzerk was one of (if not the) first games to use digitized voice
Berzerk used a voice synthesizer, so it doesn't qualify as digitized voice.
Besides, an earlier example of digitized voice is Castle Wolfenstein for the Apple 2 by Silas Warner of Muse Software. I'm not sure enough to call it the *first* game to use it, but it is one of the earliest.
In general, I'm ambivilant to this topic. I tend to think there's extremists at both sides. I like my Tivo, and my mp3s, but I also feel people gotta be paid for their work.
However, when I see this response, I think--Are you kidding? The only way people against DRM are going to change anything is by making a stink about it. Saying "Don't buy it" is about as productive as vegitarians boycotting McDonald's because they serve meat. If you're not the target market, your opinion doesn't matter.
If only the anti-DRM crowd stopped buying the products, it would be a statistical glitch on balance sheet. It's not going to make an impression when most consumers are unaware of the DRM issue.
The Anti-DRM campaign has to make itself heard, while at the same time not coming off as shrill and fringe like PETA does.
Every company has some information that needs to be secure. With a network, you're only as secure as the weakest link--one machine is all it takes for someone to infiltrate it.
While your company's password policy is much more stringant than my company's, it doesn't sound too paranoid at all. As far as remembering the password, you should write it down and carry it with you if you're having trouble remembering it. It should only take a couple days of logging in before you have it down, so then make sure you destroy the paper it's written on.
The thing is, you really need to worry about someone hacking your password remotely and a simple password of only lower-case letters and maybe some digits is a heck of a lot quicker to hack than mixed upper/lowercase, digits, and symbols. If someone got the piece of paper in your wallet, they probably would also get your keycard into your office, too. Once they had physical entry into your office, the password wouldn't be that big a deal. They could just steal your data drive and take all the time in the world to hack into it.
Planned comedy is very hard to pull off unless you've already got a lot of skill in setting up jokes and comedic timing. Unfortunately, those aren't skills people acquire in the normal day-to-day of game development. You really need someone who developed their comedic skills on their own and also loves and understands games.
Can you imagine, with all the rushed art and programming that goes on in game development, how well humor would fare? Not well. You may have a joke that works well with the development team for some reason, but just completely falls flat on the audience. In the end, the publisher is going to want the game done and not really worry about whether it's funny or not.
The best example of a funny game recently is Psychonauts, by Double-fine. The dialog in that game was from Tim Schafer (Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle) and Erik Wolpaw (from Old Man Murray - http://www.oldmanmurray.com./ The game was often delayed and was even cut from Microsoft's lineup because Schafer was hard to work with. It was eventually released by Majesco and despite lot's of great reviews, it wasn't exactly a smash hit. The humor is top-notch, but in the end, if people don't like the game and it doesn't have a huge publisher backing it, it's not going to sell.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not fat. I'm just more efficient at extracting nutrients than you.
Would most of the people who choose to buy and play new games continue to spend the same amount on new games if they couldn't resell them when finished? Probably not.
What you're arguing here doesn't necessarily imply that developers would get more sales, because if a person is reselling their games, there's also a good chance they may actually be buying a used game. A used game sale may mean either a trade-in for a new one, an old one, or nothing at all. Logically, then there's fewer new games purchased after a trade-in than there are trade-ins, so trade-ins are not 100% helpful. Really, it's a case where you'd have to do a study to see whether used game sales actually increase sales enough for developers to be profiting from them. I don't think you can make an anecdotal conclusion on that issue. In any case, I think we'll see this issue go away with digital sales and online only games. There's just not much incentive for a game developer to allow used game sales if they can prevent it.
No surprise there. Since you need an iTunes account to do anything but mail and web on the iPad, they have your identity anyways. Let's not forget there's far more iPhones out there. Chances are, if you bought an iPad, Apple already knew who you were.
That's an excellent reason why the phrase should be clarified. If you had a problem understanding it, then chances are that a large portion of the audience is also not getting it. "Game Experience May Change During Online Play" While I've always understood what they mean, I've always felt it was written in such a way as to intentionally confuse. It's as if they're trying to be a bit coy about it. "Yep, this game is perfectly fine for kids. Except....well, I don't want to startle you or anything, but...something really bad could happen online. Oops, look at the time, gotta go!"
Actually, I would have expected "Pestilence", "War", "Famine", and "Death", but I can see how the 4th one could be "The Sims".
Instead of trolling, could you read what he said? He said nothing about DirectX. Porting a game that uses DirectX to another API is straightforward these days. How to make use of all the cores in the PS3 is not.
Sorry to disappoint you, but DirectX is not the reason people don't port to other platforms.
They'll take the 12 month replacement plan off right after you've been billed. I bought the 360 bundle, which included a replacement plan. It disappeared off my invoice after I was billed. Neat.
Oh, and if you have placed a preorder for a non-bundled Wii, you'll be getting it after they sell the bundles. A friend of mine had preordered a 360 a few monthes before it was released. I ordered a bundle 3-4 weeks after the 360 was released and got it a couple monthes before my friend got his. You want it first, you've got to shell out the dough.
Ever notice that when there's an article with some criticism of Linux, it gets tagged "fud", "notfud", and often times "flamebait".
Sorry if this sounds like a troll, but I can't help but think of this as a piece of the puzzle of Linux v. the rest of the World.
A key to making an enjoyable game is to watch other people playing your game. You and your development team should already be playing constantly, obviously, but you need unbiased feedback to see the real effect of the changes you're trying.
When you have a playtester, watch them play, but don't teach them, answer questions, or comment on what they do. Let them struggle their way through the game like a player would if they bought the game. While they play, take notes on what they do. Do they appear confused? Do they miss important feedback from the game? Are they using all the weapons they currently have? If there are puzzles in the game, how long did it take them to figure them out? If they failed, how many times did they try before giving up?
Of course, if they get really stuck, or encounter a bug or an unfinished section of the game, step in to help. If it's not a bug, don't tell the player they screwed up, however. Just tell them you're still working on that and move on. The fact that the player got stuck is not their fault--it's probably a design error. You can usually tell if you get a few more testers. If it happens more than once, it's probably worth changing, possibly even removing that part of the game.
After they're done, walkthrough their experience with them. Ask them non-leading questions. Ask them what they were thinking at different parts of the game. Again, don't tell them they did something they weren't supposed to--get information FROM them. You need to know whether they were understanding what they were doing while they were playing. Also, ask what were the high points and low points of the game (note: asking if they had fun is usually pointless as most playtesters will feel gratitude for being able to play and won't want to hurt your feelings). Did they ever feel lost, or not know what they were doing? Ask them to describe how the HUD works, and what the guns did. To find out if they noticed how the HUD works, ask them questions that reveal their thinking--"Did you ever feel like you were low on ammo?" could reveal that they never knew how much they had.
The important thing during these playtests is to not taint them by giving the player any information that could alter their honest reaction. You want to see how a player who just bought the game would experience it.
Don't be afraid of showing the game while it's ugly. The most important thing is to get feedback early so that you can make changes easily. It's best to know early on if your game is boring.
Remember not to take things too personally when people just don't like some part of your game. You may have a "vision" that you want to create, but ultimately you want an audience. Watching others play your game should be a humbling experience. When things don't work out, it's not a disaster, and it's no one's fault. Take the lesson learned and use it to make things better. The nice thing about a playtest is that there can't be much arguing about the results. If the players keep hitting their head on some problem, it has to be fixed, no matter who's favorite feature it is.
Hope this helps
After reading your post, I can now see that Mac's apparently lack the ability to start new paragraphs. ;)
I don't know about pigeonholing, but whatever it was that happened to him, yeah, I would have preferred that it hadn't.
What's funny to me about this is that this is a Role-Playing game, so people should expect that some people playing the game may be playing a role of someone actively trying to rip you off. A big part of these games is about imagining yourself in this alternate world. People expect others might try to kill them and generally deal with it when it happens. When someone rips you off in the game, why would you take that any more seriously than if they killed your game character?
I remember when Ultima Online came out, a friend of mine was totally excited about the possibilities of role playing an evil character online. It was essentially just an offshoot of his playing a thief in D&D when we were growning up. In fact, I believe one of his goals was to actually create a Ponzi scheme in the game. I remember he eventually gave up on the game because no one really wanted to roleplay like he did. He and I both were disappointed as MMORPGs became more like online theme parks, where safety of the customer was paramount, than a kind of wild lawless game world.
I think a lot of the problem with this kind of thing is that many people see it as just a form of cheating. And honestly, it was the cheating that was going on in UO and others that caused the people running them to turn the game into something that was more safe for neophyte players.
It would be interesting to see a game that emphasized to the player that other players may do bad things to you from time to time, and any form of redress has to take place through action in the game world and not by banning the person from the game.
He's going to be forever known as "the guy who made that awful Vista startup sound".
Of course Epic can make a game with their own engine--they wrote it. Duh. Besides, it's not like they'd talk about it publicly if they DID have problems.
I'm not insinuating there's any problems with Epic's engine, just that there's a huge difference between using code you wrote and licensing it. You have to get used to what may be a completely different paradigm for developing that might not be compatible with the way you work.
You're clearly not a nerd. Otherwise, you'd be trying to figure out how to add this to your case mod.
I'm going to buy a Prius and put a sail on it. That way I can be even more smug than every hybrid owner on the road.
"You call THAT a hybrid? Pfff."
Are you dense? He's a friggen football player. He plays the real thing all the time. You're acting like this is some fat kid sitting on a couch complaining about football games not being real enough.
Besides, there's other reasons to want to play a game on a gaming system: if you live in different areas and can't get together, if you're injured, if you're a 280lb football player and you want to play your 80lb nephew, if it's currently raining/snowing/too dark, or when you've already been playing professional football all day and you want to play something a little less tiring.
Now wait a minute. You were just saying that game companies should keep sinking money into a project until it's good and now you're complaining about a company that followed that logic. You aren't making sense. Really what it boils down to is you liked Looking Glass, but you hate John Romero and Eidos because they didn't support Looking Glass when their games weren't selling.
Maybe it was Looking Glass that needed to learn a lesson from Novalogic. Maybe Looking Glass spent too much money on games that only appealed to a niche audience.
Oops. Berzerk was 1980, so it was before Wolfenstein (1981). But it wasn't digitized, which was my main point.
Berzerk used a voice synthesizer, so it doesn't qualify as digitized voice.
Besides, an earlier example of digitized voice is Castle Wolfenstein for the Apple 2 by Silas Warner of Muse Software. I'm not sure enough to call it the *first* game to use it, but it is one of the earliest.
Here's a link about the game:
http://www.wolfenstein.org/fanclub/castle_wolfens
In general, I'm ambivilant to this topic. I tend to think there's extremists at both sides. I like my Tivo, and my mp3s, but I also feel people gotta be paid for their work.
However, when I see this response, I think--Are you kidding? The only way people against DRM are going to change anything is by making a stink about it. Saying "Don't buy it" is about as productive as vegitarians boycotting McDonald's because they serve meat. If you're not the target market, your opinion doesn't matter.
If only the anti-DRM crowd stopped buying the products, it would be a statistical glitch on balance sheet. It's not going to make an impression when most consumers are unaware of the DRM issue.
The Anti-DRM campaign has to make itself heard, while at the same time not coming off as shrill and fringe like PETA does.
Every company has some information that needs to be secure. With a network, you're only as secure as the weakest link--one machine is all it takes for someone to infiltrate it.
While your company's password policy is much more stringant than my company's, it doesn't sound too paranoid at all. As far as remembering the password, you should write it down and carry it with you if you're having trouble remembering it. It should only take a couple days of logging in before you have it down, so then make sure you destroy the paper it's written on.
The thing is, you really need to worry about someone hacking your password remotely and a simple password of only lower-case letters and maybe some digits is a heck of a lot quicker to hack than mixed upper/lowercase, digits, and symbols. If someone got the piece of paper in your wallet, they probably would also get your keycard into your office, too. Once they had physical entry into your office, the password wouldn't be that big a deal. They could just steal your data drive and take all the time in the world to hack into it.
Planned comedy is very hard to pull off unless you've already got a lot of skill in setting up jokes and comedic timing. Unfortunately, those aren't skills people acquire in the normal day-to-day of game development. You really need someone who developed their comedic skills on their own and also loves and understands games.
Can you imagine, with all the rushed art and programming that goes on in game development, how well humor would fare? Not well. You may have a joke that works well with the development team for some reason, but just completely falls flat on the audience. In the end, the publisher is going to want the game done and not really worry about whether it's funny or not.
The best example of a funny game recently is Psychonauts, by Double-fine. The dialog in that game was from Tim Schafer (Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle) and Erik Wolpaw (from Old Man Murray - http://www.oldmanmurray.com./ The game was often delayed and was even cut from Microsoft's lineup because Schafer was hard to work with. It was eventually released by Majesco and despite lot's of great reviews, it wasn't exactly a smash hit. The humor is top-notch, but in the end, if people don't like the game and it doesn't have a huge publisher backing it, it's not going to sell.