If you have money to spend (and THAT much), you can still pirate, but if you pirate without trying to fund the source of your art and tools, you’re a mega asshole. Especially if you have as much money as this dude claims to have. You can find the creators of your games online, find their ko-fis, their patreons. Where there’s a will there’s a way
this. pirate all you want, netflix/disney/etc. will be fine. but find and support the artist. this is why i’m now stuck with the crap news around bandcamp. there are less and less ways to support creators instead of the leeches every day :(
What’s up with bandcamp?
bandcamp was sold to epic games in 2022 and again to songtradr this year, and half its staff got laid off recently. CEO said that it was not profitable enough - though it was already very profitable. So it’s likely to start squeezing every penny out of users and artists in the next few years
Oh, no. I love bandcamp. I don’t want it to go down the drain. :c
Also I’m top 4-5% in my country, but compared to developed countries in not even at top 50% and so many of these digital products are not necessarily priced lower for my region specially the big houses like EA and Ubisoft, so I understand the original comment. And i also agree on the second part that where there is a will there is a way.
But i remeber donating about 10$ for a small dev that was livestreaming and i had pirated the game because game costed 40$. And I thought 10$ was a decent enough donation to cover my sins. Dev in a couple of days was crying over stream about how donating 10$ is doing nothing and he just would buy a beer (10$ buys about 14 beers in my country) and was just being an ass over the stream.
I’m not saying all devs are like that, but for a lot of third world country pirating is a lifestyle not because they just want to keep stealing, they just see it as a movement against wealth inequality. I’m not saying it’s right or not, I’m just explaining how the thought process works.
I never said it wasn’t, but that was an extreme anecdote first of all, and second, I have re-iterated that this doesn’t apply to people who don’t have such disposable income. Relative to their cost of living, always. Pirating is a lifestyle, stealing from poor creators when you make a substantial amount of money is not. What you sent was enough, more than enough. The dev in question sounds like a jackass and unfortunately he wouldn’t be the first with how many indie and major game devs turn out to be horrible people.
Depending which country we’re talking about. Top 5% in Malawi is probably still a person who needs to pirate, although I could be wrong about that with 3rd world wealth inequality.
Edit: Based on the top 10% figure, guesses and napkin math, that’s an income of about 5000USD annually, so yeah pirate away.
Especially if you have as much money as this dude claims to have.
I mean, this is on 4chan. Regardless of whether this is true or not, the post is blatantly narcissistic. I don’t know why it should be here and what’s there to discuss.
What if the product already turned a profit? That means everyone has been paid for their work already.
Any extra revenue is just additional profit. Why would I give them more money for no extra work?
I think the point was that despite him being top 5% of earners in his country, he’s still poor and thus still pirates.
For me it’s always been different, I’ve always pirated from a data archival perspective, which is why I’m also a maintainer/contributor of several open-source data archival projects.
That is definitely not the point of this post.
I think that funding creators is great if you have the money and the inclination. I just don’t think that it makes you an asshole if you don’t.
There are creators whom I fund because they give me exclusive extra content on their Patreons or sometimes if I just think that their work is important enough and I want to see it continue. If I decide that I need that money for something else, that’s up to me.
Ehh. Tell them to make a game that is actually worth $60 and I’ll consider it.
Not to mention all of the old games they won’t re-release on purpose because emulators are “stealing.”
Why the downvotes, he’s got a point. Big mega corps that release $70 games while abandoning the old games are the most moral argument you can make for piracy.
Is that relevant to my comment? I said support the creators directly, not the corporations and explained with examples. That reply was suspicious and arrogant asf if you ask me. I never said spend 60$ for the game, I said support the creators directly, even through smaller amounts. Even a euro from a person who can is enough. You cracked the game, you liked it, why not do that bare minimum if you legit have that money + a lot more?
I guess that’s fair.
?.. Bro you’re the one in the piracy sub spewing anti-piracy rhetoric.
Consider it a courtesy that the lemmy.world chuds upvote this shit at all.
I don’t pirate games because Steam just makes it more convenient, and sites like IsThereAnyDeal make it easy to find sales.
However, as someone that’s been a hobbyist developer for 15 years, and never really been able to overcome the imposter syndrome to be able to publish anything, I’d be happy if someone thought my game was even worth the time to pirate, much less be paid for.
There’re a couple of huge downsides (for me personally) to streaming services that just grinds with me:
- the quality is always worse than physical media, and
- scrobbing (moving back and forwards in the video, with the arrow keys or by moving the playback head) is almost never instantaneous, it usually requires a couple of seconds while the video rebuffers
Perhaps physical media is better these days (than DVDs were) for scrobbing, but then you have the FBI piracy messages to deal with. I’ve never owned a BluRay player, perhaps they’re better?
But I know that sailing the high seas gets me a high-quality video, and I can jump backwards ~5 seconds instantaneously when I’ve not heard a bit a of dialogue.
If you have enough money to live comfortably, I think you should pay for art you love. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pirate anything (especially from big corps), but please donate some money to indie games, music, theatre…
Heck, I’d say even give money to those big corps so long as they are being reasonable with the price and availability. Reasonable varies by person, of course. But for me, I’ll pay for any $70-90 game (the normal price for new games now in Canada), but stuff like Sims DLC or how the original Mass Effect only let you get DLC through some dumb BioWare credits are cases where I’d pirate no regrets even with my current income.
After all, there won’t be AAA games if people don’t pay for them. I have (mostly) no qualms with big publishers pocketing a significant profit on those games if they get made well. Bigger problem I have is with games that get rushed to the point of impacting quality, but that’s something I see more for changing how you approach that individual title. Stuff like mistreating staff (crunch time) is a bit iffier. I still lean towards giving them my money, since nobody enters the game dev business without knowing it’ll involve crunch and I do want the devs to be rewarded for their hard work with a commercial success (cause that’s unfortunately just how success is measured in our capitalist society).
Cringe af
I’m a really great person. I’m good at everything. My friends are all tools and won’t ever be as amazing as me.
Congratulations. I bet those friends are absolutely real.
The RIAA drove me to piracy in the early days.
Then stuff like Google Play music came along and I stopped because I can actually pay for basically any song I want to listen to, all at my fingertips and that is still true. It makes me happy to support the artists and their music though I know they don’t get very much of the cut.
The MPAA was much of the same story.
Then Netflix happened and I was all set for the same thing to happen, but it didn’t. Now streaming is almost as fractured as cable TV packages, and I went right back to piracy.
Screw it. I don’t feel bad about it because they haven’t shown any regard for the people they continually exploit, namely their customers. They don’t give any shits if I financially sink while trying to afford to enjoy the things that they make, so I won’t give any shits about their financial situation while I enjoy it anyways. Fuck them.
I pirate a lot of stuff too but I prefer to buy stuff too sometimes just to provide support
I’ve been pirating since I was a child. That being said, I don’t think it’s particularly healthy to pin ‘media pirating’ as a personality trait.
Do you know what community this is?
participating in a community ≠ making it a lifestyle
I think a lot of people in this community consider it a lifestyle to pirate media.
I think most just don’t give a fuck. Definitely not enough fucks to make it a lifestyle.
YTA
The only “pirating” I do these days is using real debrid and I think that’s the lightest pirating you can do since I since have to pay although an extremely small amount compared to a traditional streaming service.
My coworkers were talking today about all the hoops they were going through with streaming to find the content they wanted and navigating the byzantine extra charges to share it with their family. If piracy wasn’t an option I still wouldn’t go through all that, it’s madness how much worse the paid service is to the high seas.
Yup. My gf has Netflix but for one of our shows, the English subtitles disappeared (she’s ESL). Took like 15 minutes to figure it out, but happened again the next day. Now we pirate that show because it’s easier, even though she has it on Netflix.
Also used someone else’s Netflix to finally hit the attack on titan craze some years back.
No english subs. Have to read the local language. Whatever. The names were not accurately translated. Whatever. I could look past that since they were consistent within the subs as presented.
Season 2 - all the names changed from season 1. Even something as simple as changing a K to a C is too much and unacceptable, but the fuckers were straight up changing the name of the militaty units and shit. I had no idea who was who.
20 minutes later, I’m watching the HorribleSubs version with the worldwide-accepted English names and I never watched anime on Netflix. Piracy is a service problem.
I have Netflix and Amazon and I still pirate a bunch of stuff, sometimes I even forget to check if something is available there before torrenting it
I wonder if you have legal access to things you’re pirating, could someone call that a theft too? 🤔
I’ll pirate anything except indie games. Gotta support the small devs
Aye, I used to sail the high seas, the hull of my ship gnarly with viruses, adware and malware from some infectious crackers or key-generators.
Then I had money, and started buying my software and my movies and all was good for a time. Then my media consume shifted to mobile devices, but I had Amazon Prime Video as the only really available video-streaming service around and all was good for a time. Then I added Netflix, as it arrived on my countries market and all was good for a time. Then I added Crunchyroll, Disney+ and Hulu and everything sucked, streaming the shows I wanted to watch was suddenly so expensive, no single streaming service had everything I wanted to watch, so I needed to subscribe to them all, costing an amount of money I would not spend on buying those shows.
Now I have unsubscribed from all but two again, but the market is so fractured, there is barely anything interesting on the services I still go to.
So my eyes keep wandering to that old tricorn, the hook and peg-leg, gathering dust on the wall. I can hear the waves crashing and feel the tide rising in my bones. The moneybags have decided to press us for more and more, their greed means no single harbor, not even two are enough to supply our demands. So there is plenty of bounty to be found on the high seas again, big fat galleons full of content otherwise unreachable or too expensive.
Doncha hear it boys? Davey Jones is singing again, calling us back to the sea, put on your VPN, defy the torrents and right your compasses with a good magnet. We did not choose this life, they made us turn to it.
I buy the things I want to support. Small game studios get my money. Bands get my money directly, I buy albums and merch. Pretty much, small businesses or organizations that put great amounts of care and love into their high quality work get my money all day, as directly as i can. But would I pay for an Activision/EA game? Or a Marvel movie? Absolutely not.
I’m heading back to it.
The streaming was sort of OK, and now it’s wank. Spread across dozens of services, that don’t have enough content to justify their existence. No UI linking them all together means you have no idea if something is available or not without checking justwatch.com
If music was like this, I’d pirate that too.
Doesn’t plex have an UI for all of them? I use plex to watch my media and I saw an option to add your streaming services.
