Why I hate the PS4 presentation.

In regards to the PS4, I wouldn't be hatin' if they actually showed something worth being excited about. Videos of games? Vague statements of intent using buzzwords and memes?

FUCK OFF!

Imagine if BMW did this for the launch of their latest electric car - Just a moving road, and some power poles to reinforce the notion of "electricity", but not show the car, not show the interior, not show anything at all about the car. It would quite rightly be a joke.

This announcement was just a cynical ploy to build buzz on social media, so some fuckwit in Marketing could say "we've got a million people hashtagging about #PS4" and justify his ridiculously huge salary.

From this (and all the other bullshit like Instagram's change in TOC going on) it's clear companies no longer care about providing information and solid products to consumers - as long as your flashy presentation gets 1 billion page views, that's doing your job as providing a product to the consumer.

We have a right, no, a duty, to call companies out on this kind of bullshit.

There is no doubt I will buy a next-gen console. But as a consumer I want to know
- How much it will cost.
- When will it be available.
- Will it run my old games and media content.
- Will it run on my current TV.
- Will it run on my current internet connection.
- What games will be available for launch.

If you don't or won't tell me these things, then don't tell me anything else about the fucking thing, because everything else is irrelevant.

And don't spend millions of dollars trying to tell me about these irrelevant things when those millions of dollars can be going towards keeping the cost of the damn thing down!

Piracy and Advertising

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, as I'm downloading a lot of TV shows because Australian TV sucks. When they DO show new content that isn't "reality" shit, they'll fuck up the programming with too many adverts and worse, delay or cut the show due to sports or reality shows!

Now, I would quite happily watch HULU with all it's advertising and such, but it's blocked here. And I'd buy from iTunes if the shows were able to be viewed on my PS3. I'd pay for them on my PS3 or Xbox, but again, the service is blocked.

But one of the biggest arguments against downloading TV shows is the loss of advertising revenue networks face.

But hang on a second.

An average person in the US will see between 600-625 adverts (potential exposures as they call them) per day from all media sources including radio, billboards and the like, with about 400 coming from TV over the 4 hour TV watching average [src] . I'm fairly certain it's similar in Australia.

That means I've seen over 4 million adverts in my life time (assuming I watched an average of 4 hours of TV since I was allowed to watch TV at age 5).

Haven't I paid enough for this content already?

Isn't it enough when people ask me what I'd like to drink at a restaurant I say "coke" without thinking*? Or I know there's a glass and a half of full cream dairy milk in cadburys? Or that Beans Means Heinz?


*this is assuming it's a "dry" restaurant... otherwise it's "beer".