Sadly the published RPG is dying an agonizing death. Nobody wants to pay $30-$40 for a hardcover rulebook when they can pay that for a full-function CRPG (computer or console, take your pick). Add to this the unending supply of "optional" supplimental books and the industry just cannot survive the same glut that TSR produced in the 2nd Edition AD&D days. The promise of OpenGaming and d20 can't save an industry that relies on an ever-shrinking market of buyers and an ever-increasing price of entry. Further pressure is being exerted by decreasing literacy among teens, lower interest among young adults, and thus an aging tabletop gaming populace hemmoraging to real-life issues and other problems.
I've been saying this for a while now, and think that the writing has been on the wall for at least ten years, if not fifteen. The absolute biggest problem with the gaming industry is treating it like an industry. No matter how many editions and point releases (point releases, for Chrissakes!) of a system there are, or how many different Revised Guides to the Jakes of Waterdeep are printed, games do not suffer from planned obsolescence. This is a major problem for publishers, because there is a distinctly finite market for their wares. Even if they do come up with entire new settings and flavour texts (see the proliferation-- nay, metastasis of Everquest and Warcraft D20 and their ilk) instead of repackaging the Compleat Guide to Elfs again, the publisher is still spreading itself and its profits thinner: not everyone will purchase setting-specific source material, or official setting material in the first place.
Presentation and packaging is the absolute worst element of the industry now, by far, though. In my younger years, I used to collect RPG material, especially GURPS supplements and obscure titles. $20 CDN for a 128 page perfectbound book? Hey, that was good value to me. When prices crept up to more than $25 for the same material, my purchases slowed dramatically. Now, the few GURPS books that come out each year, priced at roughly $50 a pop, don't even get a second glance. They're filled with the ugly, glossy art and oversized print that D&D paved the way for with 3rd Edition, and Evil Stevie is wondering why his profits have been dropping. Oh, but hey! They're offering PDFs of the books now, that's got to be good, right? Well, aside from the fact that 1:1 scans of 8-1/2"x11" books are an incredible pain in the butt to read on a screen... and that they're selling those for $25 a shot, too.
Palladium is screwed for the same reason that it's always been flirting with disaster: Its owner is an asshole with delusions of adequacy. This is the man that green-lit a tie-in game for the N-Gage of all platforms. The most popular books in his stable were written by people that have long since run to saner pastures, leaving him to erase their contributions through sheer mudflation.
Wizards of the Coast... well, they're probably going to be the only outfit that survives the crash of this so-called industry, because they have diversified like nobody's business-- and they have done it in directions that do not suffer the pitfalls of an industry based on the end user's imagination. Just take a peek at the front page of their website: Pokemon, Magic, Neopets... all titles and games that have officiality and collectability stamped all over them. When was the last time that someone seriously tried trotting out a homebrew pokecritter or magic card? Sure, they're still grinding out D&D material and plastering it up on that turgid mess of a website, but I can guarantee that they're making much more money out of the games that you can get into for ten bucks, and keep yourself hooked on for the price of a pack of smokes whenever you go up to the cash at the comic shop or variety store.
I never heard about the C&D's sent to magazines, but I do clearly remember Palladium threatening to sue the pants off of some outfit (the folks making Talislanta?) for daring to suggest that their supplements were compatible with the Palladium RPG. White Wolf had an interview with him, wherein that was touched upon, and he came off as the most amazingly whiny and arrogant prick in history.
Romero continues and suggests that this adaptability has been either exploited, again citing recent self-replicatining scripts [second life] and Eve Online's Great Heist, both of which are perfectly legitmate under the games rules not as cheap exploits but as fundamental inevitabilities in a human to human environment.
Actually, Linden Labs has a tendency to permanently ban users that release infinitely self-replicating scripts, because they crash entire zones for upwards of hours at a time. I've heard that they changed the server code so that scripts would cease replication after four or five cycles, but that ruined a great number of other popular (and harmless) scripts and was removed.
I'd venture to suggest that at least thirty to forty percent of the stuff on Youtube is also copyrighted to someone other than the poster, as well, which makes contractual claims entertaining too. Every time some twit's collection of full episode rips gets taken down, they just go ahead and re-upload them.
I'm going to assume that you're human, so you can choose one of those classes as your preferred. I suggest 'husband', because that gives you a reaction bonus with your pairbound character. Beyond that... yeah, the third class is definitely going to be hurting your XP rate.
Get rid of the 'father' class. Kids are the worst kind of follower you can have until you're in your mid fifties to early sixties, since they eat all of your earned loot until they're around level 18 (or longer, if they take the hikikomori feat), since the rules about sending them out to do work or corporally training them have changed in the latest edition.
The reason why CoX can put cutting-edge video hardware 'through its paces' is because it's excruciatingly CPU-bound and its geometry was assembled with no eye toward efficiency.
Pravda has the same 'journalistic' mandate as the Weekly World News. This is the same site that recently claimed that centaurs were real, and the result of humans fucking horses.
I think it's more likely that Boyd is one of Boll's distant relatives. "The color of tulip"? "Blood on This" and "Blood on That", bigger and better than Ben Hur? They've certainly got the same overinflated opinions of themselves. Boll was the first person that I thought of, when it was mentioned that a German investor was interested in the scripts, sight unseen.
Given that Germany is sewing up the tax loophole that Boll's investors were using, it's doubtful that Boyd would have got jack or shit anyway.
Sounds like yet another useless portal site, but with the added annoyance of having to use a special client to interact with it. If they're looking for market share, that's about the worst way they could go about doing it.
Apparently it's intended as an anti-ebaum's site, where the content is provided by its creators and profit from ad exposures is shared with them, instead of going into the pockets of a gigantic plagiarist. The banana flash is there because its creator is part of this cockamamie scheme.
Looks to me like video-sharing sites are the new garbage IPO.
SOE does this for several of its games, including Everquest, Matrix Online and Planetside. I think it's called a Station Pass, and it's something like $25 USD for admission to half a dozen of their MMOGs, with a few other smaller titles on the side.
That noted, you're never going to see a general subscription for all MMOGs. Ever. Period. While a very large outfit like SOE might be able to use the activity of one or two titles to subsidize other games with flagging user bases, a publisher like Funcom would not. A consortium of publishers would unfairly penalize successful products (like World of Warcraft) while propping up failures (like Sims Online). Rumour has it that Electronic Arts, fresh from its purchase of Dark Ages of Camelot (And Warhammer Online) developer Mythic, has plans to make them grind out multiple, separate MMOGs based on the DAOC engine. Clearly, while SOE hopes to keep failing projects alive by offering them as a bundle, EA thinks that the money is in extracting a separate subscription fee from every niche they fill.
Oh yes, a huge outcry. "Waah! Our pirated copies of XP have stopped working! Four out of five of our machines don't show a desktop, because we only bought one license!"
I'm sure that the FBI's piracy department will be overjoyed to take each and every one of those complaints.
The parent post imparts the truth. A fax machine isn't trained to give you the runaround that a "retention specialist" will, won't disconnect you if the spiel isn't working, and (best of all) leaves a literal paper trail.
The guy that empties the fax basket? He doesn't give a shit; his job isn't based on the number of accounts he's managed to keep active.
No, because SOE has yet to actually kill one. EA had Earth and Beyond, was testing Motor City Online, and for a brief while had a Battletech: 3025 game in widespread beta. In addition to those being killed or canceled, they also canceled Ultima Online 2, another Ultima Online spinoff and fucked the Sims Online hard enough to make Maxis walk funny for years afterward.
Exactly. It's a lot easier to pass a hardcover around the table (or loan it to a player for a week) than it is to dick around with a laptop at the gaming table. My group has tried just that, several times, and each time it's been a worse than miserable excursion. Charging full price for the books simply adds insult to injury-- Steve Jackson Games, as much as I dislike their new lineup, is at least charging $25 for their PDFs, which is a fair amount less than you'll find them for at the local gaming shop.
PDF is a great format for some forms of text, but large-format books with multiple printed columns are not one of them. I have a copy of the Dragon Magazine archive, and if it weren't for search functions then the scans would be next to useless-- there's an unacceptable trade-off between readability and being able to skim pages at a time; at the average resolution, you're stuck scrolling up and down the same page to follow the flow of each column, which a document properly formatted for electronic display avoids.
But I have to wonder if the source of that anecdote predates his development of ALS? Nazis melt when they look into the Ark of the Covenant, theoretical physicists get degenerative neurological diseases when they look for God's maker's mark on the universe.
They'll also have to get developers to adopt the PhysX API. Given that Havok already has a foothold and isn't tied to a piece of hardware with dubious benefits, Ageia has an uphill battle to fight.
That said, this is just as silly. I'm just going to wait until physics coprocessors are built straight onto video cards, or until developers realize that relatively idle processors in multi-core CPUs are just dandy for performing this kind of number crunching. I imagine that all of the technologies will mature at about the same point; right now, we're at the relative level of the old Voodoo passthrough-card kludge... without the benefit of, you know, any actual acceleration.
I think that's going to depend on how much pressure MS can apply to developers and publishers. New MS games are probably going to be DX10 only (regardless of whether they need it or not), or ship with functionality that keeps them from running perfectly or perfectly prettily under DX9. As a company, they can almost certainly afford to do that-- just look at the XBox series.
Developers probably aren't going to want to go to DX10 unless there's a huge benefit for them: there are a lot of people that won't be happy about having to shell out a few hundred on a new OS, flatten their primary partitions and reinstall from scratch just to play the latest FPS.
I'm half expecting someone to crack DX10 open and fiddle out the bits that make it Vista-only, shortly after it comes out.
Note that for that $20, you also get the full version of the original Sin, which does definitely play on modern machines. It's spectacularly dated, but if you're into that sort of thing it's definitely worth poking at.
Your $20 also gets you a few different multiplayer modes, but with one small snag: they're being patched in at an undisclosed date. Not exactly my cup of tea, on the multiplayer or "ship now, patch later" front, but different people have different tastes and tolerances.
I'm not sure if I'll pay $20 for the other two episodes, though. If they have more value-added stuff, like the Wages of Sin expansion and additional gameplay modes, then sure. Otherwise, I'd feel much more comfortable paying $15. Ten bucks is just insulting, though.
In when non-MS games will start to require DX10. I really don't care for Halo, so I'm not concerned about it being a Vista-only title. The real fun will be when DX10 comes out, and developers will have to start worrying about whether to risk alienating customers by using it exclusively, or forego any improvements it brings in order to stick with the widely accepted (and not Vista-exclusive) DX9. This isn't like DVD-only games, where the push came at the cost of drives that had already dropped to the price of an average game, or the performance gains brought by laying out a few hundred for a new video card-- it's paying several hundred bucks for a new OS (while XP is still very much supported) and pretty much having to flatten and reinstall in order to play a blasted game in the first place.
And while I'm here, Halo 2 and Shadowrun? Christ almighty. Halo PC was one of the most atrocious ports that I've had the misfortune of dealing with, and Shadowrun is shaping up to be an ugly, me-too squad-based FPS. Some great incentives there, guys. Really.
Atari wants new content coming out for the sequel game, to increase the odds of people shelling out for it. They've already made as much off the main NWN program as they ever will, given that the Diamond Edition (starring the main game, and the two official expansion packs) retails for roughly $20 CDN.
It's really very much like the console industry: If they can point at KingBonker, PriestWhacker and other cheap modules as reasons to buy NWN2 over NWN, then they don't want buyers pointing at the same titles as reasons to stick with their old and no longer particularly profitable copies of NWN. I'm honestly surprised that they're releasing the Infinite Dungeons pack for the first game at all.
"This Origami DVD Player concept uses a fully-flexible display technology (e-paper) to ensure maximum portability. When not in use, the screen folds up neatly back into the case. From the image, it looks to sport integrated speakers as well. No word yet on if this concept will go into production."
"As a product, it would target the business traveler who wants a convenient way to watch DVD movies."
...And a fucking nightmare for anyone that can't fold a map the right way.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been saying this for a while now, and think that the writing has been on the wall for at least ten years, if not fifteen. The absolute biggest problem with the gaming industry is treating it like an industry. No matter how many editions and point releases (point releases, for Chrissakes!) of a system there are, or how many different Revised Guides to the Jakes of Waterdeep are printed, games do not suffer from planned obsolescence. This is a major problem for publishers, because there is a distinctly finite market for their wares. Even if they do come up with entire new settings and flavour texts (see the proliferation-- nay, metastasis of Everquest and Warcraft D20 and their ilk) instead of repackaging the Compleat Guide to Elfs again, the publisher is still spreading itself and its profits thinner: not everyone will purchase setting-specific source material, or official setting material in the first place.
Presentation and packaging is the absolute worst element of the industry now, by far, though. In my younger years, I used to collect RPG material, especially GURPS supplements and obscure titles. $20 CDN for a 128 page perfectbound book? Hey, that was good value to me. When prices crept up to more than $25 for the same material, my purchases slowed dramatically. Now, the few GURPS books that come out each year, priced at roughly $50 a pop, don't even get a second glance. They're filled with the ugly, glossy art and oversized print that D&D paved the way for with 3rd Edition, and Evil Stevie is wondering why his profits have been dropping. Oh, but hey! They're offering PDFs of the books now, that's got to be good, right? Well, aside from the fact that 1:1 scans of 8-1/2"x11" books are an incredible pain in the butt to read on a screen... and that they're selling those for $25 a shot, too.
Palladium is screwed for the same reason that it's always been flirting with disaster: Its owner is an asshole with delusions of adequacy. This is the man that green-lit a tie-in game for the N-Gage of all platforms. The most popular books in his stable were written by people that have long since run to saner pastures, leaving him to erase their contributions through sheer mudflation.
Wizards of the Coast... well, they're probably going to be the only outfit that survives the crash of this so-called industry, because they have diversified like nobody's business-- and they have done it in directions that do not suffer the pitfalls of an industry based on the end user's imagination. Just take a peek at the front page of their website: Pokemon, Magic, Neopets... all titles and games that have officiality and collectability stamped all over them. When was the last time that someone seriously tried trotting out a homebrew pokecritter or magic card? Sure, they're still grinding out D&D material and plastering it up on that turgid mess of a website, but I can guarantee that they're making much more money out of the games that you can get into for ten bucks, and keep yourself hooked on for the price of a pack of smokes whenever you go up to the cash at the comic shop or variety store.
I never heard about the C&D's sent to magazines, but I do clearly remember Palladium threatening to sue the pants off of some outfit (the folks making Talislanta?) for daring to suggest that their supplements were compatible with the Palladium RPG. White Wolf had an interview with him, wherein that was touched upon, and he came off as the most amazingly whiny and arrogant prick in history.
Actually, Linden Labs has a tendency to permanently ban users that release infinitely self-replicating scripts, because they crash entire zones for upwards of hours at a time. I've heard that they changed the server code so that scripts would cease replication after four or five cycles, but that ruined a great number of other popular (and harmless) scripts and was removed.
"Come away, human author, take a venture capitalist by the hand/for the stock market's more full of bullshit than you can understand."
I'd venture to suggest that at least thirty to forty percent of the stuff on Youtube is also copyrighted to someone other than the poster, as well, which makes contractual claims entertaining too. Every time some twit's collection of full episode rips gets taken down, they just go ahead and re-upload them.
Get rid of the 'father' class. Kids are the worst kind of follower you can have until you're in your mid fifties to early sixties, since they eat all of your earned loot until they're around level 18 (or longer, if they take the hikikomori feat), since the rules about sending them out to do work or corporally training them have changed in the latest edition.
The reason why CoX can put cutting-edge video hardware 'through its paces' is because it's excruciatingly CPU-bound and its geometry was assembled with no eye toward efficiency.
Pravda has the same 'journalistic' mandate as the Weekly World News. This is the same site that recently claimed that centaurs were real, and the result of humans fucking horses.
Given that Germany is sewing up the tax loophole that Boll's investors were using, it's doubtful that Boyd would have got jack or shit anyway.
Sounds like yet another useless portal site, but with the added annoyance of having to use a special client to interact with it. If they're looking for market share, that's about the worst way they could go about doing it.
Looks to me like video-sharing sites are the new garbage IPO.
That noted, you're never going to see a general subscription for all MMOGs. Ever. Period. While a very large outfit like SOE might be able to use the activity of one or two titles to subsidize other games with flagging user bases, a publisher like Funcom would not. A consortium of publishers would unfairly penalize successful products (like World of Warcraft) while propping up failures (like Sims Online). Rumour has it that Electronic Arts, fresh from its purchase of Dark Ages of Camelot (And Warhammer Online) developer Mythic, has plans to make them grind out multiple, separate MMOGs based on the DAOC engine. Clearly, while SOE hopes to keep failing projects alive by offering them as a bundle, EA thinks that the money is in extracting a separate subscription fee from every niche they fill.
I'm sure that the FBI's piracy department will be overjoyed to take each and every one of those complaints.
The guy that empties the fax basket? He doesn't give a shit; his job isn't based on the number of accounts he's managed to keep active.
No, because SOE has yet to actually kill one. EA had Earth and Beyond, was testing Motor City Online, and for a brief while had a Battletech: 3025 game in widespread beta. In addition to those being killed or canceled, they also canceled Ultima Online 2, another Ultima Online spinoff and fucked the Sims Online hard enough to make Maxis walk funny for years afterward.
PDF is a great format for some forms of text, but large-format books with multiple printed columns are not one of them. I have a copy of the Dragon Magazine archive, and if it weren't for search functions then the scans would be next to useless-- there's an unacceptable trade-off between readability and being able to skim pages at a time; at the average resolution, you're stuck scrolling up and down the same page to follow the flow of each column, which a document properly formatted for electronic display avoids.
But I have to wonder if the source of that anecdote predates his development of ALS? Nazis melt when they look into the Ark of the Covenant, theoretical physicists get degenerative neurological diseases when they look for God's maker's mark on the universe.
That said, this is just as silly. I'm just going to wait until physics coprocessors are built straight onto video cards, or until developers realize that relatively idle processors in multi-core CPUs are just dandy for performing this kind of number crunching. I imagine that all of the technologies will mature at about the same point; right now, we're at the relative level of the old Voodoo passthrough-card kludge... without the benefit of, you know, any actual acceleration.
Is he any relation to Dick Hertz, or the Dover twins, Ben and Eileen?
Developers probably aren't going to want to go to DX10 unless there's a huge benefit for them: there are a lot of people that won't be happy about having to shell out a few hundred on a new OS, flatten their primary partitions and reinstall from scratch just to play the latest FPS.
I'm half expecting someone to crack DX10 open and fiddle out the bits that make it Vista-only, shortly after it comes out.
Your $20 also gets you a few different multiplayer modes, but with one small snag: they're being patched in at an undisclosed date. Not exactly my cup of tea, on the multiplayer or "ship now, patch later" front, but different people have different tastes and tolerances.
I'm not sure if I'll pay $20 for the other two episodes, though. If they have more value-added stuff, like the Wages of Sin expansion and additional gameplay modes, then sure. Otherwise, I'd feel much more comfortable paying $15. Ten bucks is just insulting, though.
I'm not proposing anything; I'm merely making an observation. Thank you for making the oh-so-tired suggestion that I'm a company shill, though.
And while I'm here, Halo 2 and Shadowrun? Christ almighty. Halo PC was one of the most atrocious ports that I've had the misfortune of dealing with, and Shadowrun is shaping up to be an ugly, me-too squad-based FPS. Some great incentives there, guys. Really.
It's really very much like the console industry: If they can point at KingBonker, PriestWhacker and other cheap modules as reasons to buy NWN2 over NWN, then they don't want buyers pointing at the same titles as reasons to stick with their old and no longer particularly profitable copies of NWN. I'm honestly surprised that they're releasing the Infinite Dungeons pack for the first game at all.
"As a product, it would target the business traveler who wants a convenient way to watch DVD movies."