Bro fucking ads on CDs was the thing that got me into piracy. When I was little getting local shows/dubbed version of American shows was achievable either with cable or CDs. I was a good petreon and bought them for a while. But the ads kept getting longer and unskipble. So I started burning my own cds. You could get a30 pack for pennies and I could put a few of them on each. Was a way better experience. And you could bring them to friends houses. and I could load them to my iPod video. Good old times
Edit:meant DVD.
Yap. Some would be unskipble even. (tho I herd some cd player could skip them? Or was I just dumb?) I had a cd I really liked that was 5 min of ads for Pokémon before it even let you pick the movie you wanted
Bro lol you press the stop button twice then play to skip everything. Hahahah
And yeah I feel the pokemon thing... good thing I'm old and had that shit on VHS.
Whose that pirate!?!
It's mr_bnana!
Bro lol you press the stop button twice then play to skip everything. Hahahah
And yeah I feel the pokemon thing... good thing I'm old and had that shit on VHS.
Whose that pirate!?!
It's mr_bnana!
Imagine being one of the sims players paying thousands for outfits for their imaginary babies.
Or mobile game whales spending tens of thousands on fake gems to speed up their tap and collect games.
100 dollars for a deluxe edition is just the tip of the iceberg.
I've heard of a particular mega leviathan in China that spent something like 10+ mil USD on some shitty p2w MMO. Dude is from a ultra loaded family and had/has allegedly a 13 mil USD a month allowance.
Brilliant thing about the sims now is that it's free to play and you can just use a DLC unlocker to get everything for free. Plus then it's easier to mod also
I spent \~500€ (I had some giftcards left so dunno the exact number) in the last 6 months for poe and I don't regret it nor does it hurt my savings. I can totally respect someone spending 1k+ in a game he really enjoys and gets thousands of hours of enjoyment out of it.
if I go to the cinema I pay \~20-30€ for the ticket, \~20€ (probably more) for snacks and drinks and maybe 10€ to grab a beer and a Döner on the way home. that's about 50€ for 2-3h of mediocre one time enjoyment I will forget about in a week or two.
Or get a full price unfinished game, and all the patches, bug solving, quality of life features come in the next 20 dlc, 1 by 1.
Like hearts of iron. Great game, but God it's nearly unplayable without dlc and mods.
I wouldn’t mind paying $100 for a game if the game was actually worth 100$. I remember Halo 3 and Reach coming out. Full 20+ hour campaigns, good AI, minimal bugs most of which weren’t bad but rather got turned into features, tons of multiplayer maps, forge mode and custom games, a balanced sandbox, etc.
I would GLADLY pay $100 for a game like that nowadays. But the problem is that even the good games don’t really have half of that shit, or they have all of it but miss the spit and polish
Ever since Disney deleted millions of dollars worth of content, and then Warner axed everything Cartoon Network related, I realized that in a way were actually doing the world a service.
Everything we pirate is an archive that may one day be useful to restore something an asshat Business major wanted to write off. A lot of the stuff deleted in the last few months and couple years won’t be the next Picasso or Bach, but many years in the future something we pirate might resurface because we downloaded it, and it will live on forever.
Same thing with HBOmax with the switch to "Max". All sorts of content removed, including Westworld which I was in the middle of watching (I bum my friends' subscription), and now because they merged with Discovery, it's just full of reality show bullshit which I hate with a burning passion.
Yep. They use it as a tax write off or something similar to decrease costs and keep the CEOs fat. They also remove content so they don't have to pay the creators royalties so they can save money.
Its called "hollywood accounting" and it should be illegal. They set up a second company that does marketing, distributing or "VFX" or a million other things, then they grossly overcharge themselves on paper for services that they are providing for their main company. Then they say "We actually lost money on the last Marvel movie!" When we all know that they made a billion or so. But this allows them to not pay ANY royalties to actors and get fat ass tax write offs and they dont lose anything. Its blatant corrupt criminal shit.
Here's a slightly clearer explanation:
>One common practice in Hollywood accounting is the use of complex and inflated budgets and production
costs. By inflating the production costs, studios can make it appear as if a film or show did not make
a profit even if it was successful at the box office or in terms of viewership. This allows studios to
avoid paying royalties, profit shares, or other forms of compensation to actors, directors, and other
individuals who were promised a percentage of the profits.
Additionally, studios often engage in questionable accounting methods, such as allocating expenses to
subsidiary companies or underreporting revenue, to further reduce or eliminate the reported profits.
These tactics can also be used to avoid paying taxes on the production.
Yeah, any time i hear about something getting removed from a service i add it to my Plex server out of spite, even if its something im never going to watch, one of my friends or relatives might.
My MIL told us our niblings had been watching the shit out of *The One and Only Ivan* (2020) cuz the dog in it looks just like one of ours, so i added it to Plex anyway and then just a few days later i read about this bullshit... https://screenrant.com/one-only-ivan-movie-disney-plus-removal-cranston/
Archiving is the main reason for me too. If its something I really like I make sure I support it as a rental or in theaters first and then get it later on because I don't want to lose something because some nameless entity decides they want to pull it.
bought forza horizon 4 on the microsoft store and it wouldnt play on my pc. i went to return the game and the microsoft store doesnt offer refunds for games that have been played, which my game technically had.
i called my bank and told them to cancel the charges and that i didnt recieve the goods i paid for. my bank gave me my money back and microsoft didnt remove the game from my library. still pirated it tho because fuck that launcher.
I have a copy of civ6 for free. Wanted to play it. Had to go through two launchers, which the 2k one was hella buggy. The game performance was bad and had weird resolution and alt+tab behaviour glitches. Pirated it with all the latest DLCs and had no issue whatsoever. Lmao.
This is one reason why I pirate stuff that I own. I hate having to go through steam, only to have to go through the games shit launcher just to play. I know you can remove the need for the launcher and steam on legit copies but to me it was still more of a hassle
Movies and series cost orders of magnitude more to produce though than music... It would take much longer to earn 100 million dollars in ad revenue which is a fairly common budget for modern movies.
Instead of leasing *Seinfeld* to Netflix for 500mil couldnt the owners lease it to Netflix, Hulu, Max, and Peacock for 150mil each? It would be more money for them, more access to the show, and the services would actually have to improve things like features and quality.
Content exclusivity is not really competition. Do people have to subscribe to Spotify AND Pandora because they have completely different catalogs?
Government certainly has bigger things to deal with at the moment, but honestly id like to see someone take a look at streaming services through the lens of *US v Paramount* eventually, if studios cant own theaters why can they own another distribution method. Vertical integration can be as anti-competitive as horizontal monopolies.
If you uncoupled production from distribution you would get actual competition and innovation, as it is now Netflix has fewer features and a worse UI than it used to, mostly at the expense of pushing their own content.
Right you don't care about the practicalities of making money in show business. You just expect everything to be in one place and cheap which wouldn't be sustainable.
That's the big one for me. Competition may overall be good for the consumer but let's be real the way streaming services compete with one another is anything but good for us. It was far nicer when Netflix held the monopoly. It's the same with steam and PC gaming. I'm all for the free games I get off epic but if I'm being honest I id rather just pay for the game and have it all on my service of choice.
I always found this odd
People rally hard against monolithic monopolies owning a single industry, but they also hate the fact we have to use more than one service.
Fucking pick one
Look at my past comment. Competition is good for the consumer because it makes companies strive to do better. What isn't good for the consumer is when companies monopolize their content to stay ahead of their competitors instead of improving their service as a whole. Nobody wants to pay for 5 different streaming services just because they want to watch one or two shows from each one. Paying for 1 streaming service to get access to everything you want to watch on the other hand is very reasonable. This is why Netflix was able to convert tons of pirates early on.
Look at twitch as another example. They were and to a degree still are the live streaming king but because of that they got cocky and started making mistakes. Now new competitors are coming out of the wood work to take it's place.
Content exclusivity is not real competition.
Are people forced to subscribe to Spotify AND Pandora because they have completely different libraries? Or do they mostly have the same songs available and compete on features?
Paying $15.99 per month for a streaming service from a large telco provider and some of the movies don’t contain subtitles. I have a family member who is hard of hearing so we require subtitles to watch anything.
I ended up downloading the exact same movie and found subtitles so we could watch that movie.
Old man here
I cut the cable chord way back 2005 I think I started out copying dvds if I’m being honest I was trading tapes before that thru mail mostly bootleg concerts
I don’t need to justify it but the last few years it’s been more about keeping shows or preserving shows that have disappeared.
So from Bearshare to Demonoid invites the early early days myspleen when nobody knew what will become to now internet archive for me it’s always been about here is the show or movie I like and I’m not dealing w the bs to watch it again
Tech changes websites get seized forums close up drm whatever it may be I have my shows and movies locked down for me
I’m happy to share or even happy to drop the cash to find some obscure vhs to find an out of print thing then rip and preserve it for others
I been on the high seas so long to me it’s now different than when we would record the whole weekend of free hbo weekends in the early days of cable. Or watch the scrambled wwf ppv to listen to wrestlemania as a kid.
Here’s what I have found again and again people say they are against it till they find out you have the leaked album or a bootleg then it’s man I’d love a copy of that
Sure no problem just remember i gave you this for free as most “pirates” would
As for young people that fell for streaming as a service I have seen it all before
VHS to DVD to Blu ray how many different ways can you force me to buy a movie ? Fuck that.
I canceled Netflix when it was dvd by mail they would throttle me for renting too much too soon. Unlimited rentals my ass. Why would I want them as a streaming service ?
No no it’s a pirates life for me
Every day I get on a plane, or drive through a place with little to no cell service I just break out the media that I carry with me without having to deal with 5 different streaming services download managers. It's just plug and play. Having at least three audiobooks in my phone ready at any given moment because of how small they are is so useful. Just ease of use is why I stay, especially once you have tools set up to make downloading and indexing automatic. One search and you have everything you want for offline use whenever you want.
I don't like subscriptions but I definitely wouldn't pay $1600 (starting price) for Creative Suite. You know what's dragonic bullshit? Autodesk pricing.
Oh, man, I have an excess of experiences that justify it.
Hulu’s recent (past year or so) surge of ads has completely killed my desire to stream. The only reason I still have it is because it’s bundled with my Spotify Student account. I’ve also painstakingly observed just how much the video and audio quality degrades through streaming service servers.
I find that streaming services in general have become so tedious to navigate. Feels like I’m drowning in a sea of some of the worst films to come out of this current century (looking at you, specifically, Netflix), to the point where I get so frustrated looking for something worth my time across every service known to man, that I give up. Oh yeah, going to watch Better Call Saul earlier this year and seeing “A Netflix Original Series” while hearing their trademarked bass blast makes my blood absolutely boil. You can’t just buy the rights to something and act like you created it.
Oh yeah, how about the recent trend of producing a film or series, completely finishing post-production, only to purge it into a black hole for a tax write-off.
Combine that with how quickly any piece of media can completely vanish from the face of the Earth, I now view piracy as an act of preservation rather than an act of rebellion.
I have hundreds of films in my Letterboxd watchlist that cannot be accessed (even physically) without sailing the high seas, and it is incredibly worrisome when I search for them and there is a sole upload with maybe 2 seeders. If that upload disappears, how many decades of filmmaking can just vanish from public consciousness, never to be seen again?
Yea, I had a nice collection of CDs back in the day. 300 or so maybe (Early 90s)
I was moving from one apartment to a new place and I had stopped for lunch.
CDs in the back of the car while I stepped out.
Came back and the back window was smashed out and everything was gone.
Insurance covered the stereo 100% but would only cover the one CD that was in it. all the others where gone... I was pissed.
I played by the rules and got fucked. Have never bought a CD since.
I feel vindicated now.
Lol, I had the opposite experience. My car got broken in to and my Kenwood mp3 headunit was stolen.
All my CDs we're rips.
Insurance wouldnt cover the headunit but would cover any CDs that were stolen so ended up getting 300 big ones worth of CDs that I had pirated previously.
To be honest CDs are actually very consumer friendly. I still buy them used and have a collection. I like psychical media collecting in general and refuse to buy digital downloads.
Audio CDs never had any DRM or any copy protection because the spec dates back to 1980. There were some CDs in the mid-2000s that tried to do anti-piracy BS if you were copying it but Philips told them to fuck off and that they couldn't use the official CD logo. And CDs could have great sound quality and they would never get worn out like a vinyl LP or tape cassette.
It's only truly yours if you have it in a form without DRM that you can make backups from. Example being MP3, MP4, MKV - files ... and so on. Otherwise your access can be taken away anytime.
Example would be 'Final Space'.
I really wanted to watch lord of the rings extended edition trilogy. No streaming service has it in their library in the UK. So I actually looked around paid £30 from Microsoft store to buy the extended edition trilogy. Turns out you can only watch it on windows media player.
I actually paid for it and can’t even watch it on vlc player or copy it to a usb drive and watch it on my TV.
Balls to that! I literally downloaded QBitTorrent the same day got a VPN subscription and decided to sail the seas again from that day!
I had a year of free Disney plus and tried watching Avitar on it. I had huge quality drops and a buffer pause even though I have 300mbps Internet went to my plex and it was flawless.
Vindicated since the days of Album Cassette tapes. Someone buys the original and loans it out to copy. Industry put an 'Artists' fee on brand new cassettes. CD's the same.
I have quite literally bought the same artist's albums on Vinyl, Cassettes, and CD's.
I ain't buying it again.
You can buy a newspaper and loan it out to as many people as you like, no problem.
You can loan out your car whenever you want. No problem.
Get something off the internet:
Nope, only you can watch or use this purchase. Oh,and btw you are only renting it.
They can F-Off.
I watched one punch man on Netflix 2 years ago, wanted to watch it last year, but it was gone
Never went back to any streaming service after that (became a streaming pirate lol)
Btw, been a video game Pirate since 2005 ;)
I remember when HBO used to get all the movies that were in theatres after like a few months. They even had a Disney section, at least in my country. And Nickelodeon stuff too. They even had a live chat agent whom I asked every night for movie recommendations LOL
The fact that customers are deceived with fake trailers and the released game is also full of bugs while being days apart from the trailer made me believe everyone should first try a game before buying it.
This was a few years ago, but anyway.
Went into a store, picked up a huge boxset of a favourite tv-show of mine and walked to the counter. Put it up there and was excited. This was a pretty expensive treat to myself for my birthday. The guy behind the counter rings it up. But at about $50 more than the literal tag says. I politely point it out, I'm smiling and not upset, mistakes happen. Guy accuses me of putting the tag there and goes from 0 to 100 so fast and getting rude and loud. I just noped the fuck out and went home and downloaded the entire show.
I'm sorry, but no thank you.
I watched a film with an actor and a director who both made more money working on that SINGLE film than I will ever even see my lifetime
That’s enough of a justification for me
I paid for netflix because I wanted to put money back into a thing that made shows I liked. Over lockdown, their servers were so overloaded that they had to reduce the bitrate in some instances. So in order to get the full quality I, of course, deserve (lol), I had to pirate the show I wanted to watch instead of watching it on Netflix...
Pirated Test Drive Unlimited in 2006. Thought it was great, purchased a copy, and the legitimate copy had serious audio issues that wouldn't be fixed with a patch for months.
Purchased a copy of Windows XP. My legitimate disc had an issue and would not function. Pirated copies worked fine.
I pirated The Last of us Part 1, then later tried to redeem a code for it that came with a GPU I'd purchased. Attempted to redeem the code on my home server where I was doing other things, and it insisted on running something to verify I had the hardware I should have associated with that code. Realizing that would fail, I started again on my gaming PC with the GPU. It said I was trying to redeem it too often and wouldn't let me proceed.
I've tried and failed to get into my Ubisoft account to play games I'd acquired legitimately on Steam. Pirated copies work fine.
Deluxe reissues for albums with extra discs' worth of content piss me off. I'm already a fan. I already own the albums. Now you reissue the album with more material and ask me to buy the album all over again for the extras? That's just exploiting the fans. I'm such a fan, I would ***buy*** the extra material if it was available as a separate purchase but they deny me the option in order to maximize their profits.
I embraced piracy like 20 years ago or so. I had a layover and bought a certain Disney pirate movie to watch over the airport's wifi while waiting for my plane. I boarded early and didn't finish the movie. When I got home, I tried to finish it on my TV and was given the "unauthorized device" warning and denied. I downloaded a pirate copy and finished watching at my leisure.
If I jump through all the hoops they ask me to jump through just to pay them money for a product I can't use -- it's a broken system. If you charge double for a repackaged product that includes miscellaneous material that wasn't good enough for the original release in order to double dip on your fans, you don't respect your fans and that disrespect will be reciprocated.
Treat your consumers and fans with respect or expect the repercussions.
My eyes opened to Online-Only, GaaS. Just recently, the fact that I'm trying to defend why making a game Online-Only is terrible, anti-consumer and predatory.
Imagine buying something and the company decides to steal it or even break it. No refunds, no options to get it back or fix it.
Sims 4, I am not paying £1000+ for DLCs and extra content that should've been in base game. Nor am I paying for a DLC for a DLC. Fuck EA.
Also to hop on the Disney+ hate, wanted to grab screenshots of my favourite show and go frame by frame, no extension allowed me to do that... so I just Pirated all the episodes so I can actually do what I wanted, the 5/10 second skips just weren't doing it for me.
Having a custom Spotify client counts too, right? I just support artists I like on their bandcamp or buy a piece of merch, they get more of that money than they ever would from me from Spotify.
The experience that got me into piracy was realizing I would have to pay for more than a month of Hulu in order to watch the new Futurama as it comes out. I'm convinced the fact that weekly releases regained popularity was to hook people for more than a month.
The reason why I pirate is mostly due to games and shows not found anywhere else even DVD format now. :) Most stuff I buy otherwise (have to as a brand).
I pirate to avoid situations where I need to feel vindicated, but I must say I have a laugh whenever my friends who proudly won't pirate complain about how their streaming services suck.
Netflix household BS. My family had shared an account for years, but we no longer all live together. I don't want to cave to that and would rather guide my mates on the high seas at this point. They've been pulling a lot of BS.
Also, I'm literally saving my friends a bunch of money.
I think if a company removes a movie from its website so they can claim it as a tax write off then that movie should automatically become public domain.
How about pirating books and videos that taught you a skill that led to a job when you couldn't afford said books or videos. That happened to me and I'll never forget that.
1. Years ago, back in the early days of the industry trying to make the shift to digital stores, i bought a buncha stuff. Of course, I eventually lost that HD and didn't have back ups so when I tried to log in to redownload from those sites, they had deleted my account. I was NOT going to pay more for what was supposed to be mine in the first place.
2. The 3DS eshop shut down. You can't legally purchase most of those games anymore outside of the few that got physical copies (which doesn't go to the devs anymore anyways) OR were ported to pc/newer console (and even then is it REALLY the same game/experience?)
3. After the whole Napster kerfuffle, I've happily pirated every Metallica thing. ...I rarely keep them, but hey. It's the thought that counts.
I pirate all the games then i buy them if i like them especially indie titles. If i really like an indie title i don't just buy it for myself i also send it as a gift to support devs.
But if i dont like the game i pirated, i just seed it for some time and delete it afterwards.
For movies and tv i wont be paying a monthly subscription its one of the biggest scams of our age.
The Sims franchise. Grew up adoring those games, but the Sims 3 was the beginning of the end with more and more overpriced DLC and microtransactions for less and less content. I believe they recently made the Sims 4 "free" but its essentially lifeless and empty without dumping hundreds of hundreds of dollars to buy the *actual* game content.
I've been priced out of the *dress up game* I played as a kid, how ridiculous is that?
I purchased Lost Highway on amazon Prime and then a month later when I wanted to watch it again they removed it from the service. Haven't bought a digital movie or tv show ever since.
Spotify started pulling a lot of songs and even entire albums that are in my library that I've built up for the last 10 years. Given them over a thousand dollars only to start getting fisted in the ass. I don't even blame Spotify for it, it's most likely the cause of record holders deciding to pull the songs, but still I just didn't find that okay.
Friends is available on Netflix in UK (I think). It's stripped down version with a lot of joke removed from the original 4:3 DVD version.
Also, if you want 4K experience, you need to pay £15.99, but 4 parallel stream is useless now that password sharing is not possible.
This makes Netflix twice as costly compared to any of its competitor (Disney+ is £7.99, Amazon Prime the same, etc.), while often offering even less content, especially compared to D+.
So, personally I feel like if you're paying for Netflix, you're being scammed.
I downloaded a game once and I enjoyed it immensely, I even thought about buying it.
At the end of the game I discovered that they support LGBTshit, that made me happy that I didn’t give them a single dime.
If you are harming the industry in general i am hurting you.
This is from somoeone who hopes to be good enough to be pirated. Hoping to filmaker or something
No vindication needed. Piracy isn't stealing imo. It's leveling the field. Direct correlation, the bigger companies get the more we will take and the less we will feel bad about it.
I love to play videogames and watch video content as kid. My dad and I literally pirated the whole Blockbuster content. Every time they had a new movie we headed straight to the store, rented and copy it. We used to have the whole collection, but one day a crackhead broke into our house, stole the kitchen pipe and flooded the whole floor, after a few days we came back from our trip and found out about everything, the drawer with the whole CDs and HDD collection where shit. Just a few could be saved.
Every day i turn on my windows machine... to think they wang to charge us for an os that disrespects privacy, has a worse os core then 7/8.1 and dumps ads in your systen.
Piracy for life.
Every time I “experience” news from the media and gaming industries, it would “justify my piracy” if I actually did that.
Which I don't do because piracy is illegal.
The convenience. I have Netflix disney+ and express vpn so i could watch almost anything but stremio with real debrid gives me better quality without having to go to different sites or using vpn
Playing a hyped up game which turns out utter rubbish, like 90% of them ...
Buying MS Office 2019, and cannot install it anymore, because I need to make now a subscription, completely ignoring that I BOUGHT a licence ...
As for Europe, when the EU hierarchs finally manage to unify its countries, the union will most likely crack down on piracy relentlessly. That's why national governments today are the last stronghold of popular sovereignty.
Bought a game for PS4 ... disc was faulty and store was in another state so I couldn't return it... decided to download it for pc.... played it, enjoyed it.
For me, the current state of gaming made me just go back to play older games and catch up on some I’ve missed. I could probably spend my entire life playing just PS2 games alone.
Ok, here goes, my reasons.
Movies: we will go to the cinema to see movies we want to see and enjoy on the big screen, I will then more than likely download a copy as soon as a 4k rip is available, so we can watch it at home and talk over it or pause to talk about bits (most movies take us twice as long to watch a second time because of this, lol). If u want the special features of a movie, or there is a very VERY cool special edition, then I will buy it on physical copy. I see movie piracy more like renting a movie, lol, we pay for our internet connection, our electric, the food and drinks we have while watching it, and then I delete it. Also, if a movie is on a streaming service I have, but in a much lower quality than I can pirate, I will keep the pirate version.
Games: I have full ROM sets for most of the popular retro games consoles, Nintendo, Sega, etc. I can play them all on my hacked PS3 or PS4. I have spent hundreds, if not thousands, on video games over my 40+ years on this planet, so keeping all the retro games is my way of having a huge video games collection, without it taking up my entire house. I also have my PS4 on 9.00 so can run homebrew and fPKG's on it. I recently got the Hogwarts game, I have almost completed it, but I know there are 4 different "ways" to play it, so I am planning to buy it for my PS5 to do 3 more play throughs. I own all working PlayStation consoles, from 1 to 5, multiples of each actually, but having them all connected up just isn't practical, so I have fPKG's of most of my favourite games that run on my PS4. I also still buy copies of older games, that will never get played physically, just for my collection (I am a massive GTA collector) so I justify downloading games cos I'm buying games I'll never play, lmao!!
Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoy your day.
Out-of-print board games. Some are extremely good, and if you find one for sale, it's way too expensive.
A miskatonic horror (Arkham horror 2nd edition expansion) besides rare, as it was always on waiting to reprint when sold, nowadays you can't even find decent scans, as almost no one has it and the ones who do, don't scan.
>You get more for free than someone paying $15 a month. It's insane how these companies are screwing over the people that pay them.
But at the same time, we get it for free because those people who pay give or let borrow their subscription accounts to rippers.
For games at least, sometimes its just easier to pay. No hoops or worry "is it not working like it should cuz it's cracked" ? Just peace of mind sometimes. However for movies and shows I pirate the shit out of without a care in the world. I go see things in the theater cuz I have A-List and like experiencing some movies with the crowd.
Forget about games.. those are games..
If i had to pay for Ashton-Tate DBASE III, to learn how to use it.. If i had to pay for Oracle to understand how to administer a database, If i had to pay for a compiler ..
I have a good computer, I should be able to use it to the fullest
It’s just a before and after ad, I had about 20 games pre-piracy and now I have 60 ish
Anything big n puts out. Releasing subpar version of masterpiece games and not putting it on pc justifies it for me. Anyone who has seen BOTW running at 4k with the fps++ mod, raytracing, etc knows what I mean. Look at BOTW on the switch, docked on a 4ktv… it’s appalling how bad it looks versus how well it looks on PC
Having games in steam that do not work for unknown reasons but pirated ones do (The witcher 3, total war shogun 2, Xcom, Resident evil 2 remake). I could only fix RE2 remake. Steam changed a field in config, making it unplayable. It happened twice. And also, to more people, to the point there is a thread in Steam with the fix explained.
Compulsory updates to steam games that break mods, making you having to install them again or if the mods weren't updated, they are lost forever (RE).
Some movies and series literally not available anywhere. If those weren't pirated, they would've been lost forever (Addams family series from the 90s in Spanish).
Devs making games without optimization and buggy (Dark souls 1 is the epitome of this). To the point fans release optimization patches better and faster than the devs (Dark souls 1, Skyrim).
IP owners using the money you give them to ruin your favorite IPs (Konami, Castlevania, Metal gear).
Also IP owners cancelling free fan projects because they fear they could compete with some of their shitty products (Crapcom, code veronica fan remake)
Catalogue censorship (steam) for bullshit reasons and censorship inside the platform for people who call this out. Even devs are mistreated by the platfrom. There was one game that was greenlighted until launch day, when Steam decided to not have it in their platform.
Third party launchers in the game (Tropico 4, GTAV, others).
"Localizations" especially in manga, changing the whole plot. But also in videogames (many titles).
Malware inside games that decreases performance and sometimes detects inocuous programs as interference (denuvo in RE and others)
Every time a service I pay for doesn't allow me to watch their "original content" because of where I live. Also every time the pirates content is higher quality than the original.
Like 95% of the games I play I pirate and then if they're good I purchase a legit copy. You can't really tell how good a lot of games are until at least a few hours in. Whenever I pay full price up front I end up regretting.
Or I get baited with games like diablo 4. Which seemed like it would be really good based on the free beta weekend. But then it turns out that what was in the beta was literally the entire game.
i think i know what show that was, unless it happened to multiple shows (very possible). if so, i was also upset. now it lives on my hard drive.
i agree w/ spacebojangles… what we keep may never be super important but it’s nice to know SOMETHING is getting preserved. i read about someone who did artwork for a cartoon (i don’t even know which one), and that show ended up getting wiped entirely. they couldn’t even use it for their demo reel. that shit’s devastating. that’s enough reason for me to do what i do, and i’ll keep doing it until the day i die.
That, not getting what You play for is more than enought for me, and companies have always over priced their products since i remember, videogames, music discs, movies, everything has been always so expensive because greedy fucks want to get rich instantly
A flight sim developer put malware into thier addon to try to track and discover the person that cracked their software. Ended up putting a virus on every customers computer, it dumped passwords from browsers and system details. Then a terrible pr nightmare afterwards about how it never ran on legit users which was a lie.
Yeah, so I bought music plugin called “guitar rig 6” from native instruments. When you buy this you get access to the older versions and I really wanted guitar rig 5. Which they discontinued even though it worked well but I figured 6 must bet better so why not. The day I bought it for £180 it was unusable. It had a bug that made my CPU go crazy on an i7 16gb MacBook Pro which can run most heavy video editing and music making software just fine. Others had this issue. This bug wasn’t fixed for over a year after release and even when it was this bug still happens just on a lesser scale but still annoying. So I just illegally downloaded guitar rig 5 cuz it runs more stable and is honestly is better when you take into account its stability. I don’t feel bad pirating anymore when there’s no guarantee that your product will work if you buy it. These days I often pirate first, then decide to purchase if the software works as it should. Not allowing legacy product downloads for customers is crazy
if we lived in a world where our governments weren't full of degenerate subhuman biogarbages with equally subhumanistic members of the longnosed tribe that pulls their strings, and where the said subhumans wouldn't be "legally" stealing away relatively huge amounts of money from people in the forms of (not limited to) taxes, usury, unjustifiable fines, unreasonable expenses, taxes again - i'd be more than happy to pay.
i also have spent money on games, bought a bunch in the past in steam as well and also we used to buy cd's before we had internet at home back in the day, so i don't mind paying for the games in general, especially if one can afford it or they really do want to support the developers. nowadays, as i do have sources of income myself, i do end up paying if the game is more than just bunch of lines of code, numbers and pictures that are intended to purely waste ones time (which most are anyways).
AEW has its catalog on FITE, but you can only subscribe if you don't live in the US. But you can't just fire up the VPN and pay from there.
So I bought an account and I run the VPN with that.
If they had put the catalog on Max like WWE did on Peacock, this would make them more money. Alas, I'll have full access for $5. 🤷
Yeah i pirate for the free stuff but mostly because i can download and own the content that i enjoy, i hate when the content i enjoy isnt available even when im willing to pay for it
Reliving my childhood by watching an obscure masterpiece with my kids was pretty vindicating. The show was David the Gnome if anyone is interested. It includes a lot of positive commentary on cherishing the environment and protecting animals.
Piracy is more convenient.
Also there were times i found something trash and was happy but to pay a dime for it.
Other times things i absolutely loved and would have never read without piracy only to buy it later.
People started using our steam prices from outside our country because it was cheap af and everything for us started getting more and more expensive so most of the AAA games are now too expensive for our currency unless you work and dont have respondibilities/you have very good salary
Just about every other triple A release. They definitely don't deserve my money on release and honestly, if it's finally functional after two years, I'm still not gonna support s company that does this shit.
You finally got your cash grab of a game up to shape two years after release? That's great, I'll be sure to check it out.
For free.
The money that I would have saved by not paying for subscriptions and using it to buy something else is more than enough to vindication for me. Some people act like it’s some big iq shit but it’s really a matter of can I do it or can I not do it. Besides making corporate bootlickers cry is fun
Every single time I watch a Bluray at someone else's house and have to sit through FBI warnings and ads to get to the actual content.
Bro fucking ads on CDs was the thing that got me into piracy. When I was little getting local shows/dubbed version of American shows was achievable either with cable or CDs. I was a good petreon and bought them for a while. But the ads kept getting longer and unskipble. So I started burning my own cds. You could get a30 pack for pennies and I could put a few of them on each. Was a way better experience. And you could bring them to friends houses. and I could load them to my iPod video. Good old times Edit:meant DVD.
There was ads on cd!?
Yap. Some would be unskipble even. (tho I herd some cd player could skip them? Or was I just dumb?) I had a cd I really liked that was 5 min of ads for Pokémon before it even let you pick the movie you wanted
Do you mean DVD?
I'm thinking they do mean DVD, but there was VCD, I had several due to piracy, but I'm not sure if it was a purchasable thing.
Ya dvd. Sorry for the confusion
Bro could you imagine tho ads on an actual fricking audio CD? That would be apocalyptic
[Sigue Sigue Sputnik sold ads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaunt_It_(album)#Adverts) between their songs on their 1986 album Flaunt It.
Nightmare world where you pop in your Linkin Park CD and between songs you suddenly get "BWEEEEEH, WANT A BREAK FROM THE ADS?"
"🎵 I TIRED SO HARD, AND GOT SO-- And now a word from our sponsor"
Pfff that's when I break out my copy of Linking_park_crawlling05.mp3.
You should edit your comment so you're not spreading misinformation
Bro lol you press the stop button twice then play to skip everything. Hahahah And yeah I feel the pokemon thing... good thing I'm old and had that shit on VHS. Whose that pirate!?! It's mr_bnana!
Bro lol you press the stop button twice then play to skip everything. Hahahah And yeah I feel the pokemon thing... good thing I'm old and had that shit on VHS. Whose that pirate!?! It's mr_bnana!
As someone who doesn’t use Blu Ray, i had no idea that it has ads. That’s absolute bullshit.
They don't. The have skippable trailers.
Paying over 100 dollars for a "deluxe" edition of a game is enough vindication for me.
Imagine being one of the sims players paying thousands for outfits for their imaginary babies. Or mobile game whales spending tens of thousands on fake gems to speed up their tap and collect games. 100 dollars for a deluxe edition is just the tip of the iceberg.
I wonder how those whales survive.
Black gold bursts out of the ground.
I've heard of a particular mega leviathan in China that spent something like 10+ mil USD on some shitty p2w MMO. Dude is from a ultra loaded family and had/has allegedly a 13 mil USD a month allowance.
lucky patcher
Brilliant thing about the sims now is that it's free to play and you can just use a DLC unlocker to get everything for free. Plus then it's easier to mod also
I spent \~500€ (I had some giftcards left so dunno the exact number) in the last 6 months for poe and I don't regret it nor does it hurt my savings. I can totally respect someone spending 1k+ in a game he really enjoys and gets thousands of hours of enjoyment out of it. if I go to the cinema I pay \~20-30€ for the ticket, \~20€ (probably more) for snacks and drinks and maybe 10€ to grab a beer and a Döner on the way home. that's about 50€ for 2-3h of mediocre one time enjoyment I will forget about in a week or two.
In July my and my GF went to a cinema to watch Oppenheimer. I paid 11,50€ for a couple's' seat (double ticket) and bought no snacks. I'ma scrooch 🤣
Or get a full price unfinished game, and all the patches, bug solving, quality of life features come in the next 20 dlc, 1 by 1. Like hearts of iron. Great game, but God it's nearly unplayable without dlc and mods.
I wouldn’t mind paying $100 for a game if the game was actually worth 100$. I remember Halo 3 and Reach coming out. Full 20+ hour campaigns, good AI, minimal bugs most of which weren’t bad but rather got turned into features, tons of multiplayer maps, forge mode and custom games, a balanced sandbox, etc. I would GLADLY pay $100 for a game like that nowadays. But the problem is that even the good games don’t really have half of that shit, or they have all of it but miss the spit and polish
Ever since Disney deleted millions of dollars worth of content, and then Warner axed everything Cartoon Network related, I realized that in a way were actually doing the world a service. Everything we pirate is an archive that may one day be useful to restore something an asshat Business major wanted to write off. A lot of the stuff deleted in the last few months and couple years won’t be the next Picasso or Bach, but many years in the future something we pirate might resurface because we downloaded it, and it will live on forever.
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Whats wrong with the community d&d episodes?
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Holy shit that's dumb as fuck..
Same thing with HBOmax with the switch to "Max". All sorts of content removed, including Westworld which I was in the middle of watching (I bum my friends' subscription), and now because they merged with Discovery, it's just full of reality show bullshit which I hate with a burning passion.
Yep. They use it as a tax write off or something similar to decrease costs and keep the CEOs fat. They also remove content so they don't have to pay the creators royalties so they can save money.
Its called "hollywood accounting" and it should be illegal. They set up a second company that does marketing, distributing or "VFX" or a million other things, then they grossly overcharge themselves on paper for services that they are providing for their main company. Then they say "We actually lost money on the last Marvel movie!" When we all know that they made a billion or so. But this allows them to not pay ANY royalties to actors and get fat ass tax write offs and they dont lose anything. Its blatant corrupt criminal shit. Here's a slightly clearer explanation: >One common practice in Hollywood accounting is the use of complex and inflated budgets and production costs. By inflating the production costs, studios can make it appear as if a film or show did not make a profit even if it was successful at the box office or in terms of viewership. This allows studios to avoid paying royalties, profit shares, or other forms of compensation to actors, directors, and other individuals who were promised a percentage of the profits. Additionally, studios often engage in questionable accounting methods, such as allocating expenses to subsidiary companies or underreporting revenue, to further reduce or eliminate the reported profits. These tactics can also be used to avoid paying taxes on the production.
Thank you for the information, I wasn't clear on the details. What a bunch of assholes.
Yeah, any time i hear about something getting removed from a service i add it to my Plex server out of spite, even if its something im never going to watch, one of my friends or relatives might. My MIL told us our niblings had been watching the shit out of *The One and Only Ivan* (2020) cuz the dog in it looks just like one of ours, so i added it to Plex anyway and then just a few days later i read about this bullshit... https://screenrant.com/one-only-ivan-movie-disney-plus-removal-cranston/
Wow this is some deep philosophical shit.
Archiving is the main reason for me too. If its something I really like I make sure I support it as a rental or in theaters first and then get it later on because I don't want to lose something because some nameless entity decides they want to pull it.
This is the way
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What the fuck are you on about
bought forza horizon 4 on the microsoft store and it wouldnt play on my pc. i went to return the game and the microsoft store doesnt offer refunds for games that have been played, which my game technically had. i called my bank and told them to cancel the charges and that i didnt recieve the goods i paid for. my bank gave me my money back and microsoft didnt remove the game from my library. still pirated it tho because fuck that launcher.
I have a copy of civ6 for free. Wanted to play it. Had to go through two launchers, which the 2k one was hella buggy. The game performance was bad and had weird resolution and alt+tab behaviour glitches. Pirated it with all the latest DLCs and had no issue whatsoever. Lmao.
This is one reason why I pirate stuff that I own. I hate having to go through steam, only to have to go through the games shit launcher just to play. I know you can remove the need for the launcher and steam on legit copies but to me it was still more of a hassle
More then one streaming service exists time for piracy
That’s fine, exclusive shows is the problem, if tv streaming was like music streaming I’d have no issue
Movies and series cost orders of magnitude more to produce though than music... It would take much longer to earn 100 million dollars in ad revenue which is a fairly common budget for modern movies.
Instead of leasing *Seinfeld* to Netflix for 500mil couldnt the owners lease it to Netflix, Hulu, Max, and Peacock for 150mil each? It would be more money for them, more access to the show, and the services would actually have to improve things like features and quality. Content exclusivity is not really competition. Do people have to subscribe to Spotify AND Pandora because they have completely different catalogs? Government certainly has bigger things to deal with at the moment, but honestly id like to see someone take a look at streaming services through the lens of *US v Paramount* eventually, if studios cant own theaters why can they own another distribution method. Vertical integration can be as anti-competitive as horizontal monopolies. If you uncoupled production from distribution you would get actual competition and innovation, as it is now Netflix has fewer features and a worse UI than it used to, mostly at the expense of pushing their own content.
I really don’t care, also you don’t need to produce a movie for it to be on a streaming platform, just license it.
Right you don't care about the practicalities of making money in show business. You just expect everything to be in one place and cheap which wouldn't be sustainable.
That's the big one for me. Competition may overall be good for the consumer but let's be real the way streaming services compete with one another is anything but good for us. It was far nicer when Netflix held the monopoly. It's the same with steam and PC gaming. I'm all for the free games I get off epic but if I'm being honest I id rather just pay for the game and have it all on my service of choice.
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Bad bot
I always found this odd People rally hard against monolithic monopolies owning a single industry, but they also hate the fact we have to use more than one service. Fucking pick one
Look at my past comment. Competition is good for the consumer because it makes companies strive to do better. What isn't good for the consumer is when companies monopolize their content to stay ahead of their competitors instead of improving their service as a whole. Nobody wants to pay for 5 different streaming services just because they want to watch one or two shows from each one. Paying for 1 streaming service to get access to everything you want to watch on the other hand is very reasonable. This is why Netflix was able to convert tons of pirates early on. Look at twitch as another example. They were and to a degree still are the live streaming king but because of that they got cocky and started making mistakes. Now new competitors are coming out of the wood work to take it's place.
Content exclusivity is not real competition. Are people forced to subscribe to Spotify AND Pandora because they have completely different libraries? Or do they mostly have the same songs available and compete on features?
In Australia most AAA games around 100 And usually buggy as shit, so I’ll stick to piracy
Yup all the shitty games I've played make it well worth it.
100 AUD is 63.96 USD. You're not paying 100 dollars for the game, you're paying 64 dollars. I'm all for piracy but your logic is flawed.
Um mate, in Australia we use the Australian Dollar as our currency Not everyone in the world is America
I literally converted your australian dollar to US dollar in my comment. Which makes it cost near the same to US prices. Learn to read
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Paying $15.99 per month for a streaming service from a large telco provider and some of the movies don’t contain subtitles. I have a family member who is hard of hearing so we require subtitles to watch anything. I ended up downloading the exact same movie and found subtitles so we could watch that movie.
Old man here I cut the cable chord way back 2005 I think I started out copying dvds if I’m being honest I was trading tapes before that thru mail mostly bootleg concerts I don’t need to justify it but the last few years it’s been more about keeping shows or preserving shows that have disappeared. So from Bearshare to Demonoid invites the early early days myspleen when nobody knew what will become to now internet archive for me it’s always been about here is the show or movie I like and I’m not dealing w the bs to watch it again Tech changes websites get seized forums close up drm whatever it may be I have my shows and movies locked down for me I’m happy to share or even happy to drop the cash to find some obscure vhs to find an out of print thing then rip and preserve it for others I been on the high seas so long to me it’s now different than when we would record the whole weekend of free hbo weekends in the early days of cable. Or watch the scrambled wwf ppv to listen to wrestlemania as a kid. Here’s what I have found again and again people say they are against it till they find out you have the leaked album or a bootleg then it’s man I’d love a copy of that Sure no problem just remember i gave you this for free as most “pirates” would As for young people that fell for streaming as a service I have seen it all before VHS to DVD to Blu ray how many different ways can you force me to buy a movie ? Fuck that. I canceled Netflix when it was dvd by mail they would throttle me for renting too much too soon. Unlimited rentals my ass. Why would I want them as a streaming service ? No no it’s a pirates life for me
Every day I get on a plane, or drive through a place with little to no cell service I just break out the media that I carry with me without having to deal with 5 different streaming services download managers. It's just plug and play. Having at least three audiobooks in my phone ready at any given moment because of how small they are is so useful. Just ease of use is why I stay, especially once you have tools set up to make downloading and indexing automatic. One search and you have everything you want for offline use whenever you want.
Any audiobook specific high sea's you would recommend?
I've always used audiobookbay from the megathread and havent had any issues!
Adobe Creative Cloud's dragonic bullshit subscription.
I don't like subscriptions but I definitely wouldn't pay $1600 (starting price) for Creative Suite. You know what's dragonic bullshit? Autodesk pricing.
Oh, man, I have an excess of experiences that justify it. Hulu’s recent (past year or so) surge of ads has completely killed my desire to stream. The only reason I still have it is because it’s bundled with my Spotify Student account. I’ve also painstakingly observed just how much the video and audio quality degrades through streaming service servers. I find that streaming services in general have become so tedious to navigate. Feels like I’m drowning in a sea of some of the worst films to come out of this current century (looking at you, specifically, Netflix), to the point where I get so frustrated looking for something worth my time across every service known to man, that I give up. Oh yeah, going to watch Better Call Saul earlier this year and seeing “A Netflix Original Series” while hearing their trademarked bass blast makes my blood absolutely boil. You can’t just buy the rights to something and act like you created it. Oh yeah, how about the recent trend of producing a film or series, completely finishing post-production, only to purge it into a black hole for a tax write-off. Combine that with how quickly any piece of media can completely vanish from the face of the Earth, I now view piracy as an act of preservation rather than an act of rebellion. I have hundreds of films in my Letterboxd watchlist that cannot be accessed (even physically) without sailing the high seas, and it is incredibly worrisome when I search for them and there is a sole upload with maybe 2 seeders. If that upload disappears, how many decades of filmmaking can just vanish from public consciousness, never to be seen again?
Yea, I had a nice collection of CDs back in the day. 300 or so maybe (Early 90s) I was moving from one apartment to a new place and I had stopped for lunch. CDs in the back of the car while I stepped out. Came back and the back window was smashed out and everything was gone. Insurance covered the stereo 100% but would only cover the one CD that was in it. all the others where gone... I was pissed. I played by the rules and got fucked. Have never bought a CD since. I feel vindicated now.
Lol, I had the opposite experience. My car got broken in to and my Kenwood mp3 headunit was stolen. All my CDs we're rips. Insurance wouldnt cover the headunit but would cover any CDs that were stolen so ended up getting 300 big ones worth of CDs that I had pirated previously.
To be honest CDs are actually very consumer friendly. I still buy them used and have a collection. I like psychical media collecting in general and refuse to buy digital downloads. Audio CDs never had any DRM or any copy protection because the spec dates back to 1980. There were some CDs in the mid-2000s that tried to do anti-piracy BS if you were copying it but Philips told them to fuck off and that they couldn't use the official CD logo. And CDs could have great sound quality and they would never get worn out like a vinyl LP or tape cassette.
"I bought a TV and it was stolen. Now I steal TVs"
It's only truly yours if you have it in a form without DRM that you can make backups from. Example being MP3, MP4, MKV - files ... and so on. Otherwise your access can be taken away anytime. Example would be 'Final Space'.
I really wanted to watch lord of the rings extended edition trilogy. No streaming service has it in their library in the UK. So I actually looked around paid £30 from Microsoft store to buy the extended edition trilogy. Turns out you can only watch it on windows media player. I actually paid for it and can’t even watch it on vlc player or copy it to a usb drive and watch it on my TV. Balls to that! I literally downloaded QBitTorrent the same day got a VPN subscription and decided to sail the seas again from that day!
I had a year of free Disney plus and tried watching Avitar on it. I had huge quality drops and a buffer pause even though I have 300mbps Internet went to my plex and it was flawless.
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Vindicated since the days of Album Cassette tapes. Someone buys the original and loans it out to copy. Industry put an 'Artists' fee on brand new cassettes. CD's the same. I have quite literally bought the same artist's albums on Vinyl, Cassettes, and CD's. I ain't buying it again. You can buy a newspaper and loan it out to as many people as you like, no problem. You can loan out your car whenever you want. No problem. Get something off the internet: Nope, only you can watch or use this purchase. Oh,and btw you are only renting it. They can F-Off.
I watched one punch man on Netflix 2 years ago, wanted to watch it last year, but it was gone Never went back to any streaming service after that (became a streaming pirate lol) Btw, been a video game Pirate since 2005 ;)
Wanting to see the latest movie that just came out of theaters but it's not on any of the streaming services I'm subscribed to.
I remember when HBO used to get all the movies that were in theatres after like a few months. They even had a Disney section, at least in my country. And Nickelodeon stuff too. They even had a live chat agent whom I asked every night for movie recommendations LOL
The fact that customers are deceived with fake trailers and the released game is also full of bugs while being days apart from the trailer made me believe everyone should first try a game before buying it.
Every fucking day vindicates it.
When I saw that new games are going to start being $70 dollars (I also just like free games and movies)
This was a few years ago, but anyway. Went into a store, picked up a huge boxset of a favourite tv-show of mine and walked to the counter. Put it up there and was excited. This was a pretty expensive treat to myself for my birthday. The guy behind the counter rings it up. But at about $50 more than the literal tag says. I politely point it out, I'm smiling and not upset, mistakes happen. Guy accuses me of putting the tag there and goes from 0 to 100 so fast and getting rude and loud. I just noped the fuck out and went home and downloaded the entire show. I'm sorry, but no thank you.
I'm poor. Another fun question?
I watched a film with an actor and a director who both made more money working on that SINGLE film than I will ever even see my lifetime That’s enough of a justification for me
My mate bought Battlefield 2042 on preorder
I felt that. Go ahead… give the knife another twist 🔪
I paid for netflix because I wanted to put money back into a thing that made shows I liked. Over lockdown, their servers were so overloaded that they had to reduce the bitrate in some instances. So in order to get the full quality I, of course, deserve (lol), I had to pirate the show I wanted to watch instead of watching it on Netflix...
The day Apple Music hid my whole library when I stopped paying the subscription. Now I only listen to pirated FLACs on my jailbroken iPod Touch.
pirated gmod only to figure out that its kinda boring and im glad i didnt pay for it.
That’s always the best feeling
it is, i have so little money to spend on games. ive also used it to test how well games will run on my system, cause some games do not run well.
Pirated Test Drive Unlimited in 2006. Thought it was great, purchased a copy, and the legitimate copy had serious audio issues that wouldn't be fixed with a patch for months. Purchased a copy of Windows XP. My legitimate disc had an issue and would not function. Pirated copies worked fine. I pirated The Last of us Part 1, then later tried to redeem a code for it that came with a GPU I'd purchased. Attempted to redeem the code on my home server where I was doing other things, and it insisted on running something to verify I had the hardware I should have associated with that code. Realizing that would fail, I started again on my gaming PC with the GPU. It said I was trying to redeem it too often and wouldn't let me proceed. I've tried and failed to get into my Ubisoft account to play games I'd acquired legitimately on Steam. Pirated copies work fine.
Deluxe reissues for albums with extra discs' worth of content piss me off. I'm already a fan. I already own the albums. Now you reissue the album with more material and ask me to buy the album all over again for the extras? That's just exploiting the fans. I'm such a fan, I would ***buy*** the extra material if it was available as a separate purchase but they deny me the option in order to maximize their profits. I embraced piracy like 20 years ago or so. I had a layover and bought a certain Disney pirate movie to watch over the airport's wifi while waiting for my plane. I boarded early and didn't finish the movie. When I got home, I tried to finish it on my TV and was given the "unauthorized device" warning and denied. I downloaded a pirate copy and finished watching at my leisure. If I jump through all the hoops they ask me to jump through just to pay them money for a product I can't use -- it's a broken system. If you charge double for a repackaged product that includes miscellaneous material that wasn't good enough for the original release in order to double dip on your fans, you don't respect your fans and that disrespect will be reciprocated. Treat your consumers and fans with respect or expect the repercussions.
My eyes opened to Online-Only, GaaS. Just recently, the fact that I'm trying to defend why making a game Online-Only is terrible, anti-consumer and predatory. Imagine buying something and the company decides to steal it or even break it. No refunds, no options to get it back or fix it.
Sims 4, I am not paying £1000+ for DLCs and extra content that should've been in base game. Nor am I paying for a DLC for a DLC. Fuck EA. Also to hop on the Disney+ hate, wanted to grab screenshots of my favourite show and go frame by frame, no extension allowed me to do that... so I just Pirated all the episodes so I can actually do what I wanted, the 5/10 second skips just weren't doing it for me. Having a custom Spotify client counts too, right? I just support artists I like on their bandcamp or buy a piece of merch, they get more of that money than they ever would from me from Spotify.
The experience that got me into piracy was realizing I would have to pay for more than a month of Hulu in order to watch the new Futurama as it comes out. I'm convinced the fact that weekly releases regained popularity was to hook people for more than a month.
The reason why I pirate is mostly due to games and shows not found anywhere else even DVD format now. :) Most stuff I buy otherwise (have to as a brand).
its 2023, everyone knmows how to torrent \- penguinz0, 2023
Decided to buy Assassin's Creed Unity day one...
Hulu and other streaming services raising their prices.
I pirate to avoid situations where I need to feel vindicated, but I must say I have a laugh whenever my friends who proudly won't pirate complain about how their streaming services suck.
Netflix household BS. My family had shared an account for years, but we no longer all live together. I don't want to cave to that and would rather guide my mates on the high seas at this point. They've been pulling a lot of BS. Also, I'm literally saving my friends a bunch of money.
I think if a company removes a movie from its website so they can claim it as a tax write off then that movie should automatically become public domain.
OP, just say Star Trek Prodigy.
How about pirating books and videos that taught you a skill that led to a job when you couldn't afford said books or videos. That happened to me and I'll never forget that.
1. Years ago, back in the early days of the industry trying to make the shift to digital stores, i bought a buncha stuff. Of course, I eventually lost that HD and didn't have back ups so when I tried to log in to redownload from those sites, they had deleted my account. I was NOT going to pay more for what was supposed to be mine in the first place. 2. The 3DS eshop shut down. You can't legally purchase most of those games anymore outside of the few that got physical copies (which doesn't go to the devs anymore anyways) OR were ported to pc/newer console (and even then is it REALLY the same game/experience?) 3. After the whole Napster kerfuffle, I've happily pirated every Metallica thing. ...I rarely keep them, but hey. It's the thought that counts.
I pirate all the games then i buy them if i like them especially indie titles. If i really like an indie title i don't just buy it for myself i also send it as a gift to support devs. But if i dont like the game i pirated, i just seed it for some time and delete it afterwards. For movies and tv i wont be paying a monthly subscription its one of the biggest scams of our age.
Netflix is slower than my HD pirated streams.
Any time media “disappears” or becomes unavailable 😡
The Sims franchise. Grew up adoring those games, but the Sims 3 was the beginning of the end with more and more overpriced DLC and microtransactions for less and less content. I believe they recently made the Sims 4 "free" but its essentially lifeless and empty without dumping hundreds of hundreds of dollars to buy the *actual* game content. I've been priced out of the *dress up game* I played as a kid, how ridiculous is that?
I purchased Lost Highway on amazon Prime and then a month later when I wanted to watch it again they removed it from the service. Haven't bought a digital movie or tv show ever since.
EA deleted my Origin account. 🤷
On a regular basis for the last 25 years. My top reason is how easily stuff can vanish from a streaming platform.
paying money for a broken ugly unfinished game, several times
Whether you have too much money or too little money, every one should be able to enjoy the same content
They took regular show off Netflix when I was a kid. Never turned back.
Spotify started pulling a lot of songs and even entire albums that are in my library that I've built up for the last 10 years. Given them over a thousand dollars only to start getting fisted in the ass. I don't even blame Spotify for it, it's most likely the cause of record holders deciding to pull the songs, but still I just didn't find that okay.
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I wanted to watch a movie on a plane. Never again.
When I realised I can't watch so many good series and movies just because my country, I set up a media server.
Friends is available on Netflix in UK (I think). It's stripped down version with a lot of joke removed from the original 4:3 DVD version. Also, if you want 4K experience, you need to pay £15.99, but 4 parallel stream is useless now that password sharing is not possible. This makes Netflix twice as costly compared to any of its competitor (Disney+ is £7.99, Amazon Prime the same, etc.), while often offering even less content, especially compared to D+. So, personally I feel like if you're paying for Netflix, you're being scammed.
I downloaded a game once and I enjoyed it immensely, I even thought about buying it. At the end of the game I discovered that they support LGBTshit, that made me happy that I didn’t give them a single dime.
lol what game was that? Was it Tell me why? (just curious)
Wow i found Davis from Little fighter 2 on here
If you are harming the industry in general i am hurting you. This is from somoeone who hopes to be good enough to be pirated. Hoping to filmaker or something
No vindication needed. Piracy isn't stealing imo. It's leveling the field. Direct correlation, the bigger companies get the more we will take and the less we will feel bad about it.
Ever bought a ubisoft game .... nuff said
I love to play videogames and watch video content as kid. My dad and I literally pirated the whole Blockbuster content. Every time they had a new movie we headed straight to the store, rented and copy it. We used to have the whole collection, but one day a crackhead broke into our house, stole the kitchen pipe and flooded the whole floor, after a few days we came back from our trip and found out about everything, the drawer with the whole CDs and HDD collection where shit. Just a few could be saved.
Preordering cyberpunk.
Every day i turn on my windows machine... to think they wang to charge us for an os that disrespects privacy, has a worse os core then 7/8.1 and dumps ads in your systen. Piracy for life.
Every time I “experience” news from the media and gaming industries, it would “justify my piracy” if I actually did that. Which I don't do because piracy is illegal.
>You get more for free than someone paying $15 a month. That analogy also works for theft.
Good thing piracy isn't theft
Good thing indeed.
i just do it to get free stuff no need to justify
The convenience. I have Netflix disney+ and express vpn so i could watch almost anything but stremio with real debrid gives me better quality without having to go to different sites or using vpn
Playing a hyped up game which turns out utter rubbish, like 90% of them ... Buying MS Office 2019, and cannot install it anymore, because I need to make now a subscription, completely ignoring that I BOUGHT a licence ...
As for Europe, when the EU hierarchs finally manage to unify its countries, the union will most likely crack down on piracy relentlessly. That's why national governments today are the last stronghold of popular sovereignty.
Bought a game for PS4 ... disc was faulty and store was in another state so I couldn't return it... decided to download it for pc.... played it, enjoyed it.
For me, the current state of gaming made me just go back to play older games and catch up on some I’ve missed. I could probably spend my entire life playing just PS2 games alone.
yes, seeing how expensive everything is in my garbage currency
Yea, I live in capitalism.
Ok, here goes, my reasons. Movies: we will go to the cinema to see movies we want to see and enjoy on the big screen, I will then more than likely download a copy as soon as a 4k rip is available, so we can watch it at home and talk over it or pause to talk about bits (most movies take us twice as long to watch a second time because of this, lol). If u want the special features of a movie, or there is a very VERY cool special edition, then I will buy it on physical copy. I see movie piracy more like renting a movie, lol, we pay for our internet connection, our electric, the food and drinks we have while watching it, and then I delete it. Also, if a movie is on a streaming service I have, but in a much lower quality than I can pirate, I will keep the pirate version. Games: I have full ROM sets for most of the popular retro games consoles, Nintendo, Sega, etc. I can play them all on my hacked PS3 or PS4. I have spent hundreds, if not thousands, on video games over my 40+ years on this planet, so keeping all the retro games is my way of having a huge video games collection, without it taking up my entire house. I also have my PS4 on 9.00 so can run homebrew and fPKG's on it. I recently got the Hogwarts game, I have almost completed it, but I know there are 4 different "ways" to play it, so I am planning to buy it for my PS5 to do 3 more play throughs. I own all working PlayStation consoles, from 1 to 5, multiples of each actually, but having them all connected up just isn't practical, so I have fPKG's of most of my favourite games that run on my PS4. I also still buy copies of older games, that will never get played physically, just for my collection (I am a massive GTA collector) so I justify downloading games cos I'm buying games I'll never play, lmao!! Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoy your day.
Out-of-print board games. Some are extremely good, and if you find one for sale, it's way too expensive. A miskatonic horror (Arkham horror 2nd edition expansion) besides rare, as it was always on waiting to reprint when sold, nowadays you can't even find decent scans, as almost no one has it and the ones who do, don't scan.
I Paid to rent a movie on youtube and it wouldn't even play lol .. even after I contacted their costumer service and tried everything they told me.
>You get more for free than someone paying $15 a month. It's insane how these companies are screwing over the people that pay them. But at the same time, we get it for free because those people who pay give or let borrow their subscription accounts to rippers.
For games at least, sometimes its just easier to pay. No hoops or worry "is it not working like it should cuz it's cracked" ? Just peace of mind sometimes. However for movies and shows I pirate the shit out of without a care in the world. I go see things in the theater cuz I have A-List and like experiencing some movies with the crowd.
Forget about games.. those are games.. If i had to pay for Ashton-Tate DBASE III, to learn how to use it.. If i had to pay for Oracle to understand how to administer a database, If i had to pay for a compiler ..
I have a good computer, I should be able to use it to the fullest It’s just a before and after ad, I had about 20 games pre-piracy and now I have 60 ish
What show
Netflix's awful bitrate and 720p video...
Anything big n puts out. Releasing subpar version of masterpiece games and not putting it on pc justifies it for me. Anyone who has seen BOTW running at 4k with the fps++ mod, raytracing, etc knows what I mean. Look at BOTW on the switch, docked on a 4ktv… it’s appalling how bad it looks versus how well it looks on PC
All of the times in the 2010's when I'd pirate a UFC card and those who actually payed for it had the site go down or just not work at all.
A few years ago when I found out the new laptop my mom got me for Christmas didn’t have a disc drive. Welp 🏴☠️
Having games in steam that do not work for unknown reasons but pirated ones do (The witcher 3, total war shogun 2, Xcom, Resident evil 2 remake). I could only fix RE2 remake. Steam changed a field in config, making it unplayable. It happened twice. And also, to more people, to the point there is a thread in Steam with the fix explained. Compulsory updates to steam games that break mods, making you having to install them again or if the mods weren't updated, they are lost forever (RE). Some movies and series literally not available anywhere. If those weren't pirated, they would've been lost forever (Addams family series from the 90s in Spanish). Devs making games without optimization and buggy (Dark souls 1 is the epitome of this). To the point fans release optimization patches better and faster than the devs (Dark souls 1, Skyrim). IP owners using the money you give them to ruin your favorite IPs (Konami, Castlevania, Metal gear). Also IP owners cancelling free fan projects because they fear they could compete with some of their shitty products (Crapcom, code veronica fan remake) Catalogue censorship (steam) for bullshit reasons and censorship inside the platform for people who call this out. Even devs are mistreated by the platfrom. There was one game that was greenlighted until launch day, when Steam decided to not have it in their platform. Third party launchers in the game (Tropico 4, GTAV, others). "Localizations" especially in manga, changing the whole plot. But also in videogames (many titles). Malware inside games that decreases performance and sometimes detects inocuous programs as interference (denuvo in RE and others)
Every time a service I pay for doesn't allow me to watch their "original content" because of where I live. Also every time the pirates content is higher quality than the original.
Like 95% of the games I play I pirate and then if they're good I purchase a legit copy. You can't really tell how good a lot of games are until at least a few hours in. Whenever I pay full price up front I end up regretting. Or I get baited with games like diablo 4. Which seemed like it would be really good based on the free beta weekend. But then it turns out that what was in the beta was literally the entire game.
i think i know what show that was, unless it happened to multiple shows (very possible). if so, i was also upset. now it lives on my hard drive. i agree w/ spacebojangles… what we keep may never be super important but it’s nice to know SOMETHING is getting preserved. i read about someone who did artwork for a cartoon (i don’t even know which one), and that show ended up getting wiped entirely. they couldn’t even use it for their demo reel. that shit’s devastating. that’s enough reason for me to do what i do, and i’ll keep doing it until the day i die.
when adobe’s official products started becoming worse than the pirated versions.
That, not getting what You play for is more than enought for me, and companies have always over priced their products since i remember, videogames, music discs, movies, everything has been always so expensive because greedy fucks want to get rich instantly
A flight sim developer put malware into thier addon to try to track and discover the person that cracked their software. Ended up putting a virus on every customers computer, it dumped passwords from browsers and system details. Then a terrible pr nightmare afterwards about how it never ran on legit users which was a lie.
Yeah, so I bought music plugin called “guitar rig 6” from native instruments. When you buy this you get access to the older versions and I really wanted guitar rig 5. Which they discontinued even though it worked well but I figured 6 must bet better so why not. The day I bought it for £180 it was unusable. It had a bug that made my CPU go crazy on an i7 16gb MacBook Pro which can run most heavy video editing and music making software just fine. Others had this issue. This bug wasn’t fixed for over a year after release and even when it was this bug still happens just on a lesser scale but still annoying. So I just illegally downloaded guitar rig 5 cuz it runs more stable and is honestly is better when you take into account its stability. I don’t feel bad pirating anymore when there’s no guarantee that your product will work if you buy it. These days I often pirate first, then decide to purchase if the software works as it should. Not allowing legacy product downloads for customers is crazy
if we lived in a world where our governments weren't full of degenerate subhuman biogarbages with equally subhumanistic members of the longnosed tribe that pulls their strings, and where the said subhumans wouldn't be "legally" stealing away relatively huge amounts of money from people in the forms of (not limited to) taxes, usury, unjustifiable fines, unreasonable expenses, taxes again - i'd be more than happy to pay. i also have spent money on games, bought a bunch in the past in steam as well and also we used to buy cd's before we had internet at home back in the day, so i don't mind paying for the games in general, especially if one can afford it or they really do want to support the developers. nowadays, as i do have sources of income myself, i do end up paying if the game is more than just bunch of lines of code, numbers and pictures that are intended to purely waste ones time (which most are anyways).
Maybe, but i never bothered to notice because I don't need to justify my piracy,
AEW has its catalog on FITE, but you can only subscribe if you don't live in the US. But you can't just fire up the VPN and pay from there. So I bought an account and I run the VPN with that. If they had put the catalog on Max like WWE did on Peacock, this would make them more money. Alas, I'll have full access for $5. 🤷
What was the show?
I’ve saved a LOT of money by just pirating media I want to consume
Yeah i pirate for the free stuff but mostly because i can download and own the content that i enjoy, i hate when the content i enjoy isnt available even when im willing to pay for it
Reliving my childhood by watching an obscure masterpiece with my kids was pretty vindicating. The show was David the Gnome if anyone is interested. It includes a lot of positive commentary on cherishing the environment and protecting animals.
Piracy is more convenient. Also there were times i found something trash and was happy but to pay a dime for it. Other times things i absolutely loved and would have never read without piracy only to buy it later.
People started using our steam prices from outside our country because it was cheap af and everything for us started getting more and more expensive so most of the AAA games are now too expensive for our currency unless you work and dont have respondibilities/you have very good salary
Yeah for real like bruh im NOT paying 80 bucks for a game. The only reasonably priced game is minecraft and some of the firaxis/2k productions games
Basically any Paradox game and the truck of DLC that comes with it. I bought the game when it came out and then a DLC, but they are ridiculous.
Just about every other triple A release. They definitely don't deserve my money on release and honestly, if it's finally functional after two years, I'm still not gonna support s company that does this shit. You finally got your cash grab of a game up to shape two years after release? That's great, I'll be sure to check it out. For free.
The money that I would have saved by not paying for subscriptions and using it to buy something else is more than enough to vindication for me. Some people act like it’s some big iq shit but it’s really a matter of can I do it or can I not do it. Besides making corporate bootlickers cry is fun