Ars Technica have posted a piece on the BSA’s recent piracy study, the conclusion of which is that digital file-stealing is actually stunting economies around the world to a significant degree.
If the amount of software piracy in the US were to be reduced by 10 percentage points over the next four years, IDC believes the end result would be $41 billion in economic growth, $7 billion in additional tax revenues, and the creation of over 32,000 new jobs. In countries with higher rates of piracy, the impact would be even greater.
And it’s at this point that my understand of economics fails, because aren’t those people who aren’t spending money on pirated good actually spending the money they would have spent on something else? And if there’s no money to be spent on the games in the first place, necessitating piracy, where would all this extra cash come from? Hmm.
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Just like every other concept in life, what is most important in the issue of piracy is balance. It constantly astounds me that the minute piracy is mentioned, so much of the internet seems to forget the nature of anything but black/white morality. There are more was of examining a situation than reaching for the BFG debating tools of ‘*Topic* is bringing about doomsday!’ versus ‘*Topic* is an incarnation of pure good!’
I, personally, buy my games 90% of the time. It seems like the right thing to do for me, but it also makes me comfortable with grabbing the odd ISO for a test run or some such. I feel like I’m doing my part to support the industry, even though I often feel like my contribution is a little superfluous amongst the Scrooge McDuck pile of money it generates.
Aside from that, though, I have to ask, Meat Circus, not out of anything other than curiosity, but if video games are important to the wellbeing of creative commons (And I believe they are.), does having smaller developers siphoned off until they collapse under their own weight – and thus losing the ability to communicate its own creative ideas – serve culture any better? To me, it’s just to ways of hamstringing creative thought from either end of the moral spectrum.
I fully acknowledge that there are often cases where piracy is a ok to an extent, and denying such is pretty ridiculous, but it seems like you want the games industry to keep providing games for you while you shrug as though not a single person on the team did a thing to earn money seems equally silly.
Meat Circus said:
Neither does the universe owe you the opportunity to gain entertainment for free when someone has placed a value upon it. There’s the moral issue.
The plumber analogy is nonsense. Of course you don’t have a pay-per-dump arrangement – you pay the plumber to gain the use of your toilet should it break. You pay a one-off fee for a service.
The way I see it, the same is true when you buy a game. You’re paying a developer a one-off fee to gain entertainment from the game. The transport mechanism involved is irrelevant, as is the fact that they have provided the labour involved in the “service” of entertaining you up-front.
You all must be talking about buying illegal copies, then. Oh, you aren’t? Well…
Downloading isn’t piracy, it’s copyright infringement. No, I’m not saying whether it’s “right” or “wrong”, merely that ignorant chuffing idiots are misusing our beloved language. But no, the BSA want big headlines, so I’m sure they include downloading cracked games in their “figures”.
how the hell does moaning that plumbers don’t get ongoing royalties make ANY sense to anyone?
Plumbers get paid by the hour. that’s the business model they choose. I (and other game devs) choose a different business model, where we work for years 12 hours a day for sod all, on the off chance that the end product is good enough that the ongoing royalties from it make up for the hours we spent making it.
Game developers earn very little, and work long hours, but somehow in some people minds the fact that we get pauid by royalties rather than an hourly wage means we are evil, and its all unfair.
What laughable bullshit.
If you aren’t prepared to support the idea of copyright, you basically have 2 morally justifiable choices:
1) do not purchase copyrighted material, do not pirate it, opt out of the whole system
2)go live in a country where they agree with you, such as North korea.
if you want the very best entertainment that copyright laws can encourage the production of, but somehow want to pretend that you shouldn’t pay for it because you don’t agree with it, that’s just leeching, freeloading and generally behaving in an antisocial way.
It’s like being the one guy on the street who refuses to pay his taxes, but still wants a police force and a fire brigade. You are leeching off the honesty of everyone else. The fact that the rest of us bought COD 4 means you are able to pirate it. In effect, all pirates are leechers and freeloaders, the very thing they whine about when it comes to badly seeded torrents. Oh the irony.
Neither does the universe owe you the opportunity to gain entertainment for free when someone has placed a value upon it.
that seems to be the real issue here. there’s a cultural shift underway that means huge changes for musicians or developers or anyone whose work can be digitized and consumed (and that there’s a demand for that format.) the idea that music is “less real” than my shoes is at the heart of what’s going on, though i think in many cases it’s a convoluted way of justifying “i wanted it and i took it.”
for whatever reason “i don’t want to pay for it so i won’t get it” is not a huge selling point. why not do without? because there’s very little cost to pirating material xyz.
well there’s no cost for the person doing it – to indie musicians, for whom digital distribution has been a mixed bag of highs and lows, there is an obvious cost which may or may not be offset in the future.
and for what it’s worth, i think the “you wouldn’t steal a bicycle” approach is not the correct way to reframe the issue. it doesn’t work, and is obviously met with severe antipathy from pirates and non-pirates alike. there is no cost in stealing from a developer or artist beyond a potential riaa letter (and the time and electricity spent downloading material xyz)
of course, imposing a cost on pirates is not only ineffective and easily bypassed, but pisses off legitimate users. as to how better reframe that, beyond an effort by more “sympathetic” developers and artists (i.e. those who can’t be dismissed as “big business” or “corporate fat cats” etc) to put a human face on what is otherwise a faceless package….i don’t really see any future changes in this attitude.
I think the problem here is that people aren’t address the issues of the other side.
Meat Circus, I know you’ve given this subject more thought than most, and have spent years studying and forming your arguments on the matter. So can you outline how you think game developers *should* be making money, and what systems you think can be put in place that do not rely on the copyright system you cannot tolerate.
Cliff. Obviously this subject matters a great deal to you because your income relies on people’s willingness to pay for software. But I don’t think you are addressing the issues that are present with the corruption of copyright’s original intentions. While Meat Circus is a provocative twit, if you ignore his needling, can you address the points he makes?
And both of you do it without swearing at each other or calling each other names.
The argument that digital copies of a game should be cheaper is nonsense. The price of a boxed game does not fluctuate at all with shipping or packaging costs. The market price for a game is set by the market, not by the related costs to the company. If that market price doesn’t cover costs, then the company won’t produce. Really simple economics, but most people don’t have a clue how the price got to $50-$60 currently and assume if companies don’t have to spend a few bucks on packaging that they can give it as a discount on a digital copy. Completely ignorant argument.
Could digital distribution add some incentives? Sure, but only until it becomes the norm and doesn’t have a need to try draw in customers.
And another economic argument for everyone that thinks pirates are just the cats balls and they are the voice of gamers everywhere getting cheated by DRM, etc.
If pirating remains constant the way it currently is, it is only a matter of time before they reduce the market value of games to zero. At the market value of zero no one is going to produce. It is the same argument against free health care. If health care is free, the actual production of health care is going to be tiny.
Luckily, pirating won’t stay constant as companies do things like move games online completely, require Live GOLD accounts, or start to just give their games away and make a buck through micro-transactions.
It is just a question of how ugly the transition is and we’re seeing how ugly it can be with the RIAA and the music industry.
I think there’s a saying somewhere about not discussing politics or religion in polite company. I think amongst gamers this topic could substitute. (and I hate to say it Mr. Walker, but unless I entirely miss the meaning of the word, I don’t think calling someone a twit is entirely consistent with your message.)
heartless_ : I really cannot follow your logic regarding digital distribution being no cheaper. Are you under the impression that the box price for a game goes straight to the developer? A large amount of the box price goes to the store selling the box. Remove the significant amount going to the store, and then the costs of packaging, printing manuals, CD manufacture, artwork, copy-writing shipping, and distribution, and it doesn’t seem unrealistic that the costs might go down, oh, a little bit? And that’s not even considering the cost of publishers.
If a company directly distributes their game digitally, and charged the same amount, they’d be making literally 1000s of percent more. If publishers do the same, they are still saving vast amounts. How do you think the store share, packaging and shipping are not a factor in your “really simple economics”?
Also, can you provide any evidence for your claim that, “If pirating remains constant the way it currently is, it is only a matter of time before they reduce the market value of games to zero”?
That’s not even getting into the reality of how the “market price of games” has been artificially maintained for years.
Also, you’re writing on a website based in a country where healthcare is free, and we seem to still have hospitals.
Pace – I am very good friends with Meat Circus, and he was being a twit. Cliff was being obstinate, if that helps.
Socialized medicine isn’t free. It’s paid for by taxes. Video games are not paid for by taxes. Comparing the two is just silly.
All of this arguing is stupid. Either the developers are going to move to a service model, develop effective DRM (FAT CHANCE) or die.
I don’t believe in copyright because it requires coercion to be perpetuated (look up Stephen Kinsella’s articles on this), but even if you believe copyright is the BEST THING EVER you must acknowledge the futility of the current course of action being pursued by corporations and the state.
This comes around every year, I swear to God. Ok guys, here’s what you’re saying:
“Mr. X is stealing games, because he downloaded a game without paying for it.”
Here’s the reality:
“Mr. X is downloading games because he doesn’t have the 80 bucks to drop on something that might be total shit.”
When I saw the title of this I thought Edge Hill were offering a new degree.
I think the whole “I steal games because they’re shitty and not worth my money” argument is BS, too.
If the games are shitty, why download them anyway? Obviously, you think that the game is worth your time and will increase the amount of happiness in your life, so why doesn’t the developer deserve compensation?
And claiming that because you can’t afford the game you therefore have the right to get it without paying is crap, too. Would you make these same claims about anything else? School, healthcare and whatnot?
MeatCircus: Corporate shills? You seem to think the only ones who profit from copyright are big corporations, record companies, whatever. That’s not the case at all now, nor is it historically true.
Could digital distribution add some incentives? Sure, but only until it becomes the norm and doesn’t have a need to try draw in customers.
steam has gotten me once or twice with their weekend sales, etc, even though it’s just a few percentage points off from whatever the normal price may have been.
however, in terms of actual incentives, the only thing that comes readily to mind is allowing prepaid downloaders to break street date (i.e. get the game a few days early) and that seems unlikely and not really worth the buy in. (not to mention it’s just asking for shit to be cracked earlier than it already is.)
“Mr. X is downloading games because he doesn’t have the 80 bucks to drop on something that might be total shit.”
the proper version of this would be:
“Mr. X is downloading games because he doesn’t wish to put out xx bucks on a title.”
though the idea of piracy being a punishment for mediocrity – which pops up in a lot of places – is very interesting.
I will be unfair by no reading all the 69 previous comments, but I wanna say this:
Here in Argentina, the piracy is the only way of actually be on the times. Without that, would be just impossible for the people of this country to access to any kind of mass software. The open source is not really an option if we take in count the need for extra technical formation for the proper use of open source software.
Here we have an 3.2xusd1 monetary exchange. Than means that the cost per license here is from the first step more than three times more expensive. Also, in U$S the licences are more expensive than in USA (Idont know why). And add to that the obviously much lower rent per capita… and you will get an initial picture.
The other path to follow is the useless and humillating options that corps as MS offer to *the third world*, as the “Starter Edition” line of Windows, which among other ultra limitations has the imposibility to open more than 3 windows (any kind). The funny part is that a licence for a Starter Edition is also very expensive…
Just a quick point about digital distribution – hopefully it should push the costs down, but the publishers (EA etc) will continue to try and keep it close enough that they can add more profit in for them whilst cutting the shop out.
The music industry still takes cuts out of artists royalties for “packaging costs” on iTunes sales. Something equivalent to that.
So, yes, we should expect digital distribution costs to be lower. But that doesn’t mean they will be as much as they should be.
The problem is in assuming that piracy is a consumptive act, rather than a productive one. Every act of piracy creates a digital copy, by definition. It creates a real good that would not have existed otherwise.
Now, obviously, this severs the manufacturing of the the end-product (the imprint of the game) from the actual design of the software– we need ways to incentivize that, and I’m not really sure we have any better mechanism than copyright at the moment to do that. However, when you analyze the economic impact of piracy, you need to take into account its nature in actually creating a desired good.
[i]The free market consistently gives people the best entertainment, unless you somehow think that North Korea and Soviet Russia were hotbeds of creative freedom?[/i]
Of course– but why do you conflate restrictions on what people can make or say or do with being the “free market”? Copyright is a system of government subsidy, after all.
“And claiming that because you can’t afford the game you therefore have the right to get it without paying is crap, too. Would you make these same claims about anything else? School, healthcare and whatnot?”
Is that part about school and healthcare a joke? Please say it is.
Why doesn’t anyone do a study on how much ‘piracy’ has boosted hardware sales, ISP and internet infrastructure profits? What about the jobs gained there – and the extra taxes earned?
I am afraid we can’t go backwards people. Is this going forwards (with digital distribution aka ‘piracy’) actually costing society as a whole or not? I really suspect it is not in the long run.
Software developers are also going to be facing pressures from open-source and modders, as well as new distribution models using advertising for revenue. Even EA are trying it with the new Battlefield game to be released ‘free’!
Many people thought using the printing press was evil in the beginning too…
Super-Tuesday makes a good point here. I think one of the PSOne’s secrets of success was that it was very easy to run pirated games on it. Friend of mine once claimed, that Sony made it easy for pirates on purpose, to boost hardware sales..
I suspect most of us would agree that piracy, aka: reselling copies for profit, is wrong. What is more gray, is the extent to which copyright infringement truly removes money from the pockets of developers and distributors. My perspective is fairly straightforward, the majority of copyrighted material I’ve acquired is content that I would have otherwise not purchased, be it software, films, or music.
By and large, this seems true of most downloaders, depending on their economic situations. However, because value is placed on content by the seller, not the consumer, it is easy to quantify losses and makes great sensational statistics about property theft.
That argument though also looses sight of the consumer value of property exposure, which is far more difficult to calculate the returns on. Exposure in my simple little mind is quantified in the following paths:
A) “That was awesome, I’m going to rush out and buy that right now even if I don’t eat for a week and tell all my friends it is wizard.”
B) “That was (degree of positive) I would buy if it I could afford it, but will probably buy the next thing they put out, and tell all my friends to as well.”
C) “That sucked balls, I’m glad I didn’t pay for it, in fact, I’ll tell my friends how sucky it was too.”
A generated income for the developer immediately. B has the *potential* for income where it did not exist before. C actually has the potential to harm income via word of mouth.
Which sort of leads me to the whole point: A quality product makes money, regardless. All the rest of the debate appears to be over the value of mediocrity and crappy to both the consumer and the developer.
…of course Mr. X is not intentionally downloading games he knows to be crap he wouldn’t want to play. But it’s one way to determine whether the game is in fact crap *before* spending one’s non-refundable cash on it. Demos are another, potentially. But not every game receives a demo, and many demos are nearly the size of the game without possessing enough of the game’s content to make an informed buying decision.
Though I make no claims as to how many people actually follow through and buy the game if they like it.
I went to buy a new game at the weekend but there was nothing in the shop worth my money. Instead, I went to the cinema tonight and spent the same amount. That money’s gone into the ‘entertainment’ industry. If I also decided to pirate a game this weekend, twenty pounds will not disappear from anyone’s pocket.
It’s not a support of piracy, but the figures people give are simply meaningless. Piracy generates plenty of jobs now, and a lot of tax on blank media too.
Introversion Software have an interesting take on piracy- read here:
http://www.introversion.co.uk/blog/index.php
under the heading “Copy Protection DRM”
this is responding to an RPS post, so linking this back I may have inadvertently caused a paradox…
how does one measure how many jobs piracy creates?
Aren’t systems like Steam going to bring an abrupt halt to pirating, anyway? I know there are hacks to get around Steam, but it’s a hell of a lot harder than copying a cracked .exe to the game directory, isn’t it?
I’ve pirated dozens of games, but not brand new games. I buy all my Valve games and games worth playing on the internets.
I have no idea how hard it is for the pirates to get around Steam, but when they bother the end result can simply be unrared.
Also, I’d like to see how much buying second hand games costs the industry, as a new customer is getting the full experience of the product without the producer seeing a penny. Because piracy can only be described as a theft of experience rather than theft of an object, surely when you buy a second hand copy of a game you’re committing the same evil, except the seller is also making a profit so it’s a double evil.
If I bought nothing but second hand games, surely I’m harming the industry as much as a pirate.
Champagne: this is the the thing that troubled me.
I illegally downloaded The Sims 2 when it came out, as I was unsure if it would run on my machine. It did, and I played it for a few days, until I started to feel guilty. So I went out and bought a second hand copy.
I never needed to open the second hand box, as I already had the game installed, and with a cd crack. The developers never got any money from my purchase. The only one who benefited was the shop that sold it to me. So I was just left feeling very confused about the whole thing, and wondering why I bothered.
If I bought nothing but second hand games, surely I’m harming the industry as much as a pirate.
not at all.
in situation one, a copy has been bought. that physical copy is then transferred to a second party. one purchase has been made.
in situation two, a copy has been made. nothing has been bought. zero purchases have been made.
in situation one, a copy has been bought. that physical copy is then transferred to a second party. one purchase has been made.
in situation two, a copy has been made. nothing has been bought. zero purchases have been made.But in either scenario, none of my money has gone towards the maker of the game. I do understand your point, but second hand games in stores are a never-ending flow.
The reason we all disapprove of piracy, as I understand it, is the fact that the people who produced the game are not getting their fair share for my experience of their product. I never buy anything on release anymore, so I could quite comfortably buy everything second hand for the foreseeable future. I’m a hardcore gamer, and yet the makers of the games will never see a penny of my money.
Should I feel guilty that I haven’t bought Darwinia yet? Or that I got Uplink free with Defcon? If I never buy Darwinia, they can’t really complain as I haven’t played their game so they’ve got none of my money. I could go on eBay or Amazon and buy a second hand disc right now. That would satisfy you, and the law. But what of Introversion?
but in your example, introversion already made their sale. it may seem like a small, niggling detail but i do think it makes all the difference.
no doubt game publishers – and the music industry, and the movie industry, and no doubt book publishers too – would love to have the government use their force to get them in on the used market. hell, car manufacturers would no doubt be delighted if they could continue to get a slice years after the initial profits for a given model year have been taken.
but that’s a 24oz bottle of crazysauce, and hopefully it will never come to be.
as to why i think this issue is important:
i don’t care for radiohead, but i do feel badly that so many of their fans thought so little of their work. people like getting something for nothing, and if it can be digitized people will take it. this attitude no doubt correlates strongly with youth. the entire concept, as i’ve mentioned before, of “doing without” (if you wish to not pay for a given copy of xyz) makes as much sense to many people as yelling latin at a dog does for poor old rover.
this doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of good criticisms of copyright, to say the least – life of author plus 75 years is a great way to enrich james joyce’s great grandson (or whomever the twat who holds the rights is), but does little to help spur the advancement of the useful arts and sciences.
People often make fun of the “Piracy funds terrorism” statements in adverts but it’s not entirely untrue. Being from Northern Ireland, just about any pirate video stall at a market was going straight into the pocket of you-know who…
The truth is, I care less and less for current entertainment, and am less interested in spending my time and money on it. When I see anti-piracy warnings at the cinema, I can’t help but read between the lines and see the result “You’d better not think about spending less money on us…”
I think purchasing second-hand goods is a form of peaceful protest about constant piracy fingerwagging. Okay, I say, I’ll live by the letter of the law. Just don’t expect any more profit from me.
“Being from Northern Ireland, just about any pirate video stall at a market was going straight into the pocket of you-know who…”
Yeah, but I hardly think that’s how they got most of the money for their massive supply of weapons.
I’m looking at you, United States.
Okay, I say, I’ll live by the letter of the law. Just don’t expect any more profit from me.
i think that’s a perfectly reasonable stance.
Just a quick wack at the corpse of the horse while comparing the relative evil of resellers to online duplication:
The games available on P2P/IRC/etc (with exception of leaked alphas/betas and cracked trials etc) stem from a legit purchased copy that was then manipulated for distribution. Clearly they impact more installations without revenue then a secondhand store who may see the same box come through half a dozen times, but it does tie into who exactly piracy may be losing money for the most, the developer or the resellers.
The most commonly illegally downloaded software is also the software that’s least easily obtained used (to wit, PC software). And one legitimately purchased copy turns into, at a conservative estimate, tens of thousands of illegal copies via P2P et al.
If I were I pirate, which I am not, I might say this:
I generally only pirate those things which I wouldn’t or couldn’t go out and buy. So, either I get it free or don’t get it at all. The man hasn’t lost a sale, because I wouldn’t have bought it if piracy weren’t an option.
Not to mention the fact that the kind of games my laptop will even run aren’t even in production anymore. Hell, half of the games I’ve pirated are made by companies that no longer exist.
That’s what I’d say if I were a pirate. Which I am not.
I’ve also found it hard to find any major difference between pirating a game and buying a second hand copy. I guess you can argue that the existance of a second hand market makes people more likely to accept higher priced new games since they now have a resale value; but I highly doubt that fact fully compensates for the lost sale of the person who bought the used game.
More generally on the subject of copywright infringement; I think it is a problem but I don’t think it’s anywhere near as morally clear cut as some make it out to be. Comparing it to theft of physical property is especially inaccurate since the main problem with theft of physical propery isn’t that someone got something for free, or that the person whose property was stolen was denied compensation. The problem is that the person actually lost something and is now worse of then he would have been if the theft hadn’t occured. That isn’t the case with copywright infringement, and if it were, say if downloading a game on P2P resulted in you actually stealing another persons copy of the game, I don’t think illegal downloading would be anywhere near as common as it is.
To make an analogy where the morality of copywright infringement doesn’t seem so clear cut, imagine an artist, who’s house is pretty remotely located, erecting a statue in his backyard and inviting people to come and view it for a fee. The problem is that the statue is visible from a public road nearby and word of mouth have led to people gathering there and getting a view of the statue without paying. Does the artist have a moral right to demand payment from these people? As far as I can see there’s no fundamental difference between this scenario and copywright infringement in general.
I does make the people outside the yard cunts though.
KG