I still see piracy as a victimless "crime". In that the amount of people doing it will never be enough to seriously effect a product. There aren't enough people smart enough to even figure out how to actually do internet piracy.

Piracy is always used as a scapegoat for bad business. But you know, I grew up as a pro-wrestling fan. The king "Sport" of all bs. I know what BS is. And the only games that have piracy touted as a killer are games with with insane budgets due to reasons beyond game making, games that were terrible and bombed, or games that would never sell to recoop their investments.

You almost never see companies with great sales mention it. And you never see them complaining about a game from five years ago being pirated. It's a scapegoat reasoning behind subpar sales in the here and now.

It's much easier to go "The game didn't sell because of piracy!" then "The game didn't sell because of poor design and conceptual work".

I doubt it's true, I remember days when noone had any legal games, and now it's common.

I don't understand the article at all.

Is this guy seriously suggesting that we abandon games to the creative commons? LOL. Enjoy your creative commons games! That's not to say they can't be good, but you are seriously damaging gaming if you do that.

I also just don't understand why you wouldn't pay for a game you wanted if it was dirt cheap like $1. Ok, it's no "work" to copy it, so what? You know what enabled you to MAKE that copy? Someone's hard work! So why would you be such a dirty scumbag of "copying" that work and not even reward the creators for their hard work? RIDICULOUS!

I'm sorry, I always prefer to go after the argument rather than the man... but if you can't be bothered to scrape up a single $1 USD to reward someone for a job well done then you are a cheap bastard with no moral compass and that's all there is to it.

I'm not very supportive of some of the crap that copyright holders pull, BUT I'll tell you what's funny. All these commies that argue that digital art has no value, they are always whining about the 'greed' of X developer or Y developer, but you see they are the true greedy ones, who expect others to provide them with entertainment free of cost. If you're such a 'sharing, caring' kind of guy, why don't you care about the game makers at all? THEY HAVE FAMILIES TO FEED TOO!

UGH. Sickens me.

I mean, from the time we have copyright law enforced :D

To play devil's advocate.

It doesn't bug you at all that the quality of modern games have decreased in contrast to their budgets? That you can go out and get a freeware game and have a better gaming experience then three games you paid 60+ each for?

I'm just saying. The idea that free games aren't as good as games you pay for is kind of bunk. They may not look as pretty, sure, but there's a lot of freeware games that put anything big companies have put out to shame.

The article has a point in a way.

What he means is: remove the big corporations who want to make money, and what will appear, is free products made by people who make them with love. And that has always happened - there's plenty of creative souls on the planet that just want to share their skills and talents.

The problem is: production values. You can always create free stuff but the standard of quality will usually be a lot lower - custom built engines, poor voice actors, less professional music, etc.

So basically, you can pay for high production values, or you can say "okay I don't care about those, I'll be glad to play a game that is a labour of love".

The Witcher 1&2 are a bit of both in a lot of ways and you pay to support them.

What freeware games? Freeware as in abandonware? Or freeware as in plain ol' freeware? How many freeware titles can you name me that actually have a big following.

Minecraft? A few online games with advertising support? What else? I'm sure there's quite a few, but really...

Compare whatever list you make to a list of priced games. Yeah, there you go.

If I said to you, "for the rest of your life, you can only play freeware games or priced games." Which would you pick? I suspect 99% of us would pick priced games.

The quality of a game is subjective, of this there can be no doubt. But there are certain tremendous benefits that priced games have that objectively give them a far greater potential.

It all comes down to the division of labor. Do you want your games being made only by those who work on them in their spare time? Or do you want games being made by professionals, people who have invested their life's work into their products? Do you want games that have a small staff of volunteers or games that have a staff that doesn't have to worry about where their next meal or their housing payment will come from?

It's true that if I slice my hand really badly, I could have a roommate patch it up for me when he gets home from working at the auto repair shop. I mean, he's read a couple books on medicine here and there. That said, I think I would prefer to go to the doctor, who devotes all of his working hours to studying Medicine.

Likewise, my roommate the mechanic will be the one I take my car to if it has problems, even if the doctor works on cars in his spare time.

Same is true in gaming as it is in every facet of life... specialization = potential.

The fundamental belief that these people seem to have is that, "if I can get it for free, why the hell not?" Incidentally, that is the same argument that thieves make. They just want to sugarcoat it.

Again, not supporting all of the copyright shenanigans, but you have to think about it. Is it really fair to not reimburse those who work M-F 9-5 to provide you with the games you want? Of course not. They just want to feel morally justified about ripping those people off.

If I knew how to make a game and also knew that I would be paid for it just once - by whoever it is that buys it first; after that, it's just copies - I probably wouldn't bother.

Greed is the nature of our species.

Yeah. wow. How do people expect others to do stuff like that while they are starving and homeless?

It would fit the stereotype of a starving artist, wouldn't it ;) ?
But yeah, it's sad that a lot of people think that paying a foundry worker is more obvious than paying a programmer.

You seriously need to play more freeware/indy games. The idea that one or two guys can't make better games then a game that costs 100 million to produce with multiple teams is crazy. Go learn how to play Roguelikes and you'll find limitless replayability in multiple styles for little if any cost. Or go pick up the multitude of indy games that provide far better gaming experiences for pure fun then anything generic shooter #248 made by EA or Activision could produce.

I'm going to put the kabosh on all this morality issue with piracy on these forums.

There is no moral high ground. Every single one of us are pirates. You may not pirate games or software but at some point in your life you have ripped off someone else to further your own desires. Why? Because we're human beings.

Let's say you work in an office. You see a really nice fancy pen left in a common area of the work place. You know it belongs to someone, and you estimate the pen is worth probably twenty dollars. You feel the desire to take the pen. Most, if not all of you, will secretly grab the pen. You won't go find the owner and ask where they got the pen. You'll take it outright, figuring "The owner must not care for it, having left it behind". If you do that, if you do not buy your own pen at whatever place sells it, you are a pirate. You have taken from someone else. Perhaps that pen business needs word of mouth to succeed. Not only have you taken someone' property but you also cost them direct business.

If your niece/daughter/son/whatever has ever come up to you with money, then forget the money, and you pocket it to "safeguard it", but will secretly spend the money on other things? You are a pirate

The very act of taking someone else's property or work for your own selfish greed is piracy. We have *ALL* done it. So sitting here trying to take some type of moral high ground when you probably swapped CD's or floppy's back in the early day of PC's just makes you a hypocrite. And again, I'm pretty sure most of you did that at some point which is again piracy.

I wonder if I read the article differently than most or whether many here disregarded the actual point it was trying to make. The way I see it, Falkvinge's argument is that copyright (i.e. not being allowed to copy for free, which he compared to not being allowed to drink water for free) is an absurd artificial constraint the world would be better off without.

I don't think the idea is without merit. Maybe we're too accustomed to copyright to imagine a world without it. We assume all too quickly that if copyright went away, new commercial games and movies could no longer be funded. Can we really know that? Plenty of people have toyed around with ideas for business schemes in a copyright-free world, but I rarely see them taken seriously.

One category of such ideas is essentially Vestin's "INSANE" idea of an international entertainment tax, possibly adjusted to be more democratic instead of comittee-based. It doesn't seem entirely insane to me. Monetary risk and reward for creators could be preserved by measuring the success of their products after release. It would also be nice if people could pick the companies or ventures their tax supports. This way a venture to make Civilization 9 or Daikatana 2 would begin only if enough people vote for it.

The biggest problem would be that some people consume more culture/entertainment than others i.e. we get back to the usual justification of taxation problem. Perhaps this could be solved by people voting to direct part of their entertainment tax to other matters and accept slightly less commercial entertainment being produced as a consequence.

Getting somewhat off topic here, wouldn't it be nice and democratic if each of us could directly vote how, say, 30% of our taxes would be used. We'd still be obligated to contribute that tax portion to "the common good", but we'd have more of a say in what sort of common good we support.

Does anyone know if a thorough and more or less unbiased analysis or critique of copyright-free economics exists somewhere?

QUOTE:
"You seriously need to play more freeware/indy games. The idea that one or two guys can't make better games then a game that costs 100 million to produce with multiple teams is crazy. Go learn how to play Roguelikes and you'll find limitless replayability in multiple styles for little if any cost. Or go pick up the multitude of indy games that provide far better gaming experiences for pure fun then anything generic shooter #248 made by EA or Activision could produce."

I never said that one *couldn't* make a free game that's better than a game that charges. It is true nevertheless that a game that is heavily invested in (talent, manpower) has much higher potential for quality and depth. That's all.

That's really not even debatable. If it was, then why wouldn't the freeware guys just charge for all their games and make a killing off of it? (No budget + charging = huge profits.)

Whether you like "Activision Game X" or not is none of my concern. If you don't like it, don't buy it. But why would we even need to have this debate if you don't like it? All you would need to do is not pirate a game you hate. How hard is that?

QUOTE:
[i]"I'm going to put the kabosh on all this morality issue with piracy on these forums.

There is no moral high ground. Every single one of us are pirates. You may not pirate games or software but at some point in your life you have ripped off someone else to further your own desires. Why? Because we're human beings."[/i]

Yeah, I downloaded a bunch of songs from Napster when I was a kid. Doesn't make it right. Doesn't mean I can't be sorry for that now.

You know what else? I stole a few dollars from my mom's purse when I was 10 to buy comic books. Does that mean I can't condemn a car thief or a bank robber? Come on, let's be serious.

What the hell kind of excuse is "we're human beings?" Human beings don't just engage in thievery, they can also be quite generous. Look at this forum if you need proof. How many game giveaways can you find on the first 5 pages?

You have a choice. *IF* you have chosen piracy over generosity then that's your own business. Don't mistake your choice for those of everyone else. It's one thing for you to pirate, but it's even more offensive to try to justify your behavior by labeling everyone else pirates. That's really messed up.

QUOTE:
[i]"Let's say you work in an office. You see a really nice fancy pen left in a common area of the work place. You know it belongs to someone, and you estimate the pen is worth probably twenty dollars. You feel the desire to take the pen. Most, if not all of you, will secretly grab the pen. You won't go find the owner and ask where they got the pen. You'll take it outright, figuring "The owner must not care for it, having left it behind". If you do that, if you do not buy your own pen at whatever place sells it, you are a pirate. You have taken from someone else. Perhaps that pen business needs word of mouth to succeed. Not only have you taken someone' property but you also cost them direct business."
[/i]

Uhhh... all of us? No. I'm not stealing someone's pen for $20. I'll just buy a bic or borrow a pen or whatever. Even if you were under the FALSE impression that "everyone has a price", $20 is like 2 hours worth of minimum wage work. The fact that your price would be that low is just weird.... I'm glad I don't work with you.

QUOTE:
"If your niece/daughter/son/whatever has ever come up to you with money, then forget the money, and you pocket it to "safeguard it", but will secretly spend the money on other things? You are a pirate."

Daughter/son?

Now you're stealing from KIDS, too? Do you have any decency at all?

QUOTE:
"The very act of taking someone else's property or work for your own selfish greed is piracy. We have *ALL* done it. So sitting here trying to take some type of moral high ground when you probably swapped CD's or floppy's back in the early day of PC's just makes you a hypocrite. And again, I'm pretty sure most of you did that at some point which is again piracy."

This sorta reminds me of an argument that a weird evangelical preacher makes all the time. It's basically, "once you steal, you're a thief forever." Uh, no, of course that's not true. You have a choice - every time you decide to steal your co-worker's pen, you're becoming a thief all over again. Every time you decide to steal your son's money, you're becoming a thief all over again, and yes, every time you decide to pirate, you're become a pirate all over again.

That's not to mention the fact that, again, you can condemn something even if you have done it. There's nothing to stop you from saying it's wrong. Even if you keep doing it, that doesn't mean you can't say it's wrong - it just makes you a hypocrite, that's all.

But either way, I beg to differ with your assessment of this community: believe it or not, I expect that the overwhelming majority of us DO NOT steal from our co-workers or take money from children. GOGers, what say you?

Skimmed the article, didn't read any of the posts.

It was a pretty long piece of bs.