Author: Db0

If you want my support, why don't you give me the code?

Db046 Comments

A new development company recently announced its attempts to crowdfund its upcoming game. I explain why it makes sense to Open Source it as well.

I just heard about the upcoming Diablo-contender game Grim Dawn which is still in its early development and has now dipped its feet into the concept of crowdfunding. That is a step in the right direction but I feel not enough to convince. You see, I’m a fan of Action RPG games (or more aptly called Diablo Clones) and I’ve even been playing Titan Quest the last few days as well but I see no reason to put my money on a game coming out 1 year from now just to “show my support.” Where is the mutual aid? Why are people asked to fund a company’s ventures but then expected to not receive any of the benefits any publisher or venture capitalist would get? Ownership.

When a publisher funds a game, they end up owning all the “IP” behind it. The copyrights, the trademarks, everything. The developer doesn’t get to keep anything, which is incidentally when developing companies go under, the actual team behind them cannot keep working on the settings they created. We end up with stuff like games truly deserving of a sequel simply disappearing. As such, it’s very worthwhile to try and get away from such a restrictive contract if possible.

However to jump from that to a concept of crowdfunding where you get to keep all the benefits and take none of the risks just strikes me as very unfair for those actually putting their money on the line. Not only do I give my money one year in advance, without knowing the quality of what I get or even if I get anything at all, but all I get is a license to play the game I funded? Does this seem  like a good deal to any you? Personally, I feel like a sucker.

If you want to crowdsource or crowdfund your ventures, then you’d better be willing to give something back to those who help you. And no, simply a license to play the game is not enough. You’d better give us the code in the form of free software. In short, if you do a public venture, it’s only fair that you create a public content. Not only will you then show that you are willing to meet those helping you half-way, not only will you ensure to those taking the risks (i.e. putting their money on the line) that they will get to keep whatever you started even if you get hit by a bus, but you also create a feeling of goodwill which will go a long way in making people willing to support you.

And not only that, but you will also get free support and development from the community you’ve become a part of.

The downside? If your game becomes insanely successful, you won’t end up swimming in money but with games like Diablo 3 coming out in the same year and you being a small-time developer, do you think that’s a possibility? You will still be able to sell your game just fine but you’ll simply have to find a way to give people a reason to buy. WIll that be dedicated online servers and scarce material goods? More likely. Will you end up losing the revenue from trying to sell a bunch of bytes? Sure, but then again, you got your money beforehand and those who want to support you will do so anyway, as they do with any free software project (of which many survive with substantial donations). Those who wouldn’t pay any money and simply play the gratis version are the sames who would pirate the game anyway.

Think about it. It makes sense to free your code if you go down this path. Think of the goodwill. I know for a fact that if you announced that the game would be licensed under the GPL, I’d already have given you my money and so would many others. Think of the free publicity from all the free software and open source related sites that announced this bold move of yours, from all those free software enthusiasts which now join your ranks of ARPG enthusiasts to spread the word of mouth. Think of freedom and the fact that your game will survive and continue to improve no matter the money.

UPDATE: I posted a link to this post on the official fora and an initial response seems to indicate that opening the source is impossible since the game is built over the proprietary Titan Quest engine. If this is indeed the case, it is very unfortunate as it takes the free software licensing just out of the table altogether. This again points out the problems with building a game on a proprietary engine or base. If the engine of the game was open sourced, it would have been improved and updated by the community and new ARPG built on it relatively cheap, creating a wealth of such games to play. See the Quake3 engine for example.

Also, it’s worth noting that GNU/Linux support is not planned.

EDIT2: Thread was closed, so even if you do want to argue a point, you now can’t. This personally does not fill me with any confidence.

On the recent betrayal by the US "justice" system

Db08 Comments

Yeah, yeah. You’ve been screwed once more. Noting to see here. Move along.

Toilet paper
Image via Wikipedia

So your courts finally and unapologetically sold your democracy out to the corporations. Are you truly that surprised? I see a lot of gnashing of teeth lately online from people who are outraged, Outraged that their high courts would pass such a ruling. “How can they not see that they’re handing the power over to the plutocracy?”, “There goes our democracy”, Boo-hoo-fucking-hoo.

WELL, WAKE UP AND SMELL THE FUCKING COFFEE.

Your democracy has been a farce ever since your corporations started being considered “persons” in the late 19th century. Your politics and your government and your justice system and your enforcement agencies have always worked for the benefits of the rich only. Whatever crumbs of wealth and illusions of democracy you received were only to prevent you from realizing the truth of your situation. But you’ve been so pathetic lately that they know they can get away by spitting at your illusions directly.

I find it extremely humorous that after all the things that have been taken from you. After all the rights you’ve lost, all the people they’ve imprisoned for nothing, all the people they’ve killed and tortured, all the wealth they’ve transferred straight out of your pocket to theirs, now you get all upset and seeing the dystopian future that awaits you?

They’ve been turning your constitution into toilet paper for the last decade (not to mention defecating in the spirit of liberty for the last 150) and you’re still surprised when they crassly continue doing it? Who’s going to stop them? Your politicians? Those were in their corporate pockets long before this latest detail, and it is a detail after all for it functionally changes nothing in the way your political system has always worked. They know how to bypass such limitation for a long while now. They’re just confident enough with your pathetic resistance that they don’t even care to keep up the pretenses.

Your justice system? Only deluded fools with naive beliefs in the efficiency of common law or due process can still expect that there’s some objectivity in the legal system that appropriately balances the interest of the poor to the interests of the wealthy. That the process by which laws and rules were created ensures their fairness. That rich judges with a constitution and politicians making laws skewed towards the wealthy, would create legal precedents that went contrary to the spirit of your “justice” (i.e. protect the rich from the poor).

Perhaps this might wake some of you up but I doubt it. The only thing you people seem to think first when they’re once again preparing the lubricants is to vote for the brand. Yes, lobby some politician to pass some law, or even better, waste your time building yet another non-starter.

When are you going to realize that these things don’t work. Not because you may not get another Pyrrhic victory in such issues, but because your whole system is rotten to the core. These are just the latest symptoms of the decay.

Realize finally that what you’ve been told to believe since you were kids, that your democracy works, is a lie. It does not. No matter how likable the muppet you have at the front is. Your only solution is to tear it down and start from a solid basis again, not battle with palliatives.

So can we please stop with the impotent internet outrages? At the least switch do some good ol’ honest cynicism. This is nothing novel or important.

It’s only business as usual.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Why do people pirate games?

Db012 Comments

Do people pirate simply because they’re cheapskates or is there more to their motives?

In the conclusion section of the article examining piracy of TweakGuides, the author puts forth his basic explanation on why Piracy happens and it basically boils down to “People are immoral cheapskates” which as far as the rest of his analysis goes is a strikingly shallow and one-sided explanation that simply reeks of his personal bias against piracy. This is based on his frankly shallow correlation that because piracy still exists, even though things like Steam, demos, DRM and whatnot have tried to fight it, people pirate simply because they can.

If you are currently scratching your head on how on earth this follows from the premises, it doesn’t. The author doesn’t even make the effort to explain why the persistence of piracy means that it’s done because of people being cheapskates and not because the available options do not satisfy the demand as the piracy option does.

To this end, I’m going to present a few reasons why piracy still persists and seemingly increases. Starting with the mean reason of course which as you’d expect is…

People Pirate because they can’t afford the games.

It’s really not difficult to grasp the concept that there’s poor people in the world. It’s also not difficult to grasp that because PCs are becoming increasingly necessary or useful during one’s daily tasks, that one will be available for many middle and lower-middle class families. Take places like India or China which have a very very large lower-class populace and yet their PC and internet use is increasing. There’s a lot of people with capacity to play games who can’t really afford them. When one takes into account the price gouging that also happens between countries in the gaming market ((Basically it goes like this: If the country’s currency is worth more than dollars, the game is priced in the local currency the same amount as in dollars, no matter the exchange rates. This is what commonly happens in Europe where 1 dollar = 1 euro for buying games. Now if the country’s currency is worth less than the dollar, more likely than not, the game is still sold in dollar price-range, making it far out of reach of most people. Sometimes you get the even worst results as is the case of Australia)) it’s not difficult to understand how legal gaming is outside the budget of those capable of it.

So all those people, who can’t afford the games will still want to play them due to the extensive marketing campaigns around them. And piracy provides this option. Where piracy not an option, these would not become customers. They would turn to something else. This is like the most obvious realization one should be able to make about people who do not have a lot of disposable income really. It is a fallacy of a monumental scale to claim that just because someone got the game for free, they would be willing to buy it if they couldn’t.The reason is simple, people try to find the games that are of the highest quality and within their capacity to buy them. Let me repeat this:

People try to find games that are of the highest quality and within their capacity to buy them.

This means something very specific. If one’s highest quality game is prohibited due to price, they are simply going to go for the next best option. If it ends up that the highest quality game they can afford is an indie game, they’ll play that. if it turns out that it’s a free browser game, they’ll play that instead. At no point will their inability to pirate a game increase their capacity to buy them. This means that even if piracy where to disappear overnight, the sales of PC games is unlikely to increase to any significant degree. The end result (companies not making as much profit as they think they deserve) will really not change.

Are these people cheapskates if they get to enjoy something they wouldn’t be able to afford anyway? Are they cheapskates because they didn’t prioritize games over food, rent or necessary socializing (eg going out for a beer with their friends)? Only by the very tortured reasoning of very privileged people.

It’s the kind of reasoning which assumes that everyone’s situation is similar to one’s own. That everyone has similar opportunities as a middle-class US American. That everyone certainly has enough money to buy their games but are just too cheap to do it. It’s simply ridiculous when you then see this reasoning used with a straight face to make an statement like this:

The purely self-serving nature of the arguments people use to justify piracy has become quite galling, and frankly is an insult to the collective intelligence of all internet users. Whether you pirate games or not is ultimately none of my business, but at least have the decency to be honest with yourself and everyone else about the real reasons why you’re doing it.

It almost sounds like a Theist who’s confidently declaring that the only reason some people are Atheists is because they’re angry at God. And is as convincing.

People pirate because it’s more convenient

If we move to those people who can afford to purchase some their games, it’s quite common to discover that many still pirate because Piracy is still the better option. Whereas a normal buy would require the whole issue of trekking to the shop, buying the game, wrangling with restrictive DRMs and whatnot. Pirating can be done from the comfort of one’s own house, usually within hours for the most popular games. And if it’s not obvious already, people value their comfort as well, especially when it’s about a hobby.

This whole thing can easily be seen in many different ways. Take Steam first of all. In regards to the wealthier pirates, it is the primary reason for them becoming legitimate customers by giving them actual reasons to buy and making their service far more useful than a torrent download. Automatic updates, free re-downloads (at fast speeds), community/social networking services  etc. All of these make buying from Steam a higher convenience than simply getting it for free, and basically smashes the pathetic people-are-cheapskates argument of the author. If people are willing to shell money for Steam even though there’s a free alternative just around the corner, doesn’t that make you rethink that argument? Or are those in Steam only the noble ones?

Don’t like the Steam example? Take good ol’ CD Piracy which is still extremely popular in the poorer nations. Why does this still exist when so people now have the capacity to either download the files directly or find someone who can? Even in the most of the poor areas of the world, you usually find internet stations with high-speed connections which can easily be used for people to download what they like. How can CD/DVD Piracy still be a million, if not billion-dollar industry? The answer again is convenience. Amongst those who do not have a lot of money to spend on gaming, paying something like 4$ is low enough of a price for avoiding tedious download periods, shady cracks and possibly non-working copies. CD/DVD pirates know this and thus provide copies that are generally working out of the box pretty well, which is especially important in a word-of-mouth kind of job they work in.

Piracy is working so well against normal purchases because it provides some very good advantages other than price. It allows people without credit cards to get their games online. It provides quicker service (not have to wait for weeks or even months to get the game in your own country). It avoids having to mess with physical items or DRMs. Services that wish to compete with Piracy for the people that can afford to purchase legally need to also hit on these points as well or alternatively provide other advantages to give people a reason to buy instead. Services like Steam and Impulse understand this and the fact that they also drop their prices temporarily to grab all those without a big gaming budget as well does not harm either.

People pirate to avoid unnecessary restrictions or delays

Compared to the previous two reasons, this is a relatively minor cause and most often than not, it does not change the number of people who buy (i.e. those who pirate for such a reason are likely to have already bought the game as well). Still it does increase the number of perceived downloaded copies which is used by people like the Author to boost their anti-piracy arguments.

These are the people who download a game in order to be able to play it in an uncensored version (with blood. With sex etc). If you consider how many countries, even rich ones like Germany, have ridiculously restrictive policies on this, it’s not hard to understand how it matters. I’ve done it quite a few times on games I have legally bought, just because I hate having to play a lobotomized game because some politician listened to the puritan lobby.

Then there’s those who can’t wait until companies get off their restrictive butts and release worldwide when the capacity exists. Some can’t wait until the game is translated or censored first and just want to play with their friends ASAP. Some know that the game is never going to be brought to their country because of ridiculous laws (coughAustraliacough) Most often than not, they end up buying the game when possible in order to get all the legal features as well.

People pirate on principle

While the author is quick to dismiss and belittle this attitude, it is not only true but getting stronger the more annoying the anti-piracy measures and lobby becomes. People pirate to teach companies a lesson.

You see, price does not give a complete signal to the companies, when the number of copies sold for a particular game are low, the company has no idea what the reason was. Perhaps the game was too bad. Perhaps people didn’t have money in that period. Perhaps it is because everyone’s a cheapskate pirate. And because companies don’t know why the game didn’t sell as much as they expected (or as much as they wished) they cannot fix the issues with it. However, when their customers explicitly and in very clear terms point out before-hand that they will refuse to buy the game if their favourite features are taken away (dedicated servers, lan play etc) or restrictive measures enforced (eg heavy-handed DRM) and the companies still go ahead and do it, how can they act surprised that their piracy rates skyrocket?

If you notice the top pirated games of the last years, you notice the same trends. Spore at the top of 2008 with its heavy DRM. CoD:MW2 at 2009 with its lack of dedicated server support. It’s not difficult to imagine that many of those pirated copies were done as a punishment for the companies from people who refused to buy. The more companies insist on going against their customer’s wishes, the more those customers will refuse to deal with them and will go to the next best alternative. And this is good.

Consumers have very small bargaining power compared to the megapublishers of games. Thus by refusing to play the games at all, they punish themselves just as much. Piracy provides the alternative which makes only the companies feel the pain of their bad management and provides a miniscule advantage (in the grand scale of things) back to the consumer. And even that is usually not enough as hardcore gamers are enough of an addict to shell their money even when they swore they wouldn’t. Thus the amazing success of MW2, even with a severely lacking multiplayer and a hostile PC community.

Piracy, much like union funds or other social nets, provide a needed counterbalance to corporate power.

In Conclusion

Speaking from myself, as someone who wholeheartedly supports the existence of piracy while currently doing very little of it myself, I can easily fit in all of the reasons I provided above. I was a heavy pirate when I was younger, poorer and without a job and this helped me actually develop a far better personality than I would have without it. Once I started having some more money, I used cut down on piracy heavily, unless it was more convenient to do so and with the advent of Steam, even that was basically reduced to zero and any times I do it now, it’s because I’m trying to get around restrictive bullshit laws of the country I’m in, for games I generally buy anyway.

I could probably list or expand on the reasons for piracy if I wanted to, but my main point was to show how amazingly short-sighted and downright insulting is the author’s analysis for the motives of pirates. It’s an extremely black&white view of the issue of piracy which is a handy way to ignore the real reasons why it happens. It’s far easier to decide there’s a good side and an evil side and those you do not like belong in the evil side. It’s like tribalism 101.

101 Blogs on Anarchism (and some guides)

Db0

I’ve populated the postrank topic on Anarchism and here I explain how it may be of use to you.

PostRank Inc.
Image via Wikipedia

Inspired by the latest postrank rankings of the Anarchosphere, I decided to improve upon the initial number of Anarchist blogs that I’d added in the past to the topic of Anarchism. To this end, I’ve basically scoured the internetubes and added around 60 new blogs to the topic bringing the grand (current) total to 101 tracked sites.

Now you may be wondering what’s the point of all this. We already have an aggregator after all. Well the thing is that postrank goes a bit futher than simple aggregation as it offers some extra features and capabilities that I’m certain some of you might find useful.

The Benefits of a postrank topic on Anarchism

  • It allows you to not only subscribe to the RSS of the topic, but also to balance between the quality and the quantity of the content you’ll end up seeing so that you don’t get swamped with posts from more than a hundred blogs. For example this feed will only display the posts from each site which have a very high engagement for that particular blog. This does not mean that you’ll be seeing only the most popular sites as the rating of a post is judged to the relative engagement of all other posts within the same site. More info here.
    It also provides you with more ways to subscribe. While you can do it the usual way of simply subscribing to the RSS of the topic, you can also simply export an OPML file with all the blogs and add them as individual feeds to your own Reader granting you even more control.
  • It avoids a centralized management as is the case of a normal Aggregator like Anarchoblogs. While there’s not reason to expect that the an admin like RadGeek would decide to start arbitrarily banning and removing sites he does not like, it still puts some limitations such as is the case in every benevolent hierarchy. Practically, there’s probably going to be little difference but with postrank you ensure that the control is more distributed and moderation thus happens faster.
    This means that you can go right ahead and add your own blog to the topic if you think you deserve to be there. While I tried to include as many as I felt should be there, doubtlessly I will have forgotten or not discovered them all. If you find you’re not included, just go ahead and add your anarchism-related blog as well. I will post a short guide on how to do this later on.
  • It provides some interesting statistics to see how popular you are, which are your most engaging posts and how active you are on the social web compared to other sites in your topic. Eventually, at the end of the year, you will also see how well you did and how your popularity rose or dropped and you can even get a nice badge for your site 😉

So if any of this is of interest to you, just go ahead and play around with the system and see how you like it.And no, before you ask, I’m not affiliated with Postrank in any way. I just like the way it works and the functionality it provides.

And now, some instructions.

How to add your own site to the Anarchism topic of Postrank

  1. Navigate to the anarchism topic
  2. If you haven’t used Postrank before, you’ll need to create an account. You can use your google or yahoo accounts to login as well AFAIK or simply an OpenID if you have one.
  3. Once you’re logged in click to manage the topic.
  4. Where it says “Add Feed” put the url of your blog. If “nothing found” is returned, it means that your site is not yet in the Postrank index. Don’t worry, it’s a few seconds’ work to add it.
    • Put your site’s url in the search textbox on the top right and press enter.
    • A new page should open from postrank, telling you that they do not know this site but will add it ASAP.
    • Go back to the management page for the topic and add your url to the “Add feed” box. The name of your site should now appear below. If it doesn’t, try removing the http:// in front of your url and leave only the domain name. The site should appear then. If that still doesn’t work, try to remove any trailing backslashes from the url and try again.
  5. Press the little green “plus” sign on the right of your blog’s title. The whole title should now become green.
  6. Click “Save Changes”. Once the page reloads, you site has been added to the topic. If you were just added in postrank you really won’t have any rank or info. Wait a few hours/days and check again. Your blog should appear at some position in the topic feeds. Visit its postrank page to get more details.

Congratulations. You’re now part of Postrank’s anarchism topic 😉

How to get only higher quality posts from the anarchism topic (or any topic for that matter)

  1. Go to the posts area of the topic.
  2. On the top, use the drop-down menu to select the quality you wish. It goes like this in regards of quality: All < Good < Great < Best. The higher the rank, the less posts you’ll get to see but all of them should have relatively high engagement for their blog’s standards.
  3. Once you have the quality you wish, click on the “RSS Feed” link on the right. You will notice that the URL has a number on appended on the end. That is the engagement rank or higher that a post needs to have before you’ll see it. You can change that number to 10.0 to see only the best of the best (note: this will be an extremely low quantity feed. Alternatively if you’re using google reader or bloglines, click on their relevant links instead.
  4. Use your browser’s controls to add the feed to your reader or do it normally via cut & paste
  5. There is a chance the feed will timeout if Postrank’s servers are overloaded. In that case you’ll have to copy the feed’s URL and add it to your reader manually. Once the servers recover, you’ll start seeing new posts.

Be aware that getting your feeds via postrank’s aggregation is going to be slower than going to the source due to the fact that a post needs to be first grabbed, then analyzed and once it has a high enough rank, presented in the feed. Therefore expect hours or even days of delays for each quality-filtered post. This shouldn’t be such an issue in general for non-news related sites as blogs are in general.

If you want new posts to appear ASAP on your reader on the other hand, your best option is to export to an OPML file and add all the feeds as individual sources to your reader. However, with this way you won’t have any filtering based on quality. If you use an online reader, you can use the special tools to achieve the same result instead.

So that’s about it. I hope you find it as useful as I do and feel free to contact me about any issues you find with it or to just let me know what you think about it.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

The perpetual confusion about "Property"

Db012 Comments

Private Property or Possession? If only an actual discussion between the two finally replaced the endless definitional bickering…

keep out
Image by Arriving at the horizon via Flickr

Once again I must return to the subject of ownership rights and how there’s two very distinct ways to define them: Private Property and Possession. That is not of course to mean that there’s no further variation between each of those systems, such as variation on the time to abandonment, the scale of ownership (individualist or collective) etc but rather that there is a hard core difference which splits the ownership scale in half, making each half incompatible with the existence of the other within the same social structure.

This idea, that Private Property as an ownership system is distinct from Possession as an ownership system should not be difficult to grasp.  It is after all one of the core concepts of most forms of Socialism and anyone trying to do a substantial critique – especially of communism – should as a bare minimum be able to understand what socialists actually oppose when we speak about “abolition of private property” or what collective ownership means in practice.

And yet, time and again, instead of seeing valid criticism against socialist theory from defenders of the capitalist mode of production, we see an endless string of strawmen centered around misunderstanding (purposefully, one starts to think eventually) the socialist opposition to “Property”. This is even more cringe-inducing when it is stated as a novel and irrefutable argument against socialist theory. As if it so easily proves that all socialists are just too silly to see and understand the obvious flaws in their opposition to Capitalism. It’s like someone bringing up the “Mud Pie” example as a new and exciting criticism against Marxian economics.

Such is the most recent example where we are guided to understand what “property” is and that communists “seem to forget” a bunch of stuff about how human societies function and the positive aspects of being able to own stuff. It once again trots out the classic red herrings about people who would prefer private property over anything else and that the only way to stop them must be via a state. Yadda yadda. Regular readers of mine should already know how easy it is to refute this nonsense.

It is all, in the end, based on simply calling all “Ownership” as “Property” and thus claiming that we, as humans, can’t function without “property”.He therefore obscures the fact that there is a difference between “Possessive property” and for lack of a better word now, “Sticky Property” and its significance. He pontificates on the voluntary aspects of “property” and how everyone else got it so wrong, while failing to make any point on whether Possession or “Sticky” property should be preferred, something which is at the heart of the socialist idea. In short we replace arguments over substance with arguments over vacuous semantics.

You see, it does not really matter what we call the various systems of ownership, we could call them blue and purple bananas for all the good it will do us. The important thing is that we understand the same concepts. That the socialist criticize the ownership system which facilitates and promotes wage-slavery, rent and usury and promote one which makes that systematically impossible. That this is not a discussion on how we’re going to enforce it (voluntarily or coercively) but on simply which system we ought to prefer.

To simply take your own or what you assume are the “right” definition of the word ‘property’ and superimpose it onto socialist critique, is simple a recipe for strawmen fallacies. Perhaps you have the most popular definition. Perhaps you have the proper or more the most clear. Perhaps not. The important thing to remember, as Proudhon pointed out in the past, is that if you’re going to call all types of ownership “property” then you really need a way to distinguish between possession and “sticky property”. He suggested to call the later the more appropriate name of “theft” of course but I doubt the propertarians will agree on that.

As a communist, I have a reason why I prefer the definitional distinction to be between “Private Property” and “Possession”. Property is generally understood anyway to be “sticky” that is, to remain with someone until they sell or abandon it, regardless of occupancy or use. As such, it does not take much effort, other than explaining that there’s other possible forms of ownership other than that, to clarify my opposition to it.  But it’s not important to use those concepts if they confuse someone. I can easily switch to a terminology that one feels more comfortable with if that will make things easier for them. However this is still my preferred terminology for the reason I just explained and thus find it incredibly silly for someone to make strawmen based on what I write for the general audience and then defend their actions on the grounds that their definitions are superior or more correct.

OTOH, what I most commonly end up seeing is that propertarians do not choose to call everything “property” because it is easy to discuss the concepts around it, but because it conveniently allows them to pretend that other valid forms of ownership do not exist. They will attempt to argue that “Property” is necessary and by that lump all concepts of ownership into the same umbrella, even when incompatible with each other. This is necessary in order to make their core arguments from “self-ownership” lead to Laissez-faire Capitalism, something which would be weakened if possession was a valid form of ownership, distinct from private property. Therefore it’s better to assume that the former is simply a subgroup of the latter. In fact, this is surprisingly similar to the way they try to argue that they’re open to the idea of communism…as long as it exists within a greater propertarian framework.

But I digress into an anti-AnCap rant again. What I’m trying to point out is that the words we use are irrelevant as long as we end up understanding each other and making substantial arguments. I long to see someone making  a solid critique on why a Possessive system is unfeasible or even simply inefficient, or how private property is more ethical and whatnot…without having those points demolished by decade-old anarchist arguments or simple facts of reality.

And until then, all misguided propertarians who insist on making strawmen and presenting them as the most insightful thing ever and the absolute refutation of any and all forms of Socialism – should and will receive at best a quick dismissal as the waste of time they are, or at worst a well deserved ridicule for being obnoxiously ignorant.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Quote of the day: Words and Meaning

Db0

A quote about the use of words

Quoth Chuang-Tzu (c. 200 B.C.E) ((As seen in the book On Being Certain))

The fish traps exist because of the fish. Once you’ve gotten the fish, you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you’ve gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning. Once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten the words so I can talk with him?

This is related to my article on the use of Mathematics and language

Top Anarchodog

Db05 Comments

The Division by Zer0 managed to conquer the 3rd place for the top Anarchist blogs of 2009.

Well, look at that. It seems that I’ve been found to be the 3rd top blog on the topic of Anarchism by the automatic calculations of Postrank for 2009.

Interesting. I don’t think that’s very accurate because as far as the topic goes, I consider myself quite a small fish in the Anarchosphere. I think it has far more to do with me being present in the Postrank analytics for a while now, specifically since I discovered it back when it was still called AideRSS and suggested it as a helping tool for the Atheosphere. Speaking of which, I’m nowhere close to the top for the Atheism category and as expected, it was Pharyngula who achieved superiority, although there were just 20 blogs in the topic.

Still, I’m glad I got even this small achievement. It makes me putting the effort to populate the category for anarchism worth it even more than the fact that it’s by itself a very useful quality-filtering tool. If you haven’t yet, take a look at the topic and subscribe to it to get all the goodness.

As for all of you who didn’t make it (either in Anarchism or Atheism), then make sure you visit the topic in question and add your own site to it so that it can start being calculated. Who knows, maybe in the next year you’ll be close to the top. And even if now, you’ll at least get a nifty badge for 2010 😉

A new pirate's haven

Db0

A new hub for piracy-related articles and news has been created on Reddit. Join us.

Short notice. I’ve recently been made a mod of the Piracy subreddit and I’m trying to improve on it as well as to get it to be a bit more active. If you like all things Piracy, from “unauthorized” file sharing to High Sea Swashbuckling to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, then join us and submit any article of relevance.

The demographics of piracy, PCs and consoles

Db03 Comments

Game Companies think that by focusing their energies on consoles instead of PCs they’ll be making more secure profits from piracy. If only they understood their audience…

Rally in Stockholm, Sweden, in support of file...
Image via Wikipedia

As TweakGuide’s examination of piracy continues, he takes a look at some of the numbers around file-sharing for each platform and find correlations from there. I will not attempt to dispute the numbers themselves, even though one can make some very valid criticisms about his methodologies which many went ahead and did here ((Simple Example: His number for downloads from Mininova is way, way off. This is the times a .torrent file has been downloaded, not the number of times the full, working game has been downloaded. Very often a particular torrent will not include a working copy, or its swarm will not be fast enough, or simply another torrent will look to be of higher quality. Add to that the file scrapping that Torrent search sites do with each other all the time, and you figure out that his numbers might easily be 1/10th of what he thinks they are. The Torrentfreak numbers are a far better indicator but of course, he interpreted them absolutely wrong.)). The reason there is no point is disputing the numbers is firstly because it’s the impression that game companies have of the numbers (and that would be similar to the author’s) and also because I’ll attempt to show that even when the numbers stand, it’s his analysis of what they mean that is flawed.

The reason for this is that TweakGuide does not seems to realize that the dynamics of the crowd of PC gaming are not the same as of consoles or how those dynamics change when these two overlap. Before one can analyze the situation, they need to recognise the difference in demographics between those two markets and how it affects puchasing behaviour and the rate of perceived piracy.

Here’s what we need to consider

PCs are proliferated all over the world

The fact of the matter is that not all the world has such a big middle and upper-middle class as the USA has, and this means a few things.

First there quite a lot of PCs that are capable of gaming but not purchased explicitly for this purpose. It’s quite often that a family will have a PC purchased for the use of everyone (business, online shopping, social networking, studies etc) which can then easily be turned into a gaming-capable machine by the simply addition of a decent graphic card. Since the need for such a PC can very often be necessary (say for business or school) it’s something prioritized over an explicitly gaming console, plus it’s not out of the budget of most families, even in developing nations ((This information shows that even in the poorer nations, 1 PC per 10 people is not uncommon. Thus Their middle class is very likely to own a gaming-capable PC)). This means that quite a few people who want to game have primarily access to a PC rather than a console.

However most of those people are not wealthy enough to purchase games to go with it. Especially teenagers which are on a limited budget but have an insatiable appetite for new games, not to mention for playing whatever their friends are, are left with the only option to pirate. Usually this is done locally and not via Downloads, although with the proliferation of high-bandwidth lines even in poorer nations, this is changing. Think of it like this, if you have a PC at home only and enough money to buy the latest-greatest game per month, would you give up all the other games? Even when salivating adverts about them are all around you?

That is exacerbated even more when we consider that nations outside the 1st world have far smaller incomes while the prices of games do not tend to drop accordingly. This forces gamers to turn even more starkly towards piracy as a means of getting their gaming fix. This is only to be expected as price is indeed the main reason most turning to file-sharing and not the infantile argument anti-piracy lobbyists use of “they are just immoral free riders”. This is the reason why piracy is largest in the more cash-strapped nations in general.

What I mean to show by all this is that the reasons PCs by far lead the numbers in piracy is because there’s far more PCs available in the poorer countries than consoles and because they are poorer and cannot afford the exorbitant prices of PC Games, they turn to piracy. Thus the numbers of downloads we see  are representative of the fact that people download all around the world and not just from the developed nations and primarily for the PC.

Consoles are primarily owned by those with spare income

While a PC is becoming more and more of a necessity in everyday life due to the increasing importance of online communication and services, consoles are instead becoming more and more of a luxury. It has always been the case that the console itself was cheap because it was making the money up via the license for the games sold but the recent consoles have not only steadily increased in price by themselves (to the point where you can get an OK gaming PC for a comparable price) but in order to take full advantage of their capabilities, you currently also need an HD TV, which relatively few can afford.

Originally things were different of course, when the first and second generation of consoles was coming out, PC were still quite expensive and not a lot of people had one at all. Thus to get a complete PC for gaming, including a monitor and peripherals could rise up to the thousands. A console OTOH required a few hundred in investment and you could plug it in your TV. It was a cheaper solution, especially in a time when piracy was not as easy or widespread. Roles now seem to have reversed somewhat, or at worst equalized. A Console along with peripherals and a few new games can easily take you to half a grand (and that’s by being generous and using current console prices), and if you include an HDTV in the mix, you quickly fly over a grand.

As weird as it may seem to those of you still living in a comfortable middle-class bubble, not many can afford this. An expenditure like this, can easily take up the whole recreation budget some have for the whole year. As a result, those who do get such setups, are also the ones who can afford to buy games legally just as well. And this shows in the rates of piracy of course.

Where Demographics collide

Of course, there’s a very big section of people who own both a gaming-capable PC and one or more consoles at the same time and here, the things get even more interesting.

Certainly someone who can afford two or more gaming stations has spare income to be buying games legally in the first place. Someone who gets a console is more than likely to get it as his “legal” and hassle-free gaming station since they also have the benefit that games just work out of the box and they don’t ever have to wonder about virii, serials and DRM, or their OS breaking. Of course the PC could still be used to be able to play those types of games that just don’t work that well on a console. If that person also happens to be a hardcore gamer who enjoys playing a lot of different games, it’s quite possible that he’ll reach time, if not money constraints at some point.

Now if that person is to pirate (To be able to play the game as a demo or simply to save money,) where do you think he would do it? Would he take his console to be chipped and risk getting discovered and losing access to many of the features of his console? (eg. multiplayer, warranty etc), or would he download the PC version which requires very little effort and risk to get working? I think we all know the answer to that. Thus, even though it’s the same person doing the pirating, and even though this piracy may eventually lead to a console sale (if he likes it enough to play it legally, or on a nice HD TV), the PC piracy gets inflated once more and talks about “economic loss” are once again brought up.

PC Gamers are more demanding

Finally one thing that deserves notice in order to understand why the PC Game piracy is higher is the increased  demands of the users of this platform. You see PC gaming had always different and more open standards than console gaming and this grew out of the nature of each platform. Consoles, from the begging have been extremely locked-down and locked-in, even to the point of special custom cartidges incompatible with anything else, modifications to the games adding extra value where practically impossible to make or distribute and in general user freedom was curtailed. This was counterbalanced with hassle-free gaming, low learning curves and initial low costs (i.e. if one does not take into account the increased costs of games.) As such, they tended to attract the kind of user who would be quite willing to sacrifice freedom for convenience. “I know my machine could do so much more, but I don’t personally care for them so I won’t demand it.”

On the other hand, The hackable nature of the PC allowed customization and expansion of games and empowered users to add extra value, far beyond the original. Furthermore, because PC multiplayer was inherently tied to the rise of the internet (as opposed to the living room split-screen in the case of consoles) it also inherited many of the aspects of the distributed, decentralized and free nature of the net. Thus individual servers for FPS, planets, modding communities, balance patches, and of course the more novel, demanding and complex games. All of this meant that the PC gamer had and still generally has quite high standards on what he should be able to do with stuff he is using. The rise in popularity of Free Software and of the more customer-focused companies has only served to increase their expectations.

So when a company attempts to introduce console mentality into the PC market, it is only natural that it faces a backlash which becomes only more intense if and when the company does an action which the PC gaming community opposes vocally. This can easily be seen by the classic by now example of Spore which instated draconian DRM and delivered a sub-par game, based on the notion that marketing alone was enough to carry them through. The most recent example was of course CoDMW2 which removed the ability for custom servers, something which they were warned would create a strong backlash. And so it did as the game soon became the most pirated game of 2009 within a few months. Not simply because it was good or popular, but also because PC gamers, quite explicitly, did it as a punishing act.

Look at the rest of the top pirated games of 2008 or 2009 and you’ll notice the same trend. The top games are those which are released for both PC and console and if anything include many options that PC gamers are not fans of. Restrictive DRMs, Missing basic features, Console-based control systems or setup, DLC-focused etc. This should point out the principled basis for this kind of piracy. It’s not based on simply wanting to get a game for free, but rather on the wish of PC gamers to make companies understand that their actions are unpopular. Unfortunately companies choose to interpret this a different way.

Bringing it all together

How does this all affect the arguments of TweakGuide? He’s basically saying that because of the disparity in the ratio of piracy to legal PC games and piracy to legal Console games, PC game developers are starting to switch their efforts to consoles and even making them their primary development platform. Accordingly we’re either going to stop seeing as many big-budget games for the PC, or they’re going to be developed with consoles in mind and therefore lose in quality, performance or taking advantage of the PC capabilities.

This is of course a bad move for their part as they are only going to worsen their sales and piracy, not increase them, and this of course will further exacerbate the issue, leading to them publishing even worse PC games, leading to more piracy and less sales etc etc.

You see, those who make the majority of pirates, the ones who simply cannot afford the huge prices for games, will not suddenly discover the money to buy a console. They will simply keep looking for the highest quality game they can get for free or for a price they can afford. If the big budget titles move exclusively to consoles, then they’ll simply won’t get them and settle for the indie and open source alternatives. If the big budget titles remove features and worsen the customization, the free or low cost alternatives are simply going to look as a better thing to play. The poor are simply incapable of getting more money for games. Naturally this means that those gaming companies have shot themselves in the foot since even the poor will shell out some money if you give them a reason to buy and the correct price. If you are not willing to do it for fear of losing control, then someone else will. Whatever happens, you’re not going to be making money out of them but rather facilitating others to doing so.

On the other hand, by focusing all their energy on consoles instead, they will start to over-saturate an already full market. Console gamers may have more disposable income but they are relatively few and have only so much time they can spend on gaming. Start churning out more games for the consoles and you’ll quickly find out that it’s the sales per individual game which start to suffer while you’ve now lost all income from the PC market. Sure, some PC gamers will switch to consoles so that they may play the big budget and exclusives but only the ones who can afford to in the first place. I doubt it will be a significant amount.

For those who have already both a gaming rig and a console, not much will change. At best they’ll switch to playing free games, or those who are given at an appropriate price for their value, or they’ll simply chip their console or buy a secondary chipped one so that they may keep pirating for demos or gratis. If anything, console piracy will increase.

And finally, those who are simply demanding of the stuff their games provide, of the modding capacity and the free support and quality service, if anything this will drive them even further away from console-type games and they will turn instead of those companies who know to give them what they expect. Companies such as Valve and Stardock and Runic and Blizzard. And if those alternatives are not enough, perhaps they’ll finally discover the possibilities of Free Software.

The large companies may think they’re protecting their interests and punishing a disloyal crowd, but their inability to understand their demographics is only going to hurt them in the long run. Naturally they won’t realize this as it’s nice to be able to say that the percentage of piracy is low, even while your total profits are lower. After all, they are misguided enough to whine about piracy hurting them…while recording record sales year after year.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]