SHADOWTEXT'S PROFILE

While the collection is certainly impressive, I've gotta ask what the quality of the emulation is before I buy it. Things like this tend to be too good to be true.

author=Ciel link=topic=3225.msg63797#msg63797 date=1235711474
The only game I bought and never finished was Star Ocean 3 as it is unbelievably terrible.

Yeah, in Bizarro World.

author=Ciel link=topic=3173.msg63650#msg63650 date=1235640307
It is so obviously the "wrong" thing to do.

Eh. Depends what you mean by "obviously." It's "obviously" the wrong thing to do if you accept that morality and legality are the same, or if you're only looking at things as they are now, and not as they could be, or as they would be now if we weren't stuck in an economic rut.

Take music piracy for example. The people who get hurt most by music piracy aren't the artists, it's the music companies. Artists who aren't A-list pop idols get very little money back from sales of CDs the money radio companies pay to play the music, and online revenue from, for example, iTunes because almost all of that money goes to their publishers. In like 75% of cases, they make way more money off of concerts than they do off of record sales, and hilariously enough, freely distributed music is a great way to advertise concerts. A number of bands have begun distributing their music as free downloads for specifically this reason, cutting out the middle man entirely. When the artist control the means of (re)production, the game changes considerably....to the point that distributing the music for free actually makes some of them more money (in the long run) than charging for it would have.

There's a case study of this happening in the literature world, too. Cory Doctorow, infamous copyright malcontent, has gotten into the practice of releasing pretty much all of his original fiction as free ebooks under the Creative Commons license at about the same time he's releasing them as for-pay dead tree versions. And all evidence points to his books selling far better because of people who liked what they read in the e-books buying the dead trees versions, largely because e-books still aren't the optimal way to read books. (If Kindles become ubiquitous, one has to wonder if that'll ruin his sinister scheme. But he seems pretty fond of Kindle, so maybe he's got other plans).

Obviously one or two examples aren't enough to prove a point, but I think it's enough to at least support the point that there could very well be ways for free online distribution of digital media being beneficial for both artists and consumers, and the main reason we won't explore them is because of the stigma of piracy being attached to it.

Now as I've been saying all along in this thread, depriving the people who worked to make something of the money they've earned if you're getting the benefit of that thing is wrong, no question of that. But I also feel like the publishing houses are (possibly without even realizing it) engaged in a campaign of social engineering that is going to set back our evolution as a creative society by getting the idea in people's heads that any time they watch TV, read a book, or listen to music, they owe some major publishers money for that privilege. I think it's a big part of why you see amateurs without a good idea to their name paranoid about people stealing their ideas even when those ideas aren't very good in the first place. And the attempt to lock up ideas as if they belong to anyone, even the people who created them, strikes me as one of the most immoral and self-destructive things a society can do.

I mean you've got to think of it in term of memology as the analog of genealogy it's supposed to be.
Like gene pools, the memeplexes that are able to spread out and propagate and get mixed up with others are the ones that become strongest and most diverse, and that make the species that has those memotypes (yay, word invention!) have the best chances of survival--either physical or intellectual. A meme that has conditional propagation, be it based on money or whatever, is about as useful to the memeplex as a neutered dog is to the doggie gene pool.

tl;dr: Intellectual property is anathema to intellect.

author=Craze link=topic=3217.msg63696#msg63696 date=1235675954
I guess I was, but I was also specifically targeting you. I greatly respect your game development opinions and would like to see if it would be possible for you to enjoy this sort of game.

Aw shucks. You're makin' me blush. As for the question--in the words of Fuura Kafuka, "The possibility exists."

I'm just not sure how. Especially how to do it such that you're not going to alienate people who usually are fans of the genre.

author=Fallen-Griever link=topic=3173.msg63495#msg63495 date=1235563657
If a developer only releases a digital copy (i.e. the customer cannot go and buy a physical copy of the program/movie/whatever in a store) then I don't see why the customer should pay for it. Why? Because the customer is not getting anything that differentiates their "real" copy from a pirated copy. There isn't even much proof that their copy isn't "real" in comparison to a well-pirated copy. Therefore, there is no incentive or advantage in paying for the product, so why should they bother..?

To recoup the expenses the developers incurred in creating it.

I think eventually the economic model's going to have to change to allow some way of dealing with the lack of inherit value (in economic terms, since demand can never outstrip supply) to any given piece of digital media, but for the time being we do have a duty to pay for the software and media we use. Especially the stuff we like, since our money helps to get more of those things made.