186 réponses à ce sujet

[meznaric]

jklinders wrote...

i did read the first sentence. I had pointed out that software is a different market than music with a very different cost. Your link did nothing to refute that.

Unless you are talking about the corporate software market or the OEM market (which are, of course, pretty big and not to be neglected) then the difference is really not very big. Unfortunately many studies focus more on music than software, but the study I posted deals with both of these (although to a larger extent with music).

Second it is not my rule. Just don't say you were not warned if a mod bans you. Don't worry I didn't snitch if that is what you are worried about:whistle:

If Bioware is so scared of people debating piracy on their forums then that just shows on how shaky a ground they stand. But until this happens (and indeed if it happens at all), I will continue to express my opinion.

lastly, you are saying that people should not be paid for work they do.

Just for the record, this is something I did NOT say. I said that developers do NOT get paid less due to piracy.

how would you like it if you took a pay cut becuase your workplace had suffered looses due to people not paying for services provided? This is the part of the equation I am not getting. not a single one of you piracy advocates can do anything to prove stealing games is making game developers richer.

Stop conflating piracy with stealing. And yes, piracy DOES help the software developers. If I have alrady bought as many games as I was able to afford this year but really want this other game I have an option to pirate it. By doing this I advertise the game for free. If I could not have pirated it, I would not have bought it either. This means that in such a scenario the company making the game profits from the free marketing I offer.

meanwhile legitmate buyers are suffering under increasingly invasive DRM as publishers and developers fight fort their rights and paychecks.

Let's face it, DRM is just stupid. They are playing cat and mouse with the hackers who are going to find holes in their security software anyway. What's the point? As you said, they end up annoying the people who paid for the software (encouraging them not to) and in the end achieve nothing. But the firms are slowly waking up to this. Spotify offers free music (although they suspended the widely available free account registration, you now need to be invited). I believe that artist donation based systems are the way forward where people can express appreciation for a particular artist rather than the entire system. Wikipedia is another example of freely available content. They are not rich, but they have enough money to pay for the bandwidth and the staff they need to hire.

[Vaenier]

Piracy is bad. DRM causes piracy. DRM is bad. My 'friend' has pirated games for the sole reason of not dealing with DRM. kinda ironic...

Interesting hypothetical situation: Its the future and you have a machine that can make a copy of any object. Is it wrong to copy a chair? you didnt steal the chair from its designer, but you get the chair at no cost to you.

Theft of an idea is a hard thing to stop. All you can do is make people know that if you dont get paid for ideas, you cant make new ones for them.

[Lmaoboat]

Vaenier wrote...

Oh well, Bungie is still the greatest.

Modifié par Lmaoboat, 28 février 2010 - 02:53 .

[Vaenier]

^ Thank you for making my day.

[jklinders]

Again you claim that devs do not lose money from piracy. yhe study you posted only dealt with music so in this debate it is garbage. as for the costs not being different for games and music, I beg to differ. a professional band can have an album written recorded and produced inside 2 months and still produce quality work. Maybe a dozen or so people involved in the process.(let's forget marketing for a moment, that costs the same for music and games anyway)



Compare that with the payrolls to the dozens of people listed in the credits of this game over 2 years of development. Kindly enter the real world, there is no comparison.



Anyway I do not suffer from the moral fault that if I cannot afford something I just take it. just because something has neither weight nor volume in a sense that you can touch it does not mean it does not have value. I assume you would not think taking a computer not paid for is OK. You have still failed to explain why taking software is. you just kind of slink around it using semantics.

[77boy84]

meznaric wrote...


Stop conflating piracy with stealing. And yes, piracy DOES help the software developers. If I have alrady bought as many games as I was able to afford this year but really want this other game I have an option to pirate it. By doing this I advertise the game for free. If I could not have pirated it, I would not have bought it either. This means that in such a scenario the company making the game profits from the free marketing I offer.

This is, by far, the most asinine thing I have ever read.

Pirating is NOT free marketing.
Pirating is playing a game that someone put tons of money, effort, and time into without giving them anything to show for it.

You might advertise the game, sure, but how many other pirates "advertise" after downloading it? How many people would you even get to buy the game if you did advertise it?

[meznaric]

max_ai wrote...


FSF has nothing to do with open source software other than the fact that they both tend to open their sources (free soft =/= open source).
GPL is a necessary evil that "Open source" had to take on itself in its early days (early 90's). Still, GPL is just a license, although an undesired one in terms of open source, but historically was just made part of it.
I really hope that this license will be ditched some day as it puts the wrong impression on the open source software, and stimulates it to develop along the lines of free software (which will eventually lead to a dead end).
FSF has political agenda, open source hasn't.

By dis-balances I mean that open source software can be shown in the same light as inventions. The so called "source" is for everyone to see, yet, it can be protected by patents which obligate you to pay money if you intend to implement the ideas. It advances the technological process, creates competition and most importantly rewards your effort. Piracy ruins almost every benefit of this system. Technological process stops, because people will start copying from each other and you won't be rewarded for your invention, hence you'll be less inclined to develop new things.

GPL is by far the most commonly used open source license (counting all of the version). I would say this expresses a great deal of support for the political ideas of FSF. GPL, unlike BSD or MIT license, essentially forces you to make any product based on the original code also open source. It thus spreads the ideal to other people through the threat of legal enforcement. Seems quite political.

Yeah, software patents exist in the United States. Luckily I live in Europe, where the European Parliament struck down the software patent agreement a few years ago. You have a point there though, having patents on open source software is possible in some countries. But  I would not call that open source anymore (though this is, of course, semantics again).

[meznaric]

77boy84 wrote...

meznaric wrote...


Stop conflating piracy with stealing. And yes, piracy DOES help the software developers. If I have alrady bought as many games as I was able to afford this year but really want this other game I have an option to pirate it. By doing this I advertise the game for free. If I could not have pirated it, I would not have bought it either. This means that in such a scenario the company making the game profits from the free marketing I offer.

This is, by far, the most asinine thing I have ever read.

Pirating is NOT free marketing.
Pirating is playing a game that someone put tons of money, effort, and time into without giving them anything to show for it.

You might advertise the game, sure, but how many other pirates "advertise" after downloading it? How many people would you even get to buy the game if you did advertise it?

Could be none, could be loads. Maybe I have lots of friends who come over and see me play this game. Maybe on the way home they decide "Why don't I go fetch that game from the shop?".

Your post is just one big assertion that piracy is not free marketing. No arguments made, nothing. Moralizing does not defeat an economic argument.

[meznaric]

jklinders wrote...

Again you claim that devs do not lose money from piracy. yhe study you posted only dealt with music so in this debate it is garbage. as for the costs not being different for games and music, I beg to differ. a professional band can have an album written recorded and produced inside 2 months and still produce quality work. Maybe a dozen or so people involved in the process.(let's forget marketing for a moment, that costs the same for music and games anyway)

Compare that with the payrolls to the dozens of people listed in the credits of this game over 2 years of development. Kindly enter the real world, there is no comparison.

Anyway I do not suffer from the moral fault that if I cannot afford something I just take it. just because something has neither weight nor volume in a sense that you can touch it does not mean it does not have value. I assume you would not think taking a computer not paid for is OK. You have still failed to explain why taking software is. you just kind of slink around it using semantics.

After a bit of searching, I found an article that does not focus on music. Here you go:
http://papers.ssrn.c...tract_id=466063

Maybe next time it would not hurt if you check out google scholar for yourself.


Also I do not agree that piracy equals stealing so asking me if taking a computer unpaid for is OK is totally unrelated. A similar question would be what if I could make an exact copy of a computer without any cost to the seller. The moral argument does not quite carry the same weight.

[meznaric]

AtreiyaN7 wrote...

meznaric wrote...

AtreiyaN7 wrote...

I played Oblivion and Fallout 3...and neither was as good as any of the BioWare games in terms of story and how things play out. Did you forget the patently stupid forced decision in Fallout 3, DESPITE having Fawkes in your group (assuming you're a good karma-type)? They "fixed" that in Broken Steel, but seriously...the original ending was a serious mistake (which many, many people complained about on the Bethesda forums anyway).

I agree with the comment about the ending. But if you forget that (or think of the Broken Steel ending instead) the overall story structure is much more interesting than the Bioware one. The story in Bioware games feels very modular. In Fallout3 it just flows naturally.

I enjoyed Fallout 3, but I wouldn't call the structure innovative in any way, except for the Tranquility Lane section, which was unique/interesting. Otherwise it's standard "go here, do this to get to your objective (aka "Dad")." Raven's Rock? Done the infiltrate a military base thing in Fallouts past. Ditto on hunting for a GECK. Also, there wasn't anything that I found terribly memorable in the writing, whereas in a BioWare game, you usually end up with a lot of memorable quotes and lines. FO3 was a solid game and lots of fun, but it didn't strike me as being awe-inspiring as far as the story went.

BioWare has structured stories that flow pretty well. In a Bethesda game, the narratives are pretty loosely connected and don't always come together in a satisfactory manner in my opinion. I prefer the generally tighter writing in a BioWare game, but to each their own.

Wait, maybe I was not making my point clearly. I am not trying to say that Fallout has an innovative structure. What I am saying is that the structure of Fallout's storytelling allows it to incorporate more mystery and detective work in the story development than Bioware's structure. Bioware's way of telling the story reveals the whole story very early on in the game, whereas in Fallout you had to play for quite a while until you'd get the same information (you'd likely have finished 2 replays of ME2 by that time).

[Vaenier]

meznaric wrote...

what if I could make an exact copy of a computer without any cost to the seller. The moral argument does not quite carry the same weight.

You stole my hypothetical

Wait... does this qualify for irony?

[lltoon]

Lmaoboat wrote...

Vaenier wrote...

Oh well, Bungie is still the greatest.

[max_ai]

meznaric wrote...
GPL is by far the most commonly used open source license (counting all of the version). I would say this expresses a great deal of support for the political ideas of FSF. GPL, unlike BSD or MIT license, essentially forces you to make any product based on the original code also open source. It thus spreads the ideal to other people through the threat of legal enforcement. Seems quite political.

Yeah, software patents exist in the United States. Luckily I live in Europe, where the European Parliament struck down the software patent agreement a few years ago. You have a point there though, having patents on open source software is possible in some countries. But  I would not call that open source anymore (though this is, of course, semantics again).

True, GPL is by far the most used license in the open source community. But that doesn't hold for much of the software (X11 license is the boldest example that comes to mind). In any cases, I'll just quote Mr. Torvalds.

On Mon, 25 Sep 2006, Michiel de Boer wrote:
>
> I support the current draft of the GPL version 3 and am very dissapointed
> it will not be adopted as is. IMHO, Linux has the power and influence
> to move mountains in the software industry, and shouldn't shy away from
> the opportunity to take moral responsibility when it arises.

Well, you do have to realize that Linux has never been an FSF project, and
in fact has never even been a "Free Software" project.

The whole "Open Source" renaming was done largely _exactly_ because people
wanted to distance themselves from the FSF. The fact that the FSF and it's
followers refused to accept the name "Open Source", and continued to call
Linux "Free Software" is not _our_ fault.

Similarly, the fact that rms and the FSF has tried to paint Linux as a GNU
project (going as far as trying to rename it "GNU/Linux" at every
opportunity they get) is their confusion, not ours.

I personally have always been very clear about this: Linux is "Open
Source". It was never a FSF project, and it was always about giving source
code back and keeping it open, not about anything else. The very first
license used for the kernel was _not_ the GPL at all, but read the release
notes for Linux 0.01, and you will see
....

You can read it more thoroughly at http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/9/25/161
It's a bit funny in the end, when Linus gets worked up :happy:

Modifié par max_ai, 28 février 2010 - 03:20 .

[meznaric]

Vaenier wrote...

meznaric wrote...

what if I could make an exact copy of a computer without any cost to the seller. The moral argument does not quite carry the same weight.

You stole my hypothetical

Wait... does this qualify for irony?

Ha ha. Well, I pirated your hypothetical .

Edit: Well I agree with most things you wrote in your post actually, except with the first sentence that piracy is bad.

Modifié par meznaric, 28 février 2010 - 03:27 .

[Crowwalker100]

I want to ask the op something.. So after the first 5 min of the game you knew everything that was going to happen.?? Wow you need to Play the lottery..

You knew where the Collectors were? You knew who Archangel was.. That was at Freedom's Progress. Why did you even play the game?? If you knew everything about it..

[Lord Atlia]

Eh the only thing I find similar about the Bioware games I've played is that the player knows who the main antagonist is right off the bat, Irenicus (BGII), Saren (ME1), Archdemon (DA:O), Collectors (ME2)...not sure if this applies to Jade Empire or KOTOR as I have never played either. It would be nice if we got many antagonists working against the player and each other or an antagonist that is revealed late in game that after knowing he/she/it is the antagonist looking back the story's events make more sense.

[DuffyMJ]

aaniadyen wrote...

meznaric wrote...

ZennExile wrote...

Llandaryn wrote...

Bioware templated stories are boring

And yet you keep buying them.

Maybe he's one of the 20 thousand or so people who stole it?

Stole it? First of all, I don't consider piracy to be stealing. Second, I could not be on this forum if I had not bought the game.

www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/piracy

Piracy is stealing.

Get your pocket protectors everyone, obviously if the man's academic books tell us that stealing from the man is wrong, it must be wrong!

[Evilmrj]

meznaric wrote...

After playing multiple Bioware games, I realized that the story structure of Bioware is made on a template. It goes like this:

1) Start in the middle of action, with a few temporary members already there. Some of them will die.
2) The whole story is revealed. Your enemy is revealed and your target is revealed.
3) Find another team member (or kill/recruit another Jedi master, or
find another Star Map, or go to another planet and kill everything
moving)
4) Repeat 3
5) Repeat 3
6) Repeat 3
7) Repeat 3 as many more times as the development resources permit
8) Do the final big boss and finish the story revealed in 2

For the majority of the game one therefore knows what will happen until the end. This is why I am starting to get bored of Bioware games. Compare this to Fallout 3 (if you intend to play it  and haven't already these are going to be major SPOILERS):

1) Find out your dad is missing, without knowing why
2) Start getting hints of where your dad is
3) Find your dad and find out why he left
4) Help your dad fix the purifier
5) Enclave captures the purifier
6) Get the last important piece required to start the purifier before the assault can begin.
7) Get captured by Enclave and talk to the president
8) Find out what president wants and that enclave is divided. You get released.
9) Assault the purifier and activate it (no final boss)

Awesome story structure! Lots of new things happening all the time, and the story gets revealed as you collect more and more clues. The sense of mystery is great. In Bioware stories, there is not such a sense of mystery as regards the progression of a story within a SINGLE episode of the game (ME1 for example is a single episode). So one piece of advice I would give to Bioware is this: DROP THE TEMPLATE and be CREATIVE.

Anyone else feel the same?

The locations of ME2 were small, Linear mission hubs. No real exploration or living world. No real side quests. As much as i love the game i get tired of the:
3) Find another team member
4) Repeat 3
5) Repeat 3
6) Repeat 3 then repeat....

For a game that wants you to explore the galaxy... it feels pretty empty.
I also feel that you can't actually truly play a bad guy... no company has aquired the ability to get this right.
Why can't i help the collectors? why cant i join the Enclave? why cant i help Mehrunes Dagon or Dagoth Ur... having a character act like a jackass isn't "renegade"

[Evilmrj]

In usability tests on one project, we learned that players with more
than four things to do at a time in any given area will feel frustrated
-- they get overwhelmed and have no idea what to do first and get the
names mixed up

Yeah... right....

[vigna]

While i don't like teh way the human reaper plot unfolded or played out. You didn't know what they were doing until the last 10 mins of the game....I don't get it?



You figured out Revan? The Star forge? The redcliffe mystery? The grey warden sacrifice? Morrigan's offer? The multiple reveals in jade empire? The fact that the reapers planted technology so you'd evolve technologically on a pre-determined path? the fact that saren could be turned?

[Evilmrj]

vigna wrote...

While i don't like teh way the human reaper plot unfolded or played out. You didn't know what they were doing until the last 10 mins of the game....I don't get it?

You figured out Revan? The Star forge? The redcliffe mystery? The grey warden sacrifice? Morrigan's offer? The multiple reveals in jade empire? The fact that the reapers planted technology so you'd evolve technologically on a pre-determined path? the fact that saren could be turned?

yes.

[NeonMeat]

I think the problem is that games are SO expensive to make these days that there are very few big studios who will try anything risky in a large title. BioWare have a very obvious formula which has strong mass market appeal, so they just go with what they know. They still make good games, but they are not great games in my opinion. I have to say the Mass Effect universe is definately less interesting to me after the second game, even though they introduced a lot of new characters. It just feels like they played it safe too much, and nothing feels fresh or exciting.

Maybe i am just becoming a cynical bastard, but that's how i feel about a lot of games i've played in recent years. At least we have a fairly healthy Indie resurgence happening on the PC platform. Sure they might not be full length games, but we are seeing some innovation and originality there.

Modifié par NeonMeat, 28 février 2010 - 05:56 .

[Revan312]

Firstly, I think every person with an anti-piracy slant should watch this www.hulu.com/watch/88782/rip-a-remix-manifesto  It makes a very good case against Intellectual Property and copyright laws from a societal point of view.

My personal opinion is thus, Piracy is inevitable and constant.  No developer can stop it and implementing things like DRM is ludacris when looking at the overall situation logically.  DRM pushes people towards pirating software/music/movies, it doesn't stop them. 

Take Assassins Creed 2, they just unveiled that you'll have to have a constant internet connection to play the game, if your connection fails then it logs you out of the game, AC2 is not an MMO nor is it a game that needs the internet in any way.  Yet, they've just alienated a large portion of the community that either 1.) doesn't have an internet connection (small proportion) or 2.) any gamer that just feels that's going waay overboard.  You know what a ton of people are gonna do? People that would have gladly bought the game outright? They're gonna pirate it...

Limited installs, internet connection/server log in requirments, encryption..  all these things push people into pirating because they either don't agree with the policy or because it's actually becoming MORE convenient to play pirated games as none of those anti-piracy measures are in cracked pieces of software.  AC2 is going to break piracy records simply because nobody wants to deal with that overbearing and preposterous requirment, and inevitably, a ****** is going to smash that code to dust and release it without that piece of DRM, probobly on release day or maybe even before it...

Until the industry understands that DRM = more pirates than things are only going to get worse.  Once developers and software companies start grasping the mechanic of high quality software that respects the consumer and embraces the community = more viable supporters than the industry is gonna keep rolling down hill.  Everytime I buy something with DRM it feels like they already assume I'm a pirate so they're not gonna respect me in any way.  I'm a thief from the get go and so, in the end, I have zero respect for them.  That's how the whole pirate community feels and so they're going to continue to crack, rip and share software.  The more they crack, the more companies feel they have to temper their losses, many times by releasing poor quality products and cutting corners which in turn makes people not wanna shell the money out for it which means more corporate losses and DRM and the cycle continues...

Radio Head, as has been mentioned, along with Nine Inch Nails have grasped this concept and are now creating large fan bases solely on the fact that their communities feel catered to as consumers.  When both bands released their albums for free they spread their music to a ton of people who would have never bought or listened to them, there by creating a bigger base that was happy and willing to buy concert tickets and merchandise.  NIN even released the master recordings for Year Zero so the community could mash them up, remix them and disect them however they pleased.  Trent Reznor even released an album of his favorite remixes the community came up with.  Things like that go a loooong way towards garnering support emotionally, intellectually and financially. 

Support and admiration are the largest aspects of good business and have been for a very very long time.  That model has increasingly been stomped into the dirt within the new world of market capitalism and the push towards intellectual property laws.  No longer is it about making sure your customers are happy but about drawing the largest quarterly profit,  treating your consumers like bottomless money pits with zero emotion in the process.  It's beginning to backfire on them as more and more people are starting to take their business model as a slap in the face and so they pirate.  There's somewhere around 60 million pirates just in the US now and that's increasing daily.  60 million isn't just a niche anymore, it's a very large portion of the country that will inevitably grow as DRM measures become more and more intrusive.  Corporate entities are living in a fantasy world and are suffering because of it.  Not that executives aren't still racking in profit, they just lay more people off and cut corners and quality to maintain their giant checks.

I have no problem with how consumers are reacting and I in fact hope more people begin to pirate, as perhaps, once the numbers get large enough, the industry as a whole will take a step back and look and how they're doing business, change it and we can all start enjoying software, music and movies that are made with the customer's support in mind rather than just the green in their wallets. 

Treat us like people rather than original sinners and we'll treat them people, simple...

[AtreiyaN7]

Mmm, yes, I can see your point about some element of "mystery" regarding Project Purity at least a little detective work. That being said, I don't think things about the Collectors were telegraphed early on.

[AM50]

Okay. To summarize.



Piracy is illegal and wrong and it does take money away from developers.



BioWare uses the same story map for each games. And finds great success using the LINEAR format in writing.



If you don't like the story, don't play the game. Many of us love the way BioWare does their games. I think the "check list" approach of visiting X amounts of planets in any order is a great idea.



Be quit bickering like children.



[/rant]

[/thread]