Video Game Piracy Is Good, Actually
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 22 พ.ค. 2024
- I don't think video game piracy is as bad as people say, and I made a video essay to prove it.
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🎵 MUSIC USED ➜ • Music Used - Piracy
📓 REFERENCES ➜ www.lextorias.com/citations/p...
🔗 LINKS🔗
Article about why anti-piracy ads don't work ➜ www.vice.com/en/article/93aan...
Reddit thread about Warez scene and EMPRESS ➜ / digital_piracy_the_ris...
Wikipedia article on Warez scene ➜ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...
🎬 CHAPTERS 🎬
0:00 What Piracy Is(n't)
6:59 The Warez Scene
10:11 DRM & Denuvo
15:42 Effect On Sales
19:37 The Business Response
24:54 Emulation & Preservation
29:17 Conclusion - บันเทิง
You told me to pirate something immediately and I couldn't think of anything, so I downloaded your video...
based
lmao
Straight up boss moment.
@@Lextorias quickly give him consent before he gets arrested
actually that works as media preservation :D
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
they’re like the evil british navy, if we’re going full analogy
Forced to work 70 hour weeks without getting overtime pay, too
@@gingerdannyYou aren’t, they’ve already been payed for their work, whether or not the game sells one more copy won’t change how underplayed they are. Like was said in the video; unions are the solution, not anti-piracy measures.
@@Lextoriasdon't you just mean the British Navy?
...While simultaneously ripping off consumes six ways to Sunday with all manner of monetization.
However, the BIGGEST threat will soon come in the form over the issue of *ownership*
Ubisoft's CEO pretty much spilled the beans "Gamers have to get comfortable with not owning their games"
"You will own NOTHING and like it" marketing that's going on as they are pushing the industry into a
Games as a service model.
Or put more succinctly -
Why let gamers/consumes buy their things once and to personally own it,
when they can be charged indefinitely only to access it?
Then we have lots of gaming media defending and excusing this, which I suspect because many are paid op eds and are in golden handcuffs.
Pirating Adobe and Ubisoft is always morally correct
dont forget EA
Amen
Amen
ACTIVISION TOO
Rockstar anyone?
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 have had that exact thing happen to me, latest it was Civilization 4 which I decided to buy after playing it for years. The legal copy had issues that made it unplayable for me. I'm still playing the illegal version now and then.
Same, have a couple games I enjoy, but play the pirated version for it being less buggy (but still I have licensed versions phrchased to support the dev)
GTA5 legal copy takes forever to launch so I just pirated it .
That's because of dunevo installed with legal copy which impact performance, while pirated version comes without dunevo.
I did the same with a movie actually. I had 4K support and 4K subscription and movie even supported 4K yet amazon prime did not provide me 4K on my Meta quest 3. So I had to pirate it in 4K.
my favorite saying is "if buying isn't owning piracy isn't stealing"
and imagine how better world would be if could magicaly copy anything? copyright crap law says if made copys of food and dropped it in poor countrys it would be ILLEGAL! jesus would be throwin in jail not for the god claism but for taking profits from the fish and bread and wine industry.......
@@NightmareRex6 in our world there are necessary evil's that we human's must commit since it's in our nature.
A companies job is to make money but in order to make money they need a good reputation, in order to have a good rep you need to submit partially to those evil's of man in order to stay in the peoples good graces.
a great example of this was when AC/DC went after napster the year after that there sales did poorly compared to there averages since in there persuit of "protecting their IP" they put there fans in the crossfire & because of that those fans got pissed at them & stopped supporting them.
@@NightmareRex6this comment reminds me of when the guy in butterfly effect is writing absolute delusions at the beginning, then you realize it all makes sense
@NightmareRex6
Not really, you'd be free to distribute your own copied food but you wouldn't be allowed to copy what someone else made without their permission. I think that'd be pretty fair even if you could copy physical objects.
@@joep2999I'd be honoured to have my copyrighted pizza illegally copied and given to children in Africa
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
My PS2 has NEVER played an original disc
Yeah Windows XP was just a memorex CD I found on the ground at my high school. I thought thats how Microsoft was angling to reach higher install counts.
@@gangsterHOTLINE I used to have a CD like that too, funnily enough
I still don't pay for Windows, honestly. I just leave it unactivated since I only really use it for whatever doesn't work on Linux lmao
@@mayoraeryn Barely anyone actually pays for windows if they aren't buying a prebuilt, however, you can get a license very cheaply from resellers if you do ever decide to buy one
"anything said in this video is a form of satire"
and then Immediately after:
"PIRACY IS AMAZING"
"Parody" is laughing WITH "the absurd situation" and victims.
"Satire" is laughing AT the absurd situation and especially the "absurd victims".
@@ynraider Then what is Parody and Satire at the same time?
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.
Streaming killed BitTorrent for that reason
You argument is correct, since piracy isn't getting people to jail. If US for instance enforced the laws that already exist, that wouldn't have been a problem.
@@theodorcalotescu1876 my brother in christ, your country passed the copyright laws and then imposed them on the whole world, you mfs enabled people to get into senate and pass those laws, fuck the US
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."
Yep, I only really pirate mainstream but smaller budget games and then buy them if they’re good. Except for Bethesda,Ubisoft or CDPR, they never get my money.
@@DiscoMouse If you eventually pay them it should be fine, although if you're going in already knowing you're not going to pay them maybe just don't play the game at that point. That would be outright stealing.
@@ultimate1769 You just watched a 40 minute long video which clearly states piracy is not legally stealing.
Plus ain't nobody gonna shoplift Starfield from Gamestop, bro.
@@LecherousLizard okay, it's not stealing legally, it's still not good or moral. You take something for yourself that you have no right to. Call it what you want, it's still wrong. Of course there's some nuance to this, but as a pirate, you're never "in the right".
@@ultimate1769 buying isnt owning so piracy isnt stealing
- Clicks "Piracy is good, actually"
- Startup up ad is the Ubisoft pirate game
When an algorythm match is simultaneously the worst and the best...
It's always good for a laugh when Michelle Rodriguez shows up unexpectedly (also damn she looks old in that ad and that makes me kind of sad)
ubisoft games aren't even worth pirating tbh
@@christopherraezter1211 maybe not for you. I got that ad at the start and as a midroll
@@Gadottinho Agreed. Ubisoft gave me AssCreed III and IV for free, and I still feel ripped off. AC never appealed to me. After climbing the first tower and clearing the first area, I was like "Oh, is that all this game is? Ok, I guess I'm done then". They also gave me Beyond Good and Evil for PC, which doesn't even work, though I'm sure the -Dolphin- GameCube version works just fine.
The fact that people actually watch ads on youtube is insane. Also no i dont watch the ads on my phone and no i dont have youtube premium.
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
Based Blackbeard pfp
People in iran wouldn't be able to play anything if it wasn't for piracy. also yes banking system sucks in iran.
Oh yes, downlodha my favorite website 🥰
@@Tiner-was-Real downloadha forever. and soft98
Even if we put sanctions aside, Iran's economy won't let many people buy games either. Average games cost 60 dollar now days, that like 10 percent of average monthly income of more than half the population.
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
and give the crown a small portion of your plunder
Would that make videogame pirates who preserve games videogane _archeologists_ instead of piratee?
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
Literally.
Why should I shill out cash for someone who's already swimming in money and cares a lot less about those who work for them and the customers.
This is why I hate DRM. They are trivially broken and yet I have to put up with worse product because I want to support the creator? Ridiculous, DRM is practically useless as well.
@@darkpixel1128 DRM'd games tend to get cracked within a *day* from launch, if the DRM in that game even lasts till launch, piracy has it's ways among the high seas.
Only thing it does is mess with a normal consumer's experience and *encourage* piracy by inconveniencing normal people.
Its only illegal if you get caught 😂
I mean, the real alternative is that you don't play the game at all.
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.
Thank you lol
Good
really? what platform? I didn't know that could happen
@@ScripulousFingore6133 PC from the Uplay account, technically the AC3 and Black Flag were free while the r6s I bought in 2015 when it was released and haven’t played in like 5-6 years but still, that account was mine, I paid for that game, it’s stupid that they just went out with a termination campaign for non active accounts.
@@ScripulousFingore6133 to add on to ScripulousFingore6133. The only way to keep your account "active" is to buy a ubisoft game or randomly play a ubisoft game attach to your Uplay account (even for a few seconds). Otherwise, even if you buoght it legally. And decide to go on an nostigia trip more than 6 years (4 years if you didn't buy ANY ubisoft game, just login to play free weekend or f2p games). too bad.
Ubisoft really want you "to be comfortable not 'owning' games.".
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.
You left out the best part. The devs of Star Sector were so chill about what happened that they approached Ssseth and asked him "hey man can we use your video as free advertising?" he agreed and to this day I think it's still linked from their homepage. The even better part? His CD key is still in the video and it still works.
A friend of mine was in the piracy scene some years back. He told me that the hype for cyberpunk 2077 was so real that the Pirates were advocating people to buy an official copy. Of course that was before a poor launch.
@@jamesesparza6893 And people say there's no honor among "thieves" jokes on them I guess.
i found starsector because of his video, i now have it and am happy with it
StarSector is a great game! You can try it using my key if you want: 07ADA-RN3A5-JX78A-6EL64
And if, like me, you enjoy playing it, consider paying the devs the 15$ they ask for their game, it's worth it.
This is exactly the argument I've been making for years. The main reason most people pirate is due to an inability to afford whatever it is with most people I know who pirate voicing significant shame at the fact that they cannot afford to pay for these things legally
Therefore someone who otherwise would not have given that company money obtaining a copy made on non-company servers means that the company has quite literally lost to nothing because either way whether this customer pirated or not the outcome for the company is the same in the company losing nothing and gaining nothing (financially)
actually there is a high potential of it gaining free advertisement, once I start talking about that game and a person who can afford it goes on to buy it.
@@aymenninja8120 and alot of people will actually buy games after pirating if they like due to multiplayer and achievement hunting
I always opt to pay for a game if I can afford it, but if I can't, I don't feel bad about pirating it.
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.
Pirating Nintendo games is pretty epic, although i tend to not like pirating indie games as i like to support the little guy
Totally agree
I’ve directly reached out to Nintendo telling them that I WANT TO GIVE THEM MONEY for Pokémon Emerald and Platinum, and they said, “We’ve got no plans to do anything with these titles.” WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO, THEN, NINTENDO??? BUYING $150 CARTRIDGES ON FACEBOOK DOESN’T MAKE YOU ANY MONEY!
*Old* Nintendo games. Even if you don't stand for Nintendo's exclusivity practices, don't own a Switch, etc. Buy the physical game, and then emulate it. Nintendo makes arguably the best games in the industry; complete on release, free of microtransactions. Just because their software is an easy target for piracy doesn't make it right. Emulation of retro games is fine if it's not available.
giving nintendo money is a crime
I appreciate that most indie games are reasonably priced, not loaded with crippling DRM, and actually work on launch.
The Ubisoft CEO recently said, "be prepared to no longer own your games" and so all I'm doing is preparing for that :)
so ironic considering nobody wants to own a shitty ubisoft gamw anyways lol
If purchase isn’t ownership then piracy isn’t theft
The thing is you can own pirated games so why would I buy something I cant own when I can own something without buying. They shouldnt complain
bruh im so tired or people that only read the headline and misquote this shit constatnly. he SAID that in order for digital sales to really take off, people need to be comfortable not owning physical copies of their games
@@Messypapa how's that boot taste
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.
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 ;)
6:13 as a child I thought this anti-piracy ad was just a really hype trailer for some internet crime movie lmaoooooo
someone should make that movie. About a criminal that downloaded a car. FBI comes, he's on the run, cops hot in pursuit. He manages to hide away in a mcdonalds parking lot and uses the free wifi to download a helicopter. Frantically waiting for seeders while the cops search the neighborhood, finally download finishes and he escapes, for now
@@flatterkatz Holy shit. I can only get so hyped. You've struck gold. Make it happen!
@@flatterkatz 🤣
@@flatterkatz i'll do the music
@@flatterkatzAnd whoever makes it needs to adhere to a copyright be damned mentality, meaning more than one person can make this movie and you can't have an issue with people "pirating" it!
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.
I had a whole segment on first sale doctrine I was gonna do! You’re absolutely right that license agreements have made things 10x worse. We somehow decided that you can’t legally share anything digital anymore, even though physical items have been able to be shared and resold for the last 100 years!
I try to argue that piracy isn’t theft, period. But I really do agree with everybody’s favorite slogan “if buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”
@@LextoriasOnly problem is the "If" part. Piracy isn't stealing whether or not Sony want to revoke your ownership of things you have paid them to own.
Genuinly, you could put every other reason aside, piracy is a net good for media for the simple fact that publishers continue to fight tooth and nail to stop you from accessing their media, even after they get rid of any legal ways to access said media otherwise.
If you want me to pay for your, idk, 40 year old product, the least you could do is actually sell it to me.
however, if you have the physical DVD's of movies or audiobooks, you ARE allowed to make a copy to loan, then archive your original.
They are entitled to keep up five copies of the IP for preservation purposes. Library of Congress especially if they IP is created in America.
Say no, they send you to the booty gulag.
That Gabe Newell clip is EXACTLY why I buy games on steam (If they don't have invasive DRM, or forces a second launcher) just because I love the features Steam has. They nailed the user experience, and because of that I would rather buy the game than pirate it.
Steam won when people started thinking "is this game on steam" as the first thought.
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.
Same as here in Kenya.
@alexbett6629 You say you live in Kenya but your profile pic tells me something else 😂
Same here in indonesia
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
Prey 2 (the real Prey 2, not the hot garbage Prey 2 they released out of assend nowhere) currently sits in a desk drawer. The game was never released after Shitesda canceled the game to inflate another of their IPs.
We have gameplay footage, we have written testimony of some of the devs (who dared talk - nda), we have the most balls to the wall trailer for a game (at that time, that inspired some people in Iron Man's movie team for the shoulder rockets) and we will never see that game, because it was sealed by three fucktarts at Bethesda cause it was eating their precious money which they had set on that other hot garbage game that got released in the same timeline.
Some have speculated that had Prey 2 been released, a cyberpunk before CyberPunk (the game), it would've been a Mass Effect killer, which at the time was huge.
Again, the game exists, it's nearly complete. Never got released.
I'm still hoping someone, somewhere farts a copy on the open internet one day.
NIntendo hovering behind a concept for a zelda mod.
@@asertaNah, NeuroShock was pretty awesome. Back when Arkane made good stuff. Granted, wholly different target audience to Prey and should've never taken that name.
Games as a service is not real, stop letting corpos gaslight you, digital goods are still goods thus cant be a service and any lease or licensing contract without a fixed duration for renewal is a sale, especially when their actual attempt to word salad people into thinking they agreed to a contract is void from the start by being outright illegal.
@@ANDELE3025But think if the company shuts down your games are pretty much gone.
Your line about adblockers followed immediately by sponsor skip skipping your ad was hilarious to me
I legit thought I had buffer issues because of the sponsorskip timing 🤣
thanks to this comment for letting me know that sponorskip was even a thing, i didn't know it even existed lol.
You have it too?? Cool!!
I have Sponsorblock too, because I'm tired of people shoving Raid: Shadow Legends down our throats, even though everyone already knows how bad that mobile piece of crap really is!
@@capybara_fan Remember to mark sponsor spots for other users!
If Piracy is hurting the industry, then CEOs wouldn't be making $100+ million a year... Like Bobky Kotick...
These greedy companies only see how much $$$ they might be missing yet they don't see without piracy, these people will not buy the game one way or another. There is no lost on company's end but more of a gain on publicity and fame, it allows more people to get to know their game. Though if people do have money to purchase, don't be stingy to support the game they love.
yep all the CEO is failing upwards which is strange.
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!
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.
Same here in Jordan and Iraq
Most devs don’t even bother with regional pricing and just sell their games for 70$
@@Juanguar Pirate those games for sure. The fact they don't account for the obvious economy change is nothing but greed.
Same here in Turkey. Literally everyone I know has migrated to Epic Games for gaming and we all know how shitty that platform is, and when they inevitably start upping prices too, the only option is turning to piracy if you don't want to fork out 1/8 of your paycheck to a single game.
Literally bought my first games while eating pizza from La Mezzetta in the middle of CABA in response to those news. Telecentro is not a good isp for playing DBD XD.
@@bionicleapple1254 have you looked at GOG? one would assume they'd do good regional pricing. I really prefer GOG to steam these days from a user standpoint, it's way more friendly and offers offline installers for everything
Piracy tends to be an accessibility and pricing issue more than anything else
I think software copyright should have a “use it or lose it” policy.
Basically, in order for a piece of software to remain copyrighted, it would have to still be available firsthand. When a piece of software becomes abandonware, it would enter the public domain.
@@EnigmaticLucas No, see, that would be logical and a result of common sense, lunacy seems to be the natural state of society these days.
@@EnigmaticLucas While abondonware is tehnically copyrighted few companies bother enforcing it. For most of them the studios that own the copyright don't even exist anymore.
@@Avetho lmfao. Although this exact problem has always existed. Stop thinking. Don't use common sense. People in power make absurd decisions with seemingly no sense.
@@adisca2kExcept Nintendo who would haunt the most abandoned piece of software regardless of if it's even available officially or not.
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 😢
Sneaking the IT crowd paraody version of that priracy trailer in there and not acknowledging it at all is amazing 😂😂
“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.
that game is goated
What about now it's time to rock with the bickedy buck bumble.
I'm more of a Monkey D. Luffy kinda pirate :D
I, personally, have always wanted to be a MIGHTY pirate! Incidentally, I'm selling these fine leather jackets...
Right about now it's time to rock with the bigitty Buck Bumble
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.
Man, i love this movie. Didn't wached the sequel.
@@DanielGT_93 The sequel is a trash fire. Stay far far away.
I would guess it depends on a case by case basis. So that experience may well be true. Piracy has advertisement function for sure. And when it regards movies - a lot of people who are anti-piracy forget one crucial point - a lot of movies aren't accessible to people. Hence piracy is the only way to watch them. Those are not lost sales.
And I would go further than just plain banned or country restricted films or old films which are not in the interest of the companies to redistribute. IMO Whenever a studio makes a decision to make a movie or a show exclusive on one platform (Netflix, HBO). They can't put a finger on a pirating for their lost sales. It's disingenuous. Because they decided to bar the access to their show to people. They didn't allow people - paying customers - to watch it. In other words, if a Netflix subscriber pirates Game of Thrones - it's their creators fault for lost sales because of barring those people access to their show and make it HBO exclusive. They didn't WANT those sales. So pirating is justified IMO.
Notch was completely fine with people pirating Minecraft too, and encouraged it
And that was way before he sold it off to Microsoft
@@BierBart12He wasn't really "fine" with it. He was actively shutting down Pirate Minecraft hosting websites, especially when the game released.
I like how you casually lay on the sofa and deliver your essay
The attitude! I love it 😂
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*
Sweet Home Al'Obama
What are you doing step jerky
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.
This is my exact experience. Back in middle / highschool, pirating was the only way to try games out with no income. Now that I have expendable income, and Steam having a consumer friendly return policy, and a hyper convenient storefront. I haven't pirated a game that I could buy instead in years because most times its just easier to buy the game there.
Same on the "pirating to test things out before I buy" thing.
Income wise I'm still stuck in the hellhole of retail work right now barely earning enough for a living because of all the expenses piling up to no end.
@@simplysmiley4670 It only gets worse 😁 I feel your pain though, I got into trade work to get myself out of that hole, I'm still not rich by any means but I pay my bills and have a little leftover for myself so it's as much as I can ask for right now
I totally agree!
I want to try something out before I spend money on it.
Same here. I occasionally buy old games (thanks GOG!) that I used to play as a kid whenever I bump into one. Or I still pirate a game I just bought just to get rid of DRM or get community/scene bug fixes.
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
Venezuelan here: trhough all my childhood and teenage years, the only way to play ANY PC/Console game was to pirate it. Only Nintendo sold physical copies in the country and those were stupidly expensive. The first game I legally owned was The Orange Box, which I bought on a trip to Colombia. I know live in Argentina and have pretty much bought all of the games I played as a kid, not because I wanted to replay them, but because I wanted to support those developers that gave me so much joy a decade earlier.
Piracy is the only way for a lot of people in developing countries to experience games, music and movies.
Pirate the rich devs, support the poor devs. That's the way i look at doing any kind of pirating tbh
What if they say "Yeah I'm Rich!"
BASED
@@diamondhamster4320 I don't even see how it's based anymore. The only reason video game piracy is so "bad" is because they want every single cent they can pinch. It's BS. But theft is theft at the end of the day I suppose... Eh, I just don't think about it too hard. I mean I don't pirate anything anymore besides anime every once in a blue moon so I don't let it bother me. If some video game dev is mad I used to steal other people's games? Cry about it xD
What makes you think people stop at the rich devs? Folks be pirating $3 games from itch. It's good now when it's free publicity but there comes a point where the rate of piracy out-pace the free publicity.
@@tacogodboomdogg which is why my original take is "pirate from rich devs, support the poor devs" I may not be conveying this well and I do apologize, but I don't just like any kind of piracy or pirates as a whole, nor do I focus my attention to them. When I pirate, I'm focused on ME. I know not every pirate plays by those rules of not pirating indie devs and such, but sadly there's nothing I personally can do about it. But what I can do is focus on being me, the pirate who supports and buy games from indie devs and teams who don't have millions upon millions of dollars at any given moment. I'm sorry if that upsets you but hey, welcome to life bud, not everyone is a good actor and follows every rule like it's a yellow brick road
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.
I bought tons of old games I used to play from pirated disks (aka the only ones that existed) in 2000s Ukraine, or later from internet, on Steam, Epic and even Origin now. Didn't even play most of them, just nostalgia hits and good deals. Now then, the prices right now are outrageous and aren't justified at all. Like our weekly salary for a full priced game WTF.
Same. I Pirated the last of us part 1 and really liked it, so I wanted to play part 2, and since that is only on PS5 I bought a (used) PS5, the game, the comic and the art book. Sony/Naughty Dog probably made 100€ at least from that, plus games I'll buy for the PlayStation, which I would have never bought if I didnt need it for TLOUP2
The weekly salary argument being that the economy was so gosh darned amazing, the prices of a digital item had to be high. Also, no trading between countries cause freedom.@@KasumiRINA
@@dansmith16 Our economy collapsed in half when the biggest country in the world invaded us in 2014, and then again in 2022, and it was bad from years of being leeched on by russia anyway, so even if Steam puts games for Ukraine, say, at 50% their original price, it doesn't really work when our salaries are 20 times smaller than in the West.
Trading games between countries was a thing and people earned on that by buying something in, say, Brazil, and reselling keys with slight profit, but Valve leaders hated it as part of money went to pockets of people from third world countries instead of financing their private jets and elite condos.
Your economy collapsed when a rootless clique headed by Zelensky illegally took control of the country and proceeded to leech off it. That Ukraine can get hundreds of billions of dollars and still not recover is laughable.@@KasumiRINA
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.
Facts
Replying to bump it up
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."
When I was younger and couldn't buy games I did this. I ended up buying them all later(first hand so studios got paid); and all expansions etc. Because I liked them.
When I was a kid we had game demos to try the games. Not every game does that nowadays. Or modern games have trial times where all u get to try is the 2 hour walking simulator tutorial lol.
@@Skyverb I try to do the same nowadays! I haven't kept great track of what I pirated at like, 14yo or something but I do it when I can.
I love the devs behind Darkwood, Acid Wizard Studio. When the game released, they uploaded their own game on TPB to be pirated by people who couldn't afford it. I recall them posting a little bit of backstory that led to that decision on some steam news thing, talking about how they themselves didn't have much access to videogames when they were younger or something. I bought it myself just this month when I remembered I hadn't done so yet and I beat it like, the week it released I think.
Here in brazil we couldn't even buy games online easily until around 2016 I think. My dad would say it was something to do with the credit card not working for those types of purchases from outside the country or w/e. Our only option for PC and the playstations we had (which were either hand-me-downs or belonged to my brothers who saved like hell for them) was, funnily enough, games that were clearly just torrented, burnt to a CD, and packaged with a shitty JPG of the games' actual cover art (or sometimes fan art, whatever the store owner thought looked cooler I guess) in a plastic bag, which my dad stopped paying for when he found out he could just buy the blank CDs himself and get whatever game he wanted. Movies were the same deal. It was kind of magical.
For sure. I pirated sleeping dogs, liked it and bought it.
This is exactly how Shareware used to work.
the thing is it doesnt always work that way. that dev profited through the publicity that story got. most ppl dont care if they get it for free and will never even think about buying it. same as ppl who pirate movies or music did never buy it afterward. You doing this is the exception. this game that made money through this publicity stunt is an exception.
I'm an artist who also sells online products like brushes and small art classes online. for a long time,e i had my stuff for free with just saying if u liked it think about donating a dollar. I had lots of ppl commenting they wanted to buy and pay for my stuff before i released it. got like 700 downloads on my brushpack with great reviews and an amazing 10$. 7$ of that i got from ppl i already knew personally. that isn't even enough to take it off the platform.
no one cares about u making money. and especially if u are a smaller creator.
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.
W mans
Very good. That is all.
honor and respect towards indie game devs and small game companies or companies that produce genuinely good games. they deserve every bit of money they can get even if I pirated their games earlier.
Yep, piracy is a free trial for games without a demo.
The game’s 15 bucks on steam, and it goes on heavy discount.
I read the title as "video games prices are actually good" so i was shook by the intro it made it way funnier 🤣
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!
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.
Gaben is a God
Gaben is still talking from a place of sheltered blue collar privilege.
Taking about 2k computers owners pirating to victimize his corporation, when the vast majority of pirates are kids and people with no economic power to purchase his products in a computer build from hand me down parts.
Gsben is just a rich asshole that covers his greed very well.
which is why ill ONLY buy games on STEAM unless something habbens to our lord and saviour.....GABE-N
if only they would fix the VAC system
yea VAC can be kinda funky sometimes @@vain.a2
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??
oh captain my captain
A Trespasser, but the only thing that's pirated is the Dinghy.
Yes. But the cool kind
commandeer! you dont steal a boat, you commandeer!
@@mandurrudnam7632 My apologies captain, it won't happen again captain! 🫡
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
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.
not to mention streaming back then is ads free, nowdays they shove ads at you even if you're premium.
When the pirates are the heroes, you know the industry didn't just dropped the ball, it went through the floor.
I stopped pirating games when I got a job, at 18 years old, haven't pirated a game since.
They might be the pirates of the lazy basement people that's close to 40 and cannot afford a game... maybe if you cannot afford it, you shouldn't be playing.
@@GeomancerHT thing is pirates tend to become the best customers if the game is good, it's been proven time and time again
@@GeomancerHT also you might want to play a game and not support a company that doens't please you, also cracked versions tend to have *better* performance sometimes (see the dogshit denuvo)
@@GeomancerHT I can easily buy and have bought plenty of games, I just choose to not throw my money at everything, as Gaben said, piracy shows there's a problem with the service not the price (altough in recent years, prices tend to be dogshit as well), I can afford stuff but that doesn't mean I want to rip myself off
@@GeomancerHT Do the games cost you half of your monthly salary? If it did, would you still buy them?
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.
but i don't get it. if a stranger doesn't give me their money, they do rob me from the potential of a big hit on the slot machine .... and i'm the main character ....
Holy fuck! Way to sum up why I dropped out of business school so succinctly!
Sadly
When gaming became big business everyone tried dipped their spoons into the gumbo.
Its how PC gaming went about famously epic games said gaming wasn't for PC.
Then steam came along and streamlined it and they're trying underhanded scummy ways to try to weasle into the market with the EGS.
The first mistake was caring about the corpos. They’re just a bunch of greedy conduits to exploit employees and make money for shareholders that shouldn’t have rights. Do the opposite of whatever the person with the profit incentive tells you
@@newturtle3 I'm pretty sure Epic games never said that
Considering all of their games are PC games
Their engines built specifically for PC
The whole user aspect approach of integrating MAYA with Unreal Tournament 2004 so PC players could easily mod the game and make custom maps with Unreal Engine (2.0 back then)
And the fact that Unreal Tournament 3 completely flopped on console
(nearly ended up bankrupting the company that's how hard it flopped)
So i'm calling you out cause there's no way epic games said ''gaming isn't for PC'' and i don't understand why you'd lie about that. Sadly there is a lot of lying going on these days with the botted comments etc.
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!
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?
Don’t just worry about the entire site going down! Individual authors can and should delete their works anytime they please. I personally download any work I want to reread. I only read fanfic on mobile, so I downloaded KyBook and download fics from AO3 as ebubs
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
Or because they cant afford to spend money on games so they wouldnt buy the games either way, so this is the only way they play these games anyway, they dont lose out on sth that wouldnt happen either way
yeah dude I'm not spending $60 on a game im gonna play for 2 weeks. or $30 on a game that came out 5 years ago
If it's easier to pirate stuff then get it legitimately then they will pirate it. Due to current streaming services all having their own payments while each having exclusive shows a lot of people pirated them
@nfrcomputers3421 it's the sake logic behind buying a paint brush. Why would I want to buy a brush for 5 bucks If I am only using it for 2 days. Better pirate it.
If you don't like the price then don't buy it
Here in brazil we woudnt have videogames without piracy. Since games got affordable in the late 2000s my motto is: pirate when i cant afford it, then buy it later when i can. Im also kind of a software hippie, and i buy on GOG when available so i have the game and not just a licence.
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
Honestly the fact we don't have laws about media and technology preservation is disgusting, you'd think after stuff like beowulf or hell, roman concrete people would realize the importance of preservation at least on a cultural level.
@@tatsuya2112They just dont understand us gamers.😞
That's what I'll never understand about people who are adamant that piracy is always wrong, go find a used copy and buy it.
If I pirate an old Nintendo game, Nintendo makes no money
If I buy an old Nintendo game on eBay for well more than it's worth, Nintendo makes no money
The only difference between piracy and eBay is how screwed over I get by a scalper. It makes no difference to Nintendo. Nintendo can change it by offering their old games for sale digitally. Emphasis on "for sale", I'm not paying a subscription to rent them
@@mjc0961 Seriously
Them allowing ROMs to be hosted on other site does not affect them financially whatsoever
Most other game companies don't even care and they're still up and running
People can't even say the reason for Nintendo taking down ROM sites is "Money" if they don't give a way to obtain these games in the first place
You can call pirate for old video games only when it still has legitimate seller which mean that exact publisher or games developer. But as you know most if not all been died long ago some even before you were born and there is no way to buy it anymore so how that heck become pirating when there is no way to buy in the first place.
Youve done a great job on this video, thoroughly enjoyed this.
Genuinely interesting video with a lot of great points. Keep up the amazing work!
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.
And the funny part is that if the game is insanely popular and sells millions of copies, there would be approx 20k people who pirate the game! From those 20k, not even half would have bought the game if it wasn't possible to pirate anyway!
Looking at Marvels Spider-Man, has sold 50M copies and has only been pirated 23k times. Like "pirates" are not a problem for the companies that force in denuvo into their already broken and unfinished games!
@@takemeseriouslyplx2124 eh, you didn't count China or russia, which will have like 99% of everything pirated. One of reasons Interplay and Troika went out of business the games they published were insanely popular in places where nobody buys anything, and if they do, it was pirated CDs, so they got no profits - this doesn't justify AAA publishers ripping people off, just sayin' that for every cartridge of some old game, there's multiple people downloading a rom pack, I don't think it's wrong, just that it's far more widespread than people pretend. I buy stuff if I WANT to support devs OR need convenience, there are also collectors etc., let people choose how they get games.
@@KasumiRINAEven with zero piracy no one would just buy games in Russia in early 00s because average salary was about 100 dollars a month. Only with appearance of regional pricing and Steam russian game market grown and was one of the biggest europe market until 2022.
There are an infinite number of ways the average person can be harmed by events, the millionaire/billionaire can only be affected by jail time or game over.
The European markets outside Russia are collapsing and Germany is imploding. Russia is winning.@@artemlarionov7084
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.
to add to that, theres also a former blizzard dev that left it and is making his own games now, his channels called Pirate Software, and he explained how he dealt with Piracy for his game in Brazil, he jsut made it affordable for people there to by it, in the sense that he took in to account the local economic situation of the people that live there, set a price then permanently made the game on sale in brazil and now, as he said, brazil is about 25 to 30% of the games revenue from there. I am jsut paraphrasing but that was the general gist of it, which makes sense and gels with what gab said!
I dread the day when Gaben kicks the bucket. If Valve goes public it's game over. Pun intended.
@@lazarmarinkovic8486 I have a friend in brazil and he explained to me that games and game systems are very heavily taxed to a point that a playstation might cost you like 6 month of average salary or something like that.
@@Shinkajo At this point he needs to really focus on getting a new leader after he is gone. He should focus mainly on making sure his successor is someone with his mindset and wants everyone to be happy not fill their own pockets.
@@masterpills At this point, he needs to focus on perfecting cloning or immortality so none of us have to face the risk of someone being groomed to fill his shoes who just plays the part and says all the right things until God Emperor Gabe is in the ground, then flips the script with no (personal) consequences.
Only ACTUAL solution I can think of is for his will to be clear that the person and any who come after Gabe is gone are never actual owners of the company, only "caretakers" of it, with the legal ownership being formulated in such a way where the legal owner knows they are the owner but have no authority to do anything to it, and the "caretaker" has authority but only within a sort of "Constitution" in Gabes will that lists out rules and boundaries that must be kept, and maybe allow for "amendments" to these terms only by popular vote by the Steam Community that is hosted by Valve but organized and managed by an outside 3rd party...and all of this being kept in check and balance by a team of lawyers whose job it is are to ensure that anytime either party (Valve leadership "caretakers" or the legal owners) overstep their limits or authority or prerogative, they hold the power to remove that person and replace them with someone else (with restrictions on who can be in either position, such as no one who is a current or former lawyer or related by blood or marriage to anyone involved in the company or legal team...always has to be a sort of sensible person for the position, but must be an outsider who can easily be kept in check and wont be easily drawn one way or another from the start do to nasty connections).
But that is stupidly complex, would be easy to find loop-holes and work-arounds, and likely would end up being either ignored or struck down by a higher court. All it could maybe do is buy us a few more precious moments of enjoyment before crap hits the fan. I just hope that by the time Valve does commit itself to forever-sleep self harm in the name of money, another company pops up to take over at the rightful heirs of God Emperor Gabe and his legacy. Would be even better if they somehow found a way to honor Steam past purchases on their platform so we could merge our library into theirs, but if I was in La-La Land with cloning and immortality, that idea right there is officially insane.
Lets just enjoy it while it lasts...the God Emperor is rich af, but has never been in the best health. I say we might have a solid 10 years, maybe 20...and then maybe ~5 years after hes gone before the Golden Age finally ends.
would like to mention game key resellers online. some publishers would rather you pirate their games than buy them from external services, as the keys are illegally obtained through compromised bank info and the money comes out of the publisher's pocket once a complaint is made. pirates only takes the games, thus the publisher makes no money. key resellers literally steal the publisher's money, and piracy is worse apparently?
With the closure of the 3ds shop i finally homebrewed my 3ds and i'm having the time of my life over here 😊
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.
Lol, so playing a cracked version is actually preferable.
@@yesseru Yep since pirate people already disabled those anti piracy bs lol.
Funniest thing is that people who pirated the game even back in the 2000s largely didn't know about these measures because they were cracked too quickly.
The reason they pirated it is so it could run without a disk, since, you know, digital games don't have disks
That’s to ironic to be true, how tf XD
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$US).
Imagine games costing half of your monthly salary.
You mean Tekken 8 Ultimate edition that cost 119$US in the first place?
00s Lithuania was like that. Now our wages got much better, but before it was like that. I remember walking in store and seeing 60-80 litas games (around 20-30 dollars), while average wage was from 200-400 litas (80-160 dollar) range. It was impossible to buy a game, so everyone pirated it.
Blame your own country for the economy issue don't blame steam. Steam is only converting the price faithfully
@@elmertsai1312world doesn't revolve around murica mate....not that America itself is any better financially these days lol
@@elmertsai1312 thats not how economy works. For example price of a kilo of meat or barrel of oil is different in each country cause it accounts for inflation and etc, etc. The fact Steam just takes dollar prices and then applies those to all countries is nuts. Also they shouldnt expect record sales then, nor slowdown of piracy if they keep doing that.
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.
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.
I've seen the video as well, but it's only his situation, a single indie developer who gave creator keys left and right without properly verifying who were the people asking for it.
I don't think that's actually where most of the keys comes from.
Piratesoftware I presume?
-@rcier2789 Some keys will probably be stolen from Steam Accounts (if that's even possible).-
@@Peekofwar It's not? Lmao
Most likely it's credit card fraud or simply buying at a discount in some countries where it's cheap
keys purchased with stolen credit cards, when they inevitably get charged back by the owner, the vendor (typically Steam obviously) passes the credit card fees on to the developer (typically only a few dollars but it adds up) meaning that the developer a) made no money from the sale and b) is now out of pocket a few bucks. That's generally the main reason devs prefer piracy to sites like g2a though that being said, there are people selling legit keys too on those sites, I have myself for games I had keys for but didn't want, just generally not the norm.
Buying at discounts doesn't work anymore, Steam has long since removed that ability, if the difference is ~10% or greater you can't send gifts between regions. @@enzomercier2789
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.
You have the right, by law, for making backups, sure, but the companies are not obligated, by law, to make it easy (or even possible), which is why we used to have copy protections on discs that made it difficult to make copies of said discs. LaserLock is a good example from the olden days.
How is the tax implemented in Sweden? In Finland, the tax is charged in the price of mass media, such as writable discs and I think other types of mass media themselves instead of being part of something like VAT other broader tax covering other stuff.
@@ErdeZ I think my stronger point is that the companies are straight up lying to your face that you're not allowed to make copies. It just adds to the gaslighting.
I think it's implemented similarly to Finland. Covers CDs, HDD, USB etc. It also covers MP3 players which makes me question if it's implemented on smartphones too.
It seems to be a EU wide thing, that this is included in the sales tax.
we have somting similar, and i think its a eu regulation that you are aloud to copy for home juse, but sadly its illegal to brake the copy-protection
@@ErdeZ Erde!WOp8MiNHQ sure is a name I haven't heard in a long time.
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? 😲
gamersupps immediately earned my unending respect by being willing to sponsor a video actively encouraging piracy
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"
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.
Because with the advent of upscaling, developers forgone optimization.
For example a turd like Starfail requires upscaling to run above 60FPS on low settings. There's literally nothing in that game that looks remotely good and yet it behaves like Crisis on max details.
piracy isnt stealing if buing isnt owning
@@delta9990 aye aye, captain!
@@LecherousLizard well, you see, the game is using a very large amount of your computer's RAM to load and run all the complexity and mind-boggling, revolutionary game technology of...
nothing. there's nothing. it's just shit optimisation.
i bought knockout city twice and the game didn't even last 3 years
As of late Ive started pirating any game which has a EULA stating anything like "you dont own this, we only license it to you" in it. If paying for a product like a video game doesnt give me ownership of said product then I feel no obligation to pay for it. The only reason for such policies is pure greed and an addiction to infinite growth at any cost. It shows me you, as a company, dont care for the quality of your game and only the money to made from it
Great video. I appreciate the effort that went into it
7:11 as a russian, I didn't understand that not everything online is free until I was 13 (when I discovered steam)
Slava Ukraini
@@DrBagPhD ?
@@DrBagPhDI'm sure not every Russian supports the invasion of Ukraine. We gotta separate the government from the citizens y'know
@@DrBagPhD ?
Same here... As a South African. Everyone who wasn't aware during the CD period or before didn't even know where to get their favorite songs. Meanwhile techies/gamers like me and friends would pass around Pirate sites to one another. It wasn't until I turned 17 and had access to unlimited internet, as a result steam and more, that I realised games actually cost money and learned what piracy is. Also in a way making me realise that according to companies every South African is a criminal lol.
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.
I'd say piracy is the best form of advertisement around. It costs you basically nothing, and it spreads through the most effective means that is word of mouth.
If your game is good, all that uber ad "spend" will translate into more sales through sheer volume. If your game is bad, you weren't going to sell much anyways
Not going to lie. I too know Crysis from pirate. When it was no easy way to buy and no money to buy a good PC just to play it. I was able to get a decent PC 4-5 years after the game launched.
Actually piracy is also another way of advertisement so in a way though there is a disadvantage piracy has advantages for the company being pirated.
One dev actually commented on kissass torrent page that it's ok to pirate but do consider buying the game if you had fun.
It was a turning point in their reputation.
People often don't know this.
@@Demopans5990
The only other form of advertising I think even compares is the free playable demo, and how many games have one of those anymore? I've seen, I think, 1 playable demo in the last year, and that was for an indie game. Most games these days just do early access instead, which isn't the same, since you still have to pay for it, and before the game is even finished.
You are great storyteller and I appreciate all the effort you put into this. \o/
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.
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.
This is the main reason I'm trying to have physical copies of everything I own digitally. They've already proven they're more than willing to prevent us from enjoying their content if it's digital
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.
It really says something when the parody isn't any more insane than some of the real PSAs of the time
As a fellow The IT Crowd enjoyer, I'm glad someone else noticed it.
I thought that was the joke?!
@@BierBart12 Kind of like the pot PSA where the kid shoots his friend. Or himself, it's been a while.
You wouldn't shoot a Policeman, and then steal his helmet. You wouldn't go to the toilet in his helmet. You wouldn't send it to the Policeman's grieving widow... and then steal it again!
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 really want you to make a video on the history of the scene, it's wild
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.
You can’t really test live service games, there needs to be server, and hosting a server just for the demo version sounds like a waste of money. Beside that, considering how broken some new AAA games on launch, I don’t think that’s gonna help to sell the game.
But yeah, for true singleplayer games it sounds good.
Thats ignoring games that just straight up arent being sold anymore.
Or are exclusive to consoles that arent being sold anymore.
Or that are tied to servers that died years ago.
If they insist on us paying for their product, they should at least try actually selling it first.
Nowadays you can just watch a gameplay video. Usually people who are media literate can figure out from there whether it's something they enjoy.
Tekken 8 has this and it got me into the game because of it
A game having a demo makes it much more likely for me to buy it.
I like to try out a game before buying it and if I'm not getting a demo I might as well try to pirate it first. Then if I like it, I buy it.
Being able to pirate games have made it more likely that I actually buy them.
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.
I do the exact same thing. If I like the game I buy it if not I delete it. If you're going to try the game for a day or two and then get a refund on steam because it doesn't click with you and what's the difference of just downloading it off of a repack website and then just deleting it from your computer. If I play a PC version of a game and I enjoy it I buy it.
Plus not to mention steam opening itself whenever you want to play a specific game hogging resources in the background. Between that and the denuvo protection makes it way harder too enjoy the game if you play it the "intended" way. Even when I buy the game I more often than not still play the crack of it because it just runs better.
Similar for me, bigger deal is games with insane amounts of dlcs, I buy the game, not the dlcs
I do this but to check the system requirements, my pc is extremely weird in running games, some high end games run fine but mid range does not even work on low, so I try then buy if It works (can't abuse the steam refund policy)
I forgot to mention once a year I send $100 of crypto to fit-girl as well. Time is money and the time saved by what the group does is clearly worth it.
damn cool vid man... keep up the good work, u got my sub amigo ;)
Friggin beautiful. I wonder how this translated to the audio software/plugin piracy world.
Can't believe you paid money for that new couch when you could have just pirated it.
You wouldn’t download a couch
@@Lextoriasthere's always Digital Ikea...
Could this maybe just be solved by giving digital licenses much shorter copyrights? Maybe 5-10 years? We need to find a compromise with the corpo-brained people and get good optics.
You can't steal a couch. You get them dirt cheap at Goodwill.
Yeah 3D print a better one next time!
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?"
damn
I love this video, I love the amount of research you do, and I love how you stand up for workers' rights by not shying away from talking about how poorly game devs are often treated
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.
damn, even his couch was arrested...
it was an accessory to piracy
He was wearing black, I'm surprised all those shots missed...
On DRM bricking CD drives: It happened to me. My friends and I used to love buying games out of the Best Buy bargin bin, trying to find a gem to play at LAN parties. I made the mistake of buying the game SpellForce 2, which StarForce.
The game installed but wouldn't play. My CD drive simply stopped working. Wouldn't open, wouldn't read the SpellForce 2 CD, but was still seen by the PC. I tried rebooting, reseating the drive, manually prying the disc tray open, everything. Nothing worked, my CD drive was just dead. I bought a legal copy of a game with DRM and it killed my hardware.
Now that's a way to quickly radicalize someone against DRM.
Can someone smarter than me explain how this even works? How tf do they brick something like a CD drive without it being easily reversible?? 😱
@@weirdrabbitgirlI think the drm had messed with cd's software that communicates with the pc and it straight up bricked it. Just like if you want to flash a new version of BIOS on your motherboard and you turn it off before it's done, code gets corrupted and now you just have a piece of junk. I guess you could try to get a new chip and resolder it but I have no idea. I am not an expert in this. Just thought I would put my two cents here.
I think you could sue for that.
@@weirdrabbitgirl I've looked a bit into how StarForce worked, and it's honestly not surprising it went wrong.
To give you the Cliff Notes, computers communicate with their peripherals, including CD-drives, with device drivers, software used to facilitate instruction translation between the two systems.
StarForce had its own drivers installed alongside the software it was meant to protect. There were several issues with the way this was implemented, it was unknown to the user and not even so much as mentioned in the license agreement of the associated games, but the largest problem by far was that these drivers were installed with kernel-level access, allowing it to make changes to the operating system itself.
This was by design and almost every implementation of StarForce was different, but there are reports that some versions used this access to alter how the computer communicated with the CD-drive, changing things such as memory access and even slowing drives down at times. This is likely where the issues with CD-drives spawned from, and why it was so inconsistently reported.
It's important to note that this was necessary to StarForce's function, physical parts of the CD were the key to the encrypted files on the disc, and so it needed to be able to verify certain aspects of the CD.
My suspicion in this particular case is that StarForce altered something in the way the operating system and CD-drive were communicating, leading to them being unable to do so outside the operating system recognizing that it was present.
StarForce's changes were notoriously difficult to undo, with several special utilities being developed for doing so over the course of its usage. It's possible that one of these utilities, provided it fully removed StarForce's drivers, would have allowed the CD-drive to function again.
I can't really say without more info, but this is at least the conclusion I'd reach based on what I could find. The key problems with StarForce was its unrestricted system access along with its volatility, so you just never knew what to expect from it.
@@littlesisterlover9105 If that were the case then wouldn't a simple reformat and OS reinstall fix the issue for the CD drive? If it only had kernel level access it *shouldn't* mess with the actual firmware of the CD drive itself, right? Either way it's pretty shitty that it did that. Hell maybe even just removing and reinstalling the CD-ROM drive driver, and/or the communication bus drivers should fix the issue.
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
What a delightful video.
Anti-piracy is the reason I stopped buying Ubisoft games. Boycott that sh!t.
Piracy is the reason I can still play SNES and PSX games on Emulators.
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.
I'm not doubting you, but how does it cost the dev money? If I understand correctly, the reseller gets the cc, buys it legally, then resells it cheaply right? If the victim asks for its money back, wouldn't the dev be at cost 0 since he just have to give the money back?
@@LuisSoto-fw3ifCC companies charge you for the "service" of getting the money back from you. It's only a dollar or so per transaction, but you can see how that may add up when there's millions of keys being sold all over the internet
@@LuisSoto-fw3ifthe reseller's supplier used carding/ stealing people's cc, the chargeback is charged because the bank see the dev is scamming the original card holder.
The problem with pirating is that in many cases games are tied to an online service, which gets very hard to use from a pirated copy sometimes, so people swallow the pill and buy the most likely stolen key.
@@LuisSoto-fw3ifexcept the great majority of these places don't do that. Some of the keys they get are like that, but the majority of the keys are from other places, like the steam clan thing, or email spamming as a false youtuber.
The whole "buy somewhere else cheaper and resell here for more" doesn't work in Steam because Steam has region locks for keys so people don't do this
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 love this example because terraria is already a really cheap game
STARCLAN???
@@deadboyo2773some people, for reasons other than the amount of money they have, can buy things for $0 but not anything $0.01 or more
i am part of that group btw
WARRIOR CATS SPOTTED??
Oh hi Warriors
Lmao the piracy add clip you played made my day, ive watched the transporter on dvd at my cabin many times and i hear and see that clip everytime 😂
For Crytek, I can imagine many people pirated Crysis to see if they could even play the game