Parallax Abstraction

Unbelieveable how many people are praising Microsoft for "taking care of their customers." Let me tell you all something for your own good: They aren't doing this to be good people, they are doing it to avoid a lawsuit and the bad PR that comes with it. They pushed the 360 out the door too early with a poor hardware design and QA plan and the initial run was bad. Rather than talk about how that should never have happened and how they only now acknowledged the problem (almost a year later), people are prising them (and bashing other companies for no relevant reason) for "taking care of their customers." Anyone remember when Sony started offer free out-of-warranty repairs for PS2 disc read issues? You know why they did that? Because a lawsuit was filed and they offered that as part of a settlement. Microsoft isn't stupid, they know that if they take care of this now, they can avoid a lawsuit (which would almost certainly be won and would come with a lot of press) and look like the good guys when in fact, many people paid for a faulty $400 device and then got jerked around by them until now. For the record too, I own a 360 (purchased recently, but still replaced twice now, ask someone about what it's like to get your Live Arcade games back when you have multiple profiles) and when it works, I love the system to death. But anyone who takes an objective, brand agnostic look at this will see that Microsoft isn't doing this for your benefit, they are doing it for their's. If there was no threat they would get sued over it, this would never have happened. And no, Sony would have been no different, neither would have anyone else. Companies exist first and foremost to make money, not to please their customers at any cost.

I'm surprised no one here has yet mentioned that almost all PopCap Games titles (many of which are on Xbox Live Arcade) are blatant plagiarism of other titles from the past (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuma_(game)#Plagiarism_Controversy). I wonder how Bizarre feels knowing that while they shut down a free, open source project that is doing them no proveable harm (the majority of GW sales were before Grid Wars was released), the same service that hosts them also hosts many for-profit ripoffs.

The problem with the Infogrames-owned Atari is like much like the Atari of the past, they can't market their way out of a wet paper bag. They actually released several good titles last year (such as Act of War and Indigo Prophecy, the latter of which was almost entirely funded by the developer), but they didn't sell because nobody knew about them. They seem to too-often rely on good games selling themselves and as much as that should be the case, it isn't. If they don't put some serious marketing behind the titles they hope will save them (such as D&D Online and Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure), they aren't going to save them. The Atari name as fondly as it is remembered by many seems to have had a curse for those they have held it. I always though Infogrames was making a mistake by using it. I hope they can come out of this though as more competition, not less is what this industry needs.