Americans especially have been sold a steaming pile that says if you work long hours it makes you a better person. So employers get to abuse and underpay salaried employees. They get the work of more than one person out of a single employee by (never outright demanding but) tacitly expecting a work week in excess of 40 hours. If you're self employed, on comission or paid hourly then by all means work as long as you want and reap the benefits (as long as it doesn't ruin the rest of your life) but if your fixed salary is based on a 40 hour week you cannot be fairly expected to regularly work more than that.
On the PC, DLC used to be called an Expansion Pack. The most popular games got them. They cost about half the price of a full game, and they added about the same amount of content that the original game offered. The current DLC model has them charging smaller amounts for smaller bits of content, but if you add up the cost of all the DLC for a popular game, it comes to as much if not more than the original game's cost. On top of that, they want to sell you subscriptions, charge fees for playing online, sell collector's editions, etc. etc. To the people defending the game companies because they have a right to make a profit (@equinator3): they certainly do. But there are two sides here, supply and demand. The demand side is coming to the realization that the supplier wants too much for the full game experience and isn't meeting their demands with the base game. They will vote with their purses, find other suppliers that meet their needs, and the suppliers who the buyers feel are too greedy will change their ways or go out of business.
So true. I don't buy a game to give the publisher an excuse to sell me 25 other things. It doesn't happen in any other entertainment medium. If you want more money, game publishers, how about you publish more games.
@the_requiem Agreed. Social engineering will get you everywhere. That's why active monitoring is the third leg of the stool. If everyone goes home at 5:00 then whoever gets in has all night to browse the databases. It's not hard to spot 10 million sets of personal data getting queried.
I've studied IT security, I work with credit card security all day and I've gone through PCI certification and subsequent anual audits. A few responses to the Sony apologists: These sorts of breaches DO NOT happen to anyone. They happen to people who let their guard down. A huge multinational corporation should have the latest IT security in place and should be actively monitoring their network for breaches. We know Sony's was using software that was several years old, which might as well be decades in terms of security. If their security plans and policies are as old as their systems they were asking for trouble. Do you realize it's not even necessary to store actual credit card numbers in order to use them to bill customers? Why was Sony so behind? If you think their security was good enough before the breach, why did it take them weeks to get back online? I wonder what they were doing all that time...? If they were state of the art, why would they shut it down at all? 10 million plus people are living and working in this country based on false documentation. How hard do you think it is to create a fake driver's license, social security card or birth certificate? In fact, do you know how easy it is to get a copy of someone's ACTUAL birth certificate? http://www.criminology.fsu.edu/transcrime/articles/certificatefraud.htm Wake up. Don't ignore the issue and hope for the best, and stop drinking the corporate Kool-Aid.
All you people who are minimizing the threat here, I sincerely hope you're not following your own advice. Everyone else, don't listen to them. Sony's security was lax. Competent security measures would have seen the intrusion and shut them down before they got anything or lured them into going after juicy but false information and thereby identifing themselves to Sony (aka honey pots). Things evil people can and have done with stolen credit card numbers and names and addresses: Contact your card issuer impersonating you, ask for mail to be redirected to a new address. Report the card lost and asks for a replacement to be sent to the new address. Encode the stolen card number on the back of another phony card, make a fake ID, walk into your issuing bank (and many other places that will accept those things as ID) and open new credit accounts. Buy phishing or spoofing web site hosting and domains in your name, making you the suspect. Shut off your utilities. Don't be a rube. Protect yourself.
You can't point to female game characters who kick ass and say there's plenty of strong women in games. They're just acting like one of the guys, and that appeals to guys WAY more than it does to women. (Men, if you doubt me, just think about how much a guy acting like one of the girls appeals to you...) You can have a strong woman like Samus or you can have a strong woman like Cate Blanchette's Elizabeth I from the movie. I'm guessing Elizabeth appeals to women much more than Samus and I'm pretty sure we have yet to see anyone remotely like Elizabeth in a game.
@godfather830 That works both ways, and it's the point of the article. If developers supply games women want to play, there will be demand. The issue is they don't and they're not interested in trying. Hollywood makes movies and television aimed at women and movies and television aimed at men, and makes profits on both. There is no reason the games industry can't do the same thing. The other big problem is the tendency of game developers toward adolescent male immaturuty (the man-boy dominated developer community mentioned in the article). Game developers in general need to grow the F*** up. Here again, entertainment is made that is aimed at teenage boys and others at adults, or teenage girls, or old people, or 20 somethings.... etc. and they're all viable economically. The games industry isn't forced to make 90% of it's games for teenage boys, they just tend to because they that's their mindset.
I see a trend in the designer's answers in that style trumped substance in their decision making, e.g. character customization and the free camera. The worst part is his desire to make the game more accessible to people who like Grand Theft Auto. If you move away from RPG and toward GTA, then you're less of an RPG, which is exactly why the RPG hardcore dislike this game. Hopefully they're really not a clueless as the ego, spin and damage control here make it sound.
ggregd's comments