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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."
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
50 bucks for Max Pain 2?! For 5 friggin hours of gameplay?
Yea there are alot of games I have downloaded but could not play online multiplayer because my cd key was invalid, but since I liked the game so muc h I bought it so I could get the valid cd key.
if im not going to buy them anyway, does anyone lose out?
If they had no value to you, you wouldn't want to copy them anyway.
Ergo, they do have value to you - which means that you should pay for them.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
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
why not paying the games by approved hours of gameplay they provide??
and why are there nofurther adventures ala "monkey island" ?
---
awake and alert!
-Penguin Mints
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.
Something that I've observed lately with a lot of games has been that cracks have come out that will support an early version of the release. Once the game-crippling bugs have been fixed (corruption in low ver Civ3 anyone?), the crackers have either moved on, or the software has been changed to the point that the game is no longer crackable.
What does this have to do with anything? Well, for one, there has been a great deal of games that my friends and myself have bought that there is no way we would have without a "Try before you buy" version floating around. I mean, who really wants to shell out $50 for 5 hours of MP2? If I'm going to be spending $10 an hour on personal entertainment, then she should have at least shaved that day.
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
First my Atari cartridges (early 80s) were so high because manufacturing was expensive, then the cassette tapes weren't sold in enough volume, etc. etc. Once a store salesmen told me prices were high because of piracy! Yeah, that's an incentive to buy your product, just yank the price up.
If I can buy a game for $10 at W-M or other big chain (put a $10 bill in a machine, press a button, a CD pops out) then I will buy other games than the overly-hyped big titles that occasionally come out. Of course I'm not talking about the Visual Basic games that are $10 now. Also a slot is nice where you can deposit a broken CD and new, clean one will pop out for free.
I don't want to pay a whole lot for box/manual artwork, TV advertising, and copy-protection licenses.
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.
by making their games so complicated and in depth that you NEED to have the manual to play it.
Then again, even with the rampant piracy of Doom and the Quake series in their day, I doubt that iD would trade places with 3000AD.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Sam and Max 2 and Full Throttle 2 were both canned by Lucas Arts. Although the details are sketchy, I have long suspected it's because pirating single player games is stupidly easy.
Grim Fandango is largely heralded as the greatest adventure game of all time, and yet it's sales were weak. Incidentally, the 2-disc set is avaiable at suprnova.org as of this moment for your pirating pleasure.
Multiplayer games are harder to pirate simply because you need a unique CD-key to get on the networks. Blizzard and Valve are experts at this.
Not to say that piracy is killing the single player genre (Knights of the Old Republic for example), but multiplayer games are a safer bet if you're trying to avoid piracy.
Corporations: your universal scapegoat for all society's ills.
When I was 8-15 or so I pirated every game I played. My parents sure as hell wouldn't have paid for them.
This year alone I have paid nearly $200 for computer games and we are only 5 months in. I will probably carry on spending about this much for the rest of my life.
Is this adequate compensation for getting me into video games and computing? I happen to think so. Piracy amongst the young should be tolerated (but not legalised because these things are a hell of a lot more fun when they are illegal) as long as they do it themselves rather than buying it from someone else.
Beep beep.
... but if this article is any indication, I would say he's a cunt.
But let's forget that, just for a second. I could forgive what a cunt he is, if only his article said anything new or different, made any unique or creative arguments against copyright violation, or indeed made ANY ARGUMENT AT ALL. But he fails to do that. Instead, he uses lots of profanity and random, irrelevant analogies, to what purpose my mind cannot fathom. He admits that "there is too much software out there, and yes, a lot of it is shit," and then rather than make a reasoned argument as to why we should be buying all this shitty software anyway, he falls back to another offensive analogy.
His one seemingly sensible argument is against a strawman: people who rebrand software and sell it as their own. Now, I don't know about you, but I have _never_ seen any claim that anyone is doing this in all the software "piracy" arguments I have ever read. It's a non-issue! People just don't DO it! Maybe, maybe they used to. But the issue here is file-swapping, and you know it, and I know it, and he knows it, and anything else is disingenuous.
And in case anybody would still argue in his favor because he is taking the "moral high ground," I recommend you read where he says that file-swapping in violation of copyright is not so bad after all, when MUSIC is being traded; no, it's only software that deserves the protection of the law. Double-standard, anyone?
No, not only does this Minter guy have nothing useful or intelligent to say, he's also a hyprocrite. In short, a cunt of the worst kind.
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
This might save you some money for 2 teenage gamers :)
please note though, I have yet to try it this service so this is not an endorsement... but the idea seems like such a good one (basically netflix for games) I am really just waiting till my next game to sign up.
meep
...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.
If you would pay for a title if you couldn't get a free copy, then you should (pay for it).
Making a copy of a game is only theft from the IP perspective, it costs the developer/distributer nothing. Choosing to make a copy of software/music/whatever instead of purchasing it does effectively cost the developer/distributer money.
That said, remember that even copying for evaluation or limited use is illegal. Be prepared to accept to consequences, or don't make the copy.
Try looking at free games. You'd be surprised how many there are. Of course most aren't worth playing, but that still leaves quite a bit.
Here's a few places to get started:
Remakes.org - remakes of many many classic games.
Freeware World Team - many categories including games.
Freestle freeware - small but good.
fullgames
world of free games
Feel free to suggest more / better resources.
P.S. So many console games drop to $20 if you're just willing to wait a year. The sports games are even cheaper if you don't absolutely need this year's updated roster. If you don't want to buy games at $50, just wait a bit.
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.
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.
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.
This is similar to any economy that has seen a new need/shift - required resources are not always properly rewarded/assigned.
The problem is that in the case of software bootlegging, it is that the individual end user is usually committing the harm(not some privateer or trader). This also directly effects the perceived piracy costs - if you think 1million people should want something at $30, but 30% will just copy it the market price then becomes $50 or so if you want to make most of what you feel you are owed. This ignores the fact that if it was only available at $30, then most of that 30% would probably not buy it anyway.
It comes down to costs for the user/buyer, and as it gets cheaper or more expensive, the number of buyers is not scaling linear(or generally modelable) to the revenue from them. So publishers randomly pick a sweet spot and hope(what the market will bare). What this means is that if you can only afford it at $30, but enough dumb/rich people want it at $50 then the publisher will be a success at $50(if publishers are happy with the number of dumb/rich people paying). If you want it, then you have to wait till there is no one wanting to buy it at any price between 50-30 or just copy it from someone who was rich enough.
The economics for different parts of the world dictate different prices for software. That is why piracy can be good for non-piracy users. ie. In countries with rampant piracy, publishers must compete on price and value.
Companies who have a strangle hold on a specific software domain (ie. MSFT) can do whatever they want once piracy is significantly small enough. If they can guarantee limited piracy then they can force you to buy the product at any price.
Piracy is also good for regular publishers. It creates a market where normally there would not be one. ie. People who should not be buying games, can afford them and get 'hooked' on the low priced ripoffs. Then a few years later, the pirates are removed producing a new market that the publisher would have never entered before. So everyone there either gets more money for this luxury or they trade some other luxury/need.
MSFT did this is many countries, even the US in the 80's. DOS 6.2 was free from their BBS for godsake! This made computers more easy to acquire and become prevalent and a requirement for business and education. Many application publishers got rich this way as then there are more people needing the next upgrade whether pirated or not. All that is left is to slowly crack down on pirates and add copy protection as the market will bare (ie. no new revolts of willful piracy).
Now with P2P and the internet, many things that relied on distribution being the anchor of the market value (ie. the value of geting physical CDs of software, music, even movies) are losing ground. The only publisher solution is to either prohibit copying someway or find another market value (hard for people like the RIAA/MPAA).
The natural tendency of piracy is to make something's value only the cost of distribution.
OT:
Things like F/OSS come from this notion of the value of a copy and the realization that somethings people will just need in a specific society. People using computers on the internet have to have certain software - OS, email, etc. and it is natural for people to develop 'public works' as it were to provide them legally.
This is also why FOSS companies can still succeed if they can bring additional value to market (consulting, support, etc.). FOSS should naturally have a stronger capablility to enter new markets(ie. it is allowing legal 'piracy' build the market for other valuable services).
The reason is simply because the rights of copyright holders are being stretched to breaking point.
Do you have the right to get paid for your work? Yes, of course you do, I don't believe that's an issue.
Do you have the right to STILL get paid now for the work you did 10 years ago? That's getting shaky. After all, if you leave your job, your boss doesn't carry on paying you because the firm is still making money using the stuff you worked on. (And you can bet that the same applies to the guys who actually wrote those early games, so all you do is pay the Nintendo execs.)
Saying "any justification doesn't matter because it's illegal" is rather daft. Something being illegal is not a state of nature, it's a decision made by people, and others have the right to question that decision (although not to ignore it).
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?
Would Nintendo know that there was a potential market to be exploited if there weren't ROM sites distributing their old games?
There was Cowboy Neal at the wheel of a bus to never-ever land.
No it hasn't!
Anyway I am not a developer but even I can see that things have changed. The languages have changed, the programs have changed, and the way programs are planned has changed. It might not all be for the better, but the fact is that as programs have grown more complex, things WILL have had to change.
Nonetheless, if you have an argument, make it - don't just be a negative nancy.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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!
Lots of people, people smarter than me, and probably smarter than you, are working on making software development more efficient. New development tools and new languages are invented all the time by people trying to make programming faster and/or easier.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Let's ask an 1828 copy of Webster's dictionary instead of you... as you don't seem to know what you're talking about.
Yep just as we thought. Copyright Infringment = Piracy.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
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.