Indie Game Developers Would Rather You Pirate their Games Than Buy From Key Resellers

[mr moose]

10 hours ago, Sauron said:

I think you're the one missing the point - having a freely available dump of all research papers doesn't impede this in the slightest. It doesn't even need to be all in one place, so long as it's available somewhere.

 

Funding for research should come from the relevant institutions and shouldn't depend on the results - the scientists work full time and should be compensated accordingly. That's kind of what universities are for.

 

It can't work like that.  If it could it already would.   Universities only fund research that will earn them more money (exactly like private business),which is why private business often work with universities on research or help fund it.  Journals cost money to run and you are still trying to argue that if you give their content away for free they can still operate. 

 

[Sauron]

3 minutes ago, mr moose said:

It can't work like that. If it could it already would.

That's not a very strong argument. "If it could, it would"... says who?

4 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Universities only fund research that will earn them more money (exactly like private business)

Maybe in the US, where they are mostly private businesses. In more sensible education systems that's not the case. Regardless, business funding for research is a separate issue and I would argue that if anything it's one more reason to demand complete transparency from public research institutions, and maybe that governments should direct more funding towards them.

9 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Journals cost money to run and you are still trying to argue that if you give their content away for free they can still operate.

Red Hat costs money to run, they still give their product away for free. Furthermore in their case they directly work on that product whereas journals simply publish others' work. I am not arguing the journal should be free. I'm saying the research they publish should be freely available from other sources.

 

Or are you saying that "their content" is the research itself and they have nothing more to offer? If journals can't justify their existence to their customers without snatching exclusivity deals from researchers, which you keep implying, then I would argue they are just an obstacle and should be removed. If they are useful for other reasons, as I have been arguing, then their customers will keep paying for those reasons.

[Thaldor]

7 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Journals cost money to run and you are still trying to argue that if you give their content away for free they can still operate.

Quite many corporations today give their products for free and quite many of those products cost a lot more to make than a journal. I would argue developing something like Blender is far more expensive than running a journal and Blenders funding is completely optional for everyone (they take donations, they collect support funding, they sell tutorials, workshops and other training (from which all of the tutorials and workshop video materials are freely in the net) and they sell support), only product/service that costs is the Blender Cloud. Not to even talk about other funding solutions available today, enterprise funding like WinRar is quite good solution (individuals can pay for the product if they want, but they are no way forced to do it, enterprises on the other hand must pay for the product) and then there's use based funding (for private use it's completely free, for any public, enterprise or anything more than you using it for yourself and not making it public, you pay for it) and probably tons of other methods.

You are going to say about bias and I will say that any funding method if not 100% transparent and public can be biased, even the subscription can be biased. And quite frankly it's not even about the funding, who makes sure the big boss of company X doesn't call the journal to become biased towards them because the big bosses friend is the chief editor? There is no way running 100% unbiased business unless everything is public and transparent.

 

But back to the real topic. The main problem with G2A and any other key reselling site that is now or in the future is that how do you know where the keys come from. Someone steals anothers CC and buys 100 copies of a game and puts those keys to the reselling site for fraction of their price just to launder the money. The only way for a service to protect from that would be either cooldowns (the key you put on the sale doesn't become public before X days has passed or you cannot withdraw the money before X weeks have passed and the game dev/publisher hasn't claimed the keys "stolen" or any buyer has contacted about their game disappearing because the key was deleted).

G2A and probably couple others are far more shittier than that because they allow selling of Steam Gifts. This is really shitty move because it allows the seller not to even have a single key or giftable game. Someone buys one of these "Steam gifts", they just get some shady link to some random site and quite possibly there were no game to be get in the first place, probably just another scam.

 

On the piracy in general. I don't support it, but I do it because some companies are the worst of the worst and they don't deserve single cent for their work. Just like I would so vote and then get some forged documents and vote again if someone was to make one huge change to the human rights law: "Whoever doesn't respect ones human rights, doesn't deserve human rights" and the same goes for piracy, if the company is shithead like EA who doesn't care a shit for the community but only their income and goes out saying shit like "They are not loot boxes, they are surprise mechanics", fuck them, if I want to play their game, I either get it when it's sale for few euros or then I just pirate it, they want to be the shitheads, I will be a shithead against them. I really want to support and buy the games from the developers who stay clear from "surprise mechanics" and other modern day cancer including monetization methods, I even shun people who pirate those games.

[mr moose]

7 minutes ago, Sauron said:

That's not a very strong argument. "If it could, it would"... says who?

Maybe in the US, where they are mostly private businesses. In more sensible education systems that's not the case. Regardless, business funding for research is a separate issue and I would argue that if anything it's one more reason to demand complete transparency from public research institutions, and maybe that governments should direct more funding towards them.

Yeah, governments are going to put more money into research, not going to happen.

 

7 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Red Hat costs money to run, they still give their product away for free.

You don't get the same product, They charge for support, the free version gets no support.   What support do you expect needs to be provided to read an article the is justified with a cost?

 

7 minutes ago, Sauron said:

 

Furthermore in their case they directly work on that product whereas journals simply publish others' work. I am not arguing the journal should be free. I'm saying the research they publish should be freely available from other sources.

 

You clearly do not understand the role of a journal,  they absolutely do not "just" publish another persons work, they completely disassemble it using peer review before they determine its good enough to publics.  The whole publishing bit is not the purpose of their existence.

 

If you have two sources for the same content, one is free and the other requires a sub,  who do you think is going to get all the business?  The one that is funded by other means.

7 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Or are you saying that "their content" is the research itself and they have nothing more to offer? If journals can't justify their existence to their customers without snatching exclusivity deals from researchers, which you keep implying, then I would argue they are just an obstacle and should be removed. If they are useful for other reasons, as I have been arguing, then their customers will keep paying for those reasons.

 

 

You clearly don't understand the role of peer review.  It is not about holding exclusive content,  they do that to fund the sole reason they exists, and that is to peer review, to scrutinize the work to ensure it meets rigorous standards.  As you pointed out before, some journals just publish what ever they are paid to,  that is not science, that is not rigorous peer review, that is just publication of an article. 

 

I did link a whole lot of articles at the start of this discussion regarding the importance of peer review.  The flow chart at the top of this article shows exactly how much work the journal and relevent scientists do for every single article submitted. If this process is not followed then the article is not peer reviewed, And in my opinion the journal should not be calling themselves a journal let alone pretending to be scientific.

 

 

https://authorservices.wiley.com/Reviewers/journal-reviewers/what-is-peer-review/the-peer-review-process.htmlhttps://authorservices.wiley.com/Reviewers/journal-reviewers/what-is-peer-review/the-peer-review-process.html

 

 

 

 

 

At the moment many of the Scientists who do the scrutineering (peer review)

[mr moose]

5 minutes ago, Thaldor said:

 

You are going to say about bias and I will say that any funding method if not 100% transparent and public can be biased, even the subscription can be biased. And quite frankly it's not even about the funding, who makes sure the big boss of company X doesn't call the journal to become biased towards them because the big bosses friend is the chief editor? There is no way running 100% unbiased business unless everything is public and transparent.

 

 

how can the sub be biased source?   Ff the journal want to let a study pass because one of the thousands of subs asked for it then nothing will work and the journal has bigger issues than bias, but if you cause the income streams to become larger single sources then you introduce points of contention.  It's just nature of the beast, all humans are susceptible to it and that's the sole reason the peer review process and the scientific method are striven for.  To remove as much human bias as possible.

 

We already have thousands of people ignoring Good scientific research simply because it was funded by Monsanto, we even have governments joining in the parade because it wins votes.  If the response is to make it easier for these companies to influence journals rather than get more rigorous on the studies themselves, then I simply don't understand the logic.

 

 

So again, I ask, find a better process/model of funding.

[Sauron]

Just now, mr moose said:

Yeah, governments are going to put more money into research, not going to happen.

[Citation needed]

1 minute ago, mr moose said:

You don't get the same product, They charge for support, the free version gets no support.

Yeah. The journals charge for curation, freely available research papers dumped in an open database don't get curation.

2 minutes ago, mr moose said:

What support do you expect needs to be provided to read an article the is justified with a cost?

 

3 minutes ago, mr moose said:

You clearly do not understand the role of a journal,  they absolutely do not "just" publish another persons work, they completely disassemble it using peer review before they determine its good enough to publics.  The whole publishing bit is not the purpose of their existence.

 

If you have two sources for the same content, one is free and the other requires a sub,  who do you think is going to get all the business?  The one that is funded by other means.

I'm getting tired of repeating myself - make up your mind. You're constantly contradicting yourself depending on what argument you want to make. I said I believe the journals offer a valuable service and you seem to agree... when it suits your narrative. In the same paragraph you said:

Quote

they absolutely do not "just" publish another persons work, they completely disassemble it using peer review before they determine its good enough to publics.

and

Quote

If you have two sources for the same content, one is free and the other requires a sub,  who do you think is going to get all the business?

Are they the same content or not? Does a non curated infodump hold the same value as extensive peer review and selection of content or not? I have offered arguments for my position regardless of which of the two you believe, but you can't hop from one to the other depending on which part of my post you're quoting.

9 minutes ago, mr moose said:

I did link a whole lot of articles at the start of this discussion regarding the importance of peer review.

I agree that peer review is important and valuable. I have said this multiple times. Because it is so important and valuable there is no doubt in my mind that journals doing it would be appreciated by the scientific community and would continue to have customers even if the research itself was freely available elsewhere. I have provided an example of another business thriving despite the "beef" of what they offer being freely available. You insist that if some uncurated dump were available the journals would lose all their customers but I have yet to see any evidence of that statement or hear any logical explanation beyond "why would people pay if they can get the thing for free" which holds no water under even the slightest scrutiny.

 

People pay for spotify even if they can listen to the same music for free on youtube. People pay for news websites even though the news themselves are usually public domain. People pay for RHEL even though CentOS is an exact clone and is available for free. People ARE willing to pay for things that could legally be obtained for free if they are presented conveniently and/or with additional services; if you're going to insist that this is different you're going to have to back up that statement better than you have so far.

[ARikozuM]

14 minutes ago, mr moose said:

So again, I ask, find a better process/model of funding.

A free archive for research. 

 

I don't want [just] articles "peer-reviewed" by a handful of people. I want all of them available for public scrutiny. You can say that only doctors should scrutinize papers from their field, but that doesn't mean that a physicist should be blocked from looking at a medical paper and scrutinizing it. 

 

If you're a publisher being funded by Monsanto, would you take the opportunity to publish a paper on the ill side effects of Round-up? Do you think that a publication will put their livelihood at stake against their funds? 

 

They would not. Every paper should be published to ensure that institutions can lock them down or keep them from being revealed. 

 

A sub can be a biased source because they choose what to publish. 

[mr moose]

3 hours ago, Sauron said:

[Citation needed]

You need a citation to know that the government won't spend more on research?

 

3 hours ago, Sauron said:

Yeah. The journals charge for curation, freely available research papers dumped in an open database don't get curation.

We already have that.  That's why there is a difference between good journals and internet blogs.

 

3 hours ago, Sauron said:

I'm getting tired of repeating myself - make up your mind. You're constantly contradicting yourself depending on what argument you want to make. I said I believe the journals offer a valuable service and you seem to agree... when it suits your narrative. In the same paragraph you said:

and

Are they the same content or not? Does a non curated infodump hold the same value as extensive peer review and selection of content or not? I have offered arguments for my position regardless of which of the two you believe, but you can't hop from one to the other depending on which part of my post you're quoting.

I agree that peer review is important and valuable. I have said this multiple times. Because it is so important and valuable there is no doubt in my mind that journals doing it would be appreciated by the scientific community and would continue to have customers even if the research itself was freely available elsewhere. I have provided an example of another business thriving despite the "beef" of what they offer being freely available. You insist that if some uncurated dump were available the journals would lose all their customers but I have yet to see any evidence of that statement or hear any logical explanation beyond "why would people pay if they can get the thing for free" which holds no water under even the slightest scrutiny.

I am not contradicting myself,  you simply don't understand the situation.    You are trying to argue that there should be some sort of repository for what? everything you think should be published but isn't?  As I said before there are plenty of reasons why somethings don;t get published and having a free repository for them won;t change that.  It's just be a dumping ground for shit papers that don't mean anything.  It's hard enough educating the masses on the difference between a proper peer reviewed article and a shit dump journal that prints whatever you pay it to.

 

 

 

3 hours ago, Sauron said:

People pay for spotify even if they can listen to the same music for free on youtube. People pay for news websites even though the news themselves are usually public domain. People pay for RHEL even though CentOS is an exact clone and is available for free. People ARE willing to pay for things that could legally be obtained for free if they are presented conveniently and/or with additional services; if you're going to insist that this is different you're going to have to back up that statement better than you have so far.

 

Again you have missed the point, a lot of the free stuff is supported by ads or data collection, We don't want our peer review process sponsored by corporations, it';s hard enough explaining the transparency when they fund the  research without letting it infect the peer review process too.

3 hours ago, ARikozuM said:

A free archive for research. 

Containing what content though?  what are you going to research in a free archive?  if your lucky it'll just be all the papers that are already free, if your not you'll need a separate degree just to work out what is worth reading.

 

3 hours ago, ARikozuM said:

I don't want [just] articles "peer-reviewed" by a handful of people. I want all of them available for public scrutiny.

They are all available for public scrutiny, for the 3rd or 4th time now, they are not hidden away from anyone,  buy a sub and scrutinize away.  just remember if you are not educated in that specific field then you may as well be telling NASA engineers how to do their job.

 

3 hours ago, ARikozuM said:

You can say that only doctors should scrutinize papers from their field, but that doesn't mean that a physicist should be blocked from looking at a medical paper and scrutinizing it. 

 

They are not blocked from that. 

3 hours ago, ARikozuM said:

If you're a publisher being funded by Monsanto, would you take the opportunity to publish a paper on the ill side effects of Round-up? Do you think that a publication will put their livelihood at stake against their funds? 

 

As I said earlier,  many article are not published for lots of reasons, the last thing we need is less scrutiny.  yes some good articles might not get published, but it also means lots of dud articles also don't get published.   Feel free to research, write up and publish your own article whenever you want,  don't expect others to do it for you. 

 

3 hours ago, ARikozuM said:

They would not. Every paper should be published to ensure that institutions can lock them down or keep them from being revealed. 

 

A sub can be a biased source because they choose what to publish. 

 

???   how can a sub be biased,  if you have a thousand people all paying $10 a month for access (numbers for arguments sake) then which one of those thousand pulls any sway over the journal that relies on credibility for success?  Anyone can sub, it isn't restricted to doctors or scientists.

 

 

[ARikozuM]

2 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Again you have missed the point, a lot of the free stuff is supported by ads or data collection, We don't want our peer review process sponsored by corporations, it';s hard enough explaining the transparency when they fund the  research without letting it infect the peer review process too.

It isn't hard to make transparency clear. A simple line on the header is all that's needed. I really don't see why you're fighting over the peer review process. The review process isn't the issue. It's the fact that some papers aren't published simply due to moneyed interests. See my oxytetracycline in chicken meat and bones as an example (it took 4 years for it to be published). A very good experiment that looked at how oxytet stays in the bones of chickens and accumulates greatly even at lower dosages. 

2 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Containing what content though?  what are you going to research in a free archive?  if your lucky it'll just be all the papers that are already free, if your not you'll need a separate degree just to work out what is worth reading.

Why does this matter? Just put any and every paper up and sort it into field or tags. We can still have peer reviews. We can still have sponsors. We can still have whatever funding you feel is best. What we wouldn't have is research that turns out to go against the wanted outcome getting buried or never seeing the light of day. 

2 minutes ago, mr moose said:

They are all available for public scrutiny, for the 3rd or 4th time now, they are not hidden away from anyone,  buy a sub and scrutinize away.  just remember if you are not educated in that specific field then you may as well be telling NASA engineers how to do their job.

Papers can frequently be held away from publication as I've mentioned. Whether it's a donor not liking the paper and the publisher knows it's in their best interest to not pursue it or it's a terrible work. Let's have all of it available. No bias. If it's a terrible paper and you read it at the archive I'm in favor of, get a sub where they've peer-reviewed it. Hell, I would allow links to the subbed peer reviews just for posterity. 

2 minutes ago, mr moose said:

They are not blocked from that. 

As I've said, they are. Buying a company and ending their research. Lawsuits blocking papers from revelation. They should all be available for review. There can be warnings that "this paper is redacted" or "this paper was in a suit to stop its release", but they should still be released. There needs to be greater clarity for research. If there was a paper that was on the archive, but it didn't meet "good" methodology someone could read it and see how to fix it and then repost it. 

2 minutes ago, mr moose said:

As I said earlier,  many article are not published for lots of reasons, the last thing we need is less scrutiny.  yes some good articles might not get published, but it also means lots of dud articles also don't get published.   Feel free to research, write up and publish your own article whenever you want,  don't expect others to do it for you. 

I'm looking for more scrutiny. Why aren't you reading at what I've said? Regardless of the paper, it should be published into an archive that anyone can access. If your publisher is only taking someone's work and doing nothing with it, why are you paying for a sub? The researcher gets nothing out of your sub. Are you getting peer reviews out of your sub? Yes? That's GREAT! 

 

Every paper needs to be published, not on your subbed publication, but on a public archive for anyone to view. The peer review can be your sub, but access to the paper should not be behind a paywall. 

2 minutes ago, mr moose said:

???   how can a sub be biased,  if you have a thousand people all paying $10 a month for access (numbers for arguments sake) then which one of those thousand pulls any sway over the journal that relies on credibility for success?  Anyone can sub, it isn't restricted to doctors or scientists.

Do you think that a publication is wholly funded by subs? How do you think they pay for the ability to publish papers? Are you truly asking how a subbed publication can be biased? 

[mr moose]

3 hours ago, ARikozuM said:

It isn't hard to make transparency clear.

It already is clear. 

3 hours ago, ARikozuM said:

 

A simple line on the header is all that's needed. I really don't see why you're fighting over the peer review process. The review process isn't the issue. It's the fact that some papers aren't published simply due to moneyed interests.

Changing the structure of scientific journals won't change that.  I don't understand why you ca';t see that? 

 

3 hours ago, ARikozuM said:

See my oxytetracycline in chicken meat and bones as an example (it took 4 years for it to be published). A very good experiment that looked at how oxytet stays in the bones of chickens and accumulates greatly even at lower dosages.

And? 

 

3 hours ago, ARikozuM said:

 

 

Why does this matter? Just put any and every paper up and sort it into field or tags. We can still have peer reviews. We can still have sponsors. We can still have whatever funding you feel is best. What we wouldn't have is research that turns out to go against the wanted outcome getting buried or never seeing the light of day. 

Again you have missed the point of the peer review process.  Please go and read the kinks I posted earlier.

 

3 hours ago, ARikozuM said:

Papers can frequently be held away from publication as I've mentioned.

And I have addressed that already, 

3 hours ago, ARikozuM said:

 

Whether it's a donor not liking the paper and the publisher knows it's in their best interest to not pursue it or it's a terrible work. Let's have all of it available. No bias.

 

Who are you asking for the paper?  If it has been rejected by the journal it will be explained why, if it is held back by the author then it doesn't matter why, you can't have it and you can;t force them to reveal it.

 

3 hours ago, ARikozuM said:

If it's a terrible paper and you read it at the archive I'm in favor of, get a sub where they've peer-reviewed it. Hell, I would allow links to the subbed peer reviews just for posterity. 

As I've said, they are. Buying a company and ending their research. Lawsuits blocking papers from revelation. They should all be available for review. There can be warnings that "this paper is redacted" or "this paper was in a suit to stop its release", but they should still be released. There needs to be greater clarity for research. If there was a paper that was on the archive, but it didn't meet "good" methodology someone could read it and see how to fix it and then repost it. 

I'm looking for more scrutiny. Why aren't you reading at what I've said? Regardless of the paper, it should be published into an archive that anyone can access. If your publisher is only taking someone's work and doing nothing with it, why are you paying for a sub? The researcher gets nothing out of your sub. Are you getting peer reviews out of your sub? Yes? That's GREAT! 

That's not the reason for the sub. It's not to pay the researcher, it's to cover the cost of the peer review and publication process.

 

3 hours ago, ARikozuM said:

Every paper needs to be published, not on your subbed publication, but on a public archive for anyone to view. The peer review can be your sub, but access to the paper should not be behind a paywall. 

Do you think that a publication is wholly funded by subs? How do you think they pay for the ability to publish papers? Are you truly asking how a subbed publication can be biased? 

Now you've moved the argument from the peer review and the point of  journals to trying to force everyone to publish their work.  You can't do that, you can't force someone to publish their findings, regardless if it's true,  A private company can do as they please on that front. You are just going to have to get used to that, having a public repository will not change that. 

 

 

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

Maybe, just maybe, put your game on Steam. 

The only reason i'd prefer G2A if the game's not on steam and i can't purchase it on uplay/EGS as they don't regional pricing or ask for International Credit card and wont accept Debit from Domestic 
I have bought a lot of games on G2A for the same reason until Steam introduced Regional pricing and even offered CASH OF DELIVERY! meaning a person would come at my door step to collect the money physically if i dont have a card
Cue the hatred for EGS

So tell them to sell it on steam, atleast salvage as much instead of making it an exclusive, the last time i used G2A was to get Watch Dogs 1 season pass
but if they were to sell the keys on their own game website it still would be beneficial for them, its when prices are absurdly costly is when ppl go to G2A

[Anomnomnomaly]

14 hours ago, ARikozuM said:

I don't mind paying Nintendo for an SNES cartridge of Super Mario World. They aren't selling them, are they? If they aren't, they do not get any say in removing those games from ROM sites. There's a clear demand in getting that game. They can easily capitalize by selling the ROM themselves. They can supply a first-party emulator for profit. They do not get to remove third-party emulators. If you want protections, you must support your products fully and for the life of those protections. 

 

If Bungie was selling the game, I could see why they should be paid for the game. But they must support the game fully and not in part. If abandoned, it's protections are abandoned in kind. 

Whilst they may not sell the actual cartridges for the SNES anymore, they do I believe still sell the games for download onto the Wii/Switch and so forth and as far as I am aware it's just the old rom being emulated.

[ianspy1]

This would be a really good ltt video