RE: [Fwd: Gamasutra article]

["Brandon J. Van Every" <vanevery@3DProgrammer.com>]

> 	Printed text fiction is currently as disposable a medium as any of
> these others; It seems that authors appearing in the last decade to
> critical accliam are all out of print already.

But at least there's nothing stopping anyone from running a book through a
OCR scanner.  The material can exist forever, so long as someone chooses to
make it so, and invests trivial support resources into it.

> 	Just having a sales window of two years instead of two
> months would be significant for a film or video game.

But bear in mind that the current sales window problem for games isn't the
3D art production values.  It's the limit of Brick & Mortar retail shelf
space.  You don't make money in 1 month, you're off the shelves.
Considering that only 10 games make money at any one time, and the way the
publisher/developer contracts are written, it's a sucker's bet.  When you
drill down to the details it resembles indentured servitude.  The first
thing that has to happen is developers have to get more control over their
own distribution.

> I do not doubt that modern titles will survive growth and
> change, if only via emulation (I can now run King of Chicago under
> Windows using an Amiga emulater, even as the PC adaptation has been
> unplayable for years).

Do you really think all this Microsoft DirectX fiddle-faddle is going to be
emulable?  They completely change everything every year!  Any future
emulation projects are going to have to decide whether or not to support
DirectX 5.0, 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, ....


Cheers,                         www.3DProgrammer.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

20% of the world is real.
80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.