Piracy

[Mamoulian War]

The whole picture being that you feel validated in pirating your games because you think they're too expensive?

 

I think his point was more to the lines that in some places games are overpriced ridiculously as to eliminate purchasing them as an option entirely. Therefore pirating it via torrent or some Chinese store becomes more appealing than it would. And for them, definitely not a lost sale. Most likely the reality of the situation, but I suppose we must get righteously angry over it still (not our money in any event so )

 

Hm, wonder how come no one's mentioned that 'entitlement' buzzword yet.

 

Yay at least 1 person who read the thread really understand what i was really talking about... Here a sweet and crunchy chocolate cookie for you

 

My last post about this theme in this thread, no more hijacking from now on.

[Hurlshort]

There are a lot of hobbies I would enjoy doing but find cost prohibitive. I'd like to go skydiving, but that doesn't mean I'm going to sneak onto planes and jump out of them because it is too expensive to take a class. Video games are just not essential or even all that important, and stealing them because they are overpriced is why the 'entitlement' buzzword gets used so often.

 

Of course I'm making this argument while rolling around in my bed of money, so there ya go

[Malcador]

There are a lot of hobbies I would enjoy doing but find cost prohibitive. I'd like to go skydiving, but that doesn't mean I'm going to sneak onto planes and jump out of them because it is too expensive to take a class. Video games are just not essential or even all that important, and stealing them because they are overpriced is why the 'entitlement' buzzword gets used so often.

 

Of course I'm making this argument while rolling around in my bed of money, so there ya go

 

Better example would be stealing library books, but that's proper stealing not "stealing" like piracy is. But the original point was just the reality of why people do it, little or no impetus to buy it.

[Humodour]

Piracy is not a equivalent to stealing and never can be.

 

It could probably be associated somewhat with opportunity cost, but again, that's not stealing.

[Orogun01]

There are a lot of hobbies I would enjoy doing but find cost prohibitive. I'd like to go skydiving, but that doesn't mean I'm going to sneak onto planes and jump out of them because it is too expensive to take a class. Video games are just not essential or even all that important, and stealing them because they are overpriced is why the 'entitlement' buzzword gets used so often.

 

Of course I'm making this argument while rolling around in my bed of money, so there ya go

If one of your buddies offered you a ride on the company's plane to sky dive without the consent from his boss, would you take it?

What if it was someone offering a free ride at the cost of the company's money?

 

See, pirates have thousands of "buddies" who all get on this thing call the world wide web and share products with each other. Some buddies procure the product, some crack it and some upload it. Then we have a whole network of buddies sharing the same thing.

 

It really it's the same concept of burning one of your friend's albums and then letting another friend burn it too, just applied to the global scale.

[Gorth]

Piracy is not a equivalent to stealing and never can be.

 

It could probably be associated somewhat with opportunity cost, but again, that's not stealing.

Whatever you call not paying for something... but that is really just semantics. Scaling the wall and attending a rock concert without paying the tickets or tell the plumber "good riddance" and dismissing him without paying him for services provided isn't technically stealing either. Doesn't make any of them an ethical beacon of light though.

 

It still gets back to the dead horse beating though, people want something, they spot an opportunity to weasel their way out of paying for it, they estimate can get away with it without getting punished. The excuses are uniformly ridiculous. Favourites being "nobody gets hurt", "it isn't stealing", "everybody else does it" and "they are rich corporations, who cares?"

[Tigranes]

Hurlshot I just want to pick up on your point about vidgames being a luxury and if you can't afford it you shouldn't play it, at all. I know it's a fairly common sentiment and one you hold quite strongly. It's correct, but I'd argue you can't slap it on indiscriminately on issues like these and call it a day.

 

Firstly a better analogy might be - if ice cream was $30 a pop would you say there was no grounds for complaint, resistance, and/or people finding less than legal ways towards its procurement? Luxury items are not all the same - with something like skydiving it already occupies, globally, a position where it is understood as a high-cost activity. At the other end of the spectrum you could argue that there's no problem if some people are priced out of soft drinks or movie rentals, but that's neither likely to persuade anybody disgruntled by $30 Coke or be considered a realistic and productive appraisal of the situation.

 

It's a little different I feel from the idea of entitlement, which we always seem to fall back to in piracy discussions - of course at the end of the day nobody's entitled to play video games, but I find we're being too black and white about this and saying "hey you don't need this to sustain your life in a biological sense, stop whining". I think it's very valid to say, or to recognise, that in countries where prices are completely out of whack with the rest of the world, there's a problem that needs to be addressed at that level, not at the level of prosecution (only).

 

None of this denies that piracy is illegal, hurts the industry, is often a coward's excuse for many people, etc. But I feel it's more constructive to look the situation in terms of, how can we balance the technological apparatuses out there (ease of / availability of pirated goods, making legit goods more appealing) as well as the market balances (prices) and the moral side (discourse).

[Gorgon]

The devil is in the details. From a neutral standpoint it's leeching, calling it stealing is a value judgment. It does represent a loss to companies, of course it does, but the stealing analogies fall short. Software pirarcy is like software priacy, not like skydiving or library borrowing.

[Monte Carlo]

We need a cyber-vigilante group that launches massive DoS attacks on piracy websites. It's stealing.

[mkreku]

Every time I go on the Steam store and see the $=

[Monte Carlo]

^ Yes, Steam is shocking in that respect.

[Humanoid]

It's not piracy if you have a Letter of Marque!

[Thorton_AP]

The whole picture being that you feel validated in pirating your games because you think they're too expensive?

 

I think his point was more to the lines that in some places games are overpriced ridiculously as to eliminate purchasing them as an option entirely. Therefore pirating it via torrent or some Chinese store becomes more appealing than it would. And for them, definitely not a lost sale. Most likely the reality of the situation, but I suppose we must get righteously angry over it still (not our money in any event so )

 

Hm, wonder how come no one's mentioned that 'entitlement' buzzword yet.

 

Yay at least 1 person who read the thread really understand what i was really talking about... Here a sweet and crunchy chocolate cookie for you

 

My last post about this theme in this thread, no more hijacking from now on.

 

I am pretty sure I understand what you're talking about. You acquire games for free because you feel they are too expensive. Or is this not actually the case?

[Orchomene]

Piracy is not like stealing a book, more like doing a photocopy of a book.

Moral judgements based on property are essentially artificial when considering intellectual property. It's too highly subjective and I'm sure that some people thinking that piracy in video game is stealing would consider that producing cheap drugs in poor countries without respect to the licence of big drug companies is totally justified. Whereas it's globally the same thing.

 

The business model is somewhat including the piracy effect in countries where the product is absurdly expensive. There are not a lot of choices :

- basing price on the richness of the population and provoking a "leaking" effect (people would command video games in poor countries at 1$ the game) and smuggling

- basing price at world level and thus having piracy.

 

What is important at production level is that the earning is exceeding the development cost. This is achieved by selling a certain amount of products that contain the 'amortisation' (don't know if this is the good translation) cost. Then they lower the price (like in high tech market, see computer hardware, LCD, cell phones,...) and increase a bit their earnings because the material part of the product is very low compared to the immaterial part of it.

Thus, piracy is stealing only if you would have bought the product but chose instead to pirate it. So, in western Europe, Commonwealth, US, Japan, ... where the market price is not of the level of a salary. This is this form of piracy that is destroying the video game industry.

Whereas in countries where salaries are at the level of the video game price, there is no real market and the choice is between almost nobody playing the game or piracy. As a producer or developper, I would rather have people in this situation pirating the game than not playing it for explainable reasons : developer would be happy that more people enjoy the game they put effort in and producer would be happy to know that the image of the company could develop in a country that may tomorrow become a real market.

Imagine : 100 millions of people in China pirating FONV and in ten years, with the current development in China it can become 100 millions of new buyers of an Obsidian video game.

 

So, for me, piracy is inherent to the immaterial products market. It's a smoothing mechanism in a world with such economical contrasts (or inequalities, if you want to had a judgement).

[alanschu]

As a game dev, it is exceptionally disheartening to read and hear about people that decide that the game experience they just had was not worth their money, even though it was worth their time to sink 30+ hours into it.

 

It is also very aggravating to see many of these same people bitch and moan because the free game they played wasn't up to the standards that they expect. I don't understand how some of the people can get so irate over something that literally cost them no money aside from internet bandwidth. But they sure do.

 

 

We understand the reality of the situation, and I am active in suggestion less severe DRM methods because I don't believe they are worth the investment, but I don't know anyone at work that enjoys seeing a game we made topping the charts at a torrent site.

 

I recently became a regular full time employee (no longer contract) at BioWare so I effectively received the "Golden Ticket" for people that start out as Term Testers, but it still sucks having to find replacements for quality terms because we're not able to offer them full employment for financial reasons. I was very close to not becoming a full time employee despite middle management trying to find a way to fit me in, until special circumstances occurred and an opening was made available. Couple this with irate people that seem to think I don't actually do any work (When DAO was released my job for two weeks was to patrol the tech support boards to find and report common issues, while providing work arounds and solutions for people having issues - I lost count at how many times it was "obvious" that BioWare didn't spend much time QAing the game...), and sometimes I just shake my head. Though the worst is when I realize I've just spent time tech supporting someone that has pirated the game. Rage!

 

Fortunately I like the people I work with, and I'm excited to see DA2 finally come together and I hope that people enjoy it. There's still a fair bit of work to do so hopefully we can keep up the velocity.

 

Cheers.

[Kaftan Barlast]

Aaaawwww, I thought this was about the Somali pirates internet pirates are boring.

[Humodour]

poo

[Niten_Ryu]

As a game dev, it is exceptionally disheartening to read and hear about people that decide that the game experience they just had was not worth their money, even though it was worth their time to sink 30+ hours into it.

 

Pirates, and I mean those who just pirate games out of habit, are probably the most critical gamers. Even most of the "free" games are not worth their time.

 

Personally I don't understand why most people bother to pirate anything anymore. Servies like Spotify will give you good selection of music (unless you really want to hear that ultra rare b-side from some obscure band... I know I can't find Ural B Diktators - Uralin Pihlaja from anywhere). Steam conversion rate from $ to

[Majek]

Well some pirate games because there is almost no demos anymore. They do buy the game if they like so there's no loss there. Reviews that are supposed to help you buy the game and mostly uninformative and pointlessly flashy.

[sorophx]

some of you seem to be missing one point, a lot of people who pirate games don't even realize they're "stealing", that it's illegal. downloading a game is exactly the same as getting a copy from a friend. the source of the problem is the Internet itself and the total accessibility it provides.

 

piracy only became a problem when publishers noticed it's scale, when it expanded beyond the scene. they're definitely not losing a lot of money, at least they weren't 'til recently.

 

you're right, the only way to solve it is to sell games at acceptable prices and make them accessible. for example, in my hometown there's not a single store I can buy games at, you can be sure no local 16-year old kid will go out of his way to order/download a legit copy, because it's a 3-step process and there aren't a lot of parents who'd bother with it.

[Monte Carlo]

As a game dev, it is exceptionally disheartening to read and hear about people that decide that the game experience they just had was not worth their money, even though it was worth their time to sink 30+ hours into it.

 

It is also very aggravating to see many of these same people bitch and moan because the free game they played wasn't up to the standards that they expect. I don't understand how some of the people can get so irate over something that literally cost them no money aside from internet bandwidth. But they sure do.

 

 

We understand the reality of the situation, and I am active in suggestion less severe DRM methods because I don't believe they are worth the investment, but I don't know anyone at work that enjoys seeing a game we made topping the charts at a torrent site.

 

I recently became a regular full time employee (no longer contract) at BioWare so I effectively received the "Golden Ticket" for people that start out as Term Testers, but it still sucks having to find replacements for quality terms because we're not able to offer them full employment for financial reasons. I was very close to not becoming a full time employee despite middle management trying to find a way to fit me in, until special circumstances occurred and an opening was made available. Couple this with irate people that seem to think I don't actually do any work (When DAO was released my job for two weeks was to patrol the tech support boards to find and report common issues, while providing work arounds and solutions for people having issues - I lost count at how many times it was "obvious" that BioWare didn't spend much time QAing the game...), and sometimes I just shake my head. Though the worst is when I realize I've just spent time tech supporting someone that has pirated the game. Rage!

 

Fortunately I like the people I work with, and I'm excited to see DA2 finally come together and I hope that people enjoy it. There's still a fair bit of work to do so hopefully we can keep up the velocity.

 

Cheers.

 

Dude it's a thread about piracy, not an advertorial for Bioware.

[Gorth]

As a game dev, it is exceptionally disheartening to read and hear about people that decide that the game experience they just had was not worth their money, even though it was worth their time to sink 30+ hours into it.

 

It is also very aggravating to see many of these same people bitch and moan because the free game they played wasn't up to the standards that they expect. I don't understand how some of the people can get so irate over something that literally cost them no money aside from internet bandwidth. But they sure do.

 

 

We understand the reality of the situation, and I am active in suggestion less severe DRM methods because I don't believe they are worth the investment, but I don't know anyone at work that enjoys seeing a game we made topping the charts at a torrent site.

 

I recently became a regular full time employee (no longer contract) at BioWare so I effectively received the "Golden Ticket" for people that start out as Term Testers, but it still sucks having to find replacements for quality terms because we're not able to offer them full employment for financial reasons. I was very close to not becoming a full time employee despite middle management trying to find a way to fit me in, until special circumstances occurred and an opening was made available. Couple this with irate people that seem to think I don't actually do any work (When DAO was released my job for two weeks was to patrol the tech support boards to find and report common issues, while providing work arounds and solutions for people having issues - I lost count at how many times it was "obvious" that BioWare didn't spend much time QAing the game...), and sometimes I just shake my head. Though the worst is when I realize I've just spent time tech supporting someone that has pirated the game. Rage!

 

Fortunately I like the people I work with, and I'm excited to see DA2 finally come together and I hope that people enjoy it. There's still a fair bit of work to do so hopefully we can keep up the velocity.

 

Cheers.

 

Dude it's a thread about piracy, not an advertorial for Bioware.

and you don't want the input and perspective from game developers on the subject because?...

[Monte Carlo]

Because their perspective is no different from mine if some dude stole my car stereo.

[Walsingham]

Or if someone copied a book I wrote.

[sorophx]

Or if someone copied a book I wrote.

by "copied" you mean didn't buy it? because as far as writers go (the real ones), they don't care, the more people read it the better, right? or am I alone in this?