A new piracy discussion

As with anyone else from a poor region, similar life story. No piracy = I wouldn't be here since I would have never had access to games to begin with. There's no way my parents would have bought any of the games I played as a kid at the prices they were at. Heck, just having a console (with mostly burned disks) and a computer as early as I did was thanks to my dad basically doing a foreign job (ship electric engineer) and getting more than the average for Bulgaria, while also traveling around to have access to cheaper tech markets. Technically that problem hasn't really gone away... With EU prices, buying games here is so nonviable that the dedicated Bulgarian pirating site (it blocks any non-Bulgarian IP addresses from accessing it) is still very active. Well... at least I can gift to anyone without worrying about Steam's regional gifting lock... Yay? ^_^'

Any time a big publisher whines about piracy, it's always the typical greed ("How dare they not give us their money!"). Any time a smaller dev complains about "look at how much my game got pirated", it comes off as extremely arrogant. It's free advertisement! The people who pirated the game wouldn't have bought it if they couldn't pirate it, they would just go to a different game! <.<

Anyhow, the second thing I ever bought on Steam was Orcs Must Die!, a game which I had previously pirated and liked a lot. ^_^

I pirated many games (heck even now I have my old modded consoles) mostly for reasons you posted:

• price to steep
• convenience to get a game

But now with spend on steam: 1714.74 USD (WHAT???!!!) no one can blame my for being pirate. Now I only pirate games that not available for sell on digital platforms (a.k.a. delisted games) or legal version is a way worse than seven sea version.

I came to know that Steam exists, around 2017 and i was in my 20s! In my country, paying for games meant paying for pirated CDs that are sold locally. Back then most people weren't savvy enough to torrent wisely or torrent at all, so they'd pay for a CD that was dirt cheap.
Now with all the safe options, people are still into piracy, however the idea of paying a premium for games has gained traction over the decade, thanks to consoles. Steam however isn't as popular as it should be though, CS GO has helped but not enough to pull others. But i feel like people are becoming more and more aware, regional prices is sooo useful in that sense. Sadly the recent Steam rates hike and sketchy users with false regions have not helped the situation. Inflation and static incomes with limited allowances for kids, doesn't help the case against piracy either.

Being on SG was like a huge cultural shock for me....people are insane enough to spend 100s of dollars on games!!?🤯 But then it dawned on me how Purchasing power parity plays a part here.

Thanks for this post, piracy talks on SG and discord are hilarious and are met with self righteous comments or BLs. I enjoy seeing how hypocritical people get, when thinking about the idea of pirating a soccer stream or a movie versus pirating a game, the mental gymnastics to internally justify one over the other is funny.

Also I don't think people from EU region and other developed nations can fathom the living conditions and real life money constraints, people have across countries. We are decades if not a hundred years behind you guys thanks to geography, colonialism, socio-economic factors, etc. Sure our growth rates as nations are higher, but it means nothing as the income inequality is insane. Reading statistics isn't enough to understand that or have a grasp on the differences.

I don't game a lot nowadays and don't feel as excited as I was when I played Alien vs Predator 1 & 2 or Max Payne on PC so I honestly don't regret It.

I haven't pirate a game in ages. I think it's morally OK to pirate some anti consumer garbage spawned by assholes like Ubisotft - but honestly - amount of ctrl-C and ctrl+V in their games stops me even from pirating them xD

I remember when my parents bought my first PC - guys in computer store already installed bunch of cracked software and games for free without even asking xD These were wild times :) I remember how everybody (and I mean everybody) were laughing at me, when I bought original Max Payne with first money that I've earned xD Everybody was like - look at that idiot - he bought something that he could copy for free from his neighbour xD

That being said I wouldn't be surprised by piracy being more and more popular. Games and software are more and more expensive. More and more hostile towards legal user and there is push for people to rather 'rent' their stuff instead of owning it.
If buying = renting, then pirating =/= stealing.

Anyway - I pirate only stuff that I can't buy legally. Like region locked stuff. Or games that offer only castrated versions for my region. I'm not going to pay full price (or anything) if I'm treated as some kind of worse type of consumer.

Gaben's quote is kinda idiotic and represents a veeeery small portion of people who pirate,

on average people make 100$ a month in my country,
and most of the planet where piracy thrives, people tend to make less than a 1000$ or even less than 500$ a month,
and yes, even on 100$ a month people save and buy used PCs to play on,
but on 100$ a month you can't really afford games,

if people in the west who make thousands of dollars a month find 60$ expensive, and were losing their minds when some companies increased the price to 70$, which is a 0.25% increase of your salary if you're making 4k a month, now imagine how it feels to someone where the same 10$ feels 40 times as much to them.

even OP only changed their mind when they found cheap games, that's the point where they started looking on the other advantages of owning a game legally,
the advantages weren't different when a game cost 60$, but at a 1$ it starts sounding like a pretty good deal.

i blame steam and all the publishers for piracy,
steam makes billions of dollars in profits and isnt willing to spend even 2 bucks to research decent regional pricing and to put measures to prevent people from exploiting these cheaper prices.

a 60$ game would barely sell any copies in developing countries, where billions live, but that same game, with the right technology and measures to protect the integrity of the system, could sell millions or tens of millions in these same countries at a proportionally discounted fair price.
but non is ready to take action.

some even went full $#%!^$ like Sony did where they decided they're not gonna sell their game in most of the world because of their own PSN that only exists in 60 70 countires, and now 130 countries don't even have the luxury of thinking about not pirating, every single person in these countries is forced to pirate their new games, even those who were able to afford the game, and yes, sony removed regional pricing to give people more reasons to pirate their game and when they failed they just completely removed it.
they decided they didnt wanna think if it was a price problem or a service problem and just removed the game.

Just one thing:

"Same as recording a movie from TV to a VHS tape.
Or recording a song on the radio to an audio cassette.
Nobody considered it "piracy" or "theft"."

That wasn't piracy.
You already paid license fees included in the casette or tape price.
Recording something broadcasted on TV or radio for personal use was totally legal.
Trying to make money by reselling these copies is another thing of course.

Nice try F.B.I. 🤣😁

I stopped pirating games when I got my first job about 12 years ago. I still pirate games for my PS Vita, PSP, and NDS since the hardware of those devices isn't supported anymore.
I don't pirate music that is available for purchase as DRM-free but I would never pay for a music subscription service so I get most of my music from Bandcamp.
I don't think there are DRM-Free films and TV Shows except for a few niche documentaries and indie films so I pirate them all the same as music, I refuse to pay for a subscription service. I however would love to buy hard copies of movies and TV shows instead of pirating them, but those aren't available in my country.

I had pretty similar story when it comes to piracy: as a kid in the 90's I didn't really understand what constituted piracy so I didn't see anything wrong with it, although I do know I had some legit copies of PC games, but they were probably only 4 or 5 games and the rest were all pirated. Then as a teen in the 2000's I went full pirate with no sense of remorse whatsoever, I just wanted stuff and said stuff was prohibitively expensive in my country at the time so I just got it from the internet for free. Then around 2013 I bought my first Humble Bundle because it had 2 or 3 indie games I really wanted for a really cheap price and that lead me to create a Steam account and over the next couple of years I slowed down my pirating activities until I just stopped engaging with piracy when it came to PC games altogether.

Kinda the same for music and movies, if it's convenient to not pirate something then I won't, but I still have a tendency to just pirate stuff when it isn't convenient for whatever reason. Like how I won't subscribe to a new streaming service if I only want to watch one thing, screw that.
And then there's retro gaming. If I can buy an old game for cheap I'll do so, but if it's too expensive for my taste I'll just download a ROM and emulate it or whatever. And if it's by Nintendo I don't even consider buying it, screw them for what they did with all of those ROM sites, they ain't gonna see a cent from me ever.

I have it similar as many other here.

As a kid my parents didn't buy any games, so I ended up pirating them. We had some local torrent trackers in my country which were quite "legit" as far as torrent trackers can be. Getting a virus was almost impossible and torrents were always checked for working. When I started earning some money myself and found out Humble Bundle I started buying some small bundles now and then and pirated even less.

These days with more money and abundance of bundles I don't pirate anymore. At least actively. I believe I still have some pirated software or games on my old PC ... mainly it was SW with stupidly expensive subscription prices or games with gazillion DLCs like Sims .. Basically EA and similar publishers who just love to spam DLCs and ask 3000 eur for a full package are the games I seriously have no remorse pirating and would most likely do it again.

Apart from that - I have bought many of the games I previously pirated, so I don't even see it as such a bad thing. It has also been brought up again and again over the years that piracy even helps promoting the game and doesn't really affect the sales that much. While of course it is a taboo topic and in the end you definitely should pay for a product you use, the industry and the pricing in it definitely does not help in fighting the piracy.

Plus the stupid DRM shit that publishers force upon the games. Pretty much ALL are cracked within days making the pirated version work the most stable. Yet those who buy officially are stuck with some shit DRM and anti piracy tools which ruin the game. I still remember how the pirated version of GTA4 worked perfectly, while you cant get the legal version working without a hassle even to this day.... How is that not boosting piracy? How detached from reality are the devs and publishers that they don't see the issues in the industry...

Overall I have grown to love the Steam platform (and epic, ubisoft even, EA) for what they offer.. achievements, community, localized stats. If the bundles dry up and we end up having to buy games individually, I might simply stop playing that much games or reverting back to piracy a bit more. My region unfortunately also has games priced same as USA, Germany etc, but we earn 2-3 times less. So while I am not bad off financially, I will definitely not spend that much on games. So that is either customer lost or gamer gained.. depending on how you want to look at piracy.

As for TV - movies and shows. With the fact of having 6 streaming services and budget / quality ratio being abysmal in new productions I have no incentive on actually buying movies or paying for subscription for TV shows. If it is on netflix or my TV subscription, cool. If not - get your shit together and stop making separate platforms for each show. With this I don't want to support netflix. They suck, but price/performance at this point trumps other platforms for me.

I used to pirate games when I first got my pc during covid. We got an internet connection at home during that time. So like it was an amazing experience for me to suddenly get access 24/7 to internet. But even then I had no knowledge on how to get games legally.

I tried making a steam account, added like f2p pvp game and honestly gave up trying to play that. Cause at that time, I knew nothing of pc gaming. So I pirated games at that time. The only games I had ever heard of as a kid in my country. Old gta games, need for speed, call of duty, assassin's creed stuff like that.

Then I was gifted a game on a facebook from a stranger. The game was Hades. And I loved it. That's when the first time I actually noticed the features of steam that I never had the chance to experience while pirating game. Like achievements, cloud save, having a steam profile, getting card drops, decorating your steam profile etc.
So then I wanted to stop pirating games completely. But the issue was I still had no idea on how to purchase games and I do not have credit card or similar to buy games directly from steam store even now but also wanted to stop pirating. So I focused on filling up my library with a lot of random free games from different sites like Indiegala(most of them were bad, but some were really good).
Then I found out on how to buy steam gift card for my steam store region and I completely shifted from piracy. I had moved towards steamdb high discount checking + regional pricing + indie games/old AAA games. Though stuff like physical gift card aren't available in like local store. But if it were, I would have never even started piracy.

And all of it was good till Sony with freaking mandatory psn account with helldivers 2 and Ghost of Tsushima and region locking the games. And I went back to sail the seas for it.
Truth be told, I finished ghost of tsushima today. I had been playing it for a week straight. And it was an amazing experience. And if it were still available in my country, I would have waited till I win giveaway for it or it had like 75% discounts in like 3-4 years.
But as it seems, I might never get to play any future Sony games on pc legally. AAA gaming was already very hard cause of lack of regional pricing. But region locking was basically decided my option. Either I never play it or sail the seas.

Admittingly - I've only pirated once and that was mostly out of spite and a desire to play the game without spending $1,000 on DLC (you probably know the one). Other than that, pretty much every game I want to play is readily available to me for a reasonable price and it's very convenient to just purchase it, so I never did it again.
I will mention though, that some publishers can just remove a game from your Steam account nowadays - when you bought it - makes me very uncomfortable but I like that there will be angrier members of the community that will figure out a way to let other people play removed games, like some of the older pokemon ones.

Well Nintendo seems to be very good at not making there games available but when I can get the game or film I try to avoid priating and try to use the internet archive

I totally agree with you on this one. I never really pirated video games except maybe for a cracked version of Minecraft, that wasn't really piracy for me as it was part of a server launcher, and it was perfect as a lot of servers accepted cracked versions, and I wasn't interested in playing in big known servers. But that was long after my Playstation era, when I got to use my mother's portable PC. I was lucky enough to inherit the Playstation 1, and later the Playstation 2 from my family with some games, I mostly remember playing Tomb Raider and my most beloved game Need for Speed Most Wanted (2005) 💗. So my gaming interest grew so I could have something to do in my free time, but I never asked for other games.

Some time later, I managed to got a Playstation 3, which was hard because of the price, but I got a discounted one. I was still young and so, when I wanted a game, I needed to ask for my parents, and each game was at 70€ each. That was quite an expensive price, for games I didn't know if they were good or not. Of course there was not digital stores yet for consoles, so going to the Micromania store was mandatory. So I could get very few games and when they were bad, I wasted 70€ as the store would rebuy it for 2 to 5€ at most (what a scam). The only game not costing 70€ I remember was PAYDAY 2, which was available for 20€, which I found amazing, as the game was good.

So when I got my hands on my mom's PC, I discovered Minecraft and online games (was playing a game called tanki-online I think) and continued to use Skype with friends on PC to play GTA 5 with them on my PS3. Most of the time, playing Call of Duty or GTA 5. As sadly my mom's PC wasn't able to run most PC games, I tried to buy Need for Speed Carbon on PC for example which was way cheaper than PS3 games, but it didn't worked so I was quite sad.

Later, managed to asked for a personal PC for Christmas. It was not a very powerful one, but it was ok for the time and it was obviously amazing for me as I discovered what a real PC was. How changing ! I still discovered Steam quite late, because friends told me to download it. I think it was to play CS:GO, one of the first games I got on Steam, and I fell in love for it as I am now more than 10.000 hours on it since 2015. I had a wonderful time playing high level competitions, tournaments, ESEA Leagues and LANs. But I soon saw that games were so much cheaper on PC, the store was so much larger and it was crazy to be able to access the files if needed and mods opposed to consoles.

Then I discovered, like you, Bundles and game trades and a whole new world opened to me ! Getting 10 games for 5 bucks, a great games for a couple of bucks or in a giveaway is awesome. So much has changed now. So even if it was a problem of not knowing how to pirate games when I was young, I just don't need it and Steam has a very good service (like someone said before about Gaben saying that to fight piracy, you have to offer a better service and they did a very good job at that), as I am not interested to play games Day One either, this is not the right era anyway as every new game release is unfinished, not optimised, and overpriced. My routine is now to wait a few months / years for a game to drop in price.

About the streaming platforms, however, I use torrents very often as those services are scammy as hell. I download or I use friend's account as it is so expensive to get subscriptions to multiple platforms to access what you want as there is no centered platform with everything (except Prime Video maybe, which you pay for each movie individually then), they are removing stuff such as shows and movies but also features (Disney+ removing GroupWatch is insulting), adding ads (Prime Video now has ads in the middle of your watching party, unskippable for 3 minutes), etc .. Overall the service proposed by those companies are so bad, getting worse each day.

For music, it's so easy to access YouTube or Spotify as you said so I sometimes download music from youtube converters to my phone, idk if it is really piracy.. and I enjoy using Spotify (even if I use an ad blocker on PC because ads are annoying when I use it on my phone) but I found the service great as paying not so much for just some comfort and great but optional features is a great move by Spotify, and you can use it for free if you want.

I'm not defend piracy, but I don't blame someone for it either.