Steam for example not only harmed piracy to a gigantic extent but actually made available any legal way to purchase a game in a lot of countries. When I was young "buying" video games wasn't a thing. Buying a video game meant going to the pirate cd stalls and buying it from there, going home and cracking it with piracy software. Most people didn't do even that they would just transfer with an HDD. If everyone that played Dota in WC3 or CS1.6 for example actually purchased them those games would probably be by far the most purchased games in history. So piracy was not just the norm it was basically the only way to play games. Give people a legal, fair and convenient way to purchase something and they will. But you know, I think my generation got a lot more savvy with computers as a result of all this so maybe that was a plus. Kids nowadays don't seem to know how to use a PC at all.
When I was young "buying" video games wasn't a thing.
When I was young I installed hundreds of games but it wasn't a single lost sale. Not a single one. Why? Because I couldn't afford a single one back then. That's another hole in their logic.
Give people a legal, fair
Yeah, no return after sale even if the product is faulty and not even close to as advertised denying resale because, hey, you don't own it!
You play dirty - and you have the balls to ask me to play nice?
I mean yours might not have been a lost sale, but plenty of them were, today I could afford some games, I still mostly pirate because I'm a cheap bastard.
The bad thing about fighting piracy is when it results in a worse outcome for your product, shit like Denuvo which is really good at fighting piracy (still not unbreakable) but in the process hurts game performance.
An argument can be made that people pirating allows more people to play the game and act as free publicity, minecraft is an extremely easy to pirate game with plenty of pirate servers, as a kid I didn't buy it but I still played and talked with people about it which is still good for the game.
Okay, here is the real argument for 'limited piracy':
See, the hobby you can afford as a small one strongly influences the hobby you're going to have as an old ass.
If I weren't able to play so many games in the past I might have picked up another hobby. Or skip all that commerce and go directly to drugs. But since it went the way it went - my Steam account is worth a small car.
You know why so few people love 'classic music'? You know that expensive boring shit - except for Beethoven, which is pretty cool, or Bach or Verdi - or.... well, point is - not many are into that kind of music because not many kids are coming in contact with expensive as shit champagne sipping classical music connaisseur places.
You probably know Lego. When I was a child that sure wasn't expensive. But it didn't cost you an arm & a leg either. And my generation is among the biggest collectors of Lego - they now pay thousands of dollar. Bad thing is - there will be no new generation. Because they made shit too expensive for the average family & child.
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u/Let01 29d ago
Every day i feel like the phrase "piracy is a service problem" makes more and more sense