Thought I'd post some thoughts here about the photomode issue rather than the official thread because I'll be touching on the development of the game rather than the finished game itself.
I'm one of the disappointed guys too...but I can understand why they need to do it.
It's a bit different this time than in FM2...not only do people take pics and post them to T10's servers so that people can see them on the internet but they are also shareable in the game. If there is a picture leaderboard resulting from ratings that means a whole lot of bandwidth used for photomode pictures.
This is going to be above and beyond the sort of bandwidth used in FM2. So it makes sense to have the files as small as possible.
But I gotta say that even when you have the FM3 logo visibly compressed and looking ghetto you've gone too far with the compression.
When I take one of the earlier shots released that were around 500kb and I downgrade it to 100kb jpeg it still looks better than these shots...maybe the algorithm they are using to convert it isn't the best?
T10 had the right idea with trying to get the stuff put onto a USB key. Unfortunately MS didn't see it the same way and in the end we have MS to blame because that would have been the best solution and could have resulted in pics at even higher resolutions.
Here's an idea that could be genius if it were possible...if I ran T10 I'd put all photomode bandwidth costs under the marketing budget. If it's going to cost $100K to host high resolution pictures for the next 3 years that should be under the marketing with the reasoning that when people share these screens with their friends it is a form of grassroots marketing. When a person sends their non-FM3 or non-360 owning friend a pic of the game they are sending them an advertisement for the game. With the way the world is interconnected with social networks these advertisements can potentially be broadcast to hundreds of friends and become viral in a sense. I pulled the $100K number out of my ass by the way it could be much less. $33000 per year for advertising is pretty damn cheap though.
