This "piracy eats our sales" thing is nothing but fluff. The people who download stuff illegally wouldn't have bought it anyway if it wasn't available illegally. Think about it, it's logical. If you don't have the money to spend on games/software in the first place, that's just the end of it. You don't buy it. If you download it, you get it for free, but you wouldn't have, and likely couldn't have bought it in the first place.
Same deal for music. At a bare minimum, 75% of music on CDs is crap. I'm not paying for the crap I'll never listen to, but I'd gladly pay $1 a song for good music (I'd happily pay $5 a song even) through whatever service, since that amounts to about $3 where I'd have to pay $20 if I bought it on a CD in a store and I get the same amount of listenable music. However, if music wasn't available online, I would just have to listen to the radio - there is no way anyone can convince me I'm going to buy a CD full of crap, especially considering that the artist never sees more than 1% of the revenue. The only way artists can make a profit is by touring - CDs are basically just a promotional thing now.
Publishers have way too much power. Music labels get virtually all of the money, and the situation's not much better for games, where the developer usually sees about 5% of the total revenue on average. That means if a game sells 100,000 copies at $50 each, the publisher (who does little more than advertising and distribution, and often screws those up somehow anyway) gets $4,750,000. The developer gets $250,000 to spread out over how many employees? This is why digital distribution has started to come into the mainstream. Assuming a developer keeps 100% of the profit (unrealistic, I know, since there's advertising, etc), they would have to sell only 5,000 copies to get the same amount of money as they'd get if they went through a major publisher and sold 100,000 copies! Insanity, just insanity. If AA wasn't free, selling at even $9.99 a copy, I'd have collected over $160,000 by now if I was using digital distribution. No advertising, no nothing, just word of mouth, and I'd have made about two thirds of what GPG as a whole made on SupCom. I-N-S-A-N-I-T-Y.
This is why Valve, for instance, can afford to be such a massive company and yet only put out products rarely - they publish their own stuff and actually get money out of the deal.
To go off on a bit of a tangent, this is why the Playstation 3 is doomed. To design a game that takes advantage of all its features, you must design it exclusively for the PS3, and you need a massive team of designers, artists, modelers, etc. This means that your entire market is now the size of the PS3 install base, which is very small, relatively speaking. So you need to literally sell a copy of your game to EVERY PS3 owner just to turn a profit! PS3 games costing $10 more won't even put a dent in that.
For the record, I own SupCom. Pre-ordered it months in advance. Money well spent. I wish my many other game purchases had been so fortunate, but the only way to actually know if a game is good or not is somehow illegal. Games should just have trial periods, like other software.
On piracy and profit
Moderator: Moderators
Re: On piracy and profit
That's assuming they download it because they don't have money and not just because it allows them to blow the money on booze instead. Most people are greedy and want to have their cake and eat it, too. They'd pay the money (at least bargain bin prices) if that was the only way to get the game but they see that it isn't.Caydr wrote:This "piracy eats our sales" thing is nothing but fluff. The people who download stuff illegally wouldn't have bought it anyway if it wasn't available illegally.
BUT I DID SO MAKE TA1111!!!12TWELVE
No, wait, I just used that one. How about, "BUT EVERYTHING I TOUCH IS MINE THAT'S WHAT GOD TOLD ME!!!!FIFTEEN"
"Wait, you mean using someone else's work and claiming it is my own is illegal? Holy COW!"
I'm aware I don't own TA or the units in TA or the units others made, or the intertubes, that's why I'm not selling them or even hinting that they were made by me. That's why I'm not selling AA and the only money I've ever received has been put back into AA by paying for domains/hosting, etc... It was an example, something to use to put things in perspective. The most popular AA release (which was for Spring, I think... somewhere around 1.4 - I'll beat you to the punch, before I ran it into the ground) has been downloaded, last I checked, about 17,000 times off of one mirror alone, not counting P2P, etc... (AA's in several illegal TA+CC+BT+AA packages that are commonly available, has been hosted on many monitored and unmonitored mirrors)
No, wait, I just used that one. How about, "BUT EVERYTHING I TOUCH IS MINE THAT'S WHAT GOD TOLD ME!!!!FIFTEEN"
"Wait, you mean using someone else's work and claiming it is my own is illegal? Holy COW!"
Code: Select all
All of the units I've included can be found at at least one of the following:
Unit Evaluation Center - http://www.planetannihilation.com/tauec
Core Prime - http://www.planetannihilation.com/coreprime
Unit Review Central - http://www.tauniverse.com/urcCode: Select all
[5] Credits:
Absolute Annihilation's Community
Brave Sir Robin (Uberhack)
Andrey Scherbakov (contributor)
StonedWolf (contributor)
Twilight (contributor)
Archangel (contributor, barbed marshmallow, Ãœberscripter of teh doom)
Forboding Angel (contributor)
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
[6] Unit Groups:
Aftermath Design
Bethany Brand Units
C.A.N.A.D.A.
Cavedog
Central Consciousness
Core Prime
Immer
Killer TA Units
M.A.D. TA
Marcosoft
Mayhem Inc
Merciless Creations
P-We Division
Rat
Skunk Works
StoneAge Creations
TAAN/TAAN Upgrades
TA Bio Hazard
TA-Power
Taskforce
The Lost Legacy
Total Annihilation Generation
Total Annihilation R&D
Total Annihilation Units Creation Center
Total Annihilation War Factory
The Dojo
Tonic Rangers
Uberhack
Upstart Design Group
Unlimited Units
Water World WarsCode: Select all
Legal/Disclaimer:
(1) I claim no ownership of the units included in this pack and acknowledge
their authors. I claim ownership only of how this pack is assembled,
and which particular units were included and/or modified.-
Felix the Cat
- Posts: 2383
- Joined: 15 Jun 2005, 17:30
Since all distribution of AA is illegal in the first place (as it is a gross violation of Atari's intellectual property, etc), then it's somewhat disingenious to suggest that distribution X of it is somehow more illegal than distribution Y.Caydr wrote:(AA's in several illegal TA+CC+BT+AA packages that are commonly available, has been hosted on many monitored and unmonitored mirrors)
Repackaging of someone else's intellectual property without their consent does not constitute a legal basis for claiming ownership of said package.
Before you type that wall-of-text flamepost that I know you're likely itching to start at this point, note that nothing I've said should be construed as a personal argument either for or against the continued production, testing, release, distribution, or use of AA and/or its derivatives in any way, shape, or form.
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SpikedHelmet
- MC: Legacy & Spring 1944 Developer
- Posts: 1948
- Joined: 21 Sep 2004, 08:25
Who the fuck cares? Property ownership is theft, it always has been and always will be, and Zpock is right, it all boils down to who has the bigger guns (or lawyers, or both). You play by their rules or you go to jail or you die.
I say die. Let Atari pry their "intellectual property" from your cold, dead hands!
I say die. Let Atari pry their "intellectual property" from your cold, dead hands!
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SpikedHelmet
- MC: Legacy & Spring 1944 Developer
- Posts: 1948
- Joined: 21 Sep 2004, 08:25
