HalloweenDocument12

I still play Civ1, too. I have a hard time ranking the best games I ever played but it is up there, probably top 5. My general experience is different, though. I tend to stockpile more good games over time. There just seems to be more in the past because I'm compressing decades. One thing I will say is that today's market is so incremental and saturated that it's not a good value to game all the time. Instead, it's better to drop in and out and buy the games that are retrospectively held in esteem. Doesn't work with MMOs, though, as, outside of WoW, those need to be played in the first 4-6 months of release. Even WoW is inaccessible to new players since circa 2010. It's harder to find games with complex rulesets like Civ and Orion. The good games today are good for different reasons. I haven't played the recent Civs and their expansion packs, though. Sim City looks like a total mess in both basic execution and game mechanics. To keep this kind of on topic, the problem with effectively raising prices on games is that there's so much more supply and incremental quality has gone down. The new equilibrium point is achieved via the purchase of used games. If game makers are to corner this market, it has to operate similar to a free market otherwise it will collapse. Perpetually charging $60 for old games is a pipe dream. The market won''t support it.

It's not true that used games are identical to new. In many ways they degrade in the same fashion as cars. Used games are far more likely to have scratches and other forms of damage, which may make the game skip cutscenes or even render it unplayable. Packaging and inserts are likely to be damaged or missing. The center knob of the case is more likely to be broken, and the case in general is more likely to be in overall poor condition. The older the game, the more magnified the effect. Over time product is lost due to damage. There's also the issue of the game simply having less overall value even with "identical bits" by the virtue of it disappearing from public consciousnesses or removal of features such as multiplayer, either by fiat or by de facto via abandonment of player base. If game quality was up to par, we wouldn't be seeing a glut of $5 off used games mere days after first sale. While evil Gamestop may be flipping those games at near retail, the people trading them in are getting a fraction back. Gamers are panicking over a poor purchase and are willing to accept virtually anything back to minimize the sunk cost. If they were motivated to hold onto the game for more than a week or two, there wouldn't be a glut of supply. As it is, these first sale customers are receiving negative value by buying at $60 and selling at $20 a few days later. Also, this $20 is in store credit, so, wow, how bad can these games be when customers are willing to abandon them without even cash in hand?

You jest, but it's perfectly legal to include "deferred revenue" and to draw upon cash reserves, which I expect they will do. Remember that 7 for the most part is sold to the enterprise as "8 with downgrade rights" so this will put 8 on the books even though that is not what's happening. Microsoft charges upfront for their subscriptions so they can apply the revenue any way they want, basically, during the lifetime of the subscription, so losses will be less apparent. When Microsoft has a surplus, they add it to cash reserves to be drawn upon later as needed. You will see a flurry of articles proclaiming the superior health of Microsoft and that criticism is overblown based on a proper looking balance sheet.

The Facebook campaign is simply bizarre. The entire point of Twitter is to interact with celebrities, and that's where they can be found. Facebook is a Classmates replacement.

I actually support the removal of backcompat from consoles, or at least I feel it should be an option. True backcompat, putting the hardware guts in, is a cost that needs to be passed onto the consumer. Software backcompat is often disappointing and essentially needs to be done per-game, thus limiting the number of practically available titles. I think most people interested in playing the old games will have the old consoles. However, the durability of the XBox 360 is an issue so there's more of an argument here than with any other console. Something else I wish they'd do is allow daisy-chaining consoles with HDMI passthroughs so that people don't need to fiddle with wires when changing consoles. This, too, would be an added cost but I don't think it would be significant. I could be wrong. Of course, I do expect the cost savings to be passed onto the consumer. If this console costs $500 or up it better have amazing specs.

I feel it stems from a kind of false equivocation: technology improves over time therefore each new technology is an improvement. While innovation and experimentation should be encouraged, failure should also be allowed, and there should be a realization that some attempts will be regressions. As time passes, the failures are less remembered than the successes thus giving the appearance of an uninterrupted string of improvements. After enough time, people start forgetting what has failed before and attempt to reintroduce bad concepts. As an example, just look at how many people are talking about full screen apps, single-tasking, and rote memorization of complex actions as innovations. We spent years trying to free ourselves of this. Even worse, Microsoft was once a primary innovator away from these computing concepts.

Not strictly true. The XS model allows local streaming. That said, it's probably not as good of a solution compared to, say, a PlayStation 3. On the other hand, Roku costs $85 for the premium model and $50 for the standard so it's not quite the same thing compared to a $500 video game console.

This one is particularly sickening to me. Cyberbullying, or any bullying has one key component, and that is an innocent victim. Such victims do not deserve the heat the receive. Adam Orth is not innocent, nor a victim. He is a self-identified Softie, and a bigwig too. He is on a huge public forum, Twitter. He is talking to a representative of another company. Thurrott is taking a giant crap on all actual innocent victims everywhere by trying to protect this Softie from any consequences for his arrogance and own big mouth. Not sure if you're aware of this, but there's this anti-bullying "thing" going on online at the moment. It started earnestly in response to high-profile suicides due to things like Facebook harassment but has been co-opted and corrupted into what amounts into a tool to chill arguments. The gist is that party X can make the most inflammatory remark and that if he receives more than a few counterarguments then he is being "bullied". One would think it pretty clear that X is, in fact, the aggressor, but "victim culture" (a related concept) twists the response into an emotional appeal to distract from the invalidity of the original argument. As in the above example, the emotional appeal will almost certainly contain platitudes with charged language. Similar concepts include "safe space", or the appeal that people should be shielded from all criticism and negativity and "privilege", or the idea that whoever is making the counterargument is in a position of strength by invalid means and cannot argue in good faith due to his ill-gotten superior position. "Safe space" and "privilege" originated in the LGBT and feminist communities but are now being used in general argumentation. When combining all these "tools" it allows one to establish a position of advocacy yet shield himself from any criticism. Skepticism, critical thinking, and evidence gathering are the sworn enemies of the above concepts.

I am guilty of the "unattended install" syndrome, though I think you mean to expand it to the entire 3rd party ecosystem (e.g. AutoPatcher, DriverPacks, etc.). I have dealt with over a thousand installs, ranging from individual to ~100 seat deployments. For me it's trying to figure out the balance, and it is a moving target. The problem is that it seems like it would be 45 minutes, but it really isn't. Sure you can get to some sort of desktop in that amount of time, but then there are the updates, drivers, applications, data, etc. For myself, I allocate an eight hour block and figure that I'll only be about halfway done, with the other half being done gradually over a period of months as circumstances arise. I used to do this professionally, and my boss wanted me to just reformat every computer I came across because he thought that was a way of getting out in under an hour, but it ended up being my last resort as it was usually faster to find out what the specific issue was and address that, even if it took 2-3 hours. Most don't seem to understand just how long it takes to restore someone's computer to the way he wants it, and how prepared one needs to be upfront to minimize lost time. The "45 minutes" figure comes up a lot, but if you do installs that way you'll never get called again. After a while, I got very good at manual virus removals, which was the #1 issue, and didn't need to wait for long scans anymore, which were often defeated by the viruses, anyway.

Minor disagreement but I feel these kind of people are "less wrong" than casual pirates. The reason is that the collectors spend so much time downloading and processing that it greatly cuts into entertainment time. I think a pathology is involved and that these people would be unlikely to translate into significant recovered sales. I think collectors are more interested in bragging about the state of their collection rather than consuming the content. Casual pirates on the other hand probably comprise the bulk of lost sales, even though they may actually buy the majority of items they consume. What about getting excited when people start dropping out, e.g. due to lack of stable, high speed Internet? This probably intersects with another line of thought common in gaming: hatred of casuals. The sycophants seem to think that gaming will improve if the customer base shrinks dramatically. I'm sure they'd change their minds once the gaming industry lost 80% of its revenue. When people complained about lag and rubber-banding in Diablo 3, some Blizzard fanboys said, in earnest, that you shouldn't be playing games unless you're willing to relocate to Southern California or South Korea. These people also expect you to have premium Internet subscriptions to multiple ISPs. Again, if there is no such thing as a premium ISP in your immediate area, then it's your fault for not gambling your livelihood just to play some game that you'll be sick of in 2-3 weeks anyway. I'm sure the same kind of comments happened with Sim City, which was totally inoperable for something like 10 days, but I knew what was going to happen before it was released just by knowing who was publishing it. I'm sure EA has their own troll base. Another popular one is "You're not buying a license to the game but permission to connect to their servers. If the server said that the game was down then that's all that's required. Anything more is generosity by the company and from that point on the game is free to play. You should be grateful."

I think it would greatly strengthen the case if they could demonstrate that not only are the games designed to be addictive to kids but that the transaction systems are often virtually indistinguishable from slot-machine style gambling. Unless the FTC et al get involved, settlement is highly likely and this case is unlikely to see a courtroom.

What these people aren't saying is that the kind of 'piracy' prevented by always online is in regards to microtranactions, which is an undesirable feature to start with. Gamers put up with it in always-online free-to-play games because they recognize it as an economic reality, but cosmetic bolt-ons and especially pay-to-win are highly undesirable in full retail games. Wherever the customers go. That would be corporate suicide. Yeah, how dare people expect to change money for working products. Having millions of them is even worse. Can't they just jive the corporations all their money and shut up about it?

I was always torn on that one. On one hand, yes, Microsoft absolutely boosted the algorithm from the Stacker source. On the other hand, the algorithm was yet another implementation of LZ77 + Huffman encoding (PKZIP, gzip, PNG, etc.) and wasn't anything particularly innovative. I'd have been more satisfied were Microsoft found guilty of copyright infringement rather than patent infringement. Admittedly, I haven't gone through the patents, but I wouldn't be surprised if they read something like "Apply LZ77 + Huffman to FAT rather than individual files." Groundbreaking.

Ah, I'm sorry for being so off-topic lately but someone mentioned Blockbuster and idiocy and I just have to comment. Years ago, Blockbuster charged $4.02 for rentals where I lived. Of course they'd most often be paid in whole dollars because in everyone's heads the cost was an even $4. Naturally, Blockbuster wanted exact change. They posted a series of signage, becoming progressively louder and aggressive, which just became comical. Why didn't they just eat the 2 cents? It's not even 1%. Or charge $4.25? I doubt anyone would have cared that much. And that "3-day" policy was BS. For a lot of people, the act of fetching the movie precluded actually watching it so the next day was the only realistic time to watch. The $1 rewind charge was crap, too, because they'd charge you but wouldn't rewind the tapes. Joke was on them since I bought a high-speed dedicated rewinder, the same they used in the store (or were supposed to). The thing about them, though, is they didn't respect the stopping point recognized by VCRs so it would slam pretty hard at the absolute end of the tape. Sometimes, the tape would just break. A screwdriver and some Scotch tape would fix it, of course, but I rarely felt so generous. I did tell them that the tape broke so that I wasn't screwing the next innocent renter. Once they threatened to charge me $80 for a replacement tape and I diffused the situation by asking them if they really thought they were getting $80 out of me.

The bigger outcry was over lack of LAN play. Supposedly it was over piracy but you needed to log onto Battle.net to authenticate anyway for the other offline portion, the campaign. The campaign even works offline after authentication. The only ramification is achievements don't work. Industry sycophants downplay the lack of LAN play but the problem is that Blizzard doesn't make available offline or even private server editions for tournament play, which is an enormous part of the StarCraft ecosystem. It's embarrassing to be watching a hot match broadcasted to hundreds of thousands only to see the screen gray out with a message that connection has been lost. It should be noted that tournaments pay Blizzard for site licenses, so customized tournament play is not an unreasonable request. D3 created even more bad will by combining all the disadvantages of online play (lag, disconnects, rubber-banding, hacking, account issues) with all the disadvantages of offline play (poor social support, limited overall multi-player experience). The game was essentially built around the real money auction house, which I doubt generated anywhere near the "WoW replacement" revenue they were probably hoping for. And these are the "good" games they make, along with the latest CoD DLC which everyone buys only because it's required to keep playing with their friends. What bugs me about this is that industry journalism, both in the games and PC industries, play all this off as a "down market". Professional writers won't even consider that decreased value is the driver behind declining revenues. Big-name development on the PC is way down, and all the consoles are 7+ years old. On top of that, games are intentionally being designed with less value to be made up via DLC and microtransactions. Finally, there are too many FPSes and not everybody likes them. But, sure, blame lack of demand.

Give it a year or so and you'll see the same article written about Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision-Blizzard. The only reason it hasn't been written already is that WoW's $150 million monthly bankroll keeps the entire company afloat. It can't last forever so when it caves it'll probably be the biggest fallout since Atari. The rest of the industry knows this which could be why Vivendi couldn't unload its stake in the company. These companies are overly bloated and poorly managed from a creative standpoint. It actually is quite similar to Microsoft in that it's obvious the brain drain has already happened and there's no one left but management and amateur designers and programmers.

I don't understand how "showrooming" applies to food, but apparently it does. This cover charge will just chase people away and accelerate the decline. Even regular "non-showrooming" customers will be put off. I don't know what brick and mortar are to do, but I doubt this method will be fruitful. Best Buy specifically offers notoriously poor customer service and salesmanship, a reputation that existed even before Internet shopping reached critical mass. There's unmet demand for electronics expertise that dates back to the late-70s or even earlier. For decades box stores have gone the route of staffing unknowledgeable but personable salespeople but they have been replaced by online reviews. Online reviews only go so far as to realize one's vision of entertainment or productive workflow, but most electronics salesmen are even more clueless in this regard than attempting to piece together information from review snippets and spec sheets.

Disabling app store browsing from foreign systems is a devastating marketing decision. You want people to see your wares. What Microsoft has done is the equivalent of an appliance store charging a cover to get in. If Microsoft wants to compete in the trendy land of consumer electronics, they have to get with the times and stand up a dedicated marketing unit who has top-level decision making authority. Basically, marketing needs to be involved at the design stage, as much as engineers hate that. Shooting from the hip, as Microsoft has always done, was fine when their primary customers were OEMs and IT-heavy businesses, who basically ignored the marketing efforts, but Microsoft just can't do that when they're trying to convince everybody that they're "cooler" than Apple and Google. Even Sony is cooler than Microsoft and they haven't been cool since the mid-90s. Microsoft was never cool. They were basically birthed as a decades old company appealing to old fogies. EDIT: there are retail stores that do charge covers to get in but they tend to cater toward savvy shoppers who purchase in bulk. In other words, the IT-heavy equivalents of retail shopping. Looky-loos don't shop at these places, and Microsoft wants the looky-loos.

Windows Phone is less than 2.5 years old. Why would anyone have bought two in that span? Maybe he's going back to Windows Mobile.

Something to keep in mind about the CLI is that it still exists and is still used for basically the same things it was in the past. What happened is the utility of computers expanded with the introduction of GUI and then again with touch. But the old stuff remains. In fact, Microsoft has been trending back toward CLI with things such as Power Shell (especially in Exchange) and MinWin. Where CLI fails is where they tried to graft it onto areas traditionally handled by GUIs, e.g. Linux Desktop. The same is true with touch, except for the fact that it is perceived as a "forward" technology rather than "backward".

I'll eat my nonexistent hat if this happens. I'm sure the FBI knows it won't work, either. However, they may be successful in being able to attach monitoring software the FBI has already created to the accounts of specific suspects whose wiretapping has been approved by a judge. Still a reason for concern, but it would have been in any case.

I was hoping an Iron Maiden fan would get the reference, even though they aren't on the soundtrack Bob's a peach. He doesn't think technology is being released at breakneck speed. When reminded that Windows is now on a yearly release schedule, he wants agree to disagree. Too bad he didn't just say that he forgot about that and was quietly reevaluating his opinions. The other guy who initially said he had "plenty of hiccups" with Windows 8 then forgot he said it was funny, too. "hiccups is not issues." Haha. I know it's a sample size of two, but do fans of Windows 8 have issues hiccups with attention span? Might explain why they like the bright colors and animated tiles so much. </snark>

I was worried the disembodied hp logo creeping through the window was going to hurt the poor girl.

Try as I may, I couldn't focus on any of that.