Kwil said:
CrystalShadow said:
swaki said:
Kollega said:
In seriousness,this is what good companies do. What bad companies do is jack up a price to $70,then say it's "reasonable".
i wouldn't exactly call the other companies bad (well okay 70 is evil but 50 is respectable), allot of people are going to exploit this by paying them 0.01 cents, but if 80% of all who played this pirated it i guess its better than nothing, but keep in mind no business can survive by letting the consumers decide the price.
Quite true. But this kind of 'pay what you want' thing is basically an ethics thing when you get right down to it.
And without getting into the whole piracy debate, computer software, and any other form of digital media (anything covered by copyright in general really) is what's known as Artificial Scarcity [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_scarcity]
What that comes down to is that the product has no inherent value.
Most physical products have a value related to the resources needed to produce one.
Digital information does not. The cost of duplication is close enough to zero to be pretty much irrelevant, so the inherent value of such a product is 0.
Thus, to be able to sell such a product at all, you have to somehow artificially control the supply. And this is precisely what copyright laws and such are about.
But, left to 'free market' conditions, voluntary donations is all anyone creating things like this would ever get, so 'pay what you want' is in fact the most honest possible reflection of the kind of product they're selling.
Given your logic, any kind of service has zero inherent value. This is, of course, garbage.
Even is we stick to your notion of value = cost of resources, which is completely rubbish because it discounts the added value that labour can give those resources (hint: the silicon in your computer is just sand until labour is applied), even using that valuation, you still have to take into account the resource costs in supporting the creators while they create the product.
And that's without even touching the concept that the value of a product is actually the negotiated arrangement between the seller and the buyer. Just because people are able to take something without engaging in that negotiation does not invalidate it.
Economic theory is pretty complicated, but I think you have a rather feeble grasp of the point I was making to say something like this:
Let's start with the fundamental definitions:
Economics - The study of how to most efficiently distribute
limited resources.
take away the 'limited' part, and the whole basis of economics collapses.
Your comparison with 'service' industries is invalid because you've missed the resource required. Labour. The application of human effort.
You're making the implicit assumption here that resources = physical material.
It doesn't. It means anything that is of limited availability. Human labour is constrained by time itself. there are only 168 hours in a week, and what a person can accomplish in that time is limited. Hence, human labour has a value (but not a very high one, if wages are anything to go by).
Point is, it can take 1,000,000 or so man-hours to make a mainstream game. But that is a sunk cost. It bears no relation to what you sell;
Sell 1,000,000 copies, and the cost (in terms of time spent), is 1 hour per copy sold.
Sell only 1 copy, and the cost is 1,000,000 hours per copy.
As for negotiation, you still miss the point. The reason digital products have no inherent value is because the individual 'copy' has no value of it's own.
Wether it is legal or not, I can make 1 copy, 20 copies, 100,000 copies or more of any digital 'product', and whoever originally created it bears no (direct) cost for me doing so.
Contrast this with say, a television, or computer, or even a loaf of bread; - If I take one without paying for it, I have directly taken the cost of producing that
specific item.
I obviously have taken value from the 'development' costs in either case, but that kind of value is purely speculative, and unrelated to the individual item.
Without getting into negotiations, the ecomomic value of any item in terms of it's resources is:
Cost of design + cost of production of individual item.
For most physical items, both costs are non-zero.
For digital items, only the 'design cost' remains, because the individual items basically don't have a production cost.
