Hetare King

Keep in mind that the skills needed for game development were pretty much dark arts at the time. There was little to no formal education for them and few tools that weren’t made in-house. So not only was the pool of people they could put to work immediately pretty small, the competitive market meant that companies were incentivised to produce the most impressive-looking games, meaning they didn’t need merely competent people, but the freaks who could pull the most out of the limited hardware.

So they were worth their weight in gold, but companies didn’t actually want to pay them that much.

Not if my legion of Great Tits get him first!

I remember the CEO of NVIDIA making similar claims like 10-15 years ago (and being rather eager for that future to come), but I’m not really seeing anything that has changed since then that makes it more likely now.

There’s the increases in hardware costs, yes, but in order to get sufficiently low latency, you can’t just plop one or a few big data centers per country, you need at least one smaller one pretty much per town. And to ensure a good quality of service, those are going to need more redundant hardware than a more centralised solution would, and given that cloud gaming service providers are also affected by hardware getting more expensive, that would make for some very high up-front costs.

There’s the possibility of VCs throwing dumb money at these companies until they control the market, but for that to work, they need to actually be able to take control of the market. But they’re not just competing against the latest and greatest, they’re also competing against ten year old hardware that’s considerably more affordable. Things aren’t advancing as quickly as they used to, and I doubt the shrinking number of people who do always want the best possible are going to be too thrilled about having graphics littered with compression artifacts.

Huh. I only every encountered shareware through an intermediary and those unofficial compilation dis[ck]s they’d sell at computer stores and book stores, so I figured that’s how most people would get them. I guess it makes sense that the shareware would have to be seeded through the market somehow, just never really thought about it.

How does the shareware version of Doom have any sales numbers at all?

Huh, that’s interesting. I already expressed my thoughts on consumers making their own physical media in another post (tl;dr: I don’t think it makes much sense), but if there are recordable discs with lifespans comparable with pressed discs, maybe a print-on-demand service could be a solution for developers that can’t afford to order a batch of a thousand discs and cases and rely on digital distribution because of that.

It feels like it would kind of defeat the purpose. If you like the ritual of physically picking a game and putting it into your machine, there are more practical ways of going at it, like those NFC card-based systems like Zaparoo. If you like having a physical collection, it seems to me that having a bookcase full of labels made with a home printer and with none of the legitimacy of them being “the real thing” would feel rather empty. You can’t legally resell it or lend it to others and if you care about preserving the game without being dependent on an external service that can go down at any time, you’re probably better off keeping several backups of your hard drive than counting on flaky recordable media (hard drives don’t last forever either, but you’re more likely to regularly check on the health of a couple of hard drives than potentially hundreds of BD-Rs and SD cards).

Basically, very few of the advantages of physical media would end up remaining.

All things decay, not even the doping of ROM chips will last forever, but I think the average lifespan of recorded optical media is like, 10 years? That feels rather short.

Doesn’t recordable optical media also have a pretty limited lifespan? Unlike commercially produced discs, where the pits are pressed into the plastic, CD/DVD/BD-Rs just have a dye that is made to change colour with a laser, and that dye degrades over time.

On one hand, from what I understand, in the 1983 crash there was a real mood of video games being over, that the fad had passed. In North America, anyway. I don’t think there’s any risk of that happening today. On the other, the video game industry is a lot larger now, so there’s a lot more shrinking that can happen without it completely destroying itself. So in that sense it may actually be bigger.

That said, I’m inclined to believe that by laying off all these people, big companies are just creating their own future competition, because there’s no shortage of demand for video games. If anything there’s a greater demand for games that aren’t constrained by the arrogance of big company executives.

The etymology is a bit different from that. Otaku does mean “your house” (important distinction: it’s always the second person’s house, not your own), but it’s also used figuratively as a formal way to refer to your family or just you. There was a culture, at least in the 70s and 80s, for enthusiasts in non-mainstream fields of interests, whether that be TV manga anime, science-fiction, wargaming etc., to talk to each other in a weirdly formal way, so they kept calling each other “otaku”.