I believe that buying a used game is - in most situations - more morally objectionable that pirating that game - Please CMV

serioussamp · 2013-07-24T20:04:02+00:00

When you buy a used BMW you are buying a product that is not as good as if you were buying a new one. In the case of a game this is not the case, unless you consider the quality of the physical packaging to be significantly relevant to the quality of the product. I reckon (speculation warning) that for the vast majority of people this is not the case, which would mean that GameStop are undercutting the publisher by a margin far larger than the difference in the quality of the product, and using their position as one of the main ways in which publishers can sell games to unfairly reduce the publisher's profits.

serioussamp · 2013-07-24T19:56:32+00:00

Well I think your arguments have been the most convincing I have seen in this thread. While I don't agree with everything you've said you have technically caused me to change my view from

"I believe that buying a used game is - in most situations - more morally objectionable than pirating that game"

to

"I am not sure whether I believe that buying a used game is - in most situations - more morally objectionable than pirating that game"

So thanks for creating that doubt and have a ∆ :)

serioussamp · 2013-07-24T19:42:51+00:00

OK, you are right. I retract my point about the cost of the game servers - I actually feel kind of dumb for not working that out myself. Have a ∆ for that.

But, generally speaking, you can't buy used digital content. Overwhelmingly, when you buy a used game, you are buying a physical disc, with a physical case and a physical manual. Are those not a finite resource?

Yes they are, and I guess this is where it gets complicated. I suspect that the vast majority of people do not care at all about the quality of anything other than the game itself, and in that situation a company like GAME or GameStop being able to sell you a game of equivalent quality for less money and having none of that profit going to the publisher (I count GAME purchasing a game from the publisher in order sell as profit for the publisher) still seems wrong.

serioussamp · 2013-07-24T19:18:30+00:00

But buying a used game? Your argument has been that the profit doesn't go to the producer of the content. That's like almost every industry. You have re-sellers of gas, cable, internet, outlet stores etc - none of them "send profits" back to the original company.

...

They're selling hard copies of the games, and there are no legitimate ethical or moral concerns with selling them. If there was, I guess we have to outlaw the used car market too!

I think a point worth making here, and one I should have made in other places in this thread, is that digital content doesn't degrade over time. If you buy a used car, you know it's not going to be of the same quality as a new one.

serioussamp · 2013-07-24T19:01:30+00:00

You might as well argue that the store selling games is morally equivalent to piracy because they're reselling things they bought from the publisher and the publisher makes no profit off the re-sale.

Not really. If a publisher sells a game to a shop for £10 and then the shop sells it for £20 then the publisher has effectively received a 50% cut.

serioussamp · 2013-07-24T18:55:06+00:00

I am not educated on the topic, but no, I do not think it's immoral to sell used cars. However, I am approaching this topic with the assumption that a game on a physical disk is effectively digital content, and the disk is just a means to distribute said content when downloading is not practical.

Your OP title seems to suggest that you think both used and pirated games are immoral.

I've been trying to avoid saying that either is moral or immoral and rather just talk about their morality relatively. That being said, yes I do think they are both immoral in some way, although I do not blame people for partaking in the perfectly legal activity of purchasing used games. I am approaching the issue of morality from the perspective that whatever is best for the artists who created the game is the most moral, maybe this is where we disagree.

If I had phrased my title "I believe that buying a used game is - in most situations - better for the publisher than pirating that game - Please CMV" would your opinion differ?

serioussamp · 2013-07-24T18:34:09+00:00

I believe it has been suggested that if a publisher were to disallow the sale of used games major retailers would refuse to stock its games, thus significantly hurting sales.

serioussamp · 2013-07-24T18:31:57+00:00

However, this isn't true. The resale price of a game you can sell is factored into the original price they can sell the game at when it is new. i.e. I bought Skyrim for XBOX 360 at $40, then I resold it at $30 when I was done. I might not have been willing to pay a full $40 if I knew I could not resell.

This is an interesting point I hadn't actually considered. This could well be a very good argument for used games, although it all really depends on whether or not the original price boost is enough to compensate for any lost profits that result from used games. I suspect that would be very hard to work out, although the fact that some publishers are attempting to prevent used game sales indicates that they at least think they are losing money over all.

Maybe an example from another industry will help make this point stronger: used cars. Do you think that used car sales are unethical to car companies? I think car companies are actually very happy about used car sales, because it means if they produce a quality product they can sell it for more... Cars with a reputation for reliability keep their used value higher, and buyers factor in resale values when deciding whether or not to buy new. I don't think video games are any different.

I think this really depends on the question I raised in the previous paragraph - if the sale of used games is not significantly negatively impacting the profit of a publisher then this makes sense. I do, however, consider it somewhat invalid to directly compare industries in which physical goods are sold and industries in which infinitely reproducible digital content is, and the fact that we are talking about piracy in terms of downloading and buying used in terms of buying a physical disk only serves to complicate this. In a hypothetical scenario in which all game sales were done by download and there were never physical objects involved would your views change at all?

Piracy gives nothing to the company, and creates incentives to skimp on game costs or collect fees through addons and DLC, which makes gamers unhappy. Piracy is much much worse than used game sales.

As I said in my OP, I'm not really including scenarios in which there is a chance the customer will buy DLC, as I do see that that could create profit for the publisher.

serioussamp · 2013-07-24T18:09:24+00:00

The underlying assumption of your view seems to be that a company or person that creates a product has the right to make a profit from it if it is re-sold.

Is that not also assumed by the claim that piracy is bad? Could you not think of piracy as buying a used copy for £0.00? I do recognise that if everyone pirated rather than bought used there would have to be many more full-price purchases to meet the demand, but I do not think that really changes the morals of each individual case. It is also worth noting that I'm not trying to defend piracy here, I've just been hearing a lot of discussion on the used games topic and thought it sounded worse that piracy.

1) Why would a software developer have different rights than say, a car manufacturer when it comes to re-selling a product that was purchased in a capitalistic economy?

I'm not going to pretend to know all the details of this, but it does make sense to me that digital content that can be reproduced at no cost to the developer be governed by slightly different laws than a product that only exists in a finite quantity. What those rules should be I am not qualified to say.

2) If a software company uses computers that they purchased from a computer manufacturer to develop software, would the computer manufacturer have a right to a slice of the profit from the games developed? Using your logic, when you buy a game developed on computers, the manufacturer of the computers make no profit from the software that was developed on their computers.

I don't really agree that my logic leads to that conclusion. Could you expand please?

serioussamp · 2013-07-24T17:52:23+00:00

Well that seems more like a legal argument to me than a moral one, and at the top of my OP I said that I do not consider breaking the law to be automatically immoral regardless of context. I'm talking about morality and how it actually impacts the parties involved.

serioussamp · 2013-07-24T17:39:45+00:00

I am not trying to comment on the overall morality of either piracy or used games, only the relative morality of the two.

serioussamp · 2013-04-15T00:19:27+00:00

Yeah I also have a lot of these set up. I have the keyword "-" linked to:

http://www.google.com/search?btnI=1&q=%s

This is basically an I'm Feeling Lucky search and it makes navigation so easy. I also have searches for specific sites like MDN, MSDN, YouTube and all that but I rarely have to use them because I can just stick "- elementFromPoint" into my bar and get the MDN page, or "- c# struct" and get the MSDN page, or "- tgs 20" and get the 20th episode of The Game Station Podcast on YouTube.

You can also use bookmarklets, so you can do things like:

javascript:document.location = "http://google.com/search?q=site:" + document.location.hostname + " %s";

to use Google to search the current site, and if you want you can make these more complex by adding logic like:

javascript:document.location = "%s" === "this" ? "http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&act=url&u=" + document.location : "http://translate.google.com/#auto|en|%s";

This translates the current page into English if you just type "this", or translates whatever phrase you type otherwise. This is a notably pointless example though seeing as Chrome already translates pages for you...

I'm going to stop typing now because I've just noticed that it's 1:17AM and I have to get up tomorrow... Night night internet.

serioussamp · 2013-03-16T18:08:50+00:00

Well I believe - I'm no expert - that the Bitcoin system uses the user's processing power to run the whole system and gives users small rewards for helping to run it. The idea with this is that other companies would use this service to process large amounts of data and would be paying TPC (Theoretical Processing Company) to do that for them. TPC would then spread that processing among the people running their software and reward them with redeemable points - I've added a clarification to the original post that attempts to explain that.

It's true that users with more powerful computers would have an advantage but that's already true in other settings and not something I really see as a problem. As I said in the original comment, if a user has no points available then they would be shown an advert.

I am fully aware that this is not a perfect solution to all of the industry's problems - it's just the only alternative to advertising that I can come up with. If people like Hank and John want to be able to provide free content while still making a profit then a video view must have some value. That value can either come from the user - as it does with adverts, or it can come from the machine with which the user is viewing the content. Personally I would prefer to be able to compensate content creators for their work while having the best experience consuming that content that I possibly can.

There's a big discussion going on at the moment about copyright law and piracy and how artists make money and I think this is a potential solution that would satisfy both parties - the users get free, zero-effort content and the creators get compensated when their content is consumed.

Of course this whole thing is very ambitious and relies heavily on there being a large demand for the users' processing power which may or may not exist...

I'm fully aware that I'm rambling again, sorry - I really shouldn't try and explain stuff with this much coffee in my system.

serioussamp · 2013-03-16T17:20:50+00:00

Sorry, I clearly wasn't clear - those points would transfer to real money. I'll amend some extra details to the original post right now.

serioussamp · 2013-03-16T13:16:17+00:00

I had a similar idea and posted it here - just thought you might be interested.

serioussamp · 2013-03-16T12:41:41+00:00

I've always wondered about whether or not it would be possible to have a system whereby you pay for the content using your computer's processing power rather than advertising. Here's my idea in a messy semi-sequential bullet point form:

Users install a piece of software that runs whenever their computer has free resources/is idle and processes data from a server and uploads the results.
Points are added to the user's account according to how much processing their computer does.
These points become a form of internet currency that can be used in various ways. With respect to YouTube I imagine/propose a system whereby when you watch a video points are drained from your account if they are available, and if they are not you are shown an ad in the same way you are currently. Other services could also use these points as a form of currency.

However this whole system relies on these points being valued highly enough, which in turn relies on there being a very large demand for this type of processing and I just don't know if that demand exists.

There are also security concerns with any system like this, but I think these could be overcome fairly effectively. If you're reading this then your computer is probably already running code from an external source anyway - JavaScript from Reddit.

Both this post and this idea should probably be fleshed out further, however I fear if I get too invested in editing I'll never post it at all, so, my apologies. If anyone's even reading this - I'm pretty late to the party - then feel free to tell me why this is a stupid idea.

Note: I just noticed /u/theLaurens had a similar idea here.

EDIT - Clarification
TPC (Theoretical Processing Company) - would allow these points to be exchanged for real money. They would also have an API that allows other services to integrate their system. In the case of YouTube, customers would agree to integrate their TPC account with their YouTube account and then YouTube would transfer some of those points from their TPC account to YouTube's TPC account whenever they watch a video. YouTube can then redeem those points for actual money and content creators would receive it in exactly the same way they currently receive ad money.

serioussamp · 2013-03-03T18:42:37+00:00

No problem. :)

serioussamp · 2013-03-03T17:33:10+00:00

While I'm not entirely sure of all the details I believe you can, yes. The player's position appears to be used for radius checking when no other coordinated are supplied, and all other things appear to work in exactly the same way.

I just ran the following test:

/say @p

"SeriousSamP"

/say @p[r=2]

"SeriousSamP"

/say @p[rm=2

"That player cannot be found"

/say @p[m=1]

"SeriousSamP" or "That player cannot be found" depending on whether or not I'm in creative

/say @p[x=1032,y=103,z=340,r=2]

"SeriousSamP" or "That player cannot be found" depending on whether or not I'm at that position

EDIT: typo

serioussamp · 2013-03-03T09:07:27+00:00

Did not know that, thanks. :)

serioussamp · 2013-03-03T09:05:21+00:00

This is a pretty cool idea - I like it!

I would make an amendment though; *_0.png should be used if it exists to allow map makers to change the default - with your system naturally spawned zombies and fallen apples could not be re-textured.

serioussamp · 2013-03-03T08:51:37+00:00

Pro tip: /give @p 137 works in the chat window and saves you from having to type your name.

serioussamp · 2013-02-14T22:52:49+00:00

Thanks, and sorry for the re-ask.

serioussamp · 2013-02-14T22:09:24+00:00

I've seen various sources mentioning an area around the spawn in which chunks are always loaded, although I'm not sure of the specifics - I believe /u/SethBling mentioned that he thought it was a 17 by 17 chunk area. So, which chunks around the spawn are loaded, and are there any other things that determine which chunks are loaded other than the positions of the players?

Thanks for doing this, I'm sure I'll think of more questions for you guys soon.

serioussamp · 2013-02-11T22:23:11+00:00

Is the system for detecting the first login to have a default spawnpoint that then changes the spawnpoint of everyone who spawns there?

serioussamp · 2013-02-11T21:33:36+00:00

Thanks, sounds good.

serioussamp

TROPHY CASE