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Piracy

blog.cobanov.cloud

41–50 of 120 posts

Re: Piracy

#41
post #7

> They sell games for $60 and then add microtransactions, turning them into service games. Just. Don't. Buy. This. Crap. There are other games which you can play.

On Steam this is not hard to do either. There are so many excellent games out there. And if you really want to minimize the cost of games, become a patient gamer. Play top-rated games two or three years after their release when they show up heavily discounted in the summer/winter sales. By then all the bugs have been ironed out if it really was an excellent game, and if the game turned out to be disappointing, it will be reflected in the reviews by then.

Or just get Factorio. You'll never have time for any other game ever again — or a social life for that matter.

Re: Piracy

#42

Having worked in the game industry in the past it's amusing to see people talk about the greed of game developers. You have no idea! You have no idea what an effort it takes to ship a game. An album is the work of one or a few individuals for a relatively short period of time with very little cost. Because of that you can have services like Spotify that allow pretty much access to all the music ever created for a 10$…

Counterpoint: Rockstar.

They take a long time to make games, but it's always very good quality.

At least enough for people to want to buy them over and over. Their game are not cheap but aren't more expensive than others triple A, yet they make a ton of money and Take 2 interactive stocks are doing great.

I'd say it's more that the gaming market is extremely concurrentiel, either you're very good at what you do, or you got load of money for marketing campaign, but if you got neither it's barely profitable. Increasing the price of your games in that case won't solve the issue, people would buy even less of your company's game.

Re: Piracy

#43
Ah, fitgirl to the rescue :) Helped me so many time to decide to buy the game,., For example Horizon Zero Dawn, played fitgirl release, loved it, purchased original. But still. fitgirl release is better as it does not require Internet!

Re: Piracy

#44
I think this is conflating two problems.

One is preservation and ownership (or lack of), which is a huge problem. Live service games aside, even if you buy physical, what’s on the disc is often unplayable or incomplete without a day-one patch, so you’re just as screwed when the servers go offline. I’ve heard this period described as a future dark ages for games due to how many will be lost, and I think I agree. It’s thanks to the work of “pirates” and true hackers that I’m able to still play digital-only 3DS games for example, because I literally have no legal way to purchase them anymore.

The other is cost. It seems like the author is in Turkey so I can’t comment on local affordability, but if anything many games are too cheap, not too expensive. Your typical triple-A game now is unfathomably expensive to make and needs thousands of people to do so. Now personally, I’m not big into those sorts of games. I think trying to create huge games rammed with endless shallow side-quests just for the sake of being bigger than the last one is a pointless endeavour and makes for a worse product, but evidently enough people think otherwise cause they keep getting made.

Yes, it is bullshit that digital versions are not only the same price, but often more expensive than physical counterparts (at least here in the UK). But new games were £50/$60USD for so long, which neither kept up with inflation or the rising scale and costs of production. Even today’s typical £60/$70 is far below what games cost in the 90s when you factor in inflation. I dunno what to do here besides keep supporting smaller, less expensive indie output, of which there is a wonderful volume.

Re: Piracy

#45

Having worked in the game industry in the past it's amusing to see people talk about the greed of game developers. You have no idea! You have no idea what an effort it takes to ship a game. An album is the work of one or a few individuals for a relatively short period of time with very little cost. Because of that you can have services like Spotify that allow pretty much access to all the music ever created for a 10$…

Doom and Doom 2... shareware, try it before buy it. And mod ability and open source later... id Software was great, shame they are gone now...

Re: Piracy

#46

GOG exists. Blu-ray discs of movies, shows and music exist. Even when consumers have the option to buy from those modes, they don't. They prefer Steam and Netflix and Spotify instead. Why? Because contrary to the opinion of a couple of online aficionados, the masses don't care that much about preserving media after they have consumed them once, or once the trend has subsided. The market has spoken, the affordability…

Steam doesn’t really compare to Netflix and Spotify - it’s not a subscription service where you can play whatever is currently available and titles appear and disappear with no notice.

You buy individual games on Steam and it stays on your account indefinitely - you do have to pick and choose what you buy.

Something like Microsoft’s Game Pass is closer to Netflix and Spotify than Steam.

Steam is more like the old iTunes Music Store model.

Re: Piracy

#47

Having worked in the game industry in the past it's amusing to see people talk about the greed of game developers. You have no idea! You have no idea what an effort it takes to ship a game. An album is the work of one or a few individuals for a relatively short period of time with very little cost. Because of that you can have services like Spotify that allow pretty much access to all the music ever created for a 10$…

Why not both. Big tech is greedy. It also is a difficult domain. There are people and companies with passion. There are also big companies trying to milk every penny out of their customers, not caring about the product, and customers.

Take mobile games for example. I am not sure how much passion goes into majority of products in that space.

Re: Piracy

#48
Corollary: If a digital product is not actively being sold, piracy is not stealing. No, an old physical copy being on sale on Ebay does not count.

Nintendo, take note.

Re: Piracy

#49

> The streaming platforms, for which you pay full price, don’t even let you choose the quality of the movie you want to watch. What you watch today might disappear from all platforms in two months. I have seen so many songs disappear from Spotify lately that I am considering to hoard music again. Gladly I have most of those that disappeared on my HDD anyways, since it's been mostly old songs, but yeah. Was kinda frus…

How do you discover new music? That's been an issue for me, considering how I don't use Spotify.

You read forums, buy magazines, or, just buy an album because it has some badass cover. At least that's how I did it back in the days. ;)

Re: Piracy

#50

> "Look, no one pirates music anymore" I must be the last person that does then. All my music is ripped from youtube

Do yourself the favor of joining Red and download your music in flac or mp3 made from high-quality sources instead of YouTube. The interview is not hard to pass if you prepare for it.
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