Pirating Game Dev Tycoon Dooms Players to be Ruined By Piracy Pages PREV 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 NEXT | |
So by your reasoning, it's simply "acting outside the law by deciding you're entitled to content without having to pay for it" for some reason. You're depriving the content producer of the money that THEY'RE entitled to by producing and distributing content. Until you stop rationalizing crime, I really cannot take your argument seriously. | |
Bigfish Games should implement this DRM. Whenever I'm looking for a walkthrough or review for one of their games, Google turns up a ton of torrent sites. I can understand downloading vaporware & out-of-print games that are 10 or more years older that a company is no longer making any money off of, especially if the console is prone to breaking or certain games were released in limited amounts & cartridges are rare to the point of costing hundreds. But when a game costs $7 & isn't even 5 years old, there's absolutely no excuse. Indie games are so cheap, that if I really like the game & they have a donate button, I give them an extra $5-$15. & if any of you like oldschool RPGs, go check out Amaranth Games. Aveyond 3 was awesome. | |
Your Dev PR Score is: ELECTRONIC ARTS. | |
Except that the analogy you gave here is flawed. Piracy is more like deciding that the local restaurant charges too much for its pasta dishes, so you download the recipe to their pasta online and start giving it away to all your friends so they can make it at home. You're not "stealing" their pasta, as a stolen product implies that the company lost physical resources to you (they didn't) and that the product you stole is no longer accessible to other people who might have paid for it (it still is). It's more accurate to state that you've copied their product, because it involved taking their model and creating a duplicate which you then distributed to other people to duplicate for themselves. Now whether or not you think that should also be illegal, that's another matter entirely. Technically, anything under copyright being duplicated and distributed without the owner's say-so is also illegal, so piracy would more adequately fall under "violation of copyright" (which it clearly is) than "theft" (which it clearly isn't). So let's be intellectually honest about the "crime" being committed here, first and foremost. It's not theft, it's copyright violation. You didn't steal anything, you just violated the company's copyright by copying and distributing their product without their consent. | |
Pirates tend to spend more money than 'legitimate customers' on whatever media form they steal from. I do think this is funny though, that forum post is priceless. | |
Massive "CITATION NEEDED" stamp goes here. | |
loll got 'em... but I do like the guy's message/response to his audience. it's not being smug or anything just straightforward | |
Just google it... http://torrentfreak.com/file-sharers-buy-30-more-music-than-non-p2p-peers-121015/ There is a citation for you though, people who pirate stuff generally pirate in addition to massive expenditure on that stuff, not instead of spending money. | |
Apparently people who work in the game industry (like myself) have adapted to go without food, water, money for bills or to support their families? Because hay Piracy hurts no one right, not like anyones paycheck is riding on a product selling. And how dare them ask for money from something that supposed to be ART!!! The nerve of those bastards.... Don't they know that art has always existed without patrons or (customers) ...well excluding like the last 800+ years (which actually would be closer to like 4000+ but hey who's counting) who likes, Rococo, baroque, classicism, neo classicism, postmodernism, Dadaism, futurism, ect ect ... anyways those were all decedent, frivolous, and unnecessary.-Especially the Dadaist Its hilarious to see people pull the ART card when referring to piracy, clearly they have absolutely no knowledge of Art history. ResonanceSD - You're awesome keep fighting the good fight. Others that think piracy hurts no one- How about not being a straight up dick to Us working in the industry, its bad enough its done in the first place, and then you go tell everyone that their horrible for asking to be paid for their work. In what way can you honestly think its right to tell people you don't give 2 shits about their work, and then go take off with it. | |
I dunno, some guy said it in another thread and it supported my argument, therefore it must be true. I heard it on the internet! http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/industry_news/riaa_pirates_spend_more_on_music.html The RIAA(which hates pirates) says that music pirates spend up to 30% more on music than non-pirates. It's pretty easy to extrapolate this statistical principle to other pirates. | |
I saw that episode, and the example you're talking about is pirating a game that you simply can't buy because it's not available at all, e.g. ancient games that the company got bored of selling, or ones that aren't available in your country (NOT counting localization or shop stocking issues). In my opinion, that's fine: if a company isn't even giving you the option of purchasing a game legitimately, then it's okay to pirate the game. Otherwise, I agree. Firstly, a game worth playing is a game worth buying, and telling someone their 'art' isn't worth anything just because you don't agree with the price tag is extremely insulting and obnoxious. Surely you people have jobs, what if your employers suddenly told you you're not going to be paid for a year's work because they wouldn't have hired you anyway? Yes I think that's a valid comparison, because it takes a LOT of effort and time to make a game, no I'm not going to argue about the semantics about employer contracts. Secondly, if you honestly can't afford $5 for a steam sale or even one whole cent for a Humble Indie bundle (no, I don't want to argue about whether one cent sales hurt HIB) each month, then sell your fucking console/computer and get another job because you have bigger issues than finding something to do during your spare time. Oh, but you're a student? Doesn't matter. Even if your study/work schedule somehow gives you no time to scrape up enough cash to buy a chocolate bar, there are PLENTY of legitimate, entertaining gaming options for anyone with a $0 game budget. Whatever happened to free browser based game websites? (I STILL play games at Newgrounds.com, yay free ad for them) What about undeniably excellent F2P titles like League of Legends or Team Fortress 2, to name a few? Thirdly, I still don't buy the whole 'Well I'll pay for it when i get the cash/ if I think that it's good enough afterwards' excuse. LOOK at that percentage rate. Maybe some people were kind enough to buy the game afterwards, but am I really expected to believe that a good portion of the other 93.4 percent bought the game after their trial run? (Or would have if the hacked version wasn't trolling them, or if it was of good quality blah de fucking blah) When the legit game sale percentage doesn't even reach double digits, don't fucking lecture me about the goodwill of pirates. Seriously guys, watch that video bug_of_war suggested. Other than obnoxious/buggy DRM and the aforementioned Sold-Out-Forever / Not-Available-Ever games, the excuses pirates make over what is essentially theft just borders on snobbery and self-serving entitlement.
Is it wrong that I hate you for so perfectly summing up my entire statement? As a final note, am I the only one who noticed the name of the company on the screenshot? | |
Tried the demo as concept intrigued me and then got the game, so +1 sale from me. For 8$ the price was more then reasonable. | |
I now feel as though it's my obligation to post the link seeing as how you're backing me on this subject. Extra Credits on Piracy: http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/piracy It's only 7 minutes long, good watch too. | |
Your history while vaguely interesting is all anecdotal evidence and does not support your "conclusion" as quoted above. | |
Notice the condition clause at the beginning of my sentence. I'm already reacting to your own hypothesis, implying that I just want free stuff for myself, describing what I WOULD do and how I would think if I would be like that. Despise me all you want for my opinion on exactly how far artist rights should extend and where public rights should begin, but at least don't put out-of-context hypothetical lines into my mouth.
I obviously disagree with that assertion, as my favorite game from last year was entirely freeware amateur project, a Visual Novel with several man/years put into it (Katawa Shoujo), and my other favorite 2012 game, that I eventually bought, I'm still playing that because of it's many incredibly elaborate map conversion mods with high production values. (Crusader Kings II).
I don't know, why did Christopher Nolan, J.J. Abrams, Peter Jeckson, or Joss Whedon, contribute their media while taking others' already existing universes and characters? Of course, that's different, because they sucked enough corporate cock to get the legal approval to their work. I'm just pointing out that you are not truly criticising why copyright infringing works are artistically bankrupt or creatively lacking, just re-stating the fact that they are illegal.
"Reasonably" means already existing mediums and genres can continue to exist without going bankrupt. For example I would accept a system that means that COD would get half the profit that it gets now, but not one where graphically realistic FPS games can't be afforded at all. And there is nothing capitalistic about the government deciding that artists need to get as much profits as they do now, and keeping all regulations in line, and writing new ones, and constantly extending copyright, for the sake of subsidiarizing them. The most socialist thing I have written in this thread, is the above paragraph where are expressed my belief that some IP should still be kept for the sake of subsidiarizing at least major genres. A true libertarian would have said "If some genres can't exist without government intervention at all, let 'em fail. Let the market find which ones can profit just from selling actual property, and from services asking for a salary before doing the work, instead of granting them extra rights because as "useful arts" they are picked as pre-determined winners"
Your problem is entirely conceptual. You keep describing the fact that IP holders can dictate exactly how individuals are non-commercially using published data, as them having "Stuff", and the idea of me wanting them to lose this right as "taking away stuff". To which, I've already wrote an analogy in this thread. Here is a shorter version: Let's say, that the Betamax case of 1984, where Sony argued in front of courts that copying TV movies for time-shifting purposes is piracy, ended up the other way. Now, in 2013, how would you even BEGIN to claim that it would be better if that particular right would stay at the public? After decades of tradition, everyone would have just gotten used to that right "belonging to Sony", and their claim of profiting from disc rents of last night's movie would be part of their ordinary incomes. (Whether or not that's a meaningful sum, the court decreed that it is). By your own logic, people keeping illegal VHSes would be "thiefs", because the right to tell when you watch your TV shows is Sony's Intellectual Property, it's their "stuff", so anyone arguing against it would be a commie Robin Hood wanting to "take away stuff from them and distribute it among the people". Let's at least agree, that IP is not "stuff" that inherently belongs to someone or someone else as an object. It's a regulation, and many of it's details were just made up in the past decades, (personal copying wasn't an issue before tape rrecorders). We are making it up as we go along, based on how much extra market control seems worth exactly how much controlling of personal actions. Even if you disagree with me about the conclusion, that file-sharing, just like timeshifting, should belong to the people, at least try to give explanations of economic necessity (though I will disagree with those, obviously), instead of turning the copyright tradition made up in the past decades into some unarguable axiom of "stuff belongs to it's owner", because IP is not true ownership.
So far, I have argued in favor of users directly copying data non-commercial personal use, and of creators productively copying larger elements of existing works, on a more opened interpretation of Fair Use. But I would agree that publishers shouldn't just directly burn a copy of their competitors' games and sell it as their own.
And then the indie bundle was a huge success earning hundreds of thousands of dollars for a handful of individuals. The economic problem here is? There are also plenty of people who read wikipedia without donating. Things are still going along. (on a side note, I don't see much difference between 1 cent and 0 cent, obviously both tried to avoid payment and should be considered freeloaders, regardless of the letter of the law says. The latter group is only different in that maybe they didn't have a paypal account, or any bank account at all. Kids, foreigners, or just people who were more comfortable uusing piratebay than going though the trouble o paying 1 cent and still effectively being a pirate.) | |
Not sure if it was mentioned yet, but I think it's funny that he says they're working hard making games when this is practically a clone of Game Dev Story by Kairosoft. I mean there's bound to be differences but I just see a lot of similarities that can't be accidental. Bravo though on the anti-piracy measures, this kind of soft sabotage is a lot more effective against the passive pirate. Edit: Just checked their forums and I guess they did bring up Kairosoft. Well, at least they're honest about their inspiration. | |
Not sure if mention yet but:
Try and justify it however you want Mr. Klug but piracy is still piracy tsk, tsk, tsk. capthca: Head Case Ok now I know captcha is just insulting me. | |
Stupid lazy me for not doing that in the first place :( Thanks for making an actual effort to link it up. Plus, about the original topic... this is what DRM should be replaced with (such an ugly broad term). Not harmful to paying customers like 'fuck off until you have internets... oh wait, now our servers are down, ON LAUNCH DAY, too bad for you', not easily picked up by pirates (crackers or downloaders) like always online or even one-time online validations. Hell, making a separate booby-trapped version even means you won't even accidentally wreck a paying customer's experience from a false positive. Plus, it makes for comedy gold when they go bitching to the forums (ZOMFG PIRATES ARE RUINING MY GAME! OH THE HUMANITY AND LACK OF IRONY!). | |
Why not? | |
If the level of simulator was deep enough it would allow the player to respond to piracy by adding asshole always online dmm, and making snarky fake pirated versions. | |
His game isnt even exactly that easy to find, I searched every online seller from Steam to Origin and everything inbetween and they didnt carry it, I googled his game, his games website is not even in the top 5 results for me. Its really no surprise people find piracy is easier than trying to hunt it down. Edit: I would be interested to see how much piracy there would be if it was actually "Widely available online" as he claimed | |
I think that idea is good, I have nothing against DRM (mainly because I rarely play games on my computer) but it does seem to be a method that needs vast improving or to be ditched entirely. While I can't possibly know the inner workings of the game industry or how programming works, I've always thought that if they could somehow program something into a game that will be triggered when someone cracks the game and thus just wipes all files would be a great pirate deterrent. In theory it would deter the people who crack the games as they would lose the files also, thus killing the problem at the source. I know it's probably farfetched technology I am talking about, but couldn't something to a similar effect be achieved? For a long time flying seemed impossible, as did recording sound and pictures, so why not this type of tech? I dunno...I don't know much about the whole workings of game development and the technology currently available and it's uses, but it's just one idea asking to be explored. | |
Pirating a game does no more damage to a business than browsing the internet with adblocker on. I am not encouraging breaking the law; I'm just saying it does not cause actual harm to a business. Much like how someone will run adblocker for a better online experience and to avoid viruses in some ads, I can't exactly condemn someone who pirates Spore to avoid getting SecurROM on their computer. Right now, businesses show no level headed response to the 'piracy problem' in the music industry they hunt down random people and RUIN THEIR ENTIRE LIVES putting them hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars of debt, in response to 'stealing' about 15 dollars worth of music. In the game industry several publishers are making the gaming experience for legit customers like me worse and worse in an attempt to slow down how fast Pirates can crack their game. I really can't take piracy to be a serious problem, because these companies are exaggerating it to the point that they might as well be trying to destroy fireant hills by calling in military air strikes. | |
Feel free to explain that one to the creaters of Dev Tycoon. With 94% of players not paying them to play their game, it is hard to see how it makes them so much money. | |
Haha! I love this. Now all he has to do is add in an algorithm of higher sales due to increased exposure and a larger fanbase and he'd be all set. | |
So do you call every single shooter ever made "practically a clone of Wolfenstein"? Just to be consistent? | |
It's not the percentage of pirates that determines a game's profits, but it's amount of sales. Pretty much every report we have about single player PC games' piracy, is around a 90%-95% rate, from the biggest hits to the tiniest failures. World of Goo also had a 90% piracy rate, that everyone was infamously up in arms about. Then World of Goo earned hundreds of thousands of $s in the humble indie bundle alone, an unknown amount on the PC otherwise, and at leeast millions of $s on multiplatform releases (that's results can't be separated from it first becoming famous on the pc). Maybe Game Dev tycoon will also be a huge success. Or maybe it won't, it might fail like a number of small games. But in the end, it's depending on that 6%, not on the 94%. | |
That is what I'm saying. Whilst there is no proof to say that a lost game is a lost sale, it stands to reason that within that 94%, it is fairly likely that there exists potential customers who wanted to see if they could freely torrent games instead. I expect there are more pirates who don't buy the games after pirating them, than there are pirates who play a game and choose to buy it later - which means JazzJack2's argument is wrong, and that piracy doesn't help. The only way Dev Tycoon benefits from piracy is through this elaborate prank they've pulled on the pirates, which has gained the game lots of attention. | |
No, that's not just it. Even if you assume that the sales could have been doubled by eliminating piracy, what would happen next? Say, this one has 600 customes and 9400 other players. A playerbase of 1200, versus a playerbase of 10.000. Which one of them has more chances for future viral growth? Even if you assume that for the second, out of the virally gained new players 94% continue to be pirates, it's not improbable, that a vew months later, the 600 outgrows the 1200, that has no such synergic help. There is plenty of anecdotal example of that pattern. For example, just look at how in the MMO market everything other than WoW constantly failed to catch on, as their unavoidable subscription turned their playerbases into little insular communities, while the current F2P market has no such problem, because the 90% freeloaders are allowed in. For a non-gaming example, the classic story is how Friendship is Magic got viral thanks to how easily it could be uploaded to youtube, and years later it resulted in lots of iTunes episode sales. Not even necessarily from the same 4chan users who first watched the youtube videos, but from the ginormous fandom that kept snowballing on and on after them, thanks to the free access and the magic of sharing. :P | |
Because you're making a broad statement based on personal experience rather than scientific evidence. That's why.
If you can afford a PC or Console, you can afford the games for said console. Or your parents can afford them if they were the ones to purchase it. How is it you had a PC for 5 years before you bought an actual game? | |
Some interesting stuff, though I've neither the time nor desperate desire to sit and pull the stats apart. There are some low hanging fruit to start arguments (things like "I note the stats don't show the percentage change in the population of the world" or "increased box office takings could easily be attributed to price increases for 3D films") but there's not a lot of point. You're right though, it's very hard to pull the figures apart and correctly adjust for other factors, off the top of my head:
Certain is something of a moveable feast. There's some interesting stats hidden in the videogames parts of that data though, try this on for size : Or this: Now I've honestly no idea how the hell someone went about defining a "game related company" but it's a reasonably hypothesis to say that a) the number of people employed in videogaming has probably gone up a lot faster than the amount of money (which either means fairer distribution of the cash) meaning that average salaries are down* and b) that development has moved the way of many smaller companies making lots of smaller, cheaper games**. * = I have no stats whatsoever to back this up. It may well be false, but I'd be surprised. The Extra Credits people popped a stat which horrified me in one of their episodes, that the average career lifespan in videogame development is 5 years. Madness. Not exclusively the fault of piracy, lots of factors to blame, but still madness.
Oh I agree, but your man there demanded an example of a game "ruined" by piracy, and for fans of the EHM franchie, EHM 2k8 counts as ruined/non-existent. Because of piracy? Well that was the line from the developers, the people who loved the game and wanted it out to as many adoring gamers as possible (as opposed to producers, the capitalist bogeymen we all love to hate) and whilst it might not be the whole truth, it's at least a big part of the truth and rarely does any single factor swing a decision. | |
Wasn't this a leaked version specially created for torrent sites? In that case, you're not even going into the store to get the cupcake. You're going into a back alley nearby where you know you're dealing with someone illicit. Do you seriously think that people are going to a torrent site to download something for free mistakenly thinking they're buying it from the shop? Maybe your analogy applies to Titan's quest, but it doesn't here. It probably doesn't apply at all. We're talking theft of physical goods versus piracy, and corruption of foodtuffs kept and prepared within the confines of a place ostensibly for human consumption versus digital goods. | |
First of all, nitpicking: the population of the world has been increasing in the third world, middle/upper class westerners in general have a steadily decreasing population. Plenty of the charts were US exclusive. Anyways, in general, I think it doesn't really matter exactly what tricks and business models and pricings were used to separate people from their money, as long as it is shown that they ARE willing to pay for media. Even if all the gaming growth would come from hard-to-crack consoles and mobile phones, it's really telling that people ARE willing to pay more and more for them, while they could just watch some pirated movies and read some pirated books. For that matter, it's interesting how the traditional media are growing too, and not just the profits, but the amounts of songs/books/movies being created. I'm not even literally saying these happened "because of piracy", just that file-sharing is inherently interconnected with a great focus on access to more and more data nowadays. For example, indie bands can now easily find an audience thanks to youtube, and then self-publish, or do a Kickstarter, or announce a concert on Twitter, and make a living from a small niche of fans, where decades ago, a publisher would have laughed at them. So more music made, more profits to music, etc. That is happening everywhere, and I just don't see a way to wish away the supposed effects of piracy, without also taking away the benefits of the open culture that the Internet brought. The idea of "surfing" in a sea of information, and first experiencing lots of new content without borders, and only worry about "rewarding the owners" second. The publishers, and even some shorter-sighted developers, would rather turn the Internet into one walled garden, or a corporate-owned store, where we can all stand in lines and get our appropriately bought content bit by bit, not even because they are certain that this would leave them with more money, just because they are terrified by the thought that they can no longer keep account of every single video viewed, book read, and game played. | |
Welcome to planet earth. You can pick up your free WalMart coupons at the travel desk to your left. | |
Science, you say? Since when we need science to prove common sense?
Thing is that until age 20 I could not Would it be better for game developers if I wouldn't be gamer because I couldn't afford games in my early and late teens? | |
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