Discuss.
I personally don’t like piracy with a passion.
It’s copyright infringement and that’s a very touchy word since pirates are going to come right up and try to correct you since it stirs up certain feelings in them.
I don’t like doing it, but I do anyway. But I buy what I like. Sometimes I am strapped for cash and pirate. It’s not an excuse, but it happens.
I don’t really pirate games anymore, I tried pirating Torchlight and I said to myself “Jeez only $20 for this game and it’s pretty sweet” So I made my way to Steam and it was on sale for $5! Good intentioned karma?
It happens to me to pirate games when there’s no demo and when I want to see if they are worth it. I never feel bad downloading movies, though.
GARTHBARTIN IS A DIRTY HACKER AND LIKES SNAILS
If a company has a business model I don’t agree with, I will not buy their stuff. They do not deserve my money. I do not like the way recording companies hurt their artists, I don’t like the way companies like Activision hurt their developers/gaming as a whole, and I don’t like the way Nike hurts their employees.
That doesn’t mean I still don’t want their stuff.
Luckily, since I wont be buying their stuff anyway, they aren’t losing any money when I pirate their stuff.
On the other hand, if I agree with a company’s business model (i.e. VALVe, No-Sweat, etc.) I will buy their products.
1 Like
So,
your ideals > their effort and work?
I personally like to buy my pirates. That way I can buy my pirates while I buy my pirates so I can pirate my buys while I pirate my buys. Or somethin like that.
i consider pirating actually a saviour of some industries, take music, music is now so easy to get a hold of you can sample artists you would never have thought twice about buying in a shop, and as a result, if you enjoyed it, you’re more likely to go to there concerts, buy there merchandise and in the future maybe even buy there cds
Piracy exists for one reason and one reason only: service.
I own a $3000 PC, money is not an issue. It is just as hard for me, with my limited internet, to download a movie/game as it is to go out and buy it.
Service is where its at. Every DVD I have bought in the last year has had up to 20 minutes of unskippable commercials at the start. Not to mention there are other factors, such as anti piracy warnings, region locking etc that do nothing but make life harder for the consumer. I will not pay for a horrible service when I can get a much better service for free.
Not to mention they do nothing but lie to us - according to anti-piracy warnings, it funds terrorism. When I saw that, I just had to facepalm.
Piracy is not, and never was about, stealing. Anyone who thinks so is uneducated on the matter, and needs to know more about it before blindly hating piates.
EDIT: To everyone who says that it hurts hard work, no it doesn’t. In the music industry, musicians often get paid a fixed amount as dictated by their contract for a recording, regardless of sales. The only thing people are doing by pirating is removing the greedy middle man, who does nothing but collect money anyway. Game developers get paid an hourly rate. The only one who benefits from me buying stuff is the company, therefore if the company cannot provide a service, they DO NOT deserve my money no matter how much work their employees have done.
Not this shit again.
I hope this gets closed before Johnkiller gets here.
I think it’s more the publishers policies he doesn’t agree with. Publishers don’t do the work, development companies do. Let’s not forget that. I really like a lot of game developers, but it really irks me when they team up with the likes of Electronic Arts. I do pay for all my games, but their DRM policies are not only illegal when it comes right down to it, but it’s only real effect is to piss off people who pay for the game.
People think DRM is designed to stop piracy. It is not. It is designed to limit resell of a game. Reselling a game isn’t illegal. A publisher does this so that people will buy more copies of a game. If there isn’t proper value to a game people tend to resell it faster, and it can impact initial sales. DRM is designed to lengthen the profitability of initial sales. It isn’t designed to stop piracy.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t participate in piracy, but I can certainly understand the unsavory tactics used by game developers to make up profit on games that are over valued making people a bit more accepting of simply not paying for it, because if you buy it and it sucks, then there is nothing you can do. You can’t resell it, you can’t return it, and you are left 60+ bucks short for something that didn’t deliver. This isn’t like buying a movie, where it’s like 20-35bucks. This is 60 bucks a pop. To say there is no consumer protection in this arena is horrible. If the game doesn’t work for you? Too bad. Steam does have a 30 day return policy, but for hard copy games, there is none. Most game store will not take back an opened copy of a game anymore. Period.
Piracy isn’t good. People shouldn’t do it. However, it’s not going away. It’s like saying drug abuse is bad and people shouldn’t do it. It is bad, but it’s not going to stop. Rounding up every citizen who buys cough and putting restraining collar on them to monitor their use doesn’t stop drug abuse. It simply pisses off regular people.
I buy, no matter what (yes, including software that costs more than $2000 (I recently bought the CS4 Master Collection).
However, in theory, I own pirated stuff, since quite a bit of my music library is from CDs my brother bought.
I only pirate if:
A. The game is really old
B. The lead developers are evidently idiots (MW2)
C. If there is no chance I could purchase the game (M rated and not on steam) due to obnoxious parents.
It’s kinda funny. Because of convenience and experience quality, I now use non original version of almost every media I own. I watch digital copies of my blu rays because it’s easier to simply select the movie from the media center than use the disk itself. Same deal with music CDs. Because of annoying DRM, and use policies I use a pirated copy of any game I can.
Why didn’t you take the 30 day trial, if it was for one week?
If the company doesn’t get the profit it wants it might lay off employees as well (which is happening a lot these days). I also find that sentence funny, how no game deserves your money regardless of any work and effort put into it.
Edit: Are you really against Johnkiller having an opinion and voicing it here? And this thread seemed more like a debate topic anyways.
I learned to pirate before buying after purchasing STALKER Clear Sky. Even after following news and after playing it amazing first edition, it still managed to fall on it’s ass. I’ve saved a lot of money by pirating a game I was genuinely interested in, and finding out it was nothing like promised. ESPECIALLY since demos are such a rarity. I do buy games that I like from small companies that I want to support.
This.
I’ve never felt bad about pirating games. And I do separate the connotations of the word ‘stealing’ from the word ‘pirating.’ Stealing, to me, implies that you are taking something from someone so that they nolonger have it, or preventing them from getting money that they otherwise would have had. Pirating software / music / games / movies does not take those respective things away from the companies that made them; it’s just a copy. I don’t pirate something if I would have otherwise purchased it. I rarely ever pirate games simply because Steam is such a good service nowadays. And I never pirate from a small company that I would like to see succeed. Take World of Goo, for example. They made it extremely easy to pirate their game (on purpose) but I never did that; I chose to purchase it because I wanted to see them continue to produce many more amazing games such as that one.
…