It’s not a failure to adhere to reality so much as a failure to convey what I actually meant…
I said there’s no product to steal. That is not true. There is a product here. It’s still theft, yes. What I intended, was a continuation of the thought that you’re supposed to be purchasing a game, not a piece of one. As such, the game still fails to exist, so there is no game to steal. There is still work to steal, a project, etc. That wasn’t an endorsement of piracy or anything, just a failure to address what I intended to.
With that said, I think piracy is wholly irrelevant to the topic at hand here. It is run on a donation model. As such, a purchase is a donation with a maybe attached to the full game, not a purchase of a fully fledged game. So the whole tone of the initial post here about how weak “sales” are an issue and how piracy is hurting everything was a bit ridiculous. The subscribers and the early adopters are all people willing to gamble on whether it might be completed, and if things are left purely to that sort of funding, it likely won’t if past experiences hold true. The stats on sales and piracy come across as whining and even a guilt trip rather than a simple “free access is capped here going forward, donate for more updates or we look forward to seeing you upon release” as it easily could have been. Again, the piracy angle came across as a way of guilting people into donating rather than anything relevant. Piracy is everywhere. That’s not news.
The game, up to now, had been following a schedule of early access to donors but free access to everyone eventually. So the idea that anyone is significantly harming anything by not donating, which is by it’s nature, optional, is a bit strange. As I said, capping the demo is fine whenever and ultimately makes a ton of sense for precisely the reason above. What real incentive is there to support it if you can just wait? Or not if you’re really insistent on piracy I guess.
With all of that said, I believe the price should be higher upon release (if it makes it there). Incentivizing the early adopters with more than just early access to what everyone got under the delayed “demo” model or even early access to the actual game under the current capped demo model is a good plan. Especially when you’re basically using early adopters as free play testers (or people paying you to test your game for you if you want to be extra cynical about it).
And unfortunately I can’t say the car example works outside of Tesla’s incompetence either thanks to the everything as a service issue I complained about right off the bat. BMW basically licenses half of “your” car’s features to you these days… My point there was a purchase of a full product should be just that, and so many have lost sight of actual ownership of anything or manufacturers/developers finishing things before expecting to be paid by their customers.