Metal Genesis said:
I am a software developer myself and a strong proponent for outright digital theft in today's climate. Don't get me wrong, I think developers and IP owners/creators should be reasonably compensated and that promotion/marketing/lawyering are a necessary evil. It's the larger infrastructure, monopoly, and unabashed greed I disagree with. The reason I pirate/crack, and I think the prime driving force for piracy today is the inordinate pricing of IP despite what should be severe mitigating factors.
The industries have moved from slow/expensive magnetic disks and tapes to mostly plastic disks with no moving parts and nearly instant duplication; not to mention digital distribution which is essentially free. So ...you used to make huge tapes, wind it around a spindle, attach it to another spindle, seal it in a cartridge with at least 3 moving parts, silk-screened it, inserted into a hard case with more printed media, loaded it onto a truck and delivered it to a brick-and-mortar who added significant overhead to cover their operating costs and their liability for underselling the product. ...and now you deliver it with as little effort as those emails that promise to make my junk bigger ...and it costs more money.
Also, the market share has exploded. Developers aren't slaving away for 200 graphic design professionals or financial analysts who might or might not want their software. They are developing for a huge community of users, you are buying one millionth of one developers/creators time. If an artist produced five million prints, exactly how much are those prints worth? At what point does the reward so far outstrip the effort that we take notice? I guess that is a bigger issue than software/IP, but can we seriously say as a nation that "Oops I did it again" was worth one hundred and fifty million dollars? The industries want me to feel guilty for "stealing" ten dollars from someone who squandered over 60 million dollars of her net worth before she was 30? I just don't believe it is fair to rent digital information for recreational use at ten dollars a pop. I'd say purchasing, but I don't consider it ownership unless I can take it to a pawn shop and use it to buy back grandma's wheelchair. *insert miscellaneous fair-use rant here*
Also, more specifically within the gaming industry, tool-sets have improved dramatically. Developers aren't working from scratch, most all software leverages modern technology and methodologies. Quake and Cry Engines aside, even the low-level APIs and IDEs are easier than ever. You don't have to build and debug your own clipping routines to publish a shoot-em-up.
I think piracy could be cut to a minimum if reasonable, transparent business practices were put in place. I have and would pay 10c for a song, I think most people would, it just doesn't sit right giving apple 35% for their veritable musical monopoly and producers 55% for ...uhm producing.
Ok, so that's a huge ***** about how little it costs to make the disks? And you try to use that to portray large software developers as money grabbing corporate bastrds? Fail.
Great, so the media has become cheaper, but have you looked at the credits list on ANY modern game? See all those names? Those are
employees. Now, you have to
pay employees, which takes
money. Now, just like with any manufacturing business, a game development company needs to look at how much it can expect to sell its games for, make an estimate for how many said games will be sold, and then add of the desired profit so the company can develop - this is a capitalist society, after all.
All this estimation gives them a budget within which to work in order to not make a loss. If they make a loss, people loose their jobs. Which is bad. If a large company produced a game, and one person bought it and cracked it and distributed it online and EVERYONE else just downloaded that copy, how much do you think that one person would have had to pay for the company not to immediately go bust? Oh, perhaps the ENTIRE cost of development, plus overheads, plus media production and distribution costs.
Now, if a company is only able to make a little headway from its sales because so many of them are taken away by piracy, then they are going to make less profit. A company with less money to fall back on in case of a poorly received game is much less likely to take a risk with something new or edgy or innovative (I mean, just look at the reception of DoWII - just a few significant changes and many fans of the original were baying for blood o.0 It doesn't take much to scare people off - many of us seem to be a conservative lot).
This all results in us getting the same stuff constantly recycled with pretty graphics and a couple of particular features, because companies aren't confident enough that people will spend money on something new - they'd probably just pirate it 'just to see if they like it', so the company sees no money, so they drop that line of investigation.
I find it fucking ironic that, as a software dev, you condone piracy - I mean, do you even intend to earn money from your work, or is it all charity to people who can't be bothered to pay for what they use? Seriously, validating piracy
because disks are cheaper than magnetic tape if ludicrous, and easily the worst validation I've read here.
