But, using your analogy and the margins other people have pointed out who have worked in theatres, You are selling your Widgets at $2, and You distribute them to the store for $1.60 (20% markup for theatres). This is best case scenario for the theatre, and the movie would have to make $125 million to break even. (being a $100 million budget film). However, As it has been pointed out, many theatres run big budget films for free, and they make all of their money off of concessions.
So I sell my Widget that costs $1 to make to the store for $2, and they sell it for $2, because my widget is so amazing it gets people into their store, and they make the profit selling other goods.
Let me explain it for those of you who didn't play the game.
Instead of aliens or supersoldiers/science-gone-wrong as a basis for a shooter (99.5% of shooters that exist are one of these two premises), Bioshock uses Objectivism (Rand's Philosophy) as a basis for the story. Pretty damn daring to explore an economic/philosophy in a video game. The game presupposes that taking Objectivism to it's full potential leads only to collapse and failure. Of course, we don't see this in the game, we just see the aftermath of what happens when man's potential is FULLY exploited. Seeing the collapse of Rapture (the underwater city you explore in bioshock) has it's own interesting aspects that were not explored by Bioshock.
I have a sinking feeling this is the game that everyone will point to in the future to show what exactly is wrong with sequels. No matter how technically competent the game is, exploring the same environment, same philisophical questions, and (from what i've seen) fighting the same splicer enemies is not a sequel. It's an expansion pack. Ctrl-X "Big Daddy" Ctrl-V "Big Sister".
Personally, I would have loved to have seen a real prequel, where you see an Ayn Randian utopia slowly fall apart, where you help businessmen reach their highest potential, which eventually leads to the collapse of rapture. That's an interesting story to tell, and leads right into Bioshock. But no, the game will start with the first crazy splicer you have to kill, and it will be a splicer run and gun.
I hope I'm wrong about this, but from what i've seen, I doubt I am.
I have a sneaking feeling that Shipping costs are going to drop approximately 7% of the entire cost on a lot of purchases. We all know that those shipping costs have built in wiggle room, now we'll start seeing retailers reduce them as to not cause sticker shock.
If a bank is allowed to claim a AAA mortgage backed security is part of their reserve, then lends out 4 times the value of said security, they have in fact created money out of nothing.
Wrong. In simpler terms, when a bank creates a house loan, it is NOT creating money. It's risk management and creating a value for risk/investment and future value of the money invested.
I worked at a local cd/game shop a few years back, and we had console demo stations where we would put in the most current release for folks to try out. When we switched out the games and sold the opened copy, we would inform the buyer that because the game was already opened, they couldn't return the game for anything except the same game (if there were scratches or anything), which we had to do by law, opened copies cannot be returned for cash (thanks DMCA!) So if they were buying it for a gift or something, we would give them an un-opened copy. If they raised a fit and we only had the opened copy, we'd give them the "local" discount which was like $2. And, if they were still reticent about buying a used copy, we'd mark their receipt to note that they had bought an opened copy so there wouldn't be ANY problem with a return. As long as people know what they are buying, there isn't a problem with such a practice. If Gamestop isn't telling people these opened games are non-refundable, then there's a problem, but otherwise, this is a non issue.
Although his ratings were less than 1/6th Bill O'Reilly, who shared the same time slot, Donahue was the highest rated show on MSNBC at the time it was canceled, managing to beat out Chris Matthews' "Hardball" in the ratings. Soon after the show's cancellation AllYourTV.com reported it had received a copy of an internal NBC memo that stated Donahue should be fired because he would be a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war".
This is the second POTUS/DOJ to give the People the finger.
Sir, I do believe you are off by a few.
Nixon - Watergate
Regan - Iran/Contra
Clinton - Perjury
then Your two.., and these are just since the 70's, and I might have missed a couple even then. I'm just surprised that Presidents have so consistantly found new and exciting ways to give us the finger, except obama, he's just recycling bush's old jokes.
Please put your strawmen away before they get burned. The only side that seems to call obama the "chosen one" are republicans. *MOST* Democrats have no illusions that Obama's Wiretapping votes and stance on Afghanistan have been the weak points. It was a hell of a lot better than Stay the Course McCain. So please, worship the guy all you want, but the rest of us will be realistic about what a politician is.
while Bush was in office, people criticized him on a constant basis... you didn't risk the vitriol, public shunning and public crucifixion
That's the funniest part of your post. I believe Phil Donahue lost his job on TV because he wasn't pro-bush/war enough. There were reports of people with Anti-Bush shirts and bumper stickers being pulled over by police. Over the past few weeks, Obama's been called everything from the anti-christ to a fascist, and that's just on Fox news. They seem to be doing just fine.
Go watch Jon Stewarts shown on Tuesday night (apr 7) the middle section, it's a little history lesson for you.
AFAIR, someone tracked down the lead designer at GDC and he said something to the effect that he was really excited about what they are working on, but he couldn't say anything without pissing off Sony. There's still just the one teaser image from a year ago (sewer cover with a chain), but many people believe that E3 will finally have some information about it.
A feature that should've been included in the initial release? This is highway robbery. The micro-payment system is worthless if a game worth $40 ends up costing $65 in $5 denominations.
Really? Slayer vs. mode should've been included in a Resident Evil game? Hardly. I don't think this will be a high selling DLC. I have a feeling most people don't want the anachronistic controls applied to deathmatch. This isn't robbery. Capcom is not going to disable your RE5 unless you buy the vs. mode. This is Entirely Optional! The game only costs you $65 if you buy all the DLC. I don't remember this kind of Outrage over RE4 re-releasing on the PS2 with new modes and a new weapon. I don't remember anyone complaining about the Wii RE4 re-release either with new controls. Those are the Pre-DLC version of add-on packs. For those who bought the gamecube version, and then the Wii version, RE4 was a $70 game.
I think they should have given out 60 action points for free. 30 just isn't enough to even do any sort of exploring. The one dungeon I found was a 19 step dungeon, and there's just something about getting halfway through it and being forced to quit that left a bad taste in my mouth. I know they are trying to entice me to pay for points, but 30 is sort of silly. Unless someone pays for points, nobody will really know if it's good or not for another couple weeks.
Note Hulu is owned and directed by media conglomerates, it's not some plucky independent.
Plucky Independants in media, especially films and TV, exist on the backs of the giant conglomerates. Look at Steam, just as an example. If you tried steam without mainstream games, and only put up games like The Path, or i-Fluid or World of Goo, Steam would have died a long time ago. The more mainstream content shoulders the cost, the more networks are able and willing to support smaller, more daring shows. I agree that letting media consolidation run rampant is never good, but because Hulu exists, i'd expect a smaller, independant version to pop up as a sister site, because frankly, YouTube doesn't cut it for content distribution.
I'd rather a simple purchase/rent model myself
And you still can, but i'll be damned if i ever pay $1.99 for 22 minutes of The Daily Show. However, we're talking about Free content here. For that, I'd rather the ability to watch when I want, where I want, with fewer commercials and no cable TV bill, the more networks sign on for this, the better.
You seem to be referring to ABC's horrific website streaming model, which often brings up a separate website to show you the ad, and then makes you click after a determined amount of time to start the show again. Not only that, it also resizes your fullscreen and the volume level is never consistant. Sounds like ABC needs to join up with Hulu to avoid the warnings you are giving them. I don't know of a way to block Hulu's ads, and frankly, I don't care to, considering most of the ads are under 30 seconds, and I WANT internet tv to succeed.
Given that 90% of the people I know still use IE, or Firefox without Adblock, I don't think that ad blocking in streaming videos is much of a concern yet.
Most of my friends buy dvd's for the following reasons
1) Kids dvd's so they can show it over and over again anywhere (car, kids room, etc)
2) their *favorite* dvd, even if they never actually watch the thing
3) Unable to get the movie through rental/torrent/streaming etc. so they are forced to buy it
Other than that, my friends stream or rent all other dvd's, leading most of their dvd collections to be under 150.
A la carte Television will only arrive when it's available same day/day after for streaming, regardless of whether or not you get to keep it, and movie a la carte will only arrive when the majority of new releases are available the same Month as the dvd release, at a quality on Par with Netflix's HD streaming, with an option to buy a DRM free HD quality version for $10. This will kill dvd sales, and blu-ray will pick up the slack for all of the people who want to own the movie in eye-bleeding quality.
The justification for the veto was 2 fold: first, fear of first amendment challenges in courts, and secondly, Utah is a "family friendly" state, where many places advertise how family friendly they are. With legislation like this, it makes it so any retailer who sells movies/games could no longer advertise they are family friendly, due to fear of sting operations that might end up taking them to court. All around, a stupid, stupid law.
Too bad you'll only be watching a crappy Youtube Quality video (an HD Youtube quality if your pipe is big enough) of those high rez textures. If you are worried about 640p vs 720p vs 1080p, move along, this isn't the console you're looking for.
But MMO's are not the graphics heavy/processing heavy games that this cloud computing idea is focusing on. This is the major flaw in this idea, any RPG or similar style game that usually doesn't require twitch reflexes is usually not graphics heavy (most of the time). The games that really need a high level machine (over $500) are mostly FPS or are based on twitch gameplay, which would seem to be unplayable on this service.
Most companies that are failing now did not verify that they were Insuring anything, they'd get phonecalls asking for insurance against different products, but never verified that the company asking for the insurance owned the product, therefore, AIG and similar companies became gambling houses. This wasn't too dangerous in itself, except they were betting against a field where 20% of the horses had broken legs and heart problems.
Piloting the ship would also make sense for the exploration/barren planet garbage of the first game. If you give me a destination planet, it damn well better have more than a single outpost with 20 people in it. However, if I'm flying though space and find an uncharted planet in some backwater galaxy, having a few people there makes sense in the lore.
Slashdot Mirror
But, using your analogy and the margins other people have pointed out who have worked in theatres, You are selling your Widgets at $2, and You distribute them to the store for $1.60 (20% markup for theatres). This is best case scenario for the theatre, and the movie would have to make $125 million to break even. (being a $100 million budget film). However, As it has been pointed out, many theatres run big budget films for free, and they make all of their money off of concessions.
So I sell my Widget that costs $1 to make to the store for $2, and they sell it for $2, because my widget is so amazing it gets people into their store, and they make the profit selling other goods.
Let me explain it for those of you who didn't play the game.
Instead of aliens or supersoldiers/science-gone-wrong as a basis for a shooter (99.5% of shooters that exist are one of these two premises), Bioshock uses Objectivism (Rand's Philosophy) as a basis for the story. Pretty damn daring to explore an economic/philosophy in a video game. The game presupposes that taking Objectivism to it's full potential leads only to collapse and failure. Of course, we don't see this in the game, we just see the aftermath of what happens when man's potential is FULLY exploited. Seeing the collapse of Rapture (the underwater city you explore in bioshock) has it's own interesting aspects that were not explored by Bioshock.
I have a sinking feeling this is the game that everyone will point to in the future to show what exactly is wrong with sequels. No matter how technically competent the game is, exploring the same environment, same philisophical questions, and (from what i've seen) fighting the same splicer enemies is not a sequel. It's an expansion pack. Ctrl-X "Big Daddy" Ctrl-V "Big Sister".
Personally, I would have loved to have seen a real prequel, where you see an Ayn Randian utopia slowly fall apart, where you help businessmen reach their highest potential, which eventually leads to the collapse of rapture. That's an interesting story to tell, and leads right into Bioshock. But no, the game will start with the first crazy splicer you have to kill, and it will be a splicer run and gun.
I hope I'm wrong about this, but from what i've seen, I doubt I am.
I just think people are mad because they feel like they're paying for a BMW, when they're driving a Chevette.
I have a sneaking feeling that Shipping costs are going to drop approximately 7% of the entire cost on a lot of purchases. We all know that those shipping costs have built in wiggle room, now we'll start seeing retailers reduce them as to not cause sticker shock.
Wrong. In simpler terms, when a bank creates a house loan, it is NOT creating money. It's risk management and creating a value for risk/investment and future value of the money invested.
I worked at a local cd/game shop a few years back, and we had console demo stations where we would put in the most current release for folks to try out. When we switched out the games and sold the opened copy, we would inform the buyer that because the game was already opened, they couldn't return the game for anything except the same game (if there were scratches or anything), which we had to do by law, opened copies cannot be returned for cash (thanks DMCA!) So if they were buying it for a gift or something, we would give them an un-opened copy. If they raised a fit and we only had the opened copy, we'd give them the "local" discount which was like $2. And, if they were still reticent about buying a used copy, we'd mark their receipt to note that they had bought an opened copy so there wouldn't be ANY problem with a return. As long as people know what they are buying, there isn't a problem with such a practice. If Gamestop isn't telling people these opened games are non-refundable, then there's a problem, but otherwise, this is a non issue.
Yep, mccain would have been exactly the same as Obama, I guess you're right. Guess I should have voted for him.
Sir, I do believe you are off by a few.
Nixon - Watergate
Regan - Iran/Contra
Clinton - Perjury
then Your two.., and these are just since the 70's, and I might have missed a couple even then. I'm just surprised that Presidents have so consistantly found new and exciting ways to give us the finger, except obama, he's just recycling bush's old jokes.
What a simplistic, and unapplicable analogy. Thanks /.
That's the funniest part of your post. I believe Phil Donahue lost his job on TV because he wasn't pro-bush/war enough. There were reports of people with Anti-Bush shirts and bumper stickers being pulled over by police. Over the past few weeks, Obama's been called everything from the anti-christ to a fascist, and that's just on Fox news. They seem to be doing just fine.
Go watch Jon Stewarts shown on Tuesday night (apr 7) the middle section, it's a little history lesson for you.
AFAIR, someone tracked down the lead designer at GDC and he said something to the effect that he was really excited about what they are working on, but he couldn't say anything without pissing off Sony. There's still just the one teaser image from a year ago (sewer cover with a chain), but many people believe that E3 will finally have some information about it.
Really? Slayer vs. mode should've been included in a Resident Evil game? Hardly. I don't think this will be a high selling DLC. I have a feeling most people don't want the anachronistic controls applied to deathmatch. This isn't robbery. Capcom is not going to disable your RE5 unless you buy the vs. mode. This is Entirely Optional! The game only costs you $65 if you buy all the DLC. I don't remember this kind of Outrage over RE4 re-releasing on the PS2 with new modes and a new weapon. I don't remember anyone complaining about the Wii RE4 re-release either with new controls. Those are the Pre-DLC version of add-on packs. For those who bought the gamecube version, and then the Wii version, RE4 was a $70 game.
I think they should have given out 60 action points for free. 30 just isn't enough to even do any sort of exploring. The one dungeon I found was a 19 step dungeon, and there's just something about getting halfway through it and being forced to quit that left a bad taste in my mouth. I know they are trying to entice me to pay for points, but 30 is sort of silly. Unless someone pays for points, nobody will really know if it's good or not for another couple weeks.
Can slashdot PLEASE implement a "-1 Missed the April Fool's Day Joke" Moderation option?
Plucky Independants in media, especially films and TV, exist on the backs of the giant conglomerates. Look at Steam, just as an example. If you tried steam without mainstream games, and only put up games like The Path, or i-Fluid or World of Goo, Steam would have died a long time ago. The more mainstream content shoulders the cost, the more networks are able and willing to support smaller, more daring shows. I agree that letting media consolidation run rampant is never good, but because Hulu exists, i'd expect a smaller, independant version to pop up as a sister site, because frankly, YouTube doesn't cut it for content distribution.
And you still can, but i'll be damned if i ever pay $1.99 for 22 minutes of The Daily Show. However, we're talking about Free content here. For that, I'd rather the ability to watch when I want, where I want, with fewer commercials and no cable TV bill, the more networks sign on for this, the better.
You seem to be referring to ABC's horrific website streaming model, which often brings up a separate website to show you the ad, and then makes you click after a determined amount of time to start the show again. Not only that, it also resizes your fullscreen and the volume level is never consistant. Sounds like ABC needs to join up with Hulu to avoid the warnings you are giving them. I don't know of a way to block Hulu's ads, and frankly, I don't care to, considering most of the ads are under 30 seconds, and I WANT internet tv to succeed.
Given that 90% of the people I know still use IE, or Firefox without Adblock, I don't think that ad blocking in streaming videos is much of a concern yet.
Most of my friends buy dvd's for the following reasons
1) Kids dvd's so they can show it over and over again anywhere (car, kids room, etc)
2) their *favorite* dvd, even if they never actually watch the thing
3) Unable to get the movie through rental/torrent/streaming etc. so they are forced to buy it
Other than that, my friends stream or rent all other dvd's, leading most of their dvd collections to be under 150.
A la carte Television will only arrive when it's available same day/day after for streaming, regardless of whether or not you get to keep it, and movie a la carte will only arrive when the majority of new releases are available the same Month as the dvd release, at a quality on Par with Netflix's HD streaming, with an option to buy a DRM free HD quality version for $10. This will kill dvd sales, and blu-ray will pick up the slack for all of the people who want to own the movie in eye-bleeding quality.
The justification for the veto was 2 fold: first, fear of first amendment challenges in courts, and secondly, Utah is a "family friendly" state, where many places advertise how family friendly they are. With legislation like this, it makes it so any retailer who sells movies/games could no longer advertise they are family friendly, due to fear of sting operations that might end up taking them to court. All around, a stupid, stupid law.
Too bad you'll only be watching a crappy Youtube Quality video (an HD Youtube quality if your pipe is big enough) of those high rez textures. If you are worried about 640p vs 720p vs 1080p, move along, this isn't the console you're looking for.
But MMO's are not the graphics heavy/processing heavy games that this cloud computing idea is focusing on. This is the major flaw in this idea, any RPG or similar style game that usually doesn't require twitch reflexes is usually not graphics heavy (most of the time). The games that really need a high level machine (over $500) are mostly FPS or are based on twitch gameplay, which would seem to be unplayable on this service.
Most companies that are failing now did not verify that they were Insuring anything, they'd get phonecalls asking for insurance against different products, but never verified that the company asking for the insurance owned the product, therefore, AIG and similar companies became gambling houses. This wasn't too dangerous in itself, except they were betting against a field where 20% of the horses had broken legs and heart problems.
Fixed that for you. It was in the late 70's where inflation became a problem and the feds had to increase interest rates to control it.
Piloting the ship would also make sense for the exploration/barren planet garbage of the first game. If you give me a destination planet, it damn well better have more than a single outpost with 20 people in it. However, if I'm flying though space and find an uncharted planet in some backwater galaxy, having a few people there makes sense in the lore.