Living in some fantasy land where never paying artists for their work magically results in them being compensated is pointless.
If you want to pirate, go ahead. I have. I don’t pretend it’s the “moral” thing to do.
Comment on #StopPayingGames
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 months agoPeople need to be paid for their work
The dogged insistence that piracy of a corporate product impacts the pay of it’s employees neglects how the wage system works.
MiddleAgesModem@lemmy.world 2 months ago
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 months ago
never paying artists for their work
In a corporate setting, wages pay the artists prior to the games’ release. And the artists don’t see additional revenue after it’s release.
nightlily@leminal.space 2 months ago
The dogged ignorance of gamers as to the financial reality of game devs neglects the fact that launch profitability bonuses are the only thing that lifts many of them out of a minimum wage bracket.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The wages only appear if the thing they produce creates profits for the corporation. If they continually produce something that doesn’t sell, they won’t have a job anymore. And I’ll raise you another part of this equation. If you pirated Assassin’s Creed: Shadows because you hate Ubisoft or whatever, that game will take somewhere between 35 and 65 hours for most people to finish, according to How Long to Beat. That’s 35 to 65 hours that you weren’t spending in some other game, perhaps a game that respects your values enough that you’d part with your money to play. Maybe that’s Kingdom Come: Deliverance II or The Alters or Knights in Tight Spaces; whatever your preferences are, there’s some other game that also didn’t get your money because you were playing that pirated game instead.
athatet@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
What are you talking about? Game devs are constantly being laid off even after the product they create, creates profits for the corp.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 months ago
That’s a different story entirely. That’s poor allocation of resources on large projects, when certain disciplines needed at the end of a project don’t necessarily have work to do at the beginning of another. The money that hired those people in the first place still came from selling the company’s previous video games.
Omnipitaph@reddthat.com 2 months ago
Eh, there are enough news reports of record profit game sales followed by massive layoffs to say otherwise. The poor allocation of resources you’re talking about? Bonuses to upper management :/
I will 100% pay full price for an indie-published game, for a game published by an honorable corp. If that company is fucking over its development team, layed off the development team after a successful launch, or is doing some unscrupulous shit, the black flag is raised.
If further projects by that big corp aren’t funded, oh no! That’s the point. Starve the bastards enough that they change their ways or give up the game.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Would you take a job that requires years to complete and forego wages until it retails?
Nobody actually works like that.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 months ago
No, they typically don’t. That’s more what startups do. In the corporate world, the schedules are amortized, but the money has to come from somewhere.
nogooduser@lemmy.world 2 months ago
You’re right. It often comes from the previous game but if that game doesn’t do well then the chances of there being another are greatly reduced.
Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org 2 months ago
And yet there are free indie games out there that are generally better than the corp funded crap. Creators will create, no matter what happens.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 months ago
You’ll find far fewer of them creating when they need to spend more of their time at a job that will allow them to feed their families. And I don’t think the games I’ve found for free (actually free, not given away for free once as a promo) have tended to be better than the paid ones.
Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org 2 months ago
I've put more hours into Infiniminer, Minetest/Luanti, Industry, Dopewars, dnd, dopewars, and various Twine/Frotz games than any corporate games. When I do want an FPS (rare), I look at Doom sourceports and maybe Cube/Sauerbraten.
And there's the real time-murderer: Nethack.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 months ago
That’s entirely untrue. Plenty of people get paid to make games that flop.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Not for more than one or two games in a row.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Blizzard has been churning out flops for over a decade