Which seas do you avoid?
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Software. 99% of the time there is some Free Software alternative that either somehow does the job for my personal tasks, or is better anyways.
FOSS for the win 😁
Or you have to run a shady crack or keygen to get it to work, and I don’t trust those.
But …their catchy 8bit music!
I can hear KMSpico in my head already…
monkrus FTW
* cries in Adobe *
i refuse to pirate indie games. i will always buy games that are independently released or from small publishers because 1. they’re just trying to break even (unlike publishers like EA and Activision who have millions of fans lining up to buy their repetitive junk) and 2. they almost never have DRM. i’ll also buy my music for similar reasons; 99% of artists can barely make a living and i really do not want to contribute to that statistic
We’ve been buying stuff on bandcamp friday, it is pretty neat
Apps. I prefer foss apps. I donate, report, contribute and spread the word.
Even if I would pirate an app it wouldn’t become open source. I couldn’t contribute. I couldn’t report bugs, suggest ideas, fork and apply my own stuff.
I only pirate apps with no alternatives and very aggressive monetization like 100€/year subscriptions…
We’ve had a no piracy rule over in the Android subs/communities for years and the funny thing is, by time we ever got to someone trying to post a pirated APK the community themselves tore them a new arsehole.
Easiest rule to enforce when the community will absolutely hiss at you. Love em.
edit: a fun talking point I suppose is YouTube, and its app. We got a lot of people arguing that Newpipe ‘was piracy’ and I even had many debates with other members/mods about is it, or isn’t it piracy?
My view it’s a website that you can parse even with other tools like yt-dl, and if Youtube.com wanted to stop use of Newpipe / Revanced whatever they could in the blink of an eye.
I had to ‘pirate’ geometry dash apk as only the lite version was on the play store. I’d already payed for the full version on Steam and iOS.
I kinda pirated Spotify (xmanager). I believe Tidal is one I would actually subscribe too if I had the income.
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It’s not that I won’t but I do try to go out of my way to support smaller artists I enjoy, especially nowadays.
Lucky it’s gotten a lot easier with sites like Bandcamp, but it’s better if I can buy directly from the bands own store.
Sad news about band camp from last year though.
I’m sadly aware…which is another reason why I try go straight to the band/artist first.
Pretty much anything that I can buy easily without going to second-hand or stupid subscriptions. For me, it’s really a service problem, not a cost problem.
As long as they participate in Steam sales, assuming they’re on Steam to begin with, PC games are more convenient to have in a library where I don’t have to manually update each game. Valve’s not perfect, with its 30% cut of sales being arguably too high (as is the case for all other platforms that defend its use as being an “industry standard”), but given Nintendo’s monetization of online gameplay and replacing the Virtual Console system with what is essentially console library rentals, I don’t mind putting up with updating Switch ROMs once in a blue moon if it means not supporting anti-consumer practices. Any games I had in my Switch library that are also on Steam I simply repurchased for the sake of convenience, however.
30% allowing to use: Steam servers, Steam Workshop, Steam Cloud, Steamworks, Steam API
All of this is free for the players and developers they got to find a way to pay for all of this.
Considering that Valve makes more money per employee than most major tech companies, it definitely seems like it would still be turning a profit if its share of sales were reduced to 15 or 20 percent. Steam’s services aren’t free; the 30% fee inflates the price of games by 43%. As with any company Valve needs to have a high enough profit margin to cover long-term costs and R&D budgets, but the 30% cut is an outdated industry standard from when server operating costs were substantially higher than today.
Well I don’t know the internal details but looking at all the benefits and services provided to the developers and players this doesn’t seem unfair.
Aside from hosting cloud saves and Steam workshop data, there aren’t many other services that justify a high fee to offset long-term costs. Steam trading cards, for instance, are just another source of revenue for Valve given that they also take a cut of sales from marketplace transactions.
Given that Valve’s costs in developing Proton are offset by the higher Steam game purchase rates of Steam Deck users (myself included), the main benefit to developers is Steam’s user base. As with Apple and the iOS app store, however, having what amounts to a monopoly in a market segment is not a justification for high platform access fees.
I mean… there’s Steam Workshop, Steam Voice, all the post, interactions, communities, etc… all of this have to weight a lot on their budget.
My guess is that R&D as well as third-party Steam keys eat into their margins.
It could be more sustainable with this higher fee as well. Valve supports old games for a long time whereas console manufacturers pull the plug 10 years later. You could argue that Microsoft takes only 12%, but Microsoft has the luxury of being able to exit the PC games market at any time, or they can take a loss on it indefinitely. Valve needs to survive off its PC store because it’s the only thing they really have
With tinfoil and a good shop, updating switch rooms can be almost as convenient
So there is a thing I kind of pirate, but not entirely – e-books.
But thing is, our public library page has e-books and some of them are available to be read online. Now I cannot officially download them, however opening a network tab on browser console shows me a request to download the whole
.epubfile. So what I do is copy that request ascurland just download it via terminal.Is it piracy, probably, is this resource publicly available for me to read, definetly yes.
Other than that I don’t really pirate much else.
I can’t recall the last time I pirated anything executable (games and other software). There are legitimate free options for everything I’ve wanted, and executable code is just too risky.
well gog games can be safely pirated because the executables you’re getting are signed with their digital signature.
it’s much less morally correct tho, especially because most of the games published on gog are indie games, but if you have literally no money to spend (like I used to) there aren’t any better options
Usually music made by artists from my country, if they have a website where I can pay for their music directly to them I do it that way.
🙌🏻 I buy CDs and newer unseal them, but pirate the songs because it’s more convenient.
Sometimes I rip CDs to replace music I’ve already pirated just for the feeling of having music I ripped myself.
Makes no sense, I know, but music is just for the feeling after all.I prefer high res over CD quality 😇 but I think I can relate.
I mean, I can put up with far worse quality.
In some cases I have to. For example I have some classical songs ripped from YouTube that sound absolutely horrible, but I am kinda accustomed to those specific performances, and it’s not always possible to find a better recording from one specific performance. And the other ones just sound… off. Sometimes this is also the case with remasters.
The worst one I have is a song from Beatles I am keeping both because it’s one of the first files I downloaded when I was 8 and however weird it sounds, I got used to the compression artifacts. It’s 32kbps HE-AAC at 22.05kHz sample rate. I don’t even know its name. The name and metadata is in Chinese.
DRM-free ebooks. I make a point of buying them, of thanking the publisher… And not sharing it on the usual piracy channels.
i try to pay indie devs whenever i can
Food for thought. If you have decided you were never going to buy the game, what’s the harm in pirating it
sometimes i decide its worth my money after i play it
Honesty as an aspiring indie dev myself, I wouldn’t mind you pirate my game BUT I just buy cheap indie games on sale without not being sure if I’m going to play them any time soon. Best case scenario I found new favorite game, worst case scenario, I just payed 8€ (-the expenses from the store) to some developer chasing their dream.
My wallet can take it and I like to support indie scene.
Fuck yeah! Good on ya :)
If you were never going to buy it, why pirate it?
To check it out and realize I don’t like it after like 15 minutes and then not have to deal with a refund.
Gimme a demo at least.That indicates that you might buy it if it’s good. The person I replied to implied they would never have purchased it at all.
Because if you’re selfish enough you can enjoy the game at no cost to you guilt free.
I’m just pointing out the facts here.
Anything that is an executable on PC (software / games) due to security risk. Game ROMs for emulators are fine.
Same
I refuse to pirate a car, just because I don’t know how
It’s a bit easier to pirate a boat, seeing as cars didn’t exist in 1600s
Nothing.
I extremely rarely pirate games and software. It’s just far too easy an attack vector for malware. The games I want to play are usually worth buying regardless, and free software is good enough for my needs. It isn’t a flat out refusal, I’ve definitely pirated these things, but it’s in niche situations where I need to see something specific, and I always check run it under a vm
