Bethesda tires of spending money to support pirates

[Brother None]

Wait, I thought only other dykes benefit from dykes?

That, and sometimes also my aesthetic sense.

 

[Sorrow]

What matters is what is legal, and by what morals you judge yourself.

What is legal can change.

Piracy has long become this circle-jerk, "everyone does it" thing, where mass action means people find it excusable. It disgusts me, to be honest.

No excuses are needed. What disgusts me is the constant promotion of the false image of sharing and creating laws based on that.

If you want to pirate, do so, but to see people prancing around defending it just sickens me.

Seeing people attacking it is what sickens me. Especially that alien anti-sharing newspeak and philosophy.

Also, comparing libraries to piracy is just plain dumb. Libraries are legal and profitable, using a revenue model based on monthly subscriptions on one hand and paying the publishers fees on the other.

What? Libraries are free and and commonly accessible - their main mission is to gather writings and promote reading. And they aren't paying any publishers fees. They only pay for books themselves, unless they get donated by readers and publishers have a duty to donate a specific number of books to the national library. Personally, I donated a big part of my book collection to a local library, including 17 Terry Pratchett's novels so that other people could read them for free, yeah, and the publisher can't do anything about that, so in reality it makes me no different from people that seed torrents.

 

[Brother None]

What is legal can change.

But it hasn't. What gives you the right to think you are above the law? What's more, if someone creates something and states he wishes to withhold you the right to use it unless you pay for it, and both common practice and the law support him in this, who are you to throw it back into his face?

Libraries are free and and commonly accessible

Heh. They can be, if they're heavily government subsidised (public libraries), in which case the point about common goods and no industry wishing to take it over sticks. Almost all public libraries are incapable of surviving without government funds, which means they are generally considered common goods of the same sort as street lights and roads - but they don't have to be, such as private libraries. It's a choice the government makes that extends only to an activity that has conceptual problems being profitable.

In a lot of countries you have to pay for a library card if you wish to borrow books (not to read them), a kind of semi-public system. And in most countries library books have special licenses. Please don't assume your local situation is international reality.

 

[Sorrow]

What is legal can change.

But it hasn't. What gives you the right to think you are above the law?

Who says I think I'm above the law?
So, now verbally disagreeing with a law is a crime?

 

[Brother None]

No.

Are you claiming all this justification is just random theorizing and your heart-fell spiel for pirates falls short at actual piracy? If so, I applaud your moral balance, but earlier spiels from you (including your hilarious "oh we're so poor and you're so rich" spiel way back) made me conclude that's not the case. Sorry if I'm mistaken.

PS: I enjoy seeing how all pro-piracy spiels always fall short of actually finding a conceptual answer to the "common good" issue of infinite reproduction, tho'.

 

[Texas Renegade]

To quote one very large rotund orange cat who likes Lasagna:

"Whoever invinted piracy should be drug out into the street and shot"

 

[UncannyGarlic]

FFS, you're a complete moron Sorrow.

Libraries gather books through buying them or receiving them from people who bought them. Either way, someone pays and gains the right to use it. Libraries simply choose to make them available to people for free or a nominal fee.

Ah but now you aren't talking about piracy but leaks. Would you then say that the pirates who buy the game, crack it, and share it on the internet are legitimate?

2. In regards to UncannyGarlic's "not everyone pays taxes but everyone gets benefits from street lights", I think you need to follow a course in Economics 101.

Stuff like street lights or roads or dykes are known as "common goods". An important element of these things is not just that they are paid for from collective funds (not the case for games), but that there is no conceivable way to limit their usage: I can't tell someone he can't be protected by a dyke because he didn't pay for it. It serves everyone by default.

And this is where you shoot yourself in your own foot: the whole issue with these common goods is that they can never be handed over from the government to particular means because no industry would take them. This is because you can not make a profit on a good that has unlimited usage, no industry will ever want to produce them, and the government has to do it instead.

You're right about common goods but not all services paid for by taxes are common goods. Take education for example. Not everyone has or will have children, not everyone with children send said children to a public school, and thus not everyone uses and directly gains (most people indirectly gain from it but that is because someone else directly gained from it) from that service. Same can be said for welfare.

Also, comparing libraries to piracy is just plain dumb. Libraries are legal and profitable, using a revenue model based on monthly subscriptions on one hand and paying the publishers fees on the other. A comparable principle for gaming would be renting a game (including from a library, but this is generally cost-prohibitive so libraries won't do it while video rental stores will), not pirating it.

Legallity is irrellevent to the discussion so let's set that aside. As for being profitable, how so? No library I've ever been to charges for anything other than getting a card printed (something like $2) and late fees and damage fees (paying to replace a book). Most are funded by public money and donations (which also supply much of their content) and all are public libraries. I've never heard of any private library that charges to read their material like a video rental store.

* And note that this is a key point: the question of piracy is not just whether it hurts net profits of the industry or not, the question is also if an individual pirate who steals a game and then never buys it is wrong in doing so, and the question is indubitably yes. He's a thief like any thief and should go to jail. There is no conceivably excuse for stealing a product you don't need to survive, nobody has any right to anything they don't pay for - including cultural goods (try walking into a museum without paying why don't you, Sorrow?), unless the proprietor opts to offers his goods for free (like the London Museum). But that's the decision of the owner, not you.

Given the current bs morallity code you're probably right however a pirate should not receive less punishment than a person who physically steals because, as Sorrow pointed out, it's not a lost sale.

To quote one very large rotund orange cat who likes Lasagna:

"Whoever invinted piracy should be drug out into the street and shot"

Damn those Greeks, damn those people who invented disk drives which could write aswell as read, and damn those people who invented the internet.

All that said, digital media, particularly for the PC, is a slightly different ballgame because it's much cheaper and easier to reproce or, in the case of PC software, keep after returning the borrowed product. At the same time, you don't recieve the full product on piracy, the instruction manual (which can be digitalized) and any other fluff inside is rarely included and certainly not in the same form. I agree that piracy in it's current form may not be the desirable and great equivilent of libraries but I'd argue that it's going in a similar direction. Hell, some libraries complain about e-books putting them out of existence so it could be that free digital distribution is the wave of the future.

 

[Texas Renegade]

yes damm those greeks and their murdering pirate ways. Seriously though you knew exactly which pirates I was referring to.

And the stuff that comes with the game is easy enough to get ahold of. Heck most information from a instruction booklet, can be read in any Faq somebody puts up about the game.

Also, Education is a common good. It isn't based on wether you send your kids to school, it is based on it is in the interest of the "common good" for society to educate its collective children.

Pirates are garbage period.

 

[Brother None]

You're right about common goods but not all services paid for by taxes are common goods.

No, a number of them are welfare goods, and there is no conceivable way games could fall under welfare. So how does this relate to this discussion?

Legallity is irrellevent to the discussion so let's set that aside.

Let's not. Why is it irrelevant?

As for being profitable, how so? No library I've ever been to charges for anything other than getting a card printed (something like $2) and late fees and damage fees (paying to replace a book). Most are funded by public money and donations (which also supply much of their content) and all are public libraries. I've never heard of any private library that charges to read their material like a video rental store.

There are private libraries that work on a profitable bases, and regardless of what library you go to it does have to be profitable on whatever revenue resource it has. Yes, it is often counted as welfare and thus heavily funded as I said, though a lot of them do charge monthly fees.

Regardless, it's not charity, and it does have to make money. It can be viewed as a welfare service, in which case it still is not relevant to this discussion.

Given the current bs morallity code you're probably right however a pirate should not receive less punishment than a person who physically steals because, as Sorrow pointed out, it's not a lost sale.

Yip. As someone who worked in retail I can affirm: it is worse than an old-fashioned lost sale for publishers.

Lost sales by theft are calculated and caught in the (often insurance-based) safety net of stores; they do not affect the entire chain of transportation and production before it and thus do not have a negative impact on the revenue of the people responsible for creating and producing the game.

Pirating does, since it is so the sale never happens and the lost sale does not have to be replaced by the store - as is the case with theft.

The economic impact of someone pirating a game is by definition larger than someone stealing it from a store.

Hell, some libraries complain about e-books putting them out of existence so it could be that free digital distribution is the wave of the future.

No. This is conceptually impossible because free digital distribution means there is no profit. There being no profit means no one will produce it. You are again confusing free reproduction costs with free production costs, they are markedly different.

 

[UncannyGarlic]

No, a number of them are welfare goods, and there is no conceivable way games could fall under welfare. So how does this relate to this discussion?

Fair enough, bad point on my part.

Legallity is irrellevent to the discussion so let's set that aside.

Let's not. Why is it irrelevant?

It's not universal (for example in China), it's always "right", and being illegal doesn't support why it's illegal. I guess dicussing legallity is fine, using it as a point is not (especially considering it's part of what's being debated).

There are private libraries that work on a profitable bases, and regardless of what library you go to it does have to be profitable on whatever revenue resource it has. Yes, it is often counted as welfare and thus heavily funded as I said, though a lot of them do charge monthly fees.

Regardless, it's not charity, and it does have to make money. It can be viewed as a welfare service, in which case it still is not relevant to this discussion.

Books, movies, and music are all in libraries, even the welfare ones, so why can't games be included? Just because it's entertainment doesn't mean that it can't be in a library.

Given the current bs morallity code you're probably right however a pirate should not receive less punishment than a person who physically steals because, as Sorrow pointed out, it's not a lost sale.

Yip. As someone who worked in retail I can affirm: it is worse than an old-fashioned lost sale for publishers.

Lost sales by theft are calculated and caught in the (often insurance-based) safety net of stores; they do not affect the entire chain of transportation and production before it and thus do not have a negative impact on the revenue of the people responsible for creating and producing the game.

Pirating does, since it is so the sale never happens and the lost sale does not have to be replaced by the store - as is the case with theft.

The economic impact of someone pirating a game is by definition larger than someone stealing it from a store.

Actually I should know that (worked in retail myself), my bad. That said, it's a non-issue since we don't have data to show that if it wasn't pirated it would be bought or physically stolen.

Hell, some libraries complain about e-books putting them out of existence so it could be that free digital distribution is the wave of the future.

No. This is conceptually impossible because free digital distribution means there is no profit. There being no profit means no one will produce it. You are again confusing free reproduction costs with free production costs, they are markedly different.

Who says that there can't be both? Still, I'd agree that immediate free digital distribution is rediculous but I think a waiting period of a few years might not be so. Then again, just because it's old doesn't mean that it can't sell nor does it mean that conditions can't be created which sell it (StarCraft battlechests sold like mad when StarCraft II was announced). All in all, maybe it shouldn't be mandated but encouraged.

 

[override367]

I hate pirates with all my heart, I can only imagine they are a huge part as to why the game market sucks so bad today for the PC compared to 10 years ago when we had so many more games available and so many different games than today.

I believe it to be the fact that video games are entering the mainstream. The need for mass-market appeal has a homogenizing effect on any media. Pirates, scurvy dogs that they might be, undoubtedly have some effect but are probably more of a convenient scapegoat.

This sort of thing is hard if not impossible to quantify, though.

The problem is the focus on the pirates. Focus on your customers, getting past either a basic cd check or the most draconian drm is usually literally the exact same. You go to website X, download crack Y and bam the game works. It doesn't matter if it has securrom that they spend $15,000,000 on or a cd check that they spend a few hours on. What percent of pirates you think crack their own games? One in five hundred thousand maybe?

Cd check and slapping a code in your game box usable to register an account on their website is enough. Require said account to exist for phone or e-mail, if they don't have internet let them make an account over the phone with the registration code.

Bioware does this, you try to get tech support for mass effect and don't have "Mass Effect PC" registered to your account you are out of luck. The community is plenty good at enforcing this in user to user support as well.

Honestly if companies spent the money they currently spend on anti piracy campaigns on a feature of their game that wouldn't be accessible to someone who pirated it (imagine if oblivion's mod forums required you owned oblivion to access, since we're using BS as the example) they wouldn't have nearly as much of a problem.

That guy from Stardock said it well, a pirated copy is NOT a lost sale. A pirated copy is a sale that never existed. If you release your game 6 months after it came out on a console with no additional features it will be pirated to hell and back, and treating consumers like criminals only makes things worse.

In fallout 3's case the lack of mod tools will likely increase the piracy, as Bethesda's last two games communities are built almost entirely around the mod community. No game community means more piracy.


My view is that if the United States Government didn't allow itself to be used as personal bounty hunters for media companies, the free market would have found solutions to many piracy related issues on its own. Imagine if someone had monitized a napster style model way back when it was big rather than focusing on destroying them? Look at what the pirate is doing and ask "why are they pirating my game?"

Easiest first step is to make sure the purchased product is always equal to or superior to the pirated product, unfortunately that's often not the case.

 

[Matt K]

Having read over the article again, the idea that BS hates being pirated is a non-issue. Piracy will never go away, ever. As a game developer you go into the business expecting some level of piracy. There are ways to lessen the number of people who pirate the game such as releasing demos (or having accurate system specs and being able to return games if they don't work or you don't like them), actually having developers talk to the fan base (and not through some PR mouthpiece) and other methods to get people to care about Team Developer so they feel bad if they pirate.

One thing these people have to remember is a pirated copy is never a lost sale and in fact a decent number of copies of the game are sold to the pirates so they can crack and post the game. In the end getting mad at pirates is like getting mad at the rain, it happens and the best you can hope for is the not get too wet.

 

[Mord_Sith]

BN, I loves ya but I gotta make a point 'ere.

I don't often buy games, and normally I'll only buy either games I've played at a friend's house, ones that have come by verbal (not webpage review) recommendation from people I know, or if they're $20 CDN and under, some of my best games I've picked up were under $20 bucks, because they were actually trying to make something decent, also with the price you can hardly complain if you find faults in it.

A blockbuster game should have blockbuster quality, however it's only blockbuster in name only.

The last game I purchased on release was DoW and it's various add-ons because I was able to play it at a local gaming LAN center, everything else I've either bargain dived for or played at the LAN center / friend's house.

I don't support crap, so in that regard yes BN I agree with you, but to say 'If you don't like it then take your ball and go home!' is pretty asinine and not a solution at all.

As for 'Statements like that' if it flies for the crapshoot companies why can't I say it hmm? This isn't some bribed poll, it's based on actual feedback from pirates to a gaming company whom was actually asking an honest question.

I'm sorry but as I said before, if the companies don't show corporate integrity, why should the consumers who are tired of being burned repeatedly by the crap?

 

[PiCroft]

Most big companies have gotten what they wanted. They made a conscious decision way back to turn us from customers into consumers.

The difference being that customers are people you treat with respect and listen to their needs and wants. Consumers just gobble up whatever you shovel at them, provided you dress up that something to the point where it becomes appetizing to try.

Well, now it worked and we're all consumers and consuming voraciously, exactly according to plan. Problem is, the same people who tried so hard to make us consumers are now crying about stealing.

What did they expect? Now they need to re-evalute their relationship with their customers. Most don't want to do that though. They are too used to shipping generic product. They don't seem to realise that, while they are looking to maximse profits, the source of those profits want some goddamn value.

 

[jero cvmi]

Initially i didnt want to join this discussion, because i wanted to respect the statement that this is a gaming site on a gaming network and does not support piracy by default.

The pleasent surprise that this forum is democratic enough to tolerate pro-piracy opinions, leads me to finally contribute my opinion.

As a person who contributes to several free software projects, as well as to several street musicians not for charity, but because i freely enjoy them and i can say that they're DARN GOOD, without having to read any crappy magazine to make my mind.

As a person who doesnt give 2 fucks about businesses and their profits, nor the laws voted to ensure they will always earn them.

As an person who knows trigonometry thanks to the fact that Pythagoras didnt ask for intellectual rights. Damn greeks.

I have to say that... i agree with you BN. Freely distributing a product is up to the company, not the consumer. Therefore, the responsibility for piracy, is up to the companies.

Furthermore, i respect thieves. they're small time crooks compared to big business executives, or warmongers.
But pirates arent thieves, they're pathetic.
If they were thieves, they'd steal a game DVD off the shelf and keep it to themselves, not brag on the internet about how 1337 haxxorz they are, unknowingly advertizing the very product they've 'stolen', while at the same time wetdreaming about working in the very software industry one day, as if it were something worth wetdreaming of.

and anyway, if i like a game i've played for free, i'm still willing to pay for it. actually back in 2004 when i played a free copy of fallout, i wished i could find an original copy to buy. now its too late, if i'm not mistaken the rights belong to bethesda, who i dont want to support.

i'm sorry for the long post, but i just wanted to make sure it's clear that i am against piracy and pro non-obligatory payment.

 

[Brother None]

and anyway, if i like a game i've played for free, i'm still willing to pay for it. actually back in 2004 when i played a free copy of fallout, i wished i could find an original copy to buy. now its too late, if i'm not mistaken the rights belong to bethesda, who i dont want to support.

Profits for sales of Fallout 1, 2, Tactics (and BoS) still go to Interplay, not Bethesda.

They'll be available for cheap on Good Old Games which should go public soon enough.

I don't support crap, so in that regard yes BN I agree with you, but to say 'If you don't like it then take your ball and go home!' is pretty asinine and not a solution at all.

No it isn't. If you truly hate crap, why are you stealing it? If it's that crappy, just turn away from it.

Now you're giving publishers an excuse for bad sales. If a title tanks, they can just blame piracy. In that way, piracy is preventing a clear picture forming on how much game sales are hurt by low-quality, bad game releases.

 

[TheWesDude]

i am one of the most anti-piracy people i know.

i do not plan on supporting fallout 3 any time soon.

i dont plan on supporting fallout 3 ever without mod tools.

that does not mean i wont play it.

 

[Texas Renegade]

i am one of the most anti-piracy people i know.

i do not plan on supporting fallout 3 any time soon.

i dont plan on supporting fallout 3 ever without mod tools.

that does not mean i wont play it.

That makes you a non pirating pirate then I guess

Huzzah for you

 

[Pope Viper]

Not necessarily, he could rent it, he could play at a friends.

 

[UncannyGarlic]

No it isn't. If you truly hate crap, why are you stealing it? If it's that crappy, just turn away from it.

Now you're giving publishers an excuse for bad sales. If a title tanks, they can just blame piracy. In that way, piracy is preventing a clear picture forming on how much game sales are hurt by low-quality, bad game releases.

(The following is about PC games) To be fair, sometimes you want to try out a game that you're on the edge about even after doing research and it doesn't offer a demo. In that case you're forced to either borrow it (which requires a friend to have it) or pirate it to give it a shot before burning money on it. This comes back to the problem of not enough games offering demos. Console games can get away with it since they can be rented but PC games are in a tight spot on this.