Sent in 1999 from Nick Thompson, Microsoft’s former VP of hardware, to Jacqualee Story, Nintendo of America’s former Executive VP of business…
The letter begins with, “Dear Jacqualee, I appreciate you taking the time to try to arrange a meeting with Mr. Takeda and Mr. Yamauchi to discuss a possible strategic partnership between Nintendo and Microsoft on future video game platforms. I understand Mr. Takeda’s concerns about the possible partnership and will try to [illegible] the guidelines he has requested.”
Former Xbox executive Kevin Bachus recalled, “Steve [Ballmer, former Microsoft CEO] made us go meet with Nintendo to see if they would consider being acquired. They just laughed their asses off. Like, imagine an hour of somebody just laughing at you. That was kind of how that meeting went.”
Microsoft made a second attempt in 2000 to try to partner with Nintendo, with the idea of Nintendo handling the “game portion,” while Microsoft worked on the hardware–more technical–part. The talks did not work out, and so a joint venture possibility between the two companies was nixed.
People don’t care for DRM, as long it is unobtrusive. And people really like Steam’ convenience.
And I mean ‘convenience’ : what they like is the convenience of having all games in the same library, with the same friend list.
Steam presents so many advantages it’s very hard to compete. At the same time, gog keeps making missteps. Recognizing that people will need to unify their libraries was very insightful. But why develop your own client from scratch? Why not fork playnite? Steam has many more resources but goes about things much smarter e.g. utilizing wine for Proton. Playnite already has a full screen mode they could have taken advantage of rather than not having one for Galaxy.
Similarly, rather than realizing they need to make transitioning over to their store as easy as possible and completely cloning steam’s networking API, they invented their own Galaxy API. Same thing for achievements. All this means even devs who want to support gog have to put in extra effort for minimal gain.
And finally, one thing they could do better than Steam is an improved web interface and modern forums, but they seem to have no idea how to do that.
Are the APIs that different? I imagine the hooks are very similar, and smart devs will call function A or B depending of a global var that indicates if the version is Steam or GOG or Epic or whatever.
And, are you sure Playnite’s code is available for commercial operations?
Sure, but think about trying to convince devs to support your tiny platform. You don’t want them to need to spend time learning any of your API. Ideally you’d want to just switch the dll and have it work.
Playnite uses an MIT license, so it can be used commercially. And I’m sure they’d have loved the exposure and upstream contributions rather than facing competition.
Absolutely. Dealing with mods outside of workshop is such a step down in terms of usability. There are some games I play that don’t have Workshop integration and it’s just such a chore chasing down mods on Nexus (now sometimes not there because of the terms of service backlash), keeping them all up to date, etc.
GH3 is about 70% master recordings and after that they almost all are. I pulled out my plastic guitar just the other night and found out my brain remembers how, but my fingers have lost all muscle memory.
This is a perfectly valid way to go, but my experience is that by playing Guitar Hero, my appreciation for instrumental guitar work increased by about 100x. I got into guitar blues and jam band music in a big way that has persisted for the decade or so since those games were ascendant. That’s the real legacy of the games for me–not that I learned how to push buttons on a plastic guitar, but it changed fundamentally how I listen to music and what I appreciate about it. It made me a better, more active listener.
Beat Saber (and arguably maybe even moreso Cytus II) have done the same thing for me with EDM, dubstep, and other electronic music. It’s a genre I didn’t really appreciate before and now I enjoy and appreciate its emotional arcs and danceability. I super appreciate having my musical taste pushed out and challenged that way. I’ve made a very active effort since I was in my late 20’s to always pursue new music and new musical styles, to try not to stagnate listening to one genre from a single decade like my parents did. These rhythm games, by making me a participant in the music, really have furthered that project. Plus Beat Saber is a pretty great and fun workout.
I’m probably one of the only people out there that prefers the Guitar Hero 2 covers to the real songs. At least for most of them. I just like the way they’re slightly more “refined” for gameplay, with less “imperfections”. Now, I can see people getting their hackles up for me calling it that. I’m the same way with a lot of songs, the “imperfections” sort of become my favorite part of the songs after listening to it for a while. But since I wasn’t a huge listener of a lot of those songs already, sawing off the raw edges sounded better to me.
That is great that you engaged that way. I come at it from a different angle. I grew up playing music, starting with piano and transitioning to trombone and tuba. I played in jazz band all through high school. So I come from a place of appreciation of music through playing. Engaging with music on an intellectual level was already my thing.
It is just the things I look for and appreciate in music are about technical proficiency, complex time signatures, stylistic blending, variability, etc. Music is very much an intellectual exercise with me, and the dance/ edm spheres are ill fit to my tastes.
I’m sure beat saber and the ilk are good, they just aren’t for me (and thats fine)
A former co-worker of mine – avid musician, totally self-taught, still plays bass in a selection of rock/rap acts around town – described time signatures thusly:
“Dude, people want to tell you all kinds of nonsense but there’s two time signatures: 4/4 and fucked up 4/4.”
On the one hand, I could tell you all kinds of things about the differences between 3/4 and 6/8. On the other, dude isn’t even wrong.
Lol, we’re the same person. I took piano lessons for a couple of years as a kid and played trombone though high-school, dabbled (of course) in guitar in college. I can read music and noodle around on most instruments. I’m probably weird, but I still get more enjoyment out of listening to music than playing it.
Well duh-doy, but the conversation about intuitive vs reasoned understanding of music is an interesting one and I always thought that was an amusing turn of phrase.
But the problem is that this person hasn’t actually communicated anything meaningful by saying that. I could tell you there’s really only one color, blue, and everything else is a fucked-up shade of blue. How would you argue that? Brown is a totally fucked up shade of blue, dude.
You got me, my casual relation of a pithy comment over beers 15 years ago is not in fact a deep discussion on what time signatures really are, man, and have you ever really looked at your hand?
FWIW, I really like the “fucked up 4/4” comment. I frequently use this sort of off the cuff gut-feeling shortcut to describe complex academic concepts, much to the annoyance of my colleagues, because sometimes it just works. I’m perfectly capable of droning on for hours using wheelbarrows of jargon and cant, and once in a while that’s actually necessary, but most of the time, I find that you can get to the meat of the point a lot quicker (and more enjoyably and with more impact, especially for undergrad students) by going for an emotional resonance.
