Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

greenheartgames.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 395 posts

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#281

Post by tinco »

Delenda wrote: post #206
tinco wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also another important figure that is routinely ignored: The number of honest customers who get screwed because game companies can not profitably release a big game anymore, so they won't. The CEO of Square Enix was fired because he produced the latest iteration of Tomb Raider, and it arguably is the best iteration of Tomb Raider ever, and plainly didn't make any money. Also your argument about 20 years ago…

Actually if I recall, the problem with Tomb Raider was an exceptionally bloated budget and unrealistic expectations. In the first month something like 3.4 million copies sold, but they were expecting closer to 7! A well reviewed game that sells millions of copies was still viewed as a failure because the budget that went into the game was downright crazy and the expectations were simply not in line with reality. If y…

Thanks a lot for those links, they are very enlightening.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#282

Post by jvrossb »

lolcraft wrote: post #255
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 m…

The relationship gets even more complex because, along with going Galt, simply moving can be a viable option. If moving to Bruxelles from Paris is really easy, the impact of higher taxes in France vs Belgium may be felt very differently than if a) it were more difficult to move or b) there are no places to move to with lower taxes.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#283

Post by omegaham »

foona wrote: post #251
talmir wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 relea…

> They should consider themselves lucky if nobody sues them for the fraud they perpetrated by misrepresenting their product

Wait, what? Their genuine product is exactly what they said it was. The Pirate Bay version is the "fraud." And that was free. They effectively released a demo.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#284

Post by nawitus »

cykod wrote: post #165
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…

The fallacy with this argument is that if everyone behaved if you did there would be no games. If this stuff is "free" it's the tragedy of the commons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons - except in this case it's developer resources that are "common" and will be depleted as there wouldn't be money to pay for them. I think at this point everyone understands that there's piracy out there and it's not g…

>The fallacy with this argument is that if everyone behaved if you did there would be no games.

The parent comment stated that he supports artists (probably financially).

For further reading, I recommend a book called Against Intellectual Property. You can download that legally for free. It's also for sale.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#285

Post by raverbashing »

jvrossb wrote: post #282
lolcraft wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

The relationship gets even more complex because, along with going Galt, simply moving can be a viable option. If moving to Bruxelles from Paris is really easy, the impact of higher taxes in France vs Belgium may be felt very differently than if a) it were more difficult to move or b) there are no places to move to with lower taxes.

Exactly

There's a point where packing and leaving is easier. And the richest the people, the easier this is.

Governments have to realize that, at a certain point, they are in competition with other countries. Multinational companies and rich people come to mind.

The rich can pay their way through most of the immigration burdens that prohibit the average joe from moving (yes, even to the US)

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#286

Post by Dylan16807 »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #98
Dylan16807 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"sandbox game" really stretches the meaning of the term game. I'm not saying that minecraft is bad, I'm saying that what it has is not "gameplay".

So SimCity, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Euro Truck Simulator, The Sims, etc aren't games either? Since they too are sandbox games that let the player direct the experience. Frankly I would love to know what your definition of the term "gameplay" is because it seems unique. To me any interactive medium contains gameplay mechanics, even point-and-click adventure games do, hell even some BluRay menus could be described as hav…

You can tell if you're doing well at simcity, rollercoaster tycoon, and the sims. (I don't know anything about euro truck simulator.) Zerg rush is all about how many zerglings you kill and how much of the page is still alive. In minecraft it's all about what you feel like building and there's no objectively doing well or badly. It's hard to make a thriving sim city, it's trivial to make a giant sculpture in minecraft.

I'll put it succinctly: The main source of fun in minecraft (without mods) is the same as the original creative mode. Creative mode is a pure building-blocks toy and not at all a game. The parts of minecraft that you can call a game are unimportant compared to what's actually fun.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#287

Post by eropple »

belorn wrote: post #106
eropple wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This line of thinking is what happens when you take barely overlapping populations and attempt to extrapolate between them. For a more related data-point that you can get from public data (because the 20-25% comment was inside baseball from folks I know personally), the average conversion rate across all titles on XBLA hovers around 18%. When you take into account the general demographics on XBLA versus something lik…

Source for that 18% on XBLA? Through, you don't answer the question on why games designed for high conversion rate should fair worse than games that aren't. You also add a additional questions when putting distinction to the population in question. Are we saying here that pirates are more likely to convert to a pay-to-play model than non-pirates are to go from a freemium model to pay? Whats the basis of such statemen…

> Source for that 18% on XBLA?

[1] says it was 18% in 2007. I very, very strongly doubt it's gone down. XBLA de-lists games with a Metacritic score below 65 (which is basically impossible) and a conversion rate below 6% (which is apparently really hard, huh?)[2]. Ken Lobb has referred to 20%-40% conversion rates for in-house games at MGS.

And you once again are bound and determined to ignore the differences between the markets you want to compare (hint: they're not identical products, they're not even substitutable products!), I think I'm going to bow out because there's no progress to be made here. HAND.

.

[1] - http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=15117

[2] - http://www.joystiq.com/2008/05/22/underperforming-xbla-title...

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#288

Post by eropple »

jeltz wrote: post #132
versk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"when in reality there maybe 1% of pirates that would have otherwise bought the game" Your number is ridiculous, and no-one assumes every pirated game is a lost sale either. Do you have any evidence to support this number?

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

His post uses a freemium market of gamers who are predominantly either too young/poor for a credit card or too casual to attach to a game to draw his conclusions against buying realized products targeted at core audiences (and I say this because the biggest torrents are all for core-targeted games).

XBLA had an 18% conversion rate in 2007, and it's hard to say with a straight face that it'd go down. 2010 saw Ken Lobb (MGS) citing 20% to 40% rates in interviews for in-house games. These aren't perfect proxies for PC piracy but even if it's halved when you jump from console to PC, the 1% value just doesn't make any sense.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#289

Post by eropple »

GhotiFish wrote: post #192
eropple wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

a system that makes absolutely no sense for data. no sense. none. Do not try to shoehorn a model where it doesn't fit, and for data: It doesn't fit . A different standard has to be adopted, and piracy is merely a symptom of that.

Whether it makes "no sense" to you is, to be honest, pretty much irrelevant. It is a societal construct and you are a member of society and you take the "bad" (it's not, but, whatever) with the good.

Copyright exists because we, as a society, want it to. We want people to make things for us to consume and so we enact laws to make it so they can do so and still eat. Don't like it? Feel free to try to change the law.

But that's hard, and hard things aren't fun, so let's just go pirate Game of Thrones, yeah?

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#290

Post by jholman »

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.

For me 1, 2, and 4 each play a big role, for sure.

On an ongoing basis, #3 plays little or no role, but if you count "steam exclusive" as a feature, then it played a critical role in getting me onto Steam in the first place. I wanted to play Natural Selection (original, natch), and that meant I needed a Steam account. Back then I was too miserly to pay for HL1, so a friend gave me a spare serial (I'd argue this was borderline piracy in-spirit). Valve didn't get money from me on HL1, but they've definitely had the last laugh. These days I spend a hundred bucks a month via Steam, and I'm happy about it.

Post reply on HN