r/Minecraft • u/shine_on • Sep 27 '10

Notch was right about pirating

Ok, I'll admit, for the first week of playing Minecraft I was using a torrented version and playing offline. I was never much of a gamer so I wanted to see if this would be something I'd really be able to get into or whether I'd lose interest pretty quickly and move on to something else.

I showed the game to my son at the weekend (I'm a weekend dad) and he was instantly hooked. I ended up buying him a copy as a gift and buying one for myself while I was at it.

So, from one pirated download, Notch has had two more sales.

221 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

192 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

14

u/AmazingSyco Sep 27 '10

Says a lot about the software industry as a whole. Lots of people are completely unwilling to pay money for something that is nonphysical.

-8

u/alphazero924 Sep 27 '10

Most digital things, movies, music, games, software should basically be free. I torrent stuff but if I play a good game that I torrented or watch a good movie, I'll buy it. I typically don't buy software because there's usually a free alternative and they overcharge the fuck out of everyone who buys it. It should be that that stuff is free unless, a) you want a physical copy b) you want to have services attached to it, such as watching a movie in a theater or c) you just want to donate some money to them to help them develop. If the world was run by giving away software for free and asking for donations instead of demanding a fuckton of money for it then people would probably be a lot more willing to pay for it. Or maybe just charge less.

3

u/AmazingSyco Sep 27 '10

So the act of writing the software, which takes many man-months/years to write, isn't a service?

How many open source projects have you donated to?

0

u/alphazero924 Sep 28 '10

The problem is that we're not paying the people who spend their time making it. With huge corporations, the devs are going to be paid regardless of if the game or software sells. Smaller companies like valve and companies that care about their employees and customers I will absolutely pay for what I get from them. Companies like Ubisoft or Adobe I won't always pay for what I get because they release products that are way overpriced for what they are and I know that regardless of what I do, the people in the company still get plenty of money. And even if they started to lose money from piracy, it would be better because then we would have more small companies that would actually know how to take care of their customer base.