

The Culture of Piracy - aw3c2
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=7327

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_delirium
I don't think the disappearance of the "made by actual people" team feel is
accidental: AAA games these days _aren't_ made by a smallish team of people
that you can actually portray to the user. The user thinks they're made by
giant faceless corporations because they _are_ ; there are literally hundreds
of people, with multiple layers of management, who produce most modern AAA
games. It's not like the System Shock team, or the mid-90s id team.

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stse
This is somewhat interesting from a "games are losing their soul" perspective,
but at least five years late. Also game piracy isn't new and has mostly been
"solved" by consoles and online multiplayer.

Ps. Calling copyright infringement "stealing" still makes you seem, at best,
uneducated.

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kiba
I have a deep interest in keeping my competitors hating the pirates and going
apeshit on them.

Meanwhile, I labor in obscurity hoping to one day prove my entrepeneural
theory about copyright.

What I see here is pirates indicating market failure created by government
intervention. The only way to beat pirates is to destroy the needs for them.
That's why you rarely if ever see open source software pirated.

If I ever succeeded in my entrepeneural ambition, I have destroy the video
game industry and prove to be one of the most evil capitalist on the planet.
:)

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patio11
You can try to convince pirates to stop stealing stuff... or you can put the
stuff in a system which you control and then use technology that essentially
worked fine thirty years ago for controlling access to it. I know which one
I'm betting on.

Client/server means you fear piracy of the client about as much as 37Signals
fears someone downloading Firefox.

~~~
DenisM
More broadly there is a set of tools you can use to control piracy:

1\. Moving (part of) logic online

2\. closed hardware (xbox or iPhone)

3\. copy-protection as a way to delay the proliferation of pirated copies

4\. Lower prices to decrease the pull

5\. Free-ish model (ads, or loss-leader).

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aw3c2
I find this a very interesting and important point. Might be the reason why
"indiegames" have become so popular.

