Discussion Game Piracy

[ceriumin]

This is not directly linked to anything to do with piracy, and is rather a negative point towards it. This is due to my friend being ridiculous and decided to start a quick discussion for it. First of all, I do not pirate games (I did when I was small but everyone pirated a game at one time) and I never have a problem with money, if I want a game I work a bit for the money towards the game and buy it. However my friend is the complete opposite and I don't know what to say to him.

Whenever he wants a game, he pirates it off a torrent site and it annoys me, especially that I buy a game that he wants to play and pirates it and says that he got the game. This includes AAA titles such as GTA, The Witcher 3 etc. He has over 15 games which are all pirated and recently he had pirated Forza Horizon 4 and Jedi the fallen order. Firstly it got me thinking, what are the actual cons of pirating a game? My friend literally has a laptop with a 2060 and has to pirate every. single. game. And it really pains me a lot that I buy the games and he just goes and downloads it. I don't know what tk say to him, because everytime I do then he says that he can get it for free and he doesn't need to spend a cent, so what's the point of buying a game? Also had there ever actually been a time when someone suffered from consequences due to pirating a game? I would never pirate due to moral reasons, because It simply doesn't feel the same as buying a game. I'll leave this up to discussion, and the simple question is "why buy games when you can pirate them?"

This isn't to criticise my friend and this isn't supporting piracy, I am against it and I do not like it when people pirate a game so please don't remove this

 

[2plash6]

why pay for anti virus when you can pirate it! 🆒

But then it your antimalware may have malware.

 

[thepersonwithaface45]

But then it your antimalware my have malware.

mal-ception, maybe you'll have two malware guys trying to get each others bit coins through the middle man that has become your system XD

 

[Phaaze88]

"Yo dawg! I heard you like malware..."

 

[USAFRet]

why pay for anti virus when you can pirate it! 🆒

We've seen people here doing exactly that...👎

 

[hotaru.hino]

This has been talked to death but, here we go again.
People that pirate games would not buy them, that's the whole reason they pirate them.
If they came out tomorrow with a 100% safe way to protect from piracy, the gaming industry would still keep making the same amount of money and not more.

I believe only a small subset of people pirate simply because they subscribe to the mindset that they shouldn't have to pay for anything if they can find a way to get it for free. The vast majority of people do it because there's some other reason (can't afford it, not available in their region, etc.)

I believe once Amazon and later Apple started offering DRM free music for a reasonable price, that was when digital music (for lack of a better term) took off over physical media.

Also most games that are always-online or loot box paywalls are the multiplayer games that can't be pirated, nba2k and battlefront 2's "surprise mechanics" have made headlines.

Sure they can. Private servers are a thing. The challenge is putting in the effort to reverse engineer the netcode to a point where people can figure out what the game likes.

A larger problem are people that preorder games causing devs to barf out semi working games that need day one patches as big as the whole game and larger.

Day-one patches are the result of modern software development techniques. Software validation, especially when releasing for consoles or store-fronts that scrutinize every bit of software that goes on them, take time. Instead of waiting around for the software to be validated and distributed, you can use that time to get the developers, who still know the ins-and-outs of the game to work on fixing bugs that weren't flagged as show stoppers in order to meet a deadline.

As much as everyone wants "perfect software", there's no such thing and eventually a product needs to be put out. Few games survived the "it's done with it's done" mindset.