- cross-posted to:
- anticorporate@lemmy.giftedmc.com
- piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- cross-posted to:
- anticorporate@lemmy.giftedmc.com
- piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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Based.
Makes me wanna buy the game even though I know literally nothing about it.
Right? First thing, look for a torrent. Second, put aside some money when I have it.
Pretty cool move. If I come across one of his games that interests me, I’ll gladly buy it.
It’s fine to pirate every piece of media. From books, to movies, to music, to textbooks, to newspapers, to my own comments online.
Information and art is meant to be shared and enjoyed. Pay walling a distraction from reality does nothing but make reality worse.
Artists and creators need and want to be paid. It’s fulfilling for some of them to have a monetary success associated with their work, and for others they need those funds to survive. We should pay artists and creators, I don’t care if people pirate. Pay the goddamn creators you like so they keep making more cool stuff!
I saw this video on here sometime ago and thought it brought up a great alternative that still lets people experience these things for free and lets artists still get paid:
Please correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn’t lack of IP just let anyone abuse a creators original work? Like if George Lucas didn’t have any IP over Star Wars, Disney wouldn’t need to partner with him etc. He’s famous because of prior work, so would be alright. That wouldn’t fly for smaller creators though
I think they address that in the video.
I find this opinion hard to reconcile with Lemmy users’ general stance that Reddit/Google are in the wrong for using comments to train AI without asking permission.
What about people who need money to not only survive but to continue making art? What separates art from, say, coding, as a form of labor that is not worth compensation? Is an artist’s work not worthy of adequate compensation?
Coding isn’t always compensated. Open source projects thrive because of the work of developers that don’t get paid in most cases. That doesn’t stop them (although it’s probably because they do other work and can spare time and money).
My point is that both, art and coding, don’t require compensation. Many people do both for the sake of it.
That doesn’t mean they don’t deserve compensation (in the form of donations). They do, most than any other.
It is a statistical fact that people who pirate things tend to buy more things than people who never pirate anything. Furthermore, people who exclusively pirate are a minority. It is also a fact that the majority of pirates would rather pay for things if the service provided is a superior experience to that of piracy.
Gabe Newell said “Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.”
People who can’t pay experiencing their creative work doesn’t take anything away from them. Complain about the lack of funding for art instead
Something interesting I’d like to point out, the videogame Mindustry is open source and copyleft (I think either GPL or AGPL). You can get a build off GitHub or FlatHub completely for free. However there is a Steam version with Steam multiplayer and achievements as well which is $9.99 USD on Steam, estimated ownership is around 846.7k [1], the price hasn’t always been $9.99, but assuming that isn’t the case the game has made around $8 million, I haven’t taken out Valve’s cut and I don’t know how much tax they’re paying but that’s pretty good. It could be a lot higher if all of the FlatHub and GitHub users paid for their copy. I initially discovered the game on FlatHub, loved it and now have it on Steam. I wouldn’t have bought the game if I hadn’t tried it for free.
It feels counterintuitive that freeloaders can help with sales, but consider a physical artwork like a painting. People don’t tend to buy these things without seeing them first, and seeing it is experiencing, so there’s very little benefit to buying it, but people do anyway to support the artist, because they want more.
Isn’t a car a form of art since it was designed? So you should steal a car too?
Come on.
Uh no? Cars have functions, and very real material costs that digital art does not.
So material costs are important, but paying artists a living wage for their art isn’t?
If that involves stifling other’s creativity and harming society, then I’d argue no.
Realistically, it is a balancing act.
Copyright, patent and even trademark laws should promote sustainable creativity and societal progress. They try to achieve this by granting some extra (non-intrinsic) rights to creators.
That these are regularly abused to stifle competition and creativity in the name of profit is a cancer deserving treatment.
And faced with an imperfect world: If any law or its implementation feels unjust, then most people will feel morally OK with breaking it.
Nobody said you shouldn’t pay artists.
YOU WOULDN’T DOWNLOAD A CAR
I WOULD IF I COULD
I’m not an advocate for unlimited pirating, but this is a poor analogy. Stealing is taking something from someone, as in the previous owner no longer possesses that item. Pirating digital media is not taking anything from anyone, as it’s digital and thus still exists. This is why the courts do not call pirating theft, they call it copyright infringement.
I disagree completely.
What about pure digital releases? Where 100% of the profits come from sales?
My analogy was spot on, and I don’t care if all your feelings are hurt so it’s downvoted.
Stealing is stealing, stop trying to justify it in the name of art and sharing.
Textbooks don’t only get digital releases. If everyone started to pirate it all the time, the author would not make any money at all.
Keep lying to yourselves about why you steal things.
Reading comprehension is key. I wasn’t advocating anything, I was simply pointing out that even the law disagrees with you. Pirating digital goods is not theft, it is copyright infringement.
Oh ok! So it means it’s not a crime right?
🙄
Where did I say in any of my comments that it isn’t a crime? Proving my comment above about reading comprehension.
Textbooks don’t only get digital releases. If everyone started to pirate it all the time, the author would not make any money at all.
Maybe you should start looking into academic publishing and the amount of money authors get for their work in this field. Spoiler: It’s a laughable fraction of the book prices.
To preface this, I do agree it’s not morally correct to pirate. At BEST it’s morally neutral, and usually it’s not even that. I don’t know why people think they’re entitled to another person’s work without paying just because it’s “art”. They’re not.
However…
I completely disagree that your analogy is spot on. If I have zero plans to ever buy a certain car, but then one day decide to just steal it to see if it’s fun to drive, that car can no longer be sold to somebody else and the dealership or whatever just lost a lot of money.
On the other hand, if I have no plans to ever buy a game, but decide to pirate it to see if it’s actually fun, the developers don’t lose money from that. I never would have bought it in the first place, and they can still sell it to others because I didn’t actually take it from them.
That’s the difference. Now, if I had already planned on buying it but decided, “nah I’ll just pirate it instead”, then I would agree they’re losing out on a potential sale. That’s still different from losing a car though, because the dealership isn’t only losing a potential sale, they’re also losing an item in limited supply that takes physical time and labor to make (as opposed to just fabricating another Steam key).
You must be a troll. Good joke.
What job do you do? I take it you do it for free yourself since that’s what you are advocating for
To be fair, it would be based if everyone did their job for free.
Money sucks. Everything should be free.
Soooo people shouldn’t get paid for taking time to create books, movies, music, textbooks, newspapers?
There should be means that would allow fans and appreciators donate money to creators. And it looks like we already have a lot of those.
Also, culture and art should be promoted by governments. Therefore taxes could go that way too.
Anyway, it’s not like people say it’s fine for everyone to not pay. But at least we know it’s fine for many to pay much less than the rest, see regional pricing and discounts. Creators are totally fine with those. Nothing prevents it from being extended further to people who have a hard time trying to become potential customers.
What of there were a model for video games where the games themselves were free to download and play, but things like cosmetics, weapons, stat boosts, and character unlocks were sold piecemeal to those willing to pay?
That model certainly wouldn’t become a cancer on the entire industry and ruin online gaming, making us beg for the days when you could just buy a fucking game and play it.
That’s a completely different statement
Eh, there’s a difference between compensation for work and using laws and legislation to sew up something tighter than a cats arse for personal exploitation
I would argue that someone saying “every piece of media” doesn’t care about that distinction.
Why the fuck do they make money 15 years after doing the work though? Build a house, you get paid for the house. Write a song? Infinite money.
15 years? What about 80 years? There are movies from the 40s that are still under copyright.
Copyright is generally a good idea. There has to be some level of restriction, otherwise infinite copies of your art immediately show up and you cant make a living.
On the flipside, it harms the industry at large if the copyright is too long. There is no reason why a corporate entity should be making royalties on something long after it’s creator has died.
So, where is the middle point? What is a good length of time to let an artist exclusively sell their art without fear of someone undercutting them as soon as they make something? Personally, i think the US figured out the sweet spot before all the changes. 14 years, plus a single 14 year extension you have to register. 28 years is enough time that you can make a career, but also not long enough to harm the creative process or prevent art from reaching the masses while its relevant.
Consider the following:
One day we manage to reach the pinnacle of invention - we create the replicator from Star Trek. We can suddenly bring immense amounts of anything we want for everyone in the world, for very little energy (caveat: I don’t know enough about Star Trek lore to know this to be true).
Now, this machine would certainly make a whole lot of business models redundant - farming, factory work, you name it - they would all no longer be able to make a living doing what they did before this invention existed.
Now for the moral question - should the fact that this invention will harm certain groups’ way of life be considered enough of a motivation to prohibit the use of this invention? Despite the immense wealth we could bring upon the world?
Take a pause to form an opinion on the subject.
Now that you’ve formed an opinion on the replicator - consider that we already have replicators for all types of digital media. It can be infinitely replicated for trivial amounts of energy. Access to the library of all cataloged information in the world is merely a matter of bandwidth.
Now, should the fact that groups relying on copyright protection for their way of life be considered reason enough to prohibit the use of the information replicator?
To me, the answer is clear. The problem of artists, authors, actors, programmers and so on not being able to make money as easily without copyright protection does not warrant depriving the people of the world from access to the information replicator. What we should focus on is to find another model under which someone creating information can sustain themselves.
deleted by creator
Information and art is meant to be shared and enjoyed.
And sometimes art and information is released for free and you are more than welcome to enjoy that for free, but when the artist asks for a payment for services rendered, and you refuse payment but still use their services, you are breaking a social contract (and a legal one, as well). To not pay for services rendered is illegal. If you want to use something, whether you are renting a car for the weekend, or you are using someones art for entertainment, if they require a payment for the service you use, you are obligated to pay for that service if you use it. If you don’t want to pay for it, then don’t use the service. You aren’t owed a video game, movie, book, textbook, or newspaper anymore than you are owed a rental car. If you use a service, you pay for the service, even if the service is entertainment.
You’re both right.
So I’ll talk about a totally different point:
The day the MPAA and the RIAA sued fans for tens of thousands of dollars for pirating content that was still generating millions, is the day I said I would never, ever, pay for their content again, and pirate it guilty-free.
The audacity from woke people.
this opinion has nothing to do with woke people smh. this is just the new sin word just like how they did with communism. everything conservstives didn’t like was conmunism, now everything they don’t like is being woke
Ohhhhhhhhhh when woke being pointed at as woke they don’t like.
But they keep telling non woke as communist, far right and anarchist.
Smh.
Agreed. Once you start blocking culture to only those who can afford it you start losing culture once it becomes unprofitable.
In my teenage years and early 20s I pirated everything because I was broke. I could squirrel away enough money to build a low grade gaming computer and the benefit to me was “I don’t have to pay for games because I can pirate them”. That or I survived on Demo CDs that came with magazines I got at the book store (and later on I think it was demoplanet.com?). If it wasn’t for these resources, I probably never would have gotten into PC gaming.
Now that I have expendable income, I buy games that I want to play.
I would never have been a customer if I wasn’t originally a pirate. It’s the circle of life.
Also I just went and bought this game because I have money to support shit like this and I’m all about supporting developers who understand.
These devs fuck
Gotta love this quote from the article: “piracy doesn’t mean a lost sale if the person pirating the game couldn’t afford it in the first place.”
I’ve seen this happen time and time again with people I know who simply couldn’t pay even a single dollar for a game, and had no other options available. They deserve to experience culture and entertainment just as much as the rest of us.
The original owner of Galactic Civilization 2 basically said the same thing. He also wrote the Gamers’ Bill of Rights.
So of course GalCiv3 did the exact opposite, removed a key feature (milky way map) that was in the first 2 so they could sell it as an overpriced DLC, and made as many DLCs as they could (though not nearly as bad as Paradox or EA).
I don’t know who owns Stardock Entertainment now, if the owner sold it, sold out, or got hostile takeovered, but now they’re just like all the other big corporate assholes.
The enshitification is a very real thing unfortunately.
To be fair, piracy does drive down sales, as some of the people who would otherwise buy the game do pirate it.
Even still, word of mouth is a great way to compensate for that effect; also, culture really shouldn’t be reserved to those who have the means.
The strategy makes a lot of business sense too. It’s why piracy controls in Microsoft Windows were so weak for so long.
Steve Ballmer said something along the lines of if the Chinese are going to pirate software, I want it to be Microsoft software.
I’m not sure if this game has an online mode but generally speaking the network effect of online means more people playing equals a better online experience. If half those people didn’t pay, the ones who did pay still get a better online experience right?
Based jakito
Why doesn’t he just put the game up for free as an option then?
I don’t think Steam supports any sort of sliding scale system and they have a price parity rule which would be broken by offering it elsewhere
These sorts of stories are stupid, and pirates love to eat them up because they see it as validation, because one developer is financially independent enough to not go broke if his game doesn’t sell. Most indie devs are not in such a position.
If he truly thought it was fine to download his game for free, he’d have released it for free in the first place. It’s pretty easy for him to have a chill attitude and say it’s okay to pirate his game after making nearly $100 million on it.
Edit: I also read the actual tweet. I think the author was responding to an “aha, gotcha!” moment. Someone posted a screenshot of them pirating his game with the caption “I love pirating indie games.” It almost feels like a troll post. And the dev didn’t bite the bait. He was like “eh, you do you. Devs gotta eat, sure, but you know what, culture should be accessible too.”
Your argument is weak.
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Ultrakill made the game to make money. Releasing a game “for free” for all makes no business sense.
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Plenty of publishers do release games for free. Though they hope sell players’ data, or ads or add-ons.
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This dev is just one dev. Everyone else is free to do whatever they want.
So, there.
It’s pretty easy for him to have a chill attitude and say it’s okay to pirate his game after making nearly $100 million on it.
This is true. I don’t see a problem with that. Give me $100 million dollars. It will be pretty easy for me to do neat stuff that doesn’t necessarily bring me profits.
Edit: Downvoted by corporate suits. On Lemmy of all places.
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