with SOPA the game development community and the whole world of internet is death

Not at anytime in the PC gaming history have you been able to return games, Unless the Game has either a corrupt filesystem or faulty installer or requires a serial and there was none. There are a few used Game Stores but they are rarity's and not easy to find. As for DRM just mentioning the word makes them hard to offload on someone.

I had one game that wouldn't install so returned the product to the location purchased from (down the road) the store argued with me for 2 1/2 hours when they finally agreed to install it on one of their systems. I got a replacement. -OMG-

 

Now wait....... SERIOUSLY?! Are you having some kind of PMS mid-life crisis? (no homo or offence)

 

Surprised no-one has posted that megafileupload has been taken offline (mostly) by action of the FBI and its founders charged with Piracy laws amongst others.

Source BBC

Alarming isn't the word, granted you can find copyright material on such a site, but one wonders how any file sharing business could possibly operate and avoid copyright infringement by its users. This is under current law, imagine what would happen with SOPA.

 

Okay this article is a few years old but this game got a 95% piracy rate. Now imagine if they they brought piracy to 0% the guy would have made 20x as many sales. Who cant spend a dollar or two, you would not steal a chocolate bar from a big company but its okay to steal game from an inide developer.

http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/read/fishlabs-slams-high-iphone-piracy-rates/07665

 

Alright, think about this, there was the post before made by runner about the release of the Witcher 2 from CD Projekt, which 4.5 million copies are pirated, even when the product is DRM-free, which probably is more pirated than some other DRM-infested product.

You might wonder, hey, wouldn't that mean even without DRM, its still targeted by heartless pirates? You might say that it is definitely an increase in piracy over a DRM-free product, however, this piece of fact is blatantly one-sided. What about the benefits of declaring themselves a DRM-free company, does CD Projekt get more consumer faith from the customers and could be the underdog that took a stand against DRM? Most likely.

What CD Projekt might have lost in this decision to go DRM-free:
- More pirated products distributed around the net (while it is very viable)
- A chance for DRM-advocating coporations to rub it in CD Projekt's 'failure' (you know who)
- Possibly less profit from sales (possibly, but definitely less sales)

WHat CD Projekt might have benefitted in this decision (and in the long run):
- More Customers will be encouraged to support CD Projekt for their consumer friendly decisions (if the company's clean, then the customer should too)
- A more positive publicity (because everyone likes a customer supporter)
- A larger growing fanbase
- More companies will lead by their example (I'm might not be correct about this, but at least, CD Projekt took a stand towards DRM-free products)

Even when CD Projekt might have loss out in terms of sales, what they got in return is publicity and support from the gamer community, and that is something positive than big corporations like Ubisoft and EA that dont give a hoot about consumer trust and only reply robotic messages in their customer service.

Piracy does not necessarily mean a complete loss of profits, you would never know if someone would definitely buy the product after pirating, or is pirating at a country where the product cannot be reached demographically. While Piracy plays a big fault at the loss of company sales, it is often the scapegoat of the 'evil' enitity that corporations paint at it when there are also other issues that lays fault, equally with piracy, at their own decisions(bad demographic sales, bad strategic marketing, etc.).

 

Dude there's no point in me rehashing my points.

You have an arbitrary set of morals that allows you to ignore existing laws to sate your own greed.

Your inability to think beyond the tiny box you've defined shows to me a lack of imagination and empathy required to understand my arguments.

I just hope that when crimes are perpetrated against you, your loved ones and your friends you show them the same understanding.

What's alarming about it?

The relevant policing agencies found significant evidence that Megaupload were intentionally profiteering of stolen goods. That's against the law, and as such they have taken appropriate steps.

If MU wish to plead their case - they will be given full process. This includes access to very expensive lawyers.

There are only two real issues:

1) How long it's taken.

There are many sites intentionally profiteering off of piracy, it's sad that it's taken so long for actions such as these to be taken. Hopefully this'll set a precedent that will enable faster action in the future - because the gap will be replaced in a blink of an eye.

2) Anonymous's reaction.

Arbitrarily taking websites offline without due process is the problem with SOPA - yet anonymous seem to be happy to do it. Furthermore attacking the justice department etc. because they are upholding the law sends a very dark message to the public.

 

taumel missed this link on that page it's worth mentioning

http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/read/piracy-is-the-best-marketing-ever/016119

 

Wow, quite scary, though you can't make the assumption that reducing piracy equates to making more sales.

Unfortunately given only percentages doesn't really make it useful data. If only 20 people played the game, then 19 were playing pirated copies. Still sounds bad, but then selling only 20 copies isn't a business to start with . Obviously those are deliberately small numbers, by the sound of the game you'd expect it to be far higher in the 10k or 100k range.

However the basic premise remains. Are you really seeing 95% of sales lost or are a large majority of those playing pirated copies never going to be a sale. So whilst you might think you 100k downloaded game is really popular, the reality is that without pirating it would only have 5k downloads. I.e. the use of pirated numbers in relation to sales is artificially boosting your perceived popularity.

What I find more alarming is the number of jailbreaked iPhones since from my limited reading (please correct me if i'm wrong) the phone needs to be jailbreaked to play pirated copies of games. Its alarming in several ways, either the jailbreak community is incredibly large (unlikely I would have thought?), or they are almost exclusively gamers (hence the 95% rate). Yet if we go back to my point above about perceived loss of sales, then maybe its a simple as the jailbreak community being more open to randomly play games since they can be obtained for 'free', but still would have had no intention of buying.

Clearly some percentage of those pirates would have bought the game if they couldn't get a copy, the key is to determine that number. Alas I guess this is an impossible figure to determine, though I would expect it to be very low. no one will refuse something for free, only the ethics of the players stop everyone from doing it illegally, once you charge for it so many other factors come into play as to why someone might not buy it.

Actually one interesting figure would be to check out on say xbox arcade how many downloaded demo's convert into paid sales. Although not a perfect system it would at least provide some basis to evaluate lost sales.

Just to point out i'm in no way condoning pirating, neither do I consider the jailbreaking community to be pure evil, I feel empathy for 'FishLabs' in the perceived loss of earnings, but I really question exactly how many sales are really lost or that if this is anything new in human history, only now we have better means to 'track' it. I guess I may even be questioning the 'business' itself, if actual sales for whatever reason are too low is it really a business?

The sad thing is I can see no answer to this question, people will pirate for whatever reason they think, nearly all forms of protection are either in-effective or draconian or both, which just ends up hurting those that have bought the product in the first place. I wonder if there needs to be a completely different business model. Its tempting to look at something along the lines of a tax for storage mediums (e.g. like analogue cassettes had) but I don't see that working either.

Just checked, I have just under 15% conversion rate from xbox arcade demos to purchases, that's on total of 65 downloads over several years.

 

Huh, do you really need to sell 480k apps on iOS at 99 cents to make $60k? Thats not even net income! The pirates may well have been used as a marketing tool, but on those numbers is there really a business here?

 

It definitely sends a dark message to the public, that people can go to jail just for a video that has copyrighted music played in the background when there is no intention of even using that copyrighted music. That this is the power to be taken away by corporations who can just blow up anything, just like anonymous, anonymous is just showing the explosive power that can be abused hands of the greedy corporate elite.

There is so much wrong is what anonymous was doing, but how the laws currently goes in this world, I doubt anyone would be opposing Anonymous's actions.

http://www.studiobriefing.net/2012/01/u-k-student-ordered-extradited-to-u-s-for-alleged-piracy/

Why pick on a college student in the UK when there are so many other domestic pirates in the US who are effectively leeching out the sales of the affected companies? And there are also comapnies that hosted and even encouraged piracy by uploading files on their servers. If this is a method of deterrance, why punish the common citizen who only at most, make a stratch on the industry, and not companies that promoted piracy in the first place?

 

How about you READ about the arrest before making up such absurd claims.

 

I was referring more to SOPA and PIPA.

 

Then next time please be more careful with your quoting, as that's clearly out of context.

Thanks

 

Show me an upload site (that uses ads) that isn't!
So I guess you want Google and YouTube shut down too? Unfortunately as there is no clear case on this take down, well end up arguing about arbitrary levels of 'intentional' knowledge. I mean Google knowingly link to pirate content and makes lots of profit, why haven't they been shut down?

What about those legitimate users who were using the system who may now find they can't access their content?

Look I don't condone pirating and perhaps MegaUploads needed to be (seen) to be doing more, but this combined with the SOPA approach is just going to lead to a massively policed and less free internet for no benefit at all.

 

I am not quoting out of context.

This is exactly what SOPA would do to megaupload, just in a bigger scale, they will shutdown facebook, twitter, and google, and arrest these owners of said websites who even aren't participating on online piracy. Megaupload's founders were arrested across the world for such a crime who arent even responsible for this mess and even if they try to make a clean search of pirated content, more of those pirated content will still reside in the website's servers.

The bloody politicans are putting their bloody foot in their mouth, it will stop some forms of piracy, but the more hardcore pirates will still find a way to jump over the roadblocks, but at what cost should we sacrifice worldwide internet liberty for a more fortified but eventually flawed security?

Your Support Sopa signature disturbs me...

 

Because you didnt click through and read the article it is linking.

BTW I saw this just now and feel it's appropiate:

 

So because I'm asking you questions and you can't give me answers, that is my lack of imagination and empathy? Me pirating software has nothing to do with greed, If it had to do with greed, I would be pirating all games and not buying any ever. But the fact is that I pirate to test, if I don't like it, the pirated copy is gone. You could then argue, you trial it because your greedy, but I trial it because I think I'm interested in the game and I'd rather check if I like it before throwing down $80 I'm not trying to prove that pirating is just, it certainly isn't.

So how is me borrowing a copy from a friend to trial a game any different than me pirating the game to trial it? The company would still lose/gain the same amount right?

@EVERYONE. Can someone FFS answer my question that I've asked like 5 times and no one has answer.... How are you harming a company by downloading a 10-20 year old game that is no longer for sale? How in any way does that harm a company's profits? or image?

 

I think I started answering this before, may not have pushed submit:

Pirating a copy for yourself does not hurt in any meaningful way. Mass distribution does.

So, lets say you find a copy of that 20 year old game and copy it. No harm done.

But should there be enough demand for a re-release/compilation/remix/etc, the posibility of doing this revisit would be slaughtered by the sudden appearance of mass pirate distribution of the work.

If everyone was able to download Ocarina of Time easily, Nintendo would not had been able to justify a 3D remake of the game for the 3DS with improved graphics.

 

Thank you Tharsman, appreciate it. That makes sense, it would stop profits if the company was planning or did re-release the product in the future. A lot of people that pirated the original wouldn't buy the re-release, me I've bought both the original OoT and the 3DS one, I buy games I enjoy.

 

LOL, headshot

 

Actually, I did, the link there just bothers me...

On topic, you can see the link with the supporters and the nay-sayers of SOPA. What SOPA is just halting the progression of innovation and the new invention of techonogical advancements. You can see that the majority of the supporters of SOPA are in fact, the media, and when a new avenue of competition has risen(ala the internet), the media feels threatened by the need to compete with it, when they are the ones that dominated the flow of information from the 20th century. The SOPA law of technological progression is like saying that televisions in the past should be censored and halt the progression of information technology because it contained the copyright of filmmakers who happened to accidentally film an artist painting his work, which is absurd.

Extreme copyright laws never solve anything, because they only halt technological advancements for the sake of earning more pennies.

 

@LordJilian

Exactly as i see it.

Have you guys all forgotten about how the sons grandma was found guilty of pirating and had to pay i think it was 200k for 5 songs her grandson downloaded? This is a perfect example of how laws are to unfair. the woman didnt know the files were on her pc, but some record label took her to court with their 250k a year retainer on some lawyer and she couldnt fight that. the problem with something like sopa and pipa is the laws are written in a way that money wins, and allows for a broad view of them. as stated by me and others, if you post a picture of you wearing a coke tshirt (loved that example) on a blog you made, you could be in violation of copyright as the coke symbol is a trademark and copyrighted. while the main theme is about piracy, it is not specific enough, and we all know how lawyers are, when they try to get specific they use to much jargon and basically try to write computer code with their laws that will end up with a debug error when approached. they then use their judges who once were those big time payed lawyers to decide in their favor or twist the story to make it sound like their client has lost millions.

as far as older games, look at the old NES and Atari games, most of those are free use now. and you can build a arcade machine (MAME) to play them. Now the catch is this, if you build said machine and load it with the games then sell it. Well you have sold copyrighted material you should not have and can goto jail for it. However if you wipe all the games off the machine and sell just the machine all is well. The new owner can load up the games (or if your nice enough you can help him load them up after its in his home) without penalty. Because you did not sell the games you only sold the machine. This is one of those weird loop holes that exists. But with the laws above we are talking about copyright infringment being broadened to an extreme. This would mean those who post a video on youtube with copyrighted music (i did it once guilty as charged and youtube took it down and i redid the music) instead of it just being removed by youtube you can end up being prosectued for it.

 

As they say, better to live in a pirate island than a dystopian city.

I need to lay off the Deus Ex games.....

EDIT: You got my name wrong btw...-_-

 

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/20111116141248301243.html

Hypocrisy
Hillary Clinton: "Viewership Of Al Jazeera Is Going Up In The United States Because It's Real News
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zW4AKrOIak&feature=related Mar 2, 2011

And much much more (long recording )
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acDcUQoeFxY&feature=related Feb 15, 2011

http://www.pcworld.com/article/24846/what_megauploads_demise_teaches_about_cloud_storage.html

 

@lordjulian

sorry bout that was on my tablet must have auto corrected it and didnt notice.

 

1) How long it's taken.

There are many sites intentionally profiteering off of piracy, it's sad that it's taken so long for actions such as these to be taken. Hopefully this'll set a precedent that will enable faster action in the future - because the gap will be replaced in a blink of an eye.

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/11...ernet-is-death?p=806434&viewfull=1#post806434

The relevant policing agencies found significant evidence that Megaupload were intentionally profiteering of stolen goods. That's against the law, and as such they have taken appropriate steps.

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/11...ernet-is-death?p=806434&viewfull=1#post806434

Hence the legal system.

Probably because they would deny that claim.

Sucks to be you.

The age old adage of 'backup' appears to be useful here.

Policing with due process != arbitrarily taking websites down with minimal process.

Don't confuse the two.

Yes you were/are. I'm talking about a specific - non-sopa - case. You then quoted me and started talking SOPA.

For example this:

Has nothing to do with the megaupload situation so it's clearly out of context.

I've given you plenty of answer, all of which you simply ignore or deny. Hence my decision not to pursue this discussion anymore with you.

That probably says more about you than it does me TBH.

 

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/megaupl...infringement-money-laundering,news-13951.html

Its not just the copyright infringement. It does indeed suck though that people who did have a megaupload account lost their money now as well as lost their files. Real smooth if you kept your backups on their server.

Also selling copyrighted material has always been illegal and has always been prosecuted fairly solidly I would say. I mean guys the law and its enforcement isnt perfect!

It was Sunday morning 6:50am, she was packing the car to go back home to her parents. She puts her imac in, closes boot, locks the car, walks back in, gets the next thing, goes out and the window is smashes and the iMac stolen. In the 2 mins that she was inside to get the next thing.

Wake up, the world isnt perfect and neither is the internet.

The link is meant to be taken with a hint of sarcasm btw.

 

So OK... show me the game that is no longer for sale? that's right almost no companies don't still have it for sale. Maybe retro 8 bit stuff. Even dos versions of ancient games... are still for sale.

 

In my experiance its generaly the last generation that you cant get anymore, Try buying a GameCube game that isent newplay controlls from nintendo. Oh and they generaly sell there 8bit stuff rediculously overpriced(i think kid icarus costs $7).

Of course if we are talking about pre owned games then yes everything is avaliable in some way shape or form

 

7$ is not over priced for a video game at all. But the majority of NES/SNES games aren't for sale, along with a lot of N64 games. I haven't found commander keen for sale anywhere

 

7$ is not over priced for a video game at all. But the majority of NES/SNES games aren't for sale, along with a lot of N64 games. I haven't found commander keen for sale anywhere

 

I was under the impression that Steam had Commander Keen up for sale.

 

It realy is as it most likely took one guy like 5 minutes to port it to 3ds, but im not complaining i got it free

 

If I have made some plastic potatoes and I have put a price sticker on it, then for as long as we live in a city or social environ where laws are enforced, you'll have to pay me for my plastic potatoes regardless if they're totally useless or not. I might have run out of plastic potatoes, but it still does not mean you can copy my plastic potato for your own ends.

I personally think that part of the problem is there are so many copyright laws and nuances that people don't know what the hell they're doing any more.

Frankly, all software 10 years old should be public domain IMHO (for that particular version), but I don't make the laws.

When I'm old and grey I plan to break the law many, many times. And be damned with it all.

 

You good sir, have just made my year excellent! -buys commander keen-

@titanty are you forgetting that it probably took several people a large amount of time to develop the game to begin with?

 

No as nintendo would have made millions then when it was in its prime, i guess they will just keep making more money as in the future that game will proboly be $0.99 and wii games will be the $7 games.

 

And?

 

They would sell more consoles if they gave away NES games with it. Just what i think. Who wouldent buy a 3DS if you got acces to all NES,SNES,GB,GBC,GBA first party games for free?

 

thinking

trusting

 

That is the so funny, i hope he gets done for the crime if SOPA passes.

 

For one, at the start of the Wii's life (and by this i mean full first few years) the console was barely able to be made faster than it was being sold. It was hard to supply the stores with the things. So no matter if Nintendo managed to brainwash the entire planet into wanting Wii's, they would not have been physically able to sell more units.

Retro gaming is also a rather niche market so it's unlikely it would have made that huge of an impact in sales (assuming unlimited wii supplies)

But it's easy to ignore many things in the process of a product's life cycle. Just assuming that the game did only took minutes to port (likely took a minimum of a full work day) the product still has to go through a minimum of a week of Q&A. This means at least 5 dudes playing the game non stop 40 hours until they are certain that the thing has no bugs. At US minimum wage that's about 1450 bucks. If bugs are found things can get nastier and delayed, but due to the cycle the developer (assuming one) must be assigned to the project for a full week. He may get a lot of downtime if he is lucky and be able to browse the web, but he still gets paid his salary (lets say about 70k a year or 1346 a week, the time assigned for the project.)

If no bugs are found, that's it and it goes to the hands of some one that creates an HTML page in the "app store" web site and editorializes that week's new product lineup and front screen to reflect the new product.

A web designer would have to be on salary and usually will handle about 2 titles a week (last time I checked long ago, that was the average release schedule for Wii virtual machine games). Lets say he gets paid a moderate low margin industry standard of 60k a year. That's 1153 a week, or 577 per title.

There is also a marketing layer that sends press releases to magazines so they can hype the next weeks title, but wont go into that (not because of insignificance but because I have no clue how to even ballpark the cost of that stage. Actually.. a single web ad can cost 1000 for a month... so lets guess 4 ads for the title worth of marketing a week should get the same range... so lets stamp 1000k there for marketing (but I'm sure I'm selling this extremely short.

So the count so far: $4,526.

Now they have to make money off this title AND try to break a profit of at least the same amount they invested, so they have to hit about $9,052 in total sales. At least they have to sell 1293 copies to get there, in a very niche market.

You may be able to argue that at 99c they can sell a LOT more than that, but it's not something you can really prove. The iPhone App Store is full of 99c failures that prove it.

Also that's assuming a title that's owned entirely by Nintendo and that they don't have to pay someone like EA or THX or Sega a chunk of the sales. Another thing you can argue is they can cut off their own extra profits from the price but then they anger their partners with "anti competitive pricing."

Another thing I did not count here was going international with the title. The above process may need being repeated (depending on title it may be laxer) for every localized version of the game.

Then there is even the simple energy costs, additional payroll things like 401ks, etc etc. The likeliness that multiple developers may have been involved and not just one, larger Q&A teams... the list of omissions in my estimate are huge.

I'm not saying I like the pricing in the Wii store, I would go for much lower than they have if I was in their shoes (although I would not go 99c) but it's not as simple as saying "it likely took them 10 minutes to port".

 

I'm afraid I'm complete agreement with Tharsman, titanty. That pretty much gels with what experience (and experiences) I have too. The fact is, retro is *incredibly* niche, probably 1% of the market.

There's a reason all this dance game bollocks and angry birds bright coloured S*** is doing well. It's what the other 99% want.

*Your percentage may vary

In any case, a 'simple' port for nintendo, also had to go through a chain of management decisions. Nintendo is nothing if not predictable in it's behaviour. First they discussed if this retro title would in any way impact negatively on their image. Most likely, they discussed the concept of releasing regular retro titles to begin with, and this is one title of many that they've discussed if it's viable or not, or if it's safe to release and so on... thats pretty expensive as well.

On some of them, they probably actually make a loss which is made up on others.

If it was just one man in his bedroom he could sell it for 99c and port it in a day. Not every developer is one man in his bedroom.

 

Not factoring in risk. Not factoring overhead [1.5x to 2x IIRC]. Not factoring in opportunity costs. Not factoring in coming up with proposition and selling it to management.

etc.

So titanty - still think it's a 5 min job?

 

You may be right I’ve never seen them port a game, but I’d say max one day I have had my 3ds crash clicking the multiplayer buttons on gba games. I think it’s most likely some kind of emulator or a click of a button. There a numerous errors with the Nintendo ambassador games they defently haven’t quality tested them to a degree that they have played every corner of the game.

I think that huge first party Gameboy games could be a buying factor, Pokémon emerald would make me buy a console. They could even do it with N64 games or GameCube games i would buy a Wii(I already own one) if i could get Mario Kart Dubble Dash, The Legend Of Zelda Wind Waker, Super Smash Brothers Melee, these wouldn’t be great on Wii as it has backwards compatibility to the GameCube but for Wii U it would be a huge incentive to buy.

Pokémon isn’t a game that would likely be feasible, as its second party but games like Mario, Zelda and Metroid would be the only games that could be done as there only made by Nintendo.


Just my opinion we will likely never know how long it takes them to port a game and how much it costs.

 

Then maybe you were a bit hasty in calling them overpriced...

 

Who knows. Perhaps it really is some little chap sitting in his tiny 5 foot square cubicle in the heart of a high rise tower block deep in Japan, where barely any light penetrates. Perhaps it took him 5 minutes while waiting for his ramen noodles to cook. We'll never know. But deep down you want that to be true.

 

The ESA, not the European Space Agency, could need some marketing.

Greeks + ancient times + piracy = Piratheus.

 

Its not over..

 

I'm a little late but i'd like to voice my opinion...

Well in all honesty pirating cant be helped or stopped.. SOPA wont really change anything.. But perhaps people wouldn't pirate so much if people didn't wanna change $200.000 for software don't get me wrong I'm against pirating but look at a program like photoshop, yes it's a good program, hell its a great program but it costs $1000 how can a young teen or anyone who doesn't have a lot of money afford such a program. Lets talk about Autodesk: 3ds Max now. yeah another great program but it costs $3500 again how can a young teen or anyone who doesn't have a lot of money afford such a program. some would argue you have blender and Gimp. Yeah you do have blender Gimp out there which are free and aren't bad programs but still the industry standards are Autodesk Adobe products. Also these game engine companies which charge close to half a million dollars to use their engine. Yeah they worked very hard on the engine and they deserve to make money off of it but half million is just being greedy. Its not worth that much because for that kinda money you could just make your own engine. I don't have much money, my family doesn't have much money in America's standards my family is poor. I work and save very strictly to get the things i need but its still hard and some people aren't willing to follow their morals and do the right thing so they pirate... That is why people pirate. These companies have plenty of people who will buy these tools and they do make enough money but because they aren't making their full profits they whine and thus bringing this stupid bill to the table...


So to put it simple Greed has caused this problem, and I believe GREED is a sin in most major religions.. What is the world coming to...

 

@ KingCharizard

1) Piracy can certainly be reduced and even eradicated to large degrees. This idea that it's somehow unstoppable is little more than a fantasy. Whether this happens is an entirely different discussion.

2) By pirating software because it's 'the industry standard' you support the monopoly and destroy the competition. This presumably results in worse software and higher prices.

I spent a serious amount of money on a Adobe subscription so I could complete my multi-media course. Others in the class pirated. [Note: distortion of capitalism]. Because, as the excuse is given, 'it's the standard'. It's interesting to note how that the 'industry standard' is being strongly challenged by competition like Unity, HTML5 etc.

Had the teacher decided to change his syllabus to utilize the free alternatives, not only would the students have plenty of work in these new technologies they would have learnt a significantly more useful skill set and got substantially more done in the limited time they had. Instead they brushed over outdated technologies [AS2!] and only had limited skills in a saturated market.

In short - do not be afraid to persevere. Find opportunities in your challenges.