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[PATV] Tuesday, August 2, 2011 - Extra Credits Season 1, Ep. 26: Piracy
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
This week, we dive headfirst into the controversies of video game piracy.
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"In a decade, when we can count on 90% of our customers having a constant internet connection, we'll be able to provide functional, non-intrusive DRM by just doing occasional check ins with our servers."
:rotate:
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Out of the game industry, check the anime translations.
Why would an anime fan pay for a poor translation if he can get a good translation for free? I'd prefer to see the free translation and send money directly to the maker of the anime (bypassing the translators). I don't want to pay (equivalent money) 50$ for an anime in which 30$ goes to the translators and 20$ goes to the anime maker if the translation is worse than the free translation! I'd prefer to send 20$ to the maker and get the free translation out there! Unfortunately, I can't.
Out of the game industry, check the anime translations.
Why would an anime fan pay for a poor translation if he can get a good translation for free? I'd prefer to see the free translation and send money directly to the maker of the anime (bypassing the translators). I don't want to pay (equivalent money) 50$ for an anime in which 30$ goes to the translators and 20$ goes to the anime maker if the translation is worse than the free translation! I'd prefer to send 20$ to the maker and get the free translation out there! Unfortunatly, I can't.
Example, there's one game I got that was dubious and the demo didn't show much about how good/bad it is. I then got the game though a torrent. In the end, I really loved the game so I ended up by buying it and keeping it in my collection.
Also you're argument about "If you have enough to buy the gaming machine, you can buy the games is not valid." I need a computer for my school stuff in college but I have NO money and had to save for a while and then borrow or get money gifted to me to afford my computer. I even had to spend a month only eating ramen and dollar menu to offset the costs so that argument is moot
I have to agree with this 100% There are plenty of good free games out there, there's really no need to steal games using bittorrent. I've been playing an F2P MMO for 4 years and never spent a penny on it. I have volunteered to work on their forum for 4 years though just to give something back. Point is that not having money is no excuse.
@greymorality - I can see where you're coming from, I was in your shoes a little more than 6 years ago, this is when I downloaded World in Conflict for example. I didn't have much money, I was in school, I was hardly eating and able to afford rent, most of my money went to art supplies and transit passes. But I missed out on a lot of really cool games at the time. Which in the end was a good thing, I would have slacked a lot in school if I hadn't just bit the bullet and waited til the end of the school semester. There was much gaming to be had once I started working for the summer, most money goes to saving, the rest to me, so other than the standard enjoying summertime I spent some of my free time catching up, and it was great! It does suck when all the best games seem to come out right at the beginning of the semester, and around Christmas, but there are solutions to doing it the right way. It can be tough, I understand that all to well, but I found it to be worth it. So the years that followed I did it that way. It also means you're not going to starve or have other issues like late rent and late school assignments.
On the flipside, though, I have not included the times when I have bought a game only to find that wading through DRM is like climbing a fence made entirely of barbed wire and so pirated the game after buying it legitimately. Since rebuilding my PC last year, I've abandoned most of those games though because getting them again feels like a waste of bandwidth, so I can't really find any examples in my current collection, but I have to say it feels like I've been cheated when I buy a game legitimately and it tells me I stole the game and doesn't let me play, and at times I have felt like abandoning the pursuit altogether and just giving in to the 'psst...c'mere...I have this great game for free' crowd.
I don't know, I may be way off base in thinking this is how companies in the gaming industry feel. It just aggravates me every time I see someone from the industry say something to the effect of, "These various DRM ideas are designed to drive up sales of our game!"
I like the suggestions made in this video for how to deal with piracy (good demo, to see if we want to bother with the game). Make a really good game and it will probably sell well. Make a really bad game. Don't expect people to buy it.
If a game is decent, I will buy it and keep it in my collection and even go so far as to advertise how much fun I had with it. Games I need to have on day one I will get from somewhere until the price drops, because honestly - $$ is not a luxury resource for me.
Also I wont buy another console just so I can play a game. Why not make it compatible with existing consoles? And why bury old games? I have a deep love for a few really retro games but with all the 'new' technology they are becoming exceedingly difficult to play on the new machines.
If games were reasonably priced ($15-$60), were multi platform/(machines backwards compatible) and not required to use some online feature to activate, it would for me make it more viable to purchase them outright. Next thing is- make it available where I live. Why do I need to wait for it to come out here if it's out somewhere else. And lastly, don't censor or change the original work. Nothing is more annoying to me than playing a game that has a different feel to it than another place's version.
I love Borderlands and currently i'm enjoying the second one. When the first one came out I was so excited, I built a new computer to play on max graphics, I even pre-ordered the game.(something I never do). Foolishly I bought the hard copy of the game rather than a steam download. 2K in their infinite wisdom put a DRM into the hard copy version requiring you to have the original disc in the tray. I've been a PC gamer for ages so I remember having to keep a floppy disc in the tray for games, and needing to keep cds in the tray for multi-disc games, figuring it was an issue of data not being copied from the disc to HDD I copied the disc myself and saved it, told the game where to look for it. All that got me was a message "Please insert the original copy of the disc into the tray." so OK my first idea didn't work. After that I try copying and burning the disc. Making both a physical copy burnt and an iso run on a virtual disc drive. Both attempts met the same error message. Out of legal options for something that should have never been a problem I torrented a cracked .exe. After playing with the pirated version for a while it occurred to me 2K needs to know how bad this is, so I sent them an e-mail explaining that the DRM on Borderlands literally did nothing other than make the pirated version of the game more convenient. I saw no response.
also, I have since purchased games and pirated them later since for similar reasons.(bugs fixed...etc)
I'd also like to add a bit of advice to the industry free of charge: if you make it convenient to obtain a legal copy of your game, I have a feeling most people will pay for it rather than go out of their way to pirate it. The Xbox arcade and Steam are great examples of this, and I'm sure games on there are not pirated as much as games that you can only get by going to Gamestop.
Its just a thought.
It's just nice to know that I'm not the only one out there that believes you should pay IF YOU CAN (I enjoy a few games made by SSI acutally). But just cause you don't work or "I have kids, I can't afford games, so I steal" isn't a reason. If you can spend the time finding a torrent, making sure it's not a virus, finding a work around for a system or whatever else ... you could prolly be submitting an application or putting some time in at Taco Bell. /rant.
Thanks for at least talking about it. Really enjoying all your episodes and hoping for some change.
You can indulge companies fantasies that this is a viable model if you like, but that's really all you're doing.
I live in South America, Brazil specifically, and here they pirate a sh*t ton of media, from movies, books and specially games. This personally saddens me because I know people are not making the money they are supposed to with the sales (I'm a software dev looking into getting in this industry and yes I want a paycheck) and people that want to buy a game have to resort to pirated games because they cannot afford to get games through the real means, i.e the store. Let me tell you, Brazilians love to play games, it is a big market that believe it or not is overlooked. In 2012, Steam started selling games here for reasonable price,which is great. Blizzard brought its games to the country, in the native language, with a pay system affordable to the people and guess what... they are raking in the moolah. I wish more companies would start doing the same thing: checking out the market, finding ways to sell their products in a more affordable price and then possibly piracy would be reduced greatly here.
The rub is, I could buy a game for $60, day one, activate it in the morning, and then that afternoon, that copy is worth zero dollars. No right to resale, no true ownership, even if I have a physical copy, held in my hand, it's now worthless, tied to my steam account forever. Steam is the best comprimise of DRM at this point, and even then it's DRM for the sake of DRM, not because it's necessary. I put up with steam's DRM so I can access it's cool features, and becasue it's easier than piracy. I get a game for cheap, can play on tv, laptop, desk, never have to copy saves, even project shield looks cool so I could play borderlands on the toilet! I love steam as a service and tolerate it's DRM because it's at least done tolerably.
The problem is as a consumer, this industry doesn't believe I have any rights, including right to resale, preferring me to simply 'own a license', legal mumbo jumbo to skirt the law. As for the right thing, you can say the devs don't get paid enough for their skills, that's their fault, notmine, if they can't negotiate a decent salary, not my problem. The Justin Rubin's of the world pressed this issue long ago, and it fell on the deaf ears of underpaid developers doing a great job everywhere. As for the ethics, publishers are huge corporations who think their customers akin to walking wallets, you can argue ethics all you want, they just want to get as much money out of you as possible, hence the rise of $5 skins that got chopped out of the game for day 1 DLC.
Sure used games are a problem, but the publishers aren't moving things forward, I mean steam has shown that with regular, heavy discounting you move volume and make more money. Not only that, but a baseline $60 price lets the monster publishers make huge amounts of money, but also hurts the industry. Take spec ops, awesome game, it got tacked on multiplayer, why? So the game would appear to have value to all the people surveyed who answered yes to multiplayer being a consideration of value. You know what else would have worked? Cutting it, selling it for $30, single player only, i'd have been much more inclined to pick it up day one, instead of waiting until it was $7.50 6 months later.
It's not just that, it's the culture of reviews we have, metacritic started with videogames, and videogames are still the most popular category on it. If you're selling a $60 item, i'm more inclined to want to know if it's worth my time than if it's a $10 item. $60 might not be a lot of money to me, but to the up and coming gamers, the teenagers who work 10 hours a week part time between school and extra-curricular activities, $60 is a lot of money. Games cost $60 back in the NES days, when you had to make a game, put it on a cartridge, which cost about 20% of that, give everyone their cut, not much left over.
Games still cost $60, and sure the costs have gone up, but there's 150 million ish current gen consoles knocking about, plus another 100 million wii's, and the hundreds of millions of PC's. Point is, there's more gamers than ever, of more ages, and yet games have not declined in 'launch day' cost. Games get discounted more rapidly, (Borderlands 2, I bought 2 weeks ago, GMG, $24, less than 3 month old game!) and unless they're a 'hit', make more money in their long sales tail than their launch period (Bastion's launch day is their 5th highest day in terms of profit for example). If I'm going to hand over my right to resale, I just want a price that reflects that reality, and $60 is not that price.
The rub is, I could buy a game for $60, day one, activate it in the morning, and then that afternoon, that copy is worth zero dollars. No right to resale, no true ownership, even if I have a physical copy, held in my hand, it's now worthless, tied to my steam account forever. Steam is the best comprimise of DRM at this point, and even then it's DRM for the sake of DRM, not because it's necessary. I put up with steam's DRM so I can access it's cool features, and becasue it's easier than piracy. I get a game for cheap, can play on tv, laptop, desk, never have to copy saves, even project shield looks cool so I could play borderlands on the toilet! I love steam as a service and tolerate it's DRM because it's at least done tolerably.
The problem is as a consumer, this industry doesn't believe I have any rights, including right to resale, preferring me to simply 'own a license', legal mumbo jumbo to skirt the law. As for the right thing, you can say the devs don't get paid enough for their skills, that's their fault, notmine, if they can't negotiate a decent salary, not my problem. The Justin Rubin's of the world pressed this issue long ago, and it fell on the deaf ears of underpaid developers doing a great job everywhere. As for the ethics, publishers are huge corporations who think their customers akin to walking wallets, you can argue ethics all you want, they just want to get as much money out of you as possible, hence the rise of $5 skins that got chopped out of the game for day 1 DLC.
Sure used games are a problem, but the publishers aren't moving things forward, I mean steam has shown that with regular, heavy discounting you move volume and make more money. Not only that, but a baseline $60 price lets the monster publishers make huge amounts of money, but also hurts the industry. Take spec ops, awesome game, it got tacked on multiplayer, why? So the game would appear to have value to all the people surveyed who answered yes to multiplayer being a consideration of value. You know what else would have worked? Cutting it, selling it for $30, single player only, i'd have been much more inclined to pick it up day one, instead of waiting until it was $7.50 6 months later.
It's not just that, it's the culture of reviews we have, metacritic started with videogames, and videogames are still the most popular category on it. If you're selling a $60 item, i'm more inclined to want to know if it's worth my time than if it's a $10 item. $60 might not be a lot of money to me, but to the up and coming gamers, the teenagers who work 10 hours a week part time between school and extra-curricular activities, $60 is a lot of money. Games cost $60 back in the NES days, when you had to make a game, put it on a cartridge, which cost about 20% of that, give everyone their cut, not much left over.
Games still cost $60, and sure the costs have gone up, but there's 150 million ish current gen consoles knocking about, plus another 100 million wii's, and the hundreds of millions of PC's. Point is, there's more gamers than ever, of more ages, and yet games have not declined in 'launch day' cost. Games get discounted more rapidly, (Borderlands 2, I bought 2 weeks ago, GMG, $24, less than 3 month old game!) and unless they're a 'hit', make more money in their long sales tail than their launch period (Bastion's launch day is their 5th highest day in terms of profit for example). If I'm going to hand over my right to resale, I just want a price that reflects that reality, and $60 is not that price.
I stole Civilization IV and played the EVER LOVING SHIT OUT OF THAT GAME. I paid for the Warlords expansion but again pirated the Beyond the Sword one. This is especially unfair of me since I've never been aware of Sid doing anything to even discourage piracy, rather seeming to trust in my better nature.
I haven't made amends, except that I did purchase a legit copy of Civ V and G+K for super-effing-cheap because, for some reason I totally cannot relate to, no one seems to like it. But, somehow, I think that weighed heavily on my conscience none the less. I've stopped pirating music entirely. Movies and TV shows, I'm not quite so good about, since I stream them on sites that aren't kicking anything back to the industry. I think I have a much easier time justifying this based on a) so much of it I would feel ripped off if I had paid, literally, anything for b) I have netflixs, if it's not on there and you want to be paid for it, get it on there (I would totally pay more for more quality stuff instead of pages of filler and sitcoms) c) anime is absurdly expensive. Those are justifications, yes but none the less I still don't 'feel bad' so my behavior probably won't change.
Music's begun to adapt, with the rise of Pandora, Amazon MP3 and iTunes, there's really not much excuse to steal it and it's just easier not having to sort through junk, poor quality and potentially malicious software to get it, all with that unlikely but still very real potential of getting a very expensive letter in the mail.
The Movie industry is still ass-backwards. The studios really just need to figure out that the market has changed drastically and there's still no shortage of profit to be made, but they'll need to adapt to the market, instead of trying to press legislation to force the market to adapt to it.
Games though? Really, we got no excuse guys. We can all basically count on anything being at least 50% off on Steam in the next 6 months and I think most of us know where to find a GameStop or local game reseller and I really doubt you've played though every decent game for every system you own. There's mad free games out there online. If you can't afford to spend 50 to 70 on a new game at release, what you really mean is that you have other (probably entirely valid) priorities. You pay for those things first because you need them, to turn around and steal something and say it's okay because you don't need it is absurd. If you don't need it, wait until you can afford it.
I've been unemployed for 9 months and, when I absolutely have to get a particular game, I find a way to make it happen. But otherwise, I have a drawer full of games I've hardly played and still more I could maybe play again or play differently or explore more fully. I doubt I'm the only one here that can say that.
After being unemployed for almost three years now, it has just really become tiresome to see some epic and memorable games just fly right by me. I still have never played Skyrim, Bioshock, Deadspace, Farcry 3, XCOM: Enemy Unkown, Dishonored, Guild Wars 2, Batman: Arkham Asylum, or basically any other must play title from the past three years.
I love my free to play games and I still have plenty of old games kicking around in my Steam library that I play all the time, but it just gets old after a while constantly being out of the loop when it comes to awesome, new titles.
Y'know, Bioshock: Infinite just came out and I wanna play it so bad but I gotta just grind my teeth and listen as everyone talks about how awesome it is and how I should have already played it because of how epicly good it is. But I'm stuck playing League of Legends and Air Mech for the ten billionth time instead x_x
The solution to your problem is time. When you wait so the game isn't brand new anymore the price falls, inevitably. You don't need to buy the games new to experience them, sure you don't get that shiny new experience but that (from my own experiences) is actually a better experience because you're not swallowed up by the rapidly moving current of "new game" it is.
If you wait, you also get a better gaming experience. All the patches are generally finished, and the bugs are mostly gone from the gaming experience.
Recently I've actually purposefully not purchased any new games so I could go try all the games I missed, at an extremely discounted price. Unfortunately I had to buy some of these games from gamestop, Ebay or Amazon so the publishers didn't get any cut of it.
If I had one complaint this would be it. Even if I'm purchasing a game after it's been out for a while, the publishers still deserve a cut, and I know from those sources they don't...I prefer to wait as long as I have to, to purchase games from Steam so the people who really deserve my money get it, not Gamestop who purposefully rips the publishers off so they can make more money.
The solution to your problem is time. When you wait so the game isn't brand new anymore the price falls, inevitably. You don't need to buy the games new to experience them, sure you don't get that shiny new experience but that (from my own experiences) is actually a better experience because you're not swallowed up by the rapidly moving current of "new game"-itis.
If you wait, you also get a better gaming experience. All the patches are generally finished, and the bugs are mostly gone from the gaming experience.
Recently I've actually purposefully not purchased any new games so I could go try all the games I missed, at an extremely discounted price. Unfortunately I had to buy some of these games from gamestop, Ebay or Amazon so the publishers didn't get any cut of it.
If I had one complaint this would be it. Even if I'm purchasing a game after it's been out for a while, the publishers still deserve a cut, and I know from those sources they don't...I prefer to wait as long as I have to, to purchase games from Steam so the people who really deserve my money get it, not Gamestop who purposefully rips the publishers off so they can make more money.
@Tarrker
SteamSales.
Steamcards from gameship. Tbis way, you wouldn't get in the trap of spensing your food money.