Edge-Online did a 6 page article heralding The Age of Steam which got picked up everywhere.  I responded with Why ‘The Age of Steam’ may not last.

Some in the media turned it into a Steam vs. Impulse argument. But it’s not.  It’s not even a Steam vs. Anything argument.

The issue is that at this stage in PC gaming, digital distribution is just beginning. By Valve’s own statistics, only around half a million or so users are using Steam to play a game each day – half of whom are playing Counterstrike.

In other words, no one including Steam has remotely reached critical mass.

Proclaiming Steam as the winner in digital distribution at this stage would have been like proclaiming Friendster as the winner in social networking. That would seem quaint now in the “age of Facebook”.

I’ve seen it argued that the above analogy doesn’t work because when you buy your games with Steam, it’s harder to switch because you become invested in their platform.  They say a better argument would be iTunes and its dominance.

The problem with the iTunes analogy is that iTunes wasn’t first. It wasn’t even close to being first. If we’re going to use digital music as our analogy then we should think about protected .WMA files which came out long before iTunes did. Early adopters bought their music from BuyMusic.com and other services that sold protected .WMA files.  They were similarly invested. But it didn’t matter because there weren’t enough of them to affect where the market ultimately went.

iTunes came out much later. It didn’t need anyone to convert over from BuyMusic to become dominant because it captured the millions and millions of new users who were just getting into digital music. PC game digital distribution is presently at that .WMA level where it’s just starting out.

Nobody knows what the future will bring. Who knows, maybe Blizzard will come out with an all-encompassing digital distribution service and absolutely crush everyone. Or something completely different might happen.

What I do know is that when all these digital services combined are getting less than a million people actually using them to play games per day, that we’re not even remotely close to being in an “age” of anything.

Demigod Beta 3C arrives. Not a lot of changes in this beta but some polish, updated network coding, performance touching, etc.  The main purpose for Beta 3C is for internal infrastructure testing.  But we think you’ll find this update worthwhile still.

• AI

• Teleporting double checks

• Friendly tower wrangling

• Betrayer fixes for Regulus

• Squad attack error fix

• More demigod opportunity handling

• Video options

• “high” preset sets Vsynch on, “medium” set Vsynch off

• “low” set Vsynch off, Global blur forced to 1, god rays disabled, shadows disabled.

• Items

• Wand of speed has a time of 0

• Sound/music level tweaking

• Updated differentiated minion icons

• Updated map loading screens and compression

• Load time improvement in texture compression

• Improved team coloring for High Priests

• Corrected max slot updates for Impulse

• Frozen torchbearer mesh fix

• Aspect autoadjust for credits movie.

• Fixed trebuchet model position

• Demigod animation rate tweaks

• Fixed shopping bug when exiting via escape

• Fast game speed tweaks

• Rook wall pathing fixes

• Set slaughter to 10 for tournaments

• Set flagcontrol to 7000 for tournament

• Removed warscore from XP bar.

Galactic Civilizations II: Ultimate Edition is now at retail.  This version combines the original release with the 2 expansion packs into a single integrated game.

The code-based is the latest version if Twilight of the Arnor but the content is the entire saga put together.

 
Ultimate Edition takes the full game and presents it in its 3 acts.

Act I: Dread Lords where the galactic civil war puts the humans from Earth and their friends up against the powerful Drengin Alliance.

Act II: Dark Avatar puts the player in the role of a commander of the Drengin Empire on what to do with those civilizations they have conquered.

Act III: Twilight of the Arnor brings back Jena Casey from the outer rim who must work with the last of the Arnor to put a final end to the Dread Lords menace.

Twilight of the Arnor completes the story of Galactic Civilizations II.

Ultimate Edition’s graphics are vastly better than the original Galactic Civilizations II even though it uses less memory and runs faster than the original.

Design your own ships.

Choose among 12 civilizations or design your own!

 
In GalCiv, you’re not playing in a distant galaxy. It’s the 23rd century and the humans are on planet earth.

Win through superior fire power, better technology, stronger economics, or the clever use of diplomacy. It’s all up to you.

Galactic Civilizations: Ultimate Edition is at a retailer near you or you can buy it direct from Stardock.

If you already have all the expansion packs and the original then you’re all set already.

Ever want a particular sound and don’t want to mess with having to find a WAV to do it?

There are websites which simply play those sites.

Some examples:

http://www.dramabutton.com/

http://nelsonhaha.com/

http://instantcrickets.com/

See get a good list go here:

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/03/08/top-four-instant-sound-effect-sites/

I want this. I need this.

I’ve long stopped using the highest settings on my cameras because there’s really no quality difference that I can tell other than when I want to zoom in and crop a piece.

On cameras, we need a new spec to help us know what quality image we can expect.

In the meantime, check out this Ars article on the topic:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2009/03/why-weve-reached-the-end-of-the-camera-megapixel-race.ars

In Finland, how much you make determines the amount of a fine.

For instance, a Finnish millionaire recently got a 112,000-euro speeding ticket (he was about 10 over).  That’s because the fine is calculated using what he earned last year.

So the guy who inherits his wealth and sits on his butt is fine. But the guy who’s working his rear end off gets penalized more.

Taking this to its logical conclusion, a young person should get more time in prison because he has more life available to him than an old person.

I understand the rationale – you want the punishment to be felt equally by all citizens. But this flies in the face of the concept of all people are equal in the eyes of the law. If the concern is that speeding is such a big deal (or any given crime) then lock them up.  But looking at how much someone earns as a means to determining punishment is repellent.

Consider this: Two people making the same amount per hour. One person chooses to work part time. The other person chooses to work 60 hours a week.  Both are caught speeding.  The person who works more ends up having to pay more.

It creates a society that punishes achievement. Luckily for Finland, it has a population of 5 million and is largely homogenous. So it can get away with this kind of thinly veiled class warfare.

In the United States, by contrast, such policies would be a disaster.

But take a look at how left-wing Digg users react:

http://digg.com/autos/Finnish_millionaire_gets_111_888_euro_speeding_ticket

As some of you know, I started out in life with relatively little. It’s one of the reasons I don’t tend to be the most sympathetic person towards people who spend their entire lives being poor. 

Americans who are chronically poor, in most cases, can look at their own poor choices as being why they’re in the state they’re in.  The remaining are people who are physically more mentally disabled and those people I have endless compassion for.

Being wealthy doesn’t mean you’re better than others. It just means that you have managed to adapt yourself to the social/economic conditions of your environment.  That happens to be a skill I’m reasonably good at.

For me, wealth has never been a goal. Freedom is the goal. I want to be free to do what I want which requires a threshold of wealth to be obtained. Beyond that, I don’t care. I’m not heavily motivated to build empires of wealth just for the sake of building empires – particularly if it results in some loss of personal freedom.

Different people have different levers that motivate them. Some people crave respect. Other people crave adulation. Still others use wealth as a score card to live a life of achievement. And there are of course people who crave material wealth because that’s what makes them happy.  For me, it’s what I said, freedom. I want to do what I want to do.

I’d argue that I have a form of narcissism. Not the self-love kind but rather excessive self-ego. I do care about other people and how what I do will affect other people but I relentlessly pursue my own personal agenda.

A normal company of our size wouldn’t have its CEO out on the forums mixing it up with customers. And for good reason – I’m pretty rude and unprofessional. When I get into the mud with some disgruntled customer, it makes me and my company look amateurish and it costs us money in terms of business.  Clearly, since I know those things and will still continue to hang out on the chat channels and the forums chatting with other users rather than using an alias or having “handlers” do that sort of thing I must have other priorities  and I do – being able to do what I want.

In my experience, most people who are wealthy are people who have become extremely adept at doing what they are doing. And what they are doing produces wealth that enriches them.  What happens, in many cases, is that the means becomes the end – their ambition becomes the goal rather than the means to a concrete objective. It’s a path that I think leads many people to have regret later in life.

Some people, which we’ll generally call “losers”, look at the most successful people and think they’re greedy. If only that were the case. The most successful people are often people who are achieving for achievement’s sake with money being the scorecard. That is what I am trying to avoid. 

Sometimes, when I get busy, I will nearly forget why I’m working so hard. Because I happen to be so good at what I do, new opportunities arise to do even more – the ambition starts to become an ends unto itself.  So I have to remind myself why I do this – freedom.  The freedom to live my life as I see fit. To able to be the husband I want to be for my wife and the father I want to be for my children without having to compromise.  It’s often a delicate balance between sticking to ones goals and controlling the urge to let ambition take over.

The long beta program draws to a close.  This has been the most challenging game I’ve worked on yet.

The biggest part of the challenge has been the evolution of betas in the PC game industry.  Stardock has been doing public betas of its games since 1993 when the OS/2 version of Galactic Civilizations went into beta.  We’ve always done it the same way – we put the betas out very early, very buggy, very non-fun and incorporate feedback into the game.

For many years, no one else had these beta programs. But in the last couple of years, someone decided (wrongly IMO) that a public beta program would be a good marketing exercise.  The problem is that when people joined the Demigod beta, many of them had only experienced those marketing betas which weren’t true betas.

Stardock betas have worked like this for eons:

Beta 1: Buggy/Sucky.

Beta 2: Less Buggy/Sucky.

Beta 3: Less Buggy/AWESOME.

When we did Sins of a Solar Empire, a lot of the beta testers came from the Galactic Civilizations world so they already knew how we worked. The Sins betas were actually a lot rougher than the Demigod betas because we had far fewer resources between us (Stardock/Ironclad).  But most beta testers understood it was a beta and the game came together in the last month before release and has gone on to win tons of Game of the Year awards (like Galactic Civilizations II did before it).

With Demigod, however, being a very different game than GalCiv or Sins, we mostly had people who had never been in a Stardock beta.  Many had been familiar with Supreme Commander and its “beta” (which was a marketing beta where the game was largely done).  So when they picked up Demigod betas, they found that the game was buggy and utterly sucked.  In Beta 1 and 2, we intentionally messed with values in order to make the game not fun so that players would focus on the parts we cared about (beta 1 – engine, beta 2 – network). 

So as Beta 3B has made clear, yea, it has all come together.  Suddenly there’s a growing buzz that hey, Demigod might be the strategy game to beat this year (if we can get websites to quit listing it as an RPG <g>). 

It’s not beta testers fault though. The PC game industry needs to stop having those marketing betas because they completely alter the perception of what a real beta is and what the goals.  This Spring, we’re going to start the Elemental beta nearly a year before release. We are currently planning to not even have the graphics engine in Beta 1 but rather have players play on the cloth map so that we can drive home the point that betas aren’t supposed to be fun, they’re supposed to be solving specific problems.

Next week, we’re going to have a beta 3C.  It’ll be even better than beta 3B but still, no where near as fun as the release date game will be.  The thing to remember here is that Stardock and GPG are privately held companies. We’re in this for the game. We don’t have public shareholders to satisfy. We just want to make an awesome game.  Hopefully, players are now able to see what our goals were with these latest betas and like where we’re going.  And like all our other games, the release date version of the game is only the beginning.

Screenshots taken on my Thinkpad laptop (great graphics that don’t require mega hardware)