Game developers gotta eat too. Until grocery markets go free to eat, or people pay up front for content, this is what we get.

Game developers were making awesome games and were well fed 20 years ago.. so no

Dude, 20 years is a long time to go without eating.
People were paying up front for games 20 years ago... so yes.

Anyway I've worked for several free to pay companies, and while South Park almost gets it right, they've missed an important aspect. It's all about landing whales, the vast majority of people do not, and never will pay for a game, I think the percentage of players who pay is something like 0.3% So it's all about making the whales feel important, they are essentially paying the developers for the admiration of other players. Anyway, I got out of free to play because I think it leads to bad game design (something the South Park video gets right.)

This is of course different from PC to console and mobile.With mobile being the worst, but PC MMOs, for example, have almost all gone free to play.

The bottom line is that if you're not paying for something, odds are whoever owns (and pays for it) it will have to end up selling you.

They talk about that later on in the episode, when Terrance and Phillip see through the charade for a second time. That segment is not included in this clip. The whole episode is worth watching.

I raise an eyebrow at any suggestion there is not a profitable market for game developers with or without pirating.

I don't agree with pirating, with buts. First, huge corporations are counting "downloads" as "lost revenue" which is absolute bullshit on a humongous scale. Secondly, huge corporations are also charging over £40 for some games that, and please let's not argue here, are often LITERALLY unfinished. Some are finished piles of garbage.

If you're pissed off with small games developers and individual programmers going hungry, the blame really isn't at the door of the pirates, and at the very least ground needs to be given on both sides. In the same way as every industry and every individual is getting hit in the wallet and struggling to manage, you can put that particular blame on the system we're using which encourages raising profit at all costs. If you stiff a bunch of people long enough they're gonna find a way to get value for money.

Any for evidence, i point you in the direction of the many one-man games that have taken the indie scene by storm and made some people a lot of money. People WILL pay reasonable prices for a GOOD product.

20 years ago was the tail end of the shareware boom, which is a different approach to "freemium". In that model, developers created a great game (Wolfenstein, Doom, Duke Nukem, Jazz Jackrabbit, Quake, OMF 2097, etc) and gave you a sizable, fully playable chunk of it for free as promotion.

The difference is, back then there was not much attention paid to "casual gaming". Games were designed to be fun and challenging. Times have changed and now games are designed to be easy and addictive instead.

Today's freemium model is more like video poker. It's not much fun but you keep putting money in because of the potential for an easy reward. That's the mechanic that keeps gambling addicts going back to the casinos and it's also the business model that makes "casual gaming" so profitable without having to make good games.

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