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Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

greenheartgames.com

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Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#251

Post by foona »

talmir wrote: post #185
foona wrote: post #167

Anyone has a link to download a liberated proper copy of the game? The one on ThePirateBay appears to be the malicious trojanized fake version described in the article.

Really? You are going to ask this here? You can get a proper copy of the game from the developers themselves for eight dollars.

After the stunt they pulled?

They should consider themselves lucky if nobody sues them for the fraud they perpetrated by misrepresenting their product, the time they caused the public to waste debugging the issue, and the emotional harm of being prevented from enjoying the game.

Not that I really care, since the game is not on NFOHump nor RlsLog, which generally means the game sucks so much that nobody bothered releasing it.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#252

Post by biot »

chii wrote: post #100
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.

so in other words, they pirated PC games, and used their limited resources to buy the games they couldn't pirate. Thus, the total amount of money they spent had been the same whether they pirated or not (just distributed differently, to different platforms). Had they not been able to pirate PC games, they might've spent a few more coins on PC games, and a few less coins on the xbox games - the industry wouldn't have…

You're overlooking the possibility that some may have eaten less at McDonalds or bought fewer candies in order to save up more money to buy those PC games if piracy weren't such an easy option.

It's not as if kids rigorously budget their money and have a "video game" line item which cannot be exceeded. If they could easily sneak into movie theatres or hockey games and never get caught, they'd do that too and spend the leftover money on something else.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#253

Post by jiggy2011 »

vy8vWJlco wrote: post #240
jiggy2011 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TPB do make money from advertising and I'm pretty sure they aren't cutting cheques from that to the artists/developers. The issue isn't so much the copies themselves, I could download every torrent on TPB and archive them on a stack of HDDs somewhere and it wouldn't hurt anybody. The issue is that there is no longer a requirement to pay to consume something where the business model requires that the consumer pay. Per…

Please don't think I'm not taking your question seriously, but I do think the future model is a donate button (I also say above, I think it boils down to begging). I do also consider this model sustainable since, even ignoring all the other ways fame can be monetized, the potential audience is 7 billion people and a gift of even $1 from even 0.001% is $100,000 - enough to justify most indie projects. But if that's to…

I'm not quite so optimistic, or at least my optimism is more measured at least in terms of the games market.

Most kickstarter projects I see (games at least) are not proposing "If this gets funded the game will be free" they are proposing "If this gets funded the game will be $20, but you can get it for $15 if you fund us". So they are still relying on copyright to some extent.

Of course there are some games that appear to be sustainable as donationware (dwarf fortress for example) but I would be amazed if we saw a COD/Skyrim scale game on a "pay what you want model" simply because the up front development costs are so high that it would be too large a risk.

I suspect in the AAA areas you will see a move towards support for closed platforms where piracy is more easily controlled and IAP type models.

So probably two divergent markets , with starving artist auteurs in one corner and AAA publicly traded behemoths in another.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#254

Post by driverdan »

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!

If you legally purchase a digital copy of music and find the quality to be too low I don't see a problem in downloading a "pirated" copy at a higher bitrate. So long as you don't share it you will never run into legal problems for doing so.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#255

Post by lolcraft »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #210
mjn wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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) Isn't that pretty much accurate? I'm not aware of any serious theory postulating that raising taxes will have any non-negative effect on economic growth in and of itself. Where it breaks down is once you account for what the tax dollars buy. If government…

Frankly, it's clear you have very much a microeconomics-based of the macroeconomy, all accounting identities and no feedback.

To begin with, there has been made the case that progressive taxation does, mostly, not mean a significant negative behavioral response in production. That is, taxes can in practice be increased a lot until the rich start fantasizing about going Galt. [D&S] estimate the optimal tax rate, for maximum social welfare, for the richest to be at 70%. It's now about, what, 20%? Citizen Romney paid 14%, and the Great Capitalist still behaves like a little bitch, whining about his being oppressed and all.

You also don't seem to take into account elasticity, the decreasing utility of money, or any notion of optimizing social utility. If I'm Bill Gates, I could not give enough of a shit that you taxed from me $5k dollars, or even $500k. But, use that to pay for nine or ten heart surgeries, and suddenly social utility is increased by, I would guesstimate, 100x (total lifetime earnings of those ten people, starting after surgery). Even if 20% of that is embezzled.

Also, there's not really any empirical support for a inverse relation between business taxes and economic growth. It's just one data point, granted, but we could take as an example Bush's years. Massive tax cuts, but very poor growth.

[D&S] http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.25.4.165

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#256

Post by alan_cx »

eropple wrote: post #23
algorias wrote: post #15

While I think this is a very clever idea, it's also somewhat dishonest. In the game world, pirates cause studios to go bankrupt. In the real world, the causal link is not as clear. People arguing that piracy is ruining gamedev routinely ignore the fact that those who pirate don't necessarily have the means to buy many games; their choice is purely between pirating and not playing. Of those 90% or more who pirate the…

> People arguing that piracy is ruining gamedev routinely ignore the fact that those who pirate don't necessarily have the means to buy many games And people who defend pirates routinely ignore that pirated products are also pirated by people who will take what they want for free if they can, because they can. Don't pretend to a higher level of intellectual honesty or moral strength. Your position can lay claim to ne…

You are assuming that some one using pirated software would have bought it.

I think pirates actually harm people who make free and cheap software, by using expensive "pirated" software instead. Had they not used the pirated software, they would possibly be using the free stuff and boosting the use of that free stuff. The big boys don't lose out, because they wouldn't have bought it in the first place.

As such, the high moral ground the big boys think they occupy is equally suspect.

IMHO, given the lack of large software houses going out of business actually due to piracy, I don't believe piracy has any real effect. All that is happening is that people are using the software, and the software houses remain profitable.

If I am ever yo believe in piracy losing business money, I want proper proof that the vast majority of people which pirated software on their machine would have paid for that software. I suspect not. I suspect that if there really was a way to stop piracy, many more people would use Linux and all it's alternatives for free. In that scenario, MS and co would really start losing money and market power.

Addition Edit: Also, most people spend the money they have. If they did buy all the stuff they pirated, software, games, music, movies, etc, there would be another sector that lost out. For example, pirating Far Cry 3 instead of buying, means £40 (whatever) to spend on clothes, food, cinema, fuel, etc. Its the same money, there is no extra. It just goes to different places.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#257

Post by pandaman »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #210
mjn wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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) Isn't that pretty much accurate? I'm not aware of any serious theory postulating that raising taxes will have any non-negative effect on economic growth in and of itself. Where it breaks down is once you account for what the tax dollars buy. If government…

>Does anyone care to argue that the second could somehow be preferable to the first?

Mind that this's not my own PoV but from what I've been taught in school in the USSR and read in the modern liberal media the general idea is that it depends.

If you just take 5K from every man, woman and child then it's not good. However if this is just the average number and you take more from the "rich" and less from the "poor" then the communists argue that you reduced the wealth disparity and the value of this could easily be over 6K per person.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#258

Post by kbenson »

tinco wrote: post #246
winthrowe wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're almost a decade off; 20 years ago Doom was released and the hottest game I knew of. The North American release of the NES was 28 years ago now.

I think the N64 also had this walled garden system :)

Depending on your definition of "top of the line", I don't think Nintendo has had any sort of monopoly. I would argue that in most terms, the PC has offered a superior gaming experience for most points in the history of gaming. Where it falls down is the supporting needs of gaming, such as system maintenance, game installation, etc. Even so, I think the top of the line title could be said to have been on the PC.

But hey, if you want to compare Doom on the PC when it came out in 1993 to Doom on the SNES when it came out three years later, and consider the sub-standard SNES port that's three years late to be a top of the line game, go ahead.

Although why Doom was used as an example (not by you, I'm aware), I'm not sure. I don't remember any copy protection on it.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#259

Post by nathanb »

sanjiallblue wrote: post #247
algorias wrote: post #15

While I think this is a very clever idea, it's also somewhat dishonest. In the game world, pirates cause studios to go bankrupt. In the real world, the causal link is not as clear. People arguing that piracy is ruining gamedev routinely ignore the fact that those who pirate don't necessarily have the means to buy many games; their choice is purely between pirating and not playing. Of those 90% or more who pirate the…

It should also be noted that there's pretty much zero evidence that piracy actually hurts the sale of a game. Any research done by third-parties on the subject has shown that piracy generally helps the sales of the products being pirated due to: A) Raising awareness of the product and giving the product exposure to a larger group of fans raising awareness of the product and studio responsible for the production. B) C…

That said, it seems like there are enthusiastic players who enjoy the game and who continue to play the pirated version (see the forum posts he cites in his original article).

I think this is an interesting measure, because presumably if you got far enough into the game that you saw this message you like the game reasonably well. You've gotten past the point where you're not sure if the game is worth the money (nevermind that there's already a demo exactly for that purpose) and you have chosen to continue playing the pirated version.

He didn't mention whether or not savegames from the pirated version can be loaded by the legitimate version, but if they can then pirates who then buy the game wouldn't even lose much in the way of progress.

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