You’re being far more irritating than any of them. You’re seriously picking a fight over “pissed off a few people”? Reevaluate how you spend your time man. I’m done personally.
Downloading a video game rom is piracy, but if you pay money to some Chinese retailer for an SD card containing the roms, that’s somehow not piracy
Literally never seen this argument, not even once. Guarantee you it’s a very small minority just assuaging some vague guilt (which is BS anyway because it’s still not your ROMs).
People do it primarily because it’s convenient. Downloading and testing hundreds if not thousand of roms - not to mention replacing all the bad ones - would take potentially days of work. Or you can spend like $10-$50 and be done with it.
It is shocking how many people don’t know how to use a VPN when proton is like $5 and takes all of 10 seconds to set up.
It seems I pissed a few people off with my comment, but hey, if you feel I’m talking about you maybe you should think about it folks!
Let me also be clear that I am not against pirating. I am against covering it with window dressing and pretending we aren’t all doing what we know we’re doing.
I am under no illusion that 99% of people who pirate, movies, music, games, etc. are doing it for purely selfish reasons and a lot of sites exist to enable it. But the simple fact of the matter is court battles over piracy have been one of the strongest bulwarks for consumer protection/ownership and protecting an open internet over the last 20 years. So yeah, a lot of folks are going to make some drivel up about how they’re preserving history or whatever as they don’t even adhere to basic archive standards and their entire collection is coincidentally only stuff they like lol, but hey, I still like seeing the wins!
About four years ago, I sat down and organized all of my cables, then tied all the matching cables together with bongo ties/Velcro straps. A lot of it of course has become scattered again, but I am still reaping the benefits from having them all generally grouped together. It is worth the hour or two folks!
This is basically an argument for itemizing any and all things that can be articulated tbh. I don't pay a "kitchen" fee or an "electrical" fee or a "dishwasher" fee when I go to a restaurant. They calculate what things cost on the whole then price accordingly. That's how 95% of non-single-item transactions occur.
I'm not even necessarily against the concept of paying for the service on consoles (I kind of go back and forth on it personally) but this argument simply doesn't hold water.
I enjoy PC gaming as much as anyone but the simple fact is you can't do what a Series S does for $250 with a $250 PC. Plus with gamepass the math doesn't even need a napkin. It's simply the best deal in gaming right now, whether you're paying for online play or not.
Getting an Xbox into developer mode, booting retro arch, really whatever you want then doing literally whatever you want with it has never been easier. The 360 was far more difficult and continues to be difficult to hack and mod in meaningful ways. The series consoles you can crack open in like 30 minutes with an article and a YouTube video.