One of their advertisements on TV for this has a man opening an envelope and taking out a very tiny piece of paper he must read with a magnifying glass, and remarking that it's a "Tiny bill" to have Comcast Digital Phone Service.
However, the $40 per month is the entry fee, I think it goes to $50/mth after the first few months (or it's $30/40).
That entry rate is comparable to my Verizon local + Verizon long distance + moderate long distance usage, AFTER taxes and fees.
The sell those in the mall here too...no Nintendo logo or anything. I doubt its a pirated product at all..and if it is, how much is Nintendo charging? Oh wait, they aren't even making those games anymore. So where's the loss?
Actually they ARE still selling those games, in classic collections or those little cards for the GBA game reader.
This was just a common example of commercialized piracy occuring in plain view. What about the piracy of commercial games? Consider the recent story of that new GBA game that the British man had bought his daughter, that turned out to be a pirated version.
Making duplicates of something is not the same as removing an object from someone's possesion. This 'I could have made X money if it wasn't pirated' doesn't fly. Are you certain that everyone that pirated the game would have purchased it if they couldn't pirate it?
You ignored my later argument where REAL financial loss occurs, where the ignorant business owners have their stock taken and can face legal battles for selling it, depite ignorance that it was pirated.
And we're talking about profiteering. If you write a program to sell, and I make a copy and start selling it, taking all the profit for none of the work and not sharing a cent with you, do you consider legal?
I'm not talking about the teenage pirates who do it for fun and games. I'm talking about the people who make a business out of it.
If they bought a pirated version for less then the normal retail, that should tell the company that its price is too high. But no, they want to ignore the part of economics that says buyer AND seller together determine price.
The pirated price would ALWAYS be less than the retail price, because the pirates expense is strictly in cost of manufacturing. They don't have to recover the development costs.
In the context of video games, the current $50 price point IS a negotiated price. There were plenty of SNES games at the $70-100. However, cost of development has gone way up while price per unit has come down. While volume has gone up, a video game is still often enough a money losing, break even, or, barely profitable, proposition. Without profit, there can't be growth.
Perhaps. There is a tendency when the word 'piracy' is used here for people to think of the small time - the kids burning copies for friends or uploading ISOs to sites.
Whereas in China, it tends to be organizations making mass copies, labelling them, and selling them to retailers, vendors, and even overseas.
I went to a mall a couple weeks before Christmas, and there was a kiosk selling those video-game-controller-game-pack things (has an N64-like controller, a light gun, and another controller, with 50 to 100 games). All those games are pirated - it had Mario Brothers, Contra, and other NES games, yet not a SINGLE Nintendo logo on the box... those are pirated games, sold at a profit. It's not much different than if I duplicated someone's software, and sold it on a website with a pre-installed crack or serial number, claiming it as my own.
In this case, I talked to some of the employees at the kiosk, and they didn't believe it was pirated software, some of their excuses were, "How could it get into the country if it isn't legit? Why would Customs allow pirated software?". In the end, it seemed more like he was trying hard NOT to believe, rather than believing out of innocence, that he was peddling illegal software.
THESE people, the mass-producers who financially profit off producing pirated products, and lure companies into buying these products (I wonder if the owner of the kiosk was ignorant enough to think it was completely legit) are where the REAL financial damage occurs, and are probably the ones who should go to jail. The financial damage isn't restricted to the original IP owners, it extends to the people like the owner of this kiosk, who could lose all his product and face a lawsuit if Nintendo approached him. His ignorance of the situation won't get him his money back from that loss.
In their ignorance, instead of actually buying copies, people thought it was OK to copy them and didn't think much about the original authors.
Just because it hurts least doesn't mean it doesn't still hurt. One of the most famous old-school games was a commercial failure because of piracy. That fact still stands, regardless of one's views on how little it may 'hurt' to pirate.
On the contrary, $1M is cheap for a game these days. A game expected to be a triple-A title (million unit seller) can be expected to cost $3-5M at the LOW end.
If the average salary is $50k for a game developer (be he artist, engineer, designer, or whatnot, each has their own pay scales but it averages out to this much for a professional employee), and it takes 50 of them 18 months to make a game, thats $3.75M in salary alone.
Not all developers are engineers, either; I'd say only 1 in 5 developers on a title tend to be engineers, the amount of content work required can be tremendous.
As an experienced game developer, even using an existing engine, even one internally developed and used with a previously shipped title, takes a hell of a lot of work. For $1M they better be leveraging existing technology they already own, and they're still doing it on the cheap.
Game codebases are NOT drop-in solutions by any stretch of the imagination. Gamers expect constant progress, so last years game engine must see significant improvements to be used in this year's game.
Assuming you bought the game in the store, then at that price the publishers probably saw $10 for that game (retailers usually mark games up 100% from wholesale, the avg wholesale price being $25).
At $10/unit, if it cost $1M to make the game (pretty cheap, these days) they'd need to sell 100,000 units to recoup the investment. Thats not a small or easily achievable mark for most games. Not all games break that mark.
The few games that turn a large profit for a company help cover the losses on the games that lost money.
However, copy protection stops the average person who might just want to make copies for friends.
I remember lots of folks who would copy games for friends just because it was possible - one person would buy the game, and then give copies to friends who saw it and liked it, if the game wasn't copy protected.
These weren't pirates, or people who would have tried to circumvent copy protection if it was present. Just the average home-computer user in the late 80s/early 90s. They didn't realize it was piracy.
MULE, a well known and popular old school game, was a commercial failure. Almost everyone had played it and many 'owned' a copy, but almost no-one had bought it.
The way the current DVD spec works is as below, but my impression is that AACS would use a similiar system.
There are 3 kinds of keys - Player keys, Disc keys, and Title keys. This is all part of CSS, or Content Scrambling System (hence DeCSS).
The Title keys unscramble the content on the disc. The Disc key decrypts the title key. The Player key decrypts the disc key.
Each manufacturer is given 1 or more of the 400-some Player keys. These keys have existed since the creation of CSS. I believe that there is an index on the disc of Disc keys, with each Disc key being associated with a Player key.
If the a Disc key for a corresponding player key was to be removed from the index, the player wouldn't be able to decrypt that disc.
The system involves a key pair. The machine has a key, which when combined with a key on the disc, produces the decryption key. The disc has an index with a bunch of keys, and the keys are assigned/sold to the various player manufacturers.
When a key is compromised, new discs would be made with an invalid second key for that index entry/DVD player.
MULE is a classic, everyone's played it and many loved it... but the amazing thing is, it was a commercial failure. It was heavily pirated; there were probably more pirated copies than legitimate ones floating around.
It's not well known but there IS an Academy Awards for video games, similiar to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences - the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences at http://www.interactive.org/.
I believe it is run by the same organization as the Motion Picture Academy. Membership is only open to full-time employees of the industry with a minimum of 2 years on development teams, who have been credited on a commercially published title. Like the Academy Awards, it is the talent of the industry judging its peers.
The 2005 DICE summit and 8th annual awards ceremony (the AIAS equivalent to the Academy Awards) is in late January.
What SpikeTV ran was nothing more than sensationalism, probably based on sales figures and TV producers misperceptions of the culture of video game players, more than it was based on any actual sampling of video gaming culture.
It is well within this group's right, however misguided, to flood the FCC with complaints about shows.
Perhaps the best way to fight back, is to slashdot the FCC:
Complain about EVERYTHING. EVERY LITTLE THING!
I'm sure 240,000 complaints is a drop in the bucket. A few grassroots organizations who complain about the most inane things will cause the PTC's percent of the volume to drop to, oh... 0.2%?
While the source of the degree (and sometimes the degree itself) likely matters little, a college with an excellent CS program is more likely to prepare you and teach you useful things you didn't know you needed/wanted to know.
Except that most users can't or won't deal with a 1-2 gig download, and want to have the CDs.
You can't cut the retail stores out of the picture. Store exposure is an important method of selling a game, even one that can only be played online. Download-only games tend to have smaller distribution and thus smaller player-base.
As a side note, that Google 'own hobby/project time' deal involves a hobby/project that is related to work and could potentially benefit the company, and is still company owned work.
For every 256x256m "sim" in SL... the users are paying between $200/mth (cheapest, 65,768m^2 land tier) and $1280 (128 people paying the $10/mth minimum to own land which comes with a 'free' 512m^2).
In addition, unless you pay the monthly fee, you get 1/10th the normal weekly 'stipend' of game money ($50/week). Paying subscribers get $500/week.
The store you buy from is taking about half of whatever you paid for that game (in this case, probably about $30-35).
Take the cost of stamping CDs and boxing and shipping them out... of the amount of that $60 you paid that the company will see, your first month's cost ends up being much closer to the normal monthly fee than it does to what you paid.
And honestly, it's sort of like a Tivo - which many people here seem to love. Pay for the device (in this case, the game), then for the service. You can't use your Tivo without paying the extra monthly fee. Sure, they offer a lifetime subscription, but it amounts to paying for 2 1/2 years up front on a device with a 90 day warranty.
You can't really consider Second Life in the same league as traditional MMORPGs.
Second Life's content is 99% player-made, and if you actually want things like land, which is important to establish an actual presence in game, you have to pay a monthly fee that increases with the amount of land; some people are paying $200/mth or more for private islands. That flat fee is for a very limiting account meant to hook you until you are ready to pay more.
In addition, it's really just a socialization environment. There is almost no combat (well, there sort of is, but it's very limited, restricted to certain areas, has barely any participants, and nothing like a regular MMORPG).
SL is mostly full of people just playing Bingo, slot machines, dancing and socializing, or cybering (lots of Mature zones and porn clubs/avatars/etc). The remainder are people who like to make things using the built in modelling and scripting systems.
Slashdot Mirror
One of their advertisements on TV for this has a man opening an envelope and taking out a very tiny piece of paper he must read with a magnifying glass, and remarking that it's a "Tiny bill" to have Comcast Digital Phone Service.
However, the $40 per month is the entry fee, I think it goes to $50/mth after the first few months (or it's $30/40).
That entry rate is comparable to my Verizon local + Verizon long distance + moderate long distance usage, AFTER taxes and fees.
The sell those in the mall here too...no Nintendo logo or anything. I doubt its a pirated product at all..and if it is, how much is Nintendo charging? Oh wait, they aren't even making those games anymore. So where's the loss?
Actually they ARE still selling those games, in classic collections or those little cards for the GBA game reader.
This was just a common example of commercialized piracy occuring in plain view. What about the piracy of commercial games? Consider the recent story of that new GBA game that the British man had bought his daughter, that turned out to be a pirated version.
Making duplicates of something is not the same as removing an object from someone's possesion. This 'I could have made X money if it wasn't pirated' doesn't fly. Are you certain that everyone that pirated the game would have purchased it if they couldn't pirate it?
You ignored my later argument where REAL financial loss occurs, where the ignorant business owners have their stock taken and can face legal battles for selling it, depite ignorance that it was pirated.
And we're talking about profiteering. If you write a program to sell, and I make a copy and start selling it, taking all the profit for none of the work and not sharing a cent with you, do you consider legal?
I'm not talking about the teenage pirates who do it for fun and games. I'm talking about the people who make a business out of it.
If they bought a pirated version for less then the normal retail, that should tell the company that its price is too high. But no, they want to ignore the part of economics that says buyer AND seller together determine price.
The pirated price would ALWAYS be less than the retail price, because the pirates expense is strictly in cost of manufacturing. They don't have to recover the development costs.
In the context of video games, the current $50 price point IS a negotiated price. There were plenty of SNES games at the $70-100. However, cost of development has gone way up while price per unit has come down. While volume has gone up, a video game is still often enough a money losing, break even, or, barely profitable, proposition. Without profit, there can't be growth.
Edison was an asshat. A brilliant asshat, but an asshat nonetheless. He took credit, and money, for others inventions.
Perhaps. There is a tendency when the word 'piracy' is used here for people to think of the small time - the kids burning copies for friends or uploading ISOs to sites.
Whereas in China, it tends to be organizations making mass copies, labelling them, and selling them to retailers, vendors, and even overseas.
I went to a mall a couple weeks before Christmas, and there was a kiosk selling those video-game-controller-game-pack things (has an N64-like controller, a light gun, and another controller, with 50 to 100 games). All those games are pirated - it had Mario Brothers, Contra, and other NES games, yet not a SINGLE Nintendo logo on the box... those are pirated games, sold at a profit. It's not much different than if I duplicated someone's software, and sold it on a website with a pre-installed crack or serial number, claiming it as my own.
In this case, I talked to some of the employees at the kiosk, and they didn't believe it was pirated software, some of their excuses were, "How could it get into the country if it isn't legit? Why would Customs allow pirated software?". In the end, it seemed more like he was trying hard NOT to believe, rather than believing out of innocence, that he was peddling illegal software.
THESE people, the mass-producers who financially profit off producing pirated products, and lure companies into buying these products (I wonder if the owner of the kiosk was ignorant enough to think it was completely legit) are where the REAL financial damage occurs, and are probably the ones who should go to jail. The financial damage isn't restricted to the original IP owners, it extends to the people like the owner of this kiosk, who could lose all his product and face a lawsuit if Nintendo approached him. His ignorance of the situation won't get him his money back from that loss.
In their ignorance, instead of actually buying copies, people thought it was OK to copy them and didn't think much about the original authors.
Just because it hurts least doesn't mean it doesn't still hurt. One of the most famous old-school games was a commercial failure because of piracy. That fact still stands, regardless of one's views on how little it may 'hurt' to pirate.
On the contrary, $1M is cheap for a game these days. A game expected to be a triple-A title (million unit seller) can be expected to cost $3-5M at the LOW end.
If the average salary is $50k for a game developer (be he artist, engineer, designer, or whatnot, each has their own pay scales but it averages out to this much for a professional employee), and it takes 50 of them 18 months to make a game, thats $3.75M in salary alone.
Not all developers are engineers, either; I'd say only 1 in 5 developers on a title tend to be engineers, the amount of content work required can be tremendous.
As an experienced game developer, even using an existing engine, even one internally developed and used with a previously shipped title, takes a hell of a lot of work. For $1M they better be leveraging existing technology they already own, and they're still doing it on the cheap.
Game codebases are NOT drop-in solutions by any stretch of the imagination. Gamers expect constant progress, so last years game engine must see significant improvements to be used in this year's game.
Assuming you bought the game in the store, then at that price the publishers probably saw $10 for that game (retailers usually mark games up 100% from wholesale, the avg wholesale price being $25).
At $10/unit, if it cost $1M to make the game (pretty cheap, these days) they'd need to sell 100,000 units to recoup the investment. Thats not a small or easily achievable mark for most games. Not all games break that mark.
The few games that turn a large profit for a company help cover the losses on the games that lost money.
However, copy protection stops the average person who might just want to make copies for friends.
I remember lots of folks who would copy games for friends just because it was possible - one person would buy the game, and then give copies to friends who saw it and liked it, if the game wasn't copy protected.
These weren't pirates, or people who would have tried to circumvent copy protection if it was present. Just the average home-computer user in the late 80s/early 90s. They didn't realize it was piracy.
Heres an argument FOR copy protection:
MULE, a well known and popular old school game, was a commercial failure. Almost everyone had played it and many 'owned' a copy, but almost no-one had bought it.
It didn't have copy protection.
little glimpse into our great paste
Even though it has at times been a sticky paste.
The way the current DVD spec works is as below, but my impression is that AACS would use a similiar system.
There are 3 kinds of keys - Player keys, Disc keys, and Title keys. This is all part of CSS, or Content Scrambling System (hence DeCSS).
The Title keys unscramble the content on the disc. The Disc key decrypts the title key. The Player key decrypts the disc key.
Each manufacturer is given 1 or more of the 400-some Player keys. These keys have existed since the creation of CSS. I believe that there is an index on the disc of Disc keys, with each Disc key being associated with a Player key.
If the a Disc key for a corresponding player key was to be removed from the index, the player wouldn't be able to decrypt that disc.
The key wouldn't be disabled on a machine.
The system involves a key pair. The machine has a key, which when combined with a key on the disc, produces the decryption key. The disc has an index with a bunch of keys, and the keys are assigned/sold to the various player manufacturers.
When a key is compromised, new discs would be made with an invalid second key for that index entry/DVD player.
PC game sales have had a steady decline in sales over the past few years, while console sales have increased at an even faster rate.
MULE is a classic, everyone's played it and many loved it... but the amazing thing is, it was a commercial failure. It was heavily pirated; there were probably more pirated copies than legitimate ones floating around.
It's not well known but there IS an Academy Awards for video games, similiar to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences - the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences at http://www.interactive.org/.
I believe it is run by the same organization as the Motion Picture Academy. Membership is only open to full-time employees of the industry with a minimum of 2 years on development teams, who have been credited on a commercially published title. Like the Academy Awards, it is the talent of the industry judging its peers.
The 2005 DICE summit and 8th annual awards ceremony (the AIAS equivalent to the Academy Awards) is in late January.
What SpikeTV ran was nothing more than sensationalism, probably based on sales figures and TV producers misperceptions of the culture of video game players, more than it was based on any actual sampling of video gaming culture.
It is well within this group's right, however misguided, to flood the FCC with complaints about shows.
Perhaps the best way to fight back, is to slashdot the FCC:
Complain about EVERYTHING. EVERY LITTLE THING!
I'm sure 240,000 complaints is a drop in the bucket. A few grassroots organizations who complain about the most inane things will cause the PTC's percent of the volume to drop to, oh... 0.2%?
While the source of the degree (and sometimes the degree itself) likely matters little, a college with an excellent CS program is more likely to prepare you and teach you useful things you didn't know you needed/wanted to know.
Except that most users can't or won't deal with a 1-2 gig download, and want to have the CDs.
You can't cut the retail stores out of the picture. Store exposure is an important method of selling a game, even one that can only be played online. Download-only games tend to have smaller distribution and thus smaller player-base.
How about a science fiction race wars MUD (not SOLELY PK)
avpmud.com 4000
As a side note, that Google 'own hobby/project time' deal involves a hobby/project that is related to work and could potentially benefit the company, and is still company owned work.
Halve that. If the game costs $50, likely the publisher is going to see $25 to $30.
Budgets on games these days run about $3m to $5m or more for development, MMORPG games tend to cost twice that.
As a followup, going by the costs...
For every 256x256m "sim" in SL... the users are paying between $200/mth (cheapest, 65,768m^2 land tier) and $1280 (128 people paying the $10/mth minimum to own land which comes with a 'free' 512m^2).
In addition, unless you pay the monthly fee, you get 1/10th the normal weekly 'stipend' of game money ($50/week). Paying subscribers get $500/week.
The store you buy from is taking about half of whatever you paid for that game (in this case, probably about $30-35).
Take the cost of stamping CDs and boxing and shipping them out... of the amount of that $60 you paid that the company will see, your first month's cost ends up being much closer to the normal monthly fee than it does to what you paid.
And honestly, it's sort of like a Tivo - which many people here seem to love. Pay for the device (in this case, the game), then for the service. You can't use your Tivo without paying the extra monthly fee. Sure, they offer a lifetime subscription, but it amounts to paying for 2 1/2 years up front on a device with a 90 day warranty.
You can't really consider Second Life in the same league as traditional MMORPGs.
Second Life's content is 99% player-made, and if you actually want things like land, which is important to establish an actual presence in game, you have to pay a monthly fee that increases with the amount of land; some people are paying $200/mth or more for private islands. That flat fee is for a very limiting account meant to hook you until you are ready to pay more.
In addition, it's really just a socialization environment. There is almost no combat (well, there sort of is, but it's very limited, restricted to certain areas, has barely any participants, and nothing like a regular MMORPG).
SL is mostly full of people just playing Bingo, slot machines, dancing and socializing, or cybering (lots of Mature zones and porn clubs/avatars/etc). The remainder are people who like to make things using the built in modelling and scripting systems.