I've been pirating since I was a child. That being said, I don't think it's particularly healthy to pin 'media pirating' as a personality trait.
Yeah, I basically stopped pirating entirely despite doing it relentlessly early in life. I still owe Capcom a thousand bucks if I am to pay that one alone back.
The basically part is that I still pirate what little music I need. Fuck the music industry.
My exception is smaller bands with bamdcamp.
Buying from there supports the artists well!
Yup. Pirating is about filling a need where companies sorely lack in providing services. When a company provides a shitty service or offers no viable alternative to obtaining something I would gladly pay for, pirating bridges that gap.
If you have money to spend (and THAT much), you can still pirate, but if you pirate without trying to fund the source of your art and tools, you're a mega asshole. Especially if you have as much money as this dude claims to have. You can find the creators of your games online, find their ko-fis, their patreons. Where there's a will there's a way
For some people, it's the convenience with pirating. It's easier to pirate a movie from a go-to piracy website that you use than to find in which of the 50 different streaming sites the movie is available.
Gabe Newell agrees with you. He said that piracy is almost always a service problem, not a pricing problem.
Also I'm top 4-5% in my country, but compared to developed countries in not even at top 50% and so many of these digital products are not necessarily priced lower for my region specially the big houses like EA and Ubisoft, so I understand the original comment. And i also agree on the second part that where there is a will there is a way.
But i remeber donating about 10$ for a small dev that was livestreaming and i had pirated the game because game costed 40$. And I thought 10$ was a decent enough donation to cover my sins. Dev in a couple of days was crying over stream about how donating 10$ is doing nothing and he just would buy a beer (10$ buys about 14 beers in my country) and was just being an ass over the stream.
I'm not saying all devs are like that, but for a lot of third world country pirating is a lifestyle not because they just want to keep stealing, they just see it as a movement against wealth inequality. I'm not saying it's right or not, I'm just explaining how the thought process works.
this. pirate all you want, netflix/disney/etc. will be fine. but find and support the artist. this is why i'm now stuck with the crap news around bandcamp. there are less and less ways to support creators instead of the leeches every day :(
Anon willl soon be 14 years old
Ah, to be young and -6 years old again
People lying on the Internet?
They can't do that, that's wrong
If you have enough money to live comfortably, I think you should pay for art you love. That doesn't mean you shouldn't pirate anything (especially from big corps), but please donate some money to indie games, music, theatre...
Heck, I'd say even give money to those big corps so long as they are being reasonable with the price and availability. Reasonable varies by person, of course. But for me, I'll pay for any $70-90 game (the normal price for new games now in Canada), but stuff like Sims DLC or how the original Mass Effect only let you get DLC through some dumb BioWare credits are cases where I'd pirate no regrets even with my current income.
After all, there won't be AAA games if people don't pay for them. I have (mostly) no qualms with big publishers pocketing a significant profit on those games if they get made well. Bigger problem I have is with games that get rushed to the point of impacting quality, but that's something I see more for changing how you approach that individual title. Stuff like mistreating staff (crunch time) is a bit iffier. I still lean towards giving them my money, since nobody enters the game dev business without knowing it'll involve crunch and I do want the devs to be rewarded for their hard work with a commercial success (cause that's unfortunately just how success is measured in our capitalist society).
Aye, I used to sail the high seas, the hull of my ship gnarly with viruses, adware and malware from some infectious crackers or key-generators.
Then I had money, and started buying my software and my movies and all was good for a time. Then my media consume shifted to mobile devices, but I had Amazon Prime Video as the only really available video-streaming service around and all was good for a time. Then I added Netflix, as it arrived on my countries market and all was good for a time. Then I added Crunchyroll, Disney+ and Hulu and everything sucked, streaming the shows I wanted to watch was suddenly so expensive, no single streaming service had everything I wanted to watch, so I needed to subscribe to them all, costing an amount of money I would not spend on buying those shows.
Now I have unsubscribed from all but two again, but the market is so fractured, there is barely anything interesting on the services I still go to.
So my eyes keep wandering to that old tricorn, the hook and peg-leg, gathering dust on the wall. I can hear the waves crashing and feel the tide rising in my bones. The moneybags have decided to press us for more and more, their greed means no single harbor, not even two are enough to supply our demands. So there is plenty of bounty to be found on the high seas again, big fat galleons full of content otherwise unreachable or too expensive.
Doncha hear it boys? Davey Jones is singing again, calling us back to the sea, put on your VPN, defy the torrents and right your compasses with a good magnet. We did not choose this life, they made us turn to it.
Cringe af
I'm a really great person. I'm good at everything. My friends are all tools and won't ever be as amazing as me.
Congratulations. I bet those friends are absolutely real.
I'm heading back to it.
The streaming was sort of OK, and now it's wank. Spread across dozens of services, that don't have enough content to justify their existence. No UI linking them all together means you have no idea if something is available or not without checking justwatch.com
If music was like this, I'd pirate that too.
YTA
The hunt is part of the fun. Like how people will opt to build a PC or a keyboard over a pre-built or pull out vinyl over digital. The steps taken to retrieve and enjoy the media is sometimes a relaxing process.
Yeah, no.
The hunt is only fun if you've got time to spare.
Throw in a spouse, kids, good but demanding job, a place to live, social obligations, detoriating (geriatric) parents, and you're so happy you can just mash one single button and your favourite track, game or series starts to play.
That's the reason why people stop pirating. Time.
When time is not (yet) your most precious resource you can see the fun in anything. Even virus scanning.
I'm well over 25 years of sailing now (40 if you count games for early PCs), and they'll pry the sabre out of my cold, dead hands. I've made not watching ads a lifestyle and piracy is so much easier than dealing with the bullshit interfaces of streaming companies.
If I have a way of directly donating to creators and not via their shitty production companies, I'll take it. Podcasts have it right, I can send money to creators and get an ad-free stream. If I can't, I don't donate and I don't listen to their work.
In the end, me avoiding ads isn't costing anyone anything, because if I hear an ad, I likely avoid that product going forward. They have at best zero effect on my buying decisions, if not a negative one.
Pay it forward. I'm from 3rd world country. Growing up pirating gave me and my brother precious memories playing cs, doom, star wars, gta2, rollercoster tycoon, sims etc. Not to mention music and movies which would've cost us weeks of our food money if we would've bought it legitimately. We both grew up and made decent enough money now. I paid for my games and sometimes paid to play old games if i could find it in Steams. Million thanks to all the crackers, hosters, translators, modders, seeders, etc. You made my childhood memorable, and worth living despite all the shits going around us where we live. Oh not to mention i learned better english playing games than learning it from school.
I buy the things I want to support. Small game studios get my money. Bands get my money directly, I buy albums and merch. Pretty much, small businesses or organizations that put great amounts of care and love into their high quality work get my money all day, as directly as i can. But would I pay for an Activision/EA game? Or a Marvel movie? Absolutely not.
I've pirated almost everything for the last 30 years from msdos on. But I wouldn't say it's a lifestyle. It's just that most of the stuff I would never buy. I don't need them, they are not important, but maybe I want a taste. I don't pirate music anymore because it's not practical and some of the software. Some. Games I don't play much anymore, but I would pirate them until I have like 50 hours in. Then I start thinking maybe it makes sense to buy. Unless it turns out cracked version is better than official one.
I pirate a lot of stuff too but I prefer to buy stuff too sometimes just to provide support
I tend to buy stuff I've already pirated.
I have games bought with 0 hours played because I already played them with my pirate hat.
When you are a pirate you have a different mindset. You get to really choose who do you want to give your money to, and you tend to chose people who really deserve it.
I've been pirating for twenty years and you do kind of just stick with it even when you can afford stuff.
That said, when I reinstalled Windows a while ago, I was fannying about for aaaaaages trying to get a cracked version of Office to work when I suddenly realised I could just buy it for a tenner and not have to fuck about 😂 It hadn't occurred to me before
I mean, if you can afford it you should support industries. I pirate a lot. Movies. Games. Music. Etc. Nothing wrong with that IMO, at this point piracy is the closest we can get to true ownership over anything because the entire industry has f*cked over consumer rights for assumed profit. But I still buy physical releases because I don't want content I enjoy to die and I like building a collection of good content. Blurays are great (although also DRM encumbered :/), nothing beats the smell of new manga, and at this point music streaming is just a far better experience than piracy (I use qobuz). If you're young or poor then do what you have to to enjoy yourself. If you're an adult with a great salary then don't be an entitled prick. If theirs ways to support content you enjoy you should. If such ways aren't provided like most Netflix originals not having blurays then f*ck Netflix release some blurays if you want my money.
When i search roku for a movie made in 1969 and its $9.00 to rent or 15 to "buy" on their shitty platform......
Ahoy, matey
There're a couple of huge downsides (for me personally) to streaming services that just grinds with me:
Perhaps physical media is better these days (than DVDs were) for scrobbing, but then you have the FBI piracy messages to deal with. I've never owned a BluRay player, perhaps they're better?
But I know that sailing the high seas gets me a high-quality video, and I can jump backwards ~5 seconds instantaneously when I've not heard a bit a of dialogue.
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