A Solution To Piracy

[4173]

Worker 1 to 32 makes food and likes games. Worker 33 to 64 makes games and likes food. Exchange.

Worker 33 to 64 must share in order for the food to come and worker 1 to 32 must share in order for the games to come.

Problem solved.

Here's the problem. If workers 33-64 don't get the food they die. If workers 1-32 don't get games, they play cards or read or exercise or have sex etc or even make the games themselves. There's a gigantic power imbalance.


Oh, and if artists can't profit from their art, what incentive do they have to share their art?

 

[Therumancer]

How would these hypothetical artists live? Presumably they would require some sort of income.

Well it's an old arguement. What it basically boils down to is that it's one thing when you have a poor artist who is creating what he wants and just barely getting by. Once an artist becomes successful, they tend to begin producing most of their work based on comission, or by popular demand rather than creating their own stuff. It becomes about what will sell, and not what is art or even good.

There is a solid analogy here to video games and how attitudes have changed in the industry once they ceased being teams of guys operating out of their basements or whatever, making the games they wanted to make, and doing whatever it took to make them good. Today it's all about money and developers are receiving substantial paychecks to produce the games that producers, corperations, and boards of directors think are good. We already see this being discussed, and even admitted to by those who make the desicians.


The thing is that I do not think that video game developers today are hurting for money. The budgets being assigned for games are based largely on the cost of human resources, ie the amount of money these guys demand to do their jobs making the games. When dealing with budgets in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars the cost of materials (computers) and office space is fairly trivial, the meat of that money going towards human resources which means someone is taking it home. There have been a lot of debates on this subject over the years here on The Escapist (mostly involving me), but the bottom line is that I think the gaming industry is so quiet about where all this money goes because they know it would upset the consumers and it wouldn't play into their "video games cost so much to buy, because they cost so much to make" when you took a look at how that money was being spent. I know i'm already raging over comments about how Square Enix claims that it would be too expensive to make a game like "Final Fantasy VII" with current technology due to the amount of artwork needed for towns and such (which is why the latest Final Fantasy didn't really have any). In the end the cost of producing that artwork is computers, and the guys to run them. The computers are a couple grand apiece, the rest of the money? Well that's all due to what the guys banging the keyboard to make the art are demanding to be paid.


At any rate, it's a difficult point to argue either way. The point is that once art becomes totally driven by money, it suffers. The OP is correct about that to an extent, and it applies to all mediums. Would Steven King have turned into a formula writer if he wasn't rich and successful and had to do more to keep ink in his printer and food in his fridge? As a lot of people will tell you, a lot of the earlier stuff that made him famous to begin with was arguably of a higher quality to what he produces now.

On the other hand telling some artist that he has no right to profit from his work, or be able to live well off their talent... well that's not exactly fair.

The guys who create these things of beauty and joy arguably deserve some returns for what they are producing for you, but at the same time those returns are arguably going to prevent them from continueing to create those things of beauty and joy as time has proven.

Any way it goes, if video games were all effectively free, I suppose that would kill piracy. Of course that's impractical when you get down to it though... so what the OP presents isn't really a viable solution.

If there is a middle ground, that can solve the "artistic dillema" it has yet to be found, and until then art and artists are always going to be touchy subjects.

 

[z3rostr1fe]

Exactly how many "piracy" threads have appeared in The Escapist?

There is no concrete solution to piracy, but you can start not being a pirate by buying the artists' stuff.

 

[Virus0015]

Like it or not, if someone did some work to make something, they can charge for it. It doesn't matter if you are an artist or a doctor, you are providing a service to the population and can charge for it. Having everything free of charge is a nice utopian idea, but in reality humans are greedy bastards. Just because someone is in a profession that produces art, does this make it immoral for them to be greedy bastards too? In my view, your idea doesn't work, because there is nothing that differentiates producing art from producing any other service in terms of being able to claim financial compensation

 

[ninjapenguin981]

I don't know how this would stop piracy. Just because the people poured their heart and soul into a game in the hopes of making something truly beautiful, doesn't mean people won't still try to steal it. Pirates don't steal games because they think that game makers are corporate money mongers, they do it because they don't want to pay fifty bucks for something.

The reason is that the artist wouldn't expect money from everyone. Although it doesn't stop piracy, it just makes it morally acceptable. This is not my opinion, I'm just clarifying what I think the OP means.

 

[Rickyvantof]

Wasn't there a thread locked because it was about piracy just now?

 

[ItsAChiaotzu]

In my opinion, no art in any form should be made with making money in mind, this is what leads to constant samey music artists and games dominating charts, if all art was made out of the desire to make art then we would have (mostly) consistently high products and piracy wouldn't be an issue.

To anyone who thinks that artists would be screwed over by the lack of money, artists are being screwed over by the lack of money already, because all the money in these industries are not going to artists, but to mindless crap.


For those who cannot be bothered to read, I AM NOT A PIRATE, shall I repeat that? I AM NOT A PIRATE! This thread is born out of the stagnation of the modern music industry and the lack of integrity, the fact that the problem of piracy would be solved is just an added bonus.

What are your thoughts?

PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE THIS POST

Why shouldn't I quote the post?



Seriously though, artists can only produce work if they can eat. Money therefore can not be unlinked from art.

Don't quote the post because it's already been quoted about 16 times already and if you check the thread your argument has been presented many times already.


Sorry if I come off grouchy it's just a little irritating when I get a load of messages from different people saying the same stuff.

 

[bob1052]

Worker 1 to 32 makes food and likes games. Worker 33 to 64 makes games and likes food. Exchange.

Worker 33 to 64 must share in order for the food to come and worker 1 to 32 must share in order for the games to come.

Problem solved.

Problem not solved. In the real world there are more than two products in existence. Whoever has the most desirable product will be able to get more, eventually people will make a valueless currency that represents value of items. Then you will be exactly where we are now.

 

[InsanityBaronOfAtrocity]

Anyway solution to priacy. Charge a couple of quid per hour usage. Say a fiver gets you 3 hours of game time. If it's any good pay for some more hours or just pay the full price. This uses the download and play model like steam. Also ensure quick download speeds so it's more convenient.

Also. Slightly off topic. Is listening to music from youtube considered piracy? That's all I ever do. Never bought a cd in my life. Can't see why I'd need to. Anyway yeah.

 

[SFR]

Imagine your favorite game for a moment. No, not that one, your actual favorite game. You know, the one that wasn't free and didn't focus on some sort of art gimmick. The game that you and many others like a lot and contains extremely high production values. Now imagine that game was never made because its creation cost 30 million dollars. Now imagine yourself being sad because almost every game available is total crap (don't worry, the crap has integrity).

Seeing any problems here? I can't wait for Episode 3, but I'd imagine if Valve were to make no money from it, we could confirm its never coming out rather than just joking about it.

 

[Soviet Steve]

I know that game companies do it to make a living and I think that you come off as a tree-hugging pussy who should be punished for their naive idealism.

 

[Zakarath]

How would these hypothetical artists live? Presumably they would require some sort of income.

The thing is that I do not think that video game developers today are hurting for money. The budgets being assigned for games are based largely on the cost of human resources, ie the amount of money these guys demand to do their jobs making the games. When dealing with budgets in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars the cost of materials (computers) and office space is fairly trivial, the meat of that money going towards human resources which means someone is taking it home. There have been a lot of debates on this subject over the years here on The Escapist (mostly involving me), but the bottom line is that I think the gaming industry is so quiet about where all this money goes because they know it would upset the consumers and it wouldn't play into their "video games cost so much to buy, because they cost so much to make" when you took a look at how that money was being spent. I know i'm already raging over comments about how Square Enix claims that it would be too expensive to make a game like "Final Fantasy VII" with current technology due to the amount of artwork needed for towns and such (which is why the latest Final Fantasy didn't really have any). In the end the cost of producing that artwork is computers, and the guys to run them. The computers are a couple grand apiece, the rest of the money? Well that's all due to what the guys banging the keyboard to make the art are demanding to be paid.

True, the majority of game funding goes to HR (In addition to expensive hardware and software suites, licensing fees for various engines and services, etc.). The studios that produce AAA games often have staffs of 60 people or many more(watch the credits on your favorite games). Assume the salaries of each of those people to be around 75k(again, or more). Now assume that your game takes about two years to produce. Also assume that you may also need to hire various outside services for music, voice acting, testing/QA, etc. Do the math.

 

[Ickorus]

I agree with you, I can't stand most of the shit on the radio and it really really pisses me off because I know some amazing artists who don't get a shot to display their music to the masses because they won't sell out to the music industry.

Piracy law needs to be changed because as it is it gives the music industry a criminally large amount of control, at a word they can make or break careers and that is simply wrong.

 

[Terramax]

How would these hypothetical artists live? Presumably they would require some sort of income.

Well, they along with everyone else, would require a job,

What type of job would pay to make a game like, say, Ico?

 

[Requx]

I love how people, like this guy take it so bad to be pirates. By the way, to Americans is it illegal to youtube download stuff over there?

 

[Chunko]

How would these hypothetical artists live? Presumably they would require some sort of income.

Well, they along with everyone else, would require a job,

Game designing is a job. And it's an extremely demanding one. You can't expect people to work 90+ hours a week and have another job. We'd wind up being left with only crappy indie games.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Unfortunately, short of a socialist revolution, this means all we'll have left are indie games. And in case you haven't poked around the XBLA marketplace lately, that roughly translates "I hope you like bare-bones isometric zombie survival games."

Super Meat Boy/Splosion' Man
Castle Crashers.
Braid.
Shadow Complex.
Several good "Schmups" (think Gradius).

Not one of those are isometric zombie shooters, and they are all good for different reasons.
Those were all built on decent sized budgets, but even the most expensive of the lot cost a fraction of any AAA title made in the last 5 years.

And you know what? A lot of those games have a fun attitude to them rather than being this forced rehash of stock characters, pretty graphics, completely recycled gameplay and bland dialogue.

If you applied the same reasoning to the film industry - "only art for art's sake" - film as we know it would completely collapse, because the reality is that quality products are ridiculously large investments in this day and age. And as of the past few years, game budgets are about the same.

Look around either the Film or Game industry for even a moment. The word "Sequel" should immediately spring to mind.
Boy do we have sequels. Sequels of Sequels. Shitloads of them.

I'm not saying that no-budget games/films would be successful, but the MAIN goal for making the game/film should be to convey a message or focus on a style.
I've seen ambitious movies completely bomb because they focused on cramming way too much shit into them (Dune had an enormous budget for its time, and it's one of the most fragmented movies I've ever seen.)

Medal of Honor just bombed (for a AAA game) for this very reason. It's become the pariah of AAA stagnation, and I'm dead certain that this problem isn't isolated to just the FPS market.

But today, most titles are about milking established franchises, and if you can't do that, then you're probably making something that imitates something else that's been established.

If only the correlation were more cut-and-dry. But a no-budget games industry isn't going to produce better art - just cheaper junk.

You are half-correct: I think we need to stop looking at this in absolutes.
Fact of the matter is, movies/games/shows that are made solely to make money do follow this strong correlation of being shallow (Avatar, Star Wars E1-E3, the new Transformers movies or Call of Duty/Fallout/Halo) but wildly profitable.

The best film I've seen this year falls into some of these trappings, and I recognize that despite my love of the film (Iron Man 2, and I do love Iron Man. Favorite comic character).
The best new game I've played this year (Mass Effect 2) suffers from this too.

However, I'm not trying to claim that a big budget automatically equates to a shallow, boring one-note product. One company that (surprisingly) still makes great, high budget movies that have a fair degree of depth to them, it's probably Pixar.
With the exception of maybe Toy Story 2, they haven't really done a movie for the sake of milking a franchise. None in my memory anyway.

If the film/game industry changes their perspective from making shitloads of money to making good works of fiction, I'm certain we would see a change for the better.
But that will never happen. Not while these industries are still printing money.

 

[SuperSuperSuperGuy]

Things like games take money to make, right? A lot of money. Money that needs to be earned back. So, they make things that they know that people will like. That should be respected.

I, personally, consider money a secondary objective when I make things. When I do something, I do it because I WANT to. Quality over quantity, I say! This may change in the future, though. I'm not a big-name artist. Heck, I'm barely an artist at all!