Via BB: A bunch of successful Indie gamedevs announced at GDC 2010 that are setting up a VC fund for indie game developers. Quoth the indiedevs:
indies no longer need the traditional distribution channels publishers once provided, they simply need the funding
I just paid for software! Specifically, the Snow Leopard update. After installing it, I have ~20 gigs more space free! Plus, I got stickerz:
The $40 CAD price point was just about right for me to not consider it a “real” purchase. Conversely, I pirated some effing fantastic software today because it was at a $100 price point which I thought a bit much (though if I had it to spare it would be worth every penny). Partly I figured I could pay up when it started generating income for me.
Both would, essentially, have been fully deductible* because they were business acquisitions. The second application gave me a little “Please don’t pirate!” popup when I mis-clicked, which I circumvented. Similarly, I could have got Snow Leopard for free but didn’t. I was looking at the torrent description, which mentioned the price of a legit copy, and I ran to the Apple retailer around the corner and just bought it:
I thought I’d mention the fact that I paid though, and go into just a tiny bit of my psychology — I assume our readers are at least somewhat interested in the software purchase decision.
* Check with a real accountant.
Ubisoft’s DRM servers went down over the weekend, denying access to all customers who had legitimately obtained Assassin’s Creed 2. Quoth the Doctorow:
Of course, pirates and people who break Ubisoft’s DRM can still play. Way to correctly align the incentives, Ubisoft.
As I mentioned before, DRM is bad business. This is another reason. It’s like those legalese FBI notices that you can’t skip at the start of a DVD, or the anti-piracy threats in theatres — they only annoy paying customers.
Dune 2000, a game that I was eagerly anticipating, shipped with DRM that wouldn’t let it install if your computer had a CD burner. I bought it, was told “tough luck” by customer service, cracked it, and it was pretty decent — until I reformatted (I was still jockeying Windows at that point) and had to crack again.
cf. This comic about Cleveland libraries and audiobook DRM.
Pirates play, listen, and watch without insult. DRM is bad biz.
Toyota has set up a site, Toyota Conversations, aggregating social media surrounding the company into one site where it can provide information and respond to trending Toyota memes as-they-propagate.
This is certainly a good attempt at a game-changer when it comes to communication from the auto industry. When GM or Chrysler need to talk to the people what are they gonna do — fly a private jet to a senate hearing?
This is on my radar as a possible emerging best practice for online PR.
Via BB, Assassin’s Creed 2’s supposedly “uncrackable” DRM (Digital Rights Management) was broken in less than 24 hours.
DRM is bad business, for a bunch of reasons. When I was working for Unnamed Giant Game Conglomerate they wanted us to cripple our games for future generations by making them unarchivable add digital locks to our games to briefly stop piracy.
“Briefly”, yes. The theory was if we could hold off the pirates for just a month — just one — then most of them would give up and buy the game.
So we added a week to our already-horrible schedule (at the cost of actual features) to cripple lock-down the product.
We uploaded the gold master to the disc printer, and my brother sent me a link to download a cracked version that afternoon.
BUSINESS FAIL
I’m still going through Apple’s supplier responsibility guidelines. Chekkit:
Working hours
Apple’s Code sets a maximum of 60 work hours per week and requires at least one day of rest per seven days of work, while allowing exceptions in unusual or emergency circumstances.
It strikes me that companies which supply software to Apple, ones that I might have worked for, do not meet this standard.
Is buying software from companies that employ a constructive (in the sense of “created”), structural overtime development strategy a violation of business ethics? Of consumer ethics?
I wish I had the same rights as a Chinese factory worker.
If you’re being entertained by a software title ground out of the crushed dreams of pixel-stained wage-slaves does your guilt bone tweak as much as when you groove on a device from iPod City while jogging in your sweet sweatshop sneaks?
Or are we all just callously oppressing each other?
Via BB: The changelog for the last Steam update for the infamous Portal contained this cryptic item:
Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations.
Which, of course, prompted an immediate nerdcore investigation.
The results? The radios in the game have been modified to transmit morse code when they are moved into certain locations on each map.
The morse code? Encoded SSTV images watermarked “Aperture Science” that hint at a Philadelphia-like experiment conducted by Aperture aboard a research ship called the Borealis, for which GLaDOS was the authorizing signatory.
In essence: the viral campaign to launch Half-Life 2: Episode Three is off and running, and it looks like they’re more-fully integrating the Poral microcosm into the overarching story.
This is how you engage an intelligent audience.
Nerdgasm!
Again from FC, here are the browser share breakdowns and deltas from Jan ‘010:
Any analysis of the deltas, as FC does in its article, amounts to a lack of understanding of basic stats — they’re probably just analyzing noise and sampling error.
Something that often goes unmentioned is that IE’s users are broken into roughly-equal subsegments. First, there are the people who don’t care about updating their browsers (including users who suffer under the heel of lax administrators). Second, the people really into IE (they exist, and include some of the best engineers I know) and people who are forced to use IE by an institution that updates it correctly.
In short: the browser market actually looks more like this (rough numbers pulled straight from my brainhole):
* Although the current Opera can’t do the new rounded-border CSS stuff — which I suppose isn’t really a standard, just useful).
Since, as I’ve mentioned before, IE8 isn’t terrible with its standards compliance one can target those standards and blanket most of the users who care about Internet stuff (ie, the market you’re trying to reach with web apps). The rest you can just ignore, like Google (which is phasing out IE6 support starting yesterday).
And: Chrome on Windows is better than Chrome on Mac because the tabs have an infinitely-tall catchment for the mouse (they’re positioned at the top of the screen when the window is maximized). OS X reserves this space for itself, so Chrome’s tabs on that platform are just as hard to target as everyone else’s.
Via ValleyWag: Apple has released its 2010 Supplier Responsibility Report [PDF].
Apple’s crisis management process seems to roughly follow this pattern: First, Steve Jobs usually apologizes for any lapses publicly and personally. Second, they set up an action plan for addressing the issues raised over time. Last, they issue annual progress reports to show how they’ve improved against third-party industry standards and highlighting areas in which they are now world-class. Apple tries to cluster those steps in time so there’s always immediate progress to report.
That, for example, is how they responded to accusations from Greenpeace that their products were environmentally unfriendly.
Since 2006 Apple has also faced criticism over the activities of its outsourced manufacturers in China. This report details the results of their continuing audit-and-improve process (cf, The Toyota Way Section III Principle 11).
Outsourcing to countries with different labor practices is a strategy fraught with ethical pitfalls. Apple has decided to continue their presence in the Chinese market while thoroughly communicating and auditing their own standards for compliance. They take a drubbing for this in the press because they don’t typically hold suppliers to a standard higher than that of the governing law, which in China is not only weak but also unenforced (though see the “Beyond Compliance” section of the Supplier Responsibility site).
The progressive capitalist party line here is that engaging economically with developing nations helps raise their people out of poverty. Apple is trying to accomplish that as ethically as possible, and is improving, but might currently be failing.
Our cheap iDevices come with large Chinese externalities.
I’ve been considering future outsourcing opportunities for SIN in India. I’m going to follow Steve’s lead here and check up on working conditions — I know what life is like in a techno sweatshop, and that was in downtown Vancouver, not downtown Bangalore. Plus, at the Deutsche Haus on Saturday I got some info on outsourcing to the former East Germany that made for enlightening reading: “highest investment subsidies in the EU — up to 50%”, eh?
Plus, if SIN wants to make devices maybe we could just CNC everything locally…
Via CNN, here’s an article and infographic breakdown of how many people play Zynga’s biggest games on Facebook (hint: more people than are waking up in France as I type this). Also how the games skew differently to gender and age, and when people tend to play them (before lunch).
If you couldn’t tell, I’m doing market research right now 