An Open Letter to the Gaming Community from CD Projekt RED

[Forgotten Friend]

The world owes hiver lots of stuff.

 

[hiver]

It is stealing. I've often read an argument that it's not theft because they wouldn't have bought it anyway.

Its not stealing because youre not taking the product from ones who made it, in any permanent manner. In fact youre not taking it from them at all. I can download a million CoD copies or hundred million and that wont mean shit to Activision.
And i really would not buy CoD even if it was the last game in the world.
Its simply true thing, but those that are desperate to call it "stealing" and make overblown statements how it destroys companies cant accept that, can they?

The only real term for it could be "illegal sharing" asshole.

You are taking the product for free when it is not listed as free. That's the definition of stealing. And something does not have to be physical to be stolen.

Youre just repeating what you already said. the term stealing cannot apply to this since youre not removing anything from developers (or rather publishers).
I said - Modern times. You cant use terms coined for something else and just pretend its true.
You just dont get it and dont want to admit it because then your stupid argument does not work.
Its illegal sharing at this point.

But here's a new question, since digital is a horn so often tooted. What if someone pirates CD-keys and then downloads/steals games off a digital store/client like Steam? Is that not a form of stealing? Valve loses out on the "shelf" space with which they are compensated and the developer, obviously, gets nothing as well.

What shelf space?

Pirates would never walk into a store and steal from that store because they don't have any balls.

:facepalm:

To deflect the glaring reasons why they pirate (ease, no-cost) they simply deflect the example by stating everything online is digital. It's not "really" stealing because it's not physical.

Thats right. My downloaded cracked copy does not prevent publishers to sell it to other people.

Let's narrow down the costs of theft to their most extremes.

really? to the most extremes?

Let's say you have a guy whose made a game; if he sells one copy he can feed himself. You are the only person to have come across his game. You pirate his game instead of paying for it. He goes hungry. Are you not stealing?

It would be stealing if i took his only copy and he had none to sell to someone else. Apart from that its really a stupid example again.

That's the most basic, raw form of theft I know of.

Oh really... my, arent we in thirteen century.

And to suggest people like that should feel "lucky" to have had their work taken like that is... well, I'm not going to get into it.

That was quite stupid, true.

Bullshit. It is a rare event at best and you know that to be true. The Codex are goodnatured, though, I will agree.

Its not bullshit. its just how things go. What was bullshit was your statement that it NEVER happens.

When Looking Glass closed they ran some extensive interviews in PC Gamer citing the enormous amount of pirating as quite destructive to their business.

It is destructive, to some extent. How much exactly NOBODY KNOWS.
Your claim that it was piracy that put them down is factually wrong.
They were closed by another company who owned theirs because of their bad decisions and stupid way of selling their products.

Valve. Steam. Heaps of money. Games cracked and pirated.

I know I've hit a sweet spot when I'm called a bigot on a debate over the legality of one form of theft.

Ah, that was just a friendly jab in the balls.
Btw, im not arguing legality. Just the proper terminology.

I'm just not the sort to sit there and act like I did nothing wrong. Or try to justify my actions by taking advantage of a new legal realm that has not yet been meted out. I typically think intuitively. And my intuition tells me if I were to go download Battlefield 3 right now I'd be in the wrong. I wouldn't care, and I never have, ever, but at least I know I have the wherewithal to admit I wasn't exactly doing the right thing.

All im saying is that is isnt "stealing". Im not arguing that makes it right at all.

"How much" is, I can confidently say, easily the vast majority.

No you cant. Thats the whole point. I mean, you can say it and even be confident about it but that doesnt make it any more true in reality.

Because you don't have to delve far into the human narrative to realize humans like free shit.

No shit...? How come Gabe goes for a swim every morning in his giant pool filled with money?

Piracy has always been about it either being free or easy to obtain. That's the fucking point of stealing shit! Always has been!

Nope. Actually piracy or stealing was always a very risky business. Not free nor easy.

From movies to music to games to books. You pirate because it's free and easy.

Nope. I remember paying for pirated CDs in my time, only a far less amount then for full prices which i could not afford even if i made myself go without food for months, not to mention anything else.
No doubt that some people do it because its just there and nowadys more or less easy available but thats not why everyone does it.
Just deal with it instead of coming up with crazy and easily debunkable propaganda copied from scum sucking greedy bastards.

You don't pirate to try something out and then buy it.

Yes i do. Although, of course i end up not buying because i see that those games are shit like i did with ... three or four games i downloaded last year.
I never even finished any of them but gave up not even half way through.
And CDprojekt for example will not get a fucking cent out of me because they made this shitty move literally few days before i would have bought W2, even if i really didnt like some decisions they made in design and whatnot.
They retracted, true but, still on my shit list.
Because of this, bad design and outright lying about the game before releasing it.

People who do are the exception that prove the rule! People who borrow shit from their best friends rarely even give it back or pay for it. Ever heard the phrase don't lend out what you don't want to lose? Because people fucking love free shit and as humans we're too shitty of a species to really pay up when we know someone or thing deserves compensation.

Valve. Gabe swimming in money every day.

And that can happen with your closest friends!

Blaime! God damn bastards! ill fucking break their legs! they are stealing from me!
:ggghaaaarggghh!:

And you expect me to believe some random joes taking games from giant corporations is really going to give a flying fuck about their bottom line?

why would he?
Is that entity going to take the bottom line of any random joe or its own employers in never ending insane rush to maximize profits?

Again, they didn't care enough to pay $0.01 to a bunch of indie developers...

many did. there are several such projects that are going well from what i occasionally read on the Internets.

I'm not gonna argue this further. I think you made some good points, particularly about publishing and I totally agree, but I think when it comes to the reasons people pirate you are totally ignoring some basic elements of human nature.

No, you are. Valve, Gabe, pools of money.
Notch saying to a guy who just asked him for a free copy because he doesnt have money to buy it "meh, just pirate it and then buy someday when you have the money. and dont forget to feel bad about it "
(also swimming in money btw)
Several others doing good.


This reminds me of a discussion i had with this guy... i wont mention any names but he is an actor and recently he got a pretty good role and then advanced into real hollywood blockbuster (hobbit) after years trying to succeed in less famous waters of almost independent action movies.
He was all "Ghhaah! piracy! bastards! I work my ass for years and years and it all goes to crapper because of piracy! We make a movie, it goes into stores as a dvd and its online five days before! ghaaargghh!"

Why exactly?

Because their publishers who financed those projects used the outdated forms of distribution and were nowhere on the internets. Nowhere. Literally.
And i sad to him, look C.... yeah, no names, err... i said, why the fuck are you guys (which meant his publishers) only trying to sell your movies like physical DVDs (which are not exactly cheap) anyway?
Why dont you just upload it yourself and charge a bit less but sell a lot more? And to a global market instead of limited regional one, like they were doing? And in the region that is known to be one of the biggest pirat markets anyway.

Answer?
Because producer companies (the ones that finance and sell those movies) dont do business that way.
And - it could never work. Games and stuff is different.

My answer?
Porn industry.

Didnt work.
Of course he himself couldnt do much about it anyway.

The world owes hiver lots of stuff.

I would settle for just a few simple things one of which would be far less idiots, from which we both would benefit.
After all, all the world needs to do it is to distribute lightning a bit more precisely.

 

[janjetina]

It is evident that sser hasn't read the topic before shitting out his initial wall of text, since his attempt at argument had been rebutted days before he made it.

 

[hiver]

Obviously. It seems lately people cant be bothered to fucking click two pages back.
But then again, there is apparently same difficulty to even consider anything that could end up devaluation their theory, regardless of anything else.

I mean he did start alright, claiming that its wrong to claim that piracy does no damage at all but then went into bullshit.
It would be also interesting to see how much damage those "menagers" and their ways of doing business are creating - and then compare to some calculated reliable figure of piracy damage.
Of course both things cannot be measured at all. But it would be interesting to see that data if it could exist.

 

[Shannow]

Making good games is not the answer. Troika made good games. Black Isle made good games. I agree with your comment, except the TLDR: part. The masses don't really care for quality, they just want to play a game that everybody likes.

Troika made good games but it made them extremely buggy and never bothered to fix bugs.
What's the point in having a good game when you simply can't play it?

The masses do care for quality if a certain line is crossed (e. g. DA2). Troika didn't make "good quality" games and they had problems with mass-appeal.
Arcanum: Shitty game for pretty much anybody but our resident C&C/Story-fags.
ToEE: Shitty game for anybody but D&D combat-fags.
Bloodlines: Probably suffered the most from the public's opinion on Troika's bugginess and lack of marketing power.

Of those 3 games Bloodlines was the only one that ever had the potential of scoring a big hit. All games sold "well" in the long run. All made a profit. The problem was that Troika was unable to secure further financing. Troika's demise is first and foremost their own fault. Then the fault of cowardly, short-term greedy publishers. It's neither the unwashed masses' nor the pirates' fault, so why even bring them up?

I've downloaded a huge amount of stuff and don't show up. The site only shows what you downloaded on the site itself. Its purpose is to pull tricks like making it look like RIAA has downloaded a ton of shit, or that innocents will get blamed.

But in all the shit I ever downloaded, the only thing I ever got a takedown notice for was some idiotic HBO documentary I downloaded by accident. Since there's time stamps and your ISP knows who had each IP at each time, you just don't get mistakes that way. The only mistakes would be some human error somewhere which is less likely and can be detected later and easily corrected.

The point is the only thing I downloaded that could get a takedown notice, did, and I never got a false one. Pirates love to manufacture "proof" that innocents are getting shafted, but if it were so prone to false positives why do they never occur to anyone but pirates? Why are only pirates pissed off about all this injustice? After all if it were true it would affect everyone. Oh right, it's all complete bullshit.

Right, because you only got into trouble for something you actually did, human error is unlikely in your opinion, other errors or pure greed don't occur, you've never heard of "open" networks (WLAN) and an IP is as sure at identifying a person as a genetical fingerprint, you ignore actual reports of innocents getting shafted that conclusively means that innocents never get shafted...

It is evident that sser hasn't read the topic before shitting out his initial wall of text, since his attempt at argument had been rebutted days before he made it.

I've been over all of these arguments at least twice a year for the last 4 years and I've tried to stay out of quite a few such arguments.
This dead horse has been beaten so much, it's a wonder anybody has unbroken sticks left.

But since anti-pirates are either financially involved and thus irrational or plain dumb and pirates are often dishonest or try to gain some ludicrous moral high-ground, the discussion is so loaded and the participants so stubborn that I predict that we'll have this discussion another 10 times this year.

 

[sser]

Obviously. It seems lately people cant be bothered to fucking click two pages back.
But then again, there is apparently same difficulty to even consider anything that could end up devaluation their theory, regardless of anything else.

I mean he did start alright, claiming that its wrong to claim that piracy does no damage at all but then went into bullshit.
It would be also interesting to see how much damage those "menagers" and their ways of doing business are creating - and then compare to some calculated reliable figure of piracy damage.
Of course both things cannot be measured at all. But it would be interesting to see that data if it could exist.

Sorry, but nothing was refuted on the basis of "because I said so". That's not how differences are settled.

Anyway, I will not argue further the semantics of theft. If you think it's just "file sharing" then that's fine. But I will tell you companies don't see product as being "shared" out of their pockets. Nor do they line up millions of dollars to tackle those doing most of the "sharing". If the world followed its own legal-speak to the letter it would be quite a different place...

You did not wish to confront my primary argument. You deflected my points on human nature when they get to the crux of piracy's ability to damage. People like free stuff and will not pay for something they have already received. That's just human nature and to ignore it is being naive. I was actually quite puzzled as to why you felt the need to justify your piracy by stating you would sometimes buy a copy. You argued that it's not wrong or damaging, so why do you feel such an obligation? Why does Notch ultimately state: "but please by a copy"? Quite interesting...

As to the actual damages caused by piracy... You say "we don't know". That's not a very compelling argument. In the intelligence fields you can learn something by pulling drag nets over wide, various forms of information. And from that information you can pull out clues that point toward what you are looking for. With piracy it's not so difficult. Many companies have simply outright stated that they have jumped away from PC gaming because of the piracy. Crytek and Epic Games stand as two notable examples. Why? Because companies have a pretty difficult time simply operating their business when they just have to "assume" losses from X-number of pirates. And, as it turned out, both of those companies were proven completely right to have jumped ship to consoles. I doubt they'll be coming back. World-wide piracy is an even bigger issue. In regions where piracy is astronomical companies simply will not operate outside of anything other than an MMO or free-to-play, micro-transaction product. That's not good business. And gamers really wonder why in this age of technology and room for advancement game design has ground to a boring, banal halt? And as much as Valve is genius for cutting at one of the big reasons for piracy -- ease of use -- I'm sure Gabe was still humbled as fuck when he saw Portal 2 was pirated almost four million times. And people were so surprised when Valve made a 180 on the console issue... The business aspect is something pirates simply don't seem able to grasp. And when someone like the guy from Iron Lore comes out and basically tells pirates to go fuck themselves all the little PC gamers come out of the woodwork to tell him they know better. They have all the information in the world to run a PC company in a field where businesses are constantly on a knife's edge of being sunk... Fuck this "We don't know" shit. We very clearly know piracy can be quite damaging one way or another.

 

[hiver]

wow...

Im not sure i should even try to respond at this point since, very obviously youre just ... stuck at one specific level and completely unable to even consider, let alone accept some simple basics.
ffs... wow... just wow.. and i thought youre not a moron...
The whole post you just wrote doesnt make any sense at all. i just dont have the patience to go through every sentence especially since it will make no difference in the end. Again.


Just a few ... i dont know why really... :

If you think it's just "file sharing" then that's fine

I fucking said - illegal file sharing.

You did not wish to confront my primary argument.

Are you retarded? seriously?

You deflected my points on human nature when they get to the crux of piracy's ability to damage.

No. I debunked them by using a very real example. wtf?

Many companies have simply outright stated

Of course they did. who gives a shit?

jumped away from PC gaming because of the piracy

where? on platforms where there is no piracy?
ffs... dont even bother to answer...

Because companies have a pretty difficult time simply operating their business when they just have to "assume" losses from X-number of pirates.

dont they "assume"... oh my...

The business aspect is something pirates simply don't seem able to grasp.

haha haaaa...

wait, wait... there was "one" more... god... have to read that again... fuck...

why you felt the need to justify your piracy by stating you would sometimes buy a copy.

That wasnt a justification. Its just how it goes.

You argued that it's not wrong or damaging

Only in your wild... err... "imagination".

 

[Forgotten Friend]

I would settle for just a few simple things one of which would be far less idiots, from which we both would benefit.
After all, all the world needs to do it is to distribute lightning a bit more precisely.

Oho, far less idiots? You need to lose some weight, hiver?

 

[hiver]

Hi retard... i dont understand what that even means... and its not because youre too smart either.

 

[Forgotten Friend]

Hi retard... i dont understand what that even means... and its not because youre too smart either.

To say less would mean to diminish in size. To say fewer would mean to have not so many of them.

 

[Shannow]

Hi retard... i dont understand what that even means... and its not because youre too smart either.

To say less would mean to diminish in size. To say fewer would mean to have not so many of them.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/less

4.smaller in size, amount,...

Not to say that going into semantics - in a forum that uses English as the common language but has many non-native-English-speaking members - when the meaning was perfectly clear isn't moronic in itself...

 

[Forgotten Friend]

That is a newfag popamole dictionary. Less is just wrong and always has been, I won't accept some newfags redefining it on me at this point in life just because too many people like hiver don't know the difference.

"The traditional view is that less applies to matters of degree, value, or amount and modifies collective nouns, mass nouns, or nouns denoting an abstract whole while fewer applies to matters of number and modifies plural nouns. Less has been used to modify plural nouns since the days of King Alfred and the usage, though roundly decried, appears to be increasing. Less is more likely than fewer to modify plural nouns when distances, sums of money, and a few fixed phrases are involved <less than 100 miles> <an investment of less than $2000> <in 25 words or less> and as likely as fewer to modify periods of time <in less (or fewer) than four hours>."

 

[Pelvis Knot]

That is a newfag popamole dictionary. Less is just wrong and always has been, I won't accept some newfags redefining it on me at this point in life just because too many people like hiver don't know the difference.

"The traditional view is that less applies to matters of degree, value, or amount and modifies collective nouns, mass nouns, or nouns denoting an abstract whole while fewer applies to matters of number and modifies plural nouns. Less has been used to modify plural nouns since the days of King Alfred and the usage, though roundly decried, appears to be increasing. Less is more likely than fewer to modify plural nouns when distances, sums of money, and a few fixed phrases are involved <less than 100 miles> <an investment of less than $2000> <in 25 words or less> and as likely as fewer to modify periods of time <in less (or fewer) than four hours>."

You are aware that hiver's native language is not english? There is no need to be anal about shit like this when you could understand the meaning perfectly

 

[Pelvis Knot]

Because companies have a pretty difficult time simply operating their business when they just have to "assume" losses from X-number of pirates.

What losses exactly? If I pirate a game 7 times, do they lose 350 USD? If I try hard enough and download enough copies of ME3 will I be able to force EA into bankruptcy?

 

[Forgotten Friend]

That is a newfag popamole dictionary. Less is just wrong and always has been, I won't accept some newfags redefining it on me at this point in life just because too many people like hiver don't know the difference.

"The traditional view is that less applies to matters of degree, value, or amount and modifies collective nouns, mass nouns, or nouns denoting an abstract whole while fewer applies to matters of number and modifies plural nouns. Less has been used to modify plural nouns since the days of King Alfred and the usage, though roundly decried, appears to be increasing. Less is more likely than fewer to modify plural nouns when distances, sums of money, and a few fixed phrases are involved <less than 100 miles> <an investment of less than $2000> <in 25 words or less> and as likely as fewer to modify periods of time <in less (or fewer) than four hours>."

You are aware that hiver's native language is not english? There is no need to be anal about shit like this when you could understand the meaning perfectly

There's also no need to say YOU ARE A FUCKING RETARD DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE to everyone on the site with every single post, either. Why don't you let hiver know that instead of butting in when I politely point out the irony of calling someone stupid with such bad grammar.

 

[Pelvis Knot]

politely point out the irony of calling someone stupid with such bad grammar.

Obviously the man can't pay much attention to grammar while raging...

 

[Forgotten Friend]

politely point out the irony of calling someone stupid with such bad grammar.

Obviously the man can't pay much attention to grammar while raging...

The meds aren't working then

 

[Oriebam]

"The traditional view is that less applies to matters of degree, value, or amount and modifies collective nouns, mass nouns, or nouns denoting an abstract whole while fewer applies to matters of number and modifies plural nouns. Less has been used to modify plural nouns since the days of King Alfred and the usage, though roundly decried, appears to be increasing. Less is more likely than fewer to modify plural nouns when distances, sums of money, and a few fixed phrases are involved <less than 100 miles> <an investment of less than $2000> <in 25 words or less> and as likely as fewer to modify periods of time <in less (or fewer) than four hours>."

I didn't know that.

 

[hiver]

There's also no need to say YOU ARE A FUCKING RETARD DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE to everyone on the site with every single post, either. Why don't you let hiver know that instead of butting in when I politely point out the irony of calling someone stupid with such bad grammar.

How about appreciating my effort to bring in some sarcastic goodness of mark twain in answering some inane question? that went under a radar eh?

No, i just couldnt understand whats your point or is there any at all.
Because instead of just saying that less is technically wrong word to use, you made some ... lets just say weird, remark about me wanting to loose weight because im supposedly fat out of the blue.
And what? You expected me to just get it?

Also, i really should stop using the term "retard". Its not fair to people who have that problem medically through no fault of their own.
Although im not sure if its even used officially anymore because of general abuse of the word.

And besides being a non english speaker im also thoruoughly inundated by amerikansky form of it due to their capitalistic imperialistic movies.
I suppose youre one of the bloody English eh?

Because companies have a pretty difficult time simply operating their business when they just have to "assume" losses from X-number of pirates.

What losses exactly? If I pirate a game 7 times, do they lose 350 USD? If I try hard enough and download enough copies of ME3 will I be able to force EA into bankruptcy?

They will bloody assume so.

btw sser,
I guess i could apologize a bit for foul language. Even though youre wrong you arent in this argument to get an ego trip.
At least not so far. Dont take it seriously. More like short, to the point expressions of complex feelings.

 

[Shannow]

Also, i really should stop using the term "retard". Its not fair to people who have that problem medically through no fault of their own.

Yeah, I've also decided to restrict myself to "moron" and to revive good old "arsehole". I'm just not able to decide which one is more applicable in the case of our Ignored Friend... Ah well, perhaps not start off with inflation.

 

[DraQ]

But I will tell you companies don't see product as being "shared" out of their pockets.

They'd be happy to see it not just as theft but as genocide if they could get away with it.

The thing is theft is when the object is removed from source, with piracy id doesn't happen.
It's simple enough people with bonus chromosome would probably understand it just fine, so why not you?

As to the actual damages caused by piracy... You say "we don't know". That's not a very compelling argument. In the intelligence fields you can learn something by pulling drag nets over wide, various forms of information. And from that information you can pull out clues that point toward what you are looking for. With piracy it's not so difficult. Many companies have simply outright stated that they have jumped away from PC gaming because of the piracy.

Here I will demonstrate they don't know what the fuck are they talking about OR they lie through their teeth. I will do so by pulling drag net over the very basics of econmic theory and the estimates of loses due to piracy produced by those companies:

Companies typically assume that losses to piracy equal downloads times price of a copy. This would assume that demand isn't affected by the game price, whether it's retail price (for retail copy) or zero for pirated copy. The only way you could come close to such stiff demand would by selling breathing air, which is absolutely essential to live and you don't really benefit from having surplus air, but even then you'd have people simply die if they can't afford it and try to limit their activity when coming close to affordability limit, so the demand would still change with unit price. I don't think I need to point out that games aren't nearly as essential as breathing air, therefore the official estimates are just plain wrong and the companies are spewing bullshit, either because they are this ignorant or because they outright lie.
QED.

If they outright lie, they probably don't do it for sport but have a fucking reason - namely to conceal the truth which can be assumed inconvenient for them.

And that's even before we factor in positive aspects of piracy, like free word-of-mouth advertisement.

Besides, the game companies don't seem to realize that they are NOT selling games. If they did sell game they would be bust before they knew what hit them. You can't return *any* profit by selling limited supply of product for hefty price when unlimited amounts of the same product are available for free.
What they are selling are material and less material goods associated with particular games - shiny boxes, nice manuals, hassle free patching, e-peen extension for having the legit version, feelies, nice fuzzy feeling that you're a loyal fan, feeling that you're contributing to future sequels and spiritual successor (if you're enough to understand that) and so on.
They can't compete with pirates when it comes to selling the game itself, so they, knowingly or not, bundle a lot of things with the game and sell them.

I'm sure Gabe was still humbled as fuck when he saw Portal 2 was pirated almost four million times.

And how many times did it sell? I assume about 2M, but can't be arsed to check.
It would mean that Valve took 1/3 of available market while competing with their own product offered for free.
Humbled?
He should be fucking .
Not everyone can pull a Lucky Luke and shoot his own shadow before it shoots himself in 33% of his attempts.
Especially when the shadow is cheating.


Also:
*Forgotten Friend casts Obvious Troll!*
*Is super effective!*

 

[hiver]

Yeah, I've also decided to restrict myself to "moron" and to revive good old "arsehole". I'm just not able to decide which one is more applicable in the case of our Ignored Friend... Ah well, perhaps not start off with inflation.

I always liked "arshole"...
what...
I mean as expression! Really!

English is such an inadequate language for swearing...err... i swear... wtf!!!
Especially for any insults lasting for more pages.

 

[Forgotten Friend]

Hey hiver I don't remember asking a question I was just laughing at how crazy you are, but thanks for giving me some more content. Hiver gonna hiver.

Also, i really should stop using the term "retard". Its not fair to people who have that problem medically through no fault of their own.

Yeah, I've also decided to restrict myself to "moron" and to revive good old "arsehole". I'm just not able to decide which one is more applicable in the case of our Ignored Friend... Ah well, perhaps not start off with inflation.

Moron was a technical term at one point too. Instead of getting on the political correctness train I'm drawing a line in the sand. I won't start using handicapable it's retarded. Retarded means slow and retarded is bad, and hiver is if not retarded quite mad.

I'm also going to continue to ridicule people who misuse less into conformity.

 

[hiver]

Yeah well, i dont exactly remember anything that falls out of that turd you call your brain either but, calling you a retarded moron is obviously less then is required.
You were not laughing. You just dreamed it.

 

[Forgotten Friend]

Yeah well, i dont exactly remember anything that falls out of that turd you call your brain either but, calling you a retarded moron is obviously less then is required.
You were not laughing. You just dreamed it.

Hiver your edginess is in danger of piercing god's eye.