CapnJack said:
You can try to find the perfect analogy as much as you want, but at the end of the day, piracy is not going to go away unless you CRIPPLE the internet or take away consumers' privacy. Big media corporations have been constantly pushing for restrictions on privacy, which is absolutely ridiculous, and there is absolutely no indication that laws should be changed to help out these big corporations when plenty of people are doing just fine in today's market.
I understand that. I also did not posit that we need to change the laws.
CapnJack said:
If these old corporations refuse to adapt and find new business models to take advantage of technology, they're going to go the way of the buggy. Then you might not get your next Britney Spears album or Mario game, but so-the-fuck-what? More competent companies that don't try to fight the information age will become successful and produce better content. I'm sure some people wanted stricter legislation against cars save the failing buggy industry back in the day as well.
They're adapting, but slowly. That is part of the problem - piracy is quickly gaining on legal content distribution, and I would not be surprised if it overtakes it in the West fairly soon. You also have to realise that it is not just the corporations losing money, but the content creators themselves. You may not care less for Gas Powered Games as a business, but there are a ton of great people there who deserve to be rewarded for the quality work that they do. If people don't buy the games, then the company doesn't make money, which often means people are out of a job. Sure, Britney Spears isn't going anywhere, but what about your favourite niche band or artist? They're probably already working at least one job to pay the bills while they try to pursue their ambitions, and what happens if the record label drops them? They might try to continue, but it will be hard for them to keep it up full-time. Most groups I listen to don't actually play music for a living, despite their excellence.
CapnJack said:
Not surprisingly, you're speaking out of your ass. There is absolutely no indication that a download equals a lost sale, and there's plenty of evidence to the contrary. Downloads are included, but not limited to, downloads from people in which the content isn't released yet, downloads from people who are poor, and downloads from people who would never pay for a game anyway. There are also people who will download it, and never buy it. But then again, there are people who will download it, tell ALL their friends about how awesome it is, and result in increased sales. Will Wright might as well send a check to pirate bay for free advertising.
This is correct, and this does happen. I know that I have bought games due to pirating them before. However, this isn't usually the case. Even though I did buy, say,
Oblivion years after pirating it, I only did it for the extra expansion content; similarly I only bought
Call of Duty 4 so I could play online. Those games are exceptions however, and I have probably twenty more I pirated in the past, yet never bought legitimately - which I am not proud of, by the way, especially because there are some fantastic games that I should have paid for. There are a few games I've pirated but had no intention of buying (that's the usual case); however, after playing more I've also found that I would have bought the majority of them had I known I'd enjoy them so much, and also would have if a pirated copy was unavailable. Of course, except for in a few cases, I never did. I assume my situation is similar to others. While piracy is occasionally capable of generating sales, that is not necessarily the case.
CapnJack said:
To bring up a recent example: X-Men Origins: Wolverine, did GREAT at the box office, even with a crappy workprint version released an entire month in advance and downloaded up to 4 million times, and even with lots of critics bashing it for being a pretty generic, lousy action movie. So, where are these mythical lost sales you're talking about, huh?
People go to the movies for the theatre experience. It's a social event. The comparison is not like for like. However, it is worth noting that film ticket sales are down, due to a combination of online distribution (legal and otherwise), as well as the growth of other industries, such as the videogame industry.
CapnJack said:
That is the worst logic I've ever heard. "Arguments like the radio promotes future sales, strengthens image, and allows spreading of word of mouth opinions, etc, all don't matter if nobody's buying the music". C wut I did thar?
Except again, the radio is not games. The radio relies upon advertising, which is how artists make money off of it (yes, make money, not just compensate or break even). It does inspire album sales, sure. The problem is that such a model has not been proven for games. In-game advertising has received a largely mixed response from the gaming community (ranging from vitriolic to accepting depending on the circumstances), but it only works in the case of some games. You might accept ads in your newest sports title, but what about seeing a big Mountain Dew billboard in
Halo 3, or Nike in
Super Mario Galaxy? Would you accept personalised ads to play a game for free, even if that means software installed with the game spies on your browsing history and not only uses it to target ads towards you? What if your information was also being sold to other companies? It's very hard to come up with a "free" method of distribution that still allows creators to make money, that also doesn't exclude a big segment of the market. It makes much more sense to simply charge money for a game if you're trying to hit a particular target demographic outside of "people who are annoyed by ads vs. people who aren't annoyed by ads".
CapnJack said:
Um, I only found out about the television show How I Met Your Mother because of an online streaming site. I watched the first two seasons, loved them so much that I bought them, told every single one of my friends about them, and now the show has at least a dozen extra people watching it every Monday Night, inluding one long-time fan that would never heard watched the show had it not been for piracy. If one in ten people love somehing enough to hype it up to a whole bunch of others, I don't see the problem.
And what if you're the only friend that actually buys the stuff in the end, while the others download it?
I never said we shouldn't adopt to new business models or anything of the sort. What I am saying is that people's justification for piracy under "freedom of information" and other moral and ethical grounds is absurd, and that piracy does actually constitute clear financial damage to the industry.
As I see it, there are maybe three things we can do. The first is to continue as we are, with more and more stringent DRM schemes as well as more and more invasive ones; these will in most cases be cracked fairly quickly, and not be all that effective despite the money poured into them. This setup will probably go on for some time yet as the industry gets its bearings, but it's not going to last forever.
The second is to accept piracy as a fact of the business and simply take its impact into account when deciding budgets for the creation of new games, long-term support, employee head count and salary, etc. This is probably the least likely (people do like their money after all), although I would argue it does have some merit in that it allows for creative freedom, as well as sensibility and efficiency in resource management. At the same time, it may stifle production values as well as severely shrink the industry and close a lot of doors for individuals on the business side of things, due to the increased risk of putting out a title with no protection and with smaller revenue.
The third is to adapt to the new marketplace by increasingly exploring new methods of generating revenue; except a lot of failures along the way, as well as a general shift towards games with continually expanding content, but also more pay-to-play, microtransactions, and the death of the blockbuster game, the single-player game, etc., which many people do still value (more than publishers would like you to believe; online gaming still makes up only about 1/3 of total gaming). System requirements and technology will stagnate in order to hit the widest possible market, and artwork will shift to simpler, more universally appealing designs. This is the most likely path, but it is not necessarily the one that I find myself most attracted to, due to the threat it poses towards creative expression and gaming as art, as well as the raw technical side of things, which is admittedly a draw for a very large number of people. I do not want my games to resemble cell phone plans, but increasingly the difference is becoming hard to discern.
