There is a reason that Starcraft 2 took about 12 years to show up.

Any given game (and this probably applies to movies and to TV to some extent) will have an initial title that proves the concept as being worth pursuing, followed by a title that effectively represents the pinnacle of the genre. For 3d Shooters you had Wolfenstien which led to Doom. For MMO's you initially had Ultima online, which gave way to Everquest, and in turn gave way to World of Warcraft. And for RTS games you had Dune which led to Warcraft 2 which led to Starcraft.

Once you have that definitive product, competitors start to back off, realizing that they have no chance to dethrone the reigning king of the genre. The expectations of the fans keep escalating, and since you can never please everyone, you have fans of the genre start to splinter off, or perhaps just get bored. Since sales fall off, the resources for sequels fall off, and that basically buries the genre.

The endgame is that the creators of the 'pinnacle' product eventually stop making new iterations, and that the competitors have usually abandoned that pursuit some time before that point. Eventually no one is making new games in that genre. Metaphorically, the challengers stopped playing the game when it was too difficult to win at it, and the champion stopped only because the rewards for victory were no longer enough to justify the effort.

But the market for that genre still exists, and after about 10 years, a new generation is available to exploit. If the original concept was strong enough, the fans are probably hungry enough that a new iteration should be successful.

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I might be overly pessimistic, but I do not think this will happen. Valve is basically talking about entering a mature market with entrenched competitors which also has a high barrier to entry. They do have one potential advantage, that being (presumably) an emphasis on streaming / downloading the content. However, that advantage is one that could be erased pretty easily if any of the other console makers adopt a similar distribution approach.

They are basically taking another crack at making the phantom. I cannot say that my confidence in them would be high.

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Lets have a fictional person called Phil (a victim) and Bob (the guy posting the info) for the purpose of this post.

If Bob posts Phil's name, address, and phone number in a message board without Phil's permission, there is most likely some kind of hostile intent. This usually happens when Phil has managed to make Bob angry for some stupid reason (flame war, abortion debate, maybe Phil is just being a jackass here. Who knows? The reason is not relevant). So Bob gets Phil's info and posts it online in that message board. Why does Bob do this?

Most likely, Bob is hoping someone will go to Phil's house and beat him up. Or break a few windows. Maybe Bob just wants someone to take a crap in a paper bag, light it on fire, and throw it on Phils porch. The intent is to make it easy for all of Phils enemies to harass or inflict harm on Phil.

Target or Walmart do not have any hostile intent. They just want to sell you stuff. They gather and analyze data, and the only objective harm thaty they would intentionally cause is filling your mail box with unwanted spam. I would agree that doing so should earn someone a kick in the nuts anyway, but it is only annoying, not dangerous. In many cases they are using info they gathered themselves for their own benefit. It could also be argued that what they are doing is of mutual benefit: Walmart gets Phil to buy stuff, Phil will have a chance to buy something he wants.

The only problem for Phil is when access to that data is then sold, shared , or illegally accessed by those whose interests may run against him. There needs to be legal protections in place for Phil, and Walmart needs to be held responsible for any harm that comes of them keeping that database.

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In the PS2 / Gamecube era, patching a console game just did not happen much. It was the XBox that introduced the notion by having a built in ethernet port, the Xbox Live service, and the built in hard drive. On the plus side this has led to certain egregious problems being fixed.

On the downside, it has become a crutch. Getting through Lotcheck used to be more difficult. It is still an unholy pain in the ass, but the big publishers can afford to drop a patch, and the revenue gained by being able to hit a launch date mandated by a marketing campaign will make up for it. If the company is big enough (EA, Ubisoft), and the title has the potential to move the needle for hardware sales, a great deal of completely terrible bugs can be forgiven if a launch day patch is forthcoming.

Smaller developers need to anticipate that they wont be able to patch the game at launch simply due to the financial constraints though.

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In order to get publishers to throw cash at a game, you need to impress them in some manner. In order for a high profile AAA game to sell, you need to be able to put together an effective commercial.

A 'Saving Private Ryan' intro is impressive. It can show off the graphics, and anyone seeing that can intuitively understand what is going on. But if you throw a controller / mouse + keyboard into the hands of a marketing executive to get them to play the game for 10 minutes, your going to have 10 minutes of an executive trying to figure out unfamiliar controls and getting killed.

Gameplay can be king, but in order to get the several million dollars needed to make the damn game, you need a strong visual element. It is easier to sell a damn good story then to sell a game description of "a deep and fast pace fighting game like Soul Calibur with better controls".

Basically, the bigger the budget, the more likely you are to be railroaded into a story.

The other side of it is that a wide open world with lots of branching in the story is cripplingly expensive to create. Do you really think they sat on Grand Theft Auto 5 so long because they had problems convincing the accountants it was a good plan? They needed the time to build the vast amount of content for that game. Same for Skyrim.

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I do not mean in the 'bubble boy' sense. Specifically, I do not think that Sherman interacts with anyone not in a position where piracy has caused real damage to their income, or who does not have a personal interest in maintaining the current copyright laws. There is no one who Sherman is talking to who is going to say anything negative about copyright.

Talking to Sherman about the privacy situation is like trying to talk to your grandmother about the internet. You may work with the internet every day and you may be aware of what Meme's are, you have an opinion on Facebooks privacy policies, and you know enough not to click on links to a certain .cx domain. If you work in that world every day, and all of your friends work in that world every day, it gets harder to relate to people who chose to live a life without an internet connection.

I have no doubt that Sherman was truly surprised at the amount of visible and high profile backlash because in Shermans world, he cannot understand why a 'normal' every day person would have a problem with SOPA and PIPA. So clearly someone else must have manipulated the agenda to turn the masses against his agenda. So I bet that Sherman is certain that once he carefully explains his position that everyone will understand why SOPA / PIPA is a good thing.

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Microsoft may have resolved their security issues.

But a bridge builder who fuxked one goat 5 years ago is still a goat fuxker. It takes longer to fix a damaged reputation than it does to fix the problems that created the reputation.

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Angry Birds is a great game, and the iOS DRM that ties phones to accounts and prevents jailbreaking combined with a very low purchase cost make it easier to purchase the game than pirate it for the vast majority of users. Given the vast amount of Angry Birds merchandising, the viewpoint of Mikael Hed is not too surprising.

But for digital products that are just not that good, piracy can destroy the profit margin. The experience of Rovio with Angry Birds does not necessarily apply to all digital products.

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Most game development studios that are supporting iOS tend to use the minimal amount of Objective C required to access the underlying system libraries and features. The rest of the code is either C / C++. This is not only true within my workplace, but it seems to hold true for new hires relating their experience with the Objective C language.

For programmers used to reading C++ code and languages derived primarily from C, the Objective C syntax is an eyesore that makes figuring out the code at a glance much more difficult. While the language has some very compelling features, the atypical syntax makes using those features more of a chore.

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The reason for that rigidity is that too many players and too many DM's get screwed over. The dice are involved as much to keep the DM honest as anything else.

As a player, it sucks to have the DM railroad something by to let a beloved villain escape even though you just scored a crit and the target ran out of HP 5 rounds and 70 HP ago. While there is an argument to be made for preserving the story, a good DM adapts the story to the actions of the players without negating the players actions. Too many DMs just hand wave it.

And on the flip side, a lenient DM with 4 casual gamers and 1 power gamer is going to end up with a single player game once the player using 'Ingar the Invincible' starts to dominate all the ingame combat.

Finally, not everyone is interested in playing a powerless protagonist while the DM recites 5 hours of marginally interactive amateur fiction. As long as everyone at the table has fun, there is no wrong way to play.

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There is no reason for college text books to be as expensive as they are now. Any educational institution that takes money from any level of government should be using text books that are open sourced. Anything that can drive down the costs of getting an education without decreasing the quality of that education should be encouraged.

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One of the most frustrating things to deal with as a game developer is the tendency for publishers to try very damn hard to hit a Christmas shiping target. To get through the lot check / TRC process, you pretty much have to be finishing up by September or October. That leaves November for going in and out of lotcheck and giving enough lead time to manufacture the game (if your not shipping a digital product).

For any software project that is tied to a consumer retail project, your probably going to have to hit a similar deadline. Based on that, I can see this result coming about. People are rushed to hit the deadline and the scrutiny is higher.

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Inheriting someone elses work is never easy, but your doing well enough. You have to resist the urge to re-implement everything wholesale and simply take the time to learn how the hell everything is working.

In your case I would suggest documenting the discovered issues and noting exactly what your concerns are. Also throw in some time estimates (with a healthy error margin) describing how long it would take you to fix such a problem if it manifested, and estimates describing how much time and effort it will take to replace and re-implement the systems that would cause the problems. Then send this stuff out as an e-mail no one will ever read.

Then when shit breaks, you at least have the paper trail and you can give the 'I tried to warn you' speech to preempt your bosses from having you eat the big bowl of dogshit that will result.

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How many of you have seen a subway train have its doors held open by some idiot trying to get on at the last moment? Some idiot will try the same crap even with this system. And because everything is moving, the potential for an accident is greatly increased. This system would not be failure tolerant to the degree it would need to work.

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Most game companies (Ubisoft and EA for certain, Activision and the rest highly likely) have API's that have the app phone home and send metrics / telemetry data back about the usage stats. This is even done in games that have no multi-player component. Some of this is done for determining how much ad revenue is generated from ingame advertisements. Some of it is just marketing and research data. (ie: If only 2% of users actually use the mode that took 15% of the development resources to create, chances are that the mode will be dropped or at least not developed any further. If 90% of users die in the room with 13 snipers, they may patch the game to remove some snipers). I suspect that some portion of this data includes unique user id / cd keys.

I would expect that titles with a great deal of piracy are somehow detected by this. If they know that they have actually sold X units through retail, and they have X+Y connections, then the number of pirated instances is Y.

Lets say a game without this DRM has 150 000 users, and that 75000 users are legit. If they are taking a beating in the press, but the number of legit users has increased, the system is a success. Ubisoft is happier to have 80 000 legit users in a pool of 90 000 total users, even if they drove off 46% of the total user base to do it.

Losing a user means nothing except in subscription based games. Losing a sale means a whole lot more.

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