Which seas do you avoid?
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Software. 99% of the time there is some Free Software alternative that either somehow does the job for my personal tasks, or is better anyways.
FOSS for the win 😁
Or you have to run a shady crack or keygen to get it to work, and I don’t trust those.
But …their catchy 8bit music!
I can hear KMSpico in my head already…
* cries in Adobe *
i refuse to pirate indie games. i will always buy games that are independently released or from small publishers because 1. they’re just trying to break even (unlike publishers like EA and Activision who have millions of fans lining up to buy their repetitive junk) and 2. they almost never have DRM. i’ll also buy my music for similar reasons; 99% of artists can barely make a living and i really do not want to contribute to that statistic
We’ve been buying stuff on bandcamp friday, it is pretty neat
It’s not that I won’t but I do try to go out of my way to support smaller artists I enjoy, especially nowadays.
Lucky it’s gotten a lot easier with sites like Bandcamp, but it’s better if I can buy directly from the bands own store.
Pretty much anything that I can buy easily without going to second-hand or stupid subscriptions. For me, it’s really a service problem, not a cost problem.
As long as they participate in Steam sales, assuming they’re on Steam to begin with, PC games are more convenient to have in a library where I don’t have to manually update each game. Valve’s not perfect, with its 30% cut of sales being arguably too high (as is the case for all other platforms that defend its use as being an “industry standard”), but given Nintendo’s monetization of online gameplay and replacing the Virtual Console system with what is essentially console library rentals, I don’t mind putting up with updating Switch ROMs once in a blue moon if it means not supporting anti-consumer practices. Any games I had in my Switch library that are also on Steam I simply repurchased for the sake of convenience, however.
30% allowing to use: Steam servers, Steam Workshop, Steam Cloud, Steamworks, Steam API
All of this is free for the players and developers they got to find a way to pay for all of this.
Considering that Valve makes more money per employee than most major tech companies, it definitely seems like it would still be turning a profit if its share of sales were reduced to 15 or 20 percent. Steam’s services aren’t free; the 30% fee inflates the price of games by 43%. As with any company Valve needs to have a high enough profit margin to cover long-term costs and R&D budgets, but the 30% cut is an outdated industry standard from when server operating costs were substantially higher than today.
Well I don’t know the internal details but looking at all the benefits and services provided to the developers and players this doesn’t seem unfair.
Aside from hosting cloud saves and Steam workshop data, there aren’t many other services that justify a high fee to offset long-term costs. Steam trading cards, for instance, are just another source of revenue for Valve given that they also take a cut of sales from marketplace transactions.
Given that Valve’s costs in developing Proton are offset by the higher Steam game purchase rates of Steam Deck users (myself included), the main benefit to developers is Steam’s user base. As with Apple and the iOS app store, however, having what amounts to a monopoly in a market segment is not a justification for high platform access fees.
I mean… there’s Steam Workshop, Steam Voice, all the post, interactions, communities, etc… all of this have to weight a lot on their budget.
My guess is that R&D as well as third-party Steam keys eat into their margins.
It could be more sustainable with this higher fee as well. Valve supports old games for a long time whereas console manufacturers pull the plug 10 years later. You could argue that Microsoft takes only 12%, but Microsoft has the luxury of being able to exit the PC games market at any time, or they can take a loss on it indefinitely. Valve needs to survive off its PC store because it’s the only thing they really have
With tinfoil and a good shop, updating switch rooms can be almost as convenient
So there is a thing I kind of pirate, but not entirely – e-books.
But thing is, our public library page has e-books and some of them are available to be read online. Now I cannot officially download them, however opening a network tab on browser console shows me a request to download the whole
.epubfile. So what I do is copy that request ascurland just download it via terminal.Is it piracy, probably, is this resource publicly available for me to read, definetly yes.
Other than that I don’t really pirate much else.
Usually music made by artists from my country, if they have a website where I can pay for their music directly to them I do it that way.
🙌🏻 I buy CDs and newer unseal them, but pirate the songs because it’s more convenient.
Sometimes I rip CDs to replace music I’ve already pirated just for the feeling of having music I ripped myself.
Makes no sense, I know, but music is just for the feeling after all.I prefer high res over CD quality 😇 but I think I can relate.
I mean, I can put up with far worse quality.
In some cases I have to. For example I have some classical songs ripped from YouTube that sound absolutely horrible, but I am kinda accustomed to those specific performances, and it’s not always possible to find a better recording from one specific performance. And the other ones just sound… off. Sometimes this is also the case with remasters.
The worst one I have is a song from Beatles I am keeping both because it’s one of the first files I downloaded when I was 8 and however weird it sounds, I got used to the compression artifacts. It’s 32kbps HE-AAC at 22.05kHz sample rate. I don’t even know its name. The name and metadata is in Chinese.
I can’t recall the last time I pirated anything executable (games and other software). There are legitimate free options for everything I’ve wanted, and executable code is just too risky.
well gog games can be safely pirated because the executables you’re getting are signed with their digital signature.
it’s much less morally correct tho, especially because most of the games published on gog are indie games, but if you have literally no money to spend (like I used to) there aren’t any better options
I refuse to pirate a car, just because I don’t know how
It’s a bit easier to pirate a boat, seeing as cars didn’t exist in 1600s
Anything that is an executable on PC (software / games) due to security risk. Game ROMs for emulators are fine.
Same
Nothing.
Not refusing, but lately I basically don’t pirate games anymore. Steam made it so easy to buy games… + pirating games is always a pita with the required hacks etc. (or at least it was way back when I did it).
Software I don’t pirate, I just use foss stuff wherever I can.
I also don’t pirate books in general. Just get them on Kindle and support the author (and unfortunately also Jeff bezos)
I pay for Netflix (mainly for kids) and go to the theater for big movies, but aside from that I pirate all screen content.
I also pirate comics, but that’s 90% because it’s almost impossible to get them legally where I live. I would pay for DC unlimited if it was available in my neck of the woods.
I’m pretty much the same. Although my e-reader supports generic epub files, so I go to whichever book shop site and look for ebooks.
When I bought my e-reader, I specifically looked for one that wouldn’t lock me into their ecosystem too much.
I extremely rarely pirate games and software. It’s just far too easy an attack vector for malware. The games I want to play are usually worth buying regardless, and free software is good enough for my needs. It isn’t a flat out refusal, I’ve definitely pirated these things, but it’s in niche situations where I need to see something specific, and I always check run it under a vm
Antivirus softwere. i cant even began to describe how horribly wrong can that go
I mean who the fuck pirate that, you went out of your way to pirate a software from a shady website just to protect yourself from other files u download from other shady websites
Newer malware wouldn’t be easily detected. Linux app stores should be proactive when reviewing apps.
ESET Endpoint, ESET used to be easy to pirate, box+Mara fix, then they patched that loophole and I was forced to subscribe to it (until I switched to Linux anyway) but I thought about putting eset on my windows VM and checked out the latest options for pirating it and I found out about ESET Endpoint which is self hosted antivirus for corporate environments. So we have pirates running their own Endpoint servers…virus definitions hosted by other pirates. That scared me a bit.
Back in the day, when I didn’t know better I did try this. With Norton I believe. I’m not gonna drag this story, it ruined my boot, but for some reason it didn’t steal or encrypt anything (Makes me think if I just fucked up the install instead of it being malicious). After re-installing Windows everything went back to normal, and I managed to get BitDefender & Malwarebytes another way xd. Good ol’ times. 2/3 AV worked
Not so much refuse, but I don’t currently pirate games or music. The systems available to me are too convenient for me to waste time fucking around with piracy.
I am in the opposite boat. I’ve been downloading individual songs I like since the age of 8 when I bought myself the cheapest Android tablet (€50).
I won’t be spending my time to move to some online service.And getting the music on other devices?
I can either play it through my laptop from phone using Bluetooth thanks to pulseaudio-bluetooth, and control the playback via KDE connect which can run over BT-PAN connection to save power, and is also more resilient to noise than Wi-Fi thanks to FHSS.
Alternatively, I can use LAN. All my music is on my phone (and a backup HDD + encrypted on cloud) and run a Navidrome server on my phone in Termux. This also goes for video which I serve from my phone using nginx with fancyindex module to make it nicer. Since I already have that, nginx acts as a reverse proxy to Navidrome. My music is sorted by folders, so to keep things simple I create m3u playlists that get autoimported to Navidrome. That part is pretty simplels playlist-dir/* > playlist.m3u.OK, perhaps the second part doesn’t sound that convenient, but first part needs no setup with most distros. Perhaps installing KDE connect for music control (and more), but that is optional. Actually, the music control can be done just via Bluetooth, but I wasn’t able to utilize my laptop’s media buttons for that, and I don’t want to have to mouse over to Bluetooth panel.
How do you handle discovering new music? That’s a big sticking point for me
I also listen to radio.
But I don’t even have to as I travel by a bus. The bus drivers almost always listen to some music, whether on radio or from their own playlists.
Since I usually sit in the front, it’s often good enough to remember the lyrics or even use Shazam.So yeah, radio and bus drivers. :)
Same, Spotify and steam are too convenient for me. Everything else though…
