... although I don't think seven is the right age to be playing Fatal Hearts, honestly. A review has indicated that at least one eight-year-old boy was INTERESTED in reading the story, but his mom shooed him away...:)
Keep the seven year olds on Carmen Sandiego. Bring me your kids when they're a little bit older!
Um... it's fairly obvious that the makers of these games are intentionally trying to rip off the games they're ripping off. They even NAMED them ripoff names. Stop being so knee-jerk and pick a sensible argument.
Compulsory licensing, now, there's a sensible argument. "You're really obviously trying to rip off our game. That's fine, but we get a cut." Then everybody's happy. Hasbro gets money, game stays in business, players keep playing game.
Sure, I'm jumping to conclusions. Isn't that part of the fun of internet argument?:) If nothing else, leaping to conclusions and accusing wildly sometimes makes it easier for someone else to see where you're misunderstanding their position to correct you. I'm *still* not sure what it is you're saying that I'm misunderstanding, though.
Somewhere, I'm missing your train of thought. Generally people are arguing either: "You should be glad we're pirating! It gives you publicity and makes more people buy stuff!"... which wouldn't be thumbing your nose at the RIAA, it would be supporting them. Or "Content producers are rich bastards and don't deserve all those sales / won't notice a few lost sales!" which would be thumbing your nose at all content producers, not just the RIAA. Unless you were carefully organising your pirate site to only pirate from rich bastards. There are some sites that try to maintain 'ethical boundaries. I know a forum where at least the staff position is that only products that haven't been made available in English should be traded. Doesn't stop a lot of members from trying to post English stuff bceause they don't give a damn, but the mods take those down when they notice them.
So, as I said, I'm confused and missing your point.
Actually, no, the prices on my site range from more like £5 to £12. Less in multipacks.:) While you'd THINK that price would be an issue, according to the people who've done price studies it isn't really... they tend to sell less if they lower the price, because the perceived value is lower. Unless you sell something like BFG's subscription service, where they get the game for the low price but it has strings attached (you have to buy more games) - this seems to counteract the 'lower price means crapper game' in people's heads. People are weird and not entirely economically logical. For instance, I regularly run contests to give away free copies of my games and offer discounts to anyone just for ENTERING. Very few people enter. Many people buy the product at full price during the time the contest is running. People are weird.
People who want to quibble over the price, when the price is $20 or less, are generally people who do not want to buy. I've had smartasses say "That's not worth $X - you should sell it for $X-5!" I promptly offer to sell it to them for $X-5, and they disappear and never respond again. Because they had no intention of buying, they only wanted to justify their decision to warez it.
I already am making enough sales to survive. I 'think people will pay those prices' because people DO pay those prices, and the games I'm offering are unique and can't be found in those other places you're talking about - like I said, it's meaningless to say that you can get games just as good for the same or lesser price, when the customer may not agree with you on the 'just as good' part and may want THIS game. Anyone who'd rather play an FPS really isn't a good customer for me, our ideas of fun are too different!:)
Anyway, I'm an established indie making a living. The people I feel really bad for are the newbies who're just starting out in the market, release their first game, and see
I don't want to stop all piracy. A certain amount of underground filesharing is really important. But people need to THINK about what they're doing and not just feel that they're gleefully getting one over on the big-man rich-company when that's not the case, and recognise the importance of supporting creators if they want to see more work from those creators.
"Of course you have to actually work for your money with this model, sorry"
Wait, so... two years of labor and thousands of dollars paid out to artists and musicians before putting a product on sale is NOT working for my money?
I don't disagree that there are other business models out there, I'm mostly here trying to clear up misconceptions (like the people posting that it's fair to steal everything because anyone selling stuff online must be making $30,000 a week... which is nonsense). The idea that paying for a downloadable game is 'money for nothing' is one of them. The game did not make itself for free! (Also, if you put new content and bugfixes on a central server... people will STILL pirate them, because they like taking stuff without paying for it. If it's not an MMORPG, if you're not in a situation where the WHOLE GAME resides somewhere other than on the user's computer, they will steal it, and you'll be no better off than if you were just selling the download.)
Basing things on new content, bugfixes, and new versions is all really more appropriate for an MMORPG than for a well-written single-player game. Obviously there can be a few bugs to fix, but otherwise... the game's done. Many game designs don't lend themselves to 'just slap a new dungeon on it every six months!' It would entirely break the gameplay or the storyline to do so. Not to mention that it would make it much more difficult to make NEW games, if you had to spend all your time adding content to the existing one... Again, fine for MMORPGs, MMORPG producers generally don't WANT to put out a new game, they want the existing one to keep making piles of money. Not so fine for single-player.
As for your wikipedia method - There actually are a lot of great tools out there for easy game creation. However, it's generally not possible to make a GREAT game with just a few hours in your spare time. (And certainly not to make a great game with great graphics and sound that aren't the exact same set of free-use graphics that came with the tool and everyone else already has.) People need time to make anything really special. And unless you're independently wealthy or have a patron, you need to find a way to be compensated for that time.
"For physical copy. CD. Case. Booklet. On my shelf."
The problem is, this doesn't always work out too well for newbies and startups who can't afford to create and distribute physical copy. I do see your point and I'm not accusing you of anything, I'm just sayin', most indies can't get onto store shelves. (And even if they do, buying the physical copy probably gives the actual developer fifty cents and the rest is all lost to the huge corporate factors involved in publishing, burning, distributing, and selling that physical copy. Whereas buying a downloadable game, the money generally goes much more directly to the creator. Not always. But usually.) Yet it's much rarer for someone to be willing to pay for the legal DOWNLOAD VERSION if they've already downloaded it warezed.
It's a complicated matter, fair compensation. I'd be happy if someone would just give me enough money to live on forever so I could just make games for free.:)
You implied that your purpose was to stop supporting a poor business model which no one should follow. That gives the general impression that you don't think anyone should try to sell downloadable content. Perhaps I am missing your point. What is it that you think downloadable games sellers should do differently?
Okay, I rephrase - You think that no one should ever again make a single player computer game and expect to receive money for it. That does seem to be what you're saying, since you're comparing them to 'volumes about navel fluff' that nobody wants.
How many single player computer games do you think will be made if no one can receive money from them? Not none, obviously. There are always a handful of dedicated game fans who have plenty of money already and are therefore able to take some time to make games free. (They won't be able to get much in the way of graphics/music for said games, unless they can find artists and musicians who are similarly rich and games fans and willing to donate. But again, there will be a few.)
So, there will be a handful of short freeware single-player games and a bunch of MMORPGs, the 'new business model'.
As I said - this is great if you like MMORPGs. Kinda sucks for people who like playing single-player games.
If you have a better idea than copyright, I'm all for it. I don't like a lot of things about copyright. I think restrictions on derivative works, for instance, are stupid. I'd be happy to make games for free if there were some sort of system where I were rewarded for being an artist and given enough money to live on.
I don't want to shut down all the pirate sites and burn all the file-sharers and anything silly like that. I just want people to think about what they're doing and whether the consequences of their behavior are really what they want or not.
I've yet to find someone making games as a full time job that isn't not only surviving, but on a better than average wage, however just like everyone else they work for well established companies.
You haven't looked very hard.:) I suspect you don't know a whole lot about the indie side of game development. That's okay, a lot of people don't.
I can tell you of many people who are surviving and not working for well-established companies. I shouldn't have to, because several of them have posted in this thread already, self included. Now, I don't know about 'better than average wage' because what's an average wage, exactly? I make more than I did as an office temp. I make a lot less than my friends in programming jobs for big companies. And I can't tell you what anybody else makes. I can't even entirely tell you what I make, because when you're not getting a salary but are instead making money directly from sales, how much you make depends on how many sales you get. That's part of why we can be touchy about piracy - because IF all those pirates were lost sales (and no, I don't think they all are) or even a tiny fraction of them... If they bought instead of torrenting, our direct income would be multiplied. We could hire employees and make tons more games. It would make a large difference to us.
Trying to start your own game development business as a full time endevour whilst churning out games that really aren't any better than the sort you might see churned out by a 12 year old with Click and Play or Torque Game Builder is never going to work, even if piracy became non-existent, because people just aren't willing to pay £10 for something that aint that great, especially when you can pick up 6 - 12 month old AAA blockbusters for the same price or less.
See, again, this is 'not being familiar with the industry'. SOME people are never going to be interested in paying for the kinds of games indies and casual game companies make. That's fine! But don't think that just because YOU don't see the value in the game that nobody else does either. For example, I can't imagine why anyone would pay $60 for a first-person shooter. I think they're ugly, nausea-inspiring, and boring. Obviously some people feel differently. Similarly, some people will indeed pay $20 to buy 'Cake Mania' and would have ZERO INTEREST in your 12 month old 'blockbuster' game even if you gave it to them for free. People like different things in games.
I don't care if people who have zero interest in casual games torrent a few and try them out and discard them as boring or not as worthy of their money as a used copy of an AAA game. That's perfectly reasonable. The problem is the people who claim to be enormous 'fans' of the casual games and 'really love them' and still don't want to pay for them because they either think no one should have to pay for downloadable games when they could just get them from rapidshare, or because they assume that anything for sale online is obviously made by a rich bastard who doesn't need the money.
"The people they/we are 'stealing' from are pretty much about as rich as you can get. I mean they ain't exactly Bill Gates, but most do make more in a week than I make in a whole year. And for accomplishing very little of any real value to the world. You can argue about the relative wealth of the recipients, but the wealth of the 'victims' is indisputable."
But this is a blatant lie. Selling something online does NOT automatically make you rich. A fifteen year old kid could have made and sold that game. A struggling single mother could have made and sold that game. Or a filthy rich evil corporation could have made and sold that game. MANY kinds of people create content. SOME of them are rich. MANY of them are not. Not bothering to look and see who you're robbing is sheer thoughtlessness. Pretending that you're Robin Hood is incredibly insulting.
"Learn how to cook or something. You can't copy a hamburger."
So, your honestly stated position is that all game developers should give up and go back to flipping burgers, and no more games should be made, because games are an outdated concept?
... so basically, you think that no one should ever again make a single-player computer game. Okay, that's a possible stance to have, if you personally prefer MMORPGs and haven't found any single-player games that are at all interesting to you. Kind of sucks for people who don't like MMORPGs though.
"was it so other people could enjoy it or was it just to make money? It's only the latter case here where it would be a problem."
Hate to break it to you, but - food and shelter are not free. Unless you've found some interesting government setup where they are. So yes, everyone who sells games wants to make money. WE HAVE TO MAKE MONEY TO SURVIVE.
Now, if you don't think a game maker's games are any good and don't WANT them to survive, that's fine. That's at least making a decision.
So wait... your argument is that we should quit selling games online because the notion that people should pay for content is a state-enforced delusion? Wow. The government never came around to my house, I must have missed the memo.
It is indeed about hurting people if your stated purpose is to destroy our 'poor' business model and send us all back to flipping burgers. You have just said that you don't want anyone to ever make a single-player computer game again.
Notice that you say 'aspiring', while we say 'existing'.:) No, I don't want all pirates to have their lungs pulled out and die a slow death or some of the ridiculous vitriol that my fellow developers feel. A small level of piracy is natural and even beneficial. But it DOES hurt my feelings to watch people intentionally trampling over my stuff, and I suspect that no matter how much you try to 'take piracy into account', if you ever are in the position of selling games for a living, you'll find it very painful to see the lengths people will go to to steal from you.
Well, just as long as you don't hold all developers to blame for one developer dicking you around, either.:)
I hate obnoxious copy protection. I use gamecopyworld to get around cd-checks myself. I don't PUT obnoxious copy protection on games sold on my site. But what burns me up is to see people on pirate boards and such saying "I really really like this game! Will someone give it to me for free? Please? I love this game so much!" (No kidding, they do say stuff like that.) And I don't understand why if they 'love' my work so much they don't want to support me so that I can keep making the bloody games...:)
I understand people downloading a game to try it out. I don't understand these people claiming to be fans! And then to come onto MY forums and ask ME for support and take up MY time for a product they've stolen! All I can assume is that it's just utter thoughtlessness... it doesn't even occur to them what they're doing...
I'm not blaming them personally for/hosting/ my games, if they do (I haven't looked. I know they have many people's games, and I know people steal my stuff, so close enough.)
I can blame them for the interviews they give, where they go on about "It doesn't matter because we're just taking stuff from big companies who make millions of dollars on tie-in product licensing anyway." And that's simply not true. It would be nice if it were. If everyone sharing a file were doing so because they KNEW who made it and they INTENTIONALLY wanted that person to be denied some extra sales. At least then you're making a choice.
But a lot of file-sharing people are just utterly thoughtless. They don't know who made the product and they don't care. They only care about themselves getting stuff free. It makes no difference whether the product was made by a monolithic company mistreating its employees so that its executives can buy cocaine and whores or the product was made by a single mother struggling to survive.... No, I'm not a single mother struggling to survive. I don't have kids.:)
Anime also. I see a lot of stories from people who work at video stores and desperately try to explain to the parents renting films that no, Ninja Scroll and Urotsukidoji may NOT be what they want to get their 8 year old...
"But it's a CARTOON!"
That's acceptable. In addition there's acknowledgment that if a child wants to see a movie a parent or legal guardian is allowed to take them to see that movie. That works.
The flipside of this is, of course, that if the parent wants to see a grisly violent movie and the child has no desire whatsoever to see it, the child doesn't get a choice.
Unless the kid screams its head off until the cinema staff intervene, which will probably get the kid in trouble later.:)
At least once as a little girl I was taken to a movie that I really did not want to watch, and spent a lot of time whimpering unhappily in my seat with my hands over my eyes. I don't see how this is better than kids who actually WANT to see gore getting in to see it.
um... who's stopping you? GO AHEAD! Feel free to make your own panel featuring whoever you like, or post your own thoughts!
I fail to see the problem here...:)
... wait, are you saying that somehow innovative games are constantly pirated and therefore get crap sales, but nobody pirates mainstream games, and therefore we end up with more mainstream games? Because that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Is piracy a problem? Yes and no.
Is piracy the reason 'innovative' games stumble compared to mainstream? No.
The mainstream games industry sucks. What sane person would want to be trapped in there?
So girls aren't keen to join? That's probably because they have too much SENSE to join the world of perpetual crunch time and all the other misery we always hear about.:)
Girls who love mainstream games are perfectly capable of getting in there themselves. There's no point in trying to force others into it. I'm a female game designer and programmer and I would be thoroughly MISERABLE if you tried to hire me to work on your FPS.
The problem comes earlier, really. The problem, as I see it, lies in schools and preconceptions. I've been in plenty of places with girl gamers who think games are cool - but have been conditioned to believe that programming is really hard and impossible to understand and they couldn't possibly do it, so they will never try. Even though there are tons of tools out there to make programming easier and help newbies make at least small, crap games with very little experience necessary. The girls are too convinced that programming is beyond them to even LOOK for tools. So they just sit around and talk about games that "it would be cool if someone made" rather than doing anything about it themselves.
Do any high schools bother teaching simple interactive creation tools like Flash? Show more little girls that they can MAKE something cool if they just TRY and a couple more of them might come and join me.:)
As I've said every time this nonsense comes up - the people who write these bloody articles tend not to bother looking for the women who DO write games to talk to us, either!
Heaven forbid we get in the way of their preconceptions. It might make the articles take longer to write.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep the seven year olds on Carmen Sandiego. Bring me your kids when they're a little bit older!
Compulsory licensing, now, there's a sensible argument. "You're really obviously trying to rip off our game. That's fine, but we get a cut." Then everybody's happy. Hasbro gets money, game stays in business, players keep playing game.
Somewhere, I'm missing your train of thought. Generally people are arguing either: "You should be glad we're pirating! It gives you publicity and makes more people buy stuff!" ... which wouldn't be thumbing your nose at the RIAA, it would be supporting them. Or "Content producers are rich bastards and don't deserve all those sales / won't notice a few lost sales!" which would be thumbing your nose at all content producers, not just the RIAA. Unless you were carefully organising your pirate site to only pirate from rich bastards. There are some sites that try to maintain 'ethical boundaries. I know a forum where at least the staff position is that only products that haven't been made available in English should be traded. Doesn't stop a lot of members from trying to post English stuff bceause they don't give a damn, but the mods take those down when they notice them.
So, as I said, I'm confused and missing your point.
People who want to quibble over the price, when the price is $20 or less, are generally people who do not want to buy. I've had smartasses say "That's not worth $X - you should sell it for $X-5!" I promptly offer to sell it to them for $X-5, and they disappear and never respond again. Because they had no intention of buying, they only wanted to justify their decision to warez it.
I already am making enough sales to survive. I 'think people will pay those prices' because people DO pay those prices, and the games I'm offering are unique and can't be found in those other places you're talking about - like I said, it's meaningless to say that you can get games just as good for the same or lesser price, when the customer may not agree with you on the 'just as good' part and may want THIS game. Anyone who'd rather play an FPS really isn't a good customer for me, our ideas of fun are too different! :)
Anyway, I'm an established indie making a living. The people I feel really bad for are the newbies who're just starting out in the market, release their first game, and see I don't want to stop all piracy. A certain amount of underground filesharing is really important. But people need to THINK about what they're doing and not just feel that they're gleefully getting one over on the big-man rich-company when that's not the case, and recognise the importance of supporting creators if they want to see more work from those creators.
Wait, so... two years of labor and thousands of dollars paid out to artists and musicians before putting a product on sale is NOT working for my money?
I don't disagree that there are other business models out there, I'm mostly here trying to clear up misconceptions (like the people posting that it's fair to steal everything because anyone selling stuff online must be making $30,000 a week... which is nonsense). The idea that paying for a downloadable game is 'money for nothing' is one of them. The game did not make itself for free! (Also, if you put new content and bugfixes on a central server... people will STILL pirate them, because they like taking stuff without paying for it. If it's not an MMORPG, if you're not in a situation where the WHOLE GAME resides somewhere other than on the user's computer, they will steal it, and you'll be no better off than if you were just selling the download.)
Basing things on new content, bugfixes, and new versions is all really more appropriate for an MMORPG than for a well-written single-player game. Obviously there can be a few bugs to fix, but otherwise... the game's done. Many game designs don't lend themselves to 'just slap a new dungeon on it every six months!' It would entirely break the gameplay or the storyline to do so. Not to mention that it would make it much more difficult to make NEW games, if you had to spend all your time adding content to the existing one... Again, fine for MMORPGs, MMORPG producers generally don't WANT to put out a new game, they want the existing one to keep making piles of money. Not so fine for single-player.
As for your wikipedia method - There actually are a lot of great tools out there for easy game creation. However, it's generally not possible to make a GREAT game with just a few hours in your spare time. (And certainly not to make a great game with great graphics and sound that aren't the exact same set of free-use graphics that came with the tool and everyone else already has.) People need time to make anything really special. And unless you're independently wealthy or have a patron, you need to find a way to be compensated for that time.
The problem is, this doesn't always work out too well for newbies and startups who can't afford to create and distribute physical copy. I do see your point and I'm not accusing you of anything, I'm just sayin', most indies can't get onto store shelves. (And even if they do, buying the physical copy probably gives the actual developer fifty cents and the rest is all lost to the huge corporate factors involved in publishing, burning, distributing, and selling that physical copy. Whereas buying a downloadable game, the money generally goes much more directly to the creator. Not always. But usually.) Yet it's much rarer for someone to be willing to pay for the legal DOWNLOAD VERSION if they've already downloaded it warezed.
It's a complicated matter, fair compensation. I'd be happy if someone would just give me enough money to live on forever so I could just make games for free. :)
You implied that your purpose was to stop supporting a poor business model which no one should follow. That gives the general impression that you don't think anyone should try to sell downloadable content. Perhaps I am missing your point. What is it that you think downloadable games sellers should do differently?
How many single player computer games do you think will be made if no one can receive money from them? Not none, obviously. There are always a handful of dedicated game fans who have plenty of money already and are therefore able to take some time to make games free. (They won't be able to get much in the way of graphics/music for said games, unless they can find artists and musicians who are similarly rich and games fans and willing to donate. But again, there will be a few.)
So, there will be a handful of short freeware single-player games and a bunch of MMORPGs, the 'new business model'.
As I said - this is great if you like MMORPGs. Kinda sucks for people who like playing single-player games.
If you have a better idea than copyright, I'm all for it. I don't like a lot of things about copyright. I think restrictions on derivative works, for instance, are stupid. I'd be happy to make games for free if there were some sort of system where I were rewarded for being an artist and given enough money to live on.
I don't want to shut down all the pirate sites and burn all the file-sharers and anything silly like that. I just want people to think about what they're doing and whether the consequences of their behavior are really what they want or not.
You haven't looked very hard. :) I suspect you don't know a whole lot about the indie side of game development. That's okay, a lot of people don't.
I can tell you of many people who are surviving and not working for well-established companies. I shouldn't have to, because several of them have posted in this thread already, self included. Now, I don't know about 'better than average wage' because what's an average wage, exactly? I make more than I did as an office temp. I make a lot less than my friends in programming jobs for big companies. And I can't tell you what anybody else makes. I can't even entirely tell you what I make, because when you're not getting a salary but are instead making money directly from sales, how much you make depends on how many sales you get. That's part of why we can be touchy about piracy - because IF all those pirates were lost sales (and no, I don't think they all are) or even a tiny fraction of them... If they bought instead of torrenting, our direct income would be multiplied. We could hire employees and make tons more games. It would make a large difference to us.
Trying to start your own game development business as a full time endevour whilst churning out games that really aren't any better than the sort you might see churned out by a 12 year old with Click and Play or Torque Game Builder is never going to work, even if piracy became non-existent, because people just aren't willing to pay £10 for something that aint that great, especially when you can pick up 6 - 12 month old AAA blockbusters for the same price or less.
See, again, this is 'not being familiar with the industry'. SOME people are never going to be interested in paying for the kinds of games indies and casual game companies make. That's fine! But don't think that just because YOU don't see the value in the game that nobody else does either. For example, I can't imagine why anyone would pay $60 for a first-person shooter. I think they're ugly, nausea-inspiring, and boring. Obviously some people feel differently. Similarly, some people will indeed pay $20 to buy 'Cake Mania' and would have ZERO INTEREST in your 12 month old 'blockbuster' game even if you gave it to them for free. People like different things in games.
I don't care if people who have zero interest in casual games torrent a few and try them out and discard them as boring or not as worthy of their money as a used copy of an AAA game. That's perfectly reasonable. The problem is the people who claim to be enormous 'fans' of the casual games and 'really love them' and still don't want to pay for them because they either think no one should have to pay for downloadable games when they could just get them from rapidshare, or because they assume that anything for sale online is obviously made by a rich bastard who doesn't need the money.
But this is a blatant lie. Selling something online does NOT automatically make you rich. A fifteen year old kid could have made and sold that game. A struggling single mother could have made and sold that game. Or a filthy rich evil corporation could have made and sold that game. MANY kinds of people create content. SOME of them are rich. MANY of them are not. Not bothering to look and see who you're robbing is sheer thoughtlessness. Pretending that you're Robin Hood is incredibly insulting.
"Learn how to cook or something. You can't copy a hamburger."
So, your honestly stated position is that all game developers should give up and go back to flipping burgers, and no more games should be made, because games are an outdated concept?
... so basically, you think that no one should ever again make a single-player computer game. Okay, that's a possible stance to have, if you personally prefer MMORPGs and haven't found any single-player games that are at all interesting to you. Kind of sucks for people who don't like MMORPGs though.
Hate to break it to you, but - food and shelter are not free. Unless you've found some interesting government setup where they are. So yes, everyone who sells games wants to make money. WE HAVE TO MAKE MONEY TO SURVIVE.
Now, if you don't think a game maker's games are any good and don't WANT them to survive, that's fine. That's at least making a decision.
It is indeed about hurting people if your stated purpose is to destroy our 'poor' business model and send us all back to flipping burgers. You have just said that you don't want anyone to ever make a single-player computer game again.
Notice that you say 'aspiring', while we say 'existing'. :) No, I don't want all pirates to have their lungs pulled out and die a slow death or some of the ridiculous vitriol that my fellow developers feel. A small level of piracy is natural and even beneficial. But it DOES hurt my feelings to watch people intentionally trampling over my stuff, and I suspect that no matter how much you try to 'take piracy into account', if you ever are in the position of selling games for a living, you'll find it very painful to see the lengths people will go to to steal from you.
I've tried logging into pirate boards and asking nicely for them to buy the product. Not making any threats. They respond by banning my IP. :)
I hate obnoxious copy protection. I use gamecopyworld to get around cd-checks myself. I don't PUT obnoxious copy protection on games sold on my site. But what burns me up is to see people on pirate boards and such saying "I really really like this game! Will someone give it to me for free? Please? I love this game so much!" (No kidding, they do say stuff like that.) And I don't understand why if they 'love' my work so much they don't want to support me so that I can keep making the bloody games... :)
I understand people downloading a game to try it out. I don't understand these people claiming to be fans! And then to come onto MY forums and ask ME for support and take up MY time for a product they've stolen! All I can assume is that it's just utter thoughtlessness... it doesn't even occur to them what they're doing...
I'm not blaming them personally for /hosting/ my games, if they do (I haven't looked. I know they have many people's games, and I know people steal my stuff, so close enough.)
I can blame them for the interviews they give, where they go on about "It doesn't matter because we're just taking stuff from big companies who make millions of dollars on tie-in product licensing anyway." And that's simply not true. It would be nice if it were. If everyone sharing a file were doing so because they KNEW who made it and they INTENTIONALLY wanted that person to be denied some extra sales. At least then you're making a choice.
But a lot of file-sharing people are just utterly thoughtless. They don't know who made the product and they don't care. They only care about themselves getting stuff free. It makes no difference whether the product was made by a monolithic company mistreating its employees so that its executives can buy cocaine and whores or the product was made by a single mother struggling to survive. ... No, I'm not a single mother struggling to survive. I don't have kids. :)
Anime also. I see a lot of stories from people who work at video stores and desperately try to explain to the parents renting films that no, Ninja Scroll and Urotsukidoji may NOT be what they want to get their 8 year old... "But it's a CARTOON!"
That's acceptable. In addition there's acknowledgment that if a child wants to see a movie a parent or legal guardian is allowed to take them to see that movie. That works. The flipside of this is, of course, that if the parent wants to see a grisly violent movie and the child has no desire whatsoever to see it, the child doesn't get a choice. Unless the kid screams its head off until the cinema staff intervene, which will probably get the kid in trouble later. :)
At least once as a little girl I was taken to a movie that I really did not want to watch, and spent a lot of time whimpering unhappily in my seat with my hands over my eyes. I don't see how this is better than kids who actually WANT to see gore getting in to see it.
um... who's stopping you? GO AHEAD! Feel free to make your own panel featuring whoever you like, or post your own thoughts! I fail to see the problem here... :)
Is piracy a problem? Yes and no.
Is piracy the reason 'innovative' games stumble compared to mainstream? No.
The mainstream games industry sucks. What sane person would want to be trapped in there?
:)
:)
So girls aren't keen to join? That's probably because they have too much SENSE to join the world of perpetual crunch time and all the other misery we always hear about.
Girls who love mainstream games are perfectly capable of getting in there themselves. There's no point in trying to force others into it. I'm a female game designer and programmer and I would be thoroughly MISERABLE if you tried to hire me to work on your FPS.
The problem comes earlier, really. The problem, as I see it, lies in schools and preconceptions. I've been in plenty of places with girl gamers who think games are cool - but have been conditioned to believe that programming is really hard and impossible to understand and they couldn't possibly do it, so they will never try. Even though there are tons of tools out there to make programming easier and help newbies make at least small, crap games with very little experience necessary. The girls are too convinced that programming is beyond them to even LOOK for tools. So they just sit around and talk about games that "it would be cool if someone made" rather than doing anything about it themselves.
Do any high schools bother teaching simple interactive creation tools like Flash? Show more little girls that they can MAKE something cool if they just TRY and a couple more of them might come and join me.
As I've said every time this nonsense comes up - the people who write these bloody articles tend not to bother looking for the women who DO write games to talk to us, either!
Heaven forbid we get in the way of their preconceptions. It might make the articles take longer to write.
I do have to agree... is there ANYONE who reads not just slashdot, but a games-specific section of slashdot, who DOESN'T know about SMB2?
.... wait, how is having my own little gay club that you don't have to join 'forcing my gay agenda on you'?