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General: Two Trends to Watch Closely
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
While the controversial legislation embodied by both the SOPA and PIPA bills has largely been tabled for now, they are not dead by any stretch. In today's Free Zone, we take a look at two trends that all who are concerned with government intervention in the Internet need to keep an eye on. See what you think and then add your comments.
After spending millions of dollars lobbying to get them created and to promote them almost into law, the entertainment industry isn’t just going to say “Okay, we tried. We’ll give up now.” So, those who think the war has been won are fooling themselves. In all probability, some form of anti-piracy legislation will still be passed, likely this year. Realistically, the goal is to have it be something reasonable, not disguised and/or barely softened versions of SOPA and PIPA.
Read more of Richard Aihoshi's The Free Zone: Two Trends to Watch Closely.
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Comments
About hybrydization - for example freemium model takes worst features of f2p and p2p and don't bring most of their advantages.
F2P - no barrier of entry , whole content avabile , no subs
P2P - level playing field, no things as "I have / I am willing to spend more money so I have better looking things / skip grind / have advantage" , no cash shops or very small ones - no break of immersion
Freemium - limited free content , cash shops as big as in f2p , frequently game 'encourage' subscribing or even de-facto force subscribing to fully experience end-game content. Much of content need unlocking' , frequently paid expansions.
Imho freemium look like a way to have cake and eating it for developers.
They have strady income from subs + increased number of players from "free" players + sell alot of things through microtransactions + sell expansions
If that's future - then I will NOT play mmorpg's in future.
It’s already happening elsewhere. I’ve written before about a few actions taken by the Chinese and Korean governments. Last year, the latter enacted what is widely known as the shutdown system. In common with SOPA and PIPA, it’s hard to argue with the underlying goal, which is to prevent young gamers from racking up excessive amounts of playing time. Also like the American bills, major issues arise in relation to the method of implementation, which reportedly went into effect just last week.
This here is a pretty big slant targetedto convince people to join the side against SOPA. Instead of mentioning how Canada and Britain have cracked down on piracy you have instead turned to China and North Korea both of which run notoriously tyranical governments.
Fact is most of the "1st world" nations are currently screening the Internet. Somehow America has made the word "censorship" into a sort of voodoo that we shouldn't do.
The opponennts of SOPA/PIPA should spend less time talking about how it should be stopped and spend more time drafting an alternative bill.
You can't blame piracy on bad revenue models. Imagine for a second that everyone was stealing candy from the candy store and the candy store dropped profits by 50%. The candy store owner calls the police but the police tell him they will not be able to arrest people unless he can prove people have stolen a minimum amount OR they catch him in the act.
Of course there are only so many kids out there stealing $100M in candy.
So the big candy store is told they should give away all of their candy for free and introduce 'premium' candy.' The big candy store disagrees of course.
Because the problem isn't his revenue model it is the fact that people are stealing things and not feeling like it is a crime. Crytek which is still a small developer in the world lost something like $500M to online piracy on just Crysis 2. Consider for a second that the game probably made around $500M total.
Crytek is a studio that is expanding and was stalled in its expansion because it lost so much money to piracy. They have something like six studios and they in fact have one in America. They cannot expand any of these studios because they don't have the money... meaning less jobs.
If you want to see the true victims of people constantly blocking anti-piracy bills look at all of the unemployed game developers, programmers, and artists in the world.
Website: http://www.thegameguru.me / YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/users/thetroublmaker
@troublemaker
While I do agree with some of what you say, you DO realize that Crytek did NOT LOST this kind of money?
You do realize that most of people that pirate game if they could not pirate this game they would simply not buy it at all?
I am NOT justifying pirating , no I don't do that. Just if game was for example pirated in 1mlon copies - if piracy was impossible it would not sell additional 1 mln. Many people pirate something to try before buying or just because they can have it.
If they had to pay for it 60$ most of them would simply not buy it.
That why counting "loss" by equation of "number of pirated copies" * price of box is bollocks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement
acta,sopa,pipa etc etc etc they keep renaming the thing we should have a new acronime soon for the same thing.
lawyer use this tactic all the time they use new word out of context and voila fixed the issue!lol
@finistil
If even 1 of those 1 million copies were bought instead of pirated then that would be one more unit of profit. While all 1 million would not turn to 1 million sold it would be safe to say probably a quarter to half might.
So while not justifying it you are minimizing it so that it is ignored.
now its hip to be against it apparently, even though most people saying theyre against SOPA dont even know what it's about
and you are what? favor it?
@troublemaker
error number one is think people who get a pirated copy would have paid for it, most of time people get teh pirated game to see if they like so they would buy it, if is a shit demon spawn think of fails, he would not pay for it so no harm done.
I'm a programmer and i'm against all this crap of sopa pipa, I think the next bill should be named, let's censor the internet and silence everyone to say what people want, imagine if they did that before people in the middle east revolted against the dictatorship they lived on? htat is the main reason I can see a congress trying to make a thing you can keep out of web without a need to use a legal system to see if he really is trying to hurt or stealing, also last I know you have to proof someone is criminal, that bill just say you are criminal and you have to proof you are not one.
and would be funny if this thing pass, and the first thing to happen is they shut down google, facebook, twiter for using copyrighted material, also guys with any blog or fan site using things like a light saber and or a pony.
I also recomend you read all teh bill not what the people who want it to pass says. if even reading the whole bill you still think its right you are like that guys who kill your own friend by mistake because you don't know.
Never said it should be ignored. Just that it is exagarrated.
Quarter to half seem alot too much imo. I would say 10-20%.
Especially that many people download ALOT of games and other stuff and they would just not enough money to afford all of it. <--- That does not make it good of course. It is bad behaviour it is obvious. I am just making a point ,that losses are exagarrated.
So while combating piracy IS important , PIPA / SOPA and ACTA are like using Nuke to destroy one small compound.
Sacrifice in citizen's freedom , cost of implementation and questonable legal practices written in those bils outweights possible gains by FAR.
Thats not to say Im not building a huge music collection should anything ever happen to my internets, but I find it laughable that people think the government would be able to enforce internet policies.
Also I guarantee if Pirate Bay contributed millions to campaign funds SOPA would never have even been brought to fruition.
Money talks in Washington DC, and the record labels and movie studios have a whole lot
Darn right.
Everything creates huge amounts of negativity on the internet, that's what the internet is for: Negativity, porn and lolcats.
I do not agree nor disagree with the rules imposed on children in other countries about video game playing... But this article's arguments against these rules were silly. If you are going to argue against the rules, you should target how they are removing freedoms or how they are imposing excessive regulations (that the parents should take care of themselves).
Attacking the law for not requiring smaller game companies to adhere is silly because that would hurt indie games and raise the prices for game development, and these games are not the core of the issue. It is the big $$ games that the majority of these kids are playing excessively. Also, saying that the kids will just 'play multiple games' to fill their day with video games anyways is pretty incorrect. The problem here is that the kids are becoming obsessed with these big named games and playing those games excessively. If you can stop them from playing that game, I would be more worried about them reading about the game or playing the same game on a second account than them playing another game. And finally, there is only so much the government can do, and that is what they are doing... They simply cant enforce a law that keeps the kids from playing ALL video games for over 3 hours a day. If they could they probably would.
Play as your fav retro characters: cnd-online.net. My site: www.lysle.net. Blog: creatingaworld.blogspot.com.
Damn pirates Van Gogh could have kept his ear if not for the damn Pirates that stole his work!
Arrrrr
:P
Though I am still for the bill to censor all, especially forbiding all games.
Imagine how useful we could spend time without forums and silly games :P
BAN THEM ALL!
*quoting this text is forbidden and only allowed if you pay me $5*
Really wish that people would stop saying that every hit on a download site is a pirated copy of whatever.
No one knows how much whatever it is is DL'ed and actually used. 500k hits so 500k games lost in revenue, bah just more numbers used to try to prove what can not be proven.
And that is why people should be against these types of legislation. There should be no laws passed till they are clear AND have very narrowly defined goals. And be based on PROVABLE facts, not guessing and false numbers.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/9013803/Student-Richard-ODwyer-can-be-extradited-over-TV-website.html
This guy in the news link shows how much power the US goverment has even in countries where the people have never even set foot in the US nor commited no crime in their country of origin.
This guy made a search engine only he never owned or had any pirated films or music. Just because he pointed people to web sites where they could find them he was arrested by the FBI. What he did is not a crime under the UK/EU laws.
hmm ... We should wonder how making games became big business ? Maybe there are some lessons to be draw from the past ?
Now this business is spread across the World. Are there any laws worlwide enforceable ? And will protective laws not shift a problem from one "region" to another ?
Piracy is a word used to cover different acts of infringements. One has to do with copyright ( "authorship" ), and there is "patented". In Europe"reverse engineering" IS allowed within reason. Are not American lawyers calling some European laws also "piracy" ? Why only look at the Asiatic region ?
USA patent legislation has nearly suffocated the electronic/informatic business, are they determined to further doom innovation rather then "protect" it?
"Protection" of ones interests seems a noble cause, but all to often all those that demand "freedom" or are called "free" use this word to further diminish the freedom and in the end protect nothing but their empty thoughts. A paradox already acknowledged by Machiavelli. How do we get out of this paradox ?
Thievery and fraude will always exists. Is it then not a question of how to get the occurences within a tolerable, liveable, reasonable limits ?
You can close your frontdoor with bars, locks and all kinds of restrictive mechanisms. Just make sure the thief does not die of laughing at your wide open backdoor, because you will have to pay for his funeral.
Rated M for Mature - May contain content inappropriate for children
Some flawed logic in some of these responses. Ecspecialy troublmaker. First of all almost no one who pirates games would buy them otherwise if they could not get them for free.
3 types of people pirate.
1. The people who can't afford the game, thus wouldn't buy it anyway.
2. The people who want to try a game before they buy it, this group makes up a huge portion of the population of piraters. Because most games lose a lot of features like multiplayer and easily accessed added content etc. when pirated, these pirates use it for testing purposes almost.
3. Thiefs people who can afford it but just download it anyway. This is the smallest category, as I don't know anyone who fits this bill myself. The worst part is even if the bill was implemented there's no garuntee that this minority of people would even buy the game anyway.
Game companies whine and moan when there games don't sell well and they blame piracy. But think back to every game that has done bad in sales and you will realise one of two things or both.
1. The game was mediocre, all to often crappy games don't sell and the 'companies' blame piracy. Not the fact that it was hated by critics and players alike.
2. Bad marketing, this is huge. So many games, so many, suffer for this. How many times have you found a dated game on steam or at your local game store and purchased it then said "damn, why haven't I heard of this? it's awesome.". You didn't hear of it because of bad marketing and exposure, or it was sold as something it wasn't. Just think about all those 'cult hit' games you discovered years after release. If no one heard of them they probably didn't die because of pirating.
This whole thing is just the industry trying to place the blame elsewear. Same goes for movies and what not. The bill is BS. Btw I'm Canadian but I'm sure this would effect me sooner or later.
Yeah. I cannot understand why UK goverment handle him over to US if this student did NOT break any UK laws.
Should I start reading USA and every other coutnries domestic laws even if I live in my country?
This is OUTRAGEUS - really.
Shame on USA and UK as well imo.
Well he made 'good' money from it and then the law is a lot harsher as if you just pirate a bit.
Though if every weed user and people that downloaded more than 100 songs/software would end up in prison, then the prison industry would be booming.
:P
He's talking about South Korea, which has a democratic government and is an ally of the US.
The rest of your post is just as misinformed, so I won't bother responding to it any further.
these types of bills have never been about piracy but really about internet censorship of independant news sites they cant control.
See you space cowboys
I am a Pirate. Not much anymore, but I am still a pirate. I used to download all my music, games, movies, etc for free back in the early days of the net. I was young, didn't see the harm in it and couldn't afford to do otherwise. Not to mention I've gone through 3 musical and 3 video format changes by the time I was in my early 20's. Who can afford to re-purchase the same thing every few years to have the new format?
Eventually I could afford to buy said items, but the Media companies were so busy fighting pirates they made it impossible to purchase digital content in an easy and affordable manner. So again, why buy a CD that may not play due to DRM when you can download it for free with no problems.
Fast forward to 2012. I can buy a subcription and listen to unlimited music for $9.99 a month, I can watch unlimited commercial free movies and tv shows for $7.99 a month, I can play engaging games for just $14 a month, all the software I use is now free and in the cloud (thanks google), even storage is free (mostly). I now have more legal media option at my fingers than I could ever use, all for less than the cost of 2 CD's or a movie back in the early 90's. I rarely have a reason to pirate anything at all anymore, yet I do occasionally.
Why? I no longer expect to pay for something I may not enjoy. This is a digital age, if a company can't allow me to try their product before using it, I will not buy it. If I'm really curious I may download it through bit torrent. 99.9% of the time it's deleted within 10 mins. I can say I've downloaded and tried 3 "illegal" games this year, of those I bought 1 and deleted the other two. My "piracy" lead to a purchase I would not have made otherwise.
The chances of a online piracy law occuring in an election year, especially when SOPA engendered such heated debate are slim and none. I guess the OP does not understand how nothing controversal happens when their jobs are on the line.