Hostile

I like the "don't break the chain" method as well. I actually designed a calendar that displays the whole year at a glance. Mine is printed out and placed on a wall that I will see every day. I use it for the "don't break the chain" idea, but it is also really good at reminding me how short a year is. Really drives home the idea that every day is important.

This method makes getting the shell off easy as well.

Edit: It's stated in the article that this method makes getting the shell off really easy. Just to be clear, I chose this method primarily for that reason, but it also requires a minimum amount of babysitting and mental RAM.

Steam doesn't rent games, which is what I believe qwikster intends to do. It's gamefly they would be competing with. If I were gamefly, I'd be very worried right now.

Polish is nice to have, sure, but if nobody wants to actually play the delivered experience, all the polish in the world won't save it. Nobody should buy a game just because it's polished. While I'd prefer polish on all my games, I'll take an unpolished dwarf fortress over a polished forgettable uncompelling game any day of the week).

As a side note, I'm not sure what rule I've broken to get downvoted. I pointed out that there could be more to this story, and that we don't have solid data on how many trial downloads there were (which is a MUCH better indicator than sales is regarding "marketing" in this case).

For those unfamiliar with XBLA, just about everyone downloads a trial first (every game on XBLA is required to have a free trial, so you'd have to be pretty impulsive to skip it completely), and then you can buy the game from within the trial version's interface.

If the point of the comments here on HN is to add to the discussion, I'm not really sure what I did to justify a downvote. I'm just getting started commenting here and don't really have karma to spare. I really try hard to be a positive member of the site, so If somebody sees this and can point out what I can avoid doing in the future, that'd be appreciated.

I tried the game and passed on it when it was released. I can't speak for the general public, but it was not a failure of marketing for me. It just wasn't enough to get me to spend money on it. It was polished, and not bad, just... sort of forgettable and average. It would be a big assumption for me to assume that my experiences are more consistent with what happened to the game in reality, but the article doesn't tell us how many trial downloads went along with the poor sales either.

My comment is a reply to chocopuff, not you.

To my knowledge Google has never used a patent offensively.

I assume that your comment is referencing things like the recent nortel patents with Apple and Microsoft.

Well, you can't even remotely say that those companies haven't used patents offensively.

I really don't think it's hypocrisy until Google starts behaving like Apple and Microsoft when it comes to patents.

Do you really not believe there to be a difference?

Writing a launcher takes work. I don't think it's ever strange to expect payment in return. Just because Google wrote a launcher at some point in the past doesn't mean that all future programmer's work in that area should be released for free.

I happen to think this particular launcher is a gimmick, but it's clear that they put work into it and that it's very different than what Google ships.

Indeed it does. I never called you wrong, just asked where you got your info. I'm in now, so I guess it doesn't matter any more.