Gamers want piracy and gamers don't want piracy

[Frogger]

OneTime said:

Frogger said:

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.

Digital games are associated with your Microsoft/XBox/AppleId/Playstation account or whatever.  There is no resell option.  There is no official box to put on your shelf.

To be fair, I suspect that the days of games that get to a "final state" you can put on a disk are mostly over.  Mostly companies will want you to have a monthly subscription which requires changes, and events, and updates.  Then you can play it as long as you continue to pay monthly.

Not in principle they aren’t. That’s all DRM. If digital games were inherently associated with accounts, there would be no file-sharing of games.

If anyone wanted to, they could download a DRM-free copy of any game playable on pc, copy it to an SD card, add a custom sticker, box, manual, and sell that as a full game and that game would be fully playable as long as they have a game launcher. That’s literally all a “physical” game is. They just add DRM to prevent that. GoG for example does not with their games. File-sharing sites have those updates too.

Tober said:

Frogger said:

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.

Tober: Ok it will kill only 99.9% of the gaming industry then. Not as bad as I thought.

I know this is sarcasm but it rests on the assumption that killing 99% of the current model would kill the abundant production of games, which isn’t true. It isn’t even true that games will be smaller. Advancements make it so that fewer people can make more ambitious games. You will just see more passion projects as making games become more accessible. The youtube boom of free film making but for games. It’s the profitability that dies, not the quantity or quality.

xl-klaudkil said:

If bought digital is not owning piracy is not stealing.

I don’t like when people say this. File-sharing has never been stealing. File-sharing copyrighted material is copyright infringement. Copyright infringement isn’t stealing, therefore file-sharing copyright infringement isn’t stealing. It never has been. It’s unauthorized copying.

IcaroRibeiro said:

Tober said:

If games were free it would only kill 99,99% of the biggest studios, but not 99,99% of the industry. It's the same with music. How many music is produced and make virtually zero profit? Many music artists started putting their first songs on SoundCloud and other free streaming services 

Think about how many artists still making draws and paiting for virtually zero profit

I believe this would make games go back to the scope, size and technical level they were in the early 2000s, but that's it 

I'd still patronage games regularly, and I believe enough people would still do it. Not enough for make AAA games, but enough for A games. I honestly wouldn't mind the change

There is also an argument about games being culture, there are alternatives to some level of state funded software development. In my country this is how many of our cultural industry survives

I think this is the future model. Either free production or patronage. Current tech allows games at like PS3-4 level with a small team. And AI will make that exponentially better. Yes, state funding as well.

DarthMetalliCube said:

With physical media - it's more about being untethered by the whims of a corporation tinkering with the content in some way or cutting it off or you being at the mercy of the internet or cloud, etc.. Especially when things like licensing issues, DRM, censorship, etc have become more prominent in many ways. Many gamers like to know that they have a tangible, concrete piece of content that cannot be altered/tampered with/yanked away, no updates to worry about, etc. Provided they have the - A. software and B. hardware to play it on, and that's all they need forever. Often not even needing access to the internet. Obviously the content is "digital" stored on a disc, but that's irrelevant, as least when applied to the argument and reasoning I see here. It's still far more untethered from any outside forces and more completely "owned" in the physical sense.

Most of my games these days are digital just for the sake of convenience and/or cheaper deals, though in principle or from an ideological standpoint I much prefer and support physical still. Plus I enjoy the physical collection aspect, of just being able to see the content stored in your space.

Again, that has nothing to do with physical media. If you want to be untethered to companies, you can just file-share your games or buy games from GoGon PC and use the heroic launcher. This just has nothing to do with digital vs physical. It’s DRM, which means copyright, which means it’s a question of wanting and not wanting to file-share ultimately. The ownership people want already exists on PC. It.s just illegal.

Dante9 said:

Manlytears said:

With all due respect. I am fully in favor of pirating exclusives.
Nintendo and Sony should bring their games to PC and ensure the public has the freedom to choose their hardware.

Surely you are joking? Nintendo and Sony don't owe their exclusives to anyone and are totally justified in making exclusive things in order to sell their hardware.

Besides, not all PC games are available on all platforms either.

Piracy is never justified.

I think copyright is never justified. It lets people manufacture scarecity that doesn’t exist so they can sell an infinite supply at any price they want and make definitionally exponential profits from what is materially worth 0 currency. File-sharing is just people acknowledging this how obvious this reality is and how easy it is to interact with. You can limit infinite supply forever. As soon as it’s copied, legal or not, it’s no longer theirs in anything but name because they are not the sole possessors of it anymore.