Rom's Rants

Saturday, October 27, 2007

XNA and VB, One Year Later

Over the last while, I've ranted and raved about Microsoft's XNA Game Studio Express Edition not supporting Visual Basic .NET.

Now that the ZMan is updating again, I've noticed a new post about some really poor communication skills from the XNA team about VB.NET support. He links to a great XNA/VB rant from a Microsoft MVP about it.

Now, awhile back one of the Microsoft guys said that the reason VB wasn't supported on the Xbox 360 was because VB used some features of the CLR that their version of the Compact Framework didn't support. I think I finally figured out what it was, and if it's the case, we have only our older VB6 brethren to blame.

The XNA team could have easily said that you couldn't use "My" on the 360, even though it's supported in the full .NET Compact Framework. They could have easily said that the Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace couldn't be used on the 360, and we would have adapted, even though it is also supported in the full .NET Compact Framework. But remember back in 2001 when the value of True was a big deal? It does make me wonder what other "hacks" were put into the full CLR to support the older VB6 way of doing things.

I love VB.NET with a passion, but over the last couple of years I have started to lose my faith in VB's future. When you look at many of the new features that are coming into the .NET Framework, the syntax that is being used to bring these features into VB is becoming more and more tortured, and some language constructs now go against best practices. (Using "Handles" with WPF applications means that you aren't using the WeakEvent pattern, for example.)

So as a result, we're going to have to move back to the realm of VB hacking to get things done...even though we no longer have that VB hacker icon to follow. If you want to use XNA and VB, you can check out Alan Phipp's page for now, but if we want full access to the managed world, we're going to have to tell Microsoft two things. One, it's okay to let the VB6 way of doing things die, and two, .NET-capable technologies that Microsoft releases must support all languages that are supported by Visual Studio out of the box.

Teams like the XNA team and the Windows Home Server team may only have the funding to support one language, but if something like that is detected inside Microsoft, the platform evangelism teams should step up to the plate with either funding or staff to help them support the other languages. After all, language diversity doesn't mean anything if Microsoft is only going to be giving us items we can use with C#.

Labels: Rant, Visual Basic, XNA

posted by Michael Russell at 10/27/2007 11:36:00 AM | 2 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

Thursday, December 07, 2006

Media Rambling Rant

The RIAA is trying to reduce the amount of royalties being paid to songwriters.

This is a difficult topic to talk about. On one side, the RIAA member companies are doing exactly what their stockholders expect them to do...find a way to increase the amount of money coming in so that they can maintain or increase their stock price.

On the flipside, because of the sheer number of exemptions and chargebacks in the music industry, artists rarely see dime one beyond their advances until they've sold over three million units.

In the middle is the public domain. Labels and artists both want to increase the maximum length of copyright protection because both want to make more money (or in the case of most artists, some money) off of the same item, but at the same time, the most recent increase in copyright protection combined with the sheer quantity of samples being used in media is increasing costs for artists and accounting complexity for labels.

This issue is beginning to creep into game development as game costs increase. Namco has said that it will take an average sell-through of 500,000 units for a next-generation title to break even, in part because of increased development costs (estimated to be approximately $5 million). Compare that to the last generation, where 350,000 to 400,000 units was generally required to recoup publisher development costs of $2 million.

More costs are getting pushed back to the developer as well. Every time you contact publisher technical support, it takes away the royalties on as many as seven copies from the developer. Staff used to fill in holes are being charged back against royalties at rates as high as $60 an hour. If you fail certification more than twice, the cost for further certifications is getting charged back.

With the percentage of games breaking even per year decreasing slowly over the last few years, you're going to start seeing some fairly interesting shifts in the industry in an effort to control costs. I'm actually expecting a lot of the majors to gradually shift to a hub-and-spoke model over a studio model so that certain departments (audio, animation, etc.) can benefit from economies of scale. We're already seeing the rise of the designer again (Wright, Jaffe, etc.), where the designer is being pushed more than the team itself.

Moves like this are beginning to simulate a shift to more of a movie industry model. As technology and formats begin to stabilize, it is very possible that the shift will become even more dramatic. Outsourcing for asset production is already at record highs in this industry, with some designers going all out in support of outsourcing.

So the question is fairly simple. When the industry restructures, will we be looking at several ILM's, or several BMG's? It's unfortunate that the answer is not as simple...

Labels: Rant

posted by Michael Russell at 12/07/2006 09:39:00 PM | 0 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

Saturday, July 22, 2006

[Games] The Hidden Cost Of Piracy

I don't think it's any secret that a warez group called Provision pirated "SiN Episodes: Emergence" about three hours after it was released over Steam.

There are lots of comments that people make trying to justify piracy. "A person who pirates wouldn't buy it anyway." "It's try before you buy, so you only support people who deserve it." "I'm poor and can't afford $20." "We aren't stealing from you, we're stealing from the faceless corporation." "We're only stealing the bits, not the merchandise."

Even if you buy all of those, I can still say that you're stealing resources from me. Why? Because you're stealing my time.

When we shipped "SiN Episodes: Emergence," we had two small config bugs that slipped out and affected a small percentage of our users. We spent the next week working on fixes for that bug and others, testing the fixes, and getting the fix up over Steam so that people wouldn't be affected by it. During that first week, I received about 230 support complaints specifically regarding these two config bugs.

The fix was released on May 17, along with several other miscellaneous fixes. The patch was released over Steam and people who owned legitimate copies were updated and were happy.

Between May 17 and May 24, I still had over 200 support complaints about the config bug. It was fixed, the fix was out and released, but I was still getting support complaints.

I E-mailed each one back individually, trying to get additional information. The responses I got back from the people who replied were insane.

"Did you let Steam install the update?" "What's Steam?"

"Where did you buy the game?" "Over Steam." "What is your Steam ID?" "I don't have one."

"Have you tried running the installer?" "Oh, my copy didn't come with an installer. It's in a folder on a DVD. I just drag it to my machine and then run the game."

For the last five weeks, support requests for the pirated version of the game outnumbered support requests from legitimate purchasers. Last week, the pirates outnumbered the true customers by almost five to one. It takes time and resources to track down solutions to people's problems. I spent seven hours searching for answers to one guy's problem just to find out that when I asked him a question regarding a setting, he was checking on his friend's machine for the "right" answer and then on his machine and if the two didn't match, he was reporting the "right" answer so I wouldn't know he had a pirated version.

I really pride myself on the level of service I have been able to provide to our customers, but it is really disheartening to see the number of people who not only stole our game, but then steal my time in an effort to truly get something for nothing.

Mind you, I'm one guy that's been handling support for what could be called a niche product. Since release, I've spent more time handling customer service than I have handling the responsibilities that I have in my department. If I'm getting overwhelmed by the freeloaders, can you imagine what it's like for other companies with more pervasive products?

Support isn't free. Support personnel have to get trained, get paid, get benefits, etc.

The copies of "SiN Episodes: Emergence" that you buy pay my salary. Retail copies of Windows are more expensive partly because Microsoft has to factor support costs into those sales. More and more companies are moving to console games, not only because they make more money (they do because there's less piracy in the console space), but because they save major bank on support costs.

There are companies that love the PC and will stick with it for richer or poorer, but until we can find a way to better reduce piracy in the PC space, I'm afraid that it's only going to be for poorer.

(Edit 7/24, 6:22pm: Fixed typo. Edit: 10/24, 9:20am: Added sponsored links, tags.)

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Labels: Game Development, Piracy, Rant, SiN Episodes

posted by Michael Russell at 7/22/2006 09:40:00 PM | View blog reactions

Thursday, May 11, 2006

[Piracy] SiN: Ep (Not Work Safe)

[ temper on ]

Evidently, this lame-ass pirate group going by the handle of "PROViSiON" decided to dedicate some hours so that episode one of "SiN Episodes" would be what is known as a "0-day warez release." Fucking smacktard pieces of shit.

The game is $20. $20. All this industry has been hearing from fuckers like this is "Oh, drop the price and we won't pirate because we poor people won't have to." So, we self-fund the game entirely, drop the price to something to a level where we stand a chance of breaking even, and what do you know! They pirate our game anyway!

So if you know any members of this "PROViSiON" group, do me a favor...kick them in the fucking nuts and piss on their face. When they ask why, just say, "Well, normally I have to go to a fetish club and spend $20 to do that to someone, but you walked by and I figured, 'What the hell, I'll do it for free.'"

Assholes.

[ temper off ]

By the way, if anyone who downloads the warez version comes to one of the sites and asks for support and I find out that you warezed the game, just be warned that you haven't seen temper yet.

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Labels: Piracy, Rant, SiN Episodes

posted by Michael Russell at 5/11/2006 07:17:00 PM | 10 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

Rom's Rants

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