US: “Six Strikes” Anti-Piracy Scheme Starts Monday

[Cowboy Moment]

HHR! is defiinitely trolling, and doing a pretty good job, hats off to you good sir. Very, very believable. You only really went too far here:

The Gamestop comparison is invalid, most used games are sold at costs very close to that of new games.

 

[evdk]

He's not trolling. What you fools fail to understand is that cheap PC games are subsidized by the wheat lobby. He's trying to save you!

 

[hoverdog]

He's not trolling. What you fools fail to understand is that cheap PC games are subsidized by the wheat lobby. He's trying to save you!

Also, remember that PC games still exist only because consoles need expensive vaccinations.

 

[Moribund]

All these sluts in short skirts forcing me to rape them.

WHEN WILL THEY LEARN

 

[Zewp]

I seem to have missed this the first time around, but;

The Gamestop comparison is invalid, most used games are sold at costs very close to that of new games.

You realise none of that money goes to the developers or publishers, right? You might as well just pirate the game, because the developers ain't seeing jack shit from you if you buy used console games.

 

[chestburster]

Or it could be because budgets soared over the years while the market didn't grow enough to compensate. Ergo demand didn't change by much but revenue to break even from a title did. Do you honestly believe that the fringe minority that would buy a game if it didn't pirate it would be enough to fill that gap? Doubtful, basic economics say that demand rises as the price of a good or service decreases, that much has been known since Adam Smith, hell maybe even earlier. If the cost of pirating is a whopping 0 pure math tells you a lot of people will pirate but if they only had the option of buying it at 10, 20, 30 or more dollars they wouldn't buy it. This is basic fact that a lot of people conveniently ignore. If you can't get shit for free you probably won't get it period. Furthermore I would like to point out that even before the age of p2p pirating existed and affected sales and the industry had to deal with it (which it couldn't really).

Rather than tilt at windmills, because quite frankly short of draconian control of the Internet it cannot be stopped, publishers and developers alike should look at their business model and budgeting. Yes, I'm sure everyone wants to make killer games with cutting-edge production values. Guess what, that's impossible. It's like every schmuck with a wrench wanting to compete with ferrari or porsche. Hell, you don't see fiat or toyota trying to compete with ferrari or porsche. Do you know why is that? Because the market isn't big enough and the costs of entry are high, the risk is big. Meanwhile we have every big publisher hell-bent trying to make their own damn ferrari, like a delusional kid who thinks he can make it big just because he wants to make it big. This is why THQ bombed, it had profitable titles, DOW, COH, Darksider, Saints Row they all somehow got the green light for sequels. But it tried to make a ferrari called Homefront and it bombed, but not just it.

The market is saturated with big-budget titles, FPS in particular. Considering the profit margins they need to sell a ton to break even, but they can't. You can't expect every game to look like Crysis, have top-notch professional voice acting and god knows how much content. The markets will evaporate anyway, why do you think people are expecting a gaming crash? Because the doing so well console gaming is going to shit revenue wise and the publishers are slowly starting to panic. Blame that on pirates if you want, but that's just foolish and naive. Just like it is in blaming the pirates that PC games don't sell more. They don't because the market is not willing to buy enough to cover the costs at the given prices. Now I would gladly have a custom-tailor made game, TV series etc. released that would be perfect for me. But the reality is that unless my tastes coincide with what the market wants enough to make money off it, odds are I will never see it. Which is the case a lot of the time. So until development costs get lowered by a lot you have to accept the sad reality that you can't expect good high budget RPGs or other games, getting popamole decline instead as that is what will break even. A billion dollar proper Fallout game won't because gamers are mostly retards. Pointing fingers and even eliminating piracy won't change that.

What you're pointing out is that the games produced are increasingly either "AAA" or "indie," while the mid-budget titles are gradually eliminated. This is analogue to an evolution phenomenon called "disruptive selection."--Under certain conditions, a species' traits would evolve to the two extremes and the more "mediocre" or "mild" traits are eliminated.

One of the possible conditions leading to such "disruptive selection" is extremely fierce competition, defined as low resource available to each individuals. In the current video game market, such fierce competition is perhaps resulted from the relatively weak economy and large number of game developers. The existence of pirating through bittorrent certainly exacebates this condition.

This is why you can still occasionally see some "AA" mid-budget genre titles as console exclusives (Bayonette, Asura's Wraith, Dark Souls before PC petition, etc.) and equivalent PC-exclusive genre titles are almost completely extinct (STALKER is perhaps the last PC exclusive "AA" genre title).

I'm not saying The Bay should be cracked down (which is impossible as I consider pirating as an inevitable spill-over effect of the internet). Just saying that bittorrent is at least partially responsible for the decline, at least on PC.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

The arrangement made sense as musicians had no alternative and the labels had to get new talent from somewhere, so it was mutually beneficial. Even when they were screwing off musicians of any profits it made sense to cooperate with them as short of making your own label which required major cash you had no choice. Why give a record company the vast majority of the revenue from sales just for promotion? That's highway robbery! You can get better deals on the ad agency market as there is more competition there, you also have more control over how you do the promotion and they don't force you to record the way they want and how.

But do musicians actually have money to start a large scale advertising campaign, together with radio and TV exposure that the industry does?

In most of cases they aren't rich and famous because of their talent (which isn't exceptional among musicians) but because of all the effort that the record labels put into marketing which does much more for their insane success than they themselves do.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

I didn't know you had become so cynical, Awor-chan.

 

[Hellraiser]

What you're pointing out is that the games produced are increasingly either "AAA" or "indie," while the mid-budget titles are gradually eliminated. This is analogue to an evolution phenomenon called "disruptive selection."--Under certain conditions, a species' traits would evolve to the two extremes and the more "mediocre" or "mild" traits are eliminated.

One of the possible conditions leading to such "disruptive selection" is extremely fierce competition, defined as low resource available to each individuals. In the current video game market, such fierce competition is perhaps resulted from the relatively weak economy and large number of game developers. The existence of pirating through bittorrent certainly exacebates this condition.

It's a classical case of market saturation albeit one combined with lowering margins. You have growth during which new competitors enter the market, at some point market demand is met or is surpassed and an equivalent of a Darwinian struggle takes place as the weak get culled. At the same time in order to compete successfully you need better production values, so you need to invest more. But the more you invest the more you need to sell but at the same time you can't push the price up or your competitors will eat you alive and you won't sell jack. One of the basic rules of microeconomics and production is that when marginal cost to make a unit exceeds marginal income you stop because your margins become suboptimal. The problem with games is that variable costs tied to production size are negligibly small compared to the fixed costs that need to be paid to actually start selling the thing. Development is basically risky business because it is the bulk of the costs that at the same time is a hard to precise amount. You can ballpark it and you should along with making a "just in case shit costs more" cash reserve, period.

The other issue is that games as a product are highly subjective, this is essentially endemic to every product that's bought for "creative values", "entertainment" or "design ideas" if you will. With something like say a car you know what a car is supposed to do, it is supposed to get you from point A to point B within the parameters the consumer demands (fuel efficiency, top speed, passenger capacity, range on a full tank stuff like that). It's a good product if it does that, has some nice bonuses and is cheaper or comparable to other cars that can do the same. So you know there is no reasons it shouldn't sell as long as marketing is all good. Cars can be objectively compared, they're pretty similar in what they do and consumer expectations are easy to determine.

But then you take a game. When do people like a game? When they are entertained. But what it means to be entertained for a person is something that is pretty much impossible to define without mind-reading ability. Furthermore there are many things which can go wrong. The online service may suck, the replyability may be too low for the target consumer group, the art direction might steer away people, DRM may be considered intrusive, somebody may not like the weapons, somebody may not like the pacing, another person may not like the story. The Gaming Industry is simply a market research nightmare, but it's not just it.

So now to my point, my point is that the industry at large may not be aware that they're dumping too much money into development (compared to what they can earn from it) because predicting how much a title will sell is borderline impossible. Sure you can use similar titles as yardsticks, but then it may not sell because the consumer is tired of the same old corridor shooter (which will happen soon(tm) hopefully). They don't know that, what is worse is that this situation leads to unintentional price dumping, when games are sold below the price required to break even reinforcing that price and causing more games to be made at budgets above their means to sell. This is suicidal competition, a battle of endurance between the AAA publishers. Essentially it will show who has the most money to burn before the "invisible hand" of the market put its back into equilibrium to reign among the ashes, in a lot of countries price dumping is in fact illegal. But in the gaming industry, due to the nature of game development and sale budgets, it is in fact impossible to know who is dumping and when and it is probably unintentional as I said. But it is bad for the industry.

Now sure, piracy in part is lowering profits. But it's overall influence is negligible because as I mentioned before demand is high when something is free, when you pay 50 bucks or more for it few who pirated it will buy it. The market is crashing, it had to eventually as perfect econometric models, especially for such a subjective product like games, don't exist. So knowing for sure if the market is all good or not is impossible as well. You can make educated guesses like I am doing here based on what I know and what I see, but old wisdom shared among generations of economists and analysts says that the crisis comes when you least expect it. Whether we're talking about games, wall street or the record industry the case is always the same, companies get caught with their pants down when shit hits the fan. Some don't but most do.

This is why you can still occasionally see some "AA" mid-budget genre titles as console exclusives (Bayonette, Asura's Wraith, Dark Souls before PC petition, etc.) and equivalent PC-exclusive genre titles are almost completely extinct (STALKER is perhaps the last PC exclusive "AA" genre title).

I'm not saying The Bay should be cracked down (which is impossible as I consider pirating as an inevitable spill-over effect of the internet). Just saying that bittorrent is at least partially responsible for the decline, at least on PC.

Depends how you define mid-budget AA on the PC. Could Paradox Grand Strategy games be considered mid-budget if you say that for example FTL is low-budget? What about Galactic Civlizations II, that one cost 300k to make from what I read. What about say the last Gothic series rape game? Is that AAA or not? If you ask me that kind of market exists, but data on budgets isn't freely available unless you would dig into income statements of listed publishers on shareholder sections. Assuming they listed development costs individually and not just lumped it in operational costs with everything including the plumbing

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

I didn't know you had become so cynical, Awor-chan.

Why cynical?

 

[Hellraiser]

But do musicians actually have money to start a large scale advertising campaign, together with radio and TV exposure that the industry does?

In most of cases they aren't rich and famous because of their talent (which isn't exceptional among musicians) but because of all the effort that the record labels put into marketing which does much more for their insane success than they themselves do.

It is true that the marketing machine is behind the wealth of many people of "varying" musical contributions to culture as a whole. And that wide-scale advertising is beyond the financial means of most musicians. However you're overestimating how often they give new talent the chance to promote it with videos, TV ads, airtime and the whole bells and whistles of the marketing machine. More often than not the newest hit that's getting so much airtime is from an artist who made 2 or 3 albums nobody heard about before the label gave him a chance.

Still this is a valid point as if you want to make it big labels are a shortcut as financing for ad campaigns to promote an act would simply be hard to get. They would have to save up money for years to afford it. But at the same time labels are merciless in how they get money from artists back, case in point the musicians which end up indebted to labels. Sometimes its better to promote yourself within your means for years and stay under the radar than jump on the "I want to be a star" bandwagon now and sign a deal with the devil which will fuck you over. At the end of the day an artist wants to create what he enjoys creating, showing it/performing where he wants to and live off it, if he wants greater fame and more money for that it is his choice, but he should deal with the consequences as it is a gamble. Maybe it's just me, but I don't see why I would want to jump through all the hoops and be the RIAA's bitch if I was a musician, not with those strings attached and the risk which does make it a gamble. Having more creative control over what I do and release would be more important for me than flashy videos and gold-plated hummers.

 

[DalekFlay]

When Gabe wanted to launch Steam in Russia, people advised him against it because Russia has one of the biggest piracy rates in the world. What happened? He went ahead and today Russia forms one of Steam's largest revenue streams in Europe. So much for pirates only pirating because they're thieves then.

This really is as close as we can get to factual evidence that "if you sell it the way consumers want it they will buy." Everyone please pay attention.

 

[Hellraiser]

Quite frankly advising against launching Steam in Russia was retarded. What, Russians can't pirate English steam games or something? GabeN opens Russian Steam and suddenly piracy skyrockets as if it wasn't there? The fuck? How does that even work? Did the retards who sold foodstuffs in the past but got into game publishing and don't understand tech at all told him that? Explains all the retardation of the game industry and not just it.

A bigger issue is the amount of credit card fraud that Russia was infamous for, that bit I could understand but in the end how does it stop him from making money? He loses a sale he wouldn't get if someone tried fraud, big deal he gets actual sales anyway. To expand a web-service to Russia he needed servers closer to it, a lawyer to get all the legal shenanigans related to selling stuff for Russians done and someone to manage the Russian service. That's it, he doesn't need a fucking factory built in the middle goddamn Siberia. Investment costs are low and potential profits even of a minority that doesn't pirate are fairly large, as Valve probably does not do the translation itself. It's a no-brainer. But nope, there be pirates. So what that getting into the market is fucking cheap as expansion for a web-service is fucking cheap. Pirates man! They apparently bend the basic laws economics.

Bloody hell how did those people ever get to run a business...

 

[Harg Harfardarssen]

Purchasing the games is actually the easiest way for me to get them. Bittorrent is almost always a slower dowload than a legitimate purchase. Since I have a job, and live in the Kwa, the cost of the games necessary to fill my gaming hours is low enough that paying it is totally worth the time and hassle I save.

But I still pirate all the time because the anti-piracy butthurt is so glorious.

Sometimes you have to sacrifice convenience to do what's right.

 

[Commander Xbox]

Purchasing the games is actually the easiest way for me to get them. Bittorrent is almost always a slower dowload than a legitimate purchase. Since I have a job, and live in the Kwa, the cost of the games necessary to fill my gaming hours is low enough that paying it is totally worth the time and hassle I save.

But I still pirate all the time because the anti-piracy butthurt is so glorious.

Sometimes you have to sacrifice convenience to do what's right.

bwahaha okay bro, have fun with your console ports cause noone wants to develop for the pc. youre only shooting yourself in the foot

 

[Spectacle]

Will the sixth strike be a drone strike?

 

[Bruma Hobo]

HHR, I honestly cannot believe someone smart enough to be on the Codex forums can be so narrow-minded.

 

[evdk]

Will the sixth strike be a drone strike?

It will, but it will take out your neghbours' family barbecue.

 

[Harg Harfardarssen]

bwahaha okay bro, have fun with your console ports cause noone wants to develop for the pc. youre only shooting yourself in the foot

Bwahaha, multi-platform AAA garbage is what's hit hardest by piracy. Bwahaha, crpgs are a niche market so anything that undermines the centralization of market power in large companies that require mass-market sales numbers to turn a profit will help them. Bwahaha.

 

[Severian Silk]

Part of what makes Steam so exciting are the frequent sales and promotions, where stuff gets marked down by 50-75% or bundled in a package with other releases. Amazon, Hulu, etc. don't have that AFAIK, and are thus less exciting and fun (even if the prices average out to be the same in the end). People like parties and celebrations and stuff even if they're pointless.

 

[Mastermind]

Anyone remember when recordable cassettes were going to kill the music industry?

It did. Now they just sell retarded shit to people too retarded to figure out how to pirate. Hmm, that sounds a lot like another industry I just can't put my finger on.

 

[Moribund]

Get a grip, Hellraiser. Fat lot you know about Kodak, that's like saying supermarket checkers need to adapt by working ten times as fast for one tenth the pay.

Professional photographers simply are not going to spend 1500 a month on film any more once digital came along, and they are not going to "adapt" when adapt would mean becoming a semiconductor giant.

Even getting the best lenses would be difficult to achieve, that would be like going to the moon. And to no purpose because people simply don't pay that kind of money any more. There's not someone making all the same money or more, it's just gone away. Now you only make money off the cameras, and only if you are an industrial giant that can leverage operating in 35 different industries to keep its research costs subsidized and has a cheap but highly technical labor source in place already. All the black homeless guys wandering around Rochester were going to make Kodak into a new Sony

And it's the same situation here, that money is just gone for music but really who gives a shit. For movies the home market is secondary so again who cares. For games it's the only market, fortunately kickstarter has come along to save an otherwise grim situation for niche games.

 

[Hellraiser]

Get a grip, Hellraiser. Fat lot you know about Kodak, that's like saying supermarket checkers need to adapt by working ten times as fast for one tenth the pay.

Professional photographers simply are not going to spend 1500 a month on film any more once digital came along, and they are not going to "adapt" when adapt would mean becoming a semiconductor giant.

Of course it could not continue to rake in that cash, that was my point when I compared it to the record labels which are facing the same situation. The good times went away and it can get only shittier. Instead of preparing for that the RIAA is putting its head in the sand and pointing the finger at pirates, when the way they have operated in so far is insufficient to survive on the market. They need to prepare for a downscaling of their operations or they face chronic insolvency and a debt spiral. They need to shift their business model to be profitable in the new market reality. Like with Kodak this is a classical case of wishful thinking that the good times will return when the market keeps changing and you keep ignoring the changes.

And what alternative did Kodak have to not becoming a semiconductor giant? Going bust? How is that a sensible business strategy? Kodak fucked up because initially they were in a good place in the digital camera race and could compete with Sony, Nikon and the other Japanese electronic giants. Furthermore they had a brand and reputation respected among professionals worldwide. That was their advantage and it would be enough to allow them to make a transition successfully, considering the dotcom bubble, hi-tech craze and general economic boom of the kwan 90s getting capital to fund that off the market would be piss easy. There is no excuse for the ten plus years of fuck ups by Kodak's management.

Also who says they had to do R&D in fucking Rochester? They had global presence, they could emulate what the Japanese did who were newcomers to the global market compared to Kodak. Instead of acting as they saw the writing on the wall they didn't do what they should have done, restructure their business by shifting its focus. Alternatively they could say fuck this and sell the whole thing to the Japanese or someone else while it still was worth something. What they ended up doing was driving their market value, business and brand into the ground.

 

[Commander Xbox]

bwahaha okay bro, have fun with your console ports cause noone wants to develop for the pc. youre only shooting yourself in the foot

Bwahaha, multi-platform AAA garbage is what's hit hardest by piracy. Bwahaha, crpgs are a niche market so anything that undermines the centralization of market power in large companies that require mass-market sales numbers to turn a profit will help them. Bwahaha.

bwwaaahahahah lmao

he thinks middle market games thrive on rampant piracy

piracy is what killed the middle market and drove the AAA publishers

AAA publishers are struggling because the market is contracting and their costs keep going up due to moronic business practice

 

[Moribund]

But Hellraiser, they are already making all they were ever going to make once the film money went away. There was not really any mismanagement, that money doesn't exist any more. Also the money for cameras doesn't exist any more either.

Film, especially polaroid had some insane markups, Electronics have a markup of about 1%. That old business just doesn't exist any more.

Similarly Gaben makes a lot of money with steam but it's nothing compared to what the big publishers make, let alone what the whole market makes, which is even tinier than the whole market if PC games hadn't died off.

You can make up masturbatory fantasies all you like but piracy has had a big negative impact on PC gaming. And they did "get with the times" they made things into horrendous MMOs and made tons of DLC nonsense, and by and large switched to consoles. And those measures worked, especially the MMO and DLC shit.

Console port bullshit is the worst offender but piracy has done more than its share of harm.