I don't owe anybody to spend my free time working on a game, either. So I won't. I do some mobile app development when a client pays for it, but mostly they pay me to work on other stuff.
I would love to spend time on a game, but whenever I try I lose interest after the juicy bits work in principle. Most of the work to get it polished are boring details that I don't particularly enjoy working on. I simply don't have the skills to produce good graphics, so I'd have to find a professional to do it for me. If I can pay for it, this is much easier.
In the end, I simply won't do it. If I spend my spare time on a project, and you don't even think it's worth paying me a beer for it but still go through the effort of downloading a pirated copy elsewhere, then this is a slap in the face.
I don't owe anybody to take that, either.
You call me greedy, because I want users to pay a minimal amount for my work. At the same time, you still install a pirated copy.
You complain about getting "raped" by ads, but aren't willing to give developers another option.
Personally, i always look for free or open source tools as they are all around less hassle, generally better quality, and i dont have to give people possibly dicey pirated versions off the torrents or whatever.
Good for you. What are your favorite open source games? Do you help developing them? Or is free (as in beer) the only attribute that is important to you?
And if what you say about the quality is true, then why do you feel the need to pirate software in the first place?
You enter an agreement when you install software, too. If you don't want to accept this agreement, then don't install the app.
So basically, your scenario is a bad comparison between something with unlimited supply and something with limited supply.
There is an unlimited supply of copies, but not of titles. Whenever a developer makes a decision whether to spend time on a project, s/he will consider the opportunity cost of not doing something else instead. If the unlimited copies of existing apps are enough to fill demand, then the developer is best advised to not waste any time.
In the long run, getting a share of content sales will make them more money.
Advertising budgets are limited. The value of ad space goes down if there's too much of it. Not just because of oversupply, but because banner blindness leads to a lower effectiveness of ads. It also reduces the value of the device itself, since it will be perceived as nothing but a carrier for ads, and the lower revenue will lead to less apps to get developed.
What they need is a mixture of both. A share from payed content, and a small enough amount of ad space to be sought after.
An ads-only strategy will lead to the same result as on the Web. It will annoy users and result in low-quality content. Just look at how much trouble newspaper sites are having.
But right now, gaining market share on the mobile OS market is paramount. Profits come later. Unfortunately, quality of apps are important to gain market share.
Which leads to another problem. If I provide an ad free version, many will use the pirated ad-free version instead of the one that actually generates income. Therefore, there is something to be said for not providing an ad-free version at all.
Luckily, I have other options. I can just do normal client work instead of working on that game, and bill by the hour.
Thank you for your encouragement. I was a bit hesitant to do this, because I personally would rather pay a small amount and not get harassed by ads. So many others are doing it already. This has made ad space cheap, it will take a significant number of ads for me to recover my costs.
You've already seen how this works on the Web. Luckily ad blockers won't work, so the video commercial I'll have to play in the beginning won't have to be too long.
Say I want to sell a small game. Nothing special, but fun to play non the less. It didn't take several man years, but it wasn't a weekend hack, either.
Someone who doesn't have any other games installed would happily pay a few bucks to play it once in a while. It would be well worth it.
If another person has a habit of pirating, then this one probably has dozens other games already. The more alternatives he has to play with, the lower the value of my game to him. He'll probably end up pirating it because he's curious about it, and spends the money on the latte at Starbuck that he drinks while playing instead. He may even have the honest intention to buy it eventually, you know, if he ends up playing it a lot. But in the end, there are so many other pirated games he could play, and by the time he spent hours playing it, he gets bored and tries something else instead, and the cycle repeats.
With so many pirates out there, how should I price my game? Do I price it for the first person, who doesn't have many other games, and for whom the added value the game brings to his life is, say, $10? Or do I price it for the other, who already has plenty of alternatives, and for whom the added value is negligible?
Thank you for your advice. Since I don't believe I can interest you in a support contract for my jump and run game, I'm going to plaster it with ads as an alternative source of income.
Newspaper/magazine apps have been banned already for editorial content.
Now, Bild is a steaming pile of crap, and Stern doesn't exactly cater to intellectuals, either, but still...
You have a point, but this effect is limited by the fact that while developers like to play, new iterations of the Player are usually only targeted long after release, when adoption is close to 100%. New versions of the authoring tool are bought primarily because of new features unrelated to the target platform.
Additionally, the Flash Player will let you save a lot of bandwidth cost through P2P streaming.
HTML5 is great, and it will replace Flash in some areas. But it's already years behind, and it's not even properly adapted yet.
And that's the latest iteration of HTML. When do you think HTML6 will be out? Meanwhile, Flash evolves further.
What I've heard about WiMax from several (former) subscribers in my city wasn't good, either. Unreliable, low bandwidth even when connectivity was there, and so on.
Between ADSL2+, cable, and now the local utility rolling out 100Mb/s (with their 50Mb/s plan being cheaper than WiMax), I don't understand how they even managed to stay in business until now. Also, local HSDPA is faster.
Actually, no, I'm not missing the part where plants soak up CO2 during growth -- that's why I like the growing aspect of the scheme.
I was arguing against the claim that biofuels were "carbon-neutral by definition," because that doesn't take everything into account. By one estimate, corn based ethanol even takes more energy to produce than it contains. We have producers that grow on cheap land in the Ukraine and ship the crop all the way to Germany for processing. Even if the whole system would run on biofuels itself, the crops for all that would grow on fertile land that presumably wouldn't be covered by nothing but sand otherwise. So at the minimum, the net "emission" is the amount of CO2 the plants that would normally grow on the land would bind.
No carbon emissions during production? And wouldn't something else grow on the land that is used to produce the raw materials?
I like the growing part. What I have a problem with is burning it afterwards. It's still CO2, no matter when the plant grew, the goal should be to simply burn less. For example, this is a very nice car running on bio-ethanol, but would you call it ecological?
The point is, it's more important what comes out of your car than what goes into it. Get a car with a highly efficient diesel engine, or better yet, take the train.
Yeah, but now you have to explain what a direct mandate is, how that relates to the proportional representation by party, what an Überhangmandat is, what a fraction is, and so on. I didn't want to go there...
The German constitution has checks and balances, too. It just goes further, being designed to resist change even if supported by the majority of the elected representatives. The final check is an explicit right to militant resistance, should it be abolished somehow anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
As it turned out, flamebait would have been more fitting. Or it could be a particularly perfidious troll. Overrated was correct in any case.
No one owes you a profit though.
I don't owe anybody to spend my free time working on a game, either. So I won't. I do some mobile app development when a client pays for it, but mostly they pay me to work on other stuff.
I would love to spend time on a game, but whenever I try I lose interest after the juicy bits work in principle. Most of the work to get it polished are boring details that I don't particularly enjoy working on. I simply don't have the skills to produce good graphics, so I'd have to find a professional to do it for me. If I can pay for it, this is much easier.
In the end, I simply won't do it. If I spend my spare time on a project, and you don't even think it's worth paying me a beer for it but still go through the effort of downloading a pirated copy elsewhere, then this is a slap in the face.
I don't owe anybody to take that, either.
You call me greedy, because I want users to pay a minimal amount for my work. At the same time, you still install a pirated copy.
You complain about getting "raped" by ads, but aren't willing to give developers another option.
Personally, i always look for free or open source tools as they are all around less hassle, generally better quality, and i dont have to give people possibly dicey pirated versions off the torrents or whatever.
Good for you. What are your favorite open source games? Do you help developing them? Or is free (as in beer) the only attribute that is important to you?
And if what you say about the quality is true, then why do you feel the need to pirate software in the first place?
You enter an agreement when you install software, too. If you don't want to accept this agreement, then don't install the app.
So basically, your scenario is a bad comparison between something with unlimited supply and something with limited supply.
There is an unlimited supply of copies, but not of titles. Whenever a developer makes a decision whether to spend time on a project, s/he will consider the opportunity cost of not doing something else instead. If the unlimited copies of existing apps are enough to fill demand, then the developer is best advised to not waste any time.
You can get refunds. It's a common complaint that when a user does this, the developer has to refund the full price, including Apple's tax.
In the long run, getting a share of content sales will make them more money.
Advertising budgets are limited. The value of ad space goes down if there's too much of it. Not just because of oversupply, but because banner blindness leads to a lower effectiveness of ads. It also reduces the value of the device itself, since it will be perceived as nothing but a carrier for ads, and the lower revenue will lead to less apps to get developed.
What they need is a mixture of both. A share from payed content, and a small enough amount of ad space to be sought after.
An ads-only strategy will lead to the same result as on the Web. It will annoy users and result in low-quality content. Just look at how much trouble newspaper sites are having.
But right now, gaining market share on the mobile OS market is paramount. Profits come later. Unfortunately, quality of apps are important to gain market share.
Which leads to another problem. If I provide an ad free version, many will use the pirated ad-free version instead of the one that actually generates income. Therefore, there is something to be said for not providing an ad-free version at all.
Luckily, I have other options. I can just do normal client work instead of working on that game, and bill by the hour.
Thank you for your encouragement. I was a bit hesitant to do this, because I personally would rather pay a small amount and not get harassed by ads. So many others are doing it already. This has made ad space cheap, it will take a significant number of ads for me to recover my costs.
You've already seen how this works on the Web. Luckily ad blockers won't work, so the video commercial I'll have to play in the beginning won't have to be too long.
Say I want to sell a small game. Nothing special, but fun to play non the less. It didn't take several man years, but it wasn't a weekend hack, either.
Someone who doesn't have any other games installed would happily pay a few bucks to play it once in a while. It would be well worth it.
If another person has a habit of pirating, then this one probably has dozens other games already. The more alternatives he has to play with, the lower the value of my game to him. He'll probably end up pirating it because he's curious about it, and spends the money on the latte at Starbuck that he drinks while playing instead. He may even have the honest intention to buy it eventually, you know, if he ends up playing it a lot. But in the end, there are so many other pirated games he could play, and by the time he spent hours playing it, he gets bored and tries something else instead, and the cycle repeats.
With so many pirates out there, how should I price my game? Do I price it for the first person, who doesn't have many other games, and for whom the added value the game brings to his life is, say, $10? Or do I price it for the other, who already has plenty of alternatives, and for whom the added value is negligible?
Thank you for your advice. Since I don't believe I can interest you in a support contract for my jump and run game, I'm going to plaster it with ads as an alternative source of income.
Here's a list. That's quite a bit of capacity already, it would be interesting to know if potential for more has any practical limits.
Adobe just uses the API Apple introduced a month ago, they didn't write it themselves, obviously. Some restrictions apply.
Newspaper/magazine apps have been banned already for editorial content. Now, Bild is a steaming pile of crap, and Stern doesn't exactly cater to intellectuals, either, but still...
He probably read the specs. SWF really is pretty compact to begin with, then everything after the first eight bytes is zipped.
Maybe you would prefer IntelliJ IDEA?
Please remind me, because I haven't seen it in a while for some reason -- how long does the Java plugin take to start up again?
Flash supports the mouse wheel, since Flash 6. We'll see how well the Flash Player will work on touch screens when it's out for Android.
You have a point, but this effect is limited by the fact that while developers like to play, new iterations of the Player are usually only targeted long after release, when adoption is close to 100%. New versions of the authoring tool are bought primarily because of new features unrelated to the target platform.
Argh, my link about the P2P streaming is missing.
Additionally, the Flash Player will let you save a lot of bandwidth cost through P2P streaming.
HTML5 is great, and it will replace Flash in some areas. But it's already years behind, and it's not even properly adapted yet.
And that's the latest iteration of HTML. When do you think HTML6 will be out? Meanwhile, Flash evolves further.
What I've heard about WiMax from several (former) subscribers in my city wasn't good, either. Unreliable, low bandwidth even when connectivity was there, and so on.
Between ADSL2+, cable, and now the local utility rolling out 100Mb/s (with their 50Mb/s plan being cheaper than WiMax), I don't understand how they even managed to stay in business until now. Also, local HSDPA is faster.
Actually, no, I'm not missing the part where plants soak up CO2 during growth -- that's why I like the growing aspect of the scheme.
I was arguing against the claim that biofuels were "carbon-neutral by definition," because that doesn't take everything into account. By one estimate, corn based ethanol even takes more energy to produce than it contains. We have producers that grow on cheap land in the Ukraine and ship the crop all the way to Germany for processing. Even if the whole system would run on biofuels itself, the crops for all that would grow on fertile land that presumably wouldn't be covered by nothing but sand otherwise. So at the minimum, the net "emission" is the amount of CO2 the plants that would normally grow on the land would bind.
So, grow stuff, and burn as little as possible.
No carbon emissions during production? And wouldn't something else grow on the land that is used to produce the raw materials?
I like the growing part. What I have a problem with is burning it afterwards. It's still CO2, no matter when the plant grew, the goal should be to simply burn less. For example, this is a very nice car running on bio-ethanol, but would you call it ecological?
The point is, it's more important what comes out of your car than what goes into it. Get a car with a highly efficient diesel engine, or better yet, take the train.
Yeah, but now you have to explain what a direct mandate is, how that relates to the proportional representation by party, what an Überhangmandat is, what a fraction is, and so on. I didn't want to go there...
You may own Mein Kampf, but you may not sell it
Actually, you may not copy it. The State of Bavaria claims copyright, like with any book, it will expire 70 years after the author's death, in 2015.
The German constitution has checks and balances, too. It just goes further, being designed to resist change even if supported by the majority of the elected representatives. The final check is an explicit right to militant resistance, should it be abolished somehow anyway.