Here’s an interesting story from the BBC. There’s a company creating a system that records a race-car track and allows players to virtually drive the track alongside real drivers. There seems to be several parts to this system:
First, they drive a car (like the google-maps car) over the racetrack. In addition to taking 360 degree images, they have a system to detect the distance to everything. Using that information they construct the geometry and images for the 3d world. (This is a whole lot easier and more accurate than constructing race-tracks in a 3d-modeling package.) The results look photorealistic, with every little puddle and asphalt crack included:
The second part is that they allow you play the game during actual races. I assume they do this by taking GPS information from the actual cars, and using it to create virtual cars in your game-world. Obviously, there’s a problem here in that the other cars cannot actually interact with the player.
I think the first part is the more interesting part. The idea of using a special camera system to construct a virtual world from real-world objects seems pretty interesting. I could imagine them using it to construct game worlds out of downtown areas of cities. The game-world would then be very realistic, with every bit of graffiti or cracked window included in the game. Game artists wouldn’t have to manually add those details. The downside to this approach is that I’m not quite sure how they’d deal with people or cars, which you’d want to edit-out. And the game-world might look too photorealistic. You don’t want your animated characters to look cartoonish and out-of-place because they’re walking around a photorealistic game-world.
Google Maps could be a whole lot more interesting if it was a 3d world, rather than a series of photographs every 30 feet.
The guys over at Stack Overflow are saying that they tried Google Adwords, and it was horrible for generating ad-revenue for them. In a recent podcast (Episode 64, 15:00), they say that they had nearly one million pageviews per day*, but Google Adwords were generating 38 cents of revenue per month. That’s astonishingly bad. They said that they hand-picked some advertisers themselves, and their ad-revenue went up 50x — which would still only be about $19 / month. I’ve sometimes wondered if ads on websites actually generated any profit for websites, or if they were just a method to pay for a fraction of the monthly costs. Sounds like the latter. Even at $19 / month, there’s no way that Stack Overflow is paying for it’s own bandwidth and server costs.
* According to Alexa.com, which tracks website traffic, Stackoverflow ranked as the 639th most visited website in the United States, which is certainly respectable.
2d Boy recently had a 1-year anniversary sale on their game “World of Goo”. The game normally sells for $20, but now you can pay whatever you want for the game (minimum of 1 cent). They also asked people why they paid what they did, and released statistics on how much people paid.
The Results:
57,000 people downloaded the game over the past week. The average price paid was $2.03. In total, that adds up to $115,710. Because PayPal takes 30 cents + 2.9% of each payment, they ended up paying 13% of that ($15,000) in transaction fees, leaving them with $100,000, or $1.75 per buyer.
Here’s their bar-chart of the money paid and number of people at each price (click for a larger image):
I have to admit that I’d thought about trying the “pay what you want” model for future games. It’s hard to interpret these results, though.
The Bad:
People paid very little – developers saw a scant $1.75 per sale.
There are some reasons that this should be taken with a grain of salt, though. I can think of quite of few reasons why this payment was low. First, the game has been out of a year. This means that everyone who would’ve paid $20 for it probably already bought it. Maybe 2dBoy is picking up the people who were willing to pay for it, but weren’t willing to pay $20. Also, in the questionnaire, asking why people paid what they did, 11.6% said they already owned it on a different platform, so they were just giving 2dBoy a few dollars for the opportunity to have it on another platform.
Of the 12% who actually answered the survey, when asked “How much do you think this game should cost normally?”, 85% said this game should normally cost $10 or more. But, only 12% of survey responders actually paid $10 or more. And only 5% of buyers paid $10 or more. Based on the sales numbers, 23,335 people (41%) paid 99 cents or less, and less than a third paid $2 or more. This is one of my fears of the pay-what-you-want model; that people will admit that a game is worth X dollars, but a large majority will pay much less than that if they have the opportunity to pay you less.
The Good:
They got a lot of sales, which added up to $100,000. That is, $100,000 on top of their previous income.
For comparison, 2dBoy says that the game actually cost about $116,000 to produce. Although, $116,000 is their “minimum living expenses” cost. They said that it took two people two years to produce the game, and $96,000 covered their living expenses – which translates to $24,000 per person per year; which is not a decent living.
I’d like to be able to try to generalize these numbers, but there’s a lot of difficulty in doing that.
First of all, World of Goo is a very popular game. So, trying to vindicate the pay-what-you-want model based on “they already earned $100,000 and only spent $116,000” doesn’t work very well. Afterall, World of Goo is probably in the top 99th percentile of games produced. So, if they made $400,000 on a $116,000 investment (ie. a good profit), it would also mean that 95% of the games on the market would be showing losses in the same situation.
Second, the pay-what-you-want model generates free publicity. Since World of Goo is essentially a first-tier game, it benefits disproportionately from free publicity. A second or third tier game might get a lot less free publicity, and then they’d get less benefit. To put it another way, let’s say that pay-what you want causes people to pay you less money, but increases the number of buyers. The numbers for some fictional games might look like this:
Using normal sales model:
GameX (Popular)
1000 buyers / month
$10 revenue per sale
= $10,000 revenue per month
GameY (Obscure)
50 buyers / month
$10 revenue per sale
= $500 revenue per month
Switching to a pay-what-you-want sales model, GameX (which is popular) gets lots of free publicity on gaming websites and blogs, GameY (which is obscure) gets a handful of mentions but remains obscure:
GameX (Popular)
8000 buyers / month
$2 revenue per sale
= $16,000 revenue per month
GameY (Obscure)
80 buyers / month
$2 revenue per sale
= $160 revenue per month
In the case above, GameY didn’t gain much in publicity, but it saw a sharp drop in the amount paid for their game. It would be a losing strategy in that case.
I also have to wonder about how pay-what-you-want model will change over time. Right now, it’s relatively novel, but if everyone did it, would the publicity decline — and, therefore, cause a decline in the profitability? In the survey, almost 1 our of 4 people said that they like the pay-what-you-want model and want to support it. But, if it becomes popular, will people stop supporting it because it is “established”? And what percentage of them paid higher amounts of money? Theoretically, the “we want to support pay-what-you-want” people could account for 100% of the people who paid $5 or more, and they could disappear as the model becomes more popular.
I was thinking today about the future of game development and graphics. The year I graduated from High School (1992), there were two major game-genres created. Dune 2 created the real-time strategy genre and Wolfenstein created first-person shooters.
Here’s a sample of the graphics. They’re not that impressive, but they were for the time.
Dune 2 gameplay (1992):
Wolfenstein gameplay (1992):
Doom (1993):
Compare that to the latest games:
All of this makes me wonder: where things will go in the future? We jumped from Wolfenstein 3d (1992) to this in 17 years. Now, add another 20 years of technology improvements, where will we be then?
I think we’re approaching the limits of how much graphics can be improved. Even if we quadruple the number of polygons rendered every second, it’s just doesn’t result in huge image-quality benefits like it used to. The major issue now is getting artists to create all that content – the geometry, textures, animations, etc. Some of the areas where I think we’ll be seeing improvement:
Graphics and Expansive Worlds:
– We’re getting to the top of what can be improved as far as graphics goes. A number of games are already boasting expansive game-worlds measured in hundreds of square miles. It seems like it won’t be long before there’s good libraries of realistic 3d models that game developers can drop into games. There’s still a big market for unique look and feel (see Brutal Legend, Team Fortress, Plants vs Zombies) which will be done with armies of artists. And there’s also lots of work to be done in level design.
Physics:
– Work on physics systems have come a long way in the last decade. Games like Crysis started showing off the fact that their physic models can handle thousands of barrels collisions at the same time. Collision detection, cloth simulation, fluid dynamics are definitely getting there. The Havok physics engine allows games to drop-in physics systems into games, so it’s being standardized. The technology behind damaging 3d objects isn’t quite there. (For example, the Halo Warthog never shows any signs of damage.) There are some racing games that tries to simulate car collision damage, but it ends up being a one-off system that isn’t standardized for game engines.
One racing game that simulates damage to vehicles:
Even in the case where games do simulate damage, it’s done in predefined ways – for example, they might have “after a car accident” cars, but they don’t have “hit by a grenade” or “shot by a gun” damage unless they explicitly create that damage.
Collisions between humanoids gets even more complicated, which is why combat in games is mostly a bunch of scripted moves. Ever notice how in games like “World of Warcraft” that a character’s weapon seems to move through the enemy? That’s because calculating the actual collision effects are too complicated. Realistically, it would include factors like the weight of the weapon, the character’s strength, the weight distribution of the enemy being hit, his muscle tension, etc. Systems like Euphoria (below) at least try to handle that kind of stuff.
Artificial Intelligence:
AI covers a whole bunch of different things. There is so much work to be done on AI that we’ll still be doing work 20 years from now. I would be nice if there were “AI engines” like there are 3d engines, now, but it seems that every game has to reinvent the wheel when it comes to AI. This is partly because “AI” is really a blanket term covering a whole bunch of different things, and also because the AI has to work well within the game rules (whatever they may be). Some types of AI systems:
– Character AI: embodied, realistic actors with personality, knowledge, desires, etc. They should be able to handle conversations. Right now, this is generally handled with predefined conversations where game designers offer players a limited set of responses. Ideally, you would want a very open conversation, but that takes enormous amounts of work. That system is also vulnerable to problems if the game plot changes. (For example, if a character is removed from the game, you won’t want anyone to make reference to that person in any conversations.)
Recently, I watched a video for “The Witcher 2”. They were boasting about the advanced AI, but I didn’t think it was that impressive. For example, in this scene, the witcher casts a spell. Game characters react, but they don’t react realistically:
For a really believable set of characters, they should’ve had a whole variety of factors influencing their reaction. First: is magic common in the game world? If magic is uncommon then they should be astonished and fearful. If magic is common, then the spell should be less surprising. In this particular scene, it seems that the characters could’ve been killed if the magic was targetted at them – which should make them nervous. And, the AI system should figure out if the game-characters were aware of who cast the spell. If the spell-casting was obvious and within their visual field, they should react to the player. Depending on their culture, religious beliefs and the exact situation, they might react in a hundred different ways, ranging from “what the heck just happened?” to “bow down and worship the player as a god” to “kill the witch” to “run away before he kills us all” to “thank god we have a powerful magic man like you on our side”. The reaction of game characters should also depend on the particular situation. For example, if the player-character says, “I’m a powerful wizard, give me your money” (and then casts a spell to intimidate the low-level game-characters), they should react by giving him what he wants. But, if the player says, “I will help you defeat the evil lord …”, then the player casts a spell, they will be impressed. Character AI gets very complicated, but then, it’s trying to simulate human reactions – which *is* a very complicated thing. Game developers can script these kinds of reactions, but it’s a lot of work and players will always do something you didn’t think of. It would be nice if developers could drop-in game-characters that could react realistically without developers needing script reactions to a hundred different things the player might do.
– Strategic AI: decision-making (deciding what to build, where and when to attack, expectations of success, forming alliances, starting wars, making trades). It also needs to have a knowledge-system, beliefs about what other players know and expect. It needs to anticipate other player’s actions and determine intentions (is the other player sending that transport over to invade my territory, or is he merely bumbling around on the map?). Ideally, the strategic AI could learn, so if players figure out clever ways to consistently beat the AI, it would react to stop that exploit – like a real-person would.
– AI voice-generation (intonation, timing, realism) – this should include an AI personality and mental state, since those things influence speech. Very difficult, probably not possible without a full-scale AI.
– Voice comprehension / text-comprehension – I’m not talking about speech-to-text technology, but actual comprehension. This is very difficult, probably not possible without a full-scale AI.
– AI/Body/Physics interaction (sports games, Force Unleashed). One irritation of mine is how games don’t handle simple things like foot-planting. Instead, in games like World Of Warcraft, characters can spin around in a circle without moving their feet. (See foot-planting in Madden ’09.) At least the character-movement and collision systems are starting to be handled by systems like Euphoria. I’ve been impressed by some of the things I’ve heard about the Euphoria engine. For example, game-characters can see if you are throwing something at them, and put their hands up in front of their face in an attempt to protect their head. All this kind of stuff will be standard.
– Pathfinding AI. Pathfinding is all about finding the best path from point A to point B. To function realistically, it should include character knowledge and the AI’s mental-map: does the game-character know the area or not? The pathway has to take into account body-type (humanoid, rodent, etc), athleticism (can he jump, crawl). I’ve seen some middleware engines that will handle this kind of navigation. It would be good to have a generalized pathfinding system that can work in 3D worlds, allowing game-characters to intelligently find their way around, even if the player disrupts the game-world (by destroying walls, blocking doorways, etc). Here’s a demo of one system:
Tools:
– We’ll look forward to better/faster tools for creating stuff (AIs, game-world terrain, etc). Instead of, say, placing every plant on a landscape, the tools will allow creators to have game-worlds grow organically based on predefined settings (vegetation types, geography, etc) and then they can go through and edit areas to put-in the things for the game. Right now, these kinds of tools are available within game editors, but it should become standardized so that these types of tools can be used across games and game-engines.
– We’ll eventually have access to 3d-objects that contain a wide variety of animations and behaviors. For example, a truck that contains a suspension system, and gets damaged in realistic ways from weapons and collisions. Or, animals that are packaged into a standard format that contains not only the 3d image and animations, but reacts intelligently to sensory information, and has behaviors. For example, deer and birds have behaviors like eating, and wandering. They get startled easily and run away in response to nearby people and sounds. This gets more complicated by the fact that the animal would have to perceive the environment around it and react to it – for example, if it wants to run away, it looks for it’s escape paths. It can’t run up a cliff or through a fence, so the pathfinding AI has to integrate with this system. Its behavior system might cause it to avoid confined spaces, and prefer staying near vegetation where it is hidden. It would be very nice if game developers could just drop-in various animals into a game world and they would react intelligently to it.
First, a chart of troop deployments in Afghanistan. The US has the most troops there, but I was surprised to see that on a per-capita basis, the US is #6 in the number of troops in Afghanistan.
The second image is the revenue from music sales over the past 35 years. It’s split-out by format. Admittedly, I think this chart could be clearer. Interesting how CD sales peaked in 1999 at $16.4 billion/year, and it looks like it’s down to $5.4 billion/year in 2008. Meanwhile, online music sales are a scant $1.6 billion/year — far too small to make-up for the dropoff of CD sales. No wonder the music industry is going after filesharing. Wouldn’t you if you saw something a 50% drop in revenue in the last ten years – an amount equal to about $8 billion. That sounds like 8 billion reasons to go after filesharers.
This picture blew-up on the internet over the past few days. Supposedly, it’s an ad by Ralph Lauren. It was picked-up by Photoshop Disasters, and then displayed on BoingBoing. It actually looks like an ad about anorexia, or maybe a parody of the fashion industry and their promotion of unrealistic body images.
After the image was displayed on BoingBoing, Ralph Lauren sent them a DMCA notice telling them to take it down. Photoshop Disasters complied, but BoingBoing balked at the legal notice, said it fell within “fair use” laws (which allow the use of copyrighted material for critique), and created a post to mock them. (I have to say, it’s rather odd when a company tries to stop people from seeing an image they created as an advertisement.) While BoingBoing was heralded as heros for bravely standing up against Ralph Lauren’s attempted to suppress the image, the reality is that their ISP is based in Canada, which means it’s exempt from the DMCA (they have past experience with this). Because Canada doesn’t recognize the DMCA, it means BoingBoing isn’t bravely doing anything except grandstanding to drum up internet traffic.
I also have to admit that I’m not entirely convinced that it’s a real ad, as opposed to a fake created with photoshop by some random person and using a real Ralph Lauren image as a starting-point. It would be an interesting twist in the story if the Filippa Hamilton “ad” was actually the work of some random photoshop artist, and RL wanted it removed because it was unfairly attributed to them. It looks so bad, that it’s hard to believe that Ralph Lauren would use it. Also notable is the fact that Ralph Lauren used other images of the same model that don’t look ridiculous:
But, the story doesn’t end there. BoingBoing also has a long history of censoring people. Sure, they might like to act like crusaders against big-corporate censorship, but if they’re going to get on their soapbox, their flaws should be held up to criticism as well.
Just a year ago, BoingBoing was caught in a scandal where they “unpublished” a bunch of stories and comments by a blogger known as “Violet Blue”. A google search [Google: BoingBoing Violet Blue] shows just how badly the whole thing blew-up in their faces. No one knows quite why Violet Blue was “unpublished” – one idea is that she tried to trademark her name to prevent a porn star from using it; another is that the “unpublishing” was the fallout of a romantic relationship gone bad. And yes, they used the word “unpublished”. Not only does the word sound Orwellian, but unpublishing is exactly what happened in the fictional 1984 world:
A major theme of Nineteen Eighty-Four is censorship, which is displayed especially in the Ministry of Truth, where photographs are doctored and public archives rewritten to rid them of “unpersons”… An excellent example of this is when Winston is charged with the task of eliminating reference to an unperson in a newspaper article. (Wikipedia: 1984)
Perhaps BoingBoing uses the word “unbirthed” when they describe the murder of someone they don’t like. At the same time, I’m sure they hated the fact that George Bush used the euphemism “collateral damage” for civilian deaths, and complained that euphemisms are used to mask reality.
Then, there’s the comments section of their website. Now, it’s reasonable to have moderators for websites, but it’s clear that they use “moderation” as a way to shut down people who disagree with them. So much for free and open debate. You can disagree with them if you want – it will just have to happen elsewhere on the internet, away from the eyes of anyone reading their stories. And with that, their comments section are transformed into a cheerleading sections. I think they know that their views can’t withstand actual scrutiny, so they have to “spank” people with comment deletion, disemvowelling, and banning accounts. Here’s an one example of their censorship: a while back they posted an entry advertising an “I pirate music T-shirt”. They advocate piracy, which is obviously a controversial position, and there’s plenty of good arguments a person could raise criticizing that position. In the comments, the moderator admits to deleting eight of the first nine comments! After that, people start to get irritable about the deletions:
Right… you admit to rapid-fire deleting a ton of comments, and then suggest we have to prove the worth of our comments to you?
[To the Moderator] your post is pretty revisionist. There were a number of posts that disagreed with the shirt’s message — saying nothing of the price — that were deleted as well.
Ok, so what gives now? I had a politely worded argument about why I thought my comments were valid, and it’s been deleted with no response.
After several days, once most everyone had left the thread, they finally allow a comment articulating an argument against piracy. Who knows how many others were deleted in an attempt to prevent their readers from hearing those ideas. And there’s hundreds of people all over the internet complaining about getting censored by BoingBoing. Exhibit A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V
Someone even went to the trouble of registering bngbng.net as a comment on their disemvowelling. I can certainly understand the irritation of spending some time writing a long comment (polite ones, even) only to have it silenced by moderators. It’s like having a big piece of duct tape slapped across your mouth. Of course, I realize there’s a difference between forcing someone to take something off their site and removing comments from your own site, but the motive behind it is still disturbing. That motive, of course, is not to save hard-disk space. It’s to reinforce groupthink of ideas they agree with. (What? You disagree with us? Nobody else is on your side; just look at the comments.)
In the end, BoingBoing is grandstanding about corporate censorship, but aren’t willing to allow open discussion on their own site – allowing only neutral or favorable comments so that they produce a facsimile of public consensus. Sounds pretty hypocritical to me. Clearly, we need better free speech advocates.
Update (January 26, 2010):
It looks like BoingBoing has cut-down on their censorship of comments. Recently, Cory posted something about O’Reilly’s eBook sales going up after removing DRM (“BoingBoing: O’Reilly drops ebook DRM, sees 104% increase in sales”). Commenters were quick to point out that Cory’s three data points were spread out at one-year intervals, and eBook sales across the entire industry (DRMed or not) have shown very strong growth over the past year. In fact, O’Reilly’s growth was actually smaller than the industry as a whole. Those stats show industry-wide eBook sales growing from around $12 million in 2008 to around $40 million in 2009, which is approximately 230% growth. It was a pretty ugly smackdown of Cory’s interpretation of the facts, but BoingBoing didn’t appear to delete the comments. Comments like:
The increase in sales is just as easily attributable to an increase in the popularity of e-book readers. It’s nice they dropped the DRM, but there’s not enough there to claim that it had much to do with the increase in sales. If you compare this graph with a graph of e-book sales overall (http://www.idpf.org/doc_library/industrystats.htm), there’s not much difference between them. This post, while encouraging, is a little dishonest.
Was it DRM that caused the increase in sales or, was it the increased consumption of ebook readers especially, mobile phone ebook readers? I did not see the connection between sales increase and DRM. Perhaps, the data are being interpreted though rose coloured spectacles?
I just no longer trust Cory’s claims on these issues any more than I trust Fox News on its take on politics. Not that I like DRM.
It’s always odd for me to see my game on other people’s displays. Not because “it’s my game on their computer”, but I’m talking about the display properties of their screens. It seems like flat-screens are all over the place when it comes to good color fidelity. In general, when I look at the game on other people’s displays, the color palette is over-saturated, overly bright, and bad. It looks like Super Mario Brothers (not that their color palette is bad, just inappropriate for my game). It makes me want to add something to the preferences so that people can tone-down the colors. It’s probably true that most people simply don’t do any adjustment of their display’s color balance, and stores tend to make their displays super-bright just to make them stand out. I suspect that my display is under-saturated, and I shouldn’t be using it when I’m making color choices. On the other hand, I recently hooked up my game to a big-screen TV, and the colors looked okay — much, much better than it looked on a laptop minutes earlier. It’s just one more complication to deal with when making games.
In accountancy, Hollywood accounting is the practice of distributing the money earned by a large project to corporate entities which, though legally distinct from the one responsible for the project itself, are actually owned by the same people. This substantially reduces the profit of the project proper, sometimes eliminating it altogether. The effect of this practice is to reduce the amount which the corporation must pay in royalties or other profit-sharing agreements.
…
Due to Hollywood accounting, it has been estimated that only about 5% of movies officially show a net profit, and the “losers” include such blockbuster films as Rain Man, Forrest Gump, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and Batman, which all took in huge amounts in box office and video sales.
Because of this, net points are sometimes referred to as “monkey points,” a term attributed to Eddie Murphy, who is said to have also stated that only a fool would accept net points in his or her contract.
…
Examples
Winston Groom’s price for the screenplay rights to his novel Forrest Gump included a share of the profits; however, due to Hollywood accounting, the film’s commercial success was converted into a net loss, and Groom received nothing. That being so, he has refused to sell the screenplay rights to the novel’s sequel, stating that he “cannot in good conscience allow money to be wasted on a failure”.
Stan Lee filed and won a lawsuit after the producers of the movie Spider-Man did not give him a portion of the gross revenue.
The estate of Jim Garrison sued Warner Bros. for their share of the profits from the movie JFK, which was based on Garrison’s book On the Trail of the Assassins.
Art Buchwald received a settlement after his lawsuit Buchwald v. Paramount over Paramount’s use of Hollywood accounting. The court found Paramount’s actions “unconscionable,” noting that it was impossible to believe that a movie (1988’s Eddie Murphy comedy Coming to America) which grossed US$350 million failed to make a profit, especially since the actual production costs were less than a tenth of that. Paramount settled for an undisclosed sum, rather than have its accounting methods closely scrutinized.
