Nowadays, the absolute vast majority of games that I play are shit tbh.
This is why I pirate games first to try them out. I wanna be very clear that if I think a game is good I buy it, no questions asked.
However, since most games don’t have demos or trials, I don’t want to feel like I’ve wasted money so I look to piracy so that I can try them out before making a purchase.
AITAH?
No. Intellectual property is not real, so nothing is being stolen by you.
If it’s a small developer, and you like the game, make sure to support them if you can. If it’s a mega studio, don’t feel bad about not paying anything.
That’s my personal policy at least.
Intellectual property is not real?
So unless I make something physical I am not making anything real? So all my work up to the point of a plant being actually built is not real?
Doing anything on a PC or smartphone is not real.
Inventing a train of thought that cures every known desease and mental illness is simply not real - because you can’t touch it. This is the equivalent of dark ages church logic.
You are being intentionally obtuse. It’s not that the thing itself literally does not exist at all, it’s that the ownership of ideas is not real. When you steal a physical item the original owner is deprived of that item. When you copy an idea the original “owner” still has access to it.
I find it funny you’re calling him intentionally obtuse right after you seem to just simplify theivery at whether something physical is stolen. If you’re basing it off of something being stolen or not, IP is used to protect the realized gains off of an idea. Yeah you aren’t stealing a physical something, but you are robbing the creator of what the item is valued at. It is exactly the issue that you can’t own an idea that IP is usually heavily protected. Ironically, the intention is to help new ideas(and their profiting worth) from being stolen by someone (or something ie Coporations) with better means to distribute and profit off of the idea. Otherwise, why wouldn’t I just get a copy of a game, underpriced it, and sell it as cheap as I wanted? I’ve put no thought or labor into actualized the idea, so I have no reason to price it beyond my initial investment. It why when someone (or something) sells full rights to their IP, it can be worth millions. They don’t care about the idea. They care about what the idea can provide in the future.
To draw a parallel, saying IP isn’t real is like saying currency has no worth. On the surface, duh of course currency isn’t actually worth anything. It’s not like people can (practically) eat a dollar or make shoes out of a dollar, but we’ve (generally) collectively decided it’s worth something. It instils confidence that when I walk into a store, my currency has a conversion rate of so many dollars per good. If thousands of people added millions of dollars into their bank accounts by just “copying” the electronic money, no one has lost money, but the value of the currency is deflated by those actions because there’s nothing stopping everyone from from just adding millions to their accounts. The confidence that people will be harshly dealt with for deflating the currency like that is one of the innate things that gives currencies (and IP’s) their value. Handwaving it away by saying it isn’t actually real is also just being obtuse.
He says it is not real, so it can not be stolen. That is a pretty simple message. What am I getting wrong? He says nothing about ownership. It just does not exist. So don’t tell me I am obtuse when the maximum is that the person was ambiguous.
The results of your ideas are real, the outcomes and impacts are real. The mental labor you do is valuable, but none of it is “property.”
If your thoughts and ideas and concepts are property that can be stolen, then please explain how you can be deprived of them.
Thinking hard about something is labor, but it’s not property, it can’t possibly be property, because it lacks all of the aspects typically required to define property.
I used to think this way, then I realized physical property is not real either. Both are defined by the state, recorded on paper somewhere, and protected by force.
Just because you can actually physically go to my property does not change the fact that it is only my property because I have a deed.
I’m still not sure how to feel about IP but I’m less dismissive of it for now.
Let’s word it differently then. Physical property is literally real, like, you can go to it. IPs are not a resource. The game devs do not run out of copies of a game because OP pirated them. They remain at an infinite supply. If someone breaks into your house and makes off with your microwave, you are now short a microwave; If you pirate software, the developer is not short in any stock of software
Possession of property isn’t the same as property itself. Although I agree with you that I am sceptical of property in general, at least physical property makes some sense when defined. Intellectual property just makes absolutely no sense.
With intellectual property there is at least (by default) a direct link between the work necessary to create an item and its ownership. With physical items the initial ownership is necessarily predicated on having controlled a means of production.
I can create an IP and I do not need to spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to do so. But I cannot create a substantial physical item without paying the people who own the materials and the factories for the privilege of doing so. Why is previous ownership such a critical factor in ownership of new items, separate from the work to create them?
Intellectual property laws have their own issues but at least with regard to them conceptually, intellectual property is more “pure” than physical property.
People should be rewarded for their mental labor, but that’s not the same as saying they have created intellectual property.
A thought or concept is not an object that can be stolen. An idea cannot be a scarce resource that is used up.
If concepts or ideas can be “stolen” then that means somebody is being deprived of them. But unless you somehow erased the idea from all parts of that person’s brain and transfered it into yours, nobody has been deprived of anything, and thus nothing has been stolen.
If intellectual property is not real, then why do you support the idea of paying small developers instead of large developers? Their intellectual property is just as fake as large studios, right?
I really wish pirates were more honest with themselves. Just admit that you’re taking something that doesn’t belong to you and own it. I pirate content all the time, but I don’t do the mental gymnastics to justify it. Just admit that you stole something and that you don’t care, it’s not that hard. I have an old PC in my closet that has about 200 movies and a bunch of cracked games on it that I’ve pirated over the years, and I don’t care that I stole them. The Robin Hood complex some pirates have is just weird, imo. You’re not sticking it to The Man; The Man is still bankrolling more per week than the team who made the content you stole is making in a year, regardless of your seed ratio.
By the way, large studios also have developers who rely on their jobs to put food on the table, just like the small studios. If you think anybody at EA aside from the C-Suite execs are significantly richer than the average indie dev, you’d be mistaken. Next time you’re playing a pirated AAA game, look at your character; the guy who spent several weeks of his life sculpting and rigging that model is probably just as concerned about paying his rent on time as you are.
By the way, this isn’t entirely directed at you, specifically. Just my thoughts on the general attitude I see in a lot of piracy communities lately.
Just admit that you stole something and that you don’t care, it’s not that hard.
You are not wrong, but maybe just a bit of perspective:
In my city, you can go to the public library, borrow a DVD, take it home, watch it. 100% legal. 100% free. No library membership fees. And they have multiple copies of most DVDs, so it’s not like it’s some lottery to use the service.
It feels a lot like downloading a movie without paying anyone to watch it. The only difference is you gotta go outside. Oh, and no guilt tripping.
Anyway, what’s my point? Well piracy is only illegal because some people (not everyone) decided that everyone is going to pay an equal, but not necessarily an equitable, share to fund the development of said IP (unless you have a library in your area to counter this, partially). Worse, that everyone will keep paying a very small group of people money we’ll after the development of said IP has been paid off. Even worse, that small group of people will use their profits to corrupt the legal system to ensure that that protectionism continues to serve their benefit, not others… Point being, you can pirate, and care… care a lot.
Victims are created when piracy affects small production houses struggling to make ends meet. Victims are created of everyone else when the law is abused beyond it’s original purpose to squeeze consumers.
So you too should be honest and not call it theft. Piracy is piracy, good or bad. To compare it to the crime of theft is to perpetuate the marketing of those to stand from a black and white view on the matter.
It is theft, but the argument is better framed as to whether or not it’s moral theft. Most people who pirate feel comfortable pirating from larger corporations over small time creators/groups, with the usual justifications you’ve provided above. Personally, I’ve justified it at times because I couldn’t afford to purchase the thing, which leads to another argument of “if I wasn’t going to buy it in the first place, is it actually effecting them”.
There is no argument to be made, however, where it isn’t true that if you were to have purchased it, the owner of the idea will make more off of it. Whether you care or not about that owner getting more is a different argument, but you are robbing them of value for the idea, however little that value might have been.
I’m not arguing for or against pirating, but people in the comments saying it isn’t theivery really seem to be arguing whether stealing is wrong or not. Call it what it is and go back to the argument people have been having for thousands of years.
Which, I realize I didn’t address libraries. Taxes pay for libraries to operate, and then the library pays to have copies of the works. If no one wants to read my book, libraries aren’t going to just go out and buy thousands of copies. And trying to tackle libraries would also start to erode arguments for reselling something. And to bring it back to the OP, I’ve read books in a library before that I enjoyed enough to purchase a copy of my own. I’ve also read books I haven’t. But someone purchased that book for me to rent, and in a small part, I’ve paid for that book myself by paying taxes.
The only difference is you gotta go outside.
No, the difference is that you’re expected to return it. You’re not supposed to keep it forever. That’s why there’s a “due by” date on checked-out materials.
It’s not mental gymnastics. Why is it so hard to believe that people genuinely don’t believe in intellectual property? It has nothing to do with “sticking it to the man.” I just do not believe in IP, full stop.
And piracy is not stealing, it is making a copy. When you steal a physical item the original owner is deprived of that item. When you copy something the original “owner” still has access to it.
Not everyone thinks the same way you do. In fact you sound like a terrible person if you genuinely believe that what you’re doing is wrong but you’re doing it anyway.
It’s the same with FOSS. IP is just as fake as physical private property, but that doesn’t mean we can’t pay people for their labour.
If I find a really useful open-source licensed app developed by one or two people as a hobby, and they have a donation link in their repo, I might send them something.
If it’s a really useful open-source licensed app developed by some corporation, there’s no way I’m giving them money. The company has invested in developing the app as open source; they chose to (or were forced to by virtue of open source dependencies) make it public. The devs were already paid by the company. Whether the company takes in enough revenue by other means to pay for this open source project isn’t my problem.
For the people discussing here: remember that the morality of an act depends on the act itself, the context where it happens, and the moral premises. It does not depend on how you phrase or label the act.
With that in mind: since I define arseholery as “actions or behaviour that cause more harm to someone else than they benefit the agent”, and there’s practically no harm being caused by OP’s actions, I do not think that OP is being an arsehole.
No. Demos are rare and games are expensive.
I tend to find I can make a pretty darn informed decision off of Let’s Plays, quick looks, etc. in a world without demos.
That still can’t inform you properly on how a game ‘feels’ to play. I’m very tempted by Alan Wake 2, but having bounced off many other similar games because of how they control has me pining for a demo. I’ll not be dropping 50 quid without being able to try it first
A good quick look or early game LP with commentary will fill that in. The Giant Bomb format has one person asking another a series of questions, and game feel usually comes up. ACG reviews so many games that it’s more than likely he covered it in a video. If you find a couple of YouTube channels where the reviewers or LPers have similar tastes as you, it ends up being as good a method as any to make an informed purchase. Demos can also sometimes be misleading, depending on the game. There’s no perfect answer here, but there isn’t for any other purchase either.
I dunno about that. Another person can describe a game however they see fit, and they may even be thorough, but what someone might define as clunky controls might feel fine to me. I can’t know how a game feels to play unless I play it for myself. Most of the games I regret buying were games I bought based on what youtubers and reviewers were saying
It’s not perfect. Nothing is. But it does make for a pretty informed decision. As long as you don’t abuse it, there’s always 2 hour refund policies as well. I don’t think it makes the OP an asshole to pirate a game as a demo, but I’ve been burned so few times by this strategy that I’ve never considered some other means of trying out a game to be necessary. If you’re really unsure, you can wait for a sale, too.
Nope. What you’ve highlighted is the need for more game devs to create free demos so people can try the games before they buy them.
If you download a game, find you really like it, and then buy it, you’re not harming anyone nor are you withholding funds from artists.
Does anyone else remember bringing home free trials on floppy disks? Like you get the first level of Wolfenstein or Commander Keen and you just play that over and over because you don’t have any money.
A bit before my manufacture date but as a kid there used to be CD ROMs in cereal boxes which had games like Tonka, Hot Wheels, Timon and Pumba, Rainbow Fish, etc. Those were hype.
No, not at all. Games used to have demos and trial versions, like basically all games, but game studios used to have to actually finish making a game before they shipped it. Trying before you bought was the business model of the whole industry. Now so many games are shipped in such bad condition they wouldn’t dare let you try it first. Trying before you buy is just prudent, as long as you actually buy the ones you like enough to play through.
