zehydra said:
suppose then, that they could.
I'd be up for defending your right to a sports car then if you couldn't afford one.
Jumplion said:
I understand your discrepancies, and I do feel sorry for her, but do not play the sympathy card here. It's just a cop-out argument, and a bad fallacy to base any argument off of.
Surely you already know the answer to your question, but I'll bite. The reason why it goes to Americans and other, more developed, countries is because these things are luxuries for us. Countries like, I dunno, Uzbekistan or Sri-Lanka or something, do not have the luxury of obtaining games, and in many cases games are not sold there at all. Westernized cultures take a ton of things for granted, going "Oh god, I have to...work for money to get a game I want!?" (not saying your friend does that, just saying) as if it's somehow unreasonable to work for something you want.
I'm not playing the sympathy card. I'm saying, if she's working her ass off, MORE so than others in the world who do the same amount of work and get paid 6 times as much for it (considering she's only a student and working a bar tending job), why doesn't she deserve the same luxury? It's a matter of logic, not sympathy.
And I don't think you understood the second part, or at least your answer seems to indicate as much. My point was that the "piracy is theft" always comes from people in US and countries that have a decent standard. Countries where you can get a job that doesn't require any education and still make as much as a job that takes 17+ years of education somewhere else. No offense, just saying, try to put yourself in the shoes of someone who's simply not able to make as much money.
If game price was scaled with standard, I'd agree with your definition of piracy=theft. But if I'm paying the same (actually higher, due to import etc.) price as someone who can make 3-5 times as much as me doing the same job, then as far as I'm concerned, that blows your argument straight out of the water. If we had places here that rented games at a price relevant to the region, I'd again agree.
If you think I'm pulling this out of my arse, compare some salaries here. I was sick lately so I got to talk to a few docs. Turns out a doctor with some serious working years behind them makes some 40k dinars a month here. That's 522$. Normal doctors make some 30-35k (391-457$). That's GPs and such btw. Wanna go to your local hospital and ask them what they make a month? Quick search on the interwebs says some 9500+$ a month at the minimum (more actually, but I'm rounding it down) around the US area. Wanna take your calculator and go to town on that bad boy? That's 18+ times as much. Think on that for a while.
blind_dead_mcjones said:
if you spent 50 dollars on agame and found you didn't like it, boo fucking hoo, deal with it, don't try to use it was a weak justification to get things for free, people make poor investments and financial decisions all the time, its part of life, you don't see the richard bransons of the world whining whenever they go bankrupt, no they dust themselves off and rebuild themselves using the knowledge they learned from their previous mistakes
Shitty game is one thing. Game not working is another. Do me a favour. Go get a job with someone to design a program for them. Then give them a dysfunctional program with a pile of bugs, a load of things that crash the program and an actual memory leak. Then tell me you managed to not have to pay them back every fucking cent they paid you. Yeah. Ain't happening.
blind_dead_mcjones said:
so? why should she get a free ride over others? especially the people who worked night and day to increasingly asinine and rediculous deadlines in order to make that game, which is a luxury item not a neccessity, don't they deserve to be compensated for their work with you showing your appreciation by just buying the damn game?
They do. And if one could afford a game, they should buy it. However, if they can't afford it, they're not a potential customer and as such, the developers lose nothing from a person pirating it.
Blazingdragoon04 said:
There is always a cost. No matter how few people you think pirate and NEVER buy the game, Id like to bet that your number is far too low to be realistic. Those digital copies of the game DO take money away from people who worked hard to create that game. And the argument of saying "people pirate games in order to play more games in the industry and enjoy it more" is just dumb. Just really really dumb. They aren't supporting the industry, they are actively diminishing it with every theft they commit. If pirates really wanted the video game industry to grow and develop they would buy the games like the rest of us. As it stands we now are dealing with game developers who won't produce games for the PS3 now that it has been hacked. It isn't that people are going to see "gee, the PS3 can be hacked, guess we should treat all consoles evenly now shouldn't we?" it will be "gee, the PS3 got hacked. Let's make Xbox games from now on."
There is nothing lost by piracy other than potential customers. Unlike other media that would need to be deprived of a physical object that costs money to manufacture and that could be sold to someone else. Thus it is not theft but copyright infringement. As for the "let's make Xbox games from now on." yeah... welcome to the world of PCs. But it's a step forward. Xbox will get hacked too, then we can go on our merry fucking way of developers having no more excuses
Blazingdragoon04 said:
And not to be vicious, but you sure are up on your moral high horse despite the fact that you are defending public thieves stealing from hard working people who just want to feed their families and keep the industry they love alive. This string of pirating WILL affect the gaming industry in the near future, and it will not be good. Pirates are ruining gaming slowly, bit by bit, whether its stealing from companies that might have been able to stay in business, keeping companies from taking risks with new IP due to the high pirate rate, or even so far as an entire console going under due to the competition being better by being less hackable. The pirates are not good people, and I really don't understand how anyone can sit there and tell us, the people against them, that they are inconsiderate bastards because we hate people who steal and ruin our fun.
Hard working people who want to feed their families and keep the industry they love alive still get paid. My argument is actually that piracy gets them paid more. I don't know many people who started gaming in their mid twenties, after they were out of education and earning money. And that's basically where you'd rather put anyone without a pair of rich parents as far as gaming is concerned. No, it's usually started before you're able to make money and if all you're given is free to play games, you might never get into it. I know I wouldn't.
Your "piracy is ruining the industry" is about as valid as "games cause violence". Just something to wave around cause it benefits someone and makes a bit of sense before you spend more than two seconds thinking about it. It's also something that's been proven time and again that it's complete bullshit. Even big names in the industry that don't just advertise their profit margin have pointed out as much. See Tim Schafer saying piracy made his Psychonauts more popular than sales ever could, something that has already earned him money (after people liked the game and bought it, as opposed to thinking "lol, small developer, not wasting money on this") and will earn him even more so when the second part comes around. And that's a small guy not making much money, the bigger guys just get paid more (even if they do "lose" more as well from piracy).
keve4433 said:
Ok look at it this way. Gaming is a hobby, just like say, working on cars. Now lets say that someone loves working on cars but can't afford to buy the parts they need. Does that mean they can just walk into the factory and take $2,000 part? Just because it's something you love and are passionate about doesn't mean it's your right to be able to do it, it just means it's something you love to do. For every sale that gaming companies don't get any money from we loose out.
What a lot of pirates don't realize is that games cost a shit load of money to produce. You have to pay for the latest and greatest software to make the thing, you have to pay the couple hundred people that work on it, you have to pay to print the disc, you have to pay to ship the game, you have to pay for advertisements, you have to pay for the cases the games go in, and finally you have to pay the company that publishes your game. The only way that a company can make any money to stay up and running is to sell as many copies of their game as they possibly can and when they can't they have to cut back, whether that be firing employees or having to continue using sub par hardware/software.People can keep thinking that that their money doesn't make that big a difference, but when say 3,000 people in the U.S. pirate a game which retails at the average sixty bucks, thats $180,000 which is a lot of money believe it or not. That would almost cover the cost for the 3D software that they put on all of the artist's computers.
Taking a 2000$ part from a factory is taking something that cost money to produce. I'm not talking about "hey, let's design this part" money to produce, I'm talking "let's get materials and put this shit together" money to produce. Piracy doesn't take anything away, it doubles it and gives it for free. No one loses anything but a potential customer in the process
and when the potential customer is not a potential customer due to lack of funds, inability to find a game etc. then nothing at all is lost.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying "well if you want a game, I think piracy is ok". I'm saying "if you're unable to get a game otherwise, whether due to location, lack of funds or whatever, I think piracy is ok". I still think everyone should support the industry as much as they can afford to, I just don't think they should necessarily be limited to fewer games because they had less fortune of not having rich parents, high country standards etc.
And wow that's a lot of replies. Scuse the huge post, went to bed last night
