Legitimate question: are you exaggerating? Average household income in the U.S. 31,000 dollars (in 2007). The countries I see with 1/6th of that are Turkey and Mexico. Are you from either?

Napkin math:

200 employees (random guess, but my gut says that's a low number)
x $75k per year (another random guess, but I don't think it's absurd)
x 5 years in development
= 75 million. Add in marketing, management, and server costs, and you might be there.

Oh, and don't forget license fees. I won't speculate on what Lucas is charging them, but I bet it's mindboggling.

I don't understand who you're talking to. It's the best leveling experience I've ever experienced in an MMO. Sure, it's not a completely new genre. If you were looking for something that doesn't play like an MMO, then you were looking in the wrong place. You can downplay the effect that the conversations and story have all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that those elements make leveling feel extremely different from World of Warcraft (unless you spacebar every conversation, in which case you're missing the point of the game).

What you seem to be saying is that you don't enjoy MMOs. That's a valid opinion, but it's not a valid criticism for this game.

There aren't a shortage of animals to dissect, I'll give you that. There is, however, a shortage of time and money. Lab quality preserved animals are not cheap, and doing a dissection lab takes a lot more time and effort from professors and their assistants than alternatives.

Please, before responding with an idiotic "But how will my doctor know what they are doing?!?!", think about this for more than 2 seconds. The vast majority of students in undergraduate biology classes will never in their lives have to cut open and dissect another animal of any kind, and the knowledge they gain from it could easily be gained by simulation. For the very small minority of students who will require surgical or dissection skills (doctors at vets), there is ample time to get them that specialized experience in their respective graduate programs. This is a good change to focus resources where they will be the most useful.

Please cite examples of this. I think you're factually incorrect. There might be a small number (single digits) of players in all of American professional sports who act the way you are describing. The vast majority act (shockingly) *professional*. They say things like "We've worked hard and we're going to try to get better every day. I'm happy to do what I do for a living." I would put my foot in mouth and consider myself humbled if you could cite one example of a players acting like "a bunch of prima donnas" without finding a dozen where they act like (again, shocking) professionals.

Self reply, your you're there their they're etc.

I promise you that their TOS doesn't say they will delete shit when you tell them to. I get you're point, but you're being a colossal douche about it. Please calm down.

Thanks for the response. I'd say that the substantive "beta" product is definitely new concept, at least for budget titles. "Indy" has been around a while and modding has been around forever, so I'd it will be interesting to see how much the "beta" aspect of Minecraft matters in the long run. We saw recently that "Version 1.0" didn't mean much, so the release model has essentially been "Release when playable, continue development indefinitely". Have any other games since Minecraft tried this? Have they been successful? I don't know of any offhand, but I haven't had the time to get into the Indy market as much as I would like to.

Dear community,

I can't think of a better place to ask this question, so I'll stick it down here where it will likely be buried. I'm not attempting to feed the trolls or anything, sorry.

Is there a report/ban request process on slashdot? I looked around briefly but can't find one. Obviously looking through the troll's post history, having them on the site is a waste of time and server space. Is this the kind of thing that karma and filtering are supposed to take care of, or is there a separate system to remove posters like this specifically?

This is a random person on the internet without any evidence of her claims or history of journalistic integrity.
You should be required to provide at least *one* of these things before you can ruin someone's life or business.

It's not necessarily that she doesn't meet all the qualifications. The fact is, she doesn't meet *any* of them. Fact checking, disclosure of conflicts of interest, and adherence to standards are the most important. I'd agree with the fact that most TV pundits don't strictly qualify. However, most of the actual "News" pieces of cable networks do qualify, at least to a reasonable extent. Keep in mind that the "News" on stations like CNN or Fox are neither the majority of the time nor viewership of those networks.

While Minecraft is both good and successful, I haven't yet seen how it has made any significant contributions to gaming as a whole. It may be that your point is that a single developer can make a great product, which is true. However, that has been shown before, and Minecraft's gameplay hasn't made much impact on the market at large, as far as I can tell. Examples of it would be interesting and appreciated, though.

I hate you, internet, for making me feel silly.

This is a man who probably more responsible for the modern video game industry than any other. While it's not likely he'll re-revolutionize games, seeing his new work could be both interesting and enjoyable.

What I'm personally more interested in is the direction that Nintendo will take in his absence. His franchises are the core of their offerings on every platform for the past 25 years or so. Will those franchises continue to balloon beyond the bounds of reason? Mario and Link will likely sell more games and merchandise than anything they could possibly replace them with. I would love to see Nintendo take a new direction with their franchises and perhaps even introduce a single deep or interesting character (which as far as I know they have never done). I wouldn't bet on it though. That's certainly not to say that Nintendo isn't a great company with great products. They are. I just wonder if they can do more.