Not to mention that I sometimes find patterns in search results and re-search to refine it. I may be searching for reviews on the Honda Civic, but be getting a lot of dealership sites, so I'd go back and exclude "dealership", and whatnot, until the search comes out with a good signal-to-noise ratio.
One of the consequences of FOSS is that now everyone wants everything for free. God forbid you pay for a library! What's with the sense of entitlement here?
MS has a brand image to keep with the Xbox. To allow unfettered distribution of homebrew is a disaster. Remember that there are certain types of content that MS would rather keep off Xboxes, even if it wasn't authorized or endorsed by MS. Adult games, games featuring direct explicit illegalities... knowing the internet and YouTube, we have an immense ability to create content that the Xbox brand does NOT want to be associated with. There is absolutely nothing wrong with MS wanting control of distribution, if only for this purpose alone.
So the idea will be to put a crutch on homebrew distribution, so that MS can pick the cream of the crop for official endorsement, and probably un-handicap the game for full XBLA distribution, free or otherwise. This will allow you and your buddies to have fun throwing pr0n and other shenanigans on the Xbox360, but disallow you from doing any real damage through mass distribution.
And what's with the "XP only" game development? It's the.NET Framework for cryin' out loud. *AND* it's Managed DirectX! This concerns Linux/UNIX zealots none. We're not talking about a C++ library for OpenGL here, this thing simply *cannot* run in 'nix. The Xbox360 runs DX only, and one of the concepts here is getting rid of complex C++ and throwing in simpler C#, none of these quite fit with 'nix eh (Mono doesn't count)?
Do you seriously think MS is intending on sucking $100/year out of every developer? Are you seriously believing that MS intends the subscription fee to be a profitable industry? There won't be enough devs out there for this to be anything but a drop in the bucket to MS. I suspect the fee is more of a barrier to entry requirement to keep your everyday kids out and encourage some serious development - without setting the price as high as to keep interested (and qualified) parties out.
As a college student and part-time indie developer, $99 is _nothing_ to pay for this service. We've been locked out of the console arena this whole time and now it's open to us. Not mention MS has also promised the sub-$1K professional licensing which I presume will allow you to shed the XNA Game Studio shackles and allow non-XNAGS-subscribing users to play the game (i.e., full-time XBLA status).
Hell, I paid more for my 3D/physics engine ($150, TrueVision3D, ridiculously awesome piece of software).
You mean like the vast number of companies whose games no longer support Win98 or Win2K and require WinXP? Once adoption reaches a certain point devs will feel safe requiring the usage of Vista, like it's always been. Whether you'd like to admit it or not, each iteration of DX has given us more and more power that devs are just itching to tap.
Strongly disagreed. The Xbox was a new entry into the console playing field when the arena was already largely dominated by Nintendo and Sony, and in a few short years MS has bought themselves a very significant portion of the pie. The Xbox was a fine machine, and its reliability was no worse than the PS2. The GC AFAIK was largely known to be a solid machine, but both the Xbox and PS2 experienced significant drive failures. The difference here is that PS2 drives are *still* dying, whereas late-gen Xboxes were rock solid.
"Xbox wasn't that good" is quite subjective, but even then it reeks of fanboy BS. It spawned the most profitable gaming franchise ever conceived (Halo) and had a fair number of well received exclusives. The Xbox separated the twitch gamer from the cinematic-cutscene gamers, and that's still where MS stands apart from everyone else. Nintendo's got the whole clean-party-game thing down. PS2's got your JRPG's down pat. And Xbox/360 has your FPSes and action games up the wazoo. Who will win? God knows, but one can't really claim the Xbox "wasn't that good".
Xbox is still in the red, that's for sure, but they certainly are doing "as well as they thought". We're talking about 0% market share to something around 20-25% (last time I saw numbers... which was a year ago). They took over a quarter of the console market in 5 years. Granted, they spent a lot of cash doing it, but they are certainly doing VERY well for a 5 year-old console company. Oh, and about the whole profit thing... the PS3 will be underpriced and Sony will be losing money hand over fist like MS. Nintendo's really the only one laughing to the bank here in terms of hardware profitability.
And can we stop with the BS about MS not giving users what they want? I have a 360, and just from people coming over I've got 3-4 other people who are now also buying 360's. People adore the iPod integration, the media center abilities, the integrated micropayments, the free downloadable demos, the unlocking of trial games over the network... The 360 is quite satisfying to me as the end user, and from the purchasing habits of my friends, them too. MS learned from the Xbox: the controller is simply THE best controller available for any console, period, and if the PS3 is using the Dualshock design again, it wll remain the best controller in the console field, the ugly blocky black box is now sleeker and fits better with your appliances, the internet connectivity and Live services are HUGE and nothing short of incredible... need I go on? As much as I dislike the rest of what MS pumps out, if there's anything they've ever gotten right it's the Xbox team. Is it a perfect console? Not by a long shot. But the Xbox team has proven itself to be able to isolate what their audience wants and deliver it well. This is the only reason I haven't written off the Zune, which looks really quite dumb on paper, because I have seen the Xbox team deliver a great product twice, and hopefully hat means they'll be able to do it a third time.
Kudos to MS I say, for giving consumers the choice. I for one can't care less about HD DVD, but I love my Xbox360, and I'm glad I didn't have to buy into some newfangled (and overrated) format that I would never use.
If I ever DO get an HDTV though, this might be a nice addon...
Unless you try to kill yourself by running your car in the garage, have an epiphany, get hit by a drunk driver, and end up in a full body cast... If you hang in there, good things DO happen!
Does piracy cost the industry money? Yeah, sure. But it's not to the same extent as some people would like to believe. One has to remember that the oodles of games your local 14 year-old downloads off BitTorrent are non-sales as it is. For every 10 games the kid downloads, how many would he actually buy if piracy was not an available option? One at best, I would guess.
There is a major problem in cases like Doom 3 where pirates beat the game to market, but those are rather rare cases. Yes, the product suffers if the pirates beat it to market by a significant margin, where you get curious gamers who can't hold their dicks for another 3 days to play the game downloading it, and then failing to buy it later (in the case of D3... who could blame them?)
The only real sort of piracy prevention one needs to do is of the garden-variety anti-burning type. As long as joe sixpack can't pop it into his CD burner and come out with a viable, immediately playable copy, you've done your job. There was a time when certain malware (helllllo Ubisoft!) was being used to "protect" games, and just caused grief for the customer instead. This is pointless. The hardcore pirates will ALWAYS find a way, there is simply no use trying to stop them. As long as you can stop the average joe, it's good enough, and that's certainly quite easy.
But back on topic: Piracy killing PC gaming? Hardly. The average player isn't sophisticated enough to pirate the games, your only major demographic of worry is the pre-teen tech-savvy kid. I sincerely hope that we don't see more shite multiplayer-centric games like Counter-Strike just because it's the easiest way to guard against piracy. There is an appeal to singleplayer gaming that needs to survive.
That said... I do think there ought to be education in terms of intellectual property and basic morals in our world. Many people would pirate a game (if they could) without batting an eye, and that disturbs me. I know of some people who rant and rave about how great Will Wright (or insert another game designer here) but has apparently never bought one of his games. There is a distinct number of people who are unwilling to pay for what they play: mostly the teenaged never-worked-a-day-in-my-life type. Most people I know grew out of it after, you know, getting a job and realizing that people do things for a living and need money for food and a roof and whatnot, but some of my acquaintances even now are still in the "games are a rip! pirate!" crowd.
Actually, while MP3 phones have flunked the general market, enthusiasts have totally bought into it. I can't count the number of mobile-nut friends I have that drool over their W810's. The early-gen MP3 phones really really sucked, but the W810 has a really slick interface (and an airplane mode... hint hint Motorola) and it's quite nice to have an integrated device done RIGHT.
While I agree with TFA that people simply aren't ready to turn PCs into TVs and vice versa, maybe they're overly harsh on the Mac. It doesn't have video in/out features, nor do any Macs have integrated TV tuners... The remote is the only media-center-esque feature on the Macs, but that hardly means Apple meant to make it a media center machine.
The problem is really one of cost and usability. An HTPC costs too much. When confronted with the option of the $100 set top box provided by the cableco vs. a $600 HTPC, what is the obvious choice for the average user? Not to mention the set top box is plug and play, and requires no finangling with software (or God forbid, Windows).
I'm sure many home users would love to have the power of MythTV, but until we can build a MythTV box for $300 and make it plug-and-play and config-free, it simply won't take off in the mainstream.
I dunno about you, but to me the new E3 format does exactly what you want. We get away from 3-hour lineups to see the Wii, and you get more keynotes, more speakers, more backroom shows, more meetings... It's precisely the atmosphere that will allow for somebody from Crytek to give a big long speech about their next game - without the noise and flashy lights and trying to out-amp the other speakers in the hall just to make yourself heard.
Kentia Hall... I'm not sure what's going to happen with that. But really, a low-key conference that stays away from the glitzy lights and million-dollar booths of the old E3 should only help highlight the smaller players, by effectively drawing people away from the glitz (since it don't exist no 'mo) and putting booths and displays on a slightly more equal footing.
As opposed to car babes that reinforce the stereotype that rich sports car/muscle car junkies are clueless nerds that drool over every moderately attractive female that feigns interest in cars?
Booth babes aren't there to satiate the fantasies of hopeless nerds, they're there 'cos sex sells, clueless nerd or not.
On one hand, it IS true that the industry loses a ridiculous amount of time each year just sharpening up E3 demos that don't go anywhere, and a lot of dev time is wasted (on the order of MONTHS) just on this one event alone that are not productive towards the end product at all.
On the other hand, E3 was the only event that the mass media ever covered. You don't see anything about GDC on the pages of the world, you hear only about E3. Methinks they need to do two things:
- Scale back E3 to its original model: backroom shows and press conferences. More professional, less glitzy.
- Create secondary shows *with* the glitz in the same model as the car shows of the world. Publishers come in and let the public get some hands-on time with their new hardware and software. These are darlings for the mass media, without impacting the professional side of things.
In other words, one perfectly serious professionals-only conference, and another glitzy conference from the proles.
Or ride off existing game-oriented events like PAX. I rather like this idea actually, push the games towards the gamers directly, right on their door step.
I too feel that a gamer-oriented convention would do much more good for the industry. Gaming is now enough of a part of American culture that one can reasonably market directly to the consumer instead of feeding a bunch of talentless hack writers who probably should've failed first-year English.
The thing is that most gamers don't *read* game rags like PCG or Gamespot or IGN. That media is strictly for the enthusiast. Most gamers see nice shiny explosions during the commercial break in between segments of The OC, and that and word-of-mouth is what sells most games. The enthusiasts already dig up every morsel of info about an exciting upcoming game as it is, they don't need billions of useless game "media" hacks to regurgitate it to them.
Many of my non-hardcore gamer friends know about E3. When I mention it to them they go "oh, it's on now eh?", but never follow any of its going-ons. E3 has failed spectacularly at gaining the type of mainstream media hoopla they wanted, and really, it was an absurd proposition to begin with. The average car-buying public doesn't watch the Detroit or New York auto shows with irresistable interest... No, they wait until the slick marketing shots come out on TV. Conventions are a terrible way to market to Joe average.
That is... Unless you let them come to said convention. Thousands upon thousands of people flock to the Detroit Auto Show every year, to sit in the new cars, stare at the Ferraris fenced off behind very scary looking guards, etc. Why can't we have this for the game industry? A week-long convention where people get to strut their products out in front of the very people who will be buying them? Why does it have to be one single event? Can we not have the LA Game Show, the New York Game Show, etc etc? Why is that we're the only ones who aren't marketing to the buying public, despite the fact that our "buying public" is a huckuva lot larger than the car-buying public in the US?
At least in my college-age demographic it is. I'm seeing a HUGE desertion of PC's in favor of the MacBooks (the MBPs are a little bit out of the range of the average college student). It's going to be a good year for Apple.
Make commercials more watchable, and less Family Guy-style "Wacky inflatable arm-flailing tube-man" ads. I don't need another crappy Swiffer duster ad, or another washed-out feel-good ad about the vast superiority of Bounty vs. other leading brands. Make me a commercial that I want to see and I'll stop skipping ads.
Good examples include the transformer Peugeot ad, that one I never tire of. Series ads that form a small narrative are also worth a chuckle, and probably won't be skipped too often. Give me TEH FUNNAY in my ads and I'll watch 'em.
Getting rid of GPUs and getting CPUs to replace them is a terrible idea. CPUs are designed to general-purpose computing, while GPUs are able to exploit the embarrassingly-parallel nature of graphics rendering. That 650MHz GeForce 7900GTX gives you a lot more oomph than a 3GHz P4 ever will. I don't mind integrating GPUs onto CPUs, but you can't just REPLACE them wholesale with general-purpose CPUs.
Mod parent up. After the initial excitement about AMD-kicking performance from the Core 2's, I proceeded to try and spec together a new PC with a Core 2. It's still easier to achieve equivalent (or damn well near it) performance for cheaper with AMD, now that the new price drops are in place. I just can't justify paying >$200 for a motherboard, even if the CPU is highly competitive, not when there are $100 mobos around.
All of the above software cover what my mom would need, feature-wise. But my mom would have a hell of a time trying to use it. FOSS is great, it's feature-packed, it can do everything and cook my breakfast for me too, but what is cannot be is usable. Like almost all open source software out there, a lot of these apps (and yes, I've used many of them) have horrible interfaces, convoluted processes, and things that simply do not appeal to a non-technical mind. My mother is edging 60, knits, and spends her time browsing garage sales, I really don't think she's of the type that would be interested in anything that's not completely intuitive, which is what the bundled Mac software gives her.
And why shouldn't I pay a premium for OSX and the hardware? OSX is the easiest-to-use OS there is out there, and the hardware build quality is consistently excellent (and in the odd case it isn't, Apple is fast and non-bitchy about replacement). My mother can move the iMac anywhere, because it's all self-contained. She doesn't have to unplug a bunch of shit from behind the tower, and then remember where everything goes again - just one measly USB keyboard and we're done. She can also adjust the screen tilt without fumbling with retarded buttons and latches like you do on 3rd-party displays, and everything is just nice and blends into the household. (my mother is a aesthetic freak, having been an interior designer, and would HATE to have a black/beige box sitting unceremoniously in the living room, but the iMac works). That is worth paying a premium for. It's time to stop thinking computers as the ugly black box sitting on top of your desk and more about how it can blend into your life.
I call BS on a lot of your post. Let's start with your first point:
They *ARE* more expensive as you purchase more expensive models.
Yes they are. Your point? Mac upgrade paths are considerably more expensive than PCs. But here's the point I think all the pro-Mac guys are trying to make: When's the last time you saw Joe Average configure a Dell and knew what they were doing?. You're talking about yourself, but unfortunately you're not in the Mac target demographic.
- Macs don't get viruses
They don't. And your point is entirely correct that, at this point, this is entirely due to the lack of marketshare and lack of interest. But so what? That is the state of Macintosh right now, and I'm going to enjoy it. 10 years down the road, maybe Macs will occupy 40% of the market and we'll start seeing viruses, we'll deal with that as we get there. Btw, Norton AV is already available on the Mac (for what purpose? I don't know), so as the virus problem emerges with growing Mac marketshare, we will deal with exactly the way Windows has dealt with it for years. Consider this a temporary advantage.
- Mac comes with pre-loaded software that you can do stuff with, and makes the price diff justifiable.
Yes, yes it does. This is precisely the point I think all the pro-Mac guys in this thread are trying to make. While niche apps like GarageBand are just funky things to play with and aren't particularly productive for most users, other apps are. FYI, a LARGE number of Mac users I know use the video editing software, and not just on a one-time "ooh I wonder what this is" basis. Many actually use it regularly to mix home videos. Mac comes with a non-shitty (yes, Outlook Express sucks balls) mail client right off the bat, has a capable chat client with integrated video-conference ability (which works VERY nicely with the integrated camera); last time I checked, MSN Messenger, while free, was still a separate download. The bundled browser doesn't crash like IE does, is more standards compliant (though not as good as Firefox), and has tabbed browsing (temporary advantage, I know). Need I go on? Everything works, and works WELL (as in, not just a temporary fix until better software can be acquired, like it is with Windows) right out of the box, and that's part of what Mac users pay for.
In addition, many of the items (iphoto or whatever) have platform independent web equivalents, many times even better.
Gaaaaah! Get past your geek side, please! Users don't care about platform independence. They don't care if the solution they're using is web-based or client-side. The whole point of Mac is to REMOVE such technobabble from their lives, and treat the computer as an appliance and a tool, as opposed to this gargantuan black box for them to learn. The most complicated Mac dialog I've seen is the network setup screen, which unfortunately must contain such technobabble.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention that I sometimes find patterns in search results and re-search to refine it. I may be searching for reviews on the Honda Civic, but be getting a lot of dealership sites, so I'd go back and exclude "dealership", and whatnot, until the search comes out with a good signal-to-noise ratio.
How in blue blazes is that post +Funny?
One of the consequences of FOSS is that now everyone wants everything for free. God forbid you pay for a library! What's with the sense of entitlement here?
MS has a brand image to keep with the Xbox. To allow unfettered distribution of homebrew is a disaster. Remember that there are certain types of content that MS would rather keep off Xboxes, even if it wasn't authorized or endorsed by MS. Adult games, games featuring direct explicit illegalities... knowing the internet and YouTube, we have an immense ability to create content that the Xbox brand does NOT want to be associated with. There is absolutely nothing wrong with MS wanting control of distribution, if only for this purpose alone.
So the idea will be to put a crutch on homebrew distribution, so that MS can pick the cream of the crop for official endorsement, and probably un-handicap the game for full XBLA distribution, free or otherwise. This will allow you and your buddies to have fun throwing pr0n and other shenanigans on the Xbox360, but disallow you from doing any real damage through mass distribution.
And what's with the "XP only" game development? It's the .NET Framework for cryin' out loud. *AND* it's Managed DirectX! This concerns Linux/UNIX zealots none. We're not talking about a C++ library for OpenGL here, this thing simply *cannot* run in 'nix. The Xbox360 runs DX only, and one of the concepts here is getting rid of complex C++ and throwing in simpler C#, none of these quite fit with 'nix eh (Mono doesn't count)?
Do you seriously think MS is intending on sucking $100/year out of every developer? Are you seriously believing that MS intends the subscription fee to be a profitable industry? There won't be enough devs out there for this to be anything but a drop in the bucket to MS. I suspect the fee is more of a barrier to entry requirement to keep your everyday kids out and encourage some serious development - without setting the price as high as to keep interested (and qualified) parties out.
As a college student and part-time indie developer, $99 is _nothing_ to pay for this service. We've been locked out of the console arena this whole time and now it's open to us. Not mention MS has also promised the sub-$1K professional licensing which I presume will allow you to shed the XNA Game Studio shackles and allow non-XNAGS-subscribing users to play the game (i.e., full-time XBLA status).
Hell, I paid more for my 3D/physics engine ($150, TrueVision3D, ridiculously awesome piece of software).
You mean like the vast number of companies whose games no longer support Win98 or Win2K and require WinXP? Once adoption reaches a certain point devs will feel safe requiring the usage of Vista, like it's always been. Whether you'd like to admit it or not, each iteration of DX has given us more and more power that devs are just itching to tap.
Strongly disagreed. The Xbox was a new entry into the console playing field when the arena was already largely dominated by Nintendo and Sony, and in a few short years MS has bought themselves a very significant portion of the pie. The Xbox was a fine machine, and its reliability was no worse than the PS2. The GC AFAIK was largely known to be a solid machine, but both the Xbox and PS2 experienced significant drive failures. The difference here is that PS2 drives are *still* dying, whereas late-gen Xboxes were rock solid.
"Xbox wasn't that good" is quite subjective, but even then it reeks of fanboy BS. It spawned the most profitable gaming franchise ever conceived (Halo) and had a fair number of well received exclusives. The Xbox separated the twitch gamer from the cinematic-cutscene gamers, and that's still where MS stands apart from everyone else. Nintendo's got the whole clean-party-game thing down. PS2's got your JRPG's down pat. And Xbox/360 has your FPSes and action games up the wazoo. Who will win? God knows, but one can't really claim the Xbox "wasn't that good".
Xbox is still in the red, that's for sure, but they certainly are doing "as well as they thought". We're talking about 0% market share to something around 20-25% (last time I saw numbers... which was a year ago). They took over a quarter of the console market in 5 years. Granted, they spent a lot of cash doing it, but they are certainly doing VERY well for a 5 year-old console company. Oh, and about the whole profit thing... the PS3 will be underpriced and Sony will be losing money hand over fist like MS. Nintendo's really the only one laughing to the bank here in terms of hardware profitability.
And can we stop with the BS about MS not giving users what they want? I have a 360, and just from people coming over I've got 3-4 other people who are now also buying 360's. People adore the iPod integration, the media center abilities, the integrated micropayments, the free downloadable demos, the unlocking of trial games over the network... The 360 is quite satisfying to me as the end user, and from the purchasing habits of my friends, them too. MS learned from the Xbox: the controller is simply THE best controller available for any console, period, and if the PS3 is using the Dualshock design again, it wll remain the best controller in the console field, the ugly blocky black box is now sleeker and fits better with your appliances, the internet connectivity and Live services are HUGE and nothing short of incredible... need I go on? As much as I dislike the rest of what MS pumps out, if there's anything they've ever gotten right it's the Xbox team. Is it a perfect console? Not by a long shot. But the Xbox team has proven itself to be able to isolate what their audience wants and deliver it well. This is the only reason I haven't written off the Zune, which looks really quite dumb on paper, because I have seen the Xbox team deliver a great product twice, and hopefully hat means they'll be able to do it a third time.
Kudos to MS I say, for giving consumers the choice. I for one can't care less about HD DVD, but I love my Xbox360, and I'm glad I didn't have to buy into some newfangled (and overrated) format that I would never use.
If I ever DO get an HDTV though, this might be a nice addon...
Unless you try to kill yourself by running your car in the garage, have an epiphany, get hit by a drunk driver, and end up in a full body cast... If you hang in there, good things DO happen!
Does piracy cost the industry money? Yeah, sure. But it's not to the same extent as some people would like to believe. One has to remember that the oodles of games your local 14 year-old downloads off BitTorrent are non-sales as it is. For every 10 games the kid downloads, how many would he actually buy if piracy was not an available option? One at best, I would guess.
There is a major problem in cases like Doom 3 where pirates beat the game to market, but those are rather rare cases. Yes, the product suffers if the pirates beat it to market by a significant margin, where you get curious gamers who can't hold their dicks for another 3 days to play the game downloading it, and then failing to buy it later (in the case of D3... who could blame them?)
The only real sort of piracy prevention one needs to do is of the garden-variety anti-burning type. As long as joe sixpack can't pop it into his CD burner and come out with a viable, immediately playable copy, you've done your job. There was a time when certain malware (helllllo Ubisoft!) was being used to "protect" games, and just caused grief for the customer instead. This is pointless. The hardcore pirates will ALWAYS find a way, there is simply no use trying to stop them. As long as you can stop the average joe, it's good enough, and that's certainly quite easy.
But back on topic: Piracy killing PC gaming? Hardly. The average player isn't sophisticated enough to pirate the games, your only major demographic of worry is the pre-teen tech-savvy kid. I sincerely hope that we don't see more shite multiplayer-centric games like Counter-Strike just because it's the easiest way to guard against piracy. There is an appeal to singleplayer gaming that needs to survive.
That said... I do think there ought to be education in terms of intellectual property and basic morals in our world. Many people would pirate a game (if they could) without batting an eye, and that disturbs me. I know of some people who rant and rave about how great Will Wright (or insert another game designer here) but has apparently never bought one of his games. There is a distinct number of people who are unwilling to pay for what they play: mostly the teenaged never-worked-a-day-in-my-life type. Most people I know grew out of it after, you know, getting a job and realizing that people do things for a living and need money for food and a roof and whatnot, but some of my acquaintances even now are still in the "games are a rip! pirate!" crowd.
Actually, while MP3 phones have flunked the general market, enthusiasts have totally bought into it. I can't count the number of mobile-nut friends I have that drool over their W810's. The early-gen MP3 phones really really sucked, but the W810 has a really slick interface (and an airplane mode... hint hint Motorola) and it's quite nice to have an integrated device done RIGHT.
While I agree with TFA that people simply aren't ready to turn PCs into TVs and vice versa, maybe they're overly harsh on the Mac. It doesn't have video in/out features, nor do any Macs have integrated TV tuners... The remote is the only media-center-esque feature on the Macs, but that hardly means Apple meant to make it a media center machine.
The problem is really one of cost and usability. An HTPC costs too much. When confronted with the option of the $100 set top box provided by the cableco vs. a $600 HTPC, what is the obvious choice for the average user? Not to mention the set top box is plug and play, and requires no finangling with software (or God forbid, Windows).
I'm sure many home users would love to have the power of MythTV, but until we can build a MythTV box for $300 and make it plug-and-play and config-free, it simply won't take off in the mainstream.
I dunno about you, but to me the new E3 format does exactly what you want. We get away from 3-hour lineups to see the Wii, and you get more keynotes, more speakers, more backroom shows, more meetings... It's precisely the atmosphere that will allow for somebody from Crytek to give a big long speech about their next game - without the noise and flashy lights and trying to out-amp the other speakers in the hall just to make yourself heard.
Kentia Hall... I'm not sure what's going to happen with that. But really, a low-key conference that stays away from the glitzy lights and million-dollar booths of the old E3 should only help highlight the smaller players, by effectively drawing people away from the glitz (since it don't exist no 'mo) and putting booths and displays on a slightly more equal footing.
As opposed to car babes that reinforce the stereotype that rich sports car/muscle car junkies are clueless nerds that drool over every moderately attractive female that feigns interest in cars?
Booth babes aren't there to satiate the fantasies of hopeless nerds, they're there 'cos sex sells, clueless nerd or not.
On one hand, it IS true that the industry loses a ridiculous amount of time each year just sharpening up E3 demos that don't go anywhere, and a lot of dev time is wasted (on the order of MONTHS) just on this one event alone that are not productive towards the end product at all.
On the other hand, E3 was the only event that the mass media ever covered. You don't see anything about GDC on the pages of the world, you hear only about E3. Methinks they need to do two things:
- Scale back E3 to its original model: backroom shows and press conferences. More professional, less glitzy.
- Create secondary shows *with* the glitz in the same model as the car shows of the world. Publishers come in and let the public get some hands-on time with their new hardware and software. These are darlings for the mass media, without impacting the professional side of things.
In other words, one perfectly serious professionals-only conference, and another glitzy conference from the proles.
Or ride off existing game-oriented events like PAX. I rather like this idea actually, push the games towards the gamers directly, right on their door step.
I too feel that a gamer-oriented convention would do much more good for the industry. Gaming is now enough of a part of American culture that one can reasonably market directly to the consumer instead of feeding a bunch of talentless hack writers who probably should've failed first-year English.
The thing is that most gamers don't *read* game rags like PCG or Gamespot or IGN. That media is strictly for the enthusiast. Most gamers see nice shiny explosions during the commercial break in between segments of The OC, and that and word-of-mouth is what sells most games. The enthusiasts already dig up every morsel of info about an exciting upcoming game as it is, they don't need billions of useless game "media" hacks to regurgitate it to them.
Many of my non-hardcore gamer friends know about E3. When I mention it to them they go "oh, it's on now eh?", but never follow any of its going-ons. E3 has failed spectacularly at gaining the type of mainstream media hoopla they wanted, and really, it was an absurd proposition to begin with. The average car-buying public doesn't watch the Detroit or New York auto shows with irresistable interest... No, they wait until the slick marketing shots come out on TV. Conventions are a terrible way to market to Joe average.
That is... Unless you let them come to said convention. Thousands upon thousands of people flock to the Detroit Auto Show every year, to sit in the new cars, stare at the Ferraris fenced off behind very scary looking guards, etc. Why can't we have this for the game industry? A week-long convention where people get to strut their products out in front of the very people who will be buying them? Why does it have to be one single event? Can we not have the LA Game Show, the New York Game Show, etc etc? Why is that we're the only ones who aren't marketing to the buying public, despite the fact that our "buying public" is a huckuva lot larger than the car-buying public in the US?
At least in my college-age demographic it is. I'm seeing a HUGE desertion of PC's in favor of the MacBooks (the MBPs are a little bit out of the range of the average college student). It's going to be a good year for Apple.
Why research cheaper ways to flip burgers when you can just build... the flip-less grill?
The above is only a half-joke, it really could work, though I suppose it would turn out to be like a toaster oven... for meat.
Make commercials more watchable, and less Family Guy-style "Wacky inflatable arm-flailing tube-man" ads. I don't need another crappy Swiffer duster ad, or another washed-out feel-good ad about the vast superiority of Bounty vs. other leading brands. Make me a commercial that I want to see and I'll stop skipping ads.
Good examples include the transformer Peugeot ad, that one I never tire of. Series ads that form a small narrative are also worth a chuckle, and probably won't be skipped too often. Give me TEH FUNNAY in my ads and I'll watch 'em.
That's disgusting. I'm paying $40CAD/month for 3Mbps down... and no TV and no free phone calls or anything like that. Where's the fricking justice? :(
Works for the Fonz, works for me! :D
Getting rid of GPUs and getting CPUs to replace them is a terrible idea. CPUs are designed to general-purpose computing, while GPUs are able to exploit the embarrassingly-parallel nature of graphics rendering. That 650MHz GeForce 7900GTX gives you a lot more oomph than a 3GHz P4 ever will. I don't mind integrating GPUs onto CPUs, but you can't just REPLACE them wholesale with general-purpose CPUs.
Mod parent up. After the initial excitement about AMD-kicking performance from the Core 2's, I proceeded to try and spec together a new PC with a Core 2. It's still easier to achieve equivalent (or damn well near it) performance for cheaper with AMD, now that the new price drops are in place. I just can't justify paying >$200 for a motherboard, even if the CPU is highly competitive, not when there are $100 mobos around.
All of the above software cover what my mom would need, feature-wise. But my mom would have a hell of a time trying to use it. FOSS is great, it's feature-packed, it can do everything and cook my breakfast for me too, but what is cannot be is usable. Like almost all open source software out there, a lot of these apps (and yes, I've used many of them) have horrible interfaces, convoluted processes, and things that simply do not appeal to a non-technical mind. My mother is edging 60, knits, and spends her time browsing garage sales, I really don't think she's of the type that would be interested in anything that's not completely intuitive, which is what the bundled Mac software gives her.
And why shouldn't I pay a premium for OSX and the hardware? OSX is the easiest-to-use OS there is out there, and the hardware build quality is consistently excellent (and in the odd case it isn't, Apple is fast and non-bitchy about replacement). My mother can move the iMac anywhere, because it's all self-contained. She doesn't have to unplug a bunch of shit from behind the tower, and then remember where everything goes again - just one measly USB keyboard and we're done. She can also adjust the screen tilt without fumbling with retarded buttons and latches like you do on 3rd-party displays, and everything is just nice and blends into the household. (my mother is a aesthetic freak, having been an interior designer, and would HATE to have a black/beige box sitting unceremoniously in the living room, but the iMac works). That is worth paying a premium for. It's time to stop thinking computers as the ugly black box sitting on top of your desk and more about how it can blend into your life.
I call BS on a lot of your post. Let's start with your first point:
They *ARE* more expensive as you purchase more expensive models.
Yes they are. Your point? Mac upgrade paths are considerably more expensive than PCs. But here's the point I think all the pro-Mac guys are trying to make: When's the last time you saw Joe Average configure a Dell and knew what they were doing?. You're talking about yourself, but unfortunately you're not in the Mac target demographic.
- Macs don't get viruses
They don't. And your point is entirely correct that, at this point, this is entirely due to the lack of marketshare and lack of interest. But so what? That is the state of Macintosh right now, and I'm going to enjoy it. 10 years down the road, maybe Macs will occupy 40% of the market and we'll start seeing viruses, we'll deal with that as we get there. Btw, Norton AV is already available on the Mac (for what purpose? I don't know), so as the virus problem emerges with growing Mac marketshare, we will deal with exactly the way Windows has dealt with it for years. Consider this a temporary advantage.
- Mac comes with pre-loaded software that you can do stuff with, and makes the price diff justifiable.
Yes, yes it does. This is precisely the point I think all the pro-Mac guys in this thread are trying to make. While niche apps like GarageBand are just funky things to play with and aren't particularly productive for most users, other apps are. FYI, a LARGE number of Mac users I know use the video editing software, and not just on a one-time "ooh I wonder what this is" basis. Many actually use it regularly to mix home videos. Mac comes with a non-shitty (yes, Outlook Express sucks balls) mail client right off the bat, has a capable chat client with integrated video-conference ability (which works VERY nicely with the integrated camera); last time I checked, MSN Messenger, while free, was still a separate download. The bundled browser doesn't crash like IE does, is more standards compliant (though not as good as Firefox), and has tabbed browsing (temporary advantage, I know). Need I go on? Everything works, and works WELL (as in, not just a temporary fix until better software can be acquired, like it is with Windows) right out of the box, and that's part of what Mac users pay for.
In addition, many of the items (iphoto or whatever) have platform independent web equivalents, many times even better.
Gaaaaah! Get past your geek side, please! Users don't care about platform independence. They don't care if the solution they're using is web-based or client-side. The whole point of Mac is to REMOVE such technobabble from their lives, and treat the computer as an appliance and a tool, as opposed to this gargantuan black box for them to learn. The most complicated Mac dialog I've seen is the network setup screen, which unfortunately must contain such technobabble.