You mean something like little Johnny Gamedesigner who decides to break free and go independent after 10 years of AAA studio life? His first game is featured all over, but released to a 95% piracy rate. Pulling in barely $20k after 6 months of work his dev team quits. He tries to stick with it, developing things on his own, but large software projects take multiple disciplines and his projects suffer. Not able to stick by him in his defeats, his girlfriend leaves, takes his corgi. Less than two years later, when no developers are willing to bring Johnny on staff because he's now 36 and has been nuked, he goes homeless.
There will never be a parable that makes people care about piracy.
I'm not really sympathetic to this argument. I agree that people deserve to get paid for their work, but it's foolish to put one's head in the sand and pretend that we aren't surrounded by devices that make it effortless to push around sequences of bits. If your entire business model collapses under the weight of copy and paste, it's just not a very good business idea. Networked computers are ubiquitous and they're here to stay; authors, artists, and developers should take heed.
Of course, in actuality, piracy is demonstrably benign. Isn't it strange that in the age of digital piracy, indi-game developers are more successful than at any other time? Movie studios are making more money than ever before, HBO continues to completely destroy the likes of Netflix in profitability despite producing the most pirated TV-show of all time. The fact is: pirates are mostly people who've already paid or would never have paid anyway. I think we can all agree that piracy is ethically wrong, but I think it's also pretty clear that it's not very harmful.
We launched in 2009, and were feature by Apple over 9 times. While we wanted to monetize on episodic content IAP wasn't yet a possibility. The programers, who already had jobs, were dissuaded to continue and for sweat equity my options were 'nil. Kickstarter had literally just launched as a website, I'm not sure it would have mattered much for us back then.
All things aside, I blame no one, but I am finding it incredibly hard to get back into the industry proper, even with my incredibly established group of contacts.
No one deserves to be paid for their work in a creative field. In life we evolve or die. It just smarts when you're dying with over seventeen years experience.
If you can't profit off a business model then you picked the wrong business model.
Today there really is no excuse. If you are a game dev looking to break into the industry, you do need a lead - something good to show off what you can do - but really all you need is a demo of your capabilities, and with something like Unity you can get something out the door really quick. You just need to demonstrate competency. And you should probably give that one away.
Then if you actually intend to make a legitimate project, of scale, with huge developer costs et al, go kickstart it. If you don't have the finances to gamble on if or if not enough people will voluntarily give you an arbitrary amount of money effectively as a donation for making the game after the fact, find out if they are willing to give you a fraction of it beforehand. If not, your game would not have sold anyway.
And if you say something along the lines of "they have no audience, how can they kickstart?" then I ask you how they can sell their game in the first place, if they have no audience. For better or worse most digital media sales are not about quality or effort but are about publicity and consistency. Fundamentally piracy does not mean you would have or not had a succesful launch - the pirates are just users who mostly would not have paid at all, and you won't get an order of magnitude more sales from somehow making it so you cannot transmit data online freely anymore.
I agree with all you've said, but my independent charade started in 2009 - IAP was not yet a function of Apple libraries. Once better tools became available for us to monetize as originally planned, my team was already well dispersed.
The entire story of my independent career would take much longer to describe than is profitable for either of us.
Evolve or die, as it were, and since I'm not yet gone I am in yet another stage. One where I've whittled own the number of people, and disciplines, I need complete my endeavor.
That's not to say it's easy. Talent of a measurable worth is not always ready to go when you are.
Today, there are ways to get around this. You can kickstart a project - decide on how much money you want, ask for it, and if you don't get it, go do something else that people will pay you for.
Not that piracy is OK in my eyes, but failing to protect oneself from it is outright ridiculous.
There may be a parable that makes people care about piracy, but it won't be one that's based on the standard but absurd assumption that every pirated copy is a lost sale.
There will never be a parable that makes people care about piracy.