So… there’s a bit of kerfluffle recently about Tycho going all Corporate or something on us, the Gamers. The nerve.
Andrew, MBP, PvD, GBN and Syp (edit: and Cap’n John) have good posts on it (with links to other good ones), so I won’t reiterate much… I’ll just point to what I’ve already written about this, almost two years ago.
…so does that make me a pirate blogger? I mean, reusing an old post is about the same as just stealing, right? Never mind that I wrote it and that I’m not charging for these things, we’re talking ideals and morals here, people!
So, henceforth, anyone (including myself) who links to any of my previous blog posts must pay me the full price originally charged for the post. There are no discounts and no sales; I’m not running a charity here. Each link will incur the full price, so if you link twice, I’ll expect you to pay twice. Anyone quoting any part of my posts will likewise be expected to pay. Anyone quoting a comment from any of my posts will also be expected to pay, though I will be sending the lion’s share* of that fee to the commenter in question.
We’ll run this on an honor system for a while, until I can buy my own legislator to enforce matters. Until then, my rabid internet wombats will be watching via my Big Brother WombatCam. Do not steal. They will find you. You will not like it.
*”Lion’s share” is here defined as a number not less than 51% and not more than 55% of the original fee, calculated at the moment of the transaction according to whim and solely at my discretion as the blog administrator.
Tish Tosh Tesh 
This topic made me wonder why companies support games at all, beyond major things like “if you start the game at 7:00 pm on the same day that you played it earlier, it will never start ever again.” Once someone has purchased the game, they’re not giving any more money to the company. If a game sells 100 copies, it will be supporting 100 copies whether those are the first buyer or the third resell, because the first player has moved along their support costs and gains to the next person. Piracy throws that off.
I’m not really sure why I care, since I can’t remember ever buying a used game. I guess I prefer games that I’m not going to want to get rid of after one play.
Exactly. Piracy is theft, pure and simple. Used games are simply changing ownership of a fairly purchased product.
Oh, and while I’ve purchased several used games (they are cheaper, and sometimes, it’s the only way to get older out of print games… that I’d have been happy paying the devs for), I don’t actually sell many. I prefer to get games I intend to keep as well. This nicely coincides with waiting for sales, since I can get a bead on whether the game is solid or not by reading a bunch of reviews and blogs about it. (Though usually the latter are more useful.)
What if I refer to a quote here in a comment, will I still be charged?
“Until then, my rabid internet wombats will be watching via my Big Brother WombatCam.”
That’s 14 words, at how much per word? I then owe you how much? What if I can’t pay, will you threaten me with rats eating my face?
War is Peace!
I asked the rabid wombats how they wanted to handle this, and they just hissed and pointed to the whoopie cushion in the corner. I’m not sure exactly what they meant, but sometimes it’s best not to ask them for clarification.
Ignorance is Strength!
I don’t buy the “piracy is theft” concept. Theft implies a set of rules in which what I have you cannot have; so if I steal a physical CD, the store cannot sell it to anyone but if I download it, they can still sell the CD. I do think if I would have bought the CD anyway, that’s close enough to being theft, since I’ve denied them the revenue which they deserved in exchange for me having the CD. On the other hand, for things that would not have been purchased, then it gets into murkier waters, but which ultimately come down to destroying the very foundation of a modern economy: money, since the person who earns $10 and the person who earns $100 have equal piracy power.
You know what I miss? Shareware. I used to play those games a lot when I was younger and now and then I’d find a really great one and buy it. The Escape Velocity ‘series’ comes to mind as a great one, which I’d still recommend if you like space combat, trading, and galactic wars. I liked having a lot of time to try a game before shelling out money.
Aye, there are some conceptual hurdles in the ownership of nontangibles. Similarly, a pirated copy (or used copy) is not the same thing as a lost sale.
I’m still going to say that copying something that you don’t have permission to copy (at least one form of pirating) is at the very least a violation of copyright law. Perhaps it’s not theft in the same way taking someone’s CD is theft, but it’s not really playing above board either.
And yes, shareware was awesome. I purchased a few of them as well; purchases I’d never have made if all I had was a name and a vague description to go on.
Does Tycho think buying a used car is grand theft auto?
“If I am purchasing games in order to reward their creators, and to ensure that more of these ingenious contraptions are produced, I honestly can’t figure out how buying a used game was any better than piracy.”
So he’s buying it to reward creators.
Okay, so how does that matter in some bigger picture?
Woops, my middle class ivory tower radar just went off – he’s acting as if he’s some sort of patron of the arts when he buys a game. And if he’s doing it, then that’s what everyone else is doing or else.
Klepasacovic, the problem is an increase of copies devalues the original. If you copy a dollar bill, the original person still has his, but over time, the number of copies drive down the worth of a dollar. Same with games, eventually the publisher wil have to lower his price because no one is buying the game, but pirating it. If everyone does, the game can fail: the GTA game for Nintendo DS was like that.
Pretty soon the used copies devalue the game so much that it makes zero sense to bother to republish it. Why republish a game like Dark Sector that is selling for 7.99 or less used?
Tesh, wouldn’t you know though? Outpost Kaloki X I think was on a collection of retail Xbox Live games: wouldn’t Ninjabee have some sales figures based on the royalties they got from it, and you could see how it affects games personally?
Thing is, I notice the game devs who don’t mind used sales are eliminating them via digital distribution anyways.
Phew, lucky me that the price for you content hovers around the $0 mark anyway.
What people like Syp seem to ignore is that the sale price of a car (and Syp’s childhood toys for that matter) is generally based on production cost. Sure there is some overhead in setting up the production facilities and designing the car, but most of its cost comes from production. When a company sells a car for cost + X they generally make a profit.
Digital media, and therefore video games, work differently. The cost of reproduction is virtually zero while the “overhead” of creating the original is quite high. That’s why what’s actually sold is a personal license to use the game.
When I buy a day ticket to an entertainment park or go to an all-you-can-eat Chinese restaurant it is absolutely not OK (or allowed) to hand my spot to someone else when I’m done. Entry pricing in both cases is set through the expectations of how many people will actually use the service rather than the actual cost each visitor incurs. This is what we should compare video games to, not physical products.
Personally I don’t mind used game sales through eBay or giving a game to a friend once you finished, but the GameStop model of business really irks me. They make a large profit based on the fact that digital goods don’t actually lose value when used – profit that should really belong to the game companies.
What this whole thing leads to is something like EA’s Project Ten Dollar on the one hand and increased video game prices (or more subscription models) on the other. I’m pretty sure that reselling games (unlike piracy) directly influences the sales of new versions of the game. If less copies sell, those copies will have to become more expensive.
@Klepsacovik, @Dblade there there are at least two huge differences between piracy and second hand sales. One the one hand second hand sales do not increase the total number of copies of the game in circulation (contrary to what Dblade has suggested) while piracy does. On the other hand and most importantly second hand sales bring in real money piracy does not. Indeed a brief consideration of the economics of the supply curve suggests that the availability of second hand copies of a game at lower prices than the original will attract in more buyers and increase total revenue from game sales. So second hand sales are a good thing for the games business as a whole because they increase (greatly increase I believe) the total revenue going into the games business. The only real argument is whether game developers are getting a fair cut of the revenues from second hand sales. In fact they are already getting a bigger cut than they let on because the second hand games are traded in against the purchase of new titles. Kill the second hand market and you remove all those game bought with trade in – new games sales fall rather than increase.
There are alternatives but all of them require that games be made available at reduced prices so that more people can afford to buy them. The Digital Distribution market allows game developers to replace second hand sales with online sales and discounts. It serves the same purpose as far as the customer is concerned.
“Tesh, wouldn’t you know though? Outpost Kaloki X I think was on a collection of retail Xbox Live games: wouldn’t Ninjabee have some sales figures based on the royalties they got from it, and you could see how it affects games personally?”
I don’t have immediate access to that, but I can ask around. And yes, my bosses prefer the XBox Live platform (digital distribution) to dodge a lot of this. We do still publish to the PC with minimal DRM (verification keys… and tangentially, we’ve announced that the Keflings sequel will also be ported to the PC as was the original!), but the bulk of our work is on Live. Notably, these games also don’t cost $50. Ranging around $15, they are a lot more palatable, even if they aren’t eight hour bloody epics like Gears of War.
Also, tangentially, if we’re talking older games and value, I should mention Good Old Games. They have been making money as a platform and for the old devs where possible by repackaging good older games and making them playable on Windows XP. They earn their keep by performing that service, and they let those older devs/publishers earn a bit on the “long tail” of those games. They don’t bother with DRM, and I’m not sure what their piracy numbers are, but I will tell you this: I’d rather buy a functional digital copy of a great old game from them than try to find one used and beat up via eBay.
Just in terms of piracy, I’m always inclined to think that if you forced all the people who pirated the game to either buy it or go without, would any of them buy it. Like if you sold 1 game and had 99 people pirate it. If you could force them to either buy or go without, would you get 99 more sales? Or no extra sales at all?
People always look at pirating as if those are definately sales being missed out on. I’m not sure that’s true.