HOT TAKE! Piracy

[Phabe Jewell]

Ice-Flame Yeah, the majority of the time pirates do use the right time to crack into games, then most of those pirates actually buy the game if they believe that it is worth a buy.
From what I've been reading here Aidy called pirates "Entitled" even though he's been acting very entitled because he gets paid to work his hobby.

Tbh I believe the cracking groups just put as much work cracking through the DRM for free, and they have stated that they're payment is the satisfaction of being better at the other groups and giving pirates a better service.

[vippy]

Yoshi Selfishness and entitlement? It's not quite so black and white. Yes, many pirates are driven by pure opportunism. But if all of them were, the peer to peer model of pirated software distribution would not exist because nobody would bother seeding or distributing torrents far and wide across the web, or maintain dedicated torrent sites for that matter. Now, what could be the pirates' motivation for being so helpful to their fellow pirates? I'll tell you.

There are many aspects at play, but the foremost three that I will talk about are 1) the nature of theft in psychology, 2) who is subconsciously considered a person and 3) how power is viewed in human society.

1) You see, humans make a subconscious distinction between the physical theft of an object and copying files because digital content is not the same as a physical object in the real world even if legally speaking they are both a form of property. A digital file is infinitely duplicatable, while a physical object is not. While physical theft removes the original object from the possession of its original owner, copying a file does not. And so, when someone attempts to artificially restrict the nature of the digital file proactively through DRM or reactively through lawsuits, that triggers a primal feeling of unfairness in humans because it is an imposition upon them and others to uphold a set of rules which do not exist in natural order and are not in the interest of the people in their immediate surroundings, but in the interests of other people in a faraway place whom they cannot see and are likely to never interact with.

2) This aspect of human psychology is precisely why corporations and other large organizations attempt to humanize themselves in the eyes of the public by having specific spokespeople or central figures that the public can associate with that organization, thereby ascribing human qualities to it. When people think of Apple for example, they think of Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak, or Tim Cook, they don't think of the shareholders or other executives or managers of the different departments because these people are not immediately visible to them.

3) As a species, we have a pecking order and our sense of who has the right to wield power largely dictated by our personal sense of fairness, which is largely emotion-driven. We don't like the idea of someone calling the shots whom we don't judge as being just or having the best of intentions. Video game publishers in our day and age are incredibly scummy and conniving, their anti-consumer practices almost crossing the lines of legality at times. Hence why their interests are not perceived to coincide with the interests of gamers. As such, they've lost legitimacy in the eyes of gamers and this is why people have no qualms about pirating their games. The publisher's right to control the game and its distribution is no longer seen as justified.

[Phabe Jewell]

That's a very in-depth way to put it.

[Garrett]

An interesting point about piracy is that some very reasonable publishers actually consider pirates to be outside their target demographic. That's why CD Projekt created GoG. They want to sell games to people who buy games and not attempt to sell games to people who don't buy games. That's really the final boss of the philosophical debate. When you beat that boss, what you thought was "stealing" is now "not buying". It's equally stupid to try to sell to those who steal as it is to try to sell to those who won't buy. Consequently trying to sell to those who don't steal and who do steal despite its futility takes more effort and makes more people angry than trying to sell only to those who buy does. In the end the latter is more profitable because nothing goes to waste.

[decoyOctopus]

I used to pirate games when I was a teenager because I didn't have any spare money to waste on games and they're expensive as F in Brazil (thanks taxes). Nowadays, I use the piracy method as a anti-DRM and "test-drive" option before I decide to buy a game.

[Phabe Jewell]

Pretty justifiable if want the game to work right you gotta pirate it these days.

[lostaname]

I am reminded of this researchpaper from 2014: Estimating displacement rates of copyrighted content in the EU

https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-uploa...ment_study.pdf