For free, no. Although I could argue that many professional teams start out either as modding teams or volunteer teams, both of which work for free initially. Some years back, when I was just starting out with the graphics, I had the opportunity to witness a formation of one such team. Guys making a fantasy RTS game, programmers, sound and graphic artists, writers, all pitching in with their skills and free time to work on their dream.
Many don't make it, but some do - and later on we read about big publishers buying them out and stiffling all that creative energy in the name of the allmighty dollar with "smart" business strategies such as rushing the product out before it is finished because Christmas is coming.

Games are interactive art. As such, they intrinsically should escape pricing, deadlines, rushing, target audiences and all those things which "guide" their creativity when creativity clearly should be kept wild and free.
Unfortunately, the bigwigs at the publishing companies do not see it that way. They only see numbers and bottom lines.

As for Mass Effect... don't always believe what the game PR tells you. They tend to be like the ancient greek historians - always multiplying the figures by a factor of 10, or in the case of Mass Effect, 100. I took time playing through and unless those novels have 2 pages each, I sort of missed on the whole 90 000 pages of written or spoken text (average novel is about 300 pages).
You've seen it many times if you are a gamer.

Hundreds of units! (actually, only about fifty in all)
Many new foes! (five in total)
...and so on.

If you want to see a game which does have several novels (still not 300) worth of dialogue, and general text in it, check out Albion. I never finished it, because it was so long. Had a blast playing it though.

Bottom line: money can buy you "technical" stuff. Great engine, great tools (licences for professional development tools tend to provoke a groan in anyone who is on a limited budget), big teams of professionals.
But money can't buy you ideas. Nor talent. Creativity is also outside of its paying power. And these things stand at the core of a great game.

I don't care about the fluff. I care about the art that are games. And *that* pirates will never destroy, just like copycats can never destroy an artist's need to express themselves. People will always make games because people like to play games. End of story.

Well it will always be a "law" that if the light shines, there will be a shadow. Nothin' to do about it. However to be exact, there are several problems with current piracy and the main problem is that it is a vicious cycle going round at the moment in my opinion. I admit, that I didn't study business or anything the like, so my opinion in this matter is of amateur interest only. The vicious cycle being that most game developers (Stardock excluded), spend a mountain of money on their copyright protection. However to get that money in again, they rise the price for the game (Though I am sure most of the increased prices go back to inflation), which leads to that "Random Guy" can't afford the game anymore from his sidejob next to school in the coal factory outside town.
However due to all the hype that has been going on because of the game "Random Guy" decides to download the game like all those other "Random Guys". Now "Random Developer" notices that and spends even more money on the next copyright protection and the cycle repeats itself.
However if a good game like SoaSE comes out and it is actually cheap, has large amounts of content and many options / modification abilities "Random Guy" who is basicly an honest hearted citizen will look in his wallet and think after reading a review somewhere: "Hmm that's nice, I'll buy it and be happy."
In my opinion the biggest problem is that pirates and most developers have their fronts up and won't budge due to their morals and because they have somewhat become archrivals due to god knows how many trials at the court.
As for me, I am one of those who rather waits until a game's price drops or watches for titles like Sins which provide long time entertainment at a good price. Though you often have to wait longer, it still pays of in your wallet at the end and you can enjoy the game without any moral doubts that you "cheated the poor programmer XYZ"

You could say the same for some businesses and governments as well. Some people even say the same about entire countries. Personally, I'm indifferent to piracy. Is it good? No. But I've got enough experience with software and media to understand where it comes from. The whole concept of copyright is based on morality. Creativity by people for people. Large businesses are not moral. It is just not a concept that is familiar to them. Small businesses allows the morality of the owner(s) and workforce to shine through in it policies. Big businesses don't allow this by nature and many important decisionmakers in big business have questionable morality themselves.


Disapprove. When I grew up (15-20 years ago), piracy was a large problem as well. It was also the only solution for most people. No internet, modems were rare and dogslow and only a handful of stores in the cities. Getting a game wasn't easy, except on school. You could find any game there, and usually when someone got their hands on the latest, everyone knew it within a few days. And the quality in terms of gameplay in that time was better than most games now. Even the graphics and music were great, if you take the limitations of that time into account.


AFAIK, games do not have to be cheap per sé, but they have provide value-for-money. That is one of the things most mainstream software fails to do, but smaller outfits like Stardock seem to get right. Value-for-money, communication and support, not treating customers as criminals or idiots; those are usually signs of a healthy relationship between a business and its customers.

These teams form in the hopes of selling out. They wouldn't be prevalent if there weren't money in the game market. The market would have neither money nor prestiege.



That depends on the nature of the business or government. A law firm that teams up with the opposiong lawers to increase profits could be said to be immoral (and most of them are). A government that embezzles money from the people for the benefit of the people who run it could be said to be immoral(and most of them are). But taxes are not inherently immoral, no matter how much you don't like them, and neither are insurence companies or law firms.



Rationally, no one should ever buy a game. Ever. As long as there are free-loaders stealing them. Why buy something when you don't have to and when other people don't? It just doesn't make sense from a logical perspective. See, "Random-guy" already buys games. "Pirate-guy" is the only guy who would consider stealing it.

[edit: The reason society does not like pirates is that a bunch of emotionally driven random-guys don't want to be taken advantage of by pirate-guys. I thought this might not be entirely obvious.]

You evidently have no understanding of the concept of rationality.
It is perfectly rational for someone to pay money for an inferior product than one they could get for free from a pirate (by inferior product, I'm referring to DRM and other copy protection measures on the non-pirated version). Why is it rational? Because of the costs associated to them of obtaining+using a pirated version. For example the time+effort cost in locating the pirate version, downloading it, etc.; The negative utility they may well suffer from doing something they know to be illegal; the risk they (believe that they) are undertaking that the pirate version may contain other undesirable elemnts, e.g. give them a virus or something.

The individual is acting irrationaly if and only if they believe using the pirate version of the game would provide them with more utility than the legal version, and yet they get the legal version instead of the pirate version.

That's a very uninspired view you have there. It tells me one thing - you have a lot to learn about creativity and how it drives mankind in its many endeavours.

To start, consider this - why art? Did Michelangelo scuplt David because of money, in the hopes of selling out? Has Dante written his "Divine Comedy" because he hoped to earn a lot of money? Or if you want to go beyond art: do you think scientists, true scientists, study the world around us because they hope to sell that knowledge? Or that the astronauts first asked "what's the pay" and then decided whether they want to fly into space? Perhaps Amundsen thought he will find gold in the Arctic ice?

It is the love for one's work which drives a man forward in what he does. If he hasn't got that love, he may do the job, but he will never excell in it. A man who loves what he does will try to do it no matter if he's getting paid for it or not. Those who just "do the job" will certainly not be doing it for free.

So in essence what you seem to be saying when all of your comments are thus analyzed, is that pirates will jeopardize that part of the gaming industry which tends to go through the motions of making games, with profit first and foremost in mind. Interesting.

@Slydrivel

go back to 4chan and troll there, your attitude about piracy is that of some non existent guru. People pirate anything and everything. Internet piracy is just a new forum of it. It's always existed and always will. If companies understand that fact and just roll their shit out without DRM then if they make a quality product people will buy it.

ps I pirate all the time and I could care less that all of you like to pretend you pay for everything you have. I'm sure you iTunes every song you've ever listened to.

Anti-piracy people get off that high horse.

And Pirates stop feeding the trolls like Slydrivel

If products are pirated, its developer, in practice, loses money (and also in all the cases I have seen, popularity as well).

How do you think good games or other related items are made? The list would include a good idea, skilled people making the game and money. If the budget is low, you will naturally get a worse game. And how do you think people get a higher budget? It is, again, that money gained from honest people who actually buy the game. Also, if a game is bad, its developer will lose popularity. And if that continues, the developer will also suffer a slow death (and for any smart-mouths there; I don't mean the "death" concretically).
In other words, piracy causes the low quality of a developer's products.

There isn't a single corporation which has suffered of piracy that is not still affecting it negatively. Even if the piracy has stopped, it has effects in some places on Earth. By that I mean there are some people who would never buy that developer's product, with usually no matter how good or bad the product is. I even know actual, real people who wouldn't voluntarily buy a product from Microsoft with the reason of that they could just take or buy them at a lower cost. I won't give their names away however, because I still respect their privacy.

-------------------------------

Sincerely yours, Elite

EDIT: I forgot to mention: If someone actually buys a product, then it is NOT about piracy. I refer to some earlier replies that said that sometimes pirates buy products too. Even if it is a pirate who buys a product, they are not pirating that particular product.

The biggest factor in a games development is talent. A budget makes the game pretty. It does not determine the fun. Can anyone think of a big budget game more fun than super mario or goldeneye or starcraft. For me, if a game's graphics are too pretty I know it will be much lauded as amazing, but most likely be amusing at best, and not brilliant or even fun.

Make games worthy of being bought(like sins{which is still too pretty}) and ill buy it.

It does take money, yes. But you don't need piles of it to make good stuff. The logic of having a low budget naturally leading to worse products is flawed. Take a movie like El Mariachi. Cost 7000$ to make, and was supposed to be a sami-local video release. Instead, it ended up getting a 200000 dollar post-production make-over and a real release, because for a 7000$ movie, it was really really good and it impressed some movie-execs. Not sure how much money was made on that movie (regardless of piracy) but I'll bet some serious cash was made. And it launched the career of Robert Rodriguez.

Take a product like Windows. MS had a huge amount of cash to spend (in fact, a few years back MS had so much on the bank, they decided to pay an extra dividend to stockholders because they couldn't do anything useful with it), but we got Vista. Which is peculiar. While Windows is probably one of the most pirated pieces of software, it is also one of the most selling pieces of software and it is one of the most profitable pieces of software. Yet, despite an almost unlimited budget, and a pricetag which was high in comparison to earlier versions, Windows Vista is mediocre at best.

In the MS case, you can even argue that people should have pirated Windows more, because Microsoft was abusing its monopoly and the courts took rather a long time to fix the situation (long enough for MS to get rid of some competition). And even now, it is still not over, looking at the stunt they pulled OOXML.


Have to agree. Besides, if a game is fun, people will buy it, and you'll get the money to make it prettier. The issue with most big budget productions is, the focus too much on being pretty and forget that looks are only the surface.

Actually, wrong on both accounts. I know it seems logical, but the fact of the matter is, the people who pirate games would not buy those games if they couldn't get a pirated version, or if they would, their budget would allow for only a few purchased titles - they certainly would not purchase ALL of those titles they downloaded for free. So in effect they are invisible. Game piracy does not directly cause money damages in any way, and since only a small portion of pirated titles would get purchased in the case of unavailability of a pirated copy, the indirect money damages are also negligible.
Piracy, in effect, is just one big fat convenient scapegoat for inert game studios to blame because their games do not net them as much profit as they would like. Or, in some cases, greedy corporates who think that if it were not for pirates they would be making an extra mountain of cash.

As for popularity, I sort of don't get it. How exactly does pirating decrease popularity of a game studio? If anything it brings the title to a wider spectrum of potential fans. You have people who wouldn't buy a game, but would play it for free, and if the game is good, why would the popularity of the studio which made it drop?

Idiots always fail to realize that advertising sells to other idiots, even when it's crap being sold.

Everything from Napster to cassette tapes have been hailed as the doom of the music industry because the rampant piracy they were going to cause would destroy them. Everything from Napster to cassette tapes has made the studios more money than they could imagine even after they were making it.

When they shut down that EVIL Napster, the bane of copyright law, sales dropped.

The evils of Napster were, according to the RIAA themselves, that only one in four users bought more than a fourth of the music they downloaded. Do one in four people buy a fourth of the music they hear on the radio? What they failed to realize is that minimum 20 million dollars in revenue they overlooked. The 300 million wishful thinking dollars that Napster stole from them never existed to start with.

Sales took a 10% dive the following year, blamed on the economy, while DVD sales had more than doubled.

Piracy, and even possible piracy, has been used to hammer on various technologies for decades. The cassette tape was an evil invention that would destroy the music industry, the VCR tape one that would destroy the movie industry. The RIAA actually claimed that blank CD sales were a measure of the piracy affecting their industry, and that measures needed to be taken to curtail them. They aren't a very bright bunch.

You have to do something really stupid to actually lose sales from piracy, Like those asstards using Fade, or truly horrific games that flat shouldn't have been released, ever. Every indication is that, were piracy to cease, the industries where it is rampant would shrink catastrophically. The PC game industry was built on shareware, the music industry became big with radio, the movie industry became a giant with the VCR. Radio and the VCR were fought tooth and nail by established industries that were stupid and feared them, the gamers started with no power, no recognition, no draw, there wasn't even a customer base to work from.

Video games were a new medium when they entered the technology age, they gave away products to create customers and still they fear piracy. There are still businesses being run, successfully, off the shareware model, download managers, desktop customizers, irc clients, torrent clients. There are virtual gadgets all over the web that are free to download and hinge on the good will of the user to pay them for it if they decide to keep it, and the good ones are making serious money.

ManShooter: "Game piracy does not directly cause money damages in any way"
psychoak: "You have to do something really stupid to actually lose sales from piracy"

Now, to both of those I really have to tell something obvious: A commercial item taken from a legal company for free IS a lost sale itself, and it causes some money to not be made, even when a copy is taken from the corporation.

Let's say that the hypotethical price for a product is 600 units of money, when producing it costs 500.
There are 200 people, who took it, 150 of these paid for it.
Their production cost 100 000 units of money, and the price was 120 000. The company should have earned 20 000 units of money for this, but since 50 people didn't pay for it, the earned sum of money is 90 000 and the balance: -10 000.
In this hypotethical situation, the corporation was to get 20 000 units of money, but instead they lost 10 000, because of piracy.
And, not to forget, even companies consist of people, and these sums of money don't seem very large, so the company must have been quite small... let's say 300 people. This would mean that either the head of the corporation paid 10 000 units of money of their own, or each of the company's members paid 33,33.
Well, 33 euros, dollars or whatever isn't very much, but certainly doesn't give any incentive to go on in making good products for people to steal, don't you think?

Sorry, this is untrue. You want an example? ok I pirate Microsoft Office 07. Will i ever buy it? no. This is what society fails to realize along with the large companies that like to cry and whine about piracy. If you make a good enough product people will buy it. And people will pirate it. A pirated copy holds no value in a hypothetical sale because it's basically a demo, if a pirate likes the program enough or game, he might even buy it.

This is where the scapegoat of piracy tends to breakdown. Most companies just use it as an excuse to treat everyone like a pirate, which is stupid because that in turn loses sales in the long run for a company. And all their counter measures don't mean dick to pirate group who cracks their game/program in less than 24hours.

So I'm just trying to clear up the misunderstanding of a pirated copy = a lost sale. This fact is false and unprovable the reality is all that may happen is someone doesn't like their shitty product and goes with some other program/game. This isn't the fault of the pirate its the companies fault for not releasing a quality product that even a pirate will shell out the cash for. And believe me most pirates actually buy shit. We aren't all cheap bastards.

Alright, alright. Maybe I'm just stupid, slow to learn, can't view the big picture or whatever... Still, I fail to see anything good in piracy. Besides, even if you are a pirate, paying for stuff is buying, not piracy. I mean, when you buy an item, you are not being a pirate at the moment. (sorry about the bad text, couldn't make up anything better)
Buying stuff = not piracy
Taking them from other, illegal places (or legal, if you are using an illegal source or something like that), whatever your reasons are = piracy
This, I already said in a reply I posted yesterday.

And piracy, as a word, means that you get an item in an illegal way, though not as straightforward as robbery. It's still stealing! Most of the people in this thread are defending illegal activities. If you want everything to be free, why don't you just simply write a persuasive letter to your country's government. Though I doubt many people would bother to do anything when there's nothing to be gained.

Man, this is really making me sick... Any hope I had about that there still was people with principles, or a small group of non-corrupted humans is nearly being flushed down the toilet. Okay, I admit; the last comment might have been a little exaggerated.