“We definitely found that piracy was a significant factor in our Nintendo DS development efforts. When we approached publishers to propose potential game projects with them, most of them brought up their concerns about piracy at some point. Many publishers even cited the issue of piracy as a specific reason why they decided to back away from our game project, especially with it being an original intellectual property concept. The publishers’ fear was that, in a climate where piracy is commonplace, original games and new mechanics are far less likely to be successful than games based on previously successful mechanics, established licenses, sequels, and sports.”
That page seems to summarize as "publishers worry about piracy, so they reject original content and force sequels/sports/crap" (... that makes zero sense to me, but to continue) plus "an original-content game maker will stop developing for the DS when publishers force sequels/ports/crap".
And they're all fearing the ecosystem decline that occurs when the publishers start forcing crap.
I mean... I think I can point to the cause of the problem in that relationship. And I won't be pointing at the pirates.
Some markets that have started to oust those gatekeepers seem to be doing fairly well, lending weight behind arguments that the gatekeepers are the real problem. Music is booming despite massive piracy for decades, as are video games in general (particularly on PC, where piracy has been even bigger for even longer).
I don't doubt that some things that are working with the current gatekeeping ecosystem will cease to exist if gatekeepers get less powerful. ... but I'm not sure those are things we should be keeping anyway. Sucks in the transition, to be sure, but in the long run?
It is still part of a very, very large shift in power away from the historical gatekeepers though (i.e. from "all-powerful overlords" to "anyone can sign up with any of the big DRM streaming platforms today, and there are moderately-sized others too"). Gatekeepers as a whole can be beneficial in a lot of ways, but they tend to turn into power-amassing despots given time. A bit of churn helps reset that to some degree.
I guess the main difference here is that historically (going back decades here) you had to use the gatekeepers to do things at literally any scale beyond handing out records by hand. They effectively controlled all physical sales, and physical sales were the only option. Now there are many more viable options, including stuff like bandcamp where there are few restrictions or costs of any kind. Gatekeepers of portions of a market will always exist, the difference is in how much power they wield over the entire marketplace.
Eh, if I stab a guy every time you touch a tomato it is literally true that "touching tomatoes causes death", but the sentence does leave out a crucial part of the mechanism - that it's less the tomato, and more me and my stabby knife.
I wouldn't take any publisher's opinion seriously. It's been proven that music piracy is _positively_ correlated with sales, yet the RIAA is still trying to stop youtube-dl from existing. I have to assume these pencil pushers in the game industry are equally ignorant, until hard data proves otherwise.
> It's been proven that music piracy is _positively_ correlated with sales
Which makes sense, things that sell well also are more likely to be pirated. Has it been shown that piracy causes sales to increase? I've looked around but I haven't found anything reliable.
There was one (not replicated) study suggesting that people who consumed more music tended to pirate more, but that's a correlation not a causation, and it doesn't follow that they would not have purchased or subscribed to even more music if the piracy option had not been available.
doesn't matter if they are right or wrong, especially when you are asking for their money. It may be a business, but it's till run by flawed humans whose irrational decisions will affect creators. So this perspective is important for a developer to know before pitching a platform.
