The fact that you'd even consider comparing identity theft with copyright infringement shows how out-of-touch you are with reality. On the one hand, we have someone getting their whole life fucked over, possibly to the point that it may be impossible for them to ever get a decent job again. (Do you know how fucked you can be if someone messes with your medical history via identity theft? You should read up on it. It's very enlightening.) On the other hand, we have someone maybe possibly losing as much as a whopping 1-5% of profit on some idea they put down on paper (or whatever) and tried to sell.
At the rate copyright extensions are happening, that probably won't be until my grandchildren are dead. If ever.
Given current production and distribution methods compared to what was available at the inception of copyright, the maximum duration should probably be about 5-10 years now, instead of 28. Everyone knows the majority of sales happen in the first year anyway. Anything after that is just gravy. Even so, I'd still be willing to concede them 28 years. But if the current trend of maximum copyright duration extension continues, copyright will never end.
So, once they're willing to hold up their end of the bargain, I'll hold up mine. Until then, I'll pay the ones I feel deserve it, and the rest can go fuck themselves.
That can definitely be true in some cases, but it doesn't have to be. I've used sleep quite a bit with my laptop (Win7) and so far it's worked flawlessly. It's also back up in a snap. I'd guess it takes about 2-5 seconds from the time I hit a key to wake it up before it's ready to go. A cold boot takes a good bit longer, sufficiently so that due to my impatience I generally go find some quick task (such as using the restroom) to do while it's working at it.
And did I mention I loath cold starts or reboots? I never do them unless it's absolutely necessary. I've even accidentally left my laptop in sleep mode in the bag for at least 2-3 days, and it was as ready as ever as soon as I woke it up.
Yeah, the problem is with this service you're paying about a dollar a minute. I think I can find someone to watch my back and chat with for a good bit less.
But seriously, paying that much for someone you don't even get to be with? I mean really, all you get is video chat? For a buck a minute? I can get that for free, and more than what they're offering. Yes, there *are* some hot chicks that play WoW and have nice boobs.
Their new browser won't support (what probably will be, by the time IE9 comes out) a 10-year-old operating system. Somehow, I'm not all that shocked. IE6 didn't support Win3.1 either. This is the same deal.
I think I agree with you, but for some reason I'm not seeing how you're tying everything together.
The point being that even as technology advances to the point that everyone _should_ be able to have an ad-free cell-phone with unlimited simple global calling, for a ridiculously cheap price (say $20/yr), the telcos will use every "Evil" means at their disposal to prevent that from happening, and keep the price at $20/mo. Ditto for cable TV. Ditto for content that short of disney-lawyers would have been in the public domain by now, and whose commercial value is in absolutely no way contributing to the artistic community in the way that IP rights were originally meant to foster.
How exactly does the topic of this story (ie. YouTube's "evil" methods in the past) relate to this portion of your post that I've quoted? I'm honestly not sure why I'm not really getting your point right now, and I'm feeling incredibly dense.
However, in the examples you give, it seems that the only people who may have been hurt are those who would have been competition for YouTube. So I would then have to contend that the public as a whole has also been positively benefited by YouTube's "evil" behavior. Probably the most significant benefit I can see from YouTube's questionable actions in the past is that they are now large enough to be the de facto location for online videos. The benefits of something like this, IMHO, can hardly be overstated. In fact, to me it's bigger than anything Microsoft has ever done as far as creating a standard.
So I guess the question is, do the ends justify the means? To me, in this case, the answer is yes.
They probably did need that infringing content to survive. But now, they've reached a point where that's no longer the case. If you really could remove all the stuff on YouTube that's unauthorized and doesn't qualify as fair use, it almost wouldn't matter any more. Nearly all the most-viewed videos now are some type of personal video, or something that's authorized and legit.
It's also really hard to make a claim that YouTube has hurt content providers more than it has helped them. You don't see full TV episodes or movies for instance. All you find is short clips that, if anything, function as advertising and get more people to purchase them than would have otherwise. Perhaps the same is not entirely true for audio tracks and music videos, but those have been so trivially easy to acquire illegally for years now, I'm not convinced YouTube had a net negative impact for those kinds of content providers either.
The problem is, at this point it's no longer really fair to consider XBox 360s "defective" goods. Everyone knows their inherent problems and potential lifespans. The term we're looking for here is "disposable". And no, I'm not trying to be funny, facetious, or sarcastic. Simply making an observation.
However, I must say that I do not like having words put in my mouth. You made a statement about what could reduce the piracy rate. I pointed to an article that explored those very things, ran figures for them, and noted that those things had no effect on the piracy rate at all. I was speaking entirely of the ratio of pirated copies to legitimate copies, and you kept trying poke holes in the argument that a download is equal to a lost sale. I never made that claim, the article never made that claim, and frankly the claim was irrelevant to the ratio. That makes it a straw man.
And I pointed out that we really have no way to know at all whether or not those "things" really had an effect on the piracy rate, regardless of what graphs your article has. And that, as a result, your claim of those "things" being an "utter failure" at affecting piracy is such an extreme statement that it's only valid if we were otherwise assuming every pirated download as a lost sale. Not a straw man at all, nor was it putting words in your mouth.
I will point out, though, that if the sales figures for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 are representative of a successful game - over 6 million copies sold for console vs. approximately 350,000 sold for PC - then the reason that the big game makers are going for the console market has a lot more to do with the size of the market than it does with the financial cost of DRM. Console games are less complex to develop (the PC game platform is really something like a hundred similar platforms, all with their own quirks, whereas a game that works on one X-Box 360 will work on all X-Box 360s), have fewer piracy issues, and a far larger market.
Well first, you got your facts wrong. http://news.vgchartz.com/news.php?id=5826 I dunno, maybe you have a bad source but according to my math, 12% of 7 million comes to 840,000, not 350,000. I also find it quite amusing that you would choose MW2 as your example of poor sales on the PC. You are aware that several hundred thousand gamers boycotted the game, precisely because it didn't offer the value that it should have? http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?dedis4mw The main reason though that some developers are finding it hard to get PC game sales to match console sales is because PC gamers are too busy playing games on their PCs that simply can be done properly on console. Namely, MMOs. Or to be specific, WoW. And yet, despite all the boycotts, despite all the piracy, despite the millions of gamers who previously would have been their target audience that are now plaing MMOs, they still managed to sell enough copies of MW2 for PC to make it the most successful PC version of Call of Duty ever. http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/modernwarfare2/news.html?sid=6241052 Yep, I guess they should just pack in their PC gaming devision because it's clearly not profitable enough.
Or, put bluntly, why would any developer put the effort into selling around half a million copies for PC if they're REALLY lucky when they can put less effort into selling a few million for consoles first?
Maybe because the game they want to create just won't work well on consoles? Or maybe because there's already so many games for consoles available, and with the big publishing houses focusing more on consoles it's a lot easier to make a profit on PCs? How about because the installed base for PCs dwarfs that of all modern consoles put together? Not all games have to be cutting-edge 3D you know. The PC game market includes far more than the retail boxed products, and way more than consoles could ever hope to offer.
And that is my last word in this discussion. I will not reply further.
No, I hadn't read the article before now because I already knew I didn't need to. I already knew what I would find there. I read it. I found it. It changes nothing.
It's irrelevant, because you really can't judge exactly what factors influence piracy, for several reasons.
1. You have no way to determine exactly how many people pirated it. Sure, you can go on a few popular torrent sites, and find "250,000" different downloads. But you have no way of knowing how accurately that even represents torrent piracy, nevermind other online piracy, and you haven't a clue about sneakernet piracy. No one has gone through and checked to see how often the same IP address shows up on different torrents for the same item, in an attempt to get a different or better version. And no one can possibly check every torrent site out there. So who knows which way those results are skewed? No one.
2. You can't truly determine the effects that pricing, quality, availability, ease of use, etc. have on piracy, because as soon as it's available... it's already too late. You'd have to be able to generate a parallel universe to get a definitive answer on it. As soon as you release the game at $60 for the first week, you no longer have the ability to test to see what the results for that game would have been if you released it at $20 for the first week. Sure, you can release a new game at $20 and try to compare, but the best you can do from that is make an educated guess. You can draw some conclusions based on correlation, but that's it. Maybe there's not as many people who consider the second game as worthwhile as the first, or vice versa. Who knows? No one. The same applies to any other market factor.
Are they?
You tell me. Can you make a profit selling 500,000 copies of a game that cost just $1,000,000 to make? If your question really wasn't glib, then I feel sorry for you having wasted that much time and effort on such a pointless, easily-answered question.
It's not rocket science to predict the trend. The PC games market that I started out in is long gone. The market from five years ago was far more rich and full than it is today.
There was also a lot more unexplored territory left, and a lot more companies taking advantage of that, and making innovative new games. Most of those companies were so profitable that they got bought out by bigger companies, which explains why you see primarily just a handful of bigger publishers. But those handful are much bigger now than they've ever been. The problem with that is the same as it is with any company that expands beyond a certain point: the focus is entirely on money, and no longer on finding out what the customers really want, and providing good quality product. Big companies are far less willing to take big risks for big rewards, and as a result we now have a glut of rehashes and reruns of the same crap we had 5 years ago. It's a direct result of the small, DRM-free developers being too profitable and being swallowed up by the giants. Very few PC game developers have ever gone out of business while they were still producing a quality product that had sufficient demand. In fact, I can't think of a single one.
The PC game makers are in the process of walking away. That's not a prediction - just an observation. It IS happening.
And that's not surprising in the least, given the huge amount of money they've been wasting on useless DRM. To which I say, good riddance. The PC games market isn't going anywhere. Every big conglomerate like Ubisoft or whoever that walks away just leaves that much more opportunity for a small innovative developer to make a splash.
And, taking Stardock as an example, you haven't presented the whole story. Here's picking up after 2008:
March 27, 2009 - Stardock unveils a low customer impact DRM solution named GOO (Game Object Obfusca
I've seen it before. As a result, I read over it so quickly that not only did I get the gist of it, I didn't even notice he'd butchered it until I read his next post. I'm not sure which is worse, his typing or my reading.
Here's the problem - that works wonderfully as a theory. It fails utterly in practice.
Really? Based on what metric?
The simple fact that PC game developers are still in business and still making money, despite wasting who knows how many millions of dollars every year on failed anti-piracy measures is all it takes to prove otherwise. And that's not even mentioning the small developers that are being successful despite using no DRM whatsoever. Here's just one excellent example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sins_of_a_solar_empire. Here's a bit I'm quoting from the page itself: "As of September 2008, Stardock's CEO, Brad Wardell, has stated that the game has sold over 500,000 units, with 100,000 of those being digital download sales, on a budget of less than $1,000,000. It sold 200,000 copies in the first month after release alone." And since the sources for that quote are extremely relevant here, I'll link those as well. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20026http://www.techreport.com/discussions.x/14383
The only possible metric you can use that would make what you said in any way correct is the one the big corporations use: that every pirated copy is a lost sale. So I guess it "fails utterly" if your metric is that they aren't making near as much money as they "could" be.
I've worked at a call center before. There's one big flaw in your argument:
Now, as for profit, that CC agent is there anyway.
Wrong. Most call centers state-side use temps to deal with the the rise and fall in calls. We're spiking today? How many new guys do we need to handle it? Five? Ok, they'll be here tomorrow, trained in 2 hours. (Yes, 2 hours, literally.) Two weeks later, the call volume drops again, and after a day or two the latest temps are gone.
And when there's not enough agents to handle the excess load, the wait times get longer, and the CC agents stay there until the last call that got in before official closing time is handled. When we had less calls, our supervisor let someone go home early.
No matter how they do it, when there's more calls, someone is getting paid more hours. It's that simple. CC supervisors/managers get lots of flak for having agents sitting around doing nothing, and they also get lots of flak if the call loss percentage gets too high.
As do the 11 million WoW players, the 500K Eve players, the 1 mllion Guild Wars players, the millions of online FPS players, etc. etc. etc. Do I need to go on? I would suspect that a massive percentage of the target audience for a game like AC2 primarily plays single-player games only when they can't play their online multiplayer.
The problem is, looking at this as an arms race in the first place is entirely the wrong perspective. IF this really were an arms race, they were doomed to lose from the beginning, and every dollar they have spent on preventing piracy is wasted. Anything they can build will quickly be broken. Even WoW has pirate servers out there, which proves that it doesn't even matter how much you tie your software to your servers.
The answers to the piracy problem are the same as they have always been: make the game worthwhile and convenient enough to purchase legitimately. WoW, for example, is worthwhile because the official servers work much better than pirate servers, and there's a huge amount of content, a huge amount of social interaction, etc. And it shows: they have 11 million active subscribers and counting. And the value is indisputable for those millions of players: in the US, for $15 a month you get all the entertainment you want. Compare that with your $30-$50 a month cable bill, or $8 for a 2-hour movie. Or even $1 for a movie rental. Only Netflix even comes close. But $60 for a single-player game that will last 10-15 hours the first time through, and probably less the second time, if it's even good enough for that? I have to say, that game better be damn good.
There will always be piracy; it's the nature of the beast. The problems that drive the beast include things like making games too expensive. So you have to sell your game at $60 to make a profit? Bad news buddy: unless your game deserves at the very least some kind of "best-in-genre-for-the-year" award, that's too much. Your problem is that you invested too much money in crap that doesn't make the game better. The answer isn't to stop piracy, because you won't get enough more sales to even cover the development cost of your anti-piracy measures any way. The answer is that your game sucks, and you made a poor investment. Perhaps for your next game, you should look at ways to make it better that cost less money. And if you can't do that, perhaps you're in the wrong industry.
You'll see there, that even the dirt-cheap "professional" photographers charge a minimum of $1,000-$1,500. The decent ones start around $3,000. There's even a photographer who posted on that page detailing his pricing, and he pays his assistant $250 per day - and he's one of the cheap ones starting at $1,500! Still think they don't make damn good money?
Also note, I never claimed nor implied that photographers (wedding or otherwise) are overpaid in general. I think they make good money for the amount of time invested. My point is that they get paid well enough up front, there's no reason whatsoever that they should retain copyrights for the work they do. It's not unlike a plumber signing you to some kind of contract forbidding you to do any kind of work or make any modifications to the plumbing in your house without his permission. Or replace "plumbing" with whatever type of work or service you'd pay someone to do for you.
This is nonsensical. They can detect how many pirated copies are hitting their update servers.
I tried to come up with a fitting response, but there just isn't one. All I can really do is assume that you're quite a bit more stupid than most pirates.
Also, you can consider this "discussion" over. Have a nice day.
The torrent-sucking copyright-is-evil gallery ought to try to make a living from IP once or twice before going off sounding like pitchfork-waving mindless rabble.
No, you've got it backwards. The self-righteous elitist "artists" ought to try to make a living from honest work once or twice before going off sounding like pompous assholes wanting a continuous revenue stream for a pittance of "work". There's already too many lazy assholes trying to make a quick buck for doing practically nothing, in the name of "IP". In the real world, if your work don't cut it, neither does your paycheck.
I doubt it - the cabinets would be a part of a greater work, just like a picture of a building that includes a sculpture in front of the building would not violate the artists copyright.
So in other words, just like the photo of the war memorial includes the ground the statues are standing on, as well as who knows what all else?
If you treat an artist like they're a tradesman,perhaps you don't really understand the scope of the service
You're right, we're treating them entirely too well. They do about a tenth the actual work of a tradesman, they should also be making about a tenth the actual pay.
Seriously though, your attitude is precisely the attitude that has made IP as fucked up as it is today. The wedding photographer, if he does good work, will make damn good money photographing the wedding. Everything they do is a la carte. Want another photo touched up? That's another hundred bucks. Why the FUCK do they deserve to have a "right" that entitles them to keep making money off the "work" they already got paid for, any more than any other type of worker? They spent a whopping half a day (maybe less) taking the photos, and maybe another day or two editing them, developing them, etc. They probably got paid anywhere from $3,000 to $20,000 for less than a week's worth of work. And yet, they should have a right to make more off the same work? Bullshit.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that you'd even consider comparing identity theft with copyright infringement shows how out-of-touch you are with reality. On the one hand, we have someone getting their whole life fucked over, possibly to the point that it may be impossible for them to ever get a decent job again. (Do you know how fucked you can be if someone messes with your medical history via identity theft? You should read up on it. It's very enlightening.) On the other hand, we have someone maybe possibly losing as much as a whopping 1-5% of profit on some idea they put down on paper (or whatever) and tried to sell.
Gee, I wonder which situation I'd rather be in.
Or wait until the copyright expires.
At the rate copyright extensions are happening, that probably won't be until my grandchildren are dead. If ever.
Given current production and distribution methods compared to what was available at the inception of copyright, the maximum duration should probably be about 5-10 years now, instead of 28. Everyone knows the majority of sales happen in the first year anyway. Anything after that is just gravy. Even so, I'd still be willing to concede them 28 years. But if the current trend of maximum copyright duration extension continues, copyright will never end.
So, once they're willing to hold up their end of the bargain, I'll hold up mine. Until then, I'll pay the ones I feel deserve it, and the rest can go fuck themselves.
That can definitely be true in some cases, but it doesn't have to be. I've used sleep quite a bit with my laptop (Win7) and so far it's worked flawlessly. It's also back up in a snap. I'd guess it takes about 2-5 seconds from the time I hit a key to wake it up before it's ready to go. A cold boot takes a good bit longer, sufficiently so that due to my impatience I generally go find some quick task (such as using the restroom) to do while it's working at it.
And did I mention I loath cold starts or reboots? I never do them unless it's absolutely necessary. I've even accidentally left my laptop in sleep mode in the bag for at least 2-3 days, and it was as ready as ever as soon as I woke it up.
Yeah, the problem is with this service you're paying about a dollar a minute. I think I can find someone to watch my back and chat with for a good bit less.
But seriously, paying that much for someone you don't even get to be with? I mean really, all you get is video chat? For a buck a minute? I can get that for free, and more than what they're offering. Yes, there *are* some hot chicks that play WoW and have nice boobs.
Their new browser won't support (what probably will be, by the time IE9 comes out) a 10-year-old operating system. Somehow, I'm not all that shocked. IE6 didn't support Win3.1 either. This is the same deal.
XP is the past. It's time to move on.
I think I agree with you, but for some reason I'm not seeing how you're tying everything together.
The point being that even as technology advances to the point that everyone _should_ be able to have an ad-free cell-phone with unlimited simple global calling, for a ridiculously cheap price (say $20/yr), the telcos will use every "Evil" means at their disposal to prevent that from happening, and keep the price at $20/mo. Ditto for cable TV. Ditto for content that short of disney-lawyers would have been in the public domain by now, and whose commercial value is in absolutely no way contributing to the artistic community in the way that IP rights were originally meant to foster.
How exactly does the topic of this story (ie. YouTube's "evil" methods in the past) relate to this portion of your post that I've quoted? I'm honestly not sure why I'm not really getting your point right now, and I'm feeling incredibly dense.
You raise some excellent points.
However, in the examples you give, it seems that the only people who may have been hurt are those who would have been competition for YouTube. So I would then have to contend that the public as a whole has also been positively benefited by YouTube's "evil" behavior. Probably the most significant benefit I can see from YouTube's questionable actions in the past is that they are now large enough to be the de facto location for online videos. The benefits of something like this, IMHO, can hardly be overstated. In fact, to me it's bigger than anything Microsoft has ever done as far as creating a standard.
So I guess the question is, do the ends justify the means? To me, in this case, the answer is yes.
They probably did need that infringing content to survive. But now, they've reached a point where that's no longer the case. If you really could remove all the stuff on YouTube that's unauthorized and doesn't qualify as fair use, it almost wouldn't matter any more. Nearly all the most-viewed videos now are some type of personal video, or something that's authorized and legit.
It's also really hard to make a claim that YouTube has hurt content providers more than it has helped them. You don't see full TV episodes or movies for instance. All you find is short clips that, if anything, function as advertising and get more people to purchase them than would have otherwise. Perhaps the same is not entirely true for audio tracks and music videos, but those have been so trivially easy to acquire illegally for years now, I'm not convinced YouTube had a net negative impact for those kinds of content providers either.
The problem is, at this point it's no longer really fair to consider XBox 360s "defective" goods. Everyone knows their inherent problems and potential lifespans. The term we're looking for here is "disposable". And no, I'm not trying to be funny, facetious, or sarcastic. Simply making an observation.
I hate to break it to you Mr. Grammar Nazi, but you actually failed. Hardcore.
NIC is Network Interface Controller.
Nice try though.
However, I must say that I do not like having words put in my mouth. You made a statement about what could reduce the piracy rate. I pointed to an article that explored those very things, ran figures for them, and noted that those things had no effect on the piracy rate at all. I was speaking entirely of the ratio of pirated copies to legitimate copies, and you kept trying poke holes in the argument that a download is equal to a lost sale. I never made that claim, the article never made that claim, and frankly the claim was irrelevant to the ratio. That makes it a straw man.
And I pointed out that we really have no way to know at all whether or not those "things" really had an effect on the piracy rate, regardless of what graphs your article has. And that, as a result, your claim of those "things" being an "utter failure" at affecting piracy is such an extreme statement that it's only valid if we were otherwise assuming every pirated download as a lost sale. Not a straw man at all, nor was it putting words in your mouth.
I will point out, though, that if the sales figures for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 are representative of a successful game - over 6 million copies sold for console vs. approximately 350,000 sold for PC - then the reason that the big game makers are going for the console market has a lot more to do with the size of the market than it does with the financial cost of DRM. Console games are less complex to develop (the PC game platform is really something like a hundred similar platforms, all with their own quirks, whereas a game that works on one X-Box 360 will work on all X-Box 360s), have fewer piracy issues, and a far larger market.
Well first, you got your facts wrong. http://news.vgchartz.com/news.php?id=5826 I dunno, maybe you have a bad source but according to my math, 12% of 7 million comes to 840,000, not 350,000. I also find it quite amusing that you would choose MW2 as your example of poor sales on the PC. You are aware that several hundred thousand gamers boycotted the game, precisely because it didn't offer the value that it should have? http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?dedis4mw The main reason though that some developers are finding it hard to get PC game sales to match console sales is because PC gamers are too busy playing games on their PCs that simply can be done properly on console. Namely, MMOs. Or to be specific, WoW. And yet, despite all the boycotts, despite all the piracy, despite the millions of gamers who previously would have been their target audience that are now plaing MMOs, they still managed to sell enough copies of MW2 for PC to make it the most successful PC version of Call of Duty ever. http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/modernwarfare2/news.html?sid=6241052 Yep, I guess they should just pack in their PC gaming devision because it's clearly not profitable enough.
Or, put bluntly, why would any developer put the effort into selling around half a million copies for PC if they're REALLY lucky when they can put less effort into selling a few million for consoles first?
Maybe because the game they want to create just won't work well on consoles? Or maybe because there's already so many games for consoles available, and with the big publishing houses focusing more on consoles it's a lot easier to make a profit on PCs? How about because the installed base for PCs dwarfs that of all modern consoles put together? Not all games have to be cutting-edge 3D you know. The PC game market includes far more than the retail boxed products, and way more than consoles could ever hope to offer.
And that is my last word in this discussion. I will not reply further.
Good for you.
Did you even read the article I linked to?
No, I hadn't read the article before now because I already knew I didn't need to. I already knew what I would find there. I read it. I found it. It changes nothing.
It's irrelevant, because you really can't judge exactly what factors influence piracy, for several reasons.
1. You have no way to determine exactly how many people pirated it. Sure, you can go on a few popular torrent sites, and find "250,000" different downloads. But you have no way of knowing how accurately that even represents torrent piracy, nevermind other online piracy, and you haven't a clue about sneakernet piracy. No one has gone through and checked to see how often the same IP address shows up on different torrents for the same item, in an attempt to get a different or better version. And no one can possibly check every torrent site out there. So who knows which way those results are skewed? No one.
2. You can't truly determine the effects that pricing, quality, availability, ease of use, etc. have on piracy, because as soon as it's available... it's already too late. You'd have to be able to generate a parallel universe to get a definitive answer on it. As soon as you release the game at $60 for the first week, you no longer have the ability to test to see what the results for that game would have been if you released it at $20 for the first week. Sure, you can release a new game at $20 and try to compare, but the best you can do from that is make an educated guess. You can draw some conclusions based on correlation, but that's it. Maybe there's not as many people who consider the second game as worthwhile as the first, or vice versa. Who knows? No one. The same applies to any other market factor.
Are they?
You tell me. Can you make a profit selling 500,000 copies of a game that cost just $1,000,000 to make?
If your question really wasn't glib, then I feel sorry for you having wasted that much time and effort on such a pointless, easily-answered question.
It's not rocket science to predict the trend. The PC games market that I started out in is long gone. The market from five years ago was far more rich and full than it is today.
There was also a lot more unexplored territory left, and a lot more companies taking advantage of that, and making innovative new games. Most of those companies were so profitable that they got bought out by bigger companies, which explains why you see primarily just a handful of bigger publishers. But those handful are much bigger now than they've ever been. The problem with that is the same as it is with any company that expands beyond a certain point: the focus is entirely on money, and no longer on finding out what the customers really want, and providing good quality product. Big companies are far less willing to take big risks for big rewards, and as a result we now have a glut of rehashes and reruns of the same crap we had 5 years ago. It's a direct result of the small, DRM-free developers being too profitable and being swallowed up by the giants. Very few PC game developers have ever gone out of business while they were still producing a quality product that had sufficient demand. In fact, I can't think of a single one.
The PC game makers are in the process of walking away. That's not a prediction - just an observation. It IS happening.
And that's not surprising in the least, given the huge amount of money they've been wasting on useless DRM. To which I say, good riddance. The PC games market isn't going anywhere. Every big conglomerate like Ubisoft or whoever that walks away just leaves that much more opportunity for a small innovative developer to make a splash.
And, taking Stardock as an example, you haven't presented the whole story. Here's picking up after 2008:
March 27, 2009 - Stardock unveils a low customer impact DRM solution named GOO (Game Object Obfusca
I've seen it before. As a result, I read over it so quickly that not only did I get the gist of it, I didn't even notice he'd butchered it until I read his next post. I'm not sure which is worse, his typing or my reading.
Here's the problem - that works wonderfully as a theory. It fails utterly in practice.
Really? Based on what metric?
The simple fact that PC game developers are still in business and still making money, despite wasting who knows how many millions of dollars every year on failed anti-piracy measures is all it takes to prove otherwise. And that's not even mentioning the small developers that are being successful despite using no DRM whatsoever. Here's just one excellent example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sins_of_a_solar_empire. Here's a bit I'm quoting from the page itself: "As of September 2008, Stardock's CEO, Brad Wardell, has stated that the game has sold over 500,000 units, with 100,000 of those being digital download sales, on a budget of less than $1,000,000. It sold 200,000 copies in the first month after release alone." And since the sources for that quote are extremely relevant here, I'll link those as well. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20026 http://www.techreport.com/discussions.x/14383
The only possible metric you can use that would make what you said in any way correct is the one the big corporations use: that every pirated copy is a lost sale. So I guess it "fails utterly" if your metric is that they aren't making near as much money as they "could" be.
I've worked at a call center before. There's one big flaw in your argument:
Now, as for profit, that CC agent is there anyway.
Wrong. Most call centers state-side use temps to deal with the the rise and fall in calls. We're spiking today? How many new guys do we need to handle it? Five? Ok, they'll be here tomorrow, trained in 2 hours. (Yes, 2 hours, literally.) Two weeks later, the call volume drops again, and after a day or two the latest temps are gone.
And when there's not enough agents to handle the excess load, the wait times get longer, and the CC agents stay there until the last call that got in before official closing time is handled. When we had less calls, our supervisor let someone go home early.
No matter how they do it, when there's more calls, someone is getting paid more hours. It's that simple. CC supervisors/managers get lots of flak for having agents sitting around doing nothing, and they also get lots of flak if the call loss percentage gets too high.
Man, that's just silly.
Everyone knows coffee is bitter anyway.
So, you finally broke the bank and bought yourself a PS2? Welcome to the 21st century!
As do the 11 million WoW players, the 500K Eve players, the 1 mllion Guild Wars players, the millions of online FPS players, etc. etc. etc. Do I need to go on? I would suspect that a massive percentage of the target audience for a game like AC2 primarily plays single-player games only when they can't play their online multiplayer.
The problem is, looking at this as an arms race in the first place is entirely the wrong perspective. IF this really were an arms race, they were doomed to lose from the beginning, and every dollar they have spent on preventing piracy is wasted. Anything they can build will quickly be broken. Even WoW has pirate servers out there, which proves that it doesn't even matter how much you tie your software to your servers.
The answers to the piracy problem are the same as they have always been: make the game worthwhile and convenient enough to purchase legitimately. WoW, for example, is worthwhile because the official servers work much better than pirate servers, and there's a huge amount of content, a huge amount of social interaction, etc. And it shows: they have 11 million active subscribers and counting. And the value is indisputable for those millions of players: in the US, for $15 a month you get all the entertainment you want. Compare that with your $30-$50 a month cable bill, or $8 for a 2-hour movie. Or even $1 for a movie rental. Only Netflix even comes close. But $60 for a single-player game that will last 10-15 hours the first time through, and probably less the second time, if it's even good enough for that? I have to say, that game better be damn good.
There will always be piracy; it's the nature of the beast. The problems that drive the beast include things like making games too expensive. So you have to sell your game at $60 to make a profit? Bad news buddy: unless your game deserves at the very least some kind of "best-in-genre-for-the-year" award, that's too much. Your problem is that you invested too much money in crap that doesn't make the game better. The answer isn't to stop piracy, because you won't get enough more sales to even cover the development cost of your anti-piracy measures any way. The answer is that your game sucks, and you made a poor investment. Perhaps for your next game, you should look at ways to make it better that cost less money. And if you can't do that, perhaps you're in the wrong industry.
I have several relatives (one being my sister) who are professional photographers, and I've also done work for photographers.
Of course, if you don't personally know people who are professional photographers you may need other sources. Here's one page to get you started:
http://www.costhelper.com/cost/wedding/wedding-phographer.html
You'll see there, that even the dirt-cheap "professional" photographers charge a minimum of $1,000-$1,500. The decent ones start around $3,000. There's even a photographer who posted on that page detailing his pricing, and he pays his assistant $250 per day - and he's one of the cheap ones starting at $1,500! Still think they don't make damn good money?
Also note, I never claimed nor implied that photographers (wedding or otherwise) are overpaid in general. I think they make good money for the amount of time invested. My point is that they get paid well enough up front, there's no reason whatsoever that they should retain copyrights for the work they do. It's not unlike a plumber signing you to some kind of contract forbidding you to do any kind of work or make any modifications to the plumbing in your house without his permission. Or replace "plumbing" with whatever type of work or service you'd pay someone to do for you.
And now there's already a cracked version available on torrent sites. Hasn't even been released yet.
Yep, guess that new DRM really did the trick.
This is nonsensical. They can detect how many pirated copies are hitting their update servers.
I tried to come up with a fitting response, but there just isn't one. All I can really do is assume that you're quite a bit more stupid than most pirates.
Also, you can consider this "discussion" over. Have a nice day.
The torrent-sucking copyright-is-evil gallery ought to try to make a living from IP once or twice before going off sounding like pitchfork-waving mindless rabble.
No, you've got it backwards. The self-righteous elitist "artists" ought to try to make a living from honest work once or twice before going off sounding like pompous assholes wanting a continuous revenue stream for a pittance of "work". There's already too many lazy assholes trying to make a quick buck for doing practically nothing, in the name of "IP". In the real world, if your work don't cut it, neither does your paycheck.
I doubt it - the cabinets would be a part of a greater work, just like a picture of a building that includes a sculpture in front of the building would not violate the artists copyright.
So in other words, just like the photo of the war memorial includes the ground the statues are standing on, as well as who knows what all else?
If you treat an artist like they're a tradesman,perhaps you don't really understand the scope of the service
You're right, we're treating them entirely too well. They do about a tenth the actual work of a tradesman, they should also be making about a tenth the actual pay.
Seriously though, your attitude is precisely the attitude that has made IP as fucked up as it is today. The wedding photographer, if he does good work, will make damn good money photographing the wedding. Everything they do is a la carte. Want another photo touched up? That's another hundred bucks. Why the FUCK do they deserve to have a "right" that entitles them to keep making money off the "work" they already got paid for, any more than any other type of worker? They spent a whopping half a day (maybe less) taking the photos, and maybe another day or two editing them, developing them, etc. They probably got paid anywhere from $3,000 to $20,000 for less than a week's worth of work. And yet, they should have a right to make more off the same work? Bullshit.