Same here. People that grow up playing and enjoying games do not become top-level executives for giant game publishers like EA.

These are business men. This guy's title is 'Label President', which should tell you all you need to know. The majority of people in those roles arrive there from similar positions in other industries, like entertainment.

What they know about actual games is mostly provided to them by consumer research reports, questionnaires and marketing analysts. There are exceptions, but I am generalising.

The result? Ridiculous statements like these in TFA, DRM up the wazzoo and hilariously bad shitware repeated ad nauseum every 12-18 months.

If you work in Microsoft-world, Win+Pause/Break is shortcut for System Properties. Quite handy.

Lt. Frank Drebin: Hector Savage. From Detroit. Ex-boxer. His real name was Joey Chicago.
Ed Hocken: Oh, yeah. He fought under the name of Kid Minneapolis.
Nordberg: I saw Kid Minneapolis fight once. In Cincinnati.
Lt. Frank Drebin: No you're thinking of Kid New York. He fought out of Philly.
Ed Hocken: He was killed in the ring in Houston. By Tex Colorado. You know, the Arizona Assassin.
Nordberg: Yeah, from Dakota. I don't remember it was North or South.
Lt. Frank Drebin: North! South Dakota was his brother. From West Virginia.
Ed Hocken: You sure know your boxing.
Lt. Frank Drebin: Well, all I know is never bet on the white guy.

Q3 had/has no voice chat. What's your point?

Subscribers can set up private games. Sure, you don't host the server from your computer, but who cares? You're getting the benefits of proper server infrastructure hosting your game.

If you want obscure maps and mods, no-one is stopping you playing Q3. Or QW or Q2 for that matter. Some people just want a level playing field and lots of opponents. id have already ported many top maps from Q3A, CPMA, Threewave and RA3 on top of the QL ones. There's Freezetag, Instagib and CA in place of RA3; by far the most popular mods.

Oh noes! Really, all I hear is bellyaching.

This is never going to happen whilst Quake Live is around. Frankly, it would tank horribly because most of the community wouldn't want it. Who plays Q3 for the graphics?

id already put in the effort bringing QL visuals up to snuff with modern shader support and post processing effects and most players switch it all off.

No. No-one else around here is wondering.

This is it. Avid gamers often have tunnel vision on this topic. Everyone has a finite number of hours per week to use for leasure. The majority of players do not play 5 hours each day.

Many modern western games update rather than innovate. To enthusiasts this is painfully obvious, but when you only spend 3 hours a week playing, it's not so apparent. So, the games still sell and the companies continue on with Halo IX.

If you're watching a Blu-Ray, you're quite possibly watching a "1080p h264 encode" anyway. If you mean an x264 re-encode at much lower bitrate, then fine. Depending on the content, the spec of your display, your viewing distance not to mention your eyes, there may be little or no discernible difference to you. You'd probably also be fine with upscaled NTSC or PAL.

Maybe once you've re-compressed your stream with something like VC1 or H.264. The raw stream coming over the wire from the player will be very significant. As a previous poster pointed out 1920 x 1080 x 24 bits per pixel x 24 fps = 145MB/sec. 2hrs of that will cost you around 1TB, provided your chosen disk system can take the pounding. Realistically, right now it's going to have to be a RAID of some kind.

Of course, you could put down some money on a realtime encoder board that can manage the task. I'm sure they exist, but I'm not sure which approach is more cost-effective.

Yes.

Good luck, he's behind 7 proxies.

Sadly, even id have noted that porting their games to Linux is largely a waste of their time.

During his annual QuakeCon address this year, John Carmack said that every time they have done so, the number of Linux users is miniscule. As such, it becomes harder and harder to justify the time and effort. It didn't bode well.

He spoke a little about installing Ubuntu on his machine and being pleasantly surprised at how all his hardware worked and that the GUI was not a terrible mess. He did say that Quake Live gets greater support under Linux than OS X, but I didn't get the impression that we could at all count on Linux clients for Rage or Doom 4.

This doesn't make much sense. h264 is a codec and Flash is a container. Using one does preclude you from using the other. Most of the 'flash' video you watch is encoded by h.264.

Looking at your id, I'm expecting that most people you speak to mistake this behaviour for dementia.

I never once said Quake Live was a better idea than Quake 3 Arena, I played that game non-stop for 5 years from q3test and loved it. I admin'd servers and games and helped out with running team ladders. I know what you're talking about. I was just trying to give counterpoint to your post and explain that until now, the Quakes have always ended up catering to an elite minority and ultimately dying because of it, which is a shame.

Sure, I get that you'd prefer id sell you a game, give it over to the community and only get involved when a bug needs fixing. That's one way to go, but they've been there and done that. All Quake Live is, is an id experiment to see if there's a market for Quake as a subscription service. That's all. It may dilute the experience somewhat, but I don't think it quite deserves the vitriol it gets from veteran players.