If you buy someone’s services, then those services end at a point. You don’t own them or that service forever. That’s ridiculous.
I feel this phrase that took off grossly oversimplifies the issue.
The real argument is that games should be seen and treated as a good, not a service.
Users expect to buy a game, a product, not a service. There are enough examples always needing to be online games where local single player stops working when sunsetting the server or just a connection issue.
Games as a service is a scam.
More like gaming executives
Pirating is stealing the owners right to distribution.
Keep on pretending like you aren’t affecting the salary and lives of artists.
Do you think everybody works on a game pro bono until it releases and makes a profit? Artists and Devs are all either commissioned or salaried employees. By the time the game releases everybody who put in any effort has long been paid. You’re effectively stealing management bonuses, shareholder dividends and most importantly the budget for a sequel or longterm support.
Piracy is not stealing. Piracy affects artists.
These two statements can and do coexist.
their lawyers would probably argue that it’s the “unlawful interception of a service”, but i don’t care.
s/developers/publishers/
Also, not sure how this is programming related 🤷
Look for games that are sold DRM free. Those can’t be taken from you by devs or the store after backed up. And usually devs and/or stores that deliberately sell such games also make it clear people can keep their games.
How’s this programmer humor?
Sovcits + consumerism == Pirating isn’t stealing because this word here has a certain definition, which invokes this special rule that lets me do what I want.
Both sides are twisting words. Pirating truly isn’t stealing, but rather closer to unauthorized use. The word ‘steal’ is used because they want to imply that it’s the same thing as taking a physical thing that can be lost. It engenders a certain feeling that they’re wanting to invoke. Stealing sounds worse than unauthorized use. Doesn’t mean it’s not wrong to do, but it isn’t the sort of wrong that they’re implying.
Eh, for me, it’s more like: capitalism is a deeply immoral system so we have a moral obligation to avoid supporting greedy, souless corporations that exploit the labor of others. But it is important to note that pirating from small indie companies should be avoided. Maybe download the game to give it a try, but if you like the game then absolutely go buy it or donate to the creators
*publishers
*Game publishers
Pointing this out isn’t clever.
Software piracy satisfies the colloquial understanding of theft as the act of obtaining something without paying for it, but not the colloquial understanding of theft as the act of depriving someone else of the thing you’ve obtained. Purchasing a software license satisfies the colloquial definition of ownership as the right to do something after having paid for that right, but not the colloquial understanding of ownership as the right to do anything you want with what you have purchased. Software piracy isn’t theft in the legal sense, and purchasing a software license is not a transfer of ownership in the legal sense.
Memes like this are just pointless quibbling over words (barely more sophisticated than “You’re a doodoohead!” “No, you’re the doodoohead times a thousand!”) and contain zero insight into the morality or legality of software piracy or software licensing.
You do realize you’re in the programming humor community, right?
But while you’ve eloquently pointed out the inherent flaw in the definitions we use in this discussion, i could use your same argument against you, reducing your argument to:
“I don’t like this meme”
Because memes, sayings, chants, etc exist to boil down a nuanced concept into a quick statement of belief, you could nitpick em, all of em all day, and while a little mental flaggelation is fun we’d have spent that day missing the point.
Pedantica aside, do you disagree with the meaning behind the saying?
I don’t think it should be the devs getting angry, rather the execs
It depends, small indie games teams usually suffer from this. Big houses that screw over players, those can go fuck themselves.
Yeah, there’s not always a clean separation between execs and devs, even if that’s politically inconvenient.
I’m going to go ahead and say that digital markets are still broken, and the solution definitely isn’t what the big execs want, either, but “everyone pirates everything” isn’t going to work if you like the present variety and quality of videogames available.
Have you noticed, nowadays, games from such “big houses” tend to be not even worth pirating?
Just a major waste of time.
For real most devs are just happy you enjoy their work.
The only ones losing money are shareholders and they barely lose enough to make a trickle of a dent.
there’s no evidence they’re losing money. the assumption that piracy is lost sales is one made by execs and we all know they don’t know their asses from their elbows.
Do devs get paid royalties? If not, why would they be mad at something that doesn’t affect them?
Sometimes. Those can get canceled when they layoff the team after release.
Who are the real pirates?
Only if they’re independent developers of the game, which is why you shouldn’t pirate little indie games. Otherwise they already got paid as much as they’re gonna get paid, only people losing money when you pirate a game are the executives.
I hate this phrase because it assumes that copyright infringement was at one point the same as stealing - it never was.
Stealing is a crime, where you take with the intent to deprive. Copyright infringement is a civil offense where the original owner loses nothing.
I don’t think that that’s necessarily true. Let’s say someone designs a rucksack because they find the existing options on the market uncomfortable. They produce them on a small scale and they get fairly popular. Then Amazon sees it, copies it, mass produces it for less than the original designer could, and makes sure that any time someone searches for a rucksack on Amazon their version appears first in the list. I think it’s reasonable to say that the original designer lost something there
That doesn’t mean copyright can’t be or isn’t abused, of course
You’re saying that like it isn’t already rampant. IP laws are a textbook example of classist disenfranchisement. It’s a rule for which the capitalists are protected and not bound by, but which workers are bound by and do not receive those protections.
I chose Amazon and a bag design as the example specifically because it’s a real story (although not a rucksack, I misremembered that part)
And what was the outcome of this IP theft? A video mocking a multi billion dollar corporation? They took down the specific product called out, but they still make extremely similar dslr bags to peak Design and they’re definitely still copying other companies designs. This is my point. IP laws only benefit the billionaire class and fuck over everyone else.
Ah, but they didn’t lose the exact item that the thief gained. For legal purposes, that’s important; nobody could be charged with larceny.
IANAL
They’ve lost potential revenue, but that is not the same as if amazon would come to their house and had stolen their only rucksack prototype.
Potential revenue is not your property.
It still sucks though.
Potential revenue isn’t, but intellectual property is. At least in most current legal systems, it is
And that’s why copyright infringement is a crime, just not the same crime as theft.
But see you’re thinking about it the wrong way… Every one of those pirated copies is 100% a potential sale lost.
Won’t you think of the shareholders?
/s
Is that PirateSoftware?
I work for a game company, the only reason I would tell you not to use a pirated version is because it probably isn’t cracked properly and will throw client-server errors. You’ll want to crack it in a way that will still receive the playlist updates
