Yet another Piracy: Good or Bad? discussion

[Damned Registrations]

Pfft. Fuck AAA games. Best games were and still are made by less than 10 people. Some of the very best have been made by 1 or 2. I'd gladly trade every soul that worked on anything Bethesda shat out since morrowind for another Tarn Adams or Thomas Biskup.

 

[Dedicated_Dark]

Pfft. Fuck AAA games. Best games were and still are made by less than 10 people. Some of the very best have been made by 1 or 2. I'd gladly trade every soul that worked on anything Bethesda shat out since morrowind for another Tarn Adams or Thomas Biskup.

That's a very generous generalization considering how fckn garbage most of indie is.

 

[Damned Registrations]

No worse than most of publisher shit.

 

[Curious_Tongue]

Or maybe because those games are often either shit or just unpopular without any market appeal.

I think it was Ken Levine or someone who remarked that they were selling many more strategy guides to Leisure Suit Larry than they were physical copies of the game.

This suggests that piracy wasn't just for shitty games no-one cared to pay for. Don't know of any modern day examples though.

Even if every pirated copy of these games you speak of was a legitimate sale, chances are the situation would stay the same.

It's really up to pirates to say whether or not they would be willing to buy physical copies of the games they pirate if piracy wasn't an option.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Curious_Tongue]

there was paid research made showing that those who pirate a lot, also buy more legal content than 'fully legal' guyz

I heard this back in the dial up days. I'd be interested to see what today's pirates are buying.

And also, gamer pirates are a different breed than regular pirates.

 

[Latro]

if you ever look at steam reviews on a regular basis, there's a ton of positive reviews from people with 0.1 play-time. i think it's a cultural thing exclusive to gamers, i doubt music or movie pirates feel morally obligated to purchase a product they really enjoy

valve tried to meet them half-way with the 2hour purchase refund thing, but i doubt they feel comfortable having money involved before they decide if they want it

 

[Damned Registrations]

It doesn't help that publishers got wise to the refund thing and started making people wait for an hour plus before gameplay even really starts. Nothing new though. Goes back to the 'not for resale' shit they tried to pull back in the day. But now their lobby is big enough to get away with that kind of shit.

 

[DalekFlay]

If you are actually a "moral pirate" who buys things you like or want to support, I'm fine with that. I still think it's a bit entitled nonsense, but I have no issue with it really at the end of the day. However I do think this is a small percentage of people that Icelandic torrent news sites glorify as if they're not 5% of the population, if that.

If you're someone who pirates everything because "fuck the man!" then I think you're an asshole. That doesn't mean we couldn't have a good time over beers though, or that I think you should suffer some horrible punishment. Lots of mostly decent people are assholes about something.

 

[Raghar]

there was paid research made showing that those who pirate a lot, also buy more legal content than 'fully legal' guyz

I heard this back in the dial up days. I'd be interested to see what today's pirates are buying.

And also, gamer pirates are a different breed than regular pirates.

I can tell you what legal customers are buying, 2-3 games per year one of it is Sims 4 or expansions. Thus for game developer, there are only two possible purchases. Because normal people have cars and pay for cable, paying for games isn't priority for them. Before expansion of game market a lot of gamers were not normal people, thus they had shitty salaries (if any).

From what I recently seen on forums, these folks are not exactly talkative, and they don't acts as communities. Hard core of Black-cat did, as did hard core of Demonoid. But these were people who wanted to preserve games books and movies for eternity, and piracy was just a means how to do that.

It's better said movie and music pirates are different breed than the rest. Both are passive experience. And they are basically recording clean versions of movies for theirs own use. If they seen it on TV, or could see it on TV, licence in theirs country was paid already, no point restricting them from obtaining for theirs own use stuff licence was paid of already. Basically theirs lawmakers should legalize theirs behavior, and TV should stop interrupting movies by ads and have some viewership.

 

[Goi~Yaas~Dinn]

I feel no guilt over piracy whatsoever when copyrights are life of author plus 70. Fuck that shit.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

The argument for "buying" videogames is invalid because you aren't buying videogames — you're leasing them from their owners for an indeterminate period of time.
You don't own the game, you aren't allowed to give it away or resell it.

 

[Curious_Tongue]

The argument for "buying" videogames is invalid because you aren't buying videogames — you're leasing them from their owners for an indeterminate period of time.
You don't own the game, you aren't allowed to give it away or resell it.

For all intents and purposes...

 

[rusty_shackleford]

The argument for "buying" videogames is invalid because you aren't buying videogames — you're leasing them from their owners for an indeterminate period of time.
You don't own the game, you aren't allowed to give it away or resell it.

For all intents and purposes...

But it's not the same.
Maybe people pirate games because there is no way to purchase the game at all?

 

[disposable]

Even if perfect DRM killed piracy once and for all they still wouldn't get any money out of me.
If I can't steal it or get it for free I'm not interested in it. I never was a potential sale.

I don't know how many immoral pirates like me are out there but at some point the anti-piracy schemes will be burning through more money than they could possibly bring in by intimidating the shrinking population of sporadic and/or moral pirates into always buying.

Considering how much funds they're pumping into advanced DRM, legal proceedings, publicity, government lobbying and other things I suspect they might be past peak copyright already.

 

[DalekFlay]

But it's not the same.
Maybe people pirate games because there is no way to purchase the game at all?

As long as you never pirate anything that's on a disc or DRM free download then I could see this stance, though one could easily "buy" things on Steam and then download a backup copy, supporting the developer and also not leasing the game. I used to do this before game file sizes made it less enticing, but you could do it with the games you really like without breaking a disc space sweat.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

Pfft. Fuck AAA games. Best games were and still are made by less than 10 people. Some of the very best have been made by 1 or 2 ...

It really depends on the type of game.
Do you know many small indie devs that have made any great action games?

 

[Damned Registrations]

I mean, Doom was pretty good imo.

 

[FeelTheRads]

For all intents and purposes...

But that's just the thing, you're not owning the game for all intents and purposes.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

I mean, Doom was pretty good imo.

One game.
How about hack n' slashes and platformers?
That 's kinda my point. More technically complex games are not easy to be developed by smaller teams.

 

[unfairlight]

I mean, Doom was pretty good imo.

Doom was made with like 7 or 8 people, during those years that wasn't even a very small development team. After 3D graphics became the standard I don't think making games that were seriously good became possible with under 10 people.

 

[Curious_Tongue]

For all intents and purposes...

But that's just the thing, you're not owning the game for all intents and purposes.

Until recently, there was no indication that the consumer wasn't the owner of the game they paid for. It was just a technicality stated in the fine print of the EULA.
So even if the game was technically a lease, the customer only paid once, and they never heard boo from the publisher/developer about it afterwards.

 

[Curious_Tongue]

Pfft. Fuck AAA games. Best games were and still are made by less than 10 people.

Nah. Every game I love had a sizeable team of professionals working on it. Even just the click and point adventure games.

I think it's because that good games played solo feel so intimate that you can't imagine that more than a few people were involved.

 

[GrainWetski]

One game.
How about hack n' slashes and platformers?
That 's kinda my point. More technically complex games are not easy to be developed by smaller teams.

The best platformer ever was made by 16 people.

 

[Goi~Yaas~Dinn]

Until recently, there was no indication that the consumer wasn't the owner of the game they paid for. It was just a technicality stated in the fine print of the EULA.
So even if the game was technically a lease, the customer only paid once, and they never heard boo from the publisher/developer about it afterwards.

That's not how laws work.