Someone counter this anti-piracy argument, because I don't know how

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Astoria

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Thing is in that situation your oranges are wortless because the other guy is getting exactly the same oranges. A pirated version of something is never 100% as good as the copy for sale. Real copies don't lose their value because the pirated version just arn't as good.
 

loc978

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Brawndo said:
Let's pretend I own an orange tree that produces unlimited oranges - whenever someone picks one, another instantly grows in its place. Now imagine that I live in a village with 100 people, and from market research I think there is a demand for 50 oranges. As the tree owner, I have the right to distribute my oranges as I see fit. I can sell exactly 50 oranges, I can flood the market with 500 oranges, or I can sell only a few and create a scarcity. Sure, it would be a completely artificial scarcity, but it doesn't matter if it is artificial because as the tree owner I have the right to sell as many or as few oranges as I want.

But then one day some guy decides he's going to pick oranges from my tree at night and hand them out to the villagers for free. I haven't lost any oranges, it's true, but I'm still screwed out of the true value of my tree.

Why? Because the guy jacking my oranges is damaging my scarcity power.

By handing out an unlimited number of my oranges for free, my oranges have lost almost all of their value. It doesn't matter that there are theoretically infinite oranges - it is my right to control their distribution because the value of my oranges is largely based on their relative scarcity. Mr. Orange Robin Hood is causing demand for my product to be obliterated by oversupply. And no matter how nice and accommodating I am to my customers, I will never be able to compete with the orange snatcher so long as he continues to have free access to my tree. I could deliver the oranges to customers' homes for no cost, I could slash the price to pennies, but whatever my competitive effort "X" is, the orange thief's method is always "X minus one".
Ah yes. "I have the ability to create an unlimited supply of something that I own the rights to yet put very little work into, therefore I want to exercise my right to be a complete dick about the distribution." but that's beside the point.

The only logical standpoint to take here goes something like this: "Defend your fucking oranges. Whining isn't how you do that."
If the law says the thief is in the wrong, catch him and call the cops... after all, you have the revenue from your orange tree to work with. I doubt the thief has any such resources. Big boy businesses wear big boy pants.
 

DeathStreamer

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What alot of people seem to forget, or blatantly ignore in the industry, is that the amount of good honest consumers usually greatly outweigh the number of people who would steal a product, which usually seems to create profits greatly surpassing the amount of money lost to piracy. Hollywood seemed to play a fair part in the SOPA and PIPA ordeal, but their profits were apparantly record breaking last year. Also, my father and I like foreign things, foreign music, movies and games in my case. We would happily go out and buy said products were they available, but they aren't, and so we resort to downloading them from the internet. Regardless piracy is still wrong, but in this day and age, unavoidable. I reckon piracy should maybe be toned down a little bit, but things were more or less fine before people decided to fuck shit up.
 

Astoria

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Mortai Gravesend said:
Astoria said:
Thing is in that situation your oranges are wortless because the other guy is getting exactly the same oranges. A pirated version of something is never 100% as good as the copy for sale. Real copies don't lose their value because the pirated version just arn't as good.
Well sometimes I see people say that the pirated version is better. Like when it comes to obnoxious DRM that requires a constant connection to the Internet. Which, I imagine, could be annoying if it cut out at some point or you're playing somewhere where there's no Internet. In fact seen people argue that it would be okay to pirate a game if you got it to get around that, so there's even people who desire to get the pirated version over the regular thing.

I'm also rather doubtful that it's never 100% as good.
Perhapes not with games now that there's digital distribution but I mean more with music and movies and such. Even if the quality it the same as the real thing, you don't get the cover with it and other thing they put in with it like posters and such sometimes. I guess to some people that doesn't matter but to me I like having the actual physical copy of things.
 

Johnnydillinger

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You should make your orange buyers sign a pact that they really bought those oranges from you, and give them an activation key written on a piece of paper that they must read out loud on the street, if they want to eat the orange in public. Of course, they might just go home and eat it hiding from everyone, but that's just weird.

Another method is genetically mutating the skin of the orange so that the buyer is only able to peel it off when he/she shows the skin the pact you signed at the time of buying it, proving it's your orange. Then you can always add another mutation that will let them eat their orange only if they are calling you on the phone and stay "online", and if the battery runs out or they hang up the orange will disappear to the 9th dimension until they recall you.

This way you will make your past buyers come back, and definitely make sure your faithful costumers will remain faithful to you, by making their purchase easier and safer, right?

In all seriousness though, I'd second and improve the idea of demos altogether. Demos shouldn't be like only one or two levels long and without multiplayer. It can be deceptive in both ways. For example, the demo for Sanitarium suggested that it was an oldschool point-and-click horror game. But upon buying it, I realized that it's more like a game that messes with your mind, and only has that one creepy level altogether that was in the demo. Of course it had some creepy elements afterwards, but it wasn't trying to be a horroristic game like the demo said, but more of a David Lynch-like gaming experience. The demo targeted a completely different group of costumers than the ones that would have been really interested in it.

I think having longer demos than a few levels should really help the industry, and they should also include some multiplayer. Example: Call of Duty series. I'm not sure if their demos actually have something like this or not, but why not have a multiplayer in the demo that 1) lets only 4-8 people play in a map at maximum, 2) have only one level with full player count, or 3) give access to multiple or all levels with full player count and give a 2-3 hours time limit for the demo.

As for the singleplayer part, I'd say a drastic change should help a lot, like letting half of the SP campaing be played in the demo, or if it's a more time consuming game (i.e. Final Fantasy XIII or L.A. Noire) then let them play through roughly around the content of the first disc (thinking of Xbox measuring here). Just imagine if you played a demo like this for the first time for, say, Heavy Rain. Will you be more interested in buying it if you only played like one scene for each character, or if you played a good big chunk of the game which ended with a cliffhanger? A perfect example for this was Limbo.

Some good ideas for demos are also the Trymedia service and the demo for Microsoft's Midtown Madness 2. The first let you download any full games for free, letting you try them for an hour. An hour can make all the difference for some smaller or shorter games, but some should have even 5 hours to be able to judge it. That's literally the only problem with the service. The second had a trial that set you a timelimit again, but after each time limit you could play the game again, but the draw distance kept coming closer to your car, until it devoured the whole screen and all you saw was your car. Use this last mechanic and remove the trial time limit (and the fact that it only had one environment and one controllable car), and you got yourself a demo that will make some people want to play your game for more than just say, an hour or even half.

Anyway, that's the only constructive thing I could think of that would help bringing costumers to rather download a bigger part of the game from the developer/publisher, as it's not as risky as a pirate download of a full game, which may or may not contain some trojans. Of course it would not cause piracy cease to exist, but those who are helping themselves to games for free for the heck of it will always do so; not because of the money or the DRM, but because they are dicks and they feel better as pirates.
 

MorganL4

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Mortai Gravesend said:
MorganL4 said:
Mortai Gravesend said:
Um what you're describing is a monopoly on oranges. Just saying, people tend to not approve of monopolies for a reason, namely their utter control over the price of their product without competition.
yeah, but there is nothing stopping you from buying a seed planting it and nurturing it to grow, because that is what Guy X had to do to get his tree to grow... time effort and money, you can do the same, and if your oranges are just as good you can compete with Guy X ... it's not a monopoly unless Guy X buys every orchard and every orange seed in the country.
Look at how he laid out the scenario in the first post. He says he can create the scarcity. Presumably he is the only one with an orange tree or that wouldn't make sense. The whole scarcity argument wouldn't make sense from any angle if everyone had orange trees.
The oranges are supposed to represent video games, IE Bioware has a monopoly on KOTOR because they made KOTOR. But just because Bioware made KOTOR doesn't mean that Rockstar isn't allowed to make Grand Theft Auto V (obviously they can't make KOTOR, that would cause legal problems). Thus Guy X has a monopoly on HIS oranges that come from HIS tree, Guy Y can still go grow and sell his own without infringing on Guy X's rights...... the same way Bioware can make KOTOR and Rockstar can make GTA. the problem comes when you steal the oranges from either Guy X or Guy Y.
 

MorganL4

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Mortai Gravesend said:
MorganL4 said:
Mortai Gravesend said:
MorganL4 said:
Mortai Gravesend said:
Um what you're describing is a monopoly on oranges. Just saying, people tend to not approve of monopolies for a reason, namely their utter control over the price of their product without competition.
yeah, but there is nothing stopping you from buying a seed planting it and nurturing it to grow, because that is what Guy X had to do to get his tree to grow... time effort and money, you can do the same, and if your oranges are just as good you can compete with Guy X ... it's not a monopoly unless Guy X buys every orchard and every orange seed in the country.
Look at how he laid out the scenario in the first post. He says he can create the scarcity. Presumably he is the only one with an orange tree or that wouldn't make sense. The whole scarcity argument wouldn't make sense from any angle if everyone had orange trees.
The oranges are supposed to represent video games, IE Bioware has a monopoly on KOTOR because they made KOTOR. But just because Bioware made KOTOR doesn't mean that Rockstar isn't allowed to make Grand Theft Auto V (obviously they can't make KOTOR, that would cause legal problems). Thus Guy X has a monopoly on HIS oranges that come from HIS tree, Guy Y can still go grow and sell his own without infringing on Guy X's rights...... the same way Bioware can make KOTOR and Rockstar can make GTA. the problem comes when you steal the oranges from either Guy X or Guy Y.
The oranges can simply represent one video game, with other video games being represented by different fruit. Or maybe he is the industry. He said it outright, he controls the scarcity. It makes no sense to consider unspoken variables to be values that make his scenario not work when there are values that work perfectly well.
If you look at how the argument is layed out, he specifically states
Brawndo said:
But then one day some guy decides he's going to pick oranges from my tree at night and hand them out to the villagers for free. I haven't lost any oranges, it's true, but I'm still screwed out of the true value of my tree.

Why? Because the guy jacking my oranges is damaging my scarcity power.
Now if we apply your argument that Guy X is the industry and not a publisher as I have posited then that would imply that there is some grand ruler of the videogame industry gets to decide how many units of GTA IV were released how many units of Portal 2 how many units of KOTOR etc.... which we both know is not the case. And if as you said earlier oranges are one indavidual video game, sure thats possible but that doesn't stop Guy Y from growing a strawberry bush anymore than it stopped him in my earlier argument when he grew his own orange tree.
 

Talshere

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Thats a monopoly and its illegal in most 1st world countries. You can be shut down for trying to control markets like that. Massive fine have been given out in the UK to companies that group together in order to try and make a fixed price for something and not competing.