Yantelope V2

Oh snap, I forgot about gamefly, they might be pissed.

Ah, yes, this is true, and MS could do a similar system. You are still however getting locked into a single DRM system and you can't transfer the license regardless of where you purchased it from. That's more what I meant.

Well, the speculaiton is that Xbox won't be eliminating the physical disc. It might just be a code thing like the online passes. Except, instead of online pass it'll just be your complete game pass. The game disc would be worthless without it. I understand why people hate this idea, I don't much care for it either, but I can also see just how much money MS stands to make from such a scheme. Also, PC is different in that you can choose which store to get your games from but some games are changing that, see steamworks titles. I was pretty dismayed when Supreme Commander 2 shipped with only half of the game on the disc.

Frankly, I'm surprised it's taken this long as well. I don't really like it but I can't think of any reason why MS wouldn't do this outisde of consumer backlash.

Well, also keep in mind that most of those games on the Xbox are running at a sub HD resolution with minimal AA and AF. I don't like synthetic benchmarks. If you want to check charts I like the combined frame charts. http://www.tomshardw...Index,2674.html In a those results it still shows about 33% of the performacne of a 6950 and closer to 1/4 the power of a GTX 580.

I'd probably break down and get the system eventually if it had some great games I want to play but I feel it wouldn't be my primary system. Right now I buy amlost everything on Xbox and very few things on PS3 but I might switch that around or even move back to PC as primary if this is the route MS goes.

See, I'd have been less suprised if it was a 6870 or a 6850 even but the 6670 is pretty far down on the heirarch sheet. On par with a Geforce 8800 GTS 512 according to Tom's Hardware.

So, I'll try and explain my position slightly better. I think that people who enter into legal contracts should hold to them and not complain that they were swindled unless there really was some sort of coercion or other illegality going on. In regards to copyright law, it's generally treated like property, hence the term, intellectual property. If you trade or sell that property you have lost your rights to it. If you value it then don't sell it. Now, if you want to tweak the way that copyright law works and how it transitions into public domain then I'm all ears on that front. In Texas you can lease the mineral rights to your land and not actually sell your land. This allows companies to drill on your land. As a provision to protect land owners most mineral leases have a clause (not sure if it's legally required or not) where if the land goes unused or undeveloped for a certain period of time the rights revert back to the property owner. Agian though, this is a lease and not a sale. If IP creators were to work out a deal like that it would probably be good. Of course, you can go back to the actual creators of the content holding it an not releasing it and then you're still left with consumers with no products. To stick with the original comparison, nobody forces anyone to lease their land for oil or gas drilling. Similar leases or provisions could be instituted in contracts to protect IP creators and I'd be fine with that but it still comes back to honoring the deal. IP is also created by groups of people now, not simply by individuals. Ownership of IP by companies is inevitable unless one person, maybe the head of a company can take sole responsibility for the work of the people in his employ and I don't think that'd be much different than corporate ownership anyway. Square Enix hasn't made a Chrono Trigger game in quite some time. Does that mean that the IP should be made public for all to use and profit from? Should Square Enix lose all rights to the game? Maybe eventually. I don't know, maybe the lengths of copyright law are too long, and we could argue that. I don't think that's the same as legally selling your rights to a game and then complaining that the company wont sell it back. So, TL;DR version here: Yes you could restructure your contracts or change the lenghts of when copyrights expeire and that's something that's debateable. Don't sign a contract with someone and complain when you regret it later.

So who can hold an IP and who can't? Who does the IP go to if it's being considered "hoarded?" Can an individual be the only person who can permanently hold an IP? What if you created a work that you specifically do not want someone to add to? A good example would be how Bill Waterson did not want his work commercialized. He felt it would have cheapened Calvin and Hobbes to sell stuffed toys. Should he have been forced to write more comics or produce breakfast cereal? Is he selfishly hoarding his IP? As far as bad contracts and such go I think you're actually arguing on an anti-monopolistic grounds and not so much on a copyright issue. If you guys think it's unfair how companies may be coercing or controling the market then that's kind of a different issue from copyright law. I also think it's funny becuase record labels and publishing companies grip on markets is actually getting much looser with the tools available to artists and publishers on the internet these days. See Minecraft.

Then do you think creators should be able to horde licenses? Should we be able to sue for the rights to Star Wars because George Lucas has promised he will never make another one?

Yeah, more curious to see than the actual cpu and gpu is going to be control, content delivery and media conncetions. This generation really pushed consoles to the "set top box" market far faster than anyone thought and I wonder just what exactly the new consoles will be focused on besides games.

This is underwhelming news if true. http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/01/24/xbox-720-will-be-six-times-as-powerful-as-current-gen

Aside from the conjecture that Swingin' Ape got a bum deal, nobody forced them to sign the deal. They signed it willingly and sold the IP willingly so complaining that they can't buy the IP back is a bit stupid of them. Is Sierra being dickish by not selling it back? Maybe but that's not an indication that copyright law is garbage. You're also right that several publishers like the afformentioned EA do allow companies to keep their IP. Maybe Swigin' Ape should have signed with them. This goes back to your original description of commisioning. Vivendi was purchasing the game idea and paying Swingin' Ape to create the game. It's not entirely different. Whether the original idea was created before and pitched to Vivendi doesn't change the contract that they signed. So, bottom line, if you want to keep your IP then keep it, don't sell it out. If you do sell it out, don't whine about the evil corporation that ripped you off.

Metal Arms wasn't commissioned. It was created and developed by Swingin' Ape Studios and then published by Vivendi. Vivendi didn't approach the studio to make the game. The developers approached Vivendi to publish the game. Metal Arms was simply an idea pitched to many developers and bankrolled by Vivendi. It was ptiched to many studios. Vivendi saw the potential and bought the idea and paid for it with their money. Your description: "developer... could create something and then, to get the work released or the funds needed to finish the work, have to turn to a record label or publisher who would say "We'll publish this but you have to hand over all the rights" and then go on to undermarket, rush etc the work and then hang onto the copyrights indefinitely." Is wholly innacurate. http://daeity.blogspot.com/2011/12/swingin-ape-studios-part-1.html

I'm still a huge fan of Community (although I haven't seen much of this season). I'm glad it's on NBC because it would have long been cancelled on CBS.

I'm fairly certain that his example of Metal Arms would be a direct comparison to commissioned work.

His ranting about IP owners should have rights is the same thing as saying that if Nike paid an agency to design them a logo then that agency should have rights to that logo forever. It's rediculous.

I dunno, the story in FFXIII was pretty bad.

I know, was hoping to invalidate pirates by showing that Jim Sterling agrees with them.

http://www.destructoid.com/jimquisition-piracy-episode-1-copyright-220166.phtml Hmmm... the big problem with his whole rant is that nobody forces anyone to sell their IP to anyone else. If you don't want an evil corporation owning your game IP, music, book or movie then don't sell it to them. It's a simple as that.

Well, as I postulated before, you can piece toegether exactly what went wrong with FFXIII and it's a bit of a Charlie Foxtrot. First, they clearly started building assets and making the game without having the story written as they came out later and reported that the story was finally complete... in 2008. 4 years after the initial development began. Then the producer made the claim that the game was too linear beacuse it was story driven. Well how can that be if the story wasn't even done until 4 years after development started? Then you hear that an entire game's worth of content had been cut from the game during development which futher fuels speculation that the initial development of the game was directionless and sloppy. Clearly Square started to make a Final Fantasy with no direction or story and couldn't even piece all their parts together properly so they sewed it up in a linear fashion and slapped a story on top of it. Play it though again and you'll notice instantly that this is the case. Final Fantasy XIII-2 is almost certainly that original game's cut content haphazardly thrown back into another mesh of a game.

but we all love to hate on EA/Origin....

To me Final Fantasy was about story. Square lost its way when they started making FF games without even having the story written. Also I find it funny that people love the gameplay of FF games so much. I remember many people who wouldn't play the FF games when they were new because the gameplay was static and not like an action game. I always felt the gameplay was a sacrifice in order to have a sweeping world and a big story.