Pirating Game Dev Tycoon Dooms Players to be Ruined By Piracy

SecondPrize

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phoenix352 said:
SecondPrize said:
phoenix352 said:
SecondPrize said:
phoenix352 said:
SecondPrize said:
phoenix352 said:
now the most used argument against piracy is "it hurts the developer" this is just false information.
piracy whole heartily helps the dev by making the game and the dev a household name.
the fact that people play it use the product for free is just a bit of a downside emotionally not financially since non of those were lost sales or lost value, NON OF THEM.
You don't think devs use sales figures when negotiating contracts with publishers? You don't think in-house devs get more resources based on sales figures? You don't think there's one person who would have bought a game they pirated if they couldn't pirate it?

Do i think they use sales figures? yes i do.
they use the actual game sales aka people who bought retail\ digital.
do i think they include theoretical sales? hell no.

pirated copy's are not lost sales, case closed.
you cant make business decisions from vague estimates and theoretical sales.

do i personally think out of those people who pirate some one would have bought a copy if he didn't have the option?
of curse some would , just like out of the people who pirate there are those who still buy copies afterwards.
those are just maybes and they work both ways.
you should not be making contracts using estimated numbers based on maybes.

if that's how the industry does business then they have only themselves to blame for it , piracy is still not a cause.
You would have to make a case for it to be closed.
You yourself admitted that some pirates would have purchased a copy if piracy was unavailable. THERE'S YOUR LOST SALE RIGHT THERE. Not theoretical, an actual 1 to add to the list of sales.
i made my argument about that in my original post~
yeah i admitted that i THINK there would be some who would pay for that game.
but you cant count sales based on THOUGHT , the only way for you to count that as a lost sale would be if you had the knowledge that some of those people would 100% buy that game if the piracy option was not available but you cant know that and that's the whole point. there's no way to get accurate numbers on any of this meaning you count lost sales on theoretical information.

on that note what do you then say to a pirate that bought that same game he pirated later ?
based on your calculations that's still a "lost sale" in the sales figures even if the pirate got it legit.
the publisher only sees that a new copy was sold but doesn't see less pirated copy's.
and then just claims like the rest that even tho sales were high piracy " crippled" half of it or some other nonsense like that.
its inherently a flawed system and should not be used.
Are you kidding? I don't have calculations. I'm talking about sales figures. Your pirate who goes on to buy the game adds 1 to the total sales figure. He is accounted for. I'm not sure where you came up with the idea that my 'calculations' would not account for this. My pirate who would have purchased the game if not for piracy does not add 1 to the sales figure. We agreed that developers use these sales figures in their relations with publishers. Therefore, the person who pirates the game when he would have purchased it instead is doing harm to the developer in not adding to the sales figure. He would have purchased it. He did not because piracy exists. The developer has a weaker position in their next negotiation because of this person.
when i say calculations i mean the sales figures.
my pirate as i stated is indeed counted as a sales figure BUT he also pirated the game beforehand meaning he is also a "lost sale" based on your rules.

so how can 1 person then be both a sale figure and a lost sale figure?
that's the pickle with that one.

i agree that the person who would have bought a copy if the option of piracy wasn't available would do harm to the dev but again you don't know that he would have.
there is no way to determine that information.
saying that he harms the dev is hypothetical because you need to assume that he otherwise would of bought it.
meaning anyone that pirates is completely irrelevant to any sales figures period.

if a developer chooses to calculate lost sales from piracy along side the actual sales figures he ends up basing it on estimates and nothing else so there can be no argument made that piracy affected his negotiations.
because in our current reality you cant prove that a pirate would buy that game if piracy wasn't a thing.
so the end figures are just lies.




that's the whole overarching point its simply a fact that piracy does no harm.
I don't consider every instance of piracy a lost sale. I wouldn't count the guy who bought a copy after designing his own piracy demo plan as a sale that should have happened had he wound up not making the purchase in the end. All I'm saying is there are people who would purchase games but do not because they are available through piracy. This is separate from trying it out first or sticking it to publishers or any of that stuff. These are sales that would have happened had the game not been cracked at distributed. Call them lost sales if you like, but while not every instance of piracy is a lost sale, there are sales that get lost in the mix. Without even doing anything like calculating lost sales, developers are harmed because their final sales numbers are not as high as they would have been and they rely on those numbers. You're right that we can't put a number to them. I'm not saying devs should find some way to account for them on top of actual sales figures, but we have to admit that this happens simply based on our consuming like locusts nature as gamers.

Now we could argue that piracy does no net harm because you can eliminate the people who were never going to buy a game and compare sales gained because of word of mouth or do-it-yourself demoing resulting in a sale and those lost by people who would have purchased if they couldn't pirate, but we don't really have those numbers so it'll be speculation. Again, I'm just saying if there is one person who would have purchased a title and doesn't, the absence of his presence in sales figures does do a bit of damage.

The funny thing is, while I won't call for it in these forums, I won't be upset when a crack of the 'real' game dev tycoon comes out because this stinks of a PR stunt which, while brilliant, is more than a little hypocritical to me because as far as I can tell these two guys are straight ripping off kairosoft and their Game Dev Story.
 

Siyano_v1legacy

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Now with all the big thing around this game I want to buy it, but their site seem to be not working, anyone has it working?
 

mjc0961

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This is made of 100% pure win. Bookmarking their site for later so I can check out the demo once their site is working again.

J Tyran said:
I hope there is a special circle of hell for people that pirate an indie game that has no DRM and has a demo. All of the excuses for piracy fall to pieces, its cheap, you do not need to crack it because of broken DRM and you can try the demo.
Also, this. And this:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/5342-When-Piracy-Becomes-Theft

Because I don't care about definitions. When you pirate a DRM free indie game (especially one that has a demo), you are morally a thief. Fuck off with "no it's copyright infringement" and "the original isn't gone so it's not theivery see?" MORALLY, you are a thief and you deserve all the negative connotations associated with being a thief.
 

Nielas

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Entitled said:
But IP laws are pretty much the opposite of free trade, they mean that if you can provide a service, like sing a song that you wrote, and if someone else can sing it better and she asks a better price for it, you can ask your friend the Man to punch her in the face until she stops singing so you are the most demanded singer again.

It would work if you would assume that your writing of the song was some sort of "property" that was yours before it was "taken away", but this in itself is a legal fiction invented specifically to make you more profitable, not a self-evident part of Natural Law.

You have a monopoly on singing that song, and your friend the government is regulating it for you. He might also decide that the other singer was actually doing "fair use" so you are out of luck, or that you lose your "property" after x years in favor of the Public. It's pretty much depending on his mood, how much of a winner you are picked to be.
All property law is "legal fiction". I own a car because of the amount of work I fulfilled the requirements for owning it (paid the maker money). Thus I have a monopoly on what can be done with the car within a set of government regulations. If someone tries to exercise rights on it that I or the law did not grant them, I can "ask your friend the Man to punch them in the face until they stop what they are doing".

Your argument pretty much boils down to you being willing to grant property rights only to physical objects and not allowing that any rights be granted for merely doing the creative work needed before hand. However, the creative people want to be compensated for their work and want to be able to set their own rates. The government acknowledges that it needs their professional contributions seriously enough that it created a social contract that grants the creators a set of rights over their creations.
 

Entitled

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mjc0961 said:
this:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/5342-When-Piracy-Becomes-Theft

Because I don't care about definitions. When you pirate a DRM free indie game (especially one that has a demo), you are morally a thief. Fuck off with "no it's copyright infringement" and "the original isn't gone so it's not theivery see?" MORALLY, you are a thief and you deserve all the negative connotations associated with being a thief.
Yeah, and if you vote for a communist party, that makes morally a rapist.
If you drink before driving, that makes you morally an arsonist.
If you abort your fetus, that makes you morally an EA CEO.

Insults are one thing, but if you really "don't care about definitions", then you might as well pick one that will cause less inevitable confusion and discussion of definitions about whether you are mixing up two crimes, or just using one crime's weight as a vague estimation of an unrelated one's weight.
 

Charli

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*spins around in leather chair*
I am going to allow this.


(no seriously though this is the kind of 'drm' if you can even call it that, that works with the 'true customers' with no detriment to their experience while also giving the pirates inconvenience. Which is what should happen.)

Kind of like those pieces of music that are pirated and half way though the song there's a clip of woody wood pecker singing instead. It's just poetic justice and discourages piracy without being heavy handed or scornful to valued customers.


Captcha: "Can't have nice things" Well actually sir Captcha, in this case, this is why we CAN have nice things.
 

Dfskelleton

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I think I might like this even more than Serious Sam 3's anti-piracy measure. And I LOVED SS3's Invincible Giant Pink Scorpion DRM.
 

J Tyran

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Entitled said:
J Tyran said:
Well then at least someone is actually considering there is no real reason for piracy other than the fact that some people simply do not want to pay, which is true because cases like this prove all of the sob stories (great description btw) are bullshit.

Not wanting to pay someone for something they created is wrong, no other way around it. Sure its not the same as theft but its taking something for nothing and not giving someone their fair due, anyone trying to justify it needs to realign their morals. Putting self entitlement ahead of fair due is one thing when it comes to big publishers that make billions but its a another when it comes to hard working devs that rely on their income for their bread and butter.

At the end of the day I have no personal ax to grind over piracy, I have no issues with some types of piracy either. Like when people pirate a TV show or film that for whatever reason had restricted availability in their region but they later buy the BD/DVD. Same goes for when publishers go out of their way to avoid selling or supporting a game outside of certain countries, thats pants on head retarded and its their own fault if it gets copied.

I just wish the train of bullshit excuses would go away when people simply want a product without paying for it.
No, I mean that in a general sense. What if there is no NEED for sob stories, because piracy is not evil?

In other words, how do you know what you know?

There are plenty of examples of you benefiting using something without necessarily paying money, because the business model ended up that way. Wikipedia (donations), The Escapist (ads), Land TV broadcasting (ads), F2P (optional paying customets), fanfiction, webcomics, youtube cartoons (hobby work), etc.

Of course, the difference between these and piracy, is that these agreed to free distribution.

But how do you know that for publishers, it's "their fair due" to force a business model on yo where everyone has to pay?

Now assume that the game actually ends up being profitable, like most do, regardless of piracy. Compared to some low level animator or sound effects designer, who just got a monthly paycheck for his work and that's it, why should there also be an "IP holder", who beyond getting money, also has "a fair due" to feel morally entitled to limit the number of people playing the game?

Beyond the financial ad absurdum of how the industry would break down if everyone would pirate, basically all arguments I hear about piracy, boil down to this moral feeling of how artists should have a right to keep controlling EXACTLY what happens to every copy of their work.

But where does it come from? Most workers have no such rights, they just work, and that's it. Why are artists so priviledged, that their rights involve cntrolling the rest of the world's data transmission to protect their "fair due?"
Sorry but this is nothing but self entitlement, you are claiming anyone should have the right to use software simply because its there and you do not agree with how people try to protect their IP?

Sure the copywrite systems in place today are broken and in need of reform but that still doesn't mean anyone has the right to obtain something because they do not agree with the business model.

Programmers and artists spend hundreds of hours creating something they intend to sell, the consumers are basically entering an unwritten contract along the lines of "you spend time creating entertainment for me, in return I will pay you for providing it for me".

Its that simple, they do it as a type of service. Your concept of free entertainment is missing an important part, sure some websites and games and other types of content are free at the point of use but ultimately we are still paying for it.

The ads and other marketing efforts just pass the cost on elsewhere, if you buy a product from a company that places internet ads the marketing budgets are passed on the consumer. The money doesn't come out of thin air.

Obtaining a product or service and not paying is morally wrong, whether a physical item was exchanged or not. Like waiters and waitresses in the US, most of their earnings come from tips. Not passing a modest tip is a shitty thing to do, sure they never actually gave you anything but they exchange their time and effort for money.

Same for a developer, you pay them to entertain you. Simple as that pirates are simply refusing to uphold that unwritten contract. Anyone that believes the things in your post is morally bankrupt at worst or some kind of digital socialist at best.
 

Wicky_42

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JazzJack2 said:
Piracy leads to more people playing your game, and if your game is good then they will not only gain trust in you as a developer (leading to much better sales for future games) but they will help market your game through word of mouth. Look at minecraft, not only is it one of the most easily pirated games of all time it is also one of the most successful indie games of all time. Why? Because piracy helped send it to almost viral like popularity.
On the other hand, people who pay for the game can also evangelise it, in addition to having paid for it. Minecraft was amazingly successful despite being massively pirated; it was also a really fun, well marketed, highly creative game.

You don't need pirates evangelising your game if it's good, not in this day and age with so many impartial reviewers on youtube giving excellent reviews of just about everything (TotalBiscuit, anyone?)
 

MeChaNiZ3D

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While that is hilarious as an anti-piracy/shaming tool, I hope that as an actual mechanic piracy does not just suck your company dry, because it doesn't necessarily work like that in real life and I don't like biased portrayals.
 

Entitled

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Nielas said:
All property law is "legal fiction". I own a car because of the amount of work I fulfilled the requirements for owning it (paid the maker money). Thus I have a monopoly on what can be done with the car within a set of government regulations. If someone tries to exercise rights on it that I or the law did not grant them, I can "ask your friend the Man to punch them in the face until they stop what they are doing".

Your argument pretty much boils down to you being willing to grant property rights only to physical objects and not allowing that any rights be granted for merely doing the creative work needed before hand. However, the creative people want to be compensated for their work and want to be able to set their own rates. The government acknowledges that it needs their professional contributions seriously enough that it created a social contract that grants the creators a set of rights over their creations.
"legal fiction [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_fiction]" is not just a nickname for laws with a subjective basis, but an actual terminology for legal rulings that are based on "virtually simulating" a fact. IP is legal fiction because it pretends that the usage of data can be thought of as physical object.

Besides, lurk more legal philosophy. Pretty much all of it agrees that the concept of property is one of the basic tenets of civilization, and the very concept of "law", and the reason why governments exist in the first place, as anecessity to protect it (with a "Social Contract" or otherwise).

Many of these philosophers wrote before IP even existed.

Copyright is a modern market regulation, that was first invented in 1662 specifically as a certain english King's method of dealing with political censorship, by trusting the book publishers' guild with regulating appropriate content in turn for getting copyright monopoly over everything. By 1710, the publshers' guild already granted copyright to individual writers first, to justify it's continued existence, and by the American Constitution, the purpose to "promote science and the useful arts" has appeared as a justification.

There is a pretty fundamental difference between physical property and IP.

While exactly how physical property is protected might be an issue of specific laws, but the basic admittance that property exists has been with us since Hammurabi and longer, it's a legal axiom. Property exists beause... because property exists.

IP on the other hand, exists because of whatever reason publishers can think of, and whatever limits of control govermnents considered to be necessary at a time being.

The recent interpretation that IP should be thought of as another form of "property", (down to it's very name "intellectual property", which is actually a late 20th century invention), and that it should be respected for it's own sake because "it belongs to the creators", is a part of the copyright industry's "piracy is theft" concept, intended to remove the possibility of copyright reform.

Because after all, if IP is just a market regulation with the specific purpose of helping artists, people might start to wonder exactly how much regulation they need. What if they don't actually need 90 years of control? Or they don't need DMCA youtube takedowns? Or they don't need to control file-sharing at all, as the make enough money from physical copies sales monopoly, and optional sales, and ads, and donations, and merch?

But if it's "property", than every move against it means "taking away from artists what is their due", what obviously belongs to them just because, regardless of whether they need it or not, taking it away would still be like Robin Hood robbing the rich.
 

JarinArenos

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Amusing not-DRM DRM (I liked the Serious Sam DRM too). On the other hand, it sounds like the game itself just isn't that good, which is probably far more to blame for sales issues than piracy.
 

LetalisK

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J Tyran said:
I hope there is a special circle of hell for people that pirate an indie game that has no DRM and has a demo. All of the excuses for piracy fall to pieces, its cheap, you do not need to crack it because of broken DRM and you can try the demo.

Plus its not a protest against big publishers and their practices its just the little guys trying to earn a living, no excuses whatsoever.
That's my biggest beef with the pirating culture. I don't care about the actual pirating, because I buy some of the moralistic arguments about fighting against the absolutely ridiculous and ineffective measures publishers use to hassle consumers and sometimes wonder if publishers aren't actually trying to push people to piracy for some reason. Then something like this or the Humble Indie Bundle incident happens. They had a chance to justify their platitudes and failed miserably. I hope the ethical pirates are absolutely fuming at this.
 

J Tyran

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LetalisK said:
J Tyran said:
I hope there is a special circle of hell for people that pirate an indie game that has no DRM and has a demo. All of the excuses for piracy fall to pieces, its cheap, you do not need to crack it because of broken DRM and you can try the demo.

Plus its not a protest against big publishers and their practices its just the little guys trying to earn a living, no excuses whatsoever.
That's my biggest beef with the pirating culture. I don't care about the actual pirating, because I buy some of the moralistic arguments about fighting against the absolutely ridiculous and ineffective measures publishers use to hassle consumers and sometimes wonder if publishers aren't actually trying to push people to piracy for some reason. Then something like this or the Humble Indie Bundle incident happens. They had a chance to justify their platitudes and failed miserably. I hope the ethical pirates are absolutely fuming at this.
Incidents like this smash all the pitiful excuses, only 6% of the people playing their game bought it. Thats horrible, spending all that time to create something only to see self entitled gamers refusing to give their fair due must be awful.
 

Entitled

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J Tyran said:
Sorry but this is nothing but self entitlement, you are claiming anyone should have the right to use software simply because its there and you do not agree with how people try to protect their IP?
Well, of course it is, I mean, just look at my username. The real question is, why is it less important than the artists' self entitlement to get profits through the outdated business model that they need to control communication, file-sharing, and copying in the world, to uphold?

J Tyran said:
Programmers and artists spend hundreds of hours creating something they intend to sell, the consumers are basically entering an unwritten contract along the lines of "you spend time creating entertainment for me, in return I will pay you for providing it for me".
Consumers are entering a contract. But what makes me, browsing the Internet, already having spent my monthly money on games weeks ago, enter into a contract when I also happen to find something new interesting to check out?

Why is it NEEDED for the publisher to have the right to stop me from that, if it already has been proven that access to free media doesn't take away money from the industry as a whole?


J Tyran said:
Its that simple, they do it as a type of service. Your concept of free entertainment is missing an important part, sure some websites and games and other types of content are free at the point of use but ultimately we are still paying for it.

The ads and other marketing efforts just pass the cost on elsewhere, if you buy a product from a company that places internet ads the marketing budgets are passed on the consumer. The money doesn't come out of thin air.
I know very well how the industry functions, I even noted the business models in my posts. I could have also listed the models of selling printed books with the ebook being under creative commons, or the anime industry selling DVDs after airing shows for free (with zero ad revenue).

Bu the overall point was, that there are so many possibilities of service providers getting payed after letting information flow free, and getting paid either by a few voluntary donators (like wikipedia, or really, basically anything that could be pirated but some people didn't choose that), by advertisements like TV, and most websites), or by selling physical objects (like novels, anime, and also music merch). Some of these assume that a few people being more generous than others, and leaves a room for freeloaders.

If there so many ways of digital works making a living, then why is it ecessary that publishers still ALSO get an authority over exactly how we are allowed o use the Internet, and our computer usage? It's not about "having a right to make a living", but about maximalizing control and maybe profits.

J Tyran said:
Anyone that believes the things in your post is morally bankrupt at worst or some kind of digital socialist at best.
See my above discussions with others, starting with "Yeah, because monopolistic market regulations as defined by governments are just so freakin' laissez-faire!".

There is nothing socialistic about not wanting the government to give creative artists subsidy in the form of letting them control all data traffic.

Letting artists and pubishers figure out how to make a living now that data is easily distributed, would be the free market thing to do. But deciding that the old publishing format simply needs to be protected even at the cost of limiting our personal rights, is probably the most extreme example of the government picking winners and losers on this side of communism.
 

Callate

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Good for them. A nice bit of satire.

I may have to buy a copy just out of solidarity.
 

Nurb

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Piracy can hurt independent smaller developers, but I WISH it would hurt the big publishers

I like helping out the independents. Plopped down a little cash for Kerbal Space Program to try it while still in development because there needs to be more games like it
 

Dead Seerius

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This is hilarious. Good on the dev team for thinking of this. Sadly, I doubt many pirates will take the lesson to heart, but at least they get a big ol' 'fuck you' in the illegally downloaded version.

Wish more people would just pay for their damn products.
 

Holythirteen

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I love sneaky DRM like this. Designed purely to annoy and inconvenience the pirates, no trouble for paying customers at all. And pure entertainment when they go into a forum trying to figure out what's wrong. Priceless.

I guess I am a pirate, or I was in my lazy/broke small-town years. But I don't pretend that I had some right to be, and I can't believe how many people in this thread are DEFENDING it as some sort of Moral Crusade. Get out you cheap idiots, we do not care what you think, if you won't even pay for the games we love, what good is your stupid opinion? Get a clue, those are free.

Piracy does hurt games. Do not kid yourself. Sure not every game I pirated was something I was going to buy, and maybe I eventually DID buy quite a few when I changed my ways and started to find sales and re-releases but whatever good you think piracy is doing for the industry is insignificant compared to the money it has cost it.

Just think about it, some horrible program or genie or whatever ends piracy forever overnight, no pirated games on any hard drive anywhere, all torrent sites down forever. Zany and impossible I know, but what do you think pirates would start doing? Maybe a few would break out the old basketball, or watch some TV. But game sales would SKYROCKET. Sure poor students would find some cheaper games to play, anybody who pretends to be taking a "Moral Stand" by not buying 60 dollar games would instantly turn into a massive hypocrite and buy those games because they want to play them, fake morals be damned.

Most of you would probably start breaking car windows, because if you think your piracy is justified, becoming an actual thief wouldn't be much of a stretch.
 

WOPR

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SecondPrize said:
...Buy Game Dev Story to show support for the above, as well as support for devs who see their products cloned by douches like these.
Little problem when you don't own an iOS or Android devise and want a similar game for your at home PC.
(That's not even addressing the obvious "Inspiration vs Replication" problems.)