Agreed if you have enough financial stability to do so.
Digital Piracy is always right when you are poor when a sale to acces a copy isn’t possible no one loses anything from acquiring it for free and if anyone deserves free game and movie entertainment to distract them from perpetual hardship its the poor.
That doesn’t make any sense. Ok yes let’s help disadvantaged people of course, but still.
Someone has to make the content and someone has to pay for it: devs gotta eat and the fair cost may be less than game retail, but it’s always greater than zero. If the cost isn’t fair, dont buy, or at least dont pretend you’re entitled to it. If the original costs X, and there are Y “free copies” of it, everyone owes X / (Y + 1), or some angel investor owes the whole total for all of us.
How about museums and parks? Any new person walking through doesn’t incur any (or minimal cost) to experience, and hell, some museums are free or have voluntary donations! That model is possible because of taxes and donations/fundraising/auctions to provide a public service. If Gabe Newell is going to finance a game, sure, you and any impoverished friend can have a free copy. For the game ecosystem now, you and every friend getting a free copy means 1 of 2 things:
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To get the next game, all of us paying for it get to be charged a larger share of fair price than if you also paid (even if things are totally fairly priced), OR
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We don’t get a next game because revenue was too low.
As an individual it totally doesn’t matter, but if everybody came to this way of thinking then nobody is gonna pay but basically everyone will still want the content.
For the record i do pay creators that make the stuff i enjoy because i am not impoverished and i recognize that within this economy i am the group that should support their livelihoods.
The way i see it when it comes to the poor only 2 options exist.
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poor person cant afford to purchase the game so valve gets 0 dollars and the poor feel worse because they see everyone enjoying this thing they are financially excluded from
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the poor person obtains a free copy, valve gets the same 0 dollars but now the poor person can be included within the games community, potentially aiding its popularity. Absolutely nothing is lost.
Currently everyone who want to pirate can do so, and yet creators still exists, evidently enough people are paying to maintain it.
I understand your argument in context of a functional fair economy but i am an anti-capitalist
I know you may disagree with this and i respect the focus in wanting to make the current system work but ultimately my ideal is that the means to live should be separate from our productivity. If food, healthcare, housing, family and entertainment are all guaranteed. Then a creator does not need money to share their work. They can create because they want to create because they enjoy to create. And the face that people would copy and enjoy their work is the highest form of flattery as it means people really like what you do/make. The enjoyment of those people becomes the creators contributing to society.
You may think that people wouldn’t do some work anymore but that is where i would wholeheartedly disagree. Many people would do volunteer work if they didn’t need a job, i would still do the very same thing for free that i am getting paid for now but arguably id be even more motivated because id feel like i am helping the community rather then having it be a business transaction for personal gain.
I respect that perspective, and hey some games even say “yeah pirate it and share it with your friends who might buy”. The place I still would have issue is that the society you’re discussing does t exist NOW in the US so it’s a little unfair to live by how things would be if the world were perfect.
Big tangent here, but
They can create because they want to create because they enjoy to create.
Okay so now everyone is a creator, who manages them? Who deals with distribution, with bugfixes, with all the tiny minutiae in Yung modern world?
My job is that I maintain the electrical power that goes to the servers that host the software that people use to create. No one has a “passion” for power and cooling system maintenance, but it’s an absolute necessity even in a fully automated world. Someone has to make sure the robots are working. Who has a passion for creating a controls monitoring system that is 2% faster and 8% more efficient than the previous iteration? Who will decide to create, in their spare time, one tenth of one percent of one percent of one project that eventually becomes the next iphone? Who will volunteers their time to make sure tickets are routed properly between these departments? Who lies awake at night wishing they were independently wealthy so they could have the time and energy to tell people that their poor performance is hurting a project and the project doesn’t want them anymore?
You envision a world where there are billions of artists and no one who knows how to replace the insulation in your attic, or would do it if they could.
There is enough open source and free and dirt cheap content available already that you can’t play in a lifetime. While I agree that stuff that’s too expensive for the majority of people shouldn’t even exist, I don’t see why creative content should be free for the taking in a society that doesn’t support that way of life yet. Unless you also agree that people should be allowed to take everything else for free as well.
To quote the meme “if you see people steal food, diapers or medicine, no you did not”
I wouldn’t call it free for the taking because i still believe that under the current system all people with the means to pay, should pay. And thats also what i mostly observe in real life.
I am also against people taking and legally buying more then what they/relatives really need. There is way to much wasted around us, even properties.
So in that scenario we can produce infinite steaks, right?
Now, people start stealing those steaks because we can produce an infinite amount of them, infinite supply = cost should be zero.
Now, tell me… What’s the incentive for the steak producer to continue producing those steaks if people aren’t paying for them?
See where I’m going with that?
In the end of doesn’t matter if an infinite quantity can be produced “for free”, there’s people behind the product that pay the price and no matter how you want to justify it, if you don’t respect the way the creator wants to give access to their product to people, you have no moral ground to stand on.
I’m not saying people don’t do it, I’m saying that trying to justify it to make you feel better about it is pure hypocrisy and just wrong.
I am good friends with someone who works with detained criminals and thats not how most thievery happens. Besides alcohol (but addiction is a different story) baby food is the item most often stolen. Packages of sliced cheese are also common.
The criminal poor don’t go to the store to steal specific items they go to buy food like normal and with every item they are counting if they will have enough on their account. When they get to their budget limit they try to swap some stuff to make It work. If that really doesn’t work they sometimes decide to take a more expansive items from their cart and smuggle it out without paying.
Of course this wont be the exact scenario for all store-theft but its what i hear is most common at least where i live.
What I’m saying is that there’s plenty of cheap games you can play, even tons of free ones (one a week on epic) if you don’t have enough money. It doesn’t make it morally right to pirate games.
I know people do it, I do it too, trying to pass it as being somehow morally right is what I can’t accept. I’m at fault, I accept it and don’t try to make myself believe that it’s ok, it’s not.
I primarily use it to see if things are actually worth me paying for them, I’ve lost count of the games I’ve tried out, found they were great and bought outright. Watching things is more of a service issue though, I’ll pay a subscription for something if it’s actually decent, Netflix went and screwed that up for me. If I could actually trust any of the streaming services to not do something stupid again then maybe I would.
