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Video Game Industry Thread: Time for a new thread
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So you lay off your security people in late March and you are a target by early April?
hhuummmmm. Sound like a pissed off employee(s) to anyone else?
There should be a rule or something. DON'T PISS OFF THE PEOPLE THAT SECURE YOUR NETWORK.
It was back when the internet was young, but they settled out of the PS2 Hardware Lawsuits. I wonder if deliberately making such blatantly bad decisions convinces a few people over there, "You know, let's just send them a suitcase full of money and tell them to drop it."
The only way it would be better* is if after getting the tipoff from Anonymous some executive looked at the person who brought it to their attention and said 'Well, you've covered your ass.' Then fired the security team.
*For us, obviously.
You're muckin' with a G!
Well, that's just it: I don't think people will notice what's wrong. Hell, I don't even think the Wii U's extra power (above the 360 and PS3's level) will get noticed much by the market (beyond the fact that it's in HD, of course). And I think Nintendo knows this, which is why they've gone the extra step with that wacky tablet. The amount of easily apparent improvement (i.e., improvement that could be noticed by your mom) between generations, even with this generation, has leveled off significantly. A console can no longer sell on just a horsepower boost alone, especially with a market that's grown increasingly accustomed to low-power Facebook and smartphone games.
There's already a rule saying 'Don't piss off the people who serve your food.' The problem with IT departments? They're considered a drain on company resources. And in the games business, they're surpassed only by QA.
It's just too easy to get on the bad side of the computer security folks. Mostly because the people who are really in charge are too stupid to know any better.
You're muckin' with a G!
Those people aren't using the right TV's. The difference is huge, if you have a TV that will display it properly.
I can tell a big difference from my TV that is limited to 1080i to my Plasma that does 1080p, especially if there is any kind of text on the screen.
Don't smartphones boost themselves in power from generation to generation? Maybe not at a giant level, but they drop new versions of that shit on the market like it was going out of style. And whether or not Facebook games are low-power, Facebook itself can become a system hog (whether or not it does now is immaterial). PCs get lost in this kind of debate simply because it's so easy to make those minor upgrades every so often.
With a minimum five year life, consoles need to be better situated for the future. Cellphones are practically disposable. PCs have (mostly) always been modular. Restricting the console to cut initial costs is, of course, something they're going to do. But unlike everything else, the RAM is the most important thing it can have. And taking the cheap route there isn't healthy for long term sustainability. (Of the console, I mean.)
All I'm saying is that they need to do a better job of giving the developers the room to make their games work. Not every developer goes batshit with the graphix, but that RAM limit will fuck them all faster than a spiraling dev budget. Why reach that point sooner rather than later?
You're muckin' with a G!
Working in IT, I hate this. It's really the IT people who have control of the most important things at any given company. We're honest people and we value our jobs, but we could probably cause more havok in the company than the custodians or the guys who load the trucks.
Nintendo Network ID: unclesporky
The difference is huge to us.
My wife can't tell the difference. When we got our plasma I tried to show her the difference between dvd and blu-ray and she could kind of tell but her conclusion was that it wasn't that big of a deal to her. Much to my annoyance as I want to replace some of our DVD collection with blu-ray and when 1/2 of your power base at home doesn't care enough to change, justifying spending the money is pretty impossible.
It blows my mind that she can't really see, or maybe she just doesn't care to see, the difference.
She can tell the difference between quality of graphics from, say, a wii game to a 360 game, but that's just pretties on the screen and not the resolution. Even then, though, she has a different view of what is better in that regard. She thought the LoZ: TP looked just as good as, say, Halo Reach.
When you don't spend an inordinate amount of your life caring about something like this, you can't always tell the difference. Similarly my wife can't tell the difference between a great pair of headphones and a shitty one, and she doesn't care if her car has 100 horsepower or 400.
It might be a useless skill, it might be something we all picked up without much effort because we are interested, but it IS a thing that you need to pay attention to to recognise. If you don't care that's not going to happen.
I guess it all comes down to me being confused about this point. How is the ram limit really fucking things? Oh sure, it makes things a pain for developers who have to work around it. But it's really not affecting sales much at all, since nobody but us tech nerds really see the limitations. Especially since there's not really anything better to compare it to.
No shit. When I worked IT, the 'best' thing at one company was hearing the complaints once people found out we had the ability to read their e-mails.
This happened after something like the third time in three months that the mail server crashed because nobody deleted old, unneeded e-mails. They'd keep whole strings of e-mail communications that had like a month's worth of replies in them. They'd keep 'sent folder' shit with giant attachment files as 'backup' (lets not get into the people who'd copy their C: drive to the network for 'backup'...) and then have multiple copies of that when it became part of a long string of responses.
And all because we'd informed them that their activities were causing problems with our server stability... And whenever we'd ask for more money to improve the servers, they'd half-ass it. Right after we finish doing the upgrades for the executives first...
Ten years after the bubble burst and people still don't get that IT workers simply don't give a shit about what you do so long as you don't break anything doing it. But, no.
You're muckin' with a G!
I swear I thought she was fucking with me, but I think she really did want to see the difference!
Bzzzt! Warning! Error! Infinite missing variable cascade!
One of the reasons Valve never brought their character updates to the 360 version of TF2 is because they couldn't possibly fit them all into the 360's memory. (There was also the fact that MS was forcing them to charge for DLC, but their original plan was to just pack the character updates together.)
Well it doesn't matter so much that PCs have more RAM because they're running the OS - the fact of the matter is that PC devs have gotten used to taking advantage of that roomy extra RAM and in some cases they just can't wrap their heads around less.
Nintendo Network ID: unclesporky
It Boggles the mind. BOGGLES.
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?p=19644518#post19644518
And some people are having trouble with the 3DS.
Some people are colour blind.
Oddly, not everybody is actually the same.
You're muckin' with a G!
Which is very true and simply means that they can get away with less ram, however the piddling amounts that these companies seem to love sticking in their machines is really hamstringing game development.
The 360 has 512MB that is shared between the CPU and the GPU. The PS3 has what...256 for the video card and 256 as regular ole ram? If we need a new console generation it'd simply be to get systems with far more ram in them so that devs are no longer so limited by the hardware. Hell, it's almost no wonder shooter development is stuck in whack-a-mole mode. You'd prolly smoke a console trying to get it to do anything clever with AI.
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On a movie, anything over 480p is a wash to me. On console games, I'll be lucky to notice a difference between 480p and 720p. Forget 720p to 1080p--there's just no difference.
Though between 720p and 1080p, on a TV I'm several feet from, it's a lot harder.