I buy the things I want to support. Small game studios get my money. Bands get my money directly, I buy albums and merch. Pretty much, small businesses or organizations that put great amounts of care and love into their high quality work get my money all day, as directly as i can. But would I pay for an Activision/EA game? Or a Marvel movie? Absolutely not.
I’ve been pirating for twenty years and you do kind of just stick with it even when you can afford stuff.
That said, when I reinstalled Windows a while ago, I was fannying about for aaaaaages trying to get a cracked version of Office to work when I suddenly realised I could just buy it for a tenner and not have to fuck about 😂 It hadn’t occurred to me before
Yeah office is literally the only thing that’s not worth it. Lifetime office 2019 is like 20 euro. This will die out with the subscription shit taking place though
Yep, it’s likely a sus licence, but when it eventually refuses to work, a quick phone call to MS and they just say “Fuck it, go on then”. Call centre people don’t care where you got it 😅
I’ve pirated almost everything for the last 30 years from msdos on. But I wouldn’t say it’s a lifestyle. It’s just that most of the stuff I would never buy. I don’t need them, they are not important, but maybe I want a taste. I don’t pirate music anymore because it’s not practical and some of the software. Some. Games I don’t play much anymore, but I would pirate them until I have like 50 hours in. Then I start thinking maybe it makes sense to buy. Unless it turns out cracked version is better than official one.
Pay it forward. I’m from 3rd world country. Growing up pirating gave me and my brother precious memories playing cs, doom, star wars, gta2, rollercoster tycoon, sims etc. Not to mention music and movies which would’ve cost us weeks of our food money if we would’ve bought it legitimately. We both grew up and made decent enough money now. I paid for my games and sometimes paid to play old games if i could find it in Steams. Million thanks to all the crackers, hosters, translators, modders, seeders, etc. You made my childhood memorable, and worth living despite all the shits going around us where we live. Oh not to mention i learned better english playing games than learning it from school.
Profit is what’s leftover after everyone gets paid.
Profit, by definition is excess.
You might want to study some basic economics before you come across as being clever. You’re buying into rhetoric that exists to take advantage of your ineptitude.
As Mark Twain once said, “it’s easier to fool a man than to convince him he’d been fooled.”
LOL profit is the motive of literally every business on the planet. You don’t even need “basic economics” to understand that.
As James Downey once said: “What you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this sub is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”
I’m still not understanding what that has to do with this discussion.
I can tell. It’s in response to your hyperbole, “Is it your hope that they will stop producing media for you to watch?” You are arguing that if they make less profit, then they won’t make media at all which isn’t true.
Is it your hope that they will stop producing media for you to watch?
If people had higher standards for what they spend their money on, businesses would have to meet those standards or go out of business. They can, they would just make less profit.
That means more money for you and me.
You really should study basic economics. It’s sad watching you laugh and dismiss facts because they describe how you’re being taken advantage of.
You are arguing that if they make less profit, then they won’t make media at all which isn’t true.
Buddy, you’re the one that said “or they make nothing at all” , not me.
You really should study basic economics.
For the third time, none of this has anything to do with economics, basic or otherwise.
It’s sad watching you laugh and dismiss facts because they describe how you’re being taken advantage of.
It’s sad watching you struggle with the difference between not paying for something and choosing to steal it. It’s sad watching you poorly try to justify crimes because, in your opinion, it’s too expensive. I’m not being taken advantage of. I pay what I think the service is worth, and when it fails to meet that value proposition, I simply don’t watch it…
Typically, personally, I will subscribe to a service for a month or 2 at a time because by that time I have consumed everything interesting that it has to offer.
I pirate because it’s more convenient, surprisingly I don’t pirate games and music because of steam and spotify, steam is just convenient, so is spotify it’s more convenient than fucking around with finding music you like
movies/tv shows it’s more convenient to have my own plex server
Gaben himself in interviews says all data points towards the best way to combat piracy is by providing a good service/convenience. The biggest reason for piracy isn’t money, surprisingly.
Personally I stopped sailing when streaming services just started. They were reasonably priced, they weren’t fragmented, and I could hop to another one for a month and catch up on their exclusives. Then they started becoming bastards in every single aspect of convenience and cost so back to sailing.
There’re a couple of huge downsides (for me personally) to streaming services that just grinds with me:
the quality is always worse than physical media, and
scrobbing (moving back and forwards in the video, with the arrow keys or by moving the playback head) is almost never instantaneous, it usually requires a couple of seconds while the video rebuffers
Perhaps physical media is better these days (than DVDs were) for scrobbing, but then you have the FBI piracy messages to deal with. I’ve never owned a BluRay player, perhaps they’re better?
But I know that sailing the high seas gets me a high-quality video, and I can jump backwards ~5 seconds instantaneously when I’ve not heard a bit a of dialogue.
I mean, if you can afford it you should support industries. I pirate a lot. Movies. Games. Music. Etc. Nothing wrong with that IMO, at this point piracy is the closest we can get to true ownership over anything because the entire industry has fcked over consumer rights for assumed profit. But I still buy physical releases because I don’t want content I enjoy to die and I like building a collection of good content. Blurays are great (although also DRM encumbered :/), nothing beats the smell of new manga, and at this point music streaming is just a far better experience than piracy (I use qobuz). If you’re young or poor then do what you have to to enjoy yourself. If you’re an adult with a great salary then don’t be an entitled prick. If theirs ways to support content you enjoy you should. If such ways aren’t provided like most Netflix originals not having blurays then fck Netflix release some blurays if you want my money.
Piracy is whatever. Using an old school ass MP3 player in 2023 is unhinged though. I’m sure their phone can do whatever that MP3 player can do just as easily.
That hasn’t been a concern for me since the early days of the modern smartphone era. But I can see it being an issue for older phones with worn out batteries or something.
As big media has screwed us by changing their offerings from products to services, as such I have changed my perspective about piracy. I will gladly patronize a creative by paying for their services, i.e. attending their performances. Their performance is a service. Their products, the media, is no longer. Copy it as you wish. They want to change the rules on us and convert what we buy from products to services which milk every last penny from us, contributing to this disastrous economy, they’re going to get a taste of their own medicine. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. They don’t like it when you used the rules they changed (intending to milk your wallet dry) against them. Boo hoo. I guess they don’t get that last million dollars. Meanwhile, we work 80 hours a week just to break even financially, but driving us further and further to the brink of madness, knowing that unless some revolution changes things, we will never be privileged enough to have earned enough money to accrue enough savings to retire, they’d rather have us poor and beholden to the 1%-ers above us. You should know this famous saying, “boss makes a dollar, I make a dime”. The people are starting to fight back with unprecedented coordination, thanks to the presence of the internet, which really hasn’t been present in previous revolutions. Big media has weaponized it against us, and we can do the same. We, the poor, use it to share our thoughts, which lead to a coordinated action to take them down a few pegs. The shit is rolling uphill, and the top brass is quietly panicking, rest assured they know where the real power comes from. Us.
Today I was driving and I saw graffiti that really resonated with me. “I miss America” was written. I know the America they’re referring to. The America that existed before the rich fine tuned their weaponized capitalism, perfecting it in order to extract the most mosyndromecough) don’t want to acknowledge any responsibility for the effects of their actions. We’re about to see a miracle, folks,grab your money… shit is about to roll uphill! I can’t wait to see the looks on their faces when they begin breaking down yelling, searching for others to blame during their final days in office, trying possible at all times, whether it’s immoral or unethical, they blame their inhuman position of inhumanity on “fiduciary duty to stockholders”. This garbage needs to stop. We, the laborers, are being driven to mental destruction. Why don’t they why they are the reason people are snapping, having psychological meltdowns and shooting up public places. All these mass shootings are the signs and symptoms of a sick society, they just prefer not to connect A and B. They don’t consider modern slavery being a factor in the deteriorating mental health of the entire working class, the 4 no room to retire based on the rules set forth from day 1, so they’ve effectively given them nothing to lose. The concept of “company loyalty” is a joke, because time after time, they’ve clearly demonstrated zero care about their employees, and illustrated there will be no 2-week notice when their that ć5d 0żdcorporate bean counter decides they could save money by giving employee A the tasks and responsibilities that employee B formerly had, and ditchingd##€l9765 kemployee B. Our overlords (especially those with out of control ego problems, coughorange Chevy Chase syndromecough). They will predict to deflect ownership of the disaster that has finally reached them. You know what they say, when a good The silver lining is by that point, the effects of the situation** they’ve created, which us poors have been living in, will be unstoppable. It’s just a matter of time now.
AND you have access to NEARLY EVERYTHING, with the right trackers…. vs one sub to n-flix getting you 2% of shows. My server has Simpsons S01-s13 randomizer, KotH randomizer, and Futurama randomizers… can’t get that on Netflix!
Money is not the issue to me. I’ll happily pay for every episode I watch, maybe even per download. I just don’t want my content scattered across different platforms in suboptimal quality and be forced to pay a fixed fee even if I just need the one show on that platform.
If media/publishing companies would just throw the exclusivity model in the trash where it belongs (and let DRM die too), then everyone could pay to see what they want on their platform of choice without this bullshit. As long as that’s not the case, I don’t see myself using these “services”.
I just don’t want my content scattered across different platforms in suboptimal quality and be forced to pay
That and also the fact that sometimes content vanishes from those platforms because of licensing agreements and/or get censored like many older TV Shows have gotten.
Oh, yes, so true. Like when a game is no longer up for buying because one of the music tracks in the OST had it’s license rot, perfect customer service
Not really over a 5 year period, especially if you talk about more than a single subscription service. If you mean by preserve as keeping a full 3-2-1 backup, then yeah sure, but most people don’t need that. Double backup the truly important/rare content, everything else can be redownloaded in case of tragedy.
For posterity, 1 year of HBO Max or Disney+ is $150. Over 5 years that’s $750. If you are someone who knows you annually rewatch content, then that’s likely a guaranteed expense. Btw, if you pay month to month unless it’s less than 8 months of the year, monthly is more expensive, so I’m being generous here. No managing monthly subscriptions is also a major benefit.
That price nets you at least six 8TB HDD’s at $109 each, which 48TB is far more storage than most people would ever need so some of that cost can go to a power efficient Optiplex and some to spare for a VPN leaving you with at least 32TB.
As mentioned, each additional streaming service is going to exponentially increase that cost, further justifying your investment, and the peace of mind that whatever service hasn’t removed it.
Technically you use your time to pay for “setting up and maintaining it” but… That’s some BS honestly. Plex/Jellyfin are set up once and forget about them. Us nerds put in time to curate and go the extra mile, but most people can very easily have a simple low power server running. If they can set up the *arrs (not really very hard) then good automation for them, if not manually searching for what you want as you want it is one more step than a subscription. More steps if you need to sign up for the first time ;)
Granted - a streaming service doesn’t charge you $325 for the initial server+storage, however streaming services also don’t give you a lot of things for 2.10 years of streaming so I’d say it’s worth the investment. And it definitely does not cost more to preserve your media if you subscribe to more than 1 service. If you subscribe to only one and cancel monthly and spend your time managing that then maybe. (but if you don’t need 4k and consume that little content, you may still be better off with a Pi-like and a hard drive…)
It depends very much how and why you pirate. I guess for many it is a hobby, they are data horders, etc. If you only stream pirated media online and use free cracked software like I mostly do, it is also totally free to pirate. But it costs you another resource then: time! So yes, piracy has a cost, the effort you have to put into it. It’s the same like trying to avoid the big five. Installing a custom os on your phone, blocking ads and intrusive trackers, selfhosting stuff etc all takes a lot of time and effort. So most people just pay for this stuff with their money or with their data out of convenience. When it gets too pricey, then they start finding alternatives. I would argue that we shouldn’t let convenience deter us from trying to be independent and having our sovereignty over our personal data respected.
I will torrent the latest movie, but I will buy the latest album from my favorite band directly off Bandcamp. Might even buy a t-shirt or some stickers.
I don’t pirate games because Steam just makes it more convenient, and sites like IsThereAnyDeal make it easy to find sales.
However, as someone that’s been a hobbyist developer for 15 years, and never really been able to overcome the imposter syndrome to be able to publish anything, I’d be happy if someone thought my game was even worth the time to pirate, much less be paid for.
I always pay for vijia but I wait for like a year or two and get em at a heavy discount.
I haven’t bought a movie or a music in 20 years. Well that’s a lit, I bought a bunch of FLACs from a guy whose music I loved because he’s a small artist and I want to see him bigger.
Other than that… movie, shows, and a music are a YOINK
All I see is people putting on clown makeup when they try to defend paying for a profitable product they could otherwise get for free.
Mark Twain was right. It’s easier to fool someone than to convince them they’d been fooled. This generation is full of proud idiots. It gives them a sense of belonging.
Add comment