+1. I've met people in their 30s still working on their degrees who were excellent programmers, and people fresh out of tech school who couldn't tell a compiler from their ass. It's not about paying tribute, its about showing you're not stuck up enough to actually shut up and try to learn something.

A small minority can also learn everything they need to on the job, but they'd have to be exceptionally driven, humble, and intelligent to be able to reach their full potential that way.

Point being you don't often see private citizens shooting up cops because of their supposed ineptitude with guns, and granted that's for a lot of reasons, one of which is that it's not as trivial to outgun them as OP suggested.

The thing about guns is people play counter-strike and go to the range a few times and suddenly think they're rambo. The simpler truth is that its a lot like sex and race car driving: every guy thinks he's good at it.

So which is it, did I prove that no employer evaluates the merits of their candidates and only cares if they have a degree, or that learning does not happen at institutions of higher education in 2 paragraphs?

Yeah...I don't think you know what you're talking about.

That's not true, for every hour of range training they get, they probably get 5 on small squad tactics, disarmament and CQB, and situation defusal. While not exactly in the realm of live fire exercises one might encounter in say, the marines, they have a small but significant edge over the average citizen -- by design.

That depends. The fact that they aren't trained for war zones says a lot of good things about our society and government.

As someone who makes hiring decisions and interviews prospects, I'm going to call bullshit. There is still real value in education. I won't hire people who think they're hot shit but haven't gone to college to get the ignorance schooled out of them.

Before I went to college for computer science, I knew everything. Then I learned otherwise. Now I owe my success to the skills I gained in college. You can't prove that with a piece of paper like a diploma, but there's some pretty damn good correlation, and I'll keep playing the odds with my hiring decisions, but thanks.

Are large numbers of stupid people graduating who don't deserve their degrees? Yes. Has higher education, to some degree, become commoditized and devalued?

Yes, but it does not follow that no learning occurs at universities.

+1 and I wish law enforcement would be more willing to exercise this right, we need less psychos on our roads.

So, uh, you know, don't lie about committing a crime you didn't do. If this really happened, it wouldn't be anyone's fault but the idiot who made up the story in the first place. I mean, it's not illegal to be a lying prick, but if its going to cause you a boatload of trouble, then just don't do it. It's not like law enforcement is psychic, so please dont turn this on the cops like its their fault if the kid's life is ruined.

Paper targets differ in many ways from trading live fire with people shooting back at you. To say shooting at the range trains you for combat is like saying that you can learn to drive by practicing to step on a gas pedal.

+1. You can often only get a permit to do certain things if you have adequate security, which generally involves hiring an on-duty police officer from a local government. Shooting a movie on a crowded street with replica guns comes to mind. As for GP's "its not like they have anything better to do" - I find it surprising the number of people who deride the very institution that lets our society function.

The distinction doesn't matter, the legal speed limit applies to everyone regardless of ability. Paradoxically, the people who think they are the best drivers cause the most accidents precisely because they think the laws don't apply to them. And I've never met anyone who deserved a speeding ticket (according to them anyways).

If you need any proof people are both terrible at driving and completely delusional about their own abilities, look at the percentage of people who rate themselves as above average drivers, then look at the vehicular accident rates.

tl;dr - nobody is special, if you use a public road, the legal limit applies to you.

Speeding is always perfectly safe until it isn't. It's one of the leading cause of accidental death in developed countries and is THE number one cause of teen deaths.

Translation: Speeding laws suck, they shouldn't apply to me. Only other people are bad drivers.

Yes, they I should have experiments and arrive at some sort of a "maximum speed." They could even put it on a sign.

Sure. "I've had enough of your bullshit" means you've been so intellectually outclassed that it was humiliating. What, I'm so wrong that you can't be moved to rebut even a single point with sound reasoning or logic?

Yes...me and the rest of the world that lives in reality. Run along now, I think some other high-tech industry is in need of your bullshit speculation in microeconomics.

Key validation works fine for online games, which is a very strange definition of "no." Game DRM is typically licensed, and is a fixed cost, so its cost is marginal relative actual development, and serves as an effective deterrence against casual pirating. Many people wouldn't even give it a second thought unless the DVD they burned for a friend refused to play.

I'll try to say this as simply and directly as possible: you can't reduce piracy by lowering the price. That's why game companies implement DRM (which only has fixed cost) as opposed to just lowering the price (which gives up marginal revenue on every copy). To say price is relevant to piracy indicates you really have no understanding of economics.

But it didn't necessarily raise their profits. The leakage that occurred was probably massive - the people who would've paid the full retail price, but paid far less because they they were able to name their own price. There is only a finite number of people who will buy your game. Thus, it is important to consider the price, and not just the number of sales. And I am 100% certain that the major game studios have studied this number longer than you have, with smarter people than you or me. Even someone as stupid and hardheaded as you would admit this is true.

Let's also consider that World of Goo is a special case, benefiting from heavy media coverage for using a novel pricing model. If they had perpetually sold the game at $2 instead of $20, they'd have to sell 10 times the number of copies they would've sold originally. Assuming those who would pay $20 would also pay $2, you'd have to find an additional 9 customers for every 1 who has already paid. This doesn't sound too implausible, until you realize it would never work if everyone did it, because there aren't that many people in the world. Think about it: if everyone in the games industry slashed their prices by 90%, existing customers would have to purchase games at 1000% of their current rate for it to work out for sellers.

And that's just to fucking break even. The problem is that the marginal utility of games goes down sharply as you purchase more (because you only have a limited amount of free time to play them) and your purchases would not go up by a factor of 10 if the price dropped 90%, not even close.

Of course, there are new customers who would buy a game instead of pirating if the price were lowered. Your assumption, holding existing sales constant, is that these people outnumber current customers at a rate of 9:1. If we assume that current customers would double their purchases (rather generous in my opinion), you are still looking at a ratio of 4.5:1. The numbers don't look very plausible even if you triple, quadruple, or quintuple your assumptions from the first segment.

Considering that we already have evidence that suggests people pirate games about 9:1, what you are really saying is that there is a population of non-pirating, waiting-to-be gamers (which is mostly disjoint from current buyers and pirates) in the same order of magnitude as the population that currently pirates games.

Which is utter horseshit.

You may have found specific examples of second or third tier developers who are overpricing their software (and reaping suboptimal profits because of it), but that does not indicate there is a systematic problem with video game pricing. Notice that even Valve only ran their 75% discounts as an experiment, negating your theory that they can optimize profits by permanently lowering prices (or, you know, they would've done so, don't you think?).

You've confused this equilibrium price with the one that generates maximum profits. You can't maximize profit without knowing the exact demand curve. Note that profit along the demand curve has nothing to do with the supply when the marginal cost of production is zero.

The fact of the matter is that games at current prices offer pretty good value for the asking price, using, lets say, a movie ticket (~12 dollars for ~90 minutes of entertainment) as a comparison. The market for high-end games is really just not that big, and there certainly aren't 3-4 NEW upstanding customers for every one that exists today (which is your implicit assumption). For most of the population, piracy provides the free perfect substitutes they need and distorts the actual market value for game studios.

If games really were overpriced, the payout to be had by lowering prices is even greater if everyone else overcharges, because it would be so easy to steal market share (since we can agree games have some degree of fungibility). Don't you think publishers would jump at the chance to take advantage of such an opportunity? Yes, yes, they would. Which is extremely strong evidence that it's not the case.

That won't work. You can't simultaneously maximize for two mutually dependent variables, and there's no guarantee the numbers would converge on maximum profits, assuming they even converged.

For someone as "brainless" I am, I have just educated your ignorant self. You're welcome.

I quoted your words verbatim. Feel free to point out specific cases where I misquoted you, because I am willing to bet money that I didn't.

No...no, I didn't say that. I said your absurd idea for "fixing" the piracy problem by lowering prices is useless because we already both agree that the class of people who pirate games aren't going to pay for them even if it were only a nickel.

Here, let me break it down for you in plain english:

There are 3 classes of players:

1. Those who will buy the game at the asking price.
2. Those who would buy the game, but currently won't, because the price is too high.
3. Those who won't buy the game even if it were a nickel, because they can get it for free. These people do not value fairness or honesty.

You are advocating lowering the price of the game to increase sales to segment 2, but you already readily admitted that those in group 3 wont buy it no matter the price. This does absolutely nothing to lower piracy.

You also said that piracy losses are imaginary. I called you on it, and you still won't admit you were clearly wrong and factually incorrect about that.

Valve's price experiment was interesting, except you forgot to mention their games are multiplayer only and can't be pirated to work online. Thus, they have no free, perfect substitute and the economics are different from singleplayer games that can be cracked. Obviously, piracy is not a problem for Valve because more of the people from group 3 are forced into groups 1 and 2. This is actually proof that piracy losses are not imaginary, but very real.

The fact that games like World of Goo (which can be cracked unlike Valve's) has stunning piracy rates even though the seller had a name-your-price deal, offering the full legal game for as low as 1 penny is evidence that there is no known solution to piracy except a DRM model that works: online key validation and a multiplayer-only model. The pricing issue is completely irrelevant.

So you can continue misinterpreting your "evidence" and peddling naive solutions to a difficult problem on slashdot all you want, just don't delude yourself into thinking you are so smart you know how to fight piracy and price games better than the games industry, because you don't.

Provably false. Your grasp of piracy and even basic economics is far from even plausible, nevermind factually true. Here is a choice quote:

This is incorrect, because if piracy were impossible, there is undoubtedly some proportion of the pirates (less than 100 percent to be sure) that would pay for the game, but they choose not to because there is a free alternative that is just as good. If the good you are selling has a perfect substitute and is free, how does that make your losses "imaginary?" Answer: it doesn't.

Your timed auctions idea is also terrible. You are living in a fantasy world where the seller gets to extract the highest price everyone is willing to pay, which only works if no one knows what everyone else is paying. When pricing information is shared among buyers, it falls apart. Why would someone be willing to bid 50 for something if he knows that someone else could get it for 20 by simply waiting a little longer? Answer: they wouldn't. You would rapidly get price convergence and be right back where you started, except now it takes longer to sell the product and more time for customers to get it.

The deadweight loss (that's the term by the way, its taught in introductory microeconomics) is already somewhat mitigated by price segmentation - that's what collectors' editions of games are for. For the lower end of the market, they can wait the 1 or 2 years to get the game in the bargain bin. In conclusion: game publishers already do market segmentation, except in a better way than you proposed.

Nonsense. Your argument boils down to lowering the price to increase sales, which has absolutely nothing to do with reducing piracy at all, because we already established pirates don't buy no matter the price as long as they can get it for free.

Thanks for playing though.