How the Pirate Bay Can Be an Asset To Game Developers

Underholdning writes "It's been five years since Radiohead brought the pay what you want model to the public with their successful sale of their 'In Rainbows' album. Now, here's a fresh example of how a game developer is making The Pirate Bay work for him by offering his game, McPixel, for free and letting people pay what they want. Currently TPB has more than 5000 applicants wanting to do the same. 'Sosowski isn't worried that promoting a game on a site known for piracy might be more effective at attracting more pirates than actual paying customers. "The game was already available on TPB beforehand, and I believe if someone didn't want to pay, he just didn't ... It is up to people to decide how much they would like to pay for the game, and I have no worries. I am happy that more people can enjoy my game. ... TPB is one of the most visited sites in the Internet, and simply having a game there is a form of advertisement and promotion."'"

Comments

So he's made 300 bucks so far...

[AmazingRuss]

...kind of puts the lie to "pirates will pay in their own good time" trope.

Content Distribution

[girlintraining]

The real reason the Pirate Bay is hated is because it is a content distribution network. The BitTorrent protocol doesn't care whether it's a linux iso or a copy of the latest popular bluray rip that it transfers; It simply distributes the load to all of its participants. The RIAA, MPAA, and organizations they represent only exist because they have controlled the distribution of content (not its creation).

To hear that an author is distributing content on the 'honor system', is not surprising. All he's doing is leveraging a (free) distribution network, and probably making more money due to reduced overhead than he would if he went with one of the commercial solutions. Not to mention that gaining access to one of those solutions would require he give them a cut of the profits and pay regular fees on top of that. For a small-margins production like this, that would probably leave him with next to nothing.

The free market at work, that's what this is: And that's exactly why he has to die, horribly, painfully, and with many legal injunctions and fees. We can't have people using the internet to create money directly for themselves without any middlemen -- most of the jobs in our economy are middlemen. Burn the heretic.

Re:Content Distribution

[jfengel]

The **AAs are/were a promotion and marketing mechanism, as well as a content distribution mechanism. That was, for a long while, a pretty good plan: they ginned up interest via marketing, which was expensive, and then made up their expenses on the content distribution side.

Content distribution is no longer a viable model; there is revenue but nowhere near what's needed to match the promotion and marketing required to generate nation-scale interest. What they really object to is the fact that they have been spending money on the promotion and marketing anyway, while other content distributors undercut their revenue.

As you say, it's broken and it's not coming back. For the RIAA, it's easy to see how they should abandon the whole thing: content creation in music is cheap. We can live just fine without them serving as promoters; between Pandora and America's Got Too Much Free Time, promotion gets done.

It's a bit harder for the MPAA. Home-grown movies still don't match what can be done by a real studio, and there really are seven-figure up-front investments. Losing control of the content distribution is a loss not just to them but to everybody, since it means certain kinds of movies can't be made profitably. They're still profitable, but it seems pretty unlikely that they'd continue to be if the MPAA gave up trying to control distribution and went for a "pay what you want" model.

I'm still not crazy about using Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead as a model. Their studios had already spent big bucks promoting them. For the average Garage Band garage band, they have a hard time giving stuff away. A better example is, of all things, Fifty Shades Of Gray, which really took off for reasons nobody can figure out except that word of mouth really spread. Do not, however, expect that to happen often. The real model is eight zillion apps languishing in the iTunes and Android stores, one of which might be awesome if only somebody got all Fifty Shades on it. But you just can't do that for a movie.

Re:Content Distribution

[girlintraining]

You're correct in that the business model does have a few advantages for funding. And if copyright lasted only a few years, perhaps it would be a reasonable tradeoff. But when something lasts 150 years plus the life of the author, then you no longer have a situation where cost and benefit are balanced -- it costs the consumer massively, for little to no benefit.

I personally think the aggressive enforcement of copyright and modification of copyright laws are what is causing the destruction of the industry, not piracy. It's just like what happened during the Prohibition in the United States -- they tried to cut off access to a common recreational activity by force of law, and drove its use underground, resulting in the creation of this country's first large-scale organized crime syndicates, which remain active to this day due to the War on Drugs. Had the Prohibition never happened, organized crime might not developed in this country, or at least not to the breadth and depth that is is today.

When I studied Macroeconomics, there was a man whose name I forget who proposed that beyond a certain point, increasing taxes would actually result in less tax being collected because the incentives to cheat the system would outweigh the risks. So a tax rate of 30% might earn the same amount of revenue that a tax rate of 70% would. I think the same situation has happened in the entertainment industry -- except the tax in this case is a amortized in the system -- there are hundreds of little fees and laws and procedures that all work together in a complex dance to create a similar framework at a macro level.

Or put more simply: The recording industry priced itself out of the market. Their attempts to raise prices to compensate for lost income (in the form of a distribution 'tax') passed the critical threshold where there were more incentives to evade the system than participate in it. And yes, we all lose because of it, in the form of less available income and lower quality material... but it is hardly the fault of the consumer (legal or illegal) -- it was, in the final analyis, caused by a lack of competition. Had the recording industry not been dominated by only a few players, the pricing couldn't have been manipulated enough to cause it to pass the critical threshold, as the price would have remained aligned with the market demands.

They did this to themselves, and they took us with them.

Re:Crappy game

[Kjella]

According to the article that $426 was made in less than one day (the first), and since you'll hopefully be getting donations seven days a week that makes it equivalent to an income just shy of $3,000 per week.

Uh, what? Opening day sales are usually way higher than your average day, usually people make up their opinion pretty quick if they want it or not. I'd be surprised if he breaks the $1000 barrier in a week and it's not like week two is going to be like week one either.

Re:Radiohead

[zixxt]

That NIN's albumt. You could even download flacs!

To bad it was off in a different direction from the traditional NIN "space".

When was there ever a traditional NIN sound?

Re:It's called donationware.

[Havenwar]

I'd agree, except in my experience most games with micropayments don't actually work like that - there tends to be plenty of things in most of them that you can't access at all unless you open your wallet. That's a dealbreaker to me when it comes to micropayments, because then it's suddenly a way to get more money out of people rather than a way to let you choose between putting time or money into it. If I want to put money into a game, I do it upfront, or I do it to unlock it once I've tried it - I am not willing to be nickle-and-dimed to death for little things I had no idea I'd have a reason to need when I started out, and have no other way of getting.

Re:Crappy game

[kelemvor4]

$3000 is not a horrible salary for a third of a year. And if he can get that in 1 week, now that is nothing to scoff at.

Then you will be excited to get a job at a local McDonald's where they pay at least $15,080.00/year because of minimum wage. I would describe $9000/year as a horrible salary. Won't keep a roof over your head, but you might be able to get high occasionally while living in a cardboard box.