rjaypeters, no worries, I dont take offense in that
Developing video games is at least an honest job. I mean you did not accuse me of being a pimp, casino owner, drug dealer, or even worse a banker or a politician
Skipjack wrote:rjaypeters, no worries, I dont take offense in that
Developing video games is at least an honest job. I mean you did not accuse me of being a pimp, casino owner, drug dealer, or even worse a banker or a politician
No, I mean that because the video game market deals in (basically) toys, they exempt themselves from reasonable practices and product design. Viz. "Downloadable Content" that milks kids from their lunch/parents' money to ridiculous extents, often enough for things that were already part of the game (but withheld for the sole purpose of presenting it as "bonus") and/or for things not at all worth their selling price - the latter even if "just 5 bucks" for some textures that are basically concept art variations of the same thing you already get with "normal package".
There's more I could describe but that's the gist of it. This is as a consumer and as relative to someone who's been in the industry for a few years now. The latter's feedback is perfectly consistent with the former. It's just ridiculous, even if the unspoken rationale is arguably "reasonable enough".
What you have, basically, are studios swimming in profits to the point of complacency. Their market is immature consumers living on grown adults' disposable income. So of course it's not surprising that things have turned out this way. So why is it a calamity worth griping about? Because video games are a medium with vastly more potential.
choff wrote:It depends on if the German reactors are the same design as the Japanese, and if they have any fault lines they've put them on. Merkel is probably blowing smoke for political reasons, cause once the rubber starts to hit the road funding alternate energy, there's probably going to be a quiet backtracking on policy. That or fusion power starts coming on line in a decade.
It also depends on if unforeseen circumstances can occur.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
Hmm, maybe the slot machine market, though I believe that the mafia there is more in the business that then use them, not those that develop them. But I had never much of a business with this side of the video game market.
The computer game market that I was in touch with, is more or less a bunch of geeks, some are just slightly bigger and richer than others...
If you think that this part of the software industry is a mafia, then you should see what is going on in the medical imaging side of things!
That is quite disturbing, I can tell you!
A whole country cannot lower its IQ. let alone a continent! This is a misunderstanding of the term.
IQ is a 'quotient', as in, 'relative intelligence'. You can say 'intelligence levels have dropped' or 'lower scores today on the same IQ tests of N years ago', but IQ is just your relative intelligence to the rest of your country's population. So a whole population cannot 'drop' IQ level.
The population above 100 IQ is ALWAYS 50%.
Get it?
Actually, if the intelligence level of youngesters is dropping, oddly the maximum IQ levels in the population goes up, because more people are now 'further above a [new] average' as the average drops!!!
Betruger wrote:What you have, basically, are studios swimming in profits to the point of complacency. Their market is immature consumers living on grown adults' disposable income. So of course it's not surprising that things have turned out this way. So why is it a calamity worth griping about? Because video games are a medium with vastly more potential.
I see your point.
Last year I was reading the statistics of sales of a game called Halo Reach for the Xbox 360. It made more than 200 million USD on its first day of sale.
Betruger wrote:What you have, basically, are studios swimming in profits to the point of complacency. Their market is immature consumers living on grown adults' disposable income. So of course it's not surprising that things have turned out this way. So why is it a calamity worth griping about? Because video games are a medium with vastly more potential.
I see your point.
Last year I was reading the statistics of sales of a game called Halo Reach for the Xbox 360. It made more than 200 million USD on its first day of sale.
You have similar games to that one being sold for 60 $, when they are nothing but clones with different artwork. Generations (in the iterative sense) of these are sold over and over and over, across a number of different franchises. Next, you have the phenomenon of reducing quality of these games even more, because of studios deciding to cater to the console market. The reason being nothing else than profit. So... You have millions and millions of profits, which means you can hire more and better staff to produce better games, right? Wrong - there's no such corresponding improvement. Instead more profiteering, e.g. on top of such games at 60 bucks a piece, you have "bonus" items (that are often enough already included in the game you bought, but "locked") sometimes consisting of nothing more than color variations (literally) of the basic content; and this is sold for the mere price of 15$. The ratio of "bonus content" price to "whole basic game" price is completely off. The proportions of profit to content are about as exaggerated as for Hollywood. You don't even need to produce quality or works of art. You just need to sell it.
It's all literally milking kids for their money with stupid and repetitive games. And then there's the "genius" execs telling the actual content developers to include the most hare-brained elements you could think of... Just like the twin spiky haired exec in Dilbert.
There's just no accountability whatsoever. Profits rule. And they get away with it because all of this is "just toys". There's no such serious responsibility as in any "real world" products. And it's a real shame because video games nowadays have the means to truly start to be the child prodigy offspring of books and movies - easy example is epic Scifi.
Betruger, you are waaay exaggerating. There are several large franchises that this is applicable to what you say. But generally this is not really the case. There are many smaller studios that release quality games without any of the practises you claim.