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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

#331

Post by kybernetikos »

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'…

> the next person who actually compensates creators, without exception and at the price they ask for the content they pirate and use will be the first.

I've got quite a few games still in their shrink wrap on my shelf because I've never had to open them to get at their ROM/CD.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#332

Post by KVFinn »

mjn wrote: post #227
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a complicated way of explaining the broken window fallacy. "Maybe the economy will be better off if the glazier has the money because he will spend it better than the butcher whose window was broken." In specific circumstances that can really be true, but in general there is no reason to expect it to be, and unless you somehow know that it is, breaking the window is more likely to cause a net loss th…

My point is more that SimCity doesn't attempt to model a complex dynamical system at all. It just defines certain aggregate relationships as true. That approach can be fun for a game, but also encodes ideological assumptions— not facts, but simplified models. If you try to build a dynamical system as the model, things get weird very fast. Even in simple ones you can build as toys, there is a lot of system-internal be…

>If you try to build a dynamical system as the model, things get weird very fast. Even in simple ones you can build as toys, there is a lot of system-internal behavior: there are feedback loops, oscillations, attractors.

They kinda sorta tried this in SimCity 5 and it's at least partially responsible for how broken the simulation is at this point. They ended up having to hack in a bunch of things to keep it stable and it is still producing some bizarre results a couple of months after release.

>But would it be a fun game? Quite possibly not: players really tend not to find complex and chaotic simulations very fun, when the knobs affect the outcome in ways that are too indirect.

It's pretty fun games like Dwarf Fortress. You can essentially trace the downfall of an entire Dwarf Civilization to pet cat dying and setting off a ridiculous chain of events. I think it helps that the expectation coming into that game is, "Losing is fun." so players roll with it.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#333

Post by ripter »

anonymous wrote: post #163

Since the devs uploaded the game on bittorrent themselves, isn't it now implicitly legal to share that copy? Obviously not the unaltered copy, but if you upload something to which you own the copyright to bittorrent, you must be either implicitly giving people the right to share it with others, or you're entrapping them into committing a copyright violation. Can the devs then be sued for knowingly tricking people int…

> Can the devs then be sued for knowingly tricking people into committing a copyright violation?

I'm not a lawyer.

If it follows entrapment laws then the "violator" would have to prove that they've never pirated before and they were tricked into it by the developers.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#334

Post by np422 »

eropple wrote: post #293
np422 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who defend copyright take copyright for given, as that would be the normal state which can not be questioned. Don't pretend to a higher level of intellectual honesty or moral strength. Your position can lay claim to neither. Culture, creativity and art have existed long before copyright and will continue to do so after it has been abandoned.

Er...no? Like, completely no? I don't care if you question it. Question it all you like. But if you want to claim it doesn't work, you have a long road to hoe. Personally, "I get other people's work for free" is outweighed by "I get other people's work that I actually want to play." Skyrim doesn't come out of a Kickstarter.

(I actually had to google skyrim, I'm that old ...)

Please take a few minutes to rethink copyright from the ground up without any regards to what you have been told by anyone...

Where does copyright originate? What purpose does it serve in the society of today? Does it serve that purpose well? How does it match up to what most people would consider to be fair use in regards to personal and commercial use? Does copyright sometimes get abused and misused?

Are there better solutions to the issues we are trying to address?

You don't need to tell me or anybody else what conclusion you reach.

But you owe it to yourself to think it over and stop repeating what you have been told by others as most people here on HN does every time copyright gets discussed.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#335

Post by kybernetikos »

eropple wrote: post #87
vy8vWJlco wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'm assuming some bad faith here, because the next person who actually compensates creators, without exception and at the price they ask for the content they pirate and use will be the first." In your own words, you say copying is human nature. It sounds like the "pay-before-evaluate" model is hoping to change that. I'd say expecting human nature to change is unrealistic. Isn't it easier to just exploit human nature…

"Taking shit for free because I can" is the nature of a certain audience, yes. Relying on attacks of moral conscience from people already willing to do this is not a workable business model, and because of this , we as a society have evolved a system of copyrights to incentivize content creation[1]. (Tchotchkes with a free game attached is, likewise, not particularly viable.) [1] - No, this is not a defense of Disney…

> running roughshod over the little guy

I assume that piracy of games behaves similarly to piracy of music and films, both of which have had research published suggesting that while piracy harms large, blockbuster style releases it actually helps sales of smaller, more obscure titles.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#336

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#337

Post by corresation »

jholman wrote: post #322
corresation wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter if there are 100 free riders for 1 customers, as long as you have enough customers. I cannot put into words how profoundly this line of thinking upsets me. It is, quite literally, the antithesis of Western society.

>> It doesn't matter if there are 100 free riders for 1 customers, as long as you have enough customers. > It is, quite literally, the antithesis of Western society. Can you explain this to me? It looks like trolling, but I'm trying to extend the benefit of the doubt. What does "Western society" mean? I'm both curious what countries or cultures qualify as Western for this purpose, and also what aspects of those count…

It looks like trolling, but I'm trying to extend the benefit of the doubt.

What a wonderful way of completely deriding any meaningful discussion possible.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#338

Post by Tbj3Y »

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's dishonest in that the paid-for version has a different model of piracy. Is that one accurate, or is the model in the for-free version correct?

The reality is that piracy does have some effect on game sales, but for the non-game designer it's not clear how much this effect is. Having a realistic unbiased simulation of the effects of piracy would likely do the most to convince those who can afford games to reconsider their choices.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#339

Post by fennecfoxen »

dllthomas wrote: post #325
jtbigwoo wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only certain types of rich people can pick up and move like that, though. Moving to a new country or even a new city means leaving behind the business connections and infrastructure they've built over the course of years and years. You'd have to be one of the idle rich or work in an industry that is location-independent and knowledge-based. That doesn't describe most rich people. You're absolutely right about the abi…

Sometimes the money can move instead of the people.

Sometimes even if the money doesn't move away directly, some entirely unrelated money ends up somewhere else building factories, and then somewhere-else starts competing with you and taking away large slices of your business.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#340

Post by chc »

Cakez0r wrote: post #211
rrouse wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite are the people who pirate the game at release and then buy it when it's in the bargain bin for $5, as if that undoes the initial act of piracy: "See? I bought it!"

Well that at least shows the pirate was willing to part with some cash to buy the product. I know games are incredibly expensive to produce, but perhaps cheap sales at volume could bring in more cash than a few sales at a higher price point. Especially if you have DLC available to cater to players who're willing to pay a little more. I guess that's dancing on the edge of a free-to-play model though, which seems to be…

This dude was charging $8. Pirates are endemic regardless of price point.
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