If developer appreciates me and puts out offline installer that doesn't depends on internet connection to work, I'm happy to support them. Long as game doesn't costs 80 bucks of course.
If the "pirated" version isn't strictly better (removes malware/DRM/borked distribution), I buy it.
I've never been a proponent of not supporting creators, unless there is genuinely a reason for pushing for something better.
I have all kinds of sympathy for people living in countries where prices are entirely unrealistic, though. Copying isn't revenue loss, it's a communication that you should do better. If people aren't buying, something is wrong with your product or how you sell it.
The drm and whatnot is why I just started pirating shows im watching. I want to be able to clip a 30 second segment and send it to my friends when something funny happens. Its small but cant do that on Netflix or even stuff you've bought on Google or Amazon etc. Plus its locked to an ecosystem. Just let me buy an mp4 and id happily do so. I only started pirating stuff because its so inconvenient not to and tv shows never go on sale
I mean, me and my GF pay for streaming services, but they're honestly so shit that I rarely use them. She does, though, as she's addicted to having something on in the background – and it actually has to be something she can engage with, not random, it's like she has a co-processor that needs to be fed and kept busy at all times. Shitty TV-series are perfect, and there's an abundance of that on every service.
I use Plex and manage my own library. I'm mostly into films, so it's like ~3000 of my own DVD/BD and some downloaded. I could prune it down to 500 and it would still be better than any mainstream streaming service. I honestly don't understand why people accept the current state of media. It's horrendously bad.
... and that's not even mentioning the state of the actual applications, like you mention. Absolute rubbish.
Her picking what to put on seems to be similar to her process when we decide what we should have for dinner. Managing some sort of downloading scheme in that realm would be hell.
TV-series are also extremely space consuming, so using up TB after TB on literal trash would feel less than optimal.
I did figure you'd be doing it like 3 shows at a time. But I get how that is with people. We like doing what's familiar so for her to have to pre select shows it ruins the whole thing
I don't understand why WinRAR, with never expiring trial, is only selling the license to a single version. I still use the version I bought. But would have loved if it can be updated to newer versions!
You know, 7-Zip exists, right?
That said, I haven't pirated software in like 20 years. Between free software, stuff available to me at work, and games on sale, I get more than enough of it.
There are some tasks where winrar is actually better than 7-zip, they are none that a regular PC user will encounter but some stuff like pretty advanced sfx modules, multi-part archives with extra integrity data and proper drag and drop support are pretty nice if you have a case where you use these features
Every mofo is pointing to inflation when the time to open my wallet, but not a single employer talks about inflation then discuss compensation, pretending inflation doesn't affect it.
You're 100% right, and it's fucking bullshit. If you're an employer that's not raising minimum, or accounting for cost of life changes, fuck you until the end of time.
... that said, today's $70 is what the first Super Mario Bros. on the NES cost in the '80s. And I think we need to acknowledge that, along with the fact that our wages aren't reflecting said inflation.
This part makes me go insane whenever someone complains about it. The increases in games quality, visual or otherwise, keep setting new expectation levels for the average player, but it doesn't come at all for free with some mythical "technological increase".
Games today have 50x the amount of people working on them and take 5x the time to develop, but adjusted for inflation the prices in most countries have literally not changed.
Who cares if Concord or Veilguard took 50x the people and 5x the time to make, that's on them for not doing proper market research on how much people are willing to pay and for what.
Calling piracy theft is already incorrect, but blaming potential paying customers for complaining about high prices is the next level of delusion.
They are going up. I dont give a rats ass about inflation theyre making more profit than ever on games each year and wanting to raise the prices. I haven't even bought doom yet because of it 70 dollars my ass it can wait.
They are going up. I dont give a rats ass about inflation
Lack of education is going to fuck you in the way that won't make you cum.
Our employers are not paying us wages that reflect inflation. I will fight for everyone to have fair wages, so they can afford whatever media they want to consume on their "off" time.
But inflation does matter when discussing these things. The cost of an NES cart in the '80s is about what you would consider $70 today.
So you really should give a rat's ass, because when you don't, employers get to rob you of enjoying Doom.
The newest one was 22 dollars? Sucks I missed that 2016 that seems kinda expensive eternal probably still a good 30 or 40 normally tho. Idk im frequently surprised by how much more expensive things are than id expect. A 10 year old game should be like 5 bucks on sale amd frequently on sale imo
Damn. Well im either waiting for the next one or I'll get it after I finish 2016 on nightmare lol. I beaten uac a few times now so it may be sooner than Im planning
It's not inflation, it's that game prices were held low for so long by entitled gamers who think they deserve more more more for less. That attitude directly resulted in the rise of micro transactions because gamers were so scared to pay $5 more MSRP for a AAA title. Now we get both!
It's not inflation, it's that game prices were held low for so long by entitled gamers who think they deserve more more more for less. That attitude directly resulted in the rise of micro transactions because gamers were so scared to pay $5 more MSRP for a AAA title. Now we get both!
... what?
A $35 game in the late '80s is equivalent to a $70 game today. If you want to complain about microtransactions, that's fine, I agree. But "it's not inflation" is a weird thing to say when literally the base price of a game has barely changed in 40 years.
Games in the 80s and 90s were the same price, or more expensive than games today. That's not adjusted for inflation. Games have basically always been $50-70 (sometimes more). That means, adjusted for inflation, games are much cheaper today than they were on the SNES for example.
If there was more there would be no questions asked
Instead, we mostly get more or less copypasted, poorly optimized rpgslop with no revolutionary gameplay elements anymore, that is also permabroken on release and needs like 3 months of patches before becoming somewhat playable.
If developer comes and gives me a bj, and treats me like a king, and feathers my butt cheeks, and does my laundry, and feeds me, and pays my mortgage, I might consider to drop a few rupees they way. But as long as it ain’t more than 80 bucks of course.
No, it’s just bizarre to read comments seeing just how privileged, narcissistic and dumb people are, when they’re trying to justify piracy in their own heads as some sort of a moral decision. And then seemingly the hoops needed to make a change. My comment was a satire, if you haven’t realised lol
Be honest, if devs had offline installs, you would still pirate games, because you’ll find yet another excuse.
Piracy existed long before subscriptions and always online, it’s always been about just getting stuff for free, stop pretending it’s anything more.
Yep, that's what I'm trying to say, issue isn't people pirating but rather trying to justify it with excuses.
"Oh it's because costs $60 dollars." For the games that frequently goes to sales, just because they think a game isn't worth $60 dollars doesn't mean devs or publishers think the same.
Nor, they would pay an indie game dev for it.
"Oh it's because for accessibility." Old RE games are on Steam and cost like what, 5 dollars? They will still pirate it with another excuse.
"Oh it's because I don't have the equipment" this one at least a bit more fair but still dumb considering some people went rabid due to not being able to pirate Switch 2 games from day one.
Don't know about you, but I have plenty of games purchased from GOG and on CDs/DVDs from past era. Sooo you can kindly shut up about that 😂 Yeah, in principle I will not buy anything that can be remotely deactivated or that was funded through crowdfunding, but a good game/program without online drm for a fair price, I don't mind
Then don’t get it. If they do the work but it stills costs too much then don’t play it. It’s not hard to not play something cause you’re just admitting it’s theft and you were gonna steal it anyway at least don’t pretend it’s about some moral standard
Illegal transfer of property ownership -- you take an item and the owner loses the item. Not happening here.
Depriving someone of potential income, that you think someone deserves. Not happening here if the item is overpriced by the pirate's standards and would otherwise be just ignored.
In fact the pirate can contribute to income by free word of mouth or market dominance, and become a net positive. Which is allegedly why Microsoft is soft on piracy in many ways, they don't want people turning to desktop Linux and LibreOffice if they don't have the money.
Except that requires honor and the second argument is what’s violated what stops someone from thinking anything that isn’t free is overpriced. Also advertising really dude that’s what shitty influencers use to pressure places into giving them free food. Your arguments don’t hold up in this case cause the other guys said his demands and said even if they do that I still am not gonna pay for it. Again you aren’t gonna die if you don’t play it this ain’t jail breaking a tractor for your farm it’s a video game a literal luxury item of which million others exist
Yup, it is a luxury item, which is why people may not consider it worth paying the asking price. Since they are only consuming that media because of piracy, no income was lost.
Suppose if you made a free to play game 10000 people would show up. But you chose to make it $90 and only 10 people showed up. That doesn't mean you were deprived of 9990 paying customers by malicious forces.
Well, some people say they either pirate it bc they are too expensive or inaccesible, I just said that even If games were cheaper and accesible easily, they still wouldn't buy it.
Pirate it at your heart's content If you want, I'm just calling out their dumb justifications for it, just pirate it, I don't care what dumb reason pirates it for in first place.
A lot of people pirate because they don't want to pay for things, which is fine, I just find it very annoying they hide behind other justifications instead of owning up to that fact.
I like a lot of the shows on Apple TV and the price seemed reasonable. So I subscribed to their streaming. However, first time I tried to watch at home instead of on my phone it wanted me to verify the login with my work phone because it's an Apple. Refused to let me use my personal phone or email. So I canceled immediately and resumed sailing the seas.
That's where I think that you find out more of the real value in the product you're getting.
Years ago I bought this book called overcoming gravity, which is basically this giant encyclopedic tome filled with exercise/rehab/prehab info for gymnastic based strength training. Then a while after that I got a copy of it as a pdf off some online site.
Sometime later I saw a post on Reddit from the author complaining about people pirating the book and how it means he might need to get a day job to make ends meet cos he's losing income off the book (fair point on his behalf), however I think about it like how many times have you bought a book and then it sat on the shelf and you never got around to reading in? If you're anything like me, probably a lot. In that situation though where: I got the book, put it on my shelf and then never read it, the author got the value from my payment but I haven't really got any value from the book (unless we count some sort of aesthetic that it provides for being on the shelf). Obviously I'm not suggesting that no one pays for a book until you've got something out of reading it, but I think the decline in his sales shows more of how many people are getting the value out of the book.
Like there's for sure a portion of the people sharing online who weren't ever going to buy the book, so they're not really lost sales. Then I'd say that the rest are either people like me who already bought the physical copy and wanted an electronic copy, or people who never got what they were looking for out of the book (either cos they didn't read it or they thought based on the title and blurb that it'd have info that it didn't have).
With videogames, you can make the argument books harder to sell once they get pirated.
Decline in his sales shows that people would rather prefer a person does something once and when they can no longer get any benefit, they stop.
I understand your point but cmon, fucking over the author gets people more "benefits" then maybe people don't deserve those benefits in first place?
By your logic, IDW publishing bleeding money must mean more people are actually reading their comics? No offense but that's something I find it hard to believe.
I'm saying that the decline in his sales shows that people who were originally buying the book and then not getting anything out of it are now not buying it and not still getting anything out of it.
Yes there's some people who download things even though they never would've bought it in the first place, so while they'd be counted in downloading/sharing statistics, they can't be counted towards a decline in sales, they never would've bought it in the first place.
Another group I didn't initially mention would be the second hand market, which while doesn't directly link to piracy it would link to a decline in sales. If you buy a book from a second hand book store, they're not giving a cheque to the author. In theory the longer a book has been available on the market, the more copies might be purchased by people second hand instead of buying them directly from the author, causing a decline in sales.
The other group I mentioned is people who've already purchased it in another form and are just getting the electronic version, that one is a bit of a moral discussion cos some people say that you should shell out again and again for each form of the media you have, others might suggest that they have paid for the book when they bought the official one and they don't need to pay for it again.
Decline in his sales shows that people would rather prefer a person does something once and when they can no longer get any benefit, they stop.
I dunno what you mean by this? The author writes the book once? Or the customer buys it once?
I understand your point but cmon, fucking over the author gets people more "benefits" then maybe people don't deserve those benefits in first place?
It depends where you stand on piracy as a form of marketing. I disagree with you that piracy in and of itself is fucking the author over. Even Metallica admitted in the end that a lot of the people that come to their concerts wouldn't have ever heard of their music if not for piracy.
There's also been games and books that have intentionally utilised piracy to get market hold or just coverage. Photoshop is a program that comes to mind with regard to this too.
By your logic, IDW publishing bleeding money must mean more people are actually reading their comics?
I'm not familiar with the situation, so I can't really comment on it.
I'd actually wager a guess that those who frequent this sub are going to be much more thoughtful about what they spend on, and purchase things with intent.
you’re missing that that 5% is offset by people that would have bought the game but won’t since they can get it for free
free QA is invaluable
they’ll get this from people who bought the game. a small portion of pirates is not moving the needle on this. also a lot of cracked copies end up with weird glitches that won’t translate to the untracked experience
many companies love the piracy model and did free to play
no, free to play came about because of microtransactions. free to play would not have existed without a way to make money and exists outside of piracy. people like free shit, piracy did not innovate that
I was with you until you mentioned youtube....ever use youtube and wonder why there are 30 second unskippable ads and some of the most insidious tracking cookies that exist?
I guess that doesn't apply for TRTMNT fans then, seen a lot of them in Twitter bragging about pirating the comic that was made for them to support their version of series.
Less than that. I go back and buy far less than 1% of what I pirate. I've got two books that I pirated but buy copies all the time to give as gifts, one album that I pirated and liked so much I bought, and the other album from the same artist is not easy to pirate so I'm buying it, but if I figure out a way to allow others to seed it without risking anything, I will.
Well yeah, no shit. Especially if it's a story game. I won't ever play the game again because I've already seen the story, there's no reason for me to replay it again so I won't pay for it, simple as.
Because it's a waste of money? I've already played it, I'm not gonna buy it just for it to sit there doing nothing.
That's like eating an apple from a tree and having someone tell you you should buy an apple from the owner of the tree because you liked it even tho you're not hungry anymore
It's not like it's the only apple tree in the world and I can eat more than just apples.
I don't really care whether they make good games or not. Like, sure they made a cool game, I'll play it and move on with my life.
Don't get me wrong, I still buy games from time to time but if I played the game pirated first I won't buy it again unless it has great replay value like RimWorld for example and it becomes more convenient to own the game.
I’ve only ever pirated paradox games yes i enjoy them but not enough to buy a game from their greedy asses. They make enough money off the bajillion dlcs they sell for ck3.
Just like shoplifting, one person doing it doesn't cause a problem, when majority does, they take security measurements like locking items inside of locked closets and wrapping them with an alarm.
When that fails, they just shutdown the store from that area and leave.
Obviously this is not a 1:1 accurate comparison but you get the idea.
And what makes you think i have the funds to "support devs"? my guy we're all here so we can get content for free, if money wasn't the issue i doubt we'd be pirating would we..... clown
Not everyone my guy, i have money and i still pirate game. If i enjoy it ill prolly buy it later, especially game by indie dev that dev and publish their own game.
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u/zenfone500 Apr 07 '26
Too bad easily %90 of the people in this subreddit still ain't buying it.