The thing with the new consoles is that the companies are making it as easy as possible to develop for them. PS3 is using OpenGL (2.0?), XBox2 will have XNA (or whatever the abbreviation is.) Nintendo hasn't said anything, but given that they're the world's best software developer, I'm sure they know what to do in terms of developer friendliness--from a software perspective, anyway. They still have problems with developer relations.

I think this "oh no, the new consoles are going to kill off 90% of all the publishers and software houses" stuff isn't going to pass. Some companies will die, but only because they put out crappy products--see Acclaim.

Personally if I had a choice between $49.95 at retail and $29.95 online, guess what I'm going to pick. The prices used are just as an example but you can see where this is going.

I agree, but my point is that there won't be a price difference in the first place. At least, not for HL2. The bandwidth and market is not there to support every single person who wants to play Half-life 2, Counter-strike 2, or whatever else is pumped out over Steam. Then you have to consider that Valve is opening Steam to other companies, so it won't be only Valve's products being jammed down the pipeline.

Let's say HL2 sells even better than HL1, and suddenly a good chunk of the PC gaming market, both casual and hardcore, has Steam. THEN the possibility of cutting out retailers and publishers will appear, but the idea itself won't come to fruition for a long time, primarily because of infrastructure. Unless Valve's got a pipeline into the Internet2 setup, I can't see their servers handling, let's say, 150,000 downloads at release.

Online distribution of games and music came of age years ago. Companies like Vivendi are the reason that we can't utilize it unless it's illegally like file sharing.

P2P file-sharing is actually legal, like emulation. The RIAA is trying to clamp down on the entire concept, but they've been foiled at every legal turn. The actual acquisition of something you haven't paid for is illegal, but the RIAA can't prove that. It's an assumption of guilt to say "everyone downloading mp3s on service X is a thief!" They can't prove these people aren't obtaining their one backup allowed by fair use laws. File sharing's quite legal.

What stuns me time after time is that rather than read the writing that's been on the wall in 12ft high letters written in blood for years and adapt, they'd rather spend millions in courts across the country just to keep the old status quo alive.

Well, it's like the mainstream media in the face of Internet journalism: they think they can ignore it and it will go away. While online distribution won't go away, it's not going to take the place of brick and mortar retailing, along with the distribution of physical media, for a long time. For all the coverage e-commerce gets, it's only something like 2% of all sales in the US. I'm sure that legit distribution services like iTunes have similar market shares, and I'm sure that Steam really won't make a dent in Gamestop's profits.

There's a long way to go yet before we can cut out a couple layers of middleman.

If valve is cutting all of this out of the loop and everything they make is going directly to them... WHY THE HELL ARE THEY STILL CHARGING AS MUCH AS RETAILERS!!!

To keep the retailers happy. If they charged less, EB/Gamestop/Best Buy/Circuit City/whoever sells games would lose a whole lot of sales. Charge the same price, however, and Steam becomes just another method of distribution with no clear advantage over going to Gamestop and buying the game in person.

I'm not criticizing. I was just curious as to why there's a duplication. How exactly is that a criticism?

IGN Xbox has more screenshots, plus a quick interview with Itagaki. The interview itself is kind of weird--I think the translator may have been hung over.

http://xbox.ign.com/articles/548/548262p1.html

Oh, and Blue, why do you have duplicate FF7 stories? FF7 Dirge of Cerberus and the "FF7 sequel" story refer to the same game.

As far as I know, Firefox always loads a favicon if the website has one available. The only site I've had problems with regarding favicons not loading is Livejournal, but a refresh or two fixed that.

And of course, Firefox now saves favicons, so once you download it, you'll see it every time.

You moron, HalfLife was probably the single best FPS that ever graced the PC in it's time. It had a great story, intense action, cool scripted events, and was voted best PC game of all time many times by almost every publisher and gamer.

Thanks for the insults. You act like I've slapped your mother.

HL1 IS boring. Great premise, but the levels themselves are terrible. Any part with the Marines was classic, especially using their equipment to call in bombing runs. But the actual progression through the game is tedious and uninteresting, beginning with the appearance of the first jumping puzzle, and they never quite go away. I maintain to this day that jumping puzzles have no place in an FPS. I think it was around On A Rail that I was asking myself, "What the hell am I doing?" The game's narration is completely lacking--constant reminders to find the Lambda complex is not what I call incentive to hop barrels floating in radioactive water. And, one word: Xen. Whoever thought up the design of that place is hopefully nowhere near the Valve premises now.

HL1 did have some great areas, like the section with the gigantic worm-like aliens that respond to sound. The first hour or so is extremely engaging. And of course, the Marines and Assassins are classic.

As for HL2, it looks like Valve threw out what didn't work in HL1, and ran with the environment and narrative. Combat looks fun, the enemies seem to be pretty smart, and that hoverboat chase scene is going to be amazing. Definitely looking forward to this, but you can keep your HL: Source.

Meanwhile, while the winner is meeting with Itagaki (and hopefully asking him to give Ninja Gaiden 2 a better plot), I'm drooling at the screenshots of Hurricane Pack vol. II. Could Rachel be playable? I hope so.

gaben again?

Seriously, glad to hear this. Can't wait for the gold announcement. Better yet, I can't wait to play the game. I hope it's not as boring as the original.

You know, Cnet News is a nice site and all, but its writers whine like all hell. Firefox had, what, two security vulnerabilities? One of which was related to the fact that Firefox was running on Windows--it didn't affect the Mac or Linux versions. And yet Cnet says that Firefox has its share of security problems as well.

Amazing. And incredibly annoying.

Gamespot already debunked these "Xbox2" photos in their Rumor Control column.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/09/11/news_6107204.html

SmyTTor... I don't think you understand what happened. We were having a conversation about eBay... and then you jumped in with a non-eBay-related Cheney bashing that sounds like it comes from the mouth of Howard Dean or Michael Moore. You completely ignored the topic at hand so you could insult Cheney and then go off on me. I'm not the one lacking critical thinking skills. I'm also not the one lacking a sense of tact. That falls on your shoulders.

And yes, you are quite the liberal nut, but that's irrelevant to what's going on here. The fact is, you shouldn't have even opened your mouth about what you did, because it's got nothing to do with what's actually going on here. This is normally called trolling, and more than once you've been called on it. Go away.

I'm sorry that the mention of Cheney makes you break down into a rabid fit of anger, but you're ranting about the wrong subject at the wrong time. Us adults are trying to have a conversation.
This comment was edited on Sep 12, 00:44.

I don't think the current administration really cares what boundries they overstep, so why not Ebay?

Don't you have a rock to crawl back under? Not once was foreign policy mentioned--we're talking about eBay, not Halliburton. Put it back in your pants and go away.

Back to eBay, even most of the used stuff I see are sold from store outlets or professional eBay venders, in the same way that Gamestop sells used games. It's second hand, but it's still added into GDP. I think this was more of a commentary than anything else. The story makes it seem like Cheney's entire point was to say that we should include eBay and other online auction sites in GDP. The broader point, that we should reconsider what counts as GDP and what's left out, is a pretty good one. There are plenty of economists who think the same way, and I had a pro/con argument presented to me in my Macroeconomics class about this.

From within Windows? Or with a ISO file on a cd-r? Intel does the former, and IBM does the latter.

I've yet to see or use a BIOS that can be flashed from within Windows, or from an ISO. And unless CD burning becomes a lot more intuitive--becoming as integrated into Windows as transferring a file to a floppy is--it ain't going to happen. Besides, that's a waste of a good CD-R.

With a pen drive? Or a cd-r(w)?

Never been to a K-12 school with CD-R(W) drives, and my high school is about 6 years old. Never been to one with a pen drive, either. Sure, they could drop the floppy and buy CD-RW drives... at a significant cost. Floppy drives cost $8, CD-RWs are, what, five times that at starting price? You can't buy some cheap brand either, because these drives would be in constant use and would have to last for years, upwards of a decade.

There still aren't any practical floppy drive replacements available. Well, I suppose there's the zip drive, but even that is starting to wear thin in terms of storage space. I think the industry needs to get together and come up with a true floppy replacement and agree to it as a standard, and start including it on all new PCs. Maybe in five years we can elminate the floppy.

Edit: fixed a typo.
This comment was edited on Sep 11, 16:57.

Erm... where in the article does it say that Cheney wants to regulate eBay? Better yet, where in the Constitution does it say the Vice President can regulate ANYTHING?

Knee-jerking is bad.

The DS was confirmed at $175 or $180 a few weeks ago, IIRC.

You want to bitch about portable pricing... the PSP will probably cost a good $300.

I think the floppy drive will hang around for a nice long time. How else will one flash the BIOS? How else will one transfer documents from a school computer to a home computer (e-mail is not a practical method)? It'd be nice if some type of flash memory drive replaced the floppy as a standard. Hell, it'd be nice if we could replace the BIOS with something newer and less-sucky. Ain't happening, though.

Wow, quite the Halo bashing fest here. Folks, if you don't like it, don't play it and be quiet. Meanwhile, I still play it--on my PC. The game runs fine (reports of it chugging were correct, but this has been fixed up in patches) and it's quite entertaining. The levels are pretty repetitive, and hopefully Bungie has kept that complaint in mind when designing Halo 2.