Does piracy mean we have no future in game dev?

[Hblade]

Aha!

Pirating is like robin hood. Steal from the rich, and give to the poor! :3

http://cristgaming.com/pirate.swf

[DST]

Pirating CAN be like robin hood.

But rest assured, if you are downloading games made by indie developers, you are not robin hood. You are another one of the sheriff's men.

Also, just for the record, i will always espouse the view opposite the ones that others are posting here. I can see both sides of the story, and it only makes sense, for the purpose of discussion, for me to play devil's advocate and argue.

Every story has two sides, and its a bad thing when one side is overlooked.

In reality, it has been a very fair fight; i would have thought the corporations would be in control by now; its a good sign that the battle rages on, instead.

Welcome to the future!

[Hblade]

Dst, for "future" records, it can annoy others when you mention the "other side" too much.

[DST]

You gotta put things into perspective, weigh both sides.

Realize, that if i weren't here, there'd be no other side. The majority of posts on the subject all say the same thing - that it's okay for x reason and y reason. Few people really look at the issue objectively.

There is no good and evil. There is only us and them. To say good and evil, is to see fire and ice, and decide that one is better than the other, as if we could live without one of them. Good is us. Whatever 'us' means to you. Bad is them. But it's not objective, it's not universal. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, they say.

So in this thread, we have developers worried about what it means for their sales; and users who are worried about justifying their vices.

And me, going against the flow (which i don't recommend) but someone's gotta do it.

It's about balance. You are finding that out more every day, aren't you?

[Hblade]

The "real issue" is only what you make of it o.o

[krenisis]

As far as my view Iam very fair to all sides. Produce quality and there be less people pissed off. I tell developers dont sell crap cause it will hurt not only you but us as a whole. I feel Iam taking both sides into account here. Give people what they pay for , but piracy will always be there. Look iphone can be jailbroken but you still make money off of it. Thats because most of the time , you get what you pay for. Where Iam I taking any sides , Iam taken none. Iam telling everyone what exactly is going on!!

[Hblade]

Yeah I agree with kren

[DST]

One of the problems we have in stopping piracy is fairness.

What i mean is, if you tell google 'you are now responsible for all search results that contain pirated material', you have asked google to police their search engine, which will destroy google for three reasons:

1. It takes too many resources - they'd go bankrupt trying to monitor everything, it takes too many people.

2. It will destroy the quality of the search engine - the engine is designed to index stuff. You'd be preventing it from doing its primary function.

3. Unfair competition - if google has to destroy their search engine, yahoo can still offer pirated material in theirs and beat google in the market. If you then police yahoo, another and another and another search engine will start getting ahead with the pirate material. Such a law will actually favor the pirates and hurt the law abiding companies!

It's just like the situation with gun control: IF you outlaw guns, then that doesn't affect criminals, because they use illegal, unregistered guns anyway. It would only prevent law abiding citizens from owning them.
Spam and hacking present the same issue; you get a hacker who is smart enough to hide his tracks and bounce the commands off a legitimate server; so the police raid the legit server, who didn't even know it was happening, and never did anything malicious.

iTunes is the best example of piracy control so far, and it's been a smashing success. Simply offer a better product than the pirate engines can come up with. Any song you want, anytime, legally, and for a nice price. It's not a theory; iTunes is doing quite well and has reduced piracy significantly since it started.

Next move: Stop with the dvdrental and start offering ALL movies for legitimate, paying download. Stop charging for expansions and do like FLStudio: Free Lifetime Upgrades. Don't punish someone for buying it early!
Start offering two licenses like Game Editor, one for private and one for commercial use, thus offering people the time they need to learn to use the software before buying it. (You don't learn jack from limited demos that can't save).

The point is, don't look at it as something to destroy; instead, just try to make something better instead. I think that's what Krenesis is saying about game quality.

Don't attack them, just BEAT THEM!

[krenisis]

Exactly what Iam saying!!! See in the windows mobile games arena alot of companies have released crappy products and charge too much for them. What resulted was 4-5 major warez sites that offer all the games for free. Now its really tough to sell any game because users are used to free games. Not to brag but the free supermario jump game I uploaded here is better than 40% of the payed software avalible. Thats really bad, not that my game is badd,but the quaility control of greedy developers is bad. Free games should never eclipse payed software. For example when I finally made a commercial game I included 3 modes of play ,powerups to change game play, and easy interface to go in and out of game menus plus a step by step readme text that explains everything including tips and tricks. Thats what is quaility , making the game player have a fun exp. and multiple modes of play so the beginner and pro player will not get bored.

[savvy]

well, we still have a future because the games must be bought to be ripped and i personnally have piratted games before, but knowhere near as many as i have bought so....yes, we do have a future and anyway, sonic games have prevented themselves from being played on the r4 so smart coding is the key to getting rid of piratism. I got this sonic game because i have sonic rush adventure and wanted to play 2 player with a friend.

[Hblade]

I bought so many games back then when money wasen't tight I noticed something too xD I don't remember pirating a game I didnt already buy in the past xD

[SquirmMaster]

Trust me some games on game editor like WinterBlast1 and TargetDefense(which are really fun) are better than some of these $50.00 games. Game editor has more restrictions than the big selling equipment but some people don't care how good there game is. All they have to do to make it look good is add a comedy scene, explosion and some guy shooting out of a car to go over a helicopter with a machine gun akimbo shooting at the driver. This also gos for movies.

[SquirmMaster]

Oh and is this really Game Editor

[PieOnGravyEquilDeath]

Oh and is this really Game Editor

Sorry for my comment, it's just I never seen game editor this deep before.