noobdoomguy8658

Creation Kit - a set of tools that makes modding the game much easier and extensive, allowing the community to build more impressive mods for the game, usually quicker than without one because the community doesn't need to reverse engineer everything before they can make really advanced stuff.

So as a game developer

Oh, now that's the real culprit! That honestly explains a lot in this conversation and makes me see you less of a corporate ally for absolutely no good.

As for the "piracy le hurts" reports, I'm really not surprised that you were able to find these, mostly debunking anything stating otherwise. As if we didn't live in the massively lobbied society where corporations and money-turners have much more leverage than anything else to manipulate the popular opinion on anything that "hurts" them, be it anything legit or simply perceived.

So first that isn’t true, people pirate games and stream/create videos of them to gain views which converts to monetization.

I don't really know where you got that from, as any content creator that has any worthwhile numbers to make their monetization off of pirated content a problem, in fact, never mentions anything positive above piracy. Following your logic, though, are these content creators supposed to share their revenue with you if their content is based on your game?

Second, we can both agree you gain something. Does money have to be the thing you gain to see it as wrong or does enjoyment count as well? Or are we in such a monetary society that we must have monetary gain from work you didn’t make for it to be wrong?

By that logic, I can't share games with my friends and family, because while they get some fun time, they pay nothing for the game. I'm sure that's an absurd idea even in your books - consider every pirate my friend and family, especially when it comes to distributors and publishers I have zero respect towards. Sometimes a game is made using and promoting damaging practices, and while the game is good in its own merits, I choose not to support the developers or decision-makers monetarily.

While I'm at it, you seem to think that I just don't for any games, like, ever, which I assure is not the case - I have a massive Steam library and some games I bought in EGS and GOG, many of which I deliberately bought as a thank you and a sign of respect only after I've played/beaten their pirated copies.

Demos, though, are still a minority. Starfield doesn't have a demo, neither does Cyberpunk 2077, nor most (if not all) games that have prices so high that people even consider piracy in the first place. You strike me as a smaller developer that I may actually find during Steam Next Fest (love these, by the way, barely skip any), and you may provide demos, for which I say thank you, and it may even earn a purchase from me specifically; however, it still is an exception more than it is a rule these days.

If you have any games on Steam, I'll be happy to check 'em out, either during a Steam Next Fest or otherwise. Most likely, you're not charging an absurd amount of money on a bunch of lies and predatory practices, and if that's the case, I won't think twice about paying for a digital revocable ticket that I can only access via a single gateway (being Steam), but you won't suddenly find yourself with less money if I simply choose to ignore your game, and you certainly won't start losing money from your bank account if I download multiple copies for free or even make multiple copies of a legally purchased one.

But if you're Bethesda, telling me that I can do impressive rounds of exploring in your game for dozens or hundreds of hours, or even months, or even years, but I have to pay at least $60 to enjoy the game... only to find out that this massive selling piece was a lie and once I've seen one POI, I've basically seen every POI of that type, down to enemy, object, and loot placement, yet you're still going to sell me DLC(s) and expect the community to patch the game for free, then sorry (not sorry), I'm not going to spend any money on your product and make you think that treating your customers like that is okay in any capacity. Is it possible that I enjoy the game despite such flaws? Yes, but it doesn't mean it's worth the money for me, not now, not later, because it's a predatory marketing strategy built on deceiving your buyers, and if you believe that pirating games hurts the companies that are supposed to receive the money, then I'm happy to pirate their games thousands of times to punish them for being absolute dickheads.

The reports and courts supporting those with the big wallets in this regard is identical to how climate change is still a prevalent problem that's being put on shoulders of people like you and me, while oil and gas and tech and other industries get subsidies, leverage, and bail-outs from the governments.

Except I'm not profiting off the games I pirate, and neither does anybody else these days (hasn't since 00s).

You don't even see the dissonance in your arguments: you're trying to tell me how bad it is and how nobody should pirate of they can't or don't want to pay, but the benefactors don't get paid either way, but I case of the latter, we're somehow not talking about ripping someone off; it's a sale that's not being made either way, and assuming that the people pirating the content would've bought it if it wasn't for piracy is just wrong as evident by a lot of research done on the topic.

I still haven't seen your arguments as to how exactly it hurts people outside not closing the deal that, again, wouldn't have been closed anyway had piracy not been an option.

No, I'm not undervaluing anybody. I'm just trying to tell you that yes, if the field was less competitive, i.e. if much nor people were good at it, we'd see smaller median salaries.

I think it is comparable to the healtcare and medicine in the US, where being a doctor or a good lawyer pays you very well for exactly same reasons.

As for your example of being an engineer doing similar stuff as some programmer and being paid differently, well, no, the pay would be very comparable. I know several people doing programming work as stated by their job descriptions and contracts, both are paid less than a middle manager I know, because the duties they have to perform can be covered by a larger population compared to the duties that pay much, much more.

The situation you're talking about is already the case, and the only reason people see IT salaries as too big is because the field and the work is perceived to be somewhat easy and simply ("Don't you sit in front of the compute rall day?"), and while it can be easy in some regards (much easier and less physically demanding that being an first responder of any kind or working in a cargo or fishing vessel), but it's not simple most of the time. Same reasons engineers are often paid more than technicians or mechanics - both are extremely important, neither is simple, but have different capabilities to match the supply and demand of their industries.

If anything, it's not like we're the execs signing ourselves monthly $400,000 as a bonus and doing actually fuck all because we have powerful parents, neither are we trust fund managers or anything similar. These are the people we should be turning against, not fellow workers that don't have dozens and hundreds of millions of dollars.

I'm sure you know better than I do what I'd spend money on to be so confident in your claim that'd I'd pick up on a sale Anyway. Not to mention that sometimes you just don't have the option to purchase the digital product because the vendors aren't selling it you, as is the case with some counties and companies.

Some practices also just don't sit well with you and you're basically voting with your wallet by not paying for the game.

As for the theft argument, let's say you have an expectation that I should you give you a certain sum of money, but it's just that, an expectation - like I promise to wire transfer you billions of dollars, plus some fees and taxes, but I never do; did I just steal from you? You have absolutely everything you had before, but didn't receive the money you were expecting.

Or I made an identical copy of something you have and am now using it, too - you still have the original, though, you're no worse off in any way because the original object is still cometely intact, and I would have never gotten it otherwise if it wasn't for the identical copy that took you no effort. Did I take the original from you, i.e. stole anything from you?

If the game's worth it and I can easily obtain it legally at a sensible price, the pirating the game isn't my first urge for sure... Again, if I pirate something I was never going to buy in the first place for one reason or the other, there's no theft to speak of.

Maybe I could transfer you several billion dollars right now, plus some change to cover up for the fees and taxes that may come up, but I just don't - would you say I stole that money from you? You probably wouldn't, because that was just a expectation and you never had the money in the first place, so there was no way for me to take it, and the fact that you expected to have more, didn't get anything as a result, and did not actually lose anything does not constitute a theft.

Look, you're framing it in a very bad way, and I'll sound like a prick regardless, but I'll try my best.

First of all, let's ignore the "ordinary workers" as a group, because that's way too vague to base anything off of. There are ordinary IT professionals that are just that in their field, ordinary, and there are exceptional people doing manual labor that the society doesn't think much about.

As for the pay, I know it seems disproportionate or "too much", but it really comes down to things like repetition, value generated, skill variety, scarcity, and adaptability. There's plenty of programming jobs that anyone familiar with the white collar jobs would call dead-end, because they got you working with the same old and irrelevant stack basically keeping some old system on life support with occasional changes, and these often pay salaries lower or at least comparable to non-IT jobs, all because with these jobs, there's very little to none that you have to learn, you don't have to adapt, you don't have to come up with creative, yet technically correct solutions all the time, and you're very replaceable, so the company doesn't feel like they should share more of their profits with you - they're simply not that afraid to lose you.

Things like frontend, on the other hand, often pay higher salaries compared to the above, because not only you have to work in a rapidly changing environment over there and adapt to it successfully each time, but also use a greater set of tools, some of which you may be working with for the first time in yuyr life, and you're expected to know how to transfer your skills from other tools and projects to properly use here. I know it feels like everyone is a developer these days, but that's because we've always been a very prominent part of the Internet, especially more FOSS and privacy and anti-big-corps parts of it like Lemmy - there simply isn't a way to supply the market with enough qualified developers to drive the salaries down.

No less important is the fact that it's all on the actually wealthy people's whim, because they feel like they can exploit other jobs much more easily than they can devs, who are cherished and valued to a point to have a lot of leverage and many options on the job market - it's much easier to quit a shitty boss when you're working remotely using your laptop and a few peripherals, making enough money to create a safety net.

As for decrease in pay to have more sensible deadlines... again, we have enough leverage and confidence to either influence the deadlines enough preemptively, or miss the deadline and make a lesson out of it. I still have all my skills and knowledge that are worth the money, despite having more time to complete a project.

Most importantly, I don't really care about the deadline, nor does the majority of other salaried developers, because there's really only so much you can force in a set amount of time - a team of 5 people can't build a fully functioning copy of New York in 7 days even if they completely miss any sleep, food, water, and other bodily functions all while doing cocaine and other stimulants, and the same applies to any job there is.

change variable names
My code.

We do set the expectations as best as we can, but the people who have these expectations really don't like that - to some, it's like we're offending them, and to many others, there's almost always some other developer they either know or heard about (they never do, in fact) that, allegedly, can do whatever we're being asked, but 10x cheaper and 100x faster, and he's also at a lower expertise level so we should be happy to have the job in the first place, oh and also update the documentation in 4 seconds in a way that doesn't take away these 4 seconds from the "main work".

Many of us love their job, or at least are very grateful to be able to have it, but we complain for the same reasons other people complain - ridiculous and/or hilarious clients, colleagues, and employers.

I'm actually not giving them shit because they're salaried and have been (undner)compensated for their labor during the course of their employment. They're not going to suddenly eat less if I simply don't pay for the product - this is identical to watching a trailer of a game and then deciding that you'll completely ignore the game; no purchase was made, yet no property was stolen, because the game is still intact. It's not the same as coming to a store and stealing a copy, preventing others to pay for it and bring profits for the store.

For some, $10 is not a sum they can spend on non-essentials. Some don't want to wait for various legitimate reasons. Some want to be able to try the game out before making up their mind on whether they'll pay for it. Some just don't care about giving money to a massive corporation that's definitely not suffering from the lack of money, for one reason or another: one of them, a very prominent one, is to avoid supporting the greedy corporate practices with your wallet, such as the lack of proper optimization and control over the graphical fidelity wrapped up in the "Oh, we just wanna preserve the look for everybody" bullshit.

Lastly, if you really insist on defending paying against piracy, you should know that pirates either never pay in the first place, so it's not like some poor big corp lost some sales, or they're one of the most consistently paying customers for a given media, as has been the case for decades now.

As for whether $10 is a lot... it's really not up to you to decide when someone can or cannot afford to spend their money on. Not to mention that there's no reason to defend a company that has more money than you can imagine, ripping off its employees only because of greed rather than lack of funds, yet they still decide to outsource basically the entire game to a gazillion of other studios, resulting in a game that's kinda good, but very flawed with massive inconsistencies and "play it safe" decisions coupled with good-for-nothing premium editions and confirmed upcoming DLCs only to squeeze more money out of their consumers.

You're not buying a copy, but a license revocable at any moment, not to mention that you need a service to leverage that license, too, so when that service either dies or prevents you from accessing what you paid for, you can kiss goodbye to it, and your only option is to cash out again.