A good part is that you feel like you are not actually hurting the producer and actually you might be a net positive, as most of those people would have not spent 60$ for a game but still contribute to a lively community.
In my case many moons ago not pirating movies and games would have just meant reading more books.
Also the total disconnect between quality and price play a role sometimes.
> A good part is that you feel like you are not actually hurting the producer and actually you might be a net positive, as most of those people would have not spent 60$ for a game but still contribute to a lively community.
Even as someone who abhors copyright as it stands, I can tell you this is bullshit thinking.
(Just to be clear I am not interest in giving a moral justification for piracy)
Game sallers profit from piracy the same way Microsoft and Mathworks would profit from a small population of pirated copies.
you could say the same for mods, If I can mod any game in skyrim why bother having any other game on steam.
Also for most markets the number of people that buy a game after piracy is greater than the number of pirates that would have bought the game anyway (no source on this) especially if mods are hard to impossible to pirate.
UPDATE: I won't claim this is an absolute, I imagine that at least a few (indie)games were deeply damaged by piracy, especially if they were hard to buy legally or not on steam. As I said my intention is not to justify piracy, just to understand its context and consequences
Yup, but at the same time we start seeing games that are new and approaching 100 USD (some of the latest AAA games) in Digital Distribution. It's going both ways in terms of pricing, even if the median price is indeed going down.
Honestly, do I like the Gold/Ultimate/etc. editions? Not particularly (I can stomach it better if there is a minus core game cost upgrade package so I can buy the core and then if I decide I do like the game, upgrade after), but I'm not totally against increasing cost.
You've got games like Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption 2, etc. that are basically epics: you could play them for months (amount of time spent gaming dependent). They're not epic naturally, the teams that put them together made them that way. So in that sense, I feel like you'd still come out okay shelling out for a game like that.
Likewise, graphical fidelity is approaching insane levels. Sure, applications assist in this, but at the end of the day, the developer is still spending a ton of time getting various things right visually. As such, I don't mind shelling out for that.
Dunno, as far as AAA games go, gamers have decided graphics and length of playtime are important. As an example of then vs now, Zelda used to be a game you could beat in a few hours. Breath of the Wild? Not so much. Both of these take increased development time which no one is doing for free. For them to bump up those two, price needs to go up. If it remains the same, honestly, it will eventually be unsustainable.
I dunno, when I was in college/hs I never felt bad about pirating stuff. it's not like I would have actually paid $60 for the game if I hadn't torrented it. now that I actually make a good living from writing closed-source software, it doesn't really seem okay, so I pay for them.
If they have no problems pirating in the first place, why would they have any problem talking about it? It's not like the FBI is going to come after them. I'd rather people be honest about their actions.
They mentioned their games come from the DirectX 9 era. Some may be just too old to find for sale anywhere. Or they re-pirated them after purchasing a legitimate copy (I did that for Mass Effect 3).
These days you pay for the game/media, and then pirate it anyway just so you don't have to deal with the obnoxious DRM on it. (Or sometimes there's no DRM but the game is abandonware that no one can hope to trace the rightsholders of, and you can only get it reasonably by pirating it.)
Giving companies money that use DRM that drives you to pirate promotes the continued use of crippling DRM.
If you don't actually want a game in the form a distributor gives it to you at the price they ask then no, you aren't a lost sale pirating it.
At that, its not some moral black and white. I use IsThereAnyDeal to price track the games I want and only buy them at all time low prices. Mostly because I still have hundreds of titles to get around to but end up programming, drawing, or reading way too much HN all the time to get around to them.
It doesn't matter if I give a developer $1 or $0 if its still not enough to keep the lights on. The same thing happens with music and movies - you need either a sufficiently large or rich enough audience to keep your studio in the green.
Its probably way too deep for the bottom of a thread on Proton but I'm realizing that no matter how copyright is written in the post-Internet era it will always be an appeal for donation. Just because I haven't pirated a game in a decade doesn't make me "moral" or the pirate "immoral" - I only buy games now because its convenient on GOG and Steam to just have them in one place and not have to keep track of independent installers from torrents and to token support Linux developers. But I'm just an increment on a Linux sales column - I'm not actually making them anything close to reasonable revenue for the number of Linux gamers there are, and my marginal impact compared to someone who would have just grabbed it off PirateBay is completely negligible.
I'll keep buying Linux ports to... collect them? But I'm still not a valuable purchase. I'm waiting often years until its under $5 and even then I sometimes say "eh, I'll get it when its cheaper". But its not some moral high ground, and it barely impacts any bottom line - all game developers depend on first week sales at full price. Nothing else keeps the lights on, you will never see revenue volume close to that again. Buying it years later for $2 on sale is practically putting loose change in a beggars cup.
Whew. So I'm not sure if I'd go this route, but I empathize to a degree. I have so many games between Steam, Origin, Uplay, Battle.NET, Epic Games, and other misc. launchers that it is near impossible to keep up.
At this point, and I've said this multiple times, I really wish Microsoft had a way to create a universal launcher/downloader where if I bought a game on Uplay, it shows up in said launcher and can be downloaded from Uplay's servers. Likewise Steam and the rest. This would be better than a Movies Anywhere style program as the various storefronts don't carry almost identical libraries of games. This is a big area where console gamers win: universal game management.
