Piracy

[TheMightyEthan]

Yeah, I won't knowingly buy any game with StarForce. Same goes for Ubi's always-on DRM. And here's the thing for me: if I refuse to buy the PC version of a game because of DRM, I will also not buy the console version even though I have the console.

[Yantelope V2]

So one thing I think it should be okay for you to do is bypass DRM for personal use. I don't think I agree with that part of the DMCA. If I bought a copy of the game and paid money for the license I should be able to strip the DRM out or even use a NO CD crack. I'd be okay with providing that sort of protection to consumers.

[deanb]

http://machinestudios.co.uk/viewentry.php?id=45

[Johnny]

Useful/interesting list! Though I'd wish he had listed sources.

A lot of these seems to be studios that have closed. On the one hand, I think the assumption that the former employees no longer get any money out of that is a pretty reasonable one, but on the other hand I don't really know that much about the kind of legal stuff going on within studios.

[Waldorf and Statler]

I've never liked the excuse that the reason one pirates is because the developer won't be seeing shares from it. Similar to how people say the reason they don't buy music albums is because the artist won't see any profits from it. But you know, there are hundreds of thousands of people that get paid with the money those "publishers" make. They need to make this money to see whether to publish another title by this developer.

[Faiblesse Des Sens]

Yeah but if the developers defunct that's not an issue.

[Waldorf and Statler]

It IS true, and if at that point the publisher doesn't really need the profits from the game then hey all to it. But in a general sense, I would prefer they justify their piracy tactics for what it is really: free shit. It's not a statement against the man done by pirates. It's only really somewhat of a statement when the publisher/developer is outright pissing people off with DRM.

Edited February 5, 2012 by Waldorf And Statler

[Faiblesse Des Sens]

Who says it has to be a statement? I don't think anyone is making a statement if their reasoning is "the developer isn't around anymore so no one who worked on it will get the money." Think about stuff that becomes public after the copyright expires. This happens in books. Which is why you can download classics for free.

[Connorrrr]

Who says it has to be a statement? I don't think anyone is making a statement if their reasoning is "the developer isn't around anymore so no one who worked on it will get the money." Think about stuff that becomes public after the copyright expires. This happens in books. Which is why you can download classics for free.

 

To be fair, some games become free "classics" too. Off the top of my head, you can get Beneath a Steel Sky, GTA 1 & 2 and the first Elder Scrolls for free from various places. I don't see a design like that becoming too popular in many "classic" games, but I think there's a case to be made for pirating games that aren't going to support the people who worked on it.

 

Another query, how come Black Isle makes money on Fallout 1 but not Fallout 2?

[TheMightyEthan]

Another query, how come Black Isle makes money on Fallout 1 but not Fallout 2?

 

They might not. The list isn't all-inclusive so just because a certain game isn't on it doesn't mean the dev is getting money.

[Thursday Next]

With regard to that list, examples such as Pandemic and Bullfrog are pretty misleading. The "developer" in that instance does not receive money directly because they sold the entire business along with all the rights to make money from those IPs to another company, included in that price would be the amount of money that the developer expects to make from its current stock of games out in the wild. The individual coders (or at least some of them) now work for that other company so will indirectly receive money from those game sales, in the form of shares, wages etc.

 

Not sure what this list is really looking to prove other than to point out that selling the IP on which a game is based is a lot different to selling the game itself.

[deanb]

Several of those were shut down by MS, wouldn't that have been a decent target?

 

The point of the list, as it states at the top, are these are games/developers that no longer get cash from those sales. And they don't. Yes if Joe Bloggs, texture editor on SW:Battlefront, is now working elsewhere within EA then theoretically the $5 or whatever that is paid for Battlefront on Steam may end up as the $5 in his pay packet, but it's hardly like he's getting paid for the actual game though. And I bet you Molyneux, what with working in a completely different company, isn't getting a penny from EAs sales of Dungeon Keeper, Syndicate, Populous etc on GoG. It wasn't a list of "games now owned by other people", it was a list of "games where the devs are no longer paid for their work".

[Thursday Next]

Several of those were shut down by MS, wouldn't that have been a decent target?

 

The point of the list, as it states at the top, are these are games/developers that no longer get cash from those sales. And they don't. Yes if Joe Bloggs, texture editor on SW:Battlefront, is now working elsewhere within EA then theoretically the $5 or whatever that is paid for Battlefront on Steam may end up as the $5 in his pay packet, but it's hardly like he's getting paid for the actual game though. And I bet you Molyneux, what with working in a completely different company, isn't getting a penny from EAs sales of Dungeon Keeper, Syndicate, Populous etc on GoG. It wasn't a list of "games now owned by other people", it was a list of "games where the devs are no longer paid for their work".

 

If I'd not used EA ones, I'd have been pulled up on it.

 

Ok, but I mean, what's the point? Yes, not everyone involved in a game will receive money for that game forever.

 

To break that question down more let's start with: Who is a "dev"?

[deanb]

The dev is the folks that develop the game. Joe Blogg the texture artist, A. Nonymus the script writer, Bill Grates the programmer, etc etc.

 

 

And I'd have been cool with MS as your pick of studios as examples. I'm not keen on their "lets close down the studios n lay off the devs, then make AoE:Online and Flight two years later anyway"

[Thursday Next]

In that case, it is ludicrous to expect each individual to get paid for whatever they did on a game in perpetuity. I can pretty much guarantee that there is not a single game in existence where everyone on the credits list is still employed by that company the logistics involved in tracking individuals as the move around, out of and back into the industry would be phenomenal.

[Hot Heart]

I'm with T-Next. It's not about the developers, as in people, getting royalties from their work. It would be akin to expecting the grip on a film to having a percentage of the takings. They've already been paid for their work in producing the thing.

 

The most relevant aspect would be the IP owners and whatever deal a developer made with a publisher. That's what the list should be establishing and investigating.

[Thorgi Duke of Frisbee]

David Jaffe on piracy:

“You're a common fucking thief and you should have been raised better by your parents. You're stealing other people's work and that's a shame. I feel bad for you, and I wouldn't want to be you.”

 

 

Well, the man certainly loves to speak his mind...\

http://totalplaystat...ps3/news/10306/

 

On Online Passes:

" It's fantastic. The publisher owes nothing to the used gamer. I don't mean this disrespectfully, but they are not our customer. We need to be responsible to the people who have paid us to do good work for them. I'm a huge proponent of the 'customer is always right' and treat them like a king. That's one of the reasons I love Apple so much as a company because my experience with them has always been they're ease of use and they put the user-experience first. I think that's such an inspiration for our industry to say look, do whatever you can to give them a good experience. You do that for the people that pay you. You're working for that customer.

 

But a person who walks into a store and buys a game used and you don't see a dollar from it?"

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/115/1155383p4.html

Edited February 6, 2012 by DukeOfPwn

[deanb]

If the game can be sold for perpetuity why can't people be paid for it perpetually? Also it's not really developers fault if they're all fired as soon as the game is out the door...

 

amend: See I've seen Online Passes as "Well we the develoeprs should be paid for our work" (I'm pretty sure that was a Naughty Dog guy). Yet they're not getting paid for their work with online passes as they come out after the game is made and developers paid (and potentially fired). So the money just goes to whoever happens to have the IP at the time.

[Yantelope V2]

If the game can be sold for perpetuity why can't people be paid for it perpetually? Also it's not really developers fault if they're all fired as soon as the game is out the door...

 

West and Zampella might agree with that part.

[Thorgi Duke of Frisbee]

In the next console generation, I see games being sold physically as well as digitally. In that way, we'll begin to see the rise of the eternally-sold product; once it's up on PSN or XBL, I don't see any motivation other than legal for it to be pulled off the service eventually.

[SixTwoSixFour]

"It's fantastic. The publisher owes nothing to the used gamer. I don't mean this disrespectfully, but they are not our customer. We need to be responsible to the people who have paid us to do good work for them. I'm a huge proponent of the 'customer is always right' and treat them like a king. That's one of the reasons I love Apple so much as a company because my experience with them has always been they're ease of use and they put the user-experience first. I think that's such an inspiration for our industry to say look, do whatever you can to give them a good experience. You do that for the people that pay you. You're working for that customer.

 

But a person who walks into a store and buys a game used and you don't see a dollar from it?"

 

[WTF]

If the game can be sold for perpetuity why can't people be paid for it perpetually? Also it's not really developers fault if they're all fired as soon as the game is out the door...

 

amend: See I've seen Online Passes as "Well we the develoeprs should be paid for our work" (I'm pretty sure that was a Naughty Dog guy). Yet they're not getting paid for their work with online passes as they come out after the game is made and the developers are paid (and potentially fired)

 

if you want to be paid for your product perpetually then you need to make sure your contract that allows you to sell the game be paid for it.

 

Sorry Dean but with this one I'm with TN and HH to an extent. Do you believe that everyone who worked on a film or an album from over 50 years ago still gets paid for it? Why should the audio-engineer who soundmixed an album still be paid for a Beatles Album? It wasn't in his contract. Does the record company get paid? yeah they do. The artist gets paid too if they own the license.

 

An employee of a company that makes a game will not get paid perpetually but the company will and by company I mean the developing company - not the publisher. And that's only if they don't go bankrupt.

 

If a person wants to be perpetually paid for a product they created they need to have contracts that get them paid perpetually. Otherwise they're just employees and you're not going to pay them beyond their tenure at that institution.

 

There is no protectory right generally for people to own what they created unless they created it in their own time these days. It's mostly been that way for a while now.

 

The only way you can permanently gain income from your creation is to create it and market it yourself, write a strong contract that keeps the ip under your ownership or if that fails at least part of it (The tetris guy still makes money from every tetris game sold - pretty sure it's case though you can ask TN since they do sell Tetris titles at EA), or are paid by means of profit-participation. To expect anything else is honestly quite naive.

 

Also when they refer to developers there I'm pretty sure they refer to the company and not the individual.

[Thursday Next]

The only way this would work is if you set your company up as a partnership. There is only one large company I can think of that runs this way http://www.johnlewispartnership.co.uk/about.html.

 

I would love to see a videogame publisher that operates like that. I used to work for both Waitrose and John Lewis on the bottom rung, shop floor roles and it was one of the nicest working environments I've ever experienced.

 

Also, yeah, he does. Sneaky Russian.

[WTF]

The only way this would work is if you set your company up as a partnership. There is only one large company I can think of that runs this way http://www.johnlewis...o.uk/about.html.

 

I would love to see a videogame publisher that operates like that. I used to work for both Waitrose and John Lewis on the bottom rung, shop floor roles and it was one of the nicest working environments I've ever experienced.

 

Also, yeah, he does. Sneaky Russian.

Thanks for the conf

I love the JL model but didn't they do that with a lot of IT companies in the past by giving the employees (every employee) shares in the company. I'm pretty sure MS and Google did that, I know that certain Asian IT firms did it too. In fact yeah MS did do that which is why Gabe who was an early employee made a lot of money cashed out and then started valve. Unfortunately in the case of the IT firms this process only lasts during the initial period whereas the JL model lasts for however long you work there iirc.

[deanb]

Well why don't contracts allow it? Why is it considered a-okay for you to make a game that the publisher will be getting revenue on 10, 20, 30 years later while you are out on the streets unemployed? Seems a very shitty end of the stick to be given considering your the ones that actually made the game in the first place. Probably explains the large rise of indies of late actually. Why work for some company for overtime, stress, etc and eventual firing, when you can work your own, be your own publisher, and for as long as your game is on sale you'll derive the revenue from it?

 

Also it was my understanding that artists, singers, actors etc do get paid royalty. Not like the beatles (as was the example) were paid £10 an hour then kicked out the door while the record studio racked in the cash off the resulting album. That's not how they became millionaires.