And the Most-Pirated Game of 2010 Is...

[AndyFromMonday]

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But you're still technically denying sales and are still distributing content you were not authorized to do so. Isn't that illegal?

You're just twisting it here. Doesn't the law specifically say that file sharing is illegal if the file in question is protected by copyrights? Doesn't the law says it becomes illegal the moment you share copyrighted material to other people who have not purchased it?

Also, no. English is not my first language. It's an irrelevant point in this discussion.

But you're still sharing files without the permission of the producers. Granted, it might not be piracy but still.

How other players define the TF2 updates is irrelevant. Doesn't Valve itself refer to these updates as... updates?

Also, no. I just lump the two together since most of the times content labeled as "downloadable" usually needs a fee whilst updates are free

No, they haven't. They just receive an unfinished product even after paying 60 dollars.

I disagree. It would be stupid to assume that people who pirated Game A would have went out and bought that game if it weren't for piracy. There are also no numbers being released about piracy. In fact, there is barely any info on piracy. All we know is that it's supposedly hurting the industry.

What rights might these be? The right to receive a finished product and the right to do what I want with my game as long as I do not distribute it.

The only thing currently standing between people and piracy is ethics. You can't crack down on every single pirate and as such the consequences of actually pirating something are minimal at most. The only barrier that you seem to cling on to is invisible.

I never argued whether piracy is ethical or not.

That, unfortunately, is mostly pirates' fault.

Because it's just in no way possible for publishers to be hiding behind piracy when their real intent is to bankrupt the used games market, right?

 

[incal11]

That is a very false claim, by the way, along with the 90% bit.

Here's the quote from 2D Boy [http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/11/acrying-shame-world-of-goo-piracy-rate-near-90.ars]. The developers of the game in question. Note that they do not use it as an excuse for poor sales. In fact, they say they're doing well in spite of piracy. And here's the Humble Bundle source [http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Saving-a-penny----pirating-the-Humble-Indie-Bundle].

They say it but they have no more proof of that assertion than you even if they are the devs themselves, plus here's how their experiment went:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/world-of-goo-experiment-a-huge-success
and about the second link, I find a 25% rate low for a popular mainstream game and in the 4 treasons they give in "Why would you pirate a pay-what-you-want bundle?" the first is sadly true but n° 2 and 3 are actually good, and n°4 is bullshit because noone is stupid enough to want to "stick it to the man" when it's an indie bundle whose profits goes to charity.

You even argue my point for me, that the market doesn't always support itself very well when plenty of people want to play games but don't want to buy them. If the old model is becoming a propped up dinosaur, like what has been happening to music and partly movies, then something new needs to be made to morph it into a viable industry.

Piracy is the equivalent of sneaking your friends into the movies through the bathroom window. If people want your stuff but don't want to pay for it, tough. They shouldn't get it for free anyway. Entertainment is a luxury, not a right.

So are democracy and freedom of though then, there's no reason to think more entertainment is bad, especially if it actually makes people want to pay for more. Studies to verify that has all been against your case so far, of course we still wait for the one big serious study with control groups and all...

Btw, did I score a few points in my last post ?
I have a pretty good idea of how you'll answer me, if you ever answer me. Still, you could surprise me and try to counter my arguments with reason and insight (and by that I mean not rehashing again all your previous arguments).

 

[JonnWood]

Do a google search. See those little text ads all the way to the right? Little things like those is what Google makes $28 billion a year off of. How can games do that?

1) Harvest eyeballs.

2) Make them look at ads.

3) Get paid by ad placers.

4) Profit.

Yes, sometimes ads are completely out of place, like in a scifi game in the year 2234 with ads for blu-rays. At the same time, on game startup, you can have a "brought to you by these companies" or heck, if you have inconsequential "loading...loading...loading" screens, you can just replace whatever filler picture with ads and sell a no-ads premium version.

That can increase revenue, yes, but the amount of ads needed to fully fund sustainable game development in the absence of people actually paying for it would pretty much destroy immersion.

snip

But you're still technically denying sales and are still distributing content you were not authorized to do so. Isn't that illegal?

For about the fifth time, no, and if you're going to insist that it is, I'm going to ask for sources explicitly stating your view is correct. You're making an extraordinary claim here.

You're just twisting it here. Doesn't the law specifically say that file sharing is illegal if the file in question is protected by copyrights? Doesn't the law says it becomes illegal the moment you share copyrighted material to other people who have not purchased it?

Again, no, the laws in question specifically refer to unauthorized reproduction.

I disagree. It would be stupid to assume that people who pirated Game A would have went out and bought that game if it weren't for piracy.

It's easier to know which points you're referring to if you quote them, like I'm doing.

There are either two outcomes to the "lost sales" argument. a)The pirates would've bought the game, in which case piracy causes lost sales, or b)the pirates wouldn't have bought the game, in which case pirates took something without permission or any plans to compensate their creators.

Neither is defensible.

There are also no numbers being released about piracy. In fact, there is barely any info on piracy. All we know is that it's supposedly hurting the industry.

Piracy tends to be evasive by its very nature.

What rights might these be? The right to receive a finished product and the right to do what I want with my game as long as I do not distribute it.

For the finished product thing, there are laws about it, yes. As for the second bit, you have a right to play, lend, and sell your games, but not to reproduce them.

The only thing currently standing between people and piracy is ethics. You can't crack down on every single pirate and as such the consequences of actually pirating something are minimal at most.

The numbers quoted in the article are in the hundreds of thousands. That has to have some effect.

The only barrier that you seem to cling on to is invisible.

Philosophically speaking, the idea of ethics and morality are illusions composed entirely of social mores. But I doubt that's what you meant.

I never argued whether piracy is ethical or not.

Which is the general topic under discussion.

Because it's just in no way possible for publishers to be hiding behind piracy when their real intent is to bankrupt the used games market, right?

It's possible. It's also possible that a hit squad is going to break down my door right now and shotgun me to death because they got the wrong address.

No hit squad. Huh. I guess the claim I phrased as a sarcastic, rhetorical question was entirely without support or merit. How 'bout that?

Also, no. English is not my first language. It's an irrelevant point in this discussion.

I was hoping it was relevant, because then I'd be able to attribute your persistence in harping on the wrong definition to the language barrier, rather than stubbornness.

They say it but they have no more proof of that assertion than you even if they are the devs themselves,

I've noticed that you piracy apologists ignore any source that doesn't support your argument. You just stated that the developers themselves have no idea how much their game was pirated. Even assuming a massive, whopping 50% margin of error still leaves their game at 40% piracy.

They're the devs, I'm some dude on the Internet, and you're some dude on the Internet. They are the authority. If you want to disprove them, you're going to have to back it up with a dissenting source, or explain exactly how they were wrong.

plus here's how their experiment went:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/world-of-goo-experiment-a-huge-success

I notice that you just linked to an article almost a full year after the one I linked, about a short term promotional experiment.

and about the second link, I find a 25% rate low for a popular mainstream game and in the 4 treasons they give in "Why would you pirate a pay-what-you-want bundle?" the first is sadly true but n° 2 and 3 are actually good, and n°4 is bullshit because noone is stupid enough to want to "stick it to the man" when it's an indie bundle whose profits goes to charity.

Odd. You're not disputing the facts on this one, just their hypothesized reasons for piracy.

Piracy is the equivalent of sneaking your friends into the movies through the bathroom window. If people want your stuff but don't want to pay for it, tough. They shouldn't get it for free anyway. Entertainment is a luxury, not a right.

So are democracy and freedom of though then,

You just put Counter-Strike and World at Warcraft on the same level of importance as civil rights.

Your argument is invalid.

Btw, did I score a few points in my last post ?

You misunderstand. I'm not arguing with you. I'm trolling you to see what sort of illogical nonsense you lot will come up with. I'm not sure if it's trolling if I sincerely hold the views expressed, but I'm not actually expecting minds to be changed here.

Still, you could surprise me and try to counter my arguments with reason and insight (and by that I mean not rehashing again all your previous arguments).

The only reason I repeat them is because you seem to misunderstand them so completely. If I'm using the same arguments, and you have to keep changing yours to keep responding, that doesn't say much for your arguments or position.

Nah, I tapped out when you compared video games to democracy. Have fun in your self-delusion.

 

[incal11]

I've noticed that you piracy apologists ignore any source that doesn't support your argument.

Says the one who just ignores the links and posts he doesn't like. Bring it on, see how I "ignore" them again.

They're the devs, I'm some dude on the Internet, and you're some dude on the Internet. They are the authority. If you want to disprove them, you're going to have to back it up with a dissenting source, or explain exactly how they were wrong.

I gave a source and explained how they are wrong in the rest of my posts, but beyond that they are developpers and not economists.

plus here's how their experiment went:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/world-of-goo-experiment-a-huge-success

I notice that you just linked to an article almost a full year after the one I linked, about a short term promotional experiment.

I mixed up in the experiments, my bad, but I notice how you don't even consider the content of this link again. Plus I have the sentiment that if their "no drm" experiment had the result of lowering the sales we would have heard about it, I'll look into it though.

and about the second link, I find a 25% rate low for a popular mainstream game and in the 4 treasons they give in "Why would you pirate a pay-what-you-want bundle?" the first is sadly true but n° 2 and 3 are actually good, and n°4 is bullshit because noone is stupid enough to want to "stick it to the man" when it's an indie bundle whose profits goes to charity.

Odd. You're not disputing the facts on this one, just their hypothesized reasons for piracy.

That's not odd, because despite what it looks to you I don't dispute facts, I dispute theories. Your saying that piracy can only be harmfull since it implies unauthorised use and that noone ever repays for what they like is only a theory too.
What relevant fact did I overlook anyway ?

Piracy is the equivalent of sneaking your friends into the movies through the bathroom window. If people want your stuff but don't want to pay for it, tough. They shouldn't get it for free anyway. Entertainment is a luxury, not a right.

So are democracy and freedom of though then,

You just put Counter-Strike and World at Warcraft on the same level of importance as civil rights.

Your argument is invalid.

I'm not just talking about civil right, but about freedom of though. Not just about mainstream drat, but the right to seek distraction, be it books, music or even video games.
I see from your reaction that we are touching the heart of the problem despite yourself, more on this later.

The only reason I repeat them is because you seem to misunderstand them so completely. If I'm using the same arguments, and you have to keep changing yours to keep responding, that doesn't say much for your arguments or position.

It is telling how you never change your arguments, you are not here to have a meaningfull conversation. You're here to rant at people whith a different opinion, and maybe to enjoy watching them rage.
Learn the difference between changing position and developping arguments.
Probaly useless to ask you but, how exactly am I misunterstanding your arguments ?

Nah, I tapped out when you compared video games to democracy. Have fun in your self-delusion.

Ah, you really give yourself out by belittling video games on this forum.
If I have delusions I'm only happy to get rid of them. So here we are : "my arguments are invalid" because I consider video games to be really important.
Not as important as democracy, you're the one who said that, but like democracy in that it is not properly speaking a necessity to survive. Both make life more enjoyable though, in this they are equally needed. Which is why I am as justified to ask for freedom of expression as I am to ask for a freer access to culture (of which video games are a part of even if nearly all are silly and unimportant).
"Entertainment is a luxury, not a right" no, some entertainments are luxuries, going to an underwater 5 stars hotel for instance, but that doesn't cover all of what entertainement is. To be entertained ough to be a right, for you to understand that imagine if your government suddenly turned radical religious and banned music, you probably wouldn't say "oh well, musics only a luxury after all, and I couldn't pay for most of it anyway".
Thinking that everything has to be bound absolutetly by authorisations and that law is unquestionable is another opinion. The real question here is: which opinion is more delusional ?
I'm saying yours because you refuse to consider anything past the authorisation business, and that is a lot more shallow than saying that what makes entertainment is a part of culture.

That said you can always delude yourself into thinking that ignoring me from now on will hurt me, if you even care that is.

 

[pokepuke]

Which is intangible and can't be claimed. They could say you had a copy and no license, but that is entirely not theft in any way, just like reverse engineering someone's product isn't considered literally stealing the inner secrets from the company.

At the very least, it's copyright infringement, even if it's not theft.

Right.

And as you own previous argument about money indicates, it is possible to "steal" things with no physical existence

Right, which also necessarily is not copying.

And this is the end of the entire argument right here. There is nothing else to say on the subject. None of the above is stealing/theft.

I'll go on to some of the other points just for the hell of it, though.

Taking? That doesn't apply. You're playing another word game, and trying to cheat.

No I'm not. If you go in, acquire something without permission, and keep it, what word would you use?

You even answer this yourself in the same post. It is reproducing it.

Lots of which has only a virtual existence, as I mentioned before. Stealing it is pretty similar to piracy, in that sense.

And that sense is completely negligible. If you copied the money then it would be counterfeit money. And just because you only read from a screen the amount you have, you still have it in your possession.

I didn't say anything about "copying" money, I'm talking about the existence of said money in absence of any physical counterpart.

And? Still no piracy. Real pirates steal stuff. You know, the ones out in the ocean or wherever. Not digital ones. Computer pirates are more like Zombie Jesus and his miracles. Sure, they didn't have copyrights back then, but he sure could have put people out of business with what he was doing.

Calling piracy a "competing force" is like calling a leak in your pipes a "tap".

You keep losing sight of the topic. Let's try to compare this example to computers. How about: the water is like hard drive space, and there happened to be a vulnerability that someone exploited and he was then using the other person's space. That would pretty much be an invasion of privacy and using, or you could call it taking, something that belongs to someone else. This has nothing to do with illegal file sharing.

What do publishers and "file-sharers" have in common?

One sells things, the other acquires them without permission. So very little. Which is my point; you were making two contradictory points.

Pay attention to the wording. You're not getting something when you share. You're giving. File sharers are uploading content to another PC. This is how they are similar to publishers. Both are presenting access to the product.

No, I'm saying that even cheap indie games without DRM are pirated.

That's no point at all.

Why even do that when you also say pirates don't buy games?

Because piracy, by definition, involves getting a game without paying legitimately for it. This is not semantics. This is the actual definition of piracy. If they were to actually buy the game afterward, then they would become a customer as well as a pirate.

That's just a dumb thing to say. It's retarded to bring up the definition like that when the object of contention was clearly your wording. What you're saying here is like if you called someone a liar because he lied once. Why would you continue to call him a liar? It's petty. Nowhere in this discussion were we talking about a specific example of piracy, so what you said here was pointless.

That is a very false claim, by the way, along with the 90% bit.

Here's the quote from 2D Boy [http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/11/acrying-shame-world-of-goo-piracy-rate-near-90.ars]. The developers of the game in question. Note that they do not use it as an excuse for poor sales. In fact, they say they're doing well in spite of piracy.

Read this [http://2dboy.com/page/22/] and eat shit.

And here's the Humble Bundle source [http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Saving-a-penny----pirating-the-Humble-Indie-Bundle].

Specious.

But, if they don't buy games then no harm done! If anything, they are helping to market the game, doing the creators a great service.

Except the people they're "marketing" to are most likely other pirates. The creators, for some reason, rarely think people playing their games for free is a "good thing".

Now you're just pulling crap out of your ass.

Piracy is the equivalent of sneaking your friends into the movies through the bathroom window. If people want your stuff but don't want to pay for it, tough. They shouldn't get it for free anyway. Entertainment is a luxury, not a right.

And when it is a movie theater, they can put locks on the windows. When it is on your PC, they shouldn't be able to put restrictions on how your computer runs. That would basically make it a virus. DRM is a basic way of putting hurdles, but either way they have relinquished the domain to my PC, so now I can do whatever I want with it. If they don't like it, they shouldn't be allowing it. They wouldn't just leave the window unlocked when they see people sneaking in, would they? This idiotic campaign to sue people for downloading stuff is like letting them through the window and then calling the cops on them.

Piracy is still illegal, and a lot of people who don't pirate don't know about it, or simply think that content producers should actually get paid for the things they make.

You mean, people pay for stuff even though they can get it for free? This is madness! That makes no sense when they can just download it through illegitimate means with no repercussions. I simply don't believe you. No one would be that stupid.

Good question. I believe you're legally allowed to make a backup copy while you have the original, as long as you don't circumvent any copy-protection to do so. You'd be able to use it if you lost or damaged the original disc, but making a copy and then giving the original or the backup to someone else would be copyright infringement. Don't quote me on that, though.

The thing is, none of it makes sense. They had to lobby pretty hard to get these rules made up, and of course they exist now just because corporations have most of the power.

It's a "backup". You're supposed to use it when you damage or lose the original. Selling it or lending it out doesn't qualify as "losing".

I could just claim I did. How are they going to enforce it? The rule might as well not exist if they can't.

That would easily make a loophole and allow you to double the usage of all the media out there. This is exactly why some DRM limits you from installing a program a number of times. Some licenses are even so limited that you are only supposed to install the item on a specific product you own. That is how OEM copies of Windows are. If you wanted to switch out the motherboard in your PC, the license would get thrown out right with the old one.

That, unfortunately, is mostly pirates' fault.

Wrong.

It should be fairly obvious that these are all ways to increase profit and sales by limiting user control. If you used to install games on both of your computers so you could play on either one or maybe have a friend play with you over your local network, well the companies didn't like that so they added restrictions, and now you're a pirate. It will only get more strict if they can get away with it and users keep buying their shit.

If there weren't pirates around, companies wouldn't be resorting to increasingly ridiculous DRM in order to protect their investment.

Protect their investment? They already made the product and are selling it. They just want to sell more. The reason that they're all complete morons is that there are no guaranteed sales. Removing pirates doesn't automatically bump up the revenue. They are delusional when they put crappy DRM that only drive away legit customers, and they're so bloated and incompetently diabetic that they also can't see or feel it when they just shot themselves in the foot. Instead of defeating piracy, they may have just tripled it.

I simply don't buy games with DRM I find restrictive. However, I don't think of it as some sort of "right" to get a DRM-free game. They have a right to protect their stuff, and I have a right not to buy it. I do not, however, have a right to circumvent their protection.

But you can, and they can't stop you.

 

[TimeLord]

I'm very hurt by this article, where are the numbers for PS3 piracy? No love for the PS3, how sad.

PS3, as far as I know, is still mostly secure.

Would that be something to do with Blu-Rays being hard to pirate? Or is it more the fact that the PS3 has to be updated to play new games?