Tim discusses the case of Eastside Hockey Manager 2007, a popular game made thoroughly and obviously unprofitable by piracy. He ends by noting that he's sympathetic to arguments that copyright protections aren't necessary for music, but still thinks that they are essential if we're to preserve industries like the one that makes videogames.

To some extent I think Tim is right: music is a unique case. But that's mostly because the industry that arose to distribute music was so bloated, stupid and inefficient. Having claimed nearly all of the profit from retail music sales, the record companies are the part of the music industry that'll withering first in the face of rampant piracy. That's shielding the actual music creators from piracy's effects — for now, anyway. Successful but non-superstar artists found different, largely concert- and merch-based means of earning a living a while ago.

But the lack of a large, parasitic & evil distribution mechanism (or at least one as evil) doesn't mean that the videogame industry can be saved by copyright any more than the record companies can (the question of whether it should be saved strikes me as fairly irrelevant). The game companies' business is vulnerable, too, and will ultimately have to transform itself. The wealth of DRM options available to game-makers and the console vendors' closed systems give them a more luxurious position, but with the rise of networked consoles and the maturation of a market for pirate technologies like Alcohol 120% and console modchips, that era is coming to an end.

But that's okay. The bloated budgets of the high-profile videogame franchises is a bug, not a feature. Look at the success of the videogames Burger King has been selling — they're short and simple, but they only cost a few bucks and the restaurant has sold 3.2 million of them. I'm sure they were envisioned as a promotional tool more than anything else, but now BK is claiming they helped their bottom line. There's clearly room for growth in this segment of the market. The idea that every videogame has to be a (shooter|RPG|platformer|sports game|GTA clone) and cost $60 is ridiculous.

Piracy's going to continue to be effective. It's also going to become much more accessible to people without soldering irons and Linux servers. The industry will respond by chasing ad revenue; by adjusting the cost:benefit ratio for piracy by making smaller, cheaper games; and by continuing to move toward service-based offerings (e.g. subscription fees in MMORPGs). For Madden devotees, this is bad news. For those of us bored by the industry's addiction to big titles and consequent inability to innovate, it's not a bad thing at all.

Yglesias has made arguments similar to Tim's about the movie industry — that pirating music might be okay, but that the film industry couldn't continue to produce content of the same quality if their profit margins decreased. As I've argued before, I think this is mostly just a problem of imagination: it's easy to imagine getting together the resources necessary to produce a very good-sounding album, and it has been for some time. Producing a professional-quality movie is a massively more expensive and inaccessible undertaking.

But this becomes less true every day. We're already past the point where a bunch of friends can make a decent movie while holding down day jobs. It wasn't too long ago that getting a good-quality camera and nonlinear editing rig meant an investment of tens of thousands of dollars. Now you can do it for an order of magnitude less. This stuff is going to continue to get cheaper and easier.

At this point I imagine that my cinematically knowledgeable friends will scoff and start talking about lighting design, makeup, film versus DV and other things that I don't know enough about to sound convincing. But I still believe in technology's ability to democratize the medium: the procedurally-generated extras of Weta Digital will show up on the desktop soon enough, and the slickness of fan productions like Star Wars: Revelations hints at a promising (albeit terribly-acted) future.

It'll probably always be the case that a professional can discern between the work of a colleague and that of a skilled amateur. But it also probably won't matter — in the same way that readers of political punditry turn out to not care all that much about copy-editing, I suspect the film world will end up finding that the priorities and standards they've set for themselves are different from those of their audience.

And that's good, because I think we're just beginning to enter the golden age of digital movie piracy. As Yglesias has noted, there's a bloated market inefficiency here, too — star salaries — which can be pared down to make up for lost revenue, in the same way that the record companies will be pared down before artists suffer. But I suspect the movie industry is going to be in a serious panic mode within a decade.