Author: Brian Carnell

The Price of An Economics Lesson

Ars Technica has a silly rant about the cost of computer games.

People often write me with their worries about the state of the gaming industry. No topic is more prevalent than how expensive the hobby has become over the last decade. Jason D. wrote to me last week and had this to say:

“Can you post an article about the INSANE pricing of games lately. I went to the local EB here and found out the selling price with tax for Warcraft 3 and NeverWinter Nights was a McDonalds meal short of a $100CDN! That is bloody insane! I can buy 4-5 DVD’s of 90 million dollar budgeted movies for that price! I have written a few of the offending parties with no reply if you can imagine. Game companies wonder why piracy is rampant well it’s because a game is not worth for the average Joe a days worth of after tax pay. Thanks in advance if you can publicly respond to this.” – Jason D.

I thought his point about a $90 billion movie costing $25 was an interesting analogy.

No, it’s a stupid point. How many movies spend 4-5 years in filming? How many movieslast 40 or 60 hours? Good computer games are a great value — piracy is rampant because so many gamers are cheap bastards.

What we have to remember is that a movie keeps making profit after the box office. Merchandise from baseball caps to action figures and DVD rentals help to keep the price of purchasing the movie down. When a game has passed its peak, it heads to the bargain bin and then eventually into gaming history, with a few exceptions like Starcraft or RollerCoaster Tycoon. So developers and publishers need to score big profits off early sales numbers.

Nope, sorry, try again. Games are priced where they are because gamers will pay high prices. Jesus, these geeks can go on at length about watercooling processors but have never even heard of something as basic as a demand curve or marginal pricing?

On the other hand, how many people would pay $60 to sit in a movie theater and watch a two-hour film? How many would pay $60 to buy the DVD for a two-hour film? Not many, I suspect, and the market price bears that out. If anything, the $25 price for a new release DVD suggests that computer games might be under-priced (the difference being that the total consumer base for a computer game is far lower than for a DVD or movie release — if the audiences were similar in size, I suspect that computer game prices would be similar to those of DVDs).

The idea of piracy being rampant because games are expensive is a two-sided affair. Prices are bolstered to offset losses from piracy, so it comes down to this: Piracy will become more prevalent as prices rise, but as piracy becomes more prevalent, prices will rise…ad infinitum.

I don’t buy this argument for a second. If piracy is so rampant, how come millions of people ponied up to buy The Sims and Diablo II when they could have just pirated the games?

I suspect piracy plays a very limited role in denying sales to computer companies. Instead, pirates are likely those people who would only buy a game at say $20. If a game company optimizes its revenues by pricing at $65, then the person who would have bought the game at $20 but pirates it at $65 isn’t really a lost sale at all.

Not that the company wouldn’t prefer to sell to that consumer at $20 rather than see him pirate a copy, but the constant technological change makes it difficult to price discriminate to capture that customer.

With a DVD, after a couple years the manufacturer can lower the price to maximize revenues. With a computer game, two years later the game is so dated that even drastic price cuts seem unable to motivate people to buy (in many ways, the computer game market is similar to the music industry in that today’s hot thing dates very quickly).

Celestia

Celestia is the successor to the excellent OpenUniverse program.

Celestia bills itself as,

a free real-time space simulation that lets you experience our universe in three dimensions. Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn’t confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.

All from the comfort of your desktop.

Why Bother Blogging?

Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article for O’Reilly.Net on why he blogs which pretty much mirrors my own reasons — as a knowledge management tool to keep track of things he runs across. Doctorow writes,

Blogging gave my knowledge-grazing direction and reward. Writing a blog entry about a useful link and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. . . .

Being deprived of my blog right now would be akin to suffering extensive brain-damage. Huge swaths of acquired knowledge would simply vanish. Just as my TiVO frees me from having to watch boring television by watching it for me, my blog frees me up from having to remember the minutiae of my life, storing it for me in handy and contextual form.

Some writers talk about/recommend keeping a journal on topics of special interest. I could never stand doing this, although it is indeed useful. But a weblog makes it easy to do this as well as — at least in my case — find patterns, make connections and (most importantly) quickly find that article that really impressed me two years ago.

This is what I think most of the professional journalists who have criticized weblogging fail to understand. Newspapers and magazine are great. I still read plenty of dead tree publications. But a weblog allows me to link disparate news stories together over a long time period.

Professional media criticism of how non-journalists uses the Internet to communicate is a constantly shifting ground that seems more opportunistic than principled. The first wave of criticism was that people were wasting their time on the Internet with trivial things like porn, games and Mahir fansites. The second wave of criticism was that, okay, people were talking about politics, religion, etc., but they were insulating themselves from any view that didn’t disagree with their own. The third wave of criticism wonders who exactly these webloggers think they are to be reading dozens of different news outlets and comparing, contrasting and criticizing the coverage.

Some of these folks seem to be holding on to their profession as special in much the same way that religious figures claim exclusive access to God. I have a lot of appreciation for friends who are editors and journalists and being an excellent journalist/editor is a lot more work than being a good blogger. But, on the other hand, it is not exactly rocket science either.

The biggest problem I have with webloggers is a tendency to be overly-credulous, but journalists are hardly immune from that as any number of high-profiled journalistic hoaxes attest to (anyone remember Janet Cooke?)

Iceland, Norway Resume Trade in Whale Meat

In 1988 Norway ended its export of whale meat with a final shipment to Japan. Fourteen years later, Norway is preparing to resume the international trade in whale meat with a 10 ton shipment of meat and blubber from minke whales destined for Iceland.

International trade in minke whale meat is banned by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, but Iceland, Norway and Japan hold reservations on that designation and claim that decision is based on politics rather than science and apparently intend to defy the ban.

Norway is also apparently in negotiations with Japan to resume whale meat shipments. Like Iceland and Norway, Japan maintains the ban on the trade in minke whale meat is politically motivated.

Sources:

Iceland, Norway Resume International Whale Meat Trade. High North News, June 21, 2002.

Whale’s on menu. The Sunday Times, June 23, 2002.

Man Arrested for Violent Actions at Geese Protest

Animal rights activists have been out in force recently protesting efforts by federal wildlife officials to round up and euthanize geese in Seattle as part of an annual cull to control the population. Officials last week arrested a 55-year-old Seattle man after he allegedly tried to cause an accident with a U.S. Department of Agriculture truck.

Witnesses told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that the man was driving an older Toyota and had been pulling in front of USDA trucks and slamming his breaks. The third time he tried this stunt, he hit a truck driven by a 45-year old federal wildlife official who was taken to a hospital and treated for neck and back injuries. The man was released the same day.

Although the paper did not disclose the man’s name, it quoted a member of the University Washington Chapter of the Northwest Animal Network as saying that the man was known for participation in animal rights protests and had organized “geese patrols” in an effort to disrupt the USDA cull efforts.

Mike Linnell, assistant state director for the USDA, told the Post-Intelligencer,

Everybody’s free to voice their opinion, but when they start running into us . . . There was a deliberate attempt to cause an accident. Someone could have very easily been injured or killed.

. . .

Our people are scared. This isn’t the first time it’s happened.

Animal rights compassion on display in Seattle.

Source:

Protests against killing of geese turn violent. Hector Castro, Seattle Post-Intelligencer Report, June 22, 2002.

Jeff Nelson vs. Robert Cohen: A Battle of Wits Between Disarmed Opponents

A few months ago Jeff Nelson of VegSource.Com and Robert Cohen, the anti-dairy activist who calls himself the Not Milk Man, had a public falling out which led Nelson to abruptly cease hosting Cohen’s web site. This month VegSource traded barbs online over who was more dishonest/deceitful. The answer, of course, is both of them.

Nelson tries to sell visitors to his site a bill of goods as slick and deceitful as any nonsense put out by Cohen. According to an essay posted to the VegSource.Com web site, Beware of Robert Cohen aka the NotMilk Man, Nelson and company have long knew that Cohen was full of it and have a duty to warn people away from Cohen,

No matter what reason brings a person to vegetarianism, ethics play a role. We do it because it’s the right thing to do for our health, our environment, or the animals we use for food.

. . .

Honesty and integrity — a respect for truth — has motivated numerous top vegetarian and vegan experts, scientists, MDs, authors and activists to arrive at the same conclusion: Robert Cohen is a fraud.

Cohen, who sometimes calls himself the “notmilk man,” is abusive and dishonest. He also has a propensity for fabricating scientific data which has time and again been shown to be not only worthless, but potentially dangerous.

. . .

VegSource has run numerous articles over time documenting Cohen’s unscrupulous excesses.

Oh yeah, the VegSource crowd have been really diligent about Cohen.

Jeff Nelson was so concerned about Cohen’s lies, that until February 2002, VegSource hosted Cohen’s web site, NotMilk.Com.

Nelson knew all along that Cohen was a fraud which is why Nelson invited to VegSource.Com’s Sept. 2001 E-Vent. Nelson addressed that E-Vent on Sept. 28, 2001 mentioning the speakers who would be featured, including this bit about Cohen,

Robert Cohen? WeÂ’ve got your case of White Wave Chocolate Silk out in the van. It was delivered this morning by a group of slaves. But seriously, weÂ’re thrilled to have Robert here, this is the first time IÂ’ve ever met him in person, and IÂ’m really looking forward to his talk tomorrow.

Nelson was just thrilled to have Cohen there.

Of course, Nelson has a newfound integrity and truth telling, so what was the first thing VegSource did after the falling out with Cohen? Why, with the sort of integrity we’ve come to expect from the animal rights movement, VegSource removed from its web site incriminating evidence of its prior support for Cohen.

This VegSource.Com web page is a full of photos from that 2001 E-vent at which Cohen was a speaker. The odd thing is if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, the last image is that of John Robbins. That’s odd, because back when it was first created, the page ended with three pictures of Robert Cohen speaking along with complimentary text.

You can see for yourself the Google cached version of the page, but in case that goes away, here is how the page looked earlier this year:


Batting in the
clean-up position was the NotMilkMan himself — Robert Cohen.

Jeff’s mom described
Rob as a “great speaker” — and Jeff’s mom is always right!

Said Jeff and Sabrina: “I think Rob Cohen just got us off dairy!”
🙂

I’m surprised Jeff and Sabrina let Jeff’s mom (not to mention others in attendance) get taken in by such a fraud. And if they knew Cohen was prone to citing faulty studies, distorting evidence and, apparently, outright lying, why did they find his talk so convincing?

The issue here is not whether or not Cohen was a fraud — that was obvious years ago to anyone who cared to actually look at the nonsense he was spewing. The problem with Cohen was that his nonsense was suddenly turned against people within the animal rights movement.

For example, on March 26, 2002, Nelson wrote an article about what he thinks is Cohen’s unfair attacks on White Wave, which makes Silk soy milk. Nelson claims that,

This charge is only the most recent in a long line of failed attempts by Cohen to damage White Wave. We’ve already responded to some of Cohen’s earlier attacks on White Wave with the article, “Does Silk Bilk?” At the time I wrote that article (September of 2001) and when I spoke to Cohen before publishing it, he told me he was making it his personal mission to try to “destroy” White Wave. He said the company had not been personally respectful to him. When I pointed out that he had made a number of unfair and untrue statements in his articles on White Wave, he told me he didn’t care whether his criticisms of the company were accurate or not, because any attack was justified because they were a “bad company.”

But look at the kid glove treatment Cohen got for unjustified attacks on White Wave:

1. Nelson’s September 2001 article does not even mention Robert Cohen by name.

2. Nelson’s article was written on Sept. 18, 2001 — more than a week before VegSource.Com had Cohen speak and sang his praises.

Ah, integrity at work.

Although Nelson apparently wants to recast VegSource.Com as willing to expose falsehoods within the animal rights movement, in fact VegSource.Com has actively nurtured a “hear no evil” policy in its discussion boards. VegSource.Com now claims that,

We have people who come onto our discussion board from time to time and state confidently that vegetarianism is a religion (we correct them).

In fact what VegSource.Com routinely done is delete posts and ban users of anyone who criticizes the animal rights movement, regardless of merit. Last June, for example, I wrote an article pointing out that VegSource.Com was using a faked photograph to illustrate a medical research story. I posted the URL on the VegSource.Com discussion group. Not only was all of the discussion about this deleted, but the discussion group was configured to reject any articles that linked to AnimalRights.Net (see VegSource “Censorship”).

VegSource.Com extolling its own integrity is a bit like Cohen recommending a good ice cream store.

As for Cohen, what can I say about Cohen. The guy is a nut case. But he’s a nut case who the animal rights movement welcomed into the fold for years despite his blatant distortions and inaccuracies. That it took Nelson until February 2002 to criticize Cohen says volumes about the alleged integrity of the animal rights movement.

Sources:

Beware of Robert Cohen aka the NotMilkMan. VegSource.Com, June 20, 2002.

The Notmilk Newsletter. Robert Cohen, June 22, 2002.