The local newscaster misspoke and said "Fireworks trafficking" and I was sort of hoping it was true just to see a senator face one of the most redneck of charges in the state.

Go check the second half of the first sentence there. But Audi does market to the masses, niche brands don't promote themselves in any form of mass media. Additionally, Audi routinely brings up their lease rates to show how reasonable luxury can be. Wealthy and VR might not be an accurate match, VR and moderate level…

Almost every company looks to market to the masses unless they want to place themselves as a higher priced niche brand. The difference though is they could play off the mobility being an essential part of your daily life. A VR headset cannot.

With telecom stuff, they still could be considered luxury items under certain circumstances. In the case of cellphones, they also can be viewed as a replacement for existing services (landlines). With VR, it replaces nothing and is purely an optional item.

There is a huge difference though, this hypothetical friend is just asking for money flat out. On KS, they are trying to solicit donations with the promise of giving you something in return. So in essence, as long as they got what was promised they should be happy.

Pretty much it is because they have no idea what actual investing is and KS co-opted the term "backer" for their fun little service. Some also confuse the service with a regular store and think of their donations as pre-orders, assuming they will eventually be shipped the product.

But that is the thing, unlike a console or operating system, the concept of a killer app does not exist for a 3rd party peripheral because it is an optional piece of hardware and while it isn't super-expensive it is expensive to be prohibitive to people that aren't core gamers. Additionally, since the unit itself…

With one major difference though, you are not investing so you have none of those protections and the company isn't accountable. You don't even have a binding contract to ensure that the promised gifts for donation are delivered.

Shipping dev units isn't the same as the consumer units though. It's not like an impatient consumer could go buy one, plug it in and enjoy the product. Since, from the sounds of things, the studios/publishers have to integrate support into their product there will be a heavy amount of resistance from the people who…

Yes, but those are not the consumer versions and consumers can't purchase those, correct?

I could imagine someone ordering the noodles after a night of drinking moonshine or paint-thinner (since that is your only excuse for eating skyline) then waking up the next morning to use the toilet and thinking they suddenly have the worst cancer ever when they look at the bowl.

I bet that was a fun time trying to explain to the sharks about the concept of kickstarter and what it means. Part of me would say yes, those "pre-orders" on KS should count as full sales not projected, but as those are not legally binding contracts (and we are now going into uncharted territory for KS with a company…

Yep, the company has "sold" a bunch of units but hasn't (if I recall) actually shipped any consumer units yet. The technology works, but since it relies on studios and publishers to devote development recourses into integration it makes the odds of it happening very slim as well. It literally feels like the dot-com…

Well, now that EA has Origin (yes, people hate it just like they hated steam when it launched) and if they start publishing indie titles, then they might be able to facilitate niche games coming to market. That being said, they may be too late to the party anyway since Steam simply has more eyeballs on it each day.

Not even 20 years ago, remember they did publish games like Psychonauts and Brutal Legend, both unusual, critically acclaimed, but not great sellers.

Check the site, it is a guy, and he would be right at home in a windowless van.

Not everything, but in the context of having a VPN service for work vs having to travel to the office makes it a luxury. Additionally, having that service makes you re-value work requests from "Can this wait until Monday or does it need to be done now?" to "I guess I could do this now". It doesn't necessarily impact…

It is a luxury in the sense that all those activities are not critical to your existence and if you suddenly were going to do without it wouldn't be the end of the world.

I kind of see the perspective of Time Warner and Comcast being luxuries, like a video game would be. But the whole point of the competition is how they treat the consumer. EA is bad with their customers, but Comcast (and TW) are so bad that people who aren't their customers feel the impact as well.

They were too focused on the apparently Jewish automatons