Jack

Bandai tips a sword to the Samurai inspiration of the Star Wars films with this awesome Samurai Darth Vader figure that recently debued at the Tokyo Toy Show.

The figure, designed by Takayuki Takeya, stands 7.8 inches high and has been dubbed the “Movie Realization Samurai General Darth Vader”. It currently has a Winter 2014 release, but pricing is still TBA.

Hit the jump for more pictures and try not to drool on the keyboard.

Photo: AmiAmi

Photo: HobbySearch

Photo: Kochiya29

(IT Media via Kotaku)

Here’s an item from the Guardian:

Drawing on IMF figures published last week, the graph compares what will happen to government spending in Britain up to 2017 with the outlook for Germany and the US. And what it shows is that the UK will plunge from public spending on a par with Germany in 2009, to spending less than the US by 2017. Had France, Sweden or Canada been included on this graph, the UK would still come bottom. If George Osborne gets his way, within the next five years, Britain will have a smaller public sector than any other major developed nation.

Fan or critic, nearly everyone now agrees that this government wants to shrink the state, but very few take on board what that means. This graph shows just how radical those ministerial plans are. Particularly striking is the fact that Britain will end up spending less as a proportion of its national income than even the US, the international byword for a decrepit public sector.

Here is the IMF data.

Country   G/GDP (2013, IMF)

Australia    35.33%

Canada    41.66%

New Zealand   32.76%

Switzerland  33.44%

UK   44.43%

US  40.47%

Asia:

Hong Kong   18.69%

Japan   40.56%

Singapore   17.88%

South Korea  20.80%

Taiwan  21.05%

Why stop at 40%.  Why not shoot for 33% to 35%, and end up with the even more “decrepit” public services of Australia and Switzerland?

Seriously, the idea that “decrepit” public services are a simple function of government spending as a share of GDP is beyond absurd. Obviously it may play some role, but there is much more involved.  Here is some data for Britain and Singapore, the country with the lowest government spending:

Country    Life expectancy  PISA scores    Infrastructure quality

Britain      80.42 years              1507                         5.3

US             79.56  years             1476                          5.8

Singapore   84.38 years           1666                          6.6

So the Britain comes in about the same as the US and far below Singapore, which spends 17.88% of GDP.  Do I think these are good ways of comparing public services?  Of course not, I’m not stupid.  Rather I provide them because they are the sorts of metrics that others use. Did I cherry pick?  In life expectancy the top 4 countries (excluding tiny places with less than 1 million) are Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong and Switzerland, all of which spend less than Britain.  Singapore is 3rd in the world in infrastructure, trailing small government Hong Kong and Switzerland.  Hong Kong is number 2 in Pisa scores, and Switzerland also scores well above the UK.  Asian countries might do well in life expectancy due to racial/diet factors (Asians live longer than whites even in America.)  But what about Denmark, where life expectancy is only 79.09.  Are we to assume they have even more “decrepit public services” than the US?

Of course this is comparing apples and oranges to some extent; many of the successful countries are small.  But the UK is much smaller than the US.  Closer in population to Canada or Australia.  Yet both of those countries get by with much lower government spending than the UK, without “decrepit public services.”  The US is a sort of bogeyman used by non-Americans on the left to scare voters into supporting bloated government sectors.

Some criticize conservatives for pointing to Singapore, a (supposedly) dictatorial regime.  (It’s not really, but let’s accept that for the sake of argument.)  The Asian data suggests the small government sector there has little to do with a lack of democracy—both Taiwan and Korea also have small government.  And of course there is no country in the world that is more democratic than Switzerland, which spends far less than even the US.  So I don’t buy the “voters prefer big government” argument made by liberals who don’t understand that poll results do NOT measure “public opinion,” because there is no such thing as public opinion.  I can get anywhere from 20% to 60% in Gov/GDP preferences depending on how I word a poll question.  Whenever you come across a blogger saying “the voters will vote GOP but actually agree with the Dems of the issues,” just change channels, you are wasting your time reading that stuff.

America does need better public services, but as the New York case shows higher taxes are not the answer.  Rather we need to lower taxes, and then spend the money more wisely.  Britain should do the same.  I believe 20% of GDP is enough in principle, but given the constraints of politics the UK might want to shoot for a less ambitious target, say the 33% to 35% you see in places like Switzerland and Australia.  Unfortunately, even that number is probably out of reach.

The main focus on Britain should be spending their funds more wisely.

PS.  How about developing countries?  Brazil has a GDP per person of $10,773 ($12,528 PPP).  Costa Rica has a GDP/person of $10,166 ($12,874 PPP).  Pretty similar.  But Brazil has public spending of 39.1% of GDP whereas Costa Rica only spends 18.2%.  So Costa Rica presumably has lousy public services.  Yet it somehow achieves a Human Development Index rating of .773, well above Brazil’s .730. There are “anomalies” all over the map.  It’s not about money; it’s about competence.

PPS.  I’ve added the excellent Britmouse to my blogroll, as well as Giles Wilkes, who also has some sympathy for market monetarism (although he disagrees with me on the optimal size of the UK government.)  At Marcus Nunes’ blog, Mark Sadowski has a very good guest post on Simon Wren-Lewis’s views on fiscal austerity.  Benjamin Cole also does good stuff over there.  Philip Greenspun has an amusing post on the view that we work so hard because we are poor:

At the same time, it does seem odd that people work so hard. My parents were Harvard graduates and my father had a great job with the Federal Trade Commission. The five of us shared a 1500 square foot house in Bethesda, Maryland with a black and white TV. My dad rode the Metrobus to work. Mom drove a dark green 1970 Chevrolet station wagon with black vinyl seats and no air-conditioning that broke down on the New Jersey turnpike every few trips to see the cousins. Putting a kid wearing shorts into the car on an August afternoon was bona fide child abuse that could result in first degree leg burns. (Note to youngsters reading this blog: the car did not break down due to advanced age; even fairly new cars in the old days were not as reliable as a 12-year-old Honda Accord would be today.) We attended public school and read books from the library. Our cavities were filled by a dentist who didn’t use novocaine for pediatric patients because it was too expensive and time-consuming. Kids in our (prosperous) neighborhood generally took between 0 and 2 commercial airline flights through high school graduation. We all shared a rotary-dial telephone. I don’t remember any family discussions over why my Dad didn’t take a second job or my Mom a full-time job so that we could have fancier stuff, a bigger house, or elaborate vacations like the lobbyists took their families on (even then lobbying the government was a great way to make money for all concerned!).

My dentist didn’t use novocaine either.  That’s what made me a utilitarian.

HT:  Jim Ancona

Every time I visit New York I think about John Kenneth Galbraith's famous remark about American private affluence and public squalor. There is impressive new residential construction. Townhouses in areas like Brooklyn are being fixed up. But the subway system is appalling, the worst I have ever seen. It's as if a Hollywood movie director tried to create a nightmarish underground set for a film. New York's airports are lousy and the roads seem to have more potholes than solid surface. Overall, just a disgraceful set of public facilities.

Were he alive today, Galbraith would probably say that the problem is insufficient tax revenues. But does the data really support that assumption? Here's a table of tax revenue by state. What's most surprising about the data is the very small variation in tax revenue.

The lowest taxed state (South Dakota) has a tax burden of 7.3%. The second highest taxed state (Hawaii) comes in at 11.3%. A range of just 4.0%. And then there is New York, in a class by itself---14.0%. (Note: this data source excludes taxes that are similar to user fees.)

Yes, even New York taxes (state and federal combined) are low by French standards. But that doesn't explain why New York has much worse public facilities than average states like Massachusetts (9.6% taxes.) New York has been trying to build a new subway line for 80 years, while Beijing and Shanghai (far poorer cities) open opulent new lines about once a year.

You might argue that China is not a good comparison, as they have cheap labor. Yes, incomes are lower in China, but so are tax revenues. One difference is that Chinese subways are built with workers who earn low wages by Chinese standards, whereas New York subways are built by highly paid union workers.

I think a better comparison for New York would be a high income, world-class city like Singapore or Hong Kong or Dubai. Those places are able to build very good infrastructure quickly and at low cost. They might use Bangladeshi migrant workers at $1/hour instead of American "prevailing wage" workers at $50/hour. Indeed even cities like Paris and Berlin build new subway lines at 1/7th the cost of the New York project. A small part of this cost gap may be due to physical differences between the various cities, but by no means all of it. Nor is it all wages, work rules and nationalistic contracting also play a role. American firms are less experienced than foreign firms at building subways and unions require over-manning. Regulations also seem stricter in the US. The comment section of this article has some useful information.

This demonstrates one of the many internal contradictions of American progressivism. (And by the way, American conservatives have just as many internal contradictions.) You can have your strong public employee unions, "prevailing wages" and restrictive work rules, or you can have nice infrastructure. New Yorkers have (perhaps unknowingly) made their choice. Now they must live with the consequences. Few progressives (with the notable exception of Matt Yglesias) understand these internal contradictions.

BTW, the Hong Kong subway system has a 99.9% on time rating and is highly profitable. It is also a private company. Of course progressives prefer to talk about the Paris subway.

PS. After I wrote this I read a post on infrastructure by Matt Yglesias. His post is better. He points out that there are also lots of wasteful transportion boondoggles being built by conservative midwestern governors.

(19 COMMENTS)

Co-blogger Bryan Caplan, in his post, "Frank on Phony Credentials," points out a big problem with cheating on credentials. He writes:

[W]hile telling an isolated lie comes easily to human beings, most human beings are bad at living a lie. If you fabricate credentials to get a job, doctoring your resume is the easy part. The challenge: You have to construct an alternate life history, and carefully segregate everyone you're lying to from everyone who knows better for the rest of your career. In short, you need the rare skills of a spy.

That reminded me of "Do the Right Thing," the second-last chapter of David R. Henderson and Charles L. Hooper, Making Great Decisions in Business and Life. A large part of our chapter is devoted to making the case for honesty as the default choice. We admit the obvious cases for dishonesty such as lying to the Nazis about the Jew you are hiding out in your basement, etc. Of course, the vast, vast majority of chances you have to lie are not in this category.

In one section, we write (CLH in parentheses says that it's Charley's story):

Sometimes on business trips, I (CLH) get the pleasure of staying with my brother Stan. When, after these visits, my wife, Lisa, asks me what we did, I remember hiking, listening to music, drumming, talking, eating, and playing with his computer. If I had actually been somewhere else and lied about it, I would still need to produce a "memory" of the evening. So my job would be twice as hard because I would have twice as much to remember: the real evening and the artificial evening. In fact, my job would be more than twice as hard because I would need to construct this artificial evening in the first place. Then I would need to know when to relate the real evening (to my confidant) or the artificial one (to the person I am lying to). Mathematics falls apart here, but we estimate that the liar works four times as hard.

Later in the chapter we write:

The lure of unethical behavior is strong, but it is largely a siren call attracting those who don't really understand how life works. The purchase price of unethical behavior is low, but it is the maintenance costs that will kill you.

(10 COMMENTS)

Do us all a favor and learn how to pee straight. Here are some, er, pointers.

Restaurant chain P.F. Chang's China Bistro got hacked recently, compromising thousands of credit cards. Oopsies. But business doesn't stop just because you got hacked, so in the short term the company is resorting to some old-school tech so that it can keep taking plastic.

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Do you remember that handy little breathalyzer we reviewed last year that synced with your smartphone via Bluetooth? The BACtrack Mobile, as it's called, turns out to not just be a means of trying to outdo (or under-do) your friends' drunkenness, but it's also been gathering a whole lot of anonymous data over the last year, the fruits of which have just been released unto us.

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"How many calories are in this mojito?" you ask yourself three drinks in. Or maybe you don't -- but you should. (Those cocktails really add up.) If you want to get a handle on your beverage habit and make sure you're adequately hydrated, a sleek,...

The PlayStation TV is a curious oddity. The $100 device, a rebranded Vita TV that's slated to launch in North America and Europe later this fall, is Sony's direct answer to the Apple TV, Roku and Amazon Fire TV streaming boxes currently flooding the...

Based on their Kickstarter, Legion Meter starts at $39 (free shipping in the US and $5 to Canada.) That's about the same as some external battery packs, but around $50 less than battery pack cases (and way easier to carry.) 

Saving the planet would be a lot cheaper than you’d think.

WHY WAS THIS EVEN A QUESTION? Police must ID officers in on-duty shootings, court rules. “The 6-1 ruling by the state’s highest court is expected to end blanket police policies against disclosure and reverse a statewide trend toward keeping officer names private. The court said the California Public Records Act does not permit police agencies to cite general concerns about officer safety to justify withholding names.” You get a badge, a gun, and qualified immunity. Putting anonymity on top of that is a bit much.

DAVID BERNSTEIN: Why aren’t there more black libertarians? Libertarian opposition to big government.

Since the 1930s, well before an organized libertarian movement existed, African Americans–whose politics once tended toward the individualistic–have thrown their lot in with, and tied their political and economic aspirations to, the growth of government, especially the federal government, and the government’s willingness to treat African Americans as one of many interest groups deserving of government assistance Not all African Americans bought into this, of course (Zora Neale Hurston was an early critic), but it’s sufficiently mainstream that many African Americans believe that any attack on “Big Government” is, implicitly, an attack on them and their collective aspirations. That is not an easy barrier for libertarians to overcome, no matter how sincerely we believe that everyone, including and perhaps especially African Americans, would be better off with a more limited government, and no matter how sensitive we might be to the way libertarian rhetoric is sometimes tone deaf to the history of racism in the U.S. In short, the problem is more the substance of libertarian beliefs than the style of how they are presented.

Read the whole thing.

THE IRONY, IT BURNS: Ezra Klein in 2009: Does The Government Run Health Care Better? “If you ordered America’s different health systems worst-functioning to best, it would look like this: individual insurance market, employer-based insurance market, Medicare, Veterans Health Administration.”

This was demonstrably untrue at the time. Ezra either doesn’t know what he’s talking about, or is happy to lie to advance an agenda. And at this point, what difference does it make?

Related: Ezra Klein in 2011: When socialism works in America. “The thing about the Veteran’s Administration’s health-care system? It’s socialized. Not single payer. Not heavily centralized. Socialized. As in, it employs the doctors and nurses. Owns the hospitals. And though I think there’s some good reason to believe its spending growth is somewhat understated — it benefits heavily from medical trainees, for instance — accounting for that difference still means a remarkable recent performance.”

And yet the predictable new spin will be: Don’t blame Obama. The VA has always sucked.

We built that.

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Equipped as we are with the innovative hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling technologies that have helped us to unlock hitherto economically unattainable formations of oil and gas, the United States and Canada are still the only significant producers of tight oil in the world — which, according to the latest fourth-quarter production reports, has given […]

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Plus, the "icy reception."

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Actually, all of those adjectives come from the New York Times — and that’s the most sympathetic take on Barack Obama’s big pivot/comeback speech on foreign policy. The West Point address accomplished a rarity in media and politics by creating a consensus between the editorial boards of the NYT, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street […]

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"Throughout history, those in authority have tried to repress ideas that threaten their power..."

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Yes, that Mike Bloomberg, Mayor Big Gulp himself. I don’t want to get too excited about this, but let me run an idea by you and if you don’t like it, you can hand it right back. Here goes: Bloomberg/Cruz 2016? “It is just a modern form of McCarthyism,” Bloomberg said of university “censorship” of […]

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Drive around the state of Wisconsin and you're probably more likely to come across a bar than a grocery store.

For Wisconsinites, this probably comes as no surprise, given the state's well-documented culture of drinking. The Wisconsin Journal-Sentinel launched a multi-part series  titled "Wasted in Wisconsin," which documented just how drunk Wisconsinites tend to be, and how often they don't know it.

Stacked up against the rest of the country, however, the picture is pretty stark. Wisconsin's bars outnumber their grocery stores almost three to one, according to Google data mapped by FlowingData's  Nathan Yau.

Yau's analysis and visualization add some useful context to data that have been around for at least the past few years. Rather than simply looking at where in the U.S. bars outnumber restaurants and vice-versa, Yau was able to map magnitude.

And though he notes that "higher rates don't necessarily point to higher volumes of drinking," its hard to miss just how deep Wisconsin's bar culture goes.

Within Wisconsin, there's some debate about the origins of the state's drinking — and bar — culture. Some of it, according to the Journal-Sentinal, is blamed on the state's German and European heritage:

Some 43% of Wisconsinites claim ancestry from Germany — second only to North Dakota, a state that virtually mirrors our drinking patterns. But time has diluted Wisconsin's German blood. The great majority of German immigration to the state ended more than 100 years ago. And while North Dakota downs a lot of alcohol, so does much of New England, where German ancestry is minimal.

"I don't buy it," Wisconsin historian Jack Holzhueter said of the German-heritage explanation. "Too many generations have gone by." ...

But even if the direct effects of Wisconsin's German and brewing heritage have largely vanished, they help shape the state's collective identity — an identity many accept as it's passed on to them.

Curious about that too, Yau went looking for similar patterns in Europe and came up with nothing in Germany, where many Wisconsinites claim their ancestors hailed from. You're more likely to find similar bar-to-grocery store ratios in France or Spain.

On the other hand, Wisconsin still doesn't rank highest in bars per capita. That honor goes to North Dakota and Montana, who are numbers one and two respectively. North Dakota has 9.9 bars per 10,000 people, according to Yau, and Montana has 8.6 per 10,000. Wisconsin comes in third with just 8 bars per 10,000 people. 

In the case of North Dakota, it doesn't help the state's bar-to-people ratio that its 699,628-person population is spread out over 68,994 square miles, which makes it easier to justify opening bars that serve people in remote areas. The same could be said of Montana.

But it probably isn't pure coincidence that the states with the most bars are also anecdotally and statistically documented to have particularly stubborn alcohol problems.

A 2009 report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration found that North Dakota led the nation in binge drinking. The problem was so bad that a former first lady of the state, Mikey Hoeven, led a campaign to combat alcohol abuse while her husband (now Sen. John Hoeven) was in office. And North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem pointed the finger at the state's "culture of acceptance" around teen drinking in an interview with the Associated Press.

It's a similar story in Montana. The state was once a place where drinking while driving was perfectly legal in some parts.  And according to the AP, some bars offered drinks in to-go cups.

Wisconsin has the highest rate of drunk driving in the country. According to the advocacy group MADD, it's the only state in the union where the first drunk driving offense is a traffic ticket, not a crime.

The numbers aren't perfect, as Yau notes in his analysis. There are bars in a lot of places, including restaurants and hotels, where people might have a drink or two with a meal, which tells us very little about the quantity of heavy drinking going on there.

And  again, the presence of bars doesn't necessarily mean that people drink less in places where there are fewer bars. People in Delaware, Maryland and Mississippi — states with the lowest rates of bars to people — could very well be drinking heavily, only in the privacy of their homes or at private functions. Chances are, some people in those places are doing just that.

Thomas Piketty thinks the Financial Times knows nothing of his technical work.

That's the Cliff Notes version of his 4,400-word response to the criticisms the Financial Times leveled against the data in his best-selling book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century." Piketty says that even though he expects people to improve on his work in the future, he still stands by it today, and the mistakes the Financial Times thinks it's found aren't actually mistakes — and that they'd know this if they'd read the appendices he put online.

Now, to recap, these alleged — emphasis here — errors fall into three categories: 1) transcription mistakes, 2) unexplained data tweaks and 3) in the case of Britain, incorrect data. But the problem with these problems, as I pointed out, is that they aren't ones. They're questions. How did Piketty choose which source to use when they told different stories? How did he adjust them? And how much did his big-picture results depend on these decisions? All good questions — but still just questions.

Well, now that Piketty has answered the FT's criticisms, let's go through them one by one.

1) Skinny finger? The smallest and most straightforward mistake that Chris Giles of the Financial Times says he found is a transcription error. Specifically, it appears that Piketty fell victim to a "fat finger" by accidentally entering Swedish wealth data for 1908 instead of for 1920 like he should have.

But Piketty explains that he was making an adjustment, not a data-entry error. Sweden has estate tax data for before 1908 and wealth tax data for after, which give different estimates for the same amount of inequality. But since these series overlap in 1908, we can see how much they differ, and use that to try to harmonize them. It's rough, but it's reasonable — and it's what Piketty did.

2) Mysterious Excel formulas? Economics is the least exact science, and compiling wealth data might be the least exact part of it. There aren't many sources, and wealth is much harder to measure than income. Not only that, but the few wealth data sources that do exist have their own biases that need to be accounted for. You have to make judgment calls about which ones to use and how to splice them together, when appropriate.

Or how to construct them. See, sometimes there isn't enough data to give a detailed description of wealth inequality, but there is enough to give a rough sketch — which, because we only care about the long-term trend, can still be useful.

Piketty, for example, has numbers for the top 1 percent's wealth in late 1800s Britain, but not for the next 9 percent. But since we know that inequality tends to follow a Pareto distribution — that is, it's heavily skewed towards the top — we can make some educated guesses for the rest. Now, Piketty's book should better indicate where he's interpolating data like this, and better explain his rationales. But as he points out now, most of the Financial Times's problems with his work come down to these kind of technical adjustments.

3) Inequality in the U.K.? The most significant, and, it seemed, on-point criticism is about Piketty's British wealth data the past few decades. But Giles is wrong here for the same reason he is right to raise concerns about the U.S. numbers. Here's why.

It didn't get as much attention, but Giles points out that Piketty's U.S. sources are less reliable than the rest. For the U.S., there isn't as much of the estate tax data that Piketty likes to use, so he has to combine what there is with the results from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) survey.

Now, as Paul Krugman explains, survey data tend to underestimate top-end inequality, because it's hard to get the rich to respond to a voluntary questionnaire about just how rich they are. The SCF, economist Gabriel Zucman told me, is better than most, because it does a better job over-sampling the top to try to correct for this bias, and it has a higher response rate. But it still needs to be adjusted if you're going to combine it with tax data.

Piketty does this, but he admits it has its limitations. He prefers to highlights more recent work by Saez and Zucman that doesn't mix and match tax and survey data, but rather uses capital income flows to construct a consistent picture of U.S. wealth inequality. This is a much more definitive account, and it shows U.S. wealth inequality rising even more than Piketty did.

The problem is Giles does with Britain what he criticizes Piketty for doing with the U.S. Specifically, Giles mixes and matches old tax data with new survey data — but unlike Piketty, he doesn't try to adjust for the survey's downward bias. This all but guarantees that it will look like inequality has been falling recently no matter the reality.

Piketty, in contrast, only uses tax data to generate his British numbers. Now, that data isn't always the best-suited, but it's still better than raw survey results. And it's why Piketty finds that the top 10 percent hold 71 percent of the wealth in Britain, while the survey that Giles touts says it's just 44 percent.

Ask yourself, as Piketty does, whether you think modern-day Britain is "one of the most egalitarian countries in history in terms of wealth distribution." That's what you'd have to believe if you take those survey results at face value.

***

One final point. I'm all in favor of journalists challenging economists's claims. And I think Giles has done admirable work digging into Piketty's Excel sheets when nobody else did. But throughout this, Giles has assumed the worst without waiting for a full response. For example, he points out that, for the U.S., Piketty takes the top 1 percent's wealth share and adds two to it in 1970. But without knowing anything about why Piketty makes this adjustment, Giles tells us that the numbers "didn't seem to fit what [Piketty] wanted to show, so he just added two to it." That's over the top innuendo.

In the end, he's done what he accused Piketty of: making claims that the data don't support.

President Obama laid out his approach to dealing with aggressive autocratic rulers this week, but his vision is ill-suited for the challenge.

The accepted, standard price of $60 for a new video game "is a little insane," according to Adrian Chmielarz, former creative director of Bulletstorm developer People Can Fly. According to him, gamers paying that much expect a great deal in return for their money these days, and by focusing so heavily on $60 AAA games, the industry is leaving money on the table.

"Everybody is smart in retrospect, and looking back I do think that we were possibly among the first victims of this giant shift in gaming, where the middle-class AAA games began to die--not 'middle-class' by quality, but we didn't have ten multiplayer modes and co-op and all of that," Chmielarz said of Bulletstorm in an interview with GamesIndustry International. "The saying in the industry right now is, 'If you want to sell a game for $60, to the player it has to feel like $200.'"

"Bulletstorm was a $60 game for $60," he added. "And these days $60 for a game sounds basically crazy, when there are literally hundreds of high quality games out there for a much smaller price--even on console. In 2014, $60 for a game is a little insane."

Bulletstorm was released by People Can Fly and Epic Games in 2011 and, despite positive reviews, it didn't turn out to be a huge seller. Epic president Mike Capps said of the game in 2012, "I think Bulletstorm was very critically successful, and I think a lot of folks really enjoyed seeing something new. From a sales perspective it was good, but not amazing. I think EA was hoping we'd do better." Epic acquired People Can Fly in 2012 and Chmielarz parted ways with the developer, which would be renamed Epic Games Poland a year later.

Chmielarz also talked about how publishers often seek to turn franchises into something they are not. He pointed to Dead Space as a series that EA has attempted to turn into a major, Call of Duty-level franchise, rather than being satisfied with sales of 2 or 3 million copies. "That could be a profitable series, but only if you're smart about the budget and the content," he said.

He's not the first to share this sentiment and cite Dead Space as an example. Lamenting the addition of multiplayer modes into games where they don't belong, Gearbox president Randy Pitchford spoke about Dead Space 2's multiplayer in a 2011 interview with Edge, stating "It's ceiling-limited; it'll never do 20 million units. The best imaginable is a peak of four or five million units if everything works perfectly in your favour. So the bean counters go: 'How do I get a higher ceiling?' And they look at games that have multiplayer. They're wrong, of course. What they should do instead is say that they're comfortable with the ceiling, and get as close to the ceiling as possible. Put in whatever investment's required to focus it on what the promise is all about."

Since leaving People Can Fly, Chmielarz cofounded The Astronauts, developer of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, which he says will shy away from having filler simply to justify a $60 price tag.

"There is a necessity to add filler in AAA games, whether it be collectibles or one more wave of enemies," Chmielarz said. "It's unfortunate, and it's also proof that the world is insane." He points out how players' calls for longer games clash with data suggesting "70 or 80 percent of people never finish the game."

"But I think that's connected to the price, and there we go again. Lower prices would allow us to stop thinking about filler for our games, and start focusing on making the experience just right," he said. "You have to live with the fact that some players will complain no matter what, but I think that when your game is tight, and the story you want to tell is told exactly the way you want, I think the effect is way more powerful than anyone complaining that they didn't get 100 hours of entertainment for their €20."

Chris Pereira is a freelance writer for GameSpot, and you can follow him on Twitter @TheSmokingManX
Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com

"Liberia is doomed" due to poor economic policy, said Liberia's finance minister this week. Uh... thanks for your service, but we've decided to go in a different direction with the "Finance Minister" position.

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Yesterday at 2014's Class Day—Harvard Law's student-recognition ceremony—Mindy Project creator Mindy Kaling delivered quite an address indeed.

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Well, let's just get on with it. Tyrone Bowd is a 24-year-old Australian man with scrotal lymphoedema, a condition that has inflated his sack to the size of a watermelon. He also, according to his mother, has an inverted penis.

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A Virginia tenth grader says he attacked and killed his parents because they were acting too parental, "taking away [his] iPod and stuff."

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Just a man and his goat, enjoying a nice sunset bike ride together.

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For the first time in 50 years, the dictionary ran out and two winners were crowned as Scripps National Spelling Bee champions. Sriram Hathwar, 14, correctly spelled "stichomythia" to win and Ansun Sujoe, 13, recited "feuilleton" to tie. In other news, this boy will never forget how to spell "kabaragoya."

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Good news for couples who enjoy holding hands while sitting outside in separate tubs that have no attached plumbing — the makers of Cialis are going to ask federal regulators to consider an over-the-counter version of the popular erectile dysfunction drug.

Cialis maker Eli Lilly and French pharma biggi Sanofi announced today that Sanofi has purchased rights to seek regulatory approval for an OTC version of the drug in the U.S., Europe, Canada, and Australia.

If these regulators give it the thumbs-up, then Sanofi would be able to sell Cialis OTC once the patent on the original drug expires.

Eli Lilly says Cialis has rung up more than $14 billion in sales for the company since it was introduced in 2002. The company’s patent on the drug (generic name tadalafil) is set to expire in 2017, meaning Eli Lilly would likely lose a lot of money to generic drug makers who won’t charge a premium for the pills.

An OTC version of the drug would not require a visit to the doctor or a prescription, thus making it available to the larger public who may have either been embarrassed to seek medical attention or who don’t actually need Cialis but want to take it anyway.

Pfizer attempted to bring its Viagra drug to the OTC market back in 2008 to bolster its market share and preempt the inevitable drop in sales once the patents expire, but ultimately decided against pursuing approval after European regulators indicated they would not sign off.

While Viagra (sildenafil) still remains a prescription drug, Pfizer began selling it directly to consumers via the company’s website in 2013.

The original Viagra patent expired in the U.S. in 2012, but a subsequent patent for the use of sildenafil for treatment of erectile dysfunction doesn’t expire un the U.S. until 2019.

[via NY Times]

It looks like the Huy Fong Foods Sriracha factory won’t have to uproot from its home in Irwindale, CA after all: The city has decided to drop its lawsuit against the factory, sayings its former stinky foe is no longer a public nuisance.

Officials for the city unanimously dismissed both the October 2013 lawsuit and the public nuisance declaration, months after the odor emanating from the factory ticked off many residents, reports the Pasadena Star-News.

Everything was decided during an informal meeting this week between Huy Fong owner David Tran and city officials, where Tran assured the council with a written statement that the company would address residents’ complaints of odors coming from the plant.

“We forged a relationship. Let’s keep that going,” City Councilman Julian Miranda said Wednesday.

This means, of course, that the city will keep the economic boost it could see from the factory, a boost other states like Texas were pursuing with much fanfare.

The town’s chamber of commerce will also embark on a new marketing effort “to talk about the positives of doing business” in Irwindale, ostensibly to keep residents on board with keeping Huy Fong around.

While there are new filters in place that are stronger, in order to allay the smelly effects of the factory, it won’t be clear if those work well enough for residents until chiles are processed starting in August.

“At the commencement of this year’s chile harvest season, if the air filtration system does not perform well, then Huy Fong Foods will make the necessary changes in order to better the system right away,” Tran wrote in a letter to the council.

Mayor Mark Breceda sounds optimistic about the developments as well when he asked the council to dismiss the public nuisance order.

“I believe he stands by his word,” Breceda said of Tran. “I will say that I believe that not always lawsuits are good for any business or any community. It’s not only hurtful but expensive. I don’t believe at this point that it was the right way to go, but certain things had to be done.”

Cue the joyful shrieks of sriracha lovers everywhere who were worried about losing their precious red sauce.

Sriracha hot sauce factory no longer considered a public nuisance in Irwindale [Pasadena Star-News]