Re: how far have we really taken these rules on the forum!
Surgery time.
I'm going to take your post apart, so this is gonna be a text wall.
"If it was just the sound design, we could talk, but Japanese games are better at practicly everything, and if you don't want to accept that it's your choice, but anyone who seriously plays audiogames will say this as a fact. Again, voice acting you say? One free non Japanese game that does voice acting well? I could think only of the blind swordsman, but that again doesn't come anywhere near the size of Shadow rine. Even Manamon rather does the story in textual form to avoid even more costs of hiring actors to do the job. I'm not even sure what your point is, since yes, Japanese games do have a different standard. Look at Planet saga, it's just a concept demo and yet we have nothing like it. We all know that the BK series is pretty much the best sidescroller we have. This includes free and paid, and now if we limit it to just free games, we better not even talk about it. Whether our developers can or can't do better is not something I can answer, but I can answer that they currently don't."
My point is that if the Japanese are doing it, so can we. And arguably, so -should we. Rather than putting it into an "us and them" scenario, we should recognize that these are just really good game developers. All game devs, if given sufficient reason and time and resources, and talent of course, can do what they're doing. There is not some secret quality which makes Japanese people better at making audio games, or any other games for that matter.
"Again, my question is simple, point to non Japanese games that are free, have some good replay value or come close to the size of CP and meet your legal sounds requirements. Even Super Liam, Judgment day, all of these have been paid at their time. Surely if you can't find one non Japanese game, they do have a different standard we aren't even close to yet? Now whether we as a community are used to accepting average games, hell yes. Is CP an average game? Most certainly no. It's in the category of top free games for sure."
You're missing the point. First, I don't have to point at a non-Japanese game that's doing a good job, because audio games are audio games. Stop with the us-and-them crap. It's a smokescreen, and it's not working on me. Second, I'm well aware of how popular and successful CP is, and I argue that it's successful in spite of its pirated assets, not because of them.
"You are playing only one mode of CP actively, since as you said yourself you don't like minigames that much, and I do respect that, but you have to understand that CP is 2 and a half games in one. On one side you have the battle mode you know, on the other a list of over 200 minigames you can play, and on the third side a list of about 50 micro games."
Again, I'm well aware of what this game encompasses. I make a point to try and know what I'm talking about before running my mouth.
If you think all these ideas are just stolen from others, you are really wrong. Taking the battle mode for example, the only thing that is stolen here are the Pokemon attack names. The concept is different from anything else."
Uh, no. No it's not. All types are borrowed from pokemon. The concept of gyms is borrowed from pokemon. I'm pretty sure every music track is pirated from pokemon. Sorry, but don't give me that. This is pokemon with some new math and a fresh coat of paint. No, it is not 100% pokemon, but it is so heavily inspired by it that it's really difficult to call this original. It's also unbalanced as hell, BTW, but that's beside the point.
"Yes, it can remind us of Pokemon or other card battling games, but it is most certainly not the same and cards as well as the whole battle system just works on it's own. Many ideas, especially recently have been contributed by the community and it is far from copy pasting ideas."
See above. You should really stop trying to justify this product as original now. If Pragma wanted to differentiate himself from pokemon, then he really shot himself in the foot by pirating pokemon fight music, using all the pokemon types, and then essentially being in favour of leaving pirated assets in his game at least in part because he's trying to invoke pokemon nostalgia. You absolutely cannot have this both ways, dude. Either it's original - in which case it should have its own sounds and music to make it its own thing - or the people playing it are out for a pokemon nostalgia fix and they really really really need pokemon music to do that with. Busted.
"Same goes for minigames. The concept borrows quite a lot from Mario party, but again, you have a lot of unique games which either Pragma or the community came up with. Micro games as far as I know is something unique to Crazy party and isn't an idea from anywhere, but perhaps I am wrong."
Again, I'm aware it's not a 100% ripoff, but the concepts are extremely similar. And again, there are so many borrowed sound assets that this originality argument is being made in bad faith. I'll say it again for the folks in the back. Either Crazy Party really is its own thing, and should do what Manamon did and differentiate itself from its source material with its own music and sounds while still respecting said source material partially in its design, or CP is trying slavishly to bring on the feels and the nostalgia by evoking fond memories of Pokemon and Mario Party for a blind audience who may not have been able to experience either one before. Given the "we neeeeeeeed those sounds" outcry from a few users, both in this thread and in others I've come across, I'd say it's the latter. The thing is, I recognize that some concepts are new, or have been tweaked a great deal. I also respect that a lot of people have had their fingers in this, and while I'm not a huge fan of the minigames, I've played probably half of them or more, some of them many times. There's some really neat ideas in there, and if I've only seen half, I know there are more. But trying to tell me that it's not a 100% ripoff...I already knew that, and it's not an adequate defense of the use of copyrighted assets. Next!
"In one of your previous posts it sounded like your impression is that Pragma only coded the game, just copying ideas the same way it worked for the sounds, nevermind that the sounds weren't just copied into the game either. Not entirely sure what your huge issue with CP all of a sudden is other than the sounds, but there are some facts to clear this up."
No. My impression was that Pragma took two popular series, said "I want to make games that are really similar to those, and oh I also want to use a bunch of their sounds for some cheap nostalgia". Then he did it. He put in a ton of work, I won't take that away from him. So did the others who have thus far worked on the game. But boiled down, this is pretty much what they did. Borrowed the fame of another established series to boost the publicity of their own. Super slimy.
Why my sudden problem, you ask? Well if you dig into this, someone else brought up Crazy Party, asked why it hadn't been banned long ago, and that was how that started. Ever since we brought in rule 3, I have been against continuing to support this game on the site. If it were up to me alone, I would have put it under the umbrella of rule 3 instantly, and that would have been an end to it. It more than deserves it. So this isn't new. Read prior posts of mine to see where my personal feelings come into this, and where my admin feelings do. Personal feelings mean I don't really want to play the game anymore. Admin sensibilities make me think that supporting this game in any way via the forum is hypocritical and may, in fact, be dangerous.
"It only conveniently happens to work that the only games that come anywhere close to this and are free come from Japan. I never meant to make any racist comment, it would be silly since I'm not even from Japan, but as I said this was always the case that the best audiogames come from there."
Irrelevant. Discussed previously. Also, this is the part of your message where I began to realize just how scattered your thoughts are.
"I would personally say that the only reason Pragma can keep CP free is due to not having any sound costs associated with the game. Is this perfect and should this always be the case? Most certainly no. However, are we stealing anything from the artists who created all this work? That's yet again a no. We aren't making any money, nor is Pragma, and they are or were paid regardless of what happens with CP. The point would be much different if the game was paid. You would have every right to argue that we are indirectly stealing money from the companies who created the sounds."
We aren't just talking about money. Obviously the monetary harm, either to individuals or corporations, is low. But my personal feeling is that projects like Crazy Party are extremely dubious from a moral perspective. You would, for instance, using this logic, be well within your rights to steal a music track from me if I posted it and said it was just a concept for something I was playing with. Since I'm not losing money, and since it won't hurt my livelihood, apparently this makes it okay? Have you lost your ever-loving mind on this? I don't know about you, but when I create something and someone else goes and uses it without my permission for their own benefit - in this case, it would be a social benefit, I've discussed this before - I'd be pretty pissed. It is extremely unlikely that individual sound or music creators are ever going to know what you're doing, but they are still artists. Take money completely out of the picture for a minute. What you are doing, or at least tacitly defending, is the free use of their hard work in order to benefit you or what you stand for. Saying "thank you" in a document they'll never read shouldn't assuage that guilt, either. You are still stealing from them, not in a financial way but in a less literal way. This is my moral stance coming to the fore. So yeah, for future reference? If I ever do dare to post something here, and I find out that any of you has, say, taken it and stuck it in your game with a quick blurb in the credits thanking me, without asking and receiving confirmation, I will figuratively scalp you. Don't do it. And for god's sake don't defend others who do it. Pragma didn't just do it once. He did it literally hundreds of times to help his game along. If you want to argue that CP wouldn't be CP without all those assets, then what you are saying is that this game would not have survived without the uncompensated work and permission of other people.
"You have also previously mentioned and compared how comes that our community jumps when we see code stealing, but this type of sound stealing is perfectly ok. This really should not need explaining again, but the code is being stolen from people who devote their time, their limited free time to making an audiogame. They aren't being paid at all, usually their income from the game is 0 dollars. All they have is their code, and stealing their work in this case, being that we are primarily a site supporting audiogame developers should really be treated the same as sharing audiogame cracks. Stealing sounds isn't okay either, I can only accept it in the case of CP because of the reasons already outlined above. It is a huge company that doesn't lose anything if one tiny audiogame for 200 players suddenly starts using their assets. I would argue that if Jayde was to create a game, and the game would be paid 10 dollars, suddenly it gets cracked, your loss would be a lot larger, perhaps making you never want to create another game comparing to if Jayde was working at Nintendo and enjoying his sallary regardless of what happens and not even knowing that Crazy party exists somewhere."
Got it. So your right to pirate is based solely upon 1. whether the victim knows and 2. whether the victim is going to lose money. There's no moral problem with taking what you didn't make yourself and using it to prop yourself up. You don't have to ask; in fact, if anyone suggests that you even inform the people with the rights to the material, you flip the fuck out because ohmygod how dare you suggest we do something moral and inform the owners of assets that they're being used without their knowledge or consent. If we had a rich audiogame developer show up one day, it would be okay to steal from them because they're rich and don't need our money. The instant anyone in this community makes mention of the fact that they've got a steady job and/or financial stability - I can think of a handful right off the top of my head, but I won't name them right now because I don't want to out them or drop them in the middle of this damned dumpster fire - they're exempt from the "we won't steal from you because we'd hurt you" rhetoric, and they're fair game. Uh, needless to say that this disgusts me on a personal level and makes me disappointed as an admin.
"That's the final conclusion of this post addressing some of the recent points brought up. Before you complain how it's hypocritical, so is the way the site is dealing with the issue. And it will continue being hypocritical even if CP was removed. If you say that one of the reasons is because people constantly blame you oh you are removing this but you aren't dealing with CP, well dealing with CP won't stop that, they will just find a new target game. That's unfortunately a sideeffect of being a forum administrator."
I've already covered most of this, but here's a quick summary. There have been threats to start reporting games if CP stops being supported, but every single one of them will be made in bad faith because your game of choice got yanked first. Our intention is to keep our forum as free from copyright as is reasonable; it's reasonable to take CP down, but it's not reasonable to take every single game down by next Tuesday. It also means that we will probably hit the stuff that's doing the most harm or contains the most assets first. Oh, BTW? Thanks for pointing out all the other forums and communities where CP has a strong following; that actually makes the argument for removing it even stronger, since clearly this game doesn't rely on us nearly as much as detractors once tried to argue.
Whew. Okay. Anybody else?
-- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
