Video Game Piracy Is Good, Actually 

You told me to pirate something immediately and I couldn't think of anything, so I downloaded your video...

my favorite saying is "if buying isn't owning piracy isn't stealing"

Pirating Adobe and Ubisoft is always morally correct

I once knew a guy, Who only pirated games. Then one day he enjoyed a game so much he decided to go and purchase a copy. After installing the game onto his PC, the legitimate copy refused to run properly and continue to crash. So he uninstalled and played his pirated copy instead.

I love how on the internet so many people are treating piracy like this big ethical dilemma, but where I grew up nobody even knew you were supposed to pay for Windows

The real pirates in the game industry are the ceos paying themselves hundreds of millions of dollars while their employees are forced to work 70 hour weeks for 2 years, and then let go anyway

"anything said in this video is a form of satire" and then Immediately after: "PIRACY IS AMAZING"

I am not a videogame pirate I am a videogame PRIVATEER, I am a contractor under the crown and all my actions are sanctioned so long as I only attack enemy games

A wise man once said: "I don't pirate indie games because they need the money. I don't pirate AAA games because they suck."

The depressing thing about piracy is that its sometimes better. Like, why pay for the same product in a worse package. Because its legal? 90% of the companies have already violated 30 workplace laws

as an iranian living in a sanctioned country we cant really buy games, the downside is we cant pay most online games like squad. otherwise ive never paid for a game in my life and i played most games. there are times when i genuinely want to support a good indie game developer but i cant bc our banking doesnt work with dollar. otherwise we have websites that only allow iranian ip addresses but let you download virtually any games cracked latest cracked version

Musician here: pirate my shit. Pirate my shit. Pirate my shit. If you like it, consider buying a cd or a vinyl. If not, well, I really don’t care. Literally anything is better than being paid literal cents per stream.

- Clicks "Piracy is good, actually" - Startup up ad is the Ubisoft pirate game When an algorythm match is simultaneously the worst and the best...

The Ubisoft CEO recently said, "be prepared to no longer own your games" and so all I'm doing is preparing for that :)

The thing I remember the most about that anti-piracy ad was wishing my internet was fast enough to download movies as fast as they do in the ad.

One of my favorite things that ever happened in the approval of piracy/ anti-DRM sphere was when Sseth reviewed Star Sector. In his review, he noted that the game has no copy protection in it at all, then he included his actual CD key, and he provided a download link where you could get the whole game, which happened to be the developer's own distribution site where you buy and download it properly. We crashed the website. Not from too many downloads at once, but we crashed it from too many people trying to buy the game at once. If piracy can be considered theft, then the invitation to piracy by a company generates so much respect that the theft becomes negligible. Helps if you make a great game too, obviously, and it is. Go get Star Sector. Go "try" it for free, if nothing else.

I “owned” R6S, AC3 and Black Flag, Ubisoft deleted my account due to inactivity. I will never buy a ubisoft game ever again and forever will be pirating their games for the shitty move they did.

As an argentinian, I am certain that the Steam price spike will be inevitably followed by a piracy spike. A lot of us still have a fresh memory of most people exclusively buying pirated software before Steam was an option and it will be an easy step to go back into that.

If Piracy is hurting the industry, then CEOs wouldn't be making $100+ million a year... Like Bobky Kotick...

In Mexico, a lot of years ago was a campaign that says: "Comprar películas piratas está mal, pero tú como papá te ves peor. ¿Qué le estas enseñando a tus hijos?" Which can be translated as "Buying pirate movies is bad, but you as a parent are worse, What are you teaching to your sons?". The irony is that most people actually answer "¡A ahorrar!" ("to save money!"), and that was hilarious

Talk to any library scientists (the graduate degree for librarians) about how DRM not only makes our job harder but also limits how we can lend anything digital. Libraries have operated by the "first sale doctrine" for a long time, but it doesn't legally apply to digital materials. We dont get to buy one ebook and own it, we have to license it out for significantly more money. And the ebooks we have to pay so much for are often lacking in quality - not marked with page numbers, full of spelling errors, ect. And dont get me started on the tyrant of audible and how they try to make some books "exclusive" to their site, which is a massive disability rights and accessibility issue. A librarian cant officially support piracy (government bullshit) but many of us unofficially do. We literally arent allowed to preserve video games.

nothing boils my blood more than knowing hundreds of people's work for multiple years can legally be just deleted of the face of the earth overnight because some rich person said "hmmm nahhhh" but then it's illegal to continue to enjoy something you've already paid for in case of games as a service

I live in Madagascar and the way for most of us to watch anime, movies, tv shows, read manga, play games is by pirating it or watching it ( anime, movies and tv shows) on tv which I wouldn't be surprised if it was pirated as well. So yeah most of the fans that could go on to earn enough extra hobby money to officially support anything they care about started with good old piracy.

Во время обработки вашего запроса произошла ошибка: Данный товар недоступен в вашем регионе They think they forced me not to play, in fact they forced me not to pay. wise decision

Piracy tends to be an accessibility and pricing issue more than anything else

The creator of the film The Man From Earth said his movie didn't become popular until it was pirated, he said he would pirate his next movie himself, the next day a bunch of lawyers said he didn't really mean what he said.

Imagine eating a sandwich, which you payed for, and the owner of the store yanks it from your mouth, saying it's no longer available and you are not allowed to eat it anymore. That's what it feels like, when a company revokes your right to play a game you payed for. Fucking abysmal.

I wrote my masters thesis on topic of video game cracking, piracy and protection measures a few months ago. I loved this video, watched it whole and I think everything you said was very concise and well put. Big props to you ;)

When I was pirating the most, I was in highschool with no job, no income, and only really got new games for Christmas/Birthdays. So nobody was getting any money from me anyways. Now as an adult with expendable income, I rarely pirate anything at all, and when I do it's mostly only a way to test a game or movie out, and if I like it enough to keep it I'll buy it. I always pay up front for indie titles though.

6:13 as a child I thought this anti-piracy ad was just a really hype trailer for some internet crime movie lmaoooooo

Companies doesn't lose anything because most pirates couldn't afford to buy the game anyway (so they were never potential customers). Electronic "theft" is completely different from physical theft because it takes absolutely no effort to copy something electronically even millions of times, whereas every physical copy requires the same amount of effort, time and materials. On the plus side, pirates can actually contribute positively to a game because they provide free advertising and make the community much larger than it really is, and that in itself offers so many other benefits, like unique play styles and guides, mods etc rather than just having very few people have it. I look at it as more of a "Fair use" kind of way. You can use anyone's material (even copyrighted material) without their consent as long as you use it fairly. There are 4 conditions which constitute fair use: 1) You use it only for private or educational or research purposes. No commercial purposes allowed. Basically you can't sell it or try to make money off it. 2) You use it how it is meant to be used and do not try to alter it in any way. 3) You give credit to the owner and do not try to claim it as your own. 4) You use only as much as is necessary. But even using the whole thing does not necessarily violate fair use. Piracy obeys all of these laws. The company is not losing anything, while someone who has nothing is getting access to it, so overall it is a net gain, which always is a positive thing. 14:06 Holy, I didn't realise CODEX shut down in 2022. I know Skidrow, FitGirl, Empress, ElAmigos, CPY, Goldberg etc are still out there doing the Lord's work. RIP Codex 😢

Your couch color matched my couch color and it felt like I was sitting with a friend tell me something they're genuinely interested in, and i am too! Glad I subbed!

Your line about adblockers followed immediately by sponsor skip skipping your ad was hilarious to me

“When I grow up I wanna be a pirate” You want to be a pirate because you want to be Jack Sparrow, I want to be a pirate so I can play Buck Bumble.

In Egypt, as an intern doctor my salary is less than AAA game price and so if you can afford a PC or gaming laptop Piracy is the normal here We used to make foreign steam accounts in turkey or Argentina but after the recent changes in the prices it doesn't matter and everyone returned to piracy

Sneaking the IT crowd paraody version of that priracy trailer in there and not acknowledging it at all is amazing 😂😂

Pirating Nintendo games is pretty epic, although i tend to not like pirating indie games as i like to support the little guy

When I was 15 I stole a boat (dinghy) with a friend and we engaged in boarding an anchored boat we did not own, am I a pirate??

remember people, we never pirate indie games, or if you do and enjoy it go and purchase the game to support them for more great games they need and deserve the budget bc they actually care for us and have actual love and passion for gaming.

I've always said piracy is fuelled by convenience. If the content providers make anti-consumer efforts, then piracy will increase because it's more convenient. Looking at movie piracy, this has been faught against by studios for decades, and despite their efforts, piracy hasn't gone away. The best solution they've had against piracy so far was when streaming arrived. The rise of Netflix resulted in a drop on piracy, because suddenly there was an affordable and convenient way for people to watch movies. But this didn't last. As the streaming market has grown, the content we all want has now been segregated across multiple platforms, each adding more costs. Those platforms have slowly gotten more greedy and keep increasing their prices, they keep removing content and it either disappears or goes to another platform, and they're stopping us from sharing our accounts. What was the result of these anti-consumer changes? That's right, piracy has increased again.

The impact of sales on video games is evident in my personal experience. When I was a poor teenager in 2012, I pirated Persona 3. However, I am now a long-time fan who owns Persona 5 Royal, Persona 4 Golden, and Persona 3 Reload on Steam. There are many games I would have never purchased if piracy had not been available to me.

My brother pirated a game called “West of Loathing” for me. I played the game, and I liked it. I then had a realization; West of loathing is an indie game that was perfectly available on sights like steam. It wasn’t made by some large company like Nintendo, and indie devs could really use the money. So I bought the game.

I've been pretty interested in the history of pirates for a while now (as in, the ones with eye patches), and while I'm no expert I have come to feel that piracy in all its forms is usually more about rebellion against an unfair system. Of course there are always some who do it purely for personal gain, but I think pirates in general, including the ones you're talking about here, deserve more moral credit than historically given. This was a great vid!

Such good video, love the research and editing done in it! I hope you do more of these... ❤

*slowly puts down the beef jerky and backs away from my brother*

When the pirates are the heroes, you know the industry didn't just dropped the ball, it went through the floor.

meanwhile larian with Baldurs Gate 3 with no DRM on launch day made estimated 700 mio. revenue. (corret me if i am wrong) piracy is a service problem.

This is the first video from you that I’ve watched. Great points and very well articulated. I’m not usually a huge consumer of video essay type content but I will definitely be subscribing and watching more content from you. Awesome job, and thank you for the interesting content.

The last thing I downloaded like this was Rimworld. I wasn't going to buy it, or anything it because it didn't look interesting. I didn't want to spend the 30 for a full game. Then the dev said on some post they made on social media or their website saying. "Pirate my game, if you like it. Then buy it when you can afford it." So I tried it. Realized how much I loved the game and got it on steam. Now I have it and all the expansions. A few people I know did the same too. That dev increased his sales through a bunch of the people I know because of that. I never would have even looked at the game twice if he hadn't said that. Meanwhile "Piracy is bad. Btw we don't pay our employees."

One of my biggest erks of modern society is the tendency of giga corporations to equate loss of potential earnings with loss of *actual* earnings. That's standard thinking within big business; As an individual, that's indistinguishable from a gambling addiction. Piracy is NOT theft, and these massive corporations are so ludicrously greed driven that it has become a moral obligation.

i like your style. feels like a late night show with the pictures left and right of you and there being a couch because thats obviously a must.

the whole thing with games being priced way too high in places outside the US is such a big issue, i know a guy thats from somewhere that a 10 dollar game would cost him over 200 dollars so he has 2 options, play nothing but F2P games, or pirate everything. and as you stated, big companies want you to think thats theft, but he literally wouldnt have been able to buy the game in the first place so they would lose nothing and maybe gain a loyal fan.

Pirate the rich devs, support the poor devs. That's the way i look at doing any kind of pirating tbh

The clip from Gabe really summarizes the whole thing. Look at platforms like Uplay, Epic, EA etc.. and their lack of success being pointed to steam being a monopoly and clearly glazing over the fact that steam is a service that offers much more to consumers as a fully complete, rock solid platform with a company that is privately owned and is not beholden to growing year on year profits even when it's unrealistic or impossible to do.

Fun fact about the Galoob Toys v. Nintendo case: The case was about Galoob's "Game Genie Video Game Enhancer" peripheral for the NES which allowed the user to apply "Game Genie codes" to slightly alter the game data. This could do anything from give the player infinite lives, a super high jump, change the color palette, make the player invincible, etc. It would do this by intercepting the flow of data between the cartridge and console, and injecting its own code. Nintendo argued that this alteration of the code was copyright infringement and effectively made derivative works of their games, but the court favored on the side of Galoob, who argued that the alterations are temporary in nature, therefore not infringing copyright law against derivative works.

Thank you for making this video. Im writing my undergrad thesis on video game piracy and in a bout of demotivation, I came across your video and a lot of it made so much sense to me. Truly appreciate the research you've put into this and allowing me to discover various avenues to expand my own writing into. You have a new sub!

Funny story the first Manhunt game has Hidden Anti-Piracy Measures coded in the game files to make it a nightmare if you want to play a pirated copy. but for some reason rockstar pirated their own game to drop it on steam with the Anti-Piracy Measures still in the game so you can't actually play it without installing third party patches even after buying it.

some dude once said "theft is substraction where as piracy is multiplication. Different math." Also 23:58 Gaben analysis of the piracy situation is the best analysis anyone ever made and this is why steam remain to this day the most user friendly platform on the market.

I read the title as "video games prices are actually good" so i was shook by the intro it made it way funnier 🤣

For many game companies, piracy isn't even about money anymore. It's about control. Game companies don't actually want players to play their game. They want you to purchase it, the DLC, and all of the in game items they stuff the game full of. Some have stated that used games shouldn't exist, or have stated players shouldn't want to play old games because new ones are out. They want us to purchase games the same way we purchase food: buy the game, consume their product, then purchase more. They turn games into live services so they can just shut the servers down when they thinks they've milked the product dry, as if they assume the moment the servers go down, we'll immediately go out and buy their new live service. So they make the game unavailable to buy to finalize that process. When a game is pirated, the control is taken from them. They can't tell you to stop playing, so they try to get rid of website hosting it, they shut down servers, etc. When all of that fails, they blame the pirates to try and make them be the issue. There's a quote from the anime industry that always comes to mind. When questioned about piracy for a show that either had no legal way to purchase or steam it new, or titles that were not licensed or brought over to the country the consumer lives in, the answer given gave it all away. They stated if you can't purchase a product new or stream it, then you have no right to. If the company doesn't want to sell it, you have no right to watch it. This was said as if it would endear people to stop watching older shows rather than just convince anyone listening to never purchase through them again.

As you said, the funniest thing about anti piracy advert and prevention its that the ones who have to suffer it are the usually the people who pay for the product. Thats some delicious irony.

Realistically most people pirate games they don’t think are worth the price they’re being sold for or cause the game literally isn’t available by conventional means

Good video 👍 haven't thought of anything to pirate yet, but i would be truly saddend if any of The fanfiction and original story posting websites went down. Better start downloading those i guess?

As an Argentinian, im glad you mentioned the issues happening with our local currency. If big games are expensive on their own, imagine how bad it is in an unstable economy. I would love to legally purchase these games, but i simply cannot afford to…

There was a developer who made a video I watched recently where he said he would prefer people pirate his games rather than purchasing them from sites that sell game keys that were pretty much all creator keys (given for free) that were resold without permission.

Something funny about copy protection is that in Sweden, even though companies fight to prevent it, you're allowed by law to make private copies of movies and games etc. It's included in our taxes. Yet when booting up a DVD or something it still shows text saying that making a copy is strictly prohibited by law no matter what and copy protection is still included, even though we have all the rights in the world to make backups or whatever.

That song in the beginning brought back memories. Great video dude.

9:45 This shit made me wanna get into Foo Fighters fr

Especially with older games, like you mentioned. The only people losing money in emulating past-generation games are eBay scalpers and they can kick rocks

Argentinian here. What Steam did here was unbearable. I used to buy games fairly often but since it changed to US pricing. Buying one game for the regular employee could cost literally half of the employee's monthly salary. Ie: right now Taken 8 Ultimate is at 105000$ARS (87$US) whereas the average monthly salary here lies around 250000$ARS (208$US). Imagine games costing half of your monthly salary.

I remember days when virtually all software used wasn't legally obtained - including the OS (the warez scene). Only when I got my first console, I started paying for games.

23:52 Good on you for mentioning unions. The only way for workers to fight the terrible pay and conditions of the games industry (or really any industry) is to organise.

Gaben's point is valid for economies in general. High trust societies generally conduct better business, because in low trust societies you need to waste a ton of time, money and resources to make sure you aren't being swindled at every point of the transaction. Should you provide more convenience and flexibility to customers, your sales will likely increase. Mistreatment of your customers with an ever escalating DRM arms race will only cause your company to be disrespected in kind.

The problem with video games nowadays is that you have Denuvo hurting performance, even without Denuvo most recent games have been absolutely catastrophic at release performance wise. And even after buying games, you don't own them. Your right to play could get revoked at any time.

Youve done a great job on this video, thoroughly enjoyed this.

denuvo hurts sales more than piracy

The Crytek thing about how piracy caused them to not sell is cap. In 2015 The Witcher 3 came out and it had no DRM. And it wasnt a secret or something, CDProjekt literally bragged and flexed how they didnt implement any piracy protection. As you might have guessed it was pirated a lot. But it didnt stop it from becoming one of the best selling games of all time. It was just this good. I know many people who bought multiple copies of it, sometimes on the same platform just to honor the developers since it was not only good but also cheap. Many of these people pirated the game before buying it.

fantastic video, and let me quote the Just Shapes and Beats' developers anti piracy message (the message that shows up if you pirate the game): "I just want to say it's ok, I'm not mad I've played my share of pirated games when I was a kid I guess this is karma right? I remember when I was a kid, I didn't have any money to support my favorite developers So I just want to say If you cannot support the game developers with money, you can support them with words You can: Talk about them Share their games with everyone Leave a positive review, a good rating Send them a tweet, an email. whatever. Let other people know. That helps a LOT"

10:00 thats why Dave is the man

A few years back, I was younger, and I saw a video from a politician or someone saying if you’re caught pirating you’ll have to pay as high as 30’000x the original price. It scared the hell out of me and I deleted my pirate Minecraft.

I feel I must point out that "You wouldn't steal a car" ad you played at 5:50 isnt the original ad but a parody that was used in The IT Crowd. The original ad doesnt have the bobby with the gun and the parody continues with the rozzer shooting the girl in the back of the head.

A lot of games would get more sales if they had a demo, I genuinely believe so. I as an example download cracked games for the sake of seeing if the game I'm looking at is worth buying. not being able to test a product before either paying a mass sum or buying many of them can affect the product because the consumer doesn't know what it is.

I just love the fact i can watch this dude lay down on the couch and ramble on a random subject and still have my mind blown😂

i live in a country where you can't buy stuff in dollar and most companies have banned their products from being purchased here and the government has banned their products from being sold. hell, even if i could, i couldn't afford the prices. buying a 60 dollar game would mean giving up a fourth of my household's salary so i have no other option but to pirate the games, movies, songs, books, etc. i wish some people would get off their moral high horse and realize not everyone has the privileges they do.

Imagine that you're a sailor on a giant container ship, and 3 frigates emerge from beyond the horizon. As every minute they get closer and closer, you already know our fate. before you could reconcile with what happens, whey board the ship, swinging their swords and firing their flintlock pistols, they open one of the containers and stuff their pockets with plastic boxes containing digital access keys before sailing off into the sunset. Your captain walks up to you, and asks you "wtf did just happen?"

Most of my games on Steam are the ones that I once pirated, said "holy shit this is so good" and bought them when I had the chance. Starclan bless Terraria for being on GOG.

I have several old DVDs and most of them have this anti-piracy advertisement. The problem is that I'm Portuguese and I live in Portugal and the funny thing is that they only copied the English version (very few have the version translated into Portuguese) and as is to be expected from a child who is not English, I lived my childhood thinking it was a trailer for a movie 😅 it was only when he was 16 that he went looking for the DVDs and as he already knew a little English I understood that it wasn't a trailer but an advertisement 😂

With piracy increasing sales, personal anecdote for me, I never watch anime through “legal” channels but people I’ve recommended various anime to have watched it legally after being recommended it

I try games from Fit-Girl, if I don't like it, I delete it. If I like it and know I'll finish it, I'll buy it and figure out where to move the savegame. I always buy it if I intend to complete it. This is a review system that works for me and the publisher/developer gets paid.

Piracy/cracking is rapidly becoming (or has already become, depending on your point of view) just preemptive archiving, with how willing publishers are to just sit on IPs / "lost" media forever...to say nothing of yanking products from sale with little or no warning.

When I was a nerdy teenager in Egypt (a relatively poor country) I couldn't afford games or books or audiobooks, so I had to pirate them, but whenever I enjoyed a game or a book so much, I tried to save up and buy a copy after I had already finished the book or the game. That went on for quite a long period or time then I gradually started making more money and I now barely pirate anything at all.

Love that disclaimer at the beginning. I hope it's strong enough to hold up in court! ;-) Little of this information is new, but you presented it well. It never hurts to have good factual information to back up your arguments. Unfortunately, some people can't be persuaded by good arguments and facts. Whoa, you really got me with that ending. Way to go! But why didn't you just *download* a couch? 😲

One thing missing from the video is the advent of key reselling websites becoming popular. Many indie developers suffer from key resellers, and have publically said they would rather people pirate their games (which makes them no money) than to buy off a key website. This being the fact that credit card scams will buy keys from the game, sell them on reselling websites, and the owner of the scammed credit card will charge-back the keys, costing the developer money.

Here in Brazil the only time we started NOT pirating was in the PS3 era, so the prices have gone so high that a lot of people started pirating all over again. Not only videogames, but mostly video streaming services have gone crazy. Its the piracy RENAISSANCE

The lay-offs in Game industry (or any tech industry, really) is kinda interesting topic. A lot of people try to connect it to poor employee treatment or rise of AI but reality is that a lot of these people got hired around 2020, year when online entertainment was booming due to certain thing stopping people from going outside and because a lot of tech-related projects is either closed or is finished and just need handful of people for maintenance, like Amazon's Web Services. As much as everyone try to be mad about it, it's just natural thing in any industry. When the market slows down people are losing job.

got to love the rust lighthouse in the background

Can't believe you paid money for that new couch when you could have just pirated it.

damn, even his couch was arrested...

Back in the days we pirated for a couple of reasons, including but not limited to: 1. crack games we bought for convenience, so we didn't have to play disc jockey all the time, when all the CD did was "confirm ownership" 2. rip and re-burn audio CDs we bought because they wouldn't work in half the players due to DRM 3. keep our collection in good shape since there's less wear on media if you just shelf it 4. no money to buy something (no lost sale to someone who can't afford it, but more sales later to the same person buying sequels and basically every childhood memory on GOG once money was available) 5. to avoid installing rootkits and other malware 6. to play with friends at a lan party where we couldn't otherwise obtain another copy (yes, there once was a time without broadband internet and/or digital stores) 3 and 5 are still main reasons today. Especially N°5 basically means that if publishers don't play fair they actively lose sales - be it excessive DRM or AntiCheat or whatever else on kernel level: i won't have it on my device. I have enough backlog so i don't need to buy any game brand new - usually i wait for the GOG release or just skip a title entirely if they stick to their bad practice. But also there's lots of games that i bought on GOG just to support a publisher's release done in good faith, just adding them to my backlog basically. Today i got the coin and i believe in paying for value and supporting a good idea. Cinemas already drove us off, asking a price per ticket for which each of us could buy the bluray and then have the audacity to shove 30 to 45 minutes of commercials in our face INCLUDING spoiler-riddled trailers for other movies!? Or Netflix billing me 4k video and delivering less than 720p because they can't control my device? Or other platforms harassing me with commercials even tho i have an active premium subscription? I can basically see the black sails appearing on the horizon again. The best strategy against piracy is to offer a better experience. Also, if piracy really would affect sales negatively, then every game that came as 0day DRM-Free release on GOG should have face planted financially - that includes basically all CDPR titles. You know, like The Witcher series, which was a mega fail due to DRM-Free release, right? Because nobody in their right mind would buy something they could get for free, right? I guess that's the mentality of greedy publishers, assuming their customer base must be just as rotten as themselves. Great video btw. I was already typing a different comment while i watched, just to then see you already address my points. You could've baited more comments by putting some flaws into your script - thank you for not doing that. Also this will lead to me visiting your other videos in the future and keep the tab open for exploration. You also addressed the "Reduce piracy by offering a better experience!" thing, but i'll just keep it in now. Don't wanna strike you for being too spot on and complete, hence sending comment 😆

I really want you to make a video on the history of the scene, it's wild