I resonate completely. Proponents of piracy don’t understand that it takes teams of people (each with a family to feed, bills to pay) to build stuff. In short term, humanity would benefit from piracy. Everyone would get what they want for free. In long term, we’d just wipe out small businesses and studios that used to make stuff.
There is also a disconnect between “I never think twice to pay for a nice shirt” vs “Games should be free”. People don’t mind paying for things in the analog world.
I never ever feel bad about paying for something that I enjoy. It’s a transaction as old as human civilization. Exchanging value that is mutually beneficial.
I don’t know why I get this feeling that we are actively dismantling the society that used to produce amazing things through trade and trending towards nothing will be built, like some sort of a Frankenstein neo-communist society. I talk to young people and they want free stuff. If it’s not open source, you’re evil.
Let's pirate, because, unfortunately it's the best way to preserve the old stuff, because copyright holders mostly don't give a damn about preservation.
Piracy is harmful short term, but absolutely necessary long term.
>Proponents of piracy don’t understand that it takes teams of people (each with a family to feed, bills to pay)
"To be more precise, the study estimates that for every 100 games that are downloaded illegally, players actually legally obtain 24 more games (including free games) than they would in a world in which piracy didn't exist."
In the limit when 100% of the society pirates, what happens then? Is there a concrete theory that after a certain threshold, piracy plateaus?
Piracy is mostly dependent on availability, pricing, value proposition, regional parity and affordability. Steam is a great example of how to tackle piracy.
Steam and F2P basically killed piracy for games (and streaming services nuked it for movies) in Russia, for instance, somewhere where I'd estimate 80-98% of everything was pirated. With the current situation there's been a revival of the piracy scene in Russia like it's 2005 all over again.
>Proponents of piracy don’t understand that it takes teams of people (each with a family to feed, bills to pay) to build stuff
How incredibly rude. As a small business owner I very personally understand what it takes to pay my bills and feed my family. There is no room in my budget for new games releases, just like there is no room in my budget for a netflix (and sixteen other streaming services') subscription.
The equation really is quite simple -- if a product is good, I will pay for it. If a product is crap -- I will not. If good product is locked behind a shitty delivery system, then I will do without it (ie, not pay) or humor myself by pirating it (ie, still not pay).
A tangentially related anecdote; I used to work for a small IOT company that dealt with some fairly proprietary software & hardware. One day I got an email in my inbox from somebody who had reverse engineered our (closed-source) windows client, and built a generic *nix command line client for the tool. We collectively shrugged, asked the developer if he wouldn't mind us hosting the source code on our corporate website, and what license he wanted to use. End result -- we grew our userbase for that particular device, and could point folks that needed a *nix solution at a source package. tl;dr, moral of the story: don't fuck with hobbyists, even if they're reversing your stuff.
There is also a disconnect between “I never think twice to pay for a nice shirt” vs “Games should be free”. People don’t mind paying for things in the analog world.
I never ever feel bad about paying for something that I enjoy. It’s a transaction as old as human civilization. Exchanging value that is mutually beneficial.
I don’t know why I get this feeling that we are actively dismantling the society that used to produce amazing things through trade and trending towards nothing will be built, like some sort of a Frankenstein neo-communist society. I talk to young people and they want free stuff. If it’s not open source, you’re evil.