Gamers at large clamor for the newest hot game to come out as soon as possible, but I have to wonder how many of 18+ gamers just don’t have time to play them. I’ve got probably 40+ modern PS3/360 games on my shelf and two dozen more in Steam. I have a World of Warcraft account, but I haven’t logged in over a month. I wonder if my guild has kicked me out yet, but I don’t have the time to really check. A friend gave me the Warhammer MMO and I never even loaded it up. Many other games I’ve only played for a few minutes or haven’t loaded at all. All of the best intentions to play them have fallen to other daily tasks.

So what gets in the way? I’m sure the list is different for everyone who has grown past their teens. I don’t have any kids to take my time, and my wonderful girlfriend doesn’t mind me playing as long as I don’t completely neglect her. Yet, life isn’t as open and sparse as it once was. Work eats a good portion of the day. General household tasks. Working on my motorcycles. Roadtrips. Playing guitar. Reading. Dining out. Spending time with friends.

It isn’t just the growth of responsibility, but also the joy of finding more in life that interests me and takes priority. Riding a motorcycle in real life beats riding one in GTA:IV. I couldn’t have done that when I was 13. Older people (I’m only 27) don’t hate games. Your parents probably don’t hate games or find them silly, but just have a hard time really fitting them into their day in a responsible way. Massively long games like Final Fantasy XIII just don’t stand a chance on my schedule. Portal or Heavy Rain are much more fitting for my time.

Gaming is a very attention intense activity. Few great games play well as a background task. I can’t cook dinner, hold a decent conversation or read a book while playing Halo ODST. I can listen to music or NPR however.

Back in the day games could include ‘feelies‘ to enhance the gaming experience (and occasionally as copy protection). No matter the cost of a game the one feelie I wish was included with every game was a spare 20 hours to enjoy it. I’ve got 3d Dot Game Heroes and Red Dead Redemption coming in the mail today and yet I know that I won’t get as much use out of them as I’d like.

Is this just  sign of getting older? Perhaps. I know some gamers just a few years older than myself who are able to dedicate more time to the pursuit, but it becomes something you must consciously choose and you make sacrifices elsewhere.

Screen

The iPad is the clear winner here, with its large 9.7 inch color display. The Newton screen however isn’t all that bad and does support multiple screen orientations and has a low power draw.

Input

The iPad brings us a large version of the iPhone keyboard, along with now popular multitouch. However the iPad completely lacks handwriting recognition. You can’t use a stylus and (most) gloves are out of the question. This is a bit of a draw. Both Newton and iPad support external keyboards.

Connectivity

The iPad offers Wifi and when they eventually get around to shipping them, 3G. That’s great, but what if you want to send a fax? Well the Newton does the job rather well here. The Newton offers a standard 8-pin Mac serial port for connecting to a variety of devices. The Newton also offers an infrared interface to talk to other Newtons. The Newton can even dial a phone by holding its speaker up to a phone.

Expandability

The iPad offers a lot of nothing here- since you can’t even easily swap in a global Sim card. The Newton however rocks it. All models had at least one PC Card expansion slot, allowing anything from CompactFlash memory, to wifi cards, to bluetooth cards.

Battery

The iPad has a nice battery that can last quite some time. The Newton is powered via AAA batteries, which don’t give it a lot of battery life here. However the Newton allows you to swap out batteries, whereas the iPad does not. Even when your iPad battery is dead and unchargable, the best you can do is go to Apple for repair. The Newton? CVS will fix you up.

Price

The iPad might seem like an expensive toy, but the MessagePad and Newton series were expensive too! Varying on model they were between $500 and $1000 1990′s dollars!

Winner

Wait, you’re really wondering who won here? Clearly the Newton… not! The iPad has 20 years of development time on the Newton and is a great piece of hardware. Despite the fact that Jobs has it locked down tighter than a Federal Prison and expansion isn’t exactly its strength, everyone has come to expect that from Apple

What is this Cap? I thought it was unlimited?

Having a bandwidth cap means that you can only download a certain amount per month before Comcast gets upset. The amount is currently 250Gb and has been unchanged since they initially instituted it in 2008. Comcast does often advertise that their service offers unlimited usage, however this simply isn’t the case.

250GB ought to be enough for anybody

Just as the quote often misattributed to Bill Gates of,”640K ought to be enough for anybody.” shows faulty logic, so does the cap imposed by Comcast. Perhaps this best describes their ideal user who pays for their service, but rarely uses it. This probably does reflect a large portion of the population. My mother does little more than check her email and Facebook with her cable modem.

Yet for a small but strong portion of the population this is simply insufficient. Those between 14-34 are using the internet in a far different way than an older generation. I am one of these.

Common Uses

Everything is streaming. We live in households with several roommates who are all similarly connected. We have not once computer, but multiple. Even if our needs are currently met, we are always pushing the edge and using more and more services. A quick look at some of the bandwidth heavy services that those of this generation use.

• NetFlix- My household has all but stopped using our physical Netflix movies. Waiting a day is too long. Instead we use their streaming service, often watching several films in one night between all of the house residents. NetFlix is soon to start streaming along with 5.1 Surround Sound. 1080p which will use 2x as much bandwidth as the current 720p library is surely also just around the corner
• Hulu- Another video streaming service, which also streams in 720p.
• YouTube, Vimeo and Blip.tv- Streaming HD video content over the web has become daily activity for many people. While a few years ago this was a very small portion of people’s behavior, this is only increasing.
• Bittorrent/Usenet- Not that I would ever admit to downloading something that isn’t public domain, but I’ve heard that downloading 1080p movies with full surround sound in Bluray quality takes around 10-30GB per movie. Queuing up a dozen or so of these is trivial and commonplace these days.
• Large downloads- I recently reinstalled my laptop and I must have downloaded at least another 15GB of legitimate applications to get it up and running again as I like it. Lets say there’s a new operating system release and you do this to 8 computers in a household. Boom, 120GB used.
• Streaming Music- Pandora is constantly streaming high quality audio to the house, if not several streaming in parallel.
• Rich websites- Websites now are larger and more complex than ever. I shudder to think about using Facebook through 14,400 baud modem which was commonplace 10 years ago in many households.
• Backup services- If you’re using something like Mozy to backup your entire computer and you multiply this by 8 or so, then you’ve got a problem with Comcast suddenly. Yes, the backup (after the initial) should only do diffs, but still the initial usage is a problem.
• Professional use- I work from home often. VMWare images, Photoshop files, huge amounts of code, video, logs, Skype calls and audio go over my connection daily. This has got to add up.
• Gaming- Xbox, Playstation and PC games eat bandwidth as well from gameplay but also patches, downloads and voice chat.

I do think that a single individual would have to try pretty hard to use up 250GB/month, but a common household in the Cambridge/Boston area of 20-something tech professionals can tear through it like we can a keg. A typical evening might be something like this:

• Roommate A is watching Lost streaming from Hulu in HD in their bedroom.
• Roommate B is downloading software updates on their computer
• Roommate C is downloading some public domain/open source torrents
• Roommate D is chatting on Skype video and playing WoW
• Roommate E is playing the Xbox 360
• The Playstation 3 is Folding
• 6+ smart phones are connected and doing their thing

8 Computers?

That number is actually low. We’ve got 6 fulltime people living in my house. Add in three significant others that are often here, and the fact that most of us have more than one computer or computer-like device and we’ve actually got around 20 devices on the network. When we’ve had friends over we’ve probably hit near 50-60 devices on the network before counting everyone’s iPhones and laptops. Game systems, netbooks, an OLPC, iPhones, security cameras, sometimes some servers and a ton of laptops. It all counts.

250GB Cap Workaround

From what I understand  you can’t ask them to upgrade your 250GB home package to something higher. They’ll give you faster packages so you can burn through it faster, but not bigger. You can’t buy two packages either and load balance in a single household. But there is a workaround, although I haven’t tried it.

If you call and order a small business package, it will cost you a bit more, but they won’t bug you about needing cable TV and the top speed of the package isn’t as high- but you are free of bandwidth caps.

Moving to the Future

While I don’t have any hard numbers on this, I feel that I use approximately 2x as much bandwidth online every year as I did the prior year. This has been a fairly consistent path for the past 15 years that I’ve been online. My usage goes up, but so does the complexity of the content that I’m downloading. With upcoming services like OnLive that promise 1080p gaming streaming into your household, more HD streaming, the release of 2K/4K video to the consumer market, more connected devices and greater cloud computing this problem isn’t going away.

I realize that Comcast needs to protect themselves, but it isn’t like they are on the edge of profitability. They are massively profitable in fact. Yet, they should also realize that this is a system and market that is quickly growing and will continue to do so. Equipment is getting faster and cheaper too so the upgrades shouldn’t be too painful to keep up with the curve. 2011, we will need 500GB/month and in 2012 we will need at least 1TB/month of transfer available.

I’ve had:

• G4 iBook 800
• Macbook Pro 15″ 2ghz
• Macbook Pro 17″ 2.4ghz (gamerDNA provided, and thus i sold the 15″)
• Macbook Pro 15″ 2.5ghz, mid – 2008 model(purchased after gamerDNA)

This isn’t the monobody slick new one. Yet- I think it is far better than what is currently offered. The good news is that you should be able to pick these up for under $1,000 easily if you look in the right places.

Why is it better? So many reasons:

• Far better keyboard – The keys have more travel, the keys are curved inward and provide better feedback.
• Real mouse button – I often don’t use it, but when I want it it really is nice.
• ExpressCard/34 slot – The 17″ is the only model to offer it now, which is $3K
• Firewire 400 and 800 ports, two USB ports – The new ones only have a single FW800, which is backward compatible, but annoying since I have a FW400 audio interface and several hard drives that don’t like being chained with an audio interface
• Matte Screen – I hate gloss screens. You can pay more for the 17″ model to have a matte these days, but it isn’t worth the cost.
• 512MB Video Memory – I know the new ones have a slightly faster graphics card, but the memory is only 256MB on the 15″ models.
• Same processor – The processor is still an Intel Core 2 Duo. They offer the 2.53ghz standard now. Mine is ‘just’ 2.5ghz. Big deal.
• DVI Output – Sorry Apple, but DisplayPort isn’t as common as DVI. I carry around adaptors anyway for VGA, but I don’t see what DisplayPort buys me today. I do rather like that the new 27″ iMac allows you to use the screen as an external monitor for another computer. I hope they do the same on laptops soon.
• Easier to play Operation – I really can’t imaging that the Monobody is all that easy to get inside or work on. I haven’t tried, but it is probably either really easy, or really hard. I’m guessing really hard. I’m thinking of hacking mine to put in some SSD drives instead of the optical drive soon. Or maybe I’ll just get the ExpressCard/34 SSD.
• Removable Battery – I don’t buy the argument that everyone will carry about extra batteries. They don’t. How many people do you know carry charged extras? Yet, it is nice to be able to replace yours easily. I threw a new one in mine and rather enjoy being able to do so without a reset even.

About the only thing I like about the new ones better is that I can pay out the nose for 8GB of memory in them instead of the 4GB that I have in mine. If you’ve got 2GB in your Macbook Pro you can upgrade for around $100 from Crucial and installation takes about 3 minutes. I recently put a 500GB 7200rpm Western Digital drive in mine, which has made for a nice speed boost in loading applications. They haven’t upgraded the stock hard drive size since mine was purchased either.

My Macbook Pro does everything that the new ones do and more. They’ve done firmware updates lately and added in things like 4-finger mouse controls and such. I’d like an 8-core Mac Pro with 24GB Ram and 4 video cards, but really this machine does 99.9% of what I realistically need on a daily basis. Oh and it plays modern games just fine!

If you do happen to pick up one however, try as hard as possible to find one with Applecare. I had my keyboard/mouse die the other day and because of Applecare I was able to get a repair within 48 hours. 100% worth it.

Perhaps the industry itself is recession proof. None of the major players have had AIG or GM style downfalls. Blizzard is still the king of MMORPGs with World of Warcraft and the big companies keep getting bigger.

Yet, this doesn’t feel like the roaring 20′s for the industry either. Show me all the charts that you want to about major title releases selling more and more, but that doesn’t mean that it is any easier to release a title, raise Venture Capital funding, meet sales goals or hold a job in the industry. Nothing is going so well that people are about to call it a bubble.

Raising VC funds right now is damn hard. I’ve seen some great ideas and companies fall apart due to the inability to raise money for creating video game related products and companies. This isn’t 1999, or even 2007 and no longer can a 6th-grader raise 6M+ in an A-round of funding. This isn’t because there aren’t good ideas out there, or even lack of raw venture money being out there. It is largely due to the relatively small number of exits available in the market today. IPOs are nearly non-existant, and major acquisitions seem to have slowed down as well. Sure Google, Apple and friends still snap up stuff for absurd amounts occasionally, but things are getting more ‘realistic’ which VCs don’t really benefit as much from.

Even companies that are well past their funding stages and have major products released and selling well are having budget issues. You’d think that a company that started one of the biggest shifts in gaming in 10 years and had just released one of the best selling games of 2009 would have no problem budget-wise. Yet Harmonix (now owned by MTV) had to slash nearly 40 positions in December. Not all of those were QA positions as initially reported in the media and the damage done to the company internally was massive. Harmonix itself may have been recession-proof, but MTV with its heavily reliance on advertising as their primary income source wasn’t. The cross-collateralized risk meant that a hit to MTV was a hit to Harmonix.

EA, one of the largest gaming companies out there laid off over 1,500 employees in October and canceled around 15 games. At the beginning of 2009 they cut 1,100 employees. Crispy Gamer slashed their editorial staff and their CEO resigned in protest last month. Only months prior, they had acquired/merged with gamerDNA, prompting yet more layoffs. GamerDNA themselves had to cut staff earlier in 2009 (which I was a part of) due to funding difficulties. None of these decisions were made lightly for sure, but all of them have built up to effect the industry overall.

The stories of such happening are seemingly endless. To call an industry recession proof is to say that a recession won’t effect it, or would even have a positive effect. This clearly isn’t what is happening and those who thought it might be recession proof were either underestimating the effects that the recession would have, overconfident, or wanting to sell this story to their investors.

However there is good news! While I’ve only been in the industry for a short time, I feel that I’m seeing a nice resurgence of indie games and innovation. Delivery platforms like Steam, Direct2Drive and the iTunes Store for the iPhone/touch/pad, combined with tools that allow for rapid development like Unity are allowing more people than ever to get into the field and create rich and amazing titles that actually have the chance of reaching large audiences with minimal upfront cost. There will always be the need for blockbuster titles however and I don’t foresee this canabalizing the main studios in the way that the ‘home studio’ has killed much of the music recording industry.

And then yesterday, the Board chooses to fire the entire editorial staff of Crispy Gamer, and the CEO of CG resigns.

So now Crispy Gamer will have no editorial content, gamerDNA has no development or community management- and the Board has a nice ad network to fill their pockets.

Also, because of the way that stock options work, probably few people were vested for any meaningful amount, which means the investors and board are likely the only ones with shares that matter at all- and of course will be the sole ones to benefit from the ad revenues.

And as always, the board members keep their jobs, compensation, etc

Good job! Way to fuck over not one, but two communities, your CEO and awesome employees!

And of course CG has been completely silent about this on their site, Twitter feed, board, etc. Way to go for transparency! Layoffs don’t have to go down like this, you can always be open and honest like Zappos did when they had to do layoffs the other year.

I am a former gamerDNA employee- for whatever that matters. All of this is public information that’s been posted in various places around the internet.

“Apple cannot release a laptop for $1,000. This has been tried before. Either this will never see the light of day or the price will actually be twice that.” said Mick Flegropanti, an expert on inexpensive laptops from Cambridge, MA.

Others were shocked at the announcement, citing that Apple wasn’t properly assessing the needs of the poor, undereducated and malnourished hipsters in these harsh urban environments. “What hipsters really need is a constant supply of clean PBR and dropoffs of food supplies from a local, organic CSA. If they really need technology improvements from Apple it would be an iPhone that wouldn’t need to be replaced after falling in the toilet while vomiting cheap whiskey and sushi.”  In the announcement however it was noted that the laptop would even survive if partially submersed in PBR and Bloody Mary’s, leading many to speculate that this technology might carry down later into the iPhone.

Earlier designs of the laptop included ones with a hand-crank to power it, but it was soon realized this would require physical exertion on the part of the woefully frail hipsters who are often weak from spending hours in the salvation army looking for trendy and ironic clothing.

Of course many hipsters don’t make money due to the economic fallout in their neighborhoods. They subsist on subsidies provided in the form of trust funds from richer family members like their parents, or maybe even grandparents. Keeping this in mind, Apple is making available a “Buy one, give one” program making it easy for parents to send the laptops to their children.

“No one expects hipsters to make their own living. It simply isn’t practical. The wages at their local coffee shop simply cannot meet the high rents of the area and also pay for their basic transportation needs like fixie bicycles and organic foods. Plus the debt they’ve accumulated through the five years getting those degrees in poetry and philosophy is just crushing to their local economy. With these laptops, it will be much easier for them to get a basic education- like a Master’s degree or PhD that they need to get by in today’s world.”

Why?

I’d prefer to never have to look down at the handlebars to know some basic things about my riding. I’d ideally show:

• Speed
• Tach (RPMs)
• Gear
• Compass Direction
• High/low beam indication and left/right turn signal indicators
• Engine temperature

Factors:

Sounds difficult, but I think we’re in luck for a lot of things according to the Wikipedia, but there’s some setbacks too:

• field of vision — I need to focus the display at around 10 feet out to infinity. This part shouldn’t be too hard, but seems to require some type of lens-like area to help focus it.
• eyebox —the eyebox is generally where your head/eye must be to see the image. Luckily the area of variability inside the helmet is almost zero. My helmet is tight and my eyes don’t move around in there.
• luminance/contrast — Doing this automatically might be a little tricky, but I’m already imagining that I could automatically adjust it relatively easily with some basic logic or even an analog circuit.
• display accuracy — Since I won’t be displaying information (at least at first) about things around me, and just the status of the bike, this doesn’t matter too much.
• installation — I have to work with the bike itself. This might be a bit tricky. The electronics on the bike are for lights and ignition only. There’s no ‘logic’ on the bike and everything is manual since its from 1979.

How?

I’m honestly not sure where to start. It seems like having a semi-transparent/semi-reflective surface on a small area inside my helmet which is reflecting back a mini OLED screen would be the best. Some of the hardest stuff I think will be integration with the bike. The bike integration is one of the hardest parts probably because the bike is so old and analog.

I’ll probably have to wear a small backpack with a netbook (or at least the guts) in it, or embed it inside a saddleback or in the bike itself. The computer will connect to the bike likely via an Arduino. I’m hoping to get to the point that I can use purely an Arduino and have no laptop. The Arduino will have a lot of sensors hooked to its inputs from the bike (turn sensors, temperature and a digital compass). It will run from a small regulated split from the power on the bike itself with a battery backup.

Hoping to hack some Apple Magsafe style connectors to give me the ability to easily split away from the bike in case I move off of it or fall, because there will need to be a cable from the helmet. Also ideally I could control it via voice commands, but these rarely work well and would definitely require a netbook or OLPC in/with the bike to make it work.

Got ideas? I’ll definitely document the work and I’m open to suggestions. Comments below!

Most of the jobs were in QA (might have explained why when I spoke with their QA manager 2 days ago he seemed kinda bummed and worn down) but there were others as well. This certainly puts a damper on things after they just had their holiday party last weekend.

While it does make sense that if they are in the early stages of development they might not need so many QA people, its really sad to see this happen and it will negatively impact the Boston game development community. Rockband The Beatles had sales of at least $60M USD, and overall the Rockband titles have netted over $1B. Obviously MTV and distribution takes a huge cut of that, but either way, its big money.

This isn’t helping the local economy, local game developers or anyone really. This time last year it was reported that the Harmonix founders, Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, were getting $300M in bonuses on top of the $150M of bonuses handed out before. Seems like something closer to Wall Street than Massachusetts Ave.

I hope the best for all of them and that they are quickly picked up by other local companies. QA testing is a tough job and they get laid off too often in this industry.

You make a product and release it. You know it needs some work. Nothing is ever perfect and even ancient applications like Photoshop have bugs and can use improvement.

So you put up a feedback and support form, you put up forums for user to post to, you listen on Twitter. Then you start getting poor feedback in really weird places, but your support inbox is a ghost town.

You get feedback like, “It doesn’t work as I expected”, “It sounds funny” or “It crashed”. None of this is really useful. You post back to the person having the issue that you need to know a bit more. You need their OS or Browser version at least. An error message or at least description of what happened would be useful. But then you don’t get one. You tried to reach out and help them, but got nothing back. At some point you think to yourself, “Are these people just stupid?”, but of course they aren’t. Your last phone conversation dropped and you didn’t call AT&T about it, and last time that Firefox crashed you didn’t submit a bug report either.

Part of it is that no one really cares as much about your product as you do. They’ve probably got some alternative and there is little reason for them to invest time into something that isn’t working for them.

Another part I will blame on larger companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft,  etc. Users are so used to their support issues never getting a response, fix or acknowledgement. They don’t feel that it is worth their time to report another Blue Screen of Death because Microsoft will never look into it. Calling tech support is futile and no one who wrote the code will ever hear about it.

So as a community manager or product developer- what are you to do? To a certain degree you are fighting an uphill battle but you should at least put some stuff in place to help out.

• Make in-product bug reporting easy. You’ve worked hard to make your incoming conversion funnels and sales path easy and you should make this process even easier. If users have to jump through hoops they won’t do it. 30 minutes on the phone waiting or having some support page that doesn’t function isn’t cutting it. Making them search hard for it doesn’t help either.
• Constantly link over to your public bug tracker and support forums. Eventually people will learn that they get support there.
• Respond promptly, even if just to say that you’ve acknowledged the issue and you’re looking into it. Give them an ETA if possible, but if you can’t tell them that you don’t have one too.
• Keep listening everywhere. Users are going to keep posting bugs and complaints in weird places. I can’t account for why they do it, but its the same reason that you complain on Twitter that Starbucks got your soy latte wrong instead of telling the employee or the manager. We’re just conditioned this way.
• And finally, show them that you’re not just all talk. Try to get fixes done as quickly as possible. With a new product this often is overwhelming because it feels like a sinking ship that has too many holes to patch. You’re often not the tech person and you’re trying to prioritize the developers who are trying to make new functionality. This is hard and another art unto itself.

Good luck!