• Not this line again 😉

      Support your game developers!!

      Pirate games if you want to, but don’t pretend it’s anything more than piracy - no judgement here, I have a stack of ROM from NES to Gamecube, but my line in the sand is I won’t pirate games that are currently available via a legitimate paid route.

      If you’re wanting to stick it N, then don’t even pirate. Just… don’t play the games. There’s some evidence that pirating, via taking about and generating “chatter” about the games you’ve played, still contributes in some small way to sales (bizarrely).

      • Support your INDIE game developers!

        Buy games from their website instead of steam/epic and don’t buy from key resellers!

        As for big companies… Yeah fuck them. They already make more money than your brain could even begin to compute, they really don’t need your 70/80 bucks.

        I’m not saying to pirate the games (unless they aren’t easily available somewhere else), I want to encourage people to BUY SECOND HAND! Videogames are amazing to buy second hand, they don’t wear off by being played, and you can usually get a like-new copy for 40% off.

        If you’re a pc gamer wait for sales/price drops, and if the game has any DRM bullshit in it, buy and then pirate if you want to stay legal.

        • Can’t disagree with any of that! Though that said buying second hand also doesn’t support developers (Indie or otherwise) as none of that money goes to them. DRM absolutely needs to die in a fire. I don’t think there has been a single title that has actually been prevented from being pirated by it, all it does it make life hard for actual paying customers.

          • It’s a matter of opinions, really. IMO Indie devs deserve all the money they can earn, while big companies already earn billions and will live on no matter what and you could eventually need those 20-30 bucks you saved each time. And even if you won’t they’ll be better reinvested into projects like lemmy, to name one.

            Also buying second-hand is always an eco-friendly choice, so there’s that too.

      • Pirating from any billion dollar company is morally correct, (don’t) change my mind.

        After all the bullshit these corpos keep pulling, with anti consumer practices and just hostile actions in general (not bothering to archive/preserve history and letting things rot because it’s ‘not profitable’), they can all go kick rocks.

        • Piracy is not morally correct. Theft is theft however it’s positioned. I have zero issue with you personally pirating, but I do think suggesting that it’s a morally correct thing along with all the lofty social-good that implies is disingenuous.

          I also didn’t say anything at all about how the money from the sale of a game gets distributed 😉

              1. My language was in error, but you get the essence of my point

              2. Agree to differ. It is reasonable for the author or owner of a creative work to chose to protect their work and earn revenue from it. The Mouse has severely pushed copyright into something very far from what it should be, and it is in dire need of reform, but it certainly should not be abolished. Artists / creatives and rights holders (who may be one and the same, or may have purchased rights from the creator or may have funded the creation of the work which are all reasonable) should have the right to decide if their works are open / libre or a commercial work.

          • The ruling class steals from the working class. By stealing from them, you are winning back some small amount of what has been taken from you, and withholding a tiny bit of power and influence they would have had if you’d bought the product. Shoplifting is also morally correct for this reason.

            Now, you shouldn’t steal from co-ops, because they generally don’t steal from their workers. Small businesses are a bit of a gray area, as many of them are much more ethical than big businesses, but many of them aren’t, too, and you can’t always know which is which.

            And before you accuse me of simply adopting a morality that is convenient to me, it’s true that I’ve always been ambivalent at worst about piracy, but I used to be firmly against shoplifting. Even tried to report a shoplifter to my supervisor when I was working retail, the one and only time I noticed someone shoplifting. (Thankfully in hindsight, they peeled out of the parking lot before they could be caught.) I came by my morals not when I suddenly needed to shoplift or pirate, but gradually as I stopped believing in liberal ideals.

            To be clear, I’m not saying you’re some kind of hero if you pirate or shoplift. Just that, ethically speaking, it’s better than buying from them.

            No, you didn’t, but you said to “support” the game devs, and how does buying a game “support” them if little of the money goes to them?

      • There’s not really anything bizarre about it, people discover things by word of mouth, and people also like to try things out they see other people doing / playing.

        It’s like trying to stick it to an F2P game by just “not paying”, it doesn’t work because players are content and encourage other people to spend more time on them, and some of those people will end up paying money. You stick it to them by just not playing at all and reducing awareness by not even discussing it, even if it might be small in the big picture.

        • Agreed entirely! This is why I don’t like the “pirating Nintendo games is always morally right” trope. It doesn’t hurt Nintendo anything like the line implies and it’s just an attempt to justify piracy.

    • Which was a colossal dick move on their part. Much more so than usual. Shutting down Switch key extractors etc… I get - that’s their current line of consoles and they have a justifiable right to prevent “unauthorised” uses (much as you and I might ethically think differently). But for a console for which physical and digital games are no longer sold first party and for which Nintendo have no route to gain any revenue? That’s just nasty.