I like the "don't break the chain" method as well. I actually designed a calendar that displays the whole year at a glance. Mine is printed out and placed on a wall that I will see every day. I use it for the "don't break the chain" idea, but it is also really good at reminding me how short a year is. Really drives home the idea that every day is important.
This method makes getting the shell off easy as well.
Edit: It's stated in the article that this method makes getting the shell off really easy. Just to be clear, I chose this method primarily for that reason, but it also requires a minimum amount of babysitting and mental RAM.
Steam doesn't rent games, which is what I believe qwikster intends to do. It's gamefly they would be competing with. If I were gamefly, I'd be very worried right now.
I haven't seen that it's dead, myself. Not sure what others are seeing. I've been doing Android development, and I sort of formed a bit of an Android dev community on G+. Some people post more than others, sure, but I've made some friends out of strangers, and I see a good bit of variety in my stream. Not all dev stuff, understandably, but I've been able to interact with some cool people.
I guess it has quieted down a bit since the beginning, but I also haven't made a huge effort to expand the number of people I follow either. It's active enough that it wouldn't occur to me to stop checking it.
I do follow some Googlers too, like you, and recently I got in on a game of Diablo 2 with one of them. A G+ organized retro gaming night (sort of in preparation for the release of Diablo 3).
I tried the game and passed on it when it was released. I can't speak for the general public, but it was not a failure of marketing for me. It just wasn't enough to get me to spend money on it. It was polished, and not bad, just... sort of forgettable and average. It would be a big assumption for me to assume that my experiences are more consistent with what happened to the game in reality, but the article doesn't tell us how many trial downloads went along with the poor sales either.
Polish is nice to have, sure, but if nobody wants to actually play the delivered experience, all the polish in the world won't save it. Nobody should buy a game just because it's polished. While I'd prefer polish on all my games, I'll take an unpolished dwarf fortress over a polished forgettable uncompelling game any day of the week).
As a side note, I'm not sure what rule I've broken to get downvoted. I pointed out that there could be more to this story, and that we don't have solid data on how many trial downloads there were (which is a MUCH better indicator than sales is regarding "marketing" in this case).
For those unfamiliar with XBLA, just about everyone downloads a trial first (every game on XBLA is required to have a free trial, so you'd have to be pretty impulsive to skip it completely), and then you can buy the game from within the trial version's interface.
If the point of the comments here on HN is to add to the discussion, I'm not really sure what I did to justify a downvote. I'm just getting started commenting here and don't really have karma to spare. I really try hard to be a positive member of the site, so If somebody sees this and can point out what I can avoid doing in the future, that'd be appreciated.
This reminds me of (what was previously _why's) "try ruby!" at http://tryruby.org/
I always loved that, and I think this has a lot of potential. Tomorrow being Whyday, I think I'll send this to some people to try and spread the joy of programming.
I do think that the parentheses and semicolon stuff might appear sort of abruptly for the completely non-technical, but it's hard for me to judge, really.
If they go through a rough patch and get acquired or there is a change of management, it could happen. Patent reform is what we need, NOT anti-competitive patent stockpiling.
How was MS had a back against a wall? They went after Android phones for patent infringement. They extorted money from Amazon for Kindle. And now they suing Barnes & Noble as well. And they have spread FUD about the Linux kernel violating their patents but have so far refused to be specific about what patents they are talking about.
It seems to me that MS is as much predator as prey.
Their share price has been going badly. Employee stock options are no longer an effective way to retain people, and they are losing long term employees to the likes of FB and G.
no offense taken. This is the problem with defensive patents. A company would be remiss to their shareholders if they didn't deploy it offensively when things don't go their way.
Completely agree with Tarn. I would go further, and describe certain types of games as evil. Social games, in particular, I believe have evil game design.
It's a view I've often come across on indie game-related blogs.
Companies like Zynga help push the issue to the fore-front: They get continuous real time data about how changes in their games effect player behavior, and try to use that to maximize the addictive factor.
Writing a launcher takes work. I don't think it's ever strange to expect payment in return. Just because Google wrote a launcher at some point in the past doesn't mean that all future programmer's work in that area should be released for free.
I happen to think this particular launcher is a gimmick, but it's clear that they put work into it and that it's very different than what Google ships.
To my knowledge, Google has never offensively used a patent. A large percentage of their products are open source. They develop a lot of open technologies in an attempt to make the web better/faster for everyone (which, in theory, will be good for their business in the long run). Their privacy practices are going to be audited by a third party for the next 20 or so years.
The parallel between Google and Wal-Mart is how they both appeal to the lowest common denominator. And how their customers are oblivious (or knowingly apathetic) to the negative impact these conglomerates are perpetuating.
As for Microsoft, they were the dominant conglomerate of yesteryear. Today it's Google. Both companies wield different powers, and both have been abusing them in different ways.
