[LAD] RAUL?

[David Olofson]

On Wednesday 16 November 2011, at 14.32.23, Louigi Verona 
<louigi.verona at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey David!
> Thanks for your contribution to the discussion. I think you have raised
> interesting points.
> I would begin by asking you a question though.
> 
> "However, if just any business was legally allowed take anyone's
> "intellectual
> property" and make money off of it, paying no royalties or anything, that
> would be a problem."
> 
> Why would that be a problem?

The problem with that is that they're potentially stealing my customers. Where 
they sell, I don't.

This becomes even more of a problem due to the fact that developers need to 
spend most of their time creating products, while the others can work full 
time on making a profit form the work of these developers. This leads to a 
situation where effectively business is everything, and development is just 
something you do if you don't value your own time.


> "Unfortunately, in the case of music, video games and various other things,
> the
> interesting part of making a polished, thoroughly enjoyable and/or useful
> product is generally only some 10% of the work. The rest is just hard,
> boring,
> frustrating work that will rarely ever get done without some other
> motivation
> than the work itself."
> 
> This is a very fair concern.
> I would say that I would not be interested in the question of free software
> if the only proprietary thing in the would would be games.

Exactly. Games in general pretty much have to be proprietary, or most of them 
just won't happen. The section of "players" and "motivated, skilled 
contributors" seems to be next to non-existent, so Free/Open Source *games* 
don't really work.

Engines and tools are different matters though. High end 3D engines are just 
too complex and short-lived (need to be mostly rewritten every other year or 
so to keep up), but there is plenty of Free/Open Source physics, scripting and 
whatnot going on in games these days.


> For music and games I do have an answer for you. And this answer comes from
> seeing the great advancements of the computer technology. Nowadays making
> music and even movies is much-much easier. In Russia one of the political
> opposition people has announced a song contest, aimed at the government. I
> am listening to what people have done and am amazed - all of it is really
> good, on par with professional work, and most contestants are amateurs
> who do it in their free time. Looks like this is not really a problem.

Well, the difference with music at least, is that you can make one song, and 
you have something to show. Make half an engine and one level of a game and 
you have... nothing?

Also, in my experience, the whole process of creating music is a lot more 
rewarding and less frustrating than (other parts of) game development. Even 
so, I never really get around to do it these days. The main reason I'm going 
beyond just playing around with synths and stuff now, is that I've decided to 
do *everything* on my first commercial game, music included.

Basically, no matter how much I enjoy creating music, games or whatever, I 
just haven't been able to find enough time and energy to do it "properly" 
without any chance of doing that instead of building web sites, programming 
embedded systems or whatever.

Maybe I'm just burned out, or not passionate enough about it; I don't know... 
But if I'm going to take things from the "fun amatuer stuff" to a professional 
quality level, I don't want to spend what little spare time I have left after 
"real" work just doing that.


> Games seem to survive today in spite of filesharing though. Do you think it
> comes from the fact that most are multiplayer?

To some extent, maybe, as that's one way of actually providing some extra 
value. Valve's Steam is another example of that; providing actual value and 
services to paying customers.

Plain DRM that's a general PITA to deal with and threatens to damage your 
operating system is not "extra value", although some companies still believe 
it actually works... One of those that recently declared "DRM works!" is down 
to 10% (!) in PC sales AND piracy, and still don't get the message. That's 
just plain neurotic if you ask me!

There is actually data showing that sales scale up with piracy. It might seem 
like nothing but a problem to a company spending millions on TV commercials 
and whatnot, but I'm not sure about that... To independent developers with 
practically zero marketing budget, it can be an invaluable marketing tool!

Of course, you actually need to have a good product that "sells itself" for 
that to work out, and looking at many of the AAA titels, you can see how that 
can be a problem for the "big guys";

If the game is great, some "pirates" will convert into customers. (Other 
statistics show that the kind of people that pirate anything that's released 
also buy a lot of games. They basically just want uncrippled "demos" to make 
informed decisions. $50+ price tags probably amplify this, as that's just too 
much for taking chances.)

However, if the game sucks, widely available cracks warns would-be buyers, 
rendering devious strategies like refusing to provide demos, threatening 
review sites and whatnot, ineffective.


-- 
//David Olofson - Consultant, Developer, Artist, Open Source Advocate

.--- Games, examples, libraries, scripting, sound, music, graphics ---.
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