They don't need it like Microsoft did. Microsoft as a gaming company was an unknown quantity and their debut was back when games were "kids" activities so they had to market heavily. Valve on the other hand is a well known game company with a proven track record, even in the console space. Try and find a console gamer who hasn't at least played Left for Dead, Portal, Team Fortress 2 or Half Life 2 on a console at least once.

Also, the age demographic has shifted since the introduction of the Xbox more than a decade ago and many of the people who are going to be getting the next gen consoles are are adults who have been playing games for years and again are well familiar with Valve and probably Steam as well. The big push isn't going to be to market to the soccer moms, it's going to be to appeal to the discerning gamer.

"We believed we knew better what customers needed long term than they did."

Yeah, except Steve Jobs thought this too, and look where Apple is.

This piece is interesting as a historical account but, like all these journalistic articles on why something happened, it's all hindsight 20/20 bullshit. If you want to understand why you can't trust the press to really explain the cause and effect of events, I encourage you to check out this book: The Halo Effect. Tears it all apart.

These would be the same people whose Apple products are made in factories with anti-suicide nets installed on them? Something something, pot kettle.

Actually, reading the article, I rather think they have. Otherwise they wouldn't be doing stuff like this:

"To promote the alliance, Nestle now plans to deliver more than 50 million chocolate bars featuring the Android mascot to shops in 19 markets, including the UK, US, Brazil, India, Japan and Russia.

The packaging had to be produced in advance over the past two months. But despite the scale of the operation, the two firms managed to keep the story a secret,"

You mean they didn't want to turn down a free opportunity to have their trademark splashed all over the world in marketing blurbs for the next couple of years on someone else's dime? Shocking!

Too bad this is nothing like an MMO or RPG. You're not leveling up to take on a boss at the end of a lengthy quest, you're just getting dropped into random match after random match. The concept of grinding hours on end to unlock a handful of efficiencies is dreadful.

There's 1.12 billion shares of Activision. These two deals alone acquire control of 601 million of them, or 53.6% of all outstanding shares. If I have 53% control of a company, you know how much leverage your 12% gives you? Absolutely none.

They could theoretically make some of their money back on their piece of software sales through the Windows Marketplace. For example I know of at least 2 people with $1000+ worth of iOS software they've bought for their iDevices and Apple gets 30% of that straight off the top. That's also Google's strategy with pricing the Nexus devices how they do, they're basically selling them at cost with the intention of getting revenue through the Play store.

Is it likely that Microsoft would be able to make it all back in this situation? No. But if they took a really long view of things and kept aggressively going after the market once they'd seeded millions of cheap units into it, they might be able to make it viable. Half the problem with their device is chicken and egg: There's nobody writing apps for the devices because there's no install base and there's no install base because nobody's writing apps to be used. Toss a few million units out into the world for cheap and that shifts. But it's a very ballsy move and many wouldn't be willing to take a risk like that.

It's international numbers are huge and it hasn't even opened in Asia yet where it's expected to do EXTREMELY well. The more stories I see calling Pac Rim a "bomb" despite the numbers it's racking up are starting to make me think this article:

http://comicsbeat.com/hollywood-mystery-who-is-trying-to-kill-pacific-rim/

is less tinfoil woo-woo and more the real story.

Between the two of them they've caused the biggest changes in Western health and diet, and yet were both so wrong. They honestly both thought what they were doing was the Right Thing, but by cherry picking evidence that supported their theories (especially in Keys' case) and ignoring data that pointed otherwise, they committed the cardinal sin of science: Don't make your data fit your hypothesis.

I tend to take a bit of a strict view of these things. If you are doing something you are not supposed to be doing, like driving with your license suspended or drunk, and an accident happens, you're automatically partly at fault. Because if you were doing what you were supposed to, your vehicle wouldn't have been on the road and the accident would most likely not have occurred at all. I don't care if the immediate accident was your fault or not, the simple fact of the matter is you shouldn't have been there at all.

"Or he was drunk" - His fault and he was breaking the law

"Or high" - His fault and he was breaking the law

"Or had a suspended license" - Indeed he did, and once again, HIS FAULT for being on the road when he shouldn't have been.

"Or a warrant." - So he's breaking the law 24/7 and should have turned himself in to sort it out.

"Or was an 'undocumented worker'" - You mean someone in the country illegally who hasn't got a driver's license? You mean someone breaking the law by driving a motor vehicle without a license? His fault.

"even if he wasn't the at fault party" - These words do not mean what you think they mean. If any of your conditions you listed for fleeing were true (and one was!) then he should NOT have been on the road, and by choosing to drive he deliberately started a chain of events that ended in tragedy. His fault.

Dude was driving with a revoked license. He needs to go to jail since obviously just taking his license away doesn't seem to be all that effective in curbing his poor judgement.

The driver fleeing the scene is a pretty clear indication of whose fault the driver presumed the accident to be. Hint: not the cyclist's.

Instead of trying to "cheap out"? The proof's in the pudding. Nobody was licensing it, never mind just Curtiss. Nobody thought they could afford to and build a plane for a profit. You know how we know that? Because nobody built any planes!

"That's what patents are for, i.e. to help foster the spread and use of new technologies via the profit motive."

Yes and the Wrights were being so *fair* with their patent licensing prices that the government had to step on them because a war had broken out and nobody had built any worthwhile number of planes in a DECADE. That's a really interesting perspective of the definition of "foster and spread". In practice it looked a lot more like "lock out and monopolize".