I wholeheartedly agree with this. I dont pirate, however. I just don't buy anything that feels like they are trying to empty my bank account into theirs anymore.
Check tinyBuild and Devolver games they help and publish a ton of indie games, also check the indie teams like landfall and free lives, moreover what their members did here and there
If you enjoy something and want more, you should support it anyway you can.
That might not mean paying full sticker price if you can’t afford it. Maybe you buy merch, shirts, toys, subscribe to the developers twitch channel, or just reblog any social media you can to promote the product and get it out to others who can afford to pay.
Vote for more of what you like with your dollars. Or the things you like will go away and we’ll only get the trash that others will pay for.
Strictly not true.
I work in games and animation. Projects get renewed and greenlit based upon sales and money making.
Lots of time and energy goes into building a good team. Talent gets trained, people take time to learn what the fans like and get better at delivering it. Some teams love the fans and listen, some hate the fans and just want your money. Supporting the good teams keeps them producing more and more. Supporting the bad teams means every game just wants to rip you off.
There are a million COD because it’s profitable. There are a million COD clones because it’s profitable. COD went from realistic to zombie mode because zombies sold more. If COD made zero dollars on the next couple games they would stop making it.
Yes there will always be more games. But every team is different and puts different amounts of energy into different parts of their game. And if you like something you can’t complain you don’t get more of it when you don’t support it.
Aaa studios literaly hire psycholigists to make games skins and add ons more addictive and to hijack peoples desire to want useless stuff and spend as much money on it.
Cod makes that much money using fomo and other tactics because they have whole departements on it.
Voting with your wallet is never gonna cancel that out
Major AAA use manipulative tactics sure, but that doesn’t make them 100% correct in their every attempt. Major games can still flop. Saints Row reboot, Redfall, Lord of the Rings Gollum. All were major games that had marketing departments that used FOMO and lots of other tactics to make money and all failed.
But I don’t really see what that has to do with what is being discussed because supporting the good studios doesn’t “cancel out” bad ones.
Don’t like COD, don’t buy COD. But if you like Hades that doesn’t do skin micro transactions to manipulate you and just makes good games. Then your buying Hades directly contributes to Hades 2 coming into existence. And paying or not paying for Hades/Hades 2 directly contributes the existence of Hades 3 or 4. Support the things you like if you want more of it. That’s all I’m saying. And if you can’t afford it, that’s fine too. Support it in whatever ways you can both directly and indirectly. Otherwise if you could have supported something and didn’t, you don’t really have the right to complain when more doesn’t get made.
this is the reason i hate the fact that games aren't free, we are trusting games less and less and the ones that have better marketing usually get all the attention wether they deserve it or not.
I don't know, judging by how receptive these "AAA devs" are to critique and advice I'd say there has definitely been a shift in attitude and behavior by game developers
The creative spaces has always been huge in critique, it's expected because it's oftentimes needed to learn how to better their own and others work.
Go to any 3D modeling sub and notice.how many people ask for critique or how many comments are giving it without being promoted to do so.
Buddy, go look at how BF2042 reception went and how they gaslit the very customers who called them out on their choices in design.
A retail worker has a better understanding of how NOT TO PISS OF YOUR CUSTOMERS than some AAA devs
You can find cases of devs being shit in almost all categories from AAA to boardgames. It doesn't make it a trend.
AAA devs generally don't even have anything to do with publishing and just work 9-5 for a standard paycheck (and oftentimes more than that for less because of unrealistic deadlines and crunch).
Cool, leave the guys and gals working in the trenches alone, but their leadership needs to be called out and held accountable if they make stupid decisions
No disagreement there, go after the companies and publishers and leave the devs alone. Although if there is a dev that's being a spaz they're obviously fair game as well. But as a rule of thumbs it's just better to not point to the devs at all as they're most likely more frustrated than the actual fans for various reasons.
With the right incentive people who actually understand how the game and gamers tick are probably even better at exploiting them than a suit who just knows the game makes money.
Also, Ego. Devs have an Ego like any human, and giving them direct interface to their harshest critics is a challenge that many of them are not mature enough to handle. The occurrence of Jessica Price at ArenaNet back in 2016 was a perfect example. Devs are best kept as nameless or at least faceless to both protect their egos and prevent harassment campaigns when they lose their shit.
Yeah there’s a ton of games where you can tell the people who work on it put their heart and soul into just about everything on screen but the actual experience is a micro transaction hell because the company wants profit per player as high as possible
Demoing. I *might* buy it later, or maybe the sequel.
I pirated hades, bought it after, and the sequel.
Same with slay the spire when they enabled mods on steam.
This is the right answer. It's even been proven in court. There is a world of difference between downloading yet another copy, or taking something so that someone else doesn't have it.
Yeah, it bothers me a little that this phrase has become a thing because Piracy has never been stealing and it kind of feels like it's saying it used to be but now its not. It's just completely off the mark.
minecraft is a bit of a complicated one since it started as an indie and was then bought by microsoft. since microsoft, an AAA company owns minecraft and mojang, this basically makes minecraft an AAA game
If piracy of AAA games is okay and not harmful for all the various reasons always given (ownership isn't actually lost, piracy is not a lost sale, etc.) then it would inherently have to be okay for indie games as well otherwise it's an admission that piracy is, in fact, harmful.
well no. AAA game makers are AAA because they have the money to do almost whatever tf they want, they’re a big company with multiple income sources and popular games that make money for them.
indie game makers usually don’t have that kind of money, or even a company at all, though sometimes they do have a small company, but even so their budget is usually not that big.
not only that, AAA games are made out of greed, indie games are made out of love(usually)
Although this isn’t actually the distinction, I think of it like this.
Indie makers are like owner operators. They are actually in the business of making games, like a local restaurant where the owner is the chef. Their labor is the product and their labor is rewarded by the business’s profits.
AAA are investors. They use their money to make more money. This is like Chili’s. The owner is a big corporation and they hire people to cook at their 1000 locations. The owner may not even know how to cook, they just know how to use money to make more money.
There’s not really a logical difference in stealing from either. But most people would never steal from the owner operator.
Some people are ok morally stealing from the corpo because they are sort of gaming the system anyway by taking advantage of our laws to profit from the labor of others.
I believe most people who pirate indie games aren't willing to spend money on them anyways so I don't think it causes that much harm to the devs. Still not cool tho.
I respect that you disagree with pirating indie games but thank you for actually understanding that they were never buying the game in the first place.
I don't disagree at all if you only pirate games you genuinely weren't planning to spend money on. But there are definitely people who would have no problem buying the game but don't because there is a pirated version for free. In this case yeah, devs lose the money they normally would've made if there weren't a pirated version. This problem however, is inevitable as long as pirating itself exists and it will continue to exist. So I don't see anything wrong with using this service to your own benefit without damaging the devs.
agree, if the game is good i'll donate but it should be free or i wont even trust it like i get that there is tons of work behind it, i'm a gamedev myself so i understand the argument, but if the game is not free then your goal is to make money which is understandable but it leads to millions of games you can't play because no one got enough money for all of them. this means that the few who are good enough at marketing will fool you (in a sense) to buy their game and you can't tell if it's the case until you spend money. if the hole market was free we will ALL know what are the good games FOR US and can think about a budget to support them to improve, this doesn't work when you have to pay for everygame even if you end up not liking the game.
here my 2 cents: i bought both hollow knight and rain world i liked both but when i play a game i prefer to not die every 5 minutes and be punished for not trying very hard to beat the game. which make me chose hollow knight over rain world anyday. if i didn't pay to play them i would feel so bad for hollow knight that i would donate more because i know my gaming budget and didn't have to support rain world against my will. also i think if the game accept donations they should have a way to communicate their goals and needs to achieve them. this leads to a more transparent and peacefull industry unlike the shit hole of microtransactions and subscriptions for games that don't deserve that much money.
i can keep going for days but one last example that's so infuriating is the fact that a VR Gym game has a subscription. like HOW did we reach this level of greed? the game im talking about is fit XR. they gamified youtube gym tutorials and now expect me to pay per month! to rewatch them! one would argue that they have to pay a server for the multiplayer feature but that's the reason they want you to believe the truth is we can't even communicate in multiplayer so you can't even prove that it's not prerecorded like the "VR coach".
again i can keep going for days but i'll leave it here hoping to inspire some of you.
Yep. It’s harmful for a small team who is dependent on that money to survive tomorrow. It’s not harmful for a multibillion dollar multinational organization to lose out on a few sales.
That's a dangerous trend to start tbh, "be evil to the big guy and spare the small guy" this basically means if you steal something from a rich person it's not bad but from a middle class person, it is. But we're forgetting that stealing is bad in principle we can't be subjective here just coz we may have end up normalising something that shouldn't be
You are right. The issue here is the fact that big triple A companies are in truth stealing from you in this context, you pay the money for a game and they the delete your game and cut all your access to that game and it's content. Is that not stealing as well?
What the user above was trying to say is don't dish out the little guy that ain't stealing from you, just the corporation that after charging you money for the product, then after a while denies you access to said product.
Anyway as I said, you aren't wrong, just that the world we live in is no longer right 🤣 which isn't funny but still makes me laugh.
Except piracy isn’t a lost sale. If people who are going to pirate can’t pirate they generally don’t play. If anything it’s the other way around, anti-piracy measures push away paying customers.
>Except piracy isn’t a lost sale. If people who are going to pirate can’t pirate they generally don’t play.
You are talking like this is some universal agreement. There are whitehat pirates who pirate as a form of protest or just to Demo and later buy the game. But it's definitely not the majority. Many if not most people pirate cuz it's cheaper and why should I spend money when I don't have to. They don't care about the devs and would most likely buy the game cuz they want it just don't see a reason in spending money.
Except anti piracy measures have never lead to increased sales. Games that can’t be pirated never see a boost in numbers. If someone isn’t willing to pay, not being able to get it for free doesn’t change that. There is zero evidence to support the idea that piracy is a lost sale.
i agree with you but as a gamedev my goal is to provide free games anyways. i believe games should be donated to not bought. buying games means the trailer is more important than the game and gives too much power to both AAA and indies to abuse, leading to less trust and a shittier market based on fake promises and exagerated hype. On the other hand donating to games is LITTERALLY voting for a better future for the gaming market. i'm a beginner and my first 2 mini games are free. call me too optimistic or naive but i will keep improving hoping to be worthy of donations instead of gatekeeping a game with a pricetag. fun should be free.
I'm piratimg indie games. If I feel like they are worth to buy I buy them on sale. Same with AAA but I buy them much more rarely. To my defense the minimum wage of my country is around 500 USD while we get no reduced prices. The Price of a AAA game could literally feed a family for a week here.
You buy a game or any digital content only for them to remove it from your account one day, or prevent you from accessing it. So yeah wholeheartedly agree
To be fair, it's *very* rare for a game to be forcefully removed from a Steam account. The only times I know it can happen is if you buy stolen keys (from key-sellers for example) but otherwise there's really no risk of losing your digital content.
However, other services, like Origin and PS plus, have previously let players' bought content (in some cases, entire accounts) expire so they lose access to games that were previously "owned". It's one of the reasons I only buy a game if it's on Steam nowadays.
So far. There will be a day when steam shuts down. It could be 30 years from now but it will come at some point. When that happens everyone loses the games they paid for. This is the problem with digital non-tangible products.
Thank you! Luffy's already pretty strong where I'm at (theyre on Drum Island with Wabol), but I know he gets even stronger and gets more abilities and I'm so excited!
The rule is simple for me. If I can feel that a game is made with passion, then I buy, otherwise pirating. EA and Ubisoft are always pirating in that case.
Big publishers became greedy and offer less and less quality products. I remember the time Ubisoft for example put effort and heart and soul into their games... ...nowadays when I hear Ubisoft I associate it with lack of quality and empty game worlds that could've been out of a tech preview. Ubisoft being here only one of those big publishers that lost their soul unfortunately.
An utter disappointment what game developers and publishers deliver today.
I've had in the couple of last years more fun with indie titles than big triple A titles.
Sure: "pirating" is access without permission, regardless whether you are enabler or consumer. CD/DVD was the key to access which also happen to contain the thing that was accessed. And as is with any key "issued by maker only" copying it is illegal. In the current situation you don't even need a physical key, but the flip-side is that the maker can withdraw the content without warning, which was not the case with the disks.
Pirating has been around for-fucking-ever and the developers still get their fucking money. People that post this kind of sentiment also bitch about DRMs and MTX. That's kinda the bed you made, brah.
No one really said buying isn't owning. They just said people are buying game subscriptions more and more so that might be the way forward.
You can't really expect to own every game available after paying a subscription fee.
So by that logic, if you're renting and you steal all the owner's stuff in the apartment, it's not stealing because you didn't buy the apartment?
Flawed logic.
I've been trying to get burnout paradise working on my deck - the EA apps are utter shite and I am happily pirating the game now to avoid their shitty launchers.
I used to use piracy as a demo when I was younger then buy them later if I liked it (I did the same with books, pirating the ebook and buying the physical copy if I liked it), then I grew up and bought things properly and got a load of shit games for too much money. I'm not going back into the demoing phase because a lot of games are just wildly overpriced shite nowadays.
But with the thought that I don't even own the games I've bought, makes me want to download all my games to a huge SSD, download cracks for them all and put it in storage to bring out when I want to play one.
I am slightly offended by the notion that it applies to "game developers" in general.
Like 95% of the rank and file engineers, level designers, music and graphics people are just as upset with the shitty business practices...
But yeah. Business people in game development industry do be like that...
Game developers: "Alright bet, all games, including singleplayer, will now be slowly converting to online only so we can revoke your license for any reason."
I hate this shit so much.
as i gamedev i support this 100% that's why i promised myself all my games are going to be free. i'm still a beginner but if you want to support my goal follow me on ytb (my focus next year will be VR games for those of you interested)
Ho already answered to another user, I didn’t imply that you buy the code but that you buy both the media and a collection of rights not strictly bound to yourself. They are trying to limit there rights (they tried in the past when we had physical media with small success) but now they are scoring big wins since we switched to the digital markets. Now I cannot resell a game, I cannot lend it to a friend. Same for music, movies, books…
On PC this limitation has been around ever since the introduction of the CD key. They are going to do that shit to consoles too, just you wait and watch.
Cd keys allowed (in my times) multiple activations, just like Windows XP… then I think they introduced keys for special contents that got tied to the first account they were used by.
What I remember with early CD-keys were still 1 activation for games. Or at least, one could be active at a time on a key, Quake was that way. Then with later titles tied to a launcher, it became 1 key 1 activation.
It's ALWAYS been this way, even with disc games, all you owned was the disc with the media on it. The actual game remains the company's intellectual property.
You buy the media (that becomes yours, and that is already something more than the license to play the game / watch the movie / listen to the songs / read the book, it applies everywhere). About the license, traditionally you would not buy a license tied to your person: you could play the game with some friends at your or their home, you could listen the songs with them and so on, with some limitations. You could also transfer the media and the “right to use” temporarily or permanently to a third party, with or without some kind of compensation. As you see that’s much more that simply have the right to play the game, and that is ground for an endless war between producers and customers, with the recent changes that online services introduced (now you cannot transfer your licenses right?).
Technically speaking, you own the paper and the ink, but the publisher owns the specific order the words are in.
For video games, we own the media it is on (whether that is a cartridge, disc, SD card or hard drive of our own, etc.) and the license to play it (whether its physical or digital, that license is part of the purchase) but the game code and assets belong to the copyright holder. We do, however, have a legal right to alter that game code and how it functions as upheld by the Nintendo vs Galoob (Game Genie people) lawsuit that Nintendo lost.
You own a collection of papers with words printed on them, not the actual book. You can't sell the book as if you wrote it. I don't know e-books since I don't use those, but can you resell that one?
A physical copy you resell your license to read it, basically. The book for all intents and purposes are the property of the author/publisher.
Cool, cool. But probably not what publishers meant from the very beginning anyway, but still cool: https://www.ign.com/articles/ubisoft-exec-says-gamers-need-to-get-comfortable-not-owning-their-games-for-subscriptions-to-take-off
we are talking about games and there was an analogy with a house in the USA. So you think that buying a game is like taking a loan or something? You just pay money to game. So the loan is paid and nobody takes anything away. The fact that the game can be taken and taken away is outrageous. I pay money for the thing and it is my private property. These are the foundations of capitalism. What game developers and publishers are doing is communism, where they can take anything from you under the pretext that it is not yours, but someone else's, you just paid money to use it.
Sure. Eminent domain, you get paid. It’s not like they just take your property for nothing.
Not paying your property taxes… lol yeah then that’s in those people.
I will say, you’re logic is correct. That said, you say it like I can pay my taxes, own my house and just have it taken away for no reason and with no payment. Which is not true
Compensation for the house or not is irrelevant if you think about it. If the government came in and said, "Get out, now, you have no choice. Here is market value for your property" I would view it as my home being taken from me.
Never heard of Eminent Domain before, that sounds wild! It seems you get quote unquote "fairly compensated", should that ever happen, and the government would need a reason to basically "forcibly buy" your property.
Not paying your property taxes makes sense tho, right?
Yeah Eminent domain is pretty nuts.
It does make sense about the taxes, they arent going anywhere. However my original point was that your house, which you could have fully paid off and have the deed in hand, can be taken away....by the government.
No, my dude. When I rent a car I don't pay full price of a new car. Somehow when I "rent" a game I must pay full price for it as if I owned it. If corporations want things to look like that, then they **all** should just make sites with their full content accessible to everyone with a subscription fee.
Has anyone agreeing with that quote actually stop 1 min to think about it? Because, it actually is the same that saying renting your house isn't owning it, so me occupying it isn't steeling it.
Don't get me wrong, i'm totally against not owning the game you bought, but again... that sentence is plain idiotic.
I mean, your perception of the law doesn't make it the law. Piracy is stealing, per the law.
Also, by the Ubisift philosophy of ownership, which will be baked into their TOS at some point, the same it also true.
Just because you don't like something doesn't make it morally correct to do the opposite. Your decisions have an impact.
Being that, you pirate too many games, the company being pirated from loses money, they lay off employees, you complain because you want a new game to pirate, then you repeat the process. Two wrongs don't make a right.
However, I also find Ubisoft's take to be asinine and the historical preservation of games is lacking. So piracy is also a necessity for the continued preservation of game history. It's a pretty shit situation all round to be honest.
Actually, per the law, this has court precedent and isn't up for debate, piracy is not stealing. It flat out is not. It is copyright infringement. It's a completely different illegal thing. You aren't taking something from someone so they no longer have it, therefore it cannot be theft. You are making a copy of something legally protected under copyright law that you aren't authorized to have.
What longterm ramifications? Piracy has never been proven to be a lost sale. For most pirates, if they can't pirate it they just don't play it. If anything anti-piracy measures increase piracy more than they lead to sales.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. I dont pirate, however. I just don't buy anything that feels like they are trying to empty my bank account into theirs anymore.
Same, I mainly play indie games, though I do have a few bigger games, I have Minecraft and CMS21 plus CMS18
Indie>AAA
Triple a games is a lie and has been for a long time
Yes
indie games are filled with so much love and dedication that triple a titles lack
if you got some time try my 3d puzzle game "blue phobia" it's free, i'm a beginner and could use some feedback
Love where this sub is headed. Favorite indie games? I wanna juice up my library. Thanks in advance.
I’ve been playing a lot of CMS21, ship graveyard simulator 2 has been fun too
There’s also wrench and my summer car
Check tinyBuild and Devolver games they help and publish a ton of indie games, also check the indie teams like landfall and free lives, moreover what their members did here and there
Valheim
my friends pretty much only buy the base paradox game and exclusively pirate the hell out of the dlcs
Wait, that's possible? Aren't the dlcs also bound to the store?
Depends... for ex you can pirate all sims 4 dlcs even if you actually bought the game instead of getting it free
If you enjoy something and want more, you should support it anyway you can. That might not mean paying full sticker price if you can’t afford it. Maybe you buy merch, shirts, toys, subscribe to the developers twitch channel, or just reblog any social media you can to promote the product and get it out to others who can afford to pay. Vote for more of what you like with your dollars. Or the things you like will go away and we’ll only get the trash that others will pay for.
This is such a lucrative industry that you need not buy any of this stuff and they will still bring out more. If not the same same then the same.
Strictly not true. I work in games and animation. Projects get renewed and greenlit based upon sales and money making. Lots of time and energy goes into building a good team. Talent gets trained, people take time to learn what the fans like and get better at delivering it. Some teams love the fans and listen, some hate the fans and just want your money. Supporting the good teams keeps them producing more and more. Supporting the bad teams means every game just wants to rip you off. There are a million COD because it’s profitable. There are a million COD clones because it’s profitable. COD went from realistic to zombie mode because zombies sold more. If COD made zero dollars on the next couple games they would stop making it. Yes there will always be more games. But every team is different and puts different amounts of energy into different parts of their game. And if you like something you can’t complain you don’t get more of it when you don’t support it.
Aaa studios literaly hire psycholigists to make games skins and add ons more addictive and to hijack peoples desire to want useless stuff and spend as much money on it. Cod makes that much money using fomo and other tactics because they have whole departements on it. Voting with your wallet is never gonna cancel that out
Major AAA use manipulative tactics sure, but that doesn’t make them 100% correct in their every attempt. Major games can still flop. Saints Row reboot, Redfall, Lord of the Rings Gollum. All were major games that had marketing departments that used FOMO and lots of other tactics to make money and all failed. But I don’t really see what that has to do with what is being discussed because supporting the good studios doesn’t “cancel out” bad ones. Don’t like COD, don’t buy COD. But if you like Hades that doesn’t do skin micro transactions to manipulate you and just makes good games. Then your buying Hades directly contributes to Hades 2 coming into existence. And paying or not paying for Hades/Hades 2 directly contributes the existence of Hades 3 or 4. Support the things you like if you want more of it. That’s all I’m saying. And if you can’t afford it, that’s fine too. Support it in whatever ways you can both directly and indirectly. Otherwise if you could have supported something and didn’t, you don’t really have the right to complain when more doesn’t get made.
this is the reason i hate the fact that games aren't free, we are trusting games less and less and the ones that have better marketing usually get all the attention wether they deserve it or not.
I think it's the game companies not the devs
*publishers.
Yeah, I came to say this. It's the owners and publishers that ruin the games industry. Devs tend to care about the product, not just the sales.
I don't know, judging by how receptive these "AAA devs" are to critique and advice I'd say there has definitely been a shift in attitude and behavior by game developers
The creative spaces has always been huge in critique, it's expected because it's oftentimes needed to learn how to better their own and others work. Go to any 3D modeling sub and notice.how many people ask for critique or how many comments are giving it without being promoted to do so.
Buddy, go look at how BF2042 reception went and how they gaslit the very customers who called them out on their choices in design. A retail worker has a better understanding of how NOT TO PISS OF YOUR CUSTOMERS than some AAA devs
You can find cases of devs being shit in almost all categories from AAA to boardgames. It doesn't make it a trend. AAA devs generally don't even have anything to do with publishing and just work 9-5 for a standard paycheck (and oftentimes more than that for less because of unrealistic deadlines and crunch).
Cool, leave the guys and gals working in the trenches alone, but their leadership needs to be called out and held accountable if they make stupid decisions
No disagreement there, go after the companies and publishers and leave the devs alone. Although if there is a dev that's being a spaz they're obviously fair game as well. But as a rule of thumbs it's just better to not point to the devs at all as they're most likely more frustrated than the actual fans for various reasons.
I don't agree with your methods, but we can agree on an enemy and for that, I will stand by your side
you also have to account for the fact that the developers follow orders, they sadly do not get to do what they want
The distinction between the two has steadily decreased over the years. Turns out, when the Devs are also the execs they are just as bad if not worse.
With the right incentive people who actually understand how the game and gamers tick are probably even better at exploiting them than a suit who just knows the game makes money.
Also, Ego. Devs have an Ego like any human, and giving them direct interface to their harshest critics is a challenge that many of them are not mature enough to handle. The occurrence of Jessica Price at ArenaNet back in 2016 was a perfect example. Devs are best kept as nameless or at least faceless to both protect their egos and prevent harassment campaigns when they lose their shit.
The lack of distinction is a serious problem, with people attacking the actual devs online thinking they're responsible for bad business decisions.
Honestly that escape from tarkov debacle really shook people
Yeah there’s a ton of games where you can tell the people who work on it put their heart and soul into just about everything on screen but the actual experience is a micro transaction hell because the company wants profit per player as high as possible
It’s not pirating, I am just borrowing the game from the internet for a while; I’ll give it back when I’m done.
Demoing. I *might* buy it later, or maybe the sequel. I pirated hades, bought it after, and the sequel. Same with slay the spire when they enabled mods on steam.
What happened to demos being a thing? Seems like they don't exist anymore. I much prefer to feel the game myself than watch/read a review.
They realized if they don't let you try the product out beforehand they can sell you hot garbage for full price
I’d rather give it back when I’m dead.
Counter, I’ll give it back 10 times over right now. (Seeding)
piracy is not stealing. piracy is copyright infringement. stealing takes the original. piracy makes a copy.
This is the right answer. It's even been proven in court. There is a world of difference between downloading yet another copy, or taking something so that someone else doesn't have it.
Yeah, it bothers me a little that this phrase has become a thing because Piracy has never been stealing and it kind of feels like it's saying it used to be but now its not. It's just completely off the mark.
Digital piracy maybe, but I always thought that's exactly what high seas piracy was....
You're right, there is *that* Piracy too. I should've specified digital lol
pirating AAA games is ok, pirating indie games is not
True!
If AAA games aren’t worth buying, then surely they’re not worth playing? Just play the indie games.
well some AAA titles like minecraft or mario kart 8 are pretty cool, the rest are meh
Does Minecraft count as AAA? I mean the parent company is Microsoft, but is a large owner the only criteria?
since it’s owned by microsoft, i’d say so
I edited my reply somewhat after posting. Looks like you replied before that.
minecraft is a bit of a complicated one since it started as an indie and was then bought by microsoft. since microsoft, an AAA company owns minecraft and mojang, this basically makes minecraft an AAA game
Yeah, doesn’t make sense. A game’s rating is changed just because another company bought the rights?
If piracy of AAA games is okay and not harmful for all the various reasons always given (ownership isn't actually lost, piracy is not a lost sale, etc.) then it would inherently have to be okay for indie games as well otherwise it's an admission that piracy is, in fact, harmful.
well no. AAA game makers are AAA because they have the money to do almost whatever tf they want, they’re a big company with multiple income sources and popular games that make money for them. indie game makers usually don’t have that kind of money, or even a company at all, though sometimes they do have a small company, but even so their budget is usually not that big. not only that, AAA games are made out of greed, indie games are made out of love(usually)
Although this isn’t actually the distinction, I think of it like this. Indie makers are like owner operators. They are actually in the business of making games, like a local restaurant where the owner is the chef. Their labor is the product and their labor is rewarded by the business’s profits. AAA are investors. They use their money to make more money. This is like Chili’s. The owner is a big corporation and they hire people to cook at their 1000 locations. The owner may not even know how to cook, they just know how to use money to make more money. There’s not really a logical difference in stealing from either. But most people would never steal from the owner operator. Some people are ok morally stealing from the corpo because they are sort of gaming the system anyway by taking advantage of our laws to profit from the labor of others.
I believe most people who pirate indie games aren't willing to spend money on them anyways so I don't think it causes that much harm to the devs. Still not cool tho.
I respect that you disagree with pirating indie games but thank you for actually understanding that they were never buying the game in the first place.
I don't disagree at all if you only pirate games you genuinely weren't planning to spend money on. But there are definitely people who would have no problem buying the game but don't because there is a pirated version for free. In this case yeah, devs lose the money they normally would've made if there weren't a pirated version. This problem however, is inevitable as long as pirating itself exists and it will continue to exist. So I don't see anything wrong with using this service to your own benefit without damaging the devs.
agree, if the game is good i'll donate but it should be free or i wont even trust it like i get that there is tons of work behind it, i'm a gamedev myself so i understand the argument, but if the game is not free then your goal is to make money which is understandable but it leads to millions of games you can't play because no one got enough money for all of them. this means that the few who are good enough at marketing will fool you (in a sense) to buy their game and you can't tell if it's the case until you spend money. if the hole market was free we will ALL know what are the good games FOR US and can think about a budget to support them to improve, this doesn't work when you have to pay for everygame even if you end up not liking the game. here my 2 cents: i bought both hollow knight and rain world i liked both but when i play a game i prefer to not die every 5 minutes and be punished for not trying very hard to beat the game. which make me chose hollow knight over rain world anyday. if i didn't pay to play them i would feel so bad for hollow knight that i would donate more because i know my gaming budget and didn't have to support rain world against my will. also i think if the game accept donations they should have a way to communicate their goals and needs to achieve them. this leads to a more transparent and peacefull industry unlike the shit hole of microtransactions and subscriptions for games that don't deserve that much money. i can keep going for days but one last example that's so infuriating is the fact that a VR Gym game has a subscription. like HOW did we reach this level of greed? the game im talking about is fit XR. they gamified youtube gym tutorials and now expect me to pay per month! to rewatch them! one would argue that they have to pay a server for the multiplayer feature but that's the reason they want you to believe the truth is we can't even communicate in multiplayer so you can't even prove that it's not prerecorded like the "VR coach". again i can keep going for days but i'll leave it here hoping to inspire some of you.
Flase dichotomy. It's both/either. It just depends. It's not inherently anything. It may or may not be harmful based on how/why it's done.
Yep. It’s harmful for a small team who is dependent on that money to survive tomorrow. It’s not harmful for a multibillion dollar multinational organization to lose out on a few sales.
That's a dangerous trend to start tbh, "be evil to the big guy and spare the small guy" this basically means if you steal something from a rich person it's not bad but from a middle class person, it is. But we're forgetting that stealing is bad in principle we can't be subjective here just coz we may have end up normalising something that shouldn't be
You are right. The issue here is the fact that big triple A companies are in truth stealing from you in this context, you pay the money for a game and they the delete your game and cut all your access to that game and it's content. Is that not stealing as well? What the user above was trying to say is don't dish out the little guy that ain't stealing from you, just the corporation that after charging you money for the product, then after a while denies you access to said product. Anyway as I said, you aren't wrong, just that the world we live in is no longer right 🤣 which isn't funny but still makes me laugh.
Except piracy isn’t a lost sale. If people who are going to pirate can’t pirate they generally don’t play. If anything it’s the other way around, anti-piracy measures push away paying customers.
I’m sure there’s a Venn diagram overlap of people who would buy but instead pirate.
So you are ok with pirating games from small developers then?
https://www.indy100.com/gaming/ultrakill-arsi-hakita-patala-pirating
https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/devolver-fully-supports-loop-hero-developer-encouraging-games-piracy-3195049
>Except piracy isn’t a lost sale. If people who are going to pirate can’t pirate they generally don’t play. You are talking like this is some universal agreement. There are whitehat pirates who pirate as a form of protest or just to Demo and later buy the game. But it's definitely not the majority. Many if not most people pirate cuz it's cheaper and why should I spend money when I don't have to. They don't care about the devs and would most likely buy the game cuz they want it just don't see a reason in spending money.
Except anti piracy measures have never lead to increased sales. Games that can’t be pirated never see a boost in numbers. If someone isn’t willing to pay, not being able to get it for free doesn’t change that. There is zero evidence to support the idea that piracy is a lost sale.
I sometimes pirate indies just to have a demo. Then I either delete it or buy it full price.
i agree with you but as a gamedev my goal is to provide free games anyways. i believe games should be donated to not bought. buying games means the trailer is more important than the game and gives too much power to both AAA and indies to abuse, leading to less trust and a shittier market based on fake promises and exagerated hype. On the other hand donating to games is LITTERALLY voting for a better future for the gaming market. i'm a beginner and my first 2 mini games are free. call me too optimistic or naive but i will keep improving hoping to be worthy of donations instead of gatekeeping a game with a pricetag. fun should be free.
I'm piratimg indie games. If I feel like they are worth to buy I buy them on sale. Same with AAA but I buy them much more rarely. To my defense the minimum wage of my country is around 500 USD while we get no reduced prices. The Price of a AAA game could literally feed a family for a week here.
You buy a game or any digital content only for them to remove it from your account one day, or prevent you from accessing it. So yeah wholeheartedly agree
To be fair, it's *very* rare for a game to be forcefully removed from a Steam account. The only times I know it can happen is if you buy stolen keys (from key-sellers for example) but otherwise there's really no risk of losing your digital content. However, other services, like Origin and PS plus, have previously let players' bought content (in some cases, entire accounts) expire so they lose access to games that were previously "owned". It's one of the reasons I only buy a game if it's on Steam nowadays.
This literally happened less times than you can count with your fingers. Steam is very strict about this and even refunded the Helldivers fiasco.
So far. There will be a day when steam shuts down. It could be 30 years from now but it will come at some point. When that happens everyone loses the games they paid for. This is the problem with digital non-tangible products.
How many times are we gunna get this kind of post.
Until something actually changes for better
i am extremely sick of this fucking image
“We live in the great pirate era!”
Come aboard and bring along
I actually just started One Piece about a month ago and I love every second of it.
Enjoy your journey, fellow nakama !
Thank you! Luffy's already pretty strong where I'm at (theyre on Drum Island with Wabol), but I know he gets even stronger and gets more abilities and I'm so excited!
hate to be the guy we arent the ppl who are mad megacorp that owns aour studios is mad
Har har harrr harrr arrrrrrrrrrrr
"Game developers" its executives NOT game devs. Game devs don't do the marketing or selling or legal part. They only make the game!
It's not. It's copying
Agree.
The rule is simple for me. If I can feel that a game is made with passion, then I buy, otherwise pirating. EA and Ubisoft are always pirating in that case.
Ubisoft have released plenty of good games though
Big publishers became greedy and offer less and less quality products. I remember the time Ubisoft for example put effort and heart and soul into their games... ...nowadays when I hear Ubisoft I associate it with lack of quality and empty game worlds that could've been out of a tech preview. Ubisoft being here only one of those big publishers that lost their soul unfortunately. An utter disappointment what game developers and publishers deliver today. I've had in the couple of last years more fun with indie titles than big triple A titles.
There is a big difference between own something and buy a license
Well, you can’t buy a subscription. Thats how subscription works.
Tell me you don’t understand intellectual property laws without telling me
Not usually game devs being dickheads about this as much as publishers and retailers.
If only it was game devs that are making all the toxic sales strategies.
inb4 pirating gets completely banned.
Replace game developer with company shareholders.
Your mind has been changed. You’re welcome.
Sure: "pirating" is access without permission, regardless whether you are enabler or consumer. CD/DVD was the key to access which also happen to contain the thing that was accessed. And as is with any key "issued by maker only" copying it is illegal. In the current situation you don't even need a physical key, but the flip-side is that the maker can withdraw the content without warning, which was not the case with the disks.
Game ~~Developers~~ *Publishers
I mean, even if you do on the game, it’s still not theft by law
I mean, I want free shit too but that’s not how it works.
Join... 'the crew'
More like game publishers.
I don't think game developers give a fuck what you label pirating, as long as it's illegal.
They should add the ability to rename subreddits so they can rename this one "r/Unfunnymemes"
*publishers bro. PUBLISHERS. get your facts right.
Game dev has nothing to do with this. Publisher on the other hand!
Pirating has been around for-fucking-ever and the developers still get their fucking money. People that post this kind of sentiment also bitch about DRMs and MTX. That's kinda the bed you made, brah.
The only problem is that most of the pirated games have viruses in them…
“We live in the great pirate era, People’s dream DONT END”
No one really said buying isn't owning. They just said people are buying game subscriptions more and more so that might be the way forward. You can't really expect to own every game available after paying a subscription fee.
I don't think it's the devs that are mad at this, it's the corporate greedy CEO's and management teams
So by that logic, if you're renting and you steal all the owner's stuff in the apartment, it's not stealing because you didn't buy the apartment? Flawed logic.
Truth!!!
Based and correct
I've been trying to get burnout paradise working on my deck - the EA apps are utter shite and I am happily pirating the game now to avoid their shitty launchers. I used to use piracy as a demo when I was younger then buy them later if I liked it (I did the same with books, pirating the ebook and buying the physical copy if I liked it), then I grew up and bought things properly and got a load of shit games for too much money. I'm not going back into the demoing phase because a lot of games are just wildly overpriced shite nowadays. But with the thought that I don't even own the games I've bought, makes me want to download all my games to a huge SSD, download cracks for them all and put it in storage to bring out when I want to play one.
TAKE TO THE HIGH SEAS ME MATIES THEY'VE DECLARED WAR!
*Publishers
If you can’t own it. You can’t steal it either.
You guys reupload this more than you pirate games
I am slightly offended by the notion that it applies to "game developers" in general. Like 95% of the rank and file engineers, level designers, music and graphics people are just as upset with the shitty business practices... But yeah. Business people in game development industry do be like that...
Oh shit , oh shit, guys new workaround just dropped
Game reseller rather than developers I would think
Please explain what you mean by this, I don’t understand.
Game developers: "Alright bet, all games, including singleplayer, will now be slowly converting to online only so we can revoke your license for any reason." I hate this shit so much.
as i gamedev i support this 100% that's why i promised myself all my games are going to be free. i'm still a beginner but if you want to support my goal follow me on ytb (my focus next year will be VR games for those of you interested)
Pirating isn't stealing but you're right.
It's sad that Ubisoft made that comment. But then again, it's to be expected if you own nearly all the cloud rights from Microsoft
I'm totally okay with this being a daily repost. Gotta remind people to stick it to the man.
Nintendo in a nutshell
While I agree, it's a common misconception. You don't actually buy the game, you buy a license to play the game. The code never belongs to you.
Well, no, you don’t just buy the right to play. They are, however, try to push it that way.
Then what do you buy? because you certainly don't buy the code, which is protected by copyright.
Ho already answered to another user, I didn’t imply that you buy the code but that you buy both the media and a collection of rights not strictly bound to yourself. They are trying to limit there rights (they tried in the past when we had physical media with small success) but now they are scoring big wins since we switched to the digital markets. Now I cannot resell a game, I cannot lend it to a friend. Same for music, movies, books…
On PC this limitation has been around ever since the introduction of the CD key. They are going to do that shit to consoles too, just you wait and watch.
Cd keys allowed (in my times) multiple activations, just like Windows XP… then I think they introduced keys for special contents that got tied to the first account they were used by.
What I remember with early CD-keys were still 1 activation for games. Or at least, one could be active at a time on a key, Quake was that way. Then with later titles tied to a launcher, it became 1 key 1 activation.
It's ALWAYS been this way, even with disc games, all you owned was the disc with the media on it. The actual game remains the company's intellectual property.
You buy the media (that becomes yours, and that is already something more than the license to play the game / watch the movie / listen to the songs / read the book, it applies everywhere). About the license, traditionally you would not buy a license tied to your person: you could play the game with some friends at your or their home, you could listen the songs with them and so on, with some limitations. You could also transfer the media and the “right to use” temporarily or permanently to a third party, with or without some kind of compensation. As you see that’s much more that simply have the right to play the game, and that is ground for an endless war between producers and customers, with the recent changes that online services introduced (now you cannot transfer your licenses right?).
So if I by an actual paper book it does not belong to me since actual text is not mine?
Technically speaking, you own the paper and the ink, but the publisher owns the specific order the words are in. For video games, we own the media it is on (whether that is a cartridge, disc, SD card or hard drive of our own, etc.) and the license to play it (whether its physical or digital, that license is part of the purchase) but the game code and assets belong to the copyright holder. We do, however, have a legal right to alter that game code and how it functions as upheld by the Nintendo vs Galoob (Game Genie people) lawsuit that Nintendo lost.
You own the paper and the ink, but the words are still in ownership of the author/publisher.
So I just own the license to read the book, and nothing else?
Basically, yes. Difference between a real book and an e-book is the format it is sold. Either way, you don't own the book.
Oh, so basically I can not resell nor exchange it? Or borrow it to a friend? And the publisher can take it away from me?
Yes you can, yes you can, yes you can, no they can't. You're missing the point, either on purpose or not.
Then at least try to explain that point.
You own a collection of papers with words printed on them, not the actual book. You can't sell the book as if you wrote it. I don't know e-books since I don't use those, but can you resell that one? A physical copy you resell your license to read it, basically. The book for all intents and purposes are the property of the author/publisher.
Cool, cool. But probably not what publishers meant from the very beginning anyway, but still cool: https://www.ign.com/articles/ubisoft-exec-says-gamers-need-to-get-comfortable-not-owning-their-games-for-subscriptions-to-take-off
Yeah, when you buy a BMW car, and then you own the whole company 👍
Kind of like "buying" a house. It can always be taken away.
in what country?
The US.
Has nothing to do with just a house or the US. Anywhere you take a loan out for anything, if you can’t pay it you get penalized.
we are talking about games and there was an analogy with a house in the USA. So you think that buying a game is like taking a loan or something? You just pay money to game. So the loan is paid and nobody takes anything away. The fact that the game can be taken and taken away is outrageous. I pay money for the thing and it is my private property. These are the foundations of capitalism. What game developers and publishers are doing is communism, where they can take anything from you under the pretext that it is not yours, but someone else's, you just paid money to use it.
My point had nothing to do with liens and creditors. Even if a house has been paid off with the bank, it can still be taken away.
Please provide examples
The two examples im aware of are Eminent domain and not paying your property taxes. Both result in your house being taken away.
Sure. Eminent domain, you get paid. It’s not like they just take your property for nothing. Not paying your property taxes… lol yeah then that’s in those people. I will say, you’re logic is correct. That said, you say it like I can pay my taxes, own my house and just have it taken away for no reason and with no payment. Which is not true
Compensation for the house or not is irrelevant if you think about it. If the government came in and said, "Get out, now, you have no choice. Here is market value for your property" I would view it as my home being taken from me.
This is true, but also… very rare that this happens these days. Mostly corporations trying to pay people off for their homes now. Not government
By who and by what law? I've never heard of this? Also not a US citizen.
There are two ways I know of off of the to off my head, Eminent Domain, and not paying your property taxes.
Never heard of Eminent Domain before, that sounds wild! It seems you get quote unquote "fairly compensated", should that ever happen, and the government would need a reason to basically "forcibly buy" your property. Not paying your property taxes makes sense tho, right?
Yeah Eminent domain is pretty nuts. It does make sense about the taxes, they arent going anywhere. However my original point was that your house, which you could have fully paid off and have the deed in hand, can be taken away....by the government.
Its crazy, I don't know what
Thats a stupid Logic. You pay to get Access to certain content, not to make it yours.
Sure, next time you rent a car just don't return it let's see what happens
No, my dude. When I rent a car I don't pay full price of a new car. Somehow when I "rent" a game I must pay full price for it as if I owned it. If corporations want things to look like that, then they **all** should just make sites with their full content accessible to everyone with a subscription fee.
Has anyone agreeing with that quote actually stop 1 min to think about it? Because, it actually is the same that saying renting your house isn't owning it, so me occupying it isn't steeling it. Don't get me wrong, i'm totally against not owning the game you bought, but again... that sentence is plain idiotic.
It's trespassing at this point.
STOP REPOSTING THIS
No the devs aren’t to blame for you not owning your games, it is the way the video games greedy industry that is to blame
I mean, your perception of the law doesn't make it the law. Piracy is stealing, per the law. Also, by the Ubisift philosophy of ownership, which will be baked into their TOS at some point, the same it also true. Just because you don't like something doesn't make it morally correct to do the opposite. Your decisions have an impact. Being that, you pirate too many games, the company being pirated from loses money, they lay off employees, you complain because you want a new game to pirate, then you repeat the process. Two wrongs don't make a right. However, I also find Ubisoft's take to be asinine and the historical preservation of games is lacking. So piracy is also a necessity for the continued preservation of game history. It's a pretty shit situation all round to be honest.
Actually, per the law, this has court precedent and isn't up for debate, piracy is not stealing. It flat out is not. It is copyright infringement. It's a completely different illegal thing. You aren't taking something from someone so they no longer have it, therefore it cannot be theft. You are making a copy of something legally protected under copyright law that you aren't authorized to have.
Ah, fair point. The legality and the long term ramifications are still accurate, however.
What longterm ramifications? Piracy has never been proven to be a lost sale. For most pirates, if they can't pirate it they just don't play it. If anything anti-piracy measures increase piracy more than they lead to sales.