» Wed Jun 29, 2011 2:03 pm #1.
We Have Some Serious Entitlement Issues
I don't want to get into an argument about piracy. I'm thinking that none of us reading this can cast the first stone on that one. Information wants to be free, you weren't going to buy it anyway, they're all greedy corporations, etc. But then you have the Humble Indie Bundle.
That was a bundle of DRM-free independent games that, combined, would normally sell for $80. The makers offered the bundle as a direct download to the consumer--no corporate middle men--and let customers pay whatever they wanted, down to a penny.
It wasn't free, you still had to pay. But you could set the price.
If ever there was a measure of the gaming community's sense of entitlement, this was it. All of the rationale for piracy--high prices, hatred of corporations, annoying DRM--was stripped away. Here we would find what we gamers think game creators owe us, and what we think we owe in return. The results:
The average downloader offered to pay $9.18, giving themselves a nice 87 percent discount off the retail price.
More than a quarter of the downloaders stole it outright.
That's right. More than a quarter believed that even one penny was too much to offer in return for the hundreds of hours of labor it took to create the games.
And that's not including the people who traded the Bundle off torrents and file trading services--this is just the people who pirated the games directly off of the game maker's server. In other words, they intentionally used the game developers' resources so, in addition to paying nothing, they would actually cost them additional money on bandwidth. It's like if you not only refused to drop a nickel into the street musician's guitar case, but waited for him to finish the song before taking a handful of change out.
Those same PC gamers--who spend 75 percent of their waking hours explaining how PC's are the ultimate gaming platform--seem baffled as to why PC gaming is dying. Hey, remember back when every new groundbreaking innovation happened on the PC? What happened to those days? After all, remember the hype about Spore and how it was going to change the world? That would be the game that was pirated 1.7 million times in its first three months.
Gosh, I wonder why these publishers are putting all of their resources into the harder-to-pirate consoles instead? Forget about the debate over the morality of file sharing. It's not that; it's just simple cause-effect. We're smashing out the windows because it's fun, and then crying because the rain is coming in. It makes us all look like spoiled, entitled brats with no concept of how the advlt world works. Don't tell me this is because gamers are mostly kids, either--the average age of video game players is 35.
We help ourselves to free game after free game, and then scream bloody murder when Ubisoft goes overboard with anti-piracy measures. When the makers of the Modern Warfare series decided to make the consoles front and center for the sequel--stripping some features PC gamers are used to in the process--gamers threw a tantrum and bombarded Amazon with hundreds of one-star reviews for a game they admit right in the reviews they never actually purchased or played.
[Pictures of reviews on Amazon for MW2]
See, I don't think those guys understand what "review" means. And of course, they couldn't make it through their crusade without the ever-present "we'll just pirate it instead!" threat.
We Have Some Serious Entitlement Issues
I don't want to get into an argument about piracy. I'm thinking that none of us reading this can cast the first stone on that one. Information wants to be free, you weren't going to buy it anyway, they're all greedy corporations, etc. But then you have the Humble Indie Bundle.
That was a bundle of DRM-free independent games that, combined, would normally sell for $80. The makers offered the bundle as a direct download to the consumer--no corporate middle men--and let customers pay whatever they wanted, down to a penny.
It wasn't free, you still had to pay. But you could set the price.
If ever there was a measure of the gaming community's sense of entitlement, this was it. All of the rationale for piracy--high prices, hatred of corporations, annoying DRM--was stripped away. Here we would find what we gamers think game creators owe us, and what we think we owe in return. The results:
The average downloader offered to pay $9.18, giving themselves a nice 87 percent discount off the retail price.
More than a quarter of the downloaders stole it outright.
That's right. More than a quarter believed that even one penny was too much to offer in return for the hundreds of hours of labor it took to create the games.
And that's not including the people who traded the Bundle off torrents and file trading services--this is just the people who pirated the games directly off of the game maker's server. In other words, they intentionally used the game developers' resources so, in addition to paying nothing, they would actually cost them additional money on bandwidth. It's like if you not only refused to drop a nickel into the street musician's guitar case, but waited for him to finish the song before taking a handful of change out.
Those same PC gamers--who spend 75 percent of their waking hours explaining how PC's are the ultimate gaming platform--seem baffled as to why PC gaming is dying. Hey, remember back when every new groundbreaking innovation happened on the PC? What happened to those days? After all, remember the hype about Spore and how it was going to change the world? That would be the game that was pirated 1.7 million times in its first three months.
Gosh, I wonder why these publishers are putting all of their resources into the harder-to-pirate consoles instead? Forget about the debate over the morality of file sharing. It's not that; it's just simple cause-effect. We're smashing out the windows because it's fun, and then crying because the rain is coming in. It makes us all look like spoiled, entitled brats with no concept of how the advlt world works. Don't tell me this is because gamers are mostly kids, either--the average age of video game players is 35.
We help ourselves to free game after free game, and then scream bloody murder when Ubisoft goes overboard with anti-piracy measures. When the makers of the Modern Warfare series decided to make the consoles front and center for the sequel--stripping some features PC gamers are used to in the process--gamers threw a tantrum and bombarded Amazon with hundreds of one-star reviews for a game they admit right in the reviews they never actually purchased or played.
[Pictures of reviews on Amazon for MW2]
See, I don't think those guys understand what "review" means. And of course, they couldn't make it through their crusade without the ever-present "we'll just pirate it instead!" threat.
http://www.cracked.com/article_18571_5-reasons-its-still-not-cool-to-admit-youre-gamer.html
So is PC gaming really dying? And rightfully so? I always have thought that people complained too much about DRM and the such, yes it's a pain but when it gets down to the numbers can you blame the companies? I'm indifferent about it DRM however.
