And the Most-Pirated Game of 2010 Is...
- Thread starter John Funk
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This is a terrible argument. People pirate because of an "obsolete system of distribution"? People pirated when it wasn't obsolete. People pirate games that are only released digitally. People pirated before the internet made it easy. If you're looking to justify the moral shortcomings of pirates to yourself I suppose this sort of logic would suffice but for anyone else you may want to try another tact.rembrandtqeinstein said:
This reads like a poorly recited pirate mantra spoken by those who believe piracy is some grand act of rebellion and refuse to consider the act as theft.
It's way too complicated an issue to make flat generalizations like people do. Now I'm not defending pirating at all because it'll only hurt the industry and that's bad for gamers just as much as the people who are losing money on it. But a few points:
Not everyone pirates simply because they can (many do I am sure though). Some people just don't have the money. Many can be from countries where that's about the only way to get it.
Some people do it for games that don't provide demos, to determine if they want to go buy it.
Some wouldn't have bought it anyway.
The people who have the money and still pirate are the ones who piss me off, then you're just being a cheap bastard and working towards damaging the very thing you enjoy.
Not everyone pirates simply because they can (many do I am sure though). Some people just don't have the money. Many can be from countries where that's about the only way to get it.
Some people do it for games that don't provide demos, to determine if they want to go buy it.
Some wouldn't have bought it anyway.
The people who have the money and still pirate are the ones who piss me off, then you're just being a cheap bastard and working towards damaging the very thing you enjoy.
The problem with that line of thinking is:Owyn_Merrilin said:
1. It excuses pirates for taking something without paying. There are many things I cannot afford, because I am on a budget. If you look around my house, you will not find those things. Because I can't afford them. So I don't have them. Because I didn't buy them. I also didn't steal them.
2. I agree that companies could lower their prices, and that it could contribute to a solution. However, it doesn't matter how low the price gets, as long as there is a COMPLETELY FREE version available, you're going to lose sales to that. Lowering the price while continuing to fight piracy is a perfectly viable solution to the problem.
Individual copyright infringement is not theft. You might as well call it "baby rape" because obviously you are going for maximum emotional appeal and ignoring reality.Eclectic Dreck said:
Theft deprives an owner of an object his ability to use the object. Copyright infringement leaves the owner with the original object.
The obsolete distribution system I'm talking about is the whole copyright system. In the digital age it is basically cost free to distribute data and a game, or song, or movie is nothing more than a set of data. The idea that a person might be prohibited from moving a collection of bits is antithetical to the free and open concept of the internet and the evolution of communication in general.
Content producers need to realize that the era of making money by creating copies of bits is coming to an end. Those that evolve will thrive and those that don't will just make everyone suffer in their death throes.
And please read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
This is the future that the copyright cartels WANT to happen.
Yes, I have heard that very argument before. Retreading that ground will serve neither of us here.rembrandtqeinstein said:
You can say "But it isn't theft because nothing is lost!" and it will not move me.
You can shout "But they're greedy, soulless bastards!" and I will not budge.
You can cry "But this DRM is beyond absurd!" and I'll nod impatiently.
You can climb upon a mountaintop and decree that the age of people making money for their work is at and end and I'll just roll my eyes.
The very moment anyone decides that they have a right to enjoy the results of the labors of another without having the decency to compensate them when compensation is requested they have done wrong.
If you do not agree with the business practices of a corporation simply refuse to purchase their product. People who speak ill about the evil conglomerate of the moment do their cause no service when they simply download the product.
I will say you have piqued my curiosity with your last bit there though. In what way are companies evolving? What successful ventures can you point to where a company has made no effort to protect what is theirs? I can think of but a handful of such companies and their business model is hardly suitable for most.
Once again, we've gone back to the essence of the problem: it's free.dastardly said:
Say, for example, Square Enix started "selling" Kane & Lynch 2 for £0.00. I know enough about the game that I wouldn't bother pulling out my credit card for it, but if I could get it for free, I might as well get a licence and give it a try.
(Before you point out that didn't happen: it did, except with EA's Burnout Paradise instead. Since I already have a copy on the 360, I've got no intention of paying for the PC version, but since a pricing error rendered it available in the UK EA store for £0.00, I helped myself. Perfectly legal, of course: it's their store, after all. My theory was that the script they used to lower the prices on the Christmas sales sneezed at Paradise's £5 price tag)
I think a significant proportion of pirates are like that (except without the whole following the law thing). They wouldn't pay £0.01 for it up front, but they might as well give it a try. Either that, or they just wanted to pirate.
Of course there's evidence that even if people are able to pay $0.01, they will pirate. More specifically, the first Humble Indie Bundle [http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Saving-a-penny----pirating-the-Humble-Indie-Bundle], where an estimated 25% of direct downloads were from people who hadn't paid a cent. This is a fine example of exactly what I'm talking about.
But see, here's the problem. Things like that come available, yet I don't have all of them? Why? Well, for instance, I'm not the least bit interested in Kayne or Lynch, and Burnout: Paradise holds nothing for me. In fact, the world is chock full of things I can get for free, but I do not have them. Why? Because I'm not interested in them.Delusibeta said:
Making something free doesn't not make someone interested in it. It only capitalizes on an existing interest in the product. If someone is getting it, it's because they were interested, even if they're getting it for free.
Cut out the whole middle section, skip to the end, and you're exactly right. Pirates want to pirate.
See, here you've upheld my point better than your own. I've said, quite clearly, several times, that people would have paid a smaller amount in the absence of a free option. If there were no pirated option, are you claiming that no one among that 25% would have paid a penny? That none of them had an interest in the product, at all, until the word "free" appeared next to it?
Rewrite that whole scenario, and let's say that you could get the Humble Indie Bundle for a penny... but there was absolutely no pirated version. Your only way of getting it was to spend at least a penny.
That wouldn't change a thing for me--I'm not interested in it. That's why I don't have it, free or otherwise. Tons of other people, same story. Yet this 25% was interested. They had a clear, obvious interest in the product... but we'll never know what they would have paid because the pirated copy skews the results.
For all the talk about how games are too expensive or game companies are greedy, the fact is that piracy (whether or not it means a LOT of lost sales, though it does) interferes with the market's ability to adjust prices. The only two data points a company has to work with are $60 and $0. Any number they pit against $0 is going to fail.
If you remove piracy, supply and demand will see a new equilibrium established. People stop paying $60, companies make no sales, they have no one to blame but themselves, and they lower the prices a few bucks. A few people start buying again, but not enough... so they lower the price a bit more. Now, suddenly, the average price is back down to $40 (with DLC making up some of the lost revenue, but the increased sales also helping to even things out).
So, because of piracy, companies can't make these adjustments. Because ANY AMOUNT OF MONEY is greater than "free," they can't be assured of seeing increased sales from lowering prices. It's better and smarter for them to just take what they can get as-is and try to fight piracy. PIRATES KEEP PRICES HIGH.
Exactly.dastardly said:
Incorrect. Enough people are paying $60 to ensure that the standard launch price tag of $60 will not reduce on launch even without piracy. The launch price tag may (and has) increase or decrease due to equilibrium fluctuations of People Actually Paying, even with the affects of piracy.dastardly said:
Prices already reduce over time anyway. Demand increases when price increases. I could point to any number of Steam sales that shows 20x increases of purchases in a 75% off Steam sale. Piracy has little if any effect in pricing compared to the cost of high quality graphics, or the cost of competing products (see also: the App Store).
Your theory is being played out already, with THQ releasing MX vs ATV Reflex at a lower price, topped up by DLC. [http://www.mcvuk.com/news/41034/THQ-predicts-lower-game-prices]
Bottom line: Pirates aren't keeping prices high, people buying games for high prices are keeping prices high.
You're proving my argument. Pirates don't keep prices high; companies keep prices high, and use piracy as an excuse. It's pretty clear that people don't want to pay $60 for games, you hear about it all the time both in person and online. A more germane statistic than the piracy rate of the first Humble Indie Bundle is the average payment for the second one, which was somewhere on the order of $7.50. That is much, much lower than $60.dastardly said:
I think you're wrong that, in the absence of piracy, there would be an equilibrium reached on the prices, because that would require a big enough drop in sales at the "pay $60 or get nothing" point to make it worth dropping prices for the companies. Well, either that or some good old fashioned price competition, but the MSRP is standardized across the board, so good luck getting that to happen. The fact is, the profits they are seeing now are the profits they would see in your hypothetical situation, because the people who are willing and able to pay $60 are already doing it. If you could wave a magic wand and eliminate piracy, the people who wouldn't pay $60, having no other option to get it cheaper, would just play free flash games or go to their local library and check out a book or a movie instead. Heck, I live out in the sticks, and even I have the option of requesting library materials delivered to my door, so a good portion of them wouldn't even have to leave their house to do it.
As I said earlier in the thread, there are currently three options to get a game: pay $60 new, pay a reduced price used, or pirate it. The publishers have been going after both piracy and used games recently, showing that even with clear evidence that a significant portion of their potential customers are unwilling or unable to pay the exorbitant price attached to the product, the publishers refuse to adapt to the market, instead trying to adapt the market to themselves. What part of that is the fault of the pirates?
I disagree that piracy of a digital object is stealing.
In my opinion, this is why:
Simply because there are an infinite amount of digital objects.
Let's take an arbitrary computer game produced by company XYZ (I'm sure it drives some people bonkers who've seen enough widgets produced by company XYZ in college textbooks, but bear with me here). Company XYZ employs some programmers, artists, etc... all of whom they keep on their payroll. So, company XYZ incurs some fixed cost producing this game, which is the total of all of the money spent producing this game. This is, I reiterate, a fixed number.
Now, in order to break even, if company XYZ were to only sell 1 copy of this game, it would need to charge the entire total of all of its production costs on that one game. Were it to sell two copies, it would need to charge half of its production costs on each game. And were it to sell N copies of this (sorry for sounding like a math teacher now), if we were to denote the total cost of the production of the game as K, in order to break even by selling N games, company XYZ would have to charge K/N dollars per game.
Well, my line of thinking is this:
When the game gets shared in a peer-to-peer fashion, thereby creating an infinite number of such games in circulation, then what should the price of each individual game mathematically *be*?
Well, as anybody knows, any constant divided by infinity is zero.
Now, of course, the total number of games both bought and pirated is not infinity. After all, there is a very finite amount of people living in this world, and even fewer of which actually have interest in this particular game. So, it stands to reason that the price of this game should not be zero. However, odds are, the prices currently being charged are probably too high, and if people can get the full-featured game for a lower price (or for free) that's not from the initial source, they probably will.
I believe that Dan Floyd (and the rest of the wonderful Extra Credits) crew actually did an episode touching upon this subject, which ended in technical difficulties due to Allison going haywire on everyone with a heavy-duty eraser. I forget which it was.
However my point is this: we, the consumers, do not pay *directly* for the time of the developers. We are not the ones hiring them. What we *do* pay for is the commodity which is the computer game. That commodity has an infinite supply, by virtue of the fact that it is available on the internet for anyone to download (whether through legal means or not).
In my mind, price comes from the scarcity of a commodity. Why must food have a price? Because growing food takes up *land*, which is scarce. So therefore, we do not (and cannot) have an infinite supply of food. So, we pay for food. However, by virtue of the vast storage space online, we in fact *do* have an infinite supply of any computer game (or anything else) that we can torrent. So since there is no scarcity, the price is zero.
CD keys, DRM, etc... are all ways of establishing artificial scarcity, in order for game developers to recoup their fixed costs spent developing the game. Because even if a very large number (going by the Magic: the Gathering definition, aka "you have an infinite loop, but you have to end it sometime, at which point you will have a 'very large number' of whatever it is you are producing") of people downloading something and not paying for it, you still would be left with $0.00 as opposed to a small percentage of this very large number were they to pay a teeny tiny bit apiece.
In my opinion, game developers (and anybody else planning on being compensated by creating an item for which there can be a theoretically infinite supply) need to have a better business model going forward. Google gives its end user products away, and makes money through a third party. That is just one way. However, DRM is not the way to go IMO.
Now I can go on and on about this, but the best compendium of arguments (particularly for) and somewhat against can be found in Chris Anderson's book "Free: the Past and Future of a Radical Price" which is a fantastic book in my opinion.
In my opinion, this is why:
Simply because there are an infinite amount of digital objects.
Let's take an arbitrary computer game produced by company XYZ (I'm sure it drives some people bonkers who've seen enough widgets produced by company XYZ in college textbooks, but bear with me here). Company XYZ employs some programmers, artists, etc... all of whom they keep on their payroll. So, company XYZ incurs some fixed cost producing this game, which is the total of all of the money spent producing this game. This is, I reiterate, a fixed number.
Now, in order to break even, if company XYZ were to only sell 1 copy of this game, it would need to charge the entire total of all of its production costs on that one game. Were it to sell two copies, it would need to charge half of its production costs on each game. And were it to sell N copies of this (sorry for sounding like a math teacher now), if we were to denote the total cost of the production of the game as K, in order to break even by selling N games, company XYZ would have to charge K/N dollars per game.
Well, my line of thinking is this:
When the game gets shared in a peer-to-peer fashion, thereby creating an infinite number of such games in circulation, then what should the price of each individual game mathematically *be*?
Well, as anybody knows, any constant divided by infinity is zero.
Now, of course, the total number of games both bought and pirated is not infinity. After all, there is a very finite amount of people living in this world, and even fewer of which actually have interest in this particular game. So, it stands to reason that the price of this game should not be zero. However, odds are, the prices currently being charged are probably too high, and if people can get the full-featured game for a lower price (or for free) that's not from the initial source, they probably will.
I believe that Dan Floyd (and the rest of the wonderful Extra Credits) crew actually did an episode touching upon this subject, which ended in technical difficulties due to Allison going haywire on everyone with a heavy-duty eraser. I forget which it was.
However my point is this: we, the consumers, do not pay *directly* for the time of the developers. We are not the ones hiring them. What we *do* pay for is the commodity which is the computer game. That commodity has an infinite supply, by virtue of the fact that it is available on the internet for anyone to download (whether through legal means or not).
In my mind, price comes from the scarcity of a commodity. Why must food have a price? Because growing food takes up *land*, which is scarce. So therefore, we do not (and cannot) have an infinite supply of food. So, we pay for food. However, by virtue of the vast storage space online, we in fact *do* have an infinite supply of any computer game (or anything else) that we can torrent. So since there is no scarcity, the price is zero.
CD keys, DRM, etc... are all ways of establishing artificial scarcity, in order for game developers to recoup their fixed costs spent developing the game. Because even if a very large number (going by the Magic: the Gathering definition, aka "you have an infinite loop, but you have to end it sometime, at which point you will have a 'very large number' of whatever it is you are producing") of people downloading something and not paying for it, you still would be left with $0.00 as opposed to a small percentage of this very large number were they to pay a teeny tiny bit apiece.
In my opinion, game developers (and anybody else planning on being compensated by creating an item for which there can be a theoretically infinite supply) need to have a better business model going forward. Google gives its end user products away, and makes money through a third party. That is just one way. However, DRM is not the way to go IMO.
Now I can go on and on about this, but the best compendium of arguments (particularly for) and somewhat against can be found in Chris Anderson's book "Free: the Past and Future of a Radical Price" which is a fantastic book in my opinion.
As much as i'd love for that to happen, it never will, games are getting incredibly expensive to make nowadays, and game companies cant really afford to set prices so low, reason one, who's to say that most pirates will stop? Theyve probably been pirating for a while. Number two, if they set game prices that low and the game bombs, they will be soooo screwedPompey71 said:
The problem is, "incredibly expensive" in this case works out to an average development cost of $20 million, which sounds like a lot, until you realize the average cost of film production was over $100 million three years ago. They can most certainly afford to lower the price, but they don't because people have been paying a similar rate since cartridge manufacturing actually justified it. Ever since the advent of the CD-ROM, videogames have been overpriced, but people were already used to paying quite a bit at that point, so they didn't notice when the unit price dropped for the manufacturers but not for them.The_Blue_Rider said:
I think you well outside the pirate mindset here. 20-25 is still much higher than 0. People triyng to make a living can't compete with people that pirate thier hard work.Pompey71 said:
Did you even read what I said? You made two points, the first of which is an argument against something I never even said, and the second basically amounts to "Nuh uh!"dastardly said:
Seriously, I never said pirates buy the games they pirate. They don't. They buy some games and pirate others. There is no reason to believe they would be paying more money than they already do if piracy were unavailable. They'd just be playing the games they own more, and maybe getting off their asses and doing something non-video game related less rarely. There aren't really any statistics on that sort of thing, because how the hell would you even collect them, but all my experience points to that being true, and I was pretty heavily into piracy back in the 90s.
As for the second point, it most certainly is provable. In fact, if you actually read that site you linked to you might notice that they break down piracy by region, and North America comes in last place, followed by Western Europe. Eastern Europe and Latin America have the highest rates. That's not quite the same as breaking it down by country and comparing piracy rates to enforcement of copyright law, but it should certainly give you a pretty good idea, and anything more specific would require a metric crap-ton of research that I'm not going to do for you.
You'll also note that I never once said that "Piracy is okay and cool!" In fact, I quite explicitly stated that piracy is theft, which seems pretty obviously not cool to me. I'm just pointing out that the practical reality is that all this stressing out over piracy is doing more harm than good, because there's no money to be made in ending piracy. Publishers don't want to hear that though, because they look at piracy statistics and have an orgasm at the huge numbers, so they loose all sight of reality in pursuit of some ridiculous pipe dream that can never be.