Are you fucking retarded or something?
How would you be able to make a wise choice if you have no reliable information to go on?
Fucking trolls.
Read a review? Watch a gameplay video? Read other people’s thoughts?
Wait for deals that you CAN’T pass up?
Lower your ridiculously high standards so you can see the awesomeness in L4D2 like everyone else?
Just don’t buy the game on Day 1 and do the above, so you can avoid any “Demigod-like” situations.
Unless you REALLY KNOW the game is going to be fucking great. Like, say, Half-Life 2: Episode 3 for example.
i think this thread has revealed one of the major issues with piracy, you notice how the majority of people against piracy, like to shout those down who do? And instead of constructing an arguement to a response they repeat the same points over and over? I mean who truley gets intellectual property anyway? It’s like stealing something that wasnt their but is now because you downloaded it. I will always believe free games with adverts is the answer, money is generated for the people who made it, people get games for free with the option to pay for the game without the adverts, and the market for pirate games thins because people can get good, clean and reliable copies of the games for free. And their should be some sort of massive survey to find out why people pirate and for the game makers to voice their thoughts and how it affects their buisness (Both major and minor publishers), before that we can only truley “speculate” on possible soloutions, and telling people to stop doing it, is not one
There’s a reason: Piracy is stealing. Stealing is illegal. Thus, Piracy is bad.
What else do you fucking need?! What else is there to add to that argument?!
If you want to pirate a game, go fucking pirate a game. But don’t try to justify your bullshit to me, because you know as well as I do that it’s wrong and harmful to the industry.
The logical leap you are making here is that illegal=bad. What makes you think illegal things are bad?
Edit - I’ll give an example; 5% of the population own 95% of the wealth. The other 5% is shared out unevenly among the other 95% of us. That is bad, but perfectly legal, and it would be illegal to directly do anything about it.
And you might argue that murder is technically illegal, but in practice it is only illegal if it doesn’t benefit the capitalist class.
Murder, rape, child labor, child pornography etc. Those are all illegal. I’m pretty sure those can also be classified as universally BAD.
Yeah, I know there are some things that are illegal that shouldn’t be (The War on Drugs is a fucking joke imo), but stealing isn’t one of them.
Edit: Seriously! 15 pages!? How is this such a heated argument!
Never has an argument had such a simple and easily discoverable conclusion! Even the anti-religion argument in the “French Court Convicts Scientology” thread was more complicated! (Apparently, making you feel “warm and fuzzy inside” justifies genocide, homophobia, and stopping scientific advancements because it’s “immoral!” (ie stem cell research), as well as indoctrinating children into cults.)
People are fucking stupid.
People are not inherently stupid, it’s just not in the interests of the capitalist class to promote intellectualism. They need ‘drones’.
“Drones?” So thinking that developers should make more money so they can make more great games makes me a “drone”?
Why does anybody even care about piracy? Not much, mostly money, and some “i made this, i want proper recognition”, in other words, the same thing that’s causing so many problems for us right now.
:facepalm:
What’s wrong with making money? It puts food on the table and you can use it to BUY VIDEO GAMES so you don’t have to pirate them like a pussy.
So people will now begin to get everything for free and will decide whether or not the person who makes the product deserves money?
Yeah, totally not bullshit.
This is true but they are not on even footing. Companies have already paid up-front to get boxed copies produced and in stores. By stealing these you are acting with the intent of causing harm because they are taking a loss; by pirating you are not necessarily doing so, because you probably wouldn’t have bought the game anyway and you’re not going into stores and stealing box copies - it’s probably such a small margin of potential revenue that I doubt it would make a difference, but I can’t say without looking at sales figures. I was trying to refute the arguments made by a couple posts that stealing physical products is somehow better than piracy because those people actually had balls to steal something instead of do it on the internet.
What if someone buys a game that is terrible and returns it to the store? They played it, hated it, took it back and got a refund. Isn’t this on the same level as downloading a game, hating it, deleting it from their computer and not paying it a second thought? In either case they pay nothing for the same experience. One is legal and the other is not but they are fundamentally the same.
I think some of the issues associated with piracy would be avoided if publishers were more up-front about their products and held a high commitment to quality as opposed to rush-producing mediocre games for holiday sales or something. If I’m buying a car I can test drive it and get a good feel for the experience of owning the product; I can’t really do the same for games unless they offer a demo, and even in that case it might not be representative of the full product. You can never get a full appreciation for a product like a car until you own it and operate it regularly; you can’t get the full appreciation for a game until you finish it, but consumers could be given better options to make a purchasing decision (And yes I am pretty certain that Steam has some sort of return option, there were refunds given out for Cities XL and preorders for example)
Our country has done horrible things that it considers perfectly legal. Legality does not mean right or wrong, especially with an issue as versatile as piracy.
Then let me rephrase that.
Replace “illegal” with “bad” on all my post, and there you go.
Not everything illegal is bad and not everything bad is illegal. You named several bad things that are illegal, but just because all elephants are mammals and all elephants have trunks doesn’t mean that all mammals have trunks.
Further, you posited that piracy was theft and it really isn’t. Piracy is copyright infringement. As per the United States Supreme Court:
In plain and simple economics, information is not considered a rival good and you are not appropriating a physical object nor are you denying the original copyright holder use of its copyright.
If you return it to the store they do not give you a full refund, but some of it. So people who buy it and return it do end up losing a few dollars. So no it isn’t the same. 
That’s the technical term for it, it’s still stealing in the real world outside of silly papers.
The United States Supreme Court is a “silly paper”?!
:facepalm:
No. Piracy is not stealing no matter how you try to twist it. You are not misappropriating any physical thing.
I’m not sure if I want some court or council of people that aren’t me to define my thoughts, but if they do that for you then that’s your thing.
Then how come taking someone’s idea is usually described as “stealing his idea”.
I heard someone on the bus today call someone on the phone their “honey bunny”. Does that mean that the thing on the other end of the line is a lapine made out of bee spit?
Stealing is a “silly paper” word for the intents and purposes of the legal world and piracy is not theft according to the “silly papers”. I don’t really give a flying rat’s ass what the “real world” calls it.
Ok fine you got me with the hunny bunny thing.
And I don’t really give a flying rat’s ass what you call it (goes both ways), it’s still potentially bad and you’re getting a product (that doesn’t run out) for free because you feel you don’t need to pay for it.
I don’t personally do it myself, but it doesn’t really matter if you care what I call it. I am using the LEGAL definition of the word and when you’re talking about legal versus illegal things, you MUST use the “silly paper” definition, not what you want it to mean.