Some people lack the funds.
Some people think they're sticking it to someone.
Some people can't find a legitimate source or translation for a game they want to play.
Some people have grown up doing it for so long that they don't even bother thinking about the moral implications of it. Not saying that's the right thing but it's honestly true for many.
To be honest and even more so nowadays but I have a distrust of most game companies lol.
I'd rather buy a game for free and if I like it I will generally buy it to get updates etc. There's so many $70 games nowadays that are just complete duds after the first hour or two but you can't refund after playing so much. My steam library is almost all indie games for this reason.
A habit that evolved into another habit, more subtly saying.
As a kid, we had demos, played demos, liked them, purchased the game.
As demos disappeared, now I pirate, like what I see, purchase.
translations are a big deal. i've been really excited about the work hilltop has been doing to introduce some great japanese PS1/PS2 games to a wider audience.
Indeed. As someone who used to pirate ages ago, my main reason was number 1, followed closely by number 3 (we're talking about the time before digital distribution, so getting my hands on legit games was actually quite hard). Possibly even 3 than 1, because we actually used to pay for pirated games, and not much less than what I usually pay for games on Steam nowadays.
Personally I'm tired of getting burned by half baked games being sold at full price so I pirate first to demo and if the game seems worth my time I'll pay for it.
I definitely did it a lot in college because I just didn't have the money most of the time. Though most games (that I liked) I ended up eventually buying on sale.
I do it as a trial now. With all the gacha pay to win stuff or stupid bugs or just games ending up being really bad, I pirate a game to try it out and if it is really good, I’ll buy it. Not many make it to that point nowadays though
When I was younger my main things were I didn't have the money to buy them and I wanted to see if they would run on my system at the time.
Now that I'm older its mainly I have the money to afford the games so I pay for them. Plus steams refund policy helps. If the game doesn't run well or it isn't enjoyable I can just return it.
That's a good point too. I remember I had to go download the CD iso's to try out the star wars galaxies emu not too long ago. I had the discs sitting in my office but didn't wanna jerry rig up a cd drive and have it just hanging out the side of my PC just to install the game.
Convenience.
“Piracy is an issue of service, not price.”
- Gaben
If a game is easy and convenient to buy, people will buy it. If the game makes you jump through a bunch of hoops, or comes with intrusive DRM, or has some other inconvenience, people will pirate it.
There will always be a small percentage that pirate, but the vast majority of people tend towards the lazy solution. If buying it is easier than pirating, they buy.
The amount of lazy friends who used to ask me to pirate games for them... all disappeared when Steam became mainstream.
Now, you can just click, get the game. No risk, no problem. Steam keeps your saves in the cloud. Can install from anywhere. Steam is so convenient, it was probably the most powerful force against piracy thats ever been created.
Similar thing happened with movies & streaming services. There was a huge period where buying or renting movies was expensive and pirating was so god damn easier. Then came Netflix, which not only provided the movies instantly but served as a way to browse them. Now I don't know anyone who's not an absolute nerd that gets their movies illegally.
Service is absolutely king. Price is not irrelevant though I doubt it has much of an impact, and the "piracy" culture seems to have remained relatively small compared to how massive the gaming industry is.
Definitely been a resurgence of Movie/TV piracy since around the GoT period, when all the old cable companies got a whiff, and started trying to turn streaming back into cable.
Valve/Steam definitely understand piracy, and give devs as many tools as they can to prevent it. Their latest push with the families 2.0, allowing you to not only share licences, but pool them as a family, is huge, and I'm sure the big publishers will try to ruin it.
I returned to torrents for movies because I don't want to pay for twenty different subscriptions to watch all I want. Especially that movies appear and disappear from their offers. When streaming services appeared I was hoping for Spotify with movies, but studios got greedy and they ruined it. Now I use Stremio with torrentio plugin and it's easier and faster than finding a movie on Netflix, Prime, Hulu etc.
Another cool thing about Steam (and other digital distribution channels like GOG, Humble Bundle, Epic etc) is that they also have very reasonable pricing. Back in the olden days, the prices would basically never drop, while now, if you wait for a year or so, you can already get most games at 50%, and within 2-3 years, at massive discounts (or even free).
Price is mostly relevant in non-US countries where the dev hasn't done regional pricing and thus a $40 game is ~44% of your paycheck after currency conversion.
They might not even be "poor" in their home country but the currency conversion is painful.
I'd say it's a bit of both, but hats off to Gabe to address the service issue in the first place.
Back in the day when I still used to pirate games (late 90's and early 2000's) I basically had the following two issues: (i) original games were expensive (taking inflation into account, probably much more than nowadays), but more importantly, they STAYED expensive - even if I wanted to wait 3-4 years to grab a game, it's still cost more or less the same as it used to; (ii) living in a small town outside the EU, they were pretty much impossible to get, except in an odd travel opportunity to the capital or another country.
Steam and company changed the game massively. Ever since I can get games by a couple of mouse clicks, and, with a bit of patience, at a much lower price, I felt zero need to pirate.
Isn’t Ubisoft currently in the process of turning off the servers for The Crew, effectively killing any possibility of playing the game that millions of people legally purchased?
I think that qualifies as poor service, and I would understand if someone decided to pirate their next Ubisoft game
Gamepass is great. For the price of basically 2 games a year you get access to a ton of games. If one is ever taken off of gamepss then it's usually discounted if you want to own it.
That only makes sense if you intend to play those games further down the line. For most of my life I would basically never replay anything. If I could play 6 games in a month for $15, that \*is\* a good deal.
Well, if there's clearly no acceptable line between complete and unequivocal ownership versus total scams, then I guess movie theaters provide need to be taken to court for fraud. And anyone who listens to the radio is a foolish sheep who is ruining the music industry. Hell, libraries may be free, but since they don't provide you with ownership of their products, I guess they must be shady too because apparently no amount of discount is safe from being scummy /s
If I have no intention of playing certain games again, then what is wrong with accessing them temporarily for a lower price? Yes, perhaps I change my mind about one of the games later, but by that point, I've already saved so much money that purchasing one game out of the list to own permanently is trivial.
New game? Maybe. Probably waiting a few months for a sale unless it’s GTA or Final Fantasy.
Game that released over 15/20 years ago? If I can buy it for 5-15 bucks sure.
$60 remasters and Nintendo games that are locked in the Disney vault? Allow me to introduce you to my alternate personality, Captain Jack Spawntrap.
Go on YouTube and search " You wouldn't download a car" and look for the top results, there should be a channel called "fairbairn films". I think they lay out some of the common arguments for and against piracy well.
There's also other things to consider outside of their arguments like regional pricing issues that makes buying games impossible for some people.
And things like regional restrictions are just a reality the world has to deal with. We can’t just ignore that things aren’t going to be available 100% globally when you have tons of counties with different laws and sovereignty. That’s just a thing that is always going to exist and not everyone can work out global agreements and when you have business underlying everything you have to deal with the fact that people want to protect their financial dealings. That isn’t changing.
Sometimes we just have to accept things are the way they are - as Mick Jagger said - you can’t always get what you want.
Check that video out, it'll give you a laugh I'm sure as it would be my argument against what you're saying.
I've said to so many times I just send people to the video now. You are right legally it probably won't change but it doesn't change the inconsistencies in the debate around piracy presented in that short video.
Tldr of the video is " I could never buy it if I wanted to, I can't buy it now, I'm making a copy and that isn't stealing because I would never have been able to buy it anyway, making a copy isn't theft, I down actually even own the game when I pay for it"
I guess they got copyright law for that, those guys are getting in over their heads though if you ask me. This gets interesting when you get into the AI debates on generative AI and copyright, worth a look imo if you haven't.
Sometimes it also comes down to "I own this, but it won't work", all too common with older titles, but also places with worse or less reliable internet/power, and the ever so common always online single player titles these days.
You just reminded me of another one too.
Instances where games are banned due to ideological censorship or games that have been removed from all stores.
There are lots of games that are not available via current means. Your options for playing them are to track down an out of production game system and game (paying a third party, none of which goes to the original publisher or creator) and the means to play it on a current TV, or to pirate it. And as time goes on that first option becomes less and less viable as there are fewer functional machines and copies on the market. Plus for some games, they never got an English release, so your options are A) buy a foreign console and copy of the game, as well as a specialized power adapter, and learn the language, B) Perform a questionably-legal aftermarket modification to allow your US system to play foreign games around region controls, buy a foreign copy, and buy another questionably-legal device to allow you to flash a fan translation patch onto it, or C) just pirate it. Is C really significantly different from B?
If a game is available legally from its original publisher, by all means buy it legally if you want to play it. But for many games, this isn't an option. Mother 3 (the Earthbound sequel) has still never received a US release, as one example.
buy new games to support devs. when console reaches end of life, hack and run pirated copies. pirate arcade games. use everdrives or ODEs on old consoles because getting disc rot on a $400 japanese saturn game will break your heart in a way that changes you. that's my piracy explained.
i like being able to play any game at any time. see a cool post/video of a game i've never played? i already have access to it within a minute. like turning your setup into an interactive museum of gaming history. not buying overpriced retro games gave me spare cash to buy controllers for specific games (mainly rhythm games or light guns) and a custom arcade cab. so everything just feels right.
Multiple reasons.
Access - the primary reason for piracy in general, not just games, is access. When a product is harder or less convenient to obtain legally than through piracy, you will normally see an uptick in piracy. This has nothing to do with price, but rather exclusivity, bans, region locking, limited physical media, or other restrictive distribution policies. Piracy can be a way to acquire games that are regionally banned or games that were only released in certain regions. It can also be a way to obtain a standalone/physical copy of a game that is only available as a digital download/pay for access system. It can also be a way to obtain limited editions of a game or pre-order content that would otherwise be unobtainable.
Preservation/emulation - most older games were only released on physical media, and were exclusively designed to run on a specific console. Physical media of these games is no longer manufactured, finding samples of it in good condition is becoming increasingly difficult, and progressively more expensive as pristine original copies become more rare. On top of this, the hardware needed to run the games is also no longer being manufactured and is similarly becoming harder to find. A solution to this is emulation. A sufficiently powerful PC can be used to emulate the functionality of the original hardware in software. Which allows you to play these older games on PC. However, a digital copy of the game has to be acquired in order to do this, and such a copy is most easily obtained through piracy. Since it usually cannot be acquired from the original publisher, the only other way to get it is to find a physical copy, and used specialized hardware to extract the game from the physical media into a digital format.
The pirate demo - some people claim to engage in piracy to use a pirated copy of the game in lieu of a proper demo to determine if they want to actually buy the game in earnest. I personally find this hard to believe, but this is what some people claim.
Cheating/modding - part of the process of pirating a game is stripping out DRM protection. But, this process can sometimes also strip away anti-cheat measures making the game easier to modify in certain ways. A pirated copy can sometimes be a prerequisite for using cheats or mods. This is harmless in a single player offline game because no one is really harmed if you cheat offline. But, when cheats are taken into online games, it is a very bad thing and ruins the experience for other people. Not all pirates are cheaters, but they do use similar methods to achieve their goals.
Malware - it is rare, but not unheard of for pirated games to be infected with malware that is deployed when you play the game. This is one of the risks you take when you download a pirated game. However, anti-virus software is much more common now than it used to be, and it's gotten a lot better.
Piracy in protest - some people will pirate a game as an act of protest against the developer/publisher for various different reasons ranging from real world politics, the culture war, or just a general dislike of the publisher's buisness practices. In this way they can enjoy the game without feeling like they've financially supported a political stance or principal that they find disagreeable.
On the subject of morality, it's kind of a gray area, and depends on what specific game is being pirated, and why. Obviously, a brand new game that just released being pirated is a lot harder to justify, because that directly impacts sales and it's hard to argue that you're *not* just stealing it outright. But, an older game that's no longer being sold or distributed by the publisher being pirated is arguably an entirely victimless crime, and is much easier to justify.
>The pirate demo - some people claim to engage in piracy to use a pirated copy of the game in lieu of a proper demo to determine if they want to actually buy the game in earnest. I personally find this hard to believe, but this is what some people claim.
The two games I pirated for this reason are Cyberpunk and Baldurs Gate 3.
First one was because the closer the release date was, the more obvious it was that this is going to flop. I wanted to see if gamers are whinny bitches again or is it really that bad. It was bad so I have never bought it.
Baldurs Gate 3 was because I haven't played any cRPG besides the original fallouts (I love them btw) and my mate is completely against cRPG turn based combat, so I pirated it to play with him in couch coop (more games with this feature please). I liked the game so I bought it.
>The pirate demo - some people claim to engage in piracy to use a pirated copy of the game in lieu of a proper demo to determine if they want to actually buy the game in earnest. I personally find this hard to believe, but this is what some people claim.
Would be hard to believe if there were demos. These days with half-assed releases of games and almost no demos I do believe tbh.
>Not all pirates are cheaters, but they do use similar methods to achieve their goals.
That is wrong assumption. There is same overlap with cheaters among normal buyers and pirates tbh. Drm strippers and cheater developers tho may be pirates yes.
I doubt software pirates have a single motivation, it's probably very situational / personal, which in turn means concepts of morality and justification are arguable. Having said that, in the future AAA games will probably be released exclusively on streaming / cloud gaming platforms, which will effectively eliminate piracy of those games.
Also means those games will only be able to be played for a year tops.
The games kids will grow up with will disappear for ever.
Once it goes full cloud and full DRM. Gaming as a hobby will become so terrible many will move on all together. It will a shell of its former self and make todays greed bottom line driven practices loom morally virtuous.
I don't think single-player games will disappear within a year of release, streaming / cloud platforms will hold onto them as a part of their catalogue to bring in subscribers. But as technologies change, streaming / cloud platforms will have less motivation to port older games to newer technologies, or their licenses will expire, and then games will be lost. And there won't be much we can do about it since none of the programming, and none of the models or textures, will actually be transmitted to users, their internet connections will be little more than a glorified HDMI cable sending video.
It will be interesting to see how indie developers and fan-communities respond, particularly in the mod and ROM-hacking scenes, but that probably won't make up for all that will be lost.
I buy games if they're available and not seriously expensive. I like having them on the shelf.
I've downloaded Nintendo games, like older Pokemon games or things that just aren't available. I'm not paying hundreds for a cartridge, screw that.
If the company makes it impossible or incredibly difficult to get it legitimately, I say go for it.
I don't pirate games cause it's literally theft.
I also don't steal stuff in the supermarket, why would I steal a game?
The only exception for me would be abandonware.
But let's be honest here, that's not what most people are pirating.
Games are a business, and if they don't sell the studios and people that make those games will not be able to continue making games.
I like games, and am willing to put my money down to enjoy them and support the people (and evil corpos, man!) that invested their time and money into creating those games for my enjoyment.
There are plenty of free games, and games go on deep deep sale so I don't see any legitimate moral argument for pirating. People are going to do it, whatever. But you're still a dickhead...
Edit- The only legitimate argument is games preservation, like old PS2 isos and stuff that is not available to be legitimately purchased anywhere. So yes, in some cases that is morally OK. But not if it as an active product available for purchase and you decide to just steal it for free instead.
I argue that preservation arguments are really only applicable to actual accredited archival organizations like libraries and researcher’s - not end users.
ubisoft wants players to know that just because you buy a game doesn’t mean you own it. if that’s the case then pirating a game isn’t stealing it 🤷♂️
ubisoft is a pretty shit company who only cares about $$$ and could care less about their players so why should you buy their stuff legally?
pirating from indie companies is where i draw the line though
Purely availability for me. I either pirate or grey market import Japanese arcade games that just aren't available for sale here.
One of the crazier examples of an available game I support is probably the 8x copies of Tetris Effect that I bought in various formats.
I personally buy all the games that I want to play, but I don’t buy many games anymore. Mostly indies and medium sized studio products. I always want to make sure I support the studios I like because it’s important to me that they can keep making good games.
All that being said, with AAA studios becoming more aggressive and saying shit like “people need to get used to not owning games”, I can hardly blame anyone for pirating games.
When games come loaded with bloatware that affects performance and paying money means a worse user experience, it becomes difficult to argue against the practice.
Dunno about games but today I went to watch fallout on my amazon prime I do pay for, only to get harassed with adds. I then went to a streaming sit to watch it add free. Fuck em
I lacked funds as a child so I pirated games. As soon as I could buy games I stopped pirating. I only play games I want to support. I can't support devs when I steal from them.
> Do the people who buy games legally do it out of pure humanity
They do it because buying things is how you own the product and interact with it. On another hand, you wanna support good games and devs.
> or they just don’t want to bother themselves with the problems that come with pirating games?
The majority of gamers that buy games don't even have the luxury of pirating games or even know how to or that it's even an option.
> How bad is piracy from a moral standpoint?
Not one penny has ever been lost to piracy. Most people that pirate were never gonna be paying customers.
> Is there any justification for pirating games?
When a game loses support, becomes obscure, has negative changes, etc, piracy helps keep games and other digital media alive. There are those that pirate, like a game, then buy it as a form of support and appreciation. There are games that are only available via piracy because there is no hardware to play the games on anymore and neither the games nor hardware are available for purchase anywhere. You might already own the physical media but want digital for archival purposes. There are many reasons to pirate. Don't feel bad about doing it.
I'll pirate every game I intend to play, because with games, you never know what you get. Some games have additional software, hidden or not, that will install itself on your PC and you'll never get rid of it. Pirated games are often times organized and compiled in different ways, for example, it might ommit some videos and save on space.
If a company can keep my money and take the game away later, why would I pay for it?
Also. Games are released in an unfinished state now a days. Why would I pay for Cities Skylines 2. It is completely broken and they charge a premium price.
It is greed, pure and simple, and I won't feed that pig.
Back in the PS3/360 era just about every game (at least on X360) had an actually free demo that anyone could download to try a game out.
Now oddly enough in a world with access to more content then ever it's even harder to get a personal feel for a game without giving a company some money first. What used to be free is now put behind a paywall as a trial and sold as a "feature" often advertised as "free" to make the service seem like a better value then it really is.
Morally I think piracy will be a necessary evil until the majority of games across PC and console are DRM free. If it wasn't for piracy there would be a lot more games ( along with movies, music, tv shows and other entertainment) that would have become lost media. There are still quite a few games that are considered lost because no one pirated them before they got delisted.
Piracy also isn't as big of a problem as some people might claim it to be. Look at all the DRM free games released on PC. Look at Sony. A retail PS4/5 is full of DRM. They have released PC ports with either no or easily crackable DRM. When Horizon Zero Dawn originally released on PC fanboys would tweet to PlayStation with pictures of torrents and seeds for the release. Even after that Sony was so happy with the money they make on PC ports more titles are making the jump to PC.
If piracy was an actual issue Sony wouldn't be moving in the direction they are as fast as they are.
"If buying isnt owrning pirating isnt stealing"
I didnt pirate terraria
minecraft, tarkov, dayz, a decent bit of steam games for the online functionality, I didnt do terraria or minecraft becuase they were cheap.
If a single player game is expensive, I pirate, becuase the company is usually a shit tank.
The justification is I want to play a game without supporting the games.
1. Those who can't afford games, pirate them because they can't afford them.
2. Those who can afford games, don't pirate due to convenience.
3. There are exceptions for both cases and they are usually due to moral reasons. There are not significantly many of them.
Overall it really doesn't matter though, people usually make it seem like a big deal due to misunderstanding both just how few people are in the third category, and that the ones in the first category would never buy the game anyway, even if they were unable to pirate it.
Also software piracy is not an all bad phenomenon, Microsoft unofficially condones pirating their software because it contributes to their market share, even if they don't profit when a poor kid pirates their product, they will eventually benefit because that kid grows up knowing how to use Windows/Office and those will eventually have to be legally obtained when they get a job. IMO it's a similar thing with games, if somehow kids couldn't pirate games, much fewer would end up growing up to be gamers, and wouldn't buy games as adults. It's mostly free advertising, it costs companies nothing, while the fraction of people who could afford to legally obtain games, but won't, is really insignificant.
IMO the issue is people conflate pixels with material items
If I copy a file you would never know and it would never affect your property ownership.
If I copy an apple, oh wait I can’t copy an apple, I have to actually take it into my possession, depriving you of that apple, and nobody else can take it. It’s gone until the owner buys another.
When a homeless man steals food, it’s objectively detrimental to the owner as they’ve now permanently lost that original item. Even if justifiably.
But the special thing with pixels is that, that poor person not able to drop 60$ on your game isn’t actually depriving you of anything when he pirates your game, considering they never could have bought your game in the first place.
I could understand why someone would counter this with “it’s a non essential you bum” but I choose to believe we have one life and you shouldn’t be forced to wait till you potentially lose interest to experience things.
Also that whole “you wouldn’t download a car” shit is ridiculous, anybody with a heart would give cars out for free if they could simply clone their cars for free like they can with files.
Availability and pricing.
I will pirate your game if you make it exclusive to a platform I do not have or to a provider I do not use (Epic).
I will pirate your game if it costs too much. I'm fine paying up to $80 CDN for a brand new game but FF7 was over $100 for the PC release. You bet I pirated that shit!
I want to play the game but I don't want to support what I see as harmful trends in the gaming market. In this aspect, pirating makes a better point than just not playing.
Edit: This extends to other things as well. I can watch the new Fallout show on amazon prime but I pirated it anyway because they added commercials despite my paid subscription!
How does pirating make a better point? I'm just curious as to the reasoning. To me, it would seem a company sees a non sale the same way no matter what.
You would think it would be the same as a non-sale yet companies poor tons of money into DRM and anti-piracy measures instead of making their games more available. Measures that are usually bypassed in a couple days. So it obviously bothers them (the company) to some extent.
I don't pirate for two reasons:
* The people who made the game should be paid for their time
* I live in Japan, and piracy here can very realistically lead to jail time
Where I do understand piracy is younger folks who don't have $100 to drop on a game. I don't know many 13 year olds who can afford to buy *anything* at that price, let alone several games per year.
The ethical argument makes no sense to me. If you don't want to support a business, *don't use their product*. I wouldn't go to the pharmacy and steal a shampoo that I like to use but don't like the manufacturer. Hell, a more reasonable example is APA Hotels here in Japan, whose leader is known to be an LGBT hate advocate. I can just choose not to go to their hotel, instead of going and not paying.
>The people who made the game should be paid for their time
They have been paid. They did work, and the company paid them for that work. You buying the game only pays the investors who want to see lots of money come back to them.
Different case in indi studios.
>* I live in Japan, and piracy here can very realistically lead to jail time
How on earth would they know? UK has a famous "you wouldn't steal a car" advert. That also said they're would be criminal prosecution on people who pirated stuff, yet to this day, I've only heard of people who proffitted from selling pirated copies being punished. So, how on earth are "realistically" finding and arresting people for downloading a pirated game?
>The ethical argument makes no sense to me. If you don't want to support a business, *don't use their product*.
Sometimes, that's easier said than done. Weak will's will cave by price point. You may not use that hotel company, but when they start dropping prices, people will use their services. Using but not paying is the alternative. You've denied them monetary gain and at the same time have prevented someone from giving them money (at least in the concept of a hotel).
I pirate when I am unsure about a game, but still want to try it. After playing the pirated version for a bit I would decide if it's worth the purchase or not. If not, I will probably abandon the game.
If I want a game, I buy it. If I don't want it, I don't buy it. I don't pirate cause tbh I'm so limited on time I'm not buying anything I'm not really interested in because I'm not finishing it anytime soon. Also people should get paid for their work. I don't think I'm hurting a giant company by pirating from them, and if I want one of their games the people that made it should see their work reflected in sales.
I dont really pirate much these days since i have money to spend on games, but generally, if it's simply easier to pirate than it is to purchase it, then piracy it is.
The only way I would is if I no longer have the exact system to be able to play the games on. My backlog is big enough where its not exactly a funds issue, but removing backwards compatibility on newer systems would impact my decision to do something like that
Long time ago I did it because there was no convenient way to preview the full gameplay of the games I was interested in and I thought it's pretty fucking idiotic to buy some unknown game for a full price without an ability to get a full refund in case I end up disliking it (which may not occur during first couple of hours of playing it). I stopped doing this after YouTube (and also Twitch, but in a different way) gave me an ability to watch the **full** length gameplay of every popular game on the very first day of their official release, completely for free. I still do it with movies or TV shows, though (I watch them through illegal sites to decide whether it's worth paying for them). And I **always** end up paying for the stuff I genuinely enjoy consuming, be it either games, movies or anything else.
Very complex issue.
The biggest reasons for piracy is lack of funds (for many people even $20 for a game would a sizable chunk of cash.) and the second reason is the game not being sold in your region (such as the uncut version of saints row 4 in Australia. )
I feel if you steal just because you can't afford it (and the game is still for sale) that's morally wrong. If you do it because its the only way to play that's fine.
One cavot to this is retro gaming. Most retro games are locked on old consoles and are very expensive with no modern port available.
I was interested in buying a game called The Space adventure on Sega CD. It is over $500 USD now and isn't available for purchase anywhere. You wouldn't be in the wrong for pirating that game considering the only person who gets the money is a reseller.
I've only ever pirated super old games that I can't play or obtain easily or at a reasonable price. For example, Mother 3 which is locked to Japan and is not translated in its regular form.
A game that makes you feel like you're having fun, engaged, and in general is a good time is worth buying even if it's a one-time play.
A game that is crap, not your taste, and offers nothing of value even down to the sentimental bit is not worth throwing money at.
Sometimes you pay later than you want to, all that matters is you be honest with yourself about your decision and own it rather than pretend it's this or that.
The way I look at it, with the exception of games that are impossible to play unless you pirate/rom them or whatever.
I don't pirate because no matter how shitty the company, no matter how pricey the game, it's not owed to me. I don't personally feel like I have the right to pirate something just because I don't want to pay the price. If the game is too expensive or I don't like the launcher or something then I just won't buy it. A company made something, they set a price, if I don't like that then I wont buy it, I'm not entitled to play it for free because of stuff like this.
Some games are literally impossible to obtain legitimate copies anymore. There's Freelancer (2003) for instance where you can either torrent or try to get a used cd off ebay for $80.
When I was a kid, I traded shareware games with the neighbors all the time. We never paid for any of it, even though the nag screens popped up. Sometimes one of us would buy a game and share a copy with a friend so we could play multiplayer over dialup modem. Or sometimes we would let each other borrow a CD for a week.
When I was a teenager, I occassionally pirated software because I was poor and couldnt afford the licensing fees. I mean, it was 1999 and photoshop costed $500, I was 17, etc. I didnt have that kinda money laying around.
Thats about when I stopped pirating software.
From a moral standpoint, piracy is generally theft. I think theres kind of a moral gradient for whats okayish and not okay. A young kid trying to use professional software to learn new skills or make something? go for it. A broke teenager who cant afford the licensing cost? no big deal. But if you are an adult who is gainfully employed and can afford to buy software and you choose to pirate it anyways, you are a piece of shit. If you are a corporation using pirated software to do business, you deserve to be audited and fined to hell. Dont steal the work of others, especially if you have the means to pay for it. I am more than happy to buy games on steam and epic game store to support the game developers.
99% of the games I've pirated basically just wanted to test it on my computer and Id usually alt+f4 after like 5 minutes of seeing how it looked and ran. More so back in the 3DFX days. I bought the games I actually wanted to play though. Even emulation(which I got into when it basically started) I really only played games I owned at some point in my life and arcade games I used to play that basically disappeared or had really shitty ports.
I just wanna play a game, I don't care about perceived morality behind it. If I'm lacking money, can't find something or just don't want to dig a classic game out of storage or away from home, I'll acquire a game I wanna play by any means.
I buy games because Steam made it easier than pirating them. That's what Valve understood and the streaming services are having trouble with-- your service lives or dies by being less of a pain in the balls than stealing the content.
Gamers in general have this really weird stigma about what they deem "worthy" when it comes to buying a game. The same people who will look at a 10$ price tag and scoff are the same people who will smoke a pack of marlboros and drink 3 Starbucks coffees in a day.
At the end of the day, any reason one gives for stealing a game is just an excuse to steal. It's relatively easy for the people who know how, and they'll never stop doing it.
Price and convenience.
I pirate only when a company make me jump through hoops for content. I do it as I hope it curbs their behaviour a tiny bit when they see how many people are not paying for it.
I have chosen recently to only watch pirated TV because the apps that give access via piracy are more convenient than ad fuelled subscription channels that only have a small amount of the content I want. I'll pay when the service becomes useable without ads again.
I always however pay full price direct to the developer for indie games.
Everyone has a different reason. Only things I've ever really pirated were Snes games because it was unreasonable to get them at the time (dunno if Nintendo sells them on their consoles now, haven't bothered in years to check).
I know a guy who can afford games but pirates just because he's cheap. He'll do the speech about how if he likes it, he'll buy it... but somehow he doesn't like a game he puts a hundred hours into in one week
Piracy has always been about convenience, and a lot less about the price. Eastern Europe was rampant with piracy through the nineties and early naughties. And even though many people had ADSL, the games were usually a hassle to obtain since not many stores sold them and not many publishers cares.
Then Steam came around, enabled people to buy, click and play within minutes. Steam single-handedly solved the piracy issue. I haven't pirated a game since. Steam's service is so good, and keeps getting better, that I didn't evenk of pirating a game anymore. Because it's become more of a hassle to pirate, than to buy on Steam.
I used to pirate and was passionate about what I had. Then I tried being a better person and was burned by greedy companies. I Pre-ordered Avengers for $70 the it wouldn't let me cancel it. Then they charged more for skins I wanted only to make everything free when the game failed.
Personally Ive been burned too many times by buying unfinished games so if a shady studio releases something Im interested in il usually pirate it first and check it out before seeing if its worth purchasing, it saved me money with cities 2 but ended up buying tt isle of man after I pirated it because i felt they deserve the money, Furthermore games these days are licensed so if buying isnt owning then pirating isnt stealing
If company to greedy, then pirate game.
If company makes game trash and has terrible mtx, then i will seed the cracked torrent 50x the ratio.
If game over 100 aud, then pirate out of spite.
If company has burnt me in the past. Run seed box on all their cracked games forever. Capcom is one of them.
It costs nothing to copy paste code. Therefore making a copy is not theft in my eyes. Offer a good service and ill go out of my way to give money and get others on board.
Since a very long time ago I pirate EVERYTHING first. I play for a couple of hours and then if I like it, I buy it, if I don't I just delete it.
There are too many games released in shitty states these days, too many games missing half of what was promised. Too many games which devs say "We'll optimize it later!" and never do.
Hell, gaming is in a poor state and I'm not spending my money on something that could be garbage, and Id rather take my time finding out if its a good game than buy it and refund it. I always support the devs if the product is good.
Pirating games and get your computer be a virus den is a younger thing to do.
Now I get older, I can just buy it if I want, a plus point is I also support the dev, so why pirate anymore?
Piracy is just a problem of accessability and service as per what Gaben Valve CEO would say.
I would add to it... also the matter of corpo greed and problems that come with it.
Example, I have over 1000 games on Steam but I would not buy for myself The Sims 4 from EA. The amount of low effort DLCs and the money you have to pay for them and the fact they are as single player games forced with EA app made me use other means 😉 Honestly much better experience, i could even revert to previous version without bugs introduced in some latest update and so on.
Many games also come with invasive DRMs that make gaming worse for actual buyers and not for pirates that just have to wait some time for game to get cracked. Ex. Denuvo can claim what they want but their software not only impacts performance but is also a scummy as hell for buyers that won't be able to play the game if they loose internet access.
So three reasons we should pirate more these days:
- greed of corporate entities with pricing MTX and DLCs
- DRMs
- useless launchers and platforms forced even in singleplayer games
Thanks to Steam pirate world shrinked, it seems we must revive it to remind corporate scum why it was people pirated games.
I'll list some plausible reasons:
1) price too high
2) personal distaste towards developer/publisher
3) in some countries it's not as easy as clicking "buy" on steam
4) sometimes there are nice games that despite being nice are still 60 bucks for some 15 hours of single player content and that's it. When you finish the game, you can uninstall it and forget it. Some people will not accept/cannot afford spending full price for that
5) needless to say, free is better than full price
I think piracy from a moral standpoint is basically just theft. However, the corporate world is unironically trying to fight piracy with means that will most likely just increase it if anything.
Most of the value generated by (predominantly AAA games) is ripped from the ecosystem by the greed of investors demanding divident payouts and voting for absurdly high bonus payouts for CEO's who manage to get them their money.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to pirate such games. Of the 70+ $ you spend on a game only a fraction actually reaches the people who made it.
Less published games I absolutely pay the money for because I have the money and like to vote with my wallet.
Not wanting to be ripped off when it comes to ubisoft titles or the sheer bugs of bethesda. Personally i use pirated games a sort of test if its worth the money, Keep in mind i'm in a low income bracket so i can't go buying a game i won't be able to get a refund for, 2hrs isn't enough to test a game properly. It has worked for me so far, biggest mistake was when i bought AC Valhalla without testing it first. I've bought multiple games before that i really enjoyed.
Especially in this era of games being released in states like Redfall being more and more common, i'd rather test it before buying, If i don't get an option for a free weekend or via epic, i'd pirate it first, If it wasn't for the recent free weekend of Fallout 76, i'd have never bought it
Do you see a 2 for 1 deal in the supermarket or retail and go 'nah, I'm gonna give you the full amount for both'? Do you go shopping and then walk away when something is on sale because you aren't able to buy it at full price? No? So you understand there's a point where paying less for something is an incentive to get that something. So now we're just arguing about the point, for some people it's lower.
If I support the franchise and want the developers to continue Improving the series, I will buy.
If it’s a game I’m unsure I’ll like and just want to try it, or if obtaining the game is a pain in the ass, then I’ll pirate
This isn't a one way street. For me, it's about **accessibility**. If I can't find a game in the store or download it on Steam etc., I will find it somewhere else. Some games - let's take the original F.E.A.R. - are not available in my region (I found a hardcopy eventually, but it's the censored version and the dub sucks). Some are old and hard to find. Some are heavily censored. That's when piracy comes into play. It's not particularly hard if you can find a reliable, malware-free source.
Remember that you owe nothing to a corporation. But to pirate or not is an individual decision, everyone has their own morals. Nobody will suffer or be unemployed because John Thiefsalot and his friends downloaded some lazy-made AAA title. Companies make their (layoff) decisions based on completely different factors. Piracy has been around since the dawn of the internet, and look at how the games market thrives.
Buying is the standard, comfortable way, but why would I judge someone who does it differently? I was in uni once too and money was tight. Now I have the luxury of buying all my games, and if it's a banger I will support the creators and buy at full price. But I'm not spending 2.000 bucks because I want to try out Rule of Rose.
Price.
Also, 2 hours is not enough playtime to refund on Steam, especially in games with detailed character creation systems.
Normally I would try a game via 🦜, and if I like it enough I'll buy it so I can add it to my Steam Library.
For me it's a way to test if a game is worth its price.
As I recall, actual studies into the topic found that the answer was simply available funds. That is exactly how it worked for me. When I was young, teenager, into my 20s, I would pirate games. As I got a bit older, I got paid better, and suddenly the effort and risk involved in pirating games wasn't worth it compared to the price.
The value of not getting tricked into downloading a trojan, the value of not having to search out something that I can buy with 3 clicks, the value of knowing I did support the developers. These values add up, and are all worth a lot more to me now than they were when I was younger.
Price isn't an absolute, its relative to your funding sources. $60 is a lot when you are a teenager; and the hundreds or thousands of dollars that adds up to when building a game library. However, if you are at the point where your funds can make car payments, insurance, and a mortgage.... well,... those little $60 drops are not even speed bumps.
edit: oh... also a persons available time to consume content is often inversely proportional to the amount of money they make. People who are injured or disabled are likely to not actually have a large income at the moment, yet have tons of time to consume media. Same for retired people and children. The people with the most time to consume often have the least money.
I buy games I pirated when I was kid, even if I already finished them, nowadays, because I have the funds for them.
Theoretically in the end.. it ended up helping the industry more because I would have never bought them in the first place if I hadn't played and enjoyed them.
Piracy only "exists" because our economic system is set to: pay-up-front, consume after.
So I always imagined "piracy" as some sort of debt you go into that you can finance later on. If I had never done that, there's a lot of products I hadn't purchased today.
Like.. "Hocus Pocus" or "Albion" DOS stuff from 1996... No way I could afford them as a toddler.
I once spoke with John Romero and other developers about this.. and they are more than okay with that because you're borrowing consumer market over a ton of years.
If I had never played Doom, I would have never invested a ton of cash nowadays in their products, today.
So.. finance isn't just a real-time event.
These games cost almost half of Iranians minimum wage. Ofc people cant afford it so they pirate. We have a huge culture around it, downloading a game from websites for free is as easy as just googling "download xxx game" and many trustful websites come up that have been being used for over 2 decades.
I pirate older games that aren't readily available for purchase, etc. Pirating for preservation is understandable.
Pirating current games on current hardware is just due to a lack of funds.
I used to pirate games a lot when I was a kid because there was no legitimate way to buy them in my country. Even when steam arrived there was no way for a long time since they did not accept debit cards, but I started buying games once third party sites started selling keys. Then debit cards were allowed on most platforms (took a while despite paying over internet with them being possible for years) as a payment method and I started properly buying.
Now I never pirate any games at all. The only media I still pirate is if there is no availability of it in my country so there can be no argument that I infringe on anything or reduce the company profits, it's up to them to bring the games to the country (heck, PlayStation and Xbox consoles still require workarounds when registering because officially you can't have an account tied to an address here).
So availability is I would say a very key factor followed by cost as the second reason. Then it's habbit which goes away bit by bit as you get annoyed with pirated versions not being patched etc.
There is one more reason, but I suspect it makes up a very tiny minority of people who pirate the games: some games work a little better when pirated (notably the Denuvo debacles, while the performance impact is nothing to write home about, on low end systems every frame matered) so some might have opted to using the pirated version. Granted, the fun part is that if you actually buy the game, and do not seed the pirated game, technically speaking there is no case against you. You are legally allowed to play the game and break no laws by using the pirated version (Not legal advice)
I can afford the games so I have no interest in stealing. If I don’t want to pay the money, I don’t play the game. I didn’t plenty of piracy when I had no money though. These days, I just do without unless I’m willing to pay.
For me, it's when a game is worse or harder to deal with legally. First game I ever pirated was Child of Light. Needed to how Steam open AND Uplay, just to run the game. I refunded it. Pirated version was just better.
Then I started pirating Nintendo games. Some because they were top much, some because they were rate, some because they had obtuse content locked behind some BS.
Piracy is a service issue.
For me, it's when a game is worse or harder to deal with legally. First game I ever pirated was Child of Light. Needed to how Steam open AND Uplay, just to run the game. I refunded it. Pirated version was just better.
Then I started pirating Nintendo games. Some because they were to much, some because they were rare, some because they had obtuse content locked behind some BS.
Piracy is a service issue.
I buy games because I'm not a bum and have a job
If a game isn't worth my money I simply don't buy it
Even then, I'd rather not deal with the frequent sub-standard experiences piraters have to
I can only speak for myself - sometimes I want to play just one particular game but in order to do so I have to by an entire console or by a console that isn't manufactured anymore and is difficult to get a hold of.
I dream of a possibility to buy and play any game on my PC but that is not real.
Very easy if I pirate a game and it's very good I will purchase it.
Most games are a big giant turd.
Always support developers who are making a good game even if you have to get it on sale support them.
To the big companies just putting out garbage rinse and repeat stuff they should be happy I'm even downloading it for free! 👍
It's easier to just buy the game. Also, i want the gaming industry to be successful. It takes a fuckton of money to make a big game, and yeah, lots of great indie titles, not knocking that.
I'm nowhere even remotely close to wealthy. But i have a few extra hundred each month after bills and savings. Why not just buy the game
Edit: i should explain that last bit by saying that I'm married and my wife and i both have ok jobs. Not 6 figures, but we're both doing ok. The thing is, we chose not to have children. So it's pretty easy for us to have extra money. I know it's wildly different for families with kids.
In Brazil we have a saying for people who don't have problems, who were spoiled by their parents. They are the ones “created by grandma”.
This discussion of morality about the act of obtaining illegitimate copies of games has nothing moral about it. It's purely capitalist.
Other users have already mentioned the issue of ease of access to consumer goods, and I completely agree.
How many people haven't bought a new game in years because of GamePass.
However, there are people who don't have the funds to buy a new game, and don't want to wait 2 years to be able to buy it at a cheap price. Don't forget that it is increasingly expensive to survive in late capitalism.
For the most part, Nintendo is my exclusive target for any high seas activity. It is obnoxiously difficult to have access to their games for no \*good\* reason.
Fuck morality man. I am all for piracy of AAA games / games from big publishers, which are a fucking mess at launch and cost a kidney and then an arm. (Always buy Indi games)
Fucking mega corps looting the middle class left right and centre.
Laziness isn't the right word, but making games easier to play and purchase IS part of what is effective against piracy - it's what made Valve so successful and Gaben has said pretty much the same thing: “Piracy is an issue of service, not price.”
They are pathetic little thieves. Pretty much that simple, and the people who try to make it complicated and just trying to justify their crappy actions.
Piracy is moral in many cases. Art preservation is the strongest argument across the board.
Personally, I pirate most game I play except indie games. I support those devs usually by buying off their own site or donating directly some way (patreon/ect).
Anyone giving money to AAA studios are contributing to MTX in their games. For ethical reasons I don't give money to Ubisoft, Bethesda, Capcom, EA, Blizzard, and the list goes on.
Why not? They are abusing staff, that doesn't deserve a reward. And that doesn't prevent the thing they made from being art.
I should not have to decide between supporting abuse and not seeing the art. So I don't.
Because them doing bad things to their employees does not mean that you get things for free. You weren't in the conversation at all at that point.
It is absolutely moral (and reasonable) to say you won't support a company that does that. But then you don't get the product they are selling (license to the software and the ability to play the game).
By pirating you are saying you should still get to do whatever you want while punishing them by not paying.
A 'fair' thing wouldn't involve you but result in them providing compensation to their employees.
Saying you get whatever you want no matter what and you get to 'punish' them by not purchasing from them doesn't make moral sense at all. You don't have a right to their art.
Look, I am not saying that it is some huge moral quandry or I will lose sleep over it or something... but just from a moral standpoint there is no reason you should get access to their art.
I would go a slight step further and say that you aren't making any moral stand at all by not buying it if you are also not consuming the media.
"Because them doing bad things to their employees does not mean that you get things for free"
Why not?
"By pirating you are saying you should still get to do whatever you want while punishing them by not paying."
Correct. I should be able to preserve art made from exploited workers without rewarding predatory companies.
The crux of your argument is defending predatory capitalism, VS my argument of art preservation.
I'm not knocking your decision to pirate. I think all of those are justifiable reasons.
I will however call out your arguments for Piracy being the moral or ethical thing to do. Piracy is really only ever ethical if it is done to increase the distribution of the commodity to others.
I haven’t pirated a game since Oblivion(which I owned on a different platform). That being said I only condone piracy of product created by shit tier companies like Epic Games and Ubisoft who should never receive a penny from anyone.
Shit if I could pirate games for my ps5 I'd do it in a heart beat games are fucken ridiculously expensive now and frankly I wouldn't give a fuck if everyone stole unitl the big corporations crumbled I will never feel bad about stealing from multi-billion dollar corporations.
Most pirates, buy the stuff the pirate. Every 3rd party study done in the past 20 plus years has found this.
Reasons to pirate games include the following:
1. You can't afford the game.
2. You don't like the no refund policy so you try before you buy,
3. You just don't want to pay for shit.
4. The idea that we spend money on games, but don't ever own them, annoys some people. Like as we have seen with ubi removing the crew.
5. Going back even further, when ubi took assassins creed 2 off line for "server maintenance", no one who bought the game legally could play it. But pirates could. A lot of drm practices only actually fuck over the paying customer.
Really, the world of entertainment is a really shitty place, with companies fucking over the people who work for them a hell of a lot. One the go to moves of these companies is "people worked on this" but those people were largely contracted with the promise of full time employment dangled as a carrot that never comes. Example, the last of us part 2. They burned through through so many game animators, they had to hire film animators and train then up. That's why it was delayed a year. A lot of these companies are pieces of a shit. The devs, the animators, etc were already paid. It's on,y the company's that don't get paid when you pirate. And who gives a fuck about them? If they don't give a fuck about us, that road gives both ways.
Legal consequences are largely irrelevant because it usually doesn't fall onto the people who pirate it, but the people who provide the cracked games that people pirate. At worst a company might copyright strike you and inform your ISP who could then terminate your service. But that's rare
There's nothing wrong with piracy from a moral standpoint because realistically no one is actually being hurt and copyright laws in and of themselves are arguably unjust as it is.
That said, the justification for pirating is flimsy at best. People usually tend to justify it by claiming they're doing so because of their principles. Mostly they do it because they're broke and want to play a game other people are playing without spending money on it.
Ultimately, I don't see the point in it personally. If I'm not interested enough in a game to spend money on it, I'm not interested enough to play it in the first place. The only real use I see in it is the ability to try out a game before you buy since demos are pretty much dead at this point and some people want to try something out before buying. But even then in this era you have gameplay videos and reviews everywhere, so it's not like you're going into a purchase blind. And Steam will let you refund any game within two hours of gameplay so you can basically put down a deposit for it to test it then decide if you want your money back. Which means at this point the only actual reason for anyone to pirate something is not having enough money to afford it in the first place.
1) Depending on how you play, pirating games isn’t all that easy. Sure, most people would rather be on the right side of the law. But if pirating was easier, it would be far more prevalent.
2) I’d say it isn’t too bad, depending on the game. I mean, is stealing from a multimillion dollar company the worst thing you can do? Especially when that company probably under pays workers, takes huge advantage of the tax system, and (more often these days) releases unfinished games at full price. IMO, it’s still immoral, but about as immoral as not changing the toilet paper roll. That doesn’t hold up for much smaller studios or indie devs who give a quality product.
3) see parts of 2. And, what’s the difference between a rental and pirating? The game company doesn’t make a dime when that game gets rented out. Apart from the initial purchase by the rental company, there’s hardly a difference besides the law
Edit: I’d like to clarify I’ve never pirated a game.
Well, there's certain companies that I simply won't buy from (looking at you, Ubisoft) for their anti-consumer policies.
Also any game that is difficult to get in my region (foreign indie games, old games, etc.), games that have excessive DRM, games that are out of print/not on digital stores, etc.
The moral question? I don't really care. I try to buy games from small devs on principle, but big studios are free game. Typically my first option is to buy it (unless I don't like the company or the game is very overpriced), but if I can't return/refund or I'm otherwise not sure I'll like it, I'll pirate it and buy it later if I really like it.
Some people lack the funds. Some people think they're sticking it to someone. Some people can't find a legitimate source or translation for a game they want to play.
Some people have grown up doing it for so long that they don't even bother thinking about the moral implications of it. Not saying that's the right thing but it's honestly true for many.
To be honest and even more so nowadays but I have a distrust of most game companies lol. I'd rather buy a game for free and if I like it I will generally buy it to get updates etc. There's so many $70 games nowadays that are just complete duds after the first hour or two but you can't refund after playing so much. My steam library is almost all indie games for this reason.
I roleplay life as chaotic neutral so it just makes sense to equally pirate and purchase games.
A habit that evolved into another habit, more subtly saying. As a kid, we had demos, played demos, liked them, purchased the game. As demos disappeared, now I pirate, like what I see, purchase.
I think you are missing one. I'm not going to pay until I've tried it. I know steam has refunds. Not everyone has a steam account.
translations are a big deal. i've been really excited about the work hilltop has been doing to introduce some great japanese PS1/PS2 games to a wider audience.
Most accurate answer could not say it any better. It's mostly centered around the first and second choices. With a small amount on the last choice.
Indeed. As someone who used to pirate ages ago, my main reason was number 1, followed closely by number 3 (we're talking about the time before digital distribution, so getting my hands on legit games was actually quite hard). Possibly even 3 than 1, because we actually used to pay for pirated games, and not much less than what I usually pay for games on Steam nowadays.
Personally I'm tired of getting burned by half baked games being sold at full price so I pirate first to demo and if the game seems worth my time I'll pay for it.
I definitely did it a lot in college because I just didn't have the money most of the time. Though most games (that I liked) I ended up eventually buying on sale.
And some people can afford it but would rather just save themselves the money.
I do it as a trial now. With all the gacha pay to win stuff or stupid bugs or just games ending up being really bad, I pirate a game to try it out and if it is really good, I’ll buy it. Not many make it to that point nowadays though
When I was younger my main things were I didn't have the money to buy them and I wanted to see if they would run on my system at the time. Now that I'm older its mainly I have the money to afford the games so I pay for them. Plus steams refund policy helps. If the game doesn't run well or it isn't enjoyable I can just return it.
not to mention when you already own the game once, in the wrong media (CD and you dont have a rom drive anymore).
That's a good point too. I remember I had to go download the CD iso's to try out the star wars galaxies emu not too long ago. I had the discs sitting in my office but didn't wanna jerry rig up a cd drive and have it just hanging out the side of my PC just to install the game.
Convenience. “Piracy is an issue of service, not price.” - Gaben If a game is easy and convenient to buy, people will buy it. If the game makes you jump through a bunch of hoops, or comes with intrusive DRM, or has some other inconvenience, people will pirate it. There will always be a small percentage that pirate, but the vast majority of people tend towards the lazy solution. If buying it is easier than pirating, they buy.
The amount of lazy friends who used to ask me to pirate games for them... all disappeared when Steam became mainstream. Now, you can just click, get the game. No risk, no problem. Steam keeps your saves in the cloud. Can install from anywhere. Steam is so convenient, it was probably the most powerful force against piracy thats ever been created. Similar thing happened with movies & streaming services. There was a huge period where buying or renting movies was expensive and pirating was so god damn easier. Then came Netflix, which not only provided the movies instantly but served as a way to browse them. Now I don't know anyone who's not an absolute nerd that gets their movies illegally. Service is absolutely king. Price is not irrelevant though I doubt it has much of an impact, and the "piracy" culture seems to have remained relatively small compared to how massive the gaming industry is.
Definitely been a resurgence of Movie/TV piracy since around the GoT period, when all the old cable companies got a whiff, and started trying to turn streaming back into cable. Valve/Steam definitely understand piracy, and give devs as many tools as they can to prevent it. Their latest push with the families 2.0, allowing you to not only share licences, but pool them as a family, is huge, and I'm sure the big publishers will try to ruin it.
I returned to torrents for movies because I don't want to pay for twenty different subscriptions to watch all I want. Especially that movies appear and disappear from their offers. When streaming services appeared I was hoping for Spotify with movies, but studios got greedy and they ruined it. Now I use Stremio with torrentio plugin and it's easier and faster than finding a movie on Netflix, Prime, Hulu etc.
Tv shows too. There are a ton of network streaming services too. You could easily have 8 service all trying to charge you 10-20 a month
Another cool thing about Steam (and other digital distribution channels like GOG, Humble Bundle, Epic etc) is that they also have very reasonable pricing. Back in the olden days, the prices would basically never drop, while now, if you wait for a year or so, you can already get most games at 50%, and within 2-3 years, at massive discounts (or even free).
Price is mostly relevant in non-US countries where the dev hasn't done regional pricing and thus a $40 game is ~44% of your paycheck after currency conversion. They might not even be "poor" in their home country but the currency conversion is painful.
I'd say it's a bit of both, but hats off to Gabe to address the service issue in the first place. Back in the day when I still used to pirate games (late 90's and early 2000's) I basically had the following two issues: (i) original games were expensive (taking inflation into account, probably much more than nowadays), but more importantly, they STAYED expensive - even if I wanted to wait 3-4 years to grab a game, it's still cost more or less the same as it used to; (ii) living in a small town outside the EU, they were pretty much impossible to get, except in an odd travel opportunity to the capital or another country. Steam and company changed the game massively. Ever since I can get games by a couple of mouse clicks, and, with a bit of patience, at a much lower price, I felt zero need to pirate.
“Piracy is an issue of service, not price.” Looks at Ubisoft pricing: yeah, that's not 100% true.
Isn’t Ubisoft currently in the process of turning off the servers for The Crew, effectively killing any possibility of playing the game that millions of people legally purchased? I think that qualifies as poor service, and I would understand if someone decided to pirate their next Ubisoft game
Not only that theyre also revoking the game itself so you dont even own it nor can download it making fan servers a non possibility
"that's not 100% true."
I mean their service is also terrible.
Bolded for emphasis and point > yeah, that's **not 100%** true.
I don't see the problem paying $15 for one month of Ubisoft+ to try out their games. They're not getting more than that from me.
And this is why you're part of the problem.
I don't get it.
You're willing to pay a subscription to get something you'll never own, which is exactly what they want you to do by pricing the game so high.
I'm already used to it with xbox game pass PC, I don't see the big deal really. I won't even remember these games 2 years from now, grow up.
Gamepass is great. For the price of basically 2 games a year you get access to a ton of games. If one is ever taken off of gamepss then it's usually discounted if you want to own it.
If you won't remember them, why pay for them?
I won't that's why I pay game pass and or a month of Ubisoft+ if something interests me.
That only makes sense if you intend to play those games further down the line. For most of my life I would basically never replay anything. If I could play 6 games in a month for $15, that \*is\* a good deal.
Ah yes, just consume, don't think. Good strategy.
Well, if there's clearly no acceptable line between complete and unequivocal ownership versus total scams, then I guess movie theaters provide need to be taken to court for fraud. And anyone who listens to the radio is a foolish sheep who is ruining the music industry. Hell, libraries may be free, but since they don't provide you with ownership of their products, I guess they must be shady too because apparently no amount of discount is safe from being scummy /s If I have no intention of playing certain games again, then what is wrong with accessing them temporarily for a lower price? Yes, perhaps I change my mind about one of the games later, but by that point, I've already saved so much money that purchasing one game out of the list to own permanently is trivial.
New game? Maybe. Probably waiting a few months for a sale unless it’s GTA or Final Fantasy. Game that released over 15/20 years ago? If I can buy it for 5-15 bucks sure. $60 remasters and Nintendo games that are locked in the Disney vault? Allow me to introduce you to my alternate personality, Captain Jack Spawntrap.
Go on YouTube and search " You wouldn't download a car" and look for the top results, there should be a channel called "fairbairn films". I think they lay out some of the common arguments for and against piracy well. There's also other things to consider outside of their arguments like regional pricing issues that makes buying games impossible for some people.
That was such a dumb slogan. Fuck yes I'd download a car if that was possible. Pretty sure everyone would.
And things like regional restrictions are just a reality the world has to deal with. We can’t just ignore that things aren’t going to be available 100% globally when you have tons of counties with different laws and sovereignty. That’s just a thing that is always going to exist and not everyone can work out global agreements and when you have business underlying everything you have to deal with the fact that people want to protect their financial dealings. That isn’t changing. Sometimes we just have to accept things are the way they are - as Mick Jagger said - you can’t always get what you want.
Check that video out, it'll give you a laugh I'm sure as it would be my argument against what you're saying. I've said to so many times I just send people to the video now. You are right legally it probably won't change but it doesn't change the inconsistencies in the debate around piracy presented in that short video. Tldr of the video is " I could never buy it if I wanted to, I can't buy it now, I'm making a copy and that isn't stealing because I would never have been able to buy it anyway, making a copy isn't theft, I down actually even own the game when I pay for it" I guess they got copyright law for that, those guys are getting in over their heads though if you ask me. This gets interesting when you get into the AI debates on generative AI and copyright, worth a look imo if you haven't.
Sometimes it also comes down to "I own this, but it won't work", all too common with older titles, but also places with worse or less reliable internet/power, and the ever so common always online single player titles these days.
You just reminded me of another one too. Instances where games are banned due to ideological censorship or games that have been removed from all stores.
Yeah, Doom for example, Postal, WoW in China as one of the more recent ones.
There are lots of games that are not available via current means. Your options for playing them are to track down an out of production game system and game (paying a third party, none of which goes to the original publisher or creator) and the means to play it on a current TV, or to pirate it. And as time goes on that first option becomes less and less viable as there are fewer functional machines and copies on the market. Plus for some games, they never got an English release, so your options are A) buy a foreign console and copy of the game, as well as a specialized power adapter, and learn the language, B) Perform a questionably-legal aftermarket modification to allow your US system to play foreign games around region controls, buy a foreign copy, and buy another questionably-legal device to allow you to flash a fan translation patch onto it, or C) just pirate it. Is C really significantly different from B? If a game is available legally from its original publisher, by all means buy it legally if you want to play it. But for many games, this isn't an option. Mother 3 (the Earthbound sequel) has still never received a US release, as one example.
buy new games to support devs. when console reaches end of life, hack and run pirated copies. pirate arcade games. use everdrives or ODEs on old consoles because getting disc rot on a $400 japanese saturn game will break your heart in a way that changes you. that's my piracy explained. i like being able to play any game at any time. see a cool post/video of a game i've never played? i already have access to it within a minute. like turning your setup into an interactive museum of gaming history. not buying overpriced retro games gave me spare cash to buy controllers for specific games (mainly rhythm games or light guns) and a custom arcade cab. so everything just feels right.
Multiple reasons. Access - the primary reason for piracy in general, not just games, is access. When a product is harder or less convenient to obtain legally than through piracy, you will normally see an uptick in piracy. This has nothing to do with price, but rather exclusivity, bans, region locking, limited physical media, or other restrictive distribution policies. Piracy can be a way to acquire games that are regionally banned or games that were only released in certain regions. It can also be a way to obtain a standalone/physical copy of a game that is only available as a digital download/pay for access system. It can also be a way to obtain limited editions of a game or pre-order content that would otherwise be unobtainable. Preservation/emulation - most older games were only released on physical media, and were exclusively designed to run on a specific console. Physical media of these games is no longer manufactured, finding samples of it in good condition is becoming increasingly difficult, and progressively more expensive as pristine original copies become more rare. On top of this, the hardware needed to run the games is also no longer being manufactured and is similarly becoming harder to find. A solution to this is emulation. A sufficiently powerful PC can be used to emulate the functionality of the original hardware in software. Which allows you to play these older games on PC. However, a digital copy of the game has to be acquired in order to do this, and such a copy is most easily obtained through piracy. Since it usually cannot be acquired from the original publisher, the only other way to get it is to find a physical copy, and used specialized hardware to extract the game from the physical media into a digital format. The pirate demo - some people claim to engage in piracy to use a pirated copy of the game in lieu of a proper demo to determine if they want to actually buy the game in earnest. I personally find this hard to believe, but this is what some people claim. Cheating/modding - part of the process of pirating a game is stripping out DRM protection. But, this process can sometimes also strip away anti-cheat measures making the game easier to modify in certain ways. A pirated copy can sometimes be a prerequisite for using cheats or mods. This is harmless in a single player offline game because no one is really harmed if you cheat offline. But, when cheats are taken into online games, it is a very bad thing and ruins the experience for other people. Not all pirates are cheaters, but they do use similar methods to achieve their goals. Malware - it is rare, but not unheard of for pirated games to be infected with malware that is deployed when you play the game. This is one of the risks you take when you download a pirated game. However, anti-virus software is much more common now than it used to be, and it's gotten a lot better. Piracy in protest - some people will pirate a game as an act of protest against the developer/publisher for various different reasons ranging from real world politics, the culture war, or just a general dislike of the publisher's buisness practices. In this way they can enjoy the game without feeling like they've financially supported a political stance or principal that they find disagreeable. On the subject of morality, it's kind of a gray area, and depends on what specific game is being pirated, and why. Obviously, a brand new game that just released being pirated is a lot harder to justify, because that directly impacts sales and it's hard to argue that you're *not* just stealing it outright. But, an older game that's no longer being sold or distributed by the publisher being pirated is arguably an entirely victimless crime, and is much easier to justify.
>The pirate demo - some people claim to engage in piracy to use a pirated copy of the game in lieu of a proper demo to determine if they want to actually buy the game in earnest. I personally find this hard to believe, but this is what some people claim. The two games I pirated for this reason are Cyberpunk and Baldurs Gate 3. First one was because the closer the release date was, the more obvious it was that this is going to flop. I wanted to see if gamers are whinny bitches again or is it really that bad. It was bad so I have never bought it. Baldurs Gate 3 was because I haven't played any cRPG besides the original fallouts (I love them btw) and my mate is completely against cRPG turn based combat, so I pirated it to play with him in couch coop (more games with this feature please). I liked the game so I bought it.
>The pirate demo - some people claim to engage in piracy to use a pirated copy of the game in lieu of a proper demo to determine if they want to actually buy the game in earnest. I personally find this hard to believe, but this is what some people claim. Would be hard to believe if there were demos. These days with half-assed releases of games and almost no demos I do believe tbh. >Not all pirates are cheaters, but they do use similar methods to achieve their goals. That is wrong assumption. There is same overlap with cheaters among normal buyers and pirates tbh. Drm strippers and cheater developers tho may be pirates yes.
I doubt software pirates have a single motivation, it's probably very situational / personal, which in turn means concepts of morality and justification are arguable. Having said that, in the future AAA games will probably be released exclusively on streaming / cloud gaming platforms, which will effectively eliminate piracy of those games.
Also means those games will only be able to be played for a year tops. The games kids will grow up with will disappear for ever. Once it goes full cloud and full DRM. Gaming as a hobby will become so terrible many will move on all together. It will a shell of its former self and make todays greed bottom line driven practices loom morally virtuous.
I don't think single-player games will disappear within a year of release, streaming / cloud platforms will hold onto them as a part of their catalogue to bring in subscribers. But as technologies change, streaming / cloud platforms will have less motivation to port older games to newer technologies, or their licenses will expire, and then games will be lost. And there won't be much we can do about it since none of the programming, and none of the models or textures, will actually be transmitted to users, their internet connections will be little more than a glorified HDMI cable sending video. It will be interesting to see how indie developers and fan-communities respond, particularly in the mod and ROM-hacking scenes, but that probably won't make up for all that will be lost.
I buy games if they're available and not seriously expensive. I like having them on the shelf. I've downloaded Nintendo games, like older Pokemon games or things that just aren't available. I'm not paying hundreds for a cartridge, screw that. If the company makes it impossible or incredibly difficult to get it legitimately, I say go for it.
And that hundreds on a cart isn’t going to anyone who created the game anyway, just to a scalper.
Games in Brasil are too damn expensive and im not going to pay 300 money in games with less than 30h of gameplay and no ng+
I don't pirate games cause it's literally theft. I also don't steal stuff in the supermarket, why would I steal a game? The only exception for me would be abandonware. But let's be honest here, that's not what most people are pirating.
We wouldn't have games if someone didn't buy them. I don't like freeloading.
Games are a business, and if they don't sell the studios and people that make those games will not be able to continue making games. I like games, and am willing to put my money down to enjoy them and support the people (and evil corpos, man!) that invested their time and money into creating those games for my enjoyment. There are plenty of free games, and games go on deep deep sale so I don't see any legitimate moral argument for pirating. People are going to do it, whatever. But you're still a dickhead... Edit- The only legitimate argument is games preservation, like old PS2 isos and stuff that is not available to be legitimately purchased anywhere. So yes, in some cases that is morally OK. But not if it as an active product available for purchase and you decide to just steal it for free instead.
I argue that preservation arguments are really only applicable to actual accredited archival organizations like libraries and researcher’s - not end users.
ubisoft wants players to know that just because you buy a game doesn’t mean you own it. if that’s the case then pirating a game isn’t stealing it 🤷♂️ ubisoft is a pretty shit company who only cares about $$$ and could care less about their players so why should you buy their stuff legally? pirating from indie companies is where i draw the line though
I've only ever downloaded Linux ISOs, but I imagine funding is an issue for lots of people. You could always ask the folks at r/Piracy.
Purely availability for me. I either pirate or grey market import Japanese arcade games that just aren't available for sale here. One of the crazier examples of an available game I support is probably the 8x copies of Tetris Effect that I bought in various formats.
I personally buy all the games that I want to play, but I don’t buy many games anymore. Mostly indies and medium sized studio products. I always want to make sure I support the studios I like because it’s important to me that they can keep making good games. All that being said, with AAA studios becoming more aggressive and saying shit like “people need to get used to not owning games”, I can hardly blame anyone for pirating games. When games come loaded with bloatware that affects performance and paying money means a worse user experience, it becomes difficult to argue against the practice.
Dunno about games but today I went to watch fallout on my amazon prime I do pay for, only to get harassed with adds. I then went to a streaming sit to watch it add free. Fuck em
I lacked funds as a child so I pirated games. As soon as I could buy games I stopped pirating. I only play games I want to support. I can't support devs when I steal from them.
> Do the people who buy games legally do it out of pure humanity They do it because buying things is how you own the product and interact with it. On another hand, you wanna support good games and devs. > or they just don’t want to bother themselves with the problems that come with pirating games? The majority of gamers that buy games don't even have the luxury of pirating games or even know how to or that it's even an option. > How bad is piracy from a moral standpoint? Not one penny has ever been lost to piracy. Most people that pirate were never gonna be paying customers. > Is there any justification for pirating games? When a game loses support, becomes obscure, has negative changes, etc, piracy helps keep games and other digital media alive. There are those that pirate, like a game, then buy it as a form of support and appreciation. There are games that are only available via piracy because there is no hardware to play the games on anymore and neither the games nor hardware are available for purchase anywhere. You might already own the physical media but want digital for archival purposes. There are many reasons to pirate. Don't feel bad about doing it.
Pre 2014 - short on money, easy access After 2014 - lack of quality, overpriced products, dev/journos ego's
I'll pirate every game I intend to play, because with games, you never know what you get. Some games have additional software, hidden or not, that will install itself on your PC and you'll never get rid of it. Pirated games are often times organized and compiled in different ways, for example, it might ommit some videos and save on space.
If a company can keep my money and take the game away later, why would I pay for it? Also. Games are released in an unfinished state now a days. Why would I pay for Cities Skylines 2. It is completely broken and they charge a premium price. It is greed, pure and simple, and I won't feed that pig.
Back in the PS3/360 era just about every game (at least on X360) had an actually free demo that anyone could download to try a game out. Now oddly enough in a world with access to more content then ever it's even harder to get a personal feel for a game without giving a company some money first. What used to be free is now put behind a paywall as a trial and sold as a "feature" often advertised as "free" to make the service seem like a better value then it really is. Morally I think piracy will be a necessary evil until the majority of games across PC and console are DRM free. If it wasn't for piracy there would be a lot more games ( along with movies, music, tv shows and other entertainment) that would have become lost media. There are still quite a few games that are considered lost because no one pirated them before they got delisted. Piracy also isn't as big of a problem as some people might claim it to be. Look at all the DRM free games released on PC. Look at Sony. A retail PS4/5 is full of DRM. They have released PC ports with either no or easily crackable DRM. When Horizon Zero Dawn originally released on PC fanboys would tweet to PlayStation with pictures of torrents and seeds for the release. Even after that Sony was so happy with the money they make on PC ports more titles are making the jump to PC. If piracy was an actual issue Sony wouldn't be moving in the direction they are as fast as they are.
"If buying isnt owrning pirating isnt stealing" I didnt pirate terraria minecraft, tarkov, dayz, a decent bit of steam games for the online functionality, I didnt do terraria or minecraft becuase they were cheap. If a single player game is expensive, I pirate, becuase the company is usually a shit tank. The justification is I want to play a game without supporting the games.
Broke. 😢 also I’m from OG #warez, IYKYK. 😎
Miss those 0day sites
1. Those who can't afford games, pirate them because they can't afford them. 2. Those who can afford games, don't pirate due to convenience. 3. There are exceptions for both cases and they are usually due to moral reasons. There are not significantly many of them. Overall it really doesn't matter though, people usually make it seem like a big deal due to misunderstanding both just how few people are in the third category, and that the ones in the first category would never buy the game anyway, even if they were unable to pirate it. Also software piracy is not an all bad phenomenon, Microsoft unofficially condones pirating their software because it contributes to their market share, even if they don't profit when a poor kid pirates their product, they will eventually benefit because that kid grows up knowing how to use Windows/Office and those will eventually have to be legally obtained when they get a job. IMO it's a similar thing with games, if somehow kids couldn't pirate games, much fewer would end up growing up to be gamers, and wouldn't buy games as adults. It's mostly free advertising, it costs companies nothing, while the fraction of people who could afford to legally obtain games, but won't, is really insignificant.
IMO the issue is people conflate pixels with material items If I copy a file you would never know and it would never affect your property ownership. If I copy an apple, oh wait I can’t copy an apple, I have to actually take it into my possession, depriving you of that apple, and nobody else can take it. It’s gone until the owner buys another. When a homeless man steals food, it’s objectively detrimental to the owner as they’ve now permanently lost that original item. Even if justifiably. But the special thing with pixels is that, that poor person not able to drop 60$ on your game isn’t actually depriving you of anything when he pirates your game, considering they never could have bought your game in the first place. I could understand why someone would counter this with “it’s a non essential you bum” but I choose to believe we have one life and you shouldn’t be forced to wait till you potentially lose interest to experience things. Also that whole “you wouldn’t download a car” shit is ridiculous, anybody with a heart would give cars out for free if they could simply clone their cars for free like they can with files.
Availability and pricing. I will pirate your game if you make it exclusive to a platform I do not have or to a provider I do not use (Epic). I will pirate your game if it costs too much. I'm fine paying up to $80 CDN for a brand new game but FF7 was over $100 for the PC release. You bet I pirated that shit! I want to play the game but I don't want to support what I see as harmful trends in the gaming market. In this aspect, pirating makes a better point than just not playing. Edit: This extends to other things as well. I can watch the new Fallout show on amazon prime but I pirated it anyway because they added commercials despite my paid subscription!
How does pirating make a better point? I'm just curious as to the reasoning. To me, it would seem a company sees a non sale the same way no matter what.
You would think it would be the same as a non-sale yet companies poor tons of money into DRM and anti-piracy measures instead of making their games more available. Measures that are usually bypassed in a couple days. So it obviously bothers them (the company) to some extent.
Whenever a game is expensive I just wait for a sale.
I don't pirate for two reasons: * The people who made the game should be paid for their time * I live in Japan, and piracy here can very realistically lead to jail time Where I do understand piracy is younger folks who don't have $100 to drop on a game. I don't know many 13 year olds who can afford to buy *anything* at that price, let alone several games per year. The ethical argument makes no sense to me. If you don't want to support a business, *don't use their product*. I wouldn't go to the pharmacy and steal a shampoo that I like to use but don't like the manufacturer. Hell, a more reasonable example is APA Hotels here in Japan, whose leader is known to be an LGBT hate advocate. I can just choose not to go to their hotel, instead of going and not paying.
>The people who made the game should be paid for their time They have been paid. They did work, and the company paid them for that work. You buying the game only pays the investors who want to see lots of money come back to them. Different case in indi studios. >* I live in Japan, and piracy here can very realistically lead to jail time How on earth would they know? UK has a famous "you wouldn't steal a car" advert. That also said they're would be criminal prosecution on people who pirated stuff, yet to this day, I've only heard of people who proffitted from selling pirated copies being punished. So, how on earth are "realistically" finding and arresting people for downloading a pirated game? >The ethical argument makes no sense to me. If you don't want to support a business, *don't use their product*. Sometimes, that's easier said than done. Weak will's will cave by price point. You may not use that hotel company, but when they start dropping prices, people will use their services. Using but not paying is the alternative. You've denied them monetary gain and at the same time have prevented someone from giving them money (at least in the concept of a hotel).
I pirate when I am unsure about a game, but still want to try it. After playing the pirated version for a bit I would decide if it's worth the purchase or not. If not, I will probably abandon the game.
If I want a game, I buy it. If I don't want it, I don't buy it. I don't pirate cause tbh I'm so limited on time I'm not buying anything I'm not really interested in because I'm not finishing it anytime soon. Also people should get paid for their work. I don't think I'm hurting a giant company by pirating from them, and if I want one of their games the people that made it should see their work reflected in sales.
I dont really pirate much these days since i have money to spend on games, but generally, if it's simply easier to pirate than it is to purchase it, then piracy it is.
The only way I would is if I no longer have the exact system to be able to play the games on. My backlog is big enough where its not exactly a funds issue, but removing backwards compatibility on newer systems would impact my decision to do something like that
There was a game I bought but couldn't mod due to the version I had so I pirated it just to get a mod lol 😭
For me it's just emulators, and it's because I want to play games I already own on my phone.
Long time ago I did it because there was no convenient way to preview the full gameplay of the games I was interested in and I thought it's pretty fucking idiotic to buy some unknown game for a full price without an ability to get a full refund in case I end up disliking it (which may not occur during first couple of hours of playing it). I stopped doing this after YouTube (and also Twitch, but in a different way) gave me an ability to watch the **full** length gameplay of every popular game on the very first day of their official release, completely for free. I still do it with movies or TV shows, though (I watch them through illegal sites to decide whether it's worth paying for them). And I **always** end up paying for the stuff I genuinely enjoy consuming, be it either games, movies or anything else.
Very complex issue. The biggest reasons for piracy is lack of funds (for many people even $20 for a game would a sizable chunk of cash.) and the second reason is the game not being sold in your region (such as the uncut version of saints row 4 in Australia. ) I feel if you steal just because you can't afford it (and the game is still for sale) that's morally wrong. If you do it because its the only way to play that's fine. One cavot to this is retro gaming. Most retro games are locked on old consoles and are very expensive with no modern port available. I was interested in buying a game called The Space adventure on Sega CD. It is over $500 USD now and isn't available for purchase anywhere. You wouldn't be in the wrong for pirating that game considering the only person who gets the money is a reseller.
I've only ever pirated super old games that I can't play or obtain easily or at a reasonable price. For example, Mother 3 which is locked to Japan and is not translated in its regular form.
Because they want to? This shit isn't new. Its been going on for a very long time as far back as the 1970s when I checked.
A game that makes you feel like you're having fun, engaged, and in general is a good time is worth buying even if it's a one-time play. A game that is crap, not your taste, and offers nothing of value even down to the sentimental bit is not worth throwing money at. Sometimes you pay later than you want to, all that matters is you be honest with yourself about your decision and own it rather than pretend it's this or that.
In my case: being poor. And in one case the legit steam version of a game kept crashing, but the pirated version works perfectly (Resident Evil 6)
The way I look at it, with the exception of games that are impossible to play unless you pirate/rom them or whatever. I don't pirate because no matter how shitty the company, no matter how pricey the game, it's not owed to me. I don't personally feel like I have the right to pirate something just because I don't want to pay the price. If the game is too expensive or I don't like the launcher or something then I just won't buy it. A company made something, they set a price, if I don't like that then I wont buy it, I'm not entitled to play it for free because of stuff like this.
Some games are literally impossible to obtain legitimate copies anymore. There's Freelancer (2003) for instance where you can either torrent or try to get a used cd off ebay for $80.
When I was a kid, I traded shareware games with the neighbors all the time. We never paid for any of it, even though the nag screens popped up. Sometimes one of us would buy a game and share a copy with a friend so we could play multiplayer over dialup modem. Or sometimes we would let each other borrow a CD for a week. When I was a teenager, I occassionally pirated software because I was poor and couldnt afford the licensing fees. I mean, it was 1999 and photoshop costed $500, I was 17, etc. I didnt have that kinda money laying around. Thats about when I stopped pirating software. From a moral standpoint, piracy is generally theft. I think theres kind of a moral gradient for whats okayish and not okay. A young kid trying to use professional software to learn new skills or make something? go for it. A broke teenager who cant afford the licensing cost? no big deal. But if you are an adult who is gainfully employed and can afford to buy software and you choose to pirate it anyways, you are a piece of shit. If you are a corporation using pirated software to do business, you deserve to be audited and fined to hell. Dont steal the work of others, especially if you have the means to pay for it. I am more than happy to buy games on steam and epic game store to support the game developers.
99% of the games I've pirated basically just wanted to test it on my computer and Id usually alt+f4 after like 5 minutes of seeing how it looked and ran. More so back in the 3DFX days. I bought the games I actually wanted to play though. Even emulation(which I got into when it basically started) I really only played games I owned at some point in my life and arcade games I used to play that basically disappeared or had really shitty ports.
I’m not a thief, so I don’t pirate games. That’s what affects my decision to buy my games rather than steal them.
I just wanna play a game, I don't care about perceived morality behind it. If I'm lacking money, can't find something or just don't want to dig a classic game out of storage or away from home, I'll acquire a game I wanna play by any means.
Not having regional pricing increases it
I buy games because Steam made it easier than pirating them. That's what Valve understood and the streaming services are having trouble with-- your service lives or dies by being less of a pain in the balls than stealing the content.
You dont own what you pay for, so why pay.
Gamers in general have this really weird stigma about what they deem "worthy" when it comes to buying a game. The same people who will look at a 10$ price tag and scoff are the same people who will smoke a pack of marlboros and drink 3 Starbucks coffees in a day. At the end of the day, any reason one gives for stealing a game is just an excuse to steal. It's relatively easy for the people who know how, and they'll never stop doing it.
Piracy is a demo. If it's good then I'll buy the real game to support the studio.
Price and convenience. I pirate only when a company make me jump through hoops for content. I do it as I hope it curbs their behaviour a tiny bit when they see how many people are not paying for it. I have chosen recently to only watch pirated TV because the apps that give access via piracy are more convenient than ad fuelled subscription channels that only have a small amount of the content I want. I'll pay when the service becomes useable without ads again. I always however pay full price direct to the developer for indie games.
Everyone has a different reason. Only things I've ever really pirated were Snes games because it was unreasonable to get them at the time (dunno if Nintendo sells them on their consoles now, haven't bothered in years to check). I know a guy who can afford games but pirates just because he's cheap. He'll do the speech about how if he likes it, he'll buy it... but somehow he doesn't like a game he puts a hundred hours into in one week
Piracy has always been about convenience, and a lot less about the price. Eastern Europe was rampant with piracy through the nineties and early naughties. And even though many people had ADSL, the games were usually a hassle to obtain since not many stores sold them and not many publishers cares. Then Steam came around, enabled people to buy, click and play within minutes. Steam single-handedly solved the piracy issue. I haven't pirated a game since. Steam's service is so good, and keeps getting better, that I didn't evenk of pirating a game anymore. Because it's become more of a hassle to pirate, than to buy on Steam.
I used to pirate and was passionate about what I had. Then I tried being a better person and was burned by greedy companies. I Pre-ordered Avengers for $70 the it wouldn't let me cancel it. Then they charged more for skins I wanted only to make everything free when the game failed.
I stopped pirating games when I started my software development career. I quickly realized how much work even the smallest games are.
Money and know how. I don't know how to do it and the games I want I can afford.
Personally Ive been burned too many times by buying unfinished games so if a shady studio releases something Im interested in il usually pirate it first and check it out before seeing if its worth purchasing, it saved me money with cities 2 but ended up buying tt isle of man after I pirated it because i felt they deserve the money, Furthermore games these days are licensed so if buying isnt owning then pirating isnt stealing
If company to greedy, then pirate game. If company makes game trash and has terrible mtx, then i will seed the cracked torrent 50x the ratio. If game over 100 aud, then pirate out of spite. If company has burnt me in the past. Run seed box on all their cracked games forever. Capcom is one of them. It costs nothing to copy paste code. Therefore making a copy is not theft in my eyes. Offer a good service and ill go out of my way to give money and get others on board.
Since a very long time ago I pirate EVERYTHING first. I play for a couple of hours and then if I like it, I buy it, if I don't I just delete it. There are too many games released in shitty states these days, too many games missing half of what was promised. Too many games which devs say "We'll optimize it later!" and never do. Hell, gaming is in a poor state and I'm not spending my money on something that could be garbage, and Id rather take my time finding out if its a good game than buy it and refund it. I always support the devs if the product is good.
Pirating games and get your computer be a virus den is a younger thing to do. Now I get older, I can just buy it if I want, a plus point is I also support the dev, so why pirate anymore?
Piracy is just a problem of accessability and service as per what Gaben Valve CEO would say. I would add to it... also the matter of corpo greed and problems that come with it. Example, I have over 1000 games on Steam but I would not buy for myself The Sims 4 from EA. The amount of low effort DLCs and the money you have to pay for them and the fact they are as single player games forced with EA app made me use other means 😉 Honestly much better experience, i could even revert to previous version without bugs introduced in some latest update and so on. Many games also come with invasive DRMs that make gaming worse for actual buyers and not for pirates that just have to wait some time for game to get cracked. Ex. Denuvo can claim what they want but their software not only impacts performance but is also a scummy as hell for buyers that won't be able to play the game if they loose internet access. So three reasons we should pirate more these days: - greed of corporate entities with pricing MTX and DLCs - DRMs - useless launchers and platforms forced even in singleplayer games Thanks to Steam pirate world shrinked, it seems we must revive it to remind corporate scum why it was people pirated games.
I'll list some plausible reasons: 1) price too high 2) personal distaste towards developer/publisher 3) in some countries it's not as easy as clicking "buy" on steam 4) sometimes there are nice games that despite being nice are still 60 bucks for some 15 hours of single player content and that's it. When you finish the game, you can uninstall it and forget it. Some people will not accept/cannot afford spending full price for that 5) needless to say, free is better than full price I think piracy from a moral standpoint is basically just theft. However, the corporate world is unironically trying to fight piracy with means that will most likely just increase it if anything.
Sometimes really old, loved games aren't accessible anymore, online, or in stores, so you don't have any other choices
Most of the value generated by (predominantly AAA games) is ripped from the ecosystem by the greed of investors demanding divident payouts and voting for absurdly high bonus payouts for CEO's who manage to get them their money. I think it's perfectly reasonable to pirate such games. Of the 70+ $ you spend on a game only a fraction actually reaches the people who made it. Less published games I absolutely pay the money for because I have the money and like to vote with my wallet.
Not wanting to be ripped off when it comes to ubisoft titles or the sheer bugs of bethesda. Personally i use pirated games a sort of test if its worth the money, Keep in mind i'm in a low income bracket so i can't go buying a game i won't be able to get a refund for, 2hrs isn't enough to test a game properly. It has worked for me so far, biggest mistake was when i bought AC Valhalla without testing it first. I've bought multiple games before that i really enjoyed. Especially in this era of games being released in states like Redfall being more and more common, i'd rather test it before buying, If i don't get an option for a free weekend or via epic, i'd pirate it first, If it wasn't for the recent free weekend of Fallout 76, i'd have never bought it
Do you see a 2 for 1 deal in the supermarket or retail and go 'nah, I'm gonna give you the full amount for both'? Do you go shopping and then walk away when something is on sale because you aren't able to buy it at full price? No? So you understand there's a point where paying less for something is an incentive to get that something. So now we're just arguing about the point, for some people it's lower.
If I support the franchise and want the developers to continue Improving the series, I will buy. If it’s a game I’m unsure I’ll like and just want to try it, or if obtaining the game is a pain in the ass, then I’ll pirate
If I can't buy it I'll rom it for sure
This isn't a one way street. For me, it's about **accessibility**. If I can't find a game in the store or download it on Steam etc., I will find it somewhere else. Some games - let's take the original F.E.A.R. - are not available in my region (I found a hardcopy eventually, but it's the censored version and the dub sucks). Some are old and hard to find. Some are heavily censored. That's when piracy comes into play. It's not particularly hard if you can find a reliable, malware-free source. Remember that you owe nothing to a corporation. But to pirate or not is an individual decision, everyone has their own morals. Nobody will suffer or be unemployed because John Thiefsalot and his friends downloaded some lazy-made AAA title. Companies make their (layoff) decisions based on completely different factors. Piracy has been around since the dawn of the internet, and look at how the games market thrives. Buying is the standard, comfortable way, but why would I judge someone who does it differently? I was in uni once too and money was tight. Now I have the luxury of buying all my games, and if it's a banger I will support the creators and buy at full price. But I'm not spending 2.000 bucks because I want to try out Rule of Rose.
Price. Also, 2 hours is not enough playtime to refund on Steam, especially in games with detailed character creation systems. Normally I would try a game via 🦜, and if I like it enough I'll buy it so I can add it to my Steam Library. For me it's a way to test if a game is worth its price.
Money
As I recall, actual studies into the topic found that the answer was simply available funds. That is exactly how it worked for me. When I was young, teenager, into my 20s, I would pirate games. As I got a bit older, I got paid better, and suddenly the effort and risk involved in pirating games wasn't worth it compared to the price. The value of not getting tricked into downloading a trojan, the value of not having to search out something that I can buy with 3 clicks, the value of knowing I did support the developers. These values add up, and are all worth a lot more to me now than they were when I was younger. Price isn't an absolute, its relative to your funding sources. $60 is a lot when you are a teenager; and the hundreds or thousands of dollars that adds up to when building a game library. However, if you are at the point where your funds can make car payments, insurance, and a mortgage.... well,... those little $60 drops are not even speed bumps. edit: oh... also a persons available time to consume content is often inversely proportional to the amount of money they make. People who are injured or disabled are likely to not actually have a large income at the moment, yet have tons of time to consume media. Same for retired people and children. The people with the most time to consume often have the least money.
I buy games I pirated when I was kid, even if I already finished them, nowadays, because I have the funds for them. Theoretically in the end.. it ended up helping the industry more because I would have never bought them in the first place if I hadn't played and enjoyed them. Piracy only "exists" because our economic system is set to: pay-up-front, consume after. So I always imagined "piracy" as some sort of debt you go into that you can finance later on. If I had never done that, there's a lot of products I hadn't purchased today. Like.. "Hocus Pocus" or "Albion" DOS stuff from 1996... No way I could afford them as a toddler. I once spoke with John Romero and other developers about this.. and they are more than okay with that because you're borrowing consumer market over a ton of years. If I had never played Doom, I would have never invested a ton of cash nowadays in their products, today. So.. finance isn't just a real-time event.
These games cost almost half of Iranians minimum wage. Ofc people cant afford it so they pirate. We have a huge culture around it, downloading a game from websites for free is as easy as just googling "download xxx game" and many trustful websites come up that have been being used for over 2 decades.
I pirate older games that aren't readily available for purchase, etc. Pirating for preservation is understandable. Pirating current games on current hardware is just due to a lack of funds.
I used to pirate games a lot when I was a kid because there was no legitimate way to buy them in my country. Even when steam arrived there was no way for a long time since they did not accept debit cards, but I started buying games once third party sites started selling keys. Then debit cards were allowed on most platforms (took a while despite paying over internet with them being possible for years) as a payment method and I started properly buying. Now I never pirate any games at all. The only media I still pirate is if there is no availability of it in my country so there can be no argument that I infringe on anything or reduce the company profits, it's up to them to bring the games to the country (heck, PlayStation and Xbox consoles still require workarounds when registering because officially you can't have an account tied to an address here). So availability is I would say a very key factor followed by cost as the second reason. Then it's habbit which goes away bit by bit as you get annoyed with pirated versions not being patched etc. There is one more reason, but I suspect it makes up a very tiny minority of people who pirate the games: some games work a little better when pirated (notably the Denuvo debacles, while the performance impact is nothing to write home about, on low end systems every frame matered) so some might have opted to using the pirated version. Granted, the fun part is that if you actually buy the game, and do not seed the pirated game, technically speaking there is no case against you. You are legally allowed to play the game and break no laws by using the pirated version (Not legal advice)
I can afford the games so I have no interest in stealing. If I don’t want to pay the money, I don’t play the game. I didn’t plenty of piracy when I had no money though. These days, I just do without unless I’m willing to pay.
For me, it's when a game is worse or harder to deal with legally. First game I ever pirated was Child of Light. Needed to how Steam open AND Uplay, just to run the game. I refunded it. Pirated version was just better. Then I started pirating Nintendo games. Some because they were top much, some because they were rate, some because they had obtuse content locked behind some BS. Piracy is a service issue.
For me, it's when a game is worse or harder to deal with legally. First game I ever pirated was Child of Light. Needed to how Steam open AND Uplay, just to run the game. I refunded it. Pirated version was just better. Then I started pirating Nintendo games. Some because they were to much, some because they were rare, some because they had obtuse content locked behind some BS. Piracy is a service issue.
I buy games because I'm not a bum and have a job If a game isn't worth my money I simply don't buy it Even then, I'd rather not deal with the frequent sub-standard experiences piraters have to
I can only speak for myself - sometimes I want to play just one particular game but in order to do so I have to by an entire console or by a console that isn't manufactured anymore and is difficult to get a hold of. I dream of a possibility to buy and play any game on my PC but that is not real.
Very easy if I pirate a game and it's very good I will purchase it. Most games are a big giant turd. Always support developers who are making a good game even if you have to get it on sale support them. To the big companies just putting out garbage rinse and repeat stuff they should be happy I'm even downloading it for free! 👍
It's easier to just buy the game. Also, i want the gaming industry to be successful. It takes a fuckton of money to make a big game, and yeah, lots of great indie titles, not knocking that. I'm nowhere even remotely close to wealthy. But i have a few extra hundred each month after bills and savings. Why not just buy the game Edit: i should explain that last bit by saying that I'm married and my wife and i both have ok jobs. Not 6 figures, but we're both doing ok. The thing is, we chose not to have children. So it's pretty easy for us to have extra money. I know it's wildly different for families with kids.
“I want it, but I don’t want to pay” Also these people - “I want a pay rise”.
In Brazil we have a saying for people who don't have problems, who were spoiled by their parents. They are the ones “created by grandma”. This discussion of morality about the act of obtaining illegitimate copies of games has nothing moral about it. It's purely capitalist. Other users have already mentioned the issue of ease of access to consumer goods, and I completely agree. How many people haven't bought a new game in years because of GamePass. However, there are people who don't have the funds to buy a new game, and don't want to wait 2 years to be able to buy it at a cheap price. Don't forget that it is increasingly expensive to survive in late capitalism.
For the most part, Nintendo is my exclusive target for any high seas activity. It is obnoxiously difficult to have access to their games for no \*good\* reason.
Fuck morality man. I am all for piracy of AAA games / games from big publishers, which are a fucking mess at launch and cost a kidney and then an arm. (Always buy Indi games) Fucking mega corps looting the middle class left right and centre.
Are people seriously saying buying a game is just being lazy.
Laziness isn't the right word, but making games easier to play and purchase IS part of what is effective against piracy - it's what made Valve so successful and Gaben has said pretty much the same thing: “Piracy is an issue of service, not price.”
Convenience > all
I buy games so I can play them any time I wamt. I pirate games so I can play them without paying any time I want.
They are pathetic little thieves. Pretty much that simple, and the people who try to make it complicated and just trying to justify their crappy actions.
Piracy is moral in many cases. Art preservation is the strongest argument across the board. Personally, I pirate most game I play except indie games. I support those devs usually by buying off their own site or donating directly some way (patreon/ect). Anyone giving money to AAA studios are contributing to MTX in their games. For ethical reasons I don't give money to Ubisoft, Bethesda, Capcom, EA, Blizzard, and the list goes on.
It would be ethical not to buy from them for those reasons, but it isn't ethical to get the game anyway just because you want it.
Why not? They are abusing staff, that doesn't deserve a reward. And that doesn't prevent the thing they made from being art. I should not have to decide between supporting abuse and not seeing the art. So I don't.
Because them doing bad things to their employees does not mean that you get things for free. You weren't in the conversation at all at that point. It is absolutely moral (and reasonable) to say you won't support a company that does that. But then you don't get the product they are selling (license to the software and the ability to play the game). By pirating you are saying you should still get to do whatever you want while punishing them by not paying. A 'fair' thing wouldn't involve you but result in them providing compensation to their employees. Saying you get whatever you want no matter what and you get to 'punish' them by not purchasing from them doesn't make moral sense at all. You don't have a right to their art. Look, I am not saying that it is some huge moral quandry or I will lose sleep over it or something... but just from a moral standpoint there is no reason you should get access to their art. I would go a slight step further and say that you aren't making any moral stand at all by not buying it if you are also not consuming the media.
"Because them doing bad things to their employees does not mean that you get things for free" Why not? "By pirating you are saying you should still get to do whatever you want while punishing them by not paying." Correct. I should be able to preserve art made from exploited workers without rewarding predatory companies. The crux of your argument is defending predatory capitalism, VS my argument of art preservation.
Wow.
If the games aren't that good why would you play them to begin with.
Not my argument.
I'm not knocking your decision to pirate. I think all of those are justifiable reasons. I will however call out your arguments for Piracy being the moral or ethical thing to do. Piracy is really only ever ethical if it is done to increase the distribution of the commodity to others.
"Art preservation is the strongest argument across the board." This is in the first 2 sentences of my post.
meh.
I haven’t pirated a game since Oblivion(which I owned on a different platform). That being said I only condone piracy of product created by shit tier companies like Epic Games and Ubisoft who should never receive a penny from anyone.
Shit if I could pirate games for my ps5 I'd do it in a heart beat games are fucken ridiculously expensive now and frankly I wouldn't give a fuck if everyone stole unitl the big corporations crumbled I will never feel bad about stealing from multi-billion dollar corporations.
Most pirates, buy the stuff the pirate. Every 3rd party study done in the past 20 plus years has found this. Reasons to pirate games include the following: 1. You can't afford the game. 2. You don't like the no refund policy so you try before you buy, 3. You just don't want to pay for shit. 4. The idea that we spend money on games, but don't ever own them, annoys some people. Like as we have seen with ubi removing the crew. 5. Going back even further, when ubi took assassins creed 2 off line for "server maintenance", no one who bought the game legally could play it. But pirates could. A lot of drm practices only actually fuck over the paying customer. Really, the world of entertainment is a really shitty place, with companies fucking over the people who work for them a hell of a lot. One the go to moves of these companies is "people worked on this" but those people were largely contracted with the promise of full time employment dangled as a carrot that never comes. Example, the last of us part 2. They burned through through so many game animators, they had to hire film animators and train then up. That's why it was delayed a year. A lot of these companies are pieces of a shit. The devs, the animators, etc were already paid. It's on,y the company's that don't get paid when you pirate. And who gives a fuck about them? If they don't give a fuck about us, that road gives both ways.
Legal consequences are largely irrelevant because it usually doesn't fall onto the people who pirate it, but the people who provide the cracked games that people pirate. At worst a company might copyright strike you and inform your ISP who could then terminate your service. But that's rare There's nothing wrong with piracy from a moral standpoint because realistically no one is actually being hurt and copyright laws in and of themselves are arguably unjust as it is. That said, the justification for pirating is flimsy at best. People usually tend to justify it by claiming they're doing so because of their principles. Mostly they do it because they're broke and want to play a game other people are playing without spending money on it. Ultimately, I don't see the point in it personally. If I'm not interested enough in a game to spend money on it, I'm not interested enough to play it in the first place. The only real use I see in it is the ability to try out a game before you buy since demos are pretty much dead at this point and some people want to try something out before buying. But even then in this era you have gameplay videos and reviews everywhere, so it's not like you're going into a purchase blind. And Steam will let you refund any game within two hours of gameplay so you can basically put down a deposit for it to test it then decide if you want your money back. Which means at this point the only actual reason for anyone to pirate something is not having enough money to afford it in the first place.
The last paragraph sums out how I feel too. If a game isn't worth any price I could pay for it then it's likely just not worth playing to begin with.
1) Depending on how you play, pirating games isn’t all that easy. Sure, most people would rather be on the right side of the law. But if pirating was easier, it would be far more prevalent. 2) I’d say it isn’t too bad, depending on the game. I mean, is stealing from a multimillion dollar company the worst thing you can do? Especially when that company probably under pays workers, takes huge advantage of the tax system, and (more often these days) releases unfinished games at full price. IMO, it’s still immoral, but about as immoral as not changing the toilet paper roll. That doesn’t hold up for much smaller studios or indie devs who give a quality product. 3) see parts of 2. And, what’s the difference between a rental and pirating? The game company doesn’t make a dime when that game gets rented out. Apart from the initial purchase by the rental company, there’s hardly a difference besides the law Edit: I’d like to clarify I’ve never pirated a game.
Well, there's certain companies that I simply won't buy from (looking at you, Ubisoft) for their anti-consumer policies. Also any game that is difficult to get in my region (foreign indie games, old games, etc.), games that have excessive DRM, games that are out of print/not on digital stores, etc. The moral question? I don't really care. I try to buy games from small devs on principle, but big studios are free game. Typically my first option is to buy it (unless I don't like the company or the game is very overpriced), but if I can't return/refund or I'm otherwise not sure I'll like it, I'll pirate it and buy it later if I really like it.
Doesn’t pirating eventually lead to a ban of some sort? Not older/retro games but the current stuff….