Thursday Next

I never get the till assistant to bag my stuff. It's much quicker if they scan things through and I shove them in the bag, that counts double when I'm not shopping on my own. I have in the past responded to "Would you like help packing your bags?" with "No thanks, would you like a hand waving stuff over the scanner?" it didn't go over well. As for how they're laid out, I get why all the useful stuff is at the back and all, but man does it annoy me when they move stuff around. I get why, they don't want you moving in your set pattern buying your set things, they want to trick you into going down strange aisles that you would never normally visit, still irks me though. Also. I never know where eggs are. I always head towards bread and milk but then I think to myself, that they should perhaps be somewhere more meaty. It's like playing King of the Hill with a moving hill some times. I'm sure the eggs relocate every 30 seconds.

Ok, like Dean says. Much more sensible. Also, love that cracked article. I'm pretty sure I've said some of those things... or at least alluded to them myself.

The problem is (as is true with independence of any form) that while the majority of the wheels get along with job of taking you where you want to go, there is always one that causes trouble and sits in the corner making loads of noise trying to drag you in a direction you don't want to go.

I can't get rid of the side-quests, I'm trapped in a Zeno's paradox of the bloody things.

American trolleys have a live axle? Now that is mental.

Amazing, that water effects one was rather cool.

Incredible. Surely Obama wants everyone to have the opportunity or the choice to go to college? He's not gonna run around stuffing rednecks into hessian sacks and dumping them in college campuses (campi?) to have liberals force book-learnin' on them. Also, it's far more snobbish to assume that because your father is a hard-working blue-collar 'murkin he will therefore want you to be a high school educated blue-collar worker too. If that was true then I wouldn't be where I am now. I'm not from a hugely wealthy background, everyone in my family has had to work for everything they've got. My father left school as soon as he was able to, but he's the one who pushed me hardest to go through school, become a lawyer and all that jazz. He definitely doesn't want my life to be a carbon copy of his. He wants me to go further than he did and do more than he did. Santorum's message that "The Status Quo is Good Enough" is a very dangerous one for a country that needs to grow to keep it's position as a global leader. I don't see how anyone could consider electing this guy, with a bit of hyperbole applied, he pretty much wants a monarchy. "If you are President you can make your children in your image and they can be President too. If you mow lawns then you can make your children in your image and they can mow lawns too." What the hell happened to the American dream man? [i may have watched too much Watchmen and The Big Lebowski over the past few days.]

What about games where you can still interact with the servers? Creating new accounts, etc? I don't know of any games that would let you create an online account with a cracked copy. Then again, I don't know much about the pirating side of video game piracy as it's something I've never done. Jonny or Dean would know better than me on that point.

That's the generous price tag EA puts on Sims :/ lol... Ooops. Still it's over what most would pay for an iOS / Android game (and I think it's over-priced).

Like Dean said, you're looking at a totally different market. In fact, Dean's generous with his $7 price tag. Those games are few and far between. In fact, what we're seeing on mobile is that freemium / paymium is the way to go, ($0.99 maybe $4.99 tops). Low to no barrier to entry and then charge for consumable in-game items. Not something I want to see on my console. To be honest I don't think I'd like to see a console go download only until Origin is able to directly serve content to the customer. (Not just Origin, Steam, D2D et al as well). If there's no competition at all then you are going to see a very unpleasant market place. The reason Digital works so well on PC is that it is open which forces some aggressive pricing.

Well, thing is we don't know how many of those connected boxes have ever downloaded a full title. If the market only sees the internet as being for DLC add ons, or worse still just to enable online play, then you cut down that 40 million even more. From a publisher perspective, the market isn't ready for all-digital yet. The platform holders may see things differently, but I doubt it.

Perhaps that's because there are more people playing shooters and more people in a single shooter round at any one time? In a fighting game it's you and one other person. Even if that other person is a sexist, they don't have a lot of other people geeing them on. In a shooter you've got 10+ other people so your chance of finding a sexist automatically spikes and if they've got some stooges so much the worse.

Taking MS numbers, there's 66 million Xboxes and 40 million accounts. So around one third of Xboxes are not connected. (obviously there's some discrepancies there with RRoD's and people with multiple accounts), also not sure if that's 40 million gold accounts or just accounts total.. http://uk.xbox360.ign.com/articles/121/1216177p1.html So yeah, a bit soon for jumping off of the retail bandwagon just yet, another generation or so I reckon. Xbox 1080 / PS5 might be physical media free.

I loved it. Played through a Journey and met 4 other people (one at a time, not sure if it's possible to have more than one companion). It's interesting how different players will react differently. Some will be constantly pinging you, others will only do so on occasion (I noticed after a while that the ping regenerates your flight ability so it's definitely worth sticking together. Some will stick close to you at all times while others will go off and complete objectives while you do the same, working in tandem. Some will just go their own way. It's strange playing alongside a person and not knowing who they are. Trying to communicate with only the minimum of input.

Depends on how you define "niche" I guess. The Sims market is pretty unique. There are a lot of Sims players out there, but perhaps unlike CoD or Mass Effect or whatever players there are probably a disproportionate number of Sims players who only play The Sims. (I don't have analytical data to back this up, just some anecdotal evidence. If as suggested above you only play The Sims, then you don't really have a clue about what other games would consider "good value". The "value" of a Stuff Pack is really relative. Yes the additions are pretty much cosmetic, but the whole game is cosmetic. Many Sims players love having new things to decorate their homes with and will get literally months of enjoyment from the £9.99 Stuff pack. If you only play The Sims you probably don't have to own all (or indeed any) of the latest expansion packs. You just get the ones that interest you. It's not like CoD or BF map packs where you get left behind in map rotations if you don't own all of them. It's that combination that makes The Sims add ons the way they are. Obviously, yes EA charge as much as they can get away with, but the only reason they can get away with it is because it is embraced by The Sims community. I completely agree with Jonny, if you think that the packs aren't good value don't buy them. That same logic applies to SimCity. if you don't think the base game, expansions, DLC, and so on are worth it don't buy them.

Ok. Not The alternative. An alternative. What's a "complete game" then? If EA release all the currently in development DLC and the base game together at a higher price (taking into account the extra resources poured into developing the extra content) then would you be ok with that? If so why not give consumers a choice to buy the base game at a lower price point and the extra content separately so that they can tailor the package as they wish? If you're saying that the extra content has no value to you and should therefore be given away for free. Then, well, no basically, not gonna happen. It costs money to develop content and EA is a business, they want that money back and then some. While I don't know what the model for SimCity is, I'm sure that some free content will be given away along the line, but if you want packs of 30+ items, or themed expansions with new scenarios and such, then you'll (probably) have to pay for them. As for Sims expansion packs. The Pets pack alone gives you an entire new class of Sim to play with since you can play as the pet. There's a character creator built in, loads of different animals, it's a pretty big product. It's not just a little cat avatar that travels around the house like a bump and go robot. Similarly, the other expansion packs normally contain new areas to explore, new things to do as well as a bunch of new items. The majority seem to think that they get a good deal because these things are crazy popular, from Sims 1-3 EA has sold over 100 million units. Which brings me on to products like Sins of a Solar Empire and Minecraft. They aren't aggressively priced because the creators are altruistic. The creators do it because they have to in order to get a return on their investment. If Sins could sell 12 million copies at £40 a pop you'd have to be pretty terrible at making money to choose to sell it at £15 just to get a couple of people on the internet to say "Awww, isn't Notch nice, doesn't he have a lovely hat." Indies cultivate that approachable hippy image because it's the best way of getting loyalty money from a small fan base. Big companies like EA and Activision couldn't exist on such a small diet.

I'd settle for Hull.

What's wrong with The Sims 3 stuff / expansion packs? They are extra content, produced well after the game is released and at £10 for Stuff Packs and ~£20 - £30 for an expansion pack, not bad value for money. I don't see what's wrong with supporting games like SimCity after launch with paid content. The alternative is the CoD version where the game is launched, a few map packs come out and then the whole thing is scrapped and a new title is released with a bunch of new (old) maps on the same engine next year. The reason The Sims 3 content costs upward of $200 dollars is because it is spread over 3 years. Take CoD over the last three years, that's $60 per game, per year, plus another $45 dollars (assuming 3 map packs at $15 each) per year for DLC. Owning all the CoD for the last three years is $315 and two thirds of that content is effectively obsolete. I think that Sim City lends itself very well to a model of base game + ex packs and will provide good value over a long time as some of the cost of the ex packs will go towards keeping the base game up to date.

Yeah, having seen his correction "You haven't lost a cent." I agree. No game has cost a company more because it was pirated. The difference to the RoI is debatable, ad nauseum.

Like I say, obviously need to read again. Once I'm done with Nightwatch.

Fortunately there is only one nasty person left in the world. Once Kony is gone there will be no more evil people to replace him. For that reason alone we should continue funding Invisible Children's heavy handed films.

I don't know if he is trying to parody the industry members who say "Every pirated copy is a lost sale", or if he intends to be taken literally, "If ONE person makes a trillion copies you haven't lost a sale" which is true, if someone is sitting at home with terabytes of copies of ME3 then bully for them. He can't possibly mean that if a trillion copies of your game are pirated you haven't lost a sale. All we can say with absolute certainty is that if 2 million copies of a game have been downloaded then the number of lost sales is equal to or less than 2 million.

Actually 16b states that anyone who parks in JR's spot will be made to spend two weeks playing Catwoman. Article 6b is the one about separate budgets and DLC.

Trademarking "Nintendo Network" is only unnecessary because there is an existing Nintendo trademark. If Nintendo are going to re-brand their Nintendo wrapped Steam client (assuming that's what they have), then it would make sense to trademark whatever name they chose.