Fuck him, not for trying to get the game out there, but for trying to make a profit off it.
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While what you say is absolutely correct, keep in mind that the profits a game makes go to the company. The workers are already paid. If a game doesn’t make money it would likely mean those people at the bottom would lose their jobs but the people at the top will absolutely get their share. But stealing a game like this doesn’t mean people aren’t getting paid. If Bethesda feels like the game doesn’t need all of the staff it took to make it, they’ll still get rid of them, regardless of how popular the game may be doing at any given time.
Indie game studios stand a better chance at doing right by their employees but a capitalist society means the profits go to the top and the losses go to the bottom and rarely are indie studios exempt from this rule of economics.
This person is being punished because they found a weakness in Bethesda’s setup and exploited it. It MIGHT be that if they had gone to Bethesda and let them know of this vulnerability rather than trying to sell what they had found that they would be been rewarded. But, more often than not, the companies who are shown a vulnerability still seek to punish those who point it out to them.
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Except for bonuses, profit sharing
This reads like equating tipping to salary.
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This is stealing directly from artists
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.
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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
What’s your source on this? Even if Bethesda had any idle hands during the development of Starfield, it already has another huge project coming down the pike in Elder Scrolls 6. Why would it fire off developers who are already familiar with the revised engine that it needs to make another massive open world game?
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bad, what could possibly justify someone being arrested over something like this? and the only one who could “deny pay” is the bosses anyway, game devs don’t get any sort of cut from profits.
He stole physical games and sold them. That’s a crime in any country on Earth I believe.
Deeply frustrating to see. Their only sin in my book is selling it instead of freely distributing it, something Bethesda is equally guilty of. I only hope they make it out of this okay.
Bethesda is guilty of not giving away their game for free? I really hope I’m misunderstanding what you are trying to say.
Yes.
Disappointing to see baiting from a mod.
This is not bait, I truly believe that all non-private art and information should be freely available to all for any purpose and liberating it is always a good thing. I’ll leave your report unresolved for another mod to weigh in on, but I’m not looking for an argument and gave a minimal response precisely because I did not want to encourage shit-flinging.
I think your opinion is disrespectful towards artists. It implies that they don’t deserve to be compensated for their work and consequently that their profession is less worthy. Why art specifically? What sets their product apart from other goods?
Why art specifically?
I assume because the topic is video games. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure they are against the whole current system and would prefer a gift based economy. I don’t think they are defending a capitalist system where artists don’t get paid.
I see, thank you!
I’m not sure whether to agree or disagree with you but thanks for being polite about it. Sorry for calling your comment baiting but when I saw something like that that just didn’t expand on anything I figured it would be. Most troll comments are like that. Say something controversial without expanding on it to encourage arguments.
In fact id consider that kind of comment to encourage far more shit-flinging than something thought out like this.
Ahaha yes I think it’s kinda suspect too. Imagine spending millions & millions on a quality title just to give it away for free?
Why would they even do that? Could they even do it? (I believe) It does not work like that :)
Seriously, I can’t imagine a world where you invest millions in a project just to give it for free. I don’t see how someone could think it’s frustrating.
For once, if you like a game and want to support the industry, buy it. Vote with your wallet.
You realize these studios operate in capitalist societies right?
What kind of a mod argues with people in their own community? 🤔
They’re a user too, and they’re arguing respectfully. What’s the problem?
It’s immature, and unprofessional. Anybody could goad a mod like that to misusing their authority, driving people away from the sub and completely destroying their credibility. Other people won’t put up with it.
I don’t see it as arguing. They’re just clarifying their position. And fwiw, we are all users here too. We don’t have the ability to not show the ‘M’ by our name
That would be a nice feature. I don’t always want to comment or post with my mod hat on. That said, I’m not seeing it on anyone here. Is it an instance-based thing?
Fr you’re a mod, you’re not allowed to be a human with feelings and ideas and opinions! Just blindly care about the community, don’t contribute to the discourse!!
I said argue, not contribute to discourse.
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Projecting much? Because I am not the one not listening to reason here, it’s you. It’s not just about this one particular douchebag. It’s the principle of the thing, that is applicable to all mods everywhere on every site.
You don’t get to just decide mods arguing with people in their own communities is okay because you find one particularly likeable. You as a user have a responsibility to hold mods to higher standards to maintain the integrity of the community too, and the only one who stands to suffer because of your refusal to accept it is you.
The developers don’t deserve to be paid? Because that’s the crux of it, no sell no profit, no profit no workers. Bye bye studio and any future art because we all are trapped in this capitalist nightmare. Do their families not deserve to be supported for their work?
I’m struggling to understand the motivation of your comment. You seem upset that a studio that worked for many years paying many developers project managers artists etc to create this game is selling the result of their hard work and investments? Where do you think they got the funds to build their latest game? Perhaps from the previous games, content, merch they have produced and sold?
How exactly is a studio to function if they simply hand out their hard work for free? How exactly are they to hire quality people if they are unable to make a profit from their primary product, the games that the developers and artists pour their heart and souls into?
I mean, shit, yeah all information, art, everything should be able to exist without tying it to finance but that’s not the world we live in and it’s not the world these developers work in.
So… what’s your point??
Bye bye studio and any future art because we all are trapped in this capitalist nightmare. Do their families not deserve to be supported for their work?
I think it’s safe to assume they are not fans of capitalism; I doubt they want to keep living in a capitalist system where artists and developers are not paid. They are talking about artists and developers because that’s what the topic is about, but I would assume this thought stretches to all of society.
You’re right, of course. I detest capitalism and while I obviously understand why people and the institutions they build operate under its rules, I see not doing so as a generally good thing. I’m under no delusions that this will bring the change we deserve, that requires actual political action. But liberating art and information is actually possible thanks to filesharing and so we ought to do so.
People seem to be missing the point about Bethesda’s guilt. I know that Bethesda cannot give this game for free and I take for granted that you know they cannot, my point is that because they can’t, they should not exist. I’m not a fool, I know how the world around me works and that games would not be made at this scale (but they would still be made…art LONG predates the profit motive and exists even today where no profit is to be had, and no one could possibly snuff out the human drive to make art) and am willing to take those consequences. I believe withholding art from the public is stealing from the common heritage of mankind, and so we ought to strive for a system in which art can be made and shared freely because people’s needs are taken care of. And yes, I focus on art and information because it is the topic here and it is particularly close to my heart, not because my beliefs stop there.
I just want to say one more time that I wasn’t trying to preach here or start a fight. I just wanted to express my sadness at this situation. That’s it. I only respond because I don’t like having my views misrepresented.
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Games are made to make profit, Bethesda made it and have legal rights to distribution, without profit games would not be made at this scale.
I’m not really sure what you are trying to say to be honest.
Like I said downthread, I wasn’t really looking at derailing this thread by starting a debate, but to clarify my position, the industry as it exists today collapsing is entirely okay with me. I’d be happy to live in a world where all games were freely distributed public domain solo endeavors, small collaborations, and the rare larger (but still not this large, likely) productions organized as public works or naturally-occurring oddities.
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whether or not games were ever like that isn’t actually relevent to the point they made, also tons of unfinished games are basically already sold as complete.
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What they were describing was basically a society that relies on a gift economy, which has already existed in the past, and still exists in some places and forms today. We’ve been brainwashed by capitalist societies to think that would be a “hippy-dippy, fantasy land” because capitalism and bartering are what is natural to us, but it’s been shown that a gift-based economy is what a lot of uncontacted tribes use. It’s also how a lot of friend groups interoperate - hell, start a minecraft server (some other survival game will do) with your friends right now, and you will almost certainly naturally default to using a gift based economy.
Uncontacted tribes also don’t have advanced medicine (though not to say they haven’t discovered a great deal of important things on their own) or well… videogames. If you want to live like that more power to you, but for all the faults of modern society it has massive benefits as well.
I think there’s plenty of middle ground to be found where we can have our cake and eat it too even if it looks wildly different from what we have now. Gift economies just don’t work when you have billions of people involved. It’s ultimately more efficient to give people money and then they can spend it on what they need or want. Even the idea of a corporation or company isn’t inherently broken, people will always have a need to organize themselves to create efficiencies and build bigger things than they could on their own.
Capitalism is shit, the concept of money, and organized labor, is quite good.
If people want to live in a fully-automated luxury space communist utopia where everyone is free from want and able to make and release games for free as passion projects, that’s great, and a worthy goal to work towards, but promoting piracy on principle without concern for how developers will be supported during their work in the context of our current capitalist society is somewhere between naive at best and self-serving rationalization at worst.
like, the game industry is incredibly exploitative, even if piracy does causes direct harm to it, thats honestly a good thing, it is set up to benefit publishers and share-holders over anyone else, especially the people actually making the games. supporting the end of that isn’t “hippy-dippy”
Maybe he simply remembers Shareware differently.
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Christ, theft of property “$2,500-$10,000”. That’s a lot of copies.
it sounds like he was listing to sell the actual game, not just 45 minutes of footage of the game…
Hasn’t starfield been in the making for ages and even had twitch streamers play officially funded streams? Or is that star citizen (or whatever it’s called). Not sure if they’re the same.
Different games
Star Citizen is a Kickstarter open world space sandbox MMO game. Look up Elite: Dangerous for a similar project.
Starfield is an upcoming open world space RPG (which I think is singleplayer only not sure) developed by Bethesda.
Yes it’s Singleplayer only.
Yeah it’s space Skyrim
