Your two statements have nothing to do with each other. Artists don’t get paid for the amount of copies sold, that’s executives and shareholders. Unless you’re talking about an indie company with shared ownership, which the companies in the post decidedly are not. Artists just care about their game being played and enjoyed, something the scummy practices of these suits actively prevents.
Comment on #StopPayingGames
grinning_serpent@lemmy.world 2 months agoFuck piracy. The artist is worthy of their hire.
ClamDrinker@lemmy.world 2 months ago
grinning_serpent@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Lots of creators get bonuses or royalties based on sales.
My bigger point is that piracy is bullshit. Either pay the price asked because you want that game or movie so bad, or say the cost is too high and walk away entirely.
Pirating something you’re too much of a skinflint to buy is super immature “I want to have my cake and eat it too” mentality. People too spineless to make even a miniscule sacrifice for their beliefs.
ClamDrinker@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Not lots sadly. There are certainly some that have a big enough public profile to demand a share, but those are few and far between, and are often doing pretty well for themselves already. To 99% of the people in the industry the response to “I want to get a cut of the game’s profits” is “you can find another place to work then.”
I don’t entirely disagree with your bigger point. At some point you have to just step away from companies that are set on abusing you. But I don’t agree that it’s immature or skinflinty. That seems to be a rather uncharitable take perhaps lacking in understanding and perspective of why people pirate. There are pirates that take for the sake of it, but that’s not mostly the case. Piracy is trackable to a certain degree, and so it is feedback that people want to give you money, but are protesting your decisions. As has been said, piracy is a service problem. People tend to have no problem parting with their money in a fair exchange, and so they often don’t, even if they could.
Wanting to be treated fairly and not taking abuse is the opposite of immature in my opinion, how much it costs doesn’t even factor into it. Some fights you fight on principle. Too many people accept being taken advantage of in this world, making it worse for everyone else. And without those people piracy would also have been unneeded, because these companies often opt to not fix their issues and instead enshittify harder to squeeze more out of the people that keep paying.
There’s also a huge psychological aspect to it. Pirates often still bond with friends over games and those friends can end up buying, and pirates often still contribute to fan communities. Both of these are hard to let go of. They also happen to still help the original game stay relevant despite pirating, so yes, quitting entirely is more effective of a boycott. But also not being able to sell the experience to someone that has already experienced it is also more permanent, and allows that person to remain in their respective communities. Piracy just hits the sweet spot between quitting and no longer directly supporting, which is why people often end up there. And for creators that have to live under the thumb of executives that sabotage their success with hostile business practices, they would much rather you be there than somewhere else, while they try to improve the situation from the inside.
grinning_serpent@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Sadly, the answer is probably that those creatives need to deprive the corporations of their products. Starve the beast. Hard to do that if you can’t afford rent, though…
I don’t mind people pirating ROMs or movies or music they’ve purchased previously and are no longer available in a reasonable manner. I do that myself from time to time. I don’t really “agree” with the concept of only buying a license instead of a copy, so I just see that behavior as addressing the obvious and IMO immoral imbalance.
I don’t have any sympathy for people who steal shit because they’re simultaneously unwilling to pay for it and unwilling to have the strength of character to walk away. I understand your points about social connections via game communities but I think that’s part of the cost of standing on principles. You can still stay in touch with friends from games without playing those games. I walked away from WoW and Blizzard in general for example due to their chain of bad decisions (like liquidating their QA and GM/CM staff in favor of chatbots that do a terrible job) but still occasionally touch base with people in those communities to see how they’re doing.
huey_m@reddthat.com 1 month ago
Either pay the price asked because you want that game or movie so bad, or say the cost is too high and walk away entirely.
I don’t entirely disagree with this regarding newer content, and I personally don’t pirate that… but I will happily subvert a system of near perma-copyright that was never meant to exist, goes entirely against key concepts around copyright when it was first conceived, and only exists due to extreme regulatory capture.
7 years. Copyright was meant to last about 7 years. There was, at that time, an acknowledgment that culture belongs to society as a whole and shouldn’t be monopolized by one person, stifling innovation (I mean, Disney is basically founded on reworking others’ stories)… copyright was seen as a sort of necessary evil to give an artist a few years of a legal monopoly to incentivize art creation.
That’s about the cutoff I use. If it’s older than 7 years, you’ve had your chance to make a buck. Even moreso today… 7 years is far more time today to actually exploit your monopoly, information is just so quickly disseminated. I tried to show my kid Charlie Brown Christmas this last holiday season… absolutely criminal people can stil gatekeep that for money, that kind of thing should belong to society as a whole.
tl;dr I think the ethics of piracy are nuanced, but I absolutely do not buy the argument that the current law around copyright is ethical as it stands and as an unethical law, it should be subverted.
Alaknar@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
Artists don’t get paid for the amount of copies sold, that’s executives and shareholders
Sales numbers are the telemetry execs use when deciding what games to green-light.
Why do you think suddenly everybody was making live-service games? Battle Royale first, then hero shooters, and now extraction shooters? These games are reporting great income because it’s not possible to pirate them. Add MTX on top and suddenly everybody and their mother wants a cut.
Why do you think even GTA became a live-service game, even when it has a single-player story?
Why do you think more and more games have launchers that require people signing in to some accounts to verify if they made the purchase?
All the crap you people are mostly moaning about are a direct result of piracy.
ClamDrinker@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Your point being? I’m well aware these are because of piracy, it doesn’t change my point. If you’re a shitty company intent on abusing your customers to extract as much money from them, of course you’re going to find any way to do it and take away their forms of protest. But in the end, an artist still gets paid for whichever game they end up greenlighting, and not for the amount of copies sold afterwards. Hell they might not even get paid at all since these are the same kind of companies that would rather fire them for AI.
And for the not so shitty companies, they simply make sure people have no reason to pirate them, and there’s a hell of a lot more of those. They just don’t make unreasonable amounts of money, almost like that’s antithetical to treating your customers fairly.
Alaknar@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
My point being: games and art are not necessities. Don’t be a little bitch, if you want to have them, pay for them. If you don’t want to support the company under which the game was made, wait for a massive sale on Steam or some such.
Giving “a shitty company intent on abusing your customers to extract as much money from them” is not done by pirating the game (which makes them try to extract even more money out of their clients), it’s by financially supporting the companies and creators who don’t do that.
nightlily@leminal.space 2 months ago
Most AAA studios have bonus programs in place for sales up to around a year after release - to theoretically make up for the extremely poor baseline salaries. Artists do in fact get paid for the amount of copies sold.
ClamDrinker@lemmy.world 2 months ago
A bonus is not the same as a percentage cut of sales. Yes, bonuses exist and they can correlate with the success of a game in the best case, but they can (and also often) completely do not, plenty of stories of people getting laid off even if the game does well. These companies are so big they do not hold onto their staff as valuable assets, but as replaceable cogs. And it’s also why a lot of artists work on a contract basis and just don’t get any bonus to begin with.
And ‘to make up for extremely poor baseline salaries’… That’s not a thing as far as I know, and if it is where you are, it shouldn’t be a thing. It would be the game industry equivalent of tipping culture. Steal from workers ahead of time so you can punish them if the suits’ stupid business decisions don’t work out, awesome.
FlyingCircus@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The artist has already been payed by the time the game hits the shelf, sales only go to the people on top.
Alaknar@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
This is such an incredible level of magical thinking that most 12 year olds already grow out of.
What do you think happens with the artists if the game doesn’t sell?
What do you think happens to the genre if the game doesn’t sell?
People are complaining about live-service games, but holy fuck, can you not see that these are the direct response to piracy? You literally cannot pirate these games, because they require constant connection to the servers that verify if you have a license.
DupaCycki@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Paid actor or just retard?
There’s clear data showing piracy almost never has a negative impact on sales. If anything, it’s usually a positive impact. And the exceptions to this are not video games.
Don’t kid yourself. The artists will get fired either way. Whether or not the game sells well will not change anything. Aside from the point above.
Anti-piracy advocates like you are the cancer of the gamer community. You’re doing absolutely nothing for the world, but spewing corporate propaganda that is based on nothing but the words of an ultra rich pedophile.
Alaknar@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
Please share! Would love to read about it!