Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes It's OK To Steal My Games
spidweb writes "One Indie developer has written a nuanced article on a how software piracy affects him, approaching the issue from the opposite direction. He lists the ways in which the widespread piracy of PC games helps him. From the article: 'You don't get everything you want in this world. You can get piles of cool stuff for free. Or you can be an honorable, ethical being. You don't get both. Most of the time. Because, when I'm being honest with myself, which happens sometimes, I have to admit that piracy is not an absolute evil. That I do get things out of it, even when I'm the one being ripped off.' The article also tries to find a middle ground between the Piracy-Is-Always-Bad and Piracy-Is-Just-Fine sides of the argument that might enable single-player PC games to continue to exist."
Me, I prefer the moral clarity that comes from seeing everything in black and white. If the founding fathers had taken the "middle ground" we never would have ended up with the Constitution, the most error-free and infallible document ever created.
You can get piles of cool stuff for free. Or you can be an honorable, ethical being. You don't get both.
Why not?
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
Much like indie music producers, many love to have their music 'pirated' because it means exposure. Like the old shareware days. Remember when Radiohead did that pay-what-you-want scheme? Not a bad idea. The sooner the content producers adapt to the new distribution models, eliminate the middle-men cartels that get all the cuts (old-school mentality), the sooner the gangsters of profit are shown that information generally wants to be 'free', finding a way to make people pay for it through their own generosity and good-will obligation, as to arm-twisting and draconian DRM, the sooner quality information can flourish, the sooner garbage that keeps our current signal-to-noise ratio so low begins to become weeded out.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there needs to be a front company to sell the work of somebody else. But I believe this should only be true for circumstances in that the producer(s) can't maintain the quality of their work, nor the channels of distribution in a manner that maintains the quality of the original product. But something that is self-contained awesomeness that has a fairly hands off approach, well, find ways to monetize it other than arm-twisting and litigation. This guy seems to get it.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
You can get piles of cool stuff for free. Or you can be an honorable, ethical being. You don't get both.
http://www.fedoraproject.org/
Palm trees and 8
Pfft... people should just stop giving the dinky flash people money so we'd get our interwebz back.
Reasonable people recognize this and go through life without calling people names.
You may feel piracy is wrong, and that's fine. We can agree to disagree. The Amish feel cell phones are wrong. We can agree to disagree. Tom Cruise feels psychiatry is wrong. Ok, he can go fuck himself.
a few of my buddies pirate games sometimes. but they usually end up buying the games because very often it is either very hard or impossible for them to get it to work online, which is where they play most of the time. so, basically, they pirate the game to see if they like it, and how well it works on there system, than, if it works well, and they like it (which is usually the case) they buy the game. so basically, it seems that if game companies made a demo (and a usuable demo, that was basically the full game with restrictions of some kind), they could cut down on some of the piracy. Like, Planetside, they had the entire game free for a while, but u could only level up to a certain point (level 6 if i remember, which isnt much, but it worked). and my friends and i played it for a while, and loved it, so we decided to pay for it so we could do more in the game, it just seems like a much smarter idea.
All those middle men are not ripping off their artists. They are ripping YOU off.
In the arts, powerful middle men sell fame to artists, and sell product to consumers. Artists get an acceptable deal if they reach the end of their contract while remanning creative, as they'll sell more shit for vastly more then.
Yet *some* artists would achieve fame anyways, maybe very different artists. YOU are deprived of them because some middle man made another choice about who becomes famous.
And middle men are ripping off the best artists by preventing an egalitarian competition for fame, obviously.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
"Information wants to be free." That's a fine statement to make if you already know what's being discussed--that is, you know the difference between free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer, but it's not a statement that is at all productive when speaking to an adversarial or even a divided crowd. Part of the problem is that the default meaning of "free" to most people is the "free beer" version. Put quite simply, most people spend far more people in their day to day lives thinking about money than they do about abstract legal concepts like free speech, and so whenever a well-meaning debater says, "Information wants to be free," that translates into most people's heads, by default, into: "I don't want to pay for information;" that is, you want to get everything for free. Yes, yes, I know that's not what the statement means, but it's a statement so easily misconstrued that it should really never be mentioned in a persuasive argument about copyrights, patents and trademarks if you want to actually try to persuade someone.
Similarly, I don't like to use the words "Intellectual Property," as that confuses the concepts of copyrights, trademarks, and patents with those of actual property, For the same reason I don't like the new mindset of calling such things "Imaginary Property," which in my mind is as juvenile as those people using M$ to denote Microsoft. Instead I try to use the acronym "CPT"--for Copyrights, Patents, and Trademarks--as a more accurate, and shorter, qualifier.
Yes, these word choices are a bit overly pedantic, but we need to be more diplomatic in our speech if we don't want discussions on CPT law to devolve into the same partisan shouting matches that everything else falls into.
He was speaking in terms of PC games. I've not seen a lot of high-quality PC games given away (Alien Swarm is the one recent exception that I know of).
The whole point of this article is what I've said in every piracy argument I've been involved in: if no one buys quality PC games, they won't be made any more. Buy the games you play. I'll go even further than the author: don't just buy one a year, you cheap schmucks. Buy anything you play for more than 10 hours.
The more money we sink into the PC games market, the healthier it will be. The more quality titles we support, the more we'll see of the same level of quality.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
You get piles of stuff for free with any Ubuntu distro, and none of it is pirated (at least I haven't heard of any "Linux for Pirates", but maybe it exists)
Yarr... we be workin' on that, matey. These peg-fingers make the work slow, and it be difficult to motivate without promise of any booty. Ye have me word on the pirate code that it will be free as in grog when we be finished, yar.
See, you have people like me who DO. For a classic example, Starcraft II. Starcraft II is a high-budget game, which Blizzard spent a lot of money marketting. All that is good. I was going to buy it. Here's what happened: I bought the thing, was confronted with a 36 hour download time, and used a version that I happened to have which was a torrented predownload. For reasons I still don't understand -- maybe it was regioning, whatever -- their DRM prevented me from using the game that day. I had to wait until July 28th, a day after it was released, to play it at all. On the release day, I'd tried numerous times to "authenticate" my copy, all of which failed. I went to my battle.net account, which claimed that I'd somehow activated too many copies. I called Blizzard and got hung up on numerous times with an "unfortunately, we're experiencing a high call volume" load of crap until I finally got through, at which point the hold time was 56 minutes. Now, I did the right thing. I bought the damned thing for $60. Blizzard's DRM caused a major screwup, which made me wish that I'd pirated it so at least it would work.
This is the reason that the FSF pushed so hard for Linux to be GPLv3'd; the FSF is more concerned about user freedom than about spreading the software as far and wide as possible as quickly as possible. This, however, is not the position that many open source developers take, as many felt that the use of Linux in TiVo meant both greater exposure (and hence more developers) and code being made available to others (i.e. TiVo's modifications to Linux). This is where free software philosophy and open source software philosophy diverge.
Palm trees and 8
You cannot look at top grossing games (or movies or music) to get an idea of the economic impact of software piracy. You have to look at the not so successful games.
The kinds of games that are going to have problems from piracy are the games that are good but not great. Think of any game that you do not ever see a commercial for on television. The impact of piracy on a high profile title is probably the difference between making 50 million dollars and 40 million dollars profit. Significant, but not really that damaging to the company that made that title.
The impact of piracy on a low profile title is probably the difference between making a modest profit and having to shut down the studio that made it.
An indie title is probably not going to be popular enough to attract that much piracy.
END COMMUNICATION
Actually, there *is* an alternative repository that is 100% binary compatible with the enterprise editions of the distro you refer to. You may have heard of it...
http://www.centos.org
The distro you refer to also has their own totally free Linux distro/repository, which you also may have heard of...
http://fedoraproject.org/
The business model of your example is not simply repository access. What you're paying for with their "main distribution" is easier access to support and updates/patches.
What are you talking about? These are THE GAMES people want to be playing! Have you seen xEyes?
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
Copyright is just an arbitrary social convention. Three hundred years ago, composers were happy when their music was used by others. Today, the staff at restaurants can’t sing the Happy Birthday song to their customers because it would constitute an unauthorised commercial use.
Copyright was a legal construct the printers (not the writers!) lobbied for in order to increase their profits, and soon, people got used to it and started seeing it as a god-given right. Perhaps in the future it will be possible to copyright individual sentences, and speaking them without the permission of the originator will be seen as ”stealing”. Perhaps there will be moral outrage, like the one over piracy, when people insist on speaking any sentence they like without paying the appropriate fee.
There are some morals which are very basic and vital to society, like the taboos against murder or theft, but copyright is not one of them. Copyright is a legal construct which gives priveleges to some (primarily large media corporations) at the expense of others (consumers). Copyright should be judged on how beneficial it is for society as a whole. It is an economic instrument meant to stimulate the production of literary and artistic works, not to ensure the income of writers and artists.
What other than DRM would stop a single player game from working when their network fails?
Do you think in a capitalistic society that having no copyright is going to promote the production of goods such as video games? Or basically any work of similar nature?
"I've not seen a lot of high-quality PC games given away"
You could at least define "high quality". If you mean high FPS, lots of bling, lots of gore, and flashing lights - yeah, you're probably right. Linux doesn't have a lot of high quality games. To me, nethack is pretty high quality.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
So it boils down to stopping people from benefiting from something which doesn't hurt anyone.
If I devote time and money to make my garden beautiful, is it unjust of my neighbours to enjoy the sight of it, having done nothing to deserve it? Should scientists stop using Newton's equations because they have done nothing to uncover them? Should writers avoid being inspired by Homeros because they have in no way contributed to his works? If it is morally wrong to get something for free, then we have to answer 'yes' to those questions.
Insulting people is not going to get you anywhere.
Really? Some comedians seem to make a living on that.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
It is still morally wrong. Sorry. I may not agree with the copyright law, but I know if I download a film, I performed something morally wrong however small it may be! Think of it like this: if I drive 26 mph in my neighborhood, I am breaking the law and I know this. If there was a way to catch me (for the sake of this argument assume this is so), I know I would have to pay for the ticket. Will this prevent me from going a couple miles per hour over? No.
The point I am trying to make is that just because it is not that big of deal doesn't make it right and it certain does not abstain one from a personal moral code. In the corporate world, this is what gets the big guys, you know the bastards you hear on the news who did these horrifying things and thought it was fine, in trouble. Having seen this moral slip, in my life, through a friend, I can tell you the slippery slope argument does not apply: what does it the ability to let one-self's moral boundaries slip without at least the acknowledgment that the change occurred. No, downloading illegal games will not cause me to go rob a store later in life or even steal a candy bar from the grocery store, but there is no gray area to a personal ethical code. (We each have our own!)
I am not trying to incite some type of response from you GNUALMAFUERTE, I have many friends who would agree with you and I sometimes find myself on both sides of the argument isle on many occasions, rather I am merely remarking on how we must guard ourselves as a society to where we really want to draw the threshold of "acceptable" at. You would say "Copyright shouldn't exist" and you are entitled to your opinion and I am not arguing this fact, but rather how you justify it. (Again, the fact that you infringe on copyright laws does not phase me at all) What bothers me is that by assembling what you refer to stealing as into physical goods, and generalizing stealing piracy as the duty performed by actual pirates (even the dumb ones who attack Navy ships) the moral threshold for you is that stealing would now require that you perform something remotely close to those acts!
I say relax, grab a beer, go download a song, and say hell with it: yes you broke the law but just like many others going a few over the speed limit, even with full knowledge of the law...this isn't something that bothers you.
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
I'd class Dwarf Fortress as high quality(with the exception of the graphics which are of a standard closer to a 1980's text editor) and that's given away free.
Some people make games for the love of making them.
I doubt that many would disagree that Cave Story, Iji, Knytt, Dwarf Fortress, or Seven Days a Skeptic are excellent examples of their genre.
All of them are given away free.
The article implicitly assumes both that game developers only make games for the money, and that a front-loaded payment model is the only way to go; both of which are not necessarily true. For example, Tarn Adams (Dwarf Fortress) earns his living entirely through donations. People torrenting his game actually help him by decreasing the bandwidth cost of his website.
So no degree of piracy or lack of piracy is ever going to cause good single player PC games to cease to exist, and, similarly, you'll be able to get piles of cool stuff for free... well, as long as net neutrality holds out, at least.
I make games for a living and while DRM and other things are a pain in the ass some times, it's still nice to get a pay check........
Nice try at justifying being a douche...I think there should be a demo to see if you like a game....
but if your playing the game and enjoying it, pay for it and don't be a douche
The music industry would have us believe they are the verge of bankruptcy, but that is simply not true. The record sales have gone down during the last decade, but that is more than offset by the increase in legally downloaded music and the increased revenues from collection agencies like ASCAP. As a whole, the music industry is making more money than ever
Care to share any evidence for that? I have never seen anyone else suggest that downloads have made up for the CD sales slump, and I don't think ASCAP bridges the gap either.
When the OP used the phrase "high quality" I read it to mean "expensive, technologically complex and with bells and whistles like voice acting/cut-scenes/whatever".
If your sole measure of quality is gameplay (and that's a damn good thing to base your judgment of a game on incidentally) then you don't need any of the above. Hell, there are games made fifteen years ago I still play. Bells and whistles don't age as well as core game mechanics.
All that being said, I would be a little sad to see the Starcraft 2's of the world die out, or migrate entirely to the consoles. So I'm going to back the person who wrote the article in the first place: Buy your games. I've no problem with people trying before they buy, or pirating abandonware they can't get legitimately (or otherwise unavailable through legal channels), or cracking games you own to get rid of obnoxious DRM schemes. But if all else is equal, we (the computer gaming community) should buy the damn things.
Because otherwise, the cost of making games gets spread around that many less legitimate customers, and I think the people who do pay have a right to be a little pissed off paying for someone else to play for free.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
And why should Blizzard's network have any impact at all on my ability to play a game, that I bought, in single-player mode, on my own pc?
Because my right to play that game must be verified via authentication against Blizzard's server.
That qualifies as DRM.
Here's why. Every individual has two commodities they own: 1. Time. 2. Money. People with #2 tend not to have #1, and vice versa. So for someone with a good income, it's just not worth the time involved to locate a torrent, download it from the few people seeding it, etc., etc. (Even if YOU could find it quickly, there's still a learning curve involved for the average person.) The people who pirate software almost always are those who wouldn't buy it in the first place, simply because they don't have any money. But by getting your software, a certain tiny percentage will help you via word of mouth, which in the end helps your bottom line.
You say you reject moral imperatives, but you create moral imperatives of your own which you seek to impose on other people. You assign infinite value to freedom of information and berate people who value it differently. What is it that makes your view superior? You're taking issues with vast configuration spaces and reducing them down to one bit of information. Oversimplifying anything this much is stupid. You're trying to optimize one variable without considering what you're doing to all of the other variables.
I see in you an example of how people can become the mirror image of the things they hate. You're so eager to negate the things you hate that you just flip them in the other direction and end up creating a structure which shows flaws congruent to the original's flaws. Your opponents have certain problems that they want to avoid and you have certain problems that you want to avoid. Your opponents want to avoid their problems even if it means that the problems you want to avoid blow up. You want to avoid your problems even if it means that the problems they want to avoid blow up.
The only way that you're helping society is by acting as a counterweight against elements on the opposite extreme. But what would really be better would be for people on both ends to move a bit closer together and find some common ground.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
I believe Randseed bought the game digitally, which meant he would have had to download the entire installer. Of course he could've done this several days in advance, as Blizzard made the downloader available beforehand to help people avoid the inevitable congestion issues, and simply activated it while installing the game on release day.
I knew as soon as I read the title this was going to involve him.
He's been around forever. I can remember when I first found exile so many years ago. Floating around a BBS.
It was probably one of the greatest games I played in the early 90s. I probably spent most of time between it and Curse of the Azure Bonds.
I hope some day he turns around and writes a book about how he did it. I don't know that you could duplicate what he has done now. He started at a time and built up his fanbase when the world was a very different place.
Just a couple of weeks ago, I bought an older game. Just Cause. When I installed it, the DRM wasn't compatible with Windows 7 and there were no patches available, I had to go download a NOCD crack to play a game that I legitimately purchased.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Let me get it straight. Your need to earn money is more important than the right of all of the human kind to freely access information?
I have information in my head right now that you probably do not have. If I refuse to share any of this information with you for free (or just refuse because I don't want to share it with you), am I violating your rights?
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
It had nothing to do with DRM. Blizzards network broke under the strain. That's why smart people wait a few days before buying a game that popular.
Actually, smart people don't buy products that require the publishers network to be up in order to play a singleplayer game. Having to wait a few days because of network load is a bit of a slap in the face when we're all subjected to the constant pre-order culture where playing on release day is the most important thing.. Paying for that just sends a message that its okay for publishers to pull that shit. Although, I guess if nobody bought it, they'd just blame piracy anyway...
"same level of quality"
A couple of so-called "AAA" titles from recent years:
Fallout3 - Backpedal, activate v.a.t.s, rinse repeat. Bugs still not fully patched (too busy working on paid-for-dlc, sequels). Inventory management UI that makes 1st year compsci projects look like works of art. GOTY!
Mass Effect - A first/third person shooter game released in 2008 with no AI. No really, observe how the mobs act. They can be approximated with
if melee, run closer, punch
if ranged, stand, shoot
2008. I expected neural net AI reacting to movie-like scripted events.
Break the game down into its elements: camera on face/dialogue chooser, planet chooser (with mouse sensitivy forced low to give you a sense of the vastness of space even though you're just choosing destinations on your ships navigation screen), D-grade First/Third person shooter. Character improvement that may as well not be there. Real-time elevator ride simulator. Yes, you get to wait 1-2 minutes in REAL-TIME before the next area starts loading. WOAH! INNOVATION!
Each element feels like it was programmed by some college dropout and the results simply lumped together. The entire game is about denying you control, whether by sticking you in a the lander vehicle or denying you any non-squad member info to make decisions (until you visit their locker located in a far corner of your ship).
GOTY again.
Do you really think making this kind of rubbish should be rewarded and not punished?