I only bring this up because there's often an underlying assumption that every pirate is a lost sale, when in reality there maybe 1% of pirates that would have otherwise bought the game. I'm in no way trying to say pirating has any moral leg to stand on.
My experience with my social group is that this second group is quite high. I know (for example) people who have bought many xbox 360 games (as these are hard to pirate) and have never bought a PC game, despite playing similar number of games on each.
There is also another important figure that is routinely ignored: the number of honest customers who get screwed by or annoyed with DRM and other forms of copyright protection (20 years ago we had to enter words from the game manual, page X line Y word Z, in the middle of the game) and decide to buy fewer games in the future (and possibly pirate them instead to avoid such annoyances).
The CEO of Square Enix was fired because he produced the latest iteration of Tomb Raider, and it arguably is the best iteration of Tomb Raider ever, and plainly didn't make any money.
Also your argument about 20 years ago is plain incorrect. 20 years ago DRM was way more strict and customer screwing than it is today. 20 years ago if you wanted to play a top of the line game, you would have to buy a Nintendo Entertainment system. Arguably the most restrictive walled garden system that has ever been in the market.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-04-09-square-enix-tho...
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/123045-Tomb-Raider...
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/712...
The North American release of the NES was 28 years ago now.
But hey, if you want to compare Doom on the PC when it came out in 1993 to Doom on the SNES when it came out three years later, and consider the sub-standard SNES port that's three years late to be a top of the line game, go ahead.
Although why Doom was used as an example (not by you, I'm aware), I'm not sure. I don't remember any copy protection on it.
(EDIT: sorry for the rant, but this stuff really gets under my skin. If you are too cheap to spend 8 bucks on an indie game, SAY SO, don't come up with rationalizations about how the world is a better place for it)
Makes sense to me.
It's not as if kids rigorously budget their money and have a "video game" line item which cannot be exceeded. If they could easily sneak into movie theatres or hockey games and never get caught, they'd do that too and spend the leftover money on something else.
I thought he simply said they would spend the same amount. So they would consume less games and so have less "cultural" experiences if they couldn't pirate some games:
So, like, if they'd pirated Gears 1 and bought Republic 2 [made up names] then next period they might have bought Gears 2, but then would have pirated Republic 3 and ArmsRace 1.
With stronger anti-piracy measures Gears 1 comes out at the same time as Republic 2 but they can only buy one so they get Republic 2. Next period they get Republic 3 because they don't want to risk the new ArmsRace 1.
In both scenarios they bought 2 games - ie spent/bought the same amount. In the second they played 3 more games than in period 1. The makers of Gears benefited from piracy by winning a convert to their franchise (but notably the industry didn't gain in this scenario).
However, despite the high piracy rates on PC platforms, good games still do well.
Is it due to convenience , availability of cheap games in sales , extra features in steam or did a rise in your disposable income just happen to coincide with the launch of steam?
For me it was mainly 2 and 4.
The other day I saw a trailer about a game I found visually stunning (Anno 2100? I forget the number), and I checked the price on Steam. It was too expensive for something I'd play once or twice, and I thought of pirating it, but then couldn't be bothered to go through all the hassle. Therefore, I suspect it's mostly convenience.
I wonder if there were less sales whether I would spend more on games, spend the same on less games or simply pirate more.
To put it another way, they never planned to sell 10 million units at $60. They planned to sell 1 million units at $60, 2 million units at $30, 3 million units at $20, and 4 million units at $10. Price drops are the only effective and legal way to do that.
I buy from steam because I don't have to deal with any of this bullshit. It's stress free and easy to use. It's the same reason I buy from iTunes. The only computer game I bought that was not on Steam was Starcraft 2. And that was mostly because of nostalgia and great reviews.
The sales, prices, and income mean I buy more games. When I spend $60 on a game it's an investment. I want more than $60 worth of entertainment from it, otherwise I'll just take the g/f to the movies or on a date. When I spend < $20 on a game, it's on the level of a lunch. If it can last a few hours I'm happy.
When I think about how Valve built their brand, at least in my eyes, it was a two-step process. First, make a few great games (and no high-profile duds). That's your foundation. Then add all the Steam stuff, and be careful to never ever screw me over. EA isn't good enough at step 1, and while they haven't screwed ME over, there are too many people crying and screaming for me to ignore it.
Who else could diversify the digital-distro ecosystem? Maybe Blizzard? Except now it's Blizzard/Activision, and Activision seems sketchy this era.
Maybe ZeniMax? (I dunno what Zenimax is like as a corporate overlord, but if you sum up the brand credibility of all their subsidiaries, that's a lot of credibility! I might not enjoy playing id games any more, but I respect the hell out of them, and open-sourcing all your engines is exactly the kind of trust-builder that an overlord needs.)
"Games I haven't played since I bought them in a steam sale"
Maybe if I was a student again...
or a credit card. a lot of great games on steam are dirt cheap - back when i was a kid that played a lot - because i had the time and motivation - 2-8 euros a game would have been affordable. but games were always full priced - 50 euros maybe?, there weren't really any cheap bargain buckets yet.
of course back then i had neither internet and even if i had, no credit card. piracy was the only option mainly because the games weren't affordable nor obtainable.
nowadays i don't have a single pirated program or game on my pc, but neither do i have the patience to play games.
On an ongoing basis, #3 plays little or no role, but if you count "steam exclusive" as a feature, then it played a critical role in getting me onto Steam in the first place. I wanted to play Natural Selection (original, natch), and that meant I needed a Steam account. Back then I was too miserly to pay for HL1, so a friend gave me a spare serial (I'd argue this was borderline piracy in-spirit). Valve didn't get money from me on HL1, but they've definitely had the last laugh. These days I spend a hundred bucks a month via Steam, and I'm happy about it.
Also lack of time, I would never think of pirating a book or game because one will keep me going for ages. I listen to music every day though so until the streaming services come in maintaining a legal music collection as prohibitively expensive.
Conclusion: even if everyone on hacker news answered a survey on piracy practices the data would be useless because HN is not a representative population for all videogamers.
(Most folks I know who deal with game piracy figure a hypothetical conversion rate around 20-25%, which, especially for companies of the article writer's size, is easily the difference between make or break.)
If we look at freemium to paid conversion rates, 20% seems out-of-this world large. Almost no one has that high. Looking around, 1% or 2.5% is said to be the average for games[1][2][3].
Why would a pirate be 10 times more likely to be incited to buy a game, rather than those who play a game designed from the ground up to encourage high conversion rates? It sound to me that logic demand that games with features designed for high conversion rates will do better than games that don't.
Ie, to sum up, the conversation rate for pirate->paying should be far less than 2.5% in average, and nowhere near 20%.
[1]: http://blog.scoutapp.com/articles/2009/11/04/running-a-freem...
[2]: http://www.gamesbrief.com/2011/11/conversion-rate/
[3]: http://www.gamesbrief.com/2013/03/arpdaus-conversion-rates-a...
You can't really compare what amounts to a SaaS conversion rate to a purchase of a completely realized product with significant media presence (like, even indie games get a ton of eyeballs and an implicit seal-of-quality when they hit Steam or XBLA). It just doesn't shake out that way.
Through, you don't answer the question on why games designed for high conversion rate should fair worse than games that aren't. You also add a additional questions when putting distinction to the population in question. Are we saying here that pirates are more likely to convert to a pay-to-play model than non-pirates are to go from a freemium model to pay? Whats the basis of such statement? All I see is a claim of inside knowledge, which in 2013 means as much (or little) as anecdotal evidence.
If all we have is unverified claims about high conversion rates, and in opposing side we have studies that shows low conversion rates for identical products, I will go with the study until proven different otherwise. I find the idea that the population in question would have a 2000% effect on the conversion rate, and that pirates are part of that group, to be a very large and unverified claim. The wilder a claim is, the more is it up the commenter to provide evidence to support it.
[1] says it was 18% in 2007. I very, very strongly doubt it's gone down. XBLA de-lists games with a Metacritic score below 65 (which is basically impossible) and a conversion rate below 6% (which is apparently really hard, huh?)[2]. Ken Lobb has referred to 20%-40% conversion rates for in-house games at MGS.
And you once again are bound and determined to ignore the differences between the markets you want to compare (hint: they're not identical products, they're not even substitutable products!), I think I'm going to bow out because there's no progress to be made here. HAND.
.
[1] - http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=15117
[2] - http://www.joystiq.com/2008/05/22/underperforming-xbla-title...
This will sound rude, but are you trying to fool others are have you just fooled yourself? Comparing a restricted store which only allow a few marked freemium games, with the PC game market in general is ridicules. The article is about the PC market and PC pirates. Not only is the PC market massive bigger than the total of 588 titles since 2004 that XBLA has, but XBLA has less freemium games per title than the PC market has. They also have a different demographic. A XBLA users is average ages 22, is a causal gamer, and has a middle class income. The average PC pirate age is lower, has less exposable income, and preference more hardcore game.
There is no shareable trait between the PC pirate, and the XBLA market. Trying to present the PC market as if its somehow would be the limited selection of XBLA titles is just false. Presenting a small selection bias as representable for the game industry is just...
Your number is ridiculous, and no-one assumes every pirated game is a lost sale either. Do you have any evidence to support this number?
Successful Free-to-Play games like League of legends are suspected to convert greater than 10 percent of players to paying customers. Of the millions of players who pirated Bioshock infinite, I seriously doubt that only 1 percent could have afforded to pay for it and had a desire to play it.
If we couldn't pirate something, we just didn't ever end up playing. It seems like the amount of money any one person will spend on games/gaming is very stable. So what game devs are really trying to do is to be a part of each of their customers game-spending pie. I know that's how it is for me and the people I interact with.
These people count towards the piracy number on hundreds of games yet would only ever buy a small fraction.
XBLA had an 18% conversion rate in 2007, and it's hard to say with a straight face that it'd go down. 2010 saw Ken Lobb (MGS) citing 20% to 40% rates in interviews for in-house games. These aren't perfect proxies for PC piracy but even if it's halved when you jump from console to PC, the 1% value just doesn't make any sense.
Not saying you're wrong, but recognize that you're completely pulling this out of your ass.
I think pirates actually harm people who make free and cheap software, by using expensive "pirated" software instead. Had they not used the pirated software, they would possibly be using the free stuff and boosting the use of that free stuff. The big boys don't lose out, because they wouldn't have bought it in the first place.
As such, the high moral ground the big boys think they occupy is equally suspect.
IMHO, given the lack of large software houses going out of business actually due to piracy, I don't believe piracy has any real effect. All that is happening is that people are using the software, and the software houses remain profitable.
If I am ever yo believe in piracy losing business money, I want proper proof that the vast majority of people which pirated software on their machine would have paid for that software. I suspect not. I suspect that if there really was a way to stop piracy, many more people would use Linux and all it's alternatives for free. In that scenario, MS and co would really start losing money and market power.
Addition Edit: Also, most people spend the money they have. If they did buy all the stuff they pirated, software, games, music, movies, etc, there would be another sector that lost out. For example, pirating Far Cry 3 instead of buying, means £40 (whatever) to spend on clothes, food, cinema, fuel, etc. Its the same money, there is no extra. It just goes to different places.
If you replace "it" [that particular good] with "something" [that good, or a similar one], then yeah. People used to buy music, after all.
> "I suspect that if there really was a way to stop piracy, many more people would use Linux and all it's alternatives for free. "
How many people pirate their OS? Windows comes bundled with just about every retail PC out there. Enthusiasts who assemble their own devices are in the minority.
> "IMHO, given the lack of large software houses going out of business actually due to piracy, I don't believe piracy has any real effect."
That makes no sense. Simply because the largest companies aren't literally going out of business piracy therefore has "no real effect"? That's a bit like saying the financial crisis in Europe isn't having any effect because Germany isn't deep in recession.
> Addition Edit: Also, most people spend the money they have. If they did buy all the stuff they pirated, software, games, music, movies, etc, there would be another sector that lost out. For example, pirating Far Cry 3 instead of buying, means £40 (whatever) to spend on clothes, food, cinema, fuel, etc. Its the same money, there is no extra. It just goes to different places.
Yeah, but so what? Not only is that statement irrelevant, but it obfuscates that where resources are allocated is just as important as whether or not they are allocated to begin with. The allocation of resources (money) is a reflection of what society deems important.
For illustration, a society that spends 20% of disposable income on alcohol & tobacco is radically different from one that spends 20% of disposable income on tools, woodworking sets & raspberry Pis. Moreover, for the protectionists out there, allocating resources domestically is different than abroad.
Not an argument against you, but a point that I see glossed over a lot. Unless you somehow legislate away piracy across an entire budget category very broadly for families and individuals, you run the danger of picking winners.
I thought the point about demand signal was interesting that you raised. Do people consider rampant privacy in some specific area to be a demand signal that is coupled with an extremely high price sensitivity?
FWIW, I do think that "sharing is caring" is a higher level of intellectual honesty than "trust me - you'll like it," especially when the former does nothing to damage attribution.
I think at this point everyone understands that there's piracy out there and it's not going away. The thing that irks me is the moral argument like yours (provided it's not a troll, I can't be sure) - I just wish people would admit that they're taking something for free that they shouldn't - no one is saying "trust me - you'll like it," don't give me that "after I evaluate" stuff - you can read dozens of reviews and watch full play-through movies on Youtube. I wish people would just admit that they are scumbags.
Extremely tiny scumbags in the grand scheme of things - less than folks taking a candybar from a corner store as digital goods, as you noted, are freely copyable without cost, but scumbags nonetheless as you are the leeches that make things worse for folks willing to pay for stuff. If you're a student and have no cash but want to play every game that comes out, you're probably going to pirate, but don't create this entire moral structure of justification to compensate for your being a freeloader. Just accept a the tiniest twinge of moral responsibility as you play your free game and become a better person down the road.
As someone who enjoys playing large-scale single player games on PC - Skyrim and the like - I'm upset because more and more developer resources are going to switch to F2P and "always online" games because those are the only ones that "beat" piracy and there are going to be less titles out for the PC and more that just are on console the next generation of locked-down consoles.
Now, what would kill the game industry is if everyone followed eropple's suggestion and solved the problem of not being able to evaluate games before buying them by just not playing any games in the first place. If everyone both stopped pirating and buying them, there is zero chance they'd decide to pay up after playing for a while, zero chance their friends would recommend the game, zero sales, and shortly thereafer zero games. Unlike piracy, that's genuinely unsustainable.
> In the past artists (and scientists) had patrons but today we have kickstarter. It is possible to fund the creation of large projects (movies, TV shows, games, hardware, research, etc) without as much risk to the people carrying it out.
There would most certainly be games, IMHO. I am also not trolling. I have been trying to rationalize copyright for over a decade. I just can't justify it anymore (and don't think that should mean I should have to ignore what my peers are talking about, and what tools are current, either).
The parent comment stated that he supports artists (probably financially).
For further reading, I recommend a book called Against Intellectual Property. You can download that legally for free. It's also for sale.
I'm not going to fisk your post, which is largely self-serving rationalization. But I am going to touch on this.
The choice is not "pirate it" or "pay for it". You can also--shocker incoming--not pirate it and not pay for it. Don't like that a publisher doesn't have a demo? Don't buy it. Don't like that the demo's not long enough? Don't buy it.
But that's hard, and you can just take it for free. So, under the guise of "evaluating", that's what you do. And, yeah, I'm assuming some bad faith here, because the next person who actually compensates creators, without exception and at the price they ask for the content they pirate and use will be the first.
People pirate because it's available. The advice of "don't buy it" (by which you really mean don't play it) is therefore pointless moralizing; it's not going to sway people who are looking for something available to play.
If you just think abstractly about the problem as a bunch of kids who are bored and looking to play, and they come upon a ball which is not being used by anyone, that is a better mental model. Why are they playing with this ball that is not theirs? Because belonging is an abstract social relation which has far less cognitive importance to the kids than the immediacy of play, so who cares who the ball belongs to. Will having someone standing atop the ball forcing them to pay a fee to use it cause them to fairly pay for the ball? Probably not, because that's not the model that they're working under. Certainly it gets worse if they try to force every single kid to pay independently for a ball that they can share. "But surely someone made that ball, and made it available, and should be compensated for this!" Well, kind of. I think from the pirate's perspective that's already been taken care of, so to speak: the developers were paid for their creative works, while the pirate community has paid for the networking which made the content available, so if you're asking her to pay for anything, she is paying perhaps some investor, or perhaps she is paying for a future game title to be produced.
(Notice that none of this really "defends" any "side". In order to understand what's going on and try to work on a solution, I'm basically checking that sort of judgmentalism at the door.)
I don't pay for anything unless I can try it or read a ton of reviews about it first. I've still gotten burned a few times but never felt any moral outrage over it. It's not some inalienable right to download stuff for free.
Your willingness to pay before you play says more about your income than anything; if nothing else, you probably have reliable income and can afford to make riskier bets.
In your own words, you say copying is human nature. It sounds like the "pay-before-evaluate" model is hoping to change that. I'd say expecting human nature to change is unrealistic. Isn't it easier to just exploit human nature? I mean, isn't that good capitalism?
(Everyone's rationalizations are self-serving, including your own, otherwise thinking would be a liability...)
[1] - No, this is not a defense of Disney at al and ever-growing copyright lengths, but neither is it an allowance that running roughshod over the little guy is acceptable either.
no sense.
none.
Do not try to shoehorn a model where it doesn't fit, and for data: It doesn't fit. A different standard has to be adopted, and piracy is merely a symptom of that.
Copyright exists because we, as a society, want it to. We want people to make things for us to consume and so we enact laws to make it so they can do so and still eat. Don't like it? Feel free to try to change the law.
But that's hard, and hard things aren't fun, so let's just go pirate Game of Thrones, yeah?
I think it's not clear that "society" "wants" copyright to exist. Society, or at least the collection of individuals composing society, is pretty clearly conflicted on the subject. People want to retain creative control over their own work, to a degree that is clearly insane and impossible. And simultaneously people (some of the same people!) want to be allowed to do whatever they feel like with the works of others, to a degree that is... dubious. The sum of these positions is not clear.
And in any case, the legal status quo does not derive from any such sum. It derives largely from Disney's lobbying, as you acknowledged.
And in fact, what society does about statuses quo is not "take the bad with the good", and "try to change the law". Historically, that's not how the law gets updated. I'm not personally drawing an equivalence between copyvio and e.g. slavery or e.g. marijuana policy or e.g. religious intolerance... but hopefully those examples will demonstrate that in most cases the law follows popular sentiment and disobedience, not leads.
Copyright exists because a majority of society currently thinks its the best way to produce, and that very well may be in the real world of limited supplies. In a world where the only value is novelty, copyright makes no sense. Once something is created, it's value drops because it's supply is infinite. Currently society thinks the way around that is to artificially restrict supply.
I hope one day we will realize that were trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
I would LOVE to pay for game of thrones... to be produced. Buying a copy of game of thrones is not worth its value, it has no value. It is in infinite supply. It is like air.
This is why we donate to blogs, subscribe to series, and fund kickstarters. Because that is the economy of the web. The true economy.
I assume that piracy of games behaves similarly to piracy of music and films, both of which have had research published suggesting that while piracy harms large, blockbuster style releases it actually helps sales of smaller, more obscure titles.
I've got quite a few games still in their shrink wrap on my shelf because I've never had to open them to get at their ROM/CD.
A 30-day money back, no questions asked, guarantee would offer this. Then you can take a risk on a game, evaluate it to your heart's content, and if you didn't like it then request a refund. That would be a useful downvote indicator.
For the recent SimCity, a stream of refunds would show as the product not being fit for purpose at launch, and as the refunds taper off and the sales continue to grow, that's a confidence indicator that the game has reached an acceptable playable standard.
Though, it would be more useful for unsolicited/open-ended feedback as to why the refund, so a company could do something to improve their games.
Granted, that system can be initially gamed by serial refund-requestors - but those people are further along the spectrum of "will not pay" anyway, but at least they've taken the step of purchasing, that's one step closer to making inroads into the pirate instead of purchase segment.
By making the refund rates public, and some sort of identifier, it should be easier to target the non-regular refund-requestor with special offers and promotions. A company should have the ability to reward loyal customers too.
From the company's perspective, people will be less inclined to ask for a refund after they've purchased a game that works and provides a decent gaming experience. That's just the nature of people who believe that they have received value on their purchase. That is one improved step beyond the "need to evaluate before purchase" mindset.
I guess this will mostly prove that the "evaluate before buying" mindset is a self-rationalisation for piracy. The Radiohead "name your own price" album is unsurprising in that it was heavily slanted to as close to free as possible, rather than reflecting a demand versus supply equilibrium.
They used to make it very difficult to return products, and rarely would you get your money back. But then they realized that if you make returns simple and painless people stop second guessing their purchase since there's less risk if the product doesn't work out later.
So more people are buying the product and those that do return it are not left feeling burned, making them more likely to purchase again from the same store.
Nobody wants to feel ripped off, and taking that risk away from customers helps remove that mental hurdle they face thinking "but what if it sucks?"
Game developers on the other hand have a bad track record. Returns are basically impossible, even with everyone's favourite Steam.
With paid reviews, gaming social media and relentless hyping. People are tricked into buying a game that's not as good as its made out to be and are left feeling scammed. Not a great way to treat your customers.
They make returns easy, and their customers are happy, but so are scam artists, ranging from people who "bought" the TV for the super bowl or the dress for the party and now are returning it, to people who bought the item somewhere else and are trying to return it to your store where they insist they bought it.
So then stores start making returns harder, dissatisfying the scam artists and their real customers. And then someone starts the cycle again, thinking they have a better handle on it.
That sounds a lot like the "copy-first, pay later - or receive a public shaming" de facto standard used by cautious patrons today (only ATM people receive their shame from other pro-copyright HN readers).
And luckily, a lot of games (this one included) come with a free demo, so that you can try them before buying them. So fortunately for all of us as customers, we don't need to download a cracked copy. We can play through the demo, see if welike it, and buy it if we do.
The question game developers should be asking is not "How many people will illegally copy it?" but "How many people will buy it?"
It doesn't matter if there are 100 free riders for 1 customers, as long as you have enough customers.
It isn't equal to total illegal downloads, but it isn't equal to zero either. It's probably also not uniform across different game genres.
There isn't really such a thing as "enough" customers either. The more you sell the more budget you have to produce the next game and the more confidence you have that it could be successful.
I cannot put into words how profoundly this line of thinking upsets me. It is, quite literally, the antithesis of Western society.
US companies make drugs. They patent them wherever they can. Places that don't acknologe the patent get the benefit anyways. And the drug users in the US bear the brunt of the costs.
I like being on the other end, too. If there's more than enough to go around, I state that it should.
Can you explain this to me? It looks like trolling, but I'm trying to extend the benefit of the doubt.
What does "Western society" mean? I'm both curious what countries or cultures qualify as Western for this purpose, and also what aspects of those countries/cultures you see as being the essential ones.
How do you equate the "accepting some free riders as long as some people pay" idea with the antithesis of Western society? Are you claiming that the fundamental premise of "Western society" is "don't let anyone have anything without paying for it"?
What does "quite literally" mean in that sentence? Is there some non-literal sense that you wanted to disambiguate, or is just an intensifier?
What a wonderful way of completely deriding any meaningful discussion possible.
There are also lots of factors in a financial proposition. Some people give away free samples, others invest in an education.
It's interesting that iTunes is doing so well, without mandatory DRM, while copying has only gotten easier...
a) higher prices to other consumers who have to pay a larger share of the fixed costs because other people are choosing to pay zero. this is not really a cost more a fairness problem.
b) some products not being produced because not enough people are willing to pay the higher price to pay off the fixed costs. even though there might be a price point X that is lower than what it is worth to some of the zero payers which would result in the fixed costs being paid. this is a real economic cost
I think following that approach further requires an untenable "enforcement" culture on private and social thinking and collaborative efforts. I'd rather put the cart back behind the horse (fund the work itself, to create the first copy, rather than pay mandatory royalties for all future copies - and endure the social unrest of preventing what boil down to thought-crimes, IMHO).
In the past artists (and scientists) had patrons but today we have kickstarter. It is possible to fund the creation of large projects (movies, TV shows, games, hardware, research, etc) without as much risk to the people carrying it out.
This can lead to products that are in fact popular being less economically feasible to produce under certain business models if the piracy rate is too high.
There are of course business models that are aided by copying (such as those based on open source software).
The difficulty is how the video games industry can adapt to this. The route they seem to be increasingly taking is to sell games as a service rather than a product but then this is decried as "always on DRM".
Every sale is still a negotiation. I've said in the past that I think the economics of copies boils down to begging, but that seems a much harder sell when I say it first, so I like to argue a bit first... :)
FWIW, I think people are also decrying the service-model appearing in games (similar to the Kindle model, where Amazon can delete your books) - recall the recent Microsoftie who was fired after some bad PR - so it looks to me like people are moving towards the same limiting equilibrium, with or without copyright: easy copying, and paying only when they feel an obligation. IMHO, we can get there the hard way (increasingly jack-booted copyright) or the easy way (accepting human nature and negotiating differently in light of it).
(Note: I have edited the first paragraph a few times trying to be clearer, for lack of a perfect analogy.)
Imagine the situation where you get your CS degree but find that few people are willing to pay for programmers or software and the people who are willing to pay will still not pay very much yet the demand for software is still very high. Such a situation doesn't make sense in a rational market.
Problem with piracy is that it isn't a "negotiation", a negotiation would imply that there are 2 sides attempting to reach a compromise. With piracy you can simply hit up TPB and download whatever you like without the consent of the author.
I can also turn on the radio and receive music for free, with ads. TPB has plenty of those (but isn't distributing anything themselves, so arguably isn't infringing... Perhaps they are facilitating, but if so they are largely facilitating non-commercial infringement; I can't imagine anyone downloading a movie and selling it would be common). Radio stations usually pay royalties, otherwise they would be commercially infringing copyright. I mention elsewhere that I can sympathize with commercial copyright enforcement.
Non-commercial copyright infringement is harder to value IMHO. In the case of commercial copyright infringement, there is positive income, and the profit can be fought over. Now that we have dropped boxed distribution media and gone digital only for most types of content (and, importantly, I pay for my ISP), the "profit" to the infringer, and the cost to the originator, from any given copy is at best very ambiguous. The profit to argue over could be positive, non-existent, or negative (heck, they might be wasting their life, watching Game of Thrones, when they could be creating value). There is nothing obvious to fight over in the case of non-commercial copyright infringement, except the copy itself (whether the copier had the right to copy). But preventing copies needs a system similar to a cable TV network, not an amoebae-like Internet.
I like the Internet and the ability to speak freely, and to mix what I find, too much to enforce copyright (even my own) anymore. It's taken a long time for me to get here, and I used to want to be a professional artist.
The issue isn't so much the copies themselves, I could download every torrent on TPB and archive them on a stack of HDDs somewhere and it wouldn't hurt anybody.
The issue is that there is no longer a requirement to pay to consume something where the business model requires that the consumer pay.
Perhaps this is no longer a viable model, but the question is how to replace it?
Does popular content simply move to locked down platforms? Do we deliver games under a SaaS model (WoW etc)?
Both of these models have disadvantages to consumers, arguably it would be better if people simply refused to consume pirated goods and always paid the asking price but this seems unrealistic.
I would also love to see people release commercial stuff more under CC-SA and similar (even if they still charge for distribution), or the FOSS licenses - assuming they need one. There's no reason they can't generate income, even while being shown through a subscription. The license doesn't change the distribution model. (Ubuntu is asking for donations. I would love to see some stats.) I think people just need to get used to flying without a net (copyright).
Take Netflix for example: they are producing their own shows. Like iTunes, all the content on Netflix can be torrented, but Netflix is easier for non-technical people. I don't even think copyright is necessary for either of Netflix's or iTunes' success. Netflix is a subscription, but I think they could make a similar amount if their shows were CC-SA licensed. People pay for both Netflix and iTunes because downloading is simply harder and more likely to give their computer an STD, even if the quality can be better ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5621119 ). Copyright still affects the food chain today, but Netflix has convinced me that they don't need copyright to keep the game going.
What's more likely however, I think, is that we will see something like the 6.4/93.6 ratio continue into the future, painfully and in spite of copyright, and with much resentment, until that hostility turns to acceptance (though, by then we'll probably have other generational gaps to deal with) - assuming we can get through the next 10-20 years without a censorship/copyright-centric police state. 6.4% of 7 billion, for something priced as low as $1, is still revenue of 448 million, even without budging that ratio, so I have no doubt creators will do well.
Edit: I don't feel like waiting 40 minutes for the reply button to appear on your comment, but I suppose only time will tell. In the mean time, the pro-copyright-ons and anti-copyright-ons will likely have to learn to live with each other, if for no other reason then so they don't collide and annihilate, sending us all back to the stone age (or industrial age).
Most kickstarter projects I see (games at least) are not proposing "If this gets funded the game will be free" they are proposing "If this gets funded the game will be $20, but you can get it for $15 if you fund us". So they are still relying on copyright to some extent.
Of course there are some games that appear to be sustainable as donationware (dwarf fortress for example) but I would be amazed if we saw a COD/Skyrim scale game on a "pay what you want model" simply because the up front development costs are so high that it would be too large a risk.
I suspect in the AAA areas you will see a move towards support for closed platforms where piracy is more easily controlled and IAP type models.
So probably two divergent markets , with starving artist auteurs in one corner and AAA publicly traded behemoths in another.
I paid $75 for my iphone 3GS. I bought it from some dude that had to buy the iphone 4 when it came out. I then proceeded to jailbreak and unlock the phone to run any software and use any carrier. I then got onto a carrier that charges $30 for unlimited phone/text/data ~ family mobile. And I don't buy any app at all. I'll save my money for tangible things instead.
Culture, creativity and art have existed long before copyright and will continue to do so after it has been abandoned.
Personally, "I get other people's work for free" is outweighed by "I get other people's work that I actually want to play." Skyrim doesn't come out of a Kickstarter.
Please take a few minutes to rethink copyright from the ground up without any regards to what you have been told by anyone...
Where does copyright originate? What purpose does it serve in the society of today? Does it serve that purpose well? How does it match up to what most people would consider to be fair use in regards to personal and commercial use? Does copyright sometimes get abused and misused?
Are there better solutions to the issues we are trying to address?
You don't need to tell me or anybody else what conclusion you reach.
But you owe it to yourself to think it over and stop repeating what you have been told by others as most people here on HN does every time copyright gets discussed.
It is illegal, but that is not the same as immoral. For illegality to imply immorality the law would need to be shown to be itself moral. But unfortunately the law has (like the game concerned) been rigged by particular interests for their own purposes. No-one has so far produced good evidence to show the current laws are economically beneficial overall.
So the intellectually honest and moral position is to admit the law is unfounded, gradually abolish it, and try to figure out other better economic arrangements that allow people to do what is the obviously moral thing: freely use and copy non-rival, non-finite goods.
The law isn't a buffet for you to pick and choose from.
And people who defend pirates routinely ignore that pirated products are also pirated by people who will take what they want for free if they can, because they can. Don't pretend to a higher level of intellectual honesty or moral strength. Your position can lay claim to neither.