Why are so many Codexers like this?

[spectre]

if you "buy" a game on Steam, you don't really own it and they can take it away at at their whim.

You never own digital products you buy, you're licensing them. It doesn't matter if it's on steam, gog, or a physical box.

Yes, it explains all the throwbacks to the 90s, I guess, back when you would actually own the game you bought.
Hence my writing "buy" in inverted commas. If they won't let me own what I'm paying for, then I'm being scammed.

Furthermore, If what I'm paying for cannot be owned, resold, etc. it means it holds no value.
And nothing feels like an appropriate base price for something that is essentially worthless.

Of course, one can assign arbitrary value to convenience of access, entertainment value, tipping the author, etc. and I have no problem paying for these if it feels justified.
Still, it's up to me to decide when and how much, since we're talking about subjective things.

 

[Van-d-all]

Is piracy really that big a deal anymore? I pay for all my games now coz it doesn't scratch the earnings. I should imagine most PC gamers are the same apart from the young kids, who are all phone gamers now anyway.

It's coming back, as far as I can tell. Mostly thanks to that bitch Sweeney and his Chinese overlords. I live in Poland, as a kid, I've been pirating games since before it was even criminalized here (in 1994), but indeed, later on, with regional pricing, I've bought majority of games I have (over a thousand on Steam alone), even ones I've pirated before just to make right. Before Epic exclusives I'd maybe pirate a game a year, just to see I want to actually dish out $60 on it. But with shit like Metro Exodus? Over my dead body I'm giving those bitches a broken penny.

 

[Falksi]

Is piracy really that big a deal anymore? I pay for all my games now coz it doesn't scratch the earnings. I should imagine most PC gamers are the same apart from the young kids, who are all phone gamers now anyway.

It's coming back, as far as I can tell. Mostly thanks to that bitch Sweeney and his Chinese overlords. I live in Poland, as a kid, I've been pirating games since before it was even criminalized here (in 1994), but indeed, later on, with regional pricing, I've bought majority of games I have (over a thousand on Steam alone), even ones I've pirated before just to make right. Before Epic exclusives I'd maybe pirate a game a year, just to see I want to actually dish out $60 on it. But with shit like Metro Exodus? Over my dead body I'm giving those bitches a broken penny.

Well I guess it's in effect more than I thought.

All PC gamers I know in the flesh just buy games now, mainly indie games and/or classics too.

 

[ArchAngel]

I stopped to pay the games... not really I shuld say stopped to play (((western]]] AAA games, still bought all I pirated in nineties though sometimes multiple times first on disc then on steam and GOG. Germ saying that Slavs are nations of thieves is rich from someone who to this this day did not payed reparations for WW I and WW II.

No need to go that close, most of Western Europe and USA built their wealth on back of slaves or colonies. East Europe on the other hand spent most of the time protecting West Europe against Otomans and Mongols before that... pirating some software is the least we can do to get closer to equal footing.

 

[Van-d-all]

Is piracy really that big a deal anymore? I pay for all my games now coz it doesn't scratch the earnings. I should imagine most PC gamers are the same apart from the young kids, who are all phone gamers now anyway.

It's coming back, as far as I can tell. Mostly thanks to that bitch Sweeney and his Chinese overlords. I live in Poland, as a kid, I've been pirating games since before it was even criminalized here (in 1994), but indeed, later on, with regional pricing, I've bought majority of games I have (over a thousand on Steam alone), even ones I've pirated before just to make right. Before Epic exclusives I'd maybe pirate a game a year, just to see I want to actually dish out $60 on it. But with shit like Metro Exodus? Over my dead body I'm giving those bitches a broken penny.

Well I guess it's in effect more than I thought.

All PC gamers I know in the flesh just buy games now, mainly indie games and/or classics too.

Well sure, mostly so do I, but analogically, all players I know, pirated Metro Exodus. It's not even as much of a service issue, as an personalized act of defiance to fabricated exclusivity.

 

[Camel]

Re: What? posters

Do you guys think torrenting was A Thing back in 2000? Back then we had to exchange CDs with the ripped game files on them. Saying that the companies in the meme were brought down by piracy is stupid.

Totally agree. When my friends and I were kids in 90s we bought and exchanged pirated CDs(then DVDs) because the "licensed" games weren't officially sold in our countries. The same with pirated movies and music. Then when we were students we started buying games which were still sold with discounted prices because nobody would've bought games for $60 in 2000s. Now with Steam you can buy what you want. Like some Codex posters already said - piracy in Eastern Europe helped to grow and cultivate a generation of PC/console gamers who started buying games later on.
People look at me like I'm an idiot when I sometimes buy colllector's edition movies now. But I still don't understand modern youth and teenagers who pay a montly subscription for Netflix and Apple music.

 

[samuraigaiden]

Anyone thinking videogame piracy is a serious problem in 2022 is retarded.

 

[Napalm]

Almost all the games I played as a kid were pirated, but nowadays if a game isn't worth my money, then it is also not worth my time.

 

[†††]

Piracy is always the excuse of sore losers, and pirates the most pointless of all strawmen. A good dev group worth their salt don't blame piracy for low sales, they analyze what did they do wrong, adapt and improve. If you're like Troika, you release an unplayable buggy mess that needs tons of unofficial patches to be playable, time after time, and then wonder why you went out of business. Maybe the blame game was excusable before, but now that communications are ubiquitous and you have the benefit of studying several business models that are proven to work, in a time where the industry has never been as profitable as it is now, if you fail in the business game you're the only one to blame. Entertainment is a luxury, not a need.

 

[JarlFrank]

Piracy actually saved decent games in Eastern Europe. This is why you get games like Pathfinder, Underrail, and ATOM.

Well-developed piracy meant that these regions were not a viable target for AAA trash or the console expansion. Good games were put on the same footing as games that received inordinate promotion. Something like KOTOR would be as available as something like King of Dragon Pass, and there was less novelty bias in games.

The problem is insufficient piracy in the US, which meant that companies could get rich from making AAA trash by promoting poor taste, and bad games got normalised. Now the US RPG is dead, but we still get plenty of great games from other regions.

Same for me. I always got my games from my Romanian pal, who returned to Romania during the summer holidays, bought tons of burned CDs from local crackers, and when he returned to Germany we'd try them out together.
There were no labels on the CDs, no manuals, no boxes. Only the name of the game, and all he knew when he got them was the genre. I remember we both got hyped for Gorasul, a mediocre B-list RPG, just from seeing its name and genre on a cracker's list of available games and the fact that it came on 6 CDs or something. Whoa! That must mean it has a LOT of content!

In the late 00s we switched to torrents and pretty much pirated any game that sounded interesting. AAA stuff and Russian shovelware was treated equally by us.

Nowadays I buy my games on Steam, and I primarily spend my money on indie devs who serve the niches I'm into. But my tastes have been shaped by the piracy of my youth.

 

[Reinhardt]

Whoa! That must mean it has a LOT of content!

It has?

 

[JarlFrank]

Whoa! That must mean it has a LOT of content!

It has?

idk I never finished it

 

[Abu Antar]

I used to pirate as a kid.
1. Not always easy to get a game.
2. I didn't want to spend all my money on games.
3. My parents disliked video games, but would buy me a few for my birthday/Christmas.

I've bought my games for the past 20 years or so. My purchases has no big effect on my everyday budget, so I'm fine.

None of the companies in the OP died because of piracy. I have a lot of fondness for the games that they developed, but their undoing was their own fault.

 

[Van-d-all]

There were no labels on the CDs, no manuals, no boxes.

Not going to lie, as a kid I loved the "no manual" part of piracy. Often figuring out the game was as fun as the game itself. Would abhor it as an adult without free time in the internet era for sure though.

 

[JarlFrank]

There were no labels on the CDs, no manuals, no boxes.

Not going to lie, as a kid I loved the "no manual" part of piracy. Often figuring out the game was as fun as the game itself. Would abhor it as an adult without free time in the internet era for sure though.

I loved going in completely blind. Usually I didn't even know what the game was gonna be like. I installed games like Arcanum, Morrowind, Baldur's Gate 2, Heroes of Might and Magic 3 etc without even knowing what awaits me. Just a blank CD with a name on it... and then you get surprised.

This is why nowadays I try to avoid pre-release info on games, just so I can dive in blind and get the same sense of pure discovery.
Still, when I go to the Steam page I already get a description of the game and screenshots so it's never quite as blind as it was back then

 

[Mortmal]

Piracy always been a huge thing, but for rpgs a little less. When you wanted to play gold box games you had to refer to some parts of the manual for descriptions , not only words for copy protection, then you had a map, sometimes a cloth map and a moonstone for ultima . it wasnt that easy to copy the manual back then nor cheap . So those games were pirated less than everything else , the arcade games were a lot more popular. Still sure it's shooting ourselves in the foot to pirate them.

 

[Abu Antar]

That feeling of going in blind was great, before the internet era. Not only for pirated CDs, but even stuff that I did buy. All I had to go on was the cover. The funny thing is that I rarely had regrets. Maybe I just tolerated all kinds of shit as a kid. Not only rpgs, which I have always liked.

I remember Moto Racer and Rage Incoming as two examples. Both in the very late 90's. Those games gave me several hours of fun. Both purchased by only judging the cover.

The same goes for the first time I played Championship manager (97/98). My brother came home with a pirated disc that said "CM". It hooked me to a degree that not even any rpg could. I still play the series, both new and old games. I had no idea what CM meant. But I remember watching him play for hours. Then, I started coming with suggestions. A week later, we were playing local multiplayer. Testing new teams and tactics. Life was simpler in those days!

Now we are fed with so much info, that feeling is mostly gone. Not that I don't enjoy games, it's something I waste a lot of time on.

I have bought some games almost blind in the past few years, so on very rare occasions, you can get that feeling.

 

[Ol' Willy]

Games today are so shitty that you, the player, should be paid to play them

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

Nearly every game I have ever pirated was either purchased prior to or after pirating. I can think of very few which I did not ever purchase. Maybe Black & White II and Doom III. Nothing I ever pirated was a recently release. These were probably 15 years ago. By about 2009, distributor sales (Steam, GoG, etc.) have made piracy kind of pointless. My GoG account has an average unit price of <$10. At one point it was close to $5.

I'm old enough to remember demo and shareware discs. These gave me enough gaming novelty as a kid, and honestly caused me to purchase games I otherwise wouldn't have.

What changed the market were consoles. Consoles were affordable and well packaged, so they became the preferred gaming platform. The limitations of consoles (hardware, net connectivity, user interface) is what gave us the corporate "cinematic experience". Now that technology has more or less plateaued, the distinctions between console and PC are far less. Not coincidentally, we're seeing much better RPGs (and games in general) than we did in the mid 2000s to mid 2010s drought.

 

[ValeVelKal]

Because piracy was a huge deal back in 1998...

Software piracy was a huge deal already in 1980... Several promising devs left the market because their games were massively pirated and they felt frustrated about this (Rob Zdybel, Tom Reamy), and SSI decided to have a strong "high quality boxes" policy in order to deter piracy.

 

[deem]

Nowadays I buy games on GOG. You can download installers if you want so you are not renting a game. Only if I can't find a title on there I go to Steam. The issue with GOG though is that, as time went on, it seems that they stopped patching the older games. They used to work 'out of the box' on modern systems. Now I need to fix them myself with patches and mods. At this point I am asking myself, what am I paying for exactly? Might as well pirate older games.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Actual good old game releases on gog were never particularly good when it comes to running out of the "box". And they are still patching them from time to time with some genuine improvements, it's just obviously not a huge priority for them atm. And there are still quite a lot of games there that are stated to work on different versions of Windows when they absolutely don't.

 

[deem]

Then I may have been simply lucky early on. My point still stands though. They take (often) abandon-ware and resell it in a broken state. Also, on another note, I fucking hate that once "enhanced" edition comes out, old version is no longer available for purchase. Especially egregious for the god awful eyesore that is Dark Souls """Remastered""".

 

[Alter Sack]

Generally I buy games from smaller studios and independent developers.

In rare cases I pirate some of these games to see if I like them. If I do, I buy them.

Since developers don't release demos anymore (in most cases), I have no moral qualms because of that.

On the other hand I don't buy games from a AAA-developers anymore because they don't respect me as a customer.

The regularly fuck you over with insane DRM measures and DLCs immediately after release.

It really is a good feeling pirating these games.

The thing is, that nowadays, with only limited time available, I can't even be arsed to pirate these games anymore.

These assholes can keep their soulless AAA-shit, I rather play old games or Indi titles.

 

[thesecret1]

I usually pirate a game and try it out. If I like it a lot, I buy it. Still, I don't think less of people who only pirate. People don't realize that piracy is, especially for smaller studios, yet another vector of marketing. You don't get to capitalize on drawing people in through ads if you're a lone dev or a tiny team, so you're basically relying on word of mouth. If someone pirates your game and likes it, then even if he doesn't buy it, he is likely to recommend it to his friends, who might buy it, and so on.

Honestly, if I ever put out my own game, I'd probably e-mail some of the bigger piracy sites and ask them whether they could put my game on the main page or something – I'd know the lost sales are literally zero (I mean, I'd be shilling to pirates), yet the word of mouth effect could be big enough from that to draw more people in and boost sales that way.

Naturally, this doesn't work for AAA titles and the like – you don't need someone to inform you about the newest Asscreed because ads for it are everywhere, and far too often, the person telling you will also add 'don't play this game, it's awful shit' because that's what AAAs usually are. AAA studios thus naturally loathe piracy – not because of lost sales, but because the word of mouth effect is a net negative for them.