The area that has a couple tables is adjacent to one of the smaller gyms where they have dance classes sometimes.

The teenagers that take the dance classes, as well as sometimes their moms, pile all their bags, boots, fast food garbage, etc. all over the 3 or 4 small tables. They aren’t even using the chairs or tables, but they completely dominate them with all their junk and then go in and take their class.

So today I get there and every table is covered with junk. I pick one that only has a pair of dirty boots (standing, soles down, on the table), two soft drink bottles, a crumpled Arby’s bag, and the dirty peeled off top to a yogurt container, and put the stuff on the (carpeted) floor next to the table. (tons of their junk is all over the floors already too).

The class ends, and everyone comes piling out. Some moms show up as well.

One of the girls and her mom actually start complaining loudly about their stuff being moved. I think they were trying to get me to say something. I didn’t say a word. Then the mom actually taps me on the shoulder and faux innocently asks “Do you know who moved our things?”

Me: “Yes, I did. This was the most empty table.”

The mom: “Oh, I didn’t think anyone would need these tables for anything super important.”

Me: “My daughter’s gymnastics practice is 4 hours long so I try to get some work done.”

She kinda harumphs angrily, walks like 2 steps away, and loudly says to her daughter “I don’t know why he needs to move our stuff to play a game on his computer.”

I almost let it go, but I just couldn’t.

Me: “Ma’am, you MIGHT have a point if it weren’t for the fact that I make computer games for a living, and what you see on my computer is our latest game. Tables really aren’t the right place for people’s dirty boots and empty fast food garbage. There are 4 trash cans within 20 feet of us.”

She had turned around when I said ma’am, but after the above she just grumbled and left.

I get so sick and tired of these entitled, selfish, disrespectful (self censored).

Please give this article a read, and let me know what you think.

Facebook Games: Where Monetization Gimicks and User Growth Matter More Than Good Game Design

I look forward to your opinions.

Is it really so hard to just stop there? Is it really necessary to start giving Apple credit for things they don’t deserve any credit for?

Apparently for the media cultists who worship Steve Jobs like a god, it is indeed necessary:

Apple’s Steve Jobs revolutionized TV too

Sorry, he didn’t.

“While the VCR and later the DVR already started to free viewers from being held hostage to network schedules, iTunes and the platforms that followed took it to the next level.”

Total bullshit. The DVR is what killed “appointment television.” NOTHING else deserves credit. Everything else simply rode the coat-tails of the DVR. Period.

DVR ownership is expected to break 50% of all households next year. That’s ~200 million daily DVR users.

After DVRs, Netflix played a HUGE role by letting people cheaply rent entire seasons of tv shows. Far, far cheaper than buying them in iTunes.

Facebook killed this.

The little reminder that pops up every day to tell you which of your friends are having a birthday (or will have one soon) means that nobody actually remembers anyone’s birthday any more. When you see a friend’s birthday notice, you can go to their wall and see 90 gazillion “Happy Birthday!” wall posts.

There are so many, and from so many random people, that they have been rendered meaningless.

Nobody actually remembered anything. Oftentimes, the people posting happy birthday messages barely even know the person they are posting about. They might just be Farmville friends someone picked up in order to unlock more features.

There are tons of huge benefits from a site like Facebook. Overall, I think it is a titanic achievement and a marvelous tool. But we have lost some things too – not just privacy. We’ve lost the good feeling we get when someone remembers our birthday, or the joy of remembering someone ELSE’S birthday and making them feel special just by the remembrance.

And maybe, also at that time, that’s just to where the internet — I hate to use that broad-based term in quotes — had gotten. Like, people love flaming. The whole thing is all — they want controversy. They’re going to say things. It’s like, “Hey, you don’t know who I really am. I can say whatever I want.” You see it in the press now.

He blames “the internet” and flaming, but still after all these years cannot admit it was their absolute despicable and deceitful business model.

Amazing.

Roper is like a drug addict. Until he admits his problem, you can’t deal with him.

Nobody in the world should hire this guy until he admits the #1 reason people hated Hellgate and Flagship with such a passion was their absolutely disgusting business model.

I talked to people in the industry, they thought, “I thought that was a great idea, especially at the time, for a business model.” “Hey, the game is free to play? Oh, but if I want to give you $10 a month, I’m going to get everything you ever do? Sure, I’m in.” But gamers hated the idea.

Clueless. He acts like everyone in the industry thought it was a good idea. Did he talk to idiots? Hellgate was roundly mocked for its business model months before it came out, and they didn’t do anything to change it.

How could he not understand that you’re either subscription or not. And even if you must go with some kind of weird partial-subscription system, you can’t TAKE AWAY the content people already paid for.

If my subscription gets me access to Zone X, you can’t take away Zone X when I stop subscribing. You can stop giving me new zones – fine. But taking away old ones I paid for? Stupid.

Or even worse, locking characters because they are one of the “subscriber only” classes? Or locking out gear? ANYONE thought that was smart? Really?

I think I was very disappointed that followed into going Cryptic. You know, people go, “Oh, great. Now this guy is going to come here and screw everything up.”

Which he did. The Cryptic “C-store” is an absolute abortion of a “freemium” attempt. The things you pay for are grossly overpriced, and they are charging extra for things that should be core gameplay elements.

We even at one point just realized, “We’re never going to make money off box sales. Even if this game sells multiple millions of copies, we might never make our money back on the box sales. We’re going to have to make our money on the back end, on the online.” Because that was a much lower nut to crack every month. But we just didn’t get the number of players.

Perhaps this explains the stupidity and the greed: desperation. They realized that the online/subscription method was their only hope to break even, so they got desperate and greedy. Instead of figuring out a Guild Wars type model where they charged a fixed price for chunks of content – or mini-expansions – they were hoping for the cash cow of subscriptions (and the free money from “sleepers”). Stupid move.

Bill Roper joined established MMO developer Cryptic Studios as design director in 2008.

Less than two years later, Roper would resign from the company after the launches of Champions Online and Star Trek Online, each of which was criticized by gamers and reviewers.

Reconcile that “resigned” part with the fact that he hasn’t been able to find a job – ANY job – for 8 months.

Translation: Roper was fired. This guy appears to be allergic to honesty.

So I’m listening to regular radio in the car and wow… what a joke. Does anyone even listen to “terrestrial” radio any more? If so, how do you bear it? It has to be 80% commercials if not more.

Plus, for some stupid reason they follow the television model of having shows change right at hourly and half-hourly breaks, with 10 minute commercial blocks in the last 5 minutes of an hour/half-hour and the first 5 minutes of the next. Why does this suck even worse in the car? Because that’s exactly when you are spending a lot of time in the car. Most appointments are at either :00 or :30, so for anything close you are listening to nothing but commercials.

If you take anyone who actually listens to the radio in their car, and give them satellite radio for a week, there is NO WAY they could ever tolerate “terrestrial” radio ever again. The difference in the technologies is enormous.

There are a lot of new technologies that nudge older ones out without destroying them. Radio took a bit of market share from books. Television took a lot of market share away from radio. The internet takes market share away from all of those. But the others still exist and still serve a valuable and viable purpose. Books are still a unique form of entertainment that is portable, extremely detailed, and evocative of your imagination. Radio is great for times where you can only listen, but cannot watch (like while driving). Television’s merits are obvious as are the internet.

But terrestrial radio? It adds NOTHING to the equation when compared to satellite radio.

I cannot wait until terrestrial radio either dies completely or is forced to massively transform itself to be more similar to satellite. Because right now, its a dead technology walking.

Silencing the Critics Who Say Video Games Are Bad

Obviously, the crowd of folks likely to read this blog are going to agree that video games are not bad. But I still think it is valuable for us pro-gamer types to be aware of the arguments being made against our hobby so we can always be poised to defend it.

Anyone who has played any game he is associated knows that Bill Roper is Computer Game Poison. So the question is: what will he ruin next? Is he going to strike out again and create another Flagship style failure? Or will he join an existing team and strangle their baby in the crib?

Predictions?

Right away, I am going to answer the question in the topic: No.

People love games. People love computer/video games. The number of people who love computer games continues to grow. The gaming industry is thriving and will continue to grow, expand, thrive, and include more and more people. Television and movies need to look out because computer/video games provide almost everything they provide, plus interactivity. (However, they don’t have to fear for their lives. Just like casual/social games won’t kill other types, television and movies provide a type of entertainment that is unique enough that many people will continue to enjoy and prefer it.)

Very few forms of legitimate entertainment get wiped out when something new comes along. The new just adds to the old, and the overall quotient of happiness increases. As I noted in a previous blog post, the Rubik’s Cube just turned 30 years old and has sold 350 million units. People still love the thing. I play Uno with one of my kids almost every day. I watch TV. I watch movies. I read books. I listen to the radio. I go for walks. I play catch. I ride my bike. The fact that we, as a species, have more and more entertainment options as our planet spins upon its axis is a GOOD THING.

Zynga is a wildly successful juggernaut that uses a variety of questionable business practices to succeed in the market with products of dubious quality. Right now, many (if not most) people think they are an unassailable titan that will continue to dominate its sector of the industry and perhaps crowd out others. Their own staff are becoming increasingly arrogant about it (perhaps as a defensive mechanism). When a Farmville developer was booed and heckled during his acceptance of the social game award at GDC, he fired back with “we’re hiring” and various other snide comments that amounted too “when you chumps are done being artists, come work for us and make money.”

I don’t know about you, but that sounds a lot like AOL to me. How many of my readers are viewing this blog while logged onto the internet through AOL? Zero? Yeah, I thought so. AOL’s primary profitable business now is TMZ if I am not mistaken (yes, that’s how far they have fallen).

The power of social games like Farmville is that it let people play games with people they like (friends, family, etc.) that they probably never thought they’d game with – ever.  Parents gaming with their kids, grandparents gaming with grandchildren, and people gaming with high school friends they haven’t spoken to in 20 years are all pretty amazing things. The fact that some of the actual games that accomplished this are weak from a game design standpoint is not really the point.

Competition will come to this space, and crappy (at least in my opinion) games like Farmville won’t be able to compete. Zyngas will have to raise their standards. The same thing happened to AOL. In AOL’s case, they didn’t evolve so they died (as far as their ISP business).

Core games will continue to be made. AAA, multi-million dollar budget games will continue to be made. FPSes and fantasy MMORPGs will keep getting made. As long as there are people who like them enough to spend money on them, they will get made.

Farmville has grown the market for games, and in the end that is a good thing. This is similar to what The Sims did to help grow the gaming market – though admittedly The Sims is a high quality game in its own right. This is a good thing for us, people. Relax.

I don’t expect every, or any, MMO to be a WoW killer. But it strikes me as a pretty dang sad indictment of the genre that time after time, big budget, major publisher MMOs come out and fail miserably.

Read on for examples that include Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, and Champions Online.

Age of Conan – Over a million sales. Now hovering around 100k subs on life support. Main reasons: horrible system performance, soul crushingly boring post Tortage content, knee jerk nerfs. For more details, see: Review of Age of Conan and Age of Conan is a Hot Mess.

Warhammer Online – Over 1.5 million sales. Now hovering below 100k subs most likely, and may be shut down at any time. Main reasons: only 2 sides in an ongoing realm war game, extreme population, class, and realm balance problems,too much crowd control, and atrocious end game RvR design. For more details, see: What Went Wrong with Warhammer?

Champions Online – Exact sales numbers are not out yet, but CO lost BADLY in September to Aion despite releasing 3 weeks earlier. Aion finished 1st and 5th (5th being the Collectors Edition). CO finished 3rd. The Sims 3 was 2nd. WoW: WotLK was 4th, WoW Battle Chest was was 8th, and vanilla WoW was 10th. But the bigger problem is the fact that usage in CO is down by about 50-70% since mid September, and is currently estimated at about 30k subs.

The rumor is that most of the staff have been moved to Star Trek Online, and CO has a skeleton crew now only. They have been releasing almost weekly knee jerk nerfs, the respec/retcon situation is still a mess, and the Champions Online cash shop/C-Store that opened up this week is a disaster of greed and Roper-style bad ideas.

In total, these three games have 200,000 to 250,000 subscribers or LESS. What a disgrace. These games have major publishers (especially Warhammer – EA, and Champions Online – Atari). World of Warcraft never even has to compete. These pretenders to the throne repeatedly kill themselves.