Back when I still used Reddit I remember explaining piracy as the new model for replacing libraries in a society ruled by capital and it was one of my most downvoted posts

Like my basic argument was how the role of libraries is to provide access to various mediums of artistic expression and academic literature to give equitable access to these things because it’s important for the enrichment of society. Equitable access means the next generation of creators and academics have access to current works to learn from and for inspiration.

But with the entire videogame industry, academic journal publishing, increasingly music and movies (though many libraries work to make these available) we have huge swaths of things that are extremely relevant to the culture and to human understanding as a whole. But we’ve decided that equitable access to these things is simply not okay because fuck poor people

Bootlickers in those threads would downvote and would reply to this with like “but YOU don’t work so hard on developing things??”. First: I have written papers and I invite you to download them for free. Plenty of authors seem to do fine despite the existence of libraries. Your game will do fine. Or it won’t, and that’s probably because your shitty game sucks

So go on sci-hub, go on torrent sites, crack everything. Fuck the stupid assholes that cry about piracy because they are super concerned that their shitty indie game will have 10-30% pirated copies as their player base, most of which would never have actually bought the game, instead of crying about conglomerates like valve, google, and apple taking 30-40% of your actual revenue.

real idiots, if im pirating something i wasn't going to buy it. piracy is more akin to sharing than stealing. and sharing is GOOD AND COOL, i learned that in kindergarten

Piracy is basically free advertising for a game. It’s an extended full free trial and pirates join the community of the video game & promote the game through word of mouth. Even as a corpo i would recognize the benefits of video game piracy, given how attempts to prevent it like DRM only inadvertently piss off buyers and dissuade potential customers because of the performance hit. DRM is basically treating your entire fanbase as “criminals” (i dont think crackers are criminals i think they are the unsung heroes of the digital age)

Brand recognition is essential for buyers & for example if i had not had the experience of playing fallout 3 by downloading at 100kbps in 2012 as a kid, at a time when i couldnt even afford the game since i was living in a third world country, i would not have fallout 4 in my steam library!!

Where are my fellow 3rd worlders

Pirate everything 👍

I have never met a single real person who's against piracy. The most negative reaction I got from a real person is them more or less going, "imagine being a dirty poor who's too poor to pay for shit." It's consumerist snobbery, but even they didn't use some bullshit "but think of the corps." That's loser shit.

My conclusion is that "but think of the corps" found exclusively on R*ddit and R*ddit-adjacent spaces are paid shills. Absolutely nobody normal cares about piracy. It's like how R*ddit and other online spaces were filled with "aktually, you don't need the start menu" when Windows 8 dropped and how all those em-dollar sign shilling completely disappeared when Windows 8.1 brought back the start menu.

meanwhile I literally just give people copies of my game if they ask lmao

But the yen is so weak now, indie devs like Nintendo are starving.

I feel like I’ve always had a bit of leftist spirit in me even before reading socialist theory or whatever due to learning about how Activision screwed over the MW2 devs even though it was one of the fastest selling games of its time. Like how the fuck could you possibly want to support any video game corporation? I hope those buttholes lose revenue

Tell them it’s no different than an AI learning from artists. After all, ideas are meant to be shared, right?

I just clown on them with my ability to play "online required" drm games without any internet connected.

Can't play single player on your $80 AAA game because your internet is down? Too bad loser, should've just pirated it. Gonna be real interesting to see opinions on this in a few years as companies stop running their DRM servers for older games and they just outright don't work anymore like an old MMO.

I think piracy is stealing but it's like fractions of a cent. The money isn't going to the laborers who make the products we enjoy while the majority of profits go to execs. The execs are stealing thousands (and sometimes millions) from their artists. Me stealing $0.000000007 of profit with thousands of people doing the same has more impact on the power grid than it does the livelihoods of creators. I'm doing more harm to their cell phone network than I am to their paycheck.

"How dare you take a picture of my painting! I'm losing so much money every time you look at it!"

If one doesn’t do it, fine. But how much of a dork do you have to be to care if other people do it? Daddy Ubisoft isn’t going to give you a pat on the back for it.

I keep trying to explain that if I were to make a game, I wouldn't give a damn if people pirate because I just want people to enjoy the game.

Literally making a game right now, I would much rather people support it financially so it can actually get made rather than me needing to abandon it. That said, people have "pirated" the game by literally asking me directly for a download link, so I don't care that much. I feel like they're aware enough to know that if no one supports the project it won't succeed, so if they actively want the game to get finished, piracy is an obstacle to that.

Very Very small indie projects are probably the biggest exception though, where an extra $100 worth of sales could honestly mean the difference between success and failure. And even then, I'm not too fussed. If people pirate my stuff, it's because they don't want to pay for it anyway.

I know several people who thought it was a “flex” to brag about how they actually pay for games and have never pirated like those “brokies”. The game that got them riled up was basically abandonware until recently being released and the pirated version was a version of the game that got turned into open source and was worked on for decades.

Truly brainwashed.

I understand that you meant anti-game-piracy, but now I can't stop thinking about anti-game piracy.

They still think game development is a still a worthwhile career SMH.

Why do you put piracy in quotes? Just own it like I do, we play games we don't want to pay for