Just a quickie, something I remembered regarding the price discussion we also had. I wrote a lot more about my opinions on high development costs and the failing business model for AAA titles (apparently only the top 10% of PS3 and X360 games even return a profit), and how the high prices it leads to are one of the major other reasons on why the games don't sell anymore. Console titles are very expensive; the $40 PC game example brought up, I live in a high income country and that's still 2-3x the price a movie theatre ticket or a meal. It might not sound like much of a difference considering how long you play a game, but it is enough to make it that much harder for people to make a purchase decision. There are no considerable numbers of spontaneous purchases at these prices. People want to be really sure that they get the best game they can for so much money, hence the sales focus on the top 10% most hyped games.

The reason why I came back to this now is because I read that regardless of platforms or types of games, $5 is said to be the price people feel most comfortable paying for a game. For indie developers, it is the price that apparently yields the best revenue, and even on Steam the majority of sales are when the per-game price is around $5. The important detail: in online distribution, the amount that developers make from that $5 sale is about equal to what they make from a $50 or $100 retail sale.
(Source)

The big publishers have reached a dead end.

Farcry 2
Dawn of Discovery
The Witcher
Quake 4
STALKER: SoC
Alpha Protocol.

There are more, those are just off the top of my head. If every developer/publisher patched out the DRM eventually like in these titles I would never really complain about DRM.

If you ever have a significantly profitable idea you will change your mind quickly.

Yeah, I agree with most of what you argue. I admit that publishers are a culprit. My main point was that the pirates themselves are not free of blame. Honestly, I have no idea how to solve the DRM mess as it stands now. Thanks for your replies, it was interesting to see your counterpoints.

Oh yeah, I did just pick your post out at random to reply to because you left easy-to-reply-to bullet points. I skimmed everyone's and just lumped it all into one reply. Sorry if I mischaracterized you in my replies at all.

I sleep very well actually. I have a nice house (in a nice neighborhood), a nice car, and good health insurance. I also retired at 30 (5 years ago) and probably won't have to work another day in my life. All because I have investments in companies such as Activision and Electronic Arts (although, that one has been sold). Living off the blood, sweat, and tears of the proletariat is actually quite lucrative; I highly recommend it!

Hahahahaha, yeah, I'm done with this topic. I was waiting for this nonsense. Taking something that does not legally belong to you is the DEFINITION of stealing. You might think that it shouldn't be illegal in this case, but, as it stands now, in terms of international law, it is, in fact, illegal.

Good luck getting new games/books/movies/art if the creator can't make a profit in some way; everyone has to eat ya know. You could try some sort of socialist model, however I would argue those models work against basic human nature. Without the compulsion to succeed, either from competition or the simple urge to not starve, I feel most folks would just sit around, do half-assed jobs, and collect off the government dole.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

**Edited to reply to Anamon**

When I think of DRM, I think of the post Bioshock era mostly. Most of your examples are of a time where DRM was still not a big deal, nor did it give any control to publishers. Also, I have Far Cry 2 Fortune's Edition that supposedly has patch 1.03 and it still has online activation. It says nothing on the documentation either. I may be wrong, but I'm very skeptical about the DRM removed news because of my own experience.

I'm a researcher, everything I achieve, I send it to a journal for every other researcher to read. You may be surprised, but I really believe in what I said, with all it's consequences.

Like I said, off the top of my head, and most of those came out after Bioshock and had the same kind of online activation.

Maybe the Fortune's Pack has online DRM on it but the main game's last patch was supposed to have removed the DRM. That was when Ubisoft went DRM-free for a while, only to then turn around go fucking crazy afterward.

And one assumes you are paid by a school or through grants, but if your paycheck and livelihood were dependent on your ideas, like a creative person in a creative field, then you would feel differently.

Is that a joke? So basically you are telling us that we have to disciplinedly pay for games so people like you can live out of thin air?

You are mistaken the definition of profit. You don't need profit to live a good life and much less "to eat ya know". Profit is the surplus you become from an investment, something that makes you richer. And, believe me, there is plenty of people doing culture for the shake of it and even more people that only pretend to make a living out of culture creation, not a profit. If the big publishing companies fall, people won't miss them for long, I can assure you.

Of course, it is very difficult to say if you are making someone richer when you buy a game, but you can still make some guesses. In summary, people who pirate and still think about the morality of what they do, don't give a damn about big companies basically because there is a higher probability for their money to go into making someone richer and not creating better games. And thanks to the internet and the democratization of technology, publishing will become less and less important with time. Long story short, if you keep investing on publishing, no, you will have to work again at some point (I hope soon).

I'm actually very worried about where this is going. All this is just benefiting the industry and is royally screwing over everyone else.

Since my childhood, I bought a Gameboy, a Lynx, a GBA, a NDS & a PSP. I had over 15 Gameboy games, +15 GBA games, 20+ NDS games and 4 PSP games (only 4 because I bought it mainly as an emulator for old NES and SNES games).

Now, however, I have zero interest in any of the new machines. I can play any game I bought so far in 20 years but with these digital licenses, I'm relying on external servers, having games tied to my account, etc. and for a mobile platform, I simply don't want this. For $5 Steam games, I can be forgiving but for $30+ games that get glued to your handheld device.

In 10 years, I bet everything will be tied online and we'll constantly lose access to our old games by devices breaking, servers going down, companies going bankrupt or getting bought out, etc. It's not a pretty future to look forward to. I much prefer the old days where you'd buy something and you could take it home and keep it. Now, you pay for some legal nonsense that lets you play a game as long as you bend over and let the publisher rape you in the ass.

People like you are what's wrong with this world. You get rich of the blood sweat and tears of the working class and then sit on your ass for the rest of your life taking up resources that, if there was any justice in the world, would have been earned by the people you got rich off of. The elite are the new bums. Get a job.

If we all did that then there would be no one doing the work.
Well, we already have publishers taking the money off the devs as it is. Publishing agreements screw over the devs as it is, developers are always complaining about never breaking even and yet the publishers rake in the dough. The system needs to change to put the power in the developers' hands, not the publishers. Until that happens the money is not going to the ones who earned it.

Yeah, I said I was done with the topic, but some of these ad hominem responses are just too much fun for me not to reply to. I'll reply, but I just won't talk about DRM, then I won't technically be replying 'on topic'. :P

My response was flippant and somewhat tongue-and-cheek. You asked how I slept at night, so my response was basically: pretty well, I want for little.

No, I am not, but perhaps we think of it differently. Profit, is, as you say, the surplus one gets from a business endeavor. Capitalism is based on profit; people want it, and thus are willing to put more effort to get more of it. I am speaking of people in general, of course; there are those that are less monetarily motivated, but they are few and far between in my experience.

In a perfect world, where everyone worked according to their ability and everyone only took according to their needs, the socialist model might be effective in regards to property rights and profit. However, I think it is human nature to take advantage of any system for their personal and selfish benefit. At least with capitalism, working hard and attaining more compensation for it puts this selfishness to work. Dishonesty will exist regardless, but at least the promise of profit keeps people, in the aggregate, more focused than just general goodwill towards man.

I had a job. I worked 70+ weeks for most of my 20s. I may work again, but I pretty much postponed my life in my twenties while becoming financially successful. Right now I am busy smelling the proverbial roses. Would you rather I stayed in the market and took a job away from someone who actually needed it?

I did work. Hard. I gave up any semblance of a social life for 7 or 8 years. My only free time most nights was the 3 hours between 7pm and 10p, which I mostly spent cooking dinner and eating it in front of the TV. So, yeah, just because I am well-off now, it doesn't mean I didn't work for it.

The thing about publishers removing DRM after a while: that's nice, and sensible if the publisher is actually emplying DRM for what they say they are. But the promise is hardly a consolation. Most people decide whether they are going to buy a game or not before that DRM removal happens (otherwise it wouldn't make much sense). At that point, I have no idea of knowing whether it's going to happen. If the publisher goes out of business, which is a major concern with these online-activated DRMs, the chances are very slim that some of their guys will still work on a patch after having lost their jobs. And for products that are simply discontinued, the public outcry for disabling a title that "hardly anyone still plays" is not likely to be a scary enough prospect to still pour money into creating a patch. There are publishers who value their customers that way, but not many.

The thing about intellectual property: extreme viewpoints on both sides, I guess. I agree though that many of the laws that are in effect today, such as software patents, are more detrimental to innovation and creativity than they help it. And I know many people in the creative industry and also technological research who agree with that. The intentions might have been well, but exploitation (e.g. patent trolls) are far too prevalent these days to ignore. For example, corporations can scare and "bully" competitors from the market by waving their patents, hampering innovation. Even if the patents are completely bogus and would never hold up in a court review, a small innovative firm is likely not ready or able to take that financial risk and go against a huge lawyered-up bully corporation. It's basically extortion made legal. For the copyright thing, I think the "Disney laws" of extending copyright timespan have spiralled way out of control, especially considering the new media which are much earlier endangered to disappear forever. At one point, it's no longer securing a creator's reproduction rights, but allowing them to be lazy instead of continuing to provide value for their customers.

The thing about publishers ripping off developers: I don't really agree with the argument. In the music industry, this was a fact for a long time, because without a contract with a major record label you couldn't even record your album, so you were almost forced to go into debt with them. This has changed with the almost universal possibility for anyone to record, produce, and distribute themselves. This has, more or less, always been the case for computer software and games. A developer signs such contracts by their own free choice. That's what I reply to people who criticise GOG.com with the argument that often times, the original developers won't see any of the money, simply some publisher who happened to acquire the rights. Well, the developer sold the rights to the game willingly, for a price that they then thought was a good deal. If they think otherwise now, that's their problem. If the developer can only finance their project through such a lopsided publishing deal, I say the problem is with the product budget. Which brings me full-circle to my previous argument that the current multi-million dollar game production market, with one shot at either making a lot of dough or losing everything, is not a viable or constructive business model. Just employ a few creative people who know how to make a good game, rather than spending $20M for an expensive graphics engine and 500 hours of motion capture and voice recording.

So you think slaves made to work to the extent of their abilities until death and only provided the bare minimum they need, is perfect?

"A shared responsibility, is no responsibility."

Anyone who does any sort of management must either learn that or should be removed. Even in the exceptionally simple exercise of a potluck there is no avoiding that.

What capitalism in its theoretical purity does is force those who produce goods and services to be beholden to their customers, because without a constant supply of monies from them they shall perish. This also encourages efficiency and quality of goods to be increased as they enable a entity to seize more market share. This in turn also tends to encourage people more towards looking at making their environment nicer and thus funding towards ecological related things they appreciate. Thus we have a full set of accountability parameters tied to a self optimizing system, where the consumer has the ultimate power to pull the trigger on any corporation. Unlike with government run institutions where the accountability is top-down instead of bottom-up, and thus they can freely be inefficient bureacratic assholes as long as it doesn't effect who they're accountable to up the chain of command. Indeed they're actually encouraged to be because more personnel means a bigger budget, etc. and so forth.

Like any form of governance run by the Public it breaks down when the Public doesn't take advantage of the power you have and other checks and balances provided by the government, or goes corrupt themselves.

This has nothing to do with the free software movement or digital rights management software however, unless you want to observe that closed source and DRM run counter to capitalistic forces and FOSS/DRM-free run with them. Hence GNU/Linux is the OS of choice for servers and Super Computers and in terms of raw performance and security crushes all rivals, and GOG.com turns a profit. Free as in freedom is fundamentally different from free as in free beer. Don't mix it up, and stop dragging out a concept that was debunked before Karl Marx's grandfather was an itch in his great grandfather's crotch like it has anything to do with anything.