Paying for software may be moral, but it certainly isn't natural. As the game's developer, you're the scare resource. Making copies of the finished game itself costs approximately $0. Copyright makes your game artificially scarce so that you can charge for it. It's a phony concept that exists to support an unnatural business model. The real business model should be players paying you directly to develop and update the game they want to play for as long as they want to play it.
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> but it certainly isn't natural.
So what? Nothing about software development is 'natural'. I don't even know what definition of 'natural' you're using here.
> It's a phony concept that exists to support an unnatural business model.
It's a social construct that we've adopted in society because it allows for things we like.
> The real business model should be players paying you directly to develop and update the game they want to play for as long as they want to play it.
This is a valid business model for some games, but there are many games that would not exist without such a model. I'd prefer that those games exist instead of insisting that reality should be the way that fits nicely with my arbitrary mental models.
>I don't even know what definition of 'natural' you're using here.
Copying data is a fundamental operation that all computers are able to perform and it costs nothing. Therefore, data is naturally easy to copy.
Software doesn't need to be manufactured like physical goods do: the software construction step is fully automated by compilers and build systems. The cost of all this is approximately $0. Networks aren't free because of bandwidth costs, but they still make it really easy and cheap to copy data to a lot of computers.
Since games are software and software is data, it is rather easy to distribute them to an unbounded number of machines. Even if you come up with some complicated copy protection scheme, people only need to crack it once and produce a DRM-free version of the game that will work everywhere and won't do stupid things such as require an internet connection. Even cryptographically secure platforms such as the PS4 eventually got cracked and the first thing people did is enable the execution of unsigned software.
>insisting that reality should be the way that fits nicely with my arbitrary mental models
That's exactly what copyright does.
> Software doesn't need to be manufactured like physical goods do: the software construction step is fully automated by compilers and build systems.
Source code surely is manufactured. I write it with my hands, using years of knowledge and experience, spending a lot of time on it.
>Source code surely is manufactured. I write it with my hands, using years of knowledge and experience, spending a lot of time on it.
Right. We not only write it with our hands, but with our brains too, as well as with the effort we put in over years to gain the skills needed to write the software in the first place. Otherwise any newbie programmer could write any of the software in the world, including complex ones.
This reminds me of that story of a senior retired engineer who was called in to diagnose a problem with some expensive, complex machine that he had worked with or operated a lot earlier (and/or maybe had invented). He walks into the room, bends down near the machine, taps it a bit, then makes an X mark with chalk near the bottom left corner. "There's your problem", he says. They open the machine, check that area, and sure enough, the fault is found and fixed. They ask him what his fee is. "$50,000", he replies. "What?", they ask. "$50,000 for making a chalk mark?". "No", he says. "$1 for making the mark. $49,999 for knowing where to make it."
Exactly. You're providing a service. The digital goods, once produced, can be replicated infinitely at extremely low costs. Nobody can create copies of you or your expertise.
In order to pay for your software development services and turn a profit, the digital goods you produce are made artificially scarce so as to enable their sale. However, that does not change the nature of those goods. Copying them is still trivial.
> Copying data is a fundamental operation that all computers are able to perform and it costs nothing.
That is not true. Running, maintaining, etc the IT infrastructure is costing money, electricity etc. It doesn't come for free.
Marginal and transaction costs are very low.
But you are right on the principle : storing, copying and transferring data always costs energy (in physics, temperature, energy and change of entropy are linked together)
OK, maybe you still have a point. What then, would be the threshold for saying: now, at this point, the costs of X are not marginal anymore but substantial enough to be taken into account?
According to Wikipedia, the best selling video game is Tetris: it has sold approximately 170 000 000¹ copies. If copying Tetris takes 1 second, the computer draws 400 W of power and electricity is rated at 30 cents/kWh, it would cost approximately $5667 to create 170 million copies of Tetris.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...
Depends on what you are thinking about ?
Such cost always need to be taken into account, but IMHO in general we must always differentiate material things (that are formed from matter and its organization) and information (i.e. concept of entropy, ideas, thoughts, songs, language, jokes etc..) which have temporary physical supports but exists apart from them
Good distinction, I agree. This leads me to this: If, for example a song, is not written down anywhere, but some brains contain it, this means there some people who could reproduce this song by singing it, this song would still exist. Is a brain a temporal physical support unit in our sense?
“Marginal costs” are the additional cost for each additional unit delivered. They can be high or low, but with modern, non-custom software they tend to be extremely low.
Suppose that a copy takes 1 second to complete and the computer's power supply unit draws 400 W of power during that 1 second. How much does it cost to complete that copy? Hawaii has the most expensive electricity¹ in the United States, averaging at 29.23 cents / kW * h. Let's use 30 cents / kW * h.
If we have 400 W sustained for one second, that equals 0.000111111111 kW * h. (400 Watt * second) * (30 cents / kWh) = 3.33333333 × 10^-5 U.S. dollars. In Hawaii, that one copy would cost $0.0000333333. If one were to make 100 000 copies of that same data, it would cost $3.33333333.
¹ https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/
This is a very large strawman you've constructed.
Please explain what the problem with what I wrote is.
> So what? Nothing about software development is 'natural'. I don't even know what definition of 'natural' you're using here.
I'm quite sure they're referring to artificial scarcity. Making copies is very easy, making games is very hard. Therefore it makes much more sense to charge for the development of the game rather than the copies. Making abundant resources artificially scarce is either frowned upon or flat-out illegal in pretty much every other industry.
> there are many games that would not exist without such a model
How do you know?
Okay, so I'm going to charge for my development time - how exactly am I going to divide that up among the customers, many of which don't exist yet, without over-charging anyone and how are you going to make sure I don't do so in a way that doesn't "illegally institute artificial scarcity" ?
The issue here is that there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of how markets work. Toro could choose to cut production of their lawnmowers by half and double the price, and this would cause "artificial scarcity". However, it would also be perfectly legal and downright stupid of Toro because the competitive lawnmower market would punish them dearly for it.
> Okay, so I'm going to charge for my development time - how exactly am I going to divide that up among the customers, many of which don't exist yet, without over-charging anyone and how are you going to make sure I don't do so in a way that doesn't "illegally institute artificial scarcity" ?
It's not my job to invent business models for other people, but all Kickstarter-type funded software is a good example of one possible way. Another is maintaining and updating a gaming server and charging for access to it, like World of Warcraft does.
> The issue here is that there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of how markets work. Toro could choose to cut production of their lawnmowers by half and double the price, and this would cause "artificial scarcity". However, it would also be perfectly legal and downright stupid of Toro because the competitive lawnmower market would punish them dearly for it.
If you had a device to copy lawnmowers, but the lawnmower industry fought back to make copying lawnmowers illegal, then you'd have a working comparison.
The software industry had/has a lucrative, self-sustaining business model that was very much the same as every other business on the planet. I'm a part of that industry, so I do have a business model. IOW, I'm not the one trying to tell someone that they shouldn't charge for their efforts/products, so it seems to me that the onus on coming up with a workable model is on those that have been trying to institute the "everything is free" model for some time, not me.
As for your other comment: I believe there's a saying that covers this:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/if_my_aunt_had_balls,_she%27d...
> Nothing about software development is 'natural'
Why do you say so?
> I don't even know what definition of 'natural' you're using here
I think that he's talking about the ease of copying software: it's quite hard to make people pay for something so easy to duplicate..
"You cannot go against nature
Because when you do
Go against Nature
It's part of nature too."
-- Love and Rockets, "No New Tale to Tell"
In the scientific sense, everything is natural. Truly "unnatural" things are like supernatural things -- stuff that exists only in fairy tales or horror stories or some metaphysical religions.
Saying that something is unnatural is typically a value judgement meaning that it is unhelpful, damaging, or against a goal considered inherent in some area of life, and so on.
Otherwise, a more valid if unfortunate use of the word "unnatural" is as the common short-hand for "human-made" or "artificial", similar to the way that "animal" is used as a short-hand for "animal that isn't human". Of course propulsion labs, parliaments, and property laws are absolutely as natural as mushrooms, mollusks, and manatees, but in addition to being natural the former are also human-made. In this truest and widest sense, everything that is artificial is also natural.
Other uses of the words "natural", "unnatural", and "nature" should be informed by this broadest and truest one, especially when making judgements about laws or norms or behavior. This might sound pedantic, didactic or even obvious at first, but with some consideration it may reveal itself as a surprisingly useful and clarifying point to keep in mind.
Rather than proclaiming copyright laws unnatural -- a value judgment masquerading as an objective fact (perhaps unintentionally) -- it would be more fruitful to ask questions such as, "How does copyright differ from other property laws?", "How are property rights justified?", "What are the differences and similarities between physical things and ideas?", and so on.
Yes, it's nearly free to copy digital works, which therefore lack the same level of scarcity that we experience in the rest of our lives.
Yet the creators and consumers of intellectual and digital works have little choice but to create and consume those works in the broader context of the world of physical scarcity in which society is embedded. It's sad, but you can't stop burning calories and taking up space just because you are consuming digital media.
> > Nothing about software development is 'natural'
> Why do you say so?
Because building even the simplest computers requires large-scale industrial processes. All of this is based on a social/economic system that required the intelligent design of many many people and organizations.
> The real business model should be players paying you directly to develop and update the game they want to play for as long as they want to play it.
They have to find your game and know they want it first, and it might not be too obvious to other people why they might want your game until it is already far enough along that it might as well be released. And by then it might be too late, unless you've made a game that can be endlessly added to.
First impressions count for quite a bit, so if you make your game available before it's really ready, when there's only a small amount of content, etc, then people (who might have loved your completed game) might give it a try, decide 'This game is broken and there's no content' and then never bother giving it a second chance.
Not to mention that indie game developers (especially those that get funding ahead of time, like on Kickstarter) tend to overpromise and and underestimate how much time and money those promises will take. See: Mighty No. 9, No Man's Sky, Star Citizen. Even the mega-hit Shovel Knight burned through all the money it crowdfunded and the developers had to work for zero salary for four months before the game was released.
Finally, the moment you make your game available for others to play, you're instantly on the hook for technical support, which could take a large amount of time, especially if you're one of only a handful of developers, precious time that could be spent developing the game instead.
So long story short, if developers want to get paid as they are developing a game, they will have to spend an inconsequential amount of time marketing and supporting an unfinished, broken buggy game, which could easily take 60% or more of their time (a percentage I often see people claim is needed for the non-software side of their software business).
It's a business model that works in some instances, but it doesn't work for everyone.
No other business endeavor on the planet operates on "production time" when pricing products. Products are priced according to their value. Given a reasonably competitive market, that value will be accurate and fair for customers, and the customers will be able to find a similar product that does most or all of what they want at the price point that they can afford.
Products are scarce. Data isn't.
What if everyone had a Star Trek replicator? Would they still pay for products according to their value? That's what a computer acts like.
You would probably pay for: the replicator, the recipe,the ingredients and the energy used by the replicator. However, Star Trek has a different economy from ours.
Star Trek has no economy except for its fictional one. Their economy of fabricators is itself a fabrication. At best, it represents an ideal.
Which is why the original argument is pointless.
Yes, and software products are the sum total of all of the effort put into developing, advertising, maintaining, and supporting them. The fact that they are distributed as data is an inconsequential fact that obscures what they actually represent, and that is very much a human achievement no different from painting a picture or building a couch. There are tooling costs and all sorts of ongoing fixed costs, just like any other business.
As for Star Trek: when that day comes, we'll deal with it then.
>>The real business model should be players paying you directly to develop and update the game they want to play for as long as they want to play it.
This may be an acceptable model for games-as-a-service, but how is anyone supposed to make money on single player puzzle or story-driven games? I enjoyed westworld, but I have no desire to replay it. By this same logic, it's also 'unnatural' (whatever you think you mean by that) to pay an author for a book. Some software products don't necessarily fit with your proposed update cycle, there are a significant number of games that get developed, released, and that is it aside from bug fixes.
> but it certainly isn't natural
Neither are money or laws, in that sense.
Remembering a chat with my landlord just a few days ago, I can only say ...
Indeed. Neither are money or laws. Or promises, for that matter.
Are you saying that the "phony concept" of copyrights shouldn't exist? Authors and artists (and software developers) would have little incentive to produce in such an environment.
Yes.
Lack of incentives didn't stop the artists of the past. Many were able to secure patronage.
You need to consider survivor bias. We don't have data for the number of "artists of the past" who were stopped because they couldn't find patrons. How many Da Vincis and Mozarts had to work in fields or row galleys rather than work as artists?
It is really, really difficult to build a career around patronage. A few people can do it. Most cannot.
The fundamental flaw of the "software should be free because duplication costs are zero" argument is that it ignores the total economic picture of software development. It's like saying "gasoline should be free because it costs next to nothing to run the pump motor at the gas station". Without someone's significant investment of time and money, that software (or that gasoline) is not going to exist. For software, the means of production is not a simple file copy, no matter how easy it is to invoke that COPY command.
We've been paying craftsmen for their work for many thousands of years. Software isn't any different if you take an honest view of the whole process.
You make some good points. Concerning whether works should or should not be free, I'm not sure. I think people should get paid somehow. How to solve that problem is not clear to me.
What I've been observing, though, is people acting as if the software is free because copying is practically free. This happens all the time and nobody even thinks about it. Friends share programs, music, movies, pictures, documents and all kinds of data among themselves and they may not even realize the fact they're infringing copyright. I see my colleagues sending each other copyrighted scientific articles via messaging applications every week. Nobody really thinks about some journal's copyright, it's just "those people need this file and I have it, so I'll send it to them". Companies have been trying in vain to police this behavior for years. I don't think they're ever going to succeed. I think that's a sign this system is incompatible with current technology. What good is a law if you can't enforce it?
>It's like saying "gasoline should be free because it costs next to nothing to run the pump motor at the gas station".
I don't think this is the same thing. A more apt comparison to software would be "gasoline should be free because the pump is magical and can somehow duplicate existing gasoline, creating new matter in the process, and the cost is so infinitesimal we don't have coins worthless enough to pay for it unless we purchase a whole tanker's worth of fuel". I'm willing to bet that such a magical pump would drastically change how people perceive the value of gasoline. Even though creating that first volume of gasoline required a substantial amount of money, the magical pump can simply duplicate it endlessly.
You're never going to stamp out casual copying. We know that doesn't work. Even in a healthy market there will always be some. Rampant copyright infringement is a sign of an inefficient market; supply is limited (e.g., geo-locked) or the price is too high. But there's always going to be some person who rationalizes liberating a $2 game because "you can't steal bits". We've been over the arguments. I've written copy-protection code, I've gone out for beers with self-professed software pirates. None of this is going away.
In your patched-up analogy, someone has to pay for that first billion dollar gallon of gasoline. Someone did pay for the exploration, drilling, extraction, transportation, refining and marketing of the fuel; they paid for equipment, for people's salaries, for mineral rights, for the overhead of keeping a company running. It's a lot of money; it's an investment, and the investors expect a return. Take away the return and you'll find that none of the exploration, drilling, refining, etc. are going to happen. Have fun starving in the dark.
Software is no different, except that the "transportation" costs are close to zero. None of the other costs are zero, but the cheapness of that COPY command is all people really think about. They don't want to think about the engineers, the animators, voice actors, IT staff, management and rooms full of equipment necessary to create the product. They don't want to know about buying servers, spending money on marketing programs, creating sales pipelines, paying taxes and permits and making sure companies can hire and retain the folks necessary to make more product. I guess it's inconvenient to the rationalization.