Thank you, for saying what I think most people are not aware of. If you could be modded +6 I would do it in an instant.
I am currently going through 3rd year in an engineering school in Canada. We are known to be the best eng school in Canada, and also known to be the toughest, though I perceive this as true for most engineering schools that I have seen.
An engineering degree is no joke. For us 60h work weeks are quite common. Where with other degrees occasional all-nighters are required, for us guys in engineering it's a weekly affair, if not more often. It's crunch time all the time, and most of us learn to take our relaxation like timed medical doses, giving us just enough to move on and stay sane, but not so much that we slack off.
My classes routinely average under 40% going into the final, and curving on the marks are never quite guaranteed. Meet an unlucky prof and 60% of the class gets to repeat the course. Couple that with a pretty hardline fail policy and you've got a lot of people on the edge.
Most of us in engineering dislike the system. We would rather extend our degrees and spend more time in school than dealing with this virtual gulag. Unfortunately there is a lot of "well in my day we did the same thing" thinking going on in the administration which perpetuates this philosophy. This false engineer's pride that there's something *good* about these living and working conditions. Hell, some of the students believe it too - if you don't work like a dog for 60-80h a week you're not a *worthy* engineer. Bullshit of that sort.
All of the engineering students I've met have developed some psychological curiosity or another. I hesitate to call them illnesses, but everyone has developed their own odd psychological defense mechanism to deal with the crushing stress, which is also why many engineers come off as such odd people. It's no surprise to me that one of them would snap and take out their rage like this.
See, your idea works if you can prevent every crazy person from getting a gun. If *nobody* has a gun, everything is great, we all live in harmony, all that other crap. Since obviously that is impossible, as these crazies tend to get their guns illegally, my (or rather the other poster's) idea is the only one of the two that will work.
QED?
Our way the crazy guy only manages to kill 3 or 4 people (if that!) before someone else shoots him. Your way, every victim doesn't have a gun, and the only people who will have guns are the crazies who are, well, crazy enough to go through the trouble to get one illegally!
Mod parent up. This is incredibly true and immediately visible on my Xbox 360. Sometimes I connect my iPod to it, and it takes *forever* for the device to reconstruct the library on the Xbox interface. The speediness and responsiveness of the iPod is at least partially due to the fact that the system has a highly device-optimized database that's guaranteed to be there.
Theoretically true, but when's the last time iTunes failed on you? For me, never. I see it like a manual/automatic shift thing. Some people prefer to drive stick, because it gives them more control. For some of these people they truly need/prefer this level of control, others are just flaunting their ability to drive stick (Slashdot demographic anyone?). Some of us prefer to drive auto, because our point is to get to the destination, and the whole bit about driving there is rather irrelevant to us.
That's something I never quite got, the iPod hate. A friend of mine recently introduced me to his Cowon D2, which is a very slick piece of hardware: 52h battery life on music, 10h on video, smaller than an iPod and has a touch screen to boot. Why wasn't I sold immediately?
Because it meant the endless tedium of synchronizing my music with the god-awful "drag into Explorer" (or in my case, "drag into Finder") interface. The whole explorer drag-drop thing was fine when our music players were
The D2 also promised great things like album covers and even lyrics (which actually is a sweet feature), but both of which required you to maintain your own music library with their proprietary software - a bit of an attempt at cloning iTunes, except the software wasn't nearly slick enough to take over as my primary media player app - which would mean I'd still have to maintain two parallel libraries.
I keep explaining this to people: the secret of iPod's success is not only its marketing, but that it rolls the entire experience together from end to end. You play your music, download your music, play your videos, download your videos all from the same spot. The software provides all the features you need - album covers for example, and it also syncs automatically with your portable player. Slick.
I enjoy the end-to-end experience so much that even a clearly superior piece of hardware like the Cowon D2 has not converted me.
Wikipedia is not the only unreliable source of information out there. Hell, blocking it risks creating an atmosphere where students become complacent and trust every source they come across - after all, everything they're exposed to has already been vetted by an external body!
No, we need to teach students how to recognize good sources and bad sources, how to research, and what citation means. Failure to do so will just create yet another generation of research-i-tards that can't find information to save their life.
It doesn't have to. The OS X window manager does notification for redraw, it's just that you as the application do not have to worry about the details of a redraw like occlusion, clipping, and transparency - just that you have to redraw.
It also gives the OS a lot of leeway for cool tricks, like OS X and Expose, where it can do thumbnails of each window.
Xbox Live is nothing like any sort of PC multiplayer gaming. We're talking about a service that integrates user preferences, statuses, and *everything* between *all* games. This is impossible on the PC for obvious reasons, but in the MS was still the first to do it. We're also talking about the near-total elimination of server browsers, the development of an entirely novel ranking system that ensures matchmaking puts you only with similarly skilled players... The list goes on. While multiplayer existed before Xbox Live, it is absolutely of no doubt that XBL made a ridiculously number of innovations that were until then virtually unseen.
That's not a fair statement to make. While MS has done their fair share of "embrace, extend, extinguish", what we've seen traditionally with MS's hardware divisions is anything but that.
Xbox: Single-handedly invents modern multiplay on the console. Still the leading online service that is leading in every way to the competing PS3 and Wii. There was no service for MS to copy from, and much of what they did is now being copied by Sony and Nintendo!
Even Zune 1.0 had innovative features that were anything but copying, albeit the execution was terribly flawed. I was very excited about the Zune - sending songs to your friends over WiFi, buying via WiFi, synching via WiFi... All that good stuff that, for some bone-headed reason was either terribly restrictive or simply didn't make it in. This is also why I'm rooting for the Zune 2.0 - there is so much potential there to make something that'd replace my current iPod.
In the end the consumers win. If MS manages to make something that can stand up to the iPod, great, more choice for me as a consumer.
Funny how DRM isn't killing the iPod, and that MS is moving towards DRM-less now that Apple's made the first move. Sure, MS isn't being terribly original here, but DRM is really the least of their concerns.
360 is still has, by leaps and bounds, a far larger installed base than any of the other next-gen consoles. Discounting the Wii (which services a different market entirely), the 360 is selling like hotcakes in comparison to the other major competing next-gen console.
Smartphones are far from flops. Blackberry's market share is being eaten away ever so steadily by Win-Mobile devices. It's not an avalanche victory, but it is going well for MS nonetheless.
For MS's failures, they are getting quite a few things right. And this is coming from me, a die-hard Apple user.
Bring it on I say. MS has shown that they can learn from their mistakes. The difference between the Xbox and 360 being a prime example. MS has the money to burn to keep making mistakes and learning from them. If that means they *eventually* make an iPod killer, so be it. The market needs more competing products, not less.
Part of the problem is that websites have zero clue what they're doing when they're laying out the page. They put the ads in the largest, most obtrusive places in an attempt to gain eye-time, but all it does is piss off the user.
Look at a print magazine. Most of them have remarkably good layout - ads are clearly ads, and text flows around the ads naturally. The site in TFA has horrifying ads that break the flow of the article and send your mind into unnatural gymnastics trying to follow along.
Ads and web content can coexist peacefully, but not until webmasters realize that layout is not just a 5-minute job in Dreamweaver, but is rather a full-time job that requires real qualifications and real training.
That's where we disagree. I have no trouble that console gamers will prefer to use 3D apps to do their online socialization and chatting. After all, MSN and Gears of War are not very multi-taskable, so therefore it's logical to presume that Xbox, PS3, Wii, or whatever console users will be more interested in a "dedicated" chat experience.
I doubt PC-IM will ever move there though. I enjoy chatting with my friends while working, while surfing, while doing just about anything. I enjoy doing it while at the airport, on a train, or simply in a quiet corner of a conference hall during some downtime. I have zero interest in 3D apps that suck up battery, CPU, and demand my full and undivided attention and robs me of my ability to multitask. I know most of my friends, including the younger ones still in high school, enjoy chatting while surfing or listening to music. Of the PC market I see proportionally *very very* few people who actually desire 3D chat. A cool niche market perhaps, but will never be mainstream.
Not sure which world you live in. In my world my coworkers, friends, and family all use standard IM clients. In fact I don't know a single person that uses IMVU or Second Life. Most of us prefer to be productive (or actively goofing off doing something else) while we chat.
As more support, I was recently tasked to compare Dell laptops vs. a MacBook. Suffice to say, Dell doesn't sell anything that includes Bluetooth *and* integrated webcams. This is a classic comparison that many have brought up, and many more have tried to skew. PC users tend to remove features as "unnecessary" to get the Dell's price down. But if you leave nothing out and do a feature-to-feature build of both machines, the Mac comes out as equal, if not cheaper.
Oh yes, the classic "if things were cheaper..." argument:)
If only cigarettes were cheaper, then I wouldn't have to rob the convenience store as often, wouldn't you agree?:D
First off, HL2 is $30 USD on Steam. This I think is a reasonable price for the game. Furthermore, the mere presence of online distribution eliminates the publishing middleman, allowing us cheaper prices without damaging developer profitability. If HL2 lasts 30 hours, how do you object to paying $1 per hour for entertainment? Better yet, even if HL2 costs $60, that's still $2/hr. You pay more than that to sit in a movie theatre listening to the teens yak on their cell phones.
As a game dev I also heartily object to the following statement:
If you think that the price of 20 euros is illogical, then you should consider that Valve spent 6 years rebuilding the game twice. Why should I have to pay for Valve's engineers having fun and not doing their jobs? Half Life 1 had more content and more substance, and it was delivered in far less time.
First off, are you a game developer? Do you have *any* experience doing the things that we do? That statement reeks of ignorance and lack of knowledge of what it is that we do. I congratulate Valve for doing things right and making a great game instead of pushing another pile of junk out onto a market that's already saturated with crap games. Blizzard did the same with Starcraft - what started as a quick-and-dirty Warcraft clone turned into one of the greatest RTS games of all time, and this because they were willing to bite the bullet, invest a LOT more in dev time to make sure things were done right.
"Having fun" and "not doing their jobs"? Where in the world do you get off on that? What evidence do you have to say that Valve's guys weren't doing their jobs and were goofing off this whole time, thus causing the infamous delay? I suppose if a car company discovers a critical flaw in one of their vehicles and delays its release by a couple months, you'd also cry foul and assert that *those* engineers aren't doing their jobs either eh? You complain about crappy ripoff games with no originality, and then you have the gall to complain also when someone stands up and does the right thing instead? Sheesh.
Why should we buy them, just for playing out 10 minutes?
Then don't buy them. But of course, that rule comes with another one that says: if you don't buy it, then don't play it. It's a pretty simple rule to follow, no? I agree there are an awful lot of crap match-3 casual games out there that aren't worth the money they're charging for it, but that's also why I don't play them. Somebody out there might find the game to be absolute genius, and if so, good for them, this is how the industry works. If you find yourself pirating it, then clearly it's worth something to you, in which case you'd be a dirty liar for asserting that those games aren't worth even 1 EUR.
yet the movie industry does not say that they are about to collapse due to piracy
They don't? That's funny... I could've sworn...:P
Did I also mention the fact that you pay $10 to get into a movie? Regardless of DVD sales, the majority of a film's profits are made at the box office while the movie is still in theatres. Imagine the game industry on a similar model: pay $10 during the first 4 weeks of a game's release to play the game for 3 hours. Then when the game gets old and nobody wants to play it anymore, you can buy it for $15. Sound good to you?
This is where I actually like Steam. Steam has a pretty good (not perfect) offline mode, where previously verified games can run without an active connection. This has been useful numerous times for me.
And why would they make Steam cross-platform? To support the massive gaming scene that's just bursting at the seams on Mac OSX? Or even more laughably, on Linux? It's an awful lot of effort to service so few consumers.
I used to be a huge critic of Steam and its related services, but I've warmed up to the idea over time.
As a softdev (and a small-time indie game dev) I have a hard time justifying piracy, and since I've made the moral choice to buy the software I use, it's hit my pocketbooks pretty hard, but it's a decision I am glad to live with. Most of my colleagues are not so conscious, I'm afraid, and most would buy a PC game if it's CD-key locked and the game was all about multiplayer (CS, BF2, etc), but almost none would ever buy a singleplayer game.
In other words, the concept that developers should just intrinsically *trust* the gamer to be moral and buy the game is hogwash. There may be a number of gamers like myself who strive to pirate as little as possible (if at all), but the majority of the world isn't so dev-friendly. I welcome (legal and reasonable) ways to protect developer content.
Additionally, I'm also a huge singleplayer gamer. I loved games like Deus Ex, Half-Life, and the new C&C3, which I bought mostly for the campaign mode (and it is excellent, btw). Many developers are eschewing singleplayer games in favour of multiplayer-only games, due to the fact that the multiplayer-ness easily lends itself to better piracy protection. This leaves gamers like me out in the cold. It is also why I believe, despite the evils of the technology, we must live with it if we are to see more singleplayer content being developed in this world.
1 - Actual songs. Guitar Hero is only 50% about the game, the other 50% is the sheer fun factor of playing some great songs. I was never able to get into Guitar Freak's pseudo-electronica... It just didn't fit with the guitar thing.
2 - 3 vs. 5 frets. This is huge. Guitar Freaks was sometimes too easy because of the fact that your fingers never truly move.
3 - Better interface. The bottom-to-top scrolling lines got confusing when the game was going real fast. Guitar Hero's top-to-bottom scrolling with bigger icons and a "fade in" made the notes much easier to hit and less confusing to play.
4 - C'mon, who doesn't want to play Free Bird?
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you, for saying what I think most people are not aware of. If you could be modded +6 I would do it in an instant.
I am currently going through 3rd year in an engineering school in Canada. We are known to be the best eng school in Canada, and also known to be the toughest, though I perceive this as true for most engineering schools that I have seen.
An engineering degree is no joke. For us 60h work weeks are quite common. Where with other degrees occasional all-nighters are required, for us guys in engineering it's a weekly affair, if not more often. It's crunch time all the time, and most of us learn to take our relaxation like timed medical doses, giving us just enough to move on and stay sane, but not so much that we slack off.
My classes routinely average under 40% going into the final, and curving on the marks are never quite guaranteed. Meet an unlucky prof and 60% of the class gets to repeat the course. Couple that with a pretty hardline fail policy and you've got a lot of people on the edge.
Most of us in engineering dislike the system. We would rather extend our degrees and spend more time in school than dealing with this virtual gulag. Unfortunately there is a lot of "well in my day we did the same thing" thinking going on in the administration which perpetuates this philosophy. This false engineer's pride that there's something *good* about these living and working conditions. Hell, some of the students believe it too - if you don't work like a dog for 60-80h a week you're not a *worthy* engineer. Bullshit of that sort.
All of the engineering students I've met have developed some psychological curiosity or another. I hesitate to call them illnesses, but everyone has developed their own odd psychological defense mechanism to deal with the crushing stress, which is also why many engineers come off as such odd people. It's no surprise to me that one of them would snap and take out their rage like this.
See, your idea works if you can prevent every crazy person from getting a gun. If *nobody* has a gun, everything is great, we all live in harmony, all that other crap. Since obviously that is impossible, as these crazies tend to get their guns illegally, my (or rather the other poster's) idea is the only one of the two that will work.
QED?
Our way the crazy guy only manages to kill 3 or 4 people (if that!) before someone else shoots him. Your way, every victim doesn't have a gun, and the only people who will have guns are the crazies who are, well, crazy enough to go through the trouble to get one illegally!
Mod parent up. This is incredibly true and immediately visible on my Xbox 360. Sometimes I connect my iPod to it, and it takes *forever* for the device to reconstruct the library on the Xbox interface. The speediness and responsiveness of the iPod is at least partially due to the fact that the system has a highly device-optimized database that's guaranteed to be there.
Theoretically true, but when's the last time iTunes failed on you? For me, never. I see it like a manual/automatic shift thing. Some people prefer to drive stick, because it gives them more control. For some of these people they truly need/prefer this level of control, others are just flaunting their ability to drive stick (Slashdot demographic anyone?). Some of us prefer to drive auto, because our point is to get to the destination, and the whole bit about driving there is rather irrelevant to us.
That's something I never quite got, the iPod hate. A friend of mine recently introduced me to his Cowon D2, which is a very slick piece of hardware: 52h battery life on music, 10h on video, smaller than an iPod and has a touch screen to boot. Why wasn't I sold immediately?
Because it meant the endless tedium of synchronizing my music with the god-awful "drag into Explorer" (or in my case, "drag into Finder") interface. The whole explorer drag-drop thing was fine when our music players were
The D2 also promised great things like album covers and even lyrics (which actually is a sweet feature), but both of which required you to maintain your own music library with their proprietary software - a bit of an attempt at cloning iTunes, except the software wasn't nearly slick enough to take over as my primary media player app - which would mean I'd still have to maintain two parallel libraries.
I keep explaining this to people: the secret of iPod's success is not only its marketing, but that it rolls the entire experience together from end to end. You play your music, download your music, play your videos, download your videos all from the same spot. The software provides all the features you need - album covers for example, and it also syncs automatically with your portable player. Slick.
I enjoy the end-to-end experience so much that even a clearly superior piece of hardware like the Cowon D2 has not converted me.
Wikipedia is not the only unreliable source of information out there. Hell, blocking it risks creating an atmosphere where students become complacent and trust every source they come across - after all, everything they're exposed to has already been vetted by an external body!
No, we need to teach students how to recognize good sources and bad sources, how to research, and what citation means. Failure to do so will just create yet another generation of research-i-tards that can't find information to save their life.
It doesn't have to. The OS X window manager does notification for redraw, it's just that you as the application do not have to worry about the details of a redraw like occlusion, clipping, and transparency - just that you have to redraw.
It also gives the OS a lot of leeway for cool tricks, like OS X and Expose, where it can do thumbnails of each window.
Correction: Oblivion + Fallout + Stolen Content from Other Games + Way Too Many Years = S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
Oh yes, that quotation has been altered and changed to death, really. But nonetheless, it speaks true.
"First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up,
because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up,
because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left
to speak up for me."
- Pastor Martin Niemöller
Xbox Live is nothing like any sort of PC multiplayer gaming. We're talking about a service that integrates user preferences, statuses, and *everything* between *all* games. This is impossible on the PC for obvious reasons, but in the MS was still the first to do it. We're also talking about the near-total elimination of server browsers, the development of an entirely novel ranking system that ensures matchmaking puts you only with similarly skilled players... The list goes on. While multiplayer existed before Xbox Live, it is absolutely of no doubt that XBL made a ridiculously number of innovations that were until then virtually unseen.
Numbers please, otherwise you're just trolling. Anecdotal blogosphere "evidence" is worse than none at all.
That's not a fair statement to make. While MS has done their fair share of "embrace, extend, extinguish", what we've seen traditionally with MS's hardware divisions is anything but that.
Xbox: Single-handedly invents modern multiplay on the console. Still the leading online service that is leading in every way to the competing PS3 and Wii. There was no service for MS to copy from, and much of what they did is now being copied by Sony and Nintendo!
Even Zune 1.0 had innovative features that were anything but copying, albeit the execution was terribly flawed. I was very excited about the Zune - sending songs to your friends over WiFi, buying via WiFi, synching via WiFi... All that good stuff that, for some bone-headed reason was either terribly restrictive or simply didn't make it in. This is also why I'm rooting for the Zune 2.0 - there is so much potential there to make something that'd replace my current iPod.
In the end the consumers win. If MS manages to make something that can stand up to the iPod, great, more choice for me as a consumer.
Funny how DRM isn't killing the iPod, and that MS is moving towards DRM-less now that Apple's made the first move. Sure, MS isn't being terribly original here, but DRM is really the least of their concerns.
360 is still has, by leaps and bounds, a far larger installed base than any of the other next-gen consoles. Discounting the Wii (which services a different market entirely), the 360 is selling like hotcakes in comparison to the other major competing next-gen console.
Smartphones are far from flops. Blackberry's market share is being eaten away ever so steadily by Win-Mobile devices. It's not an avalanche victory, but it is going well for MS nonetheless.
For MS's failures, they are getting quite a few things right. And this is coming from me, a die-hard Apple user.
Bring it on I say. MS has shown that they can learn from their mistakes. The difference between the Xbox and 360 being a prime example. MS has the money to burn to keep making mistakes and learning from them. If that means they *eventually* make an iPod killer, so be it. The market needs more competing products, not less.
Part of the problem is that websites have zero clue what they're doing when they're laying out the page. They put the ads in the largest, most obtrusive places in an attempt to gain eye-time, but all it does is piss off the user.
Look at a print magazine. Most of them have remarkably good layout - ads are clearly ads, and text flows around the ads naturally. The site in TFA has horrifying ads that break the flow of the article and send your mind into unnatural gymnastics trying to follow along.
Ads and web content can coexist peacefully, but not until webmasters realize that layout is not just a 5-minute job in Dreamweaver, but is rather a full-time job that requires real qualifications and real training.
That's where we disagree. I have no trouble that console gamers will prefer to use 3D apps to do their online socialization and chatting. After all, MSN and Gears of War are not very multi-taskable, so therefore it's logical to presume that Xbox, PS3, Wii, or whatever console users will be more interested in a "dedicated" chat experience.
I doubt PC-IM will ever move there though. I enjoy chatting with my friends while working, while surfing, while doing just about anything. I enjoy doing it while at the airport, on a train, or simply in a quiet corner of a conference hall during some downtime. I have zero interest in 3D apps that suck up battery, CPU, and demand my full and undivided attention and robs me of my ability to multitask. I know most of my friends, including the younger ones still in high school, enjoy chatting while surfing or listening to music. Of the PC market I see proportionally *very very* few people who actually desire 3D chat. A cool niche market perhaps, but will never be mainstream.
Not sure which world you live in. In my world my coworkers, friends, and family all use standard IM clients. In fact I don't know a single person that uses IMVU or Second Life. Most of us prefer to be productive (or actively goofing off doing something else) while we chat.
As more support, I was recently tasked to compare Dell laptops vs. a MacBook. Suffice to say, Dell doesn't sell anything that includes Bluetooth *and* integrated webcams. This is a classic comparison that many have brought up, and many more have tried to skew. PC users tend to remove features as "unnecessary" to get the Dell's price down. But if you leave nothing out and do a feature-to-feature build of both machines, the Mac comes out as equal, if not cheaper.
Oh yes, the classic "if things were cheaper..." argument :)
If only cigarettes were cheaper, then I wouldn't have to rob the convenience store as often, wouldn't you agree? :D
First off, HL2 is $30 USD on Steam. This I think is a reasonable price for the game. Furthermore, the mere presence of online distribution eliminates the publishing middleman, allowing us cheaper prices without damaging developer profitability. If HL2 lasts 30 hours, how do you object to paying $1 per hour for entertainment? Better yet, even if HL2 costs $60, that's still $2/hr. You pay more than that to sit in a movie theatre listening to the teens yak on their cell phones.
As a game dev I also heartily object to the following statement:
If you think that the price of 20 euros is illogical, then you should consider that Valve spent 6 years rebuilding the game twice. Why should I have to pay for Valve's engineers having fun and not doing their jobs? Half Life 1 had more content and more substance, and it was delivered in far less time.
First off, are you a game developer? Do you have *any* experience doing the things that we do? That statement reeks of ignorance and lack of knowledge of what it is that we do. I congratulate Valve for doing things right and making a great game instead of pushing another pile of junk out onto a market that's already saturated with crap games. Blizzard did the same with Starcraft - what started as a quick-and-dirty Warcraft clone turned into one of the greatest RTS games of all time, and this because they were willing to bite the bullet, invest a LOT more in dev time to make sure things were done right.
"Having fun" and "not doing their jobs"? Where in the world do you get off on that? What evidence do you have to say that Valve's guys weren't doing their jobs and were goofing off this whole time, thus causing the infamous delay? I suppose if a car company discovers a critical flaw in one of their vehicles and delays its release by a couple months, you'd also cry foul and assert that *those* engineers aren't doing their jobs either eh? You complain about crappy ripoff games with no originality, and then you have the gall to complain also when someone stands up and does the right thing instead? Sheesh.
Why should we buy them, just for playing out 10 minutes?
Then don't buy them. But of course, that rule comes with another one that says: if you don't buy it, then don't play it. It's a pretty simple rule to follow, no? I agree there are an awful lot of crap match-3 casual games out there that aren't worth the money they're charging for it, but that's also why I don't play them. Somebody out there might find the game to be absolute genius, and if so, good for them, this is how the industry works. If you find yourself pirating it, then clearly it's worth something to you, in which case you'd be a dirty liar for asserting that those games aren't worth even 1 EUR.
yet the movie industry does not say that they are about to collapse due to piracy
They don't? That's funny... I could've sworn... :P
Did I also mention the fact that you pay $10 to get into a movie? Regardless of DVD sales, the majority of a film's profits are made at the box office while the movie is still in theatres. Imagine the game industry on a similar model: pay $10 during the first 4 weeks of a game's release to play the game for 3 hours. Then when the game gets old and nobody wants to play it anymore, you can buy it for $15. Sound good to you?
This is where I actually like Steam. Steam has a pretty good (not perfect) offline mode, where previously verified games can run without an active connection. This has been useful numerous times for me.
And why would they make Steam cross-platform? To support the massive gaming scene that's just bursting at the seams on Mac OSX? Or even more laughably, on Linux? It's an awful lot of effort to service so few consumers.
I used to be a huge critic of Steam and its related services, but I've warmed up to the idea over time.
As a softdev (and a small-time indie game dev) I have a hard time justifying piracy, and since I've made the moral choice to buy the software I use, it's hit my pocketbooks pretty hard, but it's a decision I am glad to live with. Most of my colleagues are not so conscious, I'm afraid, and most would buy a PC game if it's CD-key locked and the game was all about multiplayer (CS, BF2, etc), but almost none would ever buy a singleplayer game.
In other words, the concept that developers should just intrinsically *trust* the gamer to be moral and buy the game is hogwash. There may be a number of gamers like myself who strive to pirate as little as possible (if at all), but the majority of the world isn't so dev-friendly. I welcome (legal and reasonable) ways to protect developer content.
Additionally, I'm also a huge singleplayer gamer. I loved games like Deus Ex, Half-Life, and the new C&C3, which I bought mostly for the campaign mode (and it is excellent, btw). Many developers are eschewing singleplayer games in favour of multiplayer-only games, due to the fact that the multiplayer-ness easily lends itself to better piracy protection. This leaves gamers like me out in the cold. It is also why I believe, despite the evils of the technology, we must live with it if we are to see more singleplayer content being developed in this world.
Just my 2c.
Having played both, here's why I prefer GH to GF:
1 - Actual songs. Guitar Hero is only 50% about the game, the other 50% is the sheer fun factor of playing some great songs. I was never able to get into Guitar Freak's pseudo-electronica... It just didn't fit with the guitar thing.
2 - 3 vs. 5 frets. This is huge. Guitar Freaks was sometimes too easy because of the fact that your fingers never truly move.
3 - Better interface. The bottom-to-top scrolling lines got confusing when the game was going real fast. Guitar Hero's top-to-bottom scrolling with bigger icons and a "fade in" made the notes much easier to hit and less confusing to play.
4 - C'mon, who doesn't want to play Free Bird?