What? Not even a small giveaway to sweeten the deal.... boooo
Filled it out anyway.
The question about "agree" with piracy is difficult to answer. I think you need to clarify what you mean:
Not sure really what your hoping to gather from the responses, but "Do I agree with piracy" is not a relevant/specific enough.
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Hehe no there isn't a small giveaway involved lol. I might reword the question to the first one you recommended so people can understand it better. I want to get together what people think about it and how many people actually pirate.
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If you change the question then you will need to trash all responses you recieved prior to the change otherwise they will skew your results.
P.S. I think you definitely need to change it anyway because an unclear question will skew your results even more.
P.P.S. If this is for a statistical analysis, you will not get a representative random sample here. You will mainly get PC gamers who want free games and are hoping this is an odd puzzle to get a free game. I think it is more likely that you will get more people who think piracy is acceptable. Since you specifically ask about piracy in the UK, I assume you only want respondants from the UK. Asking here will give you responses from all over the world.
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Well, it mainly so I can get a rough idea of what people think about piracy so if it is not completely accurate, it doesn't matter too much.
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Good points. Personally, I don't think this is a useful or thought out questionnaire. He needs people from the UK to respond. Not random people all over the world, most of them probably with little knowledge, if any, about piracy in the UK and the perceived impact.
Also, posting it on this site means you ask it speciffically to PC gamers, not the general mixed public. If he only wanted the result of PC gamers, he could've added age and gender to specify it a bit. Only for the "yes" answers, he asks for people to elaborate. It also needs more questions and more response options. It's very black and white.
PC gamers, from all over the world, who may or may not know anything about the potential UK businesses affected by piracy and he will only get insight in those who answer "yes". He will get a infallible result.
I have been quite amazed you would get away with such a survey in college. I thought it was for highschool (and that was before I read getmyass15's comment) at first, because a survey like this would be considered unacceptable for college where I am from =/
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i completed it and this pirate doesnt feel guilty at all
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Done.
May we have the results after? I'm very interested in the data.
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Yeah once I have all of the data I need I will post the results.
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Done. Here's my 2 cents on piracy:
There's no loss of tangible goods when you're copying binary data. Nothing of value is being taken from or removed from the company who's product gets pirated.
The real problem is lost potential sales. So, if someone's too poor to buy a game (or CD, movie, whatever) anyway, or wouldn't have bought the game to begin with due to any other reason (such as shitty DRM that can ruin your Windows install or nestle deeply in your system, harvesting personal data) and pirates it, there's no lost sale, thus no loss to the producer of the product. You're not using their bandwidth / network or doing anything else that costs them money - only not buying their product.
The issue is with people who do have the money to buy games, but choose not to. This is causing a lot of financial issues for companies. Surely, enough of these types of pirates are cheapskates and immoral jerks. But probably just as many choose not to buy due to ridiculous prices, and ridiculous regional pricing differences. If those companies didn't have such huge marketing departments, mid-level management, and other unnecessary middlemen (just about the entire music industry, and in the games world, publishers) - if they weren't so blown out of proportion, much bigger than is needed or desirable, their products might not cost an arm and a leg to buy, further encouraging sales.
Then there's the issue of companies trying to nickel and dime people more and more with shitty DLC / packages. Nowadays, you're paying upwards of 100 dollars for a game that offers a slight amount more content than games that used to cost maybe a third to half of what they cost now. Ridiculous, and another motivator for people to pirate.
And with worse and worse DRM coming out, companies are bullying legitimate consumers into saying "fuck it, downloading it free along with a crack rather than dealing with a 3 machine activation limit, or a DRM that makes installing and running the game a challenge to overcome, can break my OS in some way, or leave gaping security / privacy holes."
So, piracy makes a lot of sense as a viable option nowadays.
If games came out that didn't cost 100 euros to buy - with all DLC - (and in the case of music and movies ridiculously expensive CDs and DVDs) and more actual good games came out rather than re-hashes of the same old crap, only slightly better each iteration.. If more devs used distribution platforms like Steam, and particularly channels like Greenlight and Kickstarter to market / present / sell their games rather than rely on some exploitative and gluttonous publisher that even goes so far as to try and influence the development of a game and steer it towards producing easily marketable, formulaic crap by financially strong-arming small devs they bought over.. If games companies didn't force badly designed, buggy, insecure, and hugely restrictive DRM that makes you jump through hoops before you can enjoy what you bought on legitimate consumers.. Maybe there'd not be so much piracy.
Maybe there'd be way more of those potential sales, as people that otherwise wouldn't even consider buying (for any of the reasons outlined above) a product might actually think about it, and end up actually buying it. If the products were a bit cheaper, they might even buy more games off more suppliers / devs / labels! Thus further making the market healthier again.
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This is the result of those big middlemen trying to turn a potentially fairly profitable industry into their personal cash cow. Gotta appease the investors and shareholders!
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So true. Only problem is "If more devs used distribution platforms like Steam...". Steam is guilty of 2 of the offences you pointed out - crazy regional prices and bad DRM. Both are optional - publishers/developers have to choose to use the DRM function and they can set custom prices. But Steam (Valve) is responsible for offering (and, I suspect, encouraging use of) the DRM to begin with and for setting up the screwed default price model that most devs/pubs choose not to change, oblivious to what's wrong with it.
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Steam's DRM amounts to nothing more than "must be running Steam". Steam itself, while flawed in many ways, is fairly stable, pretty secure (the only shitty thing is that getting someone's IP is way too easy) and doesn't invasively install itself deep in your system somewhere, harvesting personal data. You also simply set it up like any other program, there's no need to install any drivers, run any Windows Updates, or anything of the sort. As far as DRM goes, it's one of the most innocuous, non-intrusive forms thereof, and doesn't warrant the label of "bad DRM", especially as mentioned in my post.
Besides that, my mention of Steam was part of a sentence that you're taking the context out of. I was mentioning Steam as an example of an avenue for devs to publish / promote their games via, removing the need for big evil publishers like EA.
As for (regional) pricing - this is entirely the fault of devs and their publishers. They set all pricing, including regional differences, not Valve / Steam. You think Valve has anything to do with Black Ops 2 costing what it does? Or how ridiculously overpriced the Season Pass for that is? They don't. And the default (and currently bad) price model is an emergent set of values determined organically by the gaming market, and currently largely the fault of consoles. Steam / Valve has nothing to do with that, other than that when they release a game of their own, and release it at a certain price, they too influence the market.
And let's be clear on something here; Steam is two forms of DRM - the client (needed to play games) and Steamworks, implemented on titles that choose it, for online / multiplayer functionality, and cloud sharing of configuration files / saves. When you say "..Steam (Valve) is responsible for offering and encouraging use of the DRM to begin with..", what are you talking about?
Surely, Valve tries to promote Steamworks to devs, although probably it isn't very necessary - as lots of devs probably consider and decide to implement it and ask for the dev kit needed themselves, anyway. Steam and Steamworks are already pretty damn popular, and devs know about this staple gaming client already anyway - no real need to promote themselves in the gaming market anymore. Steamworks is pretty damn stable, offers decent netcode to devs, and reliable multiplayer functionality. Other than that, if we're talking about games that are sold on Steam anyway, what's the point of saying Valve tries to promote Steam as DRM to devs?
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"Steam's DRM amounts to nothing more than "must be running Steam""
Correction: "Must be running Steam and connected to the Steam servers". In other words, online DRM. The alternative is to use offline mode, but then you lose the community features that make us tolerate the DRM.
"Besides that, my mention of Steam was part of a sentence that you're taking the context out of. I was mentioning Steam as an example of an avenue for devs to publish / promote their games via, removing the need for big evil publishers like EA."
Well, yes, but one of the reasons to dump publishers is that they force DRM use. But if the devs self-publish and still use DRM, that isn't any better. Therefore I needed to point out the problems with Steam.
"As for (regional) pricing - this is entirely the fault of devs and their publishers. They set all pricing, including regional differences, not Valve / Steam."
Not quite correct. I know from talking with a developer that Valve has default currency conversions from USD, and the devs/pubs have to change these, not set their own custom price. Many choose not to change them, and this is to be expected. They trust Valve to set the correct rates in the first place, and this is a reasonable expectation.
As for Steamworks, I'm not aware of how it works and what exactly it does, so I can't comment. What I meant by "encourage" (and note that I clearly said "suspect", I am in no way certain) is that I suspect the contract devs have to sign for distribution on Steam includes use of the DRM by default, and devs have to opt-out rather than opt-in. The reason I suspect it is that implementing the DRM requires effort (coding) on the part of the developer and is very unpopular with their customers, yet the majority of games on Steam use it.
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Wow! I didn't expect to get this many results. Thanks a bunch! Also, seeing the results, they are very interesting. I will post them when I have gotten all of the data I need.
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Thanks guys! I have gotten enough responses now so thanks a bunch! this will give me lots to write about! Check back tomorrow if you want to see the results!
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