what specifically is bitchy about his post? It seemed very straightforward to me.
anyone who has ever worked for a large comapny and can do even a half decent job of reading through the lines can see from what he has said now and in th past is that there’s more than one department involved in what goes on XBL when, and not everybody is always to the same drummer which leads to delays.
He didn’t say he doesn’t know why things get delayed and take time, he said he doesn’t know when it will be posted for sure, until it actually is.
I think the thing is that Larry Hyrb (Major Nelson) is not PR. He’s the Director of Programming for Xbox Live. The MS games PR blog is gamerscoreblog.com.
He may not be employed in a PR role, however the majornelson blog is regularly used by Microsoft as a way of passing official information to fans. It’s an effective marketing route for them.
MS really needs to do something soon as they are starting to build ill will. The latest lack of Prey demo, and Chromehounds not being for the US market, combined with putting up a 2nd Top Spin demo is not going over well out there.
That’s the latest? It says something that you’ve forgotten the long promised Texas Hold 'Em and long delayed Street Fighter game. The latter, I get. It’s apparently being tweaked for on-line play.
But the former… Texas Hold 'Em has been on the verge for months.
You are everything that is wrong with the internet. Do you know who decides what regions these things go up for? Is it Microsoft? No, it is the publishers. If they don’t want a demo up in NA then it is their call. So quit whining.
I don’t agree. There aren’t national boundaries on the Internet. None that people care about anymore, anyway. It should encourage a fundamental change in the way products are marketed and sold. Unfortunately, there’s still this stupid need of corporations to hold onto territorial significance when it comes to selling things. If people want to buy what you’re selling (or in this case, try it out so they can buy it when it ships), then you should be filling that need everywhere, not just everywhere but here.
I’d think a guy like you, who usually gets pretty uppity about things like this, would definitely agree that there’s an artificial limitation at work here that’s pretty stupid.
If your threshold is so low that they’re “blowing it” just because a demo isn’t available in your area just now, it’s going to be real insteresting to see how spectacularly Sony and Nintendo “blow it.”
How do you know it’s an artificial limitation? How do you know there’s not a licensing or other legal hurdle to bringing the demo - that exact build of the demo, anyway - out in North America? And if there is, and we get a demo that is slightly different (if only in a way a lawyer would ever care about) in NA later, why would it make sense for the rest of the world to wait on us?
Sure, the console itself could be regionless, technically. But consider that even consoles that are regionless (like the Game Boy) don’t release all games simultaneously all over the world. Is that an artificial limitation? In some ways it is, and in some ways it isn’t. This is really no different. You can “import” the demo as you would import a game by setting up a foreign profile.
How come nobody raised a hue and cry when the Loco Roco PSP demo was only released “in Japan” as it were?
Didn’t Sony say that they’re doing the same thing that MS did with the 360 where they allow each software publisher to set up a region lock if they wish to?
My guess is that is that the end result isn’t going to be too much different…
There is nothing to agree or disagree with. Everything I said aside from stop whining is fact. The tirade you are going on about whether limiting content is smart or not is not what I am arguing. I am complaining about bashing Microsoft when they have no control of it outside their own content.
Also, while a bit ham handed this is a pretty good explaination of why these things happen:
Having everything available everywhere all the time would be nice but that is a different debate and after reading that page you should have a pretty good idea of why it won’t work. Just off the top of my head localization, local laws, different rating standards, naming rights issues between different countries, etc. are all issues. It is one thing if a demo is released for the PC with swastikas in it and someone from Germany goes out on their own and downloads it off the internet. It is entirely different if that same German goes onto a closed system that they pay for and MS controls and downloads a demo with swastikas in it.
One other example is something that would rate an AO here unchanged but maybe just a 17+ in Europe like Indigo Prophecy (which was released under a different name in both places as well).
You guys seem to always purposefully miss the point of my posts.
The world has changed and it’s time the publishers realize that. There are no boundaries anymore where gamers are concerned. It’s global. Microsoft was so quick to push their global launch, and I believe both of you, Xaroc and Jason, were happy to trumpet that as a huge bit of awesomeness. So why would you defend this?
It’s a stupid artificial limitation. Publishers could get their shit together and make sure it all happens on the same day. They just don’t want to… and it pisses some people off. I doubt you guys would be defending it so vociferously if it were Sony.
