A media for rich people?

During the latest GDC, Warren Spector, founder of the studio Junction Point, brought a problem to daylight concerning video games:

New video games are too expensive making them only accessible to a select few. he thinks that the industry should lower the cost to the lowest possible cost that still allows profit. giving the example of having 20$ allowed you to go to the movies but not buy a video game or 20$ allowed you to buy a music CD but not buy a video game and ill add to that 20$ lets you buy a movie but not buy a video game.

While putting all new games on sale for 20$ sounds unrealistic, significantly lowering the prices actually makes alot of sense. Why, well theres many single player games that only last between 7 and 10 hours. some of them offer a little bit of replayability value and others have a multiplayer mode that can extend the life of a game. It costs me 10$ to go to the movies and watch a good movie, but it cost me 60$ to play a 10 hour game with, generally, a simpler story. if we go strictly by time spent playing. 30 or 40$ for a game would already make more sense. except some games can last you hundreds of more hours like Call of duty 4 for example. but games with a good multiplayer mode AND that is played by many players is not found around every corner.
Like i said, theres too many games that only last less than 10 hours and after its done. To the consumer, it just doesnt make sense to spend 60$ on such titles.

Secondly, lowering the price of video games, would actually make many more copies of the game sell, and make the whole thing alot more accessible, more games, more consoles, more gaming pcs. simply because it would be easier to rentabilize the hardware as you would be able to buy many games for it. More people would get into gaming, more people would have fun, more people would understand what gaming is etc etc. Beside, if new titles were selling or 20$, paying another 10$ for extra content would be less ridiculous than what it can be currently. (No EA, im not gonna pay 10$ to have Arwen and 2 multiplayer maps in Lord of the Rings Conquest)

Lastly, One big issue thats plaguing the video game industry are the sales of pre-owned games. people who dont want to pay 60$ to play a game right away just wait to buy it used and pay less. While the industry makes money off of the initial game, the retailers make the rest of the profit on the used games. As a result, theres much less new copies of games that are being sold, and many people dont keep all their games, they will re-sell (particularly those 10 hour games). If the price of all games was 20$, people would actually be much less tempted to resell their games and might hold on onto them more. and more people would buy brand new games and not bother waiting to get a pre-owned copy for couple bucks cheaper.

It just makes so much sense for games to sell for significantly less money. one one hand for the consumers, on the other hand for the developpers and change the image of the industry away from "a media for rich people"

Preparing the kids for real life

I was discussing with a friend about people leeching from certain government initatives such as financial assistance to single mothers, jobless people, and others. I wont get in details with everything but eventually we ended up speaking about the education system. we concluded that there was something wrong somewhere that made it so kids dont really know what they want to do when they get out of high school and for many they just spend couple years doing generic studies or social studies while trying to decide on something. In fact, thats exactly my case. I think theres many things that come into play in this situation, geography, economy, the way parents raise their kids and the actual education system. lets take a look deeper into some of these facets and try to find an explanation.

Depending on the place you were born and the installations that are within reasonable range you will have different developpement. for example someone that was born way out in the country in a small town that has a high school and nothing after will have different career perspective in minds than the person living in a large city with several different universities and a panoply of possibilities. Why? well its difficult to see the possibilities that youre just not aware of. its also hard to want to do something very different than what has been around you all your life. so a person that lives way out in the country might be tempted to lean toward whats at his/her disposition. for example some manual job thats available in his/her area. or perhaps theyll be tempted to move not too far and go to the next bigger town that has a small college that way they can see whats there and find something or more radically they could want to move to the bigger city and and choose from a large choice. But i said more radically for a reason, cause thats a big move to leave your family and go live somewhere else in a completely new environment. to sum it up, geography modifies the choices your consider, from a narrow selection to a wider selection.

The financial status of a family also influence what their children will want or can do. a kid from a family that has a tight budget might want to start working as soon as possible to help out their family and contribute. and that may influence what they want to do as far as a job later on. they might not want to study for many years and start their career at a younger age, or they might be motivated to work really hard and have success at school and try and aim for a good income job or whatever. im thinking the kids from low income family realize the importance of work earlier since it directly affects their daily comfort and we can almost say, it strenghten their chance of survival. But wasnt it that way for most families that hard to work really hard togheter to survive in the 18th 19th and early 20th century. the kids would start to work to help their parents really only on and didnt valorize school. while perhaps one of the kid would get financed to study. that one lucky kid that was able to study sure as hell realized the sacrifices his family made to provide him/her with education.

Things changed now, a kid is not something that will be benefit the family by working and bringing more money to the table, nowadays a kid means many things to pay to raise it. and in middle class families, the parents are able to pay. they can pay for their kids to have a good food regimen, all the school furnitures they need and everything their children might need to remain happy and healthy. so the kids gladly take what they receive. but they hate going to school cause its not cool and its boring unlike playing xbox live. so they dont work hard at school and only go cause they are forced too. others perform at school cause they dont want their parents to get mad at them. others see the importance of building their future and work hard for themselves, they might even like it but wont admit it cause its not cool to like school. so for many, they are forced to go to school and are aware they will have to work when they get out of it. as they grow they start to dislike school less and realize its kinda important, and they are driven to start to think about a career, what kind of job they want to do later. so they try to figure out what they like and what they dont in career education classes and by doing bunch of ability quizzes. Yes they do start to think about jobs early on. but do they really conceive it? the idea to work in a certain domain for the vast majority of their lifes, to actually start their own lives where theirs parents are not there to pay. but the more accurate question, do they actually want to grow older and start to work.

because thats the thing, i think is problematic. while teenagers and future worker know they need to work, cause theyve been told so and they live in a world where everybody is working at one point. They've been so used to having all their needs satisfied by their parents. the same parents that want their kids to succeed and will do whats in their power to help. The best way to learn is to be forced to work at some point like it was the case for me. i didnt really need money i had what i wanted, but my parents really wanted me to start working so i did. and its then that i realized that everything around me was built through hard work. that while i had an easy time, some people didnt, and they had it that way so that i could get the best chances at succeeding. That was for me, and i dont think i worded the reflexion i made when i started to work accurately enough to explain how i opened my eyes, but its what i got so far. but not everyone realizes the importance of working and stoppign to play like i did or at the same time i did nor do i claim to be perfect in that sense either. but i do realize that life is not about having fun all the time and i want to find what i want to do for a career and i have the tools to do so.

Because yes, the education system, in my opinion, offers pretty good tools for young students to find a career they wish to pursue. high schools have counselors and career education courses. all you need is that motivation to find something. otherwise its easy to simply be dizzied by the amount of choices and possibilities and not be able to choose. at the same time its also easy to not just wanna quickly choose the first good possibility. you wanna make sure you dont do a mistake since youll be doing it all your life technically so its pretty hard to pick a domain to study in. Also people tend to go toward the funner stuff like arts, psychology, teaching, journalism, etc... (you get the idea).

So now I'm stuck with no real solutions to suggest and no unique cause to point at. I dont wanna end up saying that teenagers today are lazy and unable to do anything. they just live in a life where they dont need to do anything until a certain age where they are pushed to start working (while the possibility of not working would technically still be viable cause they wouldnt be in danger of dieing and would find food on the table everyday). I dont simply wanna say that teenagers are victims of the system where they simply cannot realize that they wont be able to have it easy all their lives. I dont want to say the education system isnt adapted either since it has all the tools necessary to make a career choice. And i dont want to say that parents dont know how to raise their kids cause they help them succeed so much. Its probably a little bit of everything, everyone has to do his/her part to solve this problem of having a bunch of young students that dont know what they want to do.

The pirate bay trial

I recently started to follow the trial of the The Pirate Bay, a site hosting numerous torrent files, many of them containing copyrighted material.

I don't want to get too much into the details of the trials, but they are basicalled being sued because they contribute to the propagation of copyrighted material. Their argument is that hosting torrent files is not illegal, its the users who share the file that are doing illegal stuff.

While reading numerous articles reporting the development of the trial, i noticed a couple of really interesting points in favor of music downloading and sharing.

The first thing is that while discs and overall music sales have gone down, the attendance to concerts have gone up drastically over the past few years. in other words, there was a huge shift of resources and people still invest money toward their music tastes, simply they do it differently than buying tons of discs or mp3s. Maybe the number of sales of derived products like band t-shirts or other artists items has gone up too. some also say that music sharing allows you to discover bunch of new things that you normally wouldnt, simply because i dont think anyone out there will pay $15 for a cd or even $1.50 for a single song, just to see how it is and experiment and discover new stuff. and im certain we could think of many other areas where the music industry gets benefit from the massive expansion of musical culture that is done by file sharing and illegal music downloading. (what were the numbers we heard last decembers? 95% of the music is still downloaded illegally in 2008?).

Because that is the other point i noticed while reading up on the pirate bay trial. people just consume much more music and culture than if they had to pay and expand their horizons more. theres no way i would pay $2500 over 4 years for music, id rather simply listen to the radio or tv and perhaps buy a couple of my favorite songs so that i can listen to them more often. the thing is theres just too much music id like to listen to and i wouldnt be interested to afford it all so i would just not bother with it. Can we say that id be listening to 80s rock or mainstream pop music instead of electornica if it wasnt for music sharing. i would be stuck in that universe of "what the mainstream culture gives me" instead of being able to walk my own way and discover different styles and artists.

I buy music, but i have a normal budget for it, the equivalent of couple cds a year for some of my favorite artists and favorite genre. If i had a ridiculous amount of money to spend, id save it toward the purchase of a vehicule or perhaps a new computer or any other expensive thing, but music wouldnt be a priority at all and it will never be as important as other material objects. its just too easy to cut on it for any individual.