Why does it matter that artists loose money?
As always and as usual, technology has rendered something else incredibly cheap. Books became a thousand times cheaper after the invention of the printer printing press, aluminium price pummelled plummeted after we found out how to get it from bauxite, industrial revolution decreased the price of everything, and now, information is almost free to share. Not that free actually, we still pay for Internet access and storage of data isn't free either. But as entertainment companyies are powerful, they try to refrain us to use from using what is ours, by, basically, controlling any exchange of data. So we must fight them. Simple.
I thought the music and software industries were actually YOUNGER than trivially easy file sharing. In fact, they were only made possible by trivially easy file sharing; you can't make assloads of money from selling music if you need to carve the discs out of platinum or something. Film industry, maybe not. They had a nice golden age of glory before VHS came.
Anyway, if quality software was cheap-as-free to make, shouldn't the miracle of Free Market Capitalism push prices down? For some strange reason, the existence of free software isn't pushing commercial software out of business. Without knowing more of the matter, one could guess that having loads of money to spend on making their product is giving commercial software some kind of edge over volunteer-driven projects. Which would suggest that despite being information,
software isn't free to make. Truly shocking. The same goes for music. And film. And books.
Entertainment companies are providing a service, at their terms. If you disagree with the terms, you are free to not use their service. If you need the service, pray and hope entertainment companies feel gracious enough to keep providing it.
Speaking of Toady One, I don't think his business model would work for the game industry. He's been making his game for like six years now, and it is nowhere close to nearing completion. Modern games with sophisticated graphics are fairly expensive to make, requiring game developers to take millions of dollars of other people's money in advance to afford it. They then work very hard, cutting features as needed to meet the deadline. And for most of its development cycle, the game won't be entertaining to play at all. Most games in Alpha state are horrible, unplayable monsters, and developers have to pay the testers to play them, rather than the other way round.