Piracy

> The streaming platforms, for which you pay full price, don’t even let you choose the quality of the movie you want to watch. What you watch today might disappear from all platforms in two months.

I have seen so many songs disappear from Spotify lately that I am considering to hoard music again. Gladly I have most of those that disappeared on my HDD anyways, since it's been mostly old songs, but yeah. Was kinda frustrating. Maybe it's the task for this winter to go through my spotify playlists and find out which music I do not own yet

Having worked in the game industry in the past it's amusing to see people talk about the greed of game developers. You have no idea! You have no idea what an effort it takes to ship a game. An album is the work of one or a few individuals for a relatively short period of time with very little cost. Because of that you can have services like Spotify that allow pretty much access to all the music ever created for a 10$ fee. The math just doesn't work with video games. Video games take an army of developers and years of work to make. Game development is one of the hardest and worst paying professions in tech. Most people in the industry are there not for the money but because of their passion for the profession. Most games fail to pay for their production costs despite all the effort that goes into them. Companies who have had a few mega successes have to make enough money out of their popular titles to be able to pay for all the other titles that fail to pay for themselves. Please don't complain about video game prices!

I have pirated everything my whole life and I will proudly pirate these things forever. I do pay for original music, media, movies, but I also pirate everything. These two things are not mutually exclusive and I think every person who is interested in having and owning their own media should be pirating.

Corollary: If a digital product is not actively being sold, piracy is not stealing. No, an old physical copy being on sale on Ebay does not count.

Nintendo, take note.

Ah, fitgirl to the rescue :) Helped me so many time to decide to buy the game,., For example Horizon Zero Dawn, played fitgirl release, loved it, purchased original. But still. fitgirl release is better as it does not require Internet!

> "Look, no one pirates music anymore"

I must be the last person that does then. All my music is ripped from youtube

>The streaming platforms, for which you pay full price, don’t even let you choose the quality of the movie you want to watch

I wanted to re-watch Dune Part 1 before Part 2 came to theaters, so I rented the film on Youtube Movies which said it would be HD $3.99. I paid, but when the movie started playing it was NOT HD. The quality selector didn't even let me choose a HD resolution. I tried different browsers, I tried Safari on my Mac, Chrome on my Mac, disconnecting from my 4K display... was it a some bug? Was it a haywire copy protection because I opened the film on a 4K display over Displayport? I have no idea, but I felt cheated. I haven't paid for a movie since.

I don't think Spotify should be celebrated. For a start, Spotify exists because the music companies basically lost against piracy, but it was their own fault. That devalued recorded music to such an extent they had to change that business model. They collect a paltry amount from streaming (the artists get even less), but it's all they can get now. They've changed their model entirely. Bands are gone. Generic, marketable solo artists are in and money is made from concerts. Records are just marketing.

Secondly, though, Spotify is just as bad if you are into proper records rather than concert marketing. Want to listen to Queen? Well, I hope you like the god awful remasters, because that's all that is available on Spotify. And whatever is available right now could change at any moment. It's not a music collection.

The only way the record companies could have kept selling records is with vinyl. But they killed that to get more profits decades ago. Good luck convincing people music is worth sitting down for like people do with books, movies and games. Yeah, let me sit down and listen to Cardi B for the next 40 minutes, said no one. The youth just press play on a playlist and whatever comes out doesn't matter, it's all basically the same anyway.

Here's the thing: I take a step back and realize it's not a big deal. No one's dying, suffering, or anything of the sort because I don't reallly my games through steam or stream my favorite tv shows. Worst case scenario is something is no longer available anywhere thanks to it not being stremaable, rentable, on a service. Is this unfortunate? Yes, but is it enough to feel we need to massively change? Nah... Most of the movies ever produed are lost. Many hours of TV shows prior to the 60s were simply not recorded.

People also pretend like owning media means they'll one day, decades down the line, still be able to play it but in my experience this is rare. I have CD roms from the 90s that I just can't play. I'd likely need to find a windows 98 machine and do all sorts of magic to get them actually running. How much is any media of value me 8 years after I consume it? It wasn't too long ago that the only way you could watch a movie again is if a theature decided to show it again. You didn't see Attack of the Green monster in it's brief run in 1956? Oh well, too bad. It's only VHSs came out was owning a movie even a concept.

So, i've just learned to shrug it off. Ok, so i don't have a solid physical copies of all the Star Trek TNG, but I can stream them and it's not costly. In fact I've never really paid less for media in my life. Hypothetically they could take it from me, and leave me to never see it again. That'd be annoying but just annoying.

Piracy is as it ever was: annoying to setup, navigate, some level of danger and, now, nowhere near as well integrated or easy to use as the "legal" infrastructure. Maybe i'm just renting my shows but i'll take that over torrents that stop at 99%, missing epsides and dodgy subtitles.

Remember: If you can’t re-sell it, you did not buy it.

I think this is conflating two problems.

One is preservation and ownership (or lack of), which is a huge problem. Live service games aside, even if you buy physical, what’s on the disc is often unplayable or incomplete without a day-one patch, so you’re just as screwed when the servers go offline. I’ve heard this period described as a future dark ages for games due to how many will be lost, and I think I agree. It’s thanks to the work of “pirates” and true hackers that I’m able to still play digital-only 3DS games for example, because I literally have no legal way to purchase them anymore.

The other is cost. It seems like the author is in Turkey so I can’t comment on local affordability, but if anything many games are too cheap, not too expensive. Your typical triple-A game now is unfathomably expensive to make and needs thousands of people to do so. Now personally, I’m not big into those sorts of games. I think trying to create huge games rammed with endless shallow side-quests just for the sake of being bigger than the last one is a pointless endeavour and makes for a worse product, but evidently enough people think otherwise cause they keep getting made.

Yes, it is bullshit that digital versions are not only the same price, but often more expensive than physical counterparts (at least here in the UK). But new games were £50/$60USD for so long, which neither kept up with inflation or the rising scale and costs of production. Even today’s typical £60/$70 is far below what games cost in the 90s when you factor in inflation. I dunno what to do here besides keep supporting smaller, less expensive indie output, of which there is a wonderful volume.

The main problem with digital game distribution imo is that you still pay the full price, but you can't resell the game later. So you're getting much less value in the end. It would be fairer to price digital copies maybe 10-20% of the physical ones because of how single-use they are.

GOG exists. Blu-ray discs of movies, shows and music exist. Even when consumers have the option to buy from those modes, they don't. They prefer Steam and Netflix and Spotify instead.

Why? Because contrary to the opinion of a couple of online aficionados, the masses don't care that much about preserving media after they have consumed them once, or once the trend has subsided. The market has spoken, the affordability and convenience of not having to manage one's own collection beats the slight lack of guarantee.

What meme? broken link for me. I wanna see the meme.

> "Look, no one pirates music anymore"

Is using hacked streaming apps or sharing accounts in violation of ToS considered piracy?

With the rise of GenAI I am no longer pirating legal content. Now I am legally obtaining training materials to build my AI models. I might even pivot to feeding as many video games as possible straight into AI models in futile hope that one day it might produce some sort of playable thing.

My term for these kind of purchases is "DRU" - defeasible right to use.

> They sell games for $60 and then add microtransactions, turning them into service games.

Just. Don't. Buy. This. Crap. There are other games which you can play.

> Neither side is innocent—piracy is not theft, but let's admit, it is unfair. [...] The companies, with their excessive pricing, instead of selling their products once, turn them into SaaS with lifetime monthly subscriptions. They sell games for $60 and then add microtransactions, turning them into service games.

I'm sorry, but these are not comparable. One side - the pirates - are doing something that is illegal, unethical, and explicitly disallowed by the other side. It's not a voluntary arrangement - it is the opposite.

The game companies, on the other hand, are offering a voluntary arrangement. You don't like it, you don't have to agree to it. No one is forcing you.

Owning is overvalued. The things you own end up owning you.

The subject of the article is a total non-issue that it's trying to turn into a serious problem, seemingly through anxiety.

If you're worried about your games aging out, CD-ROMs did not protect you because the average Windows 98 game won't run on modern computers without significant modifications.

> How can the boxed price of a game (or software) be the same as its Steam or digital version?

In Capitalist economies, prices are set by producers and are significantly influenced by supply and demand. Prices are justified by people's willingness to pay them, and competition creates downward pressure. Games priced at $60 have to compete with $9.99 indie games on Steam, and justify their higher price through quality.

> When you buy a game digitally, it never truly belongs to you; services like Steam or PS Store only allow you to download and play it.

We're still grappling with what "ownership" means in a digital economy, but Steam's model is clearly good enough for 99% of customers. Even Nintendo (which always loved its physical carts) eventually had to admit that most buyers prefer digital downloads. They're willing to take the risk of losing access in the future in return for convenience here, today.

> 20 years later, you can plug in your Atari cartridge and play, but you can’t be sure that Steam won’t go bankrupt and deactivate its servers. (Nintendo recently closed its shops, including for the 3DS, PSP servers are shut down, etc.)

I have Steam games from 15 years ago that I could still play. But that's just it: I could still play them. Do I? No, I'm done with them and I'm playing something else now. I heard about the 3DS shop shutting down, but so what? I've got my Switch and I haven't touched the 3DS in many years.

> The companies, with their excessive pricing, instead of selling their products once, turn them into SaaS with lifetime monthly subscriptions.

Excessive compared to what? Also, most modern software buyers expect continuous updates, patches, security fixes, etc. after the initial purchase, so monthly payments for ongoing labor seem like a natural fit. When you buy a toaster, you don't expect the manufacturer to come into your house a year later and make improvements.

> They sell games for $60 and then add microtransactions, turning them into service games.

Some games do that, many do not. Our choices influence future behavior by game makers. I totally agree with you that microtransactions suck, and I try not to buy games that have them.

> Without the people who dump and archive these contents, the old series you love so much could disappear forever.

Beloved classics rarely disappear. Nintendo Online still offers lots of them on the Switch. But when you describe something as "forgotten software" (as the article did early on), you're admitting that hardly anyone wants to play it.

1. Being pedantic even if you own the medium(cd, cartrige, floppy disk), you still don’t own the software. You just own the license to use it.

2. So you are pro-Spotify but anti-Steam? All the arguments you gave above against Steam apply to Spotify as well.

Sounds to me you are trying to justify your decision to pirate to yourself.