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An In-Depth Look At Game Piracy
TweakGuides is running a detailed examination of PC game piracy. The author begins with a look at the legal, moral, and monetary issues behind copyright infringement, and goes on to measure the scale of game piracy and how it affects developers and publishers. He also discusses some of the intended solutions to piracy. He provides examples of copy protection and DRM schemes that have perhaps done more harm than good, as well as less intrusive measures which are enjoying more success. The author criticizes the "culture of piracy" that has developed, saying. "Fast forward to the 21st century, and piracy has apparently somehow become a political struggle, a fight against greedy corporations and evil copy protection, and in some cases, I've even seen some people refer to the rise of piracy as a 'revolution.' What an absolute farce. ... Piracy is the result of human nature: when faced with the option of getting something for free or paying for it, and in the absence of any significant risks, you don't need complex economic studies to show you that most people will opt for the free route."
Piracy is what happens near Somalia right now. Oh, you meant copyright infringement? Nevermind...
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Well, there's always a third route: Not getting that something, meaning that having these three options:
- 1. Play for free
- 2. Play at a cost
- 3. Don't play at all
Many people will sort it 1,3,2.
Also, some people will happily do 2,1,3 as long the price is reasonable and so it what they get.
So... stop trying to get money from people who just don't value your product if it isn't free, because it can't be done. You can piss them off though, and that can hurt your business.
If i buy the game. They treat me like a thief. Install things that may or may not fuckup my computer or game. Require the disk to be in the drive. Require activation and other bullshit. Limit the number of installs i can do. Tell me what programs i'm not allowed to use like daemon tools. And costs a shitload for a semi-beta game.
If i pirate the game. I don't have any of that. AND it's free.
Piracy. Better product, lower price.
You're kinda foolish not to pirate anymore...
Yes, but that's subjective. For me, no game is worth more than $5. Not because I'm cheap, but because I hardly ever play, and if it do, it's only for a while. So if you want to get $50 from me you are going to let me play like 10 different games or so. Note that I would still play less time than most gamers.
It's possible though that the model that they'd need to make me a regular customer is just not viable. I don't really care as these days I can live without games. But when I played a lot I couldn't really afford all the games I wanted, and now that I can -within reason- I just don't feel like playing.
It has always been called piracy. File sharing is a new term that has come into use with p2p software. File sharing is arguably distinctly different, and you probably dont want to muddy the waters between legal filesharing, and illegal piracy.
The article goes on an extensive analogy about DRM equaling Door Locks, and it completely misses the point. Yes, DRm prevents the majority of hackers from being able to do anything to the actual, hard copy of the game. This is worthless, though. All it take is for one person to break through the protection and upload it to a torrent site, and then everybody with internet access can have the game for free. It does not matter that most people couldn't break the encryption themselves. They don't need to, because somebody else already has.
Do you have any idea how long it takes to dig graves for twenty-three oak trees?
The bottom line is that the Scene provides better long-term support then most game companies ever have, and I only like to buy the games that I can and will indefinitely far into the future, which usually requires some variety of cracks and emulators, which is why even the games I have bought in the past are not installed in favor of the infringed+enhanced versions.
Some of the copy-protection schemes are also designed to try and kill the secondary ("used games") market off by locking out copies from being reactivated.
The mindset of some of these companies is that a game (or other software) has to generate revenue for them each time it changes hands. In other words, they refuse to accept the "first sale doctrine" at all.
Buying one copy and distributing multiple copies to others is piracy. Uninstalling the thing and giving the disk and key to someone else is not.
It all boils down to greed and control, really.
Piracy is the result of human nature: when faced with the option of getting something for free or paying for it, and in the absence of any significant risks, you don't need complex economic studies to show you that most people will opt for the free route."
The article summary includes the following quote, but it doesn't actually seem to be the case if you actually study the issue. In many studies it has been shown that "honor systems" result in fewer thefts than systems where there are technological or potential criminal penalties. In many, many cases building a system of trust and relying upon people's morals and ethics is the most effective solution.
I scanned this article and then gave up because it seemed unoriginal and completely one-sided. If you can't even understand the perspective of people on one side of an issue, how can you rant for so many pages about your perspective on it?
That's what calculus is for. It's so that the people selling the software/music/media/stuff/whatever can graph the people willing to pay against the price. Then they plot their expected profits for each price against that in order to find the optimal price.
People like you and me and anyone else who thinks the products are overpriced are not going to buy them. Either the companies making the products will be forced to lower the price to a more optimal one, or they will be able to keep it at the same price.
The problem is that they are claiming loss of sales for piracy done by people who never would have bought the game in the first place since the price is not right.
Granted, I am not a gamer and don't even bother to download these things since I don't have the time to play them, so take my gaming specific claims with a grain of salt.
I'm already there, you ignorant clod!
People will pirate when it's overpriced. When it's right-priced, most people will gladly pay for it.
It's simple - you don't like the price, don't buy it. Wait for the price to drop. Simply because you don't like the price doesn't mean you can copy the item for free and somehow think it's not stealing.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
People will pirate when it's overpriced. When it's right-priced, most people will gladly pay for it.
Overpricing is an intrinsic function of monopoly pricing. Revenue is maximized when raising the price would result in so many fewer copies sold that the extra per-copy income no longer outweighs the loss of copies sold.
That means that prices will simply be raised until many consumers simply cannot afford it (arguments like the original articles claims about economies of scale simply indicate lack of economic understanding; less piracy would mean _higher_ price, monopoly pricing limits are completely driven by customer dropoff, economies of scale apply to competitively enforced pricing).
The consumers making up the difference between those who would have bought the product at the lowest-possible competitively priced point and those who would have bought at the monopoly priced point are consumers for whom a free market system would have provided the good, while still allowing it to be produced. The loss of the value they would have derived is known as dead-weight loss, and is one of the most damaging aspects of monopoly laws like copyright. Piracy mitigates that loss of wealth somewhat, and introduces a certain element of competition into the market, keeping prices down, but it's a bad workaround for a problem that could be solved in more productive ways.
So any kind of rightpricing is fundamentally impossible while the monopoly aspects of the IP system are intact. Articles like this one that buy the IP lobbies arguments hook, line and sinker (assuming ignorance) are hardly productive. The author should do a little less fast-forwarding and a little more actual studying of why the debate has moved beyond his views.
Except.... you can get a car for $2000.
If no car is worth more to someone then $2000 , that person may very well end up with a car.
Back in ye olden days, things were released to the public domain after a reasonable number of years--- effectively allowing the price to change over time.
Nowadays, with copyright extended effectively indefinitely (few things that are made within my lifetime will have copyright expire within my lifetime.... ) there is a massive problem in how our culture is disseminated. File sharing has arisen partially as an effort to fulfill that gap.
After seeing indie games on bittorrent that cost 5 bucks if purchased I don't think your reasoning holds through. Some people will not purchase at any price, and will pirate it. Price is completely subjective and rarely dictates the quality of the product,, but the perception of quality. The iPhone App Store is a great representation of this. There are a lot of programs that are free, so people start to get the impression that all apps should be free. There are useful apps for $1 that some reviewers consider overpriced. You can't find an app on the app store, no matter the price, that some people will say is overpriced, when these are the same people who will go and buy a $60 game for their XBox, play it for less time than the iPhone app's usefulness, and not think anything of it. If games drop in price to, say, $20. People will find any higher variation of that price "overpriced" as their perception of the price of games now will be worth $20 instead of the $60 they're paying now.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
http://www.filesavr.com/i/piracy.png
The Constitution gives Congress the power...
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
But when people can "renew" these copyrights indefinitely, progress is not being promoted, but stifled.
That's where the second hand market comes in. Need a cheap car? Buy a used junker. Don't want to pay $50 or $60 for a new game that you'll only play for a couple hours? Buy it used. Oh wait, they want to use DRM and activations to shut down that market too.
Fuckers.
As for the people who claim that all pirated game are lost sales, they are wrong. Many of those "lost sales" would never have been made, just as Microsoft can't count me as a lost sale since I use a different OS. I'm simply not their customer, just as many of those "lost sales" would never have taken place if piracy prevention were 100% effective. This is similar to their problem with people selling used games. People sell their used games mostly so that they can buy new games, so it's not like the money doesn't get to them anyway, and the used games "grow the market", same as selling a used car.
I agree - most of the pirated software would not be bought; so saying we loss xx billions/year to piracy is simply wrong. All their seeing is there is a large demand at a free price point - demand that goes away as price rises.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I call bullshit on this article, from a number of different angles!
One of the biggest reasons is lack of logical coherence. The author cites lots of numbers, but then does not actually put them together in an objective way to actually support his conclusions. In fact, his conclusions appear to be foregone. He seems to have ignored a good body of evidence that would lead to different conclusions.
For one example, he cites an article about game piracy on Macs. The article mentions the "pirate's argument" that it is okay to pirate because that person would not have bought the product anyway, therefore there is no lost sale. However, the article only discusses this topic from the point of view of whether it makes a valid moral or ethical argument.
The cited article (and main article too) ignore that several university studies have in fact shown that somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% of piracy occurs when there would not have been a sale anyway. (In most cases because there was insufficient money to purchase the product, but there are several other reasons this occurs.) That may not be a sound ethical argument in favor of piracy, but that is irrelevant. More to the point: it is an economic reality. Economic realities are; they exist. Simply putting them down as unethical is to ignore the actual causes, and possible solutions, for the situation. Further, trying to prosecute -- and especially fine -- people for not buying a product they probably could not afford to buy anyway is completely counterproductive. It offers no societal solutions to the actual problem; it simply fosters fear and antagonism. And backlash, as the RIAA and MPAA are finding out, probably too late to do them much good. They were warned by the society of their customers, but they did not listen.
In another example of faulty logic, the author indulges in the classic logical Post Hoc fallacy argument to conclude that piracy causes DRM, not the other way around. (For those not familiar, this is the argument that because one thing happened after another, the earlier event must have caused the later event. This does not follow: in fact it is just as likely that some third event caused them both.) In particular, he states that a game that was released with no DRM resulted in lots of downloads, then claims that "The evidence is overwhelmingly clear: DRM does not cause piracy, piracy results in DRM." When in fact his "evidence" shows nothing of the sort.
As a systems manager and tech (and now Software Engineer) with many years experience, I can testify that there are a great many cases where, in fact, DRM causes piracy. One example is when I worked for an engineering company, which used quite a few proprietary programs for certain involved, specialized calculations. Many of those programs came with various forms of DRM. And I can tell you this in complete honesty: every one of the programs that used DRM failed on us. Almost always at an important point in the project. And I mean that literally: every single one of them failed, without exception. And in every case, the cause of the failure was the DRM. Further, our calls to support for the software were almost always unproductive: "You must not have installed it properly." or "You must have been tampering with the copy protection". Nonsense. We had paid a lot of good money for the software and were not about to treat it so casually.
In such cases, we were forced to either try to break the DRM ourselves, or to try to find a cracked version of the software, just to get the functionality we had already paid for! Which technically made us pirates. But it was DRM that forced us into piracy, not the other way around. Keep in mind that this was specialty software for which there was often no alternative product available. But just FYI, the invariable DRM failures did cause us to look for alternative products. Our official company policy became (this is true): "If there are alternative products available,
When we talk about piracy, we say the desire to get less for more is a moral failing that must be fought and punished. When we talk about the market, this same desire is used as a justification: there's no point fighting human nature. So we have piracy, a practice driven by greed, coming up against a system, the market, also driven by greed. How do we know which greed is good and which one is bad? If this fellow really thinks piracy is human nature, then he should stop trying to fight what can't be changed and instead find a system that works with it. But that rules out moral indignation, and it can be more satisfying to pronounce on good and evil than to seek workable solutions.
Now I don't think satisfying one's greed is admirable, and I'm skeptical of claims for some immutable human nature. Adam Smith argued not for outright greed, but for enlightened self-interest. Too often in this debate, all the enlightenment is expected to be on one side, while all the self-interest is on the other.
So if "piracy" can only refer to seaway robbery, does "hacking" only mean to chop a physical object in a random manner with a bladed instrument? Or is our language flexible and capable of multiple meanings and nuances?
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
What kind of pseudo-intellectual babble is that?
There is already a competitive market for creative works - if you don't want to play Spore you're welcome to play another game instead, and get your entertainment that way. Your whole argument is ludicrous, it suggests that a specific apple in the fruit store would have an infinitely high price because the fruit store has a monopoly on that specific, shiny, juicy apple ... unless you steal it, in which case the price becomes more reasonable.
On an aside, "hacking" to refer to the illegal use of computers only arose from the term used to describe people who were particularly competent with computers. Little to do with physical "hacking".
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Well, if they're in the US, they're getting the torrent from ThePirateBay (which is in Europe), and they're downloading pieces of it from all over the world, then technically you could say they're stealing shit on the high seas. After all, most of the international tubes pass through the high seas.
Well, that's sort of the point isn't? The term "hacking" has multiple meanings some of which aren't related to each other and some of which are.
... taken alone each synonym has a completely unrelated meaning.
Why make language drab and limit copyright infringement to a single word? We don't do that for other activities, e.g., murder: off, end, terminate, hit, rub out, take out
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Bullshit. If AAA titles were 20 bucks they would still get downloaded. Anyone who can afford the hardware to run these titles can spring $60 to buy the game. People download them because it is free and easy, and then try to rationalize it by saying that if it were less expensive or of higher quality or DRM free or if the big evil corporation that published it wasn't so greedy they would have paid for it. Hell, a new CD costs 10-15 bucks these days but people still download the shit out of those too.
An Apple isnt infinatelty replicable within a short space of time. Every piece of software (Or the software categories) becomes a market within itself.
Stop using bad analogies. Spore isnt an apple, and the guy you are flaming is using sound business knowlege to make a valid point. You are using a bad analogy about apples and getting theft and copyright infringement mixed up.
Your post couldnt be more wrong if it claimed that the earth was flat.
You completely miss the point. There is a vast difference between someone letting you use their work for free of their own free will and taking their work against their will.
The cake is a pie
However if people pirate the game now, then they're never going to buy it later, even if the publisher reduces the price.
Additionally, if you're used to getting games for free, suddenly any cost seems "overpriced" in relation to what you've previously been paying.
I wish to remain anomalous
It sounds more to me like you're just not a very strong business-person. That's not meant as a slight: the "best" automakers in the USA are busy begging for money 'cause they've screwed up. Lots of smart business people lost money with lousy businesses in the dot-boom. There's plenty of examples where plenty of people can't run a business.
Newsflash: Business is hard. Starting a business is really hard.
Plenty of small business (you are/were a small business) would kill for 400k+ customers. That you were unable to monetize this stream isn't the fault of piracy. In fact, piracy gave you almost 10x the customer base.
Lots of artists are waking up to the fact that the biggest threat to their economic viability as an artist isn't piracy: it's obscurity. Someone who has never heard of you is never going to give you any money. Someone who pirates your work might give you some money either directly (concerts, tee's etc) or indirectly, by marketing you to their friends (who then either give money directly or indirectly, rinse, repeat, profit!)
Plenty of small business don't make any money at all in the first few years. They need investments to pay the bills. That you were able to make an income that can pay the bills means you had a successful business growing. Sure, you're not going to drive a Porsche on $27k/yr, but you can live on it - I have lived on less. And if you could figure out how to get those 400k people to give you a few bucks every year then you'd have that Porsche by now.
Stop blaming other people for your problems.
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?