This is purely developer/publisher fault. Perhaps Apple and Google should put more in place to prevent this sort of thing, but the correct, and customer friendly route, to changing something like this, create a new version. Now you have Touch Racing Nitro, and Touch Racing Nitro+. Already bought the first? Awesome. Enjoy and have fun. It's no longer available for sale, but if you bought it, its yours. Play TRN+ for free, and here's all these IAP things, such as paying to remove advertising. If those various pay things are important to you, you have them, if not, you can keep playing for free. This keeps their early supporters happy, with the version they bought, and provides them a better revenue generating version for fans, new and old, that they can probably even afford to update and add new content to. This was just crappy behavior, or poor planning, on the part of TRN team.
Wish I could mod up in the same thread, that language clarification is very helpful. I will remember it in the future, as I think it's an important distinction to make.
I am not particularly fond of Apple as a company. Their strong arm tactics drive me crazy, and the slavish fan base constantly going on about the innovation they supposedly do (with their devices). But...
The true innovation that Apple has done though had nothing to do with their devices, but the platforms they created when they figured out how to handle the iTunes store, the App store, and those annoying walled gardens we all love to love and love to hate. For all the bad, it really has changed how people think about software and media distribution, and opened up opportunities to a lot of people, when the old distribution channels were only open to the chosen few.
Their devices are not innovative, they are just the most polished and accessible devices pretty much available. No wonder they are so love/hate on Slashdot, but the rest of the world loves em. Combined with one of the most effective distribution channels ever made, it's a pretty remarkable combo for consumers.
I would like to propose a tax - 10% of any politician's annual income everytime they attempt to speak with their ass. As Rep. Fourkiller is apparently doing.
Because content isn't the same thing as a commodity used for transportation. This is the continual apple's to koala bear's comparison, and it still ceases to be remotely relevant.
If the games are good, and people want to play them, I don't see the problem in expecting people to pay for them. Of course, I've been a member of teams who've seen their $10 million game sell 300k units and then have 29 million "registered" users playing online at various points. So maybe I'm just bitter.
Well, everything you said is pretty compatible with what I was trying to get across. I think I just needed to caveat it a bit more. What I'm talking about has nothing to do with the current cable monopolies, including crap services like Hulu. It's taking the new, non-scummy models, like Netflix, DVD purchases, episode purchase and rentals, and making those the predominant distribution model.
However, if you're trying to say that, if you have the choice to buy a DVD of a show you love, and instead chose to download it off the TPB and try and dress it up as anything other than out and out theft.. well, there we part ways. I don't think that's what you're saying, I'm just trying to draw a very clear line in the sand about piracy as a legitimate means to an end (Non-availability or excessively unreasonable availability - draconian DRM, or monopolistic distribution channels), and piracy because it's free and damnit, I deserve to own every show ever made for free.
But that's my point. What you're suggesting there would work, if everyone signed up for it and agreed to it. Possibly the only way to really change it - because yes, the current model is broken all to hell - is a couple steps:
- Buy DVDs to the shows you actually like. Don't download them from Pirate Bay
- Access them via Netflix - It's a small amount comparatively, but Netflix makes sure the owners get some profit based on how much they're watched
- Convince Netflix, and other streaming sites like it, that they should start making their own shows, that are not beholden to the existing networks. Screw the Nielsen outdated ratings, allow limited free viewing, but utilize smart use of subscription models and "pay per episode" ownership for people who like the show enough to watch it.
- But as part of that, the content consuming public as a whole needs to stop robbing the content creators blind through sites like the Pirate Bay. Today, Pirate Bay has a valid function. In many cases, it's actually almost impossible to get a hold of TV episodes in a reasonable time frame or even get some more obscure shows. But to really make a transition to a healthy, affordable digital marketplace, people need to stop stealing and pretending it's not. There is, however, a serious cart before the horse conundrum that consumers have every right to be very skeptical of.
That is, of course, perfectly valid, but refuse it for long enough, and given the entitled "media should be free" attitude of the last 20 years.. Pretty soon, you should assume there will be no more high quality productions. No commercials, and most people completely unwilling to pay for anything because they're somehow entitled to it, and.. You'll have a lot of YouTube reality TV and some random indie projects of mixed quality from people who do it just for the love of it. But all other programming will go away.
I hate advertising as much as the next person, but unless a pay to own model comes out that meets the needs of helping a show make money to pay for the next show, and the sometimes reasonable, sometimes insane, demands for "complete and total control over my media! I own it!!!".. We're killing our own entertainment avenues.
It's fairly blatant. Not much sympathy for a priest who feels the need to take some other groups branding to sell god. I don't know about suing, if actual money is involved, but asking him to politely "Get his own brand" is entirely appropriate, rather than stealing one that Best Buy has spent a lot of time and money building. This doesn't even touch the issue that as a company, Best Buy would probably prefer not to be associated with the Christian church, and alienate the 3.5 billion non-christian potential customers on the planet.
So, using that graph.. E&D turned a profit 7 out of the 13 quarters listed. Maybe not stellar, but also not exactly the doom and gloom of most game industry companies. Could it be better? Sure. And... E&D is only subsidized in the sense they pull from the same money pool as all divisions in the company. Their profitability, or lack, is purely driven by their divisional P&Ls.
Interestingly enough, may people who like Bing like this feature. In general, when I use Bing, I'm using it because it does tend to provide much more focused results. The fact that, if I'm curious, I can also see a cool picture with a number of interesting bits of information about that shot (be it something, somewhere, or somewhen) is just a nice "learning something outside of what I'm focused on" moment. Beauty and a moment to learn something is not something that send me into rage.
I use Google and Bing almost equally now, but i use them for different types of searches. Given how much market share Bing has gained in such short time, your anecdotal "lot of the comments I saw were" observation just reads as hyperbole, rather than something that is a real plus or negative about a non-Google search engine.
Mind you, Bing's market share is still tiny in comparison at about 11%, but it's the first time that an MS driven search engine has actually gained significant market share, helped by the fact that Bing is a really good search engine, whereas every other attempt they've ever done has been.. well, uhm.. Crap.
"device that frequently refused to charge batteries even when plugged in, in case you're wondering."
Source? I'm not denying it could be true, but would love to see a source. I've seen lots of claims that company did X or Y, but rarely see any citation, and just something about the wording yells unsubstantiated anecdote, rather than fact. No offense intended, just curious. I've not seen any reports about this problem that are definitely traced to MS's implementation of ACPI. A Google search shows a number of forum posts, as well as a few about the requirement that the laptop support the 2.0 spec for Vista, but nothing from any major cites that usually document this sort of problem.
What you call terrorism, most people call civil dissent or civil disobedience. If those in power choose to abuse that power, they will get called on that abuse, including making any and all information about them public record.
We really need to stop abusing the word terrorism into yet another fear talking point.
Wow.. Modded down for confirming a valid point, while v1 gets modded up for being "part of the problem". Slashdot at it's finest. I'll just stop bothering to convince thieves to stop being thieves.
$5 in my pocket from supporting a spurious, ludicrous lawsuit is $5 I wouldn't take. I hope the originators of the lawsuit get slapped with all the defendant's legal fees on top of their own. "We broke the terms of service but.. waaaaahhhhh.. pay us anyway!". And ultimately parent is right. This is nothing about "protecting the rights of legitimate modders", and entirely about lining the pockets of the law firm with other people's money.
At the other extreme, you have consumers not wanting to pay at all, and resenting every time someone tries to profit from the blood, sweat and tears of their labor, and expecting the corporate content producers to somehow feed their families and pay their bills through the fairy dust gratitude of the appreciative masses.
Because, don't think for a second that corporate content producers are the same thing as the RIAA and MPAA. They may represent some, but most of us making content are people who go to work, pay our bills, create the content the public consumes voraciously, and just want to get paid for the work we do.
Quite simply, anyone who pirates has ZERO respect for the people who actually make that content. You can justify it all you want, as screwing the RIAA or Microsoft, or Sony, or whoever. But really? You're screwing me and other people who make the stuff you watch and play.
Let's try a list!
- Roads.. maybe you don't use them?
- Well regulated skies so the plane you're landing in doesn't have an unexpected conjoining with another one taking off
- A nationwide electrical grid
- Required emergency care, regardless of ability to pay (that comes out of a similar source as medicare/medicaid - without it, no pay, no treatment.. got hit by a car walking down the street? No insurance? Tough luck, bub)
- Regulated banking sys...ok. bad example.
Government may do a lot wrong, but most people take for granted the stuff they do right, that they use every day. That's a small list, but not anywhere near complete. Almost every mass transit system in the US wouldn't exist if not for public funds, and often public involvement in their yearly operations.
Mind you, most of the actual politicians need their brains washed out with lye, and lobbyists should be sequestered 20,000 leauges under the sea, and there's billions in waste every year, but if not for those governments, I doubt you'd be online right now saying how little they do. LHC is one great example of where they really shine, it's true.
Buying car parts is entirely legal. The automakers support it. A console is basically worthless without games to run on it. Pirating games is illegal, as it should be, in my opinion. Since this circumvention has about a 1% chance of being used for legal purposes, making it illegal to circumvent these sorts of protections in a for-profit manner seems perfectly acceptable. There's a reason I at least called out the difference between hobbyist and for-profit. I have never, once, seen data to indicate this sort of operation is used for anything other than to facilitate piracy. With that in mind, since he's just enabling the ability to pirate, he's just "doing his job"? No more culpable for the illegal actions he's enabling than those already accused in this thread of the Nuremberg defense?
Just to provide a counterpoint (to the general tenor, not your comment specifically, parent):
"It's much like jailbreaking an iPhone"
It's NOTHING like jailbreaking an iPhone. There are tons of apps available on the iPhone, and easy to develop for one. There are very few to no unsigned apps widely available for the Xbox 360, PS3 or Wii. Programming for the PS3 is akin to ramming your head into a wall, and while the latest XDK for the 360 is pretty easy to get a hold of, developing for it isn't something most people do casually. For profit circumvention efforts like this (not hobbyists, but guys who circumvent the hardware in a retail console and then turn around and sell them) is generally for a single purpose: so the person who buys it can get their unlimited supply of games from GameFly, copy them with relative ease, and run it on their console that has no way to tell the difference now. So, I understand that many in this community don't respect copyright or fair rights management, and that's certainly their view to hold, but based on current copyright law and property ownership laws in the US, the primary intent of this sort of operation is to allow customers to copy games in an illegal fashion. There is no justification for what he was doing. If he was doing this to one of each machine as a hobbyist for his own use, it's highly unlikely this article, or prosecution would have ever happened.
The article was light on details of the indictment, so if people have more information that indicates this truly wasn't his intent, I'll happily admit to being wrong.
So in regards to the Nuremberg defense, it seems particularly inappropriate, because this wasn't some David vs. Goliath case. This was someone making profit off of other peoples hard work to facilitate piracy. It's hard to feel much sympathy for this guy, unless as I stated, there some giant facts missing from the article that provide more details as to why he was somehow the victim here.
It's so weird.. i ran the phrase "RIAA says 'Don't expect DRMed music to work forever'" through Lost in Translation, and it came back "Please if you would bend over, rhinoceros."
Strange.
My first reaction to seeing the headline for this post was basically "Shit! I forgot I need to update Firefox to 3.5!"... Humans are kinda dumb sometimes. Or maybe it's just me.
That is a very good book. And as one of the few posts that isn't raging negativity, I'll add the following.
The games industry is one of the least degree centric fields around. A degree will not get you a job in the industry (usually). It might land you an internship, which in turn might land a job, but in and of itself, it will not be the thing that suddenly gets you in. Focus on fields of study that matter to design. Human interaction. Psychology. Math. Statistics. Get some coding and tech skills as well (C++ will always be a good basis to have some understanding of the work you're doing).
As has already been stated, there is no "path" into games. QA is a good place to get some experience, especially if it's embedded QA (as in, the awesome guys who sit in the dev team area, work hand in hand with the team, handles build process, and team communication about problems, etc - publisher side QA gets a lot less chance to get involved in those sorts of things).
Know what types of things you want to work on, and start to work on them. Engine technology is lightyears ahead of where it was even 5 years ago. Engines such as Unity3D, Blade3D, Torque, among others, will allow even a non programmer to start to prototype ideas, see how things work together, and attempt to bring their own ideas to life. For someone who has no industry experience, modding and private projects are the way you have to differentiate yourself, and show you have the skills to get the job done.
After being passionate enough to do work on your own, the next most important thing is understanding what makes a good game from a bad game. If your interest is shooters, what sorts of things set one aside from another? Why is Call of Duty 4 awesome, and random misc. shooter that sold 100k copies considered a failure. What about Halo 3 makes people play the MP aspect obsessively. Start by asking the questions, and then go through the mental exercises of breaking them down. There's no one formula that makes great games great. But there are common elements that make all games good or bad. That is the first part of understanding. If you're a relatively intelligent person, once you can understand the questions you need to ask, as well as the answers, you'll start to understand how to build good games from nothing.
Read everything you can. Start with Jesse's book. Look for websites, get involved with online communities that are passionate about modding and indie projects. Design is both an art and a science. There is no one path, but there are commonalities that provide cohesion to the overall profession. But when you're reading, remember those guys dont' have all the answers either. It's most more ways of looking at things that in turn will allow you to better breakdown your own work into understandable and implementable chunks. One word of advice though: start with small scope ideas and work up from there. A great game is made up of usually just a few core, simple conceits that come together to make a great experience when finally wrapped in graphics, FX and audio.
Best of luck. And ignore the haters - find your own passion. I've been making games for over 10 years now, after years at places like Intel, Hewlett Packard and Microsoft that drained my soul. It's exhausting at times, but you're making something your passionate about (hopefully). Don't do this thinking you'll get rich. If that's your goal, become an investment banker and then once you've swindled the public for 10 years, then start your own game company.
Exactly. There are always incredulous responses to this kind of challenge. Everything is impossible. Until it's not anymore. That's research, that's progress. There's no better way to get people to innovate on crazy shit then to tell them it's almost impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
This is purely developer/publisher fault. Perhaps Apple and Google should put more in place to prevent this sort of thing, but the correct, and customer friendly route, to changing something like this, create a new version. Now you have Touch Racing Nitro, and Touch Racing Nitro+. Already bought the first? Awesome. Enjoy and have fun. It's no longer available for sale, but if you bought it, its yours. Play TRN+ for free, and here's all these IAP things, such as paying to remove advertising. If those various pay things are important to you, you have them, if not, you can keep playing for free. This keeps their early supporters happy, with the version they bought, and provides them a better revenue generating version for fans, new and old, that they can probably even afford to update and add new content to. This was just crappy behavior, or poor planning, on the part of TRN team.
And all 10 owners of the Playbook cheered.
Wish I could mod up in the same thread, that language clarification is very helpful. I will remember it in the future, as I think it's an important distinction to make.
This.
I am not particularly fond of Apple as a company. Their strong arm tactics drive me crazy, and the slavish fan base constantly going on about the innovation they supposedly do (with their devices). But...
The true innovation that Apple has done though had nothing to do with their devices, but the platforms they created when they figured out how to handle the iTunes store, the App store, and those annoying walled gardens we all love to love and love to hate. For all the bad, it really has changed how people think about software and media distribution, and opened up opportunities to a lot of people, when the old distribution channels were only open to the chosen few.
Their devices are not innovative, they are just the most polished and accessible devices pretty much available. No wonder they are so love/hate on Slashdot, but the rest of the world loves em. Combined with one of the most effective distribution channels ever made, it's a pretty remarkable combo for consumers.
I would like to propose a tax - 10% of any politician's annual income everytime they attempt to speak with their ass. As Rep. Fourkiller is apparently doing.
Because content isn't the same thing as a commodity used for transportation. This is the continual apple's to koala bear's comparison, and it still ceases to be remotely relevant.
If the games are good, and people want to play them, I don't see the problem in expecting people to pay for them. Of course, I've been a member of teams who've seen their $10 million game sell 300k units and then have 29 million "registered" users playing online at various points. So maybe I'm just bitter.
Well, everything you said is pretty compatible with what I was trying to get across. I think I just needed to caveat it a bit more. What I'm talking about has nothing to do with the current cable monopolies, including crap services like Hulu. It's taking the new, non-scummy models, like Netflix, DVD purchases, episode purchase and rentals, and making those the predominant distribution model.
However, if you're trying to say that, if you have the choice to buy a DVD of a show you love, and instead chose to download it off the TPB and try and dress it up as anything other than out and out theft.. well, there we part ways. I don't think that's what you're saying, I'm just trying to draw a very clear line in the sand about piracy as a legitimate means to an end (Non-availability or excessively unreasonable availability - draconian DRM, or monopolistic distribution channels), and piracy because it's free and damnit, I deserve to own every show ever made for free.
But that's my point. What you're suggesting there would work, if everyone signed up for it and agreed to it. Possibly the only way to really change it - because yes, the current model is broken all to hell - is a couple steps:
- Buy DVDs to the shows you actually like. Don't download them from Pirate Bay
- Access them via Netflix - It's a small amount comparatively, but Netflix makes sure the owners get some profit based on how much they're watched
- Convince Netflix, and other streaming sites like it, that they should start making their own shows, that are not beholden to the existing networks. Screw the Nielsen outdated ratings, allow limited free viewing, but utilize smart use of subscription models and "pay per episode" ownership for people who like the show enough to watch it.
- But as part of that, the content consuming public as a whole needs to stop robbing the content creators blind through sites like the Pirate Bay. Today, Pirate Bay has a valid function. In many cases, it's actually almost impossible to get a hold of TV episodes in a reasonable time frame or even get some more obscure shows. But to really make a transition to a healthy, affordable digital marketplace, people need to stop stealing and pretending it's not. There is, however, a serious cart before the horse conundrum that consumers have every right to be very skeptical of.
That is, of course, perfectly valid, but refuse it for long enough, and given the entitled "media should be free" attitude of the last 20 years.. Pretty soon, you should assume there will be no more high quality productions. No commercials, and most people completely unwilling to pay for anything because they're somehow entitled to it, and.. You'll have a lot of YouTube reality TV and some random indie projects of mixed quality from people who do it just for the love of it. But all other programming will go away.
I hate advertising as much as the next person, but unless a pay to own model comes out that meets the needs of helping a show make money to pay for the next show, and the sometimes reasonable, sometimes insane, demands for "complete and total control over my media! I own it!!!".. We're killing our own entertainment avenues.
This is really just a ploy to develop cheaper virtual machines. "No copy of Windows needed! Your Mac just THINKS it's Windows"
http://weeklypaper.blogspot.com/2008/01/touring-johnstown-pennsylvania.html
It's fairly blatant. Not much sympathy for a priest who feels the need to take some other groups branding to sell god. I don't know about suing, if actual money is involved, but asking him to politely "Get his own brand" is entirely appropriate, rather than stealing one that Best Buy has spent a lot of time and money building. This doesn't even touch the issue that as a company, Best Buy would probably prefer not to be associated with the Christian church, and alienate the 3.5 billion non-christian potential customers on the planet.
So, using that graph.. E&D turned a profit 7 out of the 13 quarters listed. Maybe not stellar, but also not exactly the doom and gloom of most game industry companies. Could it be better? Sure. And... E&D is only subsidized in the sense they pull from the same money pool as all divisions in the company. Their profitability, or lack, is purely driven by their divisional P&Ls.
Interestingly enough, may people who like Bing like this feature. In general, when I use Bing, I'm using it because it does tend to provide much more focused results. The fact that, if I'm curious, I can also see a cool picture with a number of interesting bits of information about that shot (be it something, somewhere, or somewhen) is just a nice "learning something outside of what I'm focused on" moment. Beauty and a moment to learn something is not something that send me into rage.
I use Google and Bing almost equally now, but i use them for different types of searches. Given how much market share Bing has gained in such short time, your anecdotal "lot of the comments I saw were" observation just reads as hyperbole, rather than something that is a real plus or negative about a non-Google search engine.
Mind you, Bing's market share is still tiny in comparison at about 11%, but it's the first time that an MS driven search engine has actually gained significant market share, helped by the fact that Bing is a really good search engine, whereas every other attempt they've ever done has been.. well, uhm.. Crap.
"device that frequently refused to charge batteries even when plugged in, in case you're wondering."
Source? I'm not denying it could be true, but would love to see a source. I've seen lots of claims that company did X or Y, but rarely see any citation, and just something about the wording yells unsubstantiated anecdote, rather than fact. No offense intended, just curious. I've not seen any reports about this problem that are definitely traced to MS's implementation of ACPI. A Google search shows a number of forum posts, as well as a few about the requirement that the laptop support the 2.0 spec for Vista, but nothing from any major cites that usually document this sort of problem.
What you call terrorism, most people call civil dissent or civil disobedience. If those in power choose to abuse that power, they will get called on that abuse, including making any and all information about them public record.
We really need to stop abusing the word terrorism into yet another fear talking point.
Wow.. Modded down for confirming a valid point, while v1 gets modded up for being "part of the problem". Slashdot at it's finest. I'll just stop bothering to convince thieves to stop being thieves.
$5 in my pocket from supporting a spurious, ludicrous lawsuit is $5 I wouldn't take. I hope the originators of the lawsuit get slapped with all the defendant's legal fees on top of their own. "We broke the terms of service but.. waaaaahhhhh.. pay us anyway!". And ultimately parent is right. This is nothing about "protecting the rights of legitimate modders", and entirely about lining the pockets of the law firm with other people's money.
Then in the interest of balance:
At the other extreme, you have consumers not wanting to pay at all, and resenting every time someone tries to profit from the blood, sweat and tears of their labor, and expecting the corporate content producers to somehow feed their families and pay their bills through the fairy dust gratitude of the appreciative masses.
Because, don't think for a second that corporate content producers are the same thing as the RIAA and MPAA. They may represent some, but most of us making content are people who go to work, pay our bills, create the content the public consumes voraciously, and just want to get paid for the work we do.
Quite simply, anyone who pirates has ZERO respect for the people who actually make that content. You can justify it all you want, as screwing the RIAA or Microsoft, or Sony, or whoever. But really? You're screwing me and other people who make the stuff you watch and play.
Interesting.
Let's try a list!
- Roads.. maybe you don't use them?
- Well regulated skies so the plane you're landing in doesn't have an unexpected conjoining with another one taking off
- A nationwide electrical grid
- Required emergency care, regardless of ability to pay (that comes out of a similar source as medicare/medicaid - without it, no pay, no treatment.. got hit by a car walking down the street? No insurance? Tough luck, bub)
- Regulated banking sys...ok. bad example.
Government may do a lot wrong, but most people take for granted the stuff they do right, that they use every day. That's a small list, but not anywhere near complete. Almost every mass transit system in the US wouldn't exist if not for public funds, and often public involvement in their yearly operations.
Mind you, most of the actual politicians need their brains washed out with lye, and lobbyists should be sequestered 20,000 leauges under the sea, and there's billions in waste every year, but if not for those governments, I doubt you'd be online right now saying how little they do. LHC is one great example of where they really shine, it's true.
Buying car parts is entirely legal. The automakers support it. A console is basically worthless without games to run on it. Pirating games is illegal, as it should be, in my opinion. Since this circumvention has about a 1% chance of being used for legal purposes, making it illegal to circumvent these sorts of protections in a for-profit manner seems perfectly acceptable. There's a reason I at least called out the difference between hobbyist and for-profit. I have never, once, seen data to indicate this sort of operation is used for anything other than to facilitate piracy. With that in mind, since he's just enabling the ability to pirate, he's just "doing his job"? No more culpable for the illegal actions he's enabling than those already accused in this thread of the Nuremberg defense?
Just to provide a counterpoint (to the general tenor, not your comment specifically, parent):
"It's much like jailbreaking an iPhone"
It's NOTHING like jailbreaking an iPhone. There are tons of apps available on the iPhone, and easy to develop for one. There are very few to no unsigned apps widely available for the Xbox 360, PS3 or Wii. Programming for the PS3 is akin to ramming your head into a wall, and while the latest XDK for the 360 is pretty easy to get a hold of, developing for it isn't something most people do casually. For profit circumvention efforts like this (not hobbyists, but guys who circumvent the hardware in a retail console and then turn around and sell them) is generally for a single purpose: so the person who buys it can get their unlimited supply of games from GameFly, copy them with relative ease, and run it on their console that has no way to tell the difference now. So, I understand that many in this community don't respect copyright or fair rights management, and that's certainly their view to hold, but based on current copyright law and property ownership laws in the US, the primary intent of this sort of operation is to allow customers to copy games in an illegal fashion. There is no justification for what he was doing. If he was doing this to one of each machine as a hobbyist for his own use, it's highly unlikely this article, or prosecution would have ever happened.
The article was light on details of the indictment, so if people have more information that indicates this truly wasn't his intent, I'll happily admit to being wrong.
So in regards to the Nuremberg defense, it seems particularly inappropriate, because this wasn't some David vs. Goliath case. This was someone making profit off of other peoples hard work to facilitate piracy. It's hard to feel much sympathy for this guy, unless as I stated, there some giant facts missing from the article that provide more details as to why he was somehow the victim here.
It's so weird.. i ran the phrase "RIAA says 'Don't expect DRMed music to work forever'" through Lost in Translation, and it came back "Please if you would bend over, rhinoceros." Strange.
My first reaction to seeing the headline for this post was basically "Shit! I forgot I need to update Firefox to 3.5!"... Humans are kinda dumb sometimes. Or maybe it's just me.
That is a very good book. And as one of the few posts that isn't raging negativity, I'll add the following.
The games industry is one of the least degree centric fields around. A degree will not get you a job in the industry (usually). It might land you an internship, which in turn might land a job, but in and of itself, it will not be the thing that suddenly gets you in. Focus on fields of study that matter to design. Human interaction. Psychology. Math. Statistics. Get some coding and tech skills as well (C++ will always be a good basis to have some understanding of the work you're doing).
As has already been stated, there is no "path" into games. QA is a good place to get some experience, especially if it's embedded QA (as in, the awesome guys who sit in the dev team area, work hand in hand with the team, handles build process, and team communication about problems, etc - publisher side QA gets a lot less chance to get involved in those sorts of things).
Know what types of things you want to work on, and start to work on them. Engine technology is lightyears ahead of where it was even 5 years ago. Engines such as Unity3D, Blade3D, Torque, among others, will allow even a non programmer to start to prototype ideas, see how things work together, and attempt to bring their own ideas to life. For someone who has no industry experience, modding and private projects are the way you have to differentiate yourself, and show you have the skills to get the job done.
After being passionate enough to do work on your own, the next most important thing is understanding what makes a good game from a bad game. If your interest is shooters, what sorts of things set one aside from another? Why is Call of Duty 4 awesome, and random misc. shooter that sold 100k copies considered a failure. What about Halo 3 makes people play the MP aspect obsessively. Start by asking the questions, and then go through the mental exercises of breaking them down. There's no one formula that makes great games great. But there are common elements that make all games good or bad. That is the first part of understanding. If you're a relatively intelligent person, once you can understand the questions you need to ask, as well as the answers, you'll start to understand how to build good games from nothing.
Read everything you can. Start with Jesse's book. Look for websites, get involved with online communities that are passionate about modding and indie projects. Design is both an art and a science. There is no one path, but there are commonalities that provide cohesion to the overall profession. But when you're reading, remember those guys dont' have all the answers either. It's most more ways of looking at things that in turn will allow you to better breakdown your own work into understandable and implementable chunks. One word of advice though: start with small scope ideas and work up from there. A great game is made up of usually just a few core, simple conceits that come together to make a great experience when finally wrapped in graphics, FX and audio.
Best of luck. And ignore the haters - find your own passion. I've been making games for over 10 years now, after years at places like Intel, Hewlett Packard and Microsoft that drained my soul. It's exhausting at times, but you're making something your passionate about (hopefully). Don't do this thinking you'll get rich. If that's your goal, become an investment banker and then once you've swindled the public for 10 years, then start your own game company.
Exactly. There are always incredulous responses to this kind of challenge. Everything is impossible. Until it's not anymore. That's research, that's progress. There's no better way to get people to innovate on crazy shit then to tell them it's almost impossible.