There are quite a lot of software developers/distributors for whom piracy IS the reason that DRM exists.
There are others for whom it definitely isn't.
There are many many more that neither you nor I is in a position to say for sure.
You have no call to assume bad faith in a blanket statement. Hanlon's razor?
It sucks being poor, tired, sick, and working to get even that far. No one's disputing that. But there are ways other than warez to get some entertainment without paying for things, or at least, without paying much.
Depending on where you live, you may be able to find all sorts of free music on offer to go and listen to. Buskers would prefer you threw them a dollar, of course, but other gigs exist solely as advertising and are straight-up free. Religious services can double as free concerts if you find one with a decent choir. Get desperate enough and you can hang out in stores to listen to the music they're piping in, or hog the free listening stations in a music store, like the penniless teenagers.
Small theaters often have pay-what-you-can performances. Many museums are that way all the time. There's these things called libraries where they let people go to read books for free, and some of them even allow you to rent movies, music, and games. Some people also borrow books, movies, and games from friends, or buy cheap used ones, or FIND discarded ones on the street.
There are an uncountable number of ACTUALLY FREE video games on the internet you can download, no stealing required.
Look, I'm not a 100% raving anti-piracy fanatic, but this particular argument does not hold water. "Don't steal my games" is not me cruelly denying you the only tiny drop of joy that could possibly reach into your benighted life.
Are these people aiming for jobs within the mainstream game industry, aiming to become independent game developers, or interested in game design as an art form?
If they're looking for jobs then yes, give them time with Unity and talk a lot about the limits of 3d and how to balance speed and beauty.
If they want to sell their own games, step away from Unity and look into simpler game builders that can be highly customised by people with artistic talent. Even RPG Maker would do for that (look at Rainblood for an example of an artist-driven RPG Maker game). RenPy or one of the adventure game toolkits, also. If they're not very techie but they want to create games, you want to give them tools that make the basic game-making easy, and then let them go wild exploring how different they can make the results.
If you want to explore weird experimental/conceptual game design stuff, then along with the 3d give them some simple flexible 2d tools that they can prototype wild concepts with.
Ignoring your rude suggestions (Slashdotters don't like women? What a surprise!) the exact money figure is mostly a distraction from the issue. If he's done something *actually wrong*, then the fact that he can't pay the fine shouldn't mean that he gets off scot free. If he's done something that ISN'T wrong, then the fine being a thousand instead of a million makes little difference.
While I don't apply DRM to my products because of my personal moral beliefs, that does not appear to have any effect on people's desire to pirate or not pirate, nor does it make anyone think of me as a 'nice' company that they shouldn't steal from - I still get rants about how I'm evil and deserve to die because I put thing X in a game, or didn't put thing X in a game, or didn't sell on Steam, or didn't sell at retail in Malaysia, or didn't accept some payment method I've never heard of and they never asked me about anyway, or didn't use photorealistic 3d that I could never afford anyway, or dared to charge any money at all! People who want to come up with an excuse not to pay are quite good at finding other justifications.
And what about all the publishers who DON"T use DRM and still get pirated just as much and see tons of posts about how all game publishers are evil and deserve to be ripped off? If you treat them like thugs, they may as well act like them...:)
... and then there's all the games that DON'T cost $60 and DO come with free trials, and they still get pirated just as much. Game publishers don't have to 'come up with' a fair model - there are PLENTY of game sellers out there who are more affordable and less restrictive, it's just that no one actually cares. Pirates aren't going to change and will continue this BS anyway.
Good. Buy games from developers with smaller budgets instead of buying the megazillion shiny thing. The crazy parts of the industry that just blindly follow the money around will change course if the money is obviously somewhere else.:)
With the exception of the marijuana (sorry, just not my thing) I'd be quite happy curling up in a nice dark room with couches, games, and TVs, and no man am I. Are women supposed to be afraid of the dark or something?
There are cheaper games out there. Big companies aren't complete morons - if the cheaper games are flying off the rack and the expensive ones are lingering, they'll change their sales tactics. However, if people sit at home sulking and don't buy any games at all, that just registers as either "OMG! RECESSION!" or "OMG! PIRACY!"
People love to complain about all the things big companies are doing wrong - short gameplay, high prices, nasty DRM - and sure, these things suck, but there are plenty of people who DON'T do those things. Yet as long as the big companies make more money than the people trying different tactics, they're not likely to change.
Until developers have access to time machines, retail price of a game will NOT affect the development process.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. The intended retail price DOES affect the development process. Video games are generally NOT built from scratch, completed, and handed to a marketing department which then says "Gee, what should we sell this for?" Publishers can have profit projections of what they intend to sell the game for and how many sales they think they can get before production even STARTS.
Those projections affect how much budget the publisher is willing to put up for the game.
Can you make games an awful lot cheaper? Of course you can, I'm an indie, shoestring budgets are my living. And shoestring budget doesn't always mean the game's no fun. But it does mean you're not going to get fancy physics engines and photorealistic 3d. A big budget doesn't guarantee that a game's any good, but it means that the company had the opportunity to put more Kewl Stuff into it.
PT Barnum is proved right: there IS no such thing as bad publicity.
... Except that becoming the most TORRENTED GAME hardly does the game-makers any good, does it?
Of course, many hentai companies don't *want* to sell games to Westerners (some have been very anti-export precisely because they were trying to prevent this sort of mess.)
Still, publicity that boosts piracy - or worse, boosts SALES of pirated copies, since there are places selling the download burned to a cheap disc with a broken fan-made patch applied - is not exactly helping them. And since many companies are having to alter or cancel products in development because of this mess? This was definitely bad publicity.
Dating sims aren't necessarily porn. Plenty of them are not. It's just that many of them, if they're PC games in Japan, contain some adult content. Many SHOOT EM UP games contain adult content if they're PC games in Japan.
... for that matter, Katawa Shoujo isn't a dating sim. Nor is it hard to get hold of. Nor does being on the shelf matter, since it isn't being sold. And even if it were being sold, lacking adult content wouldn't make it that much easier to get it sold on US shelves because the US doesn't have the same sort of doujinsoft tradition.
Yes, it's weird that American videogames are all yay-violence boo-sex, but your comment is rambly and doesn't entirely make sense.:)
Making up completely false versions of other people's arguments so that you can mock them. Do you do this because you are honestly incapable of understanding anyone else's viewpoint, or because you need to belittle others in order to reassure yourself of your greatness?
I find it hilarious that people are offended by fact that there are AFRICANS in AFRICA!
I have yet to actually see ANYONE who is offended by the presence of africans in africa. I charitably assume some troll under a bridge somewhere has this opinion, but it's certainly not the opinion of ANY person I've actually encountered who was concerned about RE5.
If the game involved black-killing-whites, or hispanic-killing-blacks, or black-killing-hispanics... nobody would care!
... Which is also completely untrue, but obviously you really enjoy fabricating other people's reactions so that you can pretend that they're hypocrites without bothering to deal with little things like reality. It's entirely possible that many people who complain about this game wouldn't complain about a game that was racist against Brazilians, but plenty of Brazilians would complain instead.
I laugh at the obvious insecurities of people because it really goes to show you how tiny they feel.
... Wait, wait. You recognise that minorities feel persecuted, small, and powerless, and you think this is funny?
I still find it unbelievable how the developers actually caved in after some (overly sensitive people, mind you) people accused them of racism.
A game set in Africa has blaaaaack people: Ohno!
Since that's completely not the argument that's being made you get *double* racism points.:) Oh sure, there's probably some idiot somewhere who is honestly offended that you shoot black people at all in a game. There are a vast number of idiots in the world, as your post proves. But that's honestly and seriously NOT what most people who are concerned about racist overtones are concerned about.
When you discover that you've inadvertently upset someone, perhaps you could try finding out WHY they're upset instead of deciding to assume that their reasoning is the most stupid thing possible and then mocking them for YOUR false assumptions.
I don't really care about RE, I do care about people being dicks to each other, which is what you're doing.
He's saying that criticizing a game set in remote Africa simply because it has a lot of black people in it is the height of reactionary stupidity.
Yes, that would be stupid. However, that's not the criticism that's being made. (At least, by the vast majority of people. COnsidering the stupidity of humanity, I'm sure there's someone somewhere who's actually arguing that.)
First tip to deal with accusations of being offensive - Try finding out why something offends people instead of employing straw men. You still may not agree with their proposition, but at least you won't be adding insult to injury.
Why do some people have so much trouble grasping the concept that not everyone in the world has the same tastes? Personally, I wouldn't pay $30 for either Spiderweb's games OR Oblivion, because neither really suits my taste in games. But I'd pay it for Eschalon, because that *is* more suited to my tastes, even with its 'old' graphics.
Time and again we hear these whines on./ - complaining that bejeweled is overpriced compared to halo or something while failing to recognise that they appeal to different people, and halo's 'superiority' means bupkis to someone who's not into that kind of thing.
This guy does not have a poor product. He has a product that doesn't appeal to you personally. It's not my thing either. It does have a dedicated fanbase, and a vast number of indies would love to sell that many copies.
If you don't like a particular kind of game and don't think it's worth the money, don't play it. Simple!
You could make a much better argument that piracy violates "do unto others as you would have them do unto you".
Playing games without paying for them isn't stealing, you haven't actually TAKEN them. However, you're mooching off someone else's work without giving them anything in exchange. That's not sustainable. If everybody does it, the game-maker goes bankrupt (and an awful lot of them do, lately.)
Does it harm anybody if you copy a game you would never in a million years have paid for, or that wasn't legally on sale to you? No. But if you intentionally refuse to support game-makers whose works you like, then whine about them not making the games Bigger Better Faster, then whine more when the game-makers go bust and don't make any more games, you really have only yourself to blame.
How is the hard copy of a DS game less functional? UNLIKE pc games and their stupid DRM, DS cartridges just plain WORK! They don't require that you enter stupid serial codes. They don't require that you connect to Nintendo servers to verify that you're allowed to play. They don't (until the DSi) refuse to work because you bought your console in the US and your game in Japan.
There are plenty of new games available right now that only cost $20 or less.
There are plenty of new games available right now with no DRM.
The problem is, a lot of/. posters 'protest' the high-priced crapwared games by pirating them, rather than by supporting people following the model they'd supposedly like to see. The more that cheap, DRM-free games are SUCCESSFUL, the more companies will follow that path.
(Though I will concede that I have yet to see an original english language game that didn't suck:( )
There aren't that many of them to check out, though, and most of them are written by hobbyists who have no more experience in professional writing than the bad dialog-writers that are being mocked...
I'll admit that my own work is far from perfect, although I'd hope that you'd rank Fatal Hearts at least a little bit above 'suck'.:) (Not porn. Just visual novel.)
As a game developer interested in writing-heavy games, I can say that I have been approached a few times by people desperately wanting to get hired to write game stories for me, and I pretty much ignore them. I'm writing my own games. I have stories I want to tell, and I enjoy doing it. If someone wants to write their own game and have me help them get it finished and on sale, I'm fine with that. But I'm not hiring anyone to write for me.
however, games that sell for $20 or less and have demos you can check out before you buy are STILL pirated. visit any warez forum, they happily trade all the small/indie/downloadable/casual games and cheer about how much they enjoy these games they aren't paying for.
Re:You do realize the other hobbies are the same?
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How Do Games Grow Up?
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playing games - you can learn GAME design theory and appreciation. If you follow it up with all sorts of tools, you can make little free games to entertain your friends, even if you don't go on to be a professional...:)
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There are many software sellers that don't use DRM. Wouldn't it be nice if customers actually did their homework and supported them?
There are quite a lot of software developers/distributors for whom piracy IS the reason that DRM exists. There are others for whom it definitely isn't. There are many many more that neither you nor I is in a position to say for sure. You have no call to assume bad faith in a blanket statement. Hanlon's razor?
Depending on where you live, you may be able to find all sorts of free music on offer to go and listen to. Buskers would prefer you threw them a dollar, of course, but other gigs exist solely as advertising and are straight-up free. Religious services can double as free concerts if you find one with a decent choir. Get desperate enough and you can hang out in stores to listen to the music they're piping in, or hog the free listening stations in a music store, like the penniless teenagers.
Small theaters often have pay-what-you-can performances. Many museums are that way all the time. There's these things called libraries where they let people go to read books for free, and some of them even allow you to rent movies, music, and games. Some people also borrow books, movies, and games from friends, or buy cheap used ones, or FIND discarded ones on the street.
There are an uncountable number of ACTUALLY FREE video games on the internet you can download, no stealing required.
Look, I'm not a 100% raving anti-piracy fanatic, but this particular argument does not hold water. "Don't steal my games" is not me cruelly denying you the only tiny drop of joy that could possibly reach into your benighted life.
Are these people aiming for jobs within the mainstream game industry, aiming to become independent game developers, or interested in game design as an art form? If they're looking for jobs then yes, give them time with Unity and talk a lot about the limits of 3d and how to balance speed and beauty. If they want to sell their own games, step away from Unity and look into simpler game builders that can be highly customised by people with artistic talent. Even RPG Maker would do for that (look at Rainblood for an example of an artist-driven RPG Maker game). RenPy or one of the adventure game toolkits, also. If they're not very techie but they want to create games, you want to give them tools that make the basic game-making easy, and then let them go wild exploring how different they can make the results. If you want to explore weird experimental/conceptual game design stuff, then along with the 3d give them some simple flexible 2d tools that they can prototype wild concepts with.
Ignoring your rude suggestions (Slashdotters don't like women? What a surprise!) the exact money figure is mostly a distraction from the issue. If he's done something *actually wrong*, then the fact that he can't pay the fine shouldn't mean that he gets off scot free. If he's done something that ISN'T wrong, then the fine being a thousand instead of a million makes little difference.
While I don't apply DRM to my products because of my personal moral beliefs, that does not appear to have any effect on people's desire to pirate or not pirate, nor does it make anyone think of me as a 'nice' company that they shouldn't steal from - I still get rants about how I'm evil and deserve to die because I put thing X in a game, or didn't put thing X in a game, or didn't sell on Steam, or didn't sell at retail in Malaysia, or didn't accept some payment method I've never heard of and they never asked me about anyway, or didn't use photorealistic 3d that I could never afford anyway, or dared to charge any money at all! People who want to come up with an excuse not to pay are quite good at finding other justifications.
And what about all the publishers who DON"T use DRM and still get pirated just as much and see tons of posts about how all game publishers are evil and deserve to be ripped off? If you treat them like thugs, they may as well act like them... :)
... and then there's all the games that DON'T cost $60 and DO come with free trials, and they still get pirated just as much. Game publishers don't have to 'come up with' a fair model - there are PLENTY of game sellers out there who are more affordable and less restrictive, it's just that no one actually cares. Pirates aren't going to change and will continue this BS anyway.
Good. Buy games from developers with smaller budgets instead of buying the megazillion shiny thing. The crazy parts of the industry that just blindly follow the money around will change course if the money is obviously somewhere else. :)
With the exception of the marijuana (sorry, just not my thing) I'd be quite happy curling up in a nice dark room with couches, games, and TVs, and no man am I. Are women supposed to be afraid of the dark or something?
People love to complain about all the things big companies are doing wrong - short gameplay, high prices, nasty DRM - and sure, these things suck, but there are plenty of people who DON'T do those things. Yet as long as the big companies make more money than the people trying different tactics, they're not likely to change.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. The intended retail price DOES affect the development process. Video games are generally NOT built from scratch, completed, and handed to a marketing department which then says "Gee, what should we sell this for?" Publishers can have profit projections of what they intend to sell the game for and how many sales they think they can get before production even STARTS.
Those projections affect how much budget the publisher is willing to put up for the game.
Can you make games an awful lot cheaper? Of course you can, I'm an indie, shoestring budgets are my living. And shoestring budget doesn't always mean the game's no fun. But it does mean you're not going to get fancy physics engines and photorealistic 3d. A big budget doesn't guarantee that a game's any good, but it means that the company had the opportunity to put more Kewl Stuff into it.
... is that your DMs weren't very good, especially when it comes to adjudicating magic. And everyone knows what poor management does to a business!
Of course, many hentai companies don't *want* to sell games to Westerners (some have been very anti-export precisely because they were trying to prevent this sort of mess.)
Still, publicity that boosts piracy - or worse, boosts SALES of pirated copies, since there are places selling the download burned to a cheap disc with a broken fan-made patch applied - is not exactly helping them. And since many companies are having to alter or cancel products in development because of this mess? This was definitely bad publicity.
Yes, it's weird that American videogames are all yay-violence boo-sex, but your comment is rambly and doesn't entirely make sense. :)
I find it hilarious that people are offended by fact that there are AFRICANS in AFRICA!
I have yet to actually see ANYONE who is offended by the presence of africans in africa. I charitably assume some troll under a bridge somewhere has this opinion, but it's certainly not the opinion of ANY person I've actually encountered who was concerned about RE5.
If the game involved black-killing-whites, or hispanic-killing-blacks, or black-killing-hispanics ... nobody would care!
I laugh at the obvious insecurities of people because it really goes to show you how tiny they feel.
Since that's completely not the argument that's being made you get *double* racism points. :) Oh sure, there's probably some idiot somewhere who is honestly offended that you shoot black people at all in a game. There are a vast number of idiots in the world, as your post proves. But that's honestly and seriously NOT what most people who are concerned about racist overtones are concerned about.
When you discover that you've inadvertently upset someone, perhaps you could try finding out WHY they're upset instead of deciding to assume that their reasoning is the most stupid thing possible and then mocking them for YOUR false assumptions.
I don't really care about RE, I do care about people being dicks to each other, which is what you're doing.
Yes, that would be stupid. However, that's not the criticism that's being made. (At least, by the vast majority of people. COnsidering the stupidity of humanity, I'm sure there's someone somewhere who's actually arguing that.)
First tip to deal with accusations of being offensive - Try finding out why something offends people instead of employing straw men. You still may not agree with their proposition, but at least you won't be adding insult to injury.
Time and again we hear these whines on ./ - complaining that bejeweled is overpriced compared to halo or something while failing to recognise that they appeal to different people, and halo's 'superiority' means bupkis to someone who's not into that kind of thing.
This guy does not have a poor product. He has a product that doesn't appeal to you personally. It's not my thing either. It does have a dedicated fanbase, and a vast number of indies would love to sell that many copies.
If you don't like a particular kind of game and don't think it's worth the money, don't play it. Simple!
Playing games without paying for them isn't stealing, you haven't actually TAKEN them. However, you're mooching off someone else's work without giving them anything in exchange. That's not sustainable. If everybody does it, the game-maker goes bankrupt (and an awful lot of them do, lately.)
Does it harm anybody if you copy a game you would never in a million years have paid for, or that wasn't legally on sale to you? No. But if you intentionally refuse to support game-makers whose works you like, then whine about them not making the games Bigger Better Faster, then whine more when the game-makers go bust and don't make any more games, you really have only yourself to blame.
How is the hard copy of a DS game less functional? UNLIKE pc games and their stupid DRM, DS cartridges just plain WORK! They don't require that you enter stupid serial codes. They don't require that you connect to Nintendo servers to verify that you're allowed to play. They don't (until the DSi) refuse to work because you bought your console in the US and your game in Japan.
There are plenty of new games available right now with no DRM.
The problem is, a lot of /. posters 'protest' the high-priced crapwared games by pirating them, rather than by supporting people following the model they'd supposedly like to see. The more that cheap, DRM-free games are SUCCESSFUL, the more companies will follow that path.
There aren't that many of them to check out, though, and most of them are written by hobbyists who have no more experience in professional writing than the bad dialog-writers that are being mocked...
I'll admit that my own work is far from perfect, although I'd hope that you'd rank Fatal Hearts at least a little bit above 'suck'. :) (Not porn. Just visual novel.)
As a game developer interested in writing-heavy games, I can say that I have been approached a few times by people desperately wanting to get hired to write game stories for me, and I pretty much ignore them. I'm writing my own games. I have stories I want to tell, and I enjoy doing it. If someone wants to write their own game and have me help them get it finished and on sale, I'm fine with that. But I'm not hiring anyone to write for me.
however, games that sell for $20 or less and have demos you can check out before you buy are STILL pirated. visit any warez forum, they happily trade all the small/indie/downloadable/casual games and cheer about how much they enjoy these games they aren't paying for.
playing games - you can learn GAME design theory and appreciation. If you follow it up with all sorts of tools, you can make little free games to entertain your friends, even if you don't go on to be a professional... :)