Hi Sandy, I hope you’re well. I have appreciated the recent discussions. I do not agree with your framing.
Regarding piracy, DOOM is a complicated example because shareware was the model. DOOM’s first episode was designed to be freely copied, passed around, uploaded, installed, and played. That enormous unpaid audience was not the same thing as piracy. It was part of how DOOM reached the world.
By the mid-90s, DOOM had something like 20 million shareware installs and more than 2 million paid copies sold. Those 20 million people were not “pirates” by default. A huge number of them were playing the free episode exactly as intended.
That doesn’t excuse people pirating the registered game. However, it’s important not to collapse legal shareware distribution, unpaid reach, and actual piracy into one number.
I also don’t think piracy is what “gutted” id - id is still around and still making games. Piracy may have cost money, but it wasn’t the reason Quake was hard or why people eventually went different ways.
So yes: pay developers. Buy the games you love. Support the people who make them.
But history is messier than “pirates killed the companies.” Sometimes the same free distribution that looked like lost sales was also the thing that made the game impossible to ignore.
I usually dont like to do this, but today is important, many of you may not know but i am from Venezuela the 24 of this month my estate was hit by 2 consecutive earhtquakes that destroyed everything, the fact that im here tipying this right now is nothing short of a miracle 1/?
This is it, the test bed. Not only for normalizing prices at 80 to 100 dollars but at fully killing physical. The industry is banking on this. You will pay more and get less. Some really dirty shit from all parties involved. Cant wait for the industry to collapse.
Complaining about the price of the Steam Machine while posting an image made with the technology responsible for the 30% price markup is certainly a take.
@SmugAlana@shinobi602 Honestly with how much time went between the announcement of the console and the price I am inclined to believe they tried to wait for the prices of components to go down too...
Hey guys! Sorry I haven't posted much lately. I should be back at it now! Anyways, I finished the lineart for that dark revenant sketch I did:
#eldenringnightreign