Digital Piracy

This is the U.K. we're talking about; they don't have America's DMCA, and I think (I Am Not A Solicitor) that any site that knows that it's being used for illegal purposes has an obligation to put the kibosh on them as fast as possible, instead of turning a blind eye until someone complains.

Well the point of the law not doing anything to help people would still stand. I don't understand why dl-ing of tv shows matter when the studios could just release it with a bunch of commercials slammed in the front and back of the show, alongside product placement. All advertisers want is impressions, it doesn't matter where it comes from.

thread hopping from the first couple pages because there is a lot to read here. I'm sure this has come up, but I'd like to ask anyway: why is owning a piece of media necessary for enjoyment?

Also regarding why 1:1 lending/reselling is fine while copying and dispersing is bad is because in the former, you maintain the same amount of units in the world, therefore the value of the thing being dispersed is not driven down through increased supply.

"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter

Of some relevance: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2012/07/12/pol-supreme-court-copyright-rulings.html

Summary: Canada imposes a tax on certain forms of media purchase, downloading and streaming services for the purpose of reimbursing artists for their work. Unfortunately, the view has been that these fees that were imposed have done nothing but line the pockets of publishers and done nothing to help actual artists/developers (as you see in the article, for instance, ESA, the Electronic Software Association was pitted against the music industry... so one group of artists versus another).

Supreme Court has struck down the fee for most downloading, purchases and education use, but upheld the fee for music streaming services.

Google Builds Largest Database of Links to Pirated Media

Considering that the Pirate Bay ALONE cost the RIAA $382 trillion, Google is certainly going to cost the RIAA, MPAA, etc. at least $1 quadrillion.

I'm reading this because it's interesting. I think. Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot, over.

So basically, the transparency to arm ourselves against flagrant copyright trolling inevitably turns into a comical ouroboros of links to pirated content.

edited 19th Jul '12 12:07:58 AM by Pykrete

There's also a "Linkception" as there is now a link to a takedown to take down a link for a takedown of a link. lol

I'm reading this because it's interesting. I think. Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot, over.

All of this is unnecessary, I think. What sort of importance is there if, please imagine, you had to spend that much money in order to bring justice to something that will never ever make up for the amount in return?

What profit is it to a man, when he gains his money, but loses his internet? Anonymous 16:26 I believe...

Well probably already argued to death here but generally speaking, artists should be seeking to maximise the monetisation of their product if they wish to gain money off of it, or they should not care. I suppose there might be middle ground.

What we call digital piracy is basically the equivalent of imposing artificial price flooring on products to help large corporations monetize distribution of media. In no way does this actually help artists.

Lack of Piracy Doesn't Help Artists

What's the cost of an indie e-book? Somewhere in the range of $1-$3. What is the revenue for the artist per book? Somewhere in the range of $0.70 to $2.30.

What's the cost of a publisher based e-book? Possibly $5-$15, just slightly cheaper than the normal physical book. What's the revenue for the artist per book? Possibly >$0.01 to $0.75 (depending on volume of sale and the contract). The $0.75 amount is basically a ridiculously high amount per book that nobody would ever receive.

That means a publisher-backed author has to sell basically 100x the volume in order to receive the same amount if the author were to sell independently.

Or consider computer games. A good indie developer can sell perhaps 1000 copies of their game in a year, and after about 3-4 years of working, has around 2-3 games selling per year (roughly a 1 year cycle for new games because indie developers try not to create new graphics engines for subsequent games to lower development cost). Let's take Spiderweb entertainment who sells roughly 12000 copies of their various games per year (http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/03/so-heres-how-many-games-i-sell.html). Let's presume that you are 1/3 as successful (which is quite good) at 4000, meaning you are a "successful" indie developer.

That's revenue of about $112000 per year. It's okay, not super amazing but it's a living. (I'm ignoring the millionaire outliers for now but one should note that your money scales with exactly how successful you are with your game)

What's the average typical salary of a game developer? Between 50 000 per year and 80 000 per year on the high end. Not exactly stellar and does not, ever, scale with success. You can be on the diablo 3 team and still earn 60k a year despite selling 15 million copies. Sell 10000x the copies? Earn less money than if you sold 4000 copies.

Why am I showing these numbers? Because "piracy" of indie games is the #1 way they sell additional copies.

I do not envy the devs who have that kind of salary to look forward to as their high end, and I encourage them to look for jobs elsewhere that treats them as much as they're worth.

For comparison, a typical EA engineer gets 75k starting, a typical Zynga engineer gets 90k starting, and after bonuses and stock*

, a typical tech industry engineer would probably break 100k their first year. Designers typically start around 65k, and artists tend to be way undervalued because the market for them is overcrowded, and its very unfortunate but what can you do.

The point is, if you want a team with quality you need more than 112k per year. For an all-star one-man force of nature, that's an extremely good amount of money, but I guarantee you that his games won't be of the same quality as that of a good team's more often than not. If it is, that's when you get the millionaire outliers.

"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter

You're vastly over-estimating salaries at game companies (but I agree with the "leave the company if you're paid too low"). Those are all super high-end salaries at the best companies. Generally, the instant you leave game development, your salary can go up 30-40%. Stock compensation is non-existent outside of silicon valley/California area.

EA compensation does not start at 75k, no idea where you got that figure from (that's crazy high, I don't know a single guy making that even at senior engineer level). Testers get 30k. Devs get around 40k starting, good ones 60k starting. Zero stock compensation. Blizzard salaries range from 50-80k. They don't hit six figure except for managers+.

edited 19th Jul '12 11:36:17 AM by breadloaf

getting it from the people I know who work at EA.

maybe they are lying to me.

EDIT: here we go

edited 19th Jul '12 11:39:58 AM by ch00beh

"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter

Well no, I mean someone could be making that, it's just not a typical salary. Either that or they exaggerated a bit.

Just most of the people I know got 50-60k starting and they were coming in as top candidates.

Looks pretty typical from the glassdoor link—75k average for engineer I. I assume the people not getting that didn't attempt to negotiate, understandably so with the past few years' economy.

"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter

The third party (i.e. "publisher") has the largest share in music and games. Although technically they also do with movies ("distributor") but it's a smaller ratio for those. In the case of music, the artist essentially either gets less than 0.25% of sales, or nothing at all, since they were already paid a certain amount before the album/song is released in whatever form.

It's even more ridiculous with the games, as publishers spends too much on advertising that the final cost of everything balloons. And they also apparently put too many "miscellaneous costs" for the developers' liking. And now it is usually "assumed" by big publishers that any game will achieve Call of Duty levels of profit each and every time, even if it's not actually Call of Duty.

edited 19th Jul '12 11:47:56 AM by entropy13

I'm reading this because it's interesting. I think. Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot, over.

If you take a look at EA's published quarterly reports, most of the money goes to paying distribution costs—ie licensing with consoles, server farms for downloading, physical disc creation, etc. A couple hundred thousand less goes to R&D. Marketing gets about half as much as development gets.

So that myth that they spend "way too much on advertisement" is just that—a myth. Blame the console manufacturers instead.

"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter

The problem is where the development costs of a publisher goes and it's not the engineers.

Also, thanks for the glassdoor link. So I will caution that most of their devs are in Canada so you should use http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Electronic-Arts-Canada-Salaries-EI_IE1628.0,15_IL.16,22_IN3.htm (where the starting salary is 63k, likely due to inflation since my numbers are a bit old) but other than that, I do expect the US salaries to be higher but the cost of living is also higher in the US for the cities they are in. In any case, take a look at (as an example) http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/LinkedIn-Salaries-E34865.htm or http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/microsoft-salary-SRCH_KE0,9.htm

The salaries are higher for outside of game companies.

Now, what I was saying with game publishers isn't so much that they aren't spending money. They spend somewhere in the range of 100 million to 150 million in development costs for an AAA title. The problem lies in that the vast majority of that money goes into really pointless non-gameplay related items and thus developers hardly get any money.

Indie developers are the flipside, well above half to ninety percent of development costs (which is roughly around $120 000 for a typical title) is in salary costs. They can't pay high salaries due to low income, but most of the revenue goes into salaries.

edited 19th Jul '12 11:57:08 AM by breadloaf

I'm not sure what you mean by "pointless non-gameplay items"?

"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter

Well for instance, like Call of Duty bringing in 50-cent to do some background music that you might listen to for a few seconds during the tutorial cost millions of dollars. Was that really worth it?

Or how about Microsoft Games for Windows with twenty thousand buttons and so on. Do I really want that? I just want to play the game. That costs millions of dollars to develop.

The big doozy is DRM, which costs millions to implement and introduces numerous bugs and infrastructure issues. It adds negative value to a game.

I don't disagree with the first and third points, but I'm also not sure what you mean by the second point. Games do need buttons sometimes. Otherwise you can't interact with them.

"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter

The added interface on top of games through their expensive Games for Windows Live infrastructure is not necessary to play their games. For instance, if you want to play Dawn of War 2, you must log into Steam, then Games for Windows and then to play online, the game itself already has a UI. So what did the first two things add? Nothing. But they cost money, and a lot of times, it costs a lot of money (as in millions of dollars).

There's also a tendency to come out with a new graphics engine for games irrespective of any other considerations, a choice which costs between 10-30 million dollars.

I'm talking about bang for buck. Indie developers have sink-or-swim spending. They need to ensure gameplay is top-notch which means spending entirely on developers or better developers to get out a good game. Publishers do a lot of very inefficient spending because of corporate mass and the ability to sell games on brand.

EDIT: Well anyway, we can discuss this in another topic.

The main point is that $1 of revenue in the game world translates to much less money for the developers than in the indie world. There is also a salary ceiling in the corporate world versus the indie world. The primary method of distribution for indie developers is through p2p services and online marketplaces, and their primary source of advertisement is through "piracy". So if we want more art, we should not treat p2p sharing as piracy but find a way to work it into the economic model.

edited 19th Jul '12 2:19:13 PM by breadloaf

@ch00beh: I'm guessing this is quite obviously talking about a small developer and a big publisher.

I'm reading this because it's interesting. I think. Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot, over.

That link sounds like a pretty typical example of what happens when the worker has no real bargaining power. I wouldn't expect an upcoming author or musician to refuse a big publisher contract, no matter how bad, either, just as I don't expect a blue collar worker to walk away from a low-paying job. You have to take what you can get, and regulation or lack thereof determines what you can get. If you walk away, a million other worker ants are there to take your place.

Furthermore, I think Guantanamo must be destroyed.

^^^If you take any endeavor, being self-employed with your own small company will always give you more money than being a cog in a big company if there is success. The idea behind being a cog is that you minimize risk, as you now have guaranteed income (given no surprise lay offs) over the time you are developing, instead of running on fumes throughout the entire cycle, and as a small business, you are much more likely to fail than a big one. As a startup, you only have a 50% chance of surviving past year 5. I'd imagine it's worse nowadays since the market's even more crowded, but I haven't found any data yet.

^^I don't disagree that the publisher may be inflating costs, but that article pretty much confirms that there's a ton of money spent on publishing (for whatever reason). One must also take into account that a publisher isn't supposed to just do a 1:1 input-output thing with a dev—if they are a large one, they probably have other studios that they have to fund. If the publisher made negligible profit on one studio's product, how are they going to fund the next one they sign?

"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter

Alright, bottom line is this. Corporations seek max profit so they'll screw workers out of money they made if they can. Workers seek max profit so they'll want to earn all the revenue their hard work generated as much as possible.

So when we talk about the difference between self-employed and working for a corporation, the most "equitable" concept is that when self-employed your profit is "total revenue" subtract "input costs". If you work for a corporation you expect your salary to be "total revenue" subtract "input costs" and "corporate taxation of your income for creating job stability". But when you see that corporate tax on your income going to levels such as 95%, that's unreasonable. And the main point that article that was shown above is that workers have NO ability to combat this because the corporation far outpowers a worker.

Then you have two solutions:

A) Regulate the hell out of corporations.

B) Adopt new technologies that equalise the power scale.

Digital "piracy" is solution B. The self-employed have far lower input costs thereby increasing their ability to "fail" more times before going bust and having to work for a salary and then going back to self-employed. What does that mean?

You know why Zynga pays so much money to workers? Because where they are, which is Silicon Valley, people just leave. It's that opportunity that exists in that environment that gives workers so much flexibility and high salaries. So that's also solution B, tech start-ups are a lot cheaper to do than any other start-ups and there's infrastructure there built specifically for these types of high-fail-rate start-ups. The corporate taxation rate on "fresh" companies is around 40-50% versus big ones like Microsoft or Mc Afee that have 80-99% tax rate.

It's very difficult to claw for worker rights and this technology gives them just a little more power.

(It's a personal pet peeve of mine that people complain/bitch about governments taking away money in certain fashion yet say absolutely nothing of it when the same tactic is employed in corporations. It's EXACTLY as bad as when government bureaucracy takes away your money versus corporate bureaucracy taking your money)

edited 20th Jul '12 11:12:45 AM by breadloaf