Yes, because I would trust the four or five people who'd had the disk before me not to have kept the account details and a pirate copy of the game to use them with.
What's next the music industry charging more for older songs so that new songs will be played/bought instead?
YMMV but I've seen this happening for at least 20 years, back in the early 90's when I was buying a lot of CDs it was obvious that new releases were priced around £5 - £8 less than CDs that had been out for a few months. This still seems to be the case for CDs, albeit the difference is not usually closer to £3 - £6 (I missed out on a new CD a couple of weeks back that was £5.99, went to pick it up at the weekend and it was suddenly £9.99) and although I don't buy much music online (I prefer the physical product) I've even encountered this there, too (actually the same album, I thought the £4 saving might be worth it but it had gone up by the same amount off and online).
That's fine assuming when Sony tells people to buy the game used, they still protect those people with the same warranty, otherwise they are certainly doing something wrong. If the subscribed content is distinct to the main content then they have to offer the main content for sale by itself, otherwise they're actually selling one single product and no amount of spin will change that, or the fact that if they cripple that product they're affecting its resale value. If they want to start offering single player games for $20 less but still new and covered by warranty then that's fine, somehow I don't think that's their plan.
Last week it was Sony moving to a paid subscription service for PSN, this week it's this - they're either at the point where they think, screw public opinion, we'll do what we want, or they're throwing out these leaked ideas and they'll keep doing so until one doesn't get much hate then implement it. I guess if you've already burned a lot of your customer goodwill it's even a viable tactic.
Like it matters - the point is you're paying for the whole game experience, even if you choose not to use part of it. Look at it this way, do deaf gamers get a refund because they don't use the sound? And if Sony decided to strip the sound from resale games without paying a $20 tax to reinstate it would you be saying, "A lot of people who regularly post to Slashdot seem to think [sound is important]; I just wanted to warn you about the groupthink you're up against."? I don't sell on my games, but if I chose to I'd want to be able to sell the full product I paid for, not a subset at Sony's whim.
Maybe the games industry should be more concerned with why people are trading their games in after three days - if they built in some longevity then perhaps people would hang onto them longer and solve the problem in a consumer friendly way, instead of punishing them as per usual.
It depends how far they go with it - online multiplayer for instance is not an "extra service" in many games, it's at least as important as the single player experience, and in some cases more so, so more equivalent to the car manufactuer "loaning" the gearbox to the first owner but with the right to take it back on resale.
Exactly right, I'm sure if we could see a breakdown of the Lego vs. Legos posts by country it would be overwhelmingly US posters that use the latter, and there it's such a generic usage (like "math" instead of "maths") that it is an accepted part of the language. Maybe that grates on some people's nerves (on both sides of the debate), but it doesn't mean it's an improper usage. I'd find it odd if I was on an exclusively UK-based forum and people were using the term "Legos", but when I'm using an international forum, my tendency is to be more lenient towards cultural language variations. Otherwise... well... see this thread... what were we originally talking about?
When I did statistics (long time ago), we had an in-class test where there was a right and a wrong way to calculate the same answer. The tutor spent some time the prior week drumming into us the importance of using the right method. When it came to the test, half my group copied me and used the right method, the other half used the wrong method. When we got the tests back, we all had the same low mark for using the wrong method, the guy had clearly flipped through a few and assumed we had all made the same mistake without bothering to read the rest. He even admitted as much when we pointed out to him the mistake, but he refused to regrade us with a higher mark!
In the end, I missed out on the top grade by 2% of the overall mark, I'm convinced if this idiot had properly marked the papers I would have received the higher grade, but it was an optional module anyway so not worth my getting into a big political battle over.
How about we just let them fail and have other more agile companies take their place? Should have happened with the banks and automakers. Those were political payoffs though. (Think Saturn. They weren't unionized, but profitable.)
Automotive, maybe. Banks are a trickier proposition, because so many other businesses rely on them for lines of credit, and their model was so incestuous that one or two big failures would bring down a lot of others, and while the banks might have deserved that, the customers arguably didn't. Not shoring up banks is a great way to sit back and watch your economy tank because nobody has the liquidity to move goods and services around.
Willem Buiter suggested some ideas to deal with the problem of "too big to fail". The tax ideas is quite interesting, but as always the problem is enforcing it without just driving the company oversees. There's also the concept of "too big to save", where the company exceeds too big to fail by becoming so expensive to bail out that it can't be saved (see what happened to the defaulting Icelandic banks, for instance), I wonder how long it would take Google to reach this point, and who would bail it out - the US or every country that has an interest in it not failing?
I'm not sure "too big to fail" is such an issue in Google's case anyway. At the moment they have money to burn and they seem to be acting like a TBTF company on a mad spending spree, but if revenues fall it's easy enough to reign that in, it's similarly easy to reign in spending on data centres. it's not like advertising will suddenly drop off a cliff one day. If it goes away (and I find this unlikely, even today I was reading a report that traditional offline advertising boosts online conversions by up to 40%, so the idea that old forms of advertising are losing their relevance doesn't seem right), it's likely to be a gradual decline and Google and everyone else will have time to prepare/scale down/find a new model.
I wonder if this is partially why Google is trying to get into the phone market and infrastructure, to mitigate "peak advertising".
It's one of those situations where you only realise the value after you really need the solution - prior to that it's just a chore and people put a lot of faith in their technology (which is kind of weird considering the throwaway attitude we have towards tech now compared to, say 15, 20 years ago). Proof in point, I'll bet PHD guy (well I really shouldn't call him that now, it's just cruel) will always back up everything in triplicate from now on:)
Also the fact that they used to release add-ons and make it easier for people to write their own stuff, now they want to control and market all of that content so that they can keep charging you months after the initial game purchase - there used to be an excuse for this on the consoles (before hard drives, when additional content had to be packaged and took space on a shelf in a store, there's no excuse now).
Maybe they didn't want to risk potentially eating into WoW's market while it was growing at a fast pace, or perhaps they wanted to build in some of the tricks they learned with WoW into SCII - either way so long as we get a better game as a result I can live with a little wait.
It's pretty telling that he's one of the most loved characters despite, or maybe even because of his minimal dialogue - people like the mystique, they don't need ridiculous explanations for everything and everyone.
Ah yes, the movie that finally outdid Jumping the Shark with Nuking the Fridge. I was unfortunate enough to see it at the cinema, but not as unfortunate as the group of obvious die-hard Indy fans who came out of the cinema in their Indy hats and jackets looking like someone just killed their puppy.
Not only that, your hero has to suffer if their victories are going to seem anything but hollow. Luke had his only family massacred, was dragged into a war he didn't want, found out he was destined to be some hunted warrior monk, had his tutor and friend killed in front of him, found out the guy that had been trying to kill him was his father, found out that Ewoks (not Ewoks anything, just Ewoks), that's some pretty tough crap to deal with but it elevates his victory over adversity. Anakin, on the other hand, lost his mum and... yeah that's pretty much all I've got. In light of that he seems more like a spoiled brat and not really someone you want to empathise with.
It's the same way they only ever made two Indiana Jones movies - Raiders and Last Crusade. It's weird because you'd think if they made two great movies that were a box office hit, they'd definitely go for at least a trilogy, if not try and squeeze four out of it. But nope, definitely only ever two made. Fact.
Why so? If that $8.30 represents the number of songs he downloaded instead of paying for then that is, at maximum, a fair representation of their actual loss (of course, their actual loss could be said to be less if he can prove he wouldn't have paid for the song and only downloaded it because it was free).
I think what you mean is it's disingeuous to infer that is their total loss, since there is also the possibility that they lost the potential for sales to other people who downloaded from him (which again, assumes they would have paid actual money if the song wasn't free, and also that they wouldn't have downloaded it elsewhere if they couldn't get it from him). Those aren't actual losses though, just the loss of opportunity, which is much more difficult to account for.
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Yes, because I would trust the four or five people who'd had the disk before me not to have kept the account details and a pirate copy of the game to use them with.
What's next the music industry charging more for older songs so that new songs will be played/bought instead?
YMMV but I've seen this happening for at least 20 years, back in the early 90's when I was buying a lot of CDs it was obvious that new releases were priced around £5 - £8 less than CDs that had been out for a few months. This still seems to be the case for CDs, albeit the difference is not usually closer to £3 - £6 (I missed out on a new CD a couple of weeks back that was £5.99, went to pick it up at the weekend and it was suddenly £9.99) and although I don't buy much music online (I prefer the physical product) I've even encountered this there, too (actually the same album, I thought the £4 saving might be worth it but it had gone up by the same amount off and online).
That's fine assuming when Sony tells people to buy the game used, they still protect those people with the same warranty, otherwise they are certainly doing something wrong. If the subscribed content is distinct to the main content then they have to offer the main content for sale by itself, otherwise they're actually selling one single product and no amount of spin will change that, or the fact that if they cripple that product they're affecting its resale value. If they want to start offering single player games for $20 less but still new and covered by warranty then that's fine, somehow I don't think that's their plan.
Last week it was Sony moving to a paid subscription service for PSN, this week it's this - they're either at the point where they think, screw public opinion, we'll do what we want, or they're throwing out these leaked ideas and they'll keep doing so until one doesn't get much hate then implement it. I guess if you've already burned a lot of your customer goodwill it's even a viable tactic.
Like it matters - the point is you're paying for the whole game experience, even if you choose not to use part of it. Look at it this way, do deaf gamers get a refund because they don't use the sound? And if Sony decided to strip the sound from resale games without paying a $20 tax to reinstate it would you be saying, "A lot of people who regularly post to Slashdot seem to think [sound is important]; I just wanted to warn you about the groupthink you're up against."? I don't sell on my games, but if I chose to I'd want to be able to sell the full product I paid for, not a subset at Sony's whim.
Maybe the games industry should be more concerned with why people are trading their games in after three days - if they built in some longevity then perhaps people would hang onto them longer and solve the problem in a consumer friendly way, instead of punishing them as per usual.
It depends how far they go with it - online multiplayer for instance is not an "extra service" in many games, it's at least as important as the single player experience, and in some cases more so, so more equivalent to the car manufactuer "loaning" the gearbox to the first owner but with the right to take it back on resale.
WOPR/Joshua: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?"
Exactly right, I'm sure if we could see a breakdown of the Lego vs. Legos posts by country it would be overwhelmingly US posters that use the latter, and there it's such a generic usage (like "math" instead of "maths") that it is an accepted part of the language. Maybe that grates on some people's nerves (on both sides of the debate), but it doesn't mean it's an improper usage. I'd find it odd if I was on an exclusively UK-based forum and people were using the term "Legos", but when I'm using an international forum, my tendency is to be more lenient towards cultural language variations. Otherwise... well... see this thread... what were we originally talking about?
When I did statistics (long time ago), we had an in-class test where there was a right and a wrong way to calculate the same answer. The tutor spent some time the prior week drumming into us the importance of using the right method. When it came to the test, half my group copied me and used the right method, the other half used the wrong method. When we got the tests back, we all had the same low mark for using the wrong method, the guy had clearly flipped through a few and assumed we had all made the same mistake without bothering to read the rest. He even admitted as much when we pointed out to him the mistake, but he refused to regrade us with a higher mark!
In the end, I missed out on the top grade by 2% of the overall mark, I'm convinced if this idiot had properly marked the papers I would have received the higher grade, but it was an optional module anyway so not worth my getting into a big political battle over.
There's making a conscious choice to do that because it's more efficient and then there's just being completely ignorant of the alternatives, though.
How about we just let them fail and have other more agile companies take their place? Should have happened with the banks and automakers. Those were political payoffs though. (Think Saturn. They weren't unionized, but profitable.)
Automotive, maybe. Banks are a trickier proposition, because so many other businesses rely on them for lines of credit, and their model was so incestuous that one or two big failures would bring down a lot of others, and while the banks might have deserved that, the customers arguably didn't. Not shoring up banks is a great way to sit back and watch your economy tank because nobody has the liquidity to move goods and services around.
Willem Buiter suggested some ideas to deal with the problem of "too big to fail". The tax ideas is quite interesting, but as always the problem is enforcing it without just driving the company oversees. There's also the concept of "too big to save", where the company exceeds too big to fail by becoming so expensive to bail out that it can't be saved (see what happened to the defaulting Icelandic banks, for instance), I wonder how long it would take Google to reach this point, and who would bail it out - the US or every country that has an interest in it not failing?
I'm not sure "too big to fail" is such an issue in Google's case anyway. At the moment they have money to burn and they seem to be acting like a TBTF company on a mad spending spree, but if revenues fall it's easy enough to reign that in, it's similarly easy to reign in spending on data centres. it's not like advertising will suddenly drop off a cliff one day. If it goes away (and I find this unlikely, even today I was reading a report that traditional offline advertising boosts online conversions by up to 40%, so the idea that old forms of advertising are losing their relevance doesn't seem right), it's likely to be a gradual decline and Google and everyone else will have time to prepare/scale down/find a new model.
I wonder if this is partially why Google is trying to get into the phone market and infrastructure, to mitigate "peak advertising".
I'm not so sure, a girl who dumpster dives you can probably just about live with, but a girl who doesn't backup her data??
It's one of those situations where you only realise the value after you really need the solution - prior to that it's just a chore and people put a lot of faith in their technology (which is kind of weird considering the throwaway attitude we have towards tech now compared to, say 15, 20 years ago). Proof in point, I'll bet PHD guy (well I really shouldn't call him that now, it's just cruel) will always back up everything in triplicate from now on :)
Also the fact that they used to release add-ons and make it easier for people to write their own stuff, now they want to control and market all of that content so that they can keep charging you months after the initial game purchase - there used to be an excuse for this on the consoles (before hard drives, when additional content had to be packaged and took space on a shelf in a store, there's no excuse now).
Maybe they didn't want to risk potentially eating into WoW's market while it was growing at a fast pace, or perhaps they wanted to build in some of the tricks they learned with WoW into SCII - either way so long as we get a better game as a result I can live with a little wait.
It's pretty telling that he's one of the most loved characters despite, or maybe even because of his minimal dialogue - people like the mystique, they don't need ridiculous explanations for everything and everyone.
The darkness shows off the Now With Added Lense Flare(tm) better.
Ah yes, the movie that finally outdid Jumping the Shark with Nuking the Fridge. I was unfortunate enough to see it at the cinema, but not as unfortunate as the group of obvious die-hard Indy fans who came out of the cinema in their Indy hats and jackets looking like someone just killed their puppy.
Not only that, your hero has to suffer if their victories are going to seem anything but hollow. Luke had his only family massacred, was dragged into a war he didn't want, found out he was destined to be some hunted warrior monk, had his tutor and friend killed in front of him, found out the guy that had been trying to kill him was his father, found out that Ewoks (not Ewoks anything, just Ewoks), that's some pretty tough crap to deal with but it elevates his victory over adversity. Anakin, on the other hand, lost his mum and... yeah that's pretty much all I've got. In light of that he seems more like a spoiled brat and not really someone you want to empathise with.
Oblig: Nooooooooooooooo!!
It's the same way they only ever made two Indiana Jones movies - Raiders and Last Crusade. It's weird because you'd think if they made two great movies that were a box office hit, they'd definitely go for at least a trilogy, if not try and squeeze four out of it. But nope, definitely only ever two made. Fact.
Why so? If that $8.30 represents the number of songs he downloaded instead of paying for then that is, at maximum, a fair representation of their actual loss (of course, their actual loss could be said to be less if he can prove he wouldn't have paid for the song and only downloaded it because it was free).
I think what you mean is it's disingeuous to infer that is their total loss, since there is also the possibility that they lost the potential for sales to other people who downloaded from him (which again, assumes they would have paid actual money if the song wasn't free, and also that they wouldn't have downloaded it elsewhere if they couldn't get it from him). Those aren't actual losses though, just the loss of opportunity, which is much more difficult to account for.
Newsflash Mr Fry - if you're using free software that's what you'd expect. Since when did zero multiplied by anything become a number?
Oblig. Simpsons:
Bart: But I have 52 million shares! What's 52 million times zero?! And don't tell me it's zero!