This isn't exactly game music in quite the same way, but I really enjoyed "Indigo Prophecy"'s use of the song "Sandpaper Kisses" by Martina Topley-Bird (audio here, alongside someone's machinima music video that's unrelated to the game). It's pretty, and yet has a mellow softness that really stands well to being played on loop a couple times. I remember sticking around that scene in the game for several minutes, just listening to the music flow and relaxing somewhat. It helps that the majority of the game has a rush-rush-world-is-slowly-insane feel to it, and yet in that interlude with the song you get a lovely burst of calm.
Ah, but just because replication is essentially free it doesn't mean there isn't profit to be made.
For starters, all replication isn't likely created equal. Intuition tells me that replicating simpler items (like door nails and plastic sheeting), will preceed more complex replication (like houses, cars, and dare-i-say-it, people). That imbalance will lend itself naturally to a value hirearchy in the same way that the advent of free mp3 replication sent CD prices down the toilet, but left the rest of the economic world relatively unscathed.
So now lets fast-forward to consider what happens when most or all replication technology becomes inexpensive/free. Lets assume that people have worked out a system that's as perfectly adept at make copies of real-world items as this copying program is when copying second life skins (smaller assumptions within this larger one include that these replicators are themselves inexpensive/free to replicate, that their operations costs aren't too high in terms of raw materials, electricity, etc, and that the operation and mantenance/upkeep of said devices is nearly effortless). Then you get into the "cost of labor" argument that the folks above are discussing so rigorously.
Basically, the way I see that argument is that the cost of things will come down to all the other costs associated with a service besides manufacture. Things like:
years of training needed
number of other people willing and able to do this service
cost of developing the original prototype
relative importance of the task to be performed
Yeah, this sounds like a lot to think about but it's really not all that different from how prices are calculated now.
So I predict that after a period of brief turmoil when the technology is first introduced, and everyone goes "what? we can't charge people for the manufacture of goods past the first one anymore???" they'll get over themselves and go where the REAL money is: innovation.
I don't think it's a product of videogames being mainstream or not, I think the issue is that by their nature videogames are a lot less acessable then TV/movies, and as a result the audience for videogames is a lot more polarized than the audience for TV/movies.
Here's what I mean.. Videogames are pretty easy to escape in our culture. The barrier to entry is pretty high, a hundred-dollar console that still has a bit of a uncool stigma associated with it, or the need to hunt down an arcade (not exactly as ubiquitous as movie theaters these days) so one can entertain their business model of having money sucked slowly away. Movies and tv on the other hand.. who doesn't have acess to a telivision or know someone who does? Who can't go down to the local strip-mall and watch themselves a nice flick even occasionally for a mere two-hour time comitment?
So as a result you end up with a populace where everyone has at least casually watched TV/Movies, but where much fewer (by comparison) have overcome that barrier to entry to play games. So when they're looking for a scapegoat, where do they turn? The subculture where everyone is at least partially a member (has been at some point in their lives) or the one where you can point to a distinct, discrete minority of "hardcore" players?
What I'm excited to see is the rise of gaming culture brought on by easy-to-access "casual" gaming (usually flash based, although there's some hype around that Wii system that I frankly don't buy into- until they don't make you buy a seperate system to play, I think the barrier to entry is still too high). As internet gets more and more ingraciated into the things we use in our lives, it will be interesting to see if the pace of internet gaming follows suit and if, 20-30 years from now, when Generation Mario comes into power, whether there won't be more partial gamers than we already see.
I'm no games journalist myself, nor do I live in california, but Salary.com cites numbers in the $30-$60 thou/year for entry-level copy writers (not game specific) in the San Fransisco area, which sounds pretty typical for entry-level jobs with a college degree these days, though it might be slightly less than what bay area residents typically recieve.
I think you are wrong. Homebrew, decentralized MMORPGs, while an attractive concept, will not come to dominate the market. Think about what you're proposing, that game developers will come in and design a game system that singlehandedly trashes their revenue model. It's like saying computer designers would make a self-upgrading computer that constantly improves itself and requires no new developer-input, ever. Sure, altruistic people have tried (linux), but since there is no big force pushing through the development of linux products or marketing linux to the masses, linux, and your fictional MMORPG, will forever remain niche products.
That is, of course, barring the possibility that someday cutting-edge game production (with top-notch graphics and human interaction technology) will become so simple that an average 10-year old (and up) could do it. In that instance things would get so easy, they'd happen whether it made sense profitably or not. Eventually someone would hit on that magical, innovative formula, and their product would gain enough market share to stand on its own. I still question, though, whether it will even then ever be able to stand up to "WoW 2120" or whatever the big marketing cash-cow is at the time.
I feel qualified to post on this topic because I may acctually live where you're considering setting up shop, the (north) suburban chicago suburbs. Really I've only has exposure to 2, possibly 3 gaming centers in my lifetime: 1) The (aforementioned) internet cafe in Portland, OR named Backspace... and 2) Krakaboom, a gaming center in the Old Orchard Shopping Mall of Skokie, IL (my aforementioned suburb).
Backspace struck me as more a coffeeshop where people happened to be playing games than a gaming cafe that served coffee... its in the heart of downtown portland, open wicked late, has cute alterna-grunge waitstaff serving coffee to keep you up, and has carefully cultivated a vibe of "come.. hang out here..even play a game or two perhaps". It's about much more than the games themselves.
Krakaboom is much more about the games. With a vibe that only a franchise can sustain, I think they make ends meet despite their atrocious location in the basement "arcade" area of the mall because 1) Proximity to a high school and old orchard mall, where there are lots of busses 2) the neigborhood: relatively rich kids (i think either cook or lake county where I live has one of the highest per-capita incomes in the country, second only to LA county) who can't drive yet and need some way to stay entertained besides the huge mega-multiplex right next door 3) The fact that their a franchise, which allows sharing of the losses and a little more room in the profit margin. And even with all these things going for it, I've still rarely seen the dank pit full...
All you people who are harping on about the quality of games not being normally distributed have a point, but you are missing a big point too in that while the quality of games may or may not be normally distributed, the quality of gaming review sites have no such restrictions. There are be some payola, pushiver review sources, other hard-nosed perfectionists, with the majority of game reviewers falling somewhere in the middle. Indeed, I felt likt that was the whole point of the article in claiming that the big guys (eg. IGN or Gamespot) skew their ratings.
"Back in the early-mid 70's, NBC had spent a load of dough to convert their classic "Peacock" logo to a streamlined looking "N". However, NBC forgot to
take into account that the Nebraska Public Television Network had a nearly identical logo for years. NBC managed to avoid a messy lawsuit by paying
NPTV some money in an out-of-court settlement, as well as donating a bunch of state-of-the-art (for the time) TV production equipment.
And, from their Channel 26 studios located from the A/V section at the University of Nebraska in Omaha, they created several original educational
TV programs.
The one you're thinking of is called "Once Upon A Time", where a witch kidnapped a librarian and kept her in the dungeon of her tower with a
machine that would produce books based on whatever story elements were placed into it.
The other show you're thinking of was called "Star Lore", made by the same people who did OUAT, where an alien queen kidnapped a librarian (I sense a
subliminal desire for kidnapping here) and taken her back to her home planet "until the children of her world are able to have imaginations".
Instead of a bookmaking machine this time, the heroine had the aid of a computer named 1Z2Z.
This group did a lot of shows for NPTV's Schools Telelearning Service (they were like a Midwestern version of the Children's Television Workshop), and
they still show these programs (well, they OWN the shows, so of course they can afford to air them as long as they like)."
Since that time unfortunately, the STS program has been defunded and these programs no longer air (thanks, Bush!), so the stuff I managed to get saved
to DVD is sort of a memorial to an interesting era in education TV.
Another local series I have was called "Nebraska Communities". Best way to describe this one is "eccentric 18th Century French scientist builds a time
machine and travels to circa 1980's Nebraska to learn about the future" (yes, that is the premise). I kept a few sample episodes of this series
since the guy who played the nutty french scientist was the same actor who played the original "Godfather" for the Godfather's Pizza commercials up
until the late 90's (http://www.jobfairohio.com/godfathers/gf2.jpg).
(I hope with such a detailed description someone can help you out!)
~~~
Funny, someone apparently wanted to know about both the shows you had wanted to...
Acctually, I think you're wrong. Sure, maybe in public gamers wouldn't admit to needing help, but in private insecurities go a long way towards getting folks to take whatever help they can get. They might not admit it in front of their gamer friends, or have the Nintendo Coach box sitting out in plain sight, but with the right marketing campaign highlighting promises of dramatically improved gaming results in a friendly, professional package I think folks would buy it. Hell, it works for penis enlargement pills.
GS: And what would you say the next evolution will be? Where would you take something like a Maniac Mansion or a Monkey Island in order to bring it into the mainstream, assuming all these other financial issues were in place?
RG: The thing I'm trying to do with the game right now is kind of meld it with an RPG. So what you've got is the kind of large world exploration that you have in an RPG that you don't really have with an adventure game. You've got the action, some light combat, you know, Diablo-style combat going on with it, but it is also infused with really good adventure-game-style puzzles and adventure-style sensibilities to the storytelling. So what you can do there is take those puzzles and that storytelling that really appeal to people on a certain level, but you can fuse it with the kind of action and mindless play mixed in. I think you can really broaden that audience, and really get to the people who are buying and playing games today.
To me it sounds a lot like what "Fable" was supposed to be. Where did Molyneux go wrong? Wasn't it theoretically the storytelling?
Personally, I think that while all this fuss over dastardly Microsoft and whatnot is dramatic, it will all blow over in a couple months when the PS3/Wii are released and one or both of them has their share of problems that make them the new whipping-boys of the pack, and they in turn will be replaced by the next generation of consoles (MS's portable, perhaps?).
It's human nature to find patterns in chaos in an effort to understand the world around us. As a consequence it's also human nature to complain about crap because we notice that things aren't as optimal as we like them. Yay us.
Your post reminded me of all that fuss about PDF readers and how they're still essentially tablet computers. I can't wait for the day when technology gets to the point where we can have a reader shaped like an acctual book with a handful of physical pages. Imagine how cool it would be to pull up a PDF in your "book reader", say, and having the blank pages suddenly full of text. You could carry hundreds of books around in the space of a a single one, preserve the tactile sensation of using a book, and say you could even do a search that moved the digital pages open to the section you desire, allowing you to even flip back and forth within that same general area like you would with a real book in case you weren't exactly sure where you saw it.
Eh, here's hoping by that point you could acctually load the thing into your book reader without running afoul of the bloody DRM.:)
I think it's the absence of innovation that's squelched the role of the game god in modern gaming. Look at the guys on the list- they were outstanding because they created their own game genres and made something spectacularly stand out from the competition and in the minds of gamers everywhere. Until a game developer manages to repeat that feat, no new gaming gods will be born. After all, every review of WoW say's its refining the formula rather than trying something new, hence, no gaming gods. Add that to the list of factors.
I would say it has more to do with the movie and TV industry being OVERhyped relative to games rather than the inverse. At the supermarket yesterday every single magazine I could see had Angelena on the cover.
And I think a major rationale behind movies and games being so strongly hyped is that the actor/celebrity is so much more than the role that s/he plays. The mags these days don't talk exclusively about the current star's acting, they talk just as much if not more about said actor's glamorous life. People read the magazines to have a taste of stardom and fantasize what they would do if they were as glorious as the stars. Videogames don't offer that about their characters, their limited to the world of the game. There's no profit to be had hyping the (probably not-tremendously-glamorous) videogame celebs, so they don't.
Pardon my ignorance, but what exactly does "more copy protection" mean, practically? I keep hearing that bandied around but noone ever goes into the specifics of what exactly it is possible to do with HD-DVD that one cannot do with blu-ray because of its increased protection? I presume neither system can be node-protected*, right?
*node-protected, as I understand it, means that a given disk of a particular format can only be played on the first machine that reads it and on other machines is little more than a hunk of shiny plastic. The epitome of screwing over the consumer, IMHO.
I think the makers of Blu-ray players need a killer app to sell the systems, or else be doomed to failure. It needs to have something to offer consumers that their current disks cannot provide. I don't think higher resolution movies by themselves are going to be a big selling-point for users unless the cost decreases dramatically. Now, if they could provide additional features with the disks, like the Ipod's ability to condense thousands of songs into a single compact skipless device with no extra media required to buy, ever, that might move their players, but as is? Doubtful. The average consumer doesn't have enough disposable income to give a damn.
I may have missed this when I read the article (or it went over my head), but what graphics program does she use to create the book cover mods? I would imagine it would be something like Photoshop to create the image file itself, then another program to put the jacket cover in the right place to be read properly by the program?
I thought it was interesting that, semantic quibbling aside, Sony is screaming that they have never told us about any plans to specially protect their software from second-hand sales- yet they make no promise to not do it again. Hell, they could just as easily come out tommorrow with an announcement that the PS3 will be nodeprotecteed and hell, they wouldn't be contradicting themselves.
For me I'd be a lot more reassured if Sony would promise to never nodeprotect any of their software, not that they have "definitely not been communicating that".
Geeze. And voiciferously sounds like voice+forcefully to me, so that's the way I remember that little SAT gem.
Anyone else a little disappointed that they gave Spore top nominations this year as well even though from what I've heard little more of substance has been released about the game relative to last year's E3, except more of the same? I mean, in lieu of there really being many playable versions of games at E3 I want to see awards of this nature tell me about cool new underhyped games I've never heard about winning nominations, not more of the same from the greats. What's next, Madden 2007 getting nominated?
Look at what nintendo did with the name wii itself: a new, original (and many would say bad) name for a console.. so they released it well before E3 and let gamers blow off steam about it in advance so it didn't blot out their showing at the event itself with controversy. Hell, I think that's why Sony released its price figures early, so gamers would have time to get used to the idea of having to blow 700 bucks on a console.
With good news on the other hand, its to their advantage to release the price info as late in the year as possible, so as to maximize the "wow, wii is friggin cheap!!" glow that will drive gamers into the stores and wiis off the shelf. So my predicition is that the price will be released late in the game, right before when the system is going to be released, and that it will be on the low end of the price ranges we're all quoting here.
Im no tech-head, but how will Apple's decision to move over to an intel chipset influence whether MMORPGs are released for the system, will it potentially solve the DirectX bottleneck, if that is indeed what is stopping OSX development?
I guess if nothing else mac users could install windows on their machines and use it to play windows-only MMORPGs, no?
Slashdot Mirror
*G* the scene also contains the game's only gay character, or at least the cutscene does anyway.
Yeah, suffice it to say I didn't really notice the underwear.
This isn't exactly game music in quite the same way, but I really enjoyed "Indigo Prophecy"'s use of the song "Sandpaper Kisses" by Martina Topley-Bird (audio here, alongside someone's machinima music video that's unrelated to the game). It's pretty, and yet has a mellow softness that really stands well to being played on loop a couple times. I remember sticking around that scene in the game for several minutes, just listening to the music flow and relaxing somewhat. It helps that the majority of the game has a rush-rush-world-is-slowly-insane feel to it, and yet in that interlude with the song you get a lovely burst of calm.
For starters, all replication isn't likely created equal. Intuition tells me that replicating simpler items (like door nails and plastic sheeting), will preceed more complex replication (like houses, cars, and dare-i-say-it, people). That imbalance will lend itself naturally to a value hirearchy in the same way that the advent of free mp3 replication sent CD prices down the toilet, but left the rest of the economic world relatively unscathed.
So now lets fast-forward to consider what happens when most or all replication technology becomes inexpensive/free. Lets assume that people have worked out a system that's as perfectly adept at make copies of real-world items as this copying program is when copying second life skins (smaller assumptions within this larger one include that these replicators are themselves inexpensive/free to replicate, that their operations costs aren't too high in terms of raw materials, electricity, etc, and that the operation and mantenance/upkeep of said devices is nearly effortless). Then you get into the "cost of labor" argument that the folks above are discussing so rigorously.
Basically, the way I see that argument is that the cost of things will come down to all the other costs associated with a service besides manufacture. Things like:
years of training needed
number of other people willing and able to do this service
cost of developing the original prototype
relative importance of the task to be performed
Yeah, this sounds like a lot to think about but it's really not all that different from how prices are calculated now.
So I predict that after a period of brief turmoil when the technology is first introduced, and everyone goes "what? we can't charge people for the manufacture of goods past the first one anymore???" they'll get over themselves and go where the REAL money is: innovation.
Here's what I mean.. Videogames are pretty easy to escape in our culture. The barrier to entry is pretty high, a hundred-dollar console that still has a bit of a uncool stigma associated with it, or the need to hunt down an arcade (not exactly as ubiquitous as movie theaters these days) so one can entertain their business model of having money sucked slowly away. Movies and tv on the other hand.. who doesn't have acess to a telivision or know someone who does? Who can't go down to the local strip-mall and watch themselves a nice flick even occasionally for a mere two-hour time comitment?
So as a result you end up with a populace where everyone has at least casually watched TV/Movies, but where much fewer (by comparison) have overcome that barrier to entry to play games. So when they're looking for a scapegoat, where do they turn? The subculture where everyone is at least partially a member (has been at some point in their lives) or the one where you can point to a distinct, discrete minority of "hardcore" players? What I'm excited to see is the rise of gaming culture brought on by easy-to-access "casual" gaming (usually flash based, although there's some hype around that Wii system that I frankly don't buy into- until they don't make you buy a seperate system to play, I think the barrier to entry is still too high). As internet gets more and more ingraciated into the things we use in our lives, it will be interesting to see if the pace of internet gaming follows suit and if, 20-30 years from now, when Generation Mario comes into power, whether there won't be more partial gamers than we already see.
I'm no games journalist myself, nor do I live in california, but Salary.com cites numbers in the $30-$60 thou/year for entry-level copy writers (not game specific) in the San Fransisco area, which sounds pretty typical for entry-level jobs with a college degree these days, though it might be slightly less than what bay area residents typically recieve.
oh no... damn... he just ate your dog too.
I think you are wrong. Homebrew, decentralized MMORPGs, while an attractive concept, will not come to dominate the market. Think about what you're proposing, that game developers will come in and design a game system that singlehandedly trashes their revenue model. It's like saying computer designers would make a self-upgrading computer that constantly improves itself and requires no new developer-input, ever. Sure, altruistic people have tried (linux), but since there is no big force pushing through the development of linux products or marketing linux to the masses, linux, and your fictional MMORPG, will forever remain niche products. That is, of course, barring the possibility that someday cutting-edge game production (with top-notch graphics and human interaction technology) will become so simple that an average 10-year old (and up) could do it. In that instance things would get so easy, they'd happen whether it made sense profitably or not. Eventually someone would hit on that magical, innovative formula, and their product would gain enough market share to stand on its own. I still question, though, whether it will even then ever be able to stand up to "WoW 2120" or whatever the big marketing cash-cow is at the time.
oh, and Krakaboom's website is here (http://krakkaboom.com/). Who knew they weren't a franchise
Backspace struck me as more a coffeeshop where people happened to be playing games than a gaming cafe that served coffee... its in the heart of downtown portland, open wicked late, has cute alterna-grunge waitstaff serving coffee to keep you up, and has carefully cultivated a vibe of "come.. hang out here..even play a game or two perhaps". It's about much more than the games themselves.
Krakaboom is much more about the games. With a vibe that only a franchise can sustain, I think they make ends meet despite their atrocious location in the basement "arcade" area of the mall because 1) Proximity to a high school and old orchard mall, where there are lots of busses 2) the neigborhood: relatively rich kids (i think either cook or lake county where I live has one of the highest per-capita incomes in the country, second only to LA county) who can't drive yet and need some way to stay entertained besides the huge mega-multiplex right next door 3) The fact that their a franchise, which allows sharing of the losses and a little more room in the profit margin. And even with all these things going for it, I've still rarely seen the dank pit full...
All you people who are harping on about the quality of games not being normally distributed have a point, but you are missing a big point too in that while the quality of games may or may not be normally distributed, the quality of gaming review sites have no such restrictions. There are be some payola, pushiver review sources, other hard-nosed perfectionists, with the majority of game reviewers falling somewhere in the middle. Indeed, I felt likt that was the whole point of the article in claiming that the big guys (eg. IGN or Gamespot) skew their ratings.
Source: http://www.rickstv.com/tvo/feedback.html (Control+F "1Z2Z")
"Back in the early-mid 70's, NBC had spent a load of dough to convert their classic "Peacock" logo to a streamlined looking "N". However, NBC forgot to take into account that the Nebraska Public Television Network had a nearly identical logo for years. NBC managed to avoid a messy lawsuit by paying NPTV some money in an out-of-court settlement, as well as donating a bunch of state-of-the-art (for the time) TV production equipment.
And, from their Channel 26 studios located from the A/V section at the University of Nebraska in Omaha, they created several original educational TV programs.
The one you're thinking of is called "Once Upon A Time", where a witch kidnapped a librarian and kept her in the dungeon of her tower with a machine that would produce books based on whatever story elements were placed into it.
The other show you're thinking of was called "Star Lore", made by the same people who did OUAT, where an alien queen kidnapped a librarian (I sense a subliminal desire for kidnapping here) and taken her back to her home planet "until the children of her world are able to have imaginations". Instead of a bookmaking machine this time, the heroine had the aid of a computer named 1Z2Z.
This group did a lot of shows for NPTV's Schools Telelearning Service (they were like a Midwestern version of the Children's Television Workshop), and they still show these programs (well, they OWN the shows, so of course they can afford to air them as long as they like)."
Since that time unfortunately, the STS program has been defunded and these programs no longer air (thanks, Bush!), so the stuff I managed to get saved to DVD is sort of a memorial to an interesting era in education TV.
Another local series I have was called "Nebraska Communities". Best way to describe this one is "eccentric 18th Century French scientist builds a time machine and travels to circa 1980's Nebraska to learn about the future" (yes, that is the premise). I kept a few sample episodes of this series since the guy who played the nutty french scientist was the same actor who played the original "Godfather" for the Godfather's Pizza commercials up until the late 90's (http://www.jobfairohio.com/godfathers/gf2.jpg).
(I hope with such a detailed description someone can help you out!)
~~~
Funny, someone apparently wanted to know about both the shows you had wanted to...
Damn. Now I want to see those shows...
Acctually, I think you're wrong. Sure, maybe in public gamers wouldn't admit to needing help, but in private insecurities go a long way towards getting folks to take whatever help they can get. They might not admit it in front of their gamer friends, or have the Nintendo Coach box sitting out in plain sight, but with the right marketing campaign highlighting promises of dramatically improved gaming results in a friendly, professional package I think folks would buy it. Hell, it works for penis enlargement pills.
Do elaborate, I want to understand why.
To me it sounds a lot like what "Fable" was supposed to be. Where did Molyneux go wrong? Wasn't it theoretically the storytelling?
It's human nature to find patterns in chaos in an effort to understand the world around us. As a consequence it's also human nature to complain about crap because we notice that things aren't as optimal as we like them. Yay us.
Eh, here's hoping by that point you could acctually load the thing into your book reader without running afoul of the bloody DRM. :)
I think it's the absence of innovation that's squelched the role of the game god in modern gaming. Look at the guys on the list- they were outstanding because they created their own game genres and made something spectacularly stand out from the competition and in the minds of gamers everywhere. Until a game developer manages to repeat that feat, no new gaming gods will be born. After all, every review of WoW say's its refining the formula rather than trying something new, hence, no gaming gods. Add that to the list of factors.
And I think a major rationale behind movies and games being so strongly hyped is that the actor/celebrity is so much more than the role that s/he plays. The mags these days don't talk exclusively about the current star's acting, they talk just as much if not more about said actor's glamorous life. People read the magazines to have a taste of stardom and fantasize what they would do if they were as glorious as the stars. Videogames don't offer that about their characters, their limited to the world of the game. There's no profit to be had hyping the (probably not-tremendously-glamorous) videogame celebs, so they don't.
*node-protected, as I understand it, means that a given disk of a particular format can only be played on the first machine that reads it and on other machines is little more than a hunk of shiny plastic. The epitome of screwing over the consumer, IMHO.
I think the makers of Blu-ray players need a killer app to sell the systems, or else be doomed to failure. It needs to have something to offer consumers that their current disks cannot provide. I don't think higher resolution movies by themselves are going to be a big selling-point for users unless the cost decreases dramatically. Now, if they could provide additional features with the disks, like the Ipod's ability to condense thousands of songs into a single compact skipless device with no extra media required to buy, ever, that might move their players, but as is? Doubtful. The average consumer doesn't have enough disposable income to give a damn.
I may have missed this when I read the article (or it went over my head), but what graphics program does she use to create the book cover mods? I would imagine it would be something like Photoshop to create the image file itself, then another program to put the jacket cover in the right place to be read properly by the program?
I thought it was interesting that, semantic quibbling aside, Sony is screaming that they have never told us about any plans to specially protect their software from second-hand sales- yet they make no promise to not do it again. Hell, they could just as easily come out tommorrow with an announcement that the PS3 will be nodeprotecteed and hell, they wouldn't be contradicting themselves. For me I'd be a lot more reassured if Sony would promise to never nodeprotect any of their software, not that they have "definitely not been communicating that". Geeze. And voiciferously sounds like voice+forcefully to me, so that's the way I remember that little SAT gem.
Anyone else a little disappointed that they gave Spore top nominations this year as well even though from what I've heard little more of substance has been released about the game relative to last year's E3, except more of the same? I mean, in lieu of there really being many playable versions of games at E3 I want to see awards of this nature tell me about cool new underhyped games I've never heard about winning nominations, not more of the same from the greats. What's next, Madden 2007 getting nominated?
Look at what nintendo did with the name wii itself: a new, original (and many would say bad) name for a console.. so they released it well before E3 and let gamers blow off steam about it in advance so it didn't blot out their showing at the event itself with controversy. Hell, I think that's why Sony released its price figures early, so gamers would have time to get used to the idea of having to blow 700 bucks on a console. With good news on the other hand, its to their advantage to release the price info as late in the year as possible, so as to maximize the "wow, wii is friggin cheap!!" glow that will drive gamers into the stores and wiis off the shelf. So my predicition is that the price will be released late in the game, right before when the system is going to be released, and that it will be on the low end of the price ranges we're all quoting here.
Im no tech-head, but how will Apple's decision to move over to an intel chipset influence whether MMORPGs are released for the system, will it potentially solve the DirectX bottleneck, if that is indeed what is stopping OSX development? I guess if nothing else mac users could install windows on their machines and use it to play windows-only MMORPGs, no?