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Piracy Discussion


nuget102

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I still have yet to see you reply to my point that servers cost to keep things on, and that companies spend valuable time and resources giving customer service to pirates. Here's a solid, factual example of both:

The cracked version of Minecraft auto updated from Mojangs servers. This directly cost them money.

People come here to the PZ forums and waste MY time getting tech support when they haven't even paid for the game. TIS doesn't pay me, but many companies do have paid tech support.

You haven't given a legitimate response to either of these points.

More importantly, no one who pirates a game is qualified to decide whether its costing the drvs money. You don't know who's paying for what costs.


Furthermore, if piracy isn't a problem, then everyone should pirate everything. Then we wouldn't have any products, and we don't want that. You're trying to have your cake and eat it, too. Even if piracy doesn't directly cost them money, if everyone pirated every game the market would crash. This undeniably makes piracy both wrong and bad for the industry.

And again, I have real world facts backing up my claim that were piracy not to be an option, devs would get more sales. People I know who used to buy games they were unsure about now pirate them instead. That's a solid unadulterated fact.

And the reality is, the vast majority of people pirate out of greed, nothing else.

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I'll put this here for reference because it's now behind several fabulous walls of text. :lol:
 

Say 500 people buy a game and 500 people pirate it. Then 250 of the pirates decide they like the game and buy it. The publisher has sold 750 copies, but because 500 pirated copies were downloaded it looks like there were 500 players who didn't buy the game and it could have made up to 1250 sales.




 

Do get this - I was responding to a guy who made a very flawed post about why piracy is bad for the Developer, when all he pointed in the example was Developer getting sad for seeing 500 pirate downloads. Although he did wrote : "let's say even 250 out of those 500 people liked the game and bought it", and I tried to (with his own logical path) prove him wrong. I did not get numbers out of my head, I did not "assume" that 250 bought the game, I even put 'what-ifs' in brackets to illustrate the way OP was spreading his point around.


The numbers aren't important, they're arbitrary figures meant to ilustrate a point. It's an oversimplified version of this argument:

If a game is profitable, publishers want to invest more in that game.  If it is less profitable they may choose a safer investment for their money.  A team of developers might come up with a fun, original game and sucessfully develop and release it.  Because the product is new and unknown, people are going to be more hesitant to lay down their money.  Lots of people will pirate it: because they can, because they can't afford it, because they want to try it first, whatever the reason.  All that piracy is causing the game to be (or appear to be) less profiatble, all because the pirates had the option to play the game for free instead of taking a chance with their money.
 
When a game publisher looks at that lack of profit they'll know they could be getting more value for their money with something else.  After all, why fund an indie game that might fail when you could just pour money into another Call of Duty?  You don't have to waste money developing a new game engine.  It has an existing fanbase which is both massive and dedicated.  Much of its profit comes from console sales, which are much harder to pirate.  Best of all?  The game's selling point is the multiplayer, which flat out will not work with a pirated copy.  Even if pirates do steal the game they can't get the full enjoyment out of it unless they pay.
 
When a publisher sees a game being pirated they see a risk of loss.  This causes them to take less chances on games that don't have some sort of guarenteed profit involved.  Creative and original ideas get scrapped in favor of making the same game as last year.  That's how piracy hurts game developers without ever costing them a cent.



And it's not about the publisher's hurt feelings, it's about the publisher having a way to measure how many more people were interested in the game - interested enough to illegally download the full version, not click a trailer or try a demo - above and beyond the actual sales figures. That appears to be a failure to sell on the part of the game and makes it look like a bad investment.

I'll admit that the argument is largely based on speculation but that doesn't make it necessarily unsound. If you can find flaw in my reasoning that would be another matter, but right now you seem to arguing that what I think can't be true because that's what you think.

Maybe it's the language barrier.
 

Piracy still exists because people have reasons to do it. Those who do not pirate just either don't have them and/or aren't looking for one. Shall we we judge this way, Crazy's example would not magically turn "pirates" into "legitimate customers". You look for a reason to pirate because you don't want to spend money on product. Shall Piracy not exist, you wouldn't want to spend money on that product any more than you already are. So in the end, you are most likely ending up never buying that product.
 
That was everything I was trying to point out in that rummage.


If piracy didn't exist, I can see two very basic groups of people emerging from pirate culture:

1) Those who have little interest in the game or were otherwise never going to buy it - for whatever the reason, poverty or apathy - but pirated because it was free and convienent.
2) Those who are interested in the game, want to play it and can afford it but pirated because it was free and convienent.

If piracy weren't an option, the people in group 1 don't buy the game because they were never going to anyway. However, the people in group 2 are now faced with a choice: pay for the game or don't play it. Given this choice, it's reasonable to assume that at least some of them will opt to take a chance with their money and buy the game.  It's certainly more reasonable than assuming they will all decide "oh well, if it's not free I don't want it" and give up.  They may end up unhappy with what they got - I've certainly felt burned in the past - but they paid for it regardless.
 
Again, this argument is somewhat speculative.  In this case, however, we can look at buying trends in an era before the advent of internet piracy.  This fulfils the conditions of your example - piracy didn't exist - and shows that people are indeed willing to part with their money based on a chance that a game might be good.

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@ Sev :

 

1st . - Sev, why does almost each one of your replies look defensive now? All I ever told you that because of English not being my first language I can't deliver my thoughts in text on the go as I can do on Russian, so sometimes my thoughts can appear mixed. I am not pressuring you into my point of view, yet you make me look like a bad man by grasping on each of my word, twisting it around and shoving it straight back at my face, as if all of my accusations were personal and offensive.

 

It is as hard for me to write thoughtful replies as it is for the writer who spent merely 3-4 years learning alternative language. He might be good at making as less mistakes - Both grammatical and punctuational - as possible, but you can't deny that he isn't able to fully express himself the same way he could in his native language. Now, like in my case, he may try, but again, different languages have different punctuation rules, and if you spend enough time thinking of whether or not you placed that particular comma somewhere in the way it was supposed to be, you would have much less space for a thoughtful approach at delivering your point.

 

2nd. - Can you for the love of GOD stop looking for mistake in each sentence that I've written to Crazy? I said it already : It was a rather sarcastic counter-example about why his point was flawed. I am literally getting tired having to defend each one of my words from that reply, as it wasn't intended to be as serious as you make it look like in the first place. To top it, I have to defend my DEFENSE of the sarcastic reply.

 

 

LeoIvanov, on 02 Sept 2013 - 9:21 PM, said:snapback.png

I just can't stop getting amazed how the anti-pirate people started off with the facts and ended up talking about feelings of people and how they react to the piracy, instead of taking an actual review of financial graphs.

 

 

We can argue tirelessly over hours and days and weeks about how unfair it is to pirate a game and how a developer feels about it, but in the end, I'd rather have a discussion that is more based on FACTS, rather than assumptions and "what if"s. 

 

 

 

There's no misunderstanding here, and thankfully this time I scarcely need to explain why. If you were simply bad at English, that is no real impediment to constructive debate - Everyone else might have some trouble understanding what you were trying to say, but we would understand your reasons for it once we figured how to work through the language barrier.

 

It's a different matter entirely when you're just being intellectually dishonest.

 

 

 
People started off by saying that Pirating hurts developers financially. Now that the point of that not being the case was shown, you suddenly bring in the term that is directed at what the developer feels in that situation. You can't just start off with a + b = c, then bring d in that topic (making it ad + b = c) and continue on as if the other side was arguing against "ad" all along. Of course there is the case where it could be d + b = c, I am not denying it. It is just that I have to defend against 1 point, and am forced to bring my thoughts on the second one.
 
It is rather complicated.

 

@Rath

 

I can see where you are getting at. Also, you can see who I am having to argue against ( I did have an intention of avoiding this topic, but oh well >_>) so I think it should be acceptable for me to miss one of your replies or forgetting to answer it/ignoring it because I'm emotionally exhausted from amount of thoughts I have to put in sort of replies like above.

 

I have never actually ran into the person who directly asked questions regarding the game to the game developer, without having bought the game, so it is an interesting point to look at. I've always followed a kind of policy "If the game isn't bought legally, don't bitch about it's flaws" I ended up spitting and yelling when I first got my hands on Origin's Dead Space 3, because of how godly awful Origin was. I guess that depends on the individual's personality regarding if they get so cocky they'd go and ask support about the game they never really bought, and even straight up complaint about it.

 

As for the second one, I don't think there's ever a possible way for you to know if the guy who asks for support have actually bought the game or just pirated it's latest version. Unless you put DRM all over the forums and only allow users who have bought the game to be registered. Origin has that "support" thing for the games on their system. They can run tests to see if the game is actually bought. So does Steam. I think it isn't a problem to distinguish a cracked copy from the original for companies like these. But then again, it all depends on how greedy the person is, but, unfortunately, douchebags exist. I can't be sure, however, as to how things go from there, as I haven't researched that side of arguement.

 

Edit : GOD DAMN IT CRAZYEYES NOW HAVE POSTED TOO, I'M SO DONE.

 

Announcement : To avoid further stressing out I am ending my debate here, so not to drive myself to the point of frustration. Conclusions : Pirating, there is no justification for it. It is morally wrong to do it, and it is up to what kind of person you want to be. All I ever wanted to say that pirating shouldn't be considered as strong as 'theft' or 'robbery', but it seems like the amount of defensive replies (kind of insulting in some way, too) against my rather failing attempt at spicing things up with sarcasm has driven me to the point of having to stress myself out writing the message, which I can spend on relieving the said stress by playing the games instead. And to anyone who's wondering, here is my steam library, if you consider me as some pirating greedy asshole who tries to search for justification for what I'm doing :

 

lib2_zps5b1e56f9.png lib1_zps115d86b7.png

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No one's getting defensive here but you. My arguments have remained mostly the same throughout the entire discussion, while you've backtracked all the way from "My arguments are the correct one, because they're the facts" to holing up in the fortress of "You just didn't understand me, because I have trouble communicating in English. Also, I was just being sarcastic!". Your earlier posts prove that your English might be rough but still decently fluent. Once again, your grasp of the language is obviously not the problem here.

 

As for getting personal - Let's see, you start with snide jabs at me for "repetitive arguments", implying that arguments that I specifically brought to the table are irrelevant and "non - facts". Only after I challenge you to justify why you're making these statements do you backtrack again to claiming that you agreed all along that fair play is a fact to be considered. I call you out on your flip - flopping and you turn to making yet more snarky remarks to Rathlord about me:

 

 

 

I can see where you are getting at. Also, you can see who I am having to argue against ( I did have an intention of avoiding this topic, but oh well >_>) 

 

You are in a poor position to claim that you are the victim here, given your behavior throughout the discussion.

 

(Also, you apparently have no problem showcasing snide, but quite conveniently claim that your "sarcasm" was merely misunderstood)

 

People started off by saying that Pirating hurts developers financially. 

 

No one actually started off by saying that. Finances and the whole tired argument of "Potential profits" were first brought up by people trying to justify piracy, and they have been the main ones wielding it since. Nice straw man to end the whole self - victimization farce, though!

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