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[–] Wahaha 1 point 6 points (+7|-1) ago 

Developers are contractors. They get compensation up front, maybe in the form of a salary. What they don't see is money from the game sales. And what they don't have is rights to their work. To this day, we do not even know the name of the guy that created Castlevania, for example. Castlevania is owned by a company, not by it's creator. Just like most games since the creation of games. It works similar with game studios. Even if you made a studio, you can still get to do contract work and then not have much say about what you do and what you earn after the game's release. The studio gets paid up front in this case and won't see money from sales. To actually see money from sales, you not only need your own game studio you also need to do everything else yourself. Like selling your game.

If you want to preach at least get your facts straight.

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[–] Mechanicalmechanic 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

This really needed to be said. It paints a better picture for independent studios/developers that are more intimately involved in their product. I am thinking of games like Rust or The Forest. I firmly believe in paying people a fair price for their work. When it comes to being a developer though I think most would be heartbroken if their work was rejected. It seems that most developers are artists, and they just want people to want to play their game.

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[–] 13171061? 3 points -2 points (+1|-3) ago 

By creators I mean everybody involved in the creation of a game, including the company. And if the developers exchange the rights for the game for a salary, then it is right that the game studio gets the intellectual rights they have bought. Game studios and publishers are not bloodsuckers who only exist to take the rights from the developers, they are a necessary part of the ecosystem, and if you hurt them the others get hurt too.
If people do not buy games because they don't care that Ubisoft or whoever loses money, then they can't pay the programmers and artists as much, so you are still taking money from them. Maybe I don't have complete knowledge about how the commercialisation of games is done, but the end result is the same.

If you want to preach at least get your facts straight.

Somehow answering a question and explaining the reasoning behind my answer is bad. How about you stop nitpicking on issues inconsequential to the argument made.

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[–] Wahaha 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago 

It was the center point of your argument. You said pirating deprives developers of their compensation (which is false) and of their rights to control their work (they do not have this right in the first place).

It is also not the game studio that has those rights (in most cases), which would again be a relatable entity people could feel empathy towards. There are faceless corporations paying game studios to make games, so they can sell them to you. It wasn't always like that. It used to be developers were just some guys in a garage making what they love and lots of people don't seem to have the updated information, that this is no longer the case. It's an industry now. With suits walking all over the actual creators forcing content in or out and generally being a nuisance to extract as much money from you as possible.

Gaming these days is soulless. There are still small guys around, but they don't get much visibility.

You can still make essentially the same argument, but the ones that are "hurt" by pirating are neither developers nor game studios, but faceless multi-billion-dollar corporations. Most of which we don't even know by name (hence faceless). The important differentiation is the thing were people can relate and feel empathy towards "developers", but they generally can't towards faceless corporations. I'm pretty sure they even have trouble with corporations that are not faceless, like Google.

It's also pretty difficult to pay game developers even less, since they are already bottom of the barrel. Their love for their craft gets exploited and results in pretty bad compensation. It's not quite as bad as with animators (who sometimes have to hold down more then one job just to not starve), but still. Game developers on average make next to nothing for what they do. The ones that get rich are the ones with their own studio making and selling their own games. But only if they make a game that gets big.