Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
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My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
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It's fine to pirate every piece of media. From books, to movies, to music, to textbooks, to newspapers, to my own comments online.
Information and art is meant to be shared and enjoyed. Pay walling a distraction from reality does nothing but make reality worse.
Soooo people shouldn't get paid for taking time to create books, movies, music, textbooks, newspapers?
There should be means that would allow fans and appreciators donate money to creators. And it looks like we already have a lot of those.
Also, culture and art should be promoted by governments. Therefore taxes could go that way too.
Anyway, it's not like people say it's fine for everyone to not pay. But at least we know it's fine for many to pay much less than the rest, see regional pricing and discounts. Creators are totally fine with those. Nothing prevents it from being extended further to people who have a hard time trying to become potential customers.
That's a completely different statement
Eh, there's a difference between compensation for work and using laws and legislation to sew up something tighter than a cats arse for personal exploitation
I would argue that someone saying “every piece of media” doesn’t care about that distinction.
What about people who need money to not only survive but to continue making art? What separates art from, say, coding, as a form of labor that is not worth compensation? Is an artist’s work not worthy of adequate compensation?
This is why concepts like UBI would be so transformative to society.
Imagine a world where no one had to choose between creating and surviving. Where writers and artists and coders and musicians could just make beautiful things and give them to the world for nothing.
Coding isn't always compensated. Open source projects thrive because of the work of developers that don't get paid in most cases. That doesn't stop them (although it's probably because they do other work and can spare time and money).
My point is that both, art and coding, don't require compensation. Many people do both for the sake of it.
That doesn't mean they don't deserve compensation (in the form of donations). They do, most than any other.
Something interesting I'd like to point out, the videogame Mindustry is open source and copyleft (I think either GPL or AGPL). You can get a build off GitHub or FlatHub completely for free. However there is a Steam version with Steam multiplayer and achievements as well which is $9.99 USD on Steam, estimated ownership is around 846.7k [1], the price hasn't always been $9.99, but assuming that isn't the case the game has made around $8 million, I haven't taken out Valve's cut and I don't know how much tax they're paying but that's pretty good. It could be a lot higher if all of the FlatHub and GitHub users paid for their copy. I initially discovered the game on FlatHub, loved it and now have it on Steam. I wouldn't have bought the game if I hadn't tried it for free.
It feels counterintuitive that freeloaders can help with sales, but consider a physical artwork like a painting. People don't tend to buy these things without seeing them first, and seeing it is experiencing, so there's very little benefit to buying it, but people do anyway to support the artist, because they want more.
People who can't pay experiencing their creative work doesn't take anything away from them. Complain about the lack of funding for art instead
It is a statistical fact that people who pirate things tend to buy more things than people who never pirate anything. Furthermore, people who exclusively pirate are a minority. It is also a fact that the majority of pirates would rather pay for things if the service provided is a superior experience to that of piracy.
Gabe Newell said "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem."
Artists and creators need and want to be paid. It’s fulfilling for some of them to have a monetary success associated with their work, and for others they need those funds to survive. We should pay artists and creators, I don’t care if people pirate. Pay the goddamn creators you like so they keep making more cool stuff!
I find this opinion hard to reconcile with Lemmy users' general stance that Reddit/Google are in the wrong for using comments to train AI without asking permission.
Agreed. Once you start blocking culture to only those who can afford it you start losing culture once it becomes unprofitable.
The audacity from woke people.
this opinion has nothing to do with woke people smh. this is just the new sin word just like how they did with communism. everything conservstives didn't like was conmunism, now everything they don't like is being woke
Pretty cool move. If I come across one of his games that interests me, I'll gladly buy it.
Gotta love this quote from the article: "piracy doesn't mean a lost sale if the person pirating the game couldn't afford it in the first place."
I've seen this happen time and time again with people I know who simply couldn't pay even a single dollar for a game, and had no other options available. They deserve to experience culture and entertainment just as much as the rest of us.
The original owner of Galactic Civilization 2 basically said the same thing. He also wrote the Gamers' Bill of Rights.
So of course GalCiv3 did the exact opposite, removed a key feature (milky way map) that was in the first 2 so they could sell it as an overpriced DLC, and made as many DLCs as they could (though not nearly as bad as Paradox or EA).
I don't know who owns Stardock Entertainment now, if the owner sold it, sold out, or got hostile takeovered, but now they're just like all the other big corporate assholes.
To be fair, piracy does drive down sales, as some of the people who would otherwise buy the game do pirate it.
Even still, word of mouth is a great way to compensate for that effect; also, culture really shouldn't be reserved to those who have the means.
These sorts of stories are stupid, and pirates love to eat them up because they see it as validation, because one developer is financially independent enough to not go broke if his game doesn't sell. Most indie devs are not in such a position.
If he truly thought it was fine to download his game for free, he'd have released it for free in the first place. It's pretty easy for him to have a chill attitude and say it's okay to pirate his game after making nearly $100 million on it.
Edit: I also read the actual tweet. I think the author was responding to an "aha, gotcha!" moment. Someone posted a screenshot of them pirating his game with the caption "I love pirating indie games." It almost feels like a troll post. And the dev didn't bite the bait. He was like "eh, you do you. Devs gotta eat, sure, but you know what, culture should be accessible too."
Your argument is weak.
Ultrakill made the game to make money. Releasing a game "for free" for all makes no business sense.
Plenty of publishers do release games for free. Though they hope sell players' data, or ads or add-ons.
This dev is just one dev. Everyone else is free to do whatever they want.
So, there.
It’s pretty easy for him to have a chill attitude and say it’s okay to pirate his game after making nearly $100 million on it.
This is true. I don't see a problem with that. Give me $100 million dollars. It will be pretty easy for me to do neat stuff that doesn't necessarily bring me profits.
Edit: Downvoted by corporate suits. On Lemmy of all places.
Additionally: word of mouth can turn into sales down the line, too, if the pirate liked the game and talks about it.
At worst, the developer isn't negatively impacted (by people pirating a game they couldn't afford / had no intention of buying), at best it leads to more sales.
I don't see the problem.
And I know that someone reading this will be foaming at their mouth, excited to say "But what if everyone did this? Then developers/studios/... wouldn't make any money and stop producing games/movies/...!", so I have to preemptively add the following:
Edit: btw I say this as someone who has never pirated a game except for Minecraft when I was, like, 10. I love playing (esp. Indie) games and am happy to pay for them. I just want people to leave folks alone who can't.
The people cracking games were never in a position to buy the games in the first place.
I wouldn’t necessarily say never. Truthfully, I’ve pirated a few games and once I found out I loved them I’ve bought copies. I had the capacity to buy, but didn’t want to sink the money in for a potentially low return. I definitely would never have had the money to buy all of the games I pirated over the years though.
I also don’t consider sharing of ROMs of outdated games that are no longer available for sale in order to use in an emulator as piracy, and I’d say the vast majority of my fee-free game downloads were focussed there. How can I be depriving the creators of anything if I literally have no way to pay them to access the content?
The point is that a pirated copy is not a lost sale, because it was not guaranteed that the pirate would have bought a copy if they could afford it or whatever.
Anti-piracy people hate reading this, but piracy leads to more sales in many cases. People don't want to spend so much on something they will only maybe like. Many people who pirate a game often end up spending more money than people who bought it outright.
I am one of them. I pirated NieR Automata, because I had no idea if I was going to like it or not. I bought 2 copies on PS4, 3 copies on Xbox One, and 2 copies on Steam to give to friends. For myself I also bought the White Snow Edition of NieR 1.22, a still sealed copy of NieR Gestalt imported from Japan, and a digital copy of NieR 2010 on the Xbox Store. I even felt so inclined that I broke the one rule I have and spent money on the mobile gacha game, not because I wanted any certain character or whatever, but because I literally wanted to tell the company that I want to buy more NieR products and want to see more of what Yoko Taro can cook up.
One instance of me pirating a game generated that much revenue for the company where I otherwise would have had no motivation to give that to Square Enix, and my friends would very likely not have played the game either.
Honestly I only personally consider anything as piracy if the product is still available for sale from the actual publisher/developer. If its no longer available, then whether I pirate it or not doesn't matter to the company because where I other wise would give them money, they apparently don't want it.
Based jakito
In my teenage years and early 20s I pirated everything because I was broke. I could squirrel away enough money to build a low grade gaming computer and the benefit to me was "I don't have to pay for games because I can pirate them". That or I survived on Demo CDs that came with magazines I got at the book store (and later on I think it was demoplanet.com?). If it wasn't for these resources, I probably never would have gotten into PC gaming.
Now that I have expendable income, I buy games that I want to play.
I would never have been a customer if I wasn't originally a pirate. It's the circle of life.
Also I just went and bought this game because I have money to support shit like this and I'm all about supporting developers who understand.
Based.
Makes me wanna buy the game even though I know literally nothing about it.