deanb

Oh come on, you know it's ridiculous to suggest that publishing on 3 platforms makes the game cost 3 times as much to develop. I said up to. I don't know exactly how much it cost to make, but Crytek have implied that it was much more than the first Crysis, hence going multi-plat to recoup costs. They did develop a new engine don't forget, not like most devs licensing out Unreal 3. I didn't say "more" I said worse. And that's not me saying, that's developers and publishers. Zero-day piracy is reckoned to be the worst form, and as several of us have pointed out it, the 360 (and more recently PS3) version of a game is pretty much always out well in advance of release. (LA Noire has been available since Saturday if you're on a 360.) I'd grab you an article, I'm fishing for it, but pirates covers piracy on many platforms, movies and sports teams so it's pretty hard to find the article I'm wanting. It's an interview. (but even that doesn't limit it given sports stars and movie stars do interviews ) @SL: Activiuon make 70% of their money from PC. Activision also output much more games, so of course they make more money on their games than Valve. Per individual unit I bet you Valve makes more. The bonus of not having to sell discs and being able to sell your games for almost pure profit on your own platform. iirc Valve is certainly more valuable. Per employee they're worth more than Apple n Google. They're a private company so hard to gauge. Also don't forget that TF2 has it's DLC, I'm sure there's many people out there who've comfortably spent at least $15 on hats. And once again, There's 8 COD games to the 2(4) Half-Life games. Though on PC they've sold a combined 22million. edit: not the interview I was looking for but: http://www.microsoft...winterview.aspx Given the prevalence of digital, so the lack of disc based PC games, and advances in DRM, it has really dropped in recent years. Console was there to pick up the slack. It'l all end in tears; OnLive n Co will rise up, no discs, no piracy. edit2: unspoken reason for why zero-day is an issue is because it means word of mouth can get out before release, not just the pre-approved unembargoed reviews.

I'm sure I've made myself plenty clear on where I stand on the "waah PC piracy" stuff. Even in my last post here. If Piracy was a factor big enough to drive devs away then 360 would have fuck all. It's piracy problem is arguable worse. 1million on a single platform compared to 1.5million spread across three with potentially 3 times the dev cost? And as SL pointed out (though I'd say wrong conclusion) PC games get sales, they live long lives. Crysis 1, the 3 year old game, is currently beating out Crysis 2 on the currently played charts. Whereas console games you live strong in the first few weeks or die with a whimper. Half Life 2 is 7 years old with 12million sales on PC (yes, including Steam). I doubt most were in the first week. Compared to stuff like COD where nearly half the sales are in the first 24hrs. The candle that burns twice as bright burns twice as fast.

It does matter when it's two different developers. Bit of an oversight. I'd equally dismiss any Human Revolution reviews that have a game coming from a company known for their JRPGs.

I assume that's from the Giantbomb review? This is hte same EG that I linked yesterday as the guys who run Digital Foundry? tbh I quite like EG reviews. But yeah is this the same Giantbomb review where a ctrl+f on "bondi" finds it only 3 times. twice in the comments one once on the "developer" section. Rockstar on the other hand pops up 9 times. I've never read a Giantbomb review before, but I don't think I want to dip into this one too much.

At least 80% of games will not just go in your console and poof you're playing. Fair chunk require patches. If you've bought a game new you'll pop it in and their it's a game that's been out a while, where you'll be uploading all the fixes to the game since it first came out, or it'll be brand new and the firs few weeks will be updates to "That game I just bought for £40: The Beta". And every now n then it's a system update for the console. Sure Pc has it too, but 90% of the time it's some kind of automatic updater that assumes if you've got the game installed it's probably cos you want to play it. So it'll be all "you know what, he's doing nothing at the moment, a fix is out, I'll just slip it in while he's not doing much...oh wait, scratch that he's playing a SP only game, best not download it now" As for the piracy thing, know where I said I wrote a bit. I deleted a fair chunk too. Some of it on game sales too. the tl:dr bieng: Crysis sold 3 million copies, making it one of the top 30 best selling PC games of all time. A pretty good feat for a game no one supposedly could run and tons of people pirated. It was cited as a reason for going to multi-plat (definitely by random commenter, not sure if by Crytek) that they had to go multi-plat to get the numbers to afford the game. The game was pretty agreeable all around to have major cutbacks on the original in order to work on consoles. EA haven't been too upfront on sales, but initial figures suggest 700K all around on first week, and VGchartz say 1.5million all platfroms to-date. They went multi-plat and sold less than the original Crysis did on a single dying, pirating, platform. Also as others have pointed out it's not like Console is free from piracy. It has been said many times that it's not so much the piracy in general, but the zero-day piracy that's the killer. Consoles are almost like clockwork, hitting nearly 2 weeks before release. PC games tend to be day of release or a dew days later. The DRM does actually hold them back. Last year one of the top pirated console games was Alan Wake. It was pirated 3 times more than the game sold. Yet no one ever brings it up on consoles. It's pretty much just a scapegoat that actually means jack shit or publishers wouldn't just be doing DRM on PC. edit: Not easy to do? Every single PC game has to be cracked in one of several methods. Console piracy you get a friend of a friend to chip it and you're done. Just burn a disc, pop it in and you're done. And nope CD Projeckt are not using DRM on Witcher: http://www.gog.com/en/page/tw2v3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkS169P_Eeo Right click - send to - Android. Love WinAmp

Steam/Valve just changed their sale format. They're not doing the Weekend Deal/Midweek Madness (or not just) They're doing daily 24hr deals. http://store.steampowered.com/news/5468/

There's a central "block" or something. It's from a pool of $40million or so. (well $40million worth now) and you make them through that mining thing which seems to go at a speed that changes depending on how many coins are in existence. Then you trade them with the wallet program. As I said, I don't understand the concept of money. I don't even know why the pound coin in my pocket is wroth as much as it is, but supposedly someone sat down somewhere and said "one pound equals something" and from that day forth it was worth something. And someone in Japan said a yen is worth a pixel of a something. And someone in US said a dollar is worth a somethingelse. (unless I did the convert the wrong way around) I don't know where it comes from, I don't know who says it has any value or why. The money with the queen on as far as my understanding of money goes may as well be leaves instead.

I dunno. (though Hashes are still crap ton more unique than a cd-key)

I feel it's a privacy issue waiting to happen, but I guess convenience is worth it.

It wasn't exactly long, just I wrote it halfway through the PC vs console piece, so when I came back it must have gone iffy.

I'd guess the same system that tells my computer that I have part 0042 of latest EA game, and someone in brazil is missing part 00042 of same game, and so sends that chunk from my PC to the brazil PC? Also it uses a hash, which would make duplicates pretty unlikely. (as in unlikely as someone in the world being born with the same DNA as you) It was some Googlers side project so I assume out of any part of the idea, the tech side is down to pat. It's the economical stuff where it's wobbly. Like where the value comes from.

There was a googlecache link of the review, but it seems that got taken down too.

Not really sure what this is, I think cos I don't 100% understand the concept of money, but it's supposedly going to change the world (unless governments ban them) http://launch.is/blog/l019-bitcoin-p2p-currency-the-most-dangerous-project-weve-ev.html http://www.weusecoins.com/ http://www.bitcoin.org/ The mining part sounds...dodgy. Maybe someone here can further explain it. Is the top article being sensationalist, or is this really something that could change everything?

http://www.bbc.co.uk...litics-13386948 The government owns £792,000 worth of wine. They'll be selling a few to finance buying some more.(I think it's a case of sell some now, buy some in cheap, sell those in 40 years time...if the French president at the time hasn't drunk it) Via Connnoooorrrr

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/05/16/the-witcher-2-has-four-launch-trailers/ Also I got email this morning, mines on the way.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/44334/HMV-cuts-LA-Noire-to-499 Trade in Brink to get LA Noire for just £5 at HMV.

Apparently that's the Japanese Governments fault. They're stepping in on the issue (I'd assume cos Sony is one of their largest companies and they maybe don't want to see it go down the shitter/damage Japanese reputations). Basically they're making Sony hold back on certain functions until they're satisfied it's fully up to scratch in regards to being hack-proof n such. http://www.foxbusiness.com/industries/2011/05/15/japan-restart-sony-online-games-services-approved/

Okay firstly: a minor pet peeve is that while chrome will normally do a kind of back-up of anything I type, for some reason whatever system this forum is using it goes against chrome's ability to do that, so for some reason I just lost my post. Which means second time around it won't be as good. Now to the original post as best I remember it. though largely lacking in the fire of the original. "They're a business" So what? I'm a customer. I perfectly understand that a business has the main aim of acquiring profits. Don't fault them for it. But as a customer my main purpose is not to bend over and have the business ass rape the profits out of me. As a customer I wear the pants in this relationship, I have the cash, the companies want my cash. I don't see why at all it would be an issue that as a customer I would feel I can make a few demands and requests to the company that wants my money. A customer is not there to give a business money just because they are a business. That's not how it works. A business is there to give me, the customer, enjoyable things in exchange for cash. Ass rape is not enjoyable. If you find ass rape enjoyable then you can take my turn too then yougo get your head checked out., and finally you can go get ass raped on another planet while the rest of us bend the companies to our will and not the other way around.

Well for me personally I'm mainly a PC guy. I'll grab console titles that are console exclusive but pretty much everything else is on PC. Only multi-plats I have on PS3 is ACII n Force Unleashes, both came out on PC many months after release. Control wise I'll pick whichever fits the game best. RTS, Civ V etc I'll go with keyboard, action games like Arkham Asylum I went with a gamepad. I think either side that sticks purely with one or the other is pretty stupid, use the tool that fits the job. My main reason for going with PC gaming is that it's; a ) shit tons cheaper than console gaming b ) You get really hands on with your games It's a myth that PC gaming is expensive. Everyone more than likely has a PC. So that's £500 or so they're spending regardless. Pretty much all it takes with a modern PC these days to jump from "oh hey I can check facebook" to "Need more vespene gas you say?!" is a GPU, which a graphics card can be had for under £100 and will comfortably play any game you run at it. Whereas to go from "Hey I can check facebook" to "Die Locust, Die!" is £160. Initial savings starting at £60+. Then it comes to the games, brand new PC titles come in at £25-£30 (apart from a few EA n Activision titles here n there, even less if you shop around), compared to the typically standard £40 for the same on console. There's also a ton of PC titles that come out at around the £15-20 mark too that while not top of the line are pretty sweet and fit the price. Also it's easy to pirate. This has both opened me up to many new games I might not have bothered with before, and saved me from a few duds. Console games it's a bit of a risk on picking up a new title. As for getting down n dirty with games, it's both the fact I can generally mod a game to hell n back. And I can fix a game myself. Any bugs left in a game are generally there to stay on a console title, and they're getting buggy (No idea how any of these companies coped last gen). Unless the dev decides to patch it up you're usually screwed. Whereas on PC you'll have the community patch things up. One of the bigger ones is the Unofficial Oblivion Patch which patches 1800 bugs still left in the final patch of the game. I can get for some people they don't want to be doing this kind of stuff, but I'd much rather have the option there than to be left unable to do anything. As for where the "battle" between the two came from I think partly from the whole "versus" mentality of gaming the press like to push, 360 versus PS3, Move vs Kinect, DS vs PSP, WRPG vs JRPG, COD vs BF etc. I think some of it as well is because once upon a time they were their own thing, you had your platformers, action games n JRPGs on console and you had your RTS, WRPG n FPS on PC. Then they started mingling, and something had to give. And its those things that kinda dirtied the waters a bit. Most games tend to make concessions of the PC parts. No using a mouse to control menus, textures that fit into 256MB VRAM, paying for patches/DLC, P2P multiplayer etc. The equivalent would be buying a modern console game that was built with the PS2 in mind. You'd be a bit bummed because you know it could do better. And then when you point out that a game could be better, i.e having dedicated servers for multiplayer, someone comes along n calls you elitist*. As MasterDex pointed out if they had half a brain instead of attempting to insult someone they could maybe realise that dedi's for everyone would be great. It's why I hardly play console MP, lobbys are pretty fucking dull. Even duller when it doesn't fill with the required amount n drops it. I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would willingly pay for that. I perfectly understand that PC gaming isn't for everyone and vice versa. Thing is it's nice to have the option between the two, but PC is very rapidly getting gobbled up in favour of just mushing it into a single platform. And PC gamers are kicking up a fuss on it, rightfully so, and I think if it went the other way around console gamers would kick up just as much of a fuss. Your game loads up with a mouse to control menus?!, You have to manually fish out a server to play on from a server browser?!, your games come out buggy n require constant patchi...oh wait(at least ours auto-patch, one day console's might get that, hopefully). Now to reply: @atomsk: What do you mean objects are disappearing? How low you going? Source engine doesn't really have an issue with pop-in. @Strangelove: Regarding the no one cares for AA or fps. I give you Digital Foundry. And that's mainly for consoles. Rarely do they bring in the PC versions even if they exist. They have these Face-Off things where they'll look at the fps, how the shadows look, how quick it loads the 3rd level etc. If no one cared, they wouldn't run the articles. Good reads for some of the editorials mind, go a bit more technically focused than most other sites and articles. @Misterjack: That's hardly the case with 8th gen games. They're just as likely to be buggy. n require patching. It's pretty rare to be able to put a game into the tray and play right away. (compared to PC games which come pre-patched n patch automatically when you're not playing) As long as you don't fuck around, you've bought a game that suits your system, you'll generally have very little issue running a PC game. About the only time I crash a PC game these days is cos I'm alt-tabbing too much, or cos I exited a source game (always "hl2.exe has stopped working". No idea why). sorry for the long post, you guys have had several days on this thread. *What is up with this as an insult? "The belief that certain persons or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority, as in intellect, social status, or financial resources." No shit. PC's can do things better than consoles, therefore we'd kinda like if they did. I'd find it much more insult worthy if someone was instead asking to be shat upon and have games come out as half arsed hack jobs. In which case feel free to insult and call them a moron. In fact I've just remembered something else. Off to the innernet pet peeves thread.

Now that PSN is back up anyone up for firing up some UC2 again? Sometime later in the week? Nexus has suggested 8PM GMT on Wednesday (maybe earlier)

RockPaperShotgun recommended a Plantronics 777. I wasn't up for spending that much, especially as I tend to destroy headsets. So I picked up this 377(or 367. Whichever was "open headset", meant to put out more sound) An early birthday treat.

Apparently it's down for a while due to the flood of users. (though you can change on your PS3...)

Possible that Ethan didn't sign into his main/original PS3?