Essentially. Laying fiber isn't worth it to them, since they've got a stranglehold on service and no reason to compete. The city doing it is probably a major threat to their bottom line, since they weren't anticipating it.
We have the cameras, at least. A friend of mine works for an outfit that develops drivers for them and related capture boards. The real problem is expense (which always tends to decrease-- just look at optical media technology) and demand. We may have the tech, but if people decide that their current interfaces are good enough, then it's going to go nowhere.
Lovely. Now you too can be booted for not having a high enough global ranking, or playing so well that your host's ranking looks poor by comparison, just like in Warcraft 3 or many Xbox Live titles!
I definitely agree. It's quite similar to old-school shareware games, where you get the first 'episode' or chapter, or whatever for free, and have to shell out for each of the later ones in turn. Many people just stuck with the freebie, and played it over and over again.
Western 'Freemium' (I like that term) games these days seem to work on an Annoyware basis. Hellgate and Dungeon Runners both rely on a glut of subscriber-only equipment dropping for both subscribers and free-players, but Hellgate took it to a bizarre extreme by denying basic interface functionality to 'free' players when it was finally implemented.
It probably doesn't help that Hellgate's subscription system was tacked on in mid-development, forcing them to 'incentivize' basic functionality when it became clear that their promised monthly content releases weren't going to fly.
On the other hand, Anarchy Online has had some success with the 'freemium' system. The original, base game is free to play for a year, but its years' worth of accumulated, active subscribers are off in expansion-only regions, leaving the base game a ghost town. The encouragement to subscribe is mainly social, rather than technical.
What you're describing is an issue of distribution-- the developer can't help it if the publisher insists on doling out regional rights, or throws other obstacles in the way of players looking to get into the game.
World of Warcraft is not something to be seriously competed against-- its multi-million subscriber base is a gigantic anomaly, in an industry where 250,000 subscribers is still a prodigious number. Buy-in for end-users is low enough that you can have simultaneously active subs on several games for under $50 USD per month, which is less than a lot of people pay for TV.
And while I don't care for Stormreach either, it certainly hasn't failed yet. Failures are actually extremely rare in the industry-- a bad game can last a very long time, if the publisher is determined to squeeze every dime they can out of the last few tens of thousands of subscribers that haven't moved on to something else. Even games that have failed spectacularly out of the gate (Anarchy Online, Age of Conan, or Vanguard, for example) can limp along for years, or rally behind tightened code and newly released expansion material.
It would be great to see a dying company at least open up the server software, but how can we give them incentive to do so?
That's easy. Buy the code from them. If it's not already owned by a parent company, you can probably get it for fire-sale prices. Chances are that it's already legally the property of creditors though-- purchasing or even renting the servers necessary to launch an MMO is an extremely costly venture, let alone the costs of payroll and development.
This Redbana thing is news to me, but everything about Flagship is a gigantic mess. Their regional distributors/licensees have had some head-scratching spats over who owns what, and where, since they went down. The ones in Korea are apparently planning to release the core game for free, with expansion content (Stonehenge, at the moment) available for purchase separately, instead of the bizarrely complex subscription system.
I'm not surprised that they're still trying to make money from this debacle-- all of the investors must have taken a gigantic bath. I just don't think that people are going to go for it, at least not in North America.
Not to mention that spoiler sites like Thottbot will crop up as fast as content is uncovered. Story is very, very secondary in an MMO, when you get down to it-- it's the differences in the ways that classes play, that make them compelling.
Ah, but you see, they've changed the nomenclature on us. 'Beta code' no longer means 'computer code that is mostly usable, but still in testing', but rather means 'beta is code for never saying that you promised usability, uptime, or data retention'.
There's been precedent for this for years, starting with Bun Boy's class(less) action suit against Origin for Ultima Online not having 24/7 uptime, and going on through SOE's agreement with eBay to pull auctions of Everquest characters and equipment. The data, the servers, and even the client software belongs to the company. Your $15 per month is an access fee for playing with their toys. That's the long and the short of it.
There's only so many entertainment dollars available, even in the best of times, and WoW is currently getting a relatively large chunk of that money.
I haven't seen this argument since 2001, and it's just as wrong now as it was then. First, the market is not saturated by any means.
Second, looking at WoW's numbers as a benchmark is lunacy. The average subscription-based MMO has between 100,000 and 300,000 subscribers, not the flat millions that WoW does. An MMO can survive with a player base in the tens of thousands, handily.
Third, MMO subscriptions are not utilities-- there is nothing stopping anyone from subscribing to multiple games simultaneously, and many players do so. Even with the economy tanking, two $15 subscriptions is a better deal than going to the movies a few times a month, and it's discretionary expenses like movies (or going out to dinner, or what have you) that usually get cut before quietly repeating ones like cable bills or MMO subs get canceled.
WoW is a prodigy. Treating it as competition is foolish-- it's too big to notice the smaller games, and its sheer popularity has secured the whole goddamn industry a space in the pop culture landscape. It hasn't cannibalized other games, it's singlehandedly expanded the whole damn hobby by orders of magnitude, and continues to draw in people who wouldn't have touched Asheron's Call, WAR, City of Heroes or anything else.
Because, unlike the other properties you list, Otherland is strongly focused around the kind of ultra-immersive MMO that some gamers have been slavering for since Bill Gibson coined the term 'cyberspace'. They're basically trying to take an extant virtual world, and create it in real life, without having to go through all the annoyance of sorting out what canon bits to put in.
...Which is why it's going to fail spectacularly. The novels are a decent read, but the 'cyberspace' aspects of it are as shallow and cliche as marketing blurbs.
Nero has become almost as bad as Symantec. When I got a copy of Nero 7, I discovered that the lazy bastards hadn't even bothered to put help files on the disc-- click on 'help' and it gives you a URL to download the CHM files. It doesn't even provide an installer-- you have to download each one separately, and move the damn things manually. Meanwhile, there is no way to remove any of their cruft without removing the whole damn application suite.
Companies have been hiding behind the title 'beta' for years, and numerous end-users have no idea what the Hell the term means anyway. It's just an excuse to shovel half-completed applications out and fiddle with them at leisure. Missing functionality? Oh, it's just beta code. Broken functionality? Oh, just wait for the patch. Completely redesigned UI, data loss, unannounced restrictions? Silly, it's a beta! You shouldn't be using it for mission-critical purposes, even though we're always suggesting that you do.
Christ, game companies have been using 'beta' as a dodge for shitty demos since Shiny squeezed Messiah out. The fact that the same 'it's just a beta, it'll get better!' promises and pleas have trickled upward and outward is clear indication that gravity itself is in beta, because shit certainly doesn't just flow downhill any more.
Amen to that. I've got a Motorola V220, and recent versions of the truly shitty HelloMoto interface software don't even recognize the thing. For that matter, it doesn't seem to recognize the Razr, according to reports, either.
Of course, the cell providers don't give a shit about this. I had to go out of my way to get my hands on that software, because my provider doesn't sell it, or admit that it exists. What they want, is to charge me a buck (or worse) just to transfer a 20KB ringtone through their network.
Unless modding tools were promised, and that promise was writ mile-high in the stone of the Rockies, I don't get what the fuss is about. Your assumption is not the developer's obligation.
Given that MS turfed Turbine after the debacle that was Asheron's Call 2, and canceled at least one other MMO, you'd think they'd know better than to try something as ill-advised as this.
The only possible explanation that I can think of would be an attempt to leverage Live subscriptions further... but come on, really.
Slashdot Mirror
All real superheroes do.
Essentially. Laying fiber isn't worth it to them, since they've got a stranglehold on service and no reason to compete. The city doing it is probably a major threat to their bottom line, since they weren't anticipating it.
We have the cameras, at least. A friend of mine works for an outfit that develops drivers for them and related capture boards. The real problem is expense (which always tends to decrease-- just look at optical media technology) and demand. We may have the tech, but if people decide that their current interfaces are good enough, then it's going to go nowhere.
You mean like my aunt Terry, who would be categorized as a man by that system?
There's a reason why they call these things corpse-flowers.
Lovely. Now you too can be booted for not having a high enough global ranking, or playing so well that your host's ranking looks poor by comparison, just like in Warcraft 3 or many Xbox Live titles!
Western 'Freemium' (I like that term) games these days seem to work on an Annoyware basis. Hellgate and Dungeon Runners both rely on a glut of subscriber-only equipment dropping for both subscribers and free-players, but Hellgate took it to a bizarre extreme by denying basic interface functionality to 'free' players when it was finally implemented.
It probably doesn't help that Hellgate's subscription system was tacked on in mid-development, forcing them to 'incentivize' basic functionality when it became clear that their promised monthly content releases weren't going to fly.
On the other hand, Anarchy Online has had some success with the 'freemium' system. The original, base game is free to play for a year, but its years' worth of accumulated, active subscribers are off in expansion-only regions, leaving the base game a ghost town. The encouragement to subscribe is mainly social, rather than technical.
World of Warcraft is not something to be seriously competed against-- its multi-million subscriber base is a gigantic anomaly, in an industry where 250,000 subscribers is still a prodigious number. Buy-in for end-users is low enough that you can have simultaneously active subs on several games for under $50 USD per month, which is less than a lot of people pay for TV.
And while I don't care for Stormreach either, it certainly hasn't failed yet. Failures are actually extremely rare in the industry-- a bad game can last a very long time, if the publisher is determined to squeeze every dime they can out of the last few tens of thousands of subscribers that haven't moved on to something else. Even games that have failed spectacularly out of the gate (Anarchy Online, Age of Conan, or Vanguard, for example) can limp along for years, or rally behind tightened code and newly released expansion material.
That's easy. Buy the code from them. If it's not already owned by a parent company, you can probably get it for fire-sale prices. Chances are that it's already legally the property of creditors though-- purchasing or even renting the servers necessary to launch an MMO is an extremely costly venture, let alone the costs of payroll and development.
I'm not surprised that they're still trying to make money from this debacle-- all of the investors must have taken a gigantic bath. I just don't think that people are going to go for it, at least not in North America.
Not to mention that spoiler sites like Thottbot will crop up as fast as content is uncovered. Story is very, very secondary in an MMO, when you get down to it-- it's the differences in the ways that classes play, that make them compelling.
Shadowbane? Oh god, this is doomed from the outset. At least Brad Mcquaid won't be spending the payroll on blow.
Ah, but you see, they've changed the nomenclature on us. 'Beta code' no longer means 'computer code that is mostly usable, but still in testing', but rather means 'beta is code for never saying that you promised usability, uptime, or data retention'.
There's been precedent for this for years, starting with Bun Boy's class(less) action suit against Origin for Ultima Online not having 24/7 uptime, and going on through SOE's agreement with eBay to pull auctions of Everquest characters and equipment. The data, the servers, and even the client software belongs to the company. Your $15 per month is an access fee for playing with their toys. That's the long and the short of it.
I haven't seen this argument since 2001, and it's just as wrong now as it was then. First, the market is not saturated by any means.
Second, looking at WoW's numbers as a benchmark is lunacy. The average subscription-based MMO has between 100,000 and 300,000 subscribers, not the flat millions that WoW does. An MMO can survive with a player base in the tens of thousands, handily.
Third, MMO subscriptions are not utilities-- there is nothing stopping anyone from subscribing to multiple games simultaneously, and many players do so. Even with the economy tanking, two $15 subscriptions is a better deal than going to the movies a few times a month, and it's discretionary expenses like movies (or going out to dinner, or what have you) that usually get cut before quietly repeating ones like cable bills or MMO subs get canceled.
WoW is a prodigy. Treating it as competition is foolish-- it's too big to notice the smaller games, and its sheer popularity has secured the whole goddamn industry a space in the pop culture landscape. It hasn't cannibalized other games, it's singlehandedly expanded the whole damn hobby by orders of magnitude, and continues to draw in people who wouldn't have touched Asheron's Call, WAR, City of Heroes or anything else.
Now stop touching yourself.
...Which is why it's going to fail spectacularly. The novels are a decent read, but the 'cyberspace' aspects of it are as shallow and cliche as marketing blurbs.
They're just harkening back to the original Olympics. I hear they're going to start burning hecatombs of oxen to Zeus again, soon.
Christ, these people are as bad as Realmedia.
Many people would debate the 'really good' status of a new Crash Bandicoot title.
Christ, game companies have been using 'beta' as a dodge for shitty demos since Shiny squeezed Messiah out. The fact that the same 'it's just a beta, it'll get better!' promises and pleas have trickled upward and outward is clear indication that gravity itself is in beta, because shit certainly doesn't just flow downhill any more.
Of course, the cell providers don't give a shit about this. I had to go out of my way to get my hands on that software, because my provider doesn't sell it, or admit that it exists. What they want, is to charge me a buck (or worse) just to transfer a 20KB ringtone through their network.
Unless modding tools were promised, and that promise was writ mile-high in the stone of the Rockies, I don't get what the fuss is about. Your assumption is not the developer's obligation.
So it's this site crossed up with an Alternate Reality Game. Whoopee.
The only possible explanation that I can think of would be an attempt to leverage Live subscriptions further... but come on, really.