Jeez, over 18 million in the top 5 most pirated games on the PC; no wonder everyone complains about pirating. Makes me disgusted that this many people would screw over the little man working for developers during this time of economic crisis.
Seriously, this is why we as a gaming industry can't have nice things and why developers will always trying to "screw us over", because people download the damn things for free and screw over the developers.
These seem like good numbers to have; next time a PC gamer complains that his or her system is being targeted or not being treated fairly, I can just link this article or point out the numbers and go "this is exactly why".
It's true that not every download is a lost sale. While it's a safe bet that some of the pirates would have bought the game were there no other choice, there's no way of knowing how low (or high) that percentage would be.
*shrug* What I'm seeing on "my" filesharing site, is that a popular game with no demo is downloaded the most. A popular title with a good, reasonably small demo, gets very few downloads. A game that "everyone has to have", but which isn't actually a very good game.. or if it gets variable reviews, fansite reviews, etc.. also gets downloaded a lot. Games that have massive promotion sprees but no gameplay footage don't get downloaded at all for some reason.
So - Dante's Inferno. A much promoted title with a massively sized demo that tells you absolutely nothing else than that it's a God of War clone, just with worse graphics. And yet, it's said to be awesome - downloaded a lot.
Online multiplayer, surprisingly, doesn't seem to have a lot to do with things. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 - not very notable single-player, online placed on protected servers, difficult to circumvent - downloaded a lot. Black Ops: allegedly awesome(!) single player, and online can be hacked and played p2p without authentication - pirated a whole bunch.
So basically, the pirates who go for popular games just aren't very clever, just like the ones who buy the games.
What the stats don't show, though, is the amount of games the people who download actually get down on their computer. Typically the ones who download the games don't play the games very long. They download ten-fifteen games at the same time, and simply won't have the time to play through all of them. It seems that it's more like a collector's mania than anything else - to have all the games that have come out, and have played at least parts of it.
edit: meanwhile, no-cd crack downloads increase together with overall disc-sales, not iso-downloads. Funny how that works.
So two companies try to please the PC community with proper PC versions for once and they're both met with nearly 4 million downloads of their games.
Well done PC community, I hate you. I wish I wasn't a part of your sinking ship.
You know what the worst part is? Next year, companies won't even bother with a PC port, or at least a proper PC version, and they'll all be met with massive criticism, bitching and boycotting from the entire community.
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.
please dont... you are right or couse but you must understand that this argument does not end ever and that some people cant wrap their mind around the fact that you can not steal that witch has no physical being and that you cannot commit theft by downloading games You CAN commit copyright infringment (thats a crime to and a serious one) but not theft
The way I see copyright infringement is if you are making money form somebody else's work. If I write a book, I would feel that you are infringing on copyrights by selling that book under your name, or otherwise take credit for having produced it. But if someone else just reads the book, they are not profiting off of my work. Now would I like to be compensated for writing that book? Yes. Buuuut...do I have a right to charge for something which has an infinite supply? Philosophically, I say no.
Does this mean that authors/musicians/video game developers/etc... have no right to compensation? No. It just means that they should probably find a better business model than to try and fight the onslaught of the internet manufacturing and giving away infinite copies of whatever they try to sell.
So two companies try to please the PC community with proper PC versions for once and they're both met with nearly 4 million downloads of their games.
Well done PC community, I hate you. I wish I wasn't a part of your sinking ship.
You know what the worst part is? Next year, companies won't even bother with a PC port, or at least a proper PC version, and they'll all be met with massive criticism, bitching and boycotting from the entire community.
A "proper PC version" is more than dedicated server support, y'know? Both games were pretty damn buggy on launch, from all the reports I've heard of.
I guess that 0.2% of the figures are lost sales, the rest are pirates grabbing free stuff, collecting games, hype downloads, and failed downloads. See also nipsen's post.
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.
please dont... you are right or couse but you must understand that this argument does not end ever and that some people cant wrap their mind around the fact that you can not steal that witch has no physical being and that you cannot commit theft by downloading games You CAN commit copyright infringment (thats a crime to and a serious one) but not theft
The way I see copyright infringement is if you are making money form somebody else's work. If I write a book, I would feel that you are infringing on copyrights by selling that book under your name, or otherwise take credit for having produced it. But if someone else just reads the book, they are not profiting off of my work. Now would I like to be compensated for writing that book? Yes. Buuuut...do I have a right to charge for something which has an infinite supply? Philosophically, I say no.
Does this mean that authors/musicians/video game developers/etc... have no right to compensation? No. It just means that they should probably find a better business model than to try and fight the onslaught of the internet manufacturing and giving away infinite copies of whatever they try to sell.
You are still taking something that belongs to someone without their permission for you own personal gain, whether it be selling it, or just getting what you want.
This, in essence, is stealing, and when put into this specific context, is copyright infringement.
Stealing an apple from a market stall is theft, since it follows the above statement and the apple does not have a copyright on it.
Pirating a game online is copyright infringement. Which base definition is the unauthorized use of a product under copyright. In this case, you have taken something that isn't yours that is under copyright.
Copyright infringement, in this case is a one-up of theft. It follows the essence of stealing but also has a copyright on it.
Which leads me to the whole infinite copy branch of your argument. The creators of that game have the right to the data they created. People that take their data without their permission are breaking the law despite the unlimited amount of copies they can create with it.
The infinite amount does not make taking it without their permission legal, that concept is just an excuse for pirating that doesn't work with economy. There may be no limit to the number of copies, but each one pirated is stolen. Also, the fact that those copies are illegal also makes this reason of yours seem highly invalid.
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.
please dont... you are right or couse but you must understand that this argument does not end ever and that some people cant wrap their mind around the fact that you can not steal that witch has no physical being and that you cannot commit theft by downloading games You CAN commit copyright infringment (thats a crime to and a serious one) but not theft
The way I see copyright infringement is if you are making money form somebody else's work. If I write a book, I would feel that you are infringing on copyrights by selling that book under your name, or otherwise take credit for having produced it. But if someone else just reads the book, they are not profiting off of my work. Now would I like to be compensated for writing that book? Yes. Buuuut...do I have a right to charge for something which has an infinite supply? Philosophically, I say no.
Does this mean that authors/musicians/video game developers/etc... have no right to compensation? No. It just means that they should probably find a better business model than to try and fight the onslaught of the internet manufacturing and giving away infinite copies of whatever they try to sell.
You are still taking something that belongs to someone without their permission for you own personal gain, whether it be selling it, or just getting what you want.
This, in essence, is stealing, and when put into this specific context, is copyright infringement.
Stealing an apple from a market stall is theft, since it follows the above statement and the apple does not have a copyright on it.
Pirating a game online is copyright infringement. Which base definition is the unauthorized use of a product under copyright. In this case, you have taken something that isn't yours that is under copyright.
Copyright infringement, in this case is a one-up of theft. It follows the essence of stealing but also has a copyright on it.
Which leads me to the whole infinite copy branch of your argument. The creators of that game have the right to the data they created. People that take their data without their permission are breaking the law despite the unlimited amount of copies they can create with it.
The infinite amount does not make taking it without their permission legal, that concept is just an excuse for pirating that doesn't work with economy. There may be no limit to the number of copies, but each one pirated is stolen. Also, the fact that those copies are illegal also makes this reason of yours seem highly invalid.
What I am taking is data which belongs to a certain end user, who copies said data and willingly gives me the data. For example, say I bought an e-novel in PDF form. I read the novel. I then emailed said novel to my friend because my friend wanted to read this novel. Is that suddenly copyright infringement? So, by ultimate extension, is letting your neighbor borrow your DVD to watch it suddenly illegal, or rather, your neighbor borrowing your DVD to watch it illegal?
The way I see it is that people who upload something, be it anime, a PDF, a video game, yadda yadda yadda are saying "I have something, and I'm allowing someone else to enjoy what I enjoyed."
See, in my mind, the moment something of infinite supply reaches a source willing to *share* that infinite supply, then there is infinite supply. It is their right to share what is theirs. It isn't their right to profit off of what they did not create, but it is their right to file-share their computer game.
In a similar fashion, I believe it's also legal for friends to share textbooks in college, which I have done multiple times in the past "Hey Ryan, I want to do my finance homework today, can I borrow your textbook?"
Are you really going to come down on me for sharing a college textbook with a friend? To me, file-sharing is just a case of "what would happen if my friend were able to copy that textbook for me perfectly? That way, he can use his textbook, and I can use my friend's copy". All of the bittorrent files are simply just extensions of that.
As for "well it's against the law", well: laws are made by people, and people are often stupid, or in the case of most politicians, corrupt. Anybody who believes that politicians are out for the little guy have another thing coming. After all, file-sharing would probably be a huge boon to indie music artists. Think about it:
Indie artist: "Hey I got a cool tune, but no record company's going to sign me. Gogogo file sharing! Yay, free advertising! And when people finally have a chance to hear my work, I can go on tour and have concerts!"
Big-name musician: "Hey, I can sell my cool tune for lots of money because I have a lucrative deal with a record company. I don't need any advertising because everyone knows who I am! I'd rather just make one CD and get millions as opposed to have to go on tour and perform! Die file sharing!"
It's as Chris Anderson says: commodity information wants to be free. That is, information that you can just copy-paste a zillion times over (a book manuscript, a music CD, a video game) has a marginal cost of zero to produce, and that's the price that should be paid for it. While customized information, such as booking Chris Anderson to come to speak at your gig, takes his direct time, so that information wants to be very expensive.
If I want to hire a programmer, that is customized information. But if I simply want another copy of a piece of software, that is commodity information, and if there is an infinite supply of it, then I should pay the market equilibrium price of supply and demand, which is zero. And the laws of politicians be damned. What some people dub "piracy" is in fact an economic force of what happens when people realize that there is an infinite supply of something. They are the "hand of the market" that guides prices lower.
Well, I'm sorry. I didn't get the initial memo that you're just trolling, not really presenting any argument that makes any sort of sense. Now that I know that, I can pretty much just write all of this off...
Seriously, why does it piss you off so much that someone who makes games as his job should expect to be paid in full when he does it? Yes, liking games is why he picked that line of work. BUT IT'S A LIKE OF WORK. Work means "give time, give effort, get money." If you're doing art as a job, then you're putting your full working time into that art. That means it goes beyond a "labor of love" to being something you need to get paid for.
Yet you get all pissy about these people expecting to be paid for their hard work? And the time and money they put into learning to do these things at such a high level on strict deadlines? They're the assholes for receiving a paycheck?
What about the self-entitled little prick that sees something he likes, that someone else spent money and time to make, and they just take it for free? Where's the righteous anger now? He's not supporting the art, either. He's taking something that in no way, under any code of law ever known to man, belongs to him. And he's doing it without giving any sort of reimbursement.
Then he has the audacity to give it to others out of "generosity?" Yes, yes, you're very noble and generous with other people's shit. Here's a fucking Nobel. Seriously. Taking something from someone, not paying them, and then giving it to others to thus encourage all of them to not pay for it either... is selfish. You don't understand that?
Well, let me grab some friends, we'll be over to your place in a bit. I won't be keeping anything, but I will be giving them all of your stuff for Christmas. Then they'll give me a medal for being so damned generous.
I see you sure had fun arguing with your own strawmen.
They did get paid, and even after that fact people bought the game. What difference does it make if some people play it for free? It doesn't invalidate the number of purchases made.
Leaping from physical theft to intellectual infringement just shows you are too illogical to fully engage in debate.
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.
please dont... you are right or couse but you must understand that this argument does not end ever and that some people cant wrap their mind around the fact that you can not steal that witch has no physical being and that you cannot commit theft by downloading games You CAN commit copyright infringment (thats a crime to and a serious one) but not theft
The way I see copyright infringement is if you are making money form somebody else's work. If I write a book, I would feel that you are infringing on copyrights by selling that book under your name, or otherwise take credit for having produced it. But if someone else just reads the book, they are not profiting off of my work. Now would I like to be compensated for writing that book? Yes. Buuuut...do I have a right to charge for something which has an infinite supply? Philosophically, I say no.
Does this mean that authors/musicians/video game developers/etc... have no right to compensation? No. It just means that they should probably find a better business model than to try and fight the onslaught of the internet manufacturing and giving away infinite copies of whatever they try to sell.
You are still taking something that belongs to someone without their permission for you own personal gain, whether it be selling it, or just getting what you want.
This, in essence, is stealing, and when put into this specific context, is copyright infringement.
Stealing an apple from a market stall is theft, since it follows the above statement and the apple does not have a copyright on it.
Pirating a game online is copyright infringement. Which base definition is the unauthorized use of a product under copyright. In this case, you have taken something that isn't yours that is under copyright.
Copyright infringement, in this case is a one-up of theft. It follows the essence of stealing but also has a copyright on it.
Which leads me to the whole infinite copy branch of your argument. The creators of that game have the right to the data they created. People that take their data without their permission are breaking the law despite the unlimited amount of copies they can create with it.
The infinite amount does not make taking it without their permission legal, that concept is just an excuse for pirating that doesn't work with economy. There may be no limit to the number of copies, but each one pirated is stolen. Also, the fact that those copies are illegal also makes this reason of yours seem highly invalid.
What I am taking is data which belongs to a certain end user, who copies said data and willingly gives me the data. For example, say I bought an e-novel in PDF form. I read the novel. I then emailed said novel to my friend because my friend wanted to read this novel. Is that suddenly copyright infringement? So, by ultimate extension, is letting your neighbor borrow your DVD to watch it suddenly illegal, or rather, your neighbor borrowing your DVD to watch it illegal?
The way I see it is that people who upload something, be it anime, a PDF, a video game, yadda yadda yadda are saying "I have something, and I'm allowing someone else to enjoy what I enjoyed."
See, in my mind, the moment something of infinite supply reaches a source willing to *share* that infinite supply, then there is infinite supply. It is their right to share what is theirs. It isn't their right to profit off of what they did not create, but it is their right to file-share their computer game.
In a similar fashion, I believe it's also legal for friends to share textbooks in college, which I have done multiple times in the past "Hey Ryan, I want to do my finance homework today, can I borrow your textbook?"
Are you really going to come down on me for sharing a college textbook with a friend? To me, file-sharing is just a case of "what would happen if my friend were able to copy that textbook for me perfectly? That way, he can use his textbook, and I can use my friend's copy". All of the bittorrent files are simply just extensions of that.
As for "well it's against the law", well: laws are made by people, and people are often stupid, or in the case of most politicians, corrupt. Anybody who believes that politicians are out for the little guy have another thing coming. After all, file-sharing would probably be a huge boon to indie music artists. Think about it:
Indie artist: "Hey I got a cool tune, but no record company's going to sign me. Gogogo file sharing! Yay, free advertising! And when people finally have a chance to hear my work, I can go on tour and have concerts!"
Big-name musician: "Hey, I can sell my cool tune for lots of money because I have a lucrative deal with a record company. I don't need any advertising because everyone knows who I am! I'd rather just make one CD and get millions as opposed to have to go on tour and perform! Die file sharing!"
It's as Chris Anderson says: commodity information wants to be free. That is, information that you can just copy-paste a zillion times over (a book manuscript, a music CD, a video game) has a marginal cost of zero to produce, and that's the price that should be paid for it. While customized information, such as booking Chris Anderson to come to speak at your gig, takes his direct time, so that information wants to be very expensive.
If I want to hire a programmer, that is customized information. But if I simply want another copy of a piece of software, that is commodity information, and if there is an infinite supply of it, then I should pay the market equilibrium price of supply and demand, which is zero. And the laws of politicians be damned. What some people dub "piracy" is in fact an economic force of what happens when people realize that there is an infinite supply of something. They are the "hand of the market" that guides prices lower.
Paragraph 1: You can't really compare pirating and sharing of DVDs. When someone buys a DVD of a movie, they can let someone else borrow it, they have a right allowing them to do so. However, a person who owns a game does not have the right to reproduce it, whether for profit or not, thus making it Copyright Infringement.
Paragraph 2: As much as that would be lovely, if it has a copyright, that's illegal. You know how a bunch of youtube videos get pulled off because of copyright issues? Yah thats why.
Paragraph 3: People have a right to share what is there's. That is, except for what you think it can. It is not their right to file-share computer games, that is illegal.
Paragraph 4: Physical copy, the friend owns that textbook, it is they have a right to share it, not reproduce it.
Paragraph 5: I'm just going to completely and utterly doubt that anyone in their right mind would actually copy a whole textbook down for their friend "perfectly". If he copies it "perfectly" then that is reproduction of something copyrighted and illegal, and still completely illogical.
Paragraph 6: I completely agree that the majority of people are stupid. But dumb laws rarely get by, as there are many "trials" that a bill must get through and dumb laws rarely get that far. If a dumb law is placed than it is normally repealed by the supreme court after a small period of time. Besides, a law such as this is part of a basis for our economy. Without this in place, the whole gaming industry would fall apart and shatter. In fact, our whole economy could fall apart without copyright infringement because if something good was made, than everyone business would make it and drop the price for it. That is just how our economy is set up
Paragraph 7: Just put it on Youtube, trust me, somebody will find it within a day at most Also, if the person with the copyright wants it on there, then it isn't or shouldn't be a prohibited use of the product.
Paragraph 8: Not a very good example? Yes file-sharing hinders their sales, thus why it is illegal....?
Paragraph 9: Honestly, I truly am surprised that you think this makes sense. You link together illegal things and legal things like no tomorrow. Of course illegal stuff is normally free. It's illegal!! But legally wise, no there isn't an infinite supply that anyone can produce. There is a supply that the people that own the data sells for a profit in order to keep their business.
Paragraph 10: My goodness. This infinite supply of yours is illegal. Only the people that own the copyright have the right to copy it. Nobody else does. That is how economy works.
A.) And you assume I've always been on this "side of the fence" ... why? I haven't. I've been community like you on sites long before I was press. Nor have any of the thousands of other people on this forum who can argue, sometimes heatedly, without resorting to insults.
You can keep saying stuff like that till you're blue in the face, but you're still saying it from inside a bubble. Just from observing the board, if it were that simple then no one could argue it. The policy is too vague and malleable to simply say: "don't cuss and things will be roses!". It doesn't surprise me any more to see people offended at the drop of a hat, and there is no magic shield of justice defending the users and free speech.
B.) Because they want to make games? Why should their chosen career not be economically viable because people want their things for free? Why should *they* take a second job so Billy the Pirate doesn't have to pay?
It isn't unviable, so they don't need to. They still sold games, and often the games with the most downloads will typically have comparable sales figures to go with them. So I still don't see why they would be upset about another million people playing their games. Clearly they can see they did something right.
C.) I'm not ignoring. The point you make about lack of multiplayer is a valid one, but COD's staggering popularity made it #1 on consoles last year [http://torrentfreak.com/the-most-pirated-games-of-2009-091227/], why not this year?
Um... considering how other games are also wildly popular AND exclusive to consoles. Once instance doesn't make a pattern. It was a close race this year, as it was a close race last year. That is a pattern, so this wasn't surprising at all.
D.) ... I think you think I'm arguing something else. Is it not surprising that Dante's Inferno, a game which received middling reviews and sold perhaps a million copies, was downloaded more than COD, which sold many times that? Not even the multiplayer point is valid here - it beat out Mass Effect, Alan Wake and Red Dead Redemption, all of which are single-player focused (if not only).
The point I was criticizing was that I brought up one sentence and you mentioned another, seemingly, to me, as an attempt to obfuscate one with the other. I would agree that a lesser known title being on top is anomalous, although there could be other factors.
I guarantee you this: the first time you ever put blood, sweat and tears into making something good, put it up for sale, then see it stolen by 95% of the people who claim to be your fans, your views on piracy will harden. It's literally a visceral shock to realize just how blindly two-faced a lot of these people are, mainly IMO because they have no idea what it means to produce something rather than just consume.
I refer you to my above post, sir. The games industry is more than high-end AAA+ games that sell millions of copies. And I stand by my argument that if you get dozens of hours of pleasure out of someone's creative work, but refuse to pay the (usually quite reasonable) price they're asking in return, there's a certain cognitive dissonance in calling yourself a 'fan'...
But it's also arguable that the smaller games below a AAA status aren't pirated nearly as often, whether it be less press coverage or shorter gameplay or so on. All the titles listed here all made millions of dollars, whether they were pirated or not.
Also, when you say that people get dozens of hours of pleasure from a game, and they're guaranteed that pleasure, it's more than likely that those titles will be pirated less than others.
Sure, are some people just cheapskates who don't want to pay money for a thoroughly enjoyable game? Of course, but piracy really isn't as big of a deal as people make it out to be.
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