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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.

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[–] 13177736? 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).

Then I expressed myself badly. What I mean to say with developers is the entity which holds the rights. Not that it actually matters that much, since any industry is an ecosystem and anything that harms the corporations goes down to harm the ground-level developers. You could say that the suits should get the pay-cut instead of the engineers, but videogame suits already take a huge pay-cut for being in the games industry instead of elsewhere. And those above must earn a lot of money, so that it is in the best interest to actually lead the corporation to success, and not conspire with an enemy to sink the corporation for a huge reward.
The suits are a necessary part of the videogame industry ecosystem.
And if programmers can't be paid less(which they certainly can), then they will be fired.

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.

And that's one of the biggest problems of the videogame industry, that it is boom or bust, and thus extremely risky to make your own studio. No matter how well you do it, if there isn't enough marketing, or it doesn't work as well as expected, or there is another game that has taken all the eyeballs, the studio will be broke and unable to make more games, and the ground-level developers will get fired. If they took a pay-cut and went back with their parents or borrowed money to survive until the game released and they were to become rich as many start-ups and indies do, and it doesn't happen, they are fucked and lost a few years. That is shitty.

But do you know what is the purpose of those faceless corporations? The reason why developers join with them instead of doing it alone, is because these corporations eat the risk. Partnering with a corporation means that they get a more stable job. Most games bomb, and instead of losing their jobs, the studio can survive for another try, or if not, the developers get shuffled elsewhere. Corporations mitigate risk.

But corporations aren't in the business of charity or art. They do it to get money from the earnings, if they can't get a huge boom from one lucky game, at least a few solid games. That's why they control games and add lootboxes and remove the soul, because they have to mitigate the risk. Given how big games are now, they can't take many failures.

The question then is why games have to be so big, but that's the nature of the industry. Boom or bust, the biggest game gets all the rewards, the second gets a pittance and the third gets nothing(well, maybe it's the ninth game or something, but you get what I mean). Corporations rightfully seek profit, and that's where the profit is. I think that an industry of mostly medium-sized AA titles like Hellblade, games with a good budget and still with soul, would be better. But unluckily, that's not how it is.
Luckily there are still many indies.

Are developers exploited and underpaid? Yes. From what I've read at http://askagamedev.tumblr.com/ a huge part of crunch was due to mismanagement, and now that the industry has matured a bit it has lessened. But still the salary of everyone involved is much lower than in other industries, and developers can still suffer crunch.
But that is a market problem. An over-supply of young developers leads to depression of salaries, offer and demand. It doesn't help that earnings are lesser than in other industries, that the industry is so risky, and that they are willing to work for peanuts because of passion.

But that is capitalism. The corporations and studios have done what they should. Corporations and owners have the right to seek profit, and publicly-owned company must seek profit. The situation of devs is sad, but that is capitalism. If you want to fix the situation, you must fix the market imbalance, it's the only way.

I understand that you, and many gamers, don't like the megacorporations which rule the AAA space. But they are necessary. If not, the market would have removed them. Sure, pirating doesn't directly hurt the ground-level developers, only those asshole corporations. But less money for the corporations means less money to give to studios, which means smaller studios and smaller games, which ends up with developers losing their jobs, the remaining ones having their pay cut, and less games being made, which hurts us gamers. Piracy in the end, only makes things worse for all involved.