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Engaging Debate on Piracy and Videogaming
koworld writes "WotR have put out a really intriguing issue on piracy this week. It has Jeff Minter arguing that piracy robs developers of their livelihoods and then a senior industry figure (writing under a pseudonym) offers the counter that piracy has done more to expand the overall videogaming market than any other factor. Just to round off the debate a number of insightful personal accounts of piracy and its effects are also included."
No doubt this is a two way street. Depending on the popularity of a game, piracy is going to help or hinder.
Those games that have massive massive popularity, helped along by friends copying from friends, will still manage to make money. By becoming legendary, they guarantee enough sales to keep a company or lone developer going.
Unfortunately for those games which are less popular, piracy is just going to dig in HARD to the smaller income, and what happens to those developers? the ones making some headway into a business but still need a little more skill. They lose out completely, the gaming industry for them becomes nothing but something to suck their time and energy.
In the end all that happens is we're left with the huge gaming houses (Sony sponsored ones, for example) and the odd few developers who are lucky enough to get it right first time. The raw up and coming talent gets whacked down with a big pirated 2"x4" as soon as they make an effort. You could say that they don't deserve success without the effort and without the ability to overcome obstacles, but games aren't about making developers work hard. It's about letting the really good ideas come to fruition and work for us as players.
Lies, deceit and propaganda - the state of Broadband in Australia
But if he couldn't afford to buy it, and thus wouldn't have, no money is lost.
If they had no value to you, you wouldn't want to copy them anyway.
Having no value and having a value less than $50 are two different things. There's plenty of games out there that people wouldn't mind playing for free, but would never consider paying $50 for. The Sims comes to mind.
I don't even want to bother discussing any ethics involved with piracy right now. I know tons of people have their own opinions about that kind of thing. The one thing I do want to say, however, is that with an easy (and free) way to obtain video games, a lot of developers are realizing that if the game is crap, people aren't going to buy it. To a certain extent that pisses them off because they can't make any money churning out horrible titles (of course this doesn't always work in real life because of the idiots that countless sequel regardless of quality). If I ever pirate a game, I use it almost like a demo, I play it for a while, and should I really consider a quality game that I enjoy, I'll go out and buy the whole thing just to support the folks that made it. I believe that if every one else treated piracy like this, then it wouldn't be too much of a problem. But there are folks out there that only pirate and don't give any returns by buying 'em... -E
It's not just to recover R&D costs, it's also to cover the vast majority of games that bomb. There are definitely way too many games made these days, and I think a lot of companies would be better off if they took the Blizzard route rather than "Quick, crank out more WW2 FPSes" route.
Am I the only one who kind of tuned out after (or even before) reading this?
COMPUTER! Whatever happened to Blueberry Muffin?
Imagine a cute fluffy puppy, frolicking happily and wagging its silly puppy tail. Imagine someone offering that puppy a lovely pig's ear. Think of the bright eyes and lolling tongue of the cute little puppy as the treat is offered, imagine the little nosie twitching in anticipation. then imagine that just as the puppy goes to take it, the pig's ear is harshly snatched away, and the bearer gives the poor little puppy a hefty kick in the nuts.
That is what pirates do
How did this get passed the mods? it's meaningless and boring, poorly-executed humor. There is no news, at all, anywhere here.
You know what that's called? A troll. I call bullshit.
If piracy is good for the industry, then it should be encouraged, right? Unfortunately, once piracy reaches a certain point, it destroys the industry.
This is really no different than the outsourcing issue. It's just one group of people who already benefit from a market of plenty seeking to deprive others of their share and keep it for themselves. The ever-famous something for nothing.
Just pay for the game.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
If you're such a retro gamer you should definitely know who Jeff Mitner is...
It doesn't matter if it helps spread games (I'm sure lots of things would spread if they were completely free!) or bring it to more people.
One doesn't have the right to violate the rights of the copyright holders and spread their intellectual material everywhere. It just doesn't matter what justifications are given because it's still illegal and no permission was given by the copyright holder.
I remember Nintendo busting ROM sites, and people were saying, "B-but Nintendo doesn't even sell these games anymore!" It didn't matter--it was Nintendo's property and they had the right. And of course fast-forward to now, and Nintendo is planning several old NES releases for the GBA, as well as compilations coming out for the Gamecube.
Copyright holders' rights are being completely ignored. Well, except when it's a GPL violation article, that is! Suddenly copyright enforcement becomes a really big deal then...
It's a kind of checks & balances system if you ask me. The video game industry has become such a gold rush that people are packaging sun-dried dog turds and selling them at premium prices. To me, buying a game, realizing you don't like it and returning it to EB or something is just as bad, if not worse (cd key now compromised, thus it starts to really cost companies money after a while, especially when you multiply it by millions of people) than pirating a copy with an unuseable CD key and seeing if you like it.
.02..
These days, "FPS" and "Online Multiplayer" aren't enough to warrant a $50 pricetag. What if the interface sucks? What if the framerate sucks? What if the internet playability is crippled? What if etc, etc, etc. People are sick of wasting money on crappy games.
A solution: All videogame companies' business model (or roadmap for a particular game) should include a full-featured demo (limited to 1 map only, or something similar), which includes multiplayer, internet support, all that, BEFORE the retail release of the game. If you do this, and your game is good, people will respond, embrace it and not worry about pirating it and just go buy it (in most cases). It's no different than listening to records in a record store before you buy them. I'm sick of seeing demos for games come out months after the retail version is released. In my opinion, this is practically asking for pirates to "check out the game" before buying it.
Bottom line: If your game is good, people will buy it.
My
...being FEMALE!
Or at least, that seems to be the gist of Jeff Minter's anti-piracy argument.
I couldn't even finish reading his article.
Piracy is directly related to convenience which is only indirectly related to price.
It's much easier to just download something than it is to go out and pay for it. Once you are familiar with the avenues for acquiring illicit software it's easy. It's as easy as searching on Google. Software on tap. Want to see what this-and-this game is like? 40 minutes later I've got the leaked ISO and with Alcohol 120% I don't even need to burn it. No credit card bills, no going to the ATM, no driving to the store, no waiting for the official release date. Is this game worth $50 to me? Is it worth $20 to me? Is it worth $5 to me? I don't even need to think about it because it's $0 every time.
Ok.. solution.. just give away the software right? Wrong! I'm too lazy to even pay for it after I've played it and enjoyed it. Pay for it... that requires getting a credit card or going somewhere... pain in the ass and it's time I don't need to spend because I've already played it.
The only reason this is working for the games industry is because the people that get all the games are walking advertisements. Whenever they open their mouths and talk about a game the word of mouth is worth more than a spot during the Super Bowl. That and, for most people the convenience is not there. They don't know P2P, they don't know where the crack sites are, they don't want to figure it out. These people are the ones paying, but if it ever comes to the point where it's just as easy to pirate there's little holding them back.
Are there people that pay because of morals? Sure. Should we ever count on the morality of the common man? God help us, no.
Convenience is king. If it's ever easier to buy a game than pirate it then we'd all be buying them. But for those of us that know how to pirate it's much, much easier on so many levels.
as of late their are fewer and fewer pc (windows) games coming out and more moving to the increasingly impressive and inexpensive consoles. Consoles have a great many advantages over pc to both the user and the companies making games for them. Piracy on consoles is possible but considerably more difficult (did u see the modchip install on a ps2 its insane - 40 points all over the board connected to the chip via wires).
And with the fact that realistically i dont think their will be much more native development for linux thats not bad. Ill continue to run linux on my pc and game with my ps2.
What nobody mentions, and most dare not say is that piracy is a reponse of the market to unbearbly high prices on software.
;).
Piracy is a competitive factor - if companies price too high compared to the features or quality of a product, people don't pay.
If companies start doing anticompetitive shit or in general, perform actions that piss the customers off, they lose sales to piracy.
If more executives would realise that they are in the end to blame for piracy THEMSELVES, we would have much much less piracy. But no, they insist on releasing full upgrades ever other year - at full price. But the gain in productivity for most users is negligible.
Does anyone here seriously think that say, the jump from Office 97 to Office 2000 or 2000 to XP made them a lot more productive? Did Photoshop 5.5 to 6 make you more productive ? How about Mac OS X 10.2 to 10.3 (yes i dare say, keep in mind that I'm a Mac user myself, so no flames please
Piracy is mostly due to the customer base being pissed off.
If some modicum of honesty is telling you not to steal, listen to it. There are lots of alternatives. Wait till the game has been out a while and is in the bargin bins. Have your kids mow an extra lawn or two. Cook them dinner instead of taking them to McDonald's for a huge dose of fat. Subscribe to a gamer mag and get demos to the latest games on CD so they can try them out, have fun, and decide which games they REALLY want.
Do you really want your kids to be learning to steal at age 10 and 13? Is it really that critical that they have the very latest game that they may play for 30 minutes and decide is crap?
Having no value and having a value less than $50 are two different things. There's plenty of games out there that people wouldn't mind playing for free, but would never consider paying $50 for. The Sims comes to mind.
But that doesn't justify anything. If there's something you would be willing to play for free but not be willing to pay $50 for, guess what? You just don't buy it. You move onto something else.
I mean, if someone's actually going to justify piracy with "Well, I just didn't want to pay that much," you'd have to be pretty silly to think that's a valid argument that's going to fly. It doens't matter if it was priced more than you could afford--that just means you don't buy it and move on. Or wait until it drops in price. It's called capitalism.
You can't violate copyright holder rights just because you didn't like how they priced their product. Hell, I remember those old shareware games you could buy for $10-$15, and people still pirated them. Why? Because if given the chance, people just like to get things for free instead of paying for them. It doesn't really matter how much they're priced if you can just go onto eMule and grab whatever you want for free--people will download it no matter what.
I refuse to pirate games. I really believe that unlike the music industry, games aren't really that over priced. I never understood until I started programming how long it takes to do even simple things sometimes. When I look at a game I see the millions of lines of code, the hours of artwork, and the sheer amount of time spent to get the sound right. For a really good game, $50 is not a bad price to pay. Unfortunately that price is a bit much for starving college students like myself. Is pirating tempting? You betcha. Is $50 too much for the majority of the games found at your local Wal-Mart? Definately. Consequently I think that instead of complaining about the price, we should all just be really selective about what we buy. I won't drop $50 for anything less than a HALO, Half Life 2, or Metroid Prime quality game. If anything else looks even remotely interesting I grab it from Gamefly. The point is stealing at any level is wrong. I also don't buy into the "Sampling a lot of games is expensive" bit. Not when I can go to Blockbuster or GameFly and rent as many games as I can handle in a month for $20. Every game out there has somebodys blood, sweat, and tears in it. The least I can do is show them a little respect and pay for their work if I play it.
The entire issue of piracy is not an issue of whether or not the developers are getting paid for their efforts, or whether the people who copy and distribute are stealing.
Beneath the entire issue of copying and cost is the point that there has not been the order of magnitude increases of productivity in the software development field that there has been in the hardware field. This is because software developers refuse to press for new types of software writing tools that will make it possible to develop a commercial game in 1/10 of the time that it takes today.
Software is basically a 'cost-plus' industry. Developers take as long as they like to make their product and then add up the number of hours and expected sale units and price each unit accordingly. There is no incentive to conceive and code whole new classes of development tools that will give order-of-magnitude in productivity.
This is the real reason that software costs so much and why the developers get so upset about copying. But, hell, most of them are still using C or C++: the most backward, cryptic, and unproductive languages imagineable.
Software development has really changed since the early 1970's. Although, it's not completely the software community's fault. Every time they begin to feel that the tools that they are working with are inadaquate, the hardware people come up with a order-of-magnitude performance increase that sends back to assembly language (like the microprocessor did to the VAX in the mid-1970's, and the flash Harvard-bus microcontroller did to the microprocessor in the mid-1980's, and the net did to the PC in the 1990's, and the next-big-thing will do in a few years).
Piracy is GOOD because when developers can't make enough under the old approach, they will actually be forced to develop the tools that will allow to get the order-of-magnitude gain in productivity that has been eluding them since the development of the first compiliers (40 years ago).
If Intel was a software development company they would be pissed that they can't charge $100 for an 8088 anymore, and would be taking legal action to remedy the situation in the interest of fairness.
Those against piracy seem to clench onto the idea that if games are pirated, then there availability is decreased because there's less incentive for companies to produce games. And, at a certain level of piracy there would be no games made. Consumers as pirates are aware of this, but they're also aware of more.
They're aware that with the production of the games comes also the production of the desire for the games. The hype surrounding them. They know if all of sudden there were no games, their lives would not be directly affected negatively in any important way. "Oh, no new games? I guess I'll just go outside and play shoot some hoops." There is no natural desire to create grand, expensive, consumeristic forms of entertainment. There is merely a natural desire for entertainment itself. Without the production of games people are without desire for the games, and so will merely do something else for entertainment, and be no less happy. Piracy is a strategy of the masses. An unsaid(unrecognized?) strategy to save the product of their work created with the knowledge that all is relativistic.
Sounds a lot like the music industry. Do we really want the gaming industry turning into that?
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
If I spent time, energy and money creating something, why don't I have the right to say "if you want to enjoy the fruits of my labor you must pay me $50."
Is that so wrong? Is that terribly evil?
It's just a collection of monkeys who want something for nothing and will go to whatever ends to justify it.
Yeah yeah. There is a blurry line of what to call it. Theft, while not entirely descriptive of the crime, is pretty darn close. If the owner of something hasn't granted you the right to that something, then you have no business using it. You are benifiting from someone elses work without compensating them for it.
If this had been a story about how a company was redistributing a GPL'd program in binary form only, there would be countless posts from zealots crying bloody murder on the part of that evil entity. But an opinion about how taking software without permission is wrong yields retards who think they have some inherint right to whatever they lay their grubby hands on.
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
That's all well and good if you want to play some single player action game or something, but what about fighting games, RTS's, FPS's and the myriad of other games who have a relatively short single player experience (in the case of fight games often a half hour or less!) but provide as much entertainment and time as you're willing to put into them in multiplayer and/or mastering them.
Ah, I see. Along with bankruptcy protection, and tax breaks for businesses that lose money, we also have to pay for their failed products, even if we had the good sense not to buy those products explicitly when they were on sale. Gee, thanks. I feel much better about pirating stuff now. If when I make legitimate purchases I'm paying for stuff I didn't get then it's only fair that I get some stuff for which I didn't pay. P2P. Power to the people.
Well, see, it already is.
The equivalent of "payola" in computer gaming - and in many other industries - is hype. Hyped titles get picked up by retailers because they're seen as more likely to sell. If no money is spend on hype, the producers will instead have to spend money paying retailers to carry their product.
You can then throw in the "payola" of console development kits. They're vital for access to the wider market of gamers, but not only are they astronomically expensive, you can't even buy them unless you're already an industry member - instant chicken-and-egg.
It's happened plenty before. Like, Spheres of Chaos - that was sent to a distributor to be put in stores, but because it wasn't hyped or paid for, no retailers carried it. The distributor just shrugged their shoulders and said "if they don't want to carry it there's nothing we can do". Or, Alien Flux. A guy worked on that for around a year and tried to sell it over the internet. But without paying for hype, he initially sold about 5 copies because people couldn't be bothered to shop around and find out it existed.
No matter how many arguments anyone may have against intellectual property, bandwidth theft is "real" theft.
Member of Orkut? Annoyed with spam?
Okay, I've been around a while. I've seen piracy in the form of ZIP disks of Police Quest 1 on the local warez BBSes. I've met the biggest warez pirates out there, the type that have 4 drawer file cabinets FILLED with photocopied manuals, and disk boxes stuffed with 3.5" disks that complety filled closets.
A few observations. In my youth, my parents could have never afforded to buy me the programs I pirated. They did buy me some software, thousands of dollars worth over the years. Boredom and curiosity led me to download other games, but I never spent much time playing them. Heck, there were Sierra games I never spent much time playing (Space Quest III was the BOMB though!).
In terms of applications, when I got older it helped me out in terms of being familiar with business applications. 14 year olds don't normally need Autocad, 16 year old's can't afford 3d Studio. Once you hit the business world though, things change. Lets not forget though, some prices are artificially high (Abobe bought and killed Aldus Photostyler which was awesome, eliminating competitive products, etc).
Another thing, the warez people like to collect programs. Many of them don't use them, it is just some sort of wierd obsession with collecting programs in mass. Given the amount of time it takes to play or complete a game, can someone with 2900 games in their pirate library really utilize them?
Given the costs of software, if every person bought all of their software at retail prices and there was no piracy, do you think many people would possess skills with apps like Photoshop? I can't think of many cases at all where I've not purchased a program (having the money to do so) and opted to warez the software.
I think the console games are priced as they are because the market will bear it, and there are many young adults that have jobs, living with parents, who can afford to pay the $70 or whatever it costs now for a single medicore playstation title.
Look at ID software, they made good titles and profited well. I know their stuff was pirated, but people with the money purchased the games.
A friend pirates every new game. He buys the good ones. I've seen the stacks of boxes, I'm sure he spends well over $2k a year in new releases. He was one of the evil pirates that had Dreamcast and other console hacks. What if pirates are your biggest customers?
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
I think he's well respected for his programming ability perhaps, but the stuff he produces has never really impressed me. He doesn't seem to have gotten past his fascination with psychedelic palette rotation-- a trick which was already old in the Commodore 64 days. He's a stoner with a knack for assembly language who hasn't done anything particularly noteworthy as far as I can tell. Gridrunner++ is, at best, a nostalgia game; a throwback to the C64 days. His only other project of late, Unity, sounds like it's going to be a 3D shooter full of more psychedelic crap. I respect him for what he did once, twenty years ago, but he's certainly no Sid Meier.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I'm absolutely certain this post will get ripped to shreds, but let's have at anyhow...
First off, yes, piracy is wrong - in the legal sense, it is absolutely wrong.
Morality is a different issue, however. Morality is relative to the person. Ask someone in the 1800s if pre-marital coitus was immoral, and you'd get a resounding yes. Ask folks now, and that resounding yes has stifled to a trickling maybe. Same act, same ramifications, different response.
Now, take into account that different people justify piracy to themselves for different purposes. To some, piracy is free entertainment. To others, it is a way to make money. To still others, it's a way to try the real deal before sinking THEIR hard earned money into what may be an over-hyped POS. I would personally argue that the first 2 groups are absolutely in the moral wrong. However, for me at least, the third group is a gray area. We have the right of the developer not to be ripped off for their hard work, versus the right of the consumer not to be ripped off for the hard work they did to earn the money. Morally, it's an impasse. The only decisive input is the law.
Bottom line, not all developers are starving artists, and not all pirates are immoral greed-fiends.
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A) Directly contributed to the Growth of the video game market.
Reasoning... I've seen many people who pirate a good game and love it, eventually by the game. Why? Because after awhile you get tired of looking for cracks for the latest patch etc. And most people pirate because of a lack of money... when they get older, the tend to buy if they can.
B) Piracy of Computer Games and Software made Microsoft the monopoly it is today.
Reasoning... People wanted DOS/Windows because Apple and other OS vendors didn't have the game support for all the pirated computer games we played. Many Others who saw the fun factor of Windows and weren't savvy enough to pirate, had to go out and BUY the stuff they wanted...
Did I say piracy was a bad thing?
Games decline in price very quickly. So this is not a justification at all. The reason that piracy occurs is that these guys want it both ways -- they want the very latest but don't want to pay for it.
games are requiring hardware farther and further towards the bleeding edge of technology $500-$600 Video cards, etc.
I'm not familiar with any such games, but then I don't insist on owning all the latest games. If you need the latest technology, then pay for it and quit whining.
And I have far too many friends who have been laid off after a project due to sales not panning out as hoped. The games usually however did great in various warez avenues. Most of them have moved to console development, where piracy still exists, but in far far smaller numbers.
Anyone who thinks piracy helps the developer is not a true developer who's livelihood is made or broken by the sales numbers of their game. My money says Mr. Psuedonym works for a publisher...if a game sells poorly they fire the dev team and write off the game as a loss.