I think team meat drastically overrates the power of human compassion, and seriously underestimates the power of human greed. I don't think that this will turn into anywhere near as many sales as they think it will.
Team Meat "Doesn't F*cking Care" About Pirates
- Thread starter Andy Chalk
- Start date
I don't believe it. you can find a study that will say just about anything, one study proves nothing. I'm gonna go with common sense on this one. People who own the game without paying cuts revenue.incal11 said:
I see this sort of argument a lot, and the only thing I have to say to it is.incal11 said:
Don't compare music piracy and gaming piracy.
If you have an argument to make about videogame piracy, make it with facts from the videogame industry.
Dude that's like walking up to a stranger in the street and saying. "Piracy is justifiable because of X Y and Z. What are your points against that?" and them saying" Um..I don't care?" then you claiming victory in that debate. All you did was pick out a specific out-of-context piece in my argument then say we were debating about it. It doesn't really matter if you gave evidence for your side, since I didn't read it, your just sitting there arguing out loud with yourself thinking your having an argument with me.incal11 said:
Kind of silly to be honest, that your saying your arguing with me when Im clearly not arguing with anything your saying and I don't care.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYFN6mB9Tzk&featureThe_root_of_all_evil said:
Don't believe in yourself! Believe in me, who believes in you! Your keyboard is the one that crushes the world!
Well I think you just about got it, although you could argue it is also the publisher who is investing in the developer. I thought you were definitely right about saying 'having an indie-developer say this is irrelevant to the industry on a larger scale'.SirBryghtside said:
A dare? You dare me? Well this is fun, isn't it?incal11 said:
Firstly, we are not talking about "mere ideas" here. "I am hungry" is a mere idea, one that I had this morning. The essay that I wrote for uni, one that took a few weeks of work, is not a "mere idea". The piece of software that took a large team of people several months or more to make is definitely not a "mere idea". The fact that the end result is something that can be duplicated with ease does not discount the amount of work that went into it.
With this in mind, the goal of copyright is to ensure that the work that went into something is rewarded (if such a reward is desired) without relying on the goodwill of others (which is always going to be a bad basis for one's livlihood). This is the moral justification for copyright (the "what it is supposed to do").
This answer to the "what it is supposed to do" question (i.e. the moral justification) is the important part, as far as I'm concerned. But if you want an answer to the "how" question ("explain how a mere idea can be controlled", "what it is supposed to do and how"), I can give that too. A "mere idea [sic] can be controlled" in the same way other people's personal property can be controlled. If I want to take somebody's stuff, I will have to contend with locked doors, and legal consequences of taking it. If I want to take a game that somebody has made, I have to deal with similar obstacles (non-official downloads and cracks, legal consequences).
-That first article says that Germany's intellectual culture benefitted from the proliferation of uncopyrighted scholarly works--not that the authors benefitted financially from the lack of copyright.
-The second says that the same people who pirate music also buy more music--not that they buy more of an artist's work the more they pirate that artist, thus not that artists benefit from having their works pirated.
-The third article says that the pirated versions of Spore are often non-functioning copies of the game, and thus the illegally downloaded versions often do not represent lost sales for the game--not that the creators of the game wouldn't have lost money if the game had been really pirated (i.e. if the pirates recieved the actual game).
-The fourth article says that there is a correlation between how much an album is illegally downloaded and how many CD sales are made, i.e. the more popular an album is, the more it is accessed both legally and illegally--not that the pirates purchased the albums they downloaded, nor that those illegal downloads contributed to sales.
In case you missed what just happened, the four articles you presented do not at all support your argument that piracy benefits the artists/creators/authors of the works pirated. And I even edited out the puerile personal insults and shitty comparisons with cars and apples.
So you can stop pretending that you have the moral high ground when you take someone's shit for free.
spartan231490 said:
Here's a few more then.MelasZepheos said:
http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/internet-piracy-is-good-for-films-1
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070312/165448.shtml
http://www.teleread.com/copy-right/comic-book-artist-finds-increased-sales-after-4chan-piracy/
http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2010/07/sometimes-its-ok-to-steal-my-games.html
http://torrentfreak.com/piracy-is-theft-ridiculous-lost-sales-they-dont-exist-says-minecraft-creator-110303/
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/valve-game-software-pirate,6865.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pirates-buy-more-music
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8337887.stm
Someone wo knows more will want more, why does it seems unlikely to you exactly ?SirBryghtside said:
What are those more likely explanation ? If you cannot tell me, they do not exist.
Here's your whole rant so you can see I'm not picking things out of context. This not the street this is a forum. You just refuse to admit it because you hate to recognise you are wrong.Doom-Slayer said:
You come here on a forum, say something that is wrong, I explain and prove to you why it is wrong, and you react like the immature brat you are. if we did not have an argument, why did you answer at all ?
Make your point by getting lost now.
Technically we're talking about more than just ideas, but when it can be replicated and modified just as easily as an idea thanks to technology that is what it is reduced to. The amount of work that went in it is not discounted as evidenced by artists making profits despite "piracy" existing at all.loodmoney said:
Copyright was made to ensure the publishers were rewarded. Why do you think there is copy in copyrights? Because it was originally to create a monopoly for the printers. See the statute of anne and so on.
You only advocate the "morality" of a monopoly. That can only contribute into making a work more obscure with time, as noone has a "right" to use it, not what a self respecting artist want.
That's where the real world collides with your logic. once it is "out there" and people may be making copies or passing around your work with no control on your part, this is anything but a personal property. If you want it to be a real personal property then make one and only one copy. And if someone wants to play you have to stand behind them watching their every moves.
Dealing with various cracks is a loss of time, money, and energy. Devs who dropped them only saw their sales jump up.
There's the example of that German author who made more money than Mary Shelley. Though not all author may have benefitted from this, it was before the internet after all. Anyway the benefits of the common people getting easy access to knowledge cannot have bad consequences in the long run.
It doesn't meant they don't buy from the artist they like best at all , that would not be logical. In the end all artists benefit from better exposition.
But it had "really" been "pirated" a lot. As for every other games it's sales numbers are in direct proportion to the downloads, it was by no mean a commercial failure. I find this more probable than it selling even more had there been no "piracy".
My answer is the same than for the second article.
They do, and you can go read the links I gave to the others at the top of this post for good measure.
Now why don't you give me articles that support your position, hm? If you can find any not made up by the MAFIAA.
I have the moral high ground, I do not pretend.
Since you seems interested in a challenge here's some discussions from other thread that could not go on due to a massive case of fleeing cowards. As I see you're not one of those
UNJUST ENRICHMENT ?
Is an artist really so justified to expect total control on what becomes of his ideas ? Is that expectation at all realistic ? Well no, controlling ideas is an illusion, and a distasteful one.
Why "piracy" is "wrong" boils down to it being possibly "unjust enrichment" of a part of the public:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Unjust_enrichment
In a (probably vain) attempt to further that debate I have considered this, where the defendant is the Pirate and the claimant the Copyright Holder:
1. Was the defendant enriched?
Yes.
2. Was the enrichment at the expense of the claimant?
No, or not provable.
3. Was the enrichment unjust?
Failure to profit is not the responsibility of the defendant.
4. Does the defendant have a defense?
Yes, freedom of information and fair use.
5. What remedies are available to the claimant?
On screen advertising for streamed medias, being popular among the clients and using that popularity for merchandising are two examples proven to work.
--One more aspect to this, can the law do anything about it ? Yes and no, it's clear illegal copying will never be stopped and only the most unlucky will be made to pay dearly.
IN CONCLUSION
My answer to one of the best written articles against "piracy"
http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html
I only quote the points on which I disagree, if I did not quote it I mostly agreed to it, and I read the whole thing several times. Of note is the authors opinion on Steam, that I share completely.
page 2- the legality of piracy
-"digital piracy allows perfect reproduction with no quality loss. Thus digital copies combined with a mass distribution channel like the Internet equate to far greater potential to cause economic loss to the software and entertainment industries than ever before."
->The opposite side could say with as much reason that digital copies+internet equates to a greater potential for exposition of general culture, and so a greater incentive to actually buy more creations (see the point on page 3 and the one on the conclusion for more on this).
page 2- the rationale of copyright
-"you cannot copyright an idea"
->indeed, but there is more than one side on this point. One can discuss the idea presented in an article but not pass the article itself around, or if the article is in digital form it is itself assimilable to an idea, and can thus be passed around. The only limits being basic respect for the author, which means giving credit to the one who put the idea in this form.
->When one says he "owns" something after buying it he means that he owns the right to use it as he sees fit, and sharing is not publishing. It's understandable that many artist would like perfect control on what people do with their creations after they bought it, but this is simply delusional.
-->further discussion on how the digitalisation of a work could reduce it to the equivalent of an idea may be needed. This does not mean the work becomes worthless however, see the point on Conclusion.
page 3- on the free rider problem and the incidence of positive word of mouth
-"However the argument deliberately ignores one fundamental problem: there's no evidence to suggest that positive word of mouth from pirates results in anything other than more people pirating a particularly popular game."
-"the evidence does not support the claim that anything beyond a minority of pirates actually wind up purchasing the games they pirate."
->The zeitgeist article on the situation of last century's Germany seems to be relevant here ( http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,710976,00.html ), it's main drawback is it's an historical study made of hindsights, it still is better than a flimsy study. A minority is still better than nothing, at least that is a solid gain, opposed to an hypothetic loss.
-->Is the current situation with online piracy identical, partly related, or completely different to what happened in last century's Germany despite the similarities ? That is yet to be determined objectively.
page 4- global piracy rates
-"In any case, we can conclude that the proportional rates of piracy shown above do indicate quite clearly that the scale of piracy is very high all around the world, and that there must be some genuine and likely quite significant economic losses incurred in aggregate due to all this piracy, even if it's not on the basis of each pirated copy being a full-price lost sale."
->The scale of piracy, while impressive, is not a proof of loss. (see previous point, and some of what follows)
page 6- PC vs Console (part 2)- is piracy solely to blame ?
-"So far there's a very strong case for the premise that piracy is a substantial reason why there's such a discrepancy between sales of the same game among different platforms. No other plausible explanation accounts for the way in which console games outsell PC games by such a large factor."
->The other factors (pc versions don't need emulators, casual/console gamers are the majority...) are at least equally important. The numbers of piracy would be more relevant than the other factors if the losses were not just potentials.
->Actual losses due to the unavoidable arms race against crackers can be considered, since publishers do have to invest in complex security measures constantly just to discourage the casual piracy. But even consoles need DRMs , a console is itself a DRM, so this is just a change of battlefield .
-->It's human behavior that dictates this situation, but can it be changed ? how ? Shifting to other audiences is not a long term solutions to this problem. For instance, console emulators may just become more common.
page 6- PC vs Console (part 2)- a cautionary tale
-in relation to the article Piracy bleeds Mac game makers dry.
->This is the same issue but in the smaller Mac world and that's a crucial difference, I can think of several rebutal to this point.
-->this was too small a market, especially with mac users generally not being pc gamers at all. (knowing a few mac users personally, I can tell). For that reason it is safe to say too few would have paid, if they did not have a choice, to make a difference.
-->too few publishers, and/or too little publicity.
-->the games didn't sell much because they either were not good to begin with, or were not to the tastes of the mac users.
-->mac games makers and publishers bailed out because finding a profitable solution did not hold as much short term benefit as switching to the already existent, and much larger, PC market.
--->As a conclusion to this, I would say that total destruction of the PC game market in the same way is impossible, as the proportion of paying customers is non negligible, at least for the talented developpers (as the profits of some indies like Minecraft's creator can prove). The majors switching completely to the console would leave the indie developpers freer to expand and eventually become majors themselves. Because, Finally, due to the number of PC being so large in the first place, the proportion of paying customers cannot be reduced to the point that this market would be entirely unsustainable, no matter how bad piracy gets. It's easy to stay fixated on downloads being orders of magnitude greater than the sells, it does not make them more than potentials.
page 7- Online and Subscriber-Based Business Models
-"even single-player games now usually have a multiplayer component tacked on in the hopes of building an online following and thus providing further incentive for more people to actually buy the game rather than pirate it."
->"usually" only for the most popular titles. A minority of players are not interested in any kind of multiplayer, adding multiplayer to an otherwise sound single player game may attract gamers with an interest in multiplayer, not force the single players to pay.
-->Will exclusively single player games be a thing of the past because of this ? Despite the problems raised by piracy it does not look like it, or does it matter anyway, if the single player mode is good despite ressources spent on multiplayer ?
page 7- Online and Subscriber- Episodic Content Business Models
-"We did this with Operation Flashpoint and experienced a sales spike after each new episode was released as people with conterfeit copies were forced to go out and buy the legitimate product. We are talking about many tens of thousands of extra sales gained this way."
->The other side of the coin, that is not any less valid, is that those tens of thousand of extra sales (or a part of them, to be more fair than this quote) would not have happened had the game not been downloaded and tried by these persons in the first place.
->The way episodic content is done now (à la half-life 2 etc...) is clearly wrong in that it's to the detriment of the players, but it has the potential to be a good compromise with human behavior. the quality of the add-ons and the games is a different issue, poor quality is not sustainable on the long term, and the game industry already crashed because of poor quality, not piracy.
-->is the current poor quality of games due to piracy ? That is another debate, though this is only making something unavoidable into a scapegoat: the only real reason for a lack of quality will always be a lack of talent. A lack of talent may be due to a lack of incentive, but if this lack of incentive is unavoidable there is no loss to begin with. Anyway profits are still being made, so there is no way for incentives to disappear completely in a large enough market (that include the market for non-casual games).
page 7- Online and Subscriber- Desirable or Undesirable Changes?
-"It's one thing for consumers to constantly demand that the PC games industry create better quality games which are not only cheaper and run well on lower spec hardware, but also have no copy protection; it's another thing altogether for companies to somehow find a practical way to turn this fantastic and often unrealistic request into a business model that works."
->The logic for AAAs is different because it draws the casual pirates, but that is still a reasonable expectation for niche genres. A game, good or bad, only cost more today because of the public expectations on graphic quality. Ambience, story and gameplay depth have become secondary because developpers keep targetting the largest possible audience (they would do the same even with no piracy), which is mainly concerned about the costly eye candy ; even though these elements together are proven to more than compensate for a bit less detailed game.
-"it's likely that certain types of games, possibly entire genres, will be relegated to niche status, or in extreme cases die off altogether as adventure gaming did. This is discussed in more detail in the Conclusion."
->Great games tends to be unsuccessfull because they are often too sophisticated for the larger audiences, a loss of potential sells is not any more probable than the public for these games not being large enough yet. The current publishers and devs can leave, but there will be others to fill in the gaps sooner or later, be it the frustrated gamers themselves (see point on page 10- PC Gaming is Dead). Side note, products having a life cycle is normal, it's not a point but a constatation unrelated to the authors thesis against piracy.
-->Publishers and developpers running scared of niche genres for this reason, are not helping in getting the public for these games to grow. This vicious circle could be broken if the casual gamers tastes evolve toward some of the years old classics that are still being praised. Time will tell.
page 8-Copy Protection & DRM
-on DRM being only meant to discourage casual piracy and being effective at that.
->This is easy to overlook in a heated debate, DRMs discourage the shallow casual players only interested in the new big titles. For the niche players this is a different story, it seems the ones attracted to more sophisticated, unknown or ancient games will always be savy enough to decide if they want to pay, drm or not. In effect DRMs are relevant only in proportion to the genre's popularity, as Stardock found out.
-->the conscience of gamers attracted to niche genres how they tend to pay more, and how their excuses may be more valid than the casual pirates' is yet another debate.
-on "DRM Causes Piracy"
->More popular games will attract more casual gamers, which are the casual pirates, in direct proportion. So naturally a highly popular game without protection will let them all try it, this can have some bad consequences obviously. This and the poor reviews that follow are only due to common stupidity, not on piracy simply being "bad". There are games, as mentioned in this article, who were pirated because of their DRMs, even if it was due to hysteria and more or less valid excuses. So, DRMs do cause piracy maybe as much as they fight it, at least in some cases. In other words, DRMs fight zero day piracy, but encourage the ongoing file-sharing.
page 9- Copy Protection & DRM (part 2)
-on the vested interests against starforce and others.
->It's easy to pinpoint the torrent sites owner making big profits on publicity for being amoral bastards, indeed that is what most of them are. Yet this is not enough to make sharing amoral in itself (see point on page 10- practical solutions).
page 9- Copy Protection & DRM (part 2)- DRM and the Future
-"piracy has forced increasingly intrusive DRM upon us. No-one likes it, but it's here to stay so long as people pirate things rampantly under a range of excuses. If you want to be outraged about DRM, direct a lot of that anger towards the pirates who've made it necessary."
->DRMs are a necessity agains casual piracy, piracy is unavoidable and so is the constant arms race between the crackers and the security engineers. I would rather save my anger for the crackers, but piracy can't go on without the crackers, and vice-versa in a lot of cases. In the end this is an unavoidable situation, there is no point in just getting angry about it. More intrusive DRMs fueled by hatred toward freeloaders are only food for the crackers. They may be necessary for popular games but nothing will ever change by seeing them as the one and only thing to do.
page 10- Practical Solutions & Conclusion- PC Gaming is Dead
-"while PC gaming as a whole may thrive based on the sales success of subscriber-driven MMOs and casual puzzle games for example, many PC gamers may see their favorite types of games become casualties to changing business models in search of gamers who actually pay for the games they play."
->There is no reasons to think that attracting more people with casual games will change the proportions of consumers and freeloaders. This is like chasing a mirage. At least this could have the good side effect of making niche gamers desperate enough to give more support to whatever few games and developers they like (or take matters into their own hands, see the thief serie, it's mods, and the Dark Project) .
page 10- Practical Solutions & Conclusion- The Culture of Piracy
-"Not only are the people who are pirating games openly bragging about it, they're flowering it up with a range of excuses, even suggesting that it's their right to do so."
->I can only answer this bia with my own. The right to share is a basic thing if you take the humanistic view, one may be dead set against piracy but still owe his human rights to Humanism, period. For the non casual downloader who pays for most of what he gets this is neither a flowering up nor a farce, for the casual however this is only a convenient excuse. Humanists online, interested in the betterment of all humanity through all things (not just video games, movies and music, but paintings and ebooks for example), represent only a microscopic fraction of the downloaders, but this is not enough to negate the good in humanism or in sharing.
page 10- Practical Solutions & Conclusion- Practical Solutions
-"What's objectionable about this practice isn't so much the amount of money these people are making, but the fact that they're doing it without contributing a single cent to the people who are actually responsible for creating the content that is being pirated. These sites are the ultimate free riders, because their content is almost entirely made up of other peoples' hard work."
->Wherever there is easy profits there will be nosy bastards, it remains that torrent sites have no "content" but "access to the ones sharing the products", that would be the torrent client. The torrent sites owners may be downright cynical (as are many downloaders) and yellow livered about it, they still help in a humanistic goal. At least ad-blockers are there to give back some of the cynicism.
-->some practical solutions for the torrent sites themselves would be to stop being so hilariously greedy and put links to the authors sites or even paypal accounts, to actively encourage and facilitate donating to the artists on the same pages where the clients can be found, befriend the authors who use Creative Commons by helping them to get known and so on.
page 10- Practical Solutions & Conclusion- Conclusion
-"With the Culture of Piracy so prominent now, it seems everyone is demanding freedom without understanding that freedom does not equal free; everything has a cost, and we need to recognize that if content creators provide us with entertainment, they need to be rewarded fairly for it. We need to demonstrate that we can exercise the freedoms we have responsibly if we don't want to lose them. People can conjure up all manner of excuses to justify rampant piracy all day long, however neither the data nor logic bear any of these excuses out in the end."
->With the digitalisation of all medias, for the first time in history, freedom = free since this digitalisation is making them a lot closer to ideas than to material goods. It's giving credit where credit is due that is not free, people not respecting that is more of a maturity issue. There is no need to ask for a honor system, because with piracy already being free and practical that is how things already work. If anti-piracy arguments were all completely true there would already be no more musicians and video games, they're obviously not about to disappear either.
->Data nor logic goes against the fact that from a humanistic view, the view that did more good than all the materialistic ones combined (see Human Rights, of course that can be debated, I'll defend my position on this too), sharing is beneficial for everyone on the long term.
This will be very hard to accept for some, but I don't use humanism to justify myself. It is a fact, not an excuse, that noone managed to refute.
I pirate because I can, I do not feel guilty.
I did feel guilty about it in the past, I have read hundreds of articles and studies for and against piracy myself, and now I know I don't have to feel that way. At least because I know that I paid for more than I would have if there was no file sharing. Proving or disproving this claim once and for all should be the real goal, rather than fighting up there on our respective moral high horses.
page 2- the legality of piracy
-"digital piracy allows perfect reproduction with no quality loss. Thus digital copies combined with a mass distribution channel like the Internet equate to far greater potential to cause economic loss to the software and entertainment industries than ever before."
->The opposite side could say with as much reason that digital copies+internet equates to a greater potential for exposition of general culture, and so a greater incentive to actually buy more creations (see the point on page 3 and the one on the conclusion for more on this).
page 2- the rationale of copyright
-"you cannot copyright an idea"
->indeed, but there is more than one side on this point. One can discuss the idea presented in an article but not pass the article itself around, or if the article is in digital form it is itself assimilable to an idea, and can thus be passed around. The only limits being basic respect for the author, which means giving credit to the one who put the idea in this form.
->When one says he "owns" something after buying it he means that he owns the right to use it as he sees fit, and sharing is not publishing. It's understandable that many artist would like perfect control on what people do with their creations after they bought it, but this is simply delusional.
-->further discussion on how the digitalisation of a work could reduce it to the equivalent of an idea may be needed. This does not mean the work becomes worthless however, see the point on Conclusion.
page 3- on the free rider problem and the incidence of positive word of mouth
-"However the argument deliberately ignores one fundamental problem: there's no evidence to suggest that positive word of mouth from pirates results in anything other than more people pirating a particularly popular game."
-"the evidence does not support the claim that anything beyond a minority of pirates actually wind up purchasing the games they pirate."
->The zeitgeist article on the situation of last century's Germany seems to be relevant here ( http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,710976,00.html ), it's main drawback is it's an historical study made of hindsights, it still is better than a flimsy study. A minority is still better than nothing, at least that is a solid gain, opposed to an hypothetic loss.
-->Is the current situation with online piracy identical, partly related, or completely different to what happened in last century's Germany despite the similarities ? That is yet to be determined objectively.
page 4- global piracy rates
-"In any case, we can conclude that the proportional rates of piracy shown above do indicate quite clearly that the scale of piracy is very high all around the world, and that there must be some genuine and likely quite significant economic losses incurred in aggregate due to all this piracy, even if it's not on the basis of each pirated copy being a full-price lost sale."
->The scale of piracy, while impressive, is not a proof of loss. (see previous point, and some of what follows)
page 6- PC vs Console (part 2)- is piracy solely to blame ?
-"So far there's a very strong case for the premise that piracy is a substantial reason why there's such a discrepancy between sales of the same game among different platforms. No other plausible explanation accounts for the way in which console games outsell PC games by such a large factor."
->The other factors (pc versions don't need emulators, casual/console gamers are the majority...) are at least equally important. The numbers of piracy would be more relevant than the other factors if the losses were not just potentials.
->Actual losses due to the unavoidable arms race against crackers can be considered, since publishers do have to invest in complex security measures constantly just to discourage the casual piracy. But even consoles need DRMs , a console is itself a DRM, so this is just a change of battlefield .
-->It's human behavior that dictates this situation, but can it be changed ? how ? Shifting to other audiences is not a long term solutions to this problem. For instance, console emulators may just become more common.
page 6- PC vs Console (part 2)- a cautionary tale
-in relation to the article Piracy bleeds Mac game makers dry.
->This is the same issue but in the smaller Mac world and that's a crucial difference, I can think of several rebutal to this point.
-->this was too small a market, especially with mac users generally not being pc gamers at all. (knowing a few mac users personally, I can tell). For that reason it is safe to say too few would have paid, if they did not have a choice, to make a difference.
-->too few publishers, and/or too little publicity.
-->the games didn't sell much because they either were not good to begin with, or were not to the tastes of the mac users.
-->mac games makers and publishers bailed out because finding a profitable solution did not hold as much short term benefit as switching to the already existent, and much larger, PC market.
--->As a conclusion to this, I would say that total destruction of the PC game market in the same way is impossible, as the proportion of paying customers is non negligible, at least for the talented developpers (as the profits of some indies like Minecraft's creator can prove). The majors switching completely to the console would leave the indie developpers freer to expand and eventually become majors themselves. Because, Finally, due to the number of PC being so large in the first place, the proportion of paying customers cannot be reduced to the point that this market would be entirely unsustainable, no matter how bad piracy gets. It's easy to stay fixated on downloads being orders of magnitude greater than the sells, it does not make them more than potentials.
page 7- Online and Subscriber-Based Business Models
-"even single-player games now usually have a multiplayer component tacked on in the hopes of building an online following and thus providing further incentive for more people to actually buy the game rather than pirate it."
->"usually" only for the most popular titles. A minority of players are not interested in any kind of multiplayer, adding multiplayer to an otherwise sound single player game may attract gamers with an interest in multiplayer, not force the single players to pay.
-->Will exclusively single player games be a thing of the past because of this ? Despite the problems raised by piracy it does not look like it, or does it matter anyway, if the single player mode is good despite ressources spent on multiplayer ?
page 7- Online and Subscriber- Episodic Content Business Models
-"We did this with Operation Flashpoint and experienced a sales spike after each new episode was released as people with conterfeit copies were forced to go out and buy the legitimate product. We are talking about many tens of thousands of extra sales gained this way."
->The other side of the coin, that is not any less valid, is that those tens of thousand of extra sales (or a part of them, to be more fair than this quote) would not have happened had the game not been downloaded and tried by these persons in the first place.
->The way episodic content is done now (à la half-life 2 etc...) is clearly wrong in that it's to the detriment of the players, but it has the potential to be a good compromise with human behavior. the quality of the add-ons and the games is a different issue, poor quality is not sustainable on the long term, and the game industry already crashed because of poor quality, not piracy.
-->is the current poor quality of games due to piracy ? That is another debate, though this is only making something unavoidable into a scapegoat: the only real reason for a lack of quality will always be a lack of talent. A lack of talent may be due to a lack of incentive, but if this lack of incentive is unavoidable there is no loss to begin with. Anyway profits are still being made, so there is no way for incentives to disappear completely in a large enough market (that include the market for non-casual games).
page 7- Online and Subscriber- Desirable or Undesirable Changes?
-"It's one thing for consumers to constantly demand that the PC games industry create better quality games which are not only cheaper and run well on lower spec hardware, but also have no copy protection; it's another thing altogether for companies to somehow find a practical way to turn this fantastic and often unrealistic request into a business model that works."
->The logic for AAAs is different because it draws the casual pirates, but that is still a reasonable expectation for niche genres. A game, good or bad, only cost more today because of the public expectations on graphic quality. Ambience, story and gameplay depth have become secondary because developpers keep targetting the largest possible audience (they would do the same even with no piracy), which is mainly concerned about the costly eye candy ; even though these elements together are proven to more than compensate for a bit less detailed game.
-"it's likely that certain types of games, possibly entire genres, will be relegated to niche status, or in extreme cases die off altogether as adventure gaming did. This is discussed in more detail in the Conclusion."
->Great games tends to be unsuccessfull because they are often too sophisticated for the larger audiences, a loss of potential sells is not any more probable than the public for these games not being large enough yet. The current publishers and devs can leave, but there will be others to fill in the gaps sooner or later, be it the frustrated gamers themselves (see point on page 10- PC Gaming is Dead). Side note, products having a life cycle is normal, it's not a point but a constatation unrelated to the authors thesis against piracy.
-->Publishers and developpers running scared of niche genres for this reason, are not helping in getting the public for these games to grow. This vicious circle could be broken if the casual gamers tastes evolve toward some of the years old classics that are still being praised. Time will tell.
page 8-Copy Protection & DRM
-on DRM being only meant to discourage casual piracy and being effective at that.
->This is easy to overlook in a heated debate, DRMs discourage the shallow casual players only interested in the new big titles. For the niche players this is a different story, it seems the ones attracted to more sophisticated, unknown or ancient games will always be savy enough to decide if they want to pay, drm or not. In effect DRMs are relevant only in proportion to the genre's popularity, as Stardock found out.
-->the conscience of gamers attracted to niche genres how they tend to pay more, and how their excuses may be more valid than the casual pirates' is yet another debate.
-on "DRM Causes Piracy"
->More popular games will attract more casual gamers, which are the casual pirates, in direct proportion. So naturally a highly popular game without protection will let them all try it, this can have some bad consequences obviously. This and the poor reviews that follow are only due to common stupidity, not on piracy simply being "bad". There are games, as mentioned in this article, who were pirated because of their DRMs, even if it was due to hysteria and more or less valid excuses. So, DRMs do cause piracy maybe as much as they fight it, at least in some cases. In other words, DRMs fight zero day piracy, but encourage the ongoing file-sharing.
page 9- Copy Protection & DRM (part 2)
-on the vested interests against starforce and others.
->It's easy to pinpoint the torrent sites owner making big profits on publicity for being amoral bastards, indeed that is what most of them are. Yet this is not enough to make sharing amoral in itself (see point on page 10- practical solutions).
page 9- Copy Protection & DRM (part 2)- DRM and the Future
-"piracy has forced increasingly intrusive DRM upon us. No-one likes it, but it's here to stay so long as people pirate things rampantly under a range of excuses. If you want to be outraged about DRM, direct a lot of that anger towards the pirates who've made it necessary."
->DRMs are a necessity agains casual piracy, piracy is unavoidable and so is the constant arms race between the crackers and the security engineers. I would rather save my anger for the crackers, but piracy can't go on without the crackers, and vice-versa in a lot of cases. In the end this is an unavoidable situation, there is no point in just getting angry about it. More intrusive DRMs fueled by hatred toward freeloaders are only food for the crackers. They may be necessary for popular games but nothing will ever change by seeing them as the one and only thing to do.
page 10- Practical Solutions & Conclusion- PC Gaming is Dead
-"while PC gaming as a whole may thrive based on the sales success of subscriber-driven MMOs and casual puzzle games for example, many PC gamers may see their favorite types of games become casualties to changing business models in search of gamers who actually pay for the games they play."
->There is no reasons to think that attracting more people with casual games will change the proportions of consumers and freeloaders. This is like chasing a mirage. At least this could have the good side effect of making niche gamers desperate enough to give more support to whatever few games and developers they like (or take matters into their own hands, see the thief serie, it's mods, and the Dark Project) .
page 10- Practical Solutions & Conclusion- The Culture of Piracy
-"Not only are the people who are pirating games openly bragging about it, they're flowering it up with a range of excuses, even suggesting that it's their right to do so."
->I can only answer this bia with my own. The right to share is a basic thing if you take the humanistic view, one may be dead set against piracy but still owe his human rights to Humanism, period. For the non casual downloader who pays for most of what he gets this is neither a flowering up nor a farce, for the casual however this is only a convenient excuse. Humanists online, interested in the betterment of all humanity through all things (not just video games, movies and music, but paintings and ebooks for example), represent only a microscopic fraction of the downloaders, but this is not enough to negate the good in humanism or in sharing.
page 10- Practical Solutions & Conclusion- Practical Solutions
-"What's objectionable about this practice isn't so much the amount of money these people are making, but the fact that they're doing it without contributing a single cent to the people who are actually responsible for creating the content that is being pirated. These sites are the ultimate free riders, because their content is almost entirely made up of other peoples' hard work."
->Wherever there is easy profits there will be nosy bastards, it remains that torrent sites have no "content" but "access to the ones sharing the products", that would be the torrent client. The torrent sites owners may be downright cynical (as are many downloaders) and yellow livered about it, they still help in a humanistic goal. At least ad-blockers are there to give back some of the cynicism.
-->some practical solutions for the torrent sites themselves would be to stop being so hilariously greedy and put links to the authors sites or even paypal accounts, to actively encourage and facilitate donating to the artists on the same pages where the clients can be found, befriend the authors who use Creative Commons by helping them to get known and so on.
page 10- Practical Solutions & Conclusion- Conclusion
-"With the Culture of Piracy so prominent now, it seems everyone is demanding freedom without understanding that freedom does not equal free; everything has a cost, and we need to recognize that if content creators provide us with entertainment, they need to be rewarded fairly for it. We need to demonstrate that we can exercise the freedoms we have responsibly if we don't want to lose them. People can conjure up all manner of excuses to justify rampant piracy all day long, however neither the data nor logic bear any of these excuses out in the end."
->With the digitalisation of all medias, for the first time in history, freedom = free since this digitalisation is making them a lot closer to ideas than to material goods. It's giving credit where credit is due that is not free, people not respecting that is more of a maturity issue. There is no need to ask for a honor system, because with piracy already being free and practical that is how things already work. If anti-piracy arguments were all completely true there would already be no more musicians and video games, they're obviously not about to disappear either.
->Data nor logic goes against the fact that from a humanistic view, the view that did more good than all the materialistic ones combined (see Human Rights, of course that can be debated, I'll defend my position on this too), sharing is beneficial for everyone on the long term.
This will be very hard to accept for some, but I don't use humanism to justify myself. It is a fact, not an excuse, that noone managed to refute.
I pirate because I can, I do not feel guilty.
I did feel guilty about it in the past, I have read hundreds of articles and studies for and against piracy myself, and now I know I don't have to feel that way. At least because I know that I paid for more than I would have if there was no file sharing. Proving or disproving this claim once and for all should be the real goal, rather than fighting up there on our respective moral high horses.
http://www.nccmt.ca/pubs/non-RCT2_EN.pdf
Congratulation if you read this whole post.
Um...I answered because your being stupid. Quite simply we didnt have an arguement because Im not arguing with you about piracy. At all..please feel free to reread everything to confirm this. Ill wait..incal11 said:
..
You done? If you have actually read it, you will realize thus
1. I said Piracy is wrong, to another person, about a different aspect of this topic.
2. You took that peice out of context and made an arguement against it.
The end. That's all that happened, that is not a debate. I was literally talking to someone else and you threw your beliefs at me then strode off proclaiming you won an argument when I told you I didnt care. If you really need to resort to name calling like that, and claiming you won an imaginary debate on the internet then that is quite sad indeed. If I wanted to have a debate about Piracy then I would have put forward a counter-arguement, and funny enough I didnt actually do that because I dont care. Have a nice day, I wont read your response.
Well, in case your eye wander on my answer anyway. This is a forum, thus it was my right to comment on your post. You should have made a pm then, and I did not take anything out of context, there was no context in your 3 short sentences post to begin.Doom-Slayer said:
You made me glad by showing how much I pissed you off
That's what I'm trying to ask you, why does it seem unlikely to you ?SirBryghtside said:
One case is not a proof, but more and more keeps coming, why do you think that is ? You're dead set that "piracy" is "wrong", but the truth is you don't really know why, you just echo others opinion without though.
Why don't you have a look at the rest of the post you were last quoted in ?
Yes, all those articles if you compile them suggest that a better access to media directly results in more media being paid. I have myself as an example, but you probably won't take my word.SirBryghtside said:
Your own explanation isn't so alternative, you just take things backwards. People who pay for more download more, yes. But why do they pay for more? Because they download more. If your "more probable" explanation was true indie devs woudn't get a sale spike every time their games are leaked somewhere, as shown in some of those articles.
Even if you are right that still means there is no negative consequences to piracy. It wasn't amoral in past eras before copyright was invented by greedy printers, it still isn't now.
Your not buying it is not a reasoned position, it's pure knee-jerk and it ticks me off. About that, I got over excited in this thread, sorry for having been too harsh.
No piracy is a pure impossibility, it existed long before the internet.
"Piracy" causes them to know more media than their wallets could possibly allow them to. They get to know and like things they couldn't have known existed or that they would like, and sooner or later people always pay for what they like. That said it's true my morals push me to buy, and it is not shame, sheepishness or fear of the law. It's thankfulness.
It's the investors fault then, they don't get the implications of those new technology. Here how infiniftely reproductible data cannot be sold as "units" with fixed price without distribution leaking from every joints (what everyone wrongly calls "piracy").SirBryghtside said:
AAA titles are the most pirated, AAA titles are the best selling. It is only a contradiction if you refuse to accept that paying infinitely reproductible data a fixed price per unit is an insane nonsense.
Don't care about "pirates", care about investors' congenital stupidity.
boom, no matter how you turn it, this is exactly what it is.Andy Chalk said:
OT: While this is awesome, I didn't care for their game (played it at a friends) so I won't be buying it, however if they make a game in the future i'll keep that in the back of my mind if i'm on the line for purchasing it.
No, it's like this because you don't even bother to "turn it"gmaverick019 said:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,710976,00.html
http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/04/study-pirates-buy-tons-more-music-than-average-folks.ars
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-10054438-62.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4831-net-music-piracy-does-not-harm-record-sales.html
