| Tober said: If Pirating is OK, then everyone should do it right? But if everyone Pirates, who's going to buy games? No one? Then no games are going to be made. |
Yes, if piracy is okay, then it's okay if everyone does it. If everyone pirates, no one buys games.
It does not follow that if no one buys games though, that no one will make games. That assumes the false premise that games can only be made if people buy them, but that's not true. Fan games exist, people make games for free, and patronage models exist where people commission art. What piracy destroys is the reproduction market. What it doesn't touch is the first production market. Kickstarter and patreon proves this. If a game people want won't get made unless the person making the came makes X amount of money, and there is demand for X amount of money for that game to merely exist, then that supply of 1 meets the demand of Z and the game gets made.
What you are talking about is the free loader problem, but that isn't a problem and only exists because the goods have no inherent exchange value and pirates know it. Actually, everyone knows it, but we buy games anyway out of principle or fear of prosecution.
| rapsuperstar31 said: I think if someone is religious, the fear of "thou shall not steal" would be a deterrent. Sure they could hide behind a vpn, but they can't hide anything from St Peter. |
Piracy isn't theft, though: it's copying. For something to be theft, one person loses something and the other person gains something. With piracy, no one loses anything and the other person gains something.
| Darwinianevolution said: If every gamer had all the time and money in the world, some would still pirate things. However, most of the people who pirate would rather buy it than pirate it. Steam's role in reducing PC piracy drastically over the years prove so. |
I don't think it's the case that most people who pirate would rather buy than pirate. I think most people who pirate would rather pirate. I think Steam reduced piracy because buying games on steam was more convenient than pirating at the time, not because people want to pay for something rather than get it for free. That's not the case anymore. There are launchers that allow you to download pirated games from a storefront that feels like steam, has achievements, friends lists, emulation fronts, big picture mode, etc, and they are free and open source. I think people pirate because buying a game doesn't make fiscal sense when you can pirate almost any game you want as easily with the same conveniences now for free forever with no platform anchoring. Also, piracy is surging on PC again. Valve momentarily put a bandage on the abundance problem, but like Spotify, it was not and could never be a permanent solution.
I think it's more than just that you can't fully erase piracy. You cannot eternally sustain copyright. It depends on a false assumption - that prices for abundant goods can be artificially made scarce forever. Value comes from supply meeting demand. The supply of all software that is not the first one is always potentially abundant, which means that someone will always figure out that it will cost less money for everyone to figure out how to distribute that piece of software once than it is for anyone to actually pay for it. You can't escape that.
Again, economics isn't charity. People are not going to pay more than more than software is worth forever, and it's to expensive to enforce now. Eventually it will cost less money to let people pirate than to enforce its protection. For most devs it already is. That will increase until it's not feasible for anyone, which will lead to more piracy, which will lead to less profits until these companies can't sustain themselves anymore because the entire business model contradicts thermodynamics. You can't legislate this stuff away for ever because people will always want to pay less than more, so eventually enough people won't care that maintaining copyright law will become unpopular.
| OneTime said: Piracy and physical media are completely unrelated things. |
You can buy, collect, and resell things now, with digital media. You just have to sell your system. On pc, you can buy an SD card and put it on that and you literally have a game cartridge. In fact, you can do that 100x and make a business out of selling physical versions of Cyberpunk 2077 with a box and manual and a little cyberpunk sticker on it and everything to make it collectable. The thing is, doing that is making a copy, which is copyright infringement.
Or hey, you can just download the download on that SD card. Same thing, and now you are not selling a copy. Not copyright infringement, but you're doing the same thing as selling the system. Buy the physical media is not what gives you the guarantee that you can play the game 20 years later. It's the lack of DRM enforcing an EULA, which exists to protect the risks of copyright when it meets with reality.
Either way, copyright is the issue, and the solution is not physical media, it's either no DRM, which makes piracy easier, or DRM, which means you don't "own" your games. Emulation is the prime way games are preserved today. That's digital preservation, not physical. Piracy guarantees you can play the game you paid for 20 years later, not physical media.
Last edited by Frogger - 10 hours ago
