Buy it, enjoy it, beat it...then Ebay it when you're done with it.

You'll end up paying $10-15 for one of the greatest single player shooters ever made. Thats a hell of a deal if you ask me.

First of all, making long, expansive single-player games takes a MUCH bigger initial investment, but there's zero upkeep. There are no updates, no playlist changes, no prevention of cheating--nothing. What that does is it makes a single-player game a huge financial risk, because there's no flexibility with the budget. If Halo 2 had completely flopped, it wouldn't have cost Microsoft anything to maintain it. However, there are still hundreds of thousands of people playing it every day, so they're still spending money on managing it.

When I'm talking about online subscriptions, I'm not talking about MMO-type costs, for one specific game (though in-game upgrades like map packs do make small amounts of money), but successful multiplayer online games do cause people who might not otherwise sign up for, say, Xbox Live to do so. That's where all the money is made.

Lastly, I wouldn't make the Britney Spears comparison, because unlike music, there isn't a general standard of what makes a good or bad game. Games can be simple or complex, with no real bearing on the 'quality,' imo. Games serve the sole purpose of entertaining, and it's far more dependent on preference than anything else.

I'm not going to get into the fast food debate, because that's something else entirely.

I bought it, played it intensely for 2 days, then got acutely bored with it and haven't played it at all for over 2 weeks. It was kind of like dating a really pretty girl...

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There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Rehashing the same gameplay mechanics time and time again is bad. Period.

There are countless other ways to use Xbox live (and other services) than solely to suit the standard fare genres that have saturated the market thus far.

The problem with you referring to the "upkeep" on these games is that in the grand scheme of things, the industry can't support a large number of games requiring that kind of "upkeep."

Risk should effectively work as quality control.

And all the analogies made above had to do with settling for less when they could have more, nothing else - and in that sense, they are all apt.

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last minute disco dot net

But if the industry can't support many games with that much 'upkeep,' doesn't that also become a different form of quality control? The only difference is that it takes place once the product hits the market, rather than beforehand. The budget is determined by consumer reaction--rather than the judgment of a few. The question then becomes one of whether you feel that developers or consumers are a better judge of quality. We could argue about that all day, and it still wouldn't be fully relevant to this discussion, because it might not relate to preferences for game types, which is the point here.

I didn't mean to imply that one is necessarily better than the other--only that I prefer multi-player games, and that that preference significantly affects the games I enjoy. Likewise, it also determines the variety of choices I have, as it's the more appealing of the two from a distributor's perspective.

I simply do not find leaving quality control to the masses a good idea - it essentially guarantees that the lowest common denominator is always satisfied, which really just fucks me right off because I don't need a thousand Halo or Half Life clones and the same Madden game every year.

I draw absolutely no kind of distinction between that kind of corporate fueled creative laziness and any other.

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last minute disco dot net

comparing a MP game to a SP game is an exercise in stupidity.

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quote:

Originally posted by RJT I simply do not find leaving quality control to the masses a good idea - it essentially guarantees that the lowest common denominator is always satisfied, which really just fucks me right off because I don't need a thousand Halo or Half Life clones and the same Madden game every year. I draw absolutely no kind of distinction between that kind of corporate fueled creative laziness and any other.

the Madden problem is due to licensing--not actual development. When there's no competition, there's no growth. Why? The consumer has no say.

As for the lowest common denominator theory, it's not as if video games are the most intellectually demanding of exercises, so what standard is it that you think is being lowered, and how does that relate to the differences between the average person and yourself?

quote:

Originally posted by RJT There are countless other ways to use Xbox live (and other services) than solely to suit the standard fare genres that have saturated the market thus far.

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hello thar

I could'nt even get a decent distance through it. You know when you get bored of a game after playing it way too much and you suddenly hit a plataeu and can't play it anymore? I reached that after killing the third big daddy. That's how boring I found it.

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Dont expect profoundness so much as relentless and pathological destruction.

quote:

Originally posted by inconspicuous the Madden problem is due to licensing--not actual development. When there's no competition, there's no growth. Why? The consumer has no say. As for the lowest common denominator theory, it's not as if video games are the most intellectually demanding of exercises, so what standard is it that you think is being lowered, and how does that relate to the differences between the average person and yourself?

The Madden problem was a problem long before they had exclusivity.

And how can you not see the homogenization of the gaming industry as anything but negative? It's without a doubt the exact same phenomenon as the homogenization of any genre of music, visual art, or really any other art form. It takes away from anything worthwhile, unique, or interesting and just paints a pretty picture that supposedly "everyone" can enjoy.

It's a load of shit, and it's the reason you're seeing so many "What will casual gaming do to the industry?" articles/blogs/etc. right now.

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last minute disco dot net