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Piracy and the Four Currencies

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Re: Piracy and the Four Currencies

#31

Post by ajuc »

yason wrote: post #28
chaostheory wrote: post #25

Humble Bundle, Steam, and most app stores solve these problems for gaming. It's too bad some titles from Steam include some really horrible DRM from their respective publishers, namely Ubisoft. Whenever I somehow lose a connection to Ubisoft servers, my game pauses with a 'Waiting to connect to Ubisoft servers' screen. The only way to get out of this screen is to quit the game. Based on this experience, I will never…

Humble Bundle, Steam, and most app stores solve these problems for gaming. Still, there's another unit of currency in play that the app stores and subscription services don't offer. It's $VPO or Value of Proud Ownership and it's a currency you get instead of spend. You only get $VPO from buying while these centralized stores are more like renting. I've written many times that the desire and ability to own something i…

check out Good Old Games ( gog.com ).

They have figured these additional costs out - they sell old games (ans some new games - mostly their own ) on-line like Steam, but without any DRM, and with nice installer and preconfigured dosbox when needed. So you can redownload the game any time, and because there's no DRM - you can make copies/use the game on many computers, etc.

So the cost in four currencies is sth like 5-10 USD + 0.1 $T + 0.1 $P + 0 $I

Re: Piracy and the Four Currencies

#32

Post by chakalakasp »

chaostheory wrote: post #25

Humble Bundle, Steam, and most app stores solve these problems for gaming. It's too bad some titles from Steam include some really horrible DRM from their respective publishers, namely Ubisoft. Whenever I somehow lose a connection to Ubisoft servers, my game pauses with a 'Waiting to connect to Ubisoft servers' screen. The only way to get out of this screen is to quit the game. Based on this experience, I will never…

Every time I hear arguments like the one linked to in this article, I counterlink to this: http://thepiratebay.se/search/terraria/0/7/400

Great game, indie developer, easy download (steam), quick install, cheap price, available for sale everywhere on the planet. All the metrics favor purchasing this game instead of pirating it. And yet it is massively pirated.

All the talk of it being about the convenience or about fighting the man probably contains a tiny little nugget of truth at the core, but it seems clear that most people who pirate do so because, hey, it's free and you won't get caught. I imagine if newegg.com had a sneaky "Just ship it to me but don't charge me anything, ever" button next to their "add to cart" button, that sneaky button would be getting a lot of love and a lot of 50 inch LED TVs would be on the next UPS truck, even if clicking it gave a popup that said "Warning, this is unethical and illegal! (but nobody ever gets caught). Proceed? Y/N ".

Re: Piracy and the Four Currencies

#33

Post by figglesonrails »

chakalakasp wrote: post #32
chaostheory wrote: post #25

Humble Bundle, Steam, and most app stores solve these problems for gaming. It's too bad some titles from Steam include some really horrible DRM from their respective publishers, namely Ubisoft. Whenever I somehow lose a connection to Ubisoft servers, my game pauses with a 'Waiting to connect to Ubisoft servers' screen. The only way to get out of this screen is to quit the game. Based on this experience, I will never…

Every time I hear arguments like the one linked to in this article, I counterlink to this: http://thepiratebay.se/search/terraria/0/7/400 Great game, indie developer, easy download (steam), quick install, cheap price, available for sale everywhere on the planet. All the metrics favor purchasing this game instead of pirating it. And yet it is massively pirated. All the talk of it being about the convenience or about f…

Yeah, there will always be pirates. I don't think you can fairly say "massively pirated" because you don't actually have numbers to back that statement, just like I couldn't say that "most people get the game through Steam". However, I would speculate that using Steam as a distribution channel has helped the author more than whatever online pay-then-download mechanism he would ever come up with. I would further speculate that using a common distribution channel like Steam increases the audience and simply by holding piracy constant and increasing paying user numbers, the percent of piracy would decrease. I'm sure "holding piracy constant" is a bit of stretch, but I wouldn't imagine it would increase as massively relative to the number of paying customers. Again, I don't have numbers, so this is just speculation, but I think they are reasonably sound.

If you look at TPB and say "look at all the piracy!" -- well, you won't find much else, it's TPB. I wouldn't assume then that it's pirates all the way down.

The comparison to NewEgg.com is pretty poor. What you're describing is theft of physical property. There is always a real loss of money (not potential money/profit, but honest-to-God money and resources). Software/music/digital art doesn't have this property. There is no loss of real money/resources used to make the copy. This fact actually DOES make all of the difference. If everyone pirated a game, it would not drain the physical assets of the company that produced it for each copy made. Yes, it's still theft, but it is a lot more justifiable (and sustainable, for better or for worse) than robbing a warehouse.

I pirated a copy of Windows XP 64-bit Edition (for Itanium CPUs). You know why? Because Microsoft won't sell it to me, nor will anyone else. I literally had no other choice. In America, we're blessed with being first, but I have it's really annoying to try to get around bans/censorships/date shifts that make something unavailable in your region. When you have no other choice, it's a lot easier to say "eh, screw it, they won't take my money, fine."

I'm sure plenty of people pirate because they hate paying, but I'd be interested in a large-scale survey as to the reasons. I'm sure they vary by income level, technical knowledge, and region. That would be a lot more useful than pidgeon-holing all pirates as cheap bastards when quite frankly, none of us know the results of such a survey.

---

Pirates will be pirates, yes, but the goal isn't (and never will be) to eliminate all pirates, it is minimize losses (and therefore, maximize revenue). Right now providing really good service, extra value (steam features), and low pricing is the best way we know to coaxing users to voluntarily part with their money without the flak of "WE HATE DRM" that is common with overly draconian measures. Steam's profit margins attest to its successful model.

Re: Piracy and the Four Currencies

#34

Post by figglesonrails »

gm wrote: post #7

I think this is just a different way of expressing the idea that piracy exists only because the pirate user experience is better than the non-pirate user experience. So if the non-pirate experience, for example, does not require that you have the disk in your dvd drive in order to play (since all the assets are copied to your hard drive at install time), then the pirate experience is better. And so on. so the trick i…

Well said. I used no-CD cracks on the entire Diablo series because my CD drive was slow but my HDD was big. I bought all of the games and expansion packs. Also, when running Diablo II on WINE, it was a massive pain in the ass to "umount /dev/hdc; eject" ::change disc:: "mount /dev/hdc /cdrom" every friggen time. I had a 20GB (!) HD, I damn well want to use it!

Re: Piracy and the Four Currencies

#35

Post by figglesonrails »

chc wrote: post #23
teamonkey wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But not for someone who's previously had their account locked, someone on usage-capped broadband, someone who doesn't know if their PC is up to scratch and knows that they can't get a refund...

I'm not sure how Steam would be worse than piracy for someone on usage-capped broadband. It would be better than BitTorrent, at least. And I think Steam lists system requirements for everything in its inventory, so though the refund situation still sucks, it does address the "Is my PC up to scratch?" question somewhat.

I don't think I've ever seen a store that accepts refunds on software the moment you open the shrinkwrap, so I'm not really sure how Steam is that much different.

Re: Piracy and the Four Currencies

#36

Post by idle_processor »

The author doesn't mention that buying from companies¹ perceived as evil incurs an $I cost. In the same fashion one wants to support indie devs, there's resistance to feeding the beast responsible for bad market direction. It's basically a boycott; one still consumes the product, but without supporting the publisher.

For example, think back to when Spore was pirated: http://torrentfreak.com/spore-most-pirated-game-ever-thanks-.... That's an example of a negative $I cost: even people with no interest in the game were getting on board, to send a message to EA.

¹Companies with dodgy user-experience track records, intrusive DRM, or who are perceived as having a negative effect on industry or the direction game design is going. Examples: Ubisoft, due to the forced-online connection even for single-player games, EA for Origins and banning policy, etc.

Re: Piracy and the Four Currencies

#37

Post by chaostheory »

yason wrote: post #28
chaostheory wrote: post #25

Humble Bundle, Steam, and most app stores solve these problems for gaming. It's too bad some titles from Steam include some really horrible DRM from their respective publishers, namely Ubisoft. Whenever I somehow lose a connection to Ubisoft servers, my game pauses with a 'Waiting to connect to Ubisoft servers' screen. The only way to get out of this screen is to quit the game. Based on this experience, I will never…

Humble Bundle, Steam, and most app stores solve these problems for gaming. Still, there's another unit of currency in play that the app stores and subscription services don't offer. It's $VPO or Value of Proud Ownership and it's a currency you get instead of spend. You only get $VPO from buying while these centralized stores are more like renting. I've written many times that the desire and ability to own something i…

You're pretty rare. I don't know of anyone who would still play ancient games or abandonware. The closest thing that I know of are people who still keep the Dreamcast, and I can count how many times they've played it over the last 10 years: 0. I don't feel that $VPO is a cost for most gamers as long as they can still access their game within at most a 5 year period. I would also argue that with services like Steam, players will be able to access their games for a longer period of time after changing machines.

Re: Piracy and the Four Currencies

#38

Post by chaostheory »

chakalakasp wrote: post #32
chaostheory wrote: post #25

Humble Bundle, Steam, and most app stores solve these problems for gaming. It's too bad some titles from Steam include some really horrible DRM from their respective publishers, namely Ubisoft. Whenever I somehow lose a connection to Ubisoft servers, my game pauses with a 'Waiting to connect to Ubisoft servers' screen. The only way to get out of this screen is to quit the game. Based on this experience, I will never…

Every time I hear arguments like the one linked to in this article, I counterlink to this: http://thepiratebay.se/search/terraria/0/7/400 Great game, indie developer, easy download (steam), quick install, cheap price, available for sale everywhere on the planet. All the metrics favor purchasing this game instead of pirating it. And yet it is massively pirated. All the talk of it being about the convenience or about f…

World of Goo is a really great indie game that's massively pirated, but it's still successful. The question to ask is whether the pirates would have bought the game if there was no option for piracy? It's not like they are physical products, nor are these pirates using these developers' bandwidth. From an economics standpoint, the developers lose nothing but pride. At the same time they stand to gain a massive mind share for sequels

imo I think most pirates in the West, pirate mainly because they're broke students. Once people grow up with a post college job the piracy tends to end unless there's no other option.

Re: Piracy and the Four Currencies

#39

Post by Natsu »

chaostheory wrote: post #37
yason wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humble Bundle, Steam, and most app stores solve these problems for gaming. Still, there's another unit of currency in play that the app stores and subscription services don't offer. It's $VPO or Value of Proud Ownership and it's a currency you get instead of spend. You only get $VPO from buying while these centralized stores are more like renting. I've written many times that the desire and ability to own something i…

You're pretty rare. I don't know of anyone who would still play ancient games or abandonware. The closest thing that I know of are people who still keep the Dreamcast, and I can count how many times they've played it over the last 10 years: 0. I don't feel that $VPO is a cost for most gamers as long as they can still access their game within at most a 5 year period. I would also argue that with services like Steam, p…

They're not as rare as you might think. More than a few of us know about gog.com, DOSBox and the like...

Re: Piracy and the Four Currencies

#40

Post by paulhauggis »

gm wrote: post #7

I think this is just a different way of expressing the idea that piracy exists only because the pirate user experience is better than the non-pirate user experience. So if the non-pirate experience, for example, does not require that you have the disk in your dvd drive in order to play (since all the assets are copied to your hard drive at install time), then the pirate experience is better. And so on. so the trick i…

"so the trick is to make the non-pirate experience better and the piracy problem goes away. The only people pirating are the ones who would not buy your software/game anyway, so free advertisement/word of mouth should be welcome anyway."

There are a couple of problems with this line of thinking.

First, the Louis CK $5 comedy show is a good example of this not working. Even though it has no protection and is very cheap, it's all over the torrent sites. Why would piracy continue in such massive numbers of the end user is getting everything they could possibly want?

Second, Yes, those people may not purchase your stuff. But, the bigger problem is that if everyone knows they can just download your stuff for free (and you don't care and there are basically no consequences), they will not pay you. They will get it from their friends or download it for free. I've seen this happen time and time again. Since software isn't a physical good, its value is almost like currency: it's only what people are willing to pay.

Piracy is also much worse than theft because if a TV is stolen, you just lose that TV. Over time, piracy can ruin an entire product line. Not just that one copy.

"The industry's problem is that it's hard to make a better experience, existing cash cows being existing cash cows and all. It's easier to protect them than to innovate."

Piracy has actually stifled innovation. Under normal circumstances, if I'm losing money, I'm going to figure out why, which will result in a better customer experience and product. Instead, since there is mass piracy, I'm just going to try to stop that first (Since it's obvious people like the product, they just aren't paying for it).

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