Nightly Open Thread
If you’re going to steal a laptop, don’t steal a computer geek’s laptop
…because he will probably find a way to frak with you.
By the way, the software that Mark Bao used — Backblaze — seems pretty nifty. I’d recommend checking it out.
For those of you familiar with Agile methods
…just remember the story of the second Death Star.
The latest and greatest quantum computer
This technology is inching, bit by bit, closer to the point of being marketable.
I’ve more or less entirely switched over to Chrome, myself. But the site stats suggest that most of you prefer Firefox, so grab thou thy update!
EA’s general manager thinks $60 for a game is “exploitative”
Ben Cousins has been extolling the virtues of the “free to play” model lately, and has decided to double down on his stance by declaring the full price gaming market to be “a really harsh business model.”
I suppose that this could be one possible end for the DLC distribution model: you shell out a small sum for the core game, and then add on the plotlines, characters, and suchlike that you want for incremental fees, paying (in essence) what you’re willing to in order to have the game presented to you in what way you most desire.
Could it work?
Ah…that’s why the Rustock botnet went quiet
Microsoft worked with US authorities to seize the core servers, controlling the nearly one million PCs infected with the Rustock bot.
I have enjoyed the diminished levels of spam email I’ve been receiving lately. And yes, there has been a difference.
William “The Shat” Shatner is 80 today
His hair, of course, is a bit younger than that.
Tonight’s post brought to you by Blinky:
Not entirely safe for work.
Kudos to EA’s general manager! Richard Garriot more or less said the same thing in that GG interview he did. $60 retail is a barrier to entry for a lot of folks (myself included, if gas prices get any higher). Then again, I guess the days of expecting developers to support their games post-release for free would be officially dead if we adopted the DLC pay-as-you-go model. 🙁
Or you’d see support move to a paid support subscription model, as is often the case in industry software.
In a way, it’d be an extension of the microtransaction concept that has been so lucrative for those companies that have adopted it. Users pay what they are willing to, and get exactly the content and services they desire in return. The major downside would be that you’d see a transition, by developers, away from making massive AAA titles in favour of making smaller, tighter pieces of content that users can then put together as they please.
I’m…not entirely sure that’d be a great thing, nor am I entirely sure it’d be a bad thing.
Yeah, except who’s to say that they wouldn’t still sell the “core game” for $60? The big companies most likely would. If they can get people to shell out $25 for a reskinned model with a bit of scripting, what do you think?
As for the laptop thief–kudos to the victim. He certainly has much more self-restraint than I would have had. He needs to have the victim arrested and prosecuted as a felony thief–and *THEN* call up the local football frat party house to pay the guy a visit.
Next time he makes a dance video, it should be from a wheelchair, with his jaw wired shut!
(or am I being too ‘over the top’?)
Not too over the top. Someone stealing my PC would be a wrong akin to someone kicking my dog. I would revenge.
Not keen on the EA “free to play” model at all.
For a start, such games are often designed to push you towards paying (rather than the paid parts being completely optional), and often those charges would result in you paying far more than you would have done if you’d paid upfront.
As someone who games on PCs, the most I ever pay for a game is about £25, and that would be for a new release (Alpha Protocol was the last one I paid that cash for). That works out to roughly $40, and I consider that more than fair for a game that might provide 10-20 hours of good entertainment (or in some cases far more than this!).
On the other hand, I once paid £60(~$100) for a console game (a version of Street Fighter 2 for the Sega Megadrive, possibly the Championship Edition?). That’s the most I’ve ever paid for a game, and it was a LOT of money at the time (mid 90s). I played that game for more than long enough to justify the price tag, but I certainly would think twice about paying that sort of money today. Especially since (certainly for PC games anyway) there are loads of sales on offer, even for relatively new games (Just check somewhere like Didimatic or SavyGamer and you’ll see the vast amount of cheap games on offer).
I’m also not sure how it would translate into making the sorts of games I enjoy. How would you make the Ultima series free to play? Charge $5 to get a suit of magic armour? $5 for the Hoe of Destruction? It leads down a path I’d rather not travel. Thankfully though, the standard “pay up front” model is not likely to go any time soon, and hopefully “free to play” games can fit in where they are wanted without becoming the norm.
How would it translate to the games you enjoy? Two words: Episodic content. $20 for 4-6 hours or so of game. Valve has been doing it for the past six years or so. Other successes that come to mind include the folks at Telltale games.
Also, I’m not sure how you get away with buying most of your new games for $40. $50 has been the price point for many years, and the last two (at least) Bioware PC titles have been $60 out of the gate (which happens to be the new console game price point).
As someone who is an avid gamer for both PC and console, I can tell you with absolute confidence that I am getting equally hosed by publishers across both platforms when I want a game on day one. Waiting a bit is a different story. Console gamers can count on the used game market to give them the deals they crave, and PC gamers can count on the games they want to eventually wind up in a Steam sale once all of the release hype has died down.
But all of this is getting off of the point. Free to play is the future, and it is a good future. Free to play and the ala cart content WTF was talking about means less AAA. This means smaller teams and faster turnover, which means more garage gaming, which means more innovation (since games no longer become about muscling out the competition with 200 million dollars worth of fancy art). Sounds good to me.
For what it’s worth, I rarely pay $60 for a game these days, and usually pay around $40. I only buy games digitally, though, which I guess is probably part of it; I picked up the deluxe edition of Dragon Age 2 for substantially less than the release price by pre-ordering through Impulse/Stardock. (Steam has been similarly good to me.)
Episodic content sure worked out for Valve. I completely enjoyed HL2: Epidose Three, myself.
In Australia a new release game typically costs just under $100AUD (occasionally even more if it’s a REALLY big title) in store, despite the fact that our dollar is equal in value to the US dollar and has been for quite some time now. It’s been like this as long as I’ve been buying games, which was the early 90’s. As a result I haven’t bought a game in a physical store for many many years, and I almost never buy brand new games as the price is just so inhibitive. No matter how much I want a game, I just can’t justify spending that much money on them anymore.
Not sure why, but PC games in the UK have been relatively cheap compared to console games for quite a long time.
There may be no competition with regards to brick and mortar retail, but online retail (places like HMV, Zavvi, Play.com, Amazon to name a few) is quite competitive. Add into that the multitude of sales and you can easily avoid paying a lot to play games. As I also said, I almost never buy games on release, if you wait at least a few weeks there’s usually some price drops, and if you can wait a year you can get a bargain.
On the subject of episodic content, it’s a different business model.
Also, I’m not sure it works very well. Telltale are the only company that I can think of that’s actually making money doing it, and I could probably write quite a long post about why that is. It hasn’t worked particularly well for Valve, who seem to have given up on the idea.
In all fairness, Valve isn’t the best example because at this point, there isn’t really any — or as much of a — financial impetus pushing them toward new releases (thanks to Steam).
Telltale isn’t perfect. Some feel that the quality of its games is declining the more it pursues the mainstream audience (and profit). There’s certainly a fair bit of anxiety regarding King’s Quest and how well it’d do (or not) with that – not that Activision give a monkeys about the quality of what TTG does, of course.
I could probably write quite a long post about why that is
Please do, I’m interested.