It’s a big lie that piracy has caused any drops in sale. I guess those who make such hollow claims, consider the whole planet earth population their potential paid customers.
Exactly if piracy didn’t exist a lot of resources on the internet would just be inaccessible for a lot of people , especially those in third world countries. You think people in third world countries are going to pay 70$(a considereable part of their monthly income) to play the new mario game. They have important stuff they could spend that money on like food or health care.
As much as I complain about denuvo I still do buy the games even if they do get cracked. I don’t pirate any PC games, since exes are just not something I want to risk. I’ve got a collection of legal games that surpasses the availability of gamepass. PC gamepass advertisement says ‘Play over 100 high-quality games on Windows PC.’ That’s a baby collection compared to what I got in my legal library of games. That’s not even bringing GOG into the mix.
The whole concept of getting things without paying for them being equivalent to losing a sale is stupid. I remember reading a while back that a man stole 800,000 worth of iPhones. But the thing is Apple didn’t lose 800,000 in sales. They lost whatever it cost to manufacture those iPhones.
Game preservation is something that’s already actively biting us in the ass. Apparently the percentage of games that have been saved is on par with early silent motion pictures.
Even if we ensure all the critically acclaimed games are preserved, there’s still heaps that are just going to vanish over time and that sucks for everyone.
Thanks to piracy, in the media history, prices had to adjust to the people’s pockets. Buying an original CD in the 90s was really expensive. Then, because of it was just for rich people, thanks to piracy, prices fell and were more affordable. Even tho it was still expensive, then Napster and all preceding came, and we got Spotify. Which even tho is rental, you have a gigantic catalog and musicians would still get revenue even they were able to avoid the wall of publishers. So it was a two-way benefit. For games, we got steam after the big piracy of the 90s. If I see a title that has a reasonable price, I pay for it.
I wish that older games were still available in some official capacity. There’s nothing morally wrong with pirating a game that’s no longer available for sale.
Mainly because it’s impossible to tie a solid metric between piracy viewings and marketing impact, or at least it’s difficult to the point where it hasn’t been done yet. You’d need to have a pirate viewership metric tied to movie sales / streaming views and prove a correlation to assign a value that you can present to media executives.
Until that metric relationship is established in dollars and cents, the studios will ignore it, as there’s no proof it’s making them money. You’ll note that recent releases and re-releases (cough Morbius) have spoken to the industry’s ineptitude in reading underground internet trends - there’s no way they’ll ever look at piracy as a profit center unless you can smack them in the face with a large dollar figure.
The studio dissolved from my understand the rights for the IP are in a void where nobody technically owns them and the entire franchise is abandonware at this point.
The main question for this argument that piracy does a lot of good is: are the people who are pirating things using it for this purpose? I don’t think there’s an ethical conflict for me to say that I am happy for piracy to exist for software that is otherwise unplayable, but think that piracy should not exist for new games that just come out.
Someone quoted a study that within the first 14 years is where most of the profitability comes from. Maybe I’d be okay with people pirating anything that’s been around for 14 years, but I think most people who keep using this “pirating is good” line won’t agree with this compromise.
Why does purpose or ethics matter. It is called piracy and not robin hood.
Whatever the intent, it incentives archival even with selfish purposes across different decentralized sources, which is pretty valuable with that huge amount of data that would be expensive for a centralized entity to archive on their own. Not to mention a single point of failure. So even selfishness is leading to helping history not be lost.
And you think 100 years from now or longer if some random historian comes across some still working storage containing long lost media that a pirate had kept they are going to care about the legality of that at the time?
And don’t forget how much game versions change from launch, so new version is history too. Same for movies and shows and books with how editing has been done that’s led to loss of the original copy. And led to reliance of fans to restore content like Star Wars.
It is happening now with Netflix too where now the pirated versions of some Netflix show is the only way to see what was originally shown.
“We have George Lucas’d things also that people don’t know about,” the siblings told Variety, referring to the Star Wars director’s much-critiqued altered re-releases of the original franchise. “It’s not, like, story, but you’re essentially patching in shots.”
The MCU’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is barely a year old, but even the Marvel superhero miniseries isn’t immune from Disney’s re-editing efforts. In March 2022 some devoted Reddit fans discovered that a scene where Bucky throws a pipe through a woman’s shoulder had been altered so that woman falls back on the pipe instead.
Personally, I pirate every game I play before considering paying. Demos have gone the way of the dodo so my willingness to pay for a new game before I get to test it has too. It’s a two-way street and I’ve experienced buyer’s rembourse far too many times thanks to games being busted at release or certain game-breaking bugs only becoming evident in late game.
If piracy didn’t exist the new games would simply become inaccessible for a lot of people, I don’t know about the rest of the world but I will give you an example of my country. Getting a gaming PC in my country hurts your wallet like you are buying an house, you are going to have to save for a while before you can afford a entry level gaming pc( like rtx 3050 or equivalent). The average monthly wage here is like $350-$409, you think someone with this income will put 70$ into a game ? A lot of people use piracy as a medium to get access to expensive software like photoshop or ms suite that would otherwise be inaccessible and run their small businesses usually cyber cafes. It’s not just about getting free shit, for some people it’s the only option.
Yeah, coming from a similar country, buying a Nintendo switch game would cost roughly 3 to 4 days of minimum wage, before tax.
Steam does go a long way to making indie games a lot more affordable though, but AAA games can still cost an absolute bomb. For hobbyists, having only subscription options for software like Photoshop is just too expensive to pay for when they make no income.
That is a good and valid question. Talking about the US exclusively, piracy is a grey area. Some want stuff for free and now. On the other hand, some are willing to try things before giving money for the real thing or wait. There can’t be only one for piracy.
With videogames, I’d say the number of sales are way lower than 14 years for profitability. I think it may be closer to 5 years or under. By 14 years, the game console has already gone on to it’s new iteration for a few years.
I believe in waiting until the next gen or until developers can’t make any more money for games. “Pirating for good” is either people wanting stuff for free now or the companies are making it extremely difficult to buy stuff. It’s up to the person and not really the masses.
I don’t know that a pirate’s motive is really what determines whether or not piracy does good. I read somewhere at some point [citation needed] that a large percentage of the people who pirate wouldn’t otherwise have bought the thing anyway. In those cases, that pirate would maybe never have been a sale, but is still spreading feedback and recommendations for the thing through word of mouth, and then some of the pirate’s friends might buy the thing, netting sales that wouldn’t otherwise have been made.
Of course whether or not it’s ethical is another matter, and that’s where motive probably comes in.
I had to double take when I saw this. My favorite game ever (City of heroes) and I was so happy to watch the whole ordeal break down and then getting the game brought back and continuously updated by the community.
Years and years ago, I got two books in a series published by a tiny imprint that did zero marketing, and I was too noob to do any myself. Didn’t sell shit. Had trouble even getting anyone to read the damn things.
Years pass. I get disabled, and make new friends. One of them asks to read the shit, so I send him some epub files I made for my own use.
He, being the awesome fucktard he is,promptly puts copies in his book folder. Which is one of the folders he shares via soulseek.
A few weeks later, I start getting emails from random people asking if the third book is available. My files have my author email in them, so it wasn’t super confusing, but it did take a bit to figure out where the files came from for these strangers.
To date, more people have asked about the third book than ever read the printed version.
Now, would I rather have gotten paid for those reads? Fuck yeah. But, when I sent the small list of interested people a link to the series I’m currently publishing via amazon, maybe ten percent went and bought a copy of the file.
So, despite having had maybe fifty people “steal” my two books, those thefts resulted in sales anyway. Sales that I absolutely would not have gotten from those same people if they hadn’t read and liked the older stuff.
Piracy is not some noble pursuit. But, realistically, it can be an advantage if you’re small enough that it serves as advertising, or big enough that it won’t decrease sales enough to matter monetarily. Mid range “creatives”, though? They’re going to be in a bad spot from it. The conversion from pirated works to sold works is fucking SMALL. It’s small enough that if you’re struggling to make enough income to create full time, you’re fucked because you aren’t going to get serious grass roots awareness pushing sales to bump you up like that. People are going to pirate instead of buying at that popularity level.
But me? I’m fine with it. My old books, I may put up on Amazon at some point, but since I am unlikely to finish the third in the series (which is a long story), I don’t see the point. So, they’re out there, and that makes me happy. Now, maybe once or twice a year, I get a new email. That, for a no name hack like me, is better than the chump change I’ll ever get from Amazon.
This is a good example and it is hard to attribute a lost sale to pirating as it is more likely there would be no sale if the pirate were unable to obtain it. In some cases it works the other way because someone liked something so much they want to purchase it. Or it helps folks like you gain visibility.
Your story reminded of something Paulo coelho said. “Some call this “piracy". I call it a medal to any writer who understands that there are no better reward than to be read."
That’s pretty much where I am. If I was trying to make money as a primary goal, I might be a bit miffed, but then I’d have to deal with deadlines and editors and bullshit, when the truth is that I just want to make stories like I enjoy reading, and hope that letters enjoy it. Hard for that to happen if there’s a wall between readers and the stories
I do believe in the numbers of being locked out without “piracy”. The average person is mostly trying to watch TV and movies, even games, that are locked by region. That requires a VPN at a mostly legal level. Without it, the # of legal accounts would drop and would be more costly.
Piracy of old was the only way and now the new ways are going back to old. This time however, there are more official ways of getting things without sketchy sites. A VPN, modding or a cracked app isn’t going to solve real piracy in the future if companies are letting untapped money sit out untouched.
We also get little conversation about how copyright extensions and patent trilling robs the public use of public-domain content, especially when the Mouse is lobbying the federal government to extend rights further.
I saw a post on reddit a while back from the developers of Ableton. Someone asked in the subreddit if they had permission to pirate the program because they are in high school still and don’t have the money to purchase the $600+ program but really wanted to start making music using that DAW. A developer responded saying something along the lines of “We’d prefer you pirate our program to start learning and being creative instead of using another DAW. Then, when you start making a profit on your music you created with the pirated program set some aside and eventually purchase Ableton.” This creates lifetime loyalty tbh. These developers know that they’d rather you use their programs via pirating because they know if those users like it enough they will eventually purchase it. This is exactly what I did. I pirated the program and released some songs until I hade the money to purchase it myself.
Yesssssss, that’s amazing!!! The power of community is incredible. I used to be on the City of Titans team and hope they do well, but honestly, I’m happy with my CoH
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
Piracy is responsible for anime taking off worldwide
And hentai
It’s a big lie that piracy has caused any drops in sale. I guess those who make such hollow claims, consider the whole planet earth population their potential paid customers.
Exactly if piracy didn’t exist a lot of resources on the internet would just be inaccessible for a lot of people , especially those in third world countries. You think people in third world countries are going to pay 70$(a considereable part of their monthly income) to play the new mario game. They have important stuff they could spend that money on like food or health care.
Just speaking personally, I still buy what I would buy without piracy as an option. Piracy just gives me more options.
As much as I complain about denuvo I still do buy the games even if they do get cracked. I don’t pirate any PC games, since exes are just not something I want to risk. I’ve got a collection of legal games that surpasses the availability of gamepass. PC gamepass advertisement says ‘Play over 100 high-quality games on Windows PC.’ That’s a baby collection compared to what I got in my legal library of games. That’s not even bringing GOG into the mix.
The whole concept of getting things without paying for them being equivalent to losing a sale is stupid. I remember reading a while back that a man stole 800,000 worth of iPhones. But the thing is Apple didn’t lose 800,000 in sales. They lost whatever it cost to manufacture those iPhones.
Game preservation is something that’s already actively biting us in the ass. Apparently the percentage of games that have been saved is on par with early silent motion pictures.
Even if we ensure all the critically acclaimed games are preserved, there’s still heaps that are just going to vanish over time and that sucks for everyone.
Plugging https://myrient.erista.me/ here — incredible resource.
deleted by creator
This is amazing, thanks a lot for sharing.
For the ultimate way for some Nintendo games, do https://3ds.hacks.guide/ then use Myrient’s https://hshop.erista.me/ afterwards.
It’s literally direct to 3DS downloads. It’s incredible.
Oh hell yeah.
Thanks to piracy, in the media history, prices had to adjust to the people’s pockets. Buying an original CD in the 90s was really expensive. Then, because of it was just for rich people, thanks to piracy, prices fell and were more affordable. Even tho it was still expensive, then Napster and all preceding came, and we got Spotify. Which even tho is rental, you have a gigantic catalog and musicians would still get revenue even they were able to avoid the wall of publishers. So it was a two-way benefit. For games, we got steam after the big piracy of the 90s. If I see a title that has a reasonable price, I pay for it.
I wish that older games were still available in some official capacity. There’s nothing morally wrong with pirating a game that’s no longer available for sale.
https://vimm.net/ - my favorite ROM resource
Mainly because it’s impossible to tie a solid metric between piracy viewings and marketing impact, or at least it’s difficult to the point where it hasn’t been done yet. You’d need to have a pirate viewership metric tied to movie sales / streaming views and prove a correlation to assign a value that you can present to media executives.
Until that metric relationship is established in dollars and cents, the studios will ignore it, as there’s no proof it’s making them money. You’ll note that recent releases and re-releases (cough Morbius) have spoken to the industry’s ineptitude in reading underground internet trends - there’s no way they’ll ever look at piracy as a profit center unless you can smack them in the face with a large dollar figure.
I just want to be able to play black and white\black and white 2 with out having to pirate and crack and do a bunch of work arounds.
(Okay really what I want is a black and white reboot using the PS5 and taking advantage of the duel sense touch pad for the spell casting)
Speaking of Black & White I just want a reboot that uses a VR headset. Any other game I couldn’t care less about VR but Black & White…
Still could be considered a work around and may require pirating but this exists
https://github.com/openblack/openblack
I haven’t tried it myself yet though since the setup seems like a bit of a hassle.
That first game was rough around the edges, but so so good.
These games were so good. Does anyone know why they’ve never done a modern take on these games? I remember them being pretty popular.
The studio dissolved from my understand the rights for the IP are in a void where nobody technically owns them and the entire franchise is abandonware at this point.
deleted by creator
The main question for this argument that piracy does a lot of good is: are the people who are pirating things using it for this purpose? I don’t think there’s an ethical conflict for me to say that I am happy for piracy to exist for software that is otherwise unplayable, but think that piracy should not exist for new games that just come out.
Someone quoted a study that within the first 14 years is where most of the profitability comes from. Maybe I’d be okay with people pirating anything that’s been around for 14 years, but I think most people who keep using this “pirating is good” line won’t agree with this compromise.
Why does purpose or ethics matter. It is called piracy and not robin hood.
Whatever the intent, it incentives archival even with selfish purposes across different decentralized sources, which is pretty valuable with that huge amount of data that would be expensive for a centralized entity to archive on their own. Not to mention a single point of failure. So even selfishness is leading to helping history not be lost.
And you think 100 years from now or longer if some random historian comes across some still working storage containing long lost media that a pirate had kept they are going to care about the legality of that at the time?
And don’t forget how much game versions change from launch, so new version is history too. Same for movies and shows and books with how editing has been done that’s led to loss of the original copy. And led to reliance of fans to restore content like Star Wars.
It is happening now with Netflix too where now the pirated versions of some Netflix show is the only way to see what was originally shown.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/netflix-retroactive-editing
https://screenrant.com/tv-shows-films-edited-after-original-release/
14 years… Time doesn’t stand still for that long.
Personally, I pirate every game I play before considering paying. Demos have gone the way of the dodo so my willingness to pay for a new game before I get to test it has too. It’s a two-way street and I’ve experienced buyer’s rembourse far too many times thanks to games being busted at release or certain game-breaking bugs only becoming evident in late game.
Yea pretty much what I did, glad I avoided the bullet of wo long
If piracy didn’t exist the new games would simply become inaccessible for a lot of people, I don’t know about the rest of the world but I will give you an example of my country. Getting a gaming PC in my country hurts your wallet like you are buying an house, you are going to have to save for a while before you can afford a entry level gaming pc( like rtx 3050 or equivalent). The average monthly wage here is like $350-$409, you think someone with this income will put 70$ into a game ? A lot of people use piracy as a medium to get access to expensive software like photoshop or ms suite that would otherwise be inaccessible and run their small businesses usually cyber cafes. It’s not just about getting free shit, for some people it’s the only option.
Yeah, coming from a similar country, buying a Nintendo switch game would cost roughly 3 to 4 days of minimum wage, before tax.
Steam does go a long way to making indie games a lot more affordable though, but AAA games can still cost an absolute bomb. For hobbyists, having only subscription options for software like Photoshop is just too expensive to pay for when they make no income.
Get out of those trash countries. Get work from another country, make money online.
That is a good and valid question. Talking about the US exclusively, piracy is a grey area. Some want stuff for free and now. On the other hand, some are willing to try things before giving money for the real thing or wait. There can’t be only one for piracy.
With videogames, I’d say the number of sales are way lower than 14 years for profitability. I think it may be closer to 5 years or under. By 14 years, the game console has already gone on to it’s new iteration for a few years.
I believe in waiting until the next gen or until developers can’t make any more money for games. “Pirating for good” is either people wanting stuff for free now or the companies are making it extremely difficult to buy stuff. It’s up to the person and not really the masses.
I don’t know that a pirate’s motive is really what determines whether or not piracy does good. I read somewhere at some point [citation needed] that a large percentage of the people who pirate wouldn’t otherwise have bought the thing anyway. In those cases, that pirate would maybe never have been a sale, but is still spreading feedback and recommendations for the thing through word of mouth, and then some of the pirate’s friends might buy the thing, netting sales that wouldn’t otherwise have been made.
Of course whether or not it’s ethical is another matter, and that’s where motive probably comes in.
I had to double take when I saw this. My favorite game ever (City of heroes) and I was so happy to watch the whole ordeal break down and then getting the game brought back and continuously updated by the community.
Well, here’s something I learned.
Years and years ago, I got two books in a series published by a tiny imprint that did zero marketing, and I was too noob to do any myself. Didn’t sell shit. Had trouble even getting anyone to read the damn things.
Years pass. I get disabled, and make new friends. One of them asks to read the shit, so I send him some epub files I made for my own use.
He, being the awesome fucktard he is,promptly puts copies in his book folder. Which is one of the folders he shares via soulseek.
A few weeks later, I start getting emails from random people asking if the third book is available. My files have my author email in them, so it wasn’t super confusing, but it did take a bit to figure out where the files came from for these strangers.
To date, more people have asked about the third book than ever read the printed version.
Now, would I rather have gotten paid for those reads? Fuck yeah. But, when I sent the small list of interested people a link to the series I’m currently publishing via amazon, maybe ten percent went and bought a copy of the file.
So, despite having had maybe fifty people “steal” my two books, those thefts resulted in sales anyway. Sales that I absolutely would not have gotten from those same people if they hadn’t read and liked the older stuff.
Piracy is not some noble pursuit. But, realistically, it can be an advantage if you’re small enough that it serves as advertising, or big enough that it won’t decrease sales enough to matter monetarily. Mid range “creatives”, though? They’re going to be in a bad spot from it. The conversion from pirated works to sold works is fucking SMALL. It’s small enough that if you’re struggling to make enough income to create full time, you’re fucked because you aren’t going to get serious grass roots awareness pushing sales to bump you up like that. People are going to pirate instead of buying at that popularity level.
But me? I’m fine with it. My old books, I may put up on Amazon at some point, but since I am unlikely to finish the third in the series (which is a long story), I don’t see the point. So, they’re out there, and that makes me happy. Now, maybe once or twice a year, I get a new email. That, for a no name hack like me, is better than the chump change I’ll ever get from Amazon.
Sicfi publisher Bean Books did this. They published free ebooks for all the older material, but kept the last/newest in a series paid.
So yeah, I bought those new books, since id gotten hooked.
This is a good example and it is hard to attribute a lost sale to pirating as it is more likely there would be no sale if the pirate were unable to obtain it. In some cases it works the other way because someone liked something so much they want to purchase it. Or it helps folks like you gain visibility.
Your story reminded of something Paulo coelho said. “Some call this “piracy". I call it a medal to any writer who understands that there are no better reward than to be read."
That’s pretty much where I am. If I was trying to make money as a primary goal, I might be a bit miffed, but then I’d have to deal with deadlines and editors and bullshit, when the truth is that I just want to make stories like I enjoy reading, and hope that letters enjoy it. Hard for that to happen if there’s a wall between readers and the stories
I do believe in the numbers of being locked out without “piracy”. The average person is mostly trying to watch TV and movies, even games, that are locked by region. That requires a VPN at a mostly legal level. Without it, the # of legal accounts would drop and would be more costly.
Piracy of old was the only way and now the new ways are going back to old. This time however, there are more official ways of getting things without sketchy sites. A VPN, modding or a cracked app isn’t going to solve real piracy in the future if companies are letting untapped money sit out untouched.
We also get little conversation about how copyright extensions and patent trilling robs the public use of public-domain content, especially when the Mouse is lobbying the federal government to extend rights further.
I saw a post on reddit a while back from the developers of Ableton. Someone asked in the subreddit if they had permission to pirate the program because they are in high school still and don’t have the money to purchase the $600+ program but really wanted to start making music using that DAW. A developer responded saying something along the lines of “We’d prefer you pirate our program to start learning and being creative instead of using another DAW. Then, when you start making a profit on your music you created with the pirated program set some aside and eventually purchase Ableton.” This creates lifetime loyalty tbh. These developers know that they’d rather you use their programs via pirating because they know if those users like it enough they will eventually purchase it. This is exactly what I did. I pirated the program and released some songs until I hade the money to purchase it myself.
God, City of Heroes is the perfect example of that, seeing private servers pop up…my childhood was back
To Pocket D and the dance floor!
Some servers are pushing the boundaries by generating new content. NCSoft was sitting on a gold mine but they didn’t notice.
Yesssssss, that’s amazing!!! The power of community is incredible. I used to be on the City of Titans team and hope they do well, but honestly, I’m happy with my CoH