"Piracy hurts the user as well as the creators..." or does it?

[Th37thTrump3t]

Well the problem with piracy is that in the long term... devs lose money. With the money they make from their products sales, they invest in technology to make better games. When you pirate games, those devs lose the money they need to make a very good game, and so you are left with an inferior game. Look at EA for example, shit games and horrible DRMs. Now I'm not saying that piracy is the direct cause of shit games but it is a major cause. Plus, if it weren't for piracy DRMs and Securom wouldn't exist, and no one can dispute that.

 

[FrankWestRonove]

No matter what anyone says, "Oh, I'm only one person doing it, one sale won't hurt them" Or other similar statements needs to realize that one person adds up to many, and therefore, alot of money gets lost. Why is it so hard to rent a game, ask someone who played it what it was like, look up a review, or just watch gameplay of it instead of stealing it.

 

[Aurgelmir]

I see this turning in to a discussion about "is piracy right or wrong"
And thats not what I intended. What I did intend was a discussion about the changes we are seeing the industries (movie, game, music etc) are making ,that is actually a better service for us consumers.

Because I don't want to pirate anything in an ideal world, and I find myself pirating less and less since I find that the legal solutions are becoming more convenient for me.

Be that the Zune Movie thing on 360, or music solutions as Spotify.

That being said, I still feel the games industry is not moving in the right direction, but there are good ideas out there they are just not used right.

Think of this thread more as a think tank to talk about the good solutions that has been made to combat piracy. It's easy to pick on the bad solutions, but there are tons of awesome solutions out there too. Like equal release of movies, or easy access to music.

In the end its impossible to change a persons habit, if what you are asking him to do is less convenient than what he is already doing.

 

[robakerson]

I am guessing Europe is getting Iron Man 2 ahead of the US due to internet leaking of big movies. So to avoid lost sales due to piracy in Europe the movie is released a week in advance.

I might be wholly uninformed here, but it seems your 'guess' relies on a few things I'm not so sure are even considered true by the entertainment industry:

1) Does Europe really pirate *that* much more than the US? I live in the US and I gotta say, I almost never go to the cinema anymore. I'll just leave it at that.

2) How does making the release date in Europe earlier help the issue of piracy? If Europe is pirating more than the US, why not release it in the US first? Are you saying that the issue is people recording in US theaters and posting it online, where Europeans download it? If the issue is that Europeans pirate more, wont they be more of a source of the material as well?


Forgive me for not providing a list of reasons pirating has or hasn't helped me as a consumer, but I fail to see how piracy (in this case) leads to earlier release dates.

 

[fletch_talon]

Pirating contributes to price increases of all forms of media.
It is also responsible for the DRM everyone gets so pissed about.

So yes, it hurts the "legitimate" user.

 

[Aurgelmir]

I am guessing Europe is getting Iron Man 2 ahead of the US due to internet leaking of big movies. So to avoid lost sales due to piracy in Europe the movie is released a week in advance.

I might be wholly uninformed here, but it seems your 'guess' relies on a few things I'm not so sure are even considered true by the entertainment industry:

1) Does Europe really pirate *that* much more than the US? I live in the US and I gotta say, I almost never go to the cinema anymore. I'll just leave it at that.

2) How does making the release date in Europe earlier help the issue of piracy? If Europe is pirating more than the US, why not release it in the US first? Are you saying that the issue is people recording in US theaters and posting it online, where Europeans download it? If the issue is that Europeans pirate more, wont they be more of a source of the material as well?


Forgive me for not providing a list of reasons pirating has or hasn't helped me as a consumer, but I fail to see how piracy (in this case) leads to earlier release dates.

I think I have on several occations in this thread shown that there have been earlyer release dates for europe due to piracy.

One example is the second Matrix movie, or the Starwars episode 2 and three. I do not recall how long the wait for Episode 1 was, but it was a substantial delay from when it was released in the US till we got it in Europe. But Episode 2 and 3 was released at the same time as the US.

Well it is a correlation between release dates and how much is pirated. And besides, piracy (at least online released pirated products) is about cred and epeen. So the faster you as a pirate can get it on the net, the better cred you get. So since all the movies will be released in the US before Europe, well then the "serious pirates" will of course be in the US.

And its not only about cam versions of the movie. A lot of online leaks of movies are stolen "review copies" and such.
So if the bigger part of pirates, which have a network for gaining copies is in the US then that is probably not the smartest place to release things firs, now is it?

Give it some time, and the pirates in Europe will gain a similar network, and the status quo is changed.

And as for your first point there, that you never go to the movies, well then you are one of those douches that don't pay for your entertainment, so no matter what the industry does you won't become a paying costumer... so how would you get helped by the existence of piracy?

 

[Shpongled]

Pirating contributes to price increases of all forms of media.
It is also responsible for the DRM everyone gets so pissed about.

So yes, it hurts the "legitimate" user.

The argument that piracy = lost money only follows if those who pirate would have bought the item in question if the option of piracy wasn't there. Which is, on the whole, false. Many people who pirate can't afford to buy games, even if they wanted too. The fact that games are only becoming more and more expensive whilst the disposable incomes of the vast majority of people stays in the same place is probably just as detrimental to the industry as the money lost from the maybe 10% of pirates who would have actually paid for the product.

 

[fletch_talon]

Pirating contributes to price increases of all forms of media.
It is also responsible for the DRM everyone gets so pissed about.

So yes, it hurts the "legitimate" user.

The argument that piracy = lost money only follows if those who pirate would have bought the item in question if the option of piracy wasn't there. Which is, on the whole, false. Many people who pirate can't afford to buy games, even if they wanted too. The fact that games are only becoming more and more expensive whilst the disposable incomes of the vast majority of people stays in the same place is probably just as detrimental to the industry as the money lost from the maybe 10% of pirates who would have actually paid for the product.

I highly doubt that percentage's accuracy, but even 10% is enough to justify them wanting to regain some of that money. Besides which, if someone wants something enough to break the law for it, then they clearly want it enough to save up/wait for the price to drop and pay for it.

Piracy also hurts legitimate users since it devalues our purchases. Why the hell should someone get something for free, that I have to work for? And in the case of digital distribution there is no difference between the product I pay for, and they get for free.
There are free games out there, and there are cheap games out there, lack of money is not a valid excuse for piracy.

Either way piracy has a negative effect on purchasers of games and the day an end is put to piracy (if ever) will be a happy one for me.

 

[Treblaine]

Well there is the school of thought that if said product is not available in your territory (due to it not being released, or maybe even banned), then piracy does not harm the industry as the disruption of illegal copies cannot disrupt the sales there because it IS NOT selling there.

The times you should question piracy is when a game is:
(1) readily available to you, and
(2) you CAN afford it, either now or eventually

Then you should not pirate but buy it honestly.

And remember, piracy does not directly harm developers, it harms PUBLISHERS! They are the money men.

 

[Shpongled]

Pirating contributes to price increases of all forms of media.
It is also responsible for the DRM everyone gets so pissed about.

So yes, it hurts the "legitimate" user.

The argument that piracy = lost money only follows if those who pirate would have bought the item in question if the option of piracy wasn't there. Which is, on the whole, false. Many people who pirate can't afford to buy games, even if they wanted too. The fact that games are only becoming more and more expensive whilst the disposable incomes of the vast majority of people stays in the same place is probably just as detrimental to the industry as the money lost from the maybe 10% of pirates who would have actually paid for the product.

I highly doubt that percentage's accuracy, but even 10% is enough to justify them wanting to regain some of that money. Besides which, if someone wants something enough to break the law for it, then they clearly want it enough to save up/wait for the price to drop and pay for it.

Piracy also hurts legitimate users since it devalues our purchases. Why the hell should someone get something for free, that I have to work for? And in the case of digital distribution there is no difference between the product I pay for, and they get for free.
There are free games out there, and there are cheap games out there, lack of money is not a valid excuse for piracy.

Either way piracy has a negative effect on purchasers of games and the day an end is put to piracy (if ever) will be a happy one for me.

I do agree piracy is a bad thing, but the amount of damage its really doing to the industry is suspect to me.

As to the whole breaking the law thing, you seriously underestimate how easy it is to download a game. There's a 1 in a million chance you're ever gonna be caught, and there's a 1 in a million chance you're ever going to get anything more than a warning. Not to mention the fact that in most cases its not actually a criminal offense anyway. No one considers the law when they're doing that sort of thing, just as no one considers the law when they drink underage. $60 means more to most people than the miniscule chance of getting a warning from their ISP.

 

[jasoncyrus]

I agree whole heartedly with the OP: I used to have to wait months upon months to get current US tv shows in the UK. But not we get them on the same day if not sooner.

This makes me supremely happy.

 

[Jimmyjames]

Piracy isn't just harming us, it is also forcing the industries to change their ways.

But as long as companies are willing to view piracy as an actual market competitor they will start gaining more sales.

Sure they cant compete on price, but what are the other reasons for you to buy a legitimate product? Other than "Because its the legal/right thing to do"?

That is what I am getting at. Piracy has forced the industries to shift its business models, in order to compete with pirates.

Hat off to you sir, for seeing the true problem of piracy. The way companies react to piracy will effect the end-user the most. The problem is truly that piracy ends up hurting the legitimate consumer more that the, uh "pirate".

 

[Jimmyjames]

There's another way that piracy effects the consumer:

If enough people stop paying for their entertainment, what is the motivation for companies to invest in making more of it? Voila! Less high-quality entertainment for the consumer.

 

[Treblaine]

Piracy isn't just harming us, it is also forcing the industries to change their ways.

But as long as companies are willing to view piracy as an actual market competitor they will start gaining more sales.

Sure they cant compete on price, but what are the other reasons for you to buy a legitimate product? Other than "Because its the legal/right thing to do"?


Hat off to you sir, for seeing the true problem of piracy. The way companies react to piracy will effect the end-user the most. The problem is truly that piracy ends up hurting the legitimate consumer more that the, uh "pirate".

Excellent, I think one thing PC games can do that pirated games can't do is offer integrated online services, all the bells and whistles and MORE that are normally seen with online multiplayer only bring them to the single player as well.

Now this is highly relevant to the controversial Ubisoft DRM, as everyone asks the obvious question "why would a single-player connection need - in terms of consumer needs - to be connected to the internet?"

Well, in the case of Assassin's Creed 2 and other recent games, I have to admit no, that online connection is FAR more of an impediment and benefit, but I see it as a missed opportunity to take full advantage of a "connected" online.

Singleplayer means precisley that, only a single player is the centre of the game and only their needs have to be catered for, that doesn't mean the game has to be designed, wound up and set to function entirely in isolation, with a game connected to developers servers there are whole new opportunities.

one area I am particularly interested in is server-side processing. Somewhat inspired by Onlive though I think that particular technology is doomed to fail as it cannot deliver both the quantity AND quality of data for high resolution and high framerate video with low latency.

However, take the video out of the loop, leave the video up to each users video card, it's the physics, the AI, the CODE of what is actually happening, that can be incredibly complicated but the data flow can be very low, kilobytes per second rather than gigabytes per second (that's raw pixel output for HD monitor at 60Hz). Send that off to the server, get it to figure out how a flag is supposed to blow in the wind, how a million tiny particles tumble and fall, then once those trajectories are mapped by a centralised, purpose built computer, send the data back to my PC for my video card to render it.

No compression, yet keep low latency and do what most home PCs and consoles find impossible.

And yeah, not limited to physics, what about the AI, imagine the type of AI you could get if you had a SUPER COMPUTER that the developers were constantly tweaking and could have had specially made to program for it.

Other things about integrated online singleplayer is how it can emphasise how even in single player your are part of a community, all connected to the same network, Valve have shown the way with Steam. Auto-save not just game position... but demos. And a small thing, a demo in this context is a data file that records everything that "happens" in a game, if a rocket is fired, there is code for that which is "announced" and the trajectory and all that is recorded and every other thing in the game.

It can be stored online for posterity to prove your feats, play them back and hell, even relive them. Access your best moments and kick back in at just the right point you want so you can try something new.

Sure, all of that is technically possible while offline, and I think it should be available off-line, but the advantage of online is all your gameplay can be VERIFIED, you can't cheat with the server watching (not easily). This means achievements can have much more value, hmmm, points mean prizes!

 

[fletch_talon]

Pirating contributes to price increases of all forms of media.
It is also responsible for the DRM everyone gets so pissed about.

So yes, it hurts the "legitimate" user.

The argument that piracy = lost money only follows if those who pirate would have bought the item in question if the option of piracy wasn't there. Which is, on the whole, false. Many people who pirate can't afford to buy games, even if they wanted too. The fact that games are only becoming more and more expensive whilst the disposable incomes of the vast majority of people stays in the same place is probably just as detrimental to the industry as the money lost from the maybe 10% of pirates who would have actually paid for the product.

I highly doubt that percentage's accuracy, but even 10% is enough to justify them wanting to regain some of that money. Besides which, if someone wants something enough to break the law for it, then they clearly want it enough to save up/wait for the price to drop and pay for it.

Piracy also hurts legitimate users since it devalues our purchases. Why the hell should someone get something for free, that I have to work for? And in the case of digital distribution there is no difference between the product I pay for, and they get for free.
There are free games out there, and there are cheap games out there, lack of money is not a valid excuse for piracy.

Either way piracy has a negative effect on purchasers of games and the day an end is put to piracy (if ever) will be a happy one for me.

I do agree piracy is a bad thing, but the amount of damage its really doing to the industry is suspect to me.

As to the whole breaking the law thing, you seriously underestimate how easy it is to download a game. There's a 1 in a million chance you're ever gonna be caught, and there's a 1 in a million chance you're ever going to get anything more than a warning. Not to mention the fact that in most cases its not actually a criminal offense anyway. No one considers the law when they're doing that sort of thing, just as no one considers the law when they drink underage. $60 means more to most people than the miniscule chance of getting a warning from their ISP.

I know how easy it is. I also know how tempting it is. Because I... know a guy, who knew a guy who did it... *wink*

Eventually however I started considering what I was doing. For starters there was a chance that I would get caught, however small, and those chances were slowly going up, the more the industry wanted to crack down on piracy. Secondly, I realised that there was effort put into these games, people worked their butts off, and I wasn't contributing despite admiring their work.

My family couldn't afford to buy games outside of Christmas and my birthday. I couldn't afford as much as I'd like either, but I chose to save up the money I did get, to buy games every so often.

Of course I also never drank whilst underage and that was due to common sense, and consideration of the law.

 

[Aurgelmir]

Piracy isn't just harming us, it is also forcing the industries to change their ways.

But as long as companies are willing to view piracy as an actual market competitor they will start gaining more sales.

Sure they cant compete on price, but what are the other reasons for you to buy a legitimate product? Other than "Because its the legal/right thing to do"?

That is what I am getting at. Piracy has forced the industries to shift its business models, in order to compete with pirates.

Hat off to you sir, for seeing the true problem of piracy. The way companies react to piracy will effect the end-user the most. The problem is truly that piracy ends up hurting the legitimate consumer more that the, uh "pirate".

In some fields yes, but as you see from the topic name, I was saying that there are a lot of innovations on the market that would probably never had seen the day of light if it was not for piracy.

Yeah DRM sucks, but that is mostly a problem for a very small portion of the ENTIRE entertainment industry.

What I opened with in my first post was to say that piracy has forced the movie industry to be able to put their movies out in more markets at the same time. And how is that bad for the consumer? Also keep in mind that the prices for a movie ticket hasn't gone mu that much the last couple of years, if you consider inflation. And coupled with cinema the movie industry also get money by selling the movies through a lot of sources (Zune, DVD, Blu-Ray, V rights etc). some of these distribution channels would probably not be as lucrative had the industry been able to dictate what medium we had to watch the movie in.

All in all I take the good with the bad, because for me the good outweighs the bad quite a lot. And if the entertainment industry continue to improve their products, I will gladly pay for more of it (and I pay for most of it already )

PS: I do not play much PC games, don't liek the platform as a gaming platform, so I do not take the DRM problems there so hard, I just buy it on a console instead which is an option I do not mind honestly.
That said, I do not mind the DRM, as long as it doesn't hurt me as a user. If the DRM is seamless and doesn't affect my gaming experience is it really bad? Steam is an example of DRM that actually works.

 

[Jared Veeser-Lynn]

steam is best example of how the gaming insustry can evlolve, cut out the bs publishers like valve has done