Zoraptor

I don't see how intangibility has anything to do with it really, there have already been multiple rulings about software being a product like pretty much anything else, prior to this one. The usual argument is that software does not 'degrade' as a physical product like a car does, but that's not really true, in may ways the value of software degrades at a rate that makes a car's devaluation look positively, er, pedestrian. This is a world in which it is not unusual to see a game being sold ®etail for half its nominal value within a month of its release and often for $10 or less within a year. And a lot of software simply becomes worthless within a decade or less because it is superceded, won't work on a new OS or whatever. Sure, you can duplicate software relatively easily which is not a concern for most physical products, but if you're going to be doing that you probably wouldn't have been buying your software anyway. Yep.

You can sell on stuff you're completely happy with, plenty of people sell on cars to get a new model for example. While the cash outlay is obviously a lot greater for a car the theory as to why you may trade up is pretty much the same. I think that people here are certainly not a representative sample- I'd never sell my boxed Fallouts, System Shock 2, Wing Commanders, Baldurs Gates etc, personally. But most people likely don't think about themselves as being 'completely happy' with games and view them as consumables, else there wouldn't be such a big market for 2nd hand physical media games already. If you've finished with a game and don't want to play MP extensively and aren't likely to replay it and want to move to the next big new thing then getting a discount on your next purchase is a sensible thing to do from their perspective. The Next Big Thing mentality is actively encouraged by publishers so they have to take the good of that with the bad. On the original post, at a fundamental level I see no compelling reason why designers of video games should be treated differently from designers of physical products, as the market exists now; and they (generally) do not get anything from 2nd hand sales. If there were a strong creative guild for gaming like the SAG they might be able to get some sort of residual set up and I certainly wouldn't object to that- but without that it won't happen as it isn't in the publishers' best interests, and the publishers have all the leverage. Best solution if you're independent (and lucky, almost certainly) is kickstarter or equivalent, so you get directly rewarded by its fundamental nature

Bro, Volourn. NPDs did suggest that ME3 sold through most of those 3.5m and probably sold about as much as either ME game did over their lifetime in that first month. Even if sales fell off a cliff after that it had already done enough to be profitable.

Apart from netflix (and other value added stuff MS offers/ wants to offer) there is also (potentially) OnLive style game streaming as well- if it's feasible for phones and tablets it's feasible for TVs as well. That's potentially a lot cheaper and more convenient than getting a set top box/ console, assuming you have the infrastructure to support it. That isn't the case now, but it will be a lot closer in 3-4 years time when console makers would ideally be looking at their consoles becoming profitable. It's also where a lot of game makers would like to go as (potentially) it would mean no console licence fees and no retailer cut so much more profit for them.

Everybody who cares enough about the games to analyse their respective plots and how they connect, I'd hope. There's something you can probably blame DA:O for. Played the Ultimate Edition and decided there wasn't a single bit of extended content I'd pay $10 for outside a bundle. Spare some blame for EA too, as I probably would buy (some of) the dlc if it was ever cheap, or bundled. But then while I did download BDtS I never even downloaded Zaeed, who was free, so who knows. Simply put, I'm just enough of a fan to talk about it on the internet but not enough to spend extra money if it isn't both cheap and convenient. Doesn't make it any less stupid if EA were putting crucial story information into dlc because the inevitable consequence of that is that the majority of people who do not play it will go huh? if it becomes important. Mind you, given that one of the big confusions about the ending of ME3 was caused by the last dlc implying that relays would take out entire star systems when exploding...

I'd agree that MS probably shouldn't shell out that much cash, but they're committed to consoles at this point- if they could build a time machine they'd probably go back to 2002 and kill the Xbox project and invest the money into tablet computers and shiny smart phones but as it stands a lot of people at MS have no option but to keep pushing the xbox until it succeeds. Best way to do that given it will almost certainly be a shrinking market is to get exclusives (kill the competition in the cradle) and diversify what the xbox offers as much as possible in preparation for TV makers starting to seriously go for internet capable TV which has the potential to eat console market share badly in the medium term.

I think MS could certainly find uses for WoW/ Blizzard- if they want to do streaming even as just an option (which they'd be fools not to at least look at) then things like WoW or Diablo become more useful to them on the console side as well. The strategic element would be to lock the games into prefering MS solutions and to use their biggest advantages by (groan) 'synergising' their product lines. There's a hint of that with the (non-Sega) Shogun game which is Win8 exclusive basically because that is what MS have told the devs to do. Putting MW/CoD onto Live would certainly give that a boost, and having a CoD as an exclusive launch title would given the nextbox a significant boost. Having said that THQ arguably would make a more likely targetas it is far far cheaper, even though MS is hardly short of cash reserves.

How many people actually played LotS though? There's nothing I can recall in either game they could be relatively sure everyone would have played. The only thing that makes sense for me foreshadowing wise is that the starchild is a VI of the reapers' creator race, since there are a fair few VIs around and the Prothean ones serve much the same purpose. I'm not keen on cutting much slack for Bioware here in particular. When they had a chance to explain and expand motivations and the like in the first game they copped out with "your tiny mind cannot comprehend our motivations", and the Prothean VI in the first game would have been an excellent point to foreshadow (or outright mention) the superweapon. That would also have given some much needed story ccontinuity between the three installments.

Apple, Google or especially MS might be interested as they have vested interests that might be served by owning a large game maker and all have a lot of usable cash. EA plain doesn't have enough money. Reckon they'd be about a year too late on unloading Actiblizz to get maximum return though.

Wrote themselves into a corner, probably, knew where they were going (in a general sense) but didn't know what to do when they arrived. The starchild- and the whole superweapon/ catalyst, for that matter- would not be anywhere near so bad if they'd done a proper job of foreshadowing it and it hadn't just popped up out of the blue part way through the last game in the trilogy. Hokey dream sequences and maudlin "OMG think of the children!!!" prologue sequences in the same game don't really cut it. It's marginally better than ending with "it was all a dream!", at least. But I'd still say that while the ending was not good the worse part was the overlong turgid gameplay slog preceding it.

Given the similarity of ending style we could probably look at Deux Ex Invisible War to get an idea of what any future ME titles may do to deal with the ending choice- pick whatever they think makes sense for the new story and continuity with the old can go hang. It's (to an extent) what they already did with ME2. If TOR had been more successful I think an MMO would have been inevitable, but now only if it could be done on the cheap.

Sounds more like a post apoc Men of War than anything else, unsurprising since it's the same companies and engine.

I ended up basically paying no tax at all (pretty much only VAT, think I even got NI contributions back) when I worked in the UK, but only because I knew someone who told me how to do it. It was actually a rather weird feeling, despite being completely legal.

I'd put money on both consoles being out next year. The market in consoleland is so shaky I cannot see how they can delay it further. It'd endanger a bunch of mid range publishers (not just THQ, if further R* titles sell like MP3 did 2k will be in very real trouble, Sega ain't in great shape either etc) and at the sales levels currently there probably ain't even generating that much in the way of tail end profits anyway. Realistically the 'home console' model looks like a dead duck medium term. As soon as streaming services become mainstream the console market will become (more) unsustainable.

SP the cartoon is designed in Maya, I would have thought that the game would be similar in approach so Max\ Maya whatever for character design. Most references to flash for PC/S360 games refer to the UI. I'd agree that the six month contract sounds very South Park related.

It's a bit late for character creation in South Park I would have thought- unless there's a tie in or mobile port being planned.

Plenty of people play the Sims as, well, sociopaths. No toilets, find the most amusing way to make your sims' lfe miserable, set their house on fire whatever. While it's certainly not as overt as putting No Russian on high replay at the same time it's hardly all wine and roses over in Simland either.

IIRC it was a generic "we'd love to do an Ultima" comment. The original source for the rumour was Desslock (presumably his is the linked qt3 post in the article).

For that matter the DAO marketing was hardly the epitome of taste and restraint- nor was the ludicrous and completely gratuitous blood splatter in game though at least that could be turned off. To an extent I think you can blame publishers for not doing what their close model industry (movies) do and not having lower budget releases with more focus on 'intrinsic worth' but only to an extent. Fear of risk is pretty prevalent in most industries and so long as an Activision can profitbaly run on about three major games a year that is what others will go for too. Having said that some of the discussion I've seen for the recent Sniper Elite game left me really wanting the ability to teleport them to Fallujah 2004, or Homs, or Stalingrad so they could get a taste of what they were really talking about.

The video is clearly faked. Anything with a bow upgrade in it that is Thief related is always fake.

The press and others generally don't cover 'indie' level stuff for the same general reason they don't cover the local store but will cover Walmart or McDs or Ford, there's tons of info and interest about large entities and a lot less about smaller ones. That's especially true for E3 which is unashamably a AAA event, and the big gaming news sites which are big game focused. The recent past has not been particularly kind to the smaller "1999" type publishers either though. Paradox and 1C seem to be doing OK, but Jowood and dtp have folded for example. I have no doubt that a lot of indies fold too, it's just that you hear mainly about successful ones rather than the ones which sink without trace or where two years work results in a few hundred sales.

It's all publishers know, the blockbuster model has been drummed into them repeatedly by MBA types for the past decade or so. To an extent it's fair too, if you want to run a highly profitable large company you can do it with ongoing WoW, a CoD Iteration + perhaps a Blizzard title; or maybe 100 successful indies, a year. Being publicly listed companies means that most publishers have limited scope for long term thinking and planning because there's always the push to make money now and in the 'safest' (almost always actually means the most conservative) way possible. It's extremely difficult to say that your business model is out of date because that will almost always mean a precipitous drop in share value and 'you' carrying the can for it, and people will inevitably point at CoD/ GoW/ Halo/ GTA and ask why you can't shift those numbers when others can. Basically, if you're a Paradox sized publisher running mid tier projects with maybe 30 odd employees you can do fine on six releases a year selling into the 100ks. If you're an EA or Activision size with multiple thousands of employees you have to sell blockbuster because it's the only way to maintain yourself so their options are limited.

I hope boobies can make it through, else I fear any highbrow and cultured discussion of ornithology may be severely curtailed. To be fair, Daenerys' sections in book 2 were mostly set up, reaction and aftermath from the events of Book 1. I cannot think of any real way to accelerate her arc, as written it tends quite strongly towards binary pacing, it's either sprinting ahead quickly or dawdling along doing set up and reaction, with very little in between.

Vicky II is good, it's a fair bit more streamlined than R/Vicky though that is certainly not a drawback for a game that was as complicated (and unnecessarily so, really) as the original. I'll be picking up the expansion from Gamersgate as they have a matching sale to the Steam one and getting blue coins plus avoiding The Great Satan are extra bonuses.

I probably prefer vanilla EU2 (and certainly EU2-AGCEEP/ FTG since it modifies/ provides plausible alternatives to a lot of the 'this happens now because it happened now!!!!' type determinism) to any vanilla EU3 as well, but going from EU3 to EU2 is potentially quite a significant change in philosophy for someone who likes EU3.