this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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Good. However way you feel about piracy or Bethesda. This is stealing directly from artists and we need to protect artists and their right to make money. Which in turn is their right to live, because we live in a capitalistic society. Denying someone pay is denying them shelter, food, heat, everything. I can only hope that subsequent cases like this for smaller artists are treated similarly as important. I know that's a tall ask though. That the indie games studio losing money to bootleggers isn't going to get the same response from the Sheriff's Office.
This is at least a step in the right direction as cases like this are usually hand waved away as "well those people weren't going to buy the game anyways." or "It's just copying a file." or best of all "No real damages have been done."
This is factually untrue. Artists have already been paid for their work and have possibly already been let go. (in many big gaming companies majority of the dev teams are let go on release, they operate on a hire-and-fire cycle) Artists pretty much never have a stake in the company or profit sharing. So there's no real way the # of copies sold has any bearing on their income.
At worst this is Bethesda having 150 copies stolen. Not even tiny devs would blink at that as they get copies stolen through places like G2A constantly. A huge company like Bethesda is worried more about early copies breaking embargo date that shows bad or buggy gameplay, negatively harming sales. Which, TBH, I am 100% not sympathetic towards. Review embargos any more restrictive than a week prior to launch is just trying to hide something.
This is absolutely no longer the case. I've worked in the industry for 10 years and have never seen a team release then get laid off. Imagine any other business working this way. It just doesn't make sense. In some cases though, smaller studios miscalculate how long between publisher funding and release income. You get money from a publisher to make a game, then you release and for a while, a lot of studios made the mistake that the release income would come immediately. Publishers have clauses in their contracts to recoup all the money they gave the studio with the release money. So the studios assume they'll make money the first month of release and realistically depending on the publishing contract, that's not the case all of the time. So they are forced to lay off people. In larger studios though, this is never the case.
To put it in business terms, imagine your restaurant staff just served one of the best dishes they could to a well-known reviewer and got rated well. Do you think that business is going to lay off their kitchen staff or do you think they'll try to keep the team together and make another dish? It doesn't make sense for them to lay off people and never has. It doesn't happen if the studio can avoid it. Even when games completely tank, I've only seen people quit because of studio frustrations, not laid off.
A lot of studios still give profit sharing and bonuses to those who worked on high-profile projects. Also no, again, they don't just get let go. They at most get moved to other projects. That's why there are people at Bethesda/Epic/Ubisoft/etc who have worked there for decades.
Hi, I am a tiny dev and I constantly fight against G2A and other shitty websites that steal from me. I am not alone and multiple studios have straight up come out against G2A. I am one who will say instead of buying something off of G2A, just email me for a Steam key. I'd rather give away my product than see G2A profit from it. Larger developers clearly care as they have pressed charges against people who pirate. Saying no developer cares is ignoring the entire discourse of developers on the subject.
As a developer myself, I just find it funny as fuck that people just spout off about shit like this. clearly do not understand what they are talking about.
Imagine the support nightmare alone if the dev team is dismissed on release. For example, Baldur’s gate just released 1000+ bugfix patch 20-some days after release, good luck doing that with a brand new team.
Especially today with things like day1/week1 patches which have become the usual almost, cutting the dev team loose on release would just be wild from any informed perspective