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Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

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Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#141

Post by jiggy2011 »

StavrosK wrote: post #107
CJefferson wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The important figure (for developers) is not what proportion of pirates would buy the game, but what proportion of possible buyers will pirate instead. My experience with my social group is that this second group is quite high. I know (for example) people who have bought many xbox 360 games (as these are hard to pirate) and have never bought a PC game, despite playing similar number of games on each.

As a data point, I haven't pirated a game since Steam came out.

Out of interest, why do you think that is?

Is it due to convenience , availability of cheap games in sales , extra features in steam or did a rise in your disposable income just happen to coincide with the launch of steam?

For me it was mainly 2 and 4.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#142

Post by logicallee »

citricsquid wrote: post #92
logicallee wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that screenshot is good, unfortunately I can't get to the source to verify directly. It is down at the moment and not taking registrations. if I verify I will retract my hoax allegations. May I ask how you yourself found that post, given that google didn't have it indexed?

I recognised the forum layout as being Facepunch.com, then I went to the forum and searched for "Game Dev Tycoon" and looked through the results until I found the post.

it looks like the linked comment is members-only, and I can't register for a facepunch account without an invite from someone. I will have to take your word on it.

Anyone find the steam community comment?

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#143

Post by vy8vWJlco »

Isofarro wrote: post #134
vy8vWJlco wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are people who go outside and drink from a stream (through a filter/firewall, of course), stealing? What about people who take in the scenery, or people who breath? Is nature a starving artist? I'm not for dumping toxic waste in the river, or stealing property, but the Internet is my environment, and copying data is not only cheap, that's what I pay my ISP to be able to do. IMHO, that makes copying as moral as breath…

> there is no way to downvote a game producer after you have paid for something you didn't know in advance that you would like. A 30-day money back, no questions asked, guarantee would offer this. Then you can take a risk on a game, evaluate it to your heart's content, and if you didn't like it then request a refund. That would be a useful downvote indicator. For the recent SimCity, a stream of refunds would show as…

"A 30-day money back, no questions asked, guarantee would offer this."

That sounds a lot like the "copy-first, pay later - or receive a public shaming" de facto standard used by cautious patrons today (only ATM people receive their shame from other pro-copyright HN readers).

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#144

Post by sp332 »

SG- wrote: post #48
JonnieCache wrote: post #17

Yesterday I bought some mp3s legally off amazon. They were 128 kbit/s. I deleted them out of rage/spite and ordered the CD, which is out of print and so all the money went to a second hand record dealer. If only I'd had recourse to piracy in that instance!

I was under the impression Amazon used 256Kbit VBR?

It's inconsistent. Some of the tracks are ripped with lame -V0 which is the very best quality you will ever see in an MP3 file. Others are not so good.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#145

Post by StavrosK »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #141
StavrosK wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a data point, I haven't pirated a game since Steam came out.

Out of interest, why do you think that is? Is it due to convenience , availability of cheap games in sales , extra features in steam or did a rise in your disposable income just happen to coincide with the launch of steam? For me it was mainly 2 and 4.

It's a combination of convenience, sales, rise in disposable income, and the fact that I don't have time to play more expensive big-name titles (plus, I like indie games more).

The other day I saw a trailer about a game I found visually stunning (Anno 2100? I forget the number), and I checked the price on Steam. It was too expensive for something I'd play once or twice, and I thought of pirating it, but then couldn't be bothered to go through all the hassle. Therefore, I suspect it's mostly convenience.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#146

Post by drostie »

eropple wrote: post #68
vy8vWJlco wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are people who go outside and drink from a stream (through a filter/firewall, of course), stealing? What about people who take in the scenery, or people who breath? Is nature a starving artist? I'm not for dumping toxic waste in the river, or stealing property, but the Internet is my environment, and copying data is not only cheap, that's what I pay my ISP to be able to do. IMHO, that makes copying as moral as breath…

> there is no way to downvote a game producer after you have paid for something you didn't know in advance that you would like I'm not going to fisk your post, which is largely self-serving rationalization. But I am going to touch on this. The choice is not "pirate it" or "pay for it". You can also--shocker incoming--not pirate it and not pay for it. Don't like that a publisher doesn't have a demo? Don't buy it. Don'…

Just to be 100% clear about the culture, people don't pirate because "not buying" is "hard" -- what an absurdity; not buying is like not eating, it's the easiest thing ever: just don't do something. (I mean, you can whine about biological urges for distraction and nutrition maybe, but on a case-by-case basis, it's really as simple as not going out of your way.)

People pirate because it's available. The advice of "don't buy it" (by which you really mean don't play it) is therefore pointless moralizing; it's not going to sway people who are looking for something available to play.

If you just think abstractly about the problem as a bunch of kids who are bored and looking to play, and they come upon a ball which is not being used by anyone, that is a better mental model. Why are they playing with this ball that is not theirs? Because belonging is an abstract social relation which has far less cognitive importance to the kids than the immediacy of play, so who cares who the ball belongs to. Will having someone standing atop the ball forcing them to pay a fee to use it cause them to fairly pay for the ball? Probably not, because that's not the model that they're working under. Certainly it gets worse if they try to force every single kid to pay independently for a ball that they can share. "But surely someone made that ball, and made it available, and should be compensated for this!" Well, kind of. I think from the pirate's perspective that's already been taken care of, so to speak: the developers were paid for their creative works, while the pirate community has paid for the networking which made the content available, so if you're asking her to pay for anything, she is paying perhaps some investor, or perhaps she is paying for a future game title to be produced.

(Notice that none of this really "defends" any "side". In order to understand what's going on and try to work on a solution, I'm basically checking that sort of judgmentalism at the door.)

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#147

Post by sp332 »

vy8vWJlco wrote: post #110
tpetrina wrote: post #2

This is just pure gold. When I was younger, I always pirated stuff because I didn't have the money nor the means. But today, my Steam collection is worth over a 1000 dollars and I buy more games I could play. It hurts me when people my age (27) don't consider buying stuff they like. I mean, you are paying the creators of the stuff you like so that they can create more of it. No one wants to work for free, why should…

(Sidestepping "has cost" vs "is worth.") It sounds like you are saying "do as I say, not as I did." You choose to pay now, but not paying made sense for you in the past. I'd like to see everyone have the same opportunity. I think that's the essence of digital capitalism. No copyright needed, IMHO.

Copyright is still useful, say for someone who rips off your game and sells it as their own. I'd agree the extent it's been taken to is ridiculous though.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#148

Post by mjn »

vidarh wrote: post #135
mjn wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a common approach to using gameplay for rhetorical purposes; the fact that you can code causal processes as you want is one of the main ways you can get videogames to push a point. As a more overt example, in the game Bacteria Salad [1], created after one of the E.coli scares, profits trade off directly against food safety: bigger farms are more profitable but also spread contamination more quickly. This may o…

Sim City is another good example of this. Even as a child when I first played the original, I remember reacting to the tax model in the game and how it affects net migration, as it was nothing like what I knew from Norway (and indeed, it bears little resemblance to how things works in most of Europe). A newspaper in Norway recently had to social economists play the most recent Sim City game to review the economic mod…

That's pretty interesting; I knew there was some criticism of SimCity's simplified tax model in the U.S. some years ago (a simple inverse relationship between tax rates and business growth), but the Norwegian analysis sounds quite interesting. Any idea where I might dig up a reference to the article?

I think in SimCity's case it was probably not intentional, at least originally. The first version of the game seems to have just been Will Wright coding up some ad-hoc city-simulation rules to make a fun sandbox game, not him trying to make a point about urban planning or economics on purpose. But nonetheless these interesting assumptions end up in there.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#149

Post by vy8vWJlco »

benmmurphy wrote: post #118
vy8vWJlco wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only a problem if you consider a copy as damage. (I haven't seen a convincing argument.) There are also lots of factors in a financial proposition. Some people give away free samples, others invest in an education. It's interesting that iTunes is doing so well, without mandatory DRM, while copying has only gotten easier...

You have this product which has high fixed costs to produce but zero marginal costs to produce an extra one. If everyone chose to pay zero then the product would not be made and everyone would be worse off. By choosing to pay zero you are free-riding on other people who choose to pay non-zero. It is possible that piracy could bring about: a) higher prices to other consumers who have to pay a larger share of the fixed…

I see it as a cart-before-the-horse problem. Before the printing press things were more horse-before-cart (no copyright). After the press and the statute of Anne, to today, we have been very cart-first. We paid for physical CDs without knowing if we would like most of what they had on them (we may have heard one song on the radio for free, as advertisement - ie, the pirate bay is a modern radio business - but the rest were a mystery, and distributors exploited our eagerness by adding on a dozen unknowns). We still felt like we were buying something tangible (the medium was tangible), so it was relatively easy to accept trading money in advance for something we couldn't see into first.

I think following that approach further requires an untenable "enforcement" culture on private and social thinking and collaborative efforts. I'd rather put the cart back behind the horse (fund the work itself, to create the first copy, rather than pay mandatory royalties for all future copies - and endure the social unrest of preventing what boil down to thought-crimes, IMHO).

In the past artists (and scientists) had patrons but today we have kickstarter. It is possible to fund the creation of large projects (movies, TV shows, games, hardware, research, etc) without as much risk to the people carrying it out.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#150

Post by Isofarro »

micheljansen wrote: post #31
onli wrote: post #14

The irony is great. But I fear it is possible that wasn't such a good idea. Given the graphs, there were 4k people interested in the game. Over 90% of them now have the impression that the game is unplayable long-term because of the message-box. Maybe many of them get the hint, but those who don't might generate bad pr and prevent others from buying it. But well, maybe that article combined with answers to the compla…

My thoughts exactly. The pie chart towards the end should scare off anyone willing to try this: if 93.6% of users who played the game on the first day after release got a shitty experience, it means that at least 93.6% of feedback is going to be negative (or more, because people are more likely to provide feedback when they are unhappy than when they are satisfied). Still think it's a great idea, and I love the irony…

> if 93.6% of users who played the game on the first day after release got a shitty experience,

It isn't a shitty experience though. They were playing the game, getting immersed into it, trying to win, and they got stuck. Stuck enough, and interested enough in succeeding, that they asked on forums how to deal with the in-game piracy issue.

That isn't a sign of someone having a shitty experience. What is interesting now is what players of the pirated version of the game will do with the knowledge that their success is being hampered because they pirated the game originally instead of buying it.

I hope a nice chunk will opt to buy the game, it's obviously immersed them enough to have provided entertainment value, and hopefully there's sufficiently extra gameplay and opportunities in the non-pirated version to justify the "add-on" purchase.

Or, they'll crack the game to remove the pirated limitation. Or they'll walk away from the game. Or they'll find a genuinely pirated version of the real game.

I hope they see the funny side, and appreciate it, and give kudos to the game development company. It's not a £40 boxed game.

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