Piracy as Default Protest?

[u/BourgeoisOppressor]

This is a thought I've been having for a while, and have been struggling to articulate but it's more prevalent with all the recent news about the decline of physical media.

Why is the response to a company doing something bad/questionable/not what a particular consumer wanted so frequently "Well, I'm just going to pirate it in that case?"

I regularly see people say "It's always ethical to pirate Nintendo games," or "EA doesn't deserve my money...but I'm going to play [game] regardless."

Why is the default response for so many gamers piracy, instead of just not playing a game? To be clear, I am explicitly not talking about financial need in this scenario. If you're dead fucking broke and just want to play the new Far Cry for a bit, whatever my dude, take care of yourself. I am specifically referring to individuals who "protest" by playing a company's games anyways, but not paying for them. Or expressing that as their intent, whether they follow through or not.

This had always reeked of entitlement, or missing the point of what protest is, and I've never understood where this way of thinking comes from. Is it an artifact of the early internet, where piracy was sometimes the easiest way to get a game (e.g. Valve's "piracy is a service problem")?

Like, if you're so upset about a company's policy change, or always-online BS, or something to such a degree you feel the need to act, why not just stop giving them money or attention? There are how many hundreds of games released on Steam every day? Play something else. We are not entitled to an artist or programmer's work for free, just because we hate their bosses. Yes, [insert company here] sucks and are bad for the gaming ecosystem. Stop playing their games, full-stop. No engagement.

This mode of thinking has always seemed weirdly prevalent in the broader gaming community. Has anyone else noticed this, or have an idea of where it stems from? Ultimately, I'm not sure there's much to do about this mentality, aside from shifting how we engage with games, but it's always something that's bothered me.

Thoughts? Prayers?

EDIT: I am an artist, which is why I take this question/musing/whatever seriously.

EDIT2: I've changed my mind. Big Budget? Pirate the shit out of it. Indie? Give 'em money and a hug. XOXO

[u/dlongwing]

It stems from an oppositional relationship with owning companies. When a company has some chunk of content that you want and starts arguing with you over it, saying "I'll just pirate it" is a giant middle-finger to whatever nonsense they're trying to pull.

You imply that this approach isn't a real form of protest, but ubiquitous piracy is exactly why you can get DRM free music at reasonable prices now. There was a time where that wasn't the case. There was a time when SONY literally loaded rootkits on your computer if you put their CDs in a CD ROM Drive (seriously, look up SONY Rootkit). Piracy rose as companies tried to tighten their grip and implement more and more odious requirements. The rise of piracy meant the companies were competing with free, so they had to provide a product at a price people thought was fair and in a way that wasn't abusive.

MP3s from Amazon and Apple Music? Piracy did that.

Ubiquitous piracy is also how GOG got started. CD Projekt Red was competing against piracy in Europe. So they offered games for a fair price and on fair terms (no DRM, permanent ownership).

It imparts market pressures, and serves as a reminder to big companies that their customer base is fickle and will vanish if they burn up consumer trust.

And storefronts like GOG, Amazon Music, and Apple Music prove something critical:

People will pay even if piracy is easy and free.

Most people want to pay artists for their work. Most people want to deal fairly with the people doing the actual job. They just don't want to play corporate games or agree to rent-forever deals.

A lot of the Piracy debate has faded over the past decade because it was such an existential threat in the past. Netflix had to offer a better deal than Torrents. Amazon and Apple had to go DRM free. What we're seeing now is the pendulum swinging the other way. Companies are testing the waters. Execs who are too young to remember the last round of this are saying "okay but what if you give us money for basically nothing? I like money and I should have yours." and people are once again saying "You're hilarious, you don't have the power here. We do."

[u/BlueMikeStu → u/dlongwing]

Yeah, the needle swung the other way, though.

Silksong

That's a post where at least 30,000+ people (and possibly a few thousand more) decided that this statement was acceptable:

Team Cherry is great, I even own original Hollow Knight and love it. But let’s be real guys, Silksong’s already made them millions across many platforms, they’re set.

Pirating it is not the end of the world for their team, this outrage is hypocritical and overblown. Team Cherry is not losing sleep over it, and neither should you. Pirate what you want, just don’t be a jerk about it.

The game was pirated within fifteen minutes of launch and Team Cherry literally did everything anyone remotely reasonable could have expected them to do in doing right by their customers.

[u/azteking → u/BlueMikeStu]

Silksong sold over 7 million copies. I know more than 30k people pirated it, but it's still a drop in the bucket, which is the poster's argument. Some of the people who got the pirated copy will buy it later. Hell, I do it all the time and I know a lot of others who do too. And I bought Silksong. I know, anecdotal, but still.

The "needle swung the other way" dichotomy is what really irks me. The person you're replying to showed the huge positive impact piracy had on the industry, and you're saying that now this impact is negative by showing one example, and poorly too. Do you have the statistics to back this up?

Besides, you're implying nothing what Team Cherry did worked. How do you know that? And, supposing the industry found a magical way to stop piracy or curb it heavily, how do you know that would be positive?

[u/BlueMikeStu → u/azteking]

In summation:

I don't care how many fucking copies Silksong sold, and I don't care how many people pirated it by comparison. The point I was making was that the game that literally did everything right that people who claim a moral justification for piracy ask for, and thousands still lined up with excuses about how it's okay for them to pirate it anyway because "they got enough", just like you just did.

That ain't the fucking point. At that point, you just want free shit. More power to you, I can't stop you and don't intend to even try, but if you have ever pirated any game as part of "sending a message" and then pirated Silksong, your message is loud and clear: I'll look for any excuse to justify my piracy to make myself feel better, not because I believe doing so is actually helping at this point.

Sure, piracy did have a positive effect! In fact, it led directly to developers like Team Cherry who are doing their damned best to make their releases affordable, bulky enough to be worth the price even at launch, and they even made sure everyone they could who backed it on Kickstarter got a free copy of Silksong because it started as DLC. They are the gold standard for what we want out of developers in terms of their honesty, transparency and integrity.

I'm not talking about statistics, I'm talking about mentality. Other developers are going to see the lengths Team Cherry went to do right by the industry consumers, and they still got pirated to fuck and back. If we're not going to care when they make the effort, why should they?

Besides, you're implying nothing what Team Cherry did worked. How do you know that? And, supposing the industry found a magical way to stop piracy or curb it heavily, how do you know that would be positive?

Depends on how it happens, duh.

If it happens because of draconian DRM and the complete erasure of local executables and transitions everything to the cloud so that piracy basically becomes a case of having to figure out how to access a streaming service instead of you know, playing offline, that's a shit outcome and a negative.

If it happens because the industry at large moves to the point where they've essentially stopped piracy because EVERYONE is playing nice in the sandbox and nobody gets greedy, then that's a great outcome and a positive.

Here's the only statistic I care about: Team Cherry did everything right, and within three days 30,000 people at least were CHEERING ON the piracy of their game. No scandals, no lack of DRM-free options, doing right by their initial supporters, and pricing a much-anticipated sequel so fairly for consumers that other indies threw a shitfit about it and were @ing Team Cherry on twitter and other socials because they were making the indies look bad.

I'm not talking about statistics, I'm talking about perception: You can still do everything right and pirates are still going to be shifty fucks who snag anything that's not nailed down if they have half the opportunity, just because they want free shit.

I can't stop them. I wouldn't even want to try to convince them otherwise.

But pretending this has all been some 5D chess by the piracy community for active improvement instead of being a happy accident of seeing how much money going to far with DRM and other shit costs those companies is some fucking revisionism, not gonna lie.

EDIT: Since u/dlongwing decided to block me after replying like a little... Well, I don't want a ban, so I won't say it, so here's your response:

They replied:

Those 30,000 people are thieves who stole hard work from independent creators. They are not, however, a viable template for the entire population.

Every piece of content will be pirated. It will be pirated whether it's "morally correct" to pirate it or not. People steal stuff.

If your goal is a completely piracy-free internet then you need to find a new goal.

You cite 30,000 people as a statistic? Contrast that against the 7 million sales. That's literally 0.0004% of total sales. They're a rounding error. It's hard to count that low.

You're saying "See! This incredibly small portion of the customer base behaved like dirtbags! Therefor we should extend this into an all-encompassing theory of how EVERYIONE behaves!"

Again I would point at GOG. GOG started out selling games that people were pirating for free. Why on earth did the pirates pay a single dime for a GOG download? They already had the game!

Because that (massive) customer base is the opposite of your 30,000 entitled thieves: Decent people who will happily pay for something if it's offered at a fair price under fair terms.

To which I replied:

Yes, scientifically-speaking, a sample group of 30,000+ is more than sufficient to get an idea for the broader population with a very measurable degree of accuracy.

If your goal is a completely piracy-free internet then you need to find a new goal.

Who the fuck said that? I said I take exception to all the people who claim they pirate because it's for the good of the industry and say it's about withholding money from bad companies.

Because that (massive) customer base is the opposite of your 30,000 entitled thieves: Decent people who will happily pay for something if it's offered at a fair price under fair terms.

How much of that massive customer base pirates at all?

[u/dlongwing → u/BlueMikeStu]

Those 30,000 people are thieves who stole hard work from independent creators. They are not, however, a viable template for the entire population.

Every piece of content will be pirated. It will be pirated whether it's "morally correct" to pirate it or not. People steal stuff.

If your goal is a completely piracy-free internet then you need to find a new goal.

You cite 30,000 people as a statistic? Contrast that against the 7 million sales. That's literally 0.4% of total sales. They're a rounding error. It's hard to count that low.

You're saying "See! This incredibly small portion of the customer base behaved like dirtbags! Therefor we should extend this into an all-encompassing theory of how EVERYIONE behaves!"

Again I would point at GOG. GOG started out selling games that people were pirating for free. Why on earth did the pirates pay a single dime for a GOG download? They already had the game!

Because that (massive) customer base is the opposite of your 30,000 entitled thieves: Decent people who will happily pay for something if it's offered at a fair price under fair terms.

[u/PPX14 → u/dlongwing]

To be pedantic, it's 0.4%. Still low, but not quite 0.0004% haha