He’s talking about “econonic cost”, which already has the normal ROI expectations built-in.

How many new styles of gameplay will never see the light of day simply because new gameplay concepts,
are chained to higher graphical standards?

IMHO the real problem is that graphics advancement eating away at creativity, no longer can you seed
ideas that don’t start off as immediately popular and grow them, you need some sort of watered down game that will reach some kind of critical mass… it’s sad to see modern MMO’s whose “gameplay” is about the computer playing the game for you with you merely navigating and firing off menu commands once in a while.
mass.

Curious; Miyamoto is himself in a technology driven model so what is really failing us to be Miyamoto now? To be like Miyamoto does not demand the transition from technology to creativty. What is required is recognition of creativity in ones company as well as the process of creativty. Unfortunately, creative endeavour continues to be valued at the code level and less so at the design level. Content is excluded from creaivity which is why, although valid to a large extent, content is percieved as as outsource commodity.

With regards to “fair value” for quality … I’m assuming he does not mean quality at a Pirsig level? Quality is too subjective to quantify in monetary terms.

I’m confused. I thought the trick was to increase marginal profit, instead of static as this statement suggests. Then again, GSB provided the human capital for the .com bubble and now the hedge fund bubble, so perhaps this theory works in those cases :) (j/k! have friends from GSB).

The nature of capitalism lends itself to screwing someone else out of wealth and sucking it upward towards the points of power.

How many times have you bought a game and been disappointed? How many games have you purchased for $50 and not even spent 12 hours playing? Gordon’s making an error of ommission here– we are already paying for that quality enjoyment time through the games we DON’T spend 50 hours playing. I’ve spent hundreds of hours playing Counter-Strike or Tony Hawk. But I didn’t spend 5 hours with MechAssault, and that was a highly rated game that I paid full price for. I spent 20 hours on Call of Duty 2 before deleting it from my HDD. I pay my $15/month for WoW, but I only play 5-10 hours a week. How good a deal am I really getting from that?

If you ask me, that’s simply asking the wrong question. A better question is how do you attract the larger market, rather than how do you eek more money out of your current customers. It just reeks of the sort of slimy business practices as seen in downloadable content over Xbox Live, where you pay $15 for a tiny map pack or $5 for a single upgraded graphic. How about treating your customers fairly? Modern consumers, and gamers especially, are a lot less willing to put up with mistreatment than they have in the past. If you give them a good deal, with solid content for a fair price, they will gladly pay. Otherwise, you’re just courting piracy– the natural response to being screwed by a business whose services you nonetheless desire.

If there was an easy way to cheat cell phone companies, there’s not a one of them that could stay in operation. Why? Because they screw their customers up one side and down the other. It’s bad business practice held in place by oligopoly power, just like sweatshopping your game developers is bad business practice.