“a videogame is just a file”

What kind of level of dumb fuckery is this?

Straight from mouth after reading " what the fking shit is that, plz wake me up when insanity dies"

Piracy ... It's a difficult subject.

The Devs/artists/voice actors etc deserve to receive fair compensation for their work.

But then as an end user I deserve a quality product and I deserve the ability to get a refund if it's crap.

When you're asking for £60 for 12 hours of story it better be damned good not just 3 colours of ending

With valve and Spotify I don't really pirate anymore unless it's something unavailable otherwise.

But the argument of "no one gets hurt" I kind of understand. Many of the people who pirate wouldn't buy them full rrp anyway... How many £60 games could I afford? Maybe 1 every 2 months? You get more exposure from friends telling friends...

It's a difficult balance, but for big studios and publishers over independent Devs do I feel guilty? No.

I will not pirate indy games or small games, would I pirate windows? Sure...

@seraphimsystems Precicely. People who pirate games and people who buy those same games rarely overlap.

For some anecdotal evidence, when diablo 3 was released, I really, really wanted to play it. But it did not get cracked. Did I buy the game? Well yes... after ~4-5 years, when my financial state improved.

I do buy indie games, those that I enjoy. For example, I pirated TBOI. I enjoyed it, so I bought it and now I have 400h+ playtime or smth like that on the game.

I almost never buy AAA titles though, because I do not get enough enjoyment from them. I tried out GTA5, for example, and got bored after a few hours. Why would I pay 60$ for 2 hours of entertainment?

The only triple A games worth buying are the online ones.

I might be willing to spend 60 bucks on a shit game if I earned 120k+ a year, but now? I either pirate a game or don't play it at all, so if I do pirate it, no one loses.

@Floydian true... But I would counter with this.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/...

"illegal consumption [of games] leads to increased legal consumption." 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."

I'll grant you that the study does have a pretty high margin of error, but for games (films and books piracy hurts, music has little effect ) it seems to help sales.

That said, this particular tweets attitude is wrong. And while many who pirate are not your target demographic anyway (can't pay, aren't allowed to buy, outside of pegi age group etc) there must be a notion in your head that "if I *could* pay I should"

@Floydian can't tell if sarcasm or genuine, will assume genuine...

It's hard to get good studies on piracy because people just lie, at least this study was careful about the questions they asked but this introduced a high margin of error.

@Floydian it's the lack of a centralised easy to express a sarcastic tone without vocal cues like pitch and tone

You can't always use italics

@Floydian yeah exactly.. hey how come we can't use Reddit like markup on here?