Re: [LAD] RAUL?

On Wednesday 16 November 2011, at 14.32.23, Louigi Verona
<louigi.verona@email-addr-hidden> 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 ---.
|   http://consulting.olofson.net          http://olofsonarcade.com   |
'---------------------------------------------------------------------'
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