Today on Rush Limbaugh's show, Rush referred indirectly to yesterday's article about the Instapundit vs. Rush fallout. From listening to the show, Rush clearly seems to think that conservatives, such as myself, are being naive or as he put it, should "expand their horizons" on what the repercussions of a Democratic victory in November would be. Considerable time was spent on the premise that votes shouldn't be used to "teach a lesson". Or more to the point, that a vote really can't...
Recently Glenn Reynolds, webmaster of Instapundit.com, the world's most popular blog site and a conservative made the argument that if Republicans lose, it's because they deserved it. Rush Limbaugh today struck back with the charge of "Do we deserve to have our taxes raised? Do we deserve a cut and run policy in Iraq? Do we deserve to have endless congressional investigations?" The argument is strong but I think overlooks one thing -- we do have a Republican President right? Our taxes ar...
When the November beta of Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar hits it'll be pretty apparent that it would have not been a problem to maintain the original November release date of the expansion pack had we kept the original feature set. So the question is, why add more features? The simplest answer is that Stardock is privately owned. There really isn't a good business justification. Believe me, we've tried to come up with a plausible marketing or publishing reason to add more feature...
I don't like negative reviews of things I make. And no matter how far into the fetal position they put me, there's really nothing that can be done except hope that your product or service is good enough that, on the balance, users and reviewers will respond favorably. The reviews on Galactic Civilizations II have been very positive overall. But we also got our share of reviews that I either wasn't happy with or felt were unfair. But what can one really do? In my case, if I felt a ...
A couple of years ago when I started really getting into blogging I reached a fork in the road. My blog writings were starting to really get out there and bring a lot of traffic to my blog (back then Joeuser.com was just my site). The Alexa rankings help speak to that: So at its height, JoeUser.com which was just my site was nearing the top 10,000 blog sites total. I got a lot of traffic because I was blogging every day on political issues of all kind. That is the key to b...
I've read some articles recently by digital distribution advocates that think that retail is no longer necessary for PC games. I find that notion ludicrious. Any MAJOR title of note today needs to be at retail. A lot of people won't buy games digitally. An expansion pack is one thing. But any major title looking to become remotely mainstream still needs to be at Best Buy or EB and GameStop. Perhaps someday that won't be the case but as long as people can buy their games at their l...
Michael Scheuer, the CIA operative who was in charge of the Bin Laden unit was interviewed this week and was out-right emotional in his assertion that contrary to Bill Clinton's claims on Fox News last week, Clinton did have plenty of opportunities -- 10 actionable ones to be exact -- to kill Bin Laden but chose not to. In each case, there was a plausible explaination (such as not wanting to risk damaging a Mosque). But Clinton strenuously argued that he had done "everything in his powe...
The article I link to below is written by a historian who writes far more eloquently than I can about why conspiracy theories in general and the 9/11 "inside job" conspiracy in particular are annoying to him. It's definitely worth the read.
When you're a game developer, life is easy. Make customers happy. That's pretty much the only thing you have control over. Few (very few) developers are also their own publishers. And publishers have a very different set of criteria -- making sure the retailers are happy too which may involve contradictory approaches. Stardock has one thing going for it that most publishers don't -- a mature and popular digital distribution network ( TotalGaming.net on the game side). This has helped u...
In the course of Stardock becoming a publisher we've learned a lot about the industry. Here's the dirty little secret -- game publishing is a business. A mature business. One whose models are well understood. If I make game Wizbang 1, I can't realistically release Wizbang 2 for at least 36 months. So what you get is this formula (and after reading this, take a look out there at other games). WizBang 1 released. IF WizBang 1 is BUGGY THEN release WizBang Complete 6 months...
I've seen some articles on the net usually from writers on the left-side of the political spectrum argue about how the average American isn't doing any better than they were 30 or so years ago. According to the consumer price index (CPI), the median household income is only 4% higher today. I've seen people try to make the case that our generation is the first generation that isn't going to be living better than their parent's generation. So let's be real clear about that statement -...
There's a lot left to do in Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar. But most of the core new features are implemented, they're just buggy. VERY buggy. And there's little AI yet to take advantage of it and there's a lot of polish missing and UI crumminess and tons of other things. Today I worked on some of the mega events. Coding a mega-event = Easy. Testing a mega event = Hard. They're a pain to make them balanced and feel right. Take for example the Dread Lords event. In Dark ...
In the sandbox mode of the game, the alignments in DA will be: Good: Altarian Resistance Torian Confederation Iconian Refuge The Krynn Neutral: Terran Alliance Arcean Empire The Thalan Drath Remnants Evil: Drengin Empire Korath Empire The Yor The Korx For the first time since the original Galactic Civilizations, good, evil, and neutral will be balanced.
Stardock has updated its forums to support a new kind of view -- summary view. Now when you go to the forums, you will see at the top right, just under the search bar, a "Forum summary" link. Pressing this will display the forums in a different way -- it will display the last 5 active posts in each primary category in the forum. This view will allow users who are interested in browsing the forums as a whole a way to keep up to date easier with what's going on. Subsequent u...