fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2686 ]

[ SECRET POST #2686 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2686 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 059 secrets from Secret Submission Post #384.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ], [ 1 - posted twice ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I'm starting to feel like anti-piracy arguments are kind of classist. I mean, I'm a person who has a fair deal of spending money, so I can buy most of the things I would otherwise pirate. If someone has less spending money than me, the argument seems to be that they should be buying less art than me, and that doesn't seem fair, especially for people who're trying to become artists themselves. (And yes, you can apply the same argument to other resources, but art is a special case because it's so easily reproducible--your having a copy of Fight Club doesn't prevent other people from having it.)

On a related note, it feels weird to me when artists don't want their work pirated. You should make art because you want people to consume it and love it. If you'd rather they not consume it in cases where you won't get money from it, why are you an artist and not a hedge fund manager?

Oh, and one more for the pile: I've heard game company honchos argue that widespread piracy could mean the end of super big-budget games. I would be totally okay with that. You don't NEED to see every pore on Lara Croft's face, you don't NEED Hollywood actors doing your voices, and you don't NEED fifty hours of boring sidequests no one will actually finish. I feel like big budgets allow developers to attract an audience for cool, beautiful games that aren't really all that good due to faulty core mechanics and a kitchen-sink mentality.

The best games were the 8 and 16 bit sidescrolling platformers. Everything after that has been an exercise in feature creep.

Nope.

I. . . don't actually believe this is true. But my visual processing is really poor, and I miss the days when graphics were simple, because I can't play a lot of newer games at all.

For your second point: work is work. There is still time, money, and other resources poured into a work of art. Not all work done by an artist is necessarily personal expression.

Yeah, I wonder what other groups of people the OP thinks shouldn't be paid for their work because "getting to do what you love and put it out in the world should be enough reward." Fuck that.

First, one of the reasons I don't like piracy is that it actually is bad for people who work at the stores music/videos are sold. So it's not really a class issue.

Second... well, if you go to a store and see an expensive item, do you steal it? No. I think this is the same thing. It's not that poor people can't have nice things, it's that there's ways to acquire them.

Classist? It's classist to want to be paid for the shit you worked on?

I mean I'm no Ayn Rand but holy shit. If you want to charge for something you put work into, why the fuck would you want somebody to steal it instead?

This is the kind of asshole-think that makes people start telling commissioned authors they should do it for free.

Edited 2014-05-12 01:04 (UTC)

"If you want to charge for something you put work into, why the fuck would you want somebody to steal it instead?"

Well, the artsy answer is so your message will spread further. The pragmatic answer is so they tell all their more spending-inclined friends that your game is awesome. (This particularly means a lot if your advertising budget is three cents and dryer lint.)

Oh yes. Do it for "the exposure!"

You realize that it cost money and time to make that game in the first place? Money those people who'd charge for it are hoping to recoup. And buisnesses are made up of people. People who would like their paychecks, the majority of those people whom are not in the upper class.

There will always be people who buy games, because there will always be people who want to spend money to support the games they like. (Spore was pirated to hell and back, and it still sold two million copies in its first three weeks on the market.) If some of those people hear about your game because it was pirated by a friend of theirs who wouldn't have bought it anyway, that's a net gain. If someone pirates your game, then decides to buy it to support you (which is apparently surprisingly common), that's also a net gain. The only loss is if someone pirates your game with the intent of later buying it, then decides not to buy it because it sucks, in which case you should have made a better game.

It is also a loss if someone who would have bought your game were piracy not an option pirates it instead, and then decides hey, why should I pay for this thing when I have a perfectly servicable copy right here for free?

Which is, incidentally, a hell of a lot more common than people actually pirating something to try it out and then buying it when they decide they like it.

It may be ultimately a negligible loss for large companies, but the same can't really be said of smaller developers or solo artists, who frequently charge a great deal less and still get their work pirated, generally by people who then bleat "but exposure!" when called on their shit.

("Exposure", incidentally, is also a scam used by large companies to rope emerging artists into working for them either gratis or for criminally low wages in return for the promise that someone, somewhere, will see their work and shouldn't that be enough for any artist. So congratulations on having a point of view in line with manipulative, money-grubbing assholes, I guess.)

If it's gonna turn into a numbers argument, I can't do that, because I don't have numbers. I have anecdotes, like the survival of Kudos despite being pirated to hell and back, or the success of Hotline Miami despite the dev openly helping pirates acquire it for free, but I can't factually prove what effect piracy has on the average game's sales.

I feel like big budgets allow developers to attract an audience for cool, beautiful games that aren't really all that good due to faulty core mechanics and a kitchen-sink mentality.

Seriously. I remember there was a bit of a hullabaloo where people mocked a new Call of Duty game because the developers made this thing over how the fish AI made swim away from your character when you entered the water and it's like...really? That's what they think people are playing for?

I'm a baker. I like baking. I love it, actually. My kitchen is my happy place. I still want to get paid for doing it, though, because it is my damn job. Just like my sister wants to get paid for practicing law, which she loves, because that's her job, and my girlfriend wants to get paid for building websites, which she finds enjoyable, because that's her job.

Just because someone enjoys their work doesn't mean they shouldn't expect to be paid for it, and the idea that artists specifically should be above such petty considerations is frankly idiotic. They enjoy their art, or they wouldn't be doing it, but they probably also enjoy paying their rent and eating food, because they are presumably human artists and not magical fairies who are sustained wholly by sunshine and the smiles of little children.

The analogy here would be if someone copied your recipes and started giving away free baked goods from a roadside shack--more economical for the customer, but also more likely to give them a virus. I'm not sure what effect that would have on overall sales, but I doubt it would drive you out of business.

That analogy doesn't work, because your theoretical roadside shack muffin mavericks are putting in the effort of producing their potentially virus-riddled muffins themselves - at worst, it's knock-offs, and at best it's the equivalent of fanwork, but either way it's something they themselves produced at the expense of their own time, effort, and supplies.

Pirates don't create. They aren't giving away their work. They're giving away someone else's, and while I am not actually anti-piracy, pretending it's some kind of moral stance because people who like their work shouldn't want to be paid for that work is, again, idiotic.

I don't understand the point you're drawing here. Is there something more moral about knockoffs you've put effort into than knockoffs you haven't put effort into? (If you were to say knockoffs in general are bad, that would be more consistent, but much harder to respond to.)

Piracy isn't a knockoff. It is the actual, real product, being redistributed without any compensation to the creator. Knockoffs only came into it because you made a faulty analogy, and only in the context of me saying "hey, this analogy is faulty, here's why".

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #2686 ]

Another one for the piracy thing

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You are full of shit on this one

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Re: You are full of shit on this one

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Re: Another one for the piracy thing

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