It’s worth pointing out that the Humble Bundle raised over 1.2 million dollarsin sales. Of that, about 30% or roughly $375,000, was designated to charity and will be split between the EFF and Child’s Play. It was such a success that four of the game makers involved have decided to release their games as Open Source. The developers each made about a 175,000 a piece (that’s very good money for an indie developer!) Additionally, another dev has added their game to the mix, Amanita Designs, and contributors now get Samorost 2 as well.
The Humble Bundle has been a genuine success for everyone involved, even with the amount of piracy. The devs got a nice pay day and encouragement for the their next games, the charities got a nice boost, and the gamers had fun.
I know I’m a glass half full kind of gal but it’s hard to see how all this money and goodwill would be improved by an aggressive DRM.
Doesn’t have to* completely* lose it’s stigma. Does anything completely lose it’s stigma? It just has to reach a certain tipping point. I would argue we already have reached that point. I think most people feel “piracy” is perfectly fine in a number of different situations. For example, very few people are terribly bothered by developing countries manufacturing their own HIV meds, or knockoff clothing.
Mostly because they don’t know how to obtain a working, virus-free copy. In addition, many companies are aware of the new economic reality, and are changing their business models so that people don’t feel the need to do it.
And again with the irrelevent vaguely analogous things. The subject is not “piracy” with scare quotes. It’s software piracy. The fact that you must resort to irrelevencies to attempt to support your argument suggest to me that you would be unable to support your claims if it you stayed firmly on topic.
And you’re the one who started speaking in absolutes - “Morality has nothing to do with it” means for everyone, completely. Though obviously in practice if only 5% of people retain moral compunctions against software piracy you’ll be flirting with a 95% piracy rate, which despite not being ‘complete’ is clearly enough to stagger an industry that depends on non-piracy.
It’s my opinion that you’re incorrect when speaking of the population in general. I think that, while it might maybe be the case that perhaps possibly the majority of teens-to-mid-twenties have lost their moral compunctions with regard to software piracy and not found them again (and people can and do find them again), I seriously doubt the same can be said for other demographics, or the population when taken as a whole.
I would maintain that it’s a matter of ethics, not morality. Morality is about what’s right and what’s wrong, and is absolute. Ethics is the set of rules that humans construct with the goal of achieving morality, and can vary with time or place. It’s a moral statement to say that someone who creates something that benefits others should receive some compensation for that, but an ethical issue as to how we see to it that that person gets compensation.
I have never been able to understand a difference between the terms - to me it’s a distinction without a difference. (And no, your example here doesn’t help.) The fact that the notion of an objective ‘absolute’ morality is nonsensical to me is probably a contributing factor to my confusion. Regardless, when you hear me say one term feel free to substitute in the other freely; I certainly would.
I know someone who said that morals come from some higher power - and thus are objective - while ethics come from human reason. Given that there is no higher power, I agree that objective morality is nonsensical. Even if there was a higher power objective morality would still be nonsensical, as Russell argued.
because copy protection is annoying to the consumer, why should I have to find a cd to a play game I bought, download it and you don’t need the disc? (yes that is an old example but its been a few years since i played computer games, i have an xbox now :))
Its more convenient to pirate software. Consider a student who needs a video editing program for an assignment, they have 3 options. 1) buy the program (probably too expensive) 2) use the university computer labs (a legitimate option) 3) download the program and use it from home.
Unless companies seriously drop prices to make software affordable or at the very least make legal software cheaper and more available they just cannot win this.
Cloud computing is the kind of way they’ll try to defeat it, where a large amount of the processing isnt actually done on your computer, or at least a significant amount of it is done on thier end, or even data storage is kept there.
This wont work for everything, but will for some things. Online MMO’s are one example of how pirating has been drastically reduced for one kind of gaming, because you need a server to play. Yes you can make an emulated server but that takes time and resources to run, and of course you cant carry your data (ie you character) to another server in a meaningful sense because a large amount of its meaning is based on status.
You cant eliminate theft either, but you can reduce it to manageable levels. I suspect we’ll see moves towards models like this and others over time as solutions.
I dont have a lot to add to the fight, but god DAMN do I wish I had pirated GTA4 instead of paying for it. between the drm and the f-ing “live” crap and the rockstar crap AND the fact that it was a very pretty very fun to drive stupidly irritating game to play.
Beyond the question of whether or not the estimates are accurate, I’d have to question whether or not the methodology is even sound.
Let’s take Person A. Person A loves games about wombats, can’t get enough. Person A doesn’t really love games about widgets, though. Person A hears about a game with awesome widgets and decides to give it a try, and so he pirates it. He likes it, and plays it a bit, but he wouldn’t have spent money on it (or even tried it) if it hadn’t been pirated and even after he pirated it, he wouldn’t spend money on it because he doesn’t like it enough.
Has the game company really lost money?
Person B really likes games about orangutans. Person B find out about a really cool orangutan sim but doesn’t trust the reviews online and wants to play it first, so he pirates it. After pirating it he decides that it’s worth the money and goes out and buys a copy.
“Person B find out about a really cool orangutan sim but doesn’t trust the reviews online and wants to play it first, so he pirates it. After pirating it he decides that it’s worth the money and goes out and buys a copy”.
I dont believe this happens other than a very small number of scenarios, unless some major part of functionality is missing from the pirated copy eg multiplayer or the like.
Could be. I know for a fact that there are a non-zero number of games out there that have been bought after someone pirated them in order to demo them. Don’t ask me how I know this fact…
The point being it needs to be a whole lot more than ‘non zero’ in order to be meaningful and Ive never seen credible evidence that this is the case.
And forgive me I remain a wee bit cynical about even the ‘non-zero’ cases actual circumstances. I suspect ‘I bought two out of the 50 games I pirated because I wanted to get the manual’ translates into ‘I always buy pirated games I like, I only use them as demoes’ rather often in online discussions.
The point is that we don’t have evidence one way or another. How many dollars worth of ‘lost’ revenue aren’t lost at all because people were either never going to buy the game, or thought the game was decent and paid the developers some cash for it?
We have no idea.
We do have evidence, from the iPhone app store. People who pirate games engage at roughly an equal amount to those who don’t and convert at a rate of 0%: Piracy & the App Store
Perhaps I’m totally wrong here, but this is the way I’ve viewed the problem for a while:
From what I understand, the economics of games made by large developers is sort of similar to that of large studio movies-- they make the vast majority of their money in the first few weeks they’re released. After this, there’s used copies floating around and the price of the new ones rapidly gets down to bargain bin levels. Folks like me who usually wait until a game gets cheap to buy it (or, worse, buy it used) are pretty much just as bad as pirates in terms of the developer’s bottom line.
Now this is where I’m going to simultaneously agree with the developers and the pirates. Obviously, yes, most DRM’s don’t hold back the pirates for long, but even if they manage to hold it back a couple of weeks, that’ll have a major positive effect on the game’s total bottom line. This seems to be the (unofficial) approach Ubisoft is taking as of late-- release a game with oppressive DRM that won’t deter the hardcore fans who pay full-price, but as the game gets older release patches that get rid of it to appeal to a wider market.
Since all the DRM has to do is keep the game from being pirated during the early release, I think in some ways the constant arms race between developers deploying stronger DRM’s and pirates breaking them faster in some ways is a solution to piracy that is working somewhat. The only problem is that I believe it’s starting to escalate to the point that the DRM’s themselves are cutting into sales (see below).
So here’s where I think the “just trying it out” argument might have some minuscule iota of merit. If people are pirating older games that only would have been a bargain-bin sale to the company (at best) the company’s really not losing that much money there. But if playing a pirated copy of an older game gets someone excited about a particular developer or franchise, they’re perhaps more likely to actually buy the next game during the pre-hacked full-price phase, which is really where the developers’ bread and butter is.
(I’d mention anecdotally that my one exception to buying older games was that I would pretty much always buy submarine sims new because I like to support that genre, but the DRM on the latest Silent Hunter was just too much for me, so like a lot of others I’m waiting and hoping Ubisoft removes it.)
I know you’re only being sarky, but I still agree. If you are going to run an almost empty bus between A and B, you may as well let passengers board on a voluntary donation scheme. Whether it had been a fare dodger or someone who donated nothing, how has the bus company lost any money?
The same goes with software developers. Nobody demands that an unknown artist of any sort does what they do. They should do it because they like doing it, and any monetary gain is a bonus.
So developers, writers, artists and musicians shouldn’t have any concern about money at all? None?
This kind of thinking really blows my mind. It seems as though it is backwards, that the user of the content (whether music, movie or software) has some sort of right to the work of another person just because copying is easy.
As to the argument that if a person pirates a game and doesn’t really like it, well then the game company didn’t really lose any money goes, that is based on two really iffy arguments. The first is that you have to pirate to try the game. Most games have demos. Second, even if the person pirates a game and hates it, they are still getting the value/experience of playing the game. Do you go to a movie theater, pay for a movie, decide you don’t like it after seeing it then demand your money back?
