Piracy – as an alternative

This topic is more than worn out, and in essence is a big “accordion”; game piracy has been around for more than 40 years, and all these years there have been discussions about its pros and cons, so everyone who is interested has already taken one side or another, and fiercely (or not so much) defends their position.

There will be no graphs and diagrams showing the economic component of the problem, discussions about the greed of corporations and unscrupulous lovers of freebies. My argument will definitely not put an end to the confrontation and will not even raise a new wave of discussion, but still..
“If you see this inscription, you have another article in your hands.»

Any alternative is good. Piracy is also a choice, conscious or not (̶л̶а̶т̶е̶н̶т̶н̶о̶е̶ ̶п̶и̶р̶а̶т̶с̶т̶в̶о̶), someone downloads because they don’t want to pay for “toys”, someone hides behind elegant excuses, others simply do not have funds and they steal food to exchange it for last CODE.

Yes, in real life you won’t download furniture or an apartment, which is usually an argument in a dispute, but even in harsh reality there are alternatives. When you can’t afford clothes from Timati or Kanye West, you go to a store with cheaper prices, and when you’re swollen from hunger, you take advantage of weekly discounts on stitched goods that we all love so much.

Z.S: Anyone who writes in the comments about sales on Steam, as an alternative, will destroy the semantic component of the previous sentence.

Piracy has made its own cultural contribution and even to some extent contributed to the development of the gaming industry. This does not cancel all its disadvantages, but taking away the right to choose is not good either.

Look at the problem from both sides equally, support your opinion with facts and remember – your opinion is important for a large family of gamers!

Z.Y.S: Although who am I to take away your right to a subjective, one-sided opinion?.

Best comments

When you can’t afford clothes from Timati or Kanye West, you go to a store with cheaper prices

But we don’t steal from the market or in stores, mind you, we buy cheaper things. Same on Steam. You don’t have to always buy expensive new games; you can buy them at a sale every six months, where you can buy good games cheaply and in bulk, and then play them for a YEAR!

The article is being downvoted because piracy is not an alternative, but theft. Games are fun. This is not vital food and clothing. And there is no point in proving that you can pirate.

As Daur correctly noted above: piracy is not an alternative, but theft. And you can come up with as many excuses for yourself as you want, it won’t change the essence. And the rest is about some mythical cultural influence, promoting progress – this is enchanting demagoguery in a vacuum.

But there is at https://zoomacasino.co.uk/login/ least one interesting situation: old games. Very old games. Which authors and publishers no longer sell. Which are not in stores. Which are sold on ebay for crazy money in quantities of several pieces, or are even not sold anywhere at all. Why should a digital product, which can be replicated in unlimited quantities, be limited to the number of its official physical copies?? Right now there is no one to buy the rights to some games from. And any GOG is unlikely to be spoiled by selling games from the early 80s.

Or let’s take some old console. Which is no longer produced, the disks and boards of which have already crumbled from old age. No company. No console. But during the life cycle of the console, enthusiasts managed to remove images from disks and make emulators. Downloading emulators and images is piracy? Formally, perhaps yes, but… I still say but! Who is the victim?? Who is harmed?? The company no longer exists, and even if it does exist, it produces nothing. She wouldn’t make a profit anyway.

In the debriefing, with enviable regularity, it sounds like “we wanted to buy the game, but we couldn’t find where, so we sold it.”. T.e., if we approach it formally, Stopgame promotes piracy 😀 But this is if it is formal. But if there is NO WHERE to buy the game, it’s still piracy? Questions and questions..

I downvoted the article not because piracy is theft (which is already obvious), but because it could become the topic of an extremely interesting and extensive discussion. But this article doesn’t cover the topic at all 🙁

You see, traditional theft is bad because it has a physical form. If you steal a chair from a store, you are not just taking it away from the store, but also from the person who could potentially buy this chair. In total, the damage was caused to one, quite material unit of goods, and two parties suffered from this.

Digital theft is interesting because digital is never-ending. No one will lose money from a stolen copy: neither the manufacturer nor the person who might not have received this copy. Therefore, piracy is not so much theft as it is banal faggoting. People on the other side of the world worked on this product, and they DESERVE that you pay for their work if you use this product – just like every other manufacturer of any other product in this world. The developers are not extreme, despite the developed piracy.
And I still can’t understand how piracy means expanding the gaming audience.

It’s somehow difficult to imagine that a person will take money to the cashier for something that he categorically did not like.

Everything has now been created to avoid this situation. The same demos and trial versions – not to mention the whole Internet, where you can read reviews, see the possibilities of work, and based on this, form your own pros and cons. And ghospad, in the same Steam, after the introduction of money back – what can you complain about now??

Piracy has made its own cultural contribution and even to some extent contributed to the development of the gaming industry.

Can I send a couple of examples to the studio, please?. There are very few details to cover the topic from both sides, judging by the nature of the article.

"What. pay for air to play games. What nonsense?“- this is roughly what I thought about licensed games as a child, but then I grew up and began to pay taxes, pay off loans and learned many new “charms” of life and my opinion about the virtual things of our world changed a little… but not entirely.
Yes, I know very well that stealing from people is not good, but in theory, no one takes money from the developers; they make great money from the fans of their games, who year after year gladly pay for the continuation of their favorite series of games, whose budget is recouped tenfold… yes, you understand who I mean. So what do pirates have to do with it anyway?? How do they prevent someone from earning money?? Are they dissuading people from buying these products?? If people don’t want to pay for games, they won’t and no matter how the developers protect their products, their sales won’t increase and the quality of these same products won’t improve, people will find entertainment besides computer games if they become so inaccessible.
And don’t tell me that he said “because of people like you, we don’t have sequels to our favorite games,” but no, if a developer wants to make a sequel to the games, he will find the money, in the end the fans can chip in themselves, but I’m talking about Kickstarter. If no one gives money for development, then most likely no one just doesn’t care about the developer and his games, but it also happens the other way around, that there seems to be money and a lot of suffering fans, but the developer just doesn’t want to do it! (Half-Life 3 no, haven’t heard)
And I still can’t understand why everyone is barking at pirates so much? they don’t steal from you or your holy developers, what have they ever done to you?? You yourself have almost the entire hard drive full of pirated content: movies, music, books, programs, and probably a couple of hidden games that are simply nowhere to buy(Someday I’ll get to you, Godfather 2) yes, even the damn Windows are most likely also spiraled. And there’s no need to deny that “games are completely different”, yes, it’s the same thing, the same program that there are millions of on the Internet, by the way, even the developers have already realized that in order to attract new buyers, you must first offer them games for free, but for a while, so that they try them, and then buy them – it doesn’t remind me of anything! They do this on Steam too, and in Origin they dedicated a whole section to this and the fashion for F2P didn’t just fall out of the sky either, everyone loves freebies, so the developers take advantage of this, essentially “allowing” piracy in order to earn more and attract more fans. So, remind me once again who is hurt by piracy if everyone uses it so well?

I’m not the author. But piracy has “done” a lot for Russia and the CIS. Just recently, when acquiring a license for the majority of the population was neither financially nor even physically possible (financially, by the way, for many it still remains so). This is exactly what a generation of handy people grew up on: programmers, editors, designers, journalists (including gaming ones), etc. Through the use of the best and most expensive hidden software (including games). “Merit”, of course, dubious. But still. Piracy still provides people with software and media content that they would not otherwise be able to obtain. Moreover, without any damage on the part of the developer and publisher, and even to please them, in the form of some kind of advertising.

Actually, you yourself described why in the first two paragraphs. Your point of view is not original and not really explained. Actually, the semantic load of the blog is zero, means of expression and design are minimal. Why all this was started is unclear.

Look. The publishing house orders the development of the project from studio (A). The budget is allocated, this amount will be used to cover the salaries of employees, including. Studio developers (A), lying on the beach sipping beer. The game fails because of piracy, the financial department of the publishing house doesn’t care whether because of piracy, a continuation of the game or another project, the publishing house no longer orders from the studio (A). Studio developers (A) do not lie on the beach and sip beer. Curtain.

I just don’t understand one thing: does it make sense to completely abandon piracy?? After all, in essence, everyone will lose from this, especially consumers, and game makers will ultimately receive nothing, i.e.buyers will remain “potential”, and given that the popularity of computer games will quickly decline, sales will stop growing, and the video game market will take a good step back. For me, piracy is a necessary evil, without which, for many, video games would remain “entertainment for dummies.”.

Don’t know. For a person personally, giving up piracy may make sense. Well, maybe he wants to use only licensed products, so that’s exceptionally good. Moreover, this kind of users, obviously, for the most part will be the most picky, wisely calculating the costs of their money and time. Accordingly, in the fight for such buyers it will inevitably be necessary to raise the quality bar. Well, love for freebies, on the contrary, leads to a very strange place. They will earn money from us differently. More aggressive advertising, for example. Distribution of malware and other micropayments, without which games will turn into some kind of punishment. In general, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Sooner or later, the pendulum will swing in one direction, because what is happening in the gaming industry now is complete trash.
Well, piracy is not evil and not good. Just an existing inalienable fact. They will create normal laws where piracy will be equated to a crime and begin to actively apply them, then yes, it will be evil and a bad thing.

As with other software. Limited demos and all sorts of promotions where paid software is distributed for free to students and schoolchildren. Like, you will taste the delights of our products, and then, when you become adults and self-sufficient, buy them. Or, for example, having played a pirate game, purely hypothetically, if you really like the game and want the goodies of the paid version, a person may well be ready to buy. But to imagine that a person will take money to the cashier for something that he categorically did not like is somehow difficult. Type regulation and screening. And much more like this. All this “benefit” is indirect and in no way quantifiable, but nevertheless, there are some positive aspects.

Everything, but not everywhere. Some people try, yeah. And some don’t. And here again a lot of things come up. Who will make a demo for a short and small game? And who will dig up reviews and opinions for the sake of playing for a couple of evenings?? Not even for a couple. And someone is trying very hard to protect their products (or vice versa, they are shamelessly hacking), and they are doing it so well that downloading and launching a pirated repack turns out to be much easier. In general, it won’t be difficult to remember and come up with situations here either.

If you don’t mind, write why you don’t like the article: content, point of view, etc. Interesting to hear your opinion.

I just wanted to write about the same thing. More recently, about 10 years ago, the cost of 1 3D artist’s job was tens of thousands of dollars. Moreover, this workplace had the most top-end equipment, it took up at most 20% of the budget, the rest was the cost of software. But in fairness, I can say that now there is practically no point in piracy. Almost all top software has versions of builds for training, or an indie license for pennies. Yes, versions for training have limitations, but all these restrictions, for the most part, simply limit the ability to use training versions of the software for commercial purposes. It’s just one thing when you’ve stolen something, smoked the official documentation, and realized whether this sof is suitable for you to embed it in your pipline or not. Went either bought a license or abandoned the product. And it’s completely different when you pirated it, everything suits you and you continue to use the pirated version, while also making money from it. But again, piracy makes no sense because almost everything can be tried for free and legally.

Now on to the games. Pirate games are Evil, the developers also want to sip beer while lying on the beach 8).

For example, voice acting and translation of “Fargus”, in narrow circles it is considered “nostalgic” or “that same” voice acting.Jokes about “999 in 1” and similar memes. I agree, it didn’t bring about a huge cultural transformation of the gaming industry, but it was important for me, so I mentioned it, and I upvote your comment, thank you.

It has become easier, yes. But the meaning remains and it is still the same. Home-grown young programmers, video reviewers and other not yet independent, but extremely active people are present in huge numbers. And they prefer expensive professional software, with all that it implies.

One of the most myopic positions. Who even said that money from buying a game will go into the pockets of the developers?? Why the urge to thank the developers with money is expressed in the transfer of finances to completely different people? It’s good when the publisher and developer are not strangers to each other and the financial condition of one directly affects the other. Even better if they are the same people. But that doesn’t always happen. This does not mean that piracy is good and correct, but we must be clearly aware of who and what we are paying for.

My purpose was not to justify piracy, I just wanted to give it a chance, and I took your point of view into account, as well as Daura, thanks for the comments.