Do video games cost too much?

Valve’s Gabe Newell gave the keynote address at this year’s Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain (DICE) Summit about the cost of games, the effect of piracy, and how to reach new players. Valve undertook an experiment recently to test how price affected the sales of their popular survival-horror FPS, Left 4 Dead. They Reduced the price by 50% on Steam, which “resulted in a 3000% increase in sales of the game, posting overall sales that beat the title’s original launch performance.” They also tested various other price drops over the holidays, seeing spikes in sales that corresponded well to the size of the discount. This will undoubtedly add to the speculation that game prices have risen too high for the current economic climate. G4TV ran a live blog of Newell’s presentation, providing a few more details.

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/20/0750203&from=rss

Interesting reading.

New Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Advert

OK the gorilla advert was good, and the airport vehicles one was fun (especially as it explains why our luggage gets lost in transit).

But this is just weird.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=lIx1Hhq7sUc

Thought Crimes

http://www.backlash-uk.org.uk/

OK, let me get this right….

The government’s own report says that what you view doesn’t affect how you act.

And yet….they are banning what they call “extreme pronography” on the basis that we need protecting from it.

It’s a highly subjective law, it shifts responsibility to the owner not the distributor, presumably because it’s too hard to prosecute overseas companies and is going to be damn near impossible to enforce.

Haven’t we got enough laws in this country that don’t work already? We give out ASBOs like sweeties, our prisons are stuffed to the point of being illegally overcrowded and we fail to register citizens returning from overseas prison sentences.

Am I the only one seeing a problem here?

Classified as a freak

Wow. it’s been a while…

Well, it’s official. I am a freak.

I searched everywhere this Saturday. Every shop on the main shopping streets.

Nothing.

Nowhere could I find a pair of trousers that would fit. Is it really too much to have a 34 waist with long legs?

As if it wasn’t bad enough traipsing round every shop, there wasn’t a consistent system. Some shops use an even numbered leg measurement, others use an odd system.

BBC Three Links

Is anyone else getting fed up with these links on BBC Three, the ones with home made video introducing the next show?

They just come across as so cheap and tacky.

Dual Core PC Adverts

I’m getting a little annoyed with adverts for PCs with dual core processors. They’re always desribed as allowing you to do two things at once, like editing your family photos while listening to music.

I don’t know about you, but I can already do that with my current single core PC.

I’m sorry, am I in your way?

Having cut loose the defective secondary hard drive from my computer, I needed to re-install Acrobat reader, and the latest version was version nine.

After it tried installing everything Adobe are making, these days, it then proceeded to complain that the drive is fragmented and should be cleaned up to make the software work faster.

What the hell?!?