With 60USD games being "the norm" these days, a lot of the games tend to not be worth the price that these greedy publishers are asking for. Let's look at some of the recent titles that came out:

Mass Effect 3 -- focused on single player with incentives on replay value due to outcome of characters being based on your past decisions.
Skyrim -- focused on single player, with replay value stemming from modifications and character rerolls.
Modern Warfare 3 -- focused on single and multi-player, with majority of replay value being on multi-player and future add-ons
Battlefield 3 -- focused on single and multi-player, with majority of replay value being on multi-player and future add-ons

Depending on the type of player you are, you can either be one of the first bunches of people who buy the game as it comes out or you can be the ones who wait 'till all of the add-ons and DRC (downloadable rip-off content) are collected into a "game of the year" package. As I am a multi-player gamer associated with a clan, I ended up being one of the first bunches who snagged Battlefield 3 early. I guess you could say that I'm sorta obligated (to myself) to snag a game early, despite the initial price offering. But when I view single-player games... like Mass Effect 3, Skyrim, or any other big single-player games out there, I think the price should not be tagged at $60 a pop, especially if the publisher and developer already has plans on delivering future contents. These days the term "DLC" is so blurred and screwed up that I often see it as an excuse for them to sell an incomplete game. I personally do not want an incomplete game. "Zero-day DLC" only implies that the game was incomplete to start with. And they should not be charging US$60 a pop for an incomplete game.

In the multi-player realm, things can be different... MMO and multi-player FPS tend to have people who will snag the game on the first day, since they're more than likely are either fans or are with clans/guilds that want to start as soon as possible. Prices on these can be set high (or low). Still, $60 is pricey as it is.

If I'm going to play a single-player game, I'd rather skip the initial price offering and wait it out. I already have tagged Batman Arkham City and Saints Row The Third as games that I will get later on and hopefully be collected into a Game of the Year package. You can't beat gettin' a good game at a fraction of its original release price.

until we can finally say that Firefox's version is...

OVER 9000!!!!

Yeah, I don't need sites I randomly visit to start recording the sound of me jacking off as I watch porn.

You can give 'em credit for driving away several Infinity Ward members out of the company.

But innovation is far from what Activision or anything that they have in their iron grip has. Call of Duty has done nothing more than turn itself into yet another year game churned out by the likes of EA. It's basically Madden NFL but for shooters. Innovate? Pffft!

Anyone who has been playing FPS long enough would know that CoD has gone downhill since 4 and World at War. MW2 was an overhyped gorilla that had hordes of morons blindly lining up for a game that added only a couple of things to the underlying engine. Treyarch, now famous for hand-me-downs, took that and added a couple of more things to it, but still did nothing to differentiate itself. There's no innovation involved for anyone tinkering with the CoD franchise now. It's the same shit over and over again, with only a few things changed since the last one.

EA is no different either. How many stinking Need for Speed games do they have under their belt? Each one minorly different from the last one. And that Hot Pursuit reboot by Criterion, the same developers behind Burnout? Utter console port crap with hardly anything worthwhile to truly differentiate itself from the crowd.

Everything that could have made a major impact in differentiating itself from the crowd has been put on the back burner. There's no innovation involved when sequels churned out end up being 90% like the previous game. And FYI, I speak as a PC player.

I didn't read the whole thread. But since you said that he brought up BC2, yes, the game hits the system hard. I run a 5850 and my setup is a Core2 Q9450 clocked at 3.2GHz w/ 8GB of RAM. On single-screen, it runs the game butter smooth with all the settings max'd, sans for HBAO (additional lighting effects). But turn it up to 3 monitors, and it works the card very hard. Previously, before having to tweak the game down for stability reason, I can get around 40-45fps in 5040x1050 resolution (that's 3x1680x1050). Many of the visuals were tuned to medium and maybe one or two being set to low. (It's been a while so my memory's off.) If my card and CPU can only muster that much in 3 screen, then I am finding it difficult to believe he can do that with his 5670 video card. The monitors the guy got has a native resolution of 1600x900, giving him a total screen estate of 4800x900. Total number of pixels that card has to push for a single frame is 4.320.000 and that is slightly more pixels than a single 30 inch monitor at native resolution contain -- 4.096.000. Performance has to be sub-par even if he has the fastest CPU money can buy.

The 5670 card has a 128-bit memory bus interface with memory configurations of 512MB or 1GB. Even though the memory used is GDDR5, that isn't enough to satisfy the amount of information that is going to go in and out of the card's RAM for a game like Bad Company 2. Turn on other things like anisotropic filtering or anti-aliasing and the performance goes down even more. Forget 3 screens for gaming. Even at single monitor resolution (1600x900), framerate should not be at acceptable level for that resolution.

I run a v3 (or was it v4?) router w/ Tomato (http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato/) firmware. Given the nature of GPL firmwares, wouldn't it be possible just to enable IPv6 support in the router? Correct me if I am wrong, this should not be a hardware issue at all, right?

Disappointing a company as large as Cisco to not enable support for IPv6 for the Linksys routers out there. Perhaps this is a sign for other router manufacturers like Buffalo to step up and be the first.

I can't effectively counter the points you made with regards to what title has done this or that. But I'd like to point out a current example of something similar. It isn't exactly as described. But it is somewhere along that route.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was released earlier in the year and practically on Day 1, there was a "map pack" released. If you were to remove the PC platform from the equation, you could say that this is akin to point #1 to 2nd-hand buyers of the game. Those who purchase BC2 as a used product would not be able to get this map pack, along with 5 others (soon to be 6) released. As a result, a player who do want to play on these maps would have to cough up cash in order to get a feel for it. Even worse so is that there is no way to really try it out to see if it is worth the price.

As for point #3, DICE is now notorious for this. Their VIP Map Packs 2 through 6 are largely the same, and contains virtually everything that was already seen in-game and was on the game disc. However, they were largely either locked or needed a few additional files in order to fill in the spaces. The community for BC2 has since then coined the term "Mode Packs" as the maps are the same but only its layout are different. It is akin to remaking other content, when these content should have been either finished or released since Day 1.

I have played the game on the PC end for many months. It is irritating at times that these so-called "new maps" are nothing more than the same thing but just in a different mode. Many of the players in the BC2 community also feel the same as well. We do want new maps but the same maps designed and played differently isn't our definition of "new."

You say that games are products w/ big teams. I've no issue with that. A game being worked on by a large development team will definitely be working hard to make it as good as possible. However, the growing issue at hand is the lack of content being shipped with the game. More and more games are becoming less complete or less fulfilling because they lack the content that long-time gamers have wanted. PC players are becoming more left out because of how games are being designed today due to the overwhelming market of the console platform. And with DLC, the developers and the publishers are using that option to rake in as much cash as possible in order to keep players playing their games.

I personally do not mind DLC as a whole, as long as the game itself is fulfilling, enjoyable, and has plenty of things to do in it. But this is not the case any more. DLC is stifling the modding community and the PC players are getting shafted and ignored. The devs and publishers are too narrow-minded to focus on anything else.

In the event that HTML5 takes off and the video markup becomes commonplace, Firefox would be the only browser that doesn't support it. By creating this project to have the codec support built into a Firefox codebase, Firefox can retain the userbase instead of losing out to other browser that implements H264 support. It is not simply adding support using some 3rd-party framework in place. Gstreamer is not commonly found in Windows-based systems and OS X probably has their own framework for multimedia playback and handling.

A lot of people still stick to Firefox due to extensions. Many are probably reluctant to even ditch or use anything else because of all the features that they depend on.

Soon we'll be at a crossroad where you have Firefox with HTML5 support but no H264 support, IE with H264 support with trivial HTML5 support, or Chrome. Where would the majority go with if it means being able to play back videos on HTML5-based YouTube?

I second this. Because that's the first thing that comes to mind if I wanted to greet an extraterrestrial.

"Pinky, are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

Funny... I thought it stood for

Purposely/Privately
Infiltrated
For
Tracking/Taking
Stuff

Actually... I doubt I'd call him nice since... well, I'll quote a small excerpt from the link:

Let's see what other people think of him now...

Don't quote me on it. I haven't done extensive research on it. But from what I have glanced over, a lot of people seem to have little problem with the beta. It runs fine. There are little issues. And some are saying that it's release-worthy. I do not know if they are smoking crack or if they're telling the truth with a mid-range or "average" computer running it. That's something people will have to find out when Win7 is out in retail.

If the OS is truly that stable during beta, then I see no point in keeping it in beta. So it makes perfect sense to push it into RC and see if it can be given the RTM stamp of approval.

It's not complicated. It's a series of tubes. It's as simple as that!