Why? Because for doing the things that games do - sound, graphics and input, Linux is a pain in the arse. When there's a *single standardised API* that works across all distributions then maybe it'll have a chance.
But the fact is that gaming on PC's is dead or if it isn't already, it's well on its way. Just look at the sales figures compared to consoles. Hell, I'd say it'd be a fair bet that the average Mac game sells more than the average Linux game ever has.
Consoles rock for gaming. Slip the disc in, press the power button then kick back on the couch. No screwing with drivers, libraries, etc. Real plug and play. (Yes, I admit that consoles suck for FPS's and RTS's)
People don't like taking a minute to get to highway speeds, which is one of the big reasons Diesals had such a bad rap early on (have you ever driven one of those Diesal Rabbits? It's no fun.).
Early on, yes. Modern diesel's have very good performance. Earlier this year my father purchased a 4WD with a 3L turbo diesel engine. The damn thing weighs something like 2.5T, but it accellerates rather impressively considering the size of the motor!
You should check out a new Volkswagen Golf - they're very zippy and speedy. Turbo diesel is the way of the future.
Actually, CELL is based around the 970. Expect about 80-90% performance compared to an equivalently clocked 970. Where it goes nuts is that there's a number of vector units attached that are basically "VMX on steroids" to quote one of the main guys at IBM behind this. The vector units (or Data Plane Processors as they're calling them) can also communicate between each other as well as with the central core. The workstations are actually headless server blades, each of which will have 2 CELL's on them and they'll be running Linux.
This stuff isn't bullshit, it was all disclosed Thursday at the Australian Game Developers Conference. I didn't sign a NDA so it's all good. I also fondled a PSP =]
did you miss the part saying that the calls were the same price from a standard phone? you can't have bt broadband without a bt landline (paying full standing charge every quarter).
What about calling other people with IP phones? That's free. If all your friends have broadband why not?
Why would I want to feck about with IP? It doesn't offer me any useful additional features. It would use the broadband bandwidth I already pay for, my wireless bandwidth, disk space, cpu, cause my machine to start up slower, having to feck about unpluggin my headphones/speakers to put in a headset... or i can spend £30 on a phone i can walk about the house with
If you use an IP phone or ATA with your cordless then you won't have to fuck with plugging and unplugging headphones/speakers or headsets because you won't have to use your computer for it. Plus you don't have to use BT as your VoIP provider, there's others out there that I'd reckon would have better rates.
Get yourself an ATA then (Analogue Telephone Adaptor). They're simply little boxes that you plug your existing non-IP phone into to turn it into an IP-phone. Quite snazzy little things and they're what's going to make VoIP boom.
Here in Australia and probably everywhere BUT the US, the judge would say:
"Serves ya bloody right for having a crash because you were watching TV, yapping on your mobile and having a smoke whilst driving down the freeway at 100km/h in peak-hour traffic tailgating someone. You stupid bastard, I feel sorry for the people you hurt due to your stupidity. You are ordered to pay costs for the defendant and it's off to gaol with you for being such a dill!"
I don't know why/if AC-3 audio is better than MPEG audio. I just remember their being a big stink about our DTV standard being "unique" and it causing high prices because of the small size of the aussie market when it was all introduced back in 2000 or so. On further investigation I found that the uniqueness is that we use AC-3 audio. There could be other different things, but that's as much info as I could find at the time. I just presume it's better because pretty much every DVD has an AC-3 soundtrack and every receiver can accept and and decode it. I'm not a digital audio geek so I don't know exactly all the specifics of what exactly AC-3 is and how it's different to DTS and MPEG audio. Hell, they could all be the same thing for all I know!
This looks cool. Hopefully it can view aussie DTV... I understand that our standard is a weird blend of DVB-T and ATSC in that we use DVB for everything but the audio, which is in AC-3.
Whilst that made STB's initially expensive, I think it'll be a good decision as we move to the future - it's nice to be able to receive a HD signal on my PC with my DVB-T tuner card and pipe the AC-3 out the fibre to my receiver.
So yeah, umm... this is cool and perhaps if this or something even better comes out down here that'll be another nail in the coffin of my currently-stalled DVR project.
How many game companies have gone out of business or had to downsize significantly for reasons directly traceable to copyright violation? I can't find an example; your statement's premise seems unlikely.
I don't know and it is probably impossible to know because you can't count the number of illegal copies out there. But what I can say though is that fewer and fewer studios make PC games not because of the nightmare of support for thousands of combinations of drivers and hardware, but because piracy is so fucking rampant on the platform that it's not funny. Contrast that with the PS2 - over 70 million sold, and only a minority of people mod them.
If you can't make enough money because of piracy, then something has gone badly wrong with your business; you are not offering enough value in purchasing the game (give them more cool stuff; concept art prints are always good), or your publisher has set the price much too high (consider self-publishing, and let people copying your game *be* the marketing department), or your game just isn't worth buying in the first place (haha, you suck). None of these are the fault of the customers or the copyright violators.
Yeah, it's not the fault of the copiers that they don't have any respect for the people that slaved their guts out for a couple of years to bring you the game. But what about the professional counterfeiters and scum that flog it off at flea markets and such? People buy those copies, often knowing that they're counterfeit and the developer gets nothing.
So before you continue to try to justify copying games: pull the other one, it plays jingle bells.
I'm sorry to hear that you don't like our game. Everyone has different tastes though. I hope that you have at least played the game before saying that it sucks though, rather than reading one review and parroting what the reviewer thought.
It might be interesting to note that the previous games for that license got crap reviews too (indeed, they are crap in comparison to ours) but they still sold a shitload of them because they appeal to casual gamers, not the hardcore gamers that write reviews.
So MS pays you 60k salary, then pockets 100million in profits, so whos giving who the ass there?
I wish I made that! But lets do a rough calculation: Assume a copy sells for $100. $60K * 50 people * 3 years is $9M in wages. Add on the cost of office space, equipment and utilities... say another $500K - $1M per year plus don't forget 9% superannuation and WorkCover (at least in Oz) add in overtime for casuals like testers who go all night on weekends plus meals for employees working late... probably another $500K - $1M there as well. With other expenses such as paying for the use of middleware, development tools and contractors you're probably looking at about $15M -$20M to make the game. Now for a game as big as Halo 2 figure that again or double for marketing, plus add on the cost of manufacturing and distribution - say $5-$10 per copy and say they sell a million. Now we're looking at about $35 - $60 million in costs. Now from that sales revenue take out the retailers cut, which is probably $10 - $15 and you're left with about $30 - $40M Granted that's a lot of money, but developers are in the business of making money so they can continue to make more games, which are becoming more and more expensive to make every year and in a couple of years that will probably cover just the cost of development - not marketing and distribution.
EXPLAIN to me why a $29.95 game in USA costs $98 in AU, when the currency is only a.73 difference.
Being just a programmer I can't explain that to you, but I can give you some possible reasons: aussie distributor's markup, exchange rate hedging, transportation costs (they might ship in units from overseas rather than manufacture them here is Oz) and tax.
If people only have $50 left for the next 14 days, they say "hmmm food and gas or xbox game...."
I would suggest that they need to get their priorities in order. If they choose to buy the game rather than the food and petrol, is it okay for them to steal the food and petrol because they then can't afford it?
Not everyone is earning 80k USD with free laptops and internet.
True, and that's why you don't live beyond your means lest you want to wind up broke.
Thanks for your reply, it's truly nice to have the opportunity to try and explain my opinions to you and the others who have replied.
I do not see what you, as a developer, lose from me plunking down 50 bucks for your game on a pre-order with EBgames.com, then deciding to play it a little earlier if that opportunity becomes avalible to me.
I agree that we wouldn't lose anything. It's just more of a respect thing. You've waited so long for it, so what's an extra week or two? I'd say it's like opening christmas presents the night before christmas - yeah you still get the present, but would it hurt you to wait the extra few hours to open it when the person who gave it to you is there?
If I download a game and buy it after giving it a trial run, how is that any different from renting, aside from cutting Blockbuster's 6 dollar late fees out of the picture?
When you rent it, you are renting a copy that the rental shop paid the developer for. (The late fees shouldn't come into it if you return it on time. =] ) The other option is to buy a magazine with a demo disc - no late fees to worry about, you get to try the game and the developer doesn't earn anything from demo's.
It's sweet, it's a cute lesson that ought to be in a citizenship/ethics textbook, but in real world terms, it just doesn't happen.
Part of civilisation is showing respect for others, and like I said above, I feel it's more of a respect thing than anything.
I must ask - why is it so frustrating and disappointing to see your game pirated? Did you expect anything else? You had to know this before going into production.
It's frustrating and disappointing because people are using the product of our labour without compensating us for it, especially since it's a budget title. I'd also like to think that people have respect for the work of others. Unless it happens to you it's probably hard to understand it. But yes, unfortunately I did expect it would happen.
And yes, I used to copy games as well and buy them if I liked them so I am hypocritical... call me on that if you want. But my original argument wasn't against that... it was against people downloading a leaked copy and playing it before the game is publicly released.
I wish more companies would use p2p networks to build a new content distrubution platform. I'm not talking about things like iTunes, where an old business model is dragged kicking and screaming into cyberspace.
I'm talking about a model that takes advantage of the benefits of the medium, and passes those costs along to the consumer. Of course, that's a dirty no-no: even if there is no packaging cost, we must still charge the consumer for it... because we can.
Packaging and distribution don't count for much of the cost of a game. The cost is all in the labour of the many people who worked for months or years to make it. It's good to see Valve is trying that approach and having success with Steam. Unfortunately, current consoles don't allow for that sort of distribution. Perhaps the next-gen consoles will. But then, games will be 10GB or so in size so we'll then be held back by bandwidth. Hopefully though, if next-gen consoles do allow for downloading games, you'll be able to do that in the background while playing because I don't think many people will want to have their console tied up for a couple of days downloading a new game.
Once again, thanks for your reply and I hope that you can understand my view better.
The food isn't readily copyable (at least not yet) and so it would be wrong to take food without permission unless you were _actually_ starving. Only one person can have each particular loaf of bread. It would be particularly wrong to steal food that someone else needs to eat, e.g. stealing food being sent to a refugee camp.
A whole lot of people laboured to produce the loaf of bread, when you steal it they are not receiving payment for their labour. The same goes with copying a game - you make a copy and the developers are not getting payment for their labour.
Stealing physical objects and making copies of games boil down to the same thing. Doing either shows a lack of regard and respect for the people who laboured to produce those products.
There is no indication that production of video games would cease entirely (as you threaten) in the event that it was no longer profitable. With reduced costs for distribution (P2P networks) and marketing (the real fans will hear on the grapevine) your costs shrink, and we'd probably still see plenty of low budget video games created by small teams of volunteers.
Games would not cease entirely, but you sure as hell can not look forward to games like Halo 2 being made by volunteers. The cost of the physical goods and distribution is tiny next to the cost of the labour - which is where most of the cost in developing a game is.
But what about royalties? Yes, a lot of studios essentially do 'work for hire' like that now - but what if something goes FUBAR and you run over budget and can't negotiate extra from the publisher, or the publisher decides to shitcan it?
That's when you need royalties from your games to keep you afloat. Royalties can also provide enough revenue to allow the studio to break-away from doing licenses, invest in improving and developing their technology and not always being beholden to the publisher and getting larger royalties because the studio is then taking the risk by providing their own funding.
I thought that was the dream of every developer - to have the financial security to do their own thing, but you seem to feel differently.
Would it be worthwhile when you lose your job because people copied the game instead of buying it and it doesn't make enough money to allow your company to keep running?
I'm not too sure how I feel about that. If you promise to buy it then I guess it's alright, but I think it would be more moral to wait until the developers release it so you can experience the whole package, or so to speak - there may be more to their game than just the code and data.
If people copy the game rather than buying it, we break even or we lose money on it. Either way, we don't have money to make more games so go out of business and there will be no more happyness for people.
If we didn't have bills to pay then we'd make games for free, because it's what we love doing. But seeing as we have to pay for food, clothes and housing, etc. we have to charge money in exchange for our work.
If people don't see the point in buying anymore, does that make it okay to steal food from a supermarket and should the farmers go and work in another field? ('scuse the pun)
But if the program is complete (as proved by the fact that its leaked, as if we didn't know it anyway) why isn't it just release already. I can never understand the long pause that occurs after games are apparently completed. I mean if they CAN push up the release date why wouldn't they?
Because it takes a fair amount of time to manufacture the media, package it up and ship it out to retailers. A game like this will also have a massive marketing budget that would have seen bookings for ad space made quite a while ago. You can't speed up those things, they're pretty much set in stone.
Whether you like Microsoft or not, this is bad. Many people have poured their hearts and souls into making that game not just because they like making cool stuff, but because they like to bring happyness to people. The person who leaked this clearly has no respect for the creators of the game.
As a game developer, I urge you to show some respect for the creators of the game by not downloading or distributing it. My first game came out a couple of weeks ago on PS2 and XBox and it's both frustrating and disappointing to see it readily available on P2P networks. How would you like to see something you've worked on for 50+ hours a week for months on end being freely copied around?
If you're intent on doing it, at least wait until the game has been released and if you like it, please buy it to support the developers. $50 isn't much to pay considering the number of hours of entertainment you get from the tens of thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars that would have gone into producing it - infinitely better value than a movie.
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Fact: Linux will never take off for games.
Why? Because for doing the things that games do - sound, graphics and input, Linux is a pain in the arse. When there's a *single standardised API* that works across all distributions then maybe it'll have a chance.
But the fact is that gaming on PC's is dead or if it isn't already, it's well on its way. Just look at the sales figures compared to consoles. Hell, I'd say it'd be a fair bet that the average Mac game sells more than the average Linux game ever has.
Consoles rock for gaming. Slip the disc in, press the power button then kick back on the couch. No screwing with drivers, libraries, etc. Real plug and play. (Yes, I admit that consoles suck for FPS's and RTS's)
People don't like taking a minute to get to highway speeds, which is one of the big reasons Diesals had such a bad rap early on (have you ever driven one of those Diesal Rabbits? It's no fun.).
Early on, yes. Modern diesel's have very good performance. Earlier this year my father purchased a 4WD with a 3L turbo diesel engine. The damn thing weighs something like 2.5T, but it accellerates rather impressively considering the size of the motor!
You should check out a new Volkswagen Golf - they're very zippy and speedy. Turbo diesel is the way of the future.
Actually, CELL is based around the 970. Expect about 80-90% performance compared to an equivalently clocked 970. Where it goes nuts is that there's a number of vector units attached that are basically "VMX on steroids" to quote one of the main guys at IBM behind this. The vector units (or Data Plane Processors as they're calling them) can also communicate between each other as well as with the central core. The workstations are actually headless server blades, each of which will have 2 CELL's on them and they'll be running Linux.
This stuff isn't bullshit, it was all disclosed Thursday at the Australian Game Developers Conference. I didn't sign a NDA so it's all good. I also fondled a PSP =]
did you miss the part saying that the calls were the same price from a standard phone? you can't have bt broadband without a bt landline (paying full standing charge every quarter).
What about calling other people with IP phones? That's free. If all your friends have broadband why not?
Why would I want to feck about with IP? It doesn't offer me any useful additional features. It would use the broadband bandwidth I already pay for, my wireless bandwidth, disk space, cpu, cause my machine to start up slower, having to feck about unpluggin my headphones/speakers to put in a headset... or i can spend £30 on a phone i can walk about the house with
If you use an IP phone or ATA with your cordless then you won't have to fuck with plugging and unplugging headphones/speakers or headsets because you won't have to use your computer for it. Plus you don't have to use BT as your VoIP provider, there's others out there that I'd reckon would have better rates.
Get yourself an ATA then (Analogue Telephone Adaptor). They're simply little boxes that you plug your existing non-IP phone into to turn it into an IP-phone. Quite snazzy little things and they're what's going to make VoIP boom.
Buy a games console then =]
Here in Australia and probably everywhere BUT the US, the judge would say:
"Serves ya bloody right for having a crash because you were watching TV, yapping on your mobile and having a smoke whilst driving down the freeway at 100km/h in peak-hour traffic tailgating someone. You stupid bastard, I feel sorry for the people you hurt due to your stupidity. You are ordered to pay costs for the defendant and it's off to gaol with you for being such a dill!"
Please let there be a Dopefish.
I don't know why/if AC-3 audio is better than MPEG audio. I just remember their being a big stink about our DTV standard being "unique" and it causing high prices because of the small size of the aussie market when it was all introduced back in 2000 or so. On further investigation I found that the uniqueness is that we use AC-3 audio. There could be other different things, but that's as much info as I could find at the time. I just presume it's better because pretty much every DVD has an AC-3 soundtrack and every receiver can accept and and decode it. I'm not a digital audio geek so I don't know exactly all the specifics of what exactly AC-3 is and how it's different to DTS and MPEG audio. Hell, they could all be the same thing for all I know!
This looks cool. Hopefully it can view aussie DTV... I understand that our standard is a weird blend of DVB-T and ATSC in that we use DVB for everything but the audio, which is in AC-3.
Whilst that made STB's initially expensive, I think it'll be a good decision as we move to the future - it's nice to be able to receive a HD signal on my PC with my DVB-T tuner card and pipe the AC-3 out the fibre to my receiver.
So yeah, umm... this is cool and perhaps if this or something even better comes out down here that'll be another nail in the coffin of my currently-stalled DVR project.
...for the exact same reason that I'd buy a Ferrari and run it on sump oil.
How many game companies have gone out of business or had to downsize significantly for reasons directly traceable to copyright violation? I can't find an example; your statement's premise seems unlikely.
I don't know and it is probably impossible to know because you can't count the number of illegal copies out there. But what I can say though is that fewer and fewer studios make PC games not because of the nightmare of support for thousands of combinations of drivers and hardware, but because piracy is so fucking rampant on the platform that it's not funny. Contrast that with the PS2 - over 70 million sold, and only a minority of people mod them.
If you can't make enough money because of piracy, then something has gone badly wrong with your business; you are not offering enough value in purchasing the game (give them more cool stuff; concept art prints are always good), or your publisher has set the price much too high (consider self-publishing, and let people copying your game *be* the marketing department), or your game just isn't worth buying in the first place (haha, you suck). None of these are the fault of the customers or the copyright violators.
Yeah, it's not the fault of the copiers that they don't have any respect for the people that slaved their guts out for a couple of years to bring you the game. But what about the professional counterfeiters and scum that flog it off at flea markets and such? People buy those copies, often knowing that they're counterfeit and the developer gets nothing.
So before you continue to try to justify copying games: pull the other one, it plays jingle bells.
I'm sorry to hear that you don't like our game. Everyone has different tastes though. I hope that you have at least played the game before saying that it sucks though, rather than reading one review and parroting what the reviewer thought.
It might be interesting to note that the previous games for that license got crap reviews too (indeed, they are crap in comparison to ours) but they still sold a shitload of them because they appeal to casual gamers, not the hardcore gamers that write reviews.
So MS pays you 60k salary, then pockets 100million in profits, so whos giving who the ass there?
.73 difference.
I wish I made that! But lets do a rough calculation: Assume a copy sells for $100. $60K * 50 people * 3 years is $9M in wages. Add on the cost of office space, equipment and utilities... say another $500K - $1M per year plus don't forget 9% superannuation and WorkCover (at least in Oz) add in overtime for casuals like testers who go all night on weekends plus meals for employees working late... probably another $500K - $1M there as well. With other expenses such as paying for the use of middleware, development tools and contractors you're probably looking at about $15M -$20M to make the game. Now for a game as big as Halo 2 figure that again or double for marketing, plus add on the cost of manufacturing and distribution - say $5-$10 per copy and say they sell a million. Now we're looking at about $35 - $60 million in costs. Now from that sales revenue take out the retailers cut, which is probably $10 - $15 and you're left with about $30 - $40M Granted that's a lot of money, but developers are in the business of making money so they can continue to make more games, which are becoming more and more expensive to make every year and in a couple of years that will probably cover just the cost of development - not marketing and distribution.
EXPLAIN to me why a $29.95 game in USA costs $98 in AU, when the currency is only a
Being just a programmer I can't explain that to you, but I can give you some possible reasons: aussie distributor's markup, exchange rate hedging, transportation costs (they might ship in units from overseas rather than manufacture them here is Oz) and tax.
If people only have $50 left for the next 14 days, they say "hmmm food and gas or xbox game...."
I would suggest that they need to get their priorities in order. If they choose to buy the game rather than the food and petrol, is it okay for them to steal the food and petrol because they then can't afford it?
Not everyone is earning 80k USD with free laptops and internet.
True, and that's why you don't live beyond your means lest you want to wind up broke.
Would it be worthwhile to actually prove that piracy leads to a decrease in sales?
Would it be worthwhile for the copiers to show some respect for the creators?
Thanks for your reply, it's truly nice to have the opportunity to try and explain my opinions to you and the others who have replied.
I do not see what you, as a developer, lose from me plunking down 50 bucks for your game on a pre-order with EBgames.com, then deciding to play it a little earlier if that opportunity becomes avalible to me.
I agree that we wouldn't lose anything. It's just more of a respect thing. You've waited so long for it, so what's an extra week or two? I'd say it's like opening christmas presents the night before christmas - yeah you still get the present, but would it hurt you to wait the extra few hours to open it when the person who gave it to you is there?
If I download a game and buy it after giving it a trial run, how is that any different from renting, aside from cutting Blockbuster's 6 dollar late fees out of the picture?
When you rent it, you are renting a copy that the rental shop paid the developer for. (The late fees shouldn't come into it if you return it on time. =] ) The other option is to buy a magazine with a demo disc - no late fees to worry about, you get to try the game and the developer doesn't earn anything from demo's.
It's sweet, it's a cute lesson that ought to be in a citizenship/ethics textbook, but in real world terms, it just doesn't happen.
Part of civilisation is showing respect for others, and like I said above, I feel it's more of a respect thing than anything.
I must ask - why is it so frustrating and disappointing to see your game pirated? Did you expect anything else? You had to know this before going into production.
It's frustrating and disappointing because people are using the product of our labour without compensating us for it, especially since it's a budget title. I'd also like to think that people have respect for the work of others. Unless it happens to you it's probably hard to understand it. But yes, unfortunately I did expect it would happen.
And yes, I used to copy games as well and buy them if I liked them so I am hypocritical... call me on that if you want. But my original argument wasn't against that... it was against people downloading a leaked copy and playing it before the game is publicly released.
I wish more companies would use p2p networks to build a new content distrubution platform. I'm not talking about things like iTunes, where an old business model is dragged kicking and screaming into cyberspace.
I'm talking about a model that takes advantage of the benefits of the medium, and passes those costs along to the consumer. Of course, that's a dirty no-no: even if there is no packaging cost, we must still charge the consumer for it... because we can.
Packaging and distribution don't count for much of the cost of a game. The cost is all in the labour of the many people who worked for months or years to make it. It's good to see Valve is trying that approach and having success with Steam. Unfortunately, current consoles don't allow for that sort of distribution. Perhaps the next-gen consoles will. But then, games will be 10GB or so in size so we'll then be held back by bandwidth. Hopefully though, if next-gen consoles do allow for downloading games, you'll be able to do that in the background while playing because I don't think many people will want to have their console tied up for a couple of days downloading a new game.
Once again, thanks for your reply and I hope that you can understand my view better.
spread happiness???
heart and soul???
50+ hours a week????
You did get a monthly check from your boss, didn't you?
(so stop whining)
Some of us take pride in our work because we enjoy what we do.
An illegal war is far worse than a illegal copy.
Justify it how you want, but it is still wrong that you are depriving the developers of payment for their labour.
The food isn't readily copyable (at least not yet) and so it would be wrong to take food without permission unless you were _actually_ starving. Only one person can have each particular loaf of bread. It would be particularly wrong to steal food that someone else needs to eat, e.g. stealing food being sent to a refugee camp.
A whole lot of people laboured to produce the loaf of bread, when you steal it they are not receiving payment for their labour. The same goes with copying a game - you make a copy and the developers are not getting payment for their labour.
Stealing physical objects and making copies of games boil down to the same thing. Doing either shows a lack of regard and respect for the people who laboured to produce those products.
There is no indication that production of video games would cease entirely (as you threaten) in the event that it was no longer profitable. With reduced costs for distribution (P2P networks) and marketing (the real fans will hear on the grapevine) your costs shrink, and we'd probably still see plenty of low budget video games created by small teams of volunteers.
Games would not cease entirely, but you sure as hell can not look forward to games like Halo 2 being made by volunteers. The cost of the physical goods and distribution is tiny next to the cost of the labour - which is where most of the cost in developing a game is.
If you don't like it you can always trade it in for another. If you don't want to take the financial loss that would incur, rent it first.
But then, that would take too much effort when clicking a few buttons on your computer to download a copy is so much easier.
But what about royalties? Yes, a lot of studios essentially do 'work for hire' like that now - but what if something goes FUBAR and you run over budget and can't negotiate extra from the publisher, or the publisher decides to shitcan it?
That's when you need royalties from your games to keep you afloat. Royalties can also provide enough revenue to allow the studio to break-away from doing licenses, invest in improving and developing their technology and not always being beholden to the publisher and getting larger royalties because the studio is then taking the risk by providing their own funding.
I thought that was the dream of every developer - to have the financial security to do their own thing, but you seem to feel differently.
Would it be worthwhile when you lose your job because people copied the game instead of buying it and it doesn't make enough money to allow your company to keep running?
I'm not too sure how I feel about that. If you promise to buy it then I guess it's alright, but I think it would be more moral to wait until the developers release it so you can experience the whole package, or so to speak - there may be more to their game than just the code and data.
If people copy the game rather than buying it, we break even or we lose money on it. Either way, we don't have money to make more games so go out of business and there will be no more happyness for people.
If we didn't have bills to pay then we'd make games for free, because it's what we love doing. But seeing as we have to pay for food, clothes and housing, etc. we have to charge money in exchange for our work.
If people don't see the point in buying anymore, does that make it okay to steal food from a supermarket and should the farmers go and work in another field? ('scuse the pun)
But if the program is complete (as proved by the fact that its leaked, as if we didn't know it anyway) why isn't it just release already. I can never understand the long pause that occurs after games are apparently completed. I mean if they CAN push up the release date why wouldn't they?
Because it takes a fair amount of time to manufacture the media, package it up and ship it out to retailers. A game like this will also have a massive marketing budget that would have seen bookings for ad space made quite a while ago. You can't speed up those things, they're pretty much set in stone.
Whether you like Microsoft or not, this is bad. Many people have poured their hearts and souls into making that game not just because they like making cool stuff, but because they like to bring happyness to people. The person who leaked this clearly has no respect for the creators of the game.
As a game developer, I urge you to show some respect for the creators of the game by not downloading or distributing it. My first game came out a couple of weeks ago on PS2 and XBox and it's both frustrating and disappointing to see it readily available on P2P networks. How would you like to see something you've worked on for 50+ hours a week for months on end being freely copied around?
If you're intent on doing it, at least wait until the game has been released and if you like it, please buy it to support the developers. $50 isn't much to pay considering the number of hours of entertainment you get from the tens of thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars that would have gone into producing it - infinitely better value than a movie.