I've always considered Diablo 2.5 to be Titan Quest. Titan Quest is almost free on Steam during holidays and it's a pretty good ARPG game that's more or less Diablo 2 but with a Green Mythos story instead (Greek Gods, Titans, etc). I always thought it was too bad the company went under.

Except, of course, the fire bombing of it's ratings on Amazon. I doubt something like 300 1-star reviews will do it much good.

Obligatory South Park: Whale Whores. tl;dr: Whales and Dolphins bombed Hiroshima. There's proof, but it was forged.

The specs aren't in it's favor.

• 48 hour max battery life without bluetooth.
• Requires tethering (which will require you to carry a smartphone with you anyhow!)
• One way communication? (I don't see or hear anything about writing tweets or email. Just reading)

All for a reasonable price of over $400? Ok, the exclusive obsessed and uber-rich might buy a few, and at those price points, it might make them some money (given I doubt it cost that much to develop). But once people start using them and they have a big cumbersome bracelet on their wrist (because you forgot to charge it) that has no practical purpose to respond to the emails you just got or order movie-tickets online, without pulling out that heavy phone in your pocket or purse, it will lose it's "cool factor".

Side note, Carla Fiorna and Bob Nardelli where also not engineers. Lets not forget, Steve Jobs might have been a CEO but he was also an engineer first. Those others where business majors. That could help explain things. Of course, there was Woz too.

I disagree. Offering Diablo 3 for free for a 1 year WoW subscription is a the "break glass" plan. It's a marketing trick to get people to lock in 1 year subscriptions so they can count those people and be like "See! SW:TOR came out and our numbers are the same! Boooyah!". It's downright deception but that's probably good for business.

With any new release, as soon as the flag is lifted, all the servers will quickly crash because all players will be racing to the login server. It's happened for every major MMO release. WoW was nearly unplayable for 2-4 weeks. Oh, I remember all the free game time they gave us. =)

The holidays will help and hurt Bioware. It will help, as you pointed out, by allowing people to login more sparsely than during "primetime" like hours. It will hurt because it's almost assured that the servers will be down, there will be hundreds of thousands of people foaming at the mouth to play with gleeful excitement, having ALL HOLIDAY to play, but can't because of server stability... oh, the forums will be aflame no doubt!

I'd like to be positive and say "Bioware is spending gobs of money on this game, they have WoW and piles of past MMO launches to draw experience from, they surely WILL get it right!" Yeah, I said that about every MMO that's come out and I don't recall that ever happening.

For starters, they'll probably have lots of server/shard capacity (they're pre-selecting servers for pre-orders based on allowing you to pre-create a guild) but they'll severely under-power their login server so that only a few lucky people will login and have fun while everyone else is crammed in the door, pushing and shoving to get in, until the whole door collapse and no one can get in.

It will take a couple of days before the rush to play spreads out, but not before login servers are added and rebooted, and people get so fed up with trying to login the go and do something else.

At that point, they will have major lag issues because no matter how much stress testing they do, they will miss something in the code that will thousands of players playing, will cause the game to crash. So, they will be spending the first couple of weeks pushing out patches to identifying issues to bring server stability in-line.

It always has happened. Never fails. =)

I didn't play STO but if WoW and Knights of the Old Republic had a baby, this would be it. From what I've seen, you've got combat animations like KOTOR where there's actual interaction between fighters, not just timed swing animations but blocks, parries, etc. (like KotOR). Mixed with Dragon Age / Mass Effect like voice acting with dialogue option paths, and I'm speculating that it will have game play similar to WoW, solo friendly, relatively easy/n00b friendly, upgrade loot heavy, questing centric, as well as more stylized graphics and animation akin to WoW (ie. less photo realistic, more cartoonish)

I'd hate to say it, but that's not an accurate statement. A business' goal (excluding non-profits/charity) is to make as much profit as possible, not merely a "decent amount". They do this by testing what how many people are willing to pay how much and picking a point on the curve that suggests the highest possible profit margin.

I get your point and I agree with you that too many people just bash on business, assuming they're all heartless billionaires. In reality, there are many passionate people who run business and care about their product / reputation too. That doesn't detract from the fact that there's a lot of other business savoy people trying to maximize profits. It's not an mutually exclusive scenario. They can be both.

To that point, the GP has a point, game companies can very much simply give away the client if they plan on having a subscription or micro-transaction model. There are many instances where this is the case, see League of Legends, Lord of the Rings Online, Champions Online, Conan MMO, D&D MMO, etc, etc.

The thing that still gets me is why major companies like Blizzard and Bioware (especially since their game hasn't come out yet) are still doing subscription services when Micro-transactions are far more profitable.

Yes. Ask any software programmer who programmed Applications for a living.

I like using ISO formatting for dates YYYY-MM-DD. Then again, I'm a programmer.

But I was curious about date formats. I knew Wikipedia would have some insight. They have an interesting global map of color coded countries that use one of the 3 formats (Y/M/D, D/M/Y, or M/D/Y).

I agree with you. I'd really like to get a Macbook Pro, but I'm just having a hard time justifying the price when I could spend less and get more on a PC laptop. But I'd really like to get a Mac (finally) but they keep pricing themselves out of my price-range for some of the basic specs I'd expect.

I believe Mirror's Edge is a platform game. I would say it had puzzle elements too. While it was first person, I certainly wouldn't call it a shooter even if there was limited gun play in it.

I guess they still "hang out and be rich". In 2006 [Warren Buffet] made American history by making the largest ever charitable donation by an individual – $37bn to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Simply asked, are time slots and schedule still a major concern in the realm of DVR's, on-demand, and Internet streaming?

Shows like Fringe, where I haven't seen an episode, heard a lot about it and have interest in seeing it, are programs I wait for to be released mostly on DVD/streaming so I can sit and watch back-to-back episodes in order, from the start.