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The Lawbringer: What World of Warcraft can learn from other microtransaction models, part 1
Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Mathew McCurley takes you through the world running parallel to the games we love and enjoy, full of rules, regulations, pitfalls and traps. How about you hang out with us as we discuss some of the more esoteric aspects of the games we love to play? Microtransactions are here to stay. We were wary and scared in the beginning -- it was a brave new world, having the gall to ask consumers for a couple of bucks for horse armor. DLC (downloadable content) and microtransactions evolved over time to include better customization, new missions and levels, convenience purchases, and more. The industry began to shape itself around the growing need for better revenue models, as well as conforming to the needs and wants of players while remaining (hopefully) pure in motive. With the huge success of the free-to-play model in the United States and Europe, a feat which many said was not going to go over too well outside of the Asian markets, paying for your game over time instead of up front has become a staple, an afterthought, to gamers. World of Warcraft isn't going true free-to-play any time soon, of course. The subscription model works for WoW in a fairly unique way. The number of global subscriptions for WoW make up such a huge, defined income that removing that income from the table in favor of the "5-percenters," the people who presumably pay for items in-game, would be almost criminal in terms of corporate mismanagement -- unless, of course, you could make more money on those 5-percenters than you do on 11.4 million monthly subscriptions, which seems like a hefty move to make.
Robotic AUR desk lamp doubles as collaborative lighting assistant
If you've just not been in the DIY spirit of late, and would rather your lamp console you than just brighten up your surroundings, the AUR desk lamp should do the trick. Concocted as part of a Ph.D thesis on human-robot fluency and nonverbal behavior, the robotic desk lamp "serves as a non-anthropomorphic robotic platform," and was conceived around a 5-DoF robotic arm to "evoke a personal relationship with the human partner without resorting to human-like features." The so-called objective lamp seeks to "explore the relationship that can be maintained through abstract gestures and nonverbal behavior alone," and is animated using a "custom pipeline enabling the dynamic control of behaviors authored in a 3D animation system." A lot of fancy phrasing, we know, so click on through to catch it on video and let things sink in.[Via Pasta and Vinegar]
