As a person who is highly tempted to acquire this game through less the scrupulous means, this has convinced me that I should pay them for both The Witcher titles.
I think the biggest thing that impresses me is their admitting that they could be targeting innocent folks. For so long companies have been using IP addresses etc., especially in the US, to identify copyright infringing individuals. While this may work in a majority of cases, there are far too many times where a person comes under fire who has no ability to defend themselves and is instead extorted.
Could it be that they have finally realized the thing that many studies of music and movie piracy have been saying for years? That most of the time, the people who pirate your stuff weren't going to pay for it in the first place but that some of them will buy it after pirating it if its good?
I can personally attest to having bought products after pirating them first (either due to temporary lack of funds or a lack of any sort of demo), so your argument is false.
I think the [citation needed] resides with Ardichoke's claim and Cliff's claim. Otherwise this thread is full of personal experience and opinion which I am about to add to.
People that can't afford to buy games pirate them. Perhaps they can never afford to buy them and/or they don't like the game, so they don't buy it. Perhaps they like it and decide to buy it some day. Either way, the game publisher is either at the same revenue level or an elevated revenue level. So as personal as it is when people steal from you like this, the logic behind pursuing legal justice isn't there to support the money involved in doing so. It's a financial decision.
Many of you have "ex-pirated" games in your Steam library because you wanted the benefits of Steam and bought the game through Steam and/or you grew up at some point and stopped pirating crap.
Why would anyone do this on a PC game? Most of them have a free demo available from the developer?
I'm sorry guys, this is not how 90+% of piracy works. We can't fool ourselves into thinking its fine to sample anything we like on our own terms.
I can personally attest to having bought products after pirating them first (either due to temporary lack of funds or a lack of any sort of demo), so your argument is false.
You can't say "nobody" then backtrack when examples present themselves. I have purposely pirated content that had NO demo available because I don't want to drop $60 on a maybe. Maybe not fine for you, but if I sample a product, like it, and then shell out the cash to support the dev, that is one more customer they have which they otherwise would have never had.
Okay, long rant coming, I'll try my best to keep it tidy and organized.
I've learned in years of negotiation and persuasive tactics, you start any discussion with something everyone in the room agrees on. We all hate DRM. DRM sucks, it only serves to get in the way of paying customers and does little to deter piracy. We are all thrilled a developer like CD Projekt has taken a stand against DRM in support their good paying customers.
Now @Winfrey - I do like to troll. In my honored Icrontic tradition when I do troll and someone calls me on it, I give myself up so you can know, without a shadow of doubt, if I say I'm not trollin, I'm not. Guys, not trollin here.
Next up, I do not pretend to be holier than thou. That is not what I'm suggesting about myself. Everyone steals something at one time or another. @Tushon - I'll come back to my broad generalization of "everyone" in my next point. For this one, what I'd like to say, is yes, on a few occasions in my life, I, like many other folks have taken something that was not mine. As a kid, I pocketed a few packs of baseball cards and candy bars, heck, one time I got out with a jumbo pack of AA batteries. I'm not proud of it, but I did not have the money, so I would have never bought those things otherwise, see difference between me and a few people here, I'm not going to lie to myself and say that made it okay. When Napster was new, I nabbed a few tunes, I knew it was wrong. Today, I don't pirate any digital content, ever, I just don't, its theft, its wrong, lets not kid ourselves.
Back to @Tushon - using a broad general term like nobody or everyone obviously does not mean literally 100% of the population. We both know this, and I'm certain your bright enough to know what I meant. Obviously if 4.5 million people stole a game, a few of them possibly purchased it later on. As of a Dec, The Witcher 2 had only sold about 250K copies in digital distribution. http://www.joystiq.com/2011/11/10/witcher-2-digital-sales-pass-a-quarter-million/ Now, lets be real about this, assuming that 4.5 million is anywhere close to the number of pirated copies and they only sold 250K in legit non pirated goods, of which I'm willing to bet 90+% of those users never pirated the game to begin with, well, you see, my estimate of nobody is allot closer than the assertion that pirates are saints that will drop the dollars in the hat when they have it. Kid's, you are all trying to bullshit a bullshitter. Not gonna work.
Let me also add, people that pirate PC games have done more damage to the hobby I love than anyone else. It is a reason for developers shunning PC to develop for other platforms. If you pirate games, you are contributing to that perception that a developers IP is not safe here. Stop it, you are hurting our hobby.
Lets say the argument that piracy does not actually cause losses for these developers is somehow true. I don't buy it, but lets just say for a moment it holds some weight. Does it make piracy okay? Is it okay to take what you want just because you don't think its going to hurt anybody in the long run? Is it okay that I have to pay for my games with the labor and lost time from my family and you don't? Maybe next time I'm at ICHQ I'll just go into the garage take as much Icrontic swag as I can find figuring, well, nobody was buying it anyway? Its cool right? I mean, if nobody was gonna buy it, I may as well take it....
People, there is right and there is wrong. I've done enough wrong for all of us here combined, but I'm not going to lie to myself about it.
In conclusion, Piracy is theft and its wrong, I don't care if you buy it later or not. Piracy drives some developers to do crazy things like put restrictive DRM into the games I buy, and I take that personally because I'm not the problem. Piracy drives some developers away from the PC, and that sucks.
There is no backhanded logic you can create that makes stealing okay. It's just not...... Unless its the plans to the Death Star, but otherwise, no!
I think the [citation needed] resides with Ardichoke's claim and Cliff's claim.
In conclusion, bite me.
OK.... Maybe you could use your torrent account or whatever to go steal a copy of a real study that potentially supports what you said: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0144929X.2010.501154 If it supports your argument, you can go back and buy it. If it doesn't, well then it was just a demo copy.
What about all the stuff you guys have pirated that you never bought after? It was OK because you didn't like it? / devils advocate
Perhaps but if we didn't like it we likely didn't keep it following that logic it was basically a demo copy and the company doesn't lose a cent.
Ilriyas you are pretty young. When I was under 21 I absolutely would have argued the other side of this...but just a few things to consider if you want to try and picture the other side of the coin for fun. What about the opportunity cost of someone buying the product in order to find out if they like it or not? What about the enormous marketing fees involved with making you aware that it existed in the first place? What about the fact that it wasn't a demo copy. It was a stolen copy and by finding it and downloading it you are taking stolen goods and using them. Or are "pirated" and "stolen" no longer interchangeable terms?
My real curiosity, since this is coming up and what the hell ... Does anyone feel any level of cognitive dissonance? Or is there really a culture that has evolved where this is OK?
Alright, perhaps I should expand a little bit, I have torrented in the past but as I said my most recent torrent was STALKER Call of Pripyat, which I acquired back when I had no form of income.
After I got a job, and as a result a way of actually being capable of affording things I stopped torrenting files. In no way am I trying to say that it was right for me to torrent games or tv shows, what I guess I should have made clear is that in my old situation I couldn't afford to purchase a $60 game every time one that interested me showed up on the market. In order to keep myself from wasting money I'd get a torrent to see if it was something that could A. hold my interest for extended periods and B. run well on my system if both held up then I'd go grab a legitimate copy from the store within the month.
Nowadays however I have an income and aside from the funds I'm putting away for university I also have spending money and as such I can purchase a game that interests me without feeling the need to 'test' the game in the first place.
(I'm not saying the lack of funds justified my torrenting, I'm just trying to explain why I torrented in the first place)
Please bear with me the above isn't particularly well worded but I think I (sort of) got my point across.
I love how you guys discount my entire post because one link goes to torrentfreak.com. I also love how you obviously didn't even bother to follow the link and look at the post, because if you did you'd see that they just posted an analysis of research done by... TA-DA... a music industry lobby group. I'm not saying that pirating is "right" or "good", all I said in the first place was this:
1) Data is trivial to copy, that makes it impossible to stop people from pirating things. 2) The people that are pirating just to avoid paying, aren't going to buy your good even if you can stop them from pirating it
Thus, why waste a bunch of money to try and stop people from doing something that you have no realistic way of stopping them from doing. Make a compelling product, make it available in a way where it's more convenient to buy it than pirate it and deal with the fact that there's going to be a certain amount of piracy no matter what you do. If you can't accept that, then you shouldn't be in the software business. Go into a business where you produce a tangible physical good that can't be copied trivially... because we know THAT can't be stolen... oh, wait, yes it can. Just like everything else.
Make a compelling product, make it available in a way where it's more convenient to buy it than pirate it and deal with the fact that there's going to be a certain amount of piracy no matter what you do.
I may or may not take the time to respond to the ideas presented (I think it really boils down to a paradigm shift in the way content is consumed, but anyways), but I wanted to pull this out for an extremely recent and successful example: Louis CK's new comedy special. No DRM, a streaming limit (3 times total) and a download limit (2 times, but once it is download it is yours), produced, paid for and distributed by one Louis CK and, I'm going to point this out again, no DRM. He put it out there, made it easy to torrent, but also made it equally easy to consume. Low and behold, he made a profit. I'm extremely happy with paying for a CD produced by an indie band that comes from a personal recommendation or if I saw them live as an opener (another great example, I bought an Ishi CD, after never having heard of them, but because it was download straight from them, after seeing them in concert ... a concert I probably would not have been at without having heard about the headliner through a torrent site) or paying Louis CK for the content he created and distributed. I'm not happy with paying $60 only to find out that I didn't really like a game very much or a CD that was fucking rubbish after having one good single.
Oh, and since you guys can't be assed to go read my references, yet you expect everyone else to read your wall of text. The statistics from the music industry lobbyist study show that compared to music buyers, music sharers (pirates) are…
* 31% more likely to buy single tracks online. * 33% more likely to buy music albums online. * 100% more likely to pay for music subscription services. * 60% more likely to pay for music on mobile phone.
From the Guardian article that I linked:
A report from the BI Norwegian School of Management has found that those who download music illegally are also 10 times more likely to pay for songs than those who don't.
From the Artist Force article:
Another study from the Swedish Performing Rights Society (STIM) found that 86.2 percent of Swedes would be willing to pay a monthly fee to legally share music tracks on peer-to-peer networks.
Since I know neither of you will read it as it challenges your pwecious preconceived notions, here's the most salient part:
After a study done on Dutch file-sharers, Prof. Nico van Eijk of the University of Amsterdam concludes that: "These figures show that there is no sharp divide between file sharers and others in their buying behavior. On the contrary, when it comes to attending concerts, and expenses on DVDs and games, file sharers are the industry's largest customers... There does not appear to be a clear relationship between the decline in sales and file sharing."
So then, Cliff and (irony, of ironies) Pirate, care to back up YOUR arguments with some studies, or are you just going to keep spewing walls of words and assumptions with nothing to back them up but speculation?
I never spewed a wall of text. I never made an argument, which you may notice if you read my posts. Just point me to my argument and my "pwecious preconceived notions" if I am mistaken so that I can do a glorious 10 minute Google copy/paste sesh and then top it off with an adolescent phrase to secure my Internet heroism.
I'm glad you are keen to irony. Here is something that may cheer you up. I work for a record label and made a career out of finding ways to make money off of "pirates." so the irony is, I actually have nothing against it on a business level and economically it is of course the natural way of things. Morally, I think people who are old enough to know better, and that still pirate, are thieves. I know a "fair" amount about this topic already. I'm more interested in seeing if it is possible to shake the cultural foundation of a group that is justifying piracy than I am arguing for or against the idea that piracy is good for video game publishers/developers -- and this is all that I have made an effort to do in this thread.
Take it easy .... comprehend what I post. I said both you and Cliff should post up some sources for your arguments. I never isolated you. I'm not making an argument like Cliff. We aren't the same person and we have not teamed up against you. =============
tldr or whatever for anyone who doesn't want to read the squalor above: Cliff, Ardichoke, and I are having a fabulous circle jerk. Please join us.
Ardi, you seem to always assume that when there's one person saying something against you, a whole group is teaming up on you. I just read this entire thread and I don't read that out of any of this.
the people who pirate your stuff weren't going to pay for it in the first place
If they weren't going to pay for it, then there's no reason that they should have it. Period. People work hard to make the media that others consume, and there is no argument in the world that can justify taking what they made without authorization.
If they weren't going to pay for it, then there's no reason that they should have it. Period. People work hard to make the media that others consume, and there is no argument in the world that can justify taking what they made without authorization.
Mondi said it exactly the way I was thinking it. There's a very scary trend of people just assuming that it's totally fine to flat-out steal. It's just theft, plain and simple. There is no justification for it.
Since I know neither of you will read it as it challenges your pwecious preconceived notions, here's the most salient part
Could you possibly be more condescending? Belittling people because they have a different opinion on a topic than you do isn't helping your argument. If anything it's hurting it and making you look like a bigot. I agree with several of your points but don't make me regret that by starting this crap.
Yes, I could be more condescending. I wasn't even trying very hard there. I wouldn't have gotten so bent out of shape if it weren't for Cliff and Pirate dismissing everything I was saying because 1 article I posted was hosted on a torrent website meanwhile providing no data to back up any of the arguments they made.
I have no doubt that you could be more condescending. One last time, just for kicks, I never made an argument so I don't know what data you want me to post. If anything, in opinion, I agreed with you in my very first post.
You and Cliff are not even arguing, your both presenting valid points on different topics .. one about ethics and one about profitability. All I did was try to keep things fair since Cliff quickly got outnumbered in the beginning of this discussion...
Comments
I think the biggest thing that impresses me is their admitting that they could be targeting innocent folks. For so long companies have been using IP addresses etc., especially in the US, to identify copyright infringing individuals. While this may work in a majority of cases, there are far too many times where a person comes under fire who has no ability to defend themselves and is instead extorted.
(Course because of Canada's weird download/pirating laws I can technically download whatever I want legally as long as I turn off the upload.)
I'm sorry guys, this is not how 90+% of piracy works. We can't fool ourselves into thinking its fine to sample anything we like on our own terms.
I prefer gog.com to steam when I buy a game because gog.com has zero DRM.
People that can't afford to buy games pirate them. Perhaps they can never afford to buy them and/or they don't like the game, so they don't buy it. Perhaps they like it and decide to buy it some day. Either way, the game publisher is either at the same revenue level or an elevated revenue level. So as personal as it is when people steal from you like this, the logic behind pursuing legal justice isn't there to support the money involved in doing so. It's a financial decision.
Many of you have "ex-pirated" games in your Steam library because you wanted the benefits of Steam and bought the game through Steam and/or you grew up at some point and stopped pirating crap.
/ devils advocate
http://torrentfreak.com/pirates-are-the-music-industrys-most-valuable-customers-100122/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pirates-buy-more-music
http://blog.artistforce.com/2009/04/21/pirates-are-the-biggest-music-fans-studies-say/
Anecdotal evidence:
http://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/articles/20110912/02545815903/indie-game-developer-posts-game-pirate-bay-sees-positive-results.shtml
http://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/articles/20120103/21192117268/bandcamp-embraces-pirate-googlers-turns-them-into-customers.shtml
http://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/articles/20111222/12435717172/louis-ck-over-1-million-sales-just-12-days-drm-free-download.shtml
In conclusion, bite me. These studies have been all over Icrontic at various times.
I've learned in years of negotiation and persuasive tactics, you start any discussion with something everyone in the room agrees on. We all hate DRM. DRM sucks, it only serves to get in the way of paying customers and does little to deter piracy. We are all thrilled a developer like CD Projekt has taken a stand against DRM in support their good paying customers.
Now @Winfrey - I do like to troll. In my honored Icrontic tradition when I do troll and someone calls me on it, I give myself up so you can know, without a shadow of doubt, if I say I'm not trollin, I'm not. Guys, not trollin here.
Next up, I do not pretend to be holier than thou. That is not what I'm suggesting about myself. Everyone steals something at one time or another. @Tushon - I'll come back to my broad generalization of "everyone" in my next point. For this one, what I'd like to say, is yes, on a few occasions in my life, I, like many other folks have taken something that was not mine. As a kid, I pocketed a few packs of baseball cards and candy bars, heck, one time I got out with a jumbo pack of AA batteries. I'm not proud of it, but I did not have the money, so I would have never bought those things otherwise, see difference between me and a few people here, I'm not going to lie to myself and say that made it okay. When Napster was new, I nabbed a few tunes, I knew it was wrong. Today, I don't pirate any digital content, ever, I just don't, its theft, its wrong, lets not kid ourselves.
Back to @Tushon - using a broad general term like nobody or everyone obviously does not mean literally 100% of the population. We both know this, and I'm certain your bright enough to know what I meant. Obviously if 4.5 million people stole a game, a few of them possibly purchased it later on. As of a Dec, The Witcher 2 had only sold about 250K copies in digital distribution. http://www.joystiq.com/2011/11/10/witcher-2-digital-sales-pass-a-quarter-million/ Now, lets be real about this, assuming that 4.5 million is anywhere close to the number of pirated copies and they only sold 250K in legit non pirated goods, of which I'm willing to bet 90+% of those users never pirated the game to begin with, well, you see, my estimate of nobody is allot closer than the assertion that pirates are saints that will drop the dollars in the hat when they have it. Kid's, you are all trying to bullshit a bullshitter. Not gonna work.
Let me also add, people that pirate PC games have done more damage to the hobby I love than anyone else. It is a reason for developers shunning PC to develop for other platforms. If you pirate games, you are contributing to that perception that a developers IP is not safe here. Stop it, you are hurting our hobby.
Lets say the argument that piracy does not actually cause losses for these developers is somehow true. I don't buy it, but lets just say for a moment it holds some weight. Does it make piracy okay? Is it okay to take what you want just because you don't think its going to hurt anybody in the long run? Is it okay that I have to pay for my games with the labor and lost time from my family and you don't? Maybe next time I'm at ICHQ I'll just go into the garage take as much Icrontic swag as I can find figuring, well, nobody was buying it anyway? Its cool right? I mean, if nobody was gonna buy it, I may as well take it....
People, there is right and there is wrong. I've done enough wrong for all of us here combined, but I'm not going to lie to myself about it.
In conclusion, Piracy is theft and its wrong, I don't care if you buy it later or not. Piracy drives some developers to do crazy things like put restrictive DRM into the games I buy, and I take that personally because I'm not the problem. Piracy drives some developers away from the PC, and that sucks.
There is no backhanded logic you can create that makes stealing okay. It's just not...... Unless its the plans to the Death Star, but otherwise, no!
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0144929X.2010.501154
If it supports your argument, you can go back and buy it. If it doesn't, well then it was just a demo copy. Ilriyas you are pretty young. When I was under 21 I absolutely would have argued the other side of this...but just a few things to consider if you want to try and picture the other side of the coin for fun.
What about the opportunity cost of someone buying the product in order to find out if they like it or not? What about the enormous marketing fees involved with making you aware that it existed in the first place? What about the fact that it wasn't a demo copy. It was a stolen copy and by finding it and downloading it you are taking stolen goods and using them. Or are "pirated" and "stolen" no longer interchangeable terms?
My real curiosity, since this is coming up and what the hell ... Does anyone feel any level of cognitive dissonance? Or is there really a culture that has evolved where this is OK?
After I got a job, and as a result a way of actually being capable of affording things I stopped torrenting files. In no way am I trying to say that it was right for me to torrent games or tv shows, what I guess I should have made clear is that in my old situation I couldn't afford to purchase a $60 game every time one that interested me showed up on the market. In order to keep myself from wasting money I'd get a torrent to see if it was something that could A. hold my interest for extended periods and B. run well on my system if both held up then I'd go grab a legitimate copy from the store within the month.
Nowadays however I have an income and aside from the funds I'm putting away for university I also have spending money and as such I can purchase a game that interests me without feeling the need to 'test' the game in the first place.
(I'm not saying the lack of funds justified my torrenting, I'm just trying to explain why I torrented in the first place)
Please bear with me the above isn't particularly well worded but I think I (sort of) got my point across.
1) Data is trivial to copy, that makes it impossible to stop people from pirating things.
2) The people that are pirating just to avoid paying, aren't going to buy your good even if you can stop them from pirating it
Thus, why waste a bunch of money to try and stop people from doing something that you have no realistic way of stopping them from doing. Make a compelling product, make it available in a way where it's more convenient to buy it than pirate it and deal with the fact that there's going to be a certain amount of piracy no matter what you do. If you can't accept that, then you shouldn't be in the software business. Go into a business where you produce a tangible physical good that can't be copied trivially... because we know THAT can't be stolen... oh, wait, yes it can. Just like everything else.
Since I know neither of you will read it as it challenges your pwecious preconceived notions, here's the most salient part: So then, Cliff and (irony, of ironies) Pirate, care to back up YOUR arguments with some studies, or are you just going to keep spewing walls of words and assumptions with nothing to back them up but speculation?
I'm glad you are keen to irony. Here is something that may cheer you up. I work for a record label and made a career out of finding ways to make money off of "pirates." so the irony is, I actually have nothing against it on a business level and economically it is of course the natural way of things. Morally, I think people who are old enough to know better, and that still pirate, are thieves.
I know a "fair" amount about this topic already. I'm more interested in seeing if it is possible to shake the cultural foundation of a group that is justifying piracy than I am arguing for or against the idea that piracy is good for video game publishers/developers -- and this is all that I have made an effort to do in this thread.
Take it easy .... comprehend what I post. I said both you and Cliff should post up some sources for your arguments. I never isolated you. I'm not making an argument like Cliff. We aren't the same person and we have not teamed up against you.
=============
tldr or whatever for anyone who doesn't want to read the squalor above:
Cliff, Ardichoke, and I are having a fabulous circle jerk. Please join us.
One last time, just for kicks, I never made an argument so I don't know what data you want me to post. If anything, in opinion, I agreed with you in my very first post.
You and Cliff are not even arguing, your both presenting valid points on different topics .. one about ethics and one about profitability. All I did was try to keep things fair since Cliff quickly got outnumbered in the beginning of this discussion...
I'm bailing on the circle jerk.