When you are selling lemonade glasses for 50cents on the border of the road yes it is. But when you are a real business with budget, fixed charges, etc... it's a lot more complicated than that.

That's exactly what i have said so many fucking times and you can't understand. Initial sales are not lost. To prove my point, look at how many games are doing well on the first weeks. COD sells millions of copies on the first DAY. Diablo 3 sold 9 millions within the first weeks. Sales data prove that you are WRONG. But you are too stubborn to accept simple facts.

Seriously ? you are taking Diablo 3 and COD are example ? In that case piracy is totally harmless, second hand sales are a non-existent and video games is the most profitable business ever.

Like everything, if there are some that have the risk of suffering from piracy, sales, second hand, whatever, that's not the big, multi-milion units selling franchises but the "smaller" ones.

The only problem is that in business "Darwinism" it's often the fat slow moving dinosaurs that survives longest while the fast moving smarter mammals got slaughtered :).

not really, overspecialisation and die, many mammals vent that route.... anyway - it is just a matter of knowing your limitations and not expecting to be EA with your first game. Either aim for sensible steady growth (be a smart mammal) or be content to be on the fringe. Off course you will have blips like Mojang, but examples like those is not the norm and there is no point aiming towards it (it would be a dumb mammal...). The only reason the dinosaurs did die out was a complete shift in the ecosystem which they where not prepared for, without the comet they may still have been the dominant life form.

Nothing, of course. The goal is to maximize human happiness, and every right and obligation stems from it.

There's overwhelming factual evidence in favor of some rights - for example, the right to not be raped - to the point that people consider them self-evident, and the argument goes "how do you even dare to ask why rape is wrong, you sick bastard" rather than "it's bad because it is proven to cause extreme psychological damage to people". "Rape is evil" is a particularly good counterexample, because it is relatively recent and still not universal - and I don't mean criminals, there are whole countries where rape is legal.

Look at sales chart. Darksiders 2 and Sleeping Dogs are up there, selling hundreds of thousands on the first week. And these games are not as big as COD or D3. Actually, Sleeping Dogs is a new IP.

http://www.vgchartz.com/weekly/41140/Global/

There's some date to prove my point. There are no arguments against facts. Oh, by the way, this data doesn't even count PC digital sales. Darksiders 2 sold 400k on the first week. And that doesn't count PC digital sales.

Yeah, I guess I could have guessed that from what you've been saying.

Agree to disagree.

I would like to add that I think that this notion that all file-sharing is between people who don't purchase products is not accurate. The evidence for Napster back in the day suggested otherwise. Many people using it back then had vast CD collections, music t-shirts, and concert tickets.

My view of property is based on universal self-ownership. So yes, I believe I have a right to a product I made with my ideas, but once I sell that product, this is a trade and I no longer own it. I can't claim to have a right to tell the new owner what to do (or more likely, what not to do) with their property.

I remember reading an analogy somewhere that fighting file-sharing technology is like a captain of a leaking and sinking wooden ship in the middle of the ocean ordering his cannons to fire at the ocean in protest. Seemed accurate to me :P

I don't know how you would punish without laws like SOPA though. There's a quote from a Robert Heinlein short story that seems to be fitting for the right to profit moral argument -

"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."

Oh, I most definitely agree with that. If you put on a lecture that I was interested in, I would happily pay to attend. Intellectual property isn't needed to protect this either though. Private property does just fine. IP aims at giving a right over other people's property.

I get your point, but I think most people would find it an unreasonable request when they're offering payment as an exchange. Even if I don't respect it and knew full well that is what you wanted, you could make a moral case but it still isn't theft. Consumer behavior is part of a two-way communication in a robust, emergent evolutionary network (what I like to call a free market, similar to successful AI systems). Consumers provide feedback. The internet is a useful tool to connect all of the lower rungs of dumb things to allow them to build a smart network with bottom-up governance. If you don't like that, then don't publish. People like to share things they like. It would go against their nature to not do this I think.

This is not something that is made clear when I buy a product. If it was, I would rethink how much I would be willing to spend on a product or reject it altogether. Hell, even when I rent a movie, I ask my friends or roommates if they want to watch it. If it's presented as a sale the same as any other transaction, I assume that the transaction to buy a book is a transfer of ownership just like any other commerce that happens millions of times a day. I now own the book but if I don't own it, I feel as if I have been defrauded.

This does a pretty good job of explaining what I mean - http://freenation.org/a/f31l1.html#3

Under "The Ethical Argument" of the outline if the link doesn't jump there.

to bad happiness is not a legal tender yet. Oh well.

Exactly so. No publisher has to lower the price, they can keep it higher if they feel their game is so special that it should sell at a higher price. I think that is one of EA Origin's missions, not to go compete merely with low prices.

Seems to work for Minecraft too. I don't know if its price has changed over time, but at least as far as I can remember, its price has been around 20€. The developer/publisher has simply refused to lower the price, and also made maybe even a sensible (yet risky) decision to sell it themselves, instead of releasing it on Steam and GamersGate in the sea of billions of 2€ indie games.

Someone might say "But most games are not special like Minecraft! So it isn't a good example!". Well, if someone chooses to make yet another EA NHL13 instead of something innovative and thus sees the price of their game plummet with time, that's their decision.

As much as Minecraft is not my cup of tea, I have to respect what Mojang has done with that game. I feel happy having bought already two copies of that game (as gifts). Heck, Mojang is not even releasing purchaseable DLCs for it, but simply keeps improving and expanding the game and releasing the fruits of the development for free to all customers. Wow!

Exactly the same arguments can be used to "prove" that piracy or second hand sales,etc... doesn't hurt at all video games sales either, after there is "no argument against facts" as some said. You can't use them from one without using them implicitly for the other.