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Comment Steam pricing is the weak point (Score 5, Informative) 159

They might do some great offers if you manage to catch them, however any long term users of Steam know that if you want to get the best deal for a game then sometimes you have to look elsewhere. This is starting to build up a lack of trust for customers, games on Steam are often more expensive even though it costs less to sell than a physical box - customers will end up doing Google searches for the cheapest deal elsewhere. It reminds me of people going into stores to find the product they like, then ordering off the Internet to get the best deal.

Apart from pricing it's a nice platform.

Comment Need a decent model to deal with free users (Score 1) 82

After playing various browser based games it's fairly obvious that these sort of games need to try and get some sort of revenue from players who aren't willing to spend anything on upgrading their account. Whilst I'm sure the developers might not want to put adverts in their game, they might have to. Less than $5 a month could be considered insanely cheap, but I'm sure people in their minds already have the opinion that the game isn't worth spending money on. Look at the entire web, most of it is free and funded by advertising, people expect sites to be free.

It's hard for people to relate to something being valuable in a web based game, just think twice about what users are paying for - they're paying for a few extra strings of text (rows in a table/database, etc) to get some extra stats, faster experience, new items, etc. All too often these bonuses disappear after a certain amount of time, making it hard to get any attachment to the value of it. I'm sure the developer and anyone knows about developing software realises that it's something else people for (funding the developer so he/she can continue working on it), but players will see that their wonderful web game is now trying to charge them money instead of being something great and free!

Just don't have high expectations for web based games. Some might get lucky enough to pay their developers wages, some might be good enough to expand and get profit. But certainly don't spend hundreds of hours on something and expect users will instantly rush to you with their wallets wide open.

Earth

Chemical Pollution Is Destroying Masculinity 773

myrdos2 writes "A host of common chemicals is feminizing males of every class of vertebrate animals, from fish to mammals, including people. Many have been identified as 'endocrine disruptors' or gender-benders because they interfere with hormones. Communities heavily polluted with gender-benders in Canada, Russia, and Italy have given birth to twice as many girls as boys, which may offer a clue to the mysterious shift in sex ratios worldwide. And a study at Rotterdam's Erasmus University showed that boys whose mothers had been exposed to PCBs grew up wanting to play with dolls and tea sets rather than with traditionally male toys. It also follows hard on the heels of new American research which shows that baby boys born to women exposed to widespread chemicals in pregnancy are born with smaller penises and feminized genitals. It is calculated that 250,000 babies who would have been boys have been born as girls instead in the US and Japan alone. And sperm counts are dropping precipitously. Studies in more than 20 countries have shown that they have dropped from 150 million per milliliter of sperm fluid to 60 million over 50 years."

Comment Progress from the top 100 sites - none! (Score 2, Interesting) 539

One useful site I tend to look at on a regular basis is Lars Eggert's IPv6 Deployment Trends, it uses the Alexa rankings to find the top 100 sites for various countries. You could always argue that these aren't the most visited sites - but it does give you an idea.

The top 100 sites for all these countries comes to a big fat total of 0%. I'm not expecting fast adoption, but it would've been nice to see some progress being made with these sites. Even the two sites which I regularly visit that report about IPv6 stories (Slashdot and Ars Technica) don't even have IPv6 records!

I suppose I'm just as bad as none of my personal sites don't have IPv6 records either, but then again my server host doesn't provide any native addresses yet.

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"Most of us, when all is said and done, like what we like and make up reasons for it afterwards." -- Soren F. Petersen

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