Seriously though, the whole orange simile and the whole "I wouldn't have bought it anyway" argument is complete and utter bull.
Eh, not really because you're assuming everyone who pirates a game 1. Likes it and 2. plays it to completion or worth the price of the game. Trust, turning the game on isn't worth $60.
I highly doubt a developer cares if someone pirated their game, played it for 5 minutes and never again. I know people who download games because the game doesn't have a demo and they just want to see if they like it.
I can't even remember how many dreamcast games I pirated back in highschool, played for 5 minutes and never again. The only games I actually played were the ones I bought (NFL2K1 all fucking day long, lol).
I just think it's irrational to say, "that person who pirated my game and played it for 5 minutes owes me $60!" Maybe they owe you an apology, but trust you didn't lose any money from them playing your game with no intention of ever buying it.
I got a problem with people who pirate stuff they actually like though. If you're pirating stuff just to test it out or play for 5-10 minutes, then whatever. If you're a big Modern Warfare fan and you're pirating the game with no intention of buying it and you're playing it 4 hours a day... now there's a problem.
Also people forget how pirating at times helps games and developers be known.
Here's a question... Was it okay for people to pirate the Starcraft 2 Beta even though it wasn't sold for cash?
This is more than semantics. It's about the false belief that "pirates" are the cause of all our trouble. And I don't believe there are people out there unemployed just because of piracy. Bigger economic issues are responsible.
I agree that there are other, some more important, issues at the root of our problems in this industry. However, I would argue that piracy is much more damaging than you seem to believe.
That, plus sick corporate culture that goes on at the top of the food chain. Only instead of discussing that, they just go "Look! Pirates!", and everyone ignores the problems that exist in our own industry.
The funny thing about that is that I said, repeatedly, maybe once a page even, that I'm against piracy, and that it's very harmful. People just seem to ignore that part of it.
But the problems that it causes, are the fault of the industry, not of the pirates.
Games appearing on file-sharing sites before they're released (which was mentioned in that article too btw). How is that the fault of pirates? That's the fault of the shitty distribution system we're using, which is what I've been saying all along.
DRM causing bad hype is another of those. DRM isn't needed in the strictest sense. It's another one of those features that I claim are in place to perpetuate an outdated business model.
What we need to do is accept a certain loss, and focus on making the fucking best product we possibly can. If we lose our jobs because of poor sales of a product, trust me when I say it wouldn't have made any difference if zero people had pirated the game, and that it's more than likely that the problem was chiefly elsewhere.
(You'd be surprised (or would you?) how you can make a business work by managing your expectations and keeping a good balance between being realistic and having your head in the clouds.)
I agree that most major companies use counter productive tactics that either don't work, or hinder the wrong people when attempting to thwart software piracy. That point is not in contention. Uber-companies often go to great lengths and only end up screwing their legitimate customers. We've seen it numerous times, and we all agree that they are being silly and wasteful.
However, none of that justifies leeching software. And assuming a permissive or accepting attitude towards software leeching only contributes to the problem. Yes, it is reasonable to figure in losses due to piracy into a company's financial projections. That's just good business. But that doesn't mean that you should be at all accepting of leeches, or in any way condone their behavior.
I agree that most major companies use counter productive tactics that either don't work, or hinder the wrong people when attempting to thwart software piracy. That point is not in contention. Uber-companies often go to great lengths and only end up screwing their legitimate customers. We've seen it numerous times, and we all agree that they are being silly and wasteful.
However, none of that justifies leeching software. And assuming a permissive or accepting attitude towards software leeching only contributes to the problem. Yes, it is reasonable to figure in losses due to piracy into a company's financial projections. That's just good business. But that doesn't mean that you should be at all accepting of leeches, or in any way condone their behavior.
Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.
On that I can agree with 100%. Nothing there I disagree with.
Yeah, we shouldn't be accepting to leeching/piracy (whatever you want to call it). The only difference between the way I see things, and the way you outlined them, is that I don't feel like an anti-leeching witch-hunt is productive at all. And in fact, I see piracy as a symptom of things we could fix in our own industry which will then help a lot of people (devs like us).
If you're pirating stuff just to test it out or play for 5-10 minutes, then whatever. If you're a big Modern Warfare fan and you're pirating the game with no intention of buying it and you're playing it 4 hours a day... now there's a problem.
Also people forget how pirating at times helps games and developers be known.
I've seen this happen, several times even. Back around 2004 I knew someone that pirated Naruto2 (the import fighting game) for Gamecube using the PSO exploit. Both him and many of the people he played against eventually ended up buying it and its sequels. Many 'freeloader' discs for playing imports were bought too.
The problem is that these kinds of occurances are far outweighed by the number of people that don't use pirated copies as something akine to extended demos, and never intended to purchase the title whether they liked it or not.
Yeah, we shouldn't be accepting to leeching/piracy (whatever you want to call it). The only difference between the way I see things, and the way you outlined them, is that I don't feel like an anti-leeching witch-hunt is productive at all. And in fact, I see piracy as a symptom of things we could fix in our own industry which will then help a lot of people (devs like us).
Actually, we're in agreement on that point as well. I don't approve of the current methods for dealing with leeching. I think that clever developers would be able to find much more creative ways to use the software piracy's own methods against it. I think that software piracy shouldn't be viewed as something to stop, so much as something to exploit.
What I really object to is anyone who seems complacent or permissive on the issue. For anyone who is serious about game development, a negative stance on piracy/leeching should be a given. For that matter, anyone who enjoys playing games, or the community that has grown up around game enthusiasm, should never be "accepting" of software piracy.
One thing I don't understand is how you can be so antagonistic towards big-business, yet still be ambivalent towards software leeching. Software leeching is much less likely to harm big business publishers or the executives responsible for running them. So their stock drops a point or two, who cares?
Software piracy is most potentially damaging to smaller, independent studios. Indie developers often times don't have the funding or expertise to create "services" to protect against piracy. This is why so many indies look to the AppStore and Steam for a certain measure of protection. They voluntarily give up a percentage of their profits just to take advantage of another company's service. There is also the issue of marketing. It is easy to get the necessary legitimate sales when you can afford console licences and throw millions of dollars at advertising. When most of your marketing is grass-roots and word-of-mouth, each sale matters.
If ten thousand people leeched a AAA blockbuster, the publisher would hardly feel it. If ten thousand people leeched an indie game, it could put the developer out of business. The kind of game development industry that you would prefer to see will only be hindered by software leeching.
However, none of that justifies leeching software. And assuming a permissive or accepting attitude towards software leeching only contributes to the problem. Yes, it is reasonable to figure in losses due to piracy into a company's financial projections. That's just good business. But that doesn't mean that you should be at all accepting of leeches, or in any way condone their behavior.
Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.
I don't think anyone is talking about condoning their behaviour, but it's like Bigjohn points out, we have to be clever in our ways of dealing with it (which we clearly aren't).
I don't see any harm in accepting their behaviour. It makes it easier to move on to more productive ways of convincing pirates to spend their money. They aren't our enemies, they are potential customers and consumers.
As for proverbs, I think "the road to evil is paved with good intentions" is fairly fitting, too.
One thing I don't understand is how you can be so antagonistic towards big-business, yet still be ambivalent towards software leeching. Software leeching is much less likely to harm big business publishers or the executives responsible for running them. So their stock drops a point or two, who cares?
Because I view piracy as a great thing. They're doing our work for us. They're letting us know what they want, and how they want it. They're doing proof-of-concept of delivery methods. Smart companies and smart people will exploit this, not fear it.
Even simple things like the Blizzard patcher using bit-torrent to get extra bandwidth for patches. The very existence of Steam, which was really first done in pirate-form. There's a lot for us to learn from piracy.
Depending on how you look at it, it could be seen as a good thing in a way. Not in the $'s or sale numbers way. But in how to make a better product in the future way.
About the big business vs. indie/small sort of thing. I think piracy can benefit indie devs the most. They're not bound to distribution deals. Indie devs can just sell their game on their website (Torchlight), and can experiment with it. What MMOs are doing now is really avant-garde in my opinion. The whole Free To Play model? Genius. It's a step ahead of what even pirates came up with.
Small indie devs can benefit the most from piracy. Or get burned the hardest if they're not careful these days.
i have a rather generalised question here:
how many people here who're against piracy of games, have pirated their copies of max, photoshop, zbrush etc?
i'll hold my hands up and say i have (let he who is without sin etc etc).
the reason i ask, is because i personally believe there is a line to be drawn in what is rather a gray area. i disagree with bigjohns point, and was actually waiting for "well anyone could buy an orange and instead of eating it, plant it and give the "copied" oranges he grows away". that would have been an amusing argument. i also believe that stores which buy and sell preowned games harm the industry just as much as pirates do. since after the initial sale of the brand new copy, no royalties are paid on that copy when it's re-sold, which is exactly the same as how piracy affects the industry.
however, when it comes to development software... well, i'm not IN the industry 100% and when i am, the first thing i plan on doing is buying a legitimate license for every piece of software i use. it's something i did with music, before i became a session guitarist, i didn't own my own amp, i borrowed a friends. i didn't have enough money to buy recording software, so i pirated it. but when i started making enough money from the job, i paid for the license, i saw it as "only fair".
similarly though, i also use the 3 point shader, i'll point out i paid for the full version (i'm pretty sure they can varify that if i fall under scruteny here). because i see it as something reasonably affordable, that will directly affect my efforts to get "in" the industry.
i don't pirate games, because after trying so hard to even make one character, i can just about fathom the amount of real work that goes into a fully complete title, i can say that the people making it deserve to be paid for it, in full.
if we're going to analogise here BigJohn. here's one for you:
you wouldn't move into a house without paying for it first. but you could borrow tools from a friend in order to build your house from scratch. the difference there though, is quite clear. using tools to build, in order to pay, is vastly different from avoiding paying just because you can.
i also believe that stores which buy and sell preowned games harm the industry just as much as pirates do. since after the initial sale of the brand new copy, no royalties are paid on that copy when it's re-sold, which is exactly the same as how piracy affects the industry.
The sale of games means the seller has more money to buy new games, and also knows that what they're buying automatically has more value then something they couldn't resell at the asking price.
The funny thing about that is that I said, repeatedly, maybe once a page even, that I'm against piracy, and that it's very harmful. People just seem to ignore that part of it.
But the problems that it causes, are the fault of the industry, not of the pirates.
Ok, now I have to step in. Blaming the game industry for piracy is like telling a rape victim it was her fault for wearing slutty clothes in a bad part of town.
Yes, traditional financing and distribution models are inefficient and outdated, especially since we derived them from other industries where a single product could not be duplicated endlessly, perfectly, for practically free. Print publication and motion picture production were the closest models we had for the kind of businesses we wanted to run and the products we wanted to create, but it wasn't a perfect translation and now the flaws are showing.
That doesn't justify or excuse the actions of somebody who duplicates and distributes our work without our consent, especially when it's done to circumvent having to pay for it. Just because I do something dumb or something that doesn't work well doesn't give anybody else the right to take my things.
And it is theft. There are a lot of ways US and other country's IP laws could be improved, but the basic premise is vital and sound: when I have an idea and I make it into a marketable product, both the products on the shelves AND the idea are mine. If you steal the physical products, you're stealing goods. If you take my idea and use it without permission, you've stolen a different type of property - an intangible one, but something that is still undeniably MINE. Until you stole it.
If you want the product, you have to pay me for it. If you want to use my idea, you have to ask and get my permission, and usually you have to pay me for it. The only way around that is to come up with something that improves sufficiently on my idea to the point that it's undeniably more your idea than mine.
Folks on the biz end of the office like to introduce the extra layers of publishing, distribution, retail, and duplication because that's how they make their paycheck (whether that's really warranted or not is a different discussion). The reality, though, is that all those extra layers don't change the fact that when you take something that's mine that has been sold - not given away - and make a perfect copy of it, that is theft. You did not steal the disc off the shelf, instead you stole the intangible work and property. How did you steal it? Well, you have a perfect, complete functioning copy of it, and you didn't pay me for it, and you didn't buy it from somebody who DID pay me for it, and with the possible exception of a few specific copies that I willingly gave to people as gifts, the only copies of my work that I have agreed to permit are the ones that people have to pay me for.
If you didn't pay me, and nobody else who had posession of it before you paid me, and I didn't originally give it as a gift, somebody's a goddamn thief.
Games appearing on file-sharing sites before they're released (which was mentioned in that article too btw). How is that the fault of pirates? That's the fault of the shitty distribution system we're using, which is what I've been saying all along.
Again with the blaming the victim. Who's the pirate? Uh, the guy at the disc printer who took the rejects out of the scrap bin (against the law and probably his company's rules) and handed them off to his warez buddies. Nobody in the studio, the publisher, the manufacturer, the distributor, or the retailer took that software and handed it to somebody with instructions to "go put this on the internets." Again, for that to happen, somebody is still a goddamn thief.
DRM causing bad hype is another of those. DRM isn't needed in the strictest sense. It's another one of those features that I claim are in place to perpetuate an outdated business model.
I hate DRM as much as the next guy. I still remember the golden years between widespread CD-drive adoption and the release of the first CD-R drives on the market, when we finally had DirectX to do shit with Windows and 3dfx cards let us do all kinds of new, amazing stuff... and the great part was, since none of the CDs were copy-protected, it was pretty reliable that you could drop a game in the drive and you'd be playing as soon as it was done installing. Having to worry about the game installing a root kit or embedding shit in the guts of your OS was tinfoil hat crap... or was, anyway. Now we're so acclimated to it that something like StarForce or net-connection-only play doesn't even faze most of us.
But DRM exists because with DVD-R burners, 100-disc packs that cost $10, and broadband that can move all 4gb to just about anywhere in the world in less than an hour all add up to one very important thing: risk. A risk that the companies who provide the warchests for projects like Modern Warfare and Crysis simply would never, ever touch with a 59' pole that belongs to somebody else, because it's a stupid business decision. It's akin to sinking $50 million into years of development and production for a widget anybody can perfectly duplicate on their kitchen table for ten cents: you might as well burn the cash in the parking lot. No business strategist in their right fucking mind would ever seriously consider funding that widget project unless there was some kind of guarantee that the widgets would at least be frustratingly difficult to duplicate.
I won't argue that DRM has kind of gone off the deep end recently, and that there are exceptions across the spectrum of specific situations, but the bottom line is that if it's so easy to steal something that a rock with a brain injury can do it while sleeping, nobody except the spectacularly dumb are going to risk a single penny on trying to sell it.
Want to know what my actual biggest fear is about server-connection dependent DRM and cloud subscription vs hardcopy purchase? Heritage.
I still have my original copy of MechWarrior 2. It's 15 years old. That is the game the drove me to a love of playing and making games (and also BattleTech). I have legacy computer systems set up solely to play it and other vintage games. I have a bookshelf full of games dating back to the late 80s, with a lot - most - of the milestones and halcyons that chronicle the evolution of our industry and our trade, as well as some of our subculture's most cherished moments from it.
Believe it or not, I actually want to make sure that I can show my son what it's like to blow up a Star Destroyer alone in an X-wing, circa 1993, or try to hold the line on Luthien in a captured Timber Wolf, circa 1996, or to send Kbots swarming over a Core base, circa 1997, or to climb up onto the Great Wall above the temple of Xian and take in the panorama of the mountains around you, circa 1998, or to watch your people journey across the stars trying to find the homeworld they can't even remember, circa 1999, or to discover the plot you've unwittingly been a part of after you escape from the MJ12 lab, circa 2000... You get the idea. I can do that because I have the hardcopies of that software, and all I have to do is install it and it will run.
What am I going to do 20 years from now when I want to go back and play Flight Simulator X, and Microsoft shut down the authentication servers 15 years prior? Or if I want to play Assassain's Creed II, but UbiSoft is bankrupt? Or my son wants to use Portal for his college philosophy class, but Valve stopped supporting Steam in 2018? Software rot is one thing, we do what we can about it. What are we going to do when these phone-home DRM schemes make entire eras of our work, our industry's history, and our industry's heritage disappear?
so, if the next medal of honour game, or whatever has 500k shipped copies. only 100k people buy it, the other 400k just say "oh i'll wait for a preowned one" because they can, because the option is there for them. sure they might have to wait to play, and sure EA will have sold 100k copies. but they're still down 400k, because the option is there in the first place. because the consumer has the option to pay slightly less, the reseller has the option to make a bagload of profit from doing it, and the developer has a very large shortfall over it.
that said, it's down to a law that actually exists, called the First Sale Doctrine (within the US). which allows a person to do whatever they like with their product after purchasing it, including resale, but not including manufacturing copies. the EU however, has no such law, and actually has a "Droit De Suit", where artist can claim royalties on resale of their work.
which makes me wonder if companies like Game, within the UK have to pay any royalty on preowned titles, or if they can avoid it due to most publishers being US based...
i have a rather generalised question here:
how many people here who're against piracy of games, have pirated their copies of max, photoshop, zbrush etc?
i'll hold my hands up and say i have (let he who is without sin etc etc).
.
These big companies for the most part don't care if you've pirated their software because they make their money off of companies who have to buy licenses. They actually like it when you pirate their stuff because it creates mindshare. I remember my friend telling me that Alias never changed how you cracked a version of Maya because they probably didn't mind and also it's a wast a time because it's going to get cracked anyway. I dunno if that's change since Autodesk now owns Maya.
Would they rather you buy their stuff? Yea, but you aren't the main consumer they're aiming at. Once you go freelance though, you kind of have to buy it and should because you can just write it off in taxes anyway if you're in the US.
With that said, it's slightly different, but not really.
so, if the next medal of honour game, or whatever has 500k shipped copies. only 100k people buy it, the other 400k just say "oh i'll wait for a preowned one" because they can, because the option is there for them. sure they might have to wait to play, and sure EA will have sold 100k copies. but they're still down 400k, because the option is there in the first place. because the consumer has the option to pay slightly less, the reseller has the option to make a bagload of profit from doing it, and the developer has a very large shortfall over it.
True, there is that scenario, but like I said earlier in the thread, Resale outlets (such as Gamestop) should be required to hold traded in titles the same as pawn shops for a pre-determined amount of time deemed by local laws. If theirs anything that digital distribution's taught us, whether it be legal or pirate, is that people are impatient.
Ok, now I have to step in. Blaming the game industry for piracy is like telling a rape victim it was her fault for wearing slutty clothes in a bad part of town.
It's not her fault the first time. But if she repeatedly dresses slutty, and spends every single Saturday night just wandering about in bad parts of town, then yeah... something's wrong with her.
That's not to say that her getting raped is fine. Much like how I'm not saying piracy is fine. But there's still a lot, a ton, she/we can do to stop it. And the industry is habitual in not doing anything. It's like that girl repeatedly doing the same thing, expecting a different result (or was she expecting a different result?). And really, the video-game industry is more ahead of the curve on this than most others in entertainment. My main complaint is towards the music industry. Come'on. MP3s are here, accept it already. Film industry as well. But that's a different story.
Suing your fans, putting people in prison, just wreaking havoc in general is a bad idea. It legitimizes piracy in the minds of the people running the file-sharing services, and causes them to fancy themselves heroes. It doesn't solve anything, and it just makes the piracy scene that much more sophisticated.
We can actually look at it as something to learn from, and something to embrace and use for our own benefit. That's my point.
True, there is that scenario, but like I said earlier in the thread, Resale outlets (such as Gamestop) should be required to hold traded in titles the same as pawn shops for a pre-determined amount of time deemed by local laws. If theirs anything that digital distribution's taught us, whether it be legal or pirate, is that people are impatient.
i wouldn't say complete impatience. let's face it, everyone wants to save money. they see preowned costing less and they want to pay that price instead of the "full" new price.
you'll always get the people that "want it first". and i agree those are more likely to pirate on zero day. but the majority of people... they're just in it for the money.
what they don't realise is that preowned sales probably hike the price up just as much as outright piracy.
It's not her fault the first time. But if she repeatedly dresses slutty, and spends every single Saturday night just wandering about in bad parts of town, then yeah... something's wrong with her.
Yes, it's called being spectacularly stupid.
Being spectacularly stupid doesn't give somebody a free pass to break the law by harming you.
The laws are designed to protect the rights, freedoms and property of everybody - not just the people we think "didn't deserve it", no matter how stupid they are. In fact, the strength and protections of those laws are entirely dependent on them being able to protect the people we least want protected by them... because you can never know for sure when you might end up being unpopular or doing something a lot of people think is stupid.
(This argument valid only in the United States)
I honestly don't have huge disagreements with the rest of your post. Yes, the industry needs to fix problems and stop being stupid. Yes, the whole situation seriously requires some constructive failure analysis. Yes, building a large part of your business plan on mass lawsuits and legal strongarming is ethically disgusting.
But that still does not absolve the rape. Raping a stupid person never becomes 'okay' just because they won't stop acting stupid.
It's not her fault the first time. But if she repeatedly dresses slutty, and spends every single Saturday night just wandering about in bad parts of town, then yeah... something's wrong with her.
Or maybe people just loves to rape slutty or not.
I always ponder what would've happened to these companies making really awesome games that just didn't get the advertisement budget they deserved and eventually had to shut down, and if every guy who never bought their game but still enjoyed the heck out of it would have paid for their copy?
I wonder if it would actually be well enough to keep them afloat.
I know I know, there's the theory that pirates don't pay for what they didn't enjoy, I'm partially for that even, if the pirate never enjoyed it there's no loss, he wouldn't have bought it anyway, but what if he fully enjoyed the game he pirated?
Just a bit of money from every one of those persons could've been enough.
EULA:
Anyone who games knows what it is in a general sense, so it can be considered common knowledge and therefore before you buy the game and can read its individual license you already have a general understanding of what its terms are.
Aside from that. Ignorance is no excuse. Say what you feel about that statement I don't care, its the way the law sees it.
Apples and Oranges:
BigJohn. Have you ever studied debate? Your situation that you present with buying an orange is an Apples and Oranges argument. They're similar, but in no way the same thing. Both fruit, but again not the same one. If you have studied debate, your being a slick monkey and trying to blind side people, if you haven't as most people, your simply sticking to the path that 99.9% of Software Rapists (thanks for that bbob) use. I'm not saying you're advocating piracy, just that you're at least acting uneducated in debate.
Digital Distribution:
The day they stop selling hard copies of AAA titles like Gears of War, Castlevania, or virtually ANY major console title, is the day I stop console gaming. I want the tangible product. The only exception to that are Expansions or Add-ons or whatever the eff you want to call them. Sony had talked about doing that nearly a decade ago, and 80% of the people at the time I knew said that they would never buy another console game because they want a tangible product.
That being said, I hardly buy ANY physical copies of PC games anymore. Steam and Digital River and other places that grant me easy access to support the game devs I love and aspire to be a part of gets my money. Contradictory no?
The thing is its easy to upgrade my PC, and if I upgrade a console, I could potentially be banned from online play because of the drastic measures that have been instituted by companies like Microsoft to counter-act rampant pirating.
Do I blame Microsoft for that? No, They're a business model, and you will always piss someone off, period, you just have to learn to accept that. Yes it hurts people who just want a larger non-microsoft HDD to store various digital media, but when you can easily buy a Network Storage HDD and network it. Though this brings about another topic we've creeped into in this discussion/argument/debate. (to be covered in the next topic).
Now because I'm willing to buy Digital Distributions for PC and not Console, this would completely change if I had to move back to the Sticks, BFE, where I used Dial-Up because I had to if I wanted internet access, because there isn't even a fucking cyber cafe in my home town. Then if things went DD only, fuck that I just wont game. It will suck, but I can live without it as much as it would pain me to do.
Entitlement:
A shot general not 100% on topic aside dealing with entitlement: People (at least americans as those are who I witness daily) are starting to feel more entitled about every aspect of life as the generations progress. Everyone seems to be developing this sense of "Its all about me, and I'm entitled to anything I want. If I can't afford it, but I can get it easily with little risk of recourse then I deserve it."
Back on topic sort of:
"Because I bought the right to play this game I am entitled to distribute this to everyone who will accept it because I paid $60 for it, and choose to ignore the EULA which I very damn well know the context."
"Because the fella who bought the game is giving it away freely I am entitled to receive my free copy of it, despite the fact that I know that it is illegal, and that there is a contractual agreement, however much, I may disagree with it I still know its there and I choose to ignore it, because again I am entitled to this and to say otherwise makes you a cockgobbler."
These are the statements not necessarily being made, but are being shown by the actions of the software rapists and people agreeing to gangrape the software with no intention to buy, ever, evar.
In Closing:
Software Piracy is bad, mmmmm-kay?
We can all agree, I believe, that it does affect the industry. Maybe not as much as some think, and maybe not as little as others, but it does have an impact and it does directly affect the little guys (us polycounters) because shit rolls down hill and Kotick isn't going to take a paycut, but he'll sure as fuck dish one (or thousands) out to save his bottom line and thereby his job.
(Edit) Which means if Kotick and others like him think Piracy is a problem, then it is a problem.
There's no corrupt corporate culture or insane price point to a $1.99 game and people pirated the shit out of it.
Also the "it's not necessarily a sale lost since they wouldn't have bought it in the first place blah blah" is a weak argument because you could say the same thing about stealing physical goods yet we still consider that morally and legally wrong.
stealing physical goods actually cost the person who owns it something. So that analogy isn't the best.
That's why software piracy is so weird because you didn't steal, you copied it. I could take a novel and copy it by hand. I didn't steal the novel, I copied it.
Is piracy okay? No. Is it going away? No, so figure out a way to deal/take advantage of it. Or make crappy free games like Farmville that makes more money than any console game in existence.
*Shrug* doesn't matter what side of the fence you're on, the shit is not going away.
There's no corrupt corporate culture or insane price point to a $1.99 game and people pirated the shit out of it.
Also the "it's not necessarily a sale lost since they wouldn't have bought it in the first place blah blah" is a weak argument because you could say the same thing about stealing physical goods yet we still consider that morally and legally wrong.
Man, this is a perfect example. Thanks for posting this.
As I said repeatedly in this thread, piracy is a problem. This post highlights it. But it also asks the question of how to deal with it.
Piracy is a problem, yes. But my original point is that there's very little to be gained from treating it as a crime. Say if they busted some kneecaps over this. Maybe sued a bunch of the 71.2% of the pirates for millions of dollars. What would have been gained from it? This operation would have closed up, and another developer would have made another game in the future and had 71.2% of HIS customers be pirates. Treating piracy as if it were a hardcore crime solves nothing.
And yet, in that very post, the dev tries to brainstorm some ideas around it. That's exactly what I've been trying to say. We can take it on ourselves to actually use this so-called "piracy" in a positive way.
Look at it another way. Say that the iPhone had amazing DRM and no piracy was possible. All that would mean is that they would have lost those 71.2% of their player-base. Okay, say that some of those would have maybe bought it (unprovable again, but for argument's sake). So if no piracy were possible, they would have just had a smaller player-base and would have gone around dumb-founded as to how to expand it.
But luckily it does exist, and we know that people aren't interested in buying it as is. Maybe downloadable content is the way to go? I don't know. But it's not this way.
So yeah, going back to the rape-victim example. In this case they got raped 71.2% worth. They're the victims, and this is a terrible example of piracy. But if they keep on doing this same thing over and over again, then really that just shows stupidity. Which I bet you they won't repeat that mistake. They're more clever than that.
Man, this is a perfect example. Thanks for posting this.
As I said repeatedly in this thread, piracy is a problem. This post highlights it. But it also asks the question of how to deal with it.
Piracy is a problem, yes. But my original point is that there's very little to be gained from treating it as a crime. Say if they busted some kneecaps over this. Maybe sued a bunch of the 71.2% of the pirates for millions of dollars. What would have been gained from it? This operation would have closed up, and another developer would have made another game in the future and had 71.2% of HIS customers be pirates. Treating piracy as if it were a hardcore crime solves nothing.
And yet, in that very post, the dev tries to brainstorm some ideas around it. That's exactly what I've been trying to say. We can take it on ourselves to actually use this so-called "piracy" in a positive way.
Look at it another way. Say that the iPhone had amazing DRM and no piracy was possible. All that would mean is that they would have lost those 71.2% of their player-base. Okay, say that some of those would have maybe bought it (unprovable again, but for argument's sake). So if no piracy were possible, they would have just had a smaller player-base and would have gone around dumb-founded as to how to expand it.
But luckily it does exist, and we know that people aren't interested in buying it as is. Maybe downloadable content is the way to go? I don't know. But it's not this way.
So yeah, going back to the rape-victim example. In this case they got raped 71.2% worth. They're the victims, and this is a terrible example of piracy. But if they keep on doing this same thing over and over again, then really that just shows stupidity. Which I bet you they won't repeat that mistake. They're more clever than that.
sorry to call you on this, but that's utter horse shit.
to make an argument that you've lost 71.2% of your playerbase by having an un-piratable platform is just wrong, flat out. he even got the response from someone "we pirate because we can".
now, if you were to say you'd lose SOME of your playerbase due to having an un-poratable product, i'd agree. but you'd gain a much bigger PAYING playerbase, and that's the issue.
the majority of pirates don't pirate because they want to try before they buy, they don't pirate because they might possibly think about buying it later. they pirate because they're able to. if they were unable to they'd have to choose to buy it, or not. to say that EVERY pirate on the planet would not buy anything at all just because they can't get it for free, is an incorrect assumption. when people want something, they will always get it, even if they can't get it for free.
And what I'm asking you, is why is software the only thing on this earth that this "logic" applies to?
Nobody had a problem with me buying an orange and giving it to the homeless guy outside the store. I can buy a pair of jeans and give it to my girlfriend, no problems there. How come you guys don't chime in then with "YOU do not have the right to distribute pairs of jeans you did not make"? What about if I buy a video-game, play it, enjoy it, then sell it to my neighbor? Still, I don't hear anyone saying that I cannot distribute things I bought without permission.
It's only software, and only that little thing that for some reason the rules don't apply. Anything else in this world, when you buy it, you own it to do whatever you want with it.
Not software. They can sell it, then have further rights on the item after it's sold.
With software when you "give it away" you still have an orange you can eat. In fact if you follow your logic you have as many oranges as anyone wants, no one will ever have to pay for oranges again because you can make as many copies as you want with no effort. No one would ever sell anything again, it would all be freely available, which sounds great until you need that company to make something new and they're not around.
When you make software you don't salve for 3-5 years on 1 million individual products like a company would a million pairs of jeans. It still costs a certain amount of money and you need to sell a certain number of units to recoup your costs and hopefully make enough to fund the next project. Anything that chips away at that number puts your company at risk of not being able to make it.
I personally wouldn't have a problem with the "lend a game to a friend" if it where like a book and you where unable to play it while it was in his/her possession. But with software you can distribute it to as many people as you want while everyone can play it. But that's not how the laws are written, maybe some day they'll figure a way out that doesn't punish customers and allows that but thats not how it works right now.
The solution to piracy isn't tricky design, that would lead to only specific types of games being made and others never being made ever again. Less choices not more for the players. There are only so many ways you can innovate around piracy and eventurally those restrictions will impact the type of games that get made.
The solution is making sure that the people that enjoy playing games, make sure the people who enjoy making games, get to keep doing just that. You do that by educating them that by not paying for what they're playing they're hurting the very people that make the games they like and hurt their chances that they themselves will someday be able to work in this industry.
piracy is about two sides arguing about which one has the right to be more greedy than the other.
That's possibly one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. Being paid for years of work, often with weeks of 20 hour days , as opposed to having someone steal the work that came from your labor is not "greedy".
now, if you were to say you'd lose SOME of your playerbase due to having an un-poratable product, i'd agree. but you'd gain a much bigger PAYING playerbase, and that's the issue.
Which is exactly what I said. Either you didn't read my post fully, or you missed that.
And I'll add another layer on top of that, where if there was no legitimate way to pirate it, their paying playerbase would have been larger, and if they found ways to get some of those they lost to play (like downloadable content), it would be even larger than that.
As an example of this, look at MMOs. By the nature of the product it's almost impossible to pirate (other than private servers). So people buy it, and pay them a monthly subscription. But not all games do that. The rise of the Free-to-Play model shows that. Where they give you a freakin' MMO for free, and you get to buy more downloadable content later, and people love it.
That's the kind of thinking we need. Not let's ban them and sue them.
My 2cents anyway. Seems like people here are more interested in a crusade than a debate.
And I'll add another layer on top of that, where if there was no legitimate way to pirate it, their paying playerbase would have been larger, and if they found ways to get some of those they lost to play (like downloadable content), it would be even larger than that.
downloadable content is piratable, see mass effect, dragon age etc. heck, even the guys iphone app itself is considdered downloadable content with quite rigorous DRM in place.
what would you propose they do differently, or better, next time around? what magical device would you put in place to stop people pirating his next app simply because they can?
I don't have a magical device. And I don't think piracy will ever be stopped. Don't think I ever claimed otherwise.
And how rigorous can Apple's DRM be if in that blog he describes the process as taking 5 minutes, and being easier to get a a pirated app into the iPhone than it is to get a legitimate one?
As for a possible solution, I don't know man. Not familiar with their game. But they say they have a ladder system, maybe when you buy it legit you get a serial# that lets you participate in that? Could be all sorts of things really. I don't know enough to say.
And I'm not even excluding the possibility, however unpleasant it is, that the game may just be bad. We do make bad games now and then too. There's this weird notion that just because a game was made, that it's also worth someone's money.
I'm sure there are lots of kids who got Superman64 for their birthday back in the day that would disagree.
Bigjohn so its okay if I use some of your portfolio to look for jobs? no, maybe, yes? Is it still okay if i get to a job interview before you and get the job u were looking for? I mean you still have your copy... I mean I couldn't possible have stolen it?
Piracing music, movies, games is a crime. Just because people can get away with it doesnt make it something else.
Piracy could be reduced if we had police for the internet, closing all the important warez sites and jailing too many bastards... but we all know we all like to have some things for free, like the apps for learning.
What happens with the app store and the level of piracy for the iphone is incredible. That is a perfect example of not paying nor 1 dollar because it's for free googling in the internet.
About DRMs, i don't have problems with them. For example, who knows the Ubi DRMs for their games such as Splinter Cell: Conviction or the last prince of persia? anyone have these games here? They force you to have a permanent internet connection, and i really don't know if they had great results against piracy. If someone could give numbers would be appreciated.
The same goes with games such as starcraft 2. For multiplayer you need to have an original copy. Pirates who like the game will end buying a copy in order to play the multi.
I think developers must protect their work, and force people to buy the product if they want to play it. The DRMs won't be something good for pirates, but for legit users... from my point of view, i don't care a shit if i need to be connected to the internet. when i turn on the computer, i'm already connected, and when i play any game, i need to be online. Remember that the PC platform is becoming a mmorpg and online gaming platform. The 90% of the games i have installed are f2p mmos or mmorpgs with cash shop. When my connection is down, i can't play, but it can't be helped.. who cares.
This discuss about piracy may be considered as a nonsense (piracy is a problem of conscience, awareness), at the end, too many here won't buy a game because it's FOR FREE in the internet (i know too many people working in the game industry that don't pay for games having an internet connection).
The people is not stupid, and if they can avoid to pay for a game/music/film, they will do it, yes or yes. And if you are one the few supporting the games and singers, let me say that here in Spain, you are called as a "stupid retard". And it's because you can spent that money in more "important" things like expensive hardware.
How much money we can save if we don't buy games?, in my case more than 300 euro, about 6 or 7 games a year, and that's a nice amount of money to be spent in a good graphic card.
Nvidia and AMD are the ones highly benefited in all this issue. You know, Matter is neither created nor destroyed, and with the money, i think it's something similar. What it's not wasted in games, it's wasted in hardware to play the pirated games. The good graphics cards are always very expensive and non legit gamers will always buy the best rig possible.
Piracy could be reduced but nobody does anything. It's a lost battle.
blah, do you know the issue with online manga and the removed sites?
I enjoy people respecting software developers in regards to piracy when it's a small team or just one person, kind of like 3DCoat and formerly Sculptris before Pixologic acquired them/him. To see warez/pirating communities frowning upon people trying to crack programs like that sometimes puts a smile on my face.
But Autodesk? Fuck it.
Edit: There should be no "INTERNET POLICE" ever. At all.
Piracy could be reduced if we had police for the internet, closing all the important warez sites and jailing too many bastards.
Well that flies in the face of what the internet as we know it was built on. Anything else we should do while we are at it? We are small children that need to be governed everywhere.
I enjoy people respecting software developers in regards to piracy when it's a small team or just one person, kind of like 3DCoat and formerly Sculptris before Pixologic acquired them/him. To see warez/pirating communities frowning upon people trying to crack programs like that sometimes puts a smile on my face.
But Autodesk? Fuck it.
Edit: There should be no "INTERNET POLICE" ever. At all.
I thought the general concensus was "if it can be cracked we will crack it" warez groups are not about right or wrong, but about cracking stuff for the challenge.
Otherwise we would never see cracks or pirated versions of anything small/indie/or similar.
Internet police is kind of drastic, but the internet grows in speeds where laws just cannot keep up, and the amount of criminal activities going on on the internet, and the people not fully aware of how things work is just astronomical.
People, like electricity, follow the path of least resistance.
Make buying a game and playing it easier to do than piracy and its profitable. Sadly they see fit to do the opposite for PC gaming. I know people who buy their game to support the developer then hack it so they don't have to deal with the DRM and disc in the drive BS to play it.
On a console it can still be done, and a lot of people do it, but as long as they stay in the minority and its just hard enough to discourage the majority, then its profitable.
Bigjohn so its okay if I use some of your portfolio to look for jobs? no, maybe, yes? Is it still okay if i get to a job interview before you and get the job u were looking for? I mean you still have your copy... I mean I couldn't possible have stolen it?
Piracing music, movies, games is a crime. Just because people can get away with it doesnt make it something else.
I'm sorry man, but do you even have a point? Other than echoing what the status-quo is on this subject, and try to insult me in a backwards way?
And if you had bothered to read past page1, you'd see that someone already came up with that brilliant "joke", and I'll tell you what I told him. Yeah, go for it. If you really think that cheating in life and using someone else's portfolio will do you good, then yeah, go for it. Saving pictures from my website to your HD isn't a crime. But I wonder how long you will last on a job that you're not qualified for?
Maybe I should say it again, cause it seems like it needs to be said twice a page for people to get it. I'm not saying piracy is right. I'm not saying it's not a problem. I am saying we shouldn't treat our playerbase as criminals. Because of two reasons. First, they're potential customers. Second, considering everyone is innocent until proven guilty, I don't see a way to fight them without turning that around into guilty until proven innocent.
The level of intellectual elitism and smugness in that post is staggering. (Just an observation)
He has a point. I think this discussion is getting twisted around a bit due to a few unclear arguments.
Recap?
Recap.
Pirating isn't 'good' but it's hard to define just what sort of bad we should call it. Theft? Piracy? Intellectual Counterfeiting? None of them really fit. It's a vague crime, in that the initial harm is theoretical, but the long-term affects upon sequels and unique IP's have been felt before. The answer? taking advantage of the preexisting networks and infrastructures used for the distribution of cracked files via reverse engineering and creating a digital distribution platform which removes the overhead cost associated with retailers.
Ultimately piracy is a factor and probably always will be. There is an element of human nature at play here. The best social systems in the world try to work with human nature not against it. That's why communism in the Soviet interpretation was doomed to fail from the outset. It refused to see human beings as they are.
There's no corrupt corporate culture or insane price point to a $1.99 game and people pirated the shit out of it.
Also the "it's not necessarily a sale lost since they wouldn't have bought it in the first place blah blah" is a weak argument because you could say the same thing about stealing physical goods yet we still consider that morally and legally wrong.
Here is a similar case where people pirated something despite the fact that the purchaser was given the choice of how much they should pay for it...
Lack of access to a credit card in order to purchase online seemed to be a commonly stated problem. This is a possible drawback of digital distribution models.
Edit:
Just thought I'd add this from the article linked above...
So why are people sharing the Humble Bundle, when they could get it just by donating a penny to charity? We can only speculate, but here are some possible reasons:
Some might want to donate, but it seems a whole lot easier to just click on a hyperlink than it is to enter a credit card number. Sure, it only takes a couple seconds, but for many, this is a few seconds too long. The most successful online stores all allow one-click buying, including Amazon, Steam and iTunes. In the words of one gamer, Steam showed him that he "wasn't cheap, just lazy," and I'm sure he's not alone in that realization.
Some users may want to share the bundle with their friends, and decide that it's easier to just make one donation for a larger amount than it is to make separate gift donations.
Some users may live in countries where none of our three processors (PayPal, Google Checkout, and Amazon) are accepted. These users might pay if they could, but they feel that they have no choice but to search for shared copies.
Some users just want to "stick it to the man", and be edgy and rebellious. It doesn't matter if they're sticking it to indie developers, sick children, and online civil liberties... they're sticking it to someone, so they feel cool.
Replies
Eh, not really because you're assuming everyone who pirates a game 1. Likes it and 2. plays it to completion or worth the price of the game. Trust, turning the game on isn't worth $60.
I highly doubt a developer cares if someone pirated their game, played it for 5 minutes and never again. I know people who download games because the game doesn't have a demo and they just want to see if they like it.
I can't even remember how many dreamcast games I pirated back in highschool, played for 5 minutes and never again. The only games I actually played were the ones I bought (NFL2K1 all fucking day long, lol).
I just think it's irrational to say, "that person who pirated my game and played it for 5 minutes owes me $60!" Maybe they owe you an apology, but trust you didn't lose any money from them playing your game with no intention of ever buying it.
I got a problem with people who pirate stuff they actually like though. If you're pirating stuff just to test it out or play for 5-10 minutes, then whatever. If you're a big Modern Warfare fan and you're pirating the game with no intention of buying it and you're playing it 4 hours a day... now there's a problem.
Also people forget how pirating at times helps games and developers be known.
Here's a question... Was it okay for people to pirate the Starcraft 2 Beta even though it wasn't sold for cash?
Certainly not my intention. I don't view you as a jerk, and I understand your logic.
One Example:
RIP Iron Lore: http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=42663
I agree that there are other, some more important, issues at the root of our problems in this industry. However, I would argue that piracy is much more damaging than you seem to believe.
Agreed, to some extent.
But the problems that it causes, are the fault of the industry, not of the pirates.
Games appearing on file-sharing sites before they're released (which was mentioned in that article too btw). How is that the fault of pirates? That's the fault of the shitty distribution system we're using, which is what I've been saying all along.
DRM causing bad hype is another of those. DRM isn't needed in the strictest sense. It's another one of those features that I claim are in place to perpetuate an outdated business model.
I agree that most major companies use counter productive tactics that either don't work, or hinder the wrong people when attempting to thwart software piracy. That point is not in contention. Uber-companies often go to great lengths and only end up screwing their legitimate customers. We've seen it numerous times, and we all agree that they are being silly and wasteful.
However, none of that justifies leeching software. And assuming a permissive or accepting attitude towards software leeching only contributes to the problem. Yes, it is reasonable to figure in losses due to piracy into a company's financial projections. That's just good business. But that doesn't mean that you should be at all accepting of leeches, or in any way condone their behavior.
Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.
On that I can agree with 100%. Nothing there I disagree with.
Yeah, we shouldn't be accepting to leeching/piracy (whatever you want to call it). The only difference between the way I see things, and the way you outlined them, is that I don't feel like an anti-leeching witch-hunt is productive at all. And in fact, I see piracy as a symptom of things we could fix in our own industry which will then help a lot of people (devs like us).
I've seen this happen, several times even. Back around 2004 I knew someone that pirated Naruto2 (the import fighting game) for Gamecube using the PSO exploit. Both him and many of the people he played against eventually ended up buying it and its sequels. Many 'freeloader' discs for playing imports were bought too.
The problem is that these kinds of occurances are far outweighed by the number of people that don't use pirated copies as something akine to extended demos, and never intended to purchase the title whether they liked it or not.
Actually, we're in agreement on that point as well. I don't approve of the current methods for dealing with leeching. I think that clever developers would be able to find much more creative ways to use the software piracy's own methods against it. I think that software piracy shouldn't be viewed as something to stop, so much as something to exploit.
What I really object to is anyone who seems complacent or permissive on the issue. For anyone who is serious about game development, a negative stance on piracy/leeching should be a given. For that matter, anyone who enjoys playing games, or the community that has grown up around game enthusiasm, should never be "accepting" of software piracy.
One thing I don't understand is how you can be so antagonistic towards big-business, yet still be ambivalent towards software leeching. Software leeching is much less likely to harm big business publishers or the executives responsible for running them. So their stock drops a point or two, who cares?
Software piracy is most potentially damaging to smaller, independent studios. Indie developers often times don't have the funding or expertise to create "services" to protect against piracy. This is why so many indies look to the AppStore and Steam for a certain measure of protection. They voluntarily give up a percentage of their profits just to take advantage of another company's service. There is also the issue of marketing. It is easy to get the necessary legitimate sales when you can afford console licences and throw millions of dollars at advertising. When most of your marketing is grass-roots and word-of-mouth, each sale matters.
If ten thousand people leeched a AAA blockbuster, the publisher would hardly feel it. If ten thousand people leeched an indie game, it could put the developer out of business. The kind of game development industry that you would prefer to see will only be hindered by software leeching.
I don't see any harm in accepting their behaviour. It makes it easier to move on to more productive ways of convincing pirates to spend their money. They aren't our enemies, they are potential customers and consumers.
As for proverbs, I think "the road to evil is paved with good intentions" is fairly fitting, too.
Because I view piracy as a great thing. They're doing our work for us. They're letting us know what they want, and how they want it. They're doing proof-of-concept of delivery methods. Smart companies and smart people will exploit this, not fear it.
Even simple things like the Blizzard patcher using bit-torrent to get extra bandwidth for patches. The very existence of Steam, which was really first done in pirate-form. There's a lot for us to learn from piracy.
Depending on how you look at it, it could be seen as a good thing in a way. Not in the $'s or sale numbers way. But in how to make a better product in the future way.
About the big business vs. indie/small sort of thing. I think piracy can benefit indie devs the most. They're not bound to distribution deals. Indie devs can just sell their game on their website (Torchlight), and can experiment with it. What MMOs are doing now is really avant-garde in my opinion. The whole Free To Play model? Genius. It's a step ahead of what even pirates came up with.
Small indie devs can benefit the most from piracy. Or get burned the hardest if they're not careful these days.
how many people here who're against piracy of games, have pirated their copies of max, photoshop, zbrush etc?
i'll hold my hands up and say i have (let he who is without sin etc etc).
the reason i ask, is because i personally believe there is a line to be drawn in what is rather a gray area. i disagree with bigjohns point, and was actually waiting for "well anyone could buy an orange and instead of eating it, plant it and give the "copied" oranges he grows away". that would have been an amusing argument. i also believe that stores which buy and sell preowned games harm the industry just as much as pirates do. since after the initial sale of the brand new copy, no royalties are paid on that copy when it's re-sold, which is exactly the same as how piracy affects the industry.
however, when it comes to development software... well, i'm not IN the industry 100% and when i am, the first thing i plan on doing is buying a legitimate license for every piece of software i use. it's something i did with music, before i became a session guitarist, i didn't own my own amp, i borrowed a friends. i didn't have enough money to buy recording software, so i pirated it. but when i started making enough money from the job, i paid for the license, i saw it as "only fair".
similarly though, i also use the 3 point shader, i'll point out i paid for the full version (i'm pretty sure they can varify that if i fall under scruteny here). because i see it as something reasonably affordable, that will directly affect my efforts to get "in" the industry.
i don't pirate games, because after trying so hard to even make one character, i can just about fathom the amount of real work that goes into a fully complete title, i can say that the people making it deserve to be paid for it, in full.
if we're going to analogise here BigJohn. here's one for you:
you wouldn't move into a house without paying for it first. but you could borrow tools from a friend in order to build your house from scratch. the difference there though, is quite clear. using tools to build, in order to pay, is vastly different from avoiding paying just because you can.
The sale of games means the seller has more money to buy new games, and also knows that what they're buying automatically has more value then something they couldn't resell at the asking price.
Ok, now I have to step in. Blaming the game industry for piracy is like telling a rape victim it was her fault for wearing slutty clothes in a bad part of town.
Yes, traditional financing and distribution models are inefficient and outdated, especially since we derived them from other industries where a single product could not be duplicated endlessly, perfectly, for practically free. Print publication and motion picture production were the closest models we had for the kind of businesses we wanted to run and the products we wanted to create, but it wasn't a perfect translation and now the flaws are showing.
That doesn't justify or excuse the actions of somebody who duplicates and distributes our work without our consent, especially when it's done to circumvent having to pay for it. Just because I do something dumb or something that doesn't work well doesn't give anybody else the right to take my things.
And it is theft. There are a lot of ways US and other country's IP laws could be improved, but the basic premise is vital and sound: when I have an idea and I make it into a marketable product, both the products on the shelves AND the idea are mine. If you steal the physical products, you're stealing goods. If you take my idea and use it without permission, you've stolen a different type of property - an intangible one, but something that is still undeniably MINE. Until you stole it.
If you want the product, you have to pay me for it. If you want to use my idea, you have to ask and get my permission, and usually you have to pay me for it. The only way around that is to come up with something that improves sufficiently on my idea to the point that it's undeniably more your idea than mine.
Folks on the biz end of the office like to introduce the extra layers of publishing, distribution, retail, and duplication because that's how they make their paycheck (whether that's really warranted or not is a different discussion). The reality, though, is that all those extra layers don't change the fact that when you take something that's mine that has been sold - not given away - and make a perfect copy of it, that is theft. You did not steal the disc off the shelf, instead you stole the intangible work and property. How did you steal it? Well, you have a perfect, complete functioning copy of it, and you didn't pay me for it, and you didn't buy it from somebody who DID pay me for it, and with the possible exception of a few specific copies that I willingly gave to people as gifts, the only copies of my work that I have agreed to permit are the ones that people have to pay me for.
If you didn't pay me, and nobody else who had posession of it before you paid me, and I didn't originally give it as a gift, somebody's a goddamn thief.
Again with the blaming the victim. Who's the pirate? Uh, the guy at the disc printer who took the rejects out of the scrap bin (against the law and probably his company's rules) and handed them off to his warez buddies. Nobody in the studio, the publisher, the manufacturer, the distributor, or the retailer took that software and handed it to somebody with instructions to "go put this on the internets." Again, for that to happen, somebody is still a goddamn thief.
I hate DRM as much as the next guy. I still remember the golden years between widespread CD-drive adoption and the release of the first CD-R drives on the market, when we finally had DirectX to do shit with Windows and 3dfx cards let us do all kinds of new, amazing stuff... and the great part was, since none of the CDs were copy-protected, it was pretty reliable that you could drop a game in the drive and you'd be playing as soon as it was done installing. Having to worry about the game installing a root kit or embedding shit in the guts of your OS was tinfoil hat crap... or was, anyway. Now we're so acclimated to it that something like StarForce or net-connection-only play doesn't even faze most of us.
But DRM exists because with DVD-R burners, 100-disc packs that cost $10, and broadband that can move all 4gb to just about anywhere in the world in less than an hour all add up to one very important thing: risk. A risk that the companies who provide the warchests for projects like Modern Warfare and Crysis simply would never, ever touch with a 59' pole that belongs to somebody else, because it's a stupid business decision. It's akin to sinking $50 million into years of development and production for a widget anybody can perfectly duplicate on their kitchen table for ten cents: you might as well burn the cash in the parking lot. No business strategist in their right fucking mind would ever seriously consider funding that widget project unless there was some kind of guarantee that the widgets would at least be frustratingly difficult to duplicate.
I won't argue that DRM has kind of gone off the deep end recently, and that there are exceptions across the spectrum of specific situations, but the bottom line is that if it's so easy to steal something that a rock with a brain injury can do it while sleeping, nobody except the spectacularly dumb are going to risk a single penny on trying to sell it.
Want to know what my actual biggest fear is about server-connection dependent DRM and cloud subscription vs hardcopy purchase? Heritage.
I still have my original copy of MechWarrior 2. It's 15 years old. That is the game the drove me to a love of playing and making games (and also BattleTech). I have legacy computer systems set up solely to play it and other vintage games. I have a bookshelf full of games dating back to the late 80s, with a lot - most - of the milestones and halcyons that chronicle the evolution of our industry and our trade, as well as some of our subculture's most cherished moments from it.
Believe it or not, I actually want to make sure that I can show my son what it's like to blow up a Star Destroyer alone in an X-wing, circa 1993, or try to hold the line on Luthien in a captured Timber Wolf, circa 1996, or to send Kbots swarming over a Core base, circa 1997, or to climb up onto the Great Wall above the temple of Xian and take in the panorama of the mountains around you, circa 1998, or to watch your people journey across the stars trying to find the homeworld they can't even remember, circa 1999, or to discover the plot you've unwittingly been a part of after you escape from the MJ12 lab, circa 2000... You get the idea. I can do that because I have the hardcopies of that software, and all I have to do is install it and it will run.
What am I going to do 20 years from now when I want to go back and play Flight Simulator X, and Microsoft shut down the authentication servers 15 years prior? Or if I want to play Assassain's Creed II, but UbiSoft is bankrupt? Or my son wants to use Portal for his college philosophy class, but Valve stopped supporting Steam in 2018? Software rot is one thing, we do what we can about it. What are we going to do when these phone-home DRM schemes make entire eras of our work, our industry's history, and our industry's heritage disappear?
that said, it's down to a law that actually exists, called the First Sale Doctrine (within the US). which allows a person to do whatever they like with their product after purchasing it, including resale, but not including manufacturing copies. the EU however, has no such law, and actually has a "Droit De Suit", where artist can claim royalties on resale of their work.
which makes me wonder if companies like Game, within the UK have to pay any royalty on preowned titles, or if they can avoid it due to most publishers being US based...
source 1
source 2
Would they rather you buy their stuff? Yea, but you aren't the main consumer they're aiming at. Once you go freelance though, you kind of have to buy it and should because you can just write it off in taxes anyway if you're in the US.
With that said, it's slightly different, but not really.
True, there is that scenario, but like I said earlier in the thread, Resale outlets (such as Gamestop) should be required to hold traded in titles the same as pawn shops for a pre-determined amount of time deemed by local laws. If theirs anything that digital distribution's taught us, whether it be legal or pirate, is that people are impatient.
http://commercial.apolloduck.com/feature.phtml?id=136422
It's not her fault the first time. But if she repeatedly dresses slutty, and spends every single Saturday night just wandering about in bad parts of town, then yeah... something's wrong with her.
That's not to say that her getting raped is fine. Much like how I'm not saying piracy is fine. But there's still a lot, a ton, she/we can do to stop it. And the industry is habitual in not doing anything. It's like that girl repeatedly doing the same thing, expecting a different result (or was she expecting a different result?). And really, the video-game industry is more ahead of the curve on this than most others in entertainment. My main complaint is towards the music industry. Come'on. MP3s are here, accept it already. Film industry as well. But that's a different story.
Suing your fans, putting people in prison, just wreaking havoc in general is a bad idea. It legitimizes piracy in the minds of the people running the file-sharing services, and causes them to fancy themselves heroes. It doesn't solve anything, and it just makes the piracy scene that much more sophisticated.
We can actually look at it as something to learn from, and something to embrace and use for our own benefit. That's my point.
i wouldn't say complete impatience. let's face it, everyone wants to save money. they see preowned costing less and they want to pay that price instead of the "full" new price.
you'll always get the people that "want it first". and i agree those are more likely to pirate on zero day. but the majority of people... they're just in it for the money.
what they don't realise is that preowned sales probably hike the price up just as much as outright piracy.
Yes, it's called being spectacularly stupid.
Being spectacularly stupid doesn't give somebody a free pass to break the law by harming you.
The laws are designed to protect the rights, freedoms and property of everybody - not just the people we think "didn't deserve it", no matter how stupid they are. In fact, the strength and protections of those laws are entirely dependent on them being able to protect the people we least want protected by them... because you can never know for sure when you might end up being unpopular or doing something a lot of people think is stupid.
(This argument valid only in the United States)
I honestly don't have huge disagreements with the rest of your post. Yes, the industry needs to fix problems and stop being stupid. Yes, the whole situation seriously requires some constructive failure analysis. Yes, building a large part of your business plan on mass lawsuits and legal strongarming is ethically disgusting.
But that still does not absolve the rape. Raping a stupid person never becomes 'okay' just because they won't stop acting stupid.
Or maybe people just loves to rape slutty or not.
I always ponder what would've happened to these companies making really awesome games that just didn't get the advertisement budget they deserved and eventually had to shut down, and if every guy who never bought their game but still enjoyed the heck out of it would have paid for their copy?
I wonder if it would actually be well enough to keep them afloat.
I know I know, there's the theory that pirates don't pay for what they didn't enjoy, I'm partially for that even, if the pirate never enjoyed it there's no loss, he wouldn't have bought it anyway, but what if he fully enjoyed the game he pirated?
Just a bit of money from every one of those persons could've been enough.
Anyone who games knows what it is in a general sense, so it can be considered common knowledge and therefore before you buy the game and can read its individual license you already have a general understanding of what its terms are.
Aside from that. Ignorance is no excuse. Say what you feel about that statement I don't care, its the way the law sees it.
Apples and Oranges:
BigJohn. Have you ever studied debate? Your situation that you present with buying an orange is an Apples and Oranges argument. They're similar, but in no way the same thing. Both fruit, but again not the same one. If you have studied debate, your being a slick monkey and trying to blind side people, if you haven't as most people, your simply sticking to the path that 99.9% of Software Rapists (thanks for that bbob) use. I'm not saying you're advocating piracy, just that you're at least acting uneducated in debate.
Digital Distribution:
The day they stop selling hard copies of AAA titles like Gears of War, Castlevania, or virtually ANY major console title, is the day I stop console gaming. I want the tangible product. The only exception to that are Expansions or Add-ons or whatever the eff you want to call them. Sony had talked about doing that nearly a decade ago, and 80% of the people at the time I knew said that they would never buy another console game because they want a tangible product.
That being said, I hardly buy ANY physical copies of PC games anymore. Steam and Digital River and other places that grant me easy access to support the game devs I love and aspire to be a part of gets my money. Contradictory no?
The thing is its easy to upgrade my PC, and if I upgrade a console, I could potentially be banned from online play because of the drastic measures that have been instituted by companies like Microsoft to counter-act rampant pirating.
Do I blame Microsoft for that? No, They're a business model, and you will always piss someone off, period, you just have to learn to accept that. Yes it hurts people who just want a larger non-microsoft HDD to store various digital media, but when you can easily buy a Network Storage HDD and network it. Though this brings about another topic we've creeped into in this discussion/argument/debate. (to be covered in the next topic).
Now because I'm willing to buy Digital Distributions for PC and not Console, this would completely change if I had to move back to the Sticks, BFE, where I used Dial-Up because I had to if I wanted internet access, because there isn't even a fucking cyber cafe in my home town. Then if things went DD only, fuck that I just wont game. It will suck, but I can live without it as much as it would pain me to do.
Entitlement:
A shot general not 100% on topic aside dealing with entitlement: People (at least americans as those are who I witness daily) are starting to feel more entitled about every aspect of life as the generations progress. Everyone seems to be developing this sense of "Its all about me, and I'm entitled to anything I want. If I can't afford it, but I can get it easily with little risk of recourse then I deserve it."
Back on topic sort of:
"Because I bought the right to play this game I am entitled to distribute this to everyone who will accept it because I paid $60 for it, and choose to ignore the EULA which I very damn well know the context."
"Because the fella who bought the game is giving it away freely I am entitled to receive my free copy of it, despite the fact that I know that it is illegal, and that there is a contractual agreement, however much, I may disagree with it I still know its there and I choose to ignore it, because again I am entitled to this and to say otherwise makes you a cockgobbler."
These are the statements not necessarily being made, but are being shown by the actions of the software rapists and people agreeing to gangrape the software with no intention to buy, ever, evar.
In Closing:
Software Piracy is bad, mmmmm-kay?
We can all agree, I believe, that it does affect the industry. Maybe not as much as some think, and maybe not as little as others, but it does have an impact and it does directly affect the little guys (us polycounters) because shit rolls down hill and Kotick isn't going to take a paycut, but he'll sure as fuck dish one (or thousands) out to save his bottom line and thereby his job.
(Edit) Which means if Kotick and others like him think Piracy is a problem, then it is a problem.
http://smellslikedonkey.com/wordpress/?page_id=274
There's no corrupt corporate culture or insane price point to a $1.99 game and people pirated the shit out of it.
Also the "it's not necessarily a sale lost since they wouldn't have bought it in the first place blah blah" is a weak argument because you could say the same thing about stealing physical goods yet we still consider that morally and legally wrong.
That's why software piracy is so weird because you didn't steal, you copied it. I could take a novel and copy it by hand. I didn't steal the novel, I copied it.
Is piracy okay? No. Is it going away? No, so figure out a way to deal/take advantage of it. Or make crappy free games like Farmville that makes more money than any console game in existence.
*Shrug* doesn't matter what side of the fence you're on, the shit is not going away.
Man, this is a perfect example. Thanks for posting this.
As I said repeatedly in this thread, piracy is a problem. This post highlights it. But it also asks the question of how to deal with it.
Piracy is a problem, yes. But my original point is that there's very little to be gained from treating it as a crime. Say if they busted some kneecaps over this. Maybe sued a bunch of the 71.2% of the pirates for millions of dollars. What would have been gained from it? This operation would have closed up, and another developer would have made another game in the future and had 71.2% of HIS customers be pirates. Treating piracy as if it were a hardcore crime solves nothing.
And yet, in that very post, the dev tries to brainstorm some ideas around it. That's exactly what I've been trying to say. We can take it on ourselves to actually use this so-called "piracy" in a positive way.
Look at it another way. Say that the iPhone had amazing DRM and no piracy was possible. All that would mean is that they would have lost those 71.2% of their player-base. Okay, say that some of those would have maybe bought it (unprovable again, but for argument's sake). So if no piracy were possible, they would have just had a smaller player-base and would have gone around dumb-founded as to how to expand it.
But luckily it does exist, and we know that people aren't interested in buying it as is. Maybe downloadable content is the way to go? I don't know. But it's not this way.
So yeah, going back to the rape-victim example. In this case they got raped 71.2% worth. They're the victims, and this is a terrible example of piracy. But if they keep on doing this same thing over and over again, then really that just shows stupidity. Which I bet you they won't repeat that mistake. They're more clever than that.
sorry to call you on this, but that's utter horse shit.
to make an argument that you've lost 71.2% of your playerbase by having an un-piratable platform is just wrong, flat out. he even got the response from someone "we pirate because we can".
now, if you were to say you'd lose SOME of your playerbase due to having an un-poratable product, i'd agree. but you'd gain a much bigger PAYING playerbase, and that's the issue.
the majority of pirates don't pirate because they want to try before they buy, they don't pirate because they might possibly think about buying it later. they pirate because they're able to. if they were unable to they'd have to choose to buy it, or not. to say that EVERY pirate on the planet would not buy anything at all just because they can't get it for free, is an incorrect assumption. when people want something, they will always get it, even if they can't get it for free.
http://www.neoseeker.com/news/12280-microsoft-gets-ban-happy-on-xbox-live-pirates/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/10002915
i'd be willing to bet most of those people who were banned then bought legit units and games so they could keep playing. not all, of course. but most.
When you make software you don't salve for 3-5 years on 1 million individual products like a company would a million pairs of jeans. It still costs a certain amount of money and you need to sell a certain number of units to recoup your costs and hopefully make enough to fund the next project. Anything that chips away at that number puts your company at risk of not being able to make it.
I personally wouldn't have a problem with the "lend a game to a friend" if it where like a book and you where unable to play it while it was in his/her possession. But with software you can distribute it to as many people as you want while everyone can play it. But that's not how the laws are written, maybe some day they'll figure a way out that doesn't punish customers and allows that but thats not how it works right now.
The solution to piracy isn't tricky design, that would lead to only specific types of games being made and others never being made ever again. Less choices not more for the players. There are only so many ways you can innovate around piracy and eventurally those restrictions will impact the type of games that get made.
The solution is making sure that the people that enjoy playing games, make sure the people who enjoy making games, get to keep doing just that. You do that by educating them that by not paying for what they're playing they're hurting the very people that make the games they like and hurt their chances that they themselves will someday be able to work in this industry.
Which is exactly what I said. Either you didn't read my post fully, or you missed that.
And I'll add another layer on top of that, where if there was no legitimate way to pirate it, their paying playerbase would have been larger, and if they found ways to get some of those they lost to play (like downloadable content), it would be even larger than that.
As an example of this, look at MMOs. By the nature of the product it's almost impossible to pirate (other than private servers). So people buy it, and pay them a monthly subscription. But not all games do that. The rise of the Free-to-Play model shows that. Where they give you a freakin' MMO for free, and you get to buy more downloadable content later, and people love it.
That's the kind of thinking we need. Not let's ban them and sue them.
My 2cents anyway. Seems like people here are more interested in a crusade than a debate.
downloadable content is piratable, see mass effect, dragon age etc. heck, even the guys iphone app itself is considdered downloadable content with quite rigorous DRM in place.
what would you propose they do differently, or better, next time around? what magical device would you put in place to stop people pirating his next app simply because they can?
And how rigorous can Apple's DRM be if in that blog he describes the process as taking 5 minutes, and being easier to get a a pirated app into the iPhone than it is to get a legitimate one?
As for a possible solution, I don't know man. Not familiar with their game. But they say they have a ladder system, maybe when you buy it legit you get a serial# that lets you participate in that? Could be all sorts of things really. I don't know enough to say.
And I'm not even excluding the possibility, however unpleasant it is, that the game may just be bad. We do make bad games now and then too. There's this weird notion that just because a game was made, that it's also worth someone's money.
I'm sure there are lots of kids who got Superman64 for their birthday back in the day that would disagree.
(Just an observation)
Piracing music, movies, games is a crime. Just because people can get away with it doesnt make it something else.
What happens with the app store and the level of piracy for the iphone is incredible. That is a perfect example of not paying nor 1 dollar because it's for free googling in the internet.
About DRMs, i don't have problems with them. For example, who knows the Ubi DRMs for their games such as Splinter Cell: Conviction or the last prince of persia? anyone have these games here? They force you to have a permanent internet connection, and i really don't know if they had great results against piracy. If someone could give numbers would be appreciated.
The same goes with games such as starcraft 2. For multiplayer you need to have an original copy. Pirates who like the game will end buying a copy in order to play the multi.
I think developers must protect their work, and force people to buy the product if they want to play it. The DRMs won't be something good for pirates, but for legit users... from my point of view, i don't care a shit if i need to be connected to the internet. when i turn on the computer, i'm already connected, and when i play any game, i need to be online. Remember that the PC platform is becoming a mmorpg and online gaming platform. The 90% of the games i have installed are f2p mmos or mmorpgs with cash shop. When my connection is down, i can't play, but it can't be helped.. who cares.
This discuss about piracy may be considered as a nonsense (piracy is a problem of conscience, awareness), at the end, too many here won't buy a game because it's FOR FREE in the internet (i know too many people working in the game industry that don't pay for games having an internet connection).
The people is not stupid, and if they can avoid to pay for a game/music/film, they will do it, yes or yes. And if you are one the few supporting the games and singers, let me say that here in Spain, you are called as a "stupid retard". And it's because you can spent that money in more "important" things like expensive hardware.
How much money we can save if we don't buy games?, in my case more than 300 euro, about 6 or 7 games a year, and that's a nice amount of money to be spent in a good graphic card.
Nvidia and AMD are the ones highly benefited in all this issue. You know, Matter is neither created nor destroyed, and with the money, i think it's something similar. What it's not wasted in games, it's wasted in hardware to play the pirated games. The good graphics cards are always very expensive and non legit gamers will always buy the best rig possible.
Piracy could be reduced but nobody does anything. It's a lost battle.
blah, do you know the issue with online manga and the removed sites?
But Autodesk? Fuck it.
Edit: There should be no "INTERNET POLICE" ever. At all.
Well that flies in the face of what the internet as we know it was built on. Anything else we should do while we are at it? We are small children that need to be governed everywhere.
I thought the general concensus was "if it can be cracked we will crack it" warez groups are not about right or wrong, but about cracking stuff for the challenge.
Otherwise we would never see cracks or pirated versions of anything small/indie/or similar.
Internet police is kind of drastic, but the internet grows in speeds where laws just cannot keep up, and the amount of criminal activities going on on the internet, and the people not fully aware of how things work is just astronomical.
It's a no mans land.
Dun goofed? They're going to backtrace it. Consequences will never be the same.
Oh wait, that's the Cyber Police, nevermind
As it should be.
Make buying a game and playing it easier to do than piracy and its profitable. Sadly they see fit to do the opposite for PC gaming. I know people who buy their game to support the developer then hack it so they don't have to deal with the DRM and disc in the drive BS to play it.
On a console it can still be done, and a lot of people do it, but as long as they stay in the minority and its just hard enough to discourage the majority, then its profitable.
The level of intellectual elitism and smugness in that post is staggering. (Just an observation)
I'm sorry man, but do you even have a point? Other than echoing what the status-quo is on this subject, and try to insult me in a backwards way?
And if you had bothered to read past page1, you'd see that someone already came up with that brilliant "joke", and I'll tell you what I told him. Yeah, go for it. If you really think that cheating in life and using someone else's portfolio will do you good, then yeah, go for it. Saving pictures from my website to your HD isn't a crime. But I wonder how long you will last on a job that you're not qualified for?
Maybe I should say it again, cause it seems like it needs to be said twice a page for people to get it. I'm not saying piracy is right. I'm not saying it's not a problem. I am saying we shouldn't treat our playerbase as criminals. Because of two reasons. First, they're potential customers. Second, considering everyone is innocent until proven guilty, I don't see a way to fight them without turning that around into guilty until proven innocent.
in B4lock!
the most reasonable comment on the whole issue in this topic... even though I only read the 1st and the last page.
weekend. :P
He has a point. I think this discussion is getting twisted around a bit due to a few unclear arguments.
Recap?
Recap.
Pirating isn't 'good' but it's hard to define just what sort of bad we should call it. Theft? Piracy? Intellectual Counterfeiting? None of them really fit. It's a vague crime, in that the initial harm is theoretical, but the long-term affects upon sequels and unique IP's have been felt before. The answer? taking advantage of the preexisting networks and infrastructures used for the distribution of cracked files via reverse engineering and creating a digital distribution platform which removes the overhead cost associated with retailers.
Does that just about cover it?
Here is a similar case where people pirated something despite the fact that the purchaser was given the choice of how much they should pay for it...
http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Saving-a-penny----pirating-the-Humble-Indie-Bundle
Lack of access to a credit card in order to purchase online seemed to be a commonly stated problem. This is a possible drawback of digital distribution models.
Edit:
Just thought I'd add this from the article linked above...