Speaking of Fallout 3, as a large portion of the internet seem to be doing right now regarding the latest previews that have been emerging this week, me and a friend got tangled up in a discussion regarding piracy. I felt my friend should buy Fallout 3 because he had said “omg I need a new computer so I can play that game as good as possible”. Now, I’m not any less of a pirate. I download games and I play them. If I like them, I buy them. I have the same philosophy when it comes to music and movies. Fallout 3 seems like a game more than worthy of my time and money, but my friend does not share the same ideology, and this is the discussion that followed:

[X is friend, Y is me]

———————————————————————————————————————————————————–

X - I only buy if there’s an advantage to buying it. I don’t want to give away money.

Y - Eh… so that they’ll continue to make omg awesome games for us, thank you very much?

X - There’s a million others who’ll buy it. It’s the developers and publishers who should adapt, not me, if they want to sell their product.

Y - Stop voting then, while you’re at it.

X - It’s not the same thing, at all.

Y - It’s the same logic. What do you want them to do, then?

X - I don’t know, that’s their problem.

Y - Hahahaha! Your head’s gone out the window.

X - Of course it’s their problem. OMG.

Y - If they release it on Steam, then… or something similar? Is that good?

X - Better.

Y - You bought The Orange Box.

X - Yes, because Steam was the easiest and most practical way to play it. And it was freakin’ cheap. If Fallout costs $10, sure, but, it’s not gonna cost $10.

Y - Mm, tough question…

X - But, you have to agree that it’s not the consumers responsibility to make sure the companies make money?

Y - Hmm… It is your responsibility to support developers of products that you, like, love and want. Then at what cost is always subjective. But, do you think that products grow on trees? Don’t you want to support the people that make the world a better place to live in? Do you want commercial breaks in your game? Do you only want to play Audiosurf and Peggle all your life?

X - If I’m gonna give money to “people that make the world a better place to live in”, there’s more sane options than game companies.

Y - Bad example, I know. But, why do we live? Don’t we live for the art, or do we live just to live?

X - Haha! OFF TOPIC!

Y - NO!!! You give away money every day.

X - Yes, to things that I see a value in purchasing. I get something for it, and I can’t get it any other way.

Y - No, you can get by your everyday life by shoplifting and mugging old ladies.

X - But, then I’m stealing, then I’m taking something from someone else. It’s not the same thing.

Y - There’s more value in a game you think is fantastic than the sweater you bought.

X - Value is dependent on the availability, and games can be copied an infinite number of times. Thus, the files have no value in themselves. If there’s something rare and hard to get a hold of it’s expensive, and vice versa.

Y - What about the experience, doesn’t that have a value? That’s what we assign a value to, in the end. Is it worth my time and money? I think everything should be demoed. Demo’s on games, be able to stream the entire album of the website before making you buy it, etc.

X - The experience can be totally wonderful, but, you can still get it for free. “Value” and monetary value is not the same thing.

Y - But it’s the same thing, in the end. Because the physical value, the product or “file”, is not important. Everything’s about the experience. I streamed the entire Nine Inch Nails album off of their website before deciding that “this is fucking amazing”. I saw Inland Empire for free before I bought the DVD.

X - With movie theatres, I pay for that experience. Because there’s not an infinite amount of free movie theatres. If there were, I wouldn’t pay to go to the movie theatre.

Y - The physical value is not in the product itself, that’s not what costs money to make; that’s not what you pay for. How are you gonna afford to produce “experiences”, as it is today, without revenue from consumers? Advertisements? Should the whole experience get raped so that you don’t have to pay for something that doesn’t have a physical value in itself, because there’s an infinite amount of “files” you can get anywhere and anytime?

X - Like I said, that’s up to the companies to think of. MMO’s do it very effectively. They make a ton of money and the players feel like they get something out of it. How you transfer that feeling to a singleplayer game remains to be seen. It will be a looong transitional stage, anyway. There are still a lot of people who buy games, people who are not as technically knowledgeable to pirate them. But in time, the companies have to adapt themselves to the new conditions.

Y - The new conditions = the internet? That everything is available? That in a couple of years you will still be sitting at the same computer you are today, but with an insane broadband connection, so that you can stream games off of dedicated servers and pay a small amount a month to do it? That will happen, sooner or later. Say for example, that every distributer puts out every game they publish on their servers, you create an account and have access to everything they put out for a monthly fee. There’s the solution.

X - Sure, maybe that could work. But, we’re not there yet.

Y - What if everybody was like you? So, by the time we get to that place in time, we might as well fuck it all because it’s not economically feasible to develop games. On the other hand, you could say that because of people like you, you’re putting pressure on the publishers and developers to push the evolution forward. So, we’re going around in circles here…

X - If people stopped buying games completely the companies are forced to come up with a better solution, what’s wrong with that?

Y - That we are a few decades from digging up half of the planet to put cables down so that everyone can have a limitless broadband connection.

X - I said a “better solution”, not necessarily what you suggested. There’s where my fancy transitional stage comes into play. It’s gonna take a while.

Y - Let’s discuss a better solution then. What would that be?

X - No, I don’t want to. That’s not our responsibility. Like I said, we don’t sell the games, so why should we think of a solution?

Y - We have that responsibility because we are part of the market and the world.

X - No

Y - If we don’t take responsibility to at least make our opinions heard about why we don’t buy their products, we will halt the evolution.

X - We make our opinions heard by buying/not buying. That’s what consumers do. If we buy all these games now, that’s when the evolution stops. If we don’t buy anything, it’s forced to evolve.

Y - Because of the interest we have towards the medium, we have a responsibility.

X - You might feel like that, but I don’t.

Y - We are the future.

X - What changes if we buy games?

Y - Nothing changes, but at least we’re not helping the PC becoming questioned as a platform.

Last word? Well that’s up to you…

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written by Jesper Sellerberg on Saturday, April 12th, 2008 at 3:25 pm