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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

#351

Post by lelandbatey »

versk wrote: post #153
jeltz wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1% is not totally unreasonable. See belorns post about conversion rates in freemium games for an explanation.

Comparing freemium game conversion to Triple AAA piracy is ludicrous, and the argument that a freemium game should convert more because its designed to convert people is the most textbook definition of a specious argument I've ever seen. Successful Free-to-Play games like League of legends are suspected to convert greater than 10 percent of players to paying customers. Of the millions of players who pirated Bioshock…

In all honesty, I gave the %1 number based purely on my own experience. When I was a kid/teenager, I didn't have much money and I certainly didn't have a way to buy things digitally (debit or credit card). So I pirated games that I wanted because that was the only way I could get access to them. And so did the people I knew and interacted with.

If we couldn't pirate something, we just didn't ever end up playing. It seems like the amount of money any one person will spend on games/gaming is very stable. So what game devs are really trying to do is to be a part of each of their customers game-spending pie. I know that's how it is for me and the people I interact with.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#352

Post by bellbind »

Pirated content is free content: you can't really say that one person pirating your game equals one lost sale. Would have he bought it, if he was given no alternative choice to get it? When the price is null, there are low to no expectations as to how good the product should be, hence there's a lot more people using it. Someone gives you something that has value for free in the street, would you take it? There's a good chance the answer is yes, even if you do need it.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#353

Post by vidarh »

benpbenp wrote: post #214
vidarh wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would be interested to hear more detail on this as well. Keeping in mind we are talking about taxation on the municipal level, doesn't it make sense that a tiny, not-so-special town will have difficulty getting away with higher taxes? You say "it was nothing like what I knew from Norway." Does that mean in Norway you can have one crappy town charging 20% municipal taxes next to another crappy town charging only 10%…

I should say that I haven't played Sim City versions since Sim City 3000 myself.

The main criticism was actually not the tax rate, as much as the model. In most of Europe, most tax money flows to the national governments, and large parts of the municipal spending then flows back out from the national government earmarked for specific areas, such as education.

In many cases municipal governments have no power to alter tax rates, or are bound to a very limited range.

In many countries most tax revenue also comes from VAT, rather than income taxes, and highly progressive taxation is a large part of the discussion of income taxes. Just the idea of having a single setting for tax rate itself in the original was/is something you would occasionally find advocated from far right parties, but never the European mainstream.

You would also tend to see larger infrastructure projects funded by regional or national governments, rather than coming out of municipal tax revenue.

Of course a lot of this would complicate game mechanics, and so it might be considered "just" a simplification, but it creates a model that from a European perspective is bizarre.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#354

Post by vidarh »

raverbashing wrote: post #220
rmc wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in European countries that are much more laissez-faire than Norway has tax rates much higher than in SimCity. A friend here in Ireland¹ noticed that the income tax rate can only go up to 20% in the original, and at that rate, the population were very annoyed. [1] Barack Obama refered to Ireland as a tax haven recently http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/obama-forced-to-retract...

I think Sim City only is concerned with municipal rates. Well, in Ireland if you don't earn "too much" (less than +/- 32k€ per year) your (governmental) tax rate is 20%

I think that assumption is "tricky", in that Sim City lets you control a lot of things that would not come out of municipal budgets in most European countries, and this is part of what makes it unrealistic from a European perspective.

The limit is actually ludicrously high if you consider municipal taxes. E.g. Norway has a tax load of somewhere around 40% (which includes the effect of up to 25% VAT - the income tax rate for most people is substantially lower), but only 12% of tax revenue, or 5% of income, ends up back in municipal coffers. The rest is spent in regional or national budgets.

Of those 5%, maybe 3% actually is income taxes, and they're outside the control of the municipal government.

So if we are to see it as municipal taxes, the limit is ridiculously high, from this perspective. If we are to see it as income taxes, or total tax load, it is way too low.

But even the idea that the municipal government can control tax rate to that extent, and has that wide latitude in where the money gets spent is (fairly far) right wing from a European perspective.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#355

Post by chii »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #131
chii wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, that sends a signal to the market to produce more Xbox games and less PC games despite the fact that PC games are popular.

and this is indeed the case in reality. Not really sure what to do about it unfortunately, it is quite a sad state of affairs.

However, despite the high piracy rates on PC platforms, good games still do well.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#356

Post by vidarh »

srl wrote: post #248
benpbenp wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be interested to hear more detail on this as well. Keeping in mind we are talking about taxation on the municipal level, doesn't it make sense that a tiny, not-so-special town will have difficulty getting away with higher taxes? You say "it was nothing like what I knew from Norway." Does that mean in Norway you can have one crappy town charging 20% municipal taxes next to another crappy town charging only 10%…

As far as I remember (SimCity 3000), you start out with taxes at like 7%, and you can get away with 9% when your city is small, but when you grow, you have to /lower/ taxes (down to 1-2%, eventually) to keep things stable. Which makes sense from a game design perspective (there are enough hard things when you're starting out, without having to deal with obscenely low taxes), but doesn't have much to do with real life…

The realistic way of handling this in Europe would be grants from national government. E.g. Norway sees massive grants go to smaller regions (and actually preferential income tax levels for the northernmost regions, to get more people to live there), as certain services are expected to be available even if the local tax base could not support it directly.

Subsidizing maintenance of regional settlement has been a key part of Norwegian government policies for many decades, and is a generally accepted principle by parties ranging from the various communist parties (none of which have been in government for a very long time) to the conservatives. The only exceptions you find to this is far right libertarians.

This is a similar situation to many other European countries.

It is seen as a key way to maintain the heritage of the country. We talk of "cultural landscape" - very little of Norway is actually untouched nature. Rather most other than parts of the mountain-regions, including forests, have been tended to for centuries, in various ways, whether logging, agriculture or herding animals.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#357

Post by vidarh »

Evbn wrote: post #316
tolmasky wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just seems like a (lazy) way to make the game harder as you progress. Instead of bosses you have to do more with less. I don't think it necessarily reflects any sort of deep political/economic reasoning.

And an easy way to prevent massive revenue from unbalancing the game. Remember that simcity is a socialist fantasy world: all development is directly purchased by central government. In the real world, zoning doesn't cost money, and stadiums are sometimes owner financed.

This is amusing, as not even any social democratic countries have systems where funding of development is so decentralized as it is in Sim City - usually a substantial amount of infrastructure development is done by central government, rather than the municipal government which you control in the game.

Even in the US, neither the state or federal government has so little impact at the municipal level.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#358

Post by vidarh »

mynameishere wrote: post #235
vidarh wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Get out. The characters in Simcity put up with tax rates that no human ever would. The default is like 8 percent muni. And they'll put up with them even if you don't have a single school or police station.

But being able given that level of control over tax rates at the municipal level, and that level of control of funding to municipal services, is far right fantasy land in European politics - setting tax rates is largely the domain of national governments, and a lot of what is under municipal control in Sim City is budgeted centrally in pretty much every European country, in part to enforce more equal provisioning of services.

Separate municipal tax rates is pretty much absent from the political discussion in much of Europe, because it largely doesn't exist - local budgets tends to be handed out as grants from central government. Decentralizing this is seen as dangerous because it would jeopardize the provisioning of services that are expected to be available equally to everyone. To the extent that municipal taxes exist, they tend to be very low and tied to specific limited services under local control.

When Thatcher introduced the Poll Tax in the UK, which is what eventually morphed into the current Council Tax - the UK's version of municipal tax rates - it was a shocking development that even contributed to rioting (though to be fair, in part because the way it was created also explicitly disenfranchised the homeless). But even today, a large part of UK council budgets comes from central government.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#359

Post by shadowmint »

aaronjb wrote: post #295
GhotiFish wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no. Applications are an exception. Servers can do what they want, they have that freedom as far as I'm concerned, but the client is me. It's my computer. It does what I want. Applications should never be antagonistic to me.

Seriously guys, is it really a problem? Developers use the information to make the product better. They use crash reports to fix bugs without you having to report them and they can determine what operating system and screen resolution you're using so the next time you open up the app, it's been optimised so those ugly black borders have been taken care of. Granted, they could ask your permission to do this, as some a…

It's easy to make it a non-issue. You do this:

    [ ] - Send anonymous usage statistics?
1) Opt in, not out.

2) User action required to acknowledge they know and consent to it.

3) Can be disabled by anyone concerned with privacy issues.

If you fail at any of (1), (2) or (3), you're being a douche, and writing spyware, even if you bury some ridiculous disclaimer somewhere in your EULA.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#360

Post by Houshalter »

srl wrote: post #248
benpbenp wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be interested to hear more detail on this as well. Keeping in mind we are talking about taxation on the municipal level, doesn't it make sense that a tiny, not-so-special town will have difficulty getting away with higher taxes? You say "it was nothing like what I knew from Norway." Does that mean in Norway you can have one crappy town charging 20% municipal taxes next to another crappy town charging only 10%…

As far as I remember (SimCity 3000), you start out with taxes at like 7%, and you can get away with 9% when your city is small, but when you grow, you have to /lower/ taxes (down to 1-2%, eventually) to keep things stable. Which makes sense from a game design perspective (there are enough hard things when you're starting out, without having to deal with obscenely low taxes), but doesn't have much to do with real life…

Well there is some truth to that. There are economies of scale. Infrastructure becomes more expensive as you have to expand it, but it can also get cheaper per individual.
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