![]() ![]() Price points out that if we focus on enabling more useful services (the kind that Lowery dumps on) there's a ton of money to be made (more than ever before). Lefsetz points out that we should focus on making great music and the other things will start to sort themselves out. Let's focus on the reality of the models that are working and the opportunities to enable more great new things. And when the trendlines converge, they get run over.ĭavid Lowery can ask for a pony all he wants, but it doesn't change the reality. But they miss the trendlines for the snapshot. The innovator's dilemma teaches us that the old guard always mocks the new players for being too small or not paying enough. There's a huge and growing opportunity here, and people who look at the snapshot view rather than the trends are missing the big picture. Go talk to Jeff Price, a guy who knows this stuff better than just about anyone, and let him explain just how the streaming world is developing. The complaints of low Spotify payouts are a mirage. Because you like the convenience of having all your music at your fingertips all the time. Facebook stock gets hammered because of its inadequate mobile strategy and you’re not smart enough to see the connection to music? You can’t get Spotify and its brethren on your handset without paying. You get hooked, and then you pay for higher quality on your mobile. It doesn’t pay to steal if you can listen instantly on Spotify and its ilk.Īnd please stop bitching about the low payouts… That’s like saying Apple should liquidate and give the proceeds back to its stockholders, which is what Michael Dell so famously said in the nineties. And you don’t fight piracy with laws, but economic solutions. To be fighting file-sharing is akin to protesting dot matrix printers. What doesn't work is sitting around and pining for the old days or lecturing people on a "morality" that they clearly don't agree with (and its even worse when you try to make them guilty for using services they find useful). ![]() There are amazing new business models that work. But that does not mean they should be paid the same way they used to be While we’re at it, why don’t we save the printers’ jobs too. As Bob Lefsetz eloquently said in response to Lowery: But my focus is on what's working in today's market, not pining for the way things used to be. Look, I spend an inordinate amount of time looking at new business models for content, because I think it's important to support culture. and suddenly Lowery claims to have made a "moral" argument that we should all go back to paying for music in a world where many people don't see how that makes sense. Toss in some righteous indignation that some tech companies have figured out ways to provide useful services that people want to buy, a confusion over correlation and causation. But to Lowery, that appears to be a huge sin, because the way a few musicians made money in the past was to sell music, and thus, forever must it be the same. He exaggerates what Emily actually said, and paints her as some massive pirate, despite the fact that she doesn't use file sharing networks and the gist of her blog post at NPR was basically that she and her generation just don't see the point of "owning" music any more since it's so widely available. His letter to Emily is both right and wrong. It's "worse" for some people and better for others, but there's one thing that's not debatable: it's not going away. Lowery, as we've discussed before, has some nonsensical ideas about the strawman he thinks is "the new music business model" which is somehow worse than "the old music business model." He's both right and wrong. I'm kind of amazed at how many people have been sending over, tweeting or submitting David Lowery's "Letter to Emily White at NPR All Songs Considered." Everyone seems to think there's something worth commenting on there, but I can't find it, frankly.
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![]() With Half-Life 2, we finally depart the confines of Black Mesa. With the release of Half-Life 2, they continued the story of Gordon Freeman and introduced more game-changing innovations. Platforms: Windows, Xbox, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, macOS, Linux, Android Granted, it is a decent gameplay experience in its own right, though it doesn’t quite echo the combat and story-heavy atmosphere that made Half-Life stand out. In that case, the player can switch between the two characters to solve puzzles, and the character not being controlled by the player will instead be controlled by AI.ĭecay was released only for the PlayStation 2, so it was not as popular as earlier expansions. However, though it may have been designed to be played in split-screen with two players, it can still be played in single-player. Naturally, the game plays like the original Half-Life, but with an added accent on co-op play. Once again, the game takes place in Black Mesa, only this time, we didn’t get a new protagonist, we got two.ĭecay was envisioned as a cooperative multiplayer experience, putting the player in the shoes of two Black Mesa scientists: Colette Green and Gina Cross. The third and final Half-Life expansion, Decay, was an exciting entry in the franchise’s history. Half-Life was originally released for Windows in 1998, it was ported to the PlayStation 2 in 2001, and it was also brought to macOS and Linux in 2013. All of this comes together to form a very memorable gaming experience that holds up rather well even today. The game features many enemies, aliens and humans alike, and it features some platforming and puzzles as well. ![]() ![]() After an experiment goes wrong and the Black Mesa Research Facility is turned into a nightmare flooded with alien lifeforms, it’s up to Gordon to set things straight, which he does the classic FPS way - with an arsenal of big guns. The game put the player in the shoes of Gordon Freeman, the silent protagonist whom the player controls through the wholeness of the first game and most of the series. Sure, it may seem like nothing special in retrospect, but it truly stood out at the time since it featured great-looking 3D environments and placed a greater accent on storytelling than most FPS games of that time. Platforms: Windows, PlayStation 2, Linux, macOSĭeveloped by Valve and released in 1998, the original Half-Life was quite something. |
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