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Don Andy
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« on: August 11, 2008, 01:24:23 AM »

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080810-developer-to-pirates-tell-me-why-you-steal-and-ill-change.html

Just read that article. My first thought was "Cry more?" though. Moving your development to a console because you don't like people pirating your games is just silly. I mean, if you don't want people to pirate your games, then don't make games. There will always be pirates, for anything, even if you move to console or start making your games in binary, hammered into stone. Even then will probably someone come and steal it.

Personally, I don't think piracy hurts gaming, or developers much. If you make not as much money as you hoped you'd make with your indie game, then that's not piracies fault. The people who like your game and support it WILL buy it (even maybe after the pirated it first) and the other people, if they couldn't have pirated it, probably wouldn't have played it anyway. So, in essence, you can be glad that these people at least played your game after all.

The best way to reduce piracy is either to reduce the price of your game (although the prices for indie games are already ridiculously low, including Aquaria and Braid) or just making your game so awesome that people who pirated it will pay for it afterwards.

And before I get flamed to death, that's just my opinion, I could be entirely wrong Beer!
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« Reply #1 on: August 11, 2008, 01:42:55 AM »

The best way to reduce piracy is either to reduce the price of your game
Do you have any evidence to back up this point? (I'm almost inclined to believe it myself).

Piracy might eat up quite a lot of profits, I'd imagine.  I'd also imagine, however, that it's very hard to quantify just how much.  Maybe the best way would be indeed to look at the difference between console sales and pc sales; I don't know :/
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Don Andy
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« Reply #2 on: August 11, 2008, 01:48:57 AM »

The best way to reduce piracy is either to reduce the price of your game
Do you have any evidence to back up this point? (I'm almost inclined to believe it myself).

Not really, I maybe should've phrased that a bit different. It's just my standpoint as a pirate that I pirate games which I just can't afford otherwise (getting just 3 commercial PC games comes to about 180€ to me. what.)
Indie games, with their roughly 15-30$ are a piece of cake to even buy 5 of for a reasonable price and often even offer way more quality than a lot of the licensed bullcrap we get fed from the "big companies".

So, basically, I just pirate because I can't afford gaming otherwise (and I love me games), so that's where I based my standpoints off. I know not all pirates tick like that (and maybe I'm the only one).

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« Reply #3 on: August 11, 2008, 02:29:42 AM »

Indie games, with their roughly 15-30$ are a piece of cake to even buy 5 of for a reasonable price and often even offer way more quality than a lot of the licensed bullcrap we get fed from the "big companies".

So, basically, I just pirate because I can't afford gaming otherwise (and I love me games), so that's where I based my standpoints off. I know not all pirates tick like that (and maybe I'm the only one).
So you're saying that
1: Big commercial games are very expensive
2: Big commercial games are bullcrap
3: Indie games are much cheaper (presumably better)
4: I don't have much money

But then, and I don't fully understand this, you seem to arrive at

5a: ergo I pirate games

rather than

5b: ergo I pay for indie games
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Don Andy
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« Reply #4 on: August 11, 2008, 02:32:52 AM »

No, no, my point was that I THINK lower price could reduce piracy because of the high price of commercial games with mediocre quality compared to the indie commercial games with low price and high quality :D

Oh, and I don't think that all commercial games are crap (I'd neither buy nor pirate them then) I just think that most of them don't justify a price of 60-80€ a game.


Just to clarify my whole point again, if you have to whine that too many people are pirating your game (no matter if you're indie or "big") then the price for your game as compared to the quality of your game is probably too high. However, with indie games that's generally not the case anyway, as they are already low-priced (people are just whining about Braid because they're not used paying more than 800 points on XBLA and they probably spent more points on Halo maps already).
« Last Edit: August 11, 2008, 02:37:26 AM by Don Andy » Logged
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« Reply #5 on: August 11, 2008, 02:40:25 AM »

Quote
I just think that most of them don't justify a price of 60-80€ a game.
This shouldn't be a problem for you though, because you can only afford to by a few anyway Wink
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« Reply #6 on: August 11, 2008, 03:09:33 AM »

I agree that he comes off as whining. Honestly, he says he wants to learn something from asking for peoples opinions, yet at the same time he says that "I get a lot of comments from people who defend piracy", and when he gets responses he just complain about the ones that bug him. Sure, he's nicer than your average foaming "piracy is theft and all the pirates should be shot!" - type person, but I don't get the feeling he's actually out to learn something - If he truly did, he'd try and get something out of the comments first and not complain when he didn't like what he found.

To me, the big problem about the piracy discussion is that the different parties talk about different things, or at least from vastly different perspectives. A pirate would argue about the single case; that in extremely few cases would he really buy the game if he couldn't get it for free, but he might like it and make amends later in his life. Or more likely, recommend it to others who in turn might pay for it - so it would ultimately be better for everyone if he was allowed to pirate. The publisher, on the other hand, talks about the culture surrounding games and their fear that games (and other media) are perceived at something that should be free.

Very few - possibly none - of the pirated copies are actually lost sales as most people pirating them wouldn't have bought it if in this particular case they couldn't have pirated it, so if you talk about the unique cases the pirate argument is solid. If however you take the publishers viewpoint the very idea that you can get commercial games for free is the problem and you can't reasonably argue about any single case.

My point is that the question that need to be answered isn't "why do people pirate games", as I think the reasons are pretty obvious (even though some might not like them). Rather, I think the way to find common ground is for pirates to honestly answer the question "If it was impossible for me to pirate any games at all, what would I do with the time I now spend playing new games?" and for others to consider "If we lost all of our non-paying players, how would this potentially huge loss of interest in games affect our business and the games industry at large?"

</rant>
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Farmergnome
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« Reply #7 on: August 11, 2008, 03:18:32 AM »

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080810-developer-to-pirates-tell-me-why-you-steal-and-ill-change.html


Personally, I don't think piracy hurts gaming, or developers much. If you make not as much money as you hoped you'd make with your indie game, then that's not piracies fault. The people who like your game and support it WILL buy it (even maybe after the pirated it first) and the other people, if they couldn't have pirated it, probably wouldn't have played it anyway. So, in essence, you can be glad that these people at least played your game after all.

The best way to reduce piracy is either to reduce the price of your game (although the prices for indie games are already ridiculously low, including Aquaria and Braid) or just making your game so awesome that people who pirated it will pay for it afterwards.

And before I get flamed to death, that's just my opinion, I could be entirely wrong Beer!

flame on.

Do you think its cool to steal shit because its too expensive?  If I just stole a BMW cus I thought it was too expensive then that would be A okay? Prices are set for a reason, especially with big games, the high risk factor and the millions in development would have something to do with it.

Pirates make loads of excuses to justify stealing other peoples work, makes me want to stomp there offspring into the pavement. 
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Don Andy
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« Reply #8 on: August 11, 2008, 03:26:52 AM »

In turn, publishers (of all kinds, not just for games) also make loads of excuses to justify a ridiculously high prices, so I see that pretty relaxed. We're on even ground there.

I'm pretty sure that BMW could cost a good 50% less if it wouldn't go through a lot of money-hungry hands before "hitting stores".
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Movius
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« Reply #9 on: August 11, 2008, 03:28:22 AM »

Oh boy, A thread on piracy. Time to spin the wheel-o-logical-fallacy!

Ad Hominem... Appeal to Pity... False Dichotomy... Non-Sequitur...

Which will it be? THEY'RE ALL HERE! Step right up and spin the wheel!

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« Reply #10 on: August 11, 2008, 03:35:29 AM »

A difference between stealing a BMW and a game, which is something that shockingly nobody thinks when comparing these, is that when you "steal" a BMW the (legal) owner doesn't have it anymore while when you "steal" a game, the (legal) owner* loses nothing. Piracy exists only because of that. If the original owner lost his copy (or his copy wouldn't play anymore), then piracy wouldn't exist.

(*=with "owner" here i mean the person who bought the game, not the developer. In most cases the owner legally is the developer though. I know it, so don't stick on that)
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Don Andy
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« Reply #11 on: August 11, 2008, 03:38:42 AM »

A difference between stealing a BMW and a game, which is something that shockingly nobody thinks when comparing these, is that when you "steal" a BMW the (legal) owner doesn't have it anymore while when you "steal" a game, the (legal) owner* loses nothing. Piracy exists only because of that. If the original owner lost his copy (or his copy wouldn't play anymore), then piracy wouldn't exist.

(*=with "owner" here i mean the person who bought the game, not the developer. In most cases the owner legally is the developer though. I know it, so don't stick on that)

I bet the industry is secretly stalling the development of 3D Printers just because of that :D
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Farmergnome
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« Reply #12 on: August 11, 2008, 03:45:17 AM »

A difference between stealing a BMW and a game, which is something that shockingly nobody thinks when comparing these, is that when you "steal" a BMW the (legal) owner doesn't have it anymore while when you "steal" a game, the (legal) owner* loses nothing.

I think it only happens because its easy to do and fairly risk free, and who says they loose nothing, its arguable that if piracy wasn't as rampant and easy to do, then they would be loosing a sale.  Either way its theft, you can try n justify it all you want, but end of the day the legal owner is still loosing something, even though its significantly less than stealing something physical.
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« Reply #13 on: August 11, 2008, 03:52:36 AM »

All I know is I made a well received game but have not sold much at all in comparison to the massive amount of piracy it got.  Smiley

That sort of made a difference, and if I had a game on console it would at least feel more safer than on PC.
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« Reply #14 on: August 11, 2008, 03:54:22 AM »

Read what i wrote at the end: with owner here i mean the person who bought the game, not the developer. In other words, if i buy game A and copy it to a friend of mine, i lose nothing. On the other hand if i buy a bike and i give it to someone (i can't "copy" it), then i lose the bike.

Also while i'm not pro-piracy (i buy my games), i'm against using the words "theft" and "steal" to describe unauthorized copies of copyrighted materials (i don't use this mouthful though, i just say "pirated") because in every other context (and from a legal standpoint in most countries' laws) these words mean something totally different. In fact i believe that their usage from content authors harms themselves because they use words which are not associated with what they want to describe for most people, thus making them look/sound odd.
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« Reply #15 on: August 11, 2008, 04:00:00 AM »

All I know is I made a well received game but have not sold much at all in comparison to the massive amount of piracy it got.  Smiley

That sort of made a difference, and if I had a game on console it would at least feel more safer than on PC.

Sad I hope you are not discouraged by this - NL2 is one of my favourite indie games.
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Farmergnome
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« Reply #16 on: August 11, 2008, 04:04:24 AM »

All I know is I made a well received game but have not sold much at all in comparison to the massive amount of piracy it got.  Smiley

That sort of made a difference, and if I had a game on console it would at least feel more safer than on PC.

yea man that sucks, all the proof you need that the problem exsists, even with a cheaper price and a great quality game.
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Don Andy
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« Reply #17 on: August 11, 2008, 04:05:44 AM »

All I know is I made a well received game but have not sold much at all in comparison to the massive amount of piracy it got.  Smiley

That sort of made a difference, and if I had a game on console it would at least feel more safer than on PC.

yea man that sucks, all the proof you need that the problem exsists, even with a cheaper price and a great quality game.

Definitely a better point than "stealing is bad rant rant rant", yes.
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konjak
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« Reply #18 on: August 11, 2008, 04:19:44 AM »

I am never discouraged!!
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Movius
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« Reply #19 on: August 11, 2008, 04:21:48 AM »

A difference between stealing a BMW and a game, which is something that shockingly nobody thinks when comparing these, is that when you "steal" a BMW the (legal) owner doesn't have it anymore while when you "steal" a game, the (legal) owner* loses nothing. Piracy exists only because of that. If the original owner lost his copy (or his copy wouldn't play anymore), then piracy wouldn't exist.

(*=with "owner" here i mean the person who bought the game, not the developer. In most cases the owner legally is the developer though. I know it, so don't stick on that)
Stealing isn't the right word. Piracy is really more analogous to trespassing or vandalism. Which as we all know aren't really crimes.
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