Yar har, fiddle de dee Being a pirate is alright with me! Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free You are a pirate! Ar yar, ahoy and avast Dinky-dink-dink-a-dinkadefast! Hang the black flag at the end of the mast! You are a pirate!
Amen to point #1. I buy maybe only 1-2 games a year because they offer something unique and fun. All the other games I play are pirated mostly because I don't really care about them that much. I also have the chronic habit of not finishing games, so shelling out $60 to only play between 10-20 hours is a waste of money in my opinion. I'm far more likely to wait for them to go on sale (with like 50% or 70% discounts). I'm very patient about playing games. If it weren't for piracy then I would simply not play most games or I would seek out sales / cheaper games that don't break the bank. Also, $60 (or rather 60€ because screw Europeans) is a lot of money where I'm from. The median salary where I live is like 1/5 that of the US. It's completely ridiculous that this price point has become the norm.
My father makes 200 usd who is in a well paying job in my country so how do you expect me to pay 60 dollars for a game The reason i bought minecraft and allthe games i own is regional pricing. Minecraft here costs 265 of my currency which is 5.25 usd
I don't have any issues with buying software, on the other hand I hate renting software. In the second scenario I usually try to look for free / paid alternatives, if there's no viable option, well..
Not actually the case for example I'm from India and I started playing games because of piracy cuz steam was not there and no online store and access to games was only through piracy. And after steam came also it was not easy to buy a new game even today costs around 10-30% of an avarage monthly income of a person even today the only reason I have gta 5 is because epic games gave it for a week when I got it and I still buy games but like one game in like 2-3 months if I have to play anything I'll look at free options which epic games gives every week or use an emulator with roms the prices of games being so high is pretty difficult especially a sale for a lower price will not cause the company to lose money as it's just a file so it just leaves a bad taste
While I don’t condone piracy for contemporary titles, I can understand and sympathize people pirating games that would cost them a month’s salary in their local currency, I have less understanding for middle class first-world people with $1000+ GPUs pirating, but even in that case, it’s unlikely piracy being a non-option would instantly convert to a sale. If they want more people to purchase their media they have to make it worth buying, convenient and reasonably priced with out excessive, expensive DLC.
And holding onto the rights to as many old movies/tv shows possible. If you want to legally stream the Adam West batman show, one of the most popular shows of the 20th century, your only options are to pay google or pay apple for the individual episodes. I would gladly pay for them if I knew that a majority of the money went to the cast and crew members who are still alive, but it honestly just seems like another one of a million things google and apple advertise to me daily to try and pay them a few more bucks.
TBH the best way to destroy piracy is reduce the studio’s profits and stop going after infinite profit growth, so you can make content cheaper and more accessible. That would absolutely destroy piracy. Netflix literally almost killed piracy when it first came out, because you could literally get everything you wanted to watch in one place for an affordable price. Nobody wants to pirate things if they don’t *have* to because it’s Janky AF.
Yeah but the only reason old Netflix could have basically everything at an affordable price was that it was trying to scale, and losing money while it did. Going after infinite growth, as you said. Good movies and series can't be made without people paying for them, and a ~$10/month subscription for everything under then sun just cant fund the type of big expensive productions or medium sized niche films that were common before streaming
I didn’t pirate and paid for Hulu and used my Parents Netflix Now I would need my own Crunchy Roll, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Stars, and HBO on top of a $70 internet bill. I’ll pay for a subscription if I like a show and am watching it while it’s coming out but $75-90 a month in subscriptions is absurd.
@@eggyparrot3844 good movies and games could be made with way less money, and that was the case some years ago. the problem is that higher ups and suits take most of the cuts, while the devs put in all the important work. then there are way bigger marketing costs that most of the time arent really that necessary, and bad decisions by people on the board that dont even understand the product they are directing, since they arent working on it and arent in any way invested in it, other than seeing green numbers.
Brazil pirates games more than any other country. That's because games in Brazil cost so much it's like spending £/$300 on a game - it doesn't make sense to pay for them. That's why you should localise prices.
@@eggyparrot3844 It absolutely can though. The only thing that has to happen is big budget productions need less influence from the bean counters so that the productions are actually good and therefore remain profitable. Notice how Netflix created some excellent shows that they cancelled because they didn’t increase subscriptions. They were still making loads of money on the production, they just didn’t like that they couldn’t instantly increase their profit instead of merely making money on it.
The fact that the CEO of the MPA is trying to convince people that pirated movies are the direct cause of layoffs as opposed to their greed and need to keep costs down is a colossal joke...
@@ivoryowl Not very relevant to the meat of your comment, but I like seeing unique phrasal combinations in the wild, like "milk and dime". As far as I'm aware this is the first time I've seen someone combine milk(ing) in the sense of extracting money or other resources from customers with "nickel and dime"-ing (in the sense of getting all the money you can out of someone, down to exact change). I think it's a fun combo and it works fairly well.
Movie tickets at my local theatre are $22 per person. Piracy existing or not, there is no way I'm going to take my family to see any movie for that price.
There is no solution for a dying industry. Movie theatres are kinda dated basically. If people aren't willing to pay the price, then the company either lowers them or shuts down. Crazy that movie theatres are still around. Paying money to share a crowded room with people? When you can for the same price rent a movie on your own HD Tv, or hell go to your friends place with a better Tv. Coordinate a fun movie night with some nice food with a group you know. What my family does, my uncle and grandma come over every friday to watch a movies or tv with my dad. Only reason my dad goes to movie theatres is to see a marvel movie that came out in theatres before the average consumer can. Wow actually to think that is kinda of a sad reasons movie threatres only exist, because they get access to movies a bit sooner. Which I think has recently changed a lot since streaming so yeah, just not really a point to theatres.
In my country(europian country) it costs around 20-30 usd for vip movie ticket with infinite popcorn and other refreshments and a very comfy adjustable seats with armrests xd.
@Illiminator31 Most theaters make their profit off of concessions, not ticket prices. Some theaters have shown they can make more money by selling cheaper tickets and making the difference up with more concessions.
NZ has a three strike rule. ISP's pushed back saying hey this will incur us costs to process all these requests. This was taken into account and the law requires the rights holder to pay $20 NZ for each request. It essentially makes the cost of pursuing piracy higher than the cost of the actual piracy.
IMO if the button says "buy" or similar, it should automatically legally invalidate every single EULA and TOS and whatever fuck that says otherwise. companies should be legally forced to turn the buttons into "rent, and we can remove your access anytime" (have to include that exact long text with same font size) if the button says "buy" and the company removes your access without a good reason (going out of business) you can sue them and they should lose automatically and forced to pay for all expenses
perpetual subscription doesnt exist, steam needs new sales to keep their service alive otherwise without new sales the platform collapses otherwise valve would need to charge a yearly fee akin to property tax to keep your account alive and active a keep alive, otherwise the account would become dormant, keeping games active and full disclosures this game no longer works and has an expiration date of xx
@@joshallen128wtf are you talking about? do you pay property taxes on your clothes? do you pay property taxes on your books? No, owning stuff doesn't require paying property taxes, that's only reserved for certain types of properties.
This is a very valid point. I dont think those pirating go ohh that’s another $60 I can put into savings. No it goes to other things. So what he needs to say it’s possibly taking money from HIS pockets not the economy haha.
When I was a teen I pirated everything because I had little money, if I would not have been able to pirate, I would not have had it. But it’s not like it was for free in every regard, the freaking hassle involved in getting some cracked games to run- I would sometimes waste multiple nights on that.
@@roflstomp9836dont also forget that if you bought the product you got the worse version. anyone remember when Pirated copies of game ran faster ran better and did not cause masive security issues on users PC. because installing Rootkits on peoples PC when they install a game they paid for and need a CD/DVD to run. is completly legal and there is no du diligent on the rootkit aka it was so badly written that after like a day someone had figured out a way to hack any PC that had put the CD/DVD into the computer drive (the rotkit was installed at that point even before the user had seen the license agreement that did not even mention the rootkit) it was worse if you had somehow manage to get that ting to run on the more advance CD player stuff as that would just brick it permanently).... this was after the redbook CD audio on the other half of the game CD days. what was the order that the game devs/publisher was ordered to do. post a note on there site (that they hid really well no post on there social media or on the games news uppdate system about this. and a link to download a rootkit uninstaller several months after the game was out that requires that user gave them a Email address that expicided was stated would be shared by third parties (hope you gave them a burner Email because if you did not well hello even more spam).... also the uninstaller was so shit that anti virus would complain 3 times over on it, first over that the fact that the signatures was both outdated and missing. then the fact how it removes them was written in the worst way possible aka it trigger the any antivirus in existence because that is not how your supposed to do it since late windows 2000, there was more but I dont recall what clown show number that was so I will just mention that there was more. meanwhile the pirated copy perfectly fine you could install and remove the game and there was zero crap left after. the paid DVD oh the amount of junk was insane it was so bad that some other game would have problem getting instaled because of how shit the official installer/uninstaller was. the only positive thing was that it did not brick the system no mater where you installed it... something some old win95 game had (example I think some version of Casar 3 where if you for some reason installed it in C:/Ceasar3 would nuke the whole C drive.
@@oari1150things like old video games where you literally can’t even buy those games anymore. In the term of movies there are plenty of old movies where you can’t watch it without pirating it anymore. If public domain wasn’t 99 years (thanks Disney :/ ) then it wouldn’t be like this if you want to watch a literally 60 year old movie you can’t watch it without pirating as the chances it’s not even on any steaming site
@@jevans3375Right, and you just know that not enough people are watching 99% of 50 year old movies and TV shows to make them profitable. Heck, it's probably closer to 99.999%. There's absolutely no reason for such lengthy copyright laws except for corporate bigwigs wanting to hold onto the handful of profitable franchises from a few decades ago.
@@jevans3375 You know, trademark is use it or lose it. It would be nice if something similar is done for copyright. If it's not made digitally available(at least 50% of the time within a year) AND have not met a certain minimal physical print requirement, it should become public domain. Now, this could be a bit complicated when there are regional licensing matters to consider. But at least for country of origination, there should be use it or lose it enforcements.
@@jevans3375 Yeah i got caught years ago by my ISP for downloading The Godfather even though at the time it wasn't even on any streaming services. Stupid schmuck of a system we have here. Luckily they gave me a slap on the wrist and told me not to do it again.
I stopped buying long time ago. So no, piracy is stronger than ever. That means something is seriously, seriously wrong with the world. Before i pirated because i either had no money at the time or i was trying the game before deciding to buy. But today, corporate greed made it feel completely wrong to pay and completely morally ok to pirate, even though i have money to spend.
See? There's a resurgence of people that take $$$$ out of the entertainment industry out of even spite. I know the money doesn't disappear, but the entertainment industry is totally justified to panic, as they probably see the numbers and trends.
honestly if theres a service that actually puts out consistent good content i have no problem paying for it monthly, but so often there might be one show i want to watch on a whole service...im not buying a whole subscribtion to check out one show.
Remember when things like Spotify came out and pretty much killed music piracy? It because it's affordable and convenient. All these companies need to do is make their content affordable and convenient, and when streaming turned back into cable, with all the different services breaking out and spreading the content out everywhere, you see a rise in piracy.
The problem is that you can't just make content affordable. Spotify is famously still not profitable while musicians complain that spotify is paying them jack shit for the number play they get. And the funniest thing is that people still yet complain that $10 dollars a month is just too much. Why pay at all when you can get it for free, right?
When Netflix came, I pretty much stopped pirating. Now it's easier to pirate a movie than to find in which streaming provider it's available. For a good series I usually try to get the streaming to help keep the episode count across devices
I don't necessarilly know if that is the answer, because things like Gamepass are super convenient and affordable and allow you to essentially play the games you want when they come out and throw out the old - the difference being that many gamers want to OWN their products and not have them taken from them under stupid circumstances.
But music streaming is famously not profitable yet while they continue to pay the artists less and less. People are just so depleted of dopamine no piece of media is good enough to pay what it costs.
@@Illiminator31 Those in the known which sources to trust and download from. Also, you say that as if there's no legit software out there with their own version of bloatware and malware...
@@Illiminator31 pfffft please, anyone with half a brain can reinstall windows in 45 minutes or less without the need for a security company to fix anything. Sincerely, a regular pirate.
Weren't there a few institutions that published a report, that suggested that the percentage of damages resulting from piracy was between 5% to 7%? However, it appears that the report was disregarded because it did not align with the narrative that piracy was causing losses in the millions, or in some cases, billions of dollars.
It's a very hard topic to approach, there have been some reports that found the general perceived impact to be small. But they're all very speculative, we can't hope to simulate a world without piracy. In the last couple of years I have seen a ton of people justifying piracy with parroting some quotes or statistics poorly. It used to be just an edgy cool thing, or being run by fan sub/dub as alternative in smaller countries. Now it's human right to have free entertainment paid by others. A lot has changed in the last couple of years, so I don't know if I'd pay much attention to a 10 year old report.
The everyday people already got paid during the production of the film or television show. The only people hurt by piracy is the shareholders, the actors getting paid a cut off profits, and once from royalties.
@@GiJoe94 pirate bay has basically always been mirrors since they tried to shut it down, it’s the ingenious structure of it, that quite literally anyone could host it if they want without breaking a sweat
many ppl forget that pirating can also lead to buying because without video game rental stores you don't have to ability to try a game out. I've beaten a handful of games on emulators then went to buy physical copy because I knew I liked it enough to buy it.
Companies: "This piracy is costing us hundreds of thousands of jobs" Also Companies: "We are announcing record profits, also we are laying off half our workforce"
You steal the work hours and income of those people working in the creative sector. You don't respect their work. I hope that hill as a nice view, at least.
You haven't stolen anything. You made a digital copy of their "intellectual property". If you take a photograph of a loaf of bread or make your own loaf at home that doesn't mean you stole the loaf from the store to do it. Nobody is deprived of their property and nobody even knows other than yourself that the copying even occurred, therefore who is the victim?
@@mondodimotori if i press BUY on a steam page of a game, i expect to OWN the game, perpetually, that is my payment. If 5 years down the line, the game/media product is not available because it was a digital license, I will pirate it, because I OWN it.
Lobbyists should be held responsible for their words. If banning pirate sites won't provide the promised benefit, and it won't, someone's got to compensate the waste of budget
Anyone remember how Fifa 2014, or maybe it was 2015, had the first version of Denuvo? It went uncracked for like 3 to 4 months and people were wondering after month 2 if it was ever going to get cracked? EA never made any big announcements about how much more it sold... because it didn't. It sold basically the same as every other version of Fifa.
In the United States, you can get your internet shut off. The ISPs do not have any interest in doing this, but the FCC holds the ISPs responsible for your conduct - only insofar as it affects the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act).
End of service, out of region, always online singleplayer, not available on this console, requires third-party account, drm requires root level access, no mod support, no ownership subscription models that include ads for already paid services, predatory and hidden TOS and cancellation/hidden fees, dozens of separate launchers/streaming services with their own data collection and brokering, splitting of previously centralized content into many different services so dozens of subscriptions and user logins required, getting added to email and marketing lists, data/password leaks for accounts. THAT is what is pushing piracy, not price. Many of the things that are meant to prevent piracy actually encourage it and reduce the quality of the product.
That insane perspective of "every pirated copy is a lost sale" needs to be called out harshly. Maybe 10% are, most people who would pirate your product will not buy it anyway.. Many judges will just not understand how extremely overblown the loss estimates are and can be easily manipulated into believing, that piracy damages economy in major scale.
12:40 "I don't know if I'd buy it," on a conversation regarding piracy. :P 34:39 I appreciate the guy in the white T-Shirt making a thudding motion on the floor.
I don't think this is the end of piracy, but given what Nintendo has been doing to emulators recently, I think this is the beginning of piracy becoming Beyond something the average person will be able to do without completely destroying their computer
@@the_undead Nintendo didn't come out on top because it was an emulator. They came out on top because the devs got too greedy and profited off enabling piracy by locking a software update for a game that hadn't even been released yet behind a paywall. Had they not done *that* then Nintendo would have had *no* legal standing to shut them down.
Piracy does not have zero damage-but the amount of damage it does cost is in my opinion so negligible as to be a non-issue. The amount of people who "would have bought it if there was no piracy option" is tiny compared to the number of people who would simply not obtain a copy without piracy as an option.
I would disagree. Sure, if piracy was not an option that existed, people wouldn't buy 'that' specific piece of media, but their individual expenditure in the entertainment sector would raise by orders of magnitude. Simply because people are addicted to entertainment. There are societal pressures to watch newest show, the newest movie. Piracy is big, so is the lost revenue in entertainment.
Citation needed. I wonder if someone could devise some kind of experiment that could test this once and for all. I feel like I'm pretty much in the clear, personally. I don't think I've pirated anything that I would have paid for if piracy was not an option. But I don't think that's true for everyone.
One good example of paying vs not paying is NFL Sunday Ticket. I remember a few years ago (probably before the best sports streaming site was out) I tried to exclusively get buy on those for weekly games and cast to my TV. Needless to say, it was a miserable experience. Horrible picture quality, non stop overly ads, crashing streams, constant refreshing, annoying chat, broken audio, lagging or stuttering. I already pay for RU-vid TV… just shell out the few hundred and have a seamless experience. 🙄 Way more worth it than not spending when I want to sit on the couch and watch games all day lol
I’ve been using IRC bots to download everything since 2003. This method of acquiring media flies completely under the radar, and if you set up your client correctly it’s also encrypted. The way it works is that you join an irc chat channel and send a message to a bot with the packet you want. The bot makes a direct connection to your PC via IP address and sends you the file that you want. Peer to peer downloads are virtually invisible to law enforcement. They have no way of knowing what you’re downloading even if they subpoena the traffic records from your ISP because it’s encrypted via SSL.
Ive not used irc for 15ish years, I remember xdcc bots offering packets and used them a lot, then I remember as bittorrent came around and even before tpb etc I was getting the .torrent files from an irc bot.
>This method of acquiring media flies completely under the radar Won't be for long, if you tell everyone here. Although using irc is a big issue for most.
Seems excessive I'd rather just use my $3 windscribe vpn and pull through that. Audio for me usually comes from cracked Spotify downloading or batch downloads w/ youtube-dl on yt playlists.
Piracy does not "steal" jobs. There is too much money in the industry for piracy to hurt it. If money is not reaching the people that lies on the people on the top of the chain not us
No, piracy does hurt some business in the industry to some degree, there is no denying that.(I can imagine some indie devs etc. feel it) But by far not as much, as some/most want to make it to be in general. 100 pirate DL's ain't 100 sails they missed out.
The amount of streaming services i have to subscribe to just to watch two or three retro shows is ridiculous. So I made my own on my private server and I can now watch whatever I want forever and without fear of removal.
The Matrix's green tint was actually a bad "remaster" in the first place. Theatrical and VHS versions had a colorful grading with popping skin tones and cyans, and they made it sickly green for the DVD release.
Let's call it what it is: Unauthorized copying. Is not stealing as you are not preventing the owner from using their property. As is not piracy because there is no one stopping a ship to steal their cargo. Is Unauthorized copying. You copied something that someone else didn't want you to copy. Not stealing and not piracy. Since you didn't enter into a contract to copy it, is not even a breach of contract. The fact that they called it stealing and piracy removed any moral high ground that they ever believed they had. As knowingly calling something for what is not is mislabeling and thereof FRAUD! Want your software to be bought instead of copied? Offer a better product than the unauthorized copy version.
@@rexsceleratorum1632 that came later. In short pirate, comes from pirateering, basically running small business on a ship, I think it's a pidgeon of cajun french. Priveering radio for saftey and ocasionally radio (for land) wasn't around untill the 1800s (a little past caribean pirates). lol either way, perfect, unauthorized copies isn't exactly theft or stopping anything. Your not holding a BFG to someones head and demanding they not sell photoshop or whatever else. No one told a C-suite to enshitify adobe with renting (subscricribing to) photoshop. no one putting a gun to a exec suite in nintendo to tell them to stop selling games.
@@mondodimotori depends on the product. But in the gaming/film industry specifically? Nine times out of ten, you're not taking from the developer/director's pockets, you're taking from the greedy studio execs who don't care about you or need your money.
I can't say for the USA, but in France there have been several instances (and even one last week) where the government has ordered ISPs to block illegal download and torrent sites. The only thing is, they're always a step behind, because the sites change hosting often enough (and the law only applies to the site before it moves), and it's easy to get around this by switching to another DNS than the default one. You don't even need a VPN.
I'm not a lawyer, but i have to wonder, can you just not keep logs unless someone is specifically being targetted by a legal entity? Then investigate them in conjunction with the government?
shouldn't a TV show be more expensive? Or do you mean each episode? Also, tranferrable license? Umm, no - how about a DRM-free local file to download and keep?
Ummm, no? I would use them even more if this were the case. A season of the simpsons would be $50 in your example of pricing that would make all pirate sites die off. Get real.
I'm just waiting for the day when companies will stop ignoring that research on copyrighted material that was done in 2015 that literally proved piracy has a positive effect on sales. But I guess never.
pirates offer a superior product a) it's not a physical medium (who owns a disc drive nowadays?) b) it's not a streaming service/ subscription, where you don't actually own the movie and it can be removed/ altered/ censored any moment c) not region locked/ censored for your country, it's the original release.
In the very late 00s and into the very early 10s, I lived overseas... Piracy was literally someone taking a camcorder into a theater and burning it to a dvd... That.Has.Not.Changed, I guarantee it. Piracy has not and will not disappear.
@@michaelmonstar4276 that's not how that sentence works, fyi it's meant to be a shortening of "Piracy has not [disappeared] and [piracy] will not disappear". it's a very widely used form
After getting the s95b and being excited to watch more movies, i've watched like two over the course of a year, because renting 4k hdr movies is ridiculously hard and absurdly expensive outside of streaming services, like in the order of 30-40 eur for a single movie. In my opinion if a movie costs over twice the amount to watch at home compared to going to a cinema, there's something wrong from a consumer standpoint.
How do they know how much money piracy is taking? They would have to first prove that any given person is going to spend that money. They can in no way do that.
I've never understood why people feel so entitled to piracy. If you can't afford something and choose to steal it, I certainly understand that decision. But I don't understand how those people can turn around and say ""I can't believe this company would even try to stop me from stealing this. I should be able to steal with no barriers, simply because I wouldn't have bought it anyway." I've pirated things before, but I don't think I am entitled to piracy.
I am a software developer of 3D vertical market software. The retail price of my software is one-third that of my competitors, plus I have 25% off sales twice a year. This is because I get feedback from people in other countries and regions, that my competitors' pricing is an entire month's income for them. So I try to be more reasonable in my pricing. I still do get some piracy, but the way that I look at it, is that those people never would have bought the software even if it was $5. And for those who are wondering, my software's license terms allow you to make unlimited installs, and you can use the software forever with one purchase. Plus you get multiple years of feature updates.
What about the billions of dollars consumers lost in ticket sales, game sales, and time to garbage media or media discontinued as a service? They don't seem as concerned about it when it's the other way around.
A significant contributor to piracy is the absence of consumer protection measures in cases where purchased content proves to be unsatisfactory. I believe that implementing a 20% restocking fee for software, allowing for full refunds, and a 50% fee for video content deemed subpar would significantly reduce the incentive to engage in piracy. The current language employed in user license agreements is excessively one-sided, leaving consumers completely vulnerable.
I can't believe that we live in a world where we just accepted that our isp/state can just check all my internet traffic and see what I'm doing. I'm privileged and live in a country where they aren't allowed to do that, but still, that should never be a thing. It's like them going through your mail and opening every letter... Nah.
Every time they complain that piracy costs them ticket sales I laugh because I haven't gone to the theater in a year and haven't gone in 7 years before that... It's not piracy that's costing them it's their movies that are failing.
8:00 That's something people tend to forget or not realize these days. Video games used to be a lot more expensive than they are now. 4th gen console games usually had a $50 MSRP (sometimes more, up to $90). Adjusting for inflation from 1990 that's over $120 today. Sales discounts are also a lot deeper and more common now than they were for older consoles.
2:17 "why does anyone give a fuck" "why does everyone got to watch this man's actions like a hawk and treat piracy like it's a real big deal" is what Luke should have said
I was a very frequent pirater before netflix and other streaming sites started provided low cost ad free access to my favorite movies and TV shows, allowing me to stop giving cable companies crazy amounts of money. I am now a frequent pirater because those same companies have raised prices, introduced ads and increased in numbers to the point that to find any given piece of content without ads you have to pay for 8 different 17 dollar subscriptions. Actors aside I would much prefer to actively compensate writers and other professionals in the industry, but spending 200+ dollars a month to be able to see the content I want just isnt feasible. I almost wish more creators would go the route of Louis C.K. and just have their own site for their content, but I also realize that's a marginally worse option in the long run if every movie had its own site and 4 dollar pice.
I pay for Amazon video, but I refuse to watch ads on something I’m paying for and have found a better experience watching ripped versions of their shows then trying to fight their terrible service and unskippable ads
I am so sick of these giant companies trying to leverage the law to make everything worse for everyone. Also, yall hit the nail on the head, I have never pirated a game that I ended up loving and then didn’t buy it to keep for easy access. All of the old Nintendo games that I’ve downloaded, I have owned at some point in my life or childhood. Also, again if you pirate it and never had the intention to buy it, it isn’t a lost sale, because the purchase never would have been made
Almost same thing is happening in Vietnam right now. VTC (a reasonably large game publisher, maker of some shitty bloodsucking MMO games) complained to the government that STEAM, is distributing games ILLEGALLY and evades taxes (which is ridiculous because Steam is considered to be a game distribution platform instead of a publisher and they pay VAT to the country the transaction happens in). So yeah, if the government of Vietnam decides to block access to Steam, piracy will be a lot more common (not that it isn't before, but still).
I've only pirated things I had no access to legally. Either because it streamed no where, was not available in my region, or was no longer available for purchase. If you give me a legal option I will take it, but if you don't it can't hurt you if I go around you to get what I want.
I recently (about 6 months ago) deleted all my streaming accounts and switched back to a media server. Streaming used to be cost effective but it’s out of hand with so many service providers and their price hikes. My cost is now VPN, $140 aliexpress mini-pc, and a DAS I throw an 8TB drive in occasionally as needed. Feds/states make it ok to steal from CVS so I’ll take my chances downloading a movie 🤷🏻♂️ If somehow this all becomes blocked, I’ll just stop watching movies and TV all together.
As an ex-pirate, the only reason i would pirate is when i can't afford it. Making a game anti pirate will just make me not be able to play the game. I would never buy the game in the first place cuz i can't afford it.
The VPN usefulness is greatly decreased, because service providers including just plain websites have blacklists of all the shared VPN IPs. I constantly have to turn it off to even view some information.
Guys, you are not thinking as evil company. The moment you start thinking as evil company this all makes sense: Blocking a pirate website that will move to another place 3 seconds later? Not gonna work. Blocking competition ? Hell yeah we will find a way.
Naw... I've watched you for over a decade and its MOSTLY because of your INTEGRITY. I appreciate that you try to do the right thing. Damn the money. So keep doing the what you think is right. And it DOES garner you Goodwill. The trolls don't speak for us all!
.....some people just won't pay the current prices for things even if they didn't pirate they wouldn't pay anyways. There was no difference at your end you didn't get it anyway.
I pirated as a teen in high-school one thing I can remember well was command and conquer tiberm sun I downloaded and played so much I ended up buying every command and conquer game set in completion more than once. This kicked off my drive for strategy Sims. to this day I still look for good sim games like city skylines etc
I'd argue there's little to no impact of piracy on cinema ticket sales, cause people usually go to the cinema for the whole experience of watching stuff on a big screen and stuff. piracy is basically in direct competition with online streaming market though...
tbh, with how high the cost of living is now, and how expensive media can be paired with how hit or miss media can be, its just not worth it. if i can't afford to see a movie or watch a show, i just wont. so either way, they get no money from me.
Just like y'all said, I'm not paying for 15 different streaming services. The use of exclusive licenses to shows and movies means they don't need to improve their services because they eliminate competition. If the legal services are the same quality as the piracy sites, then why would I not choose the free option?
I always feel it's a bit unethical to buy games, movies etc, would be fairer to pirate it, but the convenience recently has been so high in purchasing... Still, endless respect to all the pirates keeping the scene alive! The world depends on you folk!
I might start downloading again cuz of the pure enshittification of all online services in the last few years. At some point I'll need a subscription just to take a shit and I'll be forced to watch 5 ads before shitting.
I will say that ISP’s have gotten hella better at detecting when you torrent things. I torrented something and the next day got an email from Spectrum that they detected downloading of copyright content. 10-15 years ago that shit would take way longer
Ethical != Legal. Just because gambling sites are legal, doesn't mean they don't employ shady tactics to extract as much value out of someone as possible, most often at their own detriment.
