It's really good to see Jeff Vogel's work getting some solid attention through Steam. He's been making pretty darn good games for so bloody long; I think he's earned a shot at making some good money at it.
Any excuse to post it.
http://theoatmeal.com/comic...
@budget
While I don't wholly agree with their level of scathing, they were responding to what really is an incredibly uninformed and just plain dumb statement by stu.
It's like saying to Xbox or PS3 owners that 99% of Wii games look just as good. Now obviously such a claim is opinion-based, but to hold such an opinion would be bat-shit bananas.
No, it was a random, unsupported statistic pretending to weigh in on a stupid, useless argu...
It'd probably work pretty well, if you consider it. For one, often times consoles are loss leaders or scrape slim margins anyway; it's the software sales which create sustainability.
If architecture was unified in some fashion, it'd create a much easier environment for development, which means cheaper as well. Cheaper development means more risks can be taken. More risks taken equals a higher chance of something special catching on, like Portal.
This is probably the most enlightened comments section I've ever seen on N4G. (Almost) none of that petty elitism or bickering; just a genuine affection for good games in any form, shape, size and style.
Cheers!
It creates an unsettling prospect where developers have the idea that they can monetize anything. Worse, considering the amount of samey crap that keeps getting spewed out year after year, they won't bother to do simple things like improve or change gameplay.
It won't be about having more fun and unique ideas. It'll be about squeezing every drop of money possible from the consumers because for some reason they're willing to pay giant piles of money to receive ...
It pretty much depends upon what agreement they have with the publisher. If the distribution contract states that they can add or remove anything that doesn't compromise the intellectual property, then legality probably isn't in question.
It's still pretty goddamn unethical.
While I will be the first to admit that too often people form assumptions and comment based only on article titles, I feel it necessary to mention the work as a whole and what feels like flailing defense in this comments section.
Oh, and I do have background in journalism, writing of every shape and size, and editing. Do you? If so, you need to remember some of the things you learned.
The main problem with your article is that it's actually two completely...
Ah, but there's only a certain number of players with a certain number of hours at their disposal.
If every publisher and dev dives into multiplayer-focused or multiplayer-only games, it's going to be the disaster of big budget, MMO (WoW clones) all over again. All Points Bulletin spent 100 million in development. They probably didn't clear 100 thousand in returns.
The devs have to make a choice: do they lose money on a multiplayer shooter (or wha...
Indie development will probably always pick up whatever niche is left behind by mainstream.
Multiplayer has longer-term profitability, especially with intelligent finance models for free-to-play + premium or a reasonable monthly fee.
However, the market will always reach a saturation point. If too many publishers and devs see multiplayer as the path to financial success, there simply won't be enough player-hours to spread out to all of them. Plus people w...
http://theoatmeal.com/comic...
This isn't even for the sake of grammar nazi-ism. Any excuse to reference this post is enough for me.
As much as I love my PS3 and as much as I'm sure it'll nab me more than a few disagrees, Newell was not exactly wrong at the time.
The PS3 was not an appealing console at the beginning, and it was honestly Sony deciding and making a conscious effort to go back to gaming as the most important aspect of the PS3 which allowed it to turn around.
I still play HL2 every now and then. I've always enjoyed it very much, and I think it's held up quite well and compares very favorably with FPS games old and new.
Other really solid ones, like Deus Ex, while still being amazing in most areas, are pretty fugly, still have those oddities of voice acting, and have AIs who couldn't get out of a paper bad unless it was by sidestepping three feet and crouching to shoot repeatedly.
The thing about Half-L...
Why even compare them? They're so entirely different in so many many many ways.
That's like saying War and Peace is better than Harry Potter.
Like saying Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is better than Finding Nemo.
Like saying pie is better than cake! Well... maybe not so much the last one, but pie is soooo definitely better.
Wishful thinking does not make truth, Stealth, and you said something about lack of knowledge?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011...
They slashed their profit forecast by 80%. The company posted a loss of 25.5 billion yen (about 327 million). Their stock fell more than 20 percent.
I'm not saying I'm thrilled or am getting my tap shoes for some near...
@Shok
The big-name titles are too little, too late, and the price cut is actually a really bad thing for them.
Such an early price-cut in the electronic device market is terrifying for investors and confusing to consumers: what's wrong with the product? Why was it so over priced? Is it worth the cost now? As much as Nintendo will be scrambling to put a positive spin on it, the simple confusion factor will leave many people just disregarding the possibili...
@JellyJelly
Good enough content is still bolstered by cheap tricks.
Think of it this way:
Currently, I can run an SNES emulator on my Droid X2. I can also use, for example, a wiimote as an external controller. My phone also has an HDMI-out port.
I can, feasibly, plug my phone into the wall and my TV in order to play Super Nintendo games. This is a very basic example, as the hardware in smartphones is pretty damn high. See Infinity Blade running the Unreal engine.
Now, would it be so terrible to not have thes...
Hopefully this was just the legal department being drunk and stupid, but I don't think they realize how much of a PR faux pas this really is.
First: there's absolutely nothing useful to gain. The entire argument is completely idiotic, as they have no ground with which to pursue this claim. Even if they were right, and it could cause confusion (they aren't, it doesn't), they don't have a leg to stand on in a legal sense.
Second: everyone an...
@darthv72
Very well said. The interesting thing is that the people who are afraid of losing a physical medium are clearly quite young.
This isn't an insult to those younger. Hell, I'm only 24, but I've seen the demise of a few formats already. What good is a collecting a physical medium when the technology will be obsolete in as little as 10 years?
Besides, once you really start a robust collection, you'll find there are very ...