I’ve been pirating since I was a child. That being said, I don’t think it’s particularly healthy to pin ‘media pirating’ as a personality trait.
Yeah, I basically stopped pirating entirely despite doing it relentlessly early in life. I still owe Capcom a thousand bucks if I am to pay that one alone back.
The basically part is that I still pirate what little music I need. Fuck the music industry.
My exception is smaller bands with bamdcamp.
Buying from there supports the artists well!
I basically do the same. I buy a majority of albums as records from my favorite bands or just bands I want to support.
Yup. Pirating is about filling a need where companies sorely lack in providing services. When a company provides a shitty service or offers no viable alternative to obtaining something I would gladly pay for, pirating bridges that gap.
Do you know what community this is?
participating in a community ≠ making it a lifestyle
I think a lot of people in this community consider it a lifestyle to pirate media.
I think most just don’t give a fuck. Definitely not enough fucks to make it a lifestyle.
Yes, why?
Why not?
Because, at the end of the day, we’re basically just downloading commodity entertainment. There’s nothing directly substantive about that and that’s fine. Not everything we do needs to become a direct part of our identity.
Oh. Omg you’re so right lol.
If you have money to spend (and THAT much), you can still pirate, but if you pirate without trying to fund the source of your art and tools, you’re a mega asshole. Especially if you have as much money as this dude claims to have. You can find the creators of your games online, find their ko-fis, their patreons. Where there’s a will there’s a way
For some people, it’s the convenience with pirating. It’s easier to pirate a movie from a go-to piracy website that you use than to find in which of the 50 different streaming sites the movie is available.
Gabe Newell agrees with you. He said that piracy is almost always a service problem, not a pricing problem.
Yup, I remember that interview. It was about pirates providing translations for the pirated games, that weren’t included by their creators.
Fair pricing is also part of that. Like when Netflix first came out, even with its pretty restricted catalogue, it was a good deal at the time.
I mean, Apple movies, Steam and Spotify or whatever your storefront of choice is will 95% of the time have what you’re looking for. The only tricky medium to find stuff is TV.
Also I’m top 4-5% in my country, but compared to developed countries in not even at top 50% and so many of these digital products are not necessarily priced lower for my region specially the big houses like EA and Ubisoft, so I understand the original comment. And i also agree on the second part that where there is a will there is a way.
But i remeber donating about 10$ for a small dev that was livestreaming and i had pirated the game because game costed 40$. And I thought 10$ was a decent enough donation to cover my sins. Dev in a couple of days was crying over stream about how donating 10$ is doing nothing and he just would buy a beer (10$ buys about 14 beers in my country) and was just being an ass over the stream.
I’m not saying all devs are like that, but for a lot of third world country pirating is a lifestyle not because they just want to keep stealing, they just see it as a movement against wealth inequality. I’m not saying it’s right or not, I’m just explaining how the thought process works.
I never said it wasn’t, but that was an extreme anecdote first of all, and second, I have re-iterated that this doesn’t apply to people who don’t have such disposable income. Relative to their cost of living, always. Pirating is a lifestyle, stealing from poor creators when you make a substantial amount of money is not. What you sent was enough, more than enough. The dev in question sounds like a jackass and unfortunately he wouldn’t be the first with how many indie and major game devs turn out to be horrible people.
this. pirate all you want, netflix/disney/etc. will be fine. but find and support the artist. this is why i’m now stuck with the crap news around bandcamp. there are less and less ways to support creators instead of the leeches every day :(
What’s up with bandcamp?
bandcamp was sold to epic games in 2022 and again to songtradr this year, and half its staff got laid off recently. CEO said that it was not profitable enough - though it was already very profitable. So it’s likely to start squeezing every penny out of users and artists in the next few years
Oh, no. I love bandcamp. I don’t want it to go down the drain. :c
There were news of trouble a couple of weeks ago: sold (earlier) twice, layoffs, union problems, uncertainty :(
Especially if you have as much money as this dude claims to have.
I mean, this is on 4chan. Regardless of whether this is true or not, the post is blatantly narcissistic. I don’t know why it should be here and what’s there to discuss.
Depending which country we’re talking about. Top 5% in Malawi is probably still a person who needs to pirate, although I could be wrong about that with 3rd world wealth inequality.
Edit: Based on the top 10% figure, guesses and napkin math, that’s an income of about 5000USD annually, so yeah pirate away.
Are you free to learn or consume as necessary for your survival from the society you’re expected to grow to support? No? Then you have a need to pirate.
What if the product already turned a profit? That means everyone has been paid for their work already.
Any extra revenue is just additional profit. Why would I give them more money for no extra work?
I think that funding creators is great if you have the money and the inclination. I just don’t think that it makes you an asshole if you don’t.
There are creators whom I fund because they give me exclusive extra content on their Patreons or sometimes if I just think that their work is important enough and I want to see it continue. If I decide that I need that money for something else, that’s up to me.
Ehh. Tell them to make a game that is actually worth $60 and I’ll consider it.
Not to mention all of the old games they won’t re-release on purpose because emulators are “stealing.”
Why the downvotes, he’s got a point. Big mega corps that release $70 games while abandoning the old games are the most moral argument you can make for piracy.
Is that relevant to my comment? I said support the creators directly, not the corporations and explained with examples. That reply was suspicious and arrogant asf if you ask me. I never said spend 60$ for the game, I said support the creators directly, even through smaller amounts. Even a euro from a person who can is enough. You cracked the game, you liked it, why not do that bare minimum if you legit have that money + a lot more?
I guess that’s fair.
?.. Bro you’re the one in the piracy sub spewing anti-piracy rhetoric.
Consider it a courtesy that the lemmy.world chuds upvote this shit at all.
Anon willl soon be 14 years old
People lying on the Internet?
They can’t do that, that’s wrong
If you have enough money to live comfortably, I think you should pay for art you love. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pirate anything (especially from big corps), but please donate some money to indie games, music, theatre…
Heck, I’d say even give money to those big corps so long as they are being reasonable with the price and availability. Reasonable varies by person, of course. But for me, I’ll pay for any $70-90 game (the normal price for new games now in Canada), but stuff like Sims DLC or how the original Mass Effect only let you get DLC through some dumb BioWare credits are cases where I’d pirate no regrets even with my current income.
After all, there won’t be AAA games if people don’t pay for them. I have (mostly) no qualms with big publishers pocketing a significant profit on those games if they get made well. Bigger problem I have is with games that get rushed to the point of impacting quality, but that’s something I see more for changing how you approach that individual title. Stuff like mistreating staff (crunch time) is a bit iffier. I still lean towards giving them my money, since nobody enters the game dev business without knowing it’ll involve crunch and I do want the devs to be rewarded for their hard work with a commercial success (cause that’s unfortunately just how success is measured in our capitalist society).
My coworkers were talking today about all the hoops they were going through with streaming to find the content they wanted and navigating the byzantine extra charges to share it with their family. If piracy wasn’t an option I still wouldn’t go through all that, it’s madness how much worse the paid service is to the high seas.
That’s what they get for being too stupid to use free streaming services.
A fool and their money are soon parted.
It’s easier to fool someone than to convince them they’d been fooled.
Aye, I used to sail the high seas, the hull of my ship gnarly with viruses, adware and malware from some infectious crackers or key-generators.
Then I had money, and started buying my software and my movies and all was good for a time. Then my media consume shifted to mobile devices, but I had Amazon Prime Video as the only really available video-streaming service around and all was good for a time. Then I added Netflix, as it arrived on my countries market and all was good for a time. Then I added Crunchyroll, Disney+ and Hulu and everything sucked, streaming the shows I wanted to watch was suddenly so expensive, no single streaming service had everything I wanted to watch, so I needed to subscribe to them all, costing an amount of money I would not spend on buying those shows.
Now I have unsubscribed from all but two again, but the market is so fractured, there is barely anything interesting on the services I still go to.
So my eyes keep wandering to that old tricorn, the hook and peg-leg, gathering dust on the wall. I can hear the waves crashing and feel the tide rising in my bones. The moneybags have decided to press us for more and more, their greed means no single harbor, not even two are enough to supply our demands. So there is plenty of bounty to be found on the high seas again, big fat galleons full of content otherwise unreachable or too expensive.
Doncha hear it boys? Davey Jones is singing again, calling us back to the sea, put on your VPN, defy the torrents and right your compasses with a good magnet. We did not choose this life, they made us turn to it.
lmao is this copypasta
It is now.
By Odins beard make it so
I love everything about this ❤️❤️❤️
Beautiful. Well done
Cringe af
I’m a really great person. I’m good at everything. My friends are all tools and won’t ever be as amazing as me.
Congratulations. I bet those friends are absolutely real.
YTA
I’m heading back to it.
The streaming was sort of OK, and now it’s wank. Spread across dozens of services, that don’t have enough content to justify their existence. No UI linking them all together means you have no idea if something is available or not without checking justwatch.com
If music was like this, I’d pirate that too.
At least Chromecast for TV basically does this. I can search for something and it will tell me all the ways I can watch for any installed app even unsubscribed.
Still, the issue of paying multiple monthly fees to see what you want is ludicrous. It’s as if the media companies maliciously complied with consumers’ desire to pick and choose what they watch rather than pay $200 a month for 1000 stations they don’t watch.
Now, you have to pay $200 to get all the services that have what you want to watch - and you still have to sift through the drek.
Much better, that. /s
Instead of using something stupid like justwatch.com, use something smart like https://fmoviesz.to/
You can actually watch the content for free there. Crazy, I know.
Just make sure you have uBlock Origin installed.
I prefer movieuniverse.se, but mostly for older movies.
For newer stuff it’s streaming or the servarr stack. I didn’t buy all these speakers to listen in stereo.
The more the merrier!
The hunt is part of the fun. Like how people will opt to build a PC or a keyboard over a pre-built or pull out vinyl over digital. The steps taken to retrieve and enjoy the media is sometimes a relaxing process.
Yeah, no.
The hunt is only fun if you’ve got time to spare.
Throw in a spouse, kids, good but demanding job, a place to live, social obligations, detoriating (geriatric) parents, and you’re so happy you can just mash one single button and your favourite track, game or series starts to play.
That’s the reason why people stop pirating. Time.
When time is not (yet) your most precious resource you can see the fun in anything. Even virus scanning.
and you’re so happy you can just mash one single button and your favourite track, game or series starts to play.
yes, that’s why I pay for some things and pirate others, because for me pirating is often significantly easier and less time consuming than paying
Don’t have kids then. Much more free time.
I don’t understand
- Making the deliberate choice of having kids
- Complaining about missing out on other things because of said kids
Also, complaining about not having time but wasting their time talking to strangers online. I could understand the perspective from someone who doesn’t pirate, but to a pirate it is pretty hilarious seeing them making it out as this incredibly difficult time consuming thing like infomercials do.
[something] is sometimes a relaxing process
Yeah, no.
What are you pirating that makes it so hard? I don’t bother with software or programs so it’s just pretty much looking at what’s newly released and torrenting it.
Why even pirate if it’s that much of a pain? Pretty much same logic to me a someone who complains about how confusing pc gaming is. I’d point to the consoles.
Really? I could understand that point from someone not in the piracy community, but doesn’t seem any more time consuming than posting on lemmy. Not really starved for time if someone is spending their time on social media.
Mind you I don’t pirate software or games, so maybe that’s why. Pretty much hardest has been waiting for download to finish.
There is stuff worth pirating, stuff which can’t be found through other means or is way overpriced. Stuff like old movies or impossible to legally gather roms.
For all others: “convenience is king.”
And you’re smart to not pirate software. The. “no illegal software” rule has saved me many times.
I’m well over 25 years of sailing now (40 if you count games for early PCs), and they’ll pry the sabre out of my cold, dead hands. I’ve made not watching ads a lifestyle and piracy is so much easier than dealing with the bullshit interfaces of streaming companies.
If I have a way of directly donating to creators and not via their shitty production companies, I’ll take it. Podcasts have it right, I can send money to creators and get an ad-free stream. If I can’t, I don’t donate and I don’t listen to their work.
In the end, me avoiding ads isn’t costing anyone anything, because if I hear an ad, I likely avoid that product going forward. They have at best zero effect on my buying decisions, if not a negative one.
I’m a lot like you in a way, and I agree with what you said, but I just wanted to note that you are NOT invulnerable to marketing or ads. Advertisement (brainwashing) techniques have been researched for centuries, and with massive resources. I think even the very thing where some people think they can’t be affected by marketing, is a marketing technique itself. Probably.
I pirate a lot of stuff too but I prefer to buy stuff too sometimes just to provide support
I tend to buy stuff I’ve already pirated.
I have games bought with 0 hours played because I already played them with my pirate hat.
When you are a pirate you have a different mindset. You get to really choose who do you want to give your money to, and you tend to chose people who really deserve it.
There are only a few games that I bought without the opportunity to test them before the purchase. And I don’t mean a scuffed demo that only gives you a very shallow impression of how the different game systems interact with each other, I mean actually being able to play the damn game.
I don’t subscribe to the idea of hype purchasing just to shit on the game after release because it’s inevitably gonna be trash. Last time I made that mistake was with D3, oh boy, was that game a dumpster fire on release. The next thing I’m gonna buy without testing it first will be the Fangs of Asterkarn expansion for Grim Dawn. The devs are awesome, the base game is awesome and the last 2 DLCs were awesome too, so that’s why I don’t need my pirate hat in this instance.
Pirate the music, buy the vinyl is how I do it.
Even better: buy a ticket to a concert and buy a shirt. Especially for smaller bands, this is where they make money.
I buy the things I want to support. Small game studios get my money. Bands get my money directly, I buy albums and merch. Pretty much, small businesses or organizations that put great amounts of care and love into their high quality work get my money all day, as directly as i can. But would I pay for an Activision/EA game? Or a Marvel movie? Absolutely not.
I’ve been pirating for twenty years and you do kind of just stick with it even when you can afford stuff.
That said, when I reinstalled Windows a while ago, I was fannying about for aaaaaages trying to get a cracked version of Office to work when I suddenly realised I could just buy it for a tenner and not have to fuck about 😂 It hadn’t occurred to me before
Yeah office is literally the only thing that’s not worth it. Lifetime office 2019 is like 20 euro. This will die out with the subscription shit taking place though
Pay it forward. I’m from 3rd world country. Growing up pirating gave me and my brother precious memories playing cs, doom, star wars, gta2, rollercoster tycoon, sims etc. Not to mention music and movies which would’ve cost us weeks of our food money if we would’ve bought it legitimately. We both grew up and made decent enough money now. I paid for my games and sometimes paid to play old games if i could find it in Steams. Million thanks to all the crackers, hosters, translators, modders, seeders, etc. You made my childhood memorable, and worth living despite all the shits going around us where we live. Oh not to mention i learned better english playing games than learning it from school.
