Lot of customs, but there's still a strong competitive community if that's your thing.

Despite the other elements, NFS: Hot Pursuit is pretty much a racing game, and has amazing visuals that run well. Don't get me started on the poor physics though. But there are plenty of street race type situations, as well as time attack scenarios. Meh, maybe not purely a racing game, but it's also nothing like a sandbox GTA setting either.

[QUOTE="ggnoree"]

Who agress with me? This year seems to be awesome for gaming!

heroes 6, mw3, bf3, diablo 3, dungeon siege 3, skyrm, gw2, old republic, witcher 2, portal 2, and many more. Do you think 2011 is going to turn out as the best year of gaming yet?

Ricardo41

Looking at your list, all I see are lame sequels. There is not one single, original game idea, an idea that we haven't seen a million times before, on that list.

ToR is and will be lame, but it's by no means a sequel.

Diablo 3, Deus Ex 3, and Skyrim will all rock your face regardless of being sequels. Some of the best games ever made are sequels, or do you honestly believe Final Fantasy hit its peak on the NES? Don't hate sequels just because they're sequels...

[QUOTE="snared04"]

[QUOTE="nesproc"]

sorry but calling games that are expected to be released but haven't yet doesn't count! (seen too many last minute delays) 1/2 those games aren't released yet ;) so might have to re-adjust your list before i'd agree ..... i will say it's looking good for this year if all do get released on time ;) many games i've been waiting for coming out

nesproc

Err... gonna call shennanigans on that. The only one on that list without either a firm 2011 release date or at least at TBA 2011 is Guildwars 2. I'd say ToR and Diablo III (the only others with a 2011 on them but no firm date yet) are strong possibilities for 2011 anyway, so your "1/2 the games" assertion is pretty moot. All the rest have either been released or have a firm date set.

I don't keep track of ToR because I don't care, but Diablo III NEVER had a confirmed release date for 2010, period. If anyone said that it was A. Not a Blizzard employee, AND B. Pure speculation. That one may still be on the fence for 2011, but DX3, Skyrim, and several others WILL be released this year, so discounting them just because they aren't released at this very moment is pretty pointless.

sorry but calling games that are expected to be released but haven't yet doesn't count! (seen too many last minute delays) 1/2 those games aren't released yet ;) so might have to re-adjust your list before i'd agree ..... i will say it's looking good for this year if all do get released on time ;) many games i've been waiting for coming out

nesproc

Err... gonna call shennanigans on that. The only one on that list without either a firm 2011 release date or at least at TBA 2011 is Guildwars 2. I'd say ToR and Diablo III (the only others with a 2011 on them but no firm date yet) are strong possibilities for 2011 anyway, so your "1/2 the games" assertion is pretty moot. All the rest have either been released or have a firm date set.

Not sure you could conclusively prove it's the best year in general, no matter what happened, but it is a strong one for sure:

Deus Ex: Human Revoluation

TES V: Skyrim

Diablo III

That's a pretty strong lineup we got going, I'm excited as hell.

I mean, it's just strange to me that anyone, especially game companies, would assert something like that as being a loss.

You go to Target or Walmart and you can pretty invariably see a large stack of unbought copies of WoW: Cataclysm sitting there, collecting dust.

Now, each of those probably cost them 1-5 bucks to make, another 3-5 to ship, and so each of those is potentially a ten dollar loss. And yet I know that that isn't caused by pirating, because you don't pirate WoW. They simply ordered and shipped enough to make sure that everyone got one, and you know what? They don't give a damn about those copies sitting on the shelf, because for every paying customer they get, one month's subscription takes care of each of those little boxes, and then some. Now, they have suffered an actual "loss" because they paid to produce a product that didn't get sold, that's tangible. Saying those boxes, or any others sitting there, didn't get sold because of piracy? That's pointless, erroneous, asinine, unproveable, etc.

I never really thought of that until you mention it in that phrasing, snared - I guess retail theft also might not have been people that would have bought the product in question if they weren't stealing it, huh? The same pirates != customers mentality applies to physical products, just the only difference being that you're *definitely* out the physical cost of manufacturing the product that just got jacked.Makari

You steal a video game off the shelf of a store, and it's stealing, and a loss.

But if you download an unlicensed digital copy, it's only stealing, plain and simple.

To calculate any kind of loss based on those numbers, of which there is no tangible way to acquire them (You gonna surf every single torrent site in the world, and find out how many downloaded them? Maybe estimate that some fictitious % of those downloaders also copied for a friend via flash drive or something?), as a loss is totally asinine, and pointless. Besides, if 41 billion dollars is indeed an accurate number, that pretty much means there are two pirated copies of every game released for every one bought, and that just doesn't compute in my mind. The biggest torrent I've ever seen for anything was like 6k people, maybe like 15k if you added every single different torrent, but that doesn't compare with the millions of copies reported as sold, not even close.

Just because a "study" is done, really doesn't inject any inherent truth or enlightment in that information gained. And I've got to say those stupid "you wouldn't steal a car, a purse, etc. then why pirate movies?!?!" commercials really bend the truth quite a bit.

Pirating=stealing

Pirating=/=a loss, unless you can prove that every person that pirated that game would have bought it legitimately if they hadn't stolen in, which there's no way to do.

[QUOTE="xLittlekillx"]

[QUOTE="Diophage"] Well, I'm not really arguing about it because I'm not the one claiming any definite, here. Starshine made the claim, and if he/she firmly believes that what he is saying is a fact, he/she should do a better job of proving it.

Starshine_M2A2

Let's all be friends.

Hmm, looks like you weren't actually in here to be civil and have a conversation anyway, surprise surprise. Glad we finally cleared that up. As if the "i win, yall r dumb, looks like im way ahead of you, blah blah' wasn't a tip off to that already...

First of all, you can link whatever "studies" you want, and they're just smoke screens unless they're coming straight from the companies themselves. Your argument that they wouldn't list losses due to that is both true and erroneous; they would list it if it was legitimate and happening, and erroneous because they know what I know and what you seem to be missing: there is no such thing as "loss" from piracy.

When you work in retail and someone steals merchandise from your store, that's a loss. Digital piracy comes nowhere near this realm of control, because any "loss" that you might anticipate is simply saying "we expected to sell X number of this game, and we didn't, therefore X number of people must have stolen/pirated the game." That's beyond erroneous, and if you weren't so hell bent on pretending to be some kind of moral crusader that's more intelligent than the rest of us in here showing you the logical issues with your argument, you might have a chance to see that.

Either way, stealing, pirating or w/e else you want to call it cannot be calculated at all, loss or not, because you're basing that calculation on numbers that were, at best, pure speculation. So if you're unable to find ACTUAL number DIRECTLY from companies, then that's why: they don't exist. Yes it happens, but you can't calculate that no matter how hard you try.