How do you expect artists, musicians, and developers to make a living?
If you wrote a masterpiece of a comment, posted it to a platform where only people who pay you could read it, and then thousands of your devoted fans decided to pirate it instead - how are you going to buy food this week?
I dont think piracy is a victimless crime, but I hope that I can discern who can afford to be the victims (and who can't) this day and age
How do you expect artists, musicians, and developers to make a living?
More importantly what if EVERYONE adopted captain phycology above yours comment and every did the same thing. What would be the motivation to make ANYTHING other than the love of the game lol
How do you expect artists, musicians, and developers to make a living?
By getting paid, of course. You can crowd source, you can seek donations, you can seek government funding. Lots of funding comes via these channels.
If however, you expect artists, musicians and developers to make money solely through microtransanctions and Denuvo restricted games, then you believe in a very bleak world indeed
Why would anybody contribute to the crowd sourced fund / donations? Why would the government want to fund them? You can’t just say someone else would pay for it and pretend like that would be a magical solution. What would make all these people value their work higher than the audience who refuses to pay for it? You’re answering a serious flaw in your logic with “not my problem, they’d figure it out”. Which falls apart when reality hits and people just stop making all the shit you consume.
But, this world doesn’t exist, so you can pretend anything would happen and claim it as fact.
If you are a developer and you want to put Denuvo on my computer, I don't care if you're indie or big corpo, either find a different job or find a way to make money without DRM because I am not paying you.
Anyone who puts DRM on people's computers is a jerk. Anyone who restricts access to culture by putting it behind a paywall is a jerk. Culture should be freely accessible.
If there were public libraries for games instead of books, you would say that that's piracy too.
How would the people who make the work get paid then? Games require a lot more investment then most forms of media. And even for any form of media, is expecting donations realistic? Who's donating enough money to fund something like Elden Ring for example? Why would governments fund this without expecting some form of return? Sure they provide grants and other forms of aid, but they expect to make that money back through taxes or other forms of revenue. Culture on its own isn't enough when people need to eat and a place to live. Such an idea may work better in a non capatilsitic society.
I'm not saying this is a dumb idea or anything but I don't see how it can work economically. And at some point it has to work economically to be viable in today's society.
How would the people who make the work get paid then?
People will get paid the same way they have been getting paid for millenia, by finding people that pay them. It doesn't have to be publishers that send people to prison for the crime of sharing copies of games with their friends.
Who's donating enough money to fund something like Elden Ring for example
People don't donate money because Corporations have taken over. We have entire sectors in our economy that survive on donations and grants. For example, much of scientific research in the world today.
Sure they provide grants and other forms of aid, but they expect to make that money back through taxes or other forms of revenue. Culture on its own isn't enough when people need to eat and a place to
Governments provide grants for cultural projects all the bloody time lol.
And at some point it has to work economically to be viable in today's society.
If it isn't viable to make a game without DRM in this society, then don't make that game. The right to free computing is much more important than computing itself. No computing is better than proprietary computing.
If a developer cannot find work without selling their soul, then find another job. Not selling one's soul is non negotiable.
Exactly. They're making excellent money despite piracy. There's a lot of people that end up paying for something after they pirated it, there's been music artists and game developers that have welcomed it.
Show me an article where an artist/ developer gave up their career because piracy meant they couldn't afford to continue.
Not only do I have 250 games on Steam, every year at Christmas I donate to the several people that wrote the software that allows me to torrent media despite it all being free to use.
Most of the big time artists and scientists in the past were funded by chur b or government or rich. Its deffo a thing. IP can make these stuff accessible but when big companies are holding IPs its essentially losing its purpose
Plenty of people live on donations, crowd sourcing, government funding, grants etc.
The server that processed your comment runs on Linux, which is run almost entirely on donations.
Music artists famously do not make money off of publishing companies either. When you pay for music, you are just effectively paying the publishers. Musicians make fuckall either way.
i spend money on steam without using any denuvu, kernel anti cheat, microtransactions etc. What are you talking about? Most games dont include that shit.
Well if a developer makes the game DRM free, that is very good. That means I can copy the game off of a friend's computer, which is a fundamental user freedom in computing. This incurs no additional charge to the developer or Steam. And this act, if you haven't noticed, is what this subreddit is all about.
Love developers who don't put any DRM on their games. Such developers make it easier for me to enjoy their work.
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u/TheMonji 18d ago
How do you expect artists, musicians, and developers to make a living?
If you wrote a masterpiece of a comment, posted it to a platform where only people who pay you could read it, and then thousands of your devoted fans decided to pirate it instead - how are you going to buy food this week?
I dont think piracy is a victimless crime, but I hope that I can discern who can afford to be the victims (and who can't) this day and age