rojimboo: This is the anecdotal ethical pirate that apparently counters any loss in sales due to piracy. But it's just that, anecdotal. How many copies of games did the "ethical" pirate not buy, instead enjoy the game fully without paying a cent? Probably many many more than the few games they decided to buy years later at the bargain bin.
This is like saying 'how many copies of movie at a theater did you not do because you bought the DVD and watched it with 12 family members at home'. Or 'How many seat tickets weren't sold because some kids could peek from the side of the bleachers at a football game?'.
If it's not a physical product it has different qualities to it. It's not like buying hotdogs where '
how many hot dogs weren't sold because everyone took a picture on their phone and ate that instead of buying one'. At the end of the day nothing is physically stolen or deprived. It's a lot harder to make a case you stole someone's work, especially like the eagles band with millions of dollars in their pockets annoyed someone might be listening to Hotel California without having bought their record for it.
And naturally i
must be a so-called pirate (
and i don't own a boat and nowhere near a river or ocean...) because i listen to songs on the radio without ever paying. Or listening to them from youtube, or pandora, or a plethora of other sources. God forbid a song plays on the overhead while i'm in a store shopping! Oh my!
In business there's the 80/20 rule, and the square root rule. The 80/20 says 80% of the work is being done by 20% of the code/people. And the square root rule, says half the money you make is coming from the square root key number of people. For youtube videos 1/10th of the people will put an up/down vote, and 1/100 will likely do a comment reply. For entertainment I'd say it's probably the square root; something like every 1 million people, you will have 1,000 that are willing to pay for it. No amount of whining is probably going to change that, you just gotta make good content.
Course you also have companies like cable companies and Hollywood that want you to pay out the nose (
They want $100+/mo or more for hundreds of channels when you just want a couple specific channels) for their content rather than be like the food sector and squeak by at a few percent profit and let it run smoothly and happily.
I'll go back to what i said earlier. Either make copies abundant and cheap (
definitely cheap) where it's easier to just go buy the CD/DVD whatever, Or you gotta increase everyone's disposable income by a great amount so they can feel like they can justify letting said money go. I don't really see other options working. Though on youtube just making the content free certainly works too; At least until they decide to change that and pull the rug from under you.
Braggadar: You're lacking imagination if you think you have to go "old timey" to find a non-electronic hobby to do even in a small apartment. The only one shackling you to one type of entertaining pass-time is yourself. You don't *need* games or other entertainment media, you just think you do.
Electric hobbies while very common are fairly new, we're only talking the last 40 something years since computers have entered the mainstream and all that goes with it. Doing things more with our hands is probably better for us, be it making pottery or woodworking and making our own wooden bowls, doing our own clothes, etc.
Like sex, you DO need it, it's just not something you need to keep your heart going as in food/water/air. But it is a need, often to challenge your mind and keep yourself from going to utter boredom.
MarS666: This reward tier instantly absolves you of all guilt and includes the Thimbleweed Park game. All subsequent tiers also include guilt absolution.
Not sure what guilt you're talking about. Bjorn Lynne and others on mp3.com encouraged you to download, and the more downloads affected bonuses for them as well as discounts for buying CD's online.
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Hmmm a third option on things is to make content free. Consider, what if all movies/shows/games were free. I'm not saying no-one would get money, but the quality may be a bit lower. Collectively the MIAA and MPAA would have to get the stick out of their asses and leave people the hell alone, but SD quality content could be free. Collectively find a quality that's somewhere in the middle, fairly small and satisfies what most people may want. Especially with people using phones, a 640x360 video at 24fps 600Kbit video/audio combination and a 20min show could be a mere 50-60Mb per episode. That's a lot of content. But when you want the full HD or full quality, well then you gotta get the physical disc. I'd be surprised if most people weren't happy with that.
As for games, I think the textures they use are already too damn big. But lowering the models and textures of said games to SD quality (
runs well on 1024x768) would greatly reduce the size. Probably disable all the more fancy filters too so tons of games would take on a Xbox360 fixed lighting look.
Music, i'm seeing 128Kbit AAC on youtube for CD quality and it's 'medium', so that seems well enough.