More like people thought it was worth their money but thought free was even better.
Which people?
Those pirating it.
Do you mean a few people? The purpose of this lowering prices isn't to make sure that all people buy the product. No, it's to try to get more people to buy the product.,
Agreed. My point is that $0.99 is so low to most people for a single purchase, that it's not a factor stopping them from buying something if they have even a mild desire to have the product. Lowering the price below the point where nearly everyone is already willing to pay, makes no sense for the seller and makes little difference to the buyer. My time is worth a lot more than $0.45 per hour (assuming he cut prices in half), so assuming I'm going to spend an hour playing some game, a price reduction is irrelevant to me.
In fact, we don't even know how many 'pirates' there are (such a thing would be nearly impossible to track). All he mentioned was that there was "still people" 'pirating' his game, not how many, how much fewer than there was before, or how he can even accurately guess the amount of 'pirates'.
True. I'm not debating that point, I'm just refuting the GP's slightly catty suggestion that the piracy (great or small) is because of the cost.
That puts the lie to the notion that it is overpriced.
"Overpriced" is subjective.
Actually, I'm not talking from my own point of view, but from the market's in general. We can see whether large numbers of people are willing to pay for something at a given price or not. In fact, these companies put a lot of research into such things.
But, but... the music studios, man. They starve the artists who don't get a penny. And, those artists shouldn't be able to make so much money for just a days work as well! And if I pirate your games I'm doing you a favour because I'll tell all my friends about it and then they'll want to pirate it too and, and... something about cars. Yeah!
Same here. It's a really nice device in so many ways, but I want to have more control over it. And really bizarrely, I quite like the Windows Phone 7 but again, have a problem with having to do everything with it via the bloody Zune software. If I buy something on a contract, fair enough. But when I pay for a product outright, I want to own it. Closed markets are risky.
Jailbreaking is hardly the standard. The vast majority of users don't want to mess with their phones in that way.
And knowing how to find pirated games, their cracks, software for mounting the imgs, how to install the cracks is standard?
Well if you download a pirated song or a pirated computer game, you don't normally have to mess with your OS to do that. But when you jailbreak your phone, to most people that is a risk - they are messing with their phone in some unapproved way. That is where the difference lies. That's what I was talking about when I said the vast majority of users don't want to mess with their phones in that way. And I think that stands up. I don't have figures for it, but I'm confident that the overwhelming majority of people who buy a phone (usually on a contract), don't want to start downloading programs from the Internet to start fucking with the "insides". Very different from playing a pirated MP3 on that phone.
All else being equal, I would sooner trust the market research and knowledge of a company, than some random person on Slashdot., however. I would expect Valve to have better knowledge of price points and their own sales figures than the layman.
Their markets have expanded greatly, the cost of equipment for production has dropped, their cost of distribution has dropped through the floor to almost nothing and wow the price has dropped all the way from 10 to.... 9. huh...
The value of the music is the same to me. And if you add in inflation over the last decade, the price has dropped by more than from £10 to £9. Anyway, OP complained that the cost of music had not dropped. Aside from why the cost of music should drop when everything else in an inflation-based economy rises, I pointed out that it has.
You're comparing the cost of a physical product you can sell to a small collection of bytes? They are hardly the same.
They are to me and to most people. If I have to go to the shop to buy a CD, or if I pay to buy a pile of 320kpbs MP3s on Amazon, my ears don't care! It's the same music and I enjoy it the same way at the same times and places. The product is indeed the same, merely buying MP3 downloads is a more convenient method of delivery.
Yes but the cost of producing a computer game is NOT what the games companies pay to have a game produced.
Once you remove all the marketing, overpriced voice actors, hollywood accounting and crap that gets added on the actual
cost is a lot less.
So if you remove costs, the cost is less? Whilst I'll concede the validity of that statement, the relevance seems a little lacking. If it is your contention that piracy is legitimised because you think voice actors are overpaid, then I'm unconvinced. And fortunately so are a lot of other people, or there wouldn't be many big name computer games around.
Whilst your case may be true, the problem is that arguments about DRM, format availability, ease of downloading vs. having to go to a shop and buy... All these such arguments were made extensively as rationalisations of piracy early on. And yet most of these are dealt with now. I can buy a computer game as a direct download. I can buy high-quality MP3s at the click of a button. Things like wanting The Colour of Money in HD are edge cases these days, and getting fewer all the time. They're not good arguments for the vast bulk of piracy that goes on. If you look at popular torrents, you'll see a tonne of newly released movies and computer games. The bulk of it, in fact. And these are all things where you can get them in such formats. Most piracy is not about formats, it's about getting things without paying.
Unless you post more information on your game it will be hard to tell but my guess is that people do not think that they their worth of money. Perhaps it just has to be better.
If someone wants to spend time playing a computer game, $0.99 isn't going to put most people off. More like people thought it was worth their money but thought free was even better. If you want a more rigorous logical argument, my time is worth more than $0.99 per hour and so is almost everybody else's. So if I spend an hour on a game, I'm already paying significantly more than $0.99 in real terms. That puts the lie to the notion that it is overpriced.
They did lower the costs of music, for the record companies.
What, you thought it was going to lower prices for US?
I remember paying £10 for a CD album years ten back, and now I can get a new album as an MP3 download at 320kbps from Amazon for £9 or less. That's not even allowing for inflation. Prices are low enough. The cost of a song or a movie or, as we're discussing in this topic, a computer game, isn't the price of the cheap CD and cheap box it comes in. That's just a medium. The cost of producing a computer game remains the same.
And further, if you said your neighbour was a terrorist in the USA, it might result in some investigation or difficulties, but it would get cleared up. These people could well be killed in Egypt right now. Does Flickr want to be part of that extrajudicial process? Now if a guy knows that people are torturers and a threat to others, then he has almost an obligation to put those pictures up. But Flickr can't distinguish his actions from anyone else. Help someone get killed or decline to do so - don't see much to blame Flickr for in this instance.
Bullshit, they didn't free Mozilla from anything, Mozilla still has to pay a licensing fee for copies that are running on other OSes if they want support,
So you'd be happy if MS also provided licensed versions and plugins for OSs they don't own? Seems a little unreasonable. As to XP, it's ten years old, again it's not reasonable to complain that they're not releasing new enhancements to old software they're not selling anymore. It's not like anything on XP is broken by this, they're just not adding new functionality to it anymore.
On the other hand, I have yet to meet a person who is sure that there is no soul granted at conception who believes that early abortions should be illegal.
Well, you haven't knowingly met such a person. But I'm happy to state that I believe abortion should be illegal in all but a few cases (medical necessity and rape) and "souls" don't come into it. I don't need to believe in a soul to value life.
In short, it may be a religious debate for some, but not all. And it most certainly should not be tied to whether you want to support economic policy X or economic policy Y. As long as US politics divides up strongly emotive issues like this between two parties, the US people will always be easily played off against each other to their detriment.
Have you ever seen a man attack a women physically even once?
Yes. More than once. And if you'll allow me to include instances of my friends being attacked / beaten by a man, that rises higher. Both men and women become victims of domestic abuse. A Home Office survey a couple of years ago in the UK showed that males were about six percent less likely than females to be victims. Note that the Home Office crime survey is very well respected and not based on reported crimes to the police (reported crime statistics get skewed in the case of crimes where the victim is ashamed of the crime).
If you're even remotely attractive (Lets say, shy of disfigured), I'd say there's a very good chance. If the gender roles are reversed, there's a very good chance of getting slapped. I don't know if that's societal or biological, but I suspect it's societal.
There's a biological basis. A woman is seldom physically intimidating / threatening a male who she is sexually propositioning. The opposite is very often the case. Consider that men are predominently larger and stronger than women. Consider also that a man can't easliy be forced to have sexual intercourse against his will by a woman because he wont get hard if he isn't turned on. But a woman can be forced.
A stranger coming up to you and saying they "want to fuck you" is quite different when it is someone smaller than you who requires your cooperation, rather than someone larger and more powerful, who doesn't.
Slashdot's own marketing data which they pass on to potential advertisers, says that around a third of the membership of Slashdot is female, if iirc. Can we please just let the lonely teenager in the basement stereotype die at last? Most/. are doing well financially and are above their mid-twenties and probably partnered.
You missed an important corollary to controlling people's sex life, which is that failing to control it can still be effective so long as they feel guilty about it. But really, control of sex is a fundamental requirement of patriarchy whether in a religious context or not. Status amongst males is heavily controlled by a woman's choice of mate. Don't think so? If a king has to watch the girl(s) he fancies preferring to go have sex with some handsome young baron, then his status over that baron is greatly diminished. And you can translate that to pretty much any scenario. A woman's sexual freedom is the great obliterator of male status. So if you (as a male) want to put control of social status in your own hands, you're almost obliged to curtail female sexual freedom.
I reckon the neo-pagans have a nice idea with their one-year or seven-year handfasting. Less of the eternal binding of marriage, but without the lack of protection or commitment of purely casual sex. And if at the end of that time people want to renew, then that's fine too. But it removes the expectation that they must.
Seconded. It is absurd to lump anti-abortion in with Creationism. I am strongly anti-abortion. I also find the theory of evolution eminently believable. Making divisive issues like abortion a part of political factionalism is just a means of keeping opposition from organizing.
Vote third party. Get your friends to vote third party. You wont change the fact that each election you are presented with two unpleasant choices, if each election you accept one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
More like people thought it was worth their money but thought free was even better.
Which people?
Those pirating it.
Do you mean a few people? The purpose of this lowering prices isn't to make sure that all people buy the product. No, it's to try to get more people to buy the product.,
Agreed. My point is that $0.99 is so low to most people for a single purchase, that it's not a factor stopping them from buying something if they have even a mild desire to have the product. Lowering the price below the point where nearly everyone is already willing to pay, makes no sense for the seller and makes little difference to the buyer. My time is worth a lot more than $0.45 per hour (assuming he cut prices in half), so assuming I'm going to spend an hour playing some game, a price reduction is irrelevant to me.
In fact, we don't even know how many 'pirates' there are (such a thing would be nearly impossible to track). All he mentioned was that there was "still people" 'pirating' his game, not how many, how much fewer than there was before, or how he can even accurately guess the amount of 'pirates'.
True. I'm not debating that point, I'm just refuting the GP's slightly catty suggestion that the piracy (great or small) is because of the cost.
That puts the lie to the notion that it is overpriced.
"Overpriced" is subjective.
Actually, I'm not talking from my own point of view, but from the market's in general. We can see whether large numbers of people are willing to pay for something at a given price or not. In fact, these companies put a lot of research into such things.
But, but... the music studios, man. They starve the artists who don't get a penny. And, those artists shouldn't be able to make so much money for just a days work as well! And if I pirate your games I'm doing you a favour because I'll tell all my friends about it and then they'll want to pirate it too and, and... something about cars. Yeah!
Same here. It's a really nice device in so many ways, but I want to have more control over it. And really bizarrely, I quite like the Windows Phone 7 but again, have a problem with having to do everything with it via the bloody Zune software. If I buy something on a contract, fair enough. But when I pay for a product outright, I want to own it. Closed markets are risky.
Jailbreaking is hardly the standard. The vast majority of users don't want to mess with their phones in that way.
And knowing how to find pirated games, their cracks, software for mounting the imgs, how to install the cracks is standard?
Well if you download a pirated song or a pirated computer game, you don't normally have to mess with your OS to do that. But when you jailbreak your phone, to most people that is a risk - they are messing with their phone in some unapproved way. That is where the difference lies. That's what I was talking about when I said the vast majority of users don't want to mess with their phones in that way. And I think that stands up. I don't have figures for it, but I'm confident that the overwhelming majority of people who buy a phone (usually on a contract), don't want to start downloading programs from the Internet to start fucking with the "insides". Very different from playing a pirated MP3 on that phone.
All else being equal, I would sooner trust the market research and knowledge of a company, than some random person on Slashdot., however. I would expect Valve to have better knowledge of price points and their own sales figures than the layman.
Their markets have expanded greatly, the cost of equipment for production has dropped, their cost of distribution has dropped through the floor to almost nothing and wow the price has dropped all the way from 10 to.... 9. huh...
The value of the music is the same to me. And if you add in inflation over the last decade, the price has dropped by more than from £10 to £9. Anyway, OP complained that the cost of music had not dropped. Aside from why the cost of music should drop when everything else in an inflation-based economy rises, I pointed out that it has.
You're comparing the cost of a physical product you can sell to a small collection of bytes? They are hardly the same.
They are to me and to most people. If I have to go to the shop to buy a CD, or if I pay to buy a pile of 320kpbs MP3s on Amazon, my ears don't care! It's the same music and I enjoy it the same way at the same times and places. The product is indeed the same, merely buying MP3 downloads is a more convenient method of delivery.
Yes but the cost of producing a computer game is NOT what the games companies pay to have a game produced. Once you remove all the marketing, overpriced voice actors, hollywood accounting and crap that gets added on the actual cost is a lot less.
So if you remove costs, the cost is less? Whilst I'll concede the validity of that statement, the relevance seems a little lacking. If it is your contention that piracy is legitimised because you think voice actors are overpaid, then I'm unconvinced. And fortunately so are a lot of other people, or there wouldn't be many big name computer games around.
I know I'd rather pay for a clean copy of something than hunt for it on pirate sites.
Good for you.
They should be providing support. Ford still makes parts for cars they dont make any more.
Did IQ's just suddenly drop whilst I was away?
I already said: nothing on XP is broken by this, they're just not adding new functionality to it anymore.
Whilst your case may be true, the problem is that arguments about DRM, format availability, ease of downloading vs. having to go to a shop and buy... All these such arguments were made extensively as rationalisations of piracy early on. And yet most of these are dealt with now. I can buy a computer game as a direct download. I can buy high-quality MP3s at the click of a button. Things like wanting The Colour of Money in HD are edge cases these days, and getting fewer all the time. They're not good arguments for the vast bulk of piracy that goes on. If you look at popular torrents, you'll see a tonne of newly released movies and computer games. The bulk of it, in fact. And these are all things where you can get them in such formats. Most piracy is not about formats, it's about getting things without paying.
Unless you post more information on your game it will be hard to tell but my guess is that people do not think that they their worth of money. Perhaps it just has to be better.
If someone wants to spend time playing a computer game, $0.99 isn't going to put most people off. More like people thought it was worth their money but thought free was even better. If you want a more rigorous logical argument, my time is worth more than $0.99 per hour and so is almost everybody else's. So if I spend an hour on a game, I'm already paying significantly more than $0.99 in real terms. That puts the lie to the notion that it is overpriced.
They did lower the costs of music, for the record companies.
What, you thought it was going to lower prices for US?
I remember paying £10 for a CD album years ten back, and now I can get a new album as an MP3 download at 320kbps from Amazon for £9 or less. That's not even allowing for inflation. Prices are low enough. The cost of a song or a movie or, as we're discussing in this topic, a computer game, isn't the price of the cheap CD and cheap box it comes in. That's just a medium. The cost of producing a computer game remains the same.
Jailbreaking is hardly the standard. The vast majority of users don't want to mess with their phones in that way.
And further, if you said your neighbour was a terrorist in the USA, it might result in some investigation or difficulties, but it would get cleared up. These people could well be killed in Egypt right now. Does Flickr want to be part of that extrajudicial process? Now if a guy knows that people are torturers and a threat to others, then he has almost an obligation to put those pictures up. But Flickr can't distinguish his actions from anyone else. Help someone get killed or decline to do so - don't see much to blame Flickr for in this instance.
Bullshit, they didn't free Mozilla from anything, Mozilla still has to pay a licensing fee for copies that are running on other OSes if they want support,
So you'd be happy if MS also provided licensed versions and plugins for OSs they don't own? Seems a little unreasonable. As to XP, it's ten years old, again it's not reasonable to complain that they're not releasing new enhancements to old software they're not selling anymore. It's not like anything on XP is broken by this, they're just not adding new functionality to it anymore.
But why on earth would a specific position on a moral issue have any bearing on that same person's position on an unrelated scientific issue?
I completely agree.
On the other hand, I have yet to meet a person who is sure that there is no soul granted at conception who believes that early abortions should be illegal.
Well, you haven't knowingly met such a person. But I'm happy to state that I believe abortion should be illegal in all but a few cases (medical necessity and rape) and "souls" don't come into it. I don't need to believe in a soul to value life.
In short, it may be a religious debate for some, but not all. And it most certainly should not be tied to whether you want to support economic policy X or economic policy Y. As long as US politics divides up strongly emotive issues like this between two parties, the US people will always be easily played off against each other to their detriment.
Have you ever seen a man attack a women physically even once?
Yes. More than once. And if you'll allow me to include instances of my friends being attacked / beaten by a man, that rises higher. Both men and women become victims of domestic abuse. A Home Office survey a couple of years ago in the UK showed that males were about six percent less likely than females to be victims. Note that the Home Office crime survey is very well respected and not based on reported crimes to the police (reported crime statistics get skewed in the case of crimes where the victim is ashamed of the crime).
Your views are seriously detached from real life.
Boo!
If you're even remotely attractive (Lets say, shy of disfigured), I'd say there's a very good chance. If the gender roles are reversed, there's a very good chance of getting slapped. I don't know if that's societal or biological, but I suspect it's societal.
There's a biological basis. A woman is seldom physically intimidating / threatening a male who she is sexually propositioning. The opposite is very often the case. Consider that men are predominently larger and stronger than women. Consider also that a man can't easliy be forced to have sexual intercourse against his will by a woman because he wont get hard if he isn't turned on. But a woman can be forced.
A stranger coming up to you and saying they "want to fuck you" is quite different when it is someone smaller than you who requires your cooperation, rather than someone larger and more powerful, who doesn't.
Slashdot's own marketing data which they pass on to potential advertisers, says that around a third of the membership of Slashdot is female, if iirc. Can we please just let the lonely teenager in the basement stereotype die at last? Most /. are doing well financially and are above their mid-twenties and probably partnered.
You missed an important corollary to controlling people's sex life, which is that failing to control it can still be effective so long as they feel guilty about it. But really, control of sex is a fundamental requirement of patriarchy whether in a religious context or not. Status amongst males is heavily controlled by a woman's choice of mate. Don't think so? If a king has to watch the girl(s) he fancies preferring to go have sex with some handsome young baron, then his status over that baron is greatly diminished. And you can translate that to pretty much any scenario. A woman's sexual freedom is the great obliterator of male status. So if you (as a male) want to put control of social status in your own hands, you're almost obliged to curtail female sexual freedom.
I reckon the neo-pagans have a nice idea with their one-year or seven-year handfasting. Less of the eternal binding of marriage, but without the lack of protection or commitment of purely casual sex. And if at the end of that time people want to renew, then that's fine too. But it removes the expectation that they must.
Seconded. It is absurd to lump anti-abortion in with Creationism. I am strongly anti-abortion. I also find the theory of evolution eminently believable. Making divisive issues like abortion a part of political factionalism is just a means of keeping opposition from organizing.
We're too dumb to be faced with so many options. They know what's good for you better than you know yourself :p
That's why I like KDE. It has a design philosophy of supporting the smart first and pandering to the wallies second.
;)
Naturally, I consider myself in the former category.
Vote third party. Get your friends to vote third party. You wont change the fact that each election you are presented with two unpleasant choices, if each election you accept one of them.