[Image Description]: A meme in the style of anti-piracy ads stating the following:
You wouldn’t pirate a game you already paid for to be able to play it again since the company stopped supporting it and no longer sells it
[Image Description]: A meme in the style of anti-piracy ads stating the following:
You wouldn’t pirate a game you already paid for to be able to play it again since the company stopped supporting it and no longer sells it
Hot take: if you bought the game, but need to download a crack or cracked version to play it because the anti cheat or product key validation or whatever is broken, then you haven’t pirated the game. You’re only reclaiming access to something you paid for.
Side note, this isn’t legal advice and IANAL.
I feel the same about downloading movies that you bought which became so damaged that they can no longer be watched from the original media. You own the content, but because they packaged it in a way that was prone to becoming unusable, you lost access to the content. You still paid for a license to the media, but lost access to that media. If you regain that access -by whatever means- then you still legally have the right to it.
I know the courts and copyright lawyers would argue about the license being for that particular copy on that particular media or something, but I disagree.
Many years back , a friend was a manager of a game shop. They let me bring in badly scarred discs of movies and PS1/2 games, pay a very small fee (I want to say like $1/disc?) to get a brand new copy of the disc as replacement. Was a service that was available to resell shops apparently, though she mentioned that it also has a subscription aspect that likely placed it well out of reach of mortals.
I’d even be fine with mildly increased cost on something like that for regular consumers, but alas no…