100% always pirate games from the major development corporations, don’t give them your money, they’re killing the industry.

Otherwise, I’ll often pirate a game to try it out, and if I like it enough to see myself actually playing and returning to it, i’ll buy it. I’m angry that game renting doesn’t really seem to be a thing anymore, I miss being able to go to the blockbuster with my parents as a youth to rent a game for the week, why did we accept a new digital system that makes that impossible? The only other option is to download demos, and those are not the same in the slightest.

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Piracy is good. It’s good in music, games and movies as well. People have a right to partake in culture I think.

I think it’s great. Fuck major development corporations. I’ll use what little money I have to support indie devs.

I’m a game developer. My lifestyle and well being depends on people downloading my games and me getting paid for it.

Piracy is a non-issue. My top game is available on various cracking websites, but it’s not worth my effort to go after them since my payers aren’t the people who are on those websites anyways.

Cheating is a bigger issue, but it’s not something that grows in popularity since it ruins the fun in a game.

The entire “buying (licensing) digital media” business model is extremely flawed and is detrimental consumers for the primary purpose of making a few gigacorporations even richer, so I’m not going to lose sleep over piracy.

My biggest concern with game piracy is the malware risk associated with pirating an executable file, not for the sake of the game publisher. Though it’s not like you’re safe from that with legitimate copies either, remember when Sony literally installed rootkits that damaged their customers’ computers as DRM? And got away with it?

Organizations like the FSF, Linux Foundation, major Linux distros, etc–hell even sponsorless YouTubers on Patreon–have shown us that you can have both open source/open access, and financially sustainable content creation. It just requires your content to actually be high enough quality in and of itself, instead of relying on marketing tricks and hype to convince people to pay for something before they even know if they’ll like it.

In the end, media and software don’t have intrinsic bill of materials costs like physical objects do (costs associated with the material required to manufacture an individual unit), nor is the supply of a particular title limited physically, so it makes no logical sense to pay for every copy of it. See “Copying is not Theft.”

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The idea that limiting consumption can control production is a capitalist lie that makes us believe that voting with our dollar is the only valid expression of dissent. But also piracy is good and based 🤷

Honestly I think its value comes from the act of humiliating evil game execs. It’s not much, but it’s fun propaganda and the whole point is that it’s free propaganda. “Normally I’d buy this on release, but Bobby Kotick‘s of piece of shit, so I’ll be pirating it instead”

Folks complain about buying steam games they don’t end up playing meanwhile I am hoarding game repacks on my external HDD.

I mostly support it. If developer aren’t willing to preserve their older libraries, especially when it comes to digital games, than we will. The only problem that I have with piracy is the fact that it’s almost always possible to pirate games that just came out. It’s one thing to preserve a games that either came out 40 years ago or are no longer purchasable, but it’s very problematic when I see games that you can pirate the day they were released. I understand that the people who pirate new games and the people who actually buy new games are of a different demographic but it still seems wrong.

Pirating non-Nintendo games is morally just and a good thing to do.

I think it’s important that it exists. Now I have a relatively stable career as an engineer (not in as wealthy a country as the US, but still pretty good), and can afford to support the developers that I want to. I always buy good games with Linux ports on Steam - to support native Linux ports and the development of Proton and the Steam Deck, etc.

However, when I was young we had hardly any money at all. And being able to pirate video games was a great relief. Learning to apply cracks, and ultimately crack simple things myself led me to to hacking free online multiplayer games like Wolfenstein: ET, Habbo Hotel, etc., never for personal gain but just for fun, and it was amazing to have communities like that (forums + IRC) where you could participate with no money at all, and no-one knew or cared about your background and so on. That ultimately led me to programming and my career.

So i think it’s critically important that it’s possible, so that young unprivileged people can have those communities, and it’s a shame that technology is becoming ever more locked-down and abstracted away from the user.

Regarding communities, I think &TOTSE put it best:

Q: What is TOTSE all about, anyway?

A: A lot of people have some weird idea that this web site is a Bad Place, a place for hackers, software pirates, and anarchists. The reason that they think this is that there are informational text files on here about hacking, piracy, and anarchy.

However, there are also text files on here that discuss politics; democratic, right wing, left wing, libertarian, communist, and everything in between, but this is not a political web site.

There are files on here that discuss Jesus Christ, Muhammed, Buddha, Crowley, John Smith, and “Bob”, but this is not a religious web site.

There are files full of short stories, science fiction, humorous articles, and great works of literature, but this is not a literary web site.

There are files with information on rocketry, radio broadcasting, chemistry, electronics, genetics, and computers, but this is not a technical web site.

This web site is about INFORMATION. All sorts and all viewpoints. Some of the information you will agree with, some you will find shocking, and some you will probably disagree with violently. That is the whole point. In this society we go to schools where there is one right answer: The Teacher’s. There is one acceptable version of events: The Television’s. There is only one acceptable occupation: The pursuit of money. There is only one political choice to make: The Status Quo.

On this web site you are expected to make decisions all by yourself. You get to decide who and what to agree with, and why. You get to hear new viewpoints that you may have never heard before. On this web site people exist without age, without skin color, without gender, without clothes, without nationality, without any of the visual cues we usually use to discredit or ignore people who are unlike ourselves. All of these things are stripped away and the ideas themselves are laid bare.

You will change. You will transform. You will learn. You will disagree.

You will enjoy it.