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Piracy Helping Larger Game Developers?
Carlos Camacho writes "Piracy has been in the news recently within the game developer, and game player communities. You've seen all arguments against piracy in the past... Or have you? GBA and Mac game developer Aaron Fothergill of Strange Flavour Software wrote iDevGames a guest-editorial that will hopefully lead more users who copy games to re-think exactly it is that they are hurting. 'One of tenets of the software thief, is that "software is too expensive." They will then usually go on to bemoan how the 'giants' of the industry treat users unfairly and how stealing their software is their way of getting at 'the man.' Unfortunately, little do they realise, that the opposite is happening! Instead, rampant software theft benefits the 100 stone gorillas at the expense of new products that would otherwise be able to compete on price and features, resulting in only the big monopolistic companies keeping their products in the market and being able to control it'."
I guess it still had to be said for the clue-impaired.
How do you think Microsoft got so big? People used to copy DOS and Windows, and when their companies were getting computers, guess what software their employees were familiar with, and which was thus bought?
Same thing with Photoshop. It's really expensive, and gets pirated a lot. Instead, people could have bought Paint Shop Pro or downloaded The Gimp.
Software piracy makes you serve as free advertising for the "victim" company, and when it feels like it, it can sue you for megabucks. Do the math, people (preferably not using a pirated copy of Mathematica. Get GNU Octave instead)!
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
I've never thought of it that way before.
Personally the reason I don't have any pirated software is I've found everything I need on packages.gentoo.org, and freshmeat.net. (With the exception of a few games, which I was glad to pay for).
I do understand why people pirate some software, like Photoshop, Autocad, etc... They're industry standard and too damn expensive. And, I can see how this could potentially block out smaller competitors.
However, due to the continuing growth in popluarity of OSS, the software industry is destined to change. Piracy isn't any concern for OSS.
Have you tried Linux yet?
Yet another pro-piracy Slashdot story.
So you saw the word piracy and decided it was pro-piracy? RTFM!
DRM ... Is supposed change this,making piracy so difficult though, but will this have the opposite effect? I doubt it, The fat cats are just going to get fatter and the skinny kittens are just going to get skinnier.
The article seems to be an anti-piracy article in some sort of disguise.
In the end the consumer will decide and with the advent the choice will be a lot clearer. Let the Fat-Cats extort your money because you wont be able to use illegal software you obtained for free; or Take up on Open Source and discover that quality software is available free, and best of all its legal.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
The main person piracy helps is me. It's effect on the developers was never really a factor for me - if anything, their insistance on the validity of intellectual property made me actively unsympathetic to their desires in the whole process.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
It was mentioned earlier about applications like Photoshop, or the Windows OS, have drastically increased in price due to piracy. That's probably true. However, how has the gaming arena changed? Not very much.
As a matter of fact, it's more easy to argue the relatively small price increase of games reflects inflation and the steady increase of standard pay for programmers in the 90's. Quite frankly piracy doesn't do jack to the gaming industry, other than to cause game developers to whine and moan. Had the concept/practice not come about, we'd still be in the same situation. The only possible benefit that would come from the lack of piracy is the possible improvement in game quality since companies spend a lot of time and money on trying to keep their games from being pirated (which always fails, I've yet to see a game that hasn't been cracked except for the online aspect of Neverwinter Nights).
I think the article is a bit wrong: You do not pirate the big games, you pirate the good games! And most good games are big. Also, most good games are from big companies, that's true most of the time, and even if you are a small company that makes a good game, you will get a crapload of money off the sales and eventually become a big company, just look at Valve.
:D
Valve doesn't even sell games anymore, they sell CD-keys
Although this does make a lot of sense when it comes to business software, and it's very true. Copied software creates more educated users of that product, making business take-up that much easier.
But when it comes to games? Frankly, it's barking up the wrong tree. I don't see how piracy would help the big guy over the small guy. I mean, it's not like there's not millions of keygens floating around for all those small download games..right?
In any case, I don't think it's piracy that hurts creative industries at all. I really don't. People who tend to do that obsessivly (meaning they don't buy anything..there are quite a few like that), wouldn't have a preference over one thing or the other. You're not going to get them to buy anyway.
Not so much for the PC market, but especially for the console market, what is really hurting them is the presence of the used/pre-owned game. The same thing that is really hurting the movie industry. This creates a new sub-market for such goods that the producers don't see a penny out of. Every person that buys, for example, Metroid Prime for $20..
#1. Doesn't have that $20 to spend on another shrinkwrapped budget game..you know, one someone actually gets paid for?
#2. Considering that the shrinkwrapped price is near 20, it actually denies the producers rewards for their production. This is exactly the argument they make against piracy. But they can't do anything about this because it's above the law.
So I think complaining about piracy frankly, is half-assed until they start cracking down on used/pre-owned copies. Of course, legally, they're not on firm ground here. However, a widespread advertising campaign and pickiting campaign may convince people that going into that used-media shop is ethically wrong.
Unfortunately, little do they realise, that the opposite is happening! Instead, rampant software theft benefits the 100 stone gorillas at the expense of new products that would otherwise be able to compete on price and features,
And if it wasn't unlicensed copying, it would be loss leaders and differential pricing from the big guys. The big guys just have more money to absorb costs and losses, to price their product aggressively, and to get their product out there. Either way, the small players have an extra hurdle. But small players also have some advantages.
One thing is certain: whining about piracy isn't going to help; small players need to figure out how to survive in the market as it is.
And small players should also be aware that stronger "copyright enforcement" is probably going to hurt them in the long run: the more widely accepted DRM schemes and raids on users become, the harder it will be for small players to get their product to market and for users to install and use it safely.
I've known many people who pirated software and none of them did it to hurt The Man or because they didn't like the developer. They did it because they wanted software and they didn't want to pay for it. That's all. If anyone ever said they were fighting The Man by pirating software, they probably just had too many weevils with their Cheerios that morning.
How do you think Microsoft got so big? People used to copy DOS and Windows, and when their companies were getting computers, guess what software their employees were familiar with, and which was thus bought?
This seems more anecdotal than anything else; CP/M and DR-DOS were pirated, but that didn't do much for them in the long run. You could argue that MS-DOS was pirated more, and therefore became more popular. I think the more "obvious" explanation is that MS-DOS was popular, and therefore more widely pirated.
As a profitable third-party games developer, I don't think that piracy has hurt us in terms of pricing versus first-party developers; people assign some value to software based on price, and if anything, The big-name, $50-$60 games are pushing our prices higher rather than lower. Most people, upon seeing a $9.95 game, think, "crappy puzzle game."
Software piracy makes you serve as free advertising for the "victim" company
Dollar-for-dollar, I'd prefer to have the money, and put it towards development or media.
We're indie. We're working on our 14th game.
So I guess it was just as ethically wrong the last time I bought books at the local Salvation Aarmy? That kind of used-goods market just takes money out of the hands of the publishers who made the books to start with? By holding a yard sale, would I be subverting the capitalist system as we know it? ...my god, what about all the pawn shops? Gun and jewelry manufactures could be bringing in thousands of additional dollars if we just forced everyone to buy their products retail.
The fact is that, while game makers can choose to whine and complain about used game sales, that's where their action will end. They can't do anything about used game sales, and quite frankly, I think it's silly to consider something like second-hand marketing ethically wrong. Whenever a game ends up in the used bin, that mean's that someone else paid retail for the same. At some point, the company got their money for that unit. People spending $20 or less on two-year-old used games are people who most likely would never have paid for the game if it weren't sitting in the cheap bin.
"Infants flesh will be in season throughout the year." -Swift
I think that anybody who thinks that the eradication of piracy would lead to the big companies lowering their prices is very sadly mistaken.
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
Quite frankly piracy doesn't do jack to the gaming industry, other than to cause game developers to whine and moan. Had the concept/practice not come about, we'd still be in the same situation.
That is an amazingly ignorant statement. Piracy has had a huge effect on the industry. It raises the barrier to entry quite high. The "big" developers can survive it, but the small companies and the startups who already have enough problems can easily be taken down by piracy. Piracy helps keep the big guys big, and helps force the small to give up their independence and become a "studio" of the big in an attempt to survive. This sort of crap has been going on for decades. And pirates have been making the same lame excuses and denying their negative contribution for decades.
One thing is certain: whining about piracy isn't going to help; small players need to figure out how to survive in the market as it is.
Another thing is certain: Piracy makes the small developer's already tough job that much harder and can easily turn an otherwise survivable situation into failure.
You don't sound like you're trying to take a position for or against piracy. It sounds like to me that you're attacking Linux and claim that Linux users are pirates.
We also know that warez trading is prevalent among Linux-run IRC servers
I know several people who warez trade using Kazaa runnining on Windows.
Quit stealing source code: SCO, Windows 2000.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know there is not one line of SCO or Windows (9x, NT, 2000, or XP) code in Linux.
Quit trading in illegal MP3s and Divx movies.
Mp3 and Divx trading happens on almost every OS. I've seen users from Windows, Linux, and MacOS all trade mp3s and movies.
I do agree with your last statement though. And definitely start paying money for your games! People should get paid for their product. But I can admit that there has been a few times that I downloaded a warez copy of software to try it out or because I was strapped for cash at the time. But I did buy a valid copy if I liked it and saved the money for it.
Windows is as solid as quicksand.
Sorry, I apologize. Ethically wrong was the wrong term to use. I shouldn't presume to judge, especially since I personally don't think there's a clear answer one way or the other.
The real term to use is ethically equivilant.
And yeah. When you buy used books it's akin to piracy, at least from the perspective of the producer. The producer receives no additional benefit for your enjoyment of the work. Maybe it's right, maybe it's wrong, but there's absolutly no difference from the perspective of the producer between downloading a PDF or a book and getting it at the library.
Absolutly no difference.
Maybe you somehow feel justified in doing one but not the other, but you have to realize, they are the same.
Yes. I have rather extreme views of this. It's just that any other way of thought to me is hypocritical. They are either both right or both wrong, at least from the view that the reason you buy something is to reward the producer. (if you're against piracy because you're an elitest prick, then you have some other problems.)
What can the game companies do? They can refuse to give stock to the EBs of the world that have pre-owned stock next to new. As well, like I said, they could get well known game designer companies to have information pickits to get the word out to buy new or don't buy at all.
Myself? I think that anti-piracy laws should be strictly focused on commercial avoidance of producer renumeration. In other words, any company or group who makes a profit out of facilitating people avoiding rewarding the producers should be strictly illegal. Non-commercial file-sharing? Harmless in the wide scheme of things.
Having spent a bit of time in the amateur game dev arena myself, I have to agree; a large corporation can easily absorb the losses from piracy, but a small bedroom coder affair needs every single sale it can get. It's extremely frustrating to see cracked shareware games... it seems like a much more personal thing, precisely because fewer people would typically be interested - in me, it would lead to thoughts of "whoever cracked this must have it in for me."
--- Bwah?
What if I'm perfectly willing to purchase a game, and have been thwarted around each corner?
Take "X2: The threat" as an example.
Amazon.com does not deliver in my country and the online stores that I have tried either does not take my local currency/credit cards or they don't have stock anymore.
Some people just seem to ignore the niche market. And thus they will not get global acceptance.
I really try and buy anything I can.
I've bought Opera 5 and 7 (for win and linux) I've bought Win98, NT4 (2 copies), win2k prof and server, OSX 10.2 and 10.3 and even a RedHat CD set.
Then I've also purchased Total Comamnder, Forte Agent 1.x, Eudora, and many more utilities for many different platforms.
I can safely say it's not piracy that kills a product, but accessibility and crappy programming.
Piracy only lets you see how bad something can be before you buy it. I have spent all my available cash leaglizing, and piracy helped me decide to spen it worthwhile and not waste it on bad games/software/programmers.
Piracy/shareware has gotten me to buy more software than a magazine or store ever could.
Anyway, 'nuff ranting.
PS: Blizzard, Bioware and Id software rock... I would buy every version of their software out of principle... they make great software that does not have draconian copy protection, and thus I can easily use software such as Daemon Tools.
Also, even though Id software only requires a key of "blahblahblah..." to play, I have nonetheless bought 3 copies of Quake 3 (Mac, win32, linux) as well as two copies of Team Arena (one got stolen)
So there...
Why did I pay big money for games that often are broken and were never repaired? If they were normal physical products each and every game company would be in court getting its ass chewed out by consumer watchdog agencies.
And it just doesn't look like it is getting any better. Hell with "copy-protection" schemes it even gotten worse. Buy the legal product and you end up with something you can't copy to preserve the orginal CD, wich is a legal right in holland, and no way to get new cd's (only often send to american residents).
Where as if you download the game you can archive it as much as you want, you have no bloody keys to keep, and because they rip out the cd checking code the game frequently even runs faster. I lost 1 cd to my legally own "the longest journey", got the box if you don't believe me, I downloaded the game and notice how playing it from virtual cd's is a lot faster. No waiting for the CD to spin up to play a movie.
So game companies should get their act together. I was a paying customer who bought all his games except doom, no credit card. I now got even more money then when I was a kid and you lost me. Spend some time figuring that out. I tended to buy at least 1 game every single month and frequently more.
Have I just become a thief or am I rebelling against being ripped off by selling me broken products?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Maybe it's right, maybe it's wrong, but there's absolutly no difference from the perspective of the producer between downloading a PDF or a book and getting it at the library.
Absolutly no difference.
Wrong! Actually so wrong it hurts.
Piracy of theft of property, intellectual, physical, whatever.
Used games/books/whatever are the second sale of property. After something has been bought at retail it becomes property and whatever a person chooses to do with his own property is his business within the bounds of the law. And selling used items will never be illegal.
Libraries are also not "pirates" because they buy every item they have in their collection at retail. So the publisher has already received their royalty. And by allowing people to "borrow" said item, they are within the bounds of the law.
You're wrong, deal with it.
-----quote-----
Same thing with Photoshop. It's really expensive, and gets pirated a lot. Instead, people could have bought Paint Shop Pro or downloaded The Gimp.
-----end quote-----
True, they indeed could have gotten PSP or The Gimp, but something tells me they wanted to actually be able to get some work done doing image processing, retouching, etc, etc.
Unless this is one of those "Gimp is as good as Photoshop" things. (I love those. They're so CUTE... Wrong, but cute.)
The only possible benefit that would come from the lack of piracy is the possible improvement in game quality since companies spend a lot of time and money on trying to keep their games from being pirated (which always fails, I've yet to see a game that hasn't been cracked except for the online aspect of Neverwinter Nights).
Developers do not spend much time or money on anti-priacy. It is a pretty small amount of time overall and does not really take away from real development efforts.
Even when developers are not interested in copy protection or other anti-piracy efforts they often are forced into it by publishers or distributors.
Copy protection and other anti-piracy efforts do work. No one expects them to be 100%. The fact that a handful of more sophisticated users, and that phrase is used lightly, are able to get around anti-piracy is irrelevant. What is relevant is the fact that more casual users are stopped. More often than not someone tries a burned copy of a game, can't get it to work, and then goes out and buys the cd.
People have to understand how voting from the wallet works (and you should after reading this article).
The problem with the "I only pirate good games" argument is that you're missing the core point of the article. If you didn't pirate anything you would have to weigh the merits of software in terms of their real cost.
Most small dev shops may not be capable of the quality of the big ones, but their stuff usually doesn't cost as much either. So Paint Shop Pro might not be as powerful as PhotoShop, but it also costs 1/10.
When pirate software, that fact just becomes irrelevant. Worse, you aggravate the situation by widening the gap between the developers - in effect degrading the quality of small software devs by siphening their revenue.
This is doubly painful for games - where smaller shops might need to try something innovative or different, which is harder to market when people are more like to try and pirate UT2004.
You can justify it any way you want - but the reality is: piracy sticks it to nobody but the little guy. So when every year games become more and more mainstream, less innovative and EA buys another license - just look to you hard drive and you might know why.
Who cares about the legal definition of piracy or the "bounds of the law"
I'm talking about ethical matters.
As far as I know, copyright and IP law exists to make sure the producers get rewarded for their work, in order to encourage more to be produced. At least that's the commonly acknowledged reason...it's a good reason too.
If 500 people copy a game off a friend's CD, doesn't that cost the producer 500 sales?
If 500 people read a book through the library, doesn't that cost the author 500 sales?
What's the difference?
There isn't any, at least from the POV of the producer. Sure, it's legally protected, but it's very ethically challenged. (The library is pretty safe, as for the most part they are non-profits, but tell me your local used-media shop isn't trying to make money off the backs of others)
People say if piracy was reduced, then producers could afford to lower prices (Yeah right). Well doesn't that go the same that if second-market sales were reduced it would be the same thing?
For my own? I just wish people would make up their minds. Are we just looking for articifial scarcity to maintain high prices or are we looking to reward producers?
I fully support the second. For the first? Well, if that's the case, I don't think anybody deserves any legal protection for ANY IP.
Except if Joe doesn't want to pay at all, he won't pay for any of both games. So nohing would prevent him from getting both!
Besides, if the cheaper game is not a basic clone of the other, there's no reason why having one will prevent playing the other.
The ENIAC Demo Competition
I don't pirate games to "FUCK WITH THE MAN," I pirate games because I can't return them. It's simple, I download a game. If I like the game and want to continue playing it after a few hours, I go purchase it. If I find out that the game is a piece of crap, I delete it.
I downloaded two games recently. Secret Weapons Over Normandy and Battlefield: Vietnam. I purchased SWON after only an hour or so playing around with the warez. It was a fun game and I wanted to support the developer, and let the publisher know I wanted more fun games like this. I was *happy* to give them my money.
Battlefield Vietnam got deleted in about 5 minutes. Besides the damn-near offensive in-game "history" (one piece of text describes the Viet-Cong as "nationalist freedom fighters" trying to "liberate" South Vietnam, come on, even Tom Hayden would laugh at that), the game itself is a buggy piece of shit. If I had been stupid enough to purchase this game at EB or wherever, I'd be stuck with a $50 turd.
Therefore, I download ISOs before considering a purchase. I find this perfectly ethical. If I go to purchase something, I ought to be able to inspect it and make sure I want it, within reason. If I go to buy a used car, the seller lets me have a mechanic check it out (if he's ethical, anyway). If I go to buy furniture, I find the piece I want and have it delivered. If it comes all banged up, I tell the deliveryman to send it back and get me one he didn't play rugby with in the back of the truck. This is simply good ethical business practice.
The gaming industry practices unethical business by refusing to allow a proper inspection of the product. They give you a load of bullshit, and then expect you to gamble on whether or not the product will live up to enough of the bullshit to justify your purchase. A demo does not constitute the product, nor does the text on the back of the box. "REVOLUTIONARY 3D GRAPHICS?" Let me be the judge of that, thank you. How many games advertise "250 different fatal errors because our paki coder doesn't understand you can't divide by zero!" on the box?
Just as the seller has the responsibility to make a profit, the consumer has the responsibility to defend himself. In this case, the only way the consumer can defend himself is by pirating software and using that pirated software to make an informed decision.
Unfortunately, I'm in the distinct minority here regarding my motives for downloading games. The gaming industry could be cleaned up REAL quickly if folks simply stopped patronizing "no return" retailers and buying shitty games. But neither of those things are likely to happen, due to the addiction most video gamers have to their hobby -- and there's something to be said for consumer irrationality, to boot. And let's be honest, piracy will never stop, because we all know that most folks lack the ethics or simply intelligence to stop STEALING things that can be easily stolen without immediate repercussions.
"I HVAE A RIGHT TO PLAY VDEO GAMEZ!!!111" said the pirate, who soon found that there were no more video games worth playing.
Explain the movie industry, then ;)
Asides from you indicating (at least) a 50% increase in price, there is the economies of scale to consider. That Atari 2600 cartidge you refer to did not have 100 million+ potential customers. Further, the available technology was far more expensive at the time those older games were made. The marginal cost of game production has likely gone DOWN since those early years, even though overall budgets are staggeringly higher.
The potential payoffs today are far higher than in the past and that is what helps mitigates the risk. Unfortunately, like Hollywood, this means that the money lenders will back 9 dogs for every classic because on average, at least 1 of those 9 dogs will have a decent return. Have you noticed how front-loaded box-office receipts are? The make or break for movies is now the first 2-3 weeks after release. This is staggeringly different than what was prevalant even 10 years ago. The cost of creating games is not the issue: it is the cost of marketing games and spending money on many games knowing that only a few will be successful (the others big money losers) that most affect the price of games. The price of a game you buy (at least from a large producer) includes the cost of their failed projects as well as the cost to create the game.
Does anyone find the underlying argument of the article as amusing as I do? It seems to suggest that higher prices for consumer games is a benefit to game buyers. For shame. There are well known economic principles that help explain the aggregation of capital interests. This is not something unique to game producers or software developers. The idea that "piracy" is the driving force behind this phenomena is simply a layman reaction. Commentors like the one in that article ought do at least some preliminary study on the topics they pontificate on, lest they prove that outside of their domain of study, they are blabering idiots.
If 500 people copy a game off a friend's CD, doesn't that cost the producer 500 sales?
No. I might have decided that the game is crap so why bother paying for it? Or my computer wasn't powerful enough. Or I didn't have enough money.
Here's a serious example of not enough money. One russian user on a game company's website admitted that she pirated the $30 or so game. The developer flamed her for that of course.
Now, from the US this is all clear. But think of this: In Russia, at that time, my aunt's wage was $100 a month. This is the wage of an university teacher. Nobody there is going to spend $30 on a game, don't even think of it. You may say all you want about that the game shouldn't have been pirated, but the end result is this: The developer wouldn't have got any money in any case.
Nobody in their right mind would spend 30% of their wage on a game ($1000 maybe?). So the end result comes to this, you get no money, but the end user either gets one or doesn't. If the user gets a copy you can at least have some benefit from the extra advertising. If the user doesn't, you get nothing at all.
Alternatively, you could sell the game for $1 in russia. Of course then I'd ask my aunt to buy the game in Russia, and send her $3.
If 500 people read a book through the library, doesn't that cost the author 500 sales?
No. I have bought books that I've read in the library. Sometimes I like the book and want to have it permanently as a reference. The library then served to find a book I like.
What's the difference?
The difference is that when somebody steals a book, somebody loses their book, while when somebody makes a copy of some software nobody loses their copy of it.
The other difference is that you think of books and games as if they should disappear instantly after being used. They fortunately don't. Authors already know that most books will be read by more than one person. And there's nothing wrong with that.
More often than not someone tries a burned copy of a game, can't get it to work, and then goes out and buys the cd. More often than not someone just downloads the cracked copy from their favorite P2P network and bypasses the whole mess. That's what I started to do when I got one too many game with a completely broken CD-check. Pay less money, get a non-broken product. Practically all games have some limited copy protection these days (or at least that seems to be the case to me judging from the trouble I'd have running completely legitimate copies) so if casual piracy like the type you describe were truly the source of the problem, there wouldn't be a problem, would there?
The thing is, the total number of video game users has been escalating for a very long time. Piracy or not, that means the number of paying video game customers has been increasing. Is anyone here going to seriously doubt this assertion? The sales figures are through the roof. There is a whole lot more money being spent on games right now than there used to be. And, after all, the name of the game isn't to decrease piracy, it's to increase sales. So if sales are increasing, then piracy or no piracy, developers should be better off now than they used to be.
Why are the gaming companies becoming larger and more risk-averse? I dunno, we can all speculate plenty of reasons for this, but there's no possible way you can blame piracy--consumers are spending a mind-boggling amount of money on video games, more than the world has every spent on video games ever before.
A: Too much piracy B: Lack of sales
A->B not B Therefore, not A.
Sorry, anti-piracy zealots, but modus tollens says you suck. Really, the whole idea of competing in a games marketplace on the basis of price is ridiculous--the price of a video game is the time I invest playing it, not the paltry $50 I plunk down to pay for it.
A: Too much piracy
B: Lack of sales
A->B
not B
Therefore, not A.
Basically, for you, you want to try before you buy, no matter how far you want to go.
That's fine. That's a personal choice. What my posts are more about are talking about why nobody talks about the used market in the same light as they do about piracy. It's something that mystifies me, and makes me think that the anti-piracy forces just arn't serious about what they say they are, rewarding the producers, and instead they're just being pricks.
Why isn't this a main page topic? This is most certainly an important topic for anyone involved in the business side of software.
But the real point of my comment is to introduce a name for this side-effect of piracy, and it is monopoly-sharing. I chose this name since piracy usually occurs on file-sharing networks, but the sharers are actually perpetuating monpolies. The link is to my blog post about the topic.
True story.
What can the game companies do?
If they felt it was that much of a problem, they could simply quit selling to ED, Babbages Inc (Gamestop), FYE (which I think it Transworld Media...), Blockbuster, etc. I don't think game companies are worried about used sales in the least. By the time people are buying used copies of the game (at least in my experience working at a Gamestop), customers who were interested in paying retail have already got the game. Most used game sales are made up of games that are months or years old, whose sales have already dropped off the charts enough to not really be missed by game publishers/developers. Before that amount of time, it's just not very economical to buy the used game....the difference between it and the new price is almost negligible, and most people go for new. Maybe if publishers started lowering their prices on new titles much more than they already do once the games have been in circulation for some time and ebbed in popularity, they would be loosing more from used game sales.
"Infants flesh will be in season throughout the year." -Swift
I think the difference in opinion is that people, myself included, don't consider there to be a moral or ethical dilemma in selling or purchasing used goods.
I work in retail, and have done so for over 6 years. I cannot begin to count the number of pieces of product I have been forced to see destroyed because of lack of sales. You might be inclined to say that is because of piracy, because of secondhand sales, or some other causitive reason.
Regardless of the reason, the bottom line is that the producer of that item was paid cost for each copy that is sitting on the shelf in my store. It becomes a financial loss for our business if we fail to sell that item. As time passes, we will mark down our pricing until it moves, or until we "buy it out" and destroy it. In none of those cases was the producer out any money. With only rare exceptions are software sold on consignment; 99% of the time if a box of software sits on a shelf in a local store, it's because the store paid the producer for that physical copy.
In a way, it's an interesting quandary of ethics, and I'll pose it this way: Determine which is ethically "worse". Is it worse to buy a used copy of an item, thereby infusing the economy with money, purchasing a legally owned copy, or is it worse to force individuals into always buying at full retail, thus relegating all previously owned copies to landfills when their owners no longer desire to possess them? Furthermore, when consumers are spending more money per item, they are likely to purchase less items per annum (due to reduced funds), thus causing a ripple effect in the economy.
In fact, by being able to purchase used titles, consumers are more often able to afford and discover games that might otherwise have never been purchased in the first place. In those instances, they may find something appealing, and then look for other titles by that publisher/creator, possibly generating more revenue for the producers -- not less, as you seem to imply in your ethical concern. In fact, whether a consumer buys a new copy in my store, or a used copy down the street, that physical box in their hand (plus the one in my store) were both already bought from the producer. He has the money, has already invested it, and his shareholders are already happy.
As an example, consider companies like Nintendo who advertise 500,000 Gameboy Advance SP sales in a week at launch. That figure is only how many they have sold to retailers worldwide for resale, not necessarily how many consumers bought. Does Nintendo care? No -- they've received their money from the retailers. By your contention, the producers have been rewarded.
The bottom line is there is a serious and definable line both legally, morally, and ethically between piracy and the secondhand market. In a secondhand market a sold item generates revenue multiple times: the producer gets full cost for the first time it is sold to a store for retail sales; a consumer gets revenue when they sell the copy to a store that buys used games; a consumer who thus sells a used copy to a store will very often reinvest that profit into another game, quite often a game at full retail (trade in 2 games and get XXXX for only $10!); the used copy will generate revenue again when sold to someone purchasing the used copy; in some cases, the used copy will generate revenue for the producer should a warranty issue come to play, since the producer will charge a fee for assistance/replacement due to the out-of-warranty condition of the copy.
Piracy, however, generates revenue only once: a producer gets revenue for selling a copy to a store. That's it.
To me, I see no ethical challenge or dilemma. If you can establish beyond doubt that every single copy of a used game sold directly causes the immediate loss of a sale at full price for the same title, then I might concede there is a feduciary concern -- not ethical. In any case, the producers were always rewarded, which was the point you kept raising. It's really the retailers who w
Londovir
so if casual piracy like the type you describe were truly the source of the problem, there wouldn't be a problem, would there?
No, you are mistaken. The trivial piracy that common anti-piracy methods prevent is a different and larger problem that is largely addressed. The remaining problem with non-trivial piracy still exists and for smaller developers can be catastrophic.
To give you an idea of how bad things could get without the simplest copy protection I'll mention some chemistry software required for a freshman chemistry class. The first semester it was unprotected and only a handful of copies were sold. This occurred on numerous campuses so the publisher added copy protection. The next semester software sales was much closer to textbook sales. Chemistry students, who you would think would be a little more sophisticated than the average gamer, typically only stole software when it was trivially easy to do so.
Two problems:
1) That assumes that the consumer is selling to another consumer. Your own store credit example belies this. If a consumer sells the game to Electronics Boutique for $10 and EB resells it for $25, only the $10 gets factored into the original sale price via consumer preference, but the used game sale replaces a $25 new game sale, so the company still loses $15.
2) Although the second "sale" does indirectly go to the company, the company doesn't control its size, but it replaces a sale whose size the company does control. In other words, if I value a game at $45 and can sell it at $10, I'm willing to pay $55 and the company is making two sales, one indirect, but that's nowhere near as good for the company as if they just made two *direct* sales, since they could make both direct sales at $45 each and total $90 instead of $55. (You might argue that if the company can make the second direct sale at $45 I should pay $90 for the game and make a second sale at $45 too, but for several reasons that doesn't work.)
3) In order for this idea to work, the company would have make the games more expensive if you intend to resell than if you don't. That's not possible; the best they can do is have an intermediate price which overcharges the non-resellers and undercharges the resellers and (because it is not optimum on a per-customer basis) is not as good for the company than if there was no reselling at all.
You're talking about it fromt he PoV of the retailer.
I'm talking about it from the PoV of the producer.
There is a clear line legally..what I'm saying is that if the goal of copyright law is the reward the producers, then there shouldn't be that clear line. Because like it or not, when you buy a used game rather than a new one, the producer really is losing a sale. It's not even just a potential sale, a hypothetical one as you see with normal copying.
In a way, if I was a producer, I'd be crying bloody murder. Seriously.
It's not straight ethically wrong. Both sides have good merit.
On one side, the producers should receive their cut no matter what.
On the other side, consumers have the real power and should have the power to copy/share/etc, and the producers get what they get.
The problem is when you try to have both.
What bothers me, is that at the same time as the media groups are trying to shut down such useful services for consumers as P2P, they're doing absolutly nothing about this other black hole they have in their market. And then they try to shove DRM down our throat in an effort to maintain that.
Legally, they can't do anything about it. But why don't they talk about it? Why don't they put all this stuff in a realistic light?
Maybe so we could actually have a real conversation about IP law and actually have them make some sense.
Inserting the word "magically" into an assertion doesn't automatically make it dumb.
You're right, it's pretty fucking retarded all by itself with no insertion of words necessary.
Software sales generally come from people who meet both of the following criteria: "want the software," and "don't already have the software." If you pirated a game, you obviously met the first criterion, but you've removed yourself from the second one. That's one potential sale down the drain. The company has lost value. Not $20, but some percentage of it.
So if I remove myself from the second criteria, then it's like I never existed at all. See? If some strange holocaust killed all software pirates, it wouldn't change the revenue of software companies at all.
You need to add one more criteria: "willing to pirate software". There are people who are willing to pirate, there are people who will only use software they have acquired legally. There are probably a whole lot MORE legitimate users than pirates, not because users are particularly scrupulous, but because pirating executable code is more inconvenient and dangerous than pirating music or movies.
And looking at the sales figures, there are fantastically more legitimate users today than there ever were at any time in the past.
Not if production costs are increasing faster.
Right, something other than piracy is the source of independent developer's woe. You could blame the increasing costs of production--though I'm not sure that's really true. It costs a whole lot more to make the state of art 3d shooter than it cost to make a 2d platform game back in the day, but it's way the heck easier/cheaper to make a 2d platform game today then it has ever been in the past. I suspect that as time goes on, making 3d games is going to be easier and cheaper. 3D models will always be more expensive to build than 2D sprites, but the diminishing marginal returns of 3D graphics are starting to kick in, as games displayed on televisions and computer monitors aren't going to be able to look too much better than they do now. Which means that games using cheap, easy to use pre-packaged 3d engines will become visually indistinguishable from games developed with expensive 3d programmers.
You could blame users for growing sick of the desktop computer as a gaming platform--consoles are a much larger percentage of the marketplace than they used to be, but are vastly less friendly to independent developers. (The web is more friendly to indies, but users aren't as willing to pay.)
You could blame the thousands and thousands of available classic titles, usually available at low cost somewhere or another. Whether I choose to pirate Warcraft III or keep playing my old copy of Command and Conquer Red Alert, I'm definitely not going to buy your new independent strategy game.
You could blame the power law. As the number of users and developers increases, it's just plain natural for a small set of powerful developers to make most of the sales.
Or you could blame users again for wanting big, complicated games, instead of small innovative games.
You could realize that computer software is what microeconomics textbooks call "a natural monopoly"--the marginal costs of producing new copies is near zero, so the market gravitates toward a few dominant players.
That's not to say that a pirate shouldn't think twice about stealing an indy game they like if they'd like to see more of that sort of game in the future. But that's no more true today than it was in the past, and piracy is definitely not the reason large game developers are winning.
This is the fifth time in less than a year's time that copying has been referred to as 'theft' or 'stealing' in an article post, with nary an eyeblink.
While I agree that illicit copying of software is ungood, plusungood even, the doublethink that facsimile is equivalent to theft is impossible for me to comprehend, as it should be to all ethical geeks.
Considered with the similar trend of promoting the DMCA as 'accepted reality one can make compromise with' rather than an unholy dragon that must be slain in full, I think it's clear that slashdot is moving itself out of the center of a Venn's diagram charting the overlap between geekdom and mainstream existence - and it's moving the wrong way IMO.
I can understand when corporations with something to protect defend such laws or promote the use of exaggerated negative language for propaganda purposes. But I don't understand or support it when sites I enjoy regularly engage in it.
I can't support this site any longer. Who's with me? Neidhart?
Computer network piracy is difficult for obscure software (which sort of nullifies the "piracy attacks smaller developers" argument).
In any event, if trivial piracy is the bigger problem, then it's the bigger problem, period. Remember, the goal is maximize sales, not eliminate pirates. (It's really easy to eliminate pirates, just don't release any software.) Anyone selling information--be it games, newspapers, movies, or music, is just going to have to get over the fact that some percentage of people are going to be able to use your information without filling your wallet, and you're going to have to settle for selling to those people who actually do pay.
Look at it this way, there may be millions of people out there using your program illegally. But there are billions of people out there who have never heard of your program. I suspect you will have more luck increasing sales by targetting the latter group. Indeed, the pirates might actually be helping you by spreading word of your great yet obscure products to non-pirates.
Software required for a Chemistry class is a bad example, because a very small user base is concentrated into a very small area--a single classroom. Social network piracy is easy--just trade a disk among your classmates. Computer network piracy is very hard--who the heck is going to bother releasing a crack for such a limited audience? How much luck are you going to have finding it on warez sites? Computer network piracy is difficult for obscure software (which sort of nullifies the "piracy attacks smaller developers" argument).
You are mistaken. The chem software has cracks available for it. A simple google finds many sites offering it.
Indeed, the pirates might actually be helping you by spreading word of your great yet obscure products to non-pirates.
Actually paying customers do a far better job at that. One pirate kiddie turning another pirate kiddie onto a game doesn't really help anyone. People have tried using that rationalization for decades. Its been debunked many times.
Perhaps I wasn't clear in my response. I was discussing it from the PoV of the producer. You're just not seeing the discussion.
Explain to me how a producer is losing a sale when a used copy is purchased. Again, the physical copies of the software sitting on every shelf were already purchased by the retailers from the producers. Whether or not you purchase the new shrinkwrapped copy or not, that piece of software on the shelf was already paid for. Now, if you try to claim a causality chain, such that if I buy a used copy then a new copy sits on the shelf and thus an order for a replacement copy wouldn't take place, then that's not the case either.
The bottom line is there are some people who won't pay full retail regardless of whether or not used copies exist. They might be kids on allowance, they might be adults on a budget, whatever. If no used copies existed, they would simply wait until the game was out long enough to normally drop in price (say NFL 2002, down to $19.99 from $49.99). If they then bought that copy, it's so far out of the normal product lifecycle that the store could not even buy another new copy to replace it since it's out of print! Thus, again, the producer's rewards weren't impacted, or at least were impacted in the exact same manner used copies impact their rewards: a sale did not occur at full retail. Bottom line.
I would ask you another question: do you shop at Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Target, Kohl's, or any grocery store? I would imagine that you do. Now, does every single item you buy from those retailers come from the retailer themself, such as Wal-Mart generic branded medicine or soda? If not, if even a single item you buy in a store could be bought directly from a manufacturer via phone/mail/internet, then you are in ethical distress by your own contention. Why? Because Wal-Mart (and others) buy their items from the producer at cost, and if you buy from them, you aren't paying the full retail directly to the producer, but rather to Wal-Mart, who takes their cut off the top. All of retail is the resale of used goods, economically speaking, since you aren't the first buyer of those products. That's how retail works: I pay a producer a lower price negotiated by us in the hopes of getting a consumer to pay me a higher price so I can make money.
Here's a good example: In my hands is a novel I bought at Wal-Mart. It's Prey by Michael Crichton, by Avon Books. I paid $5.97 for it. Now, in the back of the book is a page with an order sheet where I can buy this same book from Avon Books directly for $7.99. Thus, I am ethically distressed, by your admission. I bought this copy new (not used!), yet I paid $5.97 to Wal-Mart when I could have paid $7.99 to the publisher themself. Thus, the producer was "cheated" out of at least $2.03 by my buying it from Wal-Mart instead of them ($7.99 retail - $5.96 minimum cost Wal-Mart paid to publisher for copy of book).
Thus, if we as citizens of Earth buy anything from anyone other than the original maker/producer, we are ethically wrong. That is a surprisingly and dangerously narrow vision of the world. I won't even get into the ethical morass that would result in forcing schools to always buy new textbooks each year for each new grade of students, regardless of whether or not they could reuse them. We wouldn't want to be ethically distressed. Of course, the cost of education would then exponentiate overnight, and we couldn't handle the burden in society for this cost. Is that ethically right or wrong? I wonder....
Londovir
Look, I steal a lot of software, so while I may be mistaken in this specific case (although since you haven't named the program, there really isn't a specific case to be mistaken about) I'm not mistaken about the general case. Even if the crack available, it's still vastly easier to exchange software by trading cds around IN A CLASSROOM--i.e. your example still is not generally applicable.
One pirate kiddie turning another pirate kiddie onto a game doesn't really help anyone.
Doesn't really hurt anyone either. A non-sale is a non-sale. If we're talking about obscure software, then the probability of a pirate turning a legit customer to the dark side is low, because the number of intersections between your legit and pirate set of people are smaller. This rationalization has been TRUE for decades. That even in the post-linux era people still don't understand this is mind-boggling fucking stupidity. IBM doesn't see all these desktop running linux with no IBM hardware and start bemoaning "geezus, those stupid hackers are STEALING all of our Linux research and development costs!" It sure seems like major corporations aren't buying into your "debunking".
On the other hand, encouraging legit users to be pirates by forcing them to download cracks to make their product work at all, as has happened to me with several games, definitely decreases the number of legit users in the future, by getting people in the habit of piracy--or driving them away from the PC onto the consoles, where games just freaking work. Surely consoles are vastly more small-developer hostile than PC, piracy or no piracy.
It seems to me people selling information need to remember that prayer about "the courage to change what I can, the serenity to accept what I cannot." By trying to get every last possible sale from the last few holdouts, sellers of games are alienating those who DO purchase their products. I've got no sympathy for them.
Usually what happens is that the retailer marks it up. However, the producer/distribitor specifically has authorized for them to carry the product. When you buy directly, usually they are just cutting out the middle man and giving you what the stores would take as profit/operating costs.
Regarding the first point, you are aware that the exact same argument can be made for piracy, right? That the $0 price tag is just another price level to be competed with.
School textbooks? Frankly, I think companies should be LONG out of that game. I think textbooks should be published by non-profits and advised by leading brains in that particular field.
Back to the first point.
It's a good point, what if something is out of print? Easy. The way I see things, Out of print==Public domain. Copyright law is far too out of hand.
In other words, I REALLY resent having to pay $20 to some company that never had ANY interest in producing the game/software if that's the only way I can get it, and yet continuing to have such insane length of copyright laws where things that are OoP don't fall to public domain.
Think SNES roms, for example. (A good majority)
If saying that makes you sleep better at night then good luck with that. You are still ripping people off.
If your are having problems with CD-check then 1) call tech support, 2) return the product (don't take no for an answer, they will take it back if you talk in the right ear), and 3) post which games are using broken CD-checks on the web. Doing this will cost the company money and, in time, they may actually learn not to treat their customers like thieves.
I hate CD-checks myself, waste of everybody's time, but I'm not going to hurt random people just because some idiots don't get it.
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
I disagree. People frequently have friends with similar interests to themselves, which means that those pirating "obscure" software will likely know other people with an interest in the software. You are trying to treat the users of obscure software as being distributed uniformly at random throughout society, which isn't true. The reality is much closer to the chem class example than you seem to be willing to acknowledge.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
What ends up happening is either 1) we pass a cd around to bootstrap those people who don't have a copy (only works if the game doesn't cd-check during play), 2) find a hacked .exe that doesn't do the CD check and hand that off to the guys that don't have a legit copy, or 3) share the second cd with a partner that doesn't have their own copy (this only applies to those games that have multiple install CDs and any of them will work when the check takes place).
Add to this the fact that the copy protection that's on many of the newer titles we play often prevents us from duping the play disc. If you can dupe it, it sometimes requires a pricey CD copying tool that will render a good copy. (Seems to me anyhow that if I bought and paid for a game, I should have the right to make a playable copy as a backup. CDs don't last forever, after all.)
Now, even though our group collectively spends nearly a thousand dollars on legitimately-acquired and licensed game software annually, we still get caught performing these types of pirate-ish workarounds to get everyone playing. As someone that works in a software shop, I feel pretty strongly that you oughta buy what you play, but it has happened that I've been the guy who didn't want to fork over the bux for a title I just knew I would not play outside of game night. It sticks in my craw, you might say.
I'd like to float the following suggestions:
1. What if (apart from the standard single-user license) you had the chance to buy a club license for three times the cost of a single user license, and would get five legitimate registrations out of it. If you bought a club license, you should have the ability to turn off the CD-check.
2. Assuming that you could have such a thing as club-licensing, how about having a way for a single user registrant to convert their single user copy into a club-licensed version online. You could have a seperate registration for each additional registrant on the copy, and ask for immediate payment by cred card for each additional individual applicant to the club license (at, say, %50 of the retail price).
3. Let people copy the CDs, install, and register themselves just as they would if they had bought it retail, only knock off %50 because the'res no additional cost to the game co. to produce another copy, another manual, or another pretty box.
Now, I know that this doesn't cover all the different ways and reasons people have for pirating, but it might bring more than a few pirates in from the cold, and make up for at least some of the lost revenue.
Just a thought, anyhow.
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
If we're talking about obscure games, then I would indeed believe it's distributed in sufficiently uniform manner. If I manage to steal some obscure simulation game, chances are I'm only going to be able to find one or two friends who would also want to play it, and probably none who were thinking of buying it.
If we're talking about programs for creative or productive use, than most of those users who would have any possibility of purchasing the software are probably corporate, and, in America at least, businesses have far more incentives to purchase software legitimately than ordinary mortals--if you get caught making money from something you stole, you're in big trouble. Students and hobbyiests love to steal this stuff, but they probably wouldn't buy it anyway even if piracy weren't an option.
I don't see why that's a much better idea. If I buy a game and REALLY want to play it, and the copy protection makes me unable to do so, I'm not going to fight with the store/publisher for a refund. I'm going to crack it and play the game. I'm not going to be denied a chance to use something I bought because of futile attempts to keep others from playing without paying.
Remember also that those who pirate games outright will likely cost the company MORE money than someone who buys the game, then forces a refund. Not that I'm saying you should always pirate games.
If 500 people read a book through the library, doesn't that cost the author 500 sales?
Not necessarily. Here in the EU the author gets paid each time his book gets lended at the library. I remember having read that the same system exist in the US, but I might be wrong.
"What's in the public interest, isn't what the public is interested in" - Terry Pratchett
I doubt this style of copy protection has ever caused a single sale. It's just annoying to those of us who actually buy the game (like me).
WWJD? JWRTFA!