You so made me spit my drink out, Princess.Originally Posted by Nessus
You so made me spit my drink out, Princess.
We're stuck in a bloody snowglobe.
Free-loading scum present, and reporting for duty, your Dumbassedness!
Exactly. These asshats for some reason think it's reasonable to expect their customers to wait weeks or months for something to begin being physically shipped, instead of downloading it in a matter of minutes or hours while fapping to online porn.
Furthermore, the "downloaded" product is generally superior, as it's in an easily customizable/personalizable digital format (which can be even more easily transported), rather than a shitty plastic disc that scratches and breaks easily and insists on occupying your only optical media slot while being used. Oh, and the "downloaded" product is cheaper too.
Sounds like the pirates are engaging in the purest form of capitalism there is - innovating a superior product, and at a reduced cost to the consumer too! (Half kidding. But if Big Media had any brains at all, they'd take the innovations of digital pirates and monetize those distribution channels... instead of fighting a Quixotic battle to destroy them.)
Stephen King did that with at least one of his books - first few chapters were available for free online, had to pay for the rest if you wanted to keep reading. The large multi-national movie, game and music companies don't do this, of course, because if they allowed customers to decide if the shit they churn out was worth more than a steaming dog turd, 90% of their products wouldn't sell a single copy.
Right. And how well is that working out for them? Maybe they should focus on providing a product/service their customers actually want and are willing to pay for (DRM-free digital media downloads) instead of trying to sue everyone who downloads asongmovie, and blaming business woes on piracy... instead of the actual problem of shitty products combined with suing their target demographics. Asshats. There's never a suicide bomber around when you really need one, sigh.
That's most of my motivation for any downloading I may or may not participate in. I've been burned so many times by shelling out ~$70 for a well-reviewed, highly anticipated game which turns out to be a dog turd *coughFO3cough* or $15 for a critically acclaimed movie that turns out to be as cerebral and interesting as an autistic 2 year old or $20 for an album with one and a half worthwhile songs on it from a band that used to be good.
Fuck that. I'd have to be a fool not to test the waters before handing my money over to those fucking crooks again.
The other part of the reason, of course, is [see embedded image above]. I can have TB of digital media accessible to every screen and speaker in my house, without getting up to sort through a bunch of plastic coasters. This is a service not offered by any legitimate game or movie studio, because, it seems that a requirement of being a media executive is that one must be a myopic fucktard with less intelligence than my cat. Steam and D2D ultimately don't count either, sadly, as they insist that they can A: revoke all data a customer's bought at any time, for any reason and/or B: insist on being allowed unfettered access to my network and machine in order for me to actually access the content I've paid for... that is if the data hasn't been revoked for some reason.
At least virus and spyware writers don't try to charge their end users for the same kind of "feature."
100 years of Big Content fearing technology—in its own words
Best thing written about Big Media ever, IMO. No wonder they hate innovation - they've even been using the same arguments for 100 years!
Well close... I don't know of anyone OCD enough to download shit they don't want just so they can have it or horde it - that said, in the spirit of capitalism, people in the piracy scene may, from time to time, download something they don't want in anticipation of bartering it with someone else for something they actually do want.
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
-- Thomas Jefferson: American Founding Father, clairvoyant and seditious traitor.
I'm amused. The only other thing on arstechnica I've ever read was a piece objecting to people using ad-blocking software, and how ad-blocking will kill the internet.
Last night as I lay in bed, looking up at the stars, I thought, “Where the hell is my ceiling?"
Awesome link, Cain. Their link to the Google Books scan of John Phillp Sousa's rant (with precious illustrations) is fabulous: http://books.google.com/books?id=4ps...age&q=&f=false
Apparently, demand is unrelated to price.
The light that once I thought compassion still casting shadows in your action
The words you shared were cold transactions that bring me to curse what you've done
When you're up there absorbed in greatness with such success you've grown complacent
I hope you scorch your many faces when you fly too close to the sun
There are a lot of factors, and I'm loving how everyone is confusing correlation with causation immediately after accusing someone else of doing the same thing!
Here's how I see it: you gotta segment the market instead of making fallacious statements.. and then you have to survey the market. And then, after the survey, you have to actually use some sort of mechanism to determine how many % were lying, why they were lying, and what they were really doing. Surveys for these sorts of things, well they aren't exactly reliable when the survey is asking you "are you a moron who opens up his wallet for anything you see?" and "are you morally bankrupt?" Of course people will lie.
Here are the categories, I think (to make matters worse, some categories aren't exclusive!):
* For customers who will buy good music, pirating music creates more demand because they find more good music.
* For customers who will buy anything shiny (and there are fewer and fewer of these), .. well, they don't pirate. They just open up their wallets and eat up the shit.
* Then there are those who will pirate who would have otherwise paid money if they didn't have the option to pirate and could otherwise afford it. That's really not easy to quantify because the control group for "didn't have the option to pirate and could otherwise afford it" exists in a separate universe where these people are forcibly removed from the internet tubes.
* People who pirate something after buying it legally so they don't have to deal with the DRM. Not a lot of people in this category (probably), because (probably) buying it legally is very easy, and the DRM is usually not that horrible, but pirating a quality THING wouldn't always be very easy--slow downloads, bad quality, fakes, etcetcetc.
* People who pirate something because they have been burned so much by hobbled legally bought product in the past that they believe the "content producers" have failed to uphold their end of the moral contract that they believe they made, and thus pirating for these people is now morally justified, perhaps even forever.
* Your run of the mill pirates (my guess? 90% of pirates): those who will pirate because they don't have any money, or would rather spend it on things like food, housing, electricity, or their internet connection!
* Those who will pirate just to fill up their ridiculously large and expensive hard disks. It's kind of like a sort of benign psycho-disease 0.1% of all pirates, imo.
Any I missed?
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Cain, those companies will die just like the music companies died... well, actually, they're zombies now. No big artists to monopolize anymore. Honestly, how is it that they are still around? I just don't get it... chop them off at the head maybe?
I totally agree about this though: the movie companies are doing the same thing the music companies have done in the past: totally hobble their products. Bought "Surrogates" (Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group), and it didn't even work on our Blu-ray player. Same region, same everything. Got a replacement disk, same thing. Had to temporarily buy a PS3. Going through all these hoops to watch something that was bought; it'll really brighten your day!! Asstards! Grr.
On topic:
Recent Escapist article on piracy
More interestingly, the blog post from an app developer it links to, who did some tracking to see how true it was that piracy leads to increased sales.
If you look at the total numbers, the percentage of of pirated copies of the game submitting high scores is 71.2%.
Now most pirates will tell you that they just like to try before they buy. If it’s a good game, then they’ll buy it: EDIT: Updated graph
Conversion Rate for Pirated Copies
Well, from this data we can conclude that 0% of pirates think the game is worth buying (which, by the way, is contrary to most of the forum posts we read from legit buyers).
Nice examination. They also go on to say something else I think is apt:
"Having seen our data and the fact that not a single pirate bought Tap-Fu after playing it, these arguments all sound a bit delusional to me. It seems like an attempt at trying to be legitimate while hiding the real reason. They should just change their page to say: We pirate because we can. That seems to be a much more honest statement based on the data we’ve seen."
^^ I don't agree that that analysis is proof.
Anyway, if it is to be believed the consistent 90% piracy rate there shows that no DRM is the answer. Otherwise, you're just spending money for no reason and angering your potential demand base--discouraging those who won't buy a DRM-hobbled crap and even to the point where they won't bother to pirate it.
It is pretty convincing, however. Sure, small sample size and all, but I wouldn't be surprised if the 0% conversion of pirates to paying customers holds true across most other games too.
The few games I play I do own (and that's less than 10 at present) - but of course, I play them with DRM cracks, so I know I'd show up as an unrepentant pirate in any survey like the one Wraithy posted. And in my younger years, I pirated close to 100% of all my games... because I couldn't have afforded them otherwise. Now that I have money, I pay for the vast majority of my digital media - so I also suspect that's a large part of the issue. Not the conversion of pirates to customers on a single title basis, but on a longer term basis, as the pirates graduate high school and college and enter the ranks of "people with an income."
Actually, the only really effective DRM schemes I've seen are the ones around online gaming (B.net, NWN, etc - must have a valid CD key to play online/participate in forums) and hardware dongles. If developers really did want to stop all piracy (at least of video games), they could do so overnight by including USB dongles with their games. But they don't, because of how expensive that would be, coupled with the overwhelming evidence that virtually no pirates would buy the product if they couldn't have it for free. So it would stop people from playing your game without paying for it... but it wouldn't increase the number of people who would pay for your game. <shrug>
I get how irritating it must be to see someone take your work and not pay you for it - but at least in the case of video games and software, the developers need to get over the fiction that pirates would be willing to pay for the product under any circumstances anyway. Take the Stardock approach and focus on satisfying your actual paying customers, and don't give a flying fuck about everyone who isn't a customer (or potential customer).
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
-- Thomas Jefferson: American Founding Father, clairvoyant and seditious traitor.
Even if the rate is 25% (which would be a stunning conversion rate for any "marketing" activity like giving away samples, spending on ads, etc), that would still mean 75% of users are not paying anything at all.
Well..... yeah. . . . but even 0% conversion if people like your games, 'cause of what Cain said-- increased customer loyalty from people who will eventually buy your product when they have money.
That's total bullshit dude, it just meant that you've established a fanbase of freeloaders who won't pay. Using that logic, you can just keep kicking down the can of when someone will actually pay.
US government finally admits most piracy estimates are bogus
In a new report out yesterday, the government's own internal watchdog took a close look at "efforts to quantify the economic effects of counterfeit and pirated goods." After examining all the data and consulting with numerous experts inside and outside of government, the Government Accountability Office concluded (PDF) that it is "difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the economy-wide impacts."
Heh. Irony.
Probably won't last long... this was posted at /. today.
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
-- Thomas Jefferson: American Founding Father, clairvoyant and seditious traitor.
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