I didn’t at any point say “Piracy is OK because it is not theft”, I said “Piracy =/= Theft”

The link SuperNashwan posted explains it fairly well. Copyright infringement is bad, but saying it is the same as theft is incorrect and pointlessly muddying the water.

Right, yeah, that book piracy is rife.

Copying a book, from book form to book form is *not* a trivial process. Copying a game is.

Look up the current fuss over allegedly pirated copies of 1984 and one or two other books showing up on Kindle. When/if more people start reading books in digital form, you can bet piracy will follow.

Ah, there it is, regular as clockwork. The argument that ignores the fact that book, cd, dvd, whatever retailers on the high street aren’t selling second hand goods whereas games retailers do little else.

If I go into a high street bookstore, they’re not actively trying to sell second-hand copies of books that have just come out. They’re not taking on an ever-narrower range of stock at ever-shrinking wholesale prices so that they can give over more shelf space to bypassing their suppliers.

Retailers like GameStop are milking this model so excessively that they’re rapidly accelerating the migration to digital distribution.

@dsmart

It is precisely /because/ retailers are able to make money several times on a unit of stock whereas publishers can only do so once that prices are kept artificially high. The retailers hold all the cards. They don’t want to sell a game for $20 when they can offer two new copies at $40, and twenty used copies originally bought elsewhere for $34.97.

You can’t say of media that “this is worth your X value of money”, you can’t really say “30 hours of gameplay” then try to compare that to say a movies 2 hours for £10 and claim value.

It’s because the value of that content shifts in often extreme ways depending on the user. Take CoD4, someone who played the single player once and that is it got maybe 5-6 hours entertainment for their £30-40, where as I have maybe 300+ hours from it and so gained massive value for money from that media.

How can you account for this in product pricing? You can’t. When you sell 1kg of washing up powder, if someone does 10 washes a week or 1 they are still getting the same value just on a differing time scale – media is totally different though so the only pricing models that really make sense any more are those based on a service.

Methods need to be used that charge the people who get the most value from a product the most money.
Be that via DLC, Mini-subscriptions, Micro-Transactions or other models – and of course I’m not saying that my Fundware could work for everyone, but it can work and has worked in the past for other media, several webcomics work on that basis Something Possitive springs to mind, in which the author basically asked the community to pay his wages so he could quit his job and work full-time on the comic, based upon his past (totally free) work, and the promise of continued free work (just with more updates) the community did indeed donate.
I remember reading a story (though can’t find any links) about an author who did the same released a novel chapter by chapter, releasing each one as a set donation target was met, in which once it was it became free for everyone.

The Major flaw in it is that it requires a decent body of free work in place before people will begin actively supporting the creator in regular donations for continued production, but it’s a great way for an amateur to become semi-pro or even begin to work at it full time.

No I think the pricing model of the future is going to be a massive mix of these various methods, but whichever method is used, in whatever combination the bottom line is the only way pricing is going to work is for creators to charge small amounts, but in regular doses.

Episodic content, subscription models, DLC and micro-transactions are something media producers need to embrace.

I can really see even the big boys doing this…

Another method I think might have possibilities is the rent until you’ve paid for it.
Say you rent a game (on steam or equivalent) for £3 per week, but once your total rental equals the RRP of the game, it becomes yours permanently.

Something like this could easily be done through Steam, allow people to rent PC games (like they can console games) the Dev’s get a share, and the people that really like the game and keep renting know that they’re not wasting money as they’ll eventually own the game outright.

That model is flawed on so many levels that when I read today that Gabe is even suggestion it, I was a bit baffled.

No, it doesn’t make it right, but the expense and difficulty of copying a book is what gives a book value.

The content of the book, the story is somewhere between worthless and priceless – either way, the price of the contents of that book are utterly arbitrary, it’s valueless because everybody assigns differing value to art in different forms.
So say it costs £2 to print a book and ship it to the shop (when printing in mass numbers), this is sold for £5 wholesale and then £8 RRP.
This is a tangible reason for why the price is £8.

Digital copies on the other hand are infinite and free (the cost is met by the consumers themselves via their ISP payments), so there is no cost involved in copying.

So the cost you’re left with is that utterly arbitrary value judgement by the creators deciding beforehand what THEY think the value of their product is, and then hoping that they sell enough copies at this price point to make money.
Do they sell it for £10 and hope to sell 500k copies.
Or sell it for £30 and hope to sell 170k copies?
Maybe they sell it for £5 and sell one million?

So the only value is arbitrary because it is based upon the creators hopes to sell X number at Y price for a profit level they’ve got in their heads.

Now the problem is that media’s value is utterly dependant on the users enjoyment of that media.

A game may be worth £30 to one person, while to another it’s worth £10.
Traditionally this has been provided for by price dropping over time, so those that pay more get the media sooner, those that pay less wait. This was fine when media was physical, something you could hold in your hand and had a cost to produce, had tangible value – copying wasn’t free and it wasn’t infinite.

That kind of piracy has another term more fitting to describe it – Counterfeiting.

Still in a digital world with infinite free copies with zero production costs on those copies, and no tangible value except the “eye of the beholder” media value as decided by the creators (or publishers) the idea of charging for a product just falls flat.

You’ve also got the problem of middle-men, you see people want to reward creators (most do I think, maybe I have too much faith), but very few want to reward the middle-men. Especially when those middle-men often do everything they can to control, manipulate and often downright steal from the creator.

No one wants to pay £30 for a product knowing that the Dev studio/musician/creators maybe only get £3 of that.
Now when they know that the middle-men had near zero costs involved in making that copy and getting it too you, because the same could be done by some bloke on a broadband connection and a bit torrent client for nothing.

Most people, including myself would rather make a donation directly to the creators, by bypassing all the middle-men and ensuring that their thanks in monetary reward goes to the people who deserve it.

Shareware, and donationware is the past and the future another option lets call it fundware (though I knid of like “Thermoware” after those fund raising thermometers you always see on churches) which simple operates like a fund raiser.

The product is released for free and the creator simpley says honestly and up front, “This took me 6 months and many hours to create, and it is utterly free for you to enjoy – however if you do enjoy it and would like to support my further work please donate”.
Then goes on to explain “Once I have £100,000 in donations I will release the next game/chapter in the series for free to everyone, so give what you think you think my game/product was worth too you.”

It seems a bit backwards on current models, to work hard for a long time only to be paid for your NEXT project (based on the quality of your product history) – but I honestly believe it (along with mini-transactions, and mini-subscriptions) is the pricing model of the future.

The days of media as a product are dead, long live the days of media as a service.

DSMART comment is brilliant about describing how a normal windows installation accumulate crap. His point is “why you care about the empty pizza box our demo abandon on the saloon, if there are countless more everywhere” (my words).

Neither the demo, nor our games leave ANYTHING behind. Did you not understand what I wrote? I even spelled it out in clear sentences. Even the P.R.I.S.M guys (anti-DRM group) confirmed that neither our game (BETA) nor the demo leave ANYTHING behind.